Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Semiotics

Dance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:06:39 +0000

Girls dancing at the Celebrating Sanctuary Festival on London's South Bank in 2008. The festival celebrates the cultural diversty that migrants bring to the UK. Picture by Gary Knight.

Panas Karampampas

Durham University

Initially published 2 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25dance

Abstract:

Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are enacted and negotiated. This entry explores dance as both a localised embodied practice and as a globally circulating phenomenon. It begins by questioning universal definitions of dance before outlining key contributions from dance anthropology and ethno-choreology, specifically their focus on embodiment, research methods, and the limits of representation. Subsequent sections consider dance in relation to politics, and the impact of digital media in fostering global hybrid forms of dance. The final section examines staged performances and the role of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has further institutionalised dance by recognising it as a ‘living heritage’. Together, these sections illustrate that dance operates simultaneously as practice, symbol, and political artefact—what might be called its ‘multiple existences’—and explores why understanding these layers is essential across disciplines. As a dynamic and fluid practice, dance remains a vital subject of anthropological inquiry, revealing complex interactions between tradition, innovation, and socio-political power.

Introduction

Defining dance in anthropology is a challenge, since it does not always exist as a clear-cut category as such for the people we study. Speaking of ‘dance’ therefore risks profoundly misinterpreting the activities we try to analyse and the social contexts where they occur. For example, for the sixteenth century Mixtec people of Jamiltepec, in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico, no single term for ‘dance’ existed. Instead, the word yaa simultaneously referred to dance, games, and music, which were always performed together and not experienced as distinct or separate (Stanford 1966, 103). Likewise, in classical Greece, the term ‘ὄρχησις’ referred to the inseparable triad of music, song, and bodily movement—much as in many contemporary Greek folk dance practices. Again, ‘dance’ did not exist here as a meaningful stand-alone concept (Zografou 2003). The same point applies for the all-night yamɨn siria ceremony of Papua New Guinea’s Ambonwari people. Held in people’s private houses on celebratory occasions, it combines song and dance with storytelling and bodily decoration, elements that are closely connected to the natural environment and the spirit world. Yamɨn siria is not just a dance, but a holistic ritual that reflects an entire cosmology, reproduces the cultural memory of participants and their ancestors, provides young people with a chance to flirt, and can serve as an opportunity to settle old disputes (Telban 2017). In Arabic, several terms that describe movement and rhythmic expression also do not correspond precisely to the English notion of ‘dance’. Raqs (رَقص) broadly denotes Arabic dancing—often referred to colloquially as ‘belly dance’; dabke (دبكة) designates collective line dancing that embodies social cohesion; and samāʿ (سماع) refers to musical listening and rhythmic bodily movement within Sufi ritual (Rowe 2010, 11–3).

All that said, conceptual clarity can be useful so long as it speaks to the perspectives of the people we study. A fairly encompassing definition of dance considers it to be a practice composed of purposeful, often intentionally rhythmical, and socially patterned sequences of nonverbal body movement (Hanna 1979, 316). This movement is generally considered distinct from ordinary motor activities. It involves time, space, and effort, relies on both individual choice and social learning, and possesses inherent and aesthetic value. Specific criteria tend to determine what is appropriate in each context and what may distinguish the competency of dance practitioners as perceived by their society. Finally, such movement should be recognised as dance by its practitioners and—if an audience is present—by the audience members of the practitioner’s social group.

Understood in these terms, dance can be a powerful social instrument. Often much more than mere entertainment or artistic expression, it physically manifests identity, tradition, and a sense of belonging, while also reflecting and contesting social norms (Desmond 1997a; Kealiinohomoku 1970). Various academic disciplines, from psychology to performance studies, have explored dance from multiple angles, analysing its aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. They have shown that politicians and media often harness dance as a symbol of national identity, and sometimes as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Anthropology brings a unique focus to the study of dance’s social implications and cultural contexts (Buckland 1999), in part because it tends to delve deeper into the meanings and power relations embedded in dance practices (Spencer 1985).

From the early twentieth century onward, dance has attracted the interest of influential anthropologists, including Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1928), Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Franz Boas (1927), Margaret Mead (1928) and Gregory Bateson (Mead and Bateson 1952). For these early writers, the documentation and analysis of Indigenous people’s dance was integral to understanding their social structures. As part of ritual, dance was primarily seen as contributing to social cohesion, essential for maintaining social bonds. Evans-Pritchard, for example, argued that that the gbere buda or ‘beer dance’ of the twentieth century Azande people, in what are now the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan, allowed for moderate, discreet, and therefore harmless kinds of flirting and sexual play. Thereby, Evans-Pritchard argued, the dance protected the institutions of Azande marriage and the family (1928, 458). Early anthropological studies also emphasised the importance of dance for transmitting cultural knowledge. For example, according to Mead, dance interrupted the otherwise rigorous subordination of Samoan children during the early twentieth century to the social hierarchy they grew up in. Dance allowed them greater degrees of attention and freedom than they were habitually used to. It equally permitted the expression and cultivation of children’s individuality in ‘a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic exhibitionism’ as Mead put it (1928, 118).

Early anthropological studies were equally fascinated by the ways in which ritual dance reflects and shapes people’s spiritual lives, serving as a powerful medium through which people express their cosmologies and influence spirits. During the late nineteenth century, for example, the Kwakiutl of North America used dance to attract life-giving spirits, to tame them, and to receive gifts of supernatural powers from them. As part of the ritual known as the ‘winter ceremonial’, Kwakiutl families came together and danced wearing masks that emulated and personated different spirits, tracing their family histories back to mythical times and supernatural events (Boas and Hunt 1897).

For many Indigenous peoples, ritual dance has remained central until today, as it remains part of ceremonies marking life events, seasonal transitions, and collective identity. The nomadic Wodaabe of West Africa, for example, engage in a series of dance and performance rituals throughout the year, one of which, called the yaake, comprises a beauty contest in which women chose the most beautiful male performer. The young men stand in a long line, facing the sunset, and dance by moving especially their feet and spinal column. Accentuated movements of the face highlight the whiteness of their eyes and teeth, all while being overlooked by Wodaabe women. It has been argued that in this case this dance not only expresses male pride or allows the men and women to flirt, but that it also distinguishes the Wodaabe from the more sedentary Fulani people who live in the same region. It renders the Wodaabe recognisably ‘exotic’ to the people of Niger, and to Westerners who are only superficially aware of their life circumstances. By internalising and cultivating their reputation of being ‘exotic’, Wodaabe dancing contributes to a sense of ‘cultural archaism’, which is but one of several elements of their collective survival strategies (Bovin in Hughes-Freeland & Crain 1998).

Anthropology’s early focus on the ritual contexts of dance laid the groundwork for more systematic engagements with dance, especially from the mid-twentieth century onwards. During this time, the subfield of dance anthropology (or the ‘anthropology of dance’ as it was called in the US) emerged, establishing a dialogue between dance studies and anthropology (Kurath 1960; Kealiinohomoku 1970). As part of a new comprehensive approach to dance, anthropologists and dance scholars synthesised methodologies and theoretical approaches, and began to study dance as a social phenomenon everywhere. They drew on examples from large and small-scale populations, as well as ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ groups.

In this way, they challenged prevailing Eurocentric views, which had, for example, considered ballet as the pinnacle of dance forms and as distinct from folk or ethnic dances. A ground-breaking study viewed ballet through the same anthropological lens as any other dance tradition (Kealiinohomoku 1970). It questioned the perception of ballet as a universal standard against which other dance forms were to be measured. The study recognised that ballet was conventionally celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and technical precision, having evolved from court entertainment to a professionalised art form: an ethnic dance of the West, rooted in the court cultures of Renaissance Italy and France. Political power, social hierarchies, and the spread of European colonialism had all shaped what ballet was and needed to be accounted for as ballet continues to express and reinforce the values and aesthetics of its cultural origins.

Examining ballet as an ethnic dance opened the door to a more egalitarian approach to dance studies overall, which values all dance traditions equally and appreciates their cultural significance (Kealiinohomoku 1970). Such studies and approaches suggested a more inclusive understanding of dance that recognises it in all its forms as ultimately culturally and ethnically rooted, whilst also arguing for the value of often-marginalised non-European dance traditions. Importantly, these authors called for more first-hand observation and participation in dance as part of fieldwork (Kurath 1960). Furthermore, discussions emerged that focused on how dance traditions change over time through incorporating elements from different trends that migrants carried into diverse new contexts. In line with the cultural relativism that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropologists began to show that dance is often hybridised, constantly changing and blurring boundaries of traditions that had previously been considered fixed. For example, Latin American tango emerged from the fusion of African rhythms, European couple dances, and local criollo musical forms, later becoming reinterpreted through global circulation (Savigliano 1995, 10–5).

Anthropology of dance and ethno-choreology

The anthropology of dance has a close relative, called ‘ethno-choreology’ (sometimes called ‘dance ethnology’). While these fields of study often overlap, they have different starting points, methods, and theories (Kaeppler 1991, 13). Dance anthropology has a tendency to be more ‘interested in socially constructed movement systems, the activities that generate them, how and by whom they are judged, and how they can assist in understanding society’ (Kaeppler 2000, 120). A prime example is the ethnography on lakalaka performances, which are danced and sung throughout the islands of the Tonga archipelago in the South Pacific. Performed at royal weddings, royal birthday celebrations, and coronation ceremonies since the late nineteenth century, the lakalaka is not merely a form of aesthetic expression but also serves to enact and legitimise social hierarchy and political authority. It involves singing poetry which, together with choreographed movements, elevates the monarch and chiefs, linking royal and chiefly power within the broader Tongan cosmology (Kaeppler 2006, 40–1). These performances illustrate the social origins of movement systems, and their role for the broader organisation of society, as they help negotiate rank, genealogy, and political power. Rather than analysing the choreography in isolation, dance anthropology situates it within the Tongan system of social stratification, showing how dance both reflects and reinforces societal structures (Kaeppler 1993). In contrast, ethno-choreologists often focus more closely on dance content, while the cultural context serves primarily to illuminate the dance itself (Grau 1993, 21). For example, Andriy Nahachewsky (2011) examines the movement vocabulary, structural patterns, and stylistic variants of Ukrainian folk dances, drawing on ethnographic context chiefly to clarify regional distinctions and historical layering.

Dance anthropology and ethno-choreology also sometimes differ in how they think about the dancers’ bodies. Dance anthropology has come to question the idea of a natural or archetypal dancer’s body, foregrounding instead the body’s culturally and socially constructed aspects (Grau 1993, 21). Ethno-choreologists, on the other hand, tend to consider the dancer’s body more as a given; an instrument moving in time and space that is largely separate from the dancer’s mind or sociocultural ideas about it. This makes ethno-choreology particularly interesting for dancers and choreographers who are constantly attempting to improve upon existing forms of dance, as well as for folklorists, interested in the preservation of existing cultural practices.

In short, dance anthropologists are ‘not simply to understand dance in its cultural context, but rather to understand society through analysing movement systems’ (Grau 1993, 21), while ethno-choreologists study the dance itself and its changes over time with its cultural context more in the background (Kaeppler 1991, 16–7). Despite these differences, the fields have increasingly converged over time, particularly since the 1990s when both embraced a more holistic view of dance. Both disciplines now recognise that dance is not just interesting as a physical movement but also that it matters as a cultural text that can convey complex meanings and serve various social functions (Rakočević 2020). This shared perspective has led to greater interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling folklorists and cultural critics to employ similar methodologies and theories with the goal of exploring the multifaceted nature of dance.

A relatively recent study of folk dance in Romania, for example, demonstrates the value of combining dance anthropological and ethno-choreological approaches (Giurchescu 2001). Anca Giurchescu examines 45 years of cultural policy in socialist Romania to show how traditional dance, such as in the century-old Romanian Căluș ritual, has changed in connection to its socio-political context. Over time, Romanian traditional dance has turned from a ritual that shapes the daily lives of participants to a more restricted and staged form of folklore, mostly organised and watched rather than practiced. While it continues to be danced on important social events, such as weddings or family gatherings, it is now mostly passively consumed. As a form of folklore, traditional dance always runs the risk of being used for political ends, as in late-stage Romanian Communism, when song and dance were employed to conceal the country’s socio-political contradictions, obscuring diversity while highlighting a singular national narrative. According to the author, studying dance requires examining the philosophical, ideological, socio-political, economic, and cultural systems of a given society, as well as the internal structure of the dance itself. Only through this holistic approach can dance, its social context, and its practice be illuminated simultaneously (Giurchescu 2001, 109).

Dance as elusive and embodied practice

The ephemeral and elusive nature of dance renders participant observation particularly difficult. Dance only fully exists in the moment of performance, making it hard to capture and document. Its transience arises from several factors. Movement notation systems, while developed in order to record dance, are complex and require demanding training. Moreover, describing sound and movement (as well as speech and song in some cases) all at once can often be challenging. Simply filming dance and focusing on its visual aspects does not capture the whole experience as it ignores too many other sensorial dimensions of dance. Dancer’s experiences are deeply kinaesthetic (i.e. relating to their bodily awareness), combining the visual, tactile, and auditory (Bull 1997, 269). Such embodied experience is hard to put into words, so dancers’ verbal accounts of their practices often differ from their actual behaviour. All these issues raise the problem that dance experiences may be sensible to the performers without also being intelligible for others (Bull 1997, 269).

These methodological difficulties raise an ever-prevalent question for ethnographic researchers of dance: Should the ethnographer have practiced or be trained in dance, or is this not a requirement for a deep understanding of it? The people we study may think that dancing is essential if one wants to truly understand it. Members of professional dance companies, for example, have been shown to hold that experience in ballet is an asset to make sense of it (Wulff 1998). In fact, classical dancers are frequently of the opinion that ‘you have to do it in order to understand what it’s like’ (Wulff 1998, 8). Given that dance is a mostly non-verbal activity that requires a high degree of precision and proficiency, having some embodied experience of it allows for insights which are challenging to acquire by other means (Wulff 1998, 10-1). Thus, dance ethnographies often achieve a remarkable level of understanding by relying on the fieldworker's body as a means to attain cultural knowledge. The researcher's immersion in sonic events and movement—their awareness of and participation in sound and dance—induces bodily responses that render fieldwork as a profoundly visceral experience. Thereby, important questions can be raised and put into perspective, such as what the role of tacit knowledge in dance may be, how feelings of unity and community are created and altered by dance, or how dancers conceive of pain and endurance (c.f. Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017, 3, 10-2).

Physical participation in dance also shows how ‘movement combines felt bodily experience and the culturally based organisation of that experience into cognitive patterns’ (Sklar 2001, 4). It teaches us that ‘ways of moving are ways of thinking’ (Sklar 2001, 4). For example, for young members of the Greek goth scene in Athens in 2010, dance was an important part of their lives. Goth clubs and goth nights allowed them to link their daily style and ways of living, which often emphasised the fleeting nature of life and the futility of human striving, to dance. Several of them thus danced in ways that involved irony, self-irony, and sarcasm. On the dance floor they recited the lyrics of songs that expressed their disappointment with humanity, expressed anger at their own illness and mortality through stomping movements, or mocked traditional Greek dances in a refutation of Greek national values (Karampampas 2017).

Even when the researcher does not have prior dance experience, it is possible to learn dance in the field, as has been done for other somatic ethnographies that focused on boxing (Wacquant 2004) or Aikido (Kohn 2001). Particularly interesting are the times that the researcher will have to dance with their interlocutors. These moments allow the researcher to demonstrate whether and how they have embodied local dances and how precisely they understand the local movement idioms (Pateraki and Karampampas 2014, 156).

The deeply embodied nature of dance also highlights its role in shaping and experiencing gender, sexuality, and identity (Cowan 1990, Foster 1996). Dance practices often reflect and reinforce gender roles and expectations, but they can also provide spaces for exploring and contesting these norms (Allen 2022, 3–7 and 140–50). For example, Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (2004) has studied a group of middle-class women who form an all-female ‘company of friends’ (parea) near a Greek provincial town that the author calls ‘Kallipolis’. Once initiated to their ‘company’, the women spend time with and support one another, and they engage in same-sex relationships. One way in which they perform gender is through dance, notably the belly-dance tsifteteli, associated with femininity and desire, and the powerful, masculine dance called zeimbekiko. Dance and flirtation enable the women to create intimate relationships, which may be interpreted by people outside of their group as merely playful heterosexual friendships (Kirtsoglou 2004). Dancing thus allows them to negotiate, reveal, and conceal their identities, challenging and reconfiguring the meanings attached to their bodies within their specific cultural context.

The embodied nature of dance also lends itself to exploring how cultural and political meanings are represented, felt, and lived through the body. White competitive Latin dancers may use a fake tan to represent Latinness in the context of the predominantly white dancing culture and sport. In another context, practitioners of Javanese court dances are held to embody an element of national identity that is actively passed on to younger generations and made visible in performances for tourists (Kringelbach & Skinner 2012, 11). Thus, dance frequently turns out to be a site of negotiation where dancers can both conform to and resist social norms (Cowan 1990; Fraleigh 2004). It has, for example, been argued that the bodies of classical ballet dancers can be read as affirming a Western marginalisation of women’s bodies in general. According to sociologist Janet Wolff, ballet dancers preserve a ‘classical body’, emphasising boyish petiteness, clear lines, weightlessness and ethereal presence, ideals that stand in clear tension with most real feminine corporeality (Wolff 1997, 95). This tension is also revealed in roles for women, who in classical dance often depict ‘a strangely disembodied female’ (Wolff 1997, 95).

Deeply embodied activity, such as dance, also lends itself to the expression and transmission of embodied collective memory. Thus, dance is frequently part of spirit possessions among the Songhay people of Nigeria and Mali. The Songhay pantheon is divided into six spirit families, each of which represents a specific historical period. Some stand in for Muslim clerics, commemorating the fifteenth century institutionalisation of Islam in the area, while others are Hausa spirits that entered the Songhay pantheon in the early twentieth century as part of a large migration of Hausa-speaking people to Songhay territory. Spirit possession, which involves dance, thus partially enacts Songhay history, including the ravages of nature, such as when the choreography involved in a possession recounts the movement of spirits ‘from water to heaven and back to Earth’ (Stoller 1994, 642).

In sum, dance is not simply a sequence of movements but is also an embodied system of cultural meanings and knowledge. The meanings of dance are not always explicit, and may be tacit, intuitive, and difficult to articulate verbally. Researchers need to be aware that their own cultural background and experiences may shape their interpretations of dance. It is important for them to be reflexive, considering their own positionality and biases, and it is frequently an asset if, as part of dance research, they dance themselves.

Politics, resistance, and dancing beyond borders

Beyond its artistic or cultural expression, dance is a potent form of political discourse and resistance. The intricate relationship between dance and politics has been extensively analysed, revealing how dance movements and performances can reflect, contest, and sometimes transform political realities (Shay 2002).

Dance frequently intersects with political power in the realm of national identity and statecraft. Dances are often promoted and institutionalised through state-sponsored performances, festivals, and education programs. They may serve to foster national unity, constitute emblematic representations of a nation’s cultural heritage that justifies national sovereignty, or simply project power both internally and on the international stage (Reed 1998). For example, in constructing and legitimising national identity in the modern Greek state, officially established in 1832, ancient Greek statues and monuments were used to associate the state with ancient Greek glory. In this process, folk traditions such as dances and songs were used to bridge the substantive gap between ancient and modern Greek identity, including serving as official ‘proofs’ of the ‘cultural continuity’ between the two (Karampampas 2021, 655). Until today, the so-called ‘Greek traditional dances’ are part of the country’s primary and secondary education curriculum, aiming to demonstrate the coherence of Greek populations by teaching a selection of dances that is meant to represent all the country’s regions (Karampampas 2021, 655). Importantly, this curriculum has excluded dances from the unrecognised Slavic-speaking Greek minority, marginalising some kinds of dance as it foregrounds others (Pateraki 2024; see also Manos 2003 on the minority politics of dance). In addition, some previously Greek dances are today danced beyond national borders and may be called ‘Albanian’ or ‘Turkish’, due to the shared past of these countries during the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, ‘Greek dances’ to music that shares melodies with that of the Cappadocia region of what is now Turkey are performed as far as in the city of Xi’an (西安), the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi where the Muslim minority of Hui people (回族) dances them (personal observation).

In addition to creating national identity, Jane Cowan (1990) provides us with an example of how dance can stand in for European modernity. As part of studying dance in the Northern Greek town of Sohos in the early 1980s, Cowan noticed that formal ‘evening-dances’ (horoesperidha) were regularly organised on the weekends by local civic associations such as political parties or business associations. Rather than celebrating kinship, belonging, or church affiliation, these dance events were meant to promote civic solidarity and the common good, while also fostering the wealth, reputation, and political standing of the associations that sponsored them (Cowan 1990, 134–70). To achieve these goals, the usual opportunities for competitive male dance and folklore were foreclosed, and European symbols and practices were adopted instead, including dancing ‘European dances’ like the waltz, the foxtrot, and the tango, and wearing modern apparel rather than traditional clothing. These evening-dances linked the civic associations to the West, which had long politically and culturally dominated Greece, and stood in for modernity.

National and international understandings of dance can often greatly influence one another. As mentioned above, tango, for example, originally developed in the late nineteenth century around the Río de la Plata that separates Argentina and Uruguay. It fused African rhythms, recreated by former slaves, with music of Spanish descendants born in the Americas (criollos), and with European influences brought by mostly Spanish and Italian migrants. As such, it can be seen as a dance of exiles (Savigliano 1995, xiv). However, tango soon developed into a system of seemingly ‘exotic’ Argentinian identity, considered wild, untamed, and passionate by the colonial and imperial powers of Argentina and Uruguay. As part of a global ‘political economy of passion’ that included tango records, handbooks, films, and fashion, foreigners appropriated the dance throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, London, and New York, and all the way to Japan. Tango underwent an even more widespread revival in the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that it also became Argentina’s national dance can only be made sense of when considering the interplay between Europe’s former Latin American colonies and ongoing Western imperialism. Western countries were eager to consume exoticised forms of dance that ultimately legitimated their own perceived superiority. Once consumed abroad, the exoticised dance could be re-appropriated by national elites as an appropriate marker of national identity (Savigliano 1995, 138).

However, dance can also serve as a site of resistance against colonial or oppressive regimes, providing a means through which marginalised communities assert their own identity and sovereignty. The Irish dance revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, was closely tied to broader nationalist movements seeking to affirm Irish identity in the face of British rule (O’Connor 2013; Wulff 2007). The Gaelic League and other cultural organisations promoted step dancing and céilí dancing as emblematic expressions of an authentically Irish way of life, in contrast to what they saw as British cultural dominance. Standardised competitions, codified techniques, and public performances all became tools for mobilising dance as a marker of national unity and cultural distinctiveness.

Similarly, dance has played a key role in the expression of Palestinian national identity, serving as a form of cultural resistance against European colonial imperialism as well as Israeli occupation and Islamic reform movements (Rowe 2010). Nicholas Rowe, who lived in Ramallah between 2000 and 2008 and worked with local dance groups in refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, raises the question of whether dance can be represented without highlighting the extreme political circumstances in which it takes place. He shows that Palestinian dance productions become impossible as choreographers and their family members are killed, curfews and roadblocks make movement impossible, and dance venues are vandalised and destroyed (Rowe 2010, 189). Yet even under these difficult circumstances, dance may continue, not least to express individual and collective trauma (Rowe 2010). In a similar vein, the resurgence of Indigenous dances in the Americas is not only a revival of cultural practices but also a statement of resistance against colonial erasure and a declaration of sovereignty (Prichard 2022).

Of course, the political affordances of dance go beyond traditional party or state politics. An example of this is the critical role that dance plays in creating a queer Latino/a public in the United States. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the US Latino/a population quickly gained public visibility, dance (along with other forms of performance) was crucial to enable queer Latinos/as to equally claim spaces that allowed them to live publicly. Their increase in social rights was partially enabled by queer Latino/a cultural production, which had in the 1990s permeated the mainstream American queer culture in the form of Latin rhythms and choreographies (Rivera-Servera 2012, 15). Queer Latino/as’ ability to dance eloquently to Latin rhythms helped shift the power dynamics of the dance floor of the clubs they frequented. Their dance skills can thus be understood as ‘choreographies of resistance’—as embodied practices through which minoritarian subjects claim space in social and cultural realms, such as the dance floor (Rivera-Servera 2012, 43). Studying queer Latino/a identity through dance raises the question of whether Latinidad should be thought of as a programmatic political identity in the first place, or rather ‘as a performative modality’ that establishes Latino/a cultural practice (Rivera-Servera 2012, 20).

Importantly, the role of dance in enabling oppressions or resistence is not always clear cut. Thus, dance has been a form of resistance for the Italian mafia, in mafia-patronised religious celebrations of southern Italy. These celebrations include dances on the towns’ main squares, in which prominent members of the mafia dance with local politicians and both parties engage in a symbolic fight with imaginary knives and sticks (Pipyrou 2016, 175–8). These dances imply mutual political recognition, but they also enable members of the mafia to challenge regional state hegemony. They come with ambiguous real-life consequences, as local politicians may participate as they are trying to gain local votes, while members of the mafia do the same to gain recognition and status.

The fact that dance constitutes a form of ‘embodied resistance’ distinguishes it from other forms of political activism. Dance allows individuals and communities to express dissent and critique socio-political conditions in a way that words alone cannot (Fraleigh 2004). For instance, during the apartheid era in South Africa, the gumboot dance, which includes groups of performers stomping and tapping on their rubber boots, evolved as a form of resistance among mine workers. It was a covert way to communicate and to express grievances under the guise of entertainment (Welsh-Asante 1993). Similar roots entangled with a complex and contested history can also be found in capoeira, a hybrid between a dance, a martial art, and a game. It was likely developed in Africa by enslaved people who sought to practise self-defence under the guise of dance before being transported to Brazil. Evidence shows that it has been practised in Brazil since at least 1900 by the male African-Brazilian urban underclass. For some time, the government criminalised capoeira, and practitioners were persecuted until it was legalised in 1937. After 1975, it spread to the US and Europe, and soon after to the rest of the world (Delamont and Stephens 2008, 58). Thus, what began as a form of ‘embodied resistance’ became a global practice that celebrates the hybridisation of Portuguese and African-Brazilian music, dance, and bravery. On 26 November 2014, UNESCO recognised capoeira as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The global spread of dance forms via media and migration has further complicated the dance-politics nexus, introducing issues of cultural appropriation, global inequality, and transnational identities. Street dance styles like breakdancing have been adopted by young persons across the world. This may come as a way of expressing resistance against societal norms and injustices (Koutsougera 2023; Marsh and Campbell 2020). At the same time, the global popularity of dances raises questions about cultural ownership, authenticity, and the commercialisation of cultural expressions (Ana 2017). Cuban rumba, for example, has been strategically packaged for international tourism, where performers are expected to embody ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban identity in ways that cater to visitor expectations; yet rumberos themselves often receive minimal benefits from this commodification, and many view the state-driven ‘heritagization’ of rumba with ambivalence (Ana 2017, 163–7, 173–6, 181–3).

The global spread of dance forms also raises questions regarding their hybridisation, which is often presented as a result of globalisation (Duffy 2005). Hybrid dances emerge when elements from different dance traditions combine to create new forms, reflecting the complex interactions and exchanges facilitated by global flows of people and media. One example is the Tribal Fusion dance, in which North African and Arabic dance (colloquially known as ‘belly dance’) practitioners blend modern electronica and other various styles in creative and largely unbound ways. Dancers in this style thereby mostly do not reference the modern Middle East. As a result, their dance style may be derided by purists as derivative and degenerate compared to seemingly more ‘authentic’ forms of belly dance. At the same time, the freedom of Tribal Fusion enables the dancers to eschew accusations of cultural appropriation and to bring their very own styles to the transnational dance scene, drawing on movements from tango, flamenco, jazz, and modern dance, among others (Scheelar 2013; Sellers-Young 2016).

The digital age has further accelerated the global spread and transformation of dance practices. Social media platforms and video-sharing sites enable the rapid dissemination of dance videos, influencing global dance trends and fostering a sense of global community among dancers and enthusiasts. This has also allowed new dance styles to be created, such as industrial dance, a highly stylised goth-style dance with a well-defined repertoire of movements that is practised in similar ways in different goth scenes around the world. Its creation and development, however, took place almost entirely online. Goth YouTubers from different parts of the world began uploading videos of themselves dancing to industrial music, often inspired by cyber and rave aesthetics. These videos sparked discussion in the comment sections and across online forums, where users debated what counted as industrial dance. Through these public exchanges—offering feedback, critique, and praise—a shared set of movements and aesthetics gradually emerged. Over time, these digital interactions informally established and defined industrial dance, both morphologically and conceptually, without the need for a central authority or institutional framing (Karampampas 2016, 139–46).

A compelling example of rapid global circulation in digital times is Japanese Butoh, developed in the second half of the twentieth century and marked by grotesque imagery, playful experimentation, and slow, hyper-controlled motion. Since the 1980s, Butoh groups have emerged around the world, with many non-Japanese practitioners becoming recognised artists and teachers who establish their own schools and often develop approaches that diverge from the original lineages (Calamoneri 2008, 36–7; Candelario 2019, 245–52; van Hensbergen 2019, 276–84). The global and increasingly digital dissemination of Butoh enables unprecedented participation and innovation, while also raising questions about authorship, ownership, and the ethics of cross-cultural transmission (Garnica 2019, 325–36).

Dance as intangible cultural heritage

Dancing, particularly when it is staged, can often be read as a performance of folklore, i.e. of a traditional custom that links to the beliefs or values of a specific group. It can thus stand in tight connection with broader cultural narratives, identities, and histories. This ‘second existence’ of dance, beyond its initial performance context, matters when dance is reinterpreted, adapted, or incorporated into new spatial, temporal, or cultural settings. Keeping the folkloristic aspects of dance in mind allows anthropologists to explore the dynamic processes through which traditions are transmitted, transformed, and reimagined in response to changing cultural landscapes (Nahachewsky 2001). The second existence of dance may have a parallel life with the ‘first’, i.e. with the folk-dance performances which continue to take place in their initial social context. At other times, the initial social context may have changed, or there may be discontinuity in the transmission of knowledge, and in some cases, the second existence of dance replaces the first. The second existence of dance also encompasses how dance traditions are taught, learned, and practised beyond their original contexts. Dance workshops, festivals, and educational programs serve as important spaces for the transmission and adaptation of dance traditions, contributing to the ongoing evolution of dance forms and the formation of transnational dance communities (Karampampas 2021, 660–1; Sklar 2001).

The staging of dance can thus be seen as a site of cultural production where meanings are negotiated between performers and audiences. When dances are staged, they are often adapted or recontextualised to fit new settings, engaging with audiences unfamiliar with the original cultural context. Staging can thus be seen as a form of cultural translation, where the inherent meanings and aesthetics of a dance are interpreted and potentially transformed (Shay 2016). Moreover, the folkloristic aspects of dance on stage raise questions about its authenticity and about the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Debates about authenticity highlight the tension between the desire to preserve cultural heritage and the need for artistic innovation and cultural exchange (Bendix 1997; Theodossopoulos 2013).

For example, in 2003 the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) aimed, among other things, to rethink what folklore, now referred to as ‘intangible heritage’, may be. It inaugurated the important shift from trying to record and preserve disappearing traditions to promoting their ongoing transmission. This was to be achieved by supporting both practitioners and the conditions necessary for their practices to continue (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2014, 53). While this marks a shift from older folkloristic approaches, the Convention still relies on established methods like listing, mapping, and recording (Kuutma 2012; Tauschek 2011). Notions of authenticity thus persist—albeit in redefined terms—and continue to shape public perceptions of cultural value (Bendix 2018, 6; Bortolotto 2020).

Transforming a tradition into ICH involves a process of ‘heritagisation’. This process can be deeply self-referential, as constructing heritage can itself be part of the cultural and social processes that end up constituting heritage (Smith 2006, 13). For example, when a community prepares a dance for inclusion in an ICH inventory—by defining what counts as ‘authentic’, formalising choreography, or crafting heritage narratives—these acts of preparation reshape the tradition and feed back into how it is understood. At the same time, the dance itself becomes a policy object, especially when viewed through the lens of Intangible Cultural Heritage, where safeguarding frameworks transform lived practices into administratively managed ‘heritage’ (Smith 2006, 13; Tauschek 2011). ICH may therefore be seen not merely as preserved tradition, but as a metacultural production (Tauschek 2011), a policy-oriented reimagining of tradition focused on safeguarding, transmission, and empowerment. Following this logic, ICH could be seen as a third existence (Karampampas forthcoming) of dance: no longer just a performance or culturally relevant social activity, but a policy artefact focused on cultural continuity. Through this lens, dance is framed not as a static, authentic relic, but as a living tradition that carries community values, identities, and histories. This third existence resists overly static and folkloristic views of dance and opens new directions for anthropological inquiry.

Conclusion

The study of dance offers profound insights into the human condition. It allows us to understand and rethink social dynamics and structures, as well as individual and collective identities. Dance is not merely an art form but is also a rich cultural practice that informs and is informed by the contexts in which it occurs. Its analysis reveals the many, often highly nuanced ways in which communities express themselves, negotiate social norms, and maintain traditions, making it an endlessly fascinating subject for future study. As societies continue to change, the relevance of studying dance remains undiminished. It offers a unique vantage point from which to observe the ongoing interplay between tradition and innovation, providing a mirror in which we can view the continuous reshaping of identities in response to global influences and local practices.

The ephemeral nature of dance, with its ability to adapt and morph into new forms while retaining links to the past, makes it an ideal subject for exploring broader questions of continuity and change in contemporary societies. At the same time, the rise of the internet and the turbocharged hybridisation of dance make it more exciting than ever. As a form of embodied, non-verbal communication that transcends social and linguistic barriers, dance is likely to remain crucial to understand the human condition in an increasingly interconnected world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. I am especially grateful to the editors, Hanna Nieber and Felix Stein, whose exceptional patience and valuable suggestions have shaped this entry and supported its successful completion.

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Note on contributor

Panas Karampampas, PhD (St Andrews) is a Social Anthropologist at Durham University. He currently works on Intangible Cultural Heritage policies, bureaucracy, and global governance. His doctoral research focussed on the goth scene, digital anthropology, dance, cosmopolitanism, peripherality, and globalisation. He serves as an elected member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2025–2027).

panas.karampampas@easaonline.org / ORCID: 0000-0001-8712-9445

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Atmospheres

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:40:13 +0000

"Morning rituals", 2022. Picture by Jason Boldero.

Michael Schnegg Jonas Bens

University of Hamburg

Initially published 25 Nov 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25atmospheres

Abstract:

Introduction & social science antecedents

Every situation has an atmosphere: a general feeling, tonality, or vibe that people experience collectively and individually. When we enter a room, or any other social space, its atmosphere makes us feel something: at ease or uneasy, comfortable or uncomfortable, included or excluded. Atmospheres contribute in important ways to meanings, feelings, and behaviours. They circumscribe what we can say, how we can move, or even which behaviours we consider appropriate. But atmospheres are never quite clear to us; they feel—at least to some extent—fleeting, indeterminate, and difficult to grasp.

There is an intuitive importance of this kind of affective in-between captured in the term ‘atmosphere’. Despite this, it is remarkable how late anthropologists began to theorise atmospheres more thoroughly. Instead, they have used a series of closely related concepts in the past to make sense of them. One good starting point for understanding atmospheres is the ancient Greek etymology of the term and its early uses. The word atmosphere comes from ἀτμός (atmós), ‘vapour, steam,’ and σφαῖρα (sphaîra), describing a ‘sphere’ produced by it. In line with these meanings, scientific writings of the sixteenth century used the term in two different ways: to describe the gaseous envelope of a celestial body (e.g., the Earth) and to refer to emanations of the human body. In relation to humans, these effluvia and material airs were perceived to vary with social categories, including gender, age, race, and class. Social emanations were the forces that influenced relationships and led to attraction or repulsion between people (Corbin 1982). Even in these early uses, however, the term ‘atmosphere’ referred not only to the emanations of a particular person but also to the totality of ‘atmospheres’ created by all kinds of bodies interacting in situations and places.

These ideas entered social science debates about a century ago but were not yet named ‘atmosphere’. To clarify the relationship between experiencing and knowing, Georg Simmel (1917, 130), for example, stipulates that we know that something is alive because a living being is surrounded by an ultramateriellen Wirksamkeitsumkreis (literally ‘ultramaterial sphere of influence’) that touches us immediately. Accordingly, we grasp our environment in its entirety before we can reduce it to specific sensory impressions, such as seeing the entity’s movements, smelling its vitality, and cognitively categorising other sensory impressions as belonging to a living organism. Simmel goes on to show that in situations where multiple beings are present, they form an atmosphere that can become characteristic of a particular place, like a city or even a country, foregrounding the spatial and situational meaning of the term.

In a related manner, Émile Durkheim’s notion of a ‘collective effervescence’ captures the affective in-between a situation describes. In his theory of shared affectivities in ritual, Durkheim argues that rituals contribute significantly to the solidarity that helps maintain social order in a group (1995). While rituals are salient, he says, they are threatened by individualistic interests. Therefore, rituals must produce a shared collective feeling, which he referred to as the ‘effervescence’, something which goes beyond the sharing of meanings and categories. It gives the ritual its power and ultimately enables it to maintain social representations and thus the social order of a group (von Scheve 2012).

The study of atmospheres as a force which emanates from bodies can also be linked to the early anthropological study of gift giving, as part of which Marcel Mauss (1925) argues that gifts may have their own power that makes them circulate. Drawing on ethnographic writing on property understandings among late nineteenth and early twentieth century Māori of Polynesia, Mauss discusses the Polynesian concept of the Hau (lit. wind, soul, power) as an object-centred force said to accompany gifts and drive people to reciprocate them. The Hau aligns with the term atmosphere as a force that emanates from a person and extends to objects. Moreover, the Hau is similar to atmospheres in that it has a spatial component, being linked to the gift-giver as much to the soil and the territory where it originates (Mauss [1925] 2016, 70–1). In his methodological reflections, Mauss also refers to the situational meaning of the term atmosphere. To describe the ‘tonalité morale’ (‘moral tone’) that prevails among a group of people he uses the French term ‘atmosphere’ (Mauss [1926] 2002, 282).

In the middle of the twentieth century, concrete situations became more central to social research. Ethnographers tended to study specific ‘encounters’ in which people interact ‘face-to-face’ (Goffman 1961). Thus, several researchers focused on the ways people produce their cultural (and emotional) worlds through everyday interactions (Garfinkel 1967). In face-to-face encounters, people communicate in a variety of ways and in constellations that involve human and non-human participants (Murphy 2023). For example, people may empathise with other species that are part of their world, as Michael Schnegg and Thiemo Breyer (2024) demonstrate with Damara pastoralists in Namibia. Here, embodied empathy creates a multi-species world that incorporates the perspectives of elephants, tricksters, and livestock. This world is distinct from any world in which these perspectives are absent.

Influenced by this focus on micro-situations and their affectivity, anthropologist Clifford Geertz distinguishes ‘ethos’ from ‘moods’. He understood an ethos to be the general aesthetic or moral style of a culture (1973, 89). A people’s ethos may feel universal and objective to them, but it stems at least in part from the specific ways in which people adapt to their lives’ circumstances. Moods, on the other hand, were more temporally- and spatially-bounded phenomena: ‘Like fogs, “moods” just settle and lift; like scents, suffuse and evaporate. When present moods are totalistic: if one is sad everything and everybody seems dreary; if one is gay everything and everybody seems splendid’ (Geertz 1973, 97). Moods also distinguish themselves from an ethos, in that they are made meaningful with reference to their sources, rather than being explicable through the ends they may serve (Geertz 1973, 97).

Two important dimensions of atmospheres are already apparent in these early sets of atmosphere-adjacent concepts. First, atmospheres can describe what is ‘in the air’ at very different scales. On a smaller scale, atmospheres are relevant to concrete situations: face-to-face encounters in which all kinds of bodies, human and non-human, material and immaterial, create an atmosphere. On a larger scale, atmospheres can also characterise situations: a city, a country, a community, a generation, and so on can come with specific atmospheres. Secondly, an atmosphere is usually experienced as a totality, as a sense of a whole in which people cannot immediately identify all the individual elements that make it up.

Affect studies and phenomenology

It is only recently that anthropologists have begun to explicitly theorise atmospheres. Two major theoretical developments may be responsible for this: Affect studies—an interdisciplinary field in the social sciences and humanities which explores the fundamentally relational character of feeling and emotion—has broadened scholarly attention to include more subtle, elusive and intangible affective dynamics, such as atmosphere. Secondly, phenomenology—an approach which pays close attention to people’s experience of concrete situations—has developed a particular focus on atmospheres (Schnegg 2023).

The ‘turn to affect’ in the social sciences and humanities since the late 1990s (Clough and Halley 2007) has been part of a broader movement to rethink feeling, emotion, and subjective experience in terms of the material constellations of bodies in space, rather than as internal feelings. This approach has also gained prominence in anthropology. From an affect perspective, atmospheres are primarily ‘out there’, generated in relational arrangements of bodies, even if they are subjectively felt by individuals.

An important precursor for this understanding of atmosphere is the social science scholarship of emotions beginning in the late 1970s, strongly influenced by feminist and queer studies. These scholars explicitly challenged the assumptions of mainstream psychology, which conceptualised emotions primarily as the internal states of individuals. Instead, they argued that emotions are the result of processes of social construction in culturally specific situations and performances—through everyday interactions and encounters (Hochschild 1983; Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990). From the 1990s, scholars began to move away from the idea that emotions should be understood merely as cognitive concepts that people construct in everyday interaction and began to explore that material bodies also play an important role in the experience of feeling (Leavitt 1996). From then on, queer-feminist scholars in anthropology and beyond began to use the term ‘affect’, which seemed to denote a stronger connection to bodies, while still arguing that affect is primarily shaped by society, culture, and history, rather than biology (Stoler 2002; Sedgwick 2003; Ahmed 2004).

Since the late 1990s, scholars began to introduce a much wider understanding of the body as a basis for the study of affect (Massumi 2002, Thrift 2007), including human and non-human, material and immaterial entities: ‘a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (Deleuze 1988, 127). Affect, then, emerges from such a relational constellation of all kinds of bodies that form an ‘affective arrangement’ (Slaby, Mühlhoff and Wünschner 2017). These arrangements in which affect comes to the fore shape how people experience a situation.

Early phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger developed the term Stimmung (often translated as ‘mood’) to capture how we shape situations affectively and how they in turn shape us. Following their conceptual lead, the term ‘atmosphere’ was further developed with the aim of rethinking human emotionality (Tellenbach 1981, Schmitz 2019; Schmitz, Müllan and Slaby 2011; Schnegg 2023). Hermann Schmitz (1974), a central figure in recent phenomenological debates, argues that emotions (and feelings) have long been misconceived as something located in the individual psyche. Instead, they are not private but rather ‘out there’. In Schmitz’s reading, emotions are atmospheres, also ontologically, and largely beyond the individual’s control—something that overcomes or befalls us. The feeling body (Leib) is the medium through which we resonate with them and feel them subjectively (Eisenlohr 2024, Schnegg 2024).

In recent years, Schmitz's radical ontological approach has been further developed (and, some might say, watered down). While he theorises that atmospheres are epistemic wholes that include the subject and cannot be reduced to their parts, Gernot Böhme introduces a ‘constellationalist perspective’ (Riedel 2018, 173), claiming that atmospheres are constituted by the elements present in a situation even as they transcend these elements. As such, atmospheres can be curated and transformed by changing the elements that constitute them, including the built environment, the arrangement of objects, their material makeup, symbolic nature, light, smells, etc. Churches and public spaces in cities are prime examples that demonstrate what constitutes atmospheres and to what extent atmospheres can be constructed, manipulated, and experienced.

Both of these traditions of affect studies and phenomenology use slightly different terminologies, and scholars have debated the distinctions between the concepts of feeling, emotion, and affect. When it comes to the study of atmosphere, it is possible to understand ‘feeling’ as denoting the realm of subjective experience, like a single person or a collective feeling something in their bodies. ‘Emotion’, then, refers to culturally formed and semantically expressible subjective experiences, for which people also normally have words to describe and qualitatively differentiate them – for example love, hate, shame, or joy. The term ‘affect’ is broader and also cross-cuts these categories. In the terminology of affect studies, feeling and emotion can be described as affective phenomena. The concept of affect, however, proposes a strictly relational perspective, understanding feelings and emotions as emerging in-between bodies within a constellation rather than as properties of individual subjects. Over the past three decades, these theoretical resources from affect theory and phenomenology have increasingly been used not only in anthropology, but also in sociology, geography, and other disciplines to theorise atmospheres (Anderson 2009; Gugutzer 2020a; Trigg 2022; Stewart 2011).

Thereby, the notion of atmosphere we discuss here is only one of the several concepts used to describe shared affectivities (Thonhauser 2021). Related terms include ‘affective spaces’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009), ‘Stimmung’ (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017), ‘attunement’ (Stewart 2011; Throop 2020; Zigon 2014), and ‘moods’ (Throop 2018; 2014; 2020). Given the range of definitions for all these terms, it is impossible to separate them neatly. It will be one of the major challenges for the larger field to work this out more clearly. However, some tendencies can be discerned. Whereas Stimmung and mood tend to focus more on internal states that frame our experience of the world while simultaneously acknowledging that we are framed by them, atmospheres are thought to be primarily out there, happening to us and thus leading to the feelings we have. In this sense, one comes to a classroom with a particular mood, which has its atmosphere, and while one changes the atmosphere by being present, it also changes one’s mood. When leaving the classroom, however, one takes the mood along while leaving the atmosphere behind. Furthermore, whereas Stimmung and affective spaces describe shared affectivities with some temporal duration, atmospheres also refer to a shorter temporal scale. Finally, compared to affective spaces and atmospheres, Stimmung and moods place less emphasis on the non-human bodies, materialities, and networks of affective relations that constitute them.

In the following, we narrow the focus to anthropological discussions of atmospheres. Building on previous work (Schroer and Schmitt 2018a), we describe what atmospheres are, what they do, and how they can be analysed ethnographically.

What atmospheres are

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation, yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. People often experience atmospheres as something that cannot be put into words easily; nevertheless, they enable or disable certain behaviours in situational and sometimes unpredictable ways. Didier Eribon’s autobiography Returning to Reims offers a vivid case. On his return and to explain what it meant for him to leave home, Eribon invokes his family’s conflictual constellation: ‘the atmosphere was a harsh one, painful on a daily basis, even unbearable. This constant climate of conjugal warfare must have counted for a lot in producing my will to flee both my family and my circumstances’ (2013, 83). Eribon thus underscores, first, that situations are suffused with atmospheres that shape how people feel; and second, that atmosphere is an affective layer that enables some actions while constraining others. In this view, atmosphere—alongside individual aspiration and structural constraint—becomes a further analytic for understanding the behaviour of persons and groups.

The anthropology of atmospheres has also suggested that atmospheres may be neither subjective nor objective. While an atmosphere may already be there when we enter a room, or any other social space, our presence changes it. At the same time, the atmosphere changes us, and as subjects, we are partly constituted by it. It is therefore difficult to describe atmosphere as either a purely objective or a subjective phenomenon. Rather, several scholars have insisted that atmospheres transcend this distinction. An example can illustrate this: During a recent fieldwork stay in Namibia, I (Michael Schnegg) went to a neighbour’s house to ask for a tool. The absence of people outside already signalled that something was amiss. Inside, the room was quiet; no one spoke. I was immediately solicited by an atmosphere of grief. On asking gently, I learned that a close relative had died in an accident only hours before. The situation’s affective intensity rendered me out of place; with limited language, I offered condolences. My presence, I sensed, altered the shared atmosphere, even as that atmosphere altered me—producing a felt mixture of sorrow, disconnection, and misfit.

Such atmospheres are synaesthetic, meaning they may stimulate various senses or cognitive pathways at the same time. It may be this multisensory experience of an atmosphere that makes us feel it as a whole before we can distinguish particular sensory impressions of sound, smell, and touch (Eisenlohr 2024, 40; Schmitz 2016, 18). For example, visitors to an art installation in Denmark complained about its strong smell although no chemical or material sources could be found in the environment. But as the overall tonality of the installation—its walls, its colours, its light—was reminiscent of a hospital floor, the arrangement was experienced synaesthetically as an atmosphere with odour (Stenslund 2018). Such findings suggest the existence of an embodied capacity to store atmospheres and their memory, which are then triggered when a similar arrangement is experienced again.

Atmospheres have also been shown to contain suggestions of movement. Being immersed in an atmosphere can literally move us in ways over which we have little control. This is most obvious with atmospheres that are largely created by sound, which we often experience as shaking and moving the body in particular ways. The musical recitation of devotional poetry (na't khwan) among Mauritian Muslims is a good example for this. Consisting of hymns and poems that are usually recited in Urdu, this form of poetry stirs feelings of religious affection and creates a desire for prayer among devout Muslims. It does this both through its meaning, but also very much through the mode and style of its vocal rendering and through the sonic nature of the voice involved in it. The latter creates an atmosphere that envelops and suffuses the body and changes its sense of being in space. It ‘grips you powerfully’, ‘makes you vibrate’, and ‘directly enters your soul’, as people put it (Eisenlohr 2018, 2024, 8). The sound and resulting movements become all the more meaningful insofar as they are part of ritual practices that incorporate the discursive and iconographic dimensions of a religious tradition (Eisenlohr 2022, 2018).

A final major aspect of atmospheres that the anthropological literature has insisted on is that they can be shaped or curated. For instance, by arranging the lighting in a way that fosters a sense of community, solitude, and ‘security’, a feeling called hygge ('feeling home') can be induced in Denmark (Bille 2020; 2015; Bille, Bjerregaard and Sørensen 2015). In a similar manner, urban spaces can be designed to make people feel particular ways, when, for example, the high ceilings in Christian churches are intended to make people feel small in the presence of God (for more examples, see Stenslund 2023). This possibility to craft and design atmospheres has also been demonstrated for experimental theatres (Gatt 2018), pharmacies (Liu 2023), churches (Gregersen 2021), commercial settings (Kolehmainen and Mäkinen 2021), courtrooms (Bens 2018), or even aquariums where enthusiasts create an atmosphere with water, air, and light (Schmitt 2018, 96).

What atmospheres do

We are only beginning to understand that in addition to individual motives and structural possibilities and constraints, atmospheres are a third layer that shape both meanings and behaviours. As such, atmospheres can create, for example, belonging. To this end, anthropological research has shown that people actively create the atmosphere in the Night Church, held in a cathedral in Copenhagen, through the arrangements of both human and non-human bodies, making it a special place for worship and belonging. To theorise this, Andreas Melson Gregersen (2021) introduces the term ‘atmosphering’ and demonstrates how this act involves creating a sense of being in a church without being in a traditional one, and how people perceive this atmosphere.

Similarly, to ‘feel at home’ in Japan means to create an atmosphere where practices that create intimacy (often referred to as ‘social heat’) such as sleeping, eating, and bathing are balanced with household members’ desire for autonomy and distance (Daniels 2015). In related ways, white, urban, upper-middle-class American women use ‘ethnic’ objects such as Malian bògòlan candles and cloth to create domestic spaces, which in their words, are full of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘life’ (Bodil Birkebæk Olesen 2010). They feel that exoticised objects can help them overcome the ‘coldness’ of other materials and bring life, and ultimately social relationships, into their homes. In certain British pubs the atmosphere immerses people in the essence of the place not only to make them feel at home, but primarily to encourage consumption (Shaw 2018).

While this sounds mostly positive and inclusive, atmospheres may just as well limit or exclude people in various ways. In Black skin, white masks (2008), Frantz Fanon analyses what it feels like to be Black in mid-century French society. In a much-quoted scene, he describes sitting at a table and contemplating reaching for matches. He feels inhibited and describes how the gazes of others (whether they are in the room or not) create an ‘atmosphere of certain uncertainty’ (Fanon 2008, 83) that hinders him. This atmosphere is not just something that imposes itself on him in the moment. Rather, it has become a ‘definitive structuring of the self and the world’, part of a dialectical relationality. Because of the oppressive and dangerous atmosphere in which Fanon lived, it is impossible for him to move freely and without fear. His analysis has inspired a vast literature on how the gaze of dominant groups of people can create atmospheres that inhibit or exclude others (Magrì and McQueen 2023).

Sara Ahmed (2007) is one of the most prominent contributors to this literature. In her analysis of whiteness, she shows how certain atmospheres can be created in such a way as to exclude non-white bodies. To explain how these atmospheres are formed, she extends Fanon’s account of living under a hostile, white gaze. Ahmed describes the limited scope of action of people of colour in a white world through the notion of ‘orientation’, understood as the different directions people can take in any given moment, which determine what is and is not within their reach (2007). Reflecting on the political dimension of atmosphere more generally, Janis Jenkins (2025) recently added that within any political ethos, the constitution of political subjectivity takes place at the nexus of and orientation and the atmosphere in which we orient.

The stifling effects of atmospheres that Fanon developed with respect to ethnic and racialised limitation and exclusion have been extended to other social categories such as gender, age, and class. Take, for example, outreach events by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in northern Uganda in the late 2010s. Here, ICC staff aimed at curating a ‘transitional justice atmosphere’ which included foreign media audiences but excluded in-person audiences in the village through linguistic and spatial regimes. The constellation of material arrangements contributed significantly to this exclusion: monitors displayed proceedings from The Hague in English, accessible to media representatives but incomprehensible to most local attendees who lacked adequate translation. The small screens and language barrier generated an atmosphere of boredom and restlessness among the physically present audience, yet this remained invisible to distant viewers. Television cameras and photographers transmitted a carefully curated visual atmosphere that suggested engaged participation, while the actual bodily experience of confusion and exclusion felt by local attendees was systematically filtered out of the mediated representation (Bens 2022, 46–71).

Recent scholarship on the political dimension of atmospheres also explores whether some emotions and feelings might not only be shaped by atmosphere but, in Schmitz’s sense, be atmospheres. In this line of theorising, Schnegg (2024) describes boredom in rural Namibia as an atmosphere that grows in a space created by a longing for a different future. At the same time, people experience the path to this future as being blocked—by the environment, by political and economic marginalisation, by their own bodies, and by others. This atmosphere grips people who describe boredom as ‘riding on their backs’. It can only be lifted if the determining structures change. Here, emotions as atmospheres are intertwined with the political processes responsible for materiality and its lack. In a similar manner, historical, material, and political processes, as well as the routines of the school day, contribute to an atmosphere of boredom in a Berlin Hauptschule (Wellgraf 2018). The particular school is attended by the less privileged children in a part of the city characterised by increasing ruin and decay. The feeling of boredom grows in this environment of high unemployment where students experience education as having no future.

Political atmospheres of violence have equally been observed in the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict in Kashmir, for example. These atmospheres have developed in the militarised, ecologically fragile borderlands of Pakistan and India, shaping the lives of people in the two mountain valleys described ethnographically by Omer Aijazi (2024). At the same time, Aijazi convincingly demonstrates how people overcome these violent atmospheres through everyday micro-practices such as sharing and fostering friendships with Allah. This situation compares very well to the ways in which narco-stories within the Mexican and U.S. governments' militarised war on drugs in a Mexican prostitution zone contribute to a violent atmosphere. Here, rumours about how violent narco-criminals are contributed to an affective atmosphere of terror and vulnerability. This atmosphere in turn rendered the public more passive and ultimately led sex workers and other local residents to stop working in the area and move away (Luna 2018).

While the study of atmospheres foregrounds the importance of affect, feelings, and emotions, it also matters for rational deliberation. At the ICC judging on Uganda’s past conflicts, actors such as prosecutors, defence lawyers, victims, witnesses, and judges compete to influence the atmosphere in these ‘legal spaces’ (Bens 2022, Philoppopoulos Mihalopoulos 2015). They shape the atmosphere to establish specific historical truths about Uganda’s violent past, ‘moral truths’ about who is responsible for this violence, the plausibility of both, the guilt or innocence of individuals, and the justice and legitimacy of whole legal systems, such as international criminal law. To influence these atmospheres, actors try to rearrange bodies in an ‘affective arrangement’ (Slaby et al. 2017), for example by bringing human and non-human witnesses into the courtroom (Bens 2022, 92–110). These atmospheres inside and outside the courtroom serve as ‘affective frames’ for assessing the plausibility of narratives about the past, present, and future (Bens 2022, 71–91).

Beyond rationality, atmospheres help us create meaning. A comparative analysis of museum exhibitions has revealed how atmospheres make things appear to the visitor, as in the case of the exhibition Villa Sovietica which ran from 2009-2010 at the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva and focused on Soviet objects of everyday life. These objects can never simply be seen. Instead, they require movement of the perceiving body to reach them. This arrangement dissolves the Soviet nature of these objects and opens up other perspectives on them, focusing for example on their materiality, which is similar to that of other objects in the room (Bjerregaard 2015). Similary, it has been argued that the special atmosphere of live recordings of ritual mourning taking place in a Pakistan neighbourhood emanate the mahaul, a moral atmosphere of the ritual. When the consumers of Shia Islamic media listen to these live recordings, they contribute to the atmosphere of the public spaces in which they are played (Cooper 2022; 2024). Mahaul, here, is the Urdu articulation of atmosphere, a category of knowledge and experience, with interesting ethnographic stakes. Importantly, Mahaul is not only the affective background that gives meaning to things, but also a ‘container’ that holds and frames a situation, as well as the human and non-human entities within it (Cooper 2024).

Studying this interplay of atmosphere, rationality, and meaning-making shows that atmospheres are powerful social forces that shape collective and individual behaviour (Bille and Schwabe 2023). This is evident in the atmosphere created during the temple festival in a Badaga community in southern India (Heidemann 2021). The rituals manifest and reproduce the social order and the positions of groups within it—not unlike in Durkheim’s effervescence, mentioned above. They are also experienced as a tremendous relief by devotees and visitors. In a similar manner, unmarked religiosity has been shown to exist in secular Ukrainian society before the war. Theorising this form of religiosity as an atmosphere allows us to show how, in moments of crisis, the religious atmosphere becomes an important resource for political projects, such as the popular uprising of 2013–14 (Wanner 2020).

Sporting events are prime example of how atmospheres connect, but studies can also show the ambiguous dynamics of such connections. The ‘atmosphere’ of the 2012 London Olympics, for example, embraced and fostered a nationalism that made it difficult, and at times impossible, to express a critical perspective, for example by pointing out that the Olympics were the most expensive security operation in recent British history (Stephens 2016, 183). The impact of atmospheres was particularly evident when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, fans were not allowed into football stadiums and the 22 players played in front of up to 80,000 empty seats. This atmosphere clearly affected the players’ vitality. While many lacked motivation, some reported feeling more secure and relaxed (Gugutzer 2020b, Edensor 2015). These findings point to an open challenge in atmospheric studies: explaining how an atmosphere can affect different people in different ways.

While many studies of atmospheres focus on the relationships between humans and their built environments, non-human beings can become part of the atmosphere as well. Pigdogging—an Australian form of recreational hunting—relies on close collaboration between people and dogs to locate and catch wild pigs. Hunting with dogs extends human perception into the animals’ extraordinary olfactory range. In this partnership, scent appears not as a mere trace but as atmosphere: an enveloping field that signals where pigs have moved, rested, or turned. The hunt also transforms the landscape’s atmosphere: Human, canine, machine, and terrain become frictionally enmeshed in an embodied, unfolding practice that makes—and remakes—the landscape through a multisensory chase (Keil 2021, Schroer and Schmitt 2018b).

In a related manner, recent scholarship mobilises the idea that atmospheres are an underlying dimension of our connection to all entities we find in this world. Currently, climate and environmental changes are drastically altering these entities. As a result, the soil dries out, and the grasses and eventually the livestock die, which changes the overall environmental atmosphere (Schnegg 2025). To describe this atmosphere, Damara pastoralists in Namibia use the term ǃŪke-ai, which translates as ‘collective loneliness’. Similarly, in the Pontine Marshes in Italy, an atmosphere emerges from everyday agricultural practices, like burning reeds, and becomes part of the environment itself (Gruppuso 2018). The marshes are both extremely productive and a breeding ground for mosquitoes and malaria, the Italian contraction for mal’aria (aria cattiva, or ‘bad air’). As such, the atmosphere connects to the environment (here also meteorologically), with breathing playing an important role in the process. Exploring the atmospheric links we create to other species and to post-humanist mixtures of life and technology remains a major research gap for the years to come.

How atmospheres can be analysed and studied

Given that atmospheres, by their very nature, defy precise description, they pose significant challenges for anthropological analysis. One of the first systematic attempts to address the methodological challenges that atmospheres raise came with the productive distinction between ‘knowing in atmospheres’, ‘knowing about atmospheres’, and ‘knowing through atmospheres’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2019). Thereby, ‘knowing in atmospheres’ names the researcher’s in-situ attunement as an atmosphere unfolds: staying with its contingencies, rhythms, and micro-shifts through go-alongs, recordings, and sensory notes. ‘Knowing about atmospheres’ is a reconstructive, after-the-fact account that draws on interviews, elicitation, and traces to parse how spaces, media, bodies, and histories configured what was felt. Finally, ‘knowing through atmospheres’ treats concrete episodes as engines for concept-building, connecting atmospheric experience to broader social and material formations.

Understanding people’s feelings as lying ‘in the air’ makes them more accessible (and less deterministic) than placing them in the inner psyche and the minds of our interlocutors. However, it poses another salient challenge: how can we explain that individuals can sometimes experience the ‘same’ atmospheres quite differently? Some describe feeling in one way, while others feel differently. Some seem to be completely immersed in an atmosphere, while others merely notice it. Fully understanding and theorising this is still an outstanding theoretical challenge (Seyfert 2012, 29). Recently, the notion of ‘resonance’ has been proposed to explain such individual variation (Schnegg 2025). In this view, people have different ways of resonating with an atmosphere. At least two dimensions may influence how people experience or resonate with a given atmosphere: affective dispositions and symbols.

Affective dispositions can be defined as ‘an individual’s repository of affective traces of past relationships, events, and encounters. These function in the present as potentials to affect and be affected’ (Mühlhoff 2019, 119). Experiencing atmospheres, like other experiences, leaves traces in the subject. Having experienced the exuberance of a festival, the collective excitement of a sports team’s victory, or the wind before the long-awaited rain become part of an individual’s disposition that can be triggered in certain situations. These dispositions are likely to shape how to (re)experience an atmosphere. However, other, even more personal experiences can become part of one’s affective disposition and influence how the atmosphere is felt. Someone will respond differently to the atmosphere of a funeral if they have recently experienced death. Similarly, a herdsman who depends on cattle and rain will resonate differently with an atmosphere that announces rain than a teacher who does not depend on rain at all.

The study of symbols is equally important to understand whether and how atmospheres resonate with us. Atmospheres are, to a certain extent, pre-reflective, but they still require the interpretation of symbols which contribute to them. Consider walking past a group of noisy football fans, which might feel uncomfortable to some but perfectly normal to people who are used to it. At the same time, it may feel different again to those who can read the symbols on their skin and clothing, which in Germany, for example, sometimes refer to extreme right-wing movements. The symbols may thereby co-create an atmosphere, and they take on meaning through it (Bens 2022, 71–90).

How seriously one takes the role of affective dispositions and symbols in the study of atmospheres depends on the degree to which one believes that experiencing atmospheres is pre-reflective. The ethnographic record seems to show that atmospheres can not only be consciously curated, but also that people can ‘learn’ or ‘be socialised’ to resonate with particular atmospheres by becoming familiar with their symbols (Schnegg 2024, 2025).

Methodologically speaking, atmospheres can, first, be successfully studied through participant observation. This enables an ethnographic description of the situations and affective arrangements in which atmospheres emerge. It allows us to grasp in detail how human and non-human bodies relate to each other—what sounds, smells, lights, and other diverse components form the building blocks of a given situation. To explore their saliency, ethnographers can ask themselves which components of an arrangement cannot be omitted without significantly changing the atmosphere: this could be a person, a landscape, a view, a smell, a story, and so on. They can also ask about the specific sequence of events that brought an atmosphere about, as people often only become aware of them when people, landscapes, views, smells, stories, or anything else shifted (Riedel 2019, Bens 2019).

These observations usually trigger atmospheric experiences that the readers themselves have had: affective dispositions evoke a feeling in which similar atmospheric experiences were embedded. Of course, there are several methodological problems with this, including the presumption that the audience of an ethnography has experienced similar atmospheres in order to imagine and reexperience them. For this reason, atmospheric descriptions should be complemented by interviews with participants in the field as well as by autoethnographic reflection.

A second promising method to study atmospheres are phenomenological interviews that explore how our research participants understand and feel in certain situations. Phenomenological interviews ask people to re-experience a particular situation (Schnegg 2023). They begin by eliciting a moment in which an atmosphere, such as eeriness, was felt. In a second step, the interviewees are asked to describe the situation in which something happened as precisely as possible and to mentally reposition themselves in this experience. In the final step, the ethnographer asks the interlocutor to recall the atmosphere and, to some extent, to re-experience it and describe how it felt, without using categories that are too abstract. This elicits an experiential description (Levy and Hollan 1998). In such interviews, ethnographers avoid naming and categorising the atmosphere in advance. Sometimes atmospheres may have names that are not easily translated into English, in which case interviewees can be invited to use non-English terms for them. While phenomenological interviews are typically conducted for moments that the anthropologist has not experienced, they can also be used to describe atmospheres that are known to all participants in the conversation, allowing the data to be triangulated with the descriptions made as described above.

A third method is autoethnography, i.e. describing how an individual themself has experienced a certain situation. Imagine the boredom of waiting with people for a bus, the sadness of a funeral, the excitement of a wedding. Researchers are affected by these atmospheres to varying degrees, and reflecting on these experiences can become a powerful methodological tool, as, for example, Fanon’s work demonstrates. It makes the ethnographer’s own affects and emotions a starting point and an ‘epistemic resource’ for analysis (Stodulka et al. 2018). Ethnographers may also experience liminal moments of change, when constellations in the situation change and atmospheres shift. These affective dissonances in the atmosphere can be an important starting point for ethnographic analysis. All three of these methods—participant observation, phenomenological interviews, and autoethnography—broadly align with approaches generally subsumed within sensory ethnography (Vannini 2024).

Conclusion

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation, yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. Anthropologists have begun to conceptualise this affective in-between. Most of them agree that atmospheres are situational, that they are formed by the affective forces emanating from bodies present, and that they encompass the sensory impressions left by these bodies, including appearances, smells, views, touches, sounds, lighting, and more. This entry has shown how atmospheres shape how things are perceived, how they become meaningful, how we feel, and what behaviours are appropriate and likely to happen next. As such, atmospheres have significant explanatory power that anthropology should continue to explore.

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Note on contributors

Michael Schnegg, PhD, is an anthropologist at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and Namibia. His current research explores what it feels like to live a rural life in an increasingly urbanised and warming world. To this end, he is contributing to the development of a phenomenological anthropology that brings together philosophers and anthropologists to work towards an empirically grounded theorisation of pressing issues, including climate change. His work has been published in a wide range of journals in anthropology, sociology, economics, communication studies, geography, and theoretical physics.

Michael Schnegg, Universität Hamburg, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, D-20146 Hamburg, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9240-8836

Jonas Bens is Heisenberg Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on how people navigate conflicts within plural normative orders, combining long-term ethnographic studies with analyses of various legal systems, including state law and indigenous normative orders. From this perspective, he explores central legal and political concepts such as sovereignty, justice, property, value, and punishment. His most recent monograph is The sentimental court: The affective life of international criminal justice (2020, Cambridge University Press).

Jonas Bens, Universität Hamburg, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, D-20146 Hamburg, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3485-0436

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Affect

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:28:00 +0000

Detail of "The fallen Angel" (1847) by Alex Andre Cabanel, depicting the devil after being expelled from heaven. Picture by Wikipedia.

Daniel White Andrea De Antoni

University of Cambridge, Kyoto University

Initially published 26 Feb 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25affect

Abstract:

Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although registered through biological and bodily sensation, affects are also culturally conditioned and can, in turn, strongly influence sociocultural dynamics. Anthropologists have long explored the varieties of emotional experience across cultures, from the analysis of different patterns of emotional behaviour in the early twentieth century to the linguistic comparison of different emotional expressions through the 1970s and 80s. Since around the 1990s, however, anthropologists began to shift their focus to the diverse ways that emotions also involve less linguistically determined but nevertheless socially conditioned bodily experiences they called ‘affect’. This entry documents early psychological and philosophical genealogies of affect; the relation of affect to anthropological studies of emotion; critiques of and counterpoints to the affect concept; and enduring themes in ethnographic studies of affect.

Introduction

An uneasy tingling of your skin when you pass through an unknown patch of forest; a sigh of comforting relief when you taste a familiar home-cooked dish after months away; the joyous energy of singing along with friends—word-for-word—the lyrics of a hit song; the high-intensity movements of a shamanic ritual; the low-intensity stillness of meditation; a dampness in the spleen; a longing in the heart; an ache. Many experiences are sensed but are not easily identified with a familiar emotion word like ‘fear’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘joy’, ‘transcendence’, ‘equanimity’, ‘worry’, ‘heartache’, or even ‘pain’. Moreover, feelings can often be surprising, arising at unexpected moments and carrying with them little indication of their origin or cause.

Although anthropologists have long been interested in these types of felt experiences, they have traditionally focused more explicitly on the public expression and symbolic display of feeling, which they called ‘emotion’. Since the 1990s, however, anthropologists in partnership with many others in allied social science and humanities disciplines began to explicitly emphasise the value of describing feelings that were sensed within and between bodies but did not always take linguistic or conceptual form. They called these ‘affect’.

Affect refers to a variety of bodily experiences, sensations, or simply perceived shifts in atmospheric intensities that, although conditioned through sociocultural environments, may not take form through culture-specific conventions and meanings. Despite their conceptual ambiguity, affects can feel sensorially distinct. They can feel strong, sharp, or subdued. Alternatively, they can also not feel like much at all, seemingly falling outside a person’s conscious perceptions. As an analytical concept, affect offers new ways to investigate what anthropologists have in the past variously referred to as ‘collective effervescence’, ‘sentiment’, ‘emotion’, ‘feelings’, ‘sensations’, and ‘the senses’. The broad semantic spectrum of these terms suggests not only that emotional experiences are diverse but so too are the conditions that shape them. The adoption of affect as a key conceptual tool was driven in part by a desire to address dimensions of experiences that eluded clearly circumscribed cultural frameworks and linguistic structures of meaning.

Affect theory brings together perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and several other fields such as gender studies, ethnic studies, and literature to explore the bodily and relational aspects of feeling. The following sections outline the development of the affect concept in anthropological theory. The first section traces influential genealogical roots for affect found within psychology and philosophy. The second highlights the relation between affect and earlier anthropological work on emotion. Section three evaluates critiques of and counterpoints to affect, given that the term is highly contested and debated within the emerging field of affect theory. The fourth section features distinctive features of the affect concept, and the conclusion considers enduring themes of affect studies, including implications for ethnographic method and disciplinary critique.

Psychological and philosophical forerunners to affect

Literature on affect in anthropology can be theoretical, abstract, and contested (see introductions to affect such as De Antoni 2019; Liljeström 2016; Rutherford 2016; White 2017). Therefore, it is helpful to outline key theoretical discussions in the past, which have traditionally emphasised Western traditions and that inform contemporary anthropological debates on affect. Two genealogies of this concept are particularly prominent, one psychological and the other philosophical. Each contributes distinct but complementary perspectives to shed light on how affect operates as an embodied and relational phenomenon. A common theme of this literature is a concern with how to relate somatic, or bodily, aspects of emotional processes (the ‘affective’) with its symbolic, conceptual, and representational components (the ‘emotional’).

Early psychological debates on affect adopted the worldview of Western science, which understood emotional energies as grounded in bodies and inherited through processes of evolution. As part of a natural continuum that humans share with non-human animals, according to Charles Darwin, emotional capacities could be identified through expressional behaviours, such as tendencies to bear one’s teeth when angry (Darwin [1872] 2018). This evolutionary view remained apparent in an early debate on the definition of emotion, which centred around a famous anecdote that questioned, for instance, whether fear is a condition that triggers one to run upon encountering a bear in the woods or is rather the post-hoc ascription of fear to an aroused body. Psychologist William James’ (1884) idea is that the ‘subjective experience [of sensations like] fear or disgust is the result of a process that unfolds after the alerting change in core affect’ (Beatty 2019, 202). In other words, although the common view sees emotion as a sensation that comes after one is ‘afraid’ (one sees a bear, becomes afraid, and runs away), James argued the reverse: that one is ‘afraid’ because of the physical experience of bodily sensations (one sees a bear, runs away, and finds oneself afraid).

These early debates on emotion became even more contested with the arrival of Freudian theory and the globalisation of discourses on instincts, Id, and the unconscious (W. Anderson, Jenson, and Keller 2011). With the spread of Freud’s idea that one’s psyche could be split between conscious and subconscious elements, scholars began to more commonly distinguish between feelings as containing both emotionally conscious and affectively un- or non-conscious components. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1962a; 1962b) expanded on these ideas, proposing a taxonomy of core affective instincts, such as interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, or anger-rage. His work posited that while these states are universally shared, their expressions vary across cultural contexts. Early innovative essays in critical theory that began using the word ‘affect’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995a; 1995b) revisited Tomkins’ theories, paving the way for a culturally oriented affect theory. For affect theorists today, this psychological lineage has inspired a set of questions focused on whether affect is universal or culturally distinct, to what degree it is grounded in bodies, minds, or both, and whether affect emerges before, simultaneously with, or after a conscious recognition of an experience of emotion.

Western philosophers also demonstrated an early interest in the relation between the somatic and ideological components of emotion. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza ([1677] 1994) defined affect (or what he called affectus) as the capacity to ‘affect and be affected’, a common phrase that many anthropologists would later cite. Spinoza described affect as ‘affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ ([1677] 1994, 70, emphasis added). Spinoza’s view was that affect (bodily capacities) and emotion (‘the ideas of these affections’) are two dimensions of an inseparable single process, an argument which reflects his opposition to the mind-body dualism of his time.

Spinoza continues to inspire contemporary affect theorists who highlight the enduring open-ended, processual, and mutable qualities of the affective body as it exists in relation to different social and material environments. His ideas were rekindled in the widely read materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and popularised most prominently by the philosopher Brian Massumi (1995; 2002). From Massumi’s point of view, affect indicates pre-conscious modulations of ‘intensity’ moving through and between bodies (Massumi 1995; 2002). Emotion, on the other hand, is ‘qualified intensity’, its conceptual ‘capture’ in meaning, or the ‘socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’ (Massumi 1995, 88). From this perspective, affect could be understood as a kind of physiological flux of sensation that is registered in bodies and travels between them; emotion, on the other hand, is the conceptualisation of that sensation in a culturally shared and often linguistically coded meaning.

Within contemporary debates on affect, the philosophical idea that ‘arrangements’ (Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner 2017) of humans and non-human objects shape and are shaped by affect prior to affect’s capture in meaning became a popular and highly contested idea. Many contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences cite this particular philosophical genealogy of affect as influential, even if they are also critical of it (Ahmed 2004b; Berlant 2011; Berlant and Stewart 2019; Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Seigworth and Pedwell 2023). For example, some scholars argue that the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ identify qualitatively distinct experiences that follow ‘different logics’ and ‘pertain to different orders’ (Massumi 2002, 27). Other scholars see emotion and affect as existing along a continuum (Ngai 2005). Still others have proposed that the perception of an ‘affect-emotion gap’ is itself the product of particular discursive knowledge regimes, and varies based on different cultural, political, and socioeconomic applications of affect and emotion as technical terms (White 2017; 2022).

As a result of these debates, affect became a helpful conceptual lens through which ethnographers could focus attention on nuanced felt experiences that could exceed or precede cognition and language. It also provided a more fine-grained way to approach the contagious involvement and coordination of bodies that can be witnessed during rituals, political rallies, festivals, or in stadiums. In this regard, affect offered anthropologists more diverse and detailed perspectives on classic sociological theories of sentiment, such as Émile Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim [1912] 2008), which conveys a homogenisation of affects into one single group experience.

For example, ethnographic research on contemporary militarism in Pakistan demonstrates how the state can mobilise affect to sustain its authority over other political groups in society (Rashid 2020). Through a study of mourning rituals orchestrated by military personnel, anthropologists have shown how the military transforms grief into a resource for national solidarity. Ritual activities like public commemorations of martyred soldiers and state-sponsored funerals create ‘affective subjects’ who embody both personal loss and collective loyalty. Such examples show how affect operates not only as a homogenous collective force that can emerge through large-scale rituals but also as a constellation of complex feelings that can be specifically cultivated by certain social groups and selectively fostered or resisted by others.

Anthropologies of emotion

Anthropological work on affect builds closely on anthropological studies of emotions. These studies looked primarily to non-Western case studies of emotional experiences to examine how emotions varied from one context to another, providing evidence that challenged universal perspectives assumed by early research. Prominent works on this theme from the early twentieth century approached emotion as a marker of cultural difference. These works were influenced by psychological approaches and were later categorised under the label ‘culture and personality studies’. Representative studies depicted cultures as comparable through their dominant ‘patterns’ of dispositions, attitudes, beliefs, and personalities that make up a specific cultural entity (Benedict [1934] 2005). One influential study of the Japanese by Ruth Benedict, for example, juxtaposed individualistic ‘Americans’ motivated by emotional matrices of guilt and free expression with a more group-oriented ‘Japanese’, who were portrayed as motivated by shame, interdependence, and an obligation to different in-groups (Benedict [1946] 1974). In the case of interpersonal transgression, for example, ‘instead of accusing a man of being unjust, as an American would’, says Benedict, Japanese ‘specify the circle of behavior he has not lived up to’, and pointing to the particular ‘province’ or ‘code’ that was violated (195). Therefore, in cases of socially perceived bad behaviour, an American ‘may suffer from guilt’, whereas for ‘the Japanese’ ‘a failure to follow their explicit signposts of good behavior…is a shame’ (223–4).

In the 1970s and 80s, anthropologists reformulated these ideas of cultural difference imagined through constructs of emotion-based patterns and personality types, critiquing them as too rigid, culture-bound, and resistant to change. Instead, they focused on analysing emotional differences that could be observed through linguistic discourses and ‘emotional lexicons’ (Frevert et al. 2014). These anthropologists of emotion focused on cultural differences primarily by scrutinising emotion words in the languages of those they studied that did not neatly translate into English. This method offered insights into a broad human spectrum of emotional experiences existing both across and within different cultural groups.

For example, in a prominent 1980s study of the Ifaluk in Micronesia, based on fieldwork carried out in the late 1970s, anthropologists highlighted local words such as fago (loneliness/sadness) and song (justified anger) to build a critique of the ‘unnatural’ gendered division between reason and emotion in Western cultures (Lutz 1982; 1988). Other anthropologists working among the Pintupi of Australia examined emotions such as rarru (anger), which arose from threats to ‘shared identity or kinship’ (walytja) with others. These studies suggested that emotions emerge as semiotic—or meaning-making—practices rooted ‘in social life and its relationship to other signs’ (Myers 1988, 607). Among the Ilongot in the northern Philippines, strong feelings like liget resembled sentiments of anger and grief but did not have exact equivalents in Anglophone cultures, and appeared highly nuanced, complex, and variable (M. Rosaldo 1980, 1983, 143; R. Rosaldo 1989, 3; Spiegel 2017). These works demonstrated that emotions go beyond discrete bio-psychological categories and are embedded in social processes of language, meaning-making, and ethics (Lutz 1982; 1988; 2017).

Despite their innovative and nuanced approaches to emotion, some anthropologists perceived limits in what they saw as an increasingly outdated and culture-bound model of comparison. These critiques came in the wake of globalising processes that rendered the cultural boundaries of emotional words less distinct. Additionally, a theoretical turn in the 1980s emphasised a reflexive analysis of the Western literary conventions of anthropological writing, and challenged an ‘us-them’ model of culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). In light of their focus on culturally specific language and public symbols, previous studies of emotion were also criticised for overlooking aspects of bodily intensity that could exceed and confound language, potentially impacting bodies beyond conscious reflection.

These critiques grew throughout the 2000s, extending to disciplines beyond anthropology, and resulted in a theoretical shift away from the discursive dynamics of emotion toward sensations that did not neatly map onto emotional lexicons. Some scholars referred to this shift as the ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2007). Authors associated with this ‘turn’ sought to address more explicitly what language-centred analyses in the 1980s and 90s had partly and implicitly left out. Thus, affect theory provided alternatives to certain critiques made of the anthropology of emotion. Yet, it also became the target of new critiques, which argued that affect approaches overlook aspects of sociality in favour of describing bodily sensations, physiology, and abstract energetic processes of cultural dynamics.

Critiques of affect and counterpoints

With the rise of theoretical literature on affect, the term became increasingly targeted for critique and reformulation. For example, some critics took issue with an idea of affect as a field of ‘direct feeling’ that is supposedly distinct from the ‘conscious recognition’ of emotion (Ahmed 2004b, 39). They worried this approach risked universalising affect as a natural phenomenon disconnected from the socio-political forces that shape it. Related critiques argued that such a distinction even resembles a form of biological essentialism and reductionism, in which affect is treated as autonomous from ideology (e.g., Leys 2011, 2017).

Despite these on-going critiques of affect theory, some early studies of emotional and affective processes had specifically sought to show how social dynamics could shape physiological processes that were usually identified as purely biological or psychological phenomena. For instance, while a sensation such as pain may be commonly seen as an objective measure of a body’s biological response to a harmful stimulus, it can also be understood as operating through implicit value judgements of gender, ethnicity, and racial difference that ‘code’ pain in ways that register differently in the surfaces of skin. A study of an Australian government report on testimony of the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children from their families in Australia, for example, shows how historical narratives and contemporary legal practices can result in different effects upon the surfaces of bodies. While the report includes Aboriginal testimonies that read painfully to Indigenous communities, its suggestion that white Australians should acknowledge ‘national shame’ but not necessarily feel ‘personal guilt’ could be read as producing different affective results for readers with different skin colours: ‘Indigenous Australians tell their personal stories, but white readers are allowed to disappear from this history, having no part in what was done’ (Ahmed 2004a, 34–5). From this point of view, pain emerges as an immediate sensation, shaped through histories that read and feel differently for different people. Such studies show that ‘sensations are mediated, however immediately they seem to impress upon us’ (Ahmed 2004a, 30).

Although some studies like the above had directly addressed how bodily sensations could surface through social categories, other scholars still worried that broader trends in affect theory ignored how gender (Boler and Zembylas 2016; Thien 2005), ethnicity (Ramos-Zayas 2011), and racialisation (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015) shape and socialise affect. In adopting this perspective, affect theorists were entering territory covered by scholars of feminism, ethnic studies, and critical race theory. Some called for ‘critical examinations of “whiteness”’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 654) and sought to point out explicit examples from historical studies and queer theory that analyse the affective dimensions of racial dynamics. For example, historical studies of Latin American and Caribbean migrants in the United States have shown how certain depressive states were described by predominantly white mental health professionals through culture-bound taxonomies, such as familismo, fatalismo, or the ‘Puerto Rican syndrome’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Muñoz 2006). Certain painful feelings tied to migration experiences, surfacing as uncontrollable screaming, trembling, or aggression in young women, were labelled as ‘abnormal’ and characterised through ethnic categorisations (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660). Conversely, as other historical studies have shown, the perception of schizophrenia changed significantly in the 1960s from being seen as a ‘harmless’ condition primarily affecting white people to being viewed as a dangerous disorder characterised by anger and linked with the civil rights and Black Power movements (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Metzl 2009). These studies show how institutional practices and ways of talking about race can condition negative affective states through racial frames.

Other critics argued that many affect studies ignored the role of history and place in conditioning affective responses, and offered compelling ethnographic examples as counterpoints. For instance, in a study on the ‘affective geographies’ of post-war Cyprus, after a 1974 partition of the island’s residents into a distinct northern Turkish-Cypriot and southern Greek-Cypriot territory, residents told stories of the melancholic feelings they encountered within ruined landscapes. Turkish Cypriots living in the abandoned homes of Greek Cypriots in the north faced an ‘atmosphere’ that ‘discharged a feeling of the uncanny, a strange feeling’ that was derived for some ‘out of a sense of impropriety, haunting, or an act of violation’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 11). Such studies raise the question of whether the feelings encountered in these landscapes are subjective, coming from the individual’s perception of a historically storied space, or the material environment itself, filled with abandoned objects and unkempt fields. Ethnographic evidence suggests that ‘neither the ruin…nor the people who live around it are affective on their own […] but both produce and transmit affect relationally’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 14). Detailed ethnographic studies of these socio-historical qualities of environments and space can help anthropologists unpack the multilayered impacts that some geographers have called ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson 2009).

Still other critics worried that philosophical oriented theorists of affect too heavily emphasise a ‘gap’ between the ‘signifying order’ and ‘affective order’; that is, between that which can be articulated and that which escapes linguistic expression (Martin 2013, S155; Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Navaro 2017; Navaro-Yashin 2009). They wondered whether such a distinction was needed between emotion and affect at all. To this question, some of today’s affect theorists respond that neither early formative philosophical works on affect nor much of the affect literature that followed it subscribed to as hard of a break between affect and emotion as was characterised in some critiques of affect. As noted by Massumi in his popular work on affect, ‘The approach suggested here does not accept any categorical separation between the social and the presocial, between culture and some kind of “raw” nature or experience… The field of emergence is not presocial. It is open-endedly social’ (Massumi 2002, 9). Choosing to avoid this debate altogether, some scholars have advocated using the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ interchangeably (see Lutz 2017) or argued for ‘modal’ approaches that posit affect and emotion on a continuum, ‘whereby affects acquire the semantic density and narrative complexity of emotions, and emotions conversely denature into affects’ (Ngai 2005, 27).

Anthropologists of ‘embodiment’ have also contributed to discussions of how emotional and affective practices can exist along a continuum. These scholars argue that a focus on embodiment helps situate affect not as distinct from meaning-making processes, suggestive of body-mind dichotomies, but as something through which ‘dualities such as subject and object or meaning and the material world (evoking mind/body) can be collapsed’ (McDonald 2018, 187; also see Csordas 1990; 1993). For example, studies of exorcism rituals in Italy show how feelings and affects situated in embodied practices like prayer and touch constitute the basis for the experiential emergence of spiritual entities such as the devil. These felt experiences of the possessed person and the participants in exorcisms, in turn, contribute to the reality and the ‘capturing’ of particular entities into historicised, cultural structures of meaning—namely one demon or angel rather than another (De Antoni 2022). This ethnographically grounded approach to bodily feelings showcases what a focus on affect can offer anthropology.

Finally, some critics raised a methodological concern about philosophical descriptions of affect as an ‘escape’ from ‘perception’ (Massumi 2002, 36) or, in other words, as something that was difficult to articulate or ‘capture’ in language (see also Stodulka et al., 2019). For some ethnographers accustomed to describing their interlocutors through narratives, thinking of affect as that which always escapes its articulation has led to practical and methodological frustrations. It has also invited evocative experimental forms of writing about affect, such as works on everyday American life that attempt to capture the somatic contours of daily routines and ‘ordinary affects’ in poetic language that does not correspond to common analytical concepts (Stewart 2007, 1; also see Berlant and Stewart 2019). Many anthropological works on affect can be both highly theoretical and/or poetic in their approaches, and thus offer powerful insights through virtuosity in prose. At the same time, they can appear to some as overly abstracted from ethnographic contexts (Beatty 2019, 210–6). Thus, writing against the aforementioned critiques, many recent ethnographies analyse affect as situated in historical and cultural contexts (Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016; Muehlebach 2011; Muñoz 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2009; 2012; Newell 2018; Ngai 2005). Such works emphasise the simultaneously material, historical, social, somatic, and semiotic aspects of affect, and how these components relationally feed back into one another through dynamic ‘affective-discursive loops’ (Wetherell 2012, 7).

Indeed, some recent studies of affect have addressed the challenging question of how socio-material arrangements take on a force that is felt before it is conceived by revisiting classic arguments in social theory, such as in the popular discussion around mana (Mazzarella 2017a). Mana is a concept found throughout Polynesia that refers to a transhuman ‘force or efficacy’ that was ascribed to certain people or places that expressed palpable power and ‘vital energetics’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1). Sociologist Émile Durkheim described mana as ‘at once a physical force and a moral power’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1), resembling contemporary anthropologists’ interest in the relation between the emotional-conceptual and affective-somatic aspects of social processes. Such innovate reinterpretations of social theory show that what anthropologists today call ‘affect’ can be used to shed light on classic anthropological debates, resulting in a series of productive connections between anthropological studies of affect, emotions, mana, collective effervescence, and the ‘senses’ (Howes 2005; Pink 2009).

Advancing distinctive contributions of affect

Despite the many critiques of affect, including constructive suggestions to consider the overlapping territory between affect and emotion, there remain strong arguments for maintaining the distinctiveness of the term. For example, given that human acts of sensing or ‘feeling with the world’ (De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017) incorporate complex, fluid dimensions of both somatic and semiotic phenomenon, the word ‘affect’ can help disambiguate multiple processes. It can help anthropologists discern somatic processes that seem to function in part outside or below discourse more discretely, catalogue them more comprehensively, and add to ethnographic descriptions’ clarity, granularity, and sensitivity. This can sometimes require the modulation of the ethnographer’s own senses, which broadens previous conceptions of what makes for good ethnographic training.

For example, a case study of the French perfume industry demonstrates how affective capacities can develop through pedagogies of training, sensory exercises, and objects like an odour kit (Teil 1998). An odour kit is ‘made of a series of sharply distinct pure fragrances arranged in such a way that one can go from sharpest to the smallest contrasts. To register those contrasts one needs to be trained’ (Latour 2004, 207). In so doing, a perfumer, or an ethnographer studying perfume, must learn to ‘have a nose’ that allows one to inhabit a (richly differentiated odoriferous) world’ (207). New bodily capacities develop alongside encounters with objects that also operate affectively on the body. The result is that one develops a new, more discrete sensory capacity that at the same time unveils a more sensory-rich world particular to the modern French perfume industry.

Affect as a conceptual tool can also point to the experience of feelings that, while conditioned by cultural contexts, often misalign with or even challenge established cultural values. It can also help anthropologists articulate what happens in spaces of intimacy, whether of private homes or of selves, that do not fit—or fit only in queer relation—with established social values. In the Sindh Province of Pakistan, fakirs (meaning ‘beggars’ in Urdu and, in some cases, ‘transgenders’ in Sindhi) refer to persons who voluntarily take up poverty as a practice of ascetic devotion to Islamic saints, often motivated by ‘prophetic dreams and personal callings’ (Kasmani 2022, 8). Through devotional practices and mystical encounters with saints, some fakirs describe experiences of closeness and intimacy with saints that serve both as compelling testimonies of desirable affect for other ascetics and morally troubling stories for religious and political authorities. Thus, affects of ‘private feelings’ and ‘intimate relations with saints carry ramifications for broader regimes and critiques of power’ (10).

Another helpful approach to affect is a reflexive one, which subjects conceptualisations of affect, such as ‘the affect-emotion gap’ described above, to ethnographic observation. When doing so, it becomes clear how anthropologists’ practices of theorising affect can resemble those of their interlocutors. In national branding campaigns in Japan, for example, anthropologists noted how something like an ‘affect-emotion gap’ was also conceptualised by bureaucrats and national cultural policy makers. These officials observed an affective excitement among global consumers of pop-culture commodities produced in Japan and sought to convert it into an emotionally charged affinity for Japan itself. For example, through government-funded events promoting cultures of manga, to which many readers are attracted for its minor and counter-cultural themes, officials attempted to mainstream manga as a national cultural property of Japan. In this way, an increasingly global cultural commodity could be transformed into a potential national resource of soft power (Galbraith 2019; Leheny 2018; White 2022).

A similar process of gapping or splitting emotional processes can be observed within the global technological world of modelling affection, preference, and taste. For example, computer scientists at academic labs and corporate offices in the US who build taste recommendation algorithms for social media feeds presume that an affective appeal for a certain music style can be coded into numbers (Seaver 2022). Such a perspective splits a feeling of affection into the affective dimensions of personal experience and the emotional dimensions of ‘preference’ that can be computed. Similarly, engineers and computer scientists operating in the field of ‘affective computing’ (Picard 1997) at prominent labs at MIT and Cambridge rely on models that understand ‘affect’ as physiological changes in the body and ‘emotion’ as something codable in a machine system and translatable to humans interpreting those systems. Adapting work on affective computing to East Asian contexts, some robot engineers in Japan have experimented with building ‘affective engines’ into emotionally intelligent technologies, which could theoretically discern the affective states of people by reading the signal of an emotion, such as ‘happiness’, through the facial-expression recognition of a smile (see Fujita and Kitano 1998; White and Katsuno 2021; 2023). These examples illustrate how many specialists in the hard sciences are currently operationalising their own theories of affect to much greater impact than anthropologists. In fieldwork within rapidly changing technological worlds, the term ‘affect’ can therefore help anthropologists track significant transformations in the meanings, applications, and experiences of both human and more-than-human emotion.

Conclusions

As the above theoretical debates and ethnographic examples illustrate, studies of affect are diverse and contested. Nevertheless, enduring themes remain. Three are prominent. The first is the proposition that affect can point to feelings experienced beyond language or cognition—although not necessarily unaffected by them. Affect is indeed something more than just meaning. Rather, affect holds promise to add dimensionality to meaning, showing that meaning incorporates dynamic aspects of exchange between bodily experience and signification (Slaby and Röttger-Rössler 2018; Newell 2018; and Mazzarella 2009; 2017b). Affect points to somatic worlds in a way that is shared among others and consequentially entangled with semiotic concepts and conditioning. Bringing affect and semiotics together in this way can offer ‘improved understanding of both as the intertwined core of sociality itself’ (Newell 2018, 2).

A second enduring theme of affect is relationality. Although human bodies can be understood as individual sense-making and sense-registering entities, they are far from being merely an individuated product of established discourse. Rather, bodies can function as nodes that register, exchange, mediate, reciprocate, co-participate, and change in relation with other bodies or simply bodily parts—human or otherwise, living or inanimate (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Bennett 2010). This relationality of affect points directly to affect’s political dimensions and power dynamics, which incorporate aspects of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and several other theoretical concepts commonly used in socio-cultural anthropology (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016).

Third, although affects may be distinguished by their uneasy alignment with conventional cultural categories, this by no means implies that affects are socially unconditioned. This point suggests that studies of affect hold potential to not only enrich previous anthropological studies of emotion but also to expand anthropologists’ understanding of the ‘culture’ concept on which the discipline still heavily depends. Through its ability to point anthropologists to the dynamic relation between public symbols and private feeling, the affect lens can unearth experiential dimensions of culture that have not been fully explored until recently.

Finally, beyond these enduring themes, affect may hold the greatest potential not in its theory-heavy analytics, which can draw disproportionately from the Western and philosophical traditions outlined above, but rather in its ethnographic applications in fieldwork. A growing collection of richly detailed ethnographies of religious practices, digital media, and human-nature interactions—many of non-Western contexts—show that affective practices exist in diverse and dynamic forms that don’t accommodate easily to established analytical theorising. For example, the deep cultivation of balanced states of feeling through Buddhist meditation in Thailand (Cook 2010); the pursuit of ‘queer companionship’ between Islamic saints and ascetics (Kasmani 2022); the mediation of the paranormal in Chile (Espírito Santo 2023); or the making of intimate and sometimes indifferent relationships with non-human others such as palms (Chao 2022), orangutans (Chua 2018; Parreñas 2012, 2018), mushrooms (Tsing 2021), and microbes (Benezra 2023): these innovative studies of affective themes diversify anthropology’s traditional understandings of culture; expand who speaks for and feels ethnographic knowledge; and offer reflexive resources for productively undoing and remaking the affective modes through which anthropological work is undertaken.

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Note on contributors

Daniel White is a research affiliate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His research examines emotion, politics, and emerging media technologies, with a geographic concentration on Japan and the Asia-Pacific. His recent book is Administering affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the politics of anxiety (2022, Stanford).

Daniel White, Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Level 1, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB2 1SB, United Kingdom. Orcid ID: 0000-0003-2866-6587

Andrea De Antoni is associate professor in cultural anthropology at Kyoto University and Research Coordinator of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Kyoto. He specializes in anthropology of religion, experiences with spirits, spiritual healing in contemporary Japan and Italy, the anthropology of the body, affect, and emotions. He has published extensively about these topics in English and Japanese.

Andrea De Antoni, Associate Professor, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Yoshida Nihonmatsu-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6480-0790

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Dreams

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:17:37 +0000

Scene from a 2018 mural depicting dream creatures and the women who paint them, by Guatemalen artist María Elena Curruchiche. Picture by UN Women/Ryan Brown

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney

Initially published 8 Aug 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24dreams

Abstract:

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached—if not always formally recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, social relationships, psychological landscapes, and cultural worlds of those who experience them. This entry examines three prominent themes in the anthropological study of dreams as experience and dreaming as process. The first section considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of selfhood and identity. The second section considers dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section considers dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining in particular dreams’ morality and function as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion considers the methodological opportunities and challenges that arise in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis in light of the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological approach of ‘participant-observation’.

Introduction

There is perhaps no activity more private, individual, or interior than dreaming. Dreams tend to occur as involuntary, sporadic events during slumber, encompassing visual images, cognitive activity, and a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. They are often remembered and recounted in scattered fragments or fleeting impressions rather than coherent or structured events. Their significance can seem glaringly evident, or thoroughly opaque. Some we deem meaningful, others trivial. Some dreams we are happy to share, others we would rather not reveal. Dreams, as such, sit somewhere at the interstices of the experienced and narrated, real and imagined, meaningful and meaningless, conscious and subconscious, and disclosed and concealed. Yet despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their nebulous nature, dreams have often been approached—if not always recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, relationships, affects, and environments of those who experience them.^[1]

Dreams were long considered the primary terrain of psychoanalytic theory, which centres the role of unconscious mental processes in shaping human behavioural and mental states. Anthropological approaches have shed vital light on the socially and historically shaped ways that different communities understand the origins, causes, contents, contexts, and meanings of dreams, both as individual psychic experiences and as culturally situated practices, and in ways that do not necessarily correspond to scientific definitions (Lohmann 2007). The earliest reference to dreams within anthropology can be traced to the late nineteenth century scholar Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who argued that dreaming, as a universally experienced state of reality-transcending and altered consciousness, enabled the emergence of human mythologies, cosmological frameworks, and religious beliefs worldwide. For Tylor, dreams in many non-modern societies were held to put people in touch with objectively existing souls or ghosts, while modern societies understood souls and ghosts to be the result of psychology and biology ([1871] 1920). His theories reflected a broader understanding among Victorian anthropologists that belief in the reality of dreams characterised earlier stages in the development of human society, within a three-part evolution of culture from ‘savage’ to ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’.

Early twentieth century dreaming studies, conducted primarily in non-Western settings and often tied to psychiatric interventions, tended to focus on the collection, classification, and comparison of similarities and differences in dream contents, or what was known as ‘dream data reports’ (e.g. Lincoln 1935).^[2]However, post-war scholars in psychological anthropology, and particularly those affiliated with the US-borne ‘Culture and Personality School’—an influential current concerned with how psychological and cultural forces shape human experience—were critical of the abstraction of dreams from their specific lived and interpretive contexts. They posited that dreams should instead be approached as expressions of collectively shaped personality traits and emotive dispositions shared by particular social groups (e.g. Eggan 1952).

It was primarily in the late 1980s and early 1990s that dreams came to figure more prominently as objects of ethnographic inquiry and cross-cultural comparison in their own right within the work of social anthropologists, some of whom bring their social scientific analyses into conversation with neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (e.g. Nordin 2011; Laughlin 2011). Sometimes referred to as the ‘new anthropology of dreaming’ (Tedlock 1991), albeit not thoroughly systematised or integrated, this current recognises dreams as communicative events and legitimate modes of interpreting, inhabiting, and effecting change in the world. It draws attention to dreams as both interiorly experienced and culturally contextual social facts, often requiring multi-disciplinary analysis and attention to local psychodynamics. It also considers dreaming as a fruitful way to conduct research. Dreams can help build relations between field interlocutors and fieldworkers as dreamers themselves, allowing them to connect across different sociocultural worlds.^[3]

Drawing on ethnographic examples from diverse regions, this entry considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of self, personhood, and identity. It then approaches dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section examines dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining dreams’ functions as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion assesses the opportunities and challenges entailed in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis, particularly given their often-opaque nature and the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological method of ‘participant-observation’.

Self, identity, and psyche

Dreams play a central role within anthropological investigations into constructions of the self, identity, and psyche across individuals, collectives, and cultures, or what is referred to alternately as the field of ‘ethnopsychology’ (White 2012) or ‘cultural psychodynamics’ (Mageo 2015). Freudian psychoanalysis was instrumental in rehabilitating dreams as objects of legitimate scholarly inquiry and therapeutic intervention in the West and had a profound influence on early anthropologies of dreaming. Its influence manifests, for instance, in analyses of dreams as the disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes and as expressions of trauma, anxiety, and guilt. It also surfaces in the distinction identified by researchers between dreams’ manifest or conscious content and their latent or subconscious content, and an attention to the multiple symbolic valences of recurring dream motifs or patterns.

Exemplary of this approach is an ethnographic study conducted in the 1980s that centred on the dreams of Jovenil, a recently bereaved father among the Kagwahiv people of the Brazilian Amazon (Kracke 1981). In these dreams, Jovenil witnesses the engorged penis of a man that is snapped off as punishment for the man having slept with his own sister. Jovenil also dreams of suffering the wrath of his wife for inadvertently hunting and killing a monkey and of overturning a canoe that drowns his son, Alonzo. These events, according to anthropologist Waud Kracke, manifest Jovenil’s curiosity in the large penis of a fellow villager he beheld as a child and for which he was later castigated by his mother, resulting in sexual trauma. They also show his repressed guilt for engaging in taboo incestuous relations with a parallel cousin earlier in life, and the blame he places upon himself for the consequent death of his children as a form of punishment. In a society that prescribes that the dead must be forgotten and all memories of them eradicated, it was through the subconscious experience of dreams that Jovenil was able to work through the emotional process of mourning the loss of his children, facing his guilty conscience, and acknowledge his complicity in the tragedy.

If the example above centres on a single individuals’ multiple dreams, other early studies of an ethnopsychological bent took as their primary data a wider array of subjects and dreams to identify basic personality traits and worldviews that are shared by particular social groups, or what was then called ‘culture patterns’ (Eggan 1952, 478). For instance, ‘dream charts’ were deployed to analyse the manifest content of 334 dreams collected from men and women aged 6 to 75 years in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico (Foster 1973). Recurring symbols within these dreams, and particularly among men, include a threatening environment, impotence and loneliness, fear of embarrassment, and unpredictable futures. These repeated motifs point to anxiety over what people will say, or of being found out, as central dimensions of Tzintzuntzan cultural and gendered norms. They suggest that Tzintzuntzan people’s adherence to principles of good behaviour in waking life is driven less by their sense of guilt than by their conformity to what anthropologist George Foster calls a ‘shame culture’. Importantly, dreams’ manifest content directs attention not only to the basic tenets of ‘shame culture’ as a shared disposition among Tzintzuntzan people, but also to the disharmony or tensions that exist between this cultural ideal on the one hand, and the repression of desires that sustaining this ideal demands (Eggan 1952, 478).

More recent ethnopsychological scholarship has distanced itself from Freudian and Culture and Personality approaches to studying dreams. It recognised that such approaches risked being ethnocentric, i.e. that they often misinterpreted dreams because they stuck too closely to the cultural understandings of the analysts. Previous approaches had also assumed that cultures were largely static and that insights from one culture were widely generalisable. Working against these assumptions, contemporary ethnopsychological studies consider how cultural transformation, including processes of globalisation, colonisation, and modernisation, reconfigures the ability of individuals and collectives to reorganise their sense of self. They study, for example, how dreams that reflect back to the dreamer how their organisation of self relates to them, their body, and other beings and entities in the world (so-called ‘selfscape dreams’) relate to people’s interpretive frameworks (Hollan 2004). While such dreams may be universal in their basic orienting functions, their content varies within and across both cultures and individuals, conjuring cultural contexts that are more-than-local in their scope, sites, and subjects (e.g. Lattas 1993; Hollan 2005).

In American Samoa, for example, the dreams of young students, and their own reflections on these dreams’ significance, express their efforts to situate their selves in the context of imposed cultural shifts over a century of Christian conversion and Americanisation (Mageo 2004). In one such dream, a female Samoan’s muteness, compounded with her inability or refusal to speak either English or Samoan and her appearance as a White, blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old, point to communication problems, existential confusions, and forms of cultural resistance linked to Samoan girls’ shifting sexuality and gender roles. They reflect enduring traditional hierarchies on the one hand and notions of social equality and racial categories introduced by colonialism on the other. In another dream, the violent silencing and injury suffered by a male dreamer’s girlfriend embodies the challenge of reconciling the customary authority of higher-status Samoan males with the values of romantic engagement, care, and sincerity introduced by Christian missionaries, and American soldiers in WWI. In both instances, dreams and their interpretation by dreamers themselves come to constitute experiences that are creative rather than purely passive, conscious rather than purely unconscious, and generative rather than purely reflective. It is through these experiences that Samoans engage emotionally and discursively in the effects and affects of socio-cultural change and attendant forms of meaning-making.

Cultural artefacts, ritual acts, and interpretive practices

The sociocultural dimensions of dreams accrue particular prominence when dream ritualisation, communication, and interpretation form part of an established local knowledge system. Such insider or local knowledge systems offer valuable insights into how dream experiences are defined, classified, and valued across different communities as significant or mundane, empowering or perilous, or pragmatic or supernatural. They showcase how and when dreams should be communicated to others, or not, and who has the authority to elucidate their meanings. They also shed light on the diverse functions and causes of dreams, including as momentary and revelatory journeys deep into parts of the self or beyond (Mittermaier 2015; Groark 2009); as products of the intentions of the dreamer or unsolicited visitations by outside entities (George 1995; Heneise 2017); as pathways to or predicaments of past and future events (Stewart 2017; Basso 1987); as deliberately induced expressions of creative imagination or unwilled forms of external control (Herdt and Stephen 1989; Chao 2022); as guides to behaviour or reflections thereof (Ingold 2013; Pandya 2004); as experiences of diagnostic, therapeutic, anxiogenic, or punitive valences (Devereux 2023; Traphagan 2003); as expressions of resilience or rupture in the face of change (Graham 1995; Glaskin 2005); and as continuous extensions of, or radical breaks from, waking thoughts (Kracke 1981; Rubenstein 2012).

Ethnographic studies of dreams among the Yolmo of north-central Nepal illustrate the value of attending to local understandings of dreams’ sociocultural significance as categories of experience and modes of practice (Desjarlais 1991). According to one study, conducted in the late 1980s, dreams do not exist for Yolmo as a unitary entity, but rather in three distinctive forms—auspicious, inauspicious, and seemingly insignificant—that manifest in particular dream events. While villagers can articulate these basic distinctions, it is primarily Buddhist spiritual leaders and priests, such as lamas and shamans, who have the authority and expertise to determine what particular dreams signify and to heal those who experience them. They do so by drawing on a ‘dictionary of dream symbols’ (Desjarlais 1991, 215) that identifies and indexes a wide, complex, yet finite range of dream images and meanings that are collectively recognised but also vary in significance depending on the dreamer in question.

In contrast to the notion of dreams as reflective of the individual’s self, psyche, and past, many Yolmo believe that dreams predict events that will impact those around the dreamer in the course of their future waking life. For instance, a tree falling in one person’s dream indicates that one of their close relatives will imminently die (Desjarlais 1991, 216). Another key facet of Yolmo dream knowledge systems pertains to the sustained enculturation in editing, remembering, communicating, and thus in some ways creating dream stories that begin in the early stages of life. Throughout this process, Yolmo not only come to terms with the distresses expressed in their dreams, but also actively ‘make their dreams mean what they want them to mean’ (Desjarlais 1991, 221). What this study offers is an approach to dreams anchored first and foremost in the knowledge systems of dreamers themselves—one that uncovers dreams’ divinatory functions as well as their positioning with local structures of expertise, processes of skill acquisition, and understandings of meaning-making as a concomitantly symbolic and strategic endeavour.

Other ethnographic accounts attend the embodied and ritualised dimensions and protocols of dreams and dream-sharing as collective—rather than individuated—practices that serve to guide everyday social activities. One such case centres on dreaming among the Ongee people of Little Andaman Island and its role in determining communal hunting and gathering practices in daily life (Pandya 2004). Within these dreams, shared sensations of smells help to inform conscious and practical decisions by Ongee groups around what plants or animals should be sought out in the forest, where, and when.^[4]This olfactory dimension stems from the Ongee perception of dreams as moments where individuals’ internal bodies (enteeah) collect the smells left behind or imprinted upon their external bodies (mateeah) in waking life, in a process known as dane korale, which translates literally as ‘a spider making its web’ and is also the Ongee term for ‘dreaming’ (Pandya 2004, 143).

Ongee practice a ritualised form of dream-sharing by participating in lengthy and highly stylised discussions and singing before falling asleep on concentric and mutually facing platforms, in which they describe what they did in the day and what they dreamt of the previous night. Olfactory references identified across different individuals’ dreams, such as the smell of ripe jackfruit, bring these individuals to form groups and look for jackfruit in the forest together. The discovery of ripe jackfruit validates the dreams shared, producing what Ongee call ‘dream success’ (eneyemaga-tegebe) (Pandya 2004, 140). The collective, rather than individuated, nature of dream images and smells thus works hand in hand with Ongee’s collective interpretation of these dreams’ meanings and their implications for shared daily activities. While Ongee have since experienced a transition from circular open campgrounds to private enclosed quarters, and from forest-based subsistence to plantation labour, this ritualised, sensory, and collective ethos persists. People no longer dream or discuss the familiar scents of plants and animals. Instead, their collective dream-sharing rituals speak to experiences of, and guidance found in, the novel smells of plantation foremen and buzzing helicopters.

If symbolism and sensoriality play an important role within some cultural understandings of dreaming, other anthropological approaches invite a more radical appraisal of the primacy of acts and processes of interpretation. They focus less on the instances and categories of imagery and meaning and more on the activities involved in determining and consolidating dreams’ social significance. One example of this are the new dreams of ‘being eaten by oil palm’ (dimakan sawit) experienced by the Marind people of West Papua, Indonesia (Chao 2022, 183–200), wherein sleeping individuals become violently possessed by an introduced cash crop that is rapidly taking over their lands and forests in waking life. These dreams act as cultural critiques of the plantation as a newly established mode of economic production in the region, and they resonate with the new sensory experiences of Ongee community members.

Rather than focusing their discourses on the contents or events of these dreams, or attributing a therapeutic or cathartic value to dream experiences, Marind affirm it is primarily through the oral transmission of dream narratives to and with others that collective healing takes place. For instance, knowledge of kith and kin who have recently been ‘eaten by oil palm’ brings people to travel the landscape to their encounter. Shared dream experiences prompt villagers who are in conflictual relations over land rights to reconcile with one another, or enable starcrossed lovers whose marriage is proscribed by customary law to sustain a different kind of intimate relationship through dream story-telling. In contrast to traditional dreams, whose significance was arbitrated by medicine-men (messav) (Chao 2022, 188–9), new dreams of being eaten by oil palm are open to each and everyone’s interpretation, creating an egalitarian ethos that in turn allows for the participation of women, children, youth, and elders across rural and urban divides. What dream experiences mean, in other words, matters less than what dream sharing does as an exercise in mutual trust-building and as an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability to the attritive forces of plantation capitalism across waking and sleeping worlds.

Another example of how dream interpretation processes come to produce meaning, identity, and consciousness derives from studies of ‘dreamwork groups’ in the United Kingdom (Edgar 1999). These are groups in which six to twelve people share and interpret their dreams in a structured manner. Studying these groups showed that the ways in which dreams are discussed, embellished, and censored depend heavily on social and interactional group dynamics, such as their members’ degree of mutual familiarity, friendship, and shared values.

These dynamics produce dream interpretations that, over the course of conversations initiated by the dreamer but primarily shaped by the group’s questions, suggestions, reservations, and encouragements, become vastly different from the originally recounted experience of the dream and also mutate when dreamwork groups’ composition changes over time. It is through this situated and collective ‘cultural reworking’ of dreams (Edgar 1999, 39), involving the consciousness of both the dreamer and group, that new kinds of mental and affective connectedness are generated and the grounds for individual self-realisation actualised.

Transcendent encounters, spiritual power, and beyond-human knowledge

A third prevalent motif in the anthropology of dreaming pertains to its relationship to religiosity and the transcendent, notably as a source of cosmological knowledge, divination, and power across time. In some contexts, dream experiences and their revelations are intrinsically connected to spiritual understandings of consciousness, cognition, and salvation (e.g. Young 1999). In other contexts, dreams are seen as tied to prophetic figures and events in the past that in turn motivate religious and political movements in the present (e.g. Edgar 2011; Mittermaier 2011). Religious authority can be premised on the ability of select individuals to travel in time in the pursuit of sacred knowledge or to access extra-human powers and entities including spirits, gods, ancestors, and the deceased (e.g. Alatas 2019). Dreams may act as informal yet powerful ‘technologies of governmentality’ that self-regulate individuals’ conscience and conduct in everyday life (Eves 2011). They may also constitute sources of ‘liturgical novelty’ when creatively and contextually interpreted and acted upon by recognised experts (McGee 2012). While revelatory dreams may come to chosen humans through the agency of more-than-human beings, they can also be intentionally sought out and cultivated by human dreamers, including in the form of volitional or lucid dreaming, and through rituals, prayer, and trance- or vision-inducing substances, notably hallucinogenic plants (e.g. Hurd and Bulkeley 2014; Brown 1985).

One example of the cosmological and temporal dimensions of dreams is found among the Bardi Aboriginal people of the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia (Glaskin 2005). As with many Indigenous Australian Peoples, the Bardi identify the creative period in the past during which ancestral beings gave shape to the world (or ‘Country’), as ‘the Dreaming’. Local terms for this period include buwarra, which translates as ‘dream’. While ‘ordinary’ dreams are experienced by ‘ordinary people’, particular individuals in the community, known as jarlngungurr (Glaskin 2005, 303), can communicate with ancestral figures, as well as the spirit beings and the deceased from the Dreaming. They do so through dreams that are initiated by these other-than-human beings and through which knowledges are revealed to the human dreamer. While these knowledges have existed since time immemorial, they inform contemporary ritual and ceremonial life in novel ways, including in the form of new songs, dances, designs, and more, pointing to the integration of tradition and innovation, and past and present, in both the dream form and its real-world ramifications. It is also through the knowledges acquired through dreams from spirits, ancestors, and the deceased that jarlngungurr are able to perform healing, divination, shape-shifting, and time-travel. Dreams thereby help the Bardi anticipate future calamities, notably where respect for Country has been violated and must be remedied or redressed.

As the example above demonstrates, dreams and their authority in producing truths play an important role in enabling the transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge across times and generations. In other contexts, dreams have played a seminal part in encouraging societal transformation, notably in the form of religious enculturation and spiritual self-reinvention. This is the case among the Asabano of highland Papua New Guinea, for whom dreams (aluma) have always acted as portals to the dead, forest beings, or place spirits, and as experiential evidence through which people describe, explain, and rationalise their religious beliefs (Lohmann 2000). When Baptist missionaries sought to convert them in the late 1970s, many Asabano continued to practice their customary religion. It was only following a series of prophetic dreams experienced by villagers, in which they encountered God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, angels, apocalyptic deluges, and the fires of Hell, that Christian beliefs were truly absorbed and internalised. Christian figures that appear in villagers’ dreams to this day testify to these beings’ reality and power and remind people of the behaviours they must sustain in order to secure an afterlife in paradise, whereas traditional and familiar dream-entities like evil nature spirits and cannibal witches are now interpreted as minions of Satan. As such, while the ability of dreams to convey information has not changed for Asabano, the kinds of information being received, and associated dictates of moral conduct, have significantly transformed, with dreams playing an important—potentially even determinant—role in enhancing villagers’ receptivity to the precepts of introduced Christianity.

Dreams, as such, can be instrumental in validating, inspiring, and sustaining belief among members of religious communities. Their evocative valences can also be harnessed beyond the scope of those individuals who adhere to particular religious groups, as illustrated by Amira Mittermaier’s (2015) reflective account of dream-stories among Egyptian adherents to the mystic body of Islamic religious practice known as Sufism. During her fieldwork, Mittermaier was granted permission by her interlocutor, ‘Umar, to consult and select accounts from the Book of Visions, containing the records of dreams and waking visions of followers of Shaykh Qusi, a renowned inheritor and transmitter of the prophet Muhammad’s teachings. This permission, she later found out, itself stemmed from an order that had come to ‘Umar by way of a dream. However, while Mittermaier originally chose dream-visions for her research with the aim of achieving a representative sample from diverse sources and encompassing diverse themes, ‘Umar replaced these selections with a collection of accounts that, to Mittermaier’s initial disappointment, were all relatively similar in content. What drove ‘Umar’s choices was not the pursuit of neutrality or representationality, but rather the effectiveness of these particular dreams in achieving the key aims of Sufi dream-visions—namely, to communicate the shaykh’s aura, to create a sense of awe, and to buttress the shaykh’s spiritual authority. Just as anthropologists selectively deploy ethnographic examples to convince and draw in their readers, so too Sufis approach dream-stories as invitations to their audiences that enable them to communicate and connect with the Prophet, his descendants, and the dead. Dreams allow us to catch a glimpse of the inaccessible, invisible, and unknown, and to be moved both spiritually and imaginatively. And just as prophetic dreams in Sufi communities are at once highly valued and contested, so too decisions around which dreams to include and exclude in Mittermaier’s ethnographic account were never neutral, but shaped as much by anthropological considerations as by the evocative use of dreams as examples by Sufis themselves.

Conclusions

Dreams are universal as experiences yet specific in their contents, interpretations, and performances. As such, they constitute powerful resources for engaging with long-standing questions around the construction of, and relationship between, self and society, mind and body, and continuity and change, and the meaningful slippages that arise across the realms of the known and speculated, lived and narrated, practical and spiritual, and agentive and reflective. Dreams express cultural creativity, social conflict, potentialities for self-exploratory, self-transcendence or hazardous vulnerabilities. They alternately reflect, resolve, or reinforce individual and collective anxieties and desires, as people move in and across different worlds, knowledges, and relations.

Importantly, attending to dreams anthropologically challenges the notion of a single ‘reality’ and its correlative relationship to the ‘imagination’ as the ‘broader range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception and conceptualizations of the real’ (Mittermaier 2011, 3). Instead, it invites us to think of dreams as a form of ‘emergent reality’ (Tedlock 1987b, 4)—or as ‘real in a different way’, as Vincent Crapanzano’s Moroccan informant, Tuhami, says when speaking about his nightly visitations by a she-demon (1980, 15). Dreams are multiply meaningful precisely in light of their inherent ambiguity and in-betweenness, or what Jeannette Mageo calls their ‘mimetic incompleteness’ (2004, 151). They also draw attention to the political, affective, and social force of the imagination as a culturally molded yet never entirely graspable or intelligible dimension of human existence (Stephen 1995; Stevenson 2014). And just as not all dreams bear the same hermeneutic weight or consensual meaning for those who experience them, so too it is critical to consider whose dream interpretations are foregrounded within anthropological accounts across insider-outsider and subjective-objective divides.

Since its inception, the anthropology of dreaming has continued to develop in new and exciting directions. It is no longer confined to particular ‘culture complexes’ or world-regions. Instead, comparative studies of dreams across Global North and South divides push against the romanticisation or essentialisation of non-Western dream cultures (Domhoff 1990). These studies identify recurring motifs in the dreams of American and Japanese citizens (Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago 1958), the role of conflict in the dreams of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children (Levine 1991), and the manifest content of dreams experienced by US-based college women of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American heritage (Kane 1994).^[5]

Alongside a burgeoning of multi-disciplinary approaches that combine anthropological methods and theories with cutting-edge findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, some scholars are practicing ‘studying up’ by examining how Western-trained psychotherapists understand their own dream experiences alongside their relationship to both their patients and their profession (Dombeck 1991). Other researchers practice ‘studying in’ by harnessing auto-ethnographic methods to consider how dream-related knowledge systems learned in the field come to bear new meanings in light of their own personal, physical, and psychological traumas back home (Richman 2000). The role of animals as participants in and producers of dreams (Hallowell 1960) has seen renewed attention in emerging multispecies approaches that consider, for instance, dogs’ dreams as expressions of more-than-human perspectival agency (Kohn 2007) or the haunting apparition in dreams of wrongfully killed cows as expressions of more-than-human retributive justice (Govindrajan 2022).

At the same time, dreams continue to pose certain challenges to the classical methods of anthropology. ‘Dream-narratives’ are always fragmentary and often socially or individually motivated accounts of ‘dream-experiences’ (Kirtsoglou 2010) that themselves cannot be empirically verified and lie beyond the reach of participant-observation. The personal nature of dreams, as well as their at-times spiritual, sacred, or supernatural dimensions, can make them a sensitive topic of discussion, often requiring a strong level of rapport between the researcher and her interlocutors. Taking dreams seriously as objects of analysis is also not devoid of risk for anthropologists themselves, whose professionalism and objectivity may consequently come under question—notably when it comes to writing and imparting their own dream experiences (George 1995, 17–8).

And yet, attending to dreams can also open meaningful spaces for conversations around the different yet interconnected worlds of researchers and their informants. Participating in dream-experiences and sharing dream-narratives can drive intersubjective dynamics of fieldwork, and create mutual trust, critical self-reflection, and openness to ambiguity.^[6]As a form of affective and discursive ‘involvement in the cosmology of the Other’ (Sprenger 2010, 61), delving into dreams—both one’s own and others’—can push back on the ‘anthropological taboo against going native’ (Ewing 1994, 574) and attendant assumptions around the nature of cultural belief versus empirical reality (Luhrmann 1989; Favret-Saada 1980). Rather than dismissing dreams as fictive constructs or ethnographic objects alone, it is perhaps in anthropologists’ willingness to become vulnerable to dreams’ intersubjective thrust that dreams’ agentive force as ‘wild possibilities’ (George 1995, 17) might relationally and imaginatively gain ground and grow.

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Note on contributor

Sophie Chao is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua (2022, Duke University Press) and co-editor of The promise of multispecies justice (2022, Duke University Press).

[1] On the significance of dreams and dreaming in Western history from Ancient Greece to modern times, see Pick and Roper (2004); Parman (1991). On the role of dreams in medieval world religions, including in Europe, early Asia, and Latin America, see Shulman and Stroumsa (1999); Bulkeley (2008).

[2] These studies found echo in later approaches that were concerned with identifying constant and recurring motifs underlying diverse myths across different cultural settings (e.g. Kuper 1979).

[3] For state-of-the-field syntheses of the anthropology of dreaming, see Laughlin (2011); Lohmann (2019); the edited volumes by Tedlock (1987a); Bulkeley (2001); Mageo (2003); Mageo and Sheriff (2021); and the special issues edited by Stewart (2004) and Heijnen and Edgar (2010). For region-specific anthologies of dreaming, see Lohmann (2003) on the West Pacific; Jȩdrej and Shaw (1992) on Africa; Bulkeley (1994) on the West; Price-Williams and Degarrod (1989) on South America.

[4] On the function of dreams as techniques for solving everyday practical matters, including in the contexts of hunting, curing, craftsmanship, and artistic production, see Brightman 2002; Rushforth 1992.

[5] On anthropologies of dreaming in the Global North, see Hollan 2005; Newsom 2021; Heijnen 2010; Sheriff 2017.

[6] On dreams as an intersubjective research method in the field, see Chao 2023; Lambek 2018.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Architecture

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 18:29:07 +0000

The interior of a traditional Japanese house in Takayama, Japan. Photo by David A. LaSpina, 2009

Marcel Vellinga Jorge Tomasi

Oxford Brookes University, Universidad Nacional de Jujuy

Initially published 29 Feb 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24architecture

Abstract:

Anthropologists have shown an interest in architecture since at least the end of the nineteenth century, though not to the extent that may be expected given the prominent position that architecture plays in all human societies. Notwithstanding their relatively marginal position within the discipline, anthropological studies of architecture have made some significant contributions to our understanding of the dynamic and mutually constitutive relationships between architecture, culture, and environment. These contributions include the practice of making and its central role in the development of architecture over time; processes of change and how to understand and deal with them; and anthropology’s contribution to the study of architecture as a professional discipline. The anthropological study of architecture, defined as a continuous process of designing, making, and dwelling, requires a holistic approach that considers the diverse material, social, and symbolic registers of architecture, as well as its various scales. Such an approach can pave the way for more collaborative projects between anthropologists and architects that can explore the characteristics and possibilities of both existing and new forms of designing, making, and dwelling. Thus, this entry looks at the history of anthropology’s relationship with architecture to contribute to current debates about how both disciplines can forge new practices through making.

Introduction

Architecture is part of the history and everyday life of humanity. Not only do people live within architecture, they exist with it, progressing through life in a process of mutual constitution (Bugallo and Tomasi 2012). The very experience of living or dwelling ‘in, at, on, or about’ (Oliver 1987, 7) architectural environments and structures on a daily basis has led to a certain difficulty in comprehending what architecture is: it is difficult to define something that is so evident that it has become naturalised. Academic and professional discourse on architecture has tended to dissect the concept itself, separating the practices and experiences of, on the one hand, creating architecture and, on the other, using it. In the process, it has generated a rupture between its ‘material’ and ‘social’ or ‘immaterial’ aspects. As with the study of material culture in general, the anthropological challenge has been to dissolve a deeply ingrained dichotomy between subject and object (Miller 2005), and to focus instead on architecture as a totality, looking at its diverse material, social, and symbolic registers, as well as its various scales (Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Vellinga 2007; Buchli 2013).

Architecture, of course, can be defined in many ways. In this entry we approach architecture as a physical entity, constituted as a process and shaped by the amalgamation of sets of diverse material elements. These material elements, in turn, are produced using a series of technologies and are arranged in such a way that they conduct the flow of physical forces towards the ground, regulating and distributing the energies of the physical environment. For example, the relationships between beams, columns, and walls must be balanced so as to allow the structure of a building to support the load of a roof. The type of relations between these material elements and their intrinsic conditions emerge from a diverse set of environmental and cultural variables, and from a range of material, spatial, and technological choices and options, mediated by possibilities, restrictions, and socially constituted preferences (Bourdieu 1977; Lemonnier 1993). The arrangement of the material elements shapes three-dimensional forms, generates textures, and delimits and characterises places, creating interior and exterior spaces of diverse character. One might consider that, ‘the spaces of dwelling are not already given, in the layout of the building, but are created in movement. That is to say, they are performed’ (Ingold 2013, 85; emphasis in original). The arrangement of the material elements emerges from the ideas, needs, and expectations of a society. Social actors participate in the production and reproduction of architecture—inculcating societal norms as much as enabling disruptive and transformative actions within the physical entity (Bourdieu 1977).

Our focus in this entry on the physical existence of architecture is not accidental. On the contrary, it is based on the observation that both anthropology and architecture need to take this material condition seriously: as, indeed, do the people who produce, inhabit, or otherwise experience architecture. For anthropology, this involves looking at the way in which materiality participates in the shaping of life and engaging with the very making of things. For architecture, it implies an understanding that the objects that are designed and built are part of social networks, and that their production cannot be reduced to individual creativity.

Anthropologists and architecture

In general, anthropologists have tended to study architecture as ‘a way into’ a society or culture. Houses (or, more rarely, other building types) have been of interest because they allowed the anthropologist to study and understand social relationships, cultural values, and symbolic meanings; the cultural context was normally the real focus of attention, rather than the architecture per se. In this respect, anthropologists have approached architecture differently from architects, for whom the cultural context (when it is considered in the first place) has been mainly a means to understand architecture and inform future design (Vellinga 2016). This different perspective may have contributed to the overstated claim that anthropology has never paid attention to architecture. Rather than being uninterested in architecture as such, for much of the twentieth century anthropology showed little interest in the material aspects of architecture and was more focused on its ‘intangible’ features. What lay ‘beyond’ a building (that is, the cultural values, beliefs, and relationships that a building expressed or embodied) was seen to be more important than the skilled practices that enabled its design and construction, or the material features that resulted from them.

The central question, more often than not, has been ‘how are they [built forms, built environments and constructive processes] imbued with cultural significance at all levels (material, symbolic, social)?’ (Amerlinck 2001, 3). To answer this question, anthropologists for a long time tried to ‘read’ buildings as texts, documenting how age, gender, power, or status relationship were symbolically reflected in design features, spatial layouts, or decorative elements.

This perspective on architecture goes all the way back to the beginnings of anthropology as an academic discipline. Most famously, Lewis Henry Morgan’s classic Houses and house-life of the American Aborigines (2003) argued that extended family households, which Morgan believed to be typical of pre-colonial Native American societies, practiced what he called ‘communism in living’—a communal way of life that found expression in the design and spatial layout of multi-family houses found across the continent. For instance, the Haudenosaunee or ‘people of the long-house’ constructed a variety of houses up to 100 feet long, with a central hallway giving access to subdivisions about seven feet long, with shared fire pits to accommodate up to twenty families. Of course, how architecture was read could differ between anthropologists. To Morgan (1877), the design, materiality, and construction of pre-colonial Native American buildings were indicators of the comparative social evolutionary status of the societies concerned. On the other hand, to Pierre Bourdieu (1973), the Kabyle house in Algeria illustrated the way in which the cultural characteristics of a specific society, like notions of purity and pollution, were objectified in the spatial layout of homes. Traditional Kabyle houses were divided by a low wall that created two distinct, oppositional spaces. The larger one, about two-thirds of the area, was elevated and was reserved for humans, especially guests. The smaller, darker part was the place for animals, but also where sexual intercourse and childbirth took place.

Many other ethnographic studies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included information on settlement patterns, building forms, and spatial arrangements around the world to help gain an understanding of social structures and cultural value systems. For example, Raymond Firth studied the Tikopia houses in the Solomon Islands, noting that, even though ‘the external aspect [...] has little to recommend it’, an analysis of its spatial arrangements ‘will lead us immediately to some of the most complex features of the native social organization’ (1961, 75). Gender and status relationships were expressed through the allocation of spaces, the names of building elements, and seating arrangements, amongst other things. Altogether, anthropologists have provided an extraordinarily rich ethnographic record of the various ways in which architecture is intricately related to cultural values, social identities, and political or economic relationships.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a renewed interest in the anthropology of architecture, especially in the study of houses. In line with more general anthropological perspectives at the time, much of this work was concerned with the analysis of symbolic meanings as expressed in architectural form, spatial organisation, or methods of construction. For example, various anthropologists commented on the fact that traditional houses across insular Southeast Asia were anthropomorphised structures, with particular building elements (doors, façades, posts) symbolically referred to by their inhabitants as body elements (eyes, face, legs). This practice reflected a widespread tendency in the region to see houses as living entities (Waterson 1990). In the Amazon region, anthropologists noted that Indigenous longhouses expressed distinct gender relationships through the allocation and ceremonial use of spaces, with a clear axis separating a male end at the front of the house from a female end at the back (Hugh-Jones 1979). In all these instances, architecture was studied as an object, independent from any human interaction.

From the 1980s onwards, many anthropologists have been critiqued for treating buildings as fixed and finished objects and for ignoring the dynamic and contested nature of meanings and human behaviour, especially in the case of symbolic studies that treat buildings as ‘microcosms’ or structural models of cultural and cosmic orders. The process of ‘making’ architecture has commonly been ignored, whilst meanings have generally been assumed to be intrinsically present in buildings and to already exist prior to their objectification in architecture. In so doing, the agency of people (as designers, builders, and inhabitants, and as members of a community or society) and their ability to change or adapt architecture was disregarded at the same time as social and cultural relationships and identities were essentialised. In other words, ‘an illusion of certainty and uniformity’ was created that misleadingly suggested that buildings can ever be complete, and that architectural symbolism is arranged in exclusive and orderly ways (Ellen 1986, 28).

This renewed anthropological interest coincided with an increasing attention in architectural circles in the contribution that anthropology could make to the field of architecture; not just in relation to the so-called traditional or ‘vernacular’ architecture of the world (Oliver 1979), but to architecture as a design discipline (Toy 1996). An interest in the architecture of ‘Others’, the traditional subject of anthropology, had of course always been present in architecture (see Vitruvius 2012, Laugier 1977 and Semper 1989). However, the interest now shifted towards what anthropology could contribute to the discipline in terms of theory and methodology, and how both disciplines could collaborate more closely.

Building on the late-twentieth century studies that aimed to document and analyse specific building traditions around the world (mainly, though not solely, in southeast Asia and Latin America), attention began to shift to more thematic and theoretical issues during the early twenty-first century. Discourses around materiality, consumption, and agency gave rise to an increased interest in the anthropology of the home and on what goes on ‘behind closed doors’, inside architecture (Miller 2001; Daniels 2010; Pink et al. 2017). Expanding beyond the narrow focus on houses and homes, anthropologists also explored the processual nature of architecture and the way in which it may play a part in processes of political contestation, ethnic identification, or social gentrification. For example, among the Minangkabau in Indonesia, the construction of increasingly larger and more decorated traditional houses, using modern materials and technologies, was shown to help renegotiate long-established social status relationships, revealing the active, rather than passive, role played by the house in the constitution of society (Vellinga 2004). Conversely, Melanie van der Hoorn (2009) studied how the active destruction of unwanted buildings helped redefine national identities, both in times of conflict (as during the siege of Sarajevo in former Yugoslavia from 1992 till 1996) and post-conflict (such as after the collapse of the Soviet Union).

In line with similarly burgeoning interests in the relationship between anthropology and design, studies of craft, skill, and technology began to explore the role of ‘making’ and design in architecture (Ingold 2013), while ethnographic studies of architectural firms aimed to analyse the culture of professional architectural practice (Yaneva 2009; Yarrow 2019). Much of this work involved collaborations between anthropologists and architects. Altogether, it has given rise to ongoing discussions about what architecture is, about how it can be studied from an anthropological perspective, and about how the relationship between anthropology and architecture should be conceptualised (Amerlinck 2001; Jasper 2019; Stender et al. 2022). The publication of a number of textbooks that aim to introduce the anthropological study of architecture, written by both anthropologists and architects, indicates that the subject finally ‘arrived’ in anthropological discourse at exactly the time when anthropological approaches, in parallel, have entered architectural discussion and practice (for example, Buchli 2013; Lucas 2020). As will be seen, however, the characteristics and scope of this disciplinary ‘encounter’ still require exploration.

Making architecture

The word ‘architecture’ comes from the Greek words arkhi, meaning ‘master’ or ‘chief’, and téktōn, meaning ‘carpenter’ or ‘builder’, referring to the skills for making a building. ‘Architecture’, then, as a concept, refers to the physical process that constitutes a building. A building is formed through the transformation of materials and their particular arrangement in space, using a variety of technologies, and by actions that emerge from the ways in which the physical skills of the craftsmen join with the materials (Ingold 2013). Understanding architecture as a physical process implies a recognition of ‘making’ as a practice that is sustained over time. Buildings are not made after they have been designed and before they are used—the process of constructing them is continuous. Unlike architects, anthropologists problematise the distinction between design, construction, and use (RIBA 2020). For example, a 1998 ethnography of Aymara communities in Bolivia proposed that the act of building houses is an ‘art of memory’, whereby relationships with the ancestors of the household group are reproduced and strengthened through the process of making and the songs that are sung during the building process (Arnold 1998). Once the buildings are made, they continue to be adapted, repaired, or extended.

A concern for manual building practices and crafts was very prominent in the second half of the nineteenth century, mainly due to the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement and in particular William Morris’s position in favour of artisanal work and the collective experience of production, in contrast to the alienation of mechanised production systems emerging from the Industrial Revolution (Sennett 2008). In anthropology, an early interest in the practices involved in the creation of buildings was shown through the documentation of building materials and techniques (Boas 1966; Malinowski 1935). Later, a more systematic approach towards an ‘anthropology of technology’ emerged in France around the figure of anthropologist Marcel Mauss (1935; 1968), whose concept of ‘total social facts’ encouraged anthropologists to see technology and social phenomena as deeply intertwined. Building on Mauss’s writings, anthropologists began to see technical practices such as sawing, cutting, binding, or moulding as embodied thoughts rather than mere mechanical actions. André Leroi-Gourhan (1964) introduced the concept of ‘operating chain’ (chaîne opératoire), a methodological tool for the analysis of processes of making. More recently, this concept has been problematised for its sequential and fragmented character. Instead, some anthropologists propose an understanding of making processes as flows: ‘an unbroken, contrapuntal coupling of a gestural dance with a modulation of the material’ (Ingold 2013, 26).

The process of decision-making has also been at the centre of anthropological enquiries into making, starting discussions of the social and cultural reasons for ‘technological choices’. Pierre Lemonnier (1992; 1993) proposed this framework as a critical counterpoint to prevalent ideas of ‘technological determinism’, the notion that technology is a primary influence on social relationships. As in other fields, the use of the notion of ‘habitus’ (Bourdieu 1977)—the habits, skills, and tastes through which people with shared cultural backgrounds perceive and experience the world—has been proposed as a way to overcome the apparent dichotomy between the unconscious reproduction of structural patterns and purely subjective action. Specifically, anthropologists have shown that builders have margins of action within a wide, though not infinite, universe of available options that emerge from the material conditions of the actions and demands that produce them. They choose from these options based on their habitus. Thus, within the multiplicity of ways of making in a given place, it is possible to recognise ‘family resemblances’ among different procedures (Dietler and Herbich 1998). Roof structures in traditional Indonesian houses, for example, are made in a number of ways, resulting in distinctive roof forms in different parts of the archipelago that are far from identical, but that are nonetheless closely related to one another (Waterson 1990).

The collective nature of making has also been prevalent in recent anthropological thought. The apprentice-style ethnographic work of Trevor Marchand, who worked as a novice under the expert guidance of master builders in Yemen (2001) and Mali (2009), and who used this specific learning experience to collect ethnographic information, has shown the importance of training and knowledge transfer in the development of craftsmen’s practical skills, know-how, and values around discipline and commitment. Marchand’s work shows the importance of action in ethnographic research, as opposed to pure verbal communication, in a context in which ‘the builder's apprenticeship served to enhance concepts and judgements regarding space and assembly through training, practice, and inhabiting the “process of making”’ (Marchand 2001, 243). By actively producing mud bricks, constructing walls and ceilings, and sculpting roof crenelations, Marchand gained first-hand knowledge of construction practices—knowledge that would be difficult to gain otherwise or to convey in words alone.

Collective or collaborative making is also explored anthropologically, focusing not so much on the relations between the craftsmen but on their relationship with the materials. The actions of the builder operate with the material, rather than on it, insofar as their forces meet in mutual recognition. Materials and builders are in a continuous and sensitive movement within a shared process of making, ‘like melodies in counterpoint’ (Ingold 2013, 107). Caroline Gatt and Tim Ingold invite anthropology to engage in what they call ‘correspondence’ with materials and architecture: to participate ‘in building relationships and making things’ so as to enable both disciplines to grow based more on improvisation rather than on innovation (2013, 148).

Architecture and change

In keeping with recent attention to making and collaboration, recent scholarship has shown how architecture is not static, but is instead a creative and ever-evolving process through which people—as active agents, and using their past experience, knowledge, skills, and crafts—create environments that become places for dwelling or other purposes. Architecture evolves in line with changing cultural contexts, as well as dynamic environmental contexts (which were hitherto largely ignored in the anthropological study of architecture), and with current needs, ambitions, and requirements. In most instances, this process involves material construction, and it is this material aspect of architecture—the fact that it is made of stone, wood, steel, or earth—that often gives the impression that it is fixed and ‘concrete’. In reality, the materials that architecture is made of are as fluid and temporal as the cultural relationships that it embodies and the environments that encompass it (Ingold 2007). In time, the mechanical or chemical properties of architecture may transform in response to temperature fluctuations or physical forces; they may move, harden, or disintegrate, for example. In response to such material changes, as well as to larger environmental or cultural transformations, buildings may be adapted, moved, conserved, restored, or demolished. Consequently, at no point in time is architecture ever truly complete or finished (Maudlin and Vellinga 2014).

The dynamic nature of architecture is not only evident from the material-making process, but is also manifested in the activities that take place within it. Early anthropological studies, especially those that regarded architecture as an embodiment of cosmological relationships, often described spatial patterns of use in a rather static way, correlating particular activities (and the categories of people that performed them) with certain buildings or particular parts of them. Thus, a kitchen might be identified as the domain of women who use it to cook, or a monastery as the exclusive preserve of the members of a religious order. A famous example of this approach is provided by Clark E. Cunningham’s study of the Atoni house in Indonesia (1964). Postulating that a house is ‘a mechanical model of the cosmos as conceived by a people’ (66), Cunningham argued that the use of space was strictly defined in terms of a number of dualist oppositions (male-female, high-low, old-young) that determined who could use which space at what time and for what purpose. Often, as in the case of the Atoni, such patterns were seen to be customary or traditional and were believed to have been handed down from times immemorial. As such, they were implicitly perceived as fixed and repeated in the same way in the same location.

Recently, anthropological scholarship has put more emphasis on the dynamic and changing nature of the activities that take place in architecture. The things that people do in or around buildings (cooking, meeting, working, worshipping, cleaning, socialising, sleeping, and so on) are processes through which everyday life is continuously constituted and reproduced (Cieraad 1999; Miller 2001; Daniels 2010). While human activities will often be regulated and rather routine, they are never exactly the same every time they are performed, nor do they always take place in the exact same place—even if the people who perform them think or say they do. At the same time that environmental and cultural contexts change, so too will the activities that take place in or around architecture be adapted through continuous modifications and improvisations. In their study of energy demand reduction initiatives in the UK, Sarah Pink et al. (2017) showed that people might sometimes move their activities to different parts of a house to enable them to do two things at the same time: for example, a kitchen would be used to prepare food but might simultaneously also become a place to catch up on an urgent work email. New mobile digital technologies have played an important part in this, enabling people to more easily ‘move’ through buildings as they live out their lives. Functions of spaces may change, furniture and other objects may be rearranged, and activities may be relocated in response to events, challenges, or opportunities, making architecture ‘an ongoingly changing digital, material, sensory, emotional and atmospheric environment’ (Pink et al. 2017, 70).

Of course, the on-going changes in the things people do are intimately related to changes in the material aspects of architecture. ‘The most fundamental thing about life is that it does not begin here or end there, but is always going on’ (Ingold 2001, 172; emphasis in original). This has led to the adoption of a ‘dwelling perspective’ as opposed to a ‘building perspective’ in the anthropology of architecture. The latter is the perspective of the architect, where a building is designed and constructed and consequently used. From this point of view, a building will be ‘finished’, and ready for use, once the design and building stage are over. A dwelling perspective, on the other hand, sees the design, construction, and use of architecture forming a continuous process of ‘dwelling in the world’ (Ingold 2001, 185). As people dwell, their activities take place in the context of architecture, which partly defines them but is also defined by them; in the process, architecture, in its material form, may be designed, constructed, inhabited, adapted, renovated, conserved, abandoned, or demolished, as needs, opportunities, or requirements change, as part of an on-going process. These changes are creative and meaningful even if they are not always recognised as such, and often have no clear beginnings or endings. The dynamic nature of dwelling impacts the use and meaning of the architecture and forms part of its on-going state of becoming. Architecture, as such, does not have a clearly defined starting point, nor is it ever finished (Maudlin and Vellinga 2014); it is ‘a process that is continuously going on, for as long as people dwell in an environment’ (Ingold 2001, 188).

The continuous nature of architecture raises questions about how to deal with change. Changes may be manifold and take many forms that may interrelate in all kinds of ways. Physical alterations to architecture may or may not combine with changes in use or shifting meanings. They may raise questions or concerns about identity, heritage, and authenticity, or they may be applauded and encouraged as signs of development and progress (Orbaşli and Vellinga 2020). The way in which communities deal with such changes can reveal the significance of architecture in their lives. Anthropologists have studied architectural change in a number of contexts. Most of them have considered the impact of modernity on traditional buildings in the form of, for instance, new materials or technologies, and studied the ramifications of change in terms of status or gender relationships (Schefold et al. 2003). They have also studied architectural change in relation to heritage management and conservation. For example, a study of the city of Djenné, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Mali, identified contrasting perspectives on how the city’s building heritage should be managed: that of the local participants, to whom the city is an everyday place to live in, and that of (international) heritage experts, who regard it as universal heritage to be preserved (Joy 2012). Similar discrepancies in perspectives have been identified all over the world (Tomasi and Barada 2021). Interestingly, the development of new architectural forms as a result of processes of cultural change (for example, multi-generational homes, communal living experiments, or so-called ‘tiny houses’) has received less anthropological attention thus far.

Architecture as discipline

The anthropology of architecture has also been affected by the disciplinary institutionalisation of architecture. This has involved the emergence of the role of the architect, separated from the role of the builder, the former being the designer or creator of a set of design concepts and the latter being the maker who materialises those ideas. Both architect and builder work in a hierarchical relationship in which the former dominates the latter (Carpo 2011, Ingold 2013). The beginning of this distinction can be located in the European Renaissance and goes hand-in-hand with the contemporary idealisation of Greco-Roman antiquity. From the seventeenth century onwards, architecture was institutionalised by the arts Academies (particularly the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris), which acted as the principal institutions for artistic education and took the lead in the provision of architectural training (Stevens 1998).

One way in which anthropology has problematised the increasing professionalisation of architectural practice, and the subsequent hierarchical nature of relations between builders and architects, is through studies of how construction practices, even in traditional contexts with supposedly more symmetrical relations, are characterised by hierarchies, expert knowledge, and strict power relations, without being explicitly mediated by professional roles (Marchand 2009, 2012; Tomasi 2012). Through professionalisation of the discipline, the architect is commonly presented as a kind of external, expert mediator between people and their spaces, restricting the margins of action of others. However, as previous stated, the architect does not absolutely determine the ways of dwelling (De Certeau 1984). Many other actors, including owners, builders, ritual experts, and, in modern societies, planners, insurance companies, and mortgage lenders, play major parts in the development of houses and other buildings. Within this paradigm, recent anthropological approaches have shifted their perspective from studying ‘architecture without architects’ (Rudofsky 1964) to studying ‘architecture with architects’ (Stender et al. 2022). An early, ground-breaking study of the social foundations of professional architectural prestige, success, and taste argued that successful architects do not owe their success so much to genius as to their social background: going to the right schools and aligning themselves with influential colleagues appeared to be more important than talent (Stevens 1998). Along the same lines, a number of ethnographic studies of design processes in mainstream architectural studios have shown how architectural design is less of an individual pursuit characterised by moments of brilliance, inspiration, and innovation—as it is often portrayed—than it is a collaborative, routine, and sometimes slow process of improvisation, and the recycling, repurposing, and rescaling of existing ideas and practices (Yaneva 2009; Yarrow 2019).

Considering that the establishment of national architectural canons was based on European models and became a central part of imperial ‘civilising’ projects in various parts of the world, current discussions have also aimed to rethink the relationship between architecture and anthropology, seeking new forms of mutual transformation and disciplinary action in design processes, as part of a decolonisation of practices (Stender et al. 2022). Decolonisation cannot undo the systematic stigmatisation and transformation of other, local, or Indigenous forms of architecture that became part of the ideological projects of many nation-states; however, efforts to decolonise look to local and Indigenous architecture to make visible the perspectives, demands, and struggles of diverse oppressed or minority groups. Local vernacular architecture is also often seen as a source of inspiration in relation to discussions about architectural sustainability (Vellinga 2013).

Finally, architecture has pursued new disciplinary roles that transcend individual creative genius and that move towards more collective forms of production (Blundell Jones et al. 2005). Thus far, anthropology has had very limited involvement in such pursuits, beyond occasional collaborations such as that between the anthropologist William Mangin and the architect John F.C. Turner during the 1950s and 1960s in Peru (Mangin and Turner 1969). Similar collaborations are today found in the field of design anthropology (for example, Gunn et al. 2013; Drazin 2019), which aims to imagine new forms of co-creation and collaborative production. In turn, what distinguishes an ‘anthropology of architecture’ and an ‘architectural anthropology’, as has been proposed in recent years (Stender et al 2022), is moving beyond the study of architecture that already exists towards the generative possibilities of an anthropological perspective that seeks to modify the world we inhabit (Ingold 2022). The challenge of ‘corresponding’ between disciplines requires a reflection on respective disciplinary biases and assumptions as well as a willingness to engage in forms of communication that focus on the architectural object and the practices related to its production. For architecture, this cannot be limited to the use of ‘ethnographic tools’ without the application of an interpretative theoretical framework, as noted by Marie Stender (2017). For anthropology, it requires an intention to move beyond studying what people do and an engagement with materiality and processes of making.

Conclusion

One of the foci of this entry has been what we call the ‘continuous becoming of architecture’, or how architecture is comprised of a constant process of designing, making, and dwelling that presents a relative stability within dynamic flows of people, materials, and environments. For decades now, these flows have been at the centre of an anthropological enquiry to understand ‘how the things that people make, make people’ (Miller 2005, 38). As in the case of material culture more generally, it is a dialectical relationship, in which architecture, culture, and environment mutually constitute one another. Architecture is not simply a way into cultural values or a response to environmental conditions that already exist; rather, it plays an active part in their formation and reproduction, just as much as the cultural values and environmental conditions help define the design, use, and meaning of the architecture.

The question of the relationships between people and their architecture continues to be at the core of anthropological interest in architecture. Such discussions require a holistic view that does not divide that which in our daily lives operates simultaneously. We design, build, and inhabit in overlapping moments. We seek shelter from a natural and social world, we arrange spaces that provide us with comfort and pleasure, and we define and present ourselves as persons through architectural actions that we cannot separate, nor prioritise, in clearly defined ways. Architecture can be designed and built, conserved or revived, or imposed or demolished to shape cultural identities and influence environmental conditions. It can be a place of comfort and protection, a model of the cosmos, a tool in environmental revival, and a source of pride, as much as it can be a prison, a place of fear and abuse, or a source of environmental damage.

Recognising the dynamic totality of architecture is a necessary starting-point for any shared project between architecture and anthropology. Such projects cannot be limited to understanding what already exists; rather, they should explore more egalitarian and collective approaches that allow for the creation of new forms of architectural production in pursuit of more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable ways of dwelling.

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Note on contributors

Marcel Vellinga is Professor of Anthropology and Architecture at Oxford Brookes University. Holding a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Leiden University (the Netherlands), he has taught and published on a variety of topics including vernacular architecture, the anthropology of architecture, rural architectural regeneration, and Minangkabau architecture.

Prof Marcel Vellinga, School of Architecture, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom. mvellinga@brookes.ac.uk. https://orcid.org/000b0-0002-1390-3925

Jorge Tomasi is an architect (Universidad de Buenos Aires), with a Master in Social Anthropology (ISES-IDAES-UNSAM) and a doctorate in Geography (Universidad de Buenos Aires). He is a Senior Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), and Professor at Universidad Nacional de Jujuy. He is an expert member of ISCEAH and CIAV-ICOMOS.

Jorge Tomasi, Rivadavia 642, Tilcara, Jujuy, Argentina. jorgetomasi@hotmail.com. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8568-4426

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Race and racism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:30:34 +0000

Photo: Ernest Cole: Segregational signs at a South-African train station, before 1972.

Sindre Bangstad Agustín Fuentes

KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Princeton University

Initially published 30 Nov 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23raceandracism

Abstract:

Racism is premised on the idea that humanity could and should be divided into distinct biological groups or ‘races’, and that different races stand in a ranked and hierarchical relation to one another. Racism understands human races to be separate and clear-cut clusters of people, based on biological criteria that are fixed and relevant for their behavior. While humans do vary biologically, their variation does not fall into such clusters that correspond to racial categories. Speaking of human races thus ignores the contemporary science of human variation, whilst intimately mixing the study of human biology with hierarchy, stigma and prejudice.

As a worldview, racism was historically pervasive in the academy and in anthropology, a discipline that emerged in the context of colonialism, colonial discovery, and the exploration of human diversity. While the concept of race was in many respects foundational to the development and practice of anthropology it is now contested. As we will discover in this entry, the concepts and definitions of race, and their applicability, have changed greatly over time. Drawing on ethnographic material from various social and political contexts, and attempts at theorising race and racism, this entry will discuss important ways in which anthropologists have shaped both concepts in the past and in the present. Their work contributes to the important insight that race is not biologically but socially constituted. ‘Race is the child of racism, not the father’ (Coates 2015, 7).

Introduction

There are no biological races in humans. This is the conclusion of scientific bodies such as the American Anthropological Association (AAA) as well as the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (AAPA; formerly the American Association of Biological Anthropologists, or AABA). As the 2019 AABA statement makes clear, ‘no group of people is biologically homogeneous’, and human populations are ‘not biologically discrete, truly isolated or fixed’.^[1] The 1998 AAA Statement identifies ‘race’ as ‘an ideology about human differences’, and states that physical variations in the human species have problematic non-biological meanings culturally and politically ascribed onto them.^[2] These anthropological associations are not alone in rejecting the biological nature of racial groups, with genetic, psychological, and other scientific associations also publishing concordant statements.^[3]

Yet, one need only look at news items about police violence towards African-Americans in the US; ethnic minority mortality rates during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK; xenophobic violence against African migrants in South Africa; or the on-going hardening of borders of Europe to prevent the resettlement of migrants and refugees from African and Asian countries (de Genova 2018), to understand why race and racism remain such important topics in our time.

Knowledge about race and racism is produced in the interstices between popular and scientific ideas (Reardon 2005). Anthropology is one of the social sciences that has a contradictory disciplinary heritage (Mullings 2005, 669). ‘Anthropology’s early professionalization as a science was associated closely with the elaboration of typologies and techniques for classifying and operationalizing the discrete “races of man”’ (Harrison 1995, 50). Historically, the discipline has been involved in and complicit with white supremacy, racism, and colonialism (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023; Asad 1973). We may even regard the concept of race as a ‘master concept’ in anthropology, emerging from the context of colonialism and settler colonialism and continuing right until the emergence of powerful critiques of the concept of race in the twenty-first century. Recent anthropological critiques of race grew out of a long-standing concern relating to the origins and uses of the concept in the era of so-called ‘scientific racism’. Scientific racism tried to prove the existence of distinct human races by seemingly scientific means, building on biological concepts of race that had been in existence since the sixteenth century. It reached its heyday from the late 18th century, and was disproven in the early 20th century.^[4]

The ideas which underpinned scientific racism were anything but scientific. They flowed from the very racism they were evoked to support. Its lingering effects are still with us, and its central tenets of hierarchical biological difference between human groups have made a disturbing return in recent years (Saini 2019). Concern with scientific racism, and against race as a fixed socio-biological category, was spurred by some anthropologists gradually adopting explicitly anti-racist positions, in line with insights from biological and socio-cultural studies: all humans are now seen as belonging to one and the same human race, thus being endowed with the same inherent value, and the same right to life and dignity. This perspective is broadly recognised as socially and biologically accurate by much (but not all) of the academy and a smaller portion of the broader public. It took long and protracted struggles to undo racist understandings of human groups. The term ‘racism’ was coined in the late nineteenth century, but only adopted in the twentieth century (see below). It provided a starting point for what would mature into a critique of the concept of race both in anthropology and beyond.

Race does not reflect biological reality

Humans vary biologically and that variation is important in understanding the human experience. However, that variation is not distributed in clusters that correspond to racial categories based on phenotype (e.g. Black, white, Asian, etc.) or continental regions (Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.) (Lewis et al. 2022). In the context of human variation, it is often assumed that specific physical differences attest to specific racial, biological, or evolved group differences between racial categories of people, but they do not. In spite of over 300 years of trying to classify humans into mostly distinct biological units, human genetic, morphological and physiological variation does not correspond to racial categories such as Black, white, Caucasian or Asian. Instead most evolutionary scientists today think of human group variation in terms of existing populations, i.e. groups of people who either live in the same place or share other connections such as eating similar food or having children together. Human blood groups, body sizes, immune systems and skin colour simply do not map onto racial categories (Fuentes 2022, 74-91). The vast majority of genetic variation does not even occur across human populations but within them, as different parts of the human genome have different ancestral histories. In fact, there is nearly twice as much genetic variation among human populations in Africa as among all populations elsewhere (Fuentes 2022, 74-91).

This has not stopped humans in the past from trying to impose hierarchical social orders based on assumed biological differences. For example, in the era of segregation in the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ meant that a person known to have one ancestor who was Black was, for the purposes of the law, considered to be Black. Under the racist regime of apartheid in South Africa (1948-1990), the authorities introduced laws which imposed a system of racial classification on the South African population in the form of the 1950 Population Registration Act. Under this and other South African apartheid laws, ‘coloureds’ were classified as an intermediate racial category, and deprived of many basic rights as citizens. In the context of the Population Registration Act, South African citizens whose racial classification was unclear to the authorities were subjected to the so-called ‘pencil test’. The pencil test involved running a pencil through a person’s hair to determine that person’s racial classification. If the hair was straight, and the pencil dropped out of the person’s hair, the person would be classified as ‘white’; if the person had curly, coily or kinky hair, the person would be classified as ‘coloured’ or in some cases as ‘native’ (i.e. Black). Long after the demise of apartheid, such apartheid categories of racial difference remain socially and materially salient.

The category of being ‘native’, also holds negative connotations in Europe. An ethnographic study of a small and mixed coastal community in Northern Norway in the late 1940s found that public identity markers of the Sami ethnic group carried with them a significant social stigma. Locals of Sami background avoided such markers by avoiding use of Sami language and attire in public, and making derogatory remarks about nomadic Sami as ‘primitive’, especially when in the presence of non-Sami Norwegians. Being Sami was associatively linked to ‘uncleanliness’, and some locals of Sami background even referred to Samis as forming part of ‘an inferior race’ (Eidheim 1966; Eidheim 1969). Even today, Norwegian Samis remain targets of discrimination. These few historical examples of which there are countless others testify to the persistence of official and popular beliefs about the existence of biological race.

But race has real social and material consequences

Race is not biologically real, but its social and material consequences surely are (Hartigan 2013, 188). Racist systems, processes, and structures create the linkages between non-biological racialised groups and specific social, political, economic, and health-related outcomes. For example, statistics pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic in the US found that whilst average life expectancies had fallen by two years in the population at large as a result of the pandemic, that figure rose to seven years for Native Americans and Alaskan Americans.^[5] The social and material realities of racism can create specific biological consequences connected to racial categories, such as the reality that Black American women are three times more likely to die during childbirth than white American women.^[6]

Ethnographic studies from Brazil also point to the important effects of racism and discrimination on Black Brazilians. One early 1990s study of a small town in Rio’s coffee-growing interior, shows that racial inequality was upheld as the town’s inhabitants embraced aesthetic features that pointed to European ancestry, denigrated physical traits that point to African ancestry and wilfully forgot the non-white parts of their family histories (Twine 1998). Here racism endured, in part because commonsense definitions of it focused on direct human interactions. They excluded more complex and covert forms of racism, such as institutional racism or racist media imagery. As a result, Black Brazilians were routinely the subject of racist jokes, remained underpaid and were excluded from privileged social, educational and occupational spaces (Twine 1998).

While insisting on biological racial difference is not scientifically defensible, refuting the idea of biological race can also have negative consequences. In large parts of Latin America, the idea of mestizaje, or of people being biologically and culturally mixed, often serves attempts to whiten the population or to facilitate nation building (Hordge-Freeman 2015, 11-13). However, it is also part of more recent efforts to stop focusing on biological differences and to remedy centuries of racism and discrimination as part of democratic nation building (Wade 2017). Yet this emphasis on ‘mixture’ has its limits. It continues to provide a space within which Blackness, Indigeneity, and whiteness can implicitly be hierarchically valued. Insisting on people’s sameness may even blend into opposition to affirmative action policies. In Brazil for example, the insistence that race is not a primarily biological category has led some activists on the political left and right to argue against policies that explicitly recognised racial groups in society so as to give them special rights (Wade 2017, 129). This undermines efforts of those Black and Indigenous activists who are actively fighting to be recognized as racially and culturally distinct. The myth of a Brazilian ‘racial democracy’ thereby undercuts affirmative action policies, with the argument being that if race does not exist in Brazil, racial quotas should not either. It equally obscures the important processes of racialisation, which routinely lead to gendered racism and racialised sexism in the country (Caldwell 2007, 8).

Histories of race, histories of racism

‘The history of race and racism is a major component in the development of modern anthropology’ (Sussman 2014, 9). Anthropologists now generally contend that racism is epistemologically prior to race, or that ‘racism made race’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 5). This can be a bit confusing, because the term ‘racism’ is in fact a much more recent addition to the lexicon than ‘race’.

As a designator for biological ideas about human difference, the term ‘race’ emerged in the period of 1730-1790 in Europe (Bancel, David and Thomas 2019), whereas the first recorded instance of the term ‘racism’ in a Western language appears to be that of the French anarchist Charles Malato in his Philosophie de l’anarchie (1888), and in English that of the US military commander Richard Henry Pratt in Proceedings of the Mohonk conference (1902). Arguably the most central scholarly contribution to popularising the term came in the form of the exiled German Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s posthumously published monograph Rassismus (1938).^[7]It was not until 1942 that the term ‘racism’ appeared in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for the first time.

A first clear-cut example of racism in Europe that historians tend to point to is the discrimination faced by Muslim and Jewish converts to Catholicism—moriscos and conversos—during the Catholic Reconquista of the Muslim-controlled al-Andalus area of the Iberian Peninsula from the twelfth century onwards (Bethencourt 2013). These converts to Catholicism and their patrilineal descendants were for centuries denied full civil rights with reference to their alleged lack of ‘purity of blood’ ('limpieza de sangre'). We may distinguish between biology as a science which assesses the organic dynamics of bodies, and biology as popular ideas about the body. Biology as a contemporary science did not exist in the Iberian Peninsula at the time of the Catholic Reconquista. And yet, the idea of an essential link between blood and descent appears to be already present, although there was no underlying concept of biological race involved: raza or ‘race’ in Spanish referred at the time to ‘noble birth’, rather than biological race.

The biological conceptions of race, in which skin colour and other phenotypical markers of human difference are made salient and prominent, are a product of the European Enlightenment. Enlightenment science enabled race to ‘become biological’ (Graves, Jr. and Goodman 2021, 21). For example, botanist Carl Linnaeus’ classified humans into ‘five varieties’ in the tenth edition of his Systema naturae from 1758 (Marks 2017; Blunt 2002). Immanuel Kant’s philosophical anthropology linked skin colour to human character and intellect, describing humans of paler skin as superior to humans of darker skin (Mills 2017). ‘Skin colour is the primary criterion by which people have been classified into groups in the Western scientific tradition’ (Jablonski 2021, 437), but skin colour was only one of the criteria: physical markers such as hair texture, head size, bodily shape, eye colour and shape, and the size of one’s lips, nose, and sexual organs have at various times also been seen as marking race. What is rarely appreciated is ‘the extent to which current thought and research remain influenced by colour-based race concepts’ (Jablonski 2021, 437).

European colonialism was also integral to the development of racism, as European conquest sought to legitimate itself by recourse to arguments about human difference in an age of European discovery of other parts of the world. Given that anthropology emerged as a science intimately linked to European colonialism (Asad 1975, Trouillot 2003; Gupta and Stoolman 2022), it is hardly surprising that early anthropology would play a central role in the development and elaboration of ideas about human difference and otherness intrinsic to European colonialism that created ‘biological’ (but actually social) conceptions of race. These ‘biological’ understandings of human difference have adapted to highly variegated historical, social, and political contexts, and have adopted different forms. It is in reference to this that cultural theorist Stuart Hall referred to race as a ‘floating’ or ‘sliding signifier’ (2017) or a concept with no fixed categories or meanings. Hall’s is not an argument for the timelessness and universalism of all forms of racism but rather for the malleability of race concepts underpinning racism. According to him, race works like a language. The meaning of racial categories is not primarily defined by what they refer to. Instead, their meaning depends on other meaning making concepts. People’s different histories, experiences and modes of living determine which racial categories they may find convincing. For Hall, the study of how racial categories are made and remade is thus not primarily about human and scientific progress, but it is driven by socio-cultural ruptures and continuities.

For example, racial regimes of colonialism and settler colonialism varied according to time, context, and targets: the racism faced by African-Americans and Indigenous American Indians in the US differed from others in form and character. The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a racialisation whereby African-Americans were seen as property and sources of labour, while settler colonialism resulted in Indigenous Americans being viewed as obstacles to extraction and control of resources (Mamdani 2020). Simply subsuming them under the same umbrella of racism risks under-emphasizing the specific forms of violence that people in different times and places have had to endure.

Scientific racism

By the nineteenth century the idea that there were innate human differences attributable to assumed races was considered as established scientific knowledge, as well as simple common sense in large parts of the world (Saini 2019). Linnaeus, who laid the foundations for scientific racism, included humans among the animal species and divided them into different varieties based on skin colour as well as real and assumed behaviour (Kenyon-Hyatt 2021). Linnaeus’ contemporary, the eighteenth century biologist Comte de Buffon believed that an original white ‘Caucasian’ race had degraded into other races due to environmental factors such as difficult climates and poor diets. Though he admitted that humans were one single species and any classification of humans was bound to be arbitrary, he still held the view that there was a biological racial hierarchy. The biologist Johan Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) divided humans into ultimately five hierarchically structured races, based on people’s anatomy as well as their linguistic and psychological features (Bethencourt 2013; Gates, Jr. and Curran 2022). Race thinking in scientific racism cut across the divisions between ‘monogenism’, which posited a single origin of humanity, and ‘polygenism’, which held that human races had different origins. Historians have documented how the tenets of Western scientific racism were exported to other parts of the world and applied to local circumstances by local elites (see Skidmore 1993 for Brazil, Zia-Ebrahimi 2016 for Persia/Iran and Weaver 2022 for India).

Scientific racism also provided license and legitimation for eugenics (el-Haj 2007), the belief that human ‘stock’ could and should be ‘perfected’ by means of restricting the right to reproduce for certain categories of humans. Such reproductive restrictions were usually imposed on racialised others, the poor and people with mental or physical disabilities. Eugenics counted on widespread support from white academic, social, political, and media elites in both Europe and the US (Rutherford 2022). The eugenicist idea that humans could and should be ‘perfected’ was intrinsically linked to a racial hierarchy in which the supposed ‘white race’ was placed on top. ‘Miscegenation’ between supposedly different races of humans was declared either undesirable or outlawed. Moreover, the right to biological reproduction of people or groups of people of all colours was limited. In places like South Africa under apartheid, the US South in the era of segregation, and in Nazi Germany, sexual relations, co-habitation, and marriage between individuals deemed to belong to different ‘races’ was prohibited by state law. The obsession with ‘interracial’ sex, and the casting of hypersexualised Black and brown men, in particular, as sexual threats against white women, has been and remains an ever-recurrent facet of racist thought from slavery and colonialism to the present (Stoler 2010).

Arguments for eugenics often came wrapped in arguments about the supposed ‘superiority’ of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, and physical anthropologists provided data in the form of cranial and other physical measurements meant to lend credence to these ideas (Kyllingstad 2012). Given these ideas about alleged racial superiority of the ‘white’ and ‘Nordic race’, it should not be any surprise that the eugenicists’ calls for restricting the right to reproduce often also entailed calls to restrict ‘non-white immigration’ and interracial sexual relations in the name of ‘preserving racial purity’ both in the US and in Europe. There was in fact an extensive trans- and inter-continental traffic of racist ideas about the ‘white’ race and/or ‘Nordic’ and/or ‘Aryan’ racial superiority with the US white supremacist and eugenicist movement (Whitman 2017).

Though European colonialists legitimated any number of atrocities and violence inflicted on colonised peoples by recourse to ideas central to scientific racism—such as the transatlantic slave trade, genocide, and the forced removal of children from their families and communities—broader European and Euro-American popular recognition of how lethal and dehumanising these ideas actually were was catalysed by Nazi extermination policies. These views culminated in the Holocaust against - among others - Jews, Roma, queer, and disabled peoples from 1942 to 1945. The central role of some German anthropologists in this horror is well documented (Schafft 2003).

The Boasian turn

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ideas of scientific racism were dominant among liberal Western elites. They were also dominant and widely taken for granted among anthropologists—and not least in physical anthropology. Work by the Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin (1885) directly countered and challenged 19th century racial typologies and their associated racism. He insisted on focusing on people’s moral and intellectual dimensions, rather than their physical attributes, leading him to argue for the essential equality of humans. His work did not make a global impact during his time or over coming decades, in part due to the racist biases of the academy. However, it did foreshadow later arguments about the social construction of race (Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) and his successors received the most attention in challenging the ideas about biological race so central to scientific racism. Influenced by and in dialogue with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), Boas and his students took on key elements in the push against racial essentialism and the racism it supported (but not without issues: see Baker 2021 and below).

Physical anthropology in Boas’ time was wedded to the idea that one could derive conclusions about the mental and intellectual capacities of purportedly different races through determining physical attributes such as head size and shape. It was Boas’ 1912 monograph Changes in bodily form of descendants of immigrants that demonstrated that, contrary to dominant claims at the time, the lived human environment was a significant factor in the development of physical attributes among humans (Baker 2004; Gravlee, Bernard and Leonard 2003). The book showed that the physical aspects of European immigrants to the United States changed more drastically than expected, and more the longer their parents had been to the United States. Boas and his successors conducted this study in the context of struggles against eugenics and white supremacist movements in Europe and the US in the 1920s and 1930s, and not the least German Nazism (King 2019). Central in the new anthropological conceptualisation of what was and should be the focus in the study of human difference and variety was the concept of culture. Cultural differences were increasingly seen as being more important than biological differences. More specifically, the ‘Boasian turn’ in anthropology disrupted the ideology that biology underlay culture. Previously presumed biological traits and cultural phenomena were no longer causally linked (Mukhopadhyay and Moses 1997, 525), and one could no longer proclaim that ‘group X does this because of biological trait Y’.

Whereas Boas had hedged his bets, and retained the concept of race itself, his radical student Ashley Montagu (1905-1999) launched a full attack on the concept in anthropology (for a related, if somewhat more demure, anti-racism in mainstream physical anthropology, see Washburn 1963). For Montagu, race was a myth, and ought to be replaced by the concept of ‘ethnic group’. The ethnic group was not intended to merely ‘substitute’ for race; it entailed adopting an entirely new viewpoint (Montagu 1962, 926). Montagu, who during World War II published the seminal monograph Man’s most dangerous myth: The fallacy of race (1942), would later become the main author of UNESCO’s 1950 Statement on Race, in which race was declared to be a non-scientific concept (Brattain 2012). The Statement foregrounded humanity’s common ancestry and genetic similarities across populations to argue that racism was nothing but an inherently aggressive ideology and a misguided feeling. Montagu believed that the concept of race was so intertwined with racism that one could not do away with the latter without first doing away with the former (Yudell 2014).

Though they have in time become part of the anthropological common sense, it often seems forgotten, even within anthropology itself, how radical Montagu’s ideas about race and racism were at the time. The years that followed the 1950 UNESCO Statement on Race also revealed that Montagu’s radical anti-racist stance as a drafter of the statement had uneven support among the cross-disciplinary group of scientists involved in UNESCO: it would be followed by more anodyne UNESCO statements on race in 1951, 1967 and 1978 (Hazard, Jr. 2012). Another anthropologist involved in the 1950 UNESCO Statement, and critical of the concept of race, was Claude Lévi-Strauss (Rouse 2019). But in anthropology, Montagu, building on Firmin, Boas, Washburn, and the work of many others, won out, and the lingering effects of his contribution can also be found in the various institutional statements on race and racism today.

The critique of Boasian racial liberalism

Changes brought by the Boasian turn were incomplete. In the eyes of its detractors, the dominant Boasian ‘racial liberalism’ in anthropology in the post-World War II era turned out to be quite compatible with the continued exclusion and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and other racialised scholars (Baker 2021). The idea of racial liberalism foregrounds that liberalism has been racialised, as liberal theory long restricted full personhood to white men, and its insistence on liberal values trivialises white supremacy (Rana 2020). Liberalism has historically tended to describe white supremacist and racist imaginaries about state and nation as pertaining to the political fringes (Shoshan 2015). This is an analytical and conceptual move which often exceptionalises racism and reinforces notions of ‘white innocence’ (Wekker 2015).

Radical critiques of Boasian racial liberalism starting in the 1960s, inspired by the nascent field of Black studies (Anderson 2019; de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023). They took aim at what they declared to be the fiction that anthropology itself and the societies it studies had become ‘post-racial’ by declaring race to be a social construct and adopting a ‘no race’ position. Boasian racial liberalism would also at times appear to efface the central role that transatlantic slavery played in the formulation of anti-Black racism (Harrison 1995, 52), and to have reduced racism to a matter of individual attitudes rather than social structures and systemic practice. Critiques of Boasian racial liberalism have also taken aim at the notion that replacing the concept of race with the concept of ethnicity—as popularised by the works of Montagu (1942) and anthropologist Fredrik W. Barth (1969)—would do away with racism. For turning ethnicity into the ‘master principle of classification’, in the words of its critics, ‘euphemized, if not denied race’ by not specifying the conditions under which racism emerges and persists (Harrison 1995, 48).

The radical critique of Boasian racial liberalism also took on board the empirically registrable fact that far-right and racist movements had shifted from a discourse highlighting immigrants and minorities’ physical and phenotypical features to a discourse about the culture and religion of ‘racial others’. They had done so in a very elaborate and conscious attempt at evading the very accusations of racism that often blocked their popular appeal. Diagnosed as ‘cultural racism’ by Frantz Fanon (1967), this was not so much a ‘new racism’ (Balibar 1991), as a return to the very origins of European racism by making culture and religion the central markers of exclusion of ‘others’ (Stolcke 1995). Peter Wade makes the important point that ‘race has always been seen as a natural-cultural assemblage in which “nature” and “culture” are always shaping each other and the differences between them are not always clear’ (Wade 2015, 53).

What this return to cultural racism translated into in practice was the racist and discriminatory treatment of Muslim and/or Black populations throughout Western societies in particular, a form of racism often described as ‘Islamophobia’ (Bangstad 2022). Islamophobia is by no means limited to the West. The new forms of racism represented a ‘racism without races’ or a supposedly ‘colour-blind racism’ (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Omi and Winant 1986). By the 1990s, it had arguably become a dominant form of racism in Europe and the US. Regardless of the elaboration and differentiation of the concept of culture in anthropology, out in the real world, ‘culture’ would, over the course of the 1990s, assume some of the very same essentialised properties as the concept of race once had. The new ‘culture talk’ was exemplified in the political construction of the category of ‘Muslim’ which followed in the wake of al-Qaida’s terrorist attack on the US on September 11, 2001 (Mamdani 2002; Abu-Lughod 2002).

Noteworthy in this context of racism against Muslims was also the ubiquity of racist stereotyping of Muslim males as existential sexual threats against women and women’s rights worldwide (Abu-Lughod 2015). That racist trope travelled fast and far and has been present in, for example, the anti-Muslim hate speech and rhetoric of Buddhist nationalists in Myanmar as well as among Hindutva nationalists in India in recent years. Darren Byler has also noted that the production of Uyghur Muslim men, in particular, as ‘subhuman under the sign of terror’ is characteristic of both state authorities and settler colonial discourse in Xinjang, China (2022, 9). Arjun Appadurai identified a ‘fear of small numbers’ (2006) as a central element of global racisms: with the rise, mainstreaming, and circulation of far-right and racist ideas about white ‘replacement’ or ‘extinction’ in various societies such as Europe, the US, India, and South Africa. Those fears have long since become global.

New frontiers in the anthropological study of race and racisms

Anthropology has been taken to task for largely ignoring race and racism as central to its history, practice, and development (Pierre 2013; Jobson 2020). That anthropological scholarship about race and racism has overwhelmingly focused on Western contexts should not blind us to the fact that while racism is not a human universal (i.e., found in all human cultures), it is certainly a global phenomenon (i.e., found in contemporary human societies in all parts of the world) (Hage 1998; Twine 1998; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Loftsdóttir and Jensen 2014; Ghassem-Fachandi 2012; Pierre 2012). Anthropological studies have also demonstrated that many societies that are profoundly multiracial and multicultural—such as in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa (Pierre 2012)—have developed and sustained elaborate racial hierarchies premised on the retention of privileges for the ‘least Black parts’ of the population (Wade 2017). Anthropologists have equally documented how racism can even pervade institutions in which there is a formal commitment to equal treatment or the eradication of racism (Rouse 2009; Shange 2019). Inspired by critical whiteness studies, they have also reversed the tendency to study race through the study of people of colour, and explored the intersections between class, gender, and race among white people (Hartigan 2005). In the ‘decolonizing turn’ in anthropology in recent years, critical calls to dismantle past and present structures of white privilege and white supremacy within anthropology (de Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2023) as well as to de-centre white epistemologies have been central (Allen and Jobson 2016; Gupta and Stoolman 2022).

Anthropological theories and analyses do not evolve in isolation from developments in society and politics at large. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has engendered a shift from definitions and analyses of racism premised on seeing it as the articulation of individual attitudes, to definitions and analyses with concepts such as ‘systemic’ and/or ‘structural’ racism. That shift now provides directions and new avenues for future research (see, among others, Gilmore 2022), and is discernible in Laurence Ralph’s study of the use of torture alongside everyday incidents of police violence against Black Americans in Chicago (2020) as well as in Ruha Benjamin’s studies of how digital technology structures (coders, developers, users) reinforce racial discrimination and biases that create and inform coded inequity or what Benjamin calls the “New Jim Code” (2019). Inspired by work on science and technology, anthropologists have also taken an interest in how the rise and popularity of modern and privatised DNA testing and the new science of genomics may re-inscribe racial frames and engender racism (M’charek 2005; el-Haj 2007; Fullwiley 2011; Nelson 2016; Abel and Schroeder 2020; Abel 2022). Yet, they have also discussed how the use of genomic analyses can be used to push against racist and colonial frames, for example by solidifying empowering forms of otherness (Benn-Torres and Torres-Colon 2021).

For what it will be worth, in an uncertain human future under conditions of man-made and intertwined ‘polycrises’ including global climate change and environmental destruction, increased migration flows coupled with the bordering of the richer parts of the world, global pandemics, and ravaging wars, anthropology seems in recent years to have taken more substantive steps in the direction of anti-racism (Mullings 2005). As anthropology helps us recognise and address racism, we may in turn be in a better position to deal with looming threats to the idea of a shared humanity.

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Note on contributors

Sindre Bangstad is a Research Professor at KIFO, Oslo, Norway. He was a Visiting Professor in Anthropology at Princeton University 2022-23.

Sindre Bangstad, KIFO Institute of Church, Religion and Worldview Research, Øvre Slottsgate 6B, 0192 Oslo, Norway. sindre.bangstad@kifo.no

Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University.

Agustín Fuentes, Department of Anthropology, Princeton University, 116 Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. afuentes2@princeton.edu

[1] ”AABA statement on race & racism.” 2019. American Association of Biological Anthropologists, March 27. https://bioanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement-race-and-racism-2019/

[2] “AAA statement on race.” 1998. American Anthropological Association, May 17. https://americananthro.org/about/policies/statement-on-race/

[3] See, for example, ” American Society of Human Genetics statement regarding concepts of ’good genes’ and human genetics.” 2020. American Society of Human Genetics, September 24. https://www.ashg.org/publications-news/ashg-news/statement-regarding-good-genes-human-genetics/#:~:text=Genetics%20demonstrates%20that%20humans%20cannot,ancestry%20have%20no%20scientific%20evidence

[4] From roughly 1840-1945; see “Scientific racism.” Confronting anti-Black racism resource, Harvard Library. https://library.harvard.edu/confronting-anti-black-racism/scientific-racism

[5] Rabin, Roni Caryn. 2022. “U.S. life expectancy falls again in ‘historic’ setback.” The New York Times, August 31. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/31/health/life-expectancy-covid-pandemic.html

[6] Population Reference Bureau. 2021. Black women over three times more likely to die in pregnancy, postpartum than white women, new research finds. Washington, D.C.: PRB. https://www.prb.org/resources/black-women-over-three-times-more-likely-to-die-in-pregnancy-postpartum-than-white-women-new-research-finds/

[7] The authors would like to thank Dr. Tobias Hübinette, Karlstad University, Sweden for information on this.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Literacy

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 02 Dec 2021 03:45:18 +0000

Mark Turin Robert Hanks

University of British Columbia

Initially published 2 Dec 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21literacy

Abstract:

Literacy is a linguistic innovation characterised by the encoding and decoding of language into a system of visual signs whose relevance to daily life in most societies cannot be overstated. Understood to be both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been the subject of anthropological inquiry since the late nineteenth century, with protracted debates about its effects on human consciousness and social life. This entry tracks the development of literacy as a concept.

Initially dominated by technologically deterministic assertions that literacy was a tool for sociocultural and cognitive development, anthropology would later embrace the more culturally relativistic perspective advanced by the New Literacy Studies movement of the 1980s and 1990s. This movement sought to understand how cultural logics and norms informed the development of localised literacy practices, thus creating variations of ‘literacies’ which were themselves embedded within ideologies and structures of power relations. Coming to recognise the marginalising power of standardised literacy, anthropology turned its attention to education.

Anthropologists and educators have become partners in research dedicated to developing pedagogical practices that draw upon the unique linguistic resources and practices that students bring with them into the classroom to cultivate inclusivity and empowerment. The increasing prevalence of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life have challenged earlier notions of literacy, inspiring anthropologists to investigate how people draw upon multiple modalities to encode and decode meaning, thereby fundamentally reshaping our understanding of what it means to ‘read and write’.

Introduction

Literacy is such a central part of most people’s everyday lives that its ubiquity can be taken for granted. Scholars have highlighted how, for many of us, literacy represents an essential pathway to development and personal liberation that has the power to cure almost any social ill (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Street 1997: 49; Ong 2012). Literacy is often presented as an ability with such transformative potential that becoming literate leads to a fundamental redefinition of an individual’s identity (Riemer 2008; Ahearn 2004). However, there are communities for whom literacy can be a less integral, sometimes even inappropriate, means for documenting and communicating language (Debenport 2015). In circumventing the constraints of the written word, such communities seek alternative ways of transmitting ideas, both orally and through other technologies (Finnegan 2012; Turin et al. 2013). Considering the perceived centrality of literacy to most contemporary human societies, and its continued absence from others, how has anthropology contributed to a cross-cultural understanding of literacy?

Broadly defined as both a technology and a social practice, literacy has been characterised as communication through an invented system of visually decoded signs, rather than by oral or gestural modes (Besnier 1999: 141). As an area of interest, literacy has figured prominently in anthropological inquiry since the discipline’s inception, as scholars sought to make sense of what the ability to read and write means for us. While studies have included exploring the origins, use, and transmission of different writing systems, the central question remains: does giving a tangible form to the most fundamental aspect of humanity, namely our capacity for language, transform how we think about, perceive, and process the world around us? In essence, does literacy change who we are as humans? Understanding this has become all the more relevant as the rapid transition from analogue to digital technologies further complicates how people engage with the written word, and thus reshapes our sense of what it means to be literate (Jewitt 2006; Wolf 2017).

In this entry, we track the progression of literacy through different eras of anthropological theory. Early interpretations treated literacy as a lens for analyses at the societal level, a framework that saw writing systems as a means for differentiating between cultures and their imagined evolutionary, cognitive, and socioeconomic development, which thus helped to frame literacy as an autonomous technology independent of its social contexts (Morgan 1878: 3, 11). While this position has softened over the years, the crucial link between literacy and consciousness was maintained as scholars emphasised the intrinsic benefits that a literate mind offered individuals and the societies in which they lived (Goody & Watt 1963; Ong 2012).

Beginning in the 1980s, anthropologists began to reflect on the sociocultural underpinnings of literacy practices, with the scale of analysis narrowing to focus on local specificity and variation (Scribner & Cole 1981). Strict definitions of ‘literacy’ and what it meant to be ‘literate’ were shown to be implicated in the hegemonic ideologies that structure our societies and determine our values, and have given way to more nuanced understandings (Bialostok & Whitman 2006; Street 1997; Blommaert 2008). This newer movement in literacy studies situated literacy’s power to marginalise and sought to re-evaluate the diversity of written language in ways that challenged normative assumptions prevalent in earlier models. Insights generated by a sociocultural approach to literacy have motivated anthropologists to work with educators to make pedagogical literacy practices more inclusive and empowering for students (Street 1997; Hornberger 2003). The increasing centrality of digital technologies in all aspects of daily life (Horst & Miller 2012) has led to a re-scoping of what it means to read and write, with traditional definitions of literacy becoming less relevant to understanding the emergent meaning-making processes of digital texts.

Literacy and pre-literature

In the discipline’s early years, anthropologists took so-called ‘primitive’ peoples as their subjects of inquiry to expand their understandings of humanity (Mandelbaum 1955: 213; Hsu 1964: 169). Broadly applied to peoples living beyond the cultural and political ‘West’, the term ‘primitive’ invoked a Hobbesian image of primordial humanity that contrasted with the presumed cultural, historical, and linguistic sophistication of the societies from which anthropologists hailed (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 169). While the term ‘primitive’ was used extensively by prominent anthropological theorists at the time, objections quickly arose due to its analytical ambiguity and racist implications of superiority and inferiority (Faris 1925: 711; Hsu 1964: 173). In response, and on account of their apparent objectivity and perceived greater scientific precision, the terms ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ arose as alternatives to the ‘primitive’/ ‘civilised’ opposition.

Unlike primitivity, ‘literacy’ was considered to carry less awkward baggage, being an attainable state of socioeconomic and cognitive development rather than an essential and inherent condition. Those who had not yet learned to read could be identified as ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’, only because written literature had not been introduced or developed in their societies (Faris 1925: 711-2; Hsu 1964: 169). However, the use of ‘non-literate’ or ‘pre-literate’ also assumed that literacy and orality were mutually exclusive (Dickinson 1994: 320) and presented literacy as the first step towards greater civilisation and sophistication (Faris 1925: 712). The essence of the connection between literacy and civilisation derived from a belief that written language had an inevitable impact on how people understood, interpreted, and made sense of the world around them.

As twentieth century scholars became increasingly interested in understanding how language might shape thought and culture (Whorf 1952; Lévi-Strauss 1966), the physical form of written language came to be seen as more than a simple representation of speech, and rather a unique form of language in its own right (Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 5, 8). While earlier assumptions ascribed a ‘prelogical’ cognitive state to ‘primitive’ peoples, a notion assuming that such communities were completely uninterested in abstract thinking and focused solely on ensuring their basic needs of survival (Lévy-Bruhl 2018; Brockmeier & Olson 2009: 10), Claude Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how both literate and oral peoples engage in the rational ordering of the world, albeit from quite different perspectives (1966: 269). Oral peoples were presented as reasoning with a ‘mythical thought’ pattern that was ‘entangled in imagery’, while literate peoples could reason at a ‘concrete’ level that was detached from perception and imagination (Lévi-Strauss 2001: 11-2; Lévi-Strauss 1966: 15, 20, 22).

Drawing from linguistic theory, Lévi-Strauss posited that the key difference between literate and oral thought processes was the capacity of the literate mind to distinguish between signs and the signified, thus being able to explore the relationship between images and the concepts they represent (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 18, 21). This perspective continues into the present with cognitive scientists like David Olson asserting that literacy leads to a meta-awareness of language that allows for an objectified and decontextualised understanding of concepts (2017: 239). Writing, having the capacity to lift words (signs and concepts) out of context, transforms them into objects that can be scrutinised and categorised on their own without attachment to a particular image or signification (Olson 2017: 241). In this way, the rationality of the literate mind has been compared to that of an engineer looking for ways to think beyond cultural and categorical constraints by critically focusing on its constituent elements, whereas the oral mind was theorised as only capable of rearranging, and never thinking beyond, the categories it was given (Lévi-Strauss 1966: 19).

While ‘literature’ is generally used to refer only to cultural expressions with written form, there is no compelling reason to treat the verbal art of oral societies as fundamentally different to written traditions: oral literatures simply exist at one end of the spectrum of literary types (Finnegan 2012: 20, 27; Turin et al. 2013). A bias towards the written word combined with the tendency of anthropologists to record and transcode oral traditions into textual form (Turin 2014) has resulted in the misrepresentation of oral literatures as simply verbatim transmissions of narratives across generations, and further contributes to the belief that such traditions are cruder than written literature (Finnegan 2012: 15-6). In reality, the difference between written and oral literature is the mode of transmission: oral literatures are more dependent on live (and increasingly online) performances and are therefore characterised by greater variability as performers improvise and innovate, often in active dialogue with their audience (Finnegan 2012: 10-2). In contrast to the unchanging physical form of written texts which can be transmitted unaltered across time and space (albeit subject to much reinterpretation), the composition and dissemination of oral literature—much like music and dance—is dependent upon and inextricably linked to the performative context (Finnegan 2012: 4-5, 14). While this difference in tangibility has led to academic and popular assumptions regarding the supposed objectivity and verifiability of written historical narratives, Michel-Rolph Trouillot (2015) critiques such perspectives as holding a positivist bias that fails to account for how power enters into the process of constructing historical narratives. This results in conceptions of history that present a ‘fixed past’, whereas the ‘truth’ of history is actually intimately tied to the present even in the case of written records.

Working through the dichotomies: primitive/civilised and oral/literate

Early anthropologists like Lewis Henry Morgan (1878) suggested that writing gave a permanence to language that was fundamental for understanding a particular society’s thought processes and its capacity for development. For late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century anthropologists, literacy represented a necessary precondition for a culture to be considered a ‘Civilization’ within the monodirectional and evolutionary logic that served to organise all societies (Morgan 1878: 3, 11; Hsu 1964: 169; Akinnaso 1981: 180). While scholars would later criticise their predecessors for assuming radical cognitive differences between literate and oral peoples, many anthropologists nevertheless felt comfortable asserting that written language had a deterministic influence on an individual’s analytical processes and capacities (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Ong 2012: 8-9).

This position is known as the ‘universalist’ or ‘autonomous’ model of literacy. It understands writing to be a technology reliant on generalised skills and language practices that in turn impact an individual’s linguistic, cultural, and cognitive potential (Collins 1995: 75; Akinnaso 1981: 187; Ong 2012: 77-8, 81). Some observers, like Walter Ong, travelled far with this perspective, asserting that writing is an inevitable, even ‘absolutely necessary’, technology for the development of science, history, and philosophy; a precondition for nuanced understandings of art and language without which humans will not achieve their full cognitive potential (2012: 14-5).

According to this logic, and given their lack of written records, oral societies were presumed to be homeostatic, that is, internally and perpetually stable, operating with a model of cultural transmission incapable of distinguishing between history and myth, past and present. Literate societies, on the other hand, could draw on written records and were thus positioned to make objective distinctions between ‘what was and what is’ (Goody & Watt 1963: 308, 310-1; Ong 2012: 8; Faris 1925: 712). In this conceptualisation, literacy was a means for expanding a society’s capacity for rational and abstract thought (Langlois 2006: 18; Akinnaso 1981: 164; Ong 2012: 102) and if properly harnessed, could catalyse socioeconomic and cognitive development (Collin 2013: 29; Akinnaso 1981: 164, 169).

Research on oral literature has challenged the prevailing and myopic assumptions in the autonomous model of literacy. Comparative research shows that technologies like writing are better conceptualised as shaping, rather than determining, our collective and individual recollections (Martindale et al. 2018: 198; Scribner & Cole 1981). Archaeological evidence, for example, corroborates thousands of years of layered histories as recorded in the oral narratives of Tsimshian people in British Columbia, Canada, while members of the Thangmi community in Nepal disrupt the presumed path of orality to literacy by incorporating digital technologies as part of their techniques of recording oral history (Martindale et al. 2018: 199-200, 202). The centrality of oral performances to the recitation of origin myths by ritual practitioners is internalised by members of the Thangmi community who view orality as a source of strength and as essential to their ethnic identity (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 82-3). As a consequence, writing down the oral performances of Thangmi ritual practitioners can be seen as undermining the very feature that makes these narratives identifiably Thangmi (Shneiderman 2015: 83, 87). Alternative technologies, such as audio and video, present a more desirable means of documenting and transmitting oral narratives for practitioners who thereby retain control over the message, with multimedia helping to emphasise distinctiveness and variation, avoiding the pitfalls of standardisation through the mediation of the written word (Shneiderman 2015: 64, 87, 96).

Christine Helliwell’s work in a Borneo Dayak community further demonstrates the diverse understandings encoded in oral literature by contrasting two distinct narrative genres, the sensangan and the cerito Nosi (2012: 52). Both of these genres are considered high prestige art forms of storytelling and recount epic poems of great heroes, often taking many hours to complete. Despite this general similarity, they differ in a number of significant ways: the sensangan are a corpus of tales about the culture-hero and trickster Koling that are each narrated as a slow song with a drum accompaniment, whereas cerito Nosi are standalone stories chanted quickly without any accompanying instruments (Helliwell 2012: 54, 57). The different pacing and styles by which these two distinct genres are performed affect how the audience experiences and interprets their content. The slow pace of the sensangan allows for the content to be discussed by the audience as it is performed, while the rapid chanting of the cerito Nosi necessitates focussed attention. In contrast to theories that present oral societies as incapable of distinguishing between myth and history, the unique performative styles of these genres illustrate important differences in how their content is interpreted, impacting the level of truth attributed to the stories by the audiences (Helliwell 2012: 53, 60).

Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) challenges the assumed necessity of written language for scientific knowledge with a description of the Onondaga Nation’s Thanksgiving Address. This ancient practice of expressing gratitude to the environment speaks to the relationship that the Onondaga Nation has to the natural world (Kimmerer 2013: 107-8, 111). As speakers name and thank each species in turn for their roles in sustaining the environment, the structure of the Thanksgiving Address serves as a scientific inventory of ecological information, ‘a lesson in Native science’ that unifies the speaker and audience in a collective reflection on the ethic of responsibility towards the land (Kimmerer 2013: 108, 110, 115). Crucially, much of the power of the Thanksgiving Address comes from its oral performance which, in contrast to a written document that may be skimmed, requires the audience to actively participate for the duration of its lengthy recitation and creates the space to contemplate one’s relationship to the environment (Kimmerer 2013: 110). Kimmerer asserts that Indigenous knowledge practices like the Thanksgiving Address can complement Western science’s focus on matter by interweaving Indigenous understandings of respect and gratitude, and by positioning ecological restoration as a return to reciprocal relations between humans and the environment (2013: 257, 263).

In short, while some communities may not have a long history of written texts, this does not imply that their histories and perspectives are solely confined to the present (Martindale et al. 2018: 205). Moreover, the assertion of the autonomous model that literacy results in improved rationality remains questionable when considering how real-time, in vivo oral performances allow for audience members to challenge and seek clarification from performers (Finnegan 2012: 14). This is no new realisation: Socrates himself identified that an inherent flaw of written language was its inflexibility. Seen in this light, the written word can hinder deeper understanding because a reader cannot challenge or seek clarification from a text. By definition, written words just keep repeating themselves (Wolf 2017: 76; Plato 2002).

Even though evolutionary theories of literacy fell out of fashion and remain unsupported by ethnographic evidence, literacy has continued to be used to distinguish between human cultures (Goody & Watt 1963: 321; Akinnaso 1981: 164). In particular, the imagined capacity for social organisation, socioeconomic growth, and cognitive development that some acquaint with literacy continue to situate the terms ‘non-literate’, ‘pre-literate’, or ‘oral’ alongside a reduced level of technological development in ways that are unfortunate (Berndt 1960: 64; Akinnaso 1981: 164). While not connected to the earlier evolutionary theories, the technological determinism implicit in the autonomous model of literacy assumes negative consequences for both cognition and society in the absence of literacy. Furthermore, the standards by which certain language practices are recognised as constituting ‘literacy’ must be considered in light of the colonial histories that have informed those very standards.

As part of the colonial project, languages were historically equated with race, with non-European languages and their speakers categorised as inferior to Europeans and their language practices (Rosa & Flores 2017: 623-4). These racio-linguistic ideologies continue today in forms such as ‘standardised languages’ which can legitimate the language practices of White speakers by positioning their language practices as the ‘norm’ or ‘ideal’ to be used in written texts (Rosa 2016: 163, 165; Baker-Bell 2020), thus devaluing and discounting the diversity of reading and writing practices that exist outside of this narrow standard (Rosa 2019: 187-8). For this, the autonomous model of literacy has been critiqued as merely replacing one racist and evolutionary dichotomy (primitive/civilised) with another: preliterate/literate or oral/literate (Akinnaso 1981: 164; Langlois 2006: 16-7; Collin 2013: 29-30).

Literacy as a sociocultural practice

From the 1980s, anthropologists grew dissatisfied with the essentialising dichotomies that had characterised mid-twentieth century theories and that posited a ‘great divide’ between societies. Such simplistic binaries failed to explain the complexity and rationality present in oral societies (Collin 2013: 30; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382), not to mention the many varied ways in which oral and written language are used (Stephens 2000: 11; Dickinson 1994). In response, scholars shifted their inquiries from broad societal-level analyses to the local and granular, proposing a sociocultural model in which literacy was better understood as a collective activity with varied potentials dependent upon how a particular community incorporated writing into their processes (Collin 2013: 30; Street 2013: 54). Referred to as ‘New Literacy Studies’ (NLS), this movement made use of more ethnographic approaches and embraced a cultural understanding of literacy as a practice embedded within, and defined by, institutional settings and everyday life (Collins 1995: 80-1; Stephens 2000: 10).

In addition, NLS rejected the idea that writing was no more than a general skillset easily transposable onto different contexts. For example, the ubiquity of keyboard writing in certain societies has meant that ‘computer literacy’ has supplanted analogue forms of literacy practices to such an extent that being ‘computer illiterate’ is seen as equivalent to being illiterate (Blommaert 2008: 5). NLS proposes a relativistic, dynamic, and situated model that recognises diverse forms of ‘literacies’ embedded within particular cultural contexts, norms, and discourses. These vary across time and space and are tied to how individuals construct their identities (Collins 1995: 75-6; Street 1997: 48; Riemer 2008: 444).

NLS is therefore understood to advocate a culturally relativistic approach (Collin 2013: 32), with aligned research demonstrating how textual practices are influenced by cultural logics and beliefs (Riemer 2008), such as the use of magical writing in Ecuador as means of critiquing state power (Wogan 2004), or the strict norms regulating the creation and dissemination of textual documents to preserve community secrecy in a New Mexico Pueblo community (Debenport 2015). The NLS approach has encouraged anthropologists to reflect on how their own level of literacy in the ‘texts’ of the communities with whom they work may affect their interpretations. Researchers often ‘normatively reorganize’ texts, silencing the original author’s voice (Blommaert 2008: 10-1), while in other cases have little or no reading ability in the predominant written language of the communities with whom they work, calling into question the kinds of knowledge represented in anthropologist’s publications (Allen 1992; Ortner 1992).

A key element of NLS is the realisation that literacy functions as an ideology, and that the uses, meanings, definitions of, and efforts to control literacy policies are embedded within wider relations of power (Street 1997: 48; Wogan 2003: 66; Blommaert 2008: 6). Determinist assumptions inherent in the autonomous model of literacy cultivated a conviction within development organisations that literacy was a panacea for all social ills, leading to the entanglement of literacy programs with free-market neoliberal capitalism (Street 1997: 49; Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 384). Targeting Indigenous peoples and other marginalised populations, development-minded literacy programs remain tethered to earlier missionary activities which sought to ‘civilise’ non-Western peoples through education and religious conversion (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 382-3; Wogan 2004: 62-4; Besnier 1995).

Literacy interventions across the Global South during the mid-twentieth century, while distinct from the ethnocentric drive of missionary literacy programs, nevertheless upheld colonial ideologies through a ‘liberal paternalism’ that identified literacy as the path to progress and modernity (Bialostok & Whitman 2006: 383). In such thinking, literacy was a mechanism for moral transformation, constituting new subjectivities in the context of modern capitalist states, with schools serving as key institutional sites for integrating individuals into the nation (Collins 1995: 82; Riemer 2008: 450). ‘Schooled literacy’, that is, standardised writing practices as transmitted in educational settings, replaced diverse literacies that were present in other social spheres (Collins 1995: 82). These diverse literacies might have included the reading of religious texts for ritual purposes, the use of books in children’s play (such as word games and puzzles), or reading stories aloud in the home (De la Piedra 2009: 116, 121; O’Neil 2007: 172). María Teresa De la Piedra’s research on the multiple forms of ‘hybrid literacy practices’ that coexist within the rural Urpipata community in Peru demonstrates that the replacement of alternative literacies with schooled literacy is not necessarily total; individuals continue to mix and appropriate Quechua and Spanish literacy for use in different contexts and to fulfil their own purposes (2009: 110, 112–3).

Jan Blommaert (2008) classifies alternative literacies under the umbrella term ‘grassroots literacy’, which he applies to a broad range of ‘non-elite’ literacy practices. These forms of writing deviate from standardised norms of spelling and speech and can usually only be interpreted within a local context (Blommaert 2008: 7, 193). Graffiti is an example of a grassroots literacy in which reading and decoding a script is only accessible to other graffiti writers (Blommaert 2008: 193). Some scholars consider schooled literacy to be part of an elite-led movement against grassroots literacies, seeking to establish a particular literacy standard as foundational for citizenship and the moral order, contributing to the problematic use of the term ‘officially literate’ as a necessary requirement to access social standing (Collins 1995: 82-3; Erickson 1984: 525; Rosa 2019; Baker-Bell 2020).

Laura Ahearn (2004) and Frances Riemer (2008) examine the effects of development-minded literacy programs in Nepal and Botswana. In Junigau, Nepal, Ahearn studied women’s newly acquired literacy skills in the 1990s in the context of the writing of love-letters and suggested that a growth in romantic elopements indicated that learning to write love-letters impacted how villagers conceptualised their agency (2004: 306). In Ahearn’s analysis, the dominant discourses of Nepali society encouraged a moral connection between the acquisition of literacy skills and increased development, capitalism, independence, and agency (2004: 309, 311). However, in connecting literacy to a belief that romantic love was integral to modern life (Ahearn 2004: 308, 312), development-minded literacy education in Junigau may have inadvertently resulted in women’s disempowerment, as those who chose to elope often lost the support of their natal families. Demonstrating how women who later faced difficulties in their marriage had few options, Ahearn challenges an instrumental view that positions literacy as a necessarily positive capacity that inevitably leads to greater empowerment (2004: 313).

Riemer’s research into the meanings ascribed to literacy in Botswana demonstrates that while adult learners may frame their path to literacy as coming to see ‘the light’, the greater sense of personal empowerment they experience as a result also leads to their increased participation in the modern global capitalist system (2008: 449-50, 458). Riemer describes a cultural model in which strong associations exist between literacy, education, and moral transformation, and the acquisition of literacy skills through schooling involves reconstructing one’s identity to be a full member of a modern community (2008: 451-2). Aside from the technical skills associated with literacy, the transformed sense of self produced through school-based literacy programs further situated these new readers in a nexus of discursive power relations constructed by ideologies of race, Christian morality, and political economy (Riemer 2008: 456-8). In this analysis, the desire for literacy—and the sense of personal empowerment that students feel—can be read as a ‘discipline’ in the Foucauldian sense in which literacy generates compliance and functions as a tool for assimilation (Riemer 2008: 458).

An anthropology of literacy education

The aversion to generalisation that informs NLS’s descriptivist approach to literacy limits its effectiveness as a scalable educational model, running the risk of generating little more than collected anecdotes about diverse forms of literacies (Besnier 1999: 141; Stephens 2000: 19). While acknowledging the importance of contextuality to literacy, Kate Stephens argues that some aspects of literacy skills development are not context-specific and can indeed be generalised, and that there is educational value in understanding how writing can be recontextualised and interpreted across time and space (2000: 12-3). Furthermore, while superior cognitive processing is not necessarily a consequence of being literate, there is increasing evidence indicating that literacy does support cognitive potentialities that cultivate skills like metalinguistic knowledge: that is, knowledge about language that may be impossible to harness without the linguistic objectification associated with literacy (Stephens 2000: 14, 16-7; Wolf 2017; Olson 1977; Olson 1994). A ‘literacy for education’ approach can balance the action-oriented concerns of educators with a greater anthropological recognition of context by offering language instruction for specific contexts and purposes (Stephens 2000: 20-1). So managed, the problem of shoehorning strict definitions of literacy into a narrow standard can be offset by expanding the range of practices that qualify as ‘literate’, thus diversifying the writing contexts for which students are prepared (Akinnaso 1981: 167; Street 2013: 60).

H. Samy Alim et al.’s (2011) examination of Hip Hop literacies offers an example of how the cultural relativism of NLS can mesh with the development of effective pedagogical models. While the Black English language used in Hip Hop has been criticised as ‘illiterate’, scholars point out that the grammatical prescriptivism of ‘standard English’ is itself artistically limiting and an example of linguistic racism that devalues the language and literacy practices of marginalised communities (Alim et al. 2011: 121; Baker-Bell 2020: 15-6). Recognising the normalising power of ‘schooled literacy’ in defining standards of educability (Collins 1995: 83; Erickson 1984: 531; Rosa & Flores 2017: 626-7), Alim et al. advocate for literacy education that locates its goals within the lived realities of its students by making it ‘ILL’, namely: Intimate, Lived, and Liberatory (2011: 134). Through Hip Hop, young people introduce their own cultural standards and prioritise ‘ill-legitimate’ artistic creativity, challenging dominant ideals of correctness by defining their textual practices as ill, or skilled (Alim et al. 2011: 122).

‘Ill-literacy studies’ helps to frame American educational institutions as illiterate on account of their inability to decode the culturally rich and linguistically complicated experiences of their students. This institutional illiteracy results in schools failing to take advantage of the range of opportunities for true learning (Alim et al. 2011: 122, 132). Drawing on NLS, which situates literacies within the politics of unequal power relations, identity formation, and state authority in modern capitalist nation-states (Alim et al. 2011: 133; Collins 1995: 81-2), ill-literacy studies redefines ‘being literate’ as a capacity to critique dominant ideologies and reclaim one’s own voice from the constraints of institutional structures and practices (Alim et al. 2011: 133).

Pedagogical strategies such as Alim et al.’s (2011) ill-literacy studies align with what April Baker-Bell calls ‘Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy’, which provide students with the opportunity to learn about and through Black English, thereby educating them into a ‘Black Linguistic Consciousness’ that can heal the traumas of ‘Anti-Black Linguistic Racism’ while simultaneously nurturing their language abilities (2020: 8, 34). Critical pedagogies of this type are crucial as they enable students and educators to see past the narrow-minded binary of the ‘street’ versus the ‘school’ that forces students’ identities, communicative repertoires, and literacy skills into contradictory categories that reproduce problematic hierarchies (Rosa 2019: 207-8). In this re-framing, students are not marginalised minorities but rather complicated individuals capable of giving voice to their lived realities through the use of ill-literate texts, without necessarily shunning the acquisition of traditional literacy skills (Alim et al. 2011: 134, 136, 140). So viewed, ill-literate pedagogies help to nurture metaliteracy and greater awareness in learners, uplifting their social consciousness beyond dominant ideologies of language and identity (Alim et al. 2011: 140).

Multilingualism and literacy education

As processes associated with globalisation bring ever-greater numbers of multilingual students into schools, literacy researchers face the difficult task of making sense of the specific challenges and opportunities that multilingualism introduces into the classroom environment (Hornberger 2003: 4). Beginning in the late 1980s, researchers identified a glaring gap between the extensive literature on multilingualism and writings on literacy. In response, a theoretical approach was developed for understanding how these two aligned phenomena interact with and shape one another (Hornberger 2003: 4). The concept of ‘biliteracy’ is the result of these inquiries and offers an analytical framework applicable to any occurrence of reading or writing in which more than one language features (Hornberger 2003: 5).

The biliteracy model does not characterise multilingualism and literacy through a binary perspective that (re)produces oppositions like first language (L1) vs. second language (L2), monolingual vs. bilingual, or literate vs. oral. Instead, it understands any single biliterate practice to be entangled within each of these states simultaneously. In this way, the biliteracy model conceptualises states of language as multiple, intersecting, and nested continua that together constitute a complex whole (Hornberger 2003: 4-5; Hornberger & Link 2012: 264). Briefly, these continua describe the media through which different languages are used; the contexts in which language and literacy practices are enacted and evaluated; and the content expressed by language and literacy practices; that is, their styles, genres, and the perspectives they communicate. In contrast to the compartmentalising and decontextualising perspectives that typically inform educational policies and practices, the biliteracy model enables researchers and educators to delve into multilingual settings and unpack how the development of biliterate skills occurs so that novel solutions in support of literacy education for multilingual learners may be imagined (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265; Hornberger 2003: 25).

Nancy Hornberger and Holly Link describe a scenario in which bilingual first grade students read an English language text while discussing it with one another in Spanish, and then respond to their teacher’s inquiries in English (2012: 269). The biliteracy model makes clear that, while the teacher’s acceptance of Spanish dialogue offsets obvious power dynamics and helps to validate students’ voices, the use of English as the sole language of instruction limits the possibilities for biliteracy development as Spanish is only permitted for oral communication (Hornberger & Link 2012: 270). Similarly, Melisa Cahnmann’s study of a grade nine Spanish-English classroom examines how correction and assessment strategies influence student resistance or acceptance of biliterate practices (2003: 191). During the research, Cahnmann learned that students would often draw upon their Spanish linguistic resources to aid them in the creation of English-language texts. For example, to assist herself in spelling the English word ‘people’, one student verbalised the Spanish phonemes of ‘PE-O-PE-LE’ [pronounced as ‘pay-oh-pay-lay’ in English] (Cahnmann 2003: 193). While some experts in second language acquisition believe that such inter-lingual transcoding should be discouraged, the biliteracy model considers any kind of transfer along the L1-L2 continuum to be an opportunity, because it reveals students’ strengths and identifies areas where teachers can focus their energy to support positive and impactful learning (Cahnmann 2003: 192-3).

The key insight of biliteracy is that interrelatedness between continua ensures that literacy and language skills can develop across and between different languages and literacies, with contextual factors determining and shaping specific manifestations (Hornberger 2003: 25). Stronger biliteracy skills will therefore emerge in environments that encourage students to draw on all points of the continua (Hornberger & Link 2012: 265). Crucially, this analytical framework is capable of recognising and incorporating students’ multilingual practices as part of a classroom’s learning resources, critiquing standard literacy norms while also producing alternative outcomes (Hornberger & Link 2012: 274; Cahnmann 2003: 189).

Re-imagining literacy in a digital world

The circulation of fast-changing information technologies and media in the twenty-first century introduces new aspects to established questions about what it means to be ‘literate’ in an overwhelmingly digital era (Wolf 2017: 219-20). Does the immediate access to vast amounts of information through Internet technologies change how people critically engage with texts (Wolf 2017: 222-3)? There is growing concern among researchers and educators that the shift from physical to digital texts may result in a reduction in the ability of young readers to analyse and think beyond the words they read, thus failing to perceive deeper meanings. In response, literacy research is moving towards understanding how students can become ‘multitextual’, that is, proficient in reading and analysing different kinds of texts in adaptable ways to harness the benefits of both print and digital media (Wolf 2017: 223, 226-7).

Multimodality is a theoretical approach to meaning-making that stems from social semiotics: the study of the social life of signs and symbols (Jewitt 2006: 3). In this framework, ‘signs’ refer to the association of meaning to a form; ‘modes’ describe the different forms in which signs are constructed (for example, an image versus a written word); and ‘media’ applies to the ways in which modes disseminate their signs (for example, ink on paper, computer screens, etc.) (Heydon 2007: 39). A social semiotic approach to the sociality of language recognises that linguistic meanings are constantly reproduced through people’s sociocultural work and are not simply a pre-existing code waiting to be activated (Jewitt 2006: 3). Multimodality extends this theory to suggest that the production of meaning is further influenced by any modes through which signs are communicated (Jewitt 2006: 3). In reconceptualising literacy as ‘multimodal design’, the analytical lens offered by multimodal literacy takes the focus away from the written word and broadens the frame to examine how people make meaning through the many modes and media to which they have access (Heydon 2007: 38; Jewitt 2006: 8).

Applying the multimodal literacy framework to new digital technologies can illustrate how digital media are reconfiguring our understanding of writing in generative ways (Jewitt 2006: 107). In particular, the dominance of writing is being decentred through digital technologies that harness images, speech, music, and moving elements to communicate (Jewitt 2006: 108; Heydon 2007: 39). In the classroom, there is increasing reliance on forms of ‘edutainment’; that is, games, computer applications, and videos used for educational purposes, in place of strictly textual resources (Jewitt 2006: 6-7, 108). The influence of the digital screen on the meaning of texts is so great that, even when it is used to render the written word, as in an e-book, it mediates how we encounter and interpret the text we read. For example, book layout is often restructured to fit a screen, altering how a textual narrative is represented on a page (Jewitt 2006: 108-9). Carey Jewitt asserts that new digital media are changing what literacy means so profoundly that it may soon no longer be possible to define reading solely as the act of interpreting the written word (2006: 123). Instead, readers will have to make sense of all the features that have been enabled by the capabilities of the digital screen as they navigate the meanings communicated by a screen’s multimodal design (Jewitt 2006: 123). Effectively ‘reading’ a digital text, then, also requires understanding how the design of images and writing contribute to the realisation of the text’s own meaning (Jewitt 2006: 136).

Conclusion

This entry offers a review of how literacy has been theorised in anthropology since the first days of the discipline. While perspectives have changed over the years, with definitions of literacy fluctuating between opposing frameworks of technological determinism and cultural relativism, the underlying theme remains unaltered: the development of literacy represents one of the most significant innovations of human history.

Despite more than a century’s worth of research on literacy, questions about how humans shape literacy and how literacy shapes humans continue to be actively discussed. The rapid development of new information and media technologies has only accentuated the conversation. As new media invite novel possibilities for encoding and decoding meaning, which in turn result in changes in language practices, communication, and society, literacy will continue to be a prominent subject of anthropological research. If the history of anthropological theory is any indication of its future, the role of literacy in shaping the human condition will be ardently debated as its function is productively reinterpreted.

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Note on contributors

Mark Turin is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, cross-appointed between the departments of Anthropology and the Institute of Critical Indigenous Studies. His research is situated in the fields of language documentation, reclamation, and revitalisation with regional focuses on the Himalaya and the Pacific Northwest of Canada. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2262-0986

Prof. Mark Turin, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. mark.turin@ubc.ca

Robert Hanks is a graduate student in the department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His research examines language and literacy education in multilingual contexts and the decolonisation of pedagogy. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3788-321X

Robert Hanks, Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, University of British Columbia, 2104 – 6303 NW Marine Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z1. rhanks@alumni.ubc.ca

Freedom of speech

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:35:47 +0000

Matei Candea Fiona Wright Paolo Heywood Taras Fedirko

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21speech

Abstract:

Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has extensive tools for bringing free speech into view beyond its quality as an abstract ideal or legal category. This entry borrows theoretical perspectives, as well as ethnographic examples produced by anthropologists, to shed light on free speech within a broader comparative frame. It begins by focusing on free speech as a dynamic value or virtue, asking: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? Secondly, the entry casts critical light on the idea of an individual as the universal ‘free speaker’, demonstrating how collective or disaggregated subjects can also practice free speech. Thirdly, it explores the material settings, contexts, or technologies through which free speech is curtailed or realised. Finally, the entry considers the idea of ‘voice’ as signalling modes of embodiment, and auditory phenomena such as noise, sound, and silence, which are not spoken language but can inform and expand our understanding of free speech.

Introduction

Freedom of speech is a core tenet of liberal political philosophy, and a criterion frequently invoked to distinguish liberal democracies from their political others. In recent years, it has become a focus of extensive and embittered debates within the US and Europe. Some fear the rise of a ‘cancel culture’, and accuse proponents of ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and ‘no-platforming’ of challenging freedom of speech. The latter in turn accuse their critics of invoking freedom of speech disingenuously in order to protect established interests. These debates invoke the notion of freedom of speech to apportion blame and responsibility for political injuries, but rarely involve a sustained analysis of the notion of freedom of speech itself. However they might disagree about the rights and wrongs of specific cases, the debating parties tend—with few exceptions—to subscribe to a familiar liberal vision in which freedom of speech, within certain limits, is broadly speaking good for individuals and polities, while silencing, except in certain carefully delimited cases, is broadly speaking bad. Despite appearances, these public debates are therefore still disagreements within, rather than about, a liberal consensus. Legal scholarship and classical political philosophy have given us more formal representations of this liberal space of disagreement over free speech and its limits.

Anthropologists can make a useful intervention by putting these familiar debates about freedom of speech into a broader comparative frame. This allows us to pick out, by contrast, some of the distinctive assumptions embedded in these familiar debates—assumptions about the nature of language, about speaking subjects and the polities they inhabit. These comparative explorations tend to challenge the idea that speech can ever be ‘free’ in any simple sense. Anthropologists have demonstrated extensive determinations—from grammar to sociolinguistics—that are entailed in any speech act; they have pointed to the pervasive and sometimes productive nature of silencing in social life; and they have shown the multiple ways in which authoritative speech is entangled in and produced by controls and limitations of other kinds of expression.

Nonetheless, it remains a persistent fact that many of the people anthropologists work with value, desire, or imagine something like freedom of speech as a particular goal, and mourn, fear, or protest its absence. Anthropologists have the resources to examine the varied ways in which free speech is imagined, valued, and practiced as a lived ideal in necessarily compromised and imperfect conditions.

Semiotic ideologies, religious and secular

The most sustained anthropological explorations of the question of freedom of speech have been in relation to recent debates around religious and secular representation. The case of the ‘Danish cartoon controversy’, in which satirical representations of the prophet Mohammed sparked outrage and violence, has been paradigmatic (Asad et al. 2013; Keane 2009, Favret-Saada 2015). This controversy was a natural entry-point into the subject of freedom of speech for anthropologists because of the wealth of material in the anthropology of religion focusing on comparable disputes about the morality and politics of speaking, silencing others or staying silent oneself, or of representing and stopping others from representing. Such ‘moral questions about semiotic form’ (Keane 2007: 6), arose, for instance, in the struggles of seventeenth century Quakers in England to separate out the word of God from everyday language as a ‘thing of the flesh’ (Baumann 1984). The Quakers’ project included a wholesale repudiation of accepted forms of politeness and honorific titles as insincere words that glorify the earthly person—a practice that exposed them to violence from offended interlocutors. The moral and political stakes of speech were similarly high in missionary encounters in non-Western contexts. For instance, Webb Keane details the struggles between Calvinist missionaries and followers of marapu (Sumbanese ancestral ritual) in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) about how to address spiritual entities. The Calvinists condemned the marapu followers’ uses of traditional ritual formulae as a violation of the ‘proper’ norm of speaking sincerely to God in one’s own words. Conversely marapu followers decried a form of hubris in Calvinist prayer aimed directly from the individual to the godhead without the mediation of ancestral formulae (Keane 2007: 176-96).

Considering liberal debates and concerns over freedom of speech alongside these cases points to the deep cultural assumptions about the nature and effects of language and representation that inform all of these moral struggles over semiotic form. Such assumptions about language and meaning have been described by anthropologists as ‘language ideologies’ (Woolard & Schieffelin 1994), or more broadly ‘semiotic ideologies’ (Keane 2007). By situating liberal concerns with freedom of speech within a particular (Western, modern, liberal, secular) semiotic ideology, anthropologists have thus opened up alternative angles on recent high-profile debates, such as the Danish cartoons controversy. Keane, for instance, argues that

[t]he classic [liberal] defence of freedom of expression draws, in part, on a semiotic ideology that takes words and pictures to be vehicles for the transmission of opinion or information among otherwise autonomous and unengaged parties and the information they bear to be itself so much inert content more or less independent of the activity of representation (2009: 58).

From this perspective, Muslims offended by cartoons of the Prophet are sometimes dismissed by liberal commentators as committing a category error, and one furthermore that designates them as insufficiently ‘modern’ in their continued attachment to the transcendent power of mere images (Asad et al. 2013: xiii). But as anthropologists such as Talal Asad have been at pains to point out, liberal freedom of speech also has well-defined limits, for instance in respect of patents, copyright, or pornography. These ‘liberal’ limits point to the extent to which liberal freedom of speech is premised on and limited by notions of property and ownership—ownership of one’s texts, ideas, or body (Asad et al. 2013). One might add that hate speech laws show that modern liberals do seem quite concerned with the capacity of words to do harm, at least in some contexts (Butler 1997; Heywood 2019). Or that contemporary laws of libel or insult in places like France or Germany have a genealogy that links them to honour codes, which many sociologists imagined to be extinct in ‘modernity’ (Candea 2019, Whitman 2000). While such comparisons may occasionally sound as if they are trying to score points by showing that liberals are not as liberal as they think, at its best this work provides a more subtle understanding, rather than a mere deconstruction, of aspirations to freedom of speech, liberal or otherwise. The point, as Asad puts it, is that ‘[t]he shape that free speech takes at different times and in different places [reflects] different structures of power and subjectivity’ (2013: 29).^[1]

Virtues: courage, truth, and risk

Another related way that anthropologists can contribute to our understanding of free speech is by examining its status as a value or a virtue. In a range of ethnographic contexts—perhaps most obviously but not exclusively those labelled as ‘liberal’—people understand ‘speaking freely’ to be a virtuous practice, and view the right to be able to do so to be an important value. Anthropology has an extensive conceptual apparatus with which to analyse and compare the ways in which people think about values and virtues in work on ethics (e.g. Faubion 2001; Laidlaw 2002, 2013; Robbins 2007, 2016; Lambek 2010; Keane 2015). In fact, one of the key conceptual sources for anthropological work on ethics, Michel Foucault, also had quite a lot to say about the genealogy of ‘free speech’ as a virtue.

Foucault’s late work on classical self-cultivation investigates how people work to make themselves into particular kinds of virtuous subjects. Despite its individualist overtones, self-cultivation does not occur in isolation. It is something done in a particular cultural and historical context, and in relation to others. In his final two lecture series at the Collège de France, Foucault sought to clarify this relationship between subject and context by turning to a very specific aspect of self-cultivation in the ancient world (2010; 2011). He believed that then—as now—there was a ‘necessary other person’ involved in work on the self. These are types of people whose role it is to help us decipher and establish the ‘truth’ of our selves (teachers, doctors, psychoanalysts, jurists, policemen). In the classical world, unlike ours, however, Foucault thought that this ‘necessary other’ was not an institutionally defined position. Rather, it was predicated on the possession of a particular virtue, namely parrhêsia, translated in the title of one of the lecture series as ‘the courage of truth’. To be the right sort of person to help others to work upon themselves, one had to possess the ability to speak freely and frankly, regardless of risk or consequence.

The history of this particular virtue in the ancient world is varied. For instance, there is what we might think of as ‘political’ parrhêsia, characteristic of pre-Socratic Athens. This is ‘free speech’ in which what is at stake are questions of the government of others. Later, and exemplified most obviously in Socrates, we find a virtuous ‘free speech’ that is much more concerned with ‘ethics’, and with the government of the self. Socrates eschews the political field to focus instead on the conduct of individuals, and to measure the gap between the way they think they ought to live and the way they actually do. Later still we find these modalities combined in the philosophy of the Cynics, who sought both to live their own lives as bare truth (naked and in the open) and to missionise this life to those around them, to make their lives speak as examples to others (Foucault 2011).

Like any concept, parrhêsia is situated in a particular context. Not all that is true about free speech in the ancient world applies to our own. While Foucault’s own account ends broadly speaking in the classical period, tracing the later history of parrhêsia gives us some insights into the origin of contemporary liberal notions of freedom of speech. Historian David Colclough argues, for instance, that classical parrhêsia served as one of the sources for imagining freedom of speech in seventeenth century England—the period which also gave us some of the classic sources of liberal defences of freedom of speech, such as Milton’s Areopagitica, or the works of John Locke. Somewhat ironically, however, Colclough notes that parrhêsia at that point was primarily a figure of rhetoric. Rhetorical manuals drew on examples from speeches by classical Greek and Roman orators, which consisted of prefacing one’s speech by warning that one’s position was controversial, daring, and likely to offend. For seventeenth century English commentators, ‘parrhêsia’ as a rhetorical figure therefore posed an inherent problem of sincerity. It could be a genuine warning and apology for speech that was necessary, but might offend. Equally, it could be merely a cynical way to flatter an audience by delivering, as if they were surprising or extreme, views which the speaker knew were perfectly conventional and likely to gain broad assent in any case.

Colclough notes that the debates around parrhêsia were only one amongst the cultural sources of seventeenth century English discussions of the value of free speech. Others included stories from the lives of Christian martyrs who had continued to speak the truth of their faith in the face of torture and death, or the legal prerogatives of unrestricted speech that applied (in principle at least) to parliamentary discussions. Colclough’s and Foucault's accounts point to the complex, diverse, and contested genealogy of liberal visions of freedom of speech.

Anthropologists have used Foucault's discussion of parrhêsia to ask comparative questions about the ways in which freedom of speech is understood and valued in various contexts today. Pascal Boyer, for instance, has suggested that some contemporary political movements based on satire, such as Iceland’s iconoclastic ‘Best Party’—a joke political party that eventually achieved electoral success—may resemble aspects of ancient parrhêsia (2013). On the other hand, Harri Englund has pointed to the dangers of assuming that parrhêsia is portable beyond its own specific context (2018). In Finnish talk radio, he argues, what might look like ‘parrhesiastic’ speech on the part of individual callers is in fact a process carefully cultivated by the show’s hosts, an arrangement of multiple voices, rather than any individual ‘speaking truth to power’ (see below for a fuller discussion). As with many concepts, there is probably little to be gained by arguing over exactly how transposable the precise details of classical parrhêsia are or are not. The point is rather that one can ask of any context similar questions to those Foucault was asking about Ancient Greece, or Colclough about early Stuart England: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? To what ends is it directed? What role does it play in relation to the broader system of ethics in which it exists? How is speaking freely supposed to affect one’s relationship to oneself, and to others? These questions already move us in a much more anthropological direction than the classic juridical and political arguments over the extent of free speech rights, or the balance between freedom of speech and other legal protections.

Subjects: whose speech, and whose freedom?

Building on the above discussion, one might look more closely at who or what, in any given setting, counts as the free-speaking subject. If free speech is in some cultural contexts considered to be a virtue, we could ask: whose virtue is it? More generally, the ethnographic record compels us to move beyond a virtue-based understanding of ethics, and reconsider familiar assumptions about the individuality of speaking subjects, and the forms of freedom that characterise them.

Liberal freedom of speech could be understood as involving a specific ‘production format’ of speech (Goffman 1981), in which the speaker is simultaneously the utterer, the author, and the responsible agent of speech. Erving Goffman (1981) proposed the notion of production format to disentangle the complexity of conversation roles in communicative situations, arguing that the figure of the speaker should be differentiated into several analytical roles: the animator, i.e. the ‘sounding box’ physically pronouncing the words; the author, i.e. ‘someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded’; and the principal, ‘that is, someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is committed to what the words say’ (Goffman 1981: 144). Separating the different conversational roles entailed in speaking and hearing, Goffman demonstrates that they might converge in the same social roles, and indeed the same person, as when we think of an autonomous, sincere speaker of liberal language ideologies; or equally, they might be distributed across several persons. One example of the latter might be the Wolof griots in Senegal—low-ranking poets hired to perform ritual insults on behalf of noblemen (e.g. Irvine 1989). Here, the roles of the animator and author converge on the individual speaker, while the principal is thought to be the collective whole to which the speaker belongs.

Building on Goffman’s work, anthropologists (e.g. Hill & Irvine 1992; Merlan & Rumsey 1991) have further explored the relation between complex, dynamic speaking roles, and the autonomy of speakers. For instance, in his ethnography of royal orators, or akeyame, in the Akan-speaking areas of Ghana in the 1980s and ‘90s, Kwesi Yankah describes them as ‘social mediators of speech’ and ‘specialists in the artistic reporting or representation of speech’ (1995: 8) as they act as ‘surrogate speakers’ for their chiefs. Yankah argues that the hierarchical subordination of the ‘surrogate speaker’—the orator—to their chief does not preclude autonomy in speech acts, for without the orator’s voice ‘a royal communicative act is incomplete’ (1995: 8). The duties of the orator ‘range from strict reporting to discretionary interpretation’, which means that relations of subordination that formally characterise surrogate speech might here entail ‘mutual reliance and dependency’ (Yankah 1995: 9). Akeyame are indispensable to royal speech, and, for instance in court judgments, ‘a greater part of akeyame’s contribution during prosecution is not structurally linked to a patron’s; it is independent’ (Yankah 1995: 163). Nevertheless, ‘in spite of its autonomy, the akeyame’s contribution is still made on behalf of the royal realm, to which they make occasional reference’. Yankah’s ethnography prompts us to question the autonomy of action inherent to the different speaking roles, and the way such autonomy is shaped by the social relations among persons performing these roles.

A similar reconfiguration of roles can be seen in the historical Soviet practice of self-criticism (samokritika), a form of speaking truth to power in which the author and addressee of speech are understood to be collective subjects, even when the speech act itself is performed by an individual person (Kharkhordin 1999; also Glaeser 2011). State socialist regimes that curtailed individual freedom of speech through explicit forms of official censorship were one of the key counterpoints against which liberal visions of freedom of speech were articulated throughout the twentieth century (cf. Boyer 2003, see below for a fuller discussion). Yet state socialism was not without its own imaginaries and practical repertories of free speech. Oleg Kharkhordin describes samokritika in Soviet Russia as a key element of socialist ethics and a means to achieving the revolutionary consciousness of the masses in the nascent Soviet state. Samokritika meant ‘an open statement by the working masses of their opinions on the weaknesses in Soviet … administrative apparatus and life’ (Viktorsky 1929: 266). Crucially, in samokritika within particular Communist Party cells or workers collectives, contemporary commentators saw not acts of individual confession or complaint but ‘the working class that upholds the proletarian dictatorship … criticiz[ing] and correct[ing] its own mistakes and failures by itself’ (Ingulov 1930: 97, in Kharkhordin 1999: 146). In theory, this notion of collective critical speech reflected the understanding of the Soviet state as an expression of class will; the ‘self’ of self-criticism referred to the working class as the sovereign of the ‘proletarian dictatorship’. In practice, however, bringing this collective subject into being through particular acts of speaking was no small feat.

In the Communist Party discourse in the 1920s and early 30s, self-criticism ‘normally meant collective criticism by Party members of the weaknesses of the Party’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 146). Thus in the 1920s, ‘The Party continuously solicited self-criticism, which in practice meant urging rank-and-file members to criticize top leaders, in order to make the body of the Party homogenous’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 149). Party theorists who promoted samokritika as a form of accountability were aware that the imperative of collective speech gave rank-and-file workers an opportunity for political manoeuvring. When in 1928, self-criticism from below led to a wave of denunciations that evidently sought to settle personal scores, Party commentators had to remind Soviet workers to criticise collective, not individual, weaknesses.^[2] At a central Communist Party committee meeting in August 1928, for example, one high-ranking speaker proposed ‘a particular psychological technique’: ‘A worker was advised to imagine, before saying something critical of a manager, that the body he was kicking was not somebody else’s but his own, since in the Party view he was assaulting a corporate body of which he was a part’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 153).

Such critical truth-telling must be understood against the background of early Soviet techniques of the self and operations of power that aimed at creating socialist unity by orchestrating forms of action and speech that transcended individual subjects. Many Bolshevik revolutionaries wanted ‘to organize their experience and energy around an ideology that would help them lose their sense of self and acquire the sense of the collective’ (Williams 1980: 393). By submitting the self to the collective, revolutionaries aimed to achieve immortality through the lasting social effects of personal sacrifice. The notion of kollektiv—a collective of people united and transformed by the common experience of working on a particular task—is key to understanding samokritika. A kollektiv, typically a workplace collective, was imagined to act and think as one, and to exert group sovereignty that subsumed individual action under the imperative of a common goal. Regular, often ritualised acts of self-criticism revealed and analysed perceived flaws in the organisation of work, relations among workmates, or even between workers and their families, as seen in the light of communist ideals. But these acts of samokritika also objectified kollektiv before itself, helped it correct itself on its path to communism, and promoted its unity by strengthening horizontal surveillance of their members over one another. Unlike critical introspection or individual confession in Western Christianity, which Foucault sees as one of the historical forces underpinning modern individuation, samokritika was expected to be performed by workers and party members before—and on behalf of—their kollektiv. One was free to speak up as long as critique was directed at the self as part of the corporate whole of kollektiv, and in so far as it promoted the ‘fusion’ (spaika) of kollektiv into one. The subject and the object of samokritika was emphatically a ‘we’: a nested corporate subject, where a kollektiv of workers stood for and became aligned with both the proletarian class they represented, and the Communist Party leading that class. In the Party’s opinion at the time, ‘[T]hrough a certain person speaking up, the whole Party criticised itself’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 146).

These comparative cases remind us that the liberal framing of free speech as performed by individual persons is only one of many cultural possibilities. Yet comparisons of this kind shouldn’t lead us to assume that liberal visions of free speech are, by contrast, simply or uniformly individualist. Consider for instance the ‘speech’ of capitalist corporations. ‘Pronounced’ by corporate spokespeople, authored by PR and press offices, and attributed to the fictive legal person of the corporation, corporate speech rarely raises the question of freedom. Yet, in a recent landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission, which enshrined the status of corporations as legal persons enjoying the same rights as human persons, the US Supreme Court granted First Amendment protections to corporations’ and unions’ direct spending on political election campaigns. The court had designated election spending as a form of protected free speech. Susan Gal and Judith Irvine explain that the consequences of speech mattered in this instance, rather than the identity of the speakers: ‘making speech available as a source of information for the public’ so as to ensure the political ideal of a well-informed citizenry (2019: 9). The Court’s majority opinion that ‘prohibition on corporate … expenditures is a ban on speech’ rested on an equation of money, a resource necessary for corporate persons to orchestrate political speech, to speech itself (Gal & Irvine 2019: 9). The opposition to the ruling predominantly focused on dismantling this analogy, and demonstrating the false equality between natural (human) and fictitious (corporate) persons. In sum, the Citizens United decision revealed competing understandings of speech in the contemporary United States: on the one hand, a view that ‘takes speech to be a material thing, equivalent to money, and independent of speakers’, and on the other, one that ‘takes speech to be different from material objects, and freedom of speech to be embodied only in natural persons’ (Gal & Irvine 2019: 10).

These and other ethnographies help us understand that the model of a self-owning, rights-bearing individual subject of free speech is only one of multiple possible ways in which human societies have thought about and organised the relation between speech and freedom.

Platforms: censorship, materiality, and mediation

The question of who is the subject of free speech leads, in turn, to a focus on the material devices, spaces, and media they engage in their communicative practices. The question of who gets to speak doesn’t exhaust debates over freedom of speech—just as important is the question of who gets to be heard, and how. This issue has gained particular visibility in contemporary debates in the US and UK over ‘no-platforming’ on university campuses and beyond. No-platforming includes practices of boycotting or uninviting a speaker, blocking their access to a forum or debate, be it online or offline, because particular views they hold are deemed offensive or harmful. A ‘platform’ in this sense refers to a literal or metaphorical stage from which to address an audience. Critics of no-platforming cast it as a new form of censorship, part of a broader ‘cancel culture’ emanating from a progressive left which is increasingly unwilling to allow views it disagrees with to be publicly expressed. Proponents of no-platforming by contrast argue that they are not censoring anyone, but simply refusing to ‘amplify’ the voices of speakers deemed not only offensive or dangerous but also—crucially—privileged in their access to other high-profile platforms for being heard. Simultaneously, some proponents argue that the public media debates occasioned by no-platforming such high-profile speakers are themselves an occasion to give more ‘platform’ to marginalised voices. From this perspective, no-platforming can be cast as a form of epistemic justice, a righting of the scales in a world in which access to platforms for expression is unequal to begin with.

Whatever one makes of these arguments, these cases usefully focus attention on the important distinction between the formal right to speak and the substantive means for being heard by others. Both sides in arguments about no-platforming appeal in various ways to a difference between what one might call, following Isaiah Berlin (1969), a ‘negative’ freedom of speech (the freedom from, for instance, legal impediments to speech) and a ‘positive’ freedom of speech (freedom to speak, which includes the means of accessing a platform from which to do so).

It is precisely because such a distinction between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ is so difficult to make in practice that debates and concerns over freedom of speech are so often also arguments over material settings, devices, and media, in the broadest sense: objects, spaces, and techniques that mediate communication. Thus, while freedom of speech is often imagined as a single abstract principle relating to intangible contents and messages (political opinions, artistic expression, scientific knowledge), the history of changing understandings of freedom of speech is inseparable from the rise and transformation of a host of technologies of mediation: mass-circulation newspapers (Keane 2009), radio stations (Englund 2018), the cinema industry (Mazzarella 2013), television, or the internet (Coleman 2009, Gershon 2014). These material devices, spaces, and media may seem like mere background when talk is of principles. And yet they profoundly shape what ‘freedom of speech’ can concretely mean in any given situation, in ways that are historically and culturally variable. Matters of principle take multiple forms through very concrete questions of access and presence: who can speak where and who can hear them? How long can people speak for and must they take turns? What kinds of expression, beyond the spoken or written word, can be made available and under what modalities? What does it cost? How far does it reach?

Thus, on the one hand, new media have frequently been linked with new possibilities for freed and challenging expression—the heavily internet-mediated uprisings in Arabic-speaking countries in 2011 being a classic case in point. On the other hand, the mediation of expression is often the most obvious means through which it can be impeded, filtered, and censored—from the explicit work of film censorship boards, for instance, to the subtle pre-publication pressures of in-house legal advisors in publishing houses (cf. Candea 2019). Mediation in this sense is not merely a matter of technology but of the particular social relations, forms of intervention, and expertise that different technologies enable and require. For instance, in his above-mentioned work on a vox populi phone-in radio show in Finland, Englund (2018) notes how radio hosts in practice manage conversations with callers whose anti-immigration views they find unpalatable. Rather than cut them off, or even directly challenge them, the hosts steer the conversation in subtle ways in order to ‘strive for harmony’, while making space for their callers’ ‘need to be heard’ (Englund 2018: 108). It is interesting to put this example alongside Dominic Boyer’s archival exploration of the practices of state censors in East Germany (2002). Boyer shows that the classic vision of censors as mere administrative agents of deletion—erasing offending passages or cancelling entire texts—underplays censors’ view of themselves as involved in an intellectual, even productive, enterprise akin to the work of editing. Censors intervened not merely in ideological matters, but also concerned themselves with questions of style and quality; they often worked in a back-and-forth (albeit unequal) dialogue with the authors of the work. Boyer argues provocatively that state censorship was thus not always that different from the practices of editorial intervention, review, and selection practiced by academic journals. Whatever one makes of the latter comparison (see Candea 2019) these two cases are useful to think of side by side because they highlight the extent to which concerns with freedom of expression in any particular case are inseparable from the particularity of the medium through which that expression occurs. Live airtime and peer-review, for instance, both bear on the shaping, allowing, and curtailing of expression, but they do so in profoundly different ways.

While material mediation poses the question of access, it is therefore not sufficient to think of freedom of expression merely as a singular good of which one can have more or less. Changes in media also involve changes in the nature of what is expressed. In his ethnography of film censorship in colonial and postcolonial India, William Mazzarella (2013) explores the distinctive affective power of cinema as a form of mass mediation. The moving image, in its sociocultural setting of production and reception, does things to people in embodied ways, things that cannot be reduced to or deduced from an analysis of its contents, meanings, or the ideas it ‘encodes’. This in part explains the permanence and broad acceptability of film censorship even in settings in which other forms of censorship—such as official censorship of the press—have been abandoned. But more broadly, as Mazzarella notes, a history of censorship shows the extent to which the attention of censors—and, one might add, the experimentation of producers of 'content'—recurrently focuses on new media and their new ways of generating affects, just as it moves away from media which have grown familiar and old: newspapers, the radio, film, television, the internet. Anthropologists studying censorship in practice have thus contributed to the chorus of challenges brought by social theorists (Bourdieu 1991; Fish 1994; Butler 1997; cf. Bunn 2005 for an overview) against arguments for freedom of expression in which expression is set apart as a special form of conduct which is essentially about conveying contents. Attending to the materiality of media reminds us not only of the material constraints on expression, but also of its material effects.

But the materiality of media also reveals how imaginaries of freedom of expression are transformed together with the appearance of new forms and visions of the public. Thus Ilana Gershon (2014) argues that the rise of social media has contributed to the emergence of a new conception of the public, in terms of access, reachability, and responsiveness. By contrast to the classic liberal visions of a public defined as a collection of anonymous strangers (Warner 2005), publics defined by accessibility—epitomised on platforms like Facebook—are experienced by their participants as collectives structured by links extending from close friends to distant acquaintances. In these kinds of publics named relations entail accountability, a responsible and graduated use of the information that is exchanged.

Gershon analyses the tensions between this ‘new’ vision of the public as a network of knowable persons enmeshed in relations with one another and the older vision of the public as a collective of strangers, from the perspective of young social media users whose comfort zone is broadly situated in the former. These younger informants, Gershon argues, ‘often believe that members of a public will experience certain obligations in managing information, and as a result will act responsibly. At the same time, they imagine that they can anticipate who might read their material’ (Gershon 2014:80). Yet these new online publics are also the home of internet ‘trolls’—anonymous users who post inflammatory comments or target and harry other users with pranks and attacks which seem designed to puncture this feeling of online safety. Gershon follows Gabriella Coleman (2011) in characterising trolls as self-appointed crusaders for a return to an older vision of the public as a collective of strangers who do not take things personally. It is thus unsurprising, perhaps, that Gershon’s informants feel that the public sphere beyond their own familiar and accountable networks is a space of risk, and ‘anonymity a cover for antagonism’ (Gershon 2014: 84).

In sum, Gershon’s argument shows how these new online public/private borderlands are the scene of struggles and accommodations between radically different ethics and politics of communication. These contested spaces increasingly overspill the porous boundaries between online and offline communication. Shifting struggles are illustrated in the rise of a bevy of neologisms—‘echo chambers’, ‘safe spaces’, ‘snowflakes’, ‘haters’, ‘trigger warnings’—which purport to diagnose communicational pathologies or, on the contrary, hoped-for solutions to the risks of expression through shifting and ambiguous media. Returning to the opening problematic of this section, one might say that attending to the materiality of media suggests that being heard is not simply a right, but can also be a vector of risk.

Voice: embodiment, affect and sound

Apart from being shaped by the materiality of their settings, practices of free speech are also constituted by what they look, feel, and sound like. Anthropologists have studied linguistic and vocal practices that do not involve the kinds of reasoned, articulate forms of speech ideally associated with democratic participation, but rather emphasise the embodied and affective nature of communication. Theories of free speech and political engagement have typically been premised on the idea of citizens having a ‘voice’ within the polis, with that voice understood as a transparent representation of the conscious, self-interested, individual self (Kunreuther 2014, 2018; Weidman 2014).^[3] In recent explorations of how voice manifests as part of the production and transformation of publics and political movements in various cultural contexts, though, where voice is often still used as a metaphor for political participation, actual practices of voicing involve bodies, sounds, and collectives of people in ways that do not map neatly on to traditional liberal notions of political and free speech. The notion of voice has been helpful as a way to consider political speech, as it can shift our attention away from the linguistic and semiotic content of the speech at hand, and focus instead on the actual sounds being produced and circulated, which in turn brings to light the various bodies and materialities at play in the making of free speech.

In her study of the sounds of protest events in Kathmandu, Laura Kunreuther (2018) shows how artists’ and demonstrators’ use of various kinds of noise—produced by cars moving through the city, protestors banging on pots and pans, and the radio broadcast of recordings of human crying—transform what is generally thought of as unruly, unproductive sound into political engagement. Kunreuther describes a 107-day demonstration in front of the Prime Minister’s residence protesting violence against women, in which everyday noises were repurposed to indicate popular support for the movement and a challenge to civic life as usual that, yet, was expressed through its very own auditory forms. The use of domestic items such as pots, pans, and plates, for example, served to bring the home and domestic sphere into the public and political realm, and in particular evoked the status of women as those who generally perform household labour and whose experiences of being subject to violence often remain hidden. Beyond these immediate resonances, the noise of the banging acted to reveal popular anger and discontent, as Kunreuther suggests, ‘signifying through noise a breakdown in communication between ruler and ruled’ (2018: 23). In this way, noise becomes a form of political 'speech' and a way in which protestors can shape the forms of their expression without necessarily having to use words at all.

Similarly, Kunreuther shows how sounds produced by humans, but that are not made up of words, can speak volumes as part of the non-linguistic, affective realm of politics. In a performance piece by a Nepali artist, staged during the Maoist insurgency and in the context of regular state violence against protesters, recordings of mothers and babies crying were compiled and broadcast both at the site of the street performance and on all national FM stations (2018: 14-15). The sound of the wailing was effective in calling forth a national, secular public given the anonymity of the voices heard, who, although clearly women and children, were not identifiable through accent, social class or caste, ethnicity or religion. Combined with the imagery evoked of the women, heard as mothers of the nation, and of a genre of sound mostly heard in funerary and wedding rituals, the broadcast had the effect of sidestepping the government/Maoist divide, with both sides claiming the piece was condemning the other. There was a sense, then, that a purer, more human voice was made possible through the use of the immediacy of the cry, devoid of language but able to express meanings otherwise hampered in the context of civil conflict. This interpretation stands in contrast to those theorists of liberalism who have framed the bodily and collective energy of the crowd as a threat to the measured, reasonable publics of deliberative democracy (see Cody 2011, 2015; Mazzarella 2015), and draws instead on theories of popular assembly that reframe how the gathering of publics and collectivities can be a central and transformative part of democratic and other political processes (Butler 2015, Butler & Athanasiou 2013).

Finally, even silence can be thought of as a form of free speech. The absence of words, sound, or noise is a tool that protesters in diverse contexts have employed to communicate opposition to government practices of censorship, war, and oppression. As an easily translatable technology of protest, silence symbolises popular dispossession or a government’s lack of listening to what is being said out loud in the public sphere. Through the intensity of the silence of a large crowd gathered in a normally noisy public space, it has a solemn emotional character while also emphasising popular cohesion in support of a political position. As Kunreuther (2018) explains, in its use both by the performance artist who employed silence in parallel with the broadcast crying described above, and by journalists and media personnel at other moments in Nepali history to highlight government censorship, silence recalls the modern liberal subject. It implies silent concentration and rational, reflective engagement with the political, but does so without concealing the bodily and collective instantiation of these democratic subjects, given the centrality of embodied presence to the protest. As Athena Athanasiou also observes about the use of silent vigils by activists in post-conflict Serbia, silence can be a powerful, subversive force precisely because it can express forms of mourning and of protesting injustice that, when people attempt to voice them through language, become tied up in the limits and politically exclusionary nature of speech and representation (Athanasiou 2005, 2017).

Free speech, therefore, may take the form of non-linguistic noise and sound, bodily presence, and symbolic resonance, as much as it can involve verbal forms of expression. By focusing ethnographically on the material, embodied, and affective forms through which political voice actually takes shape, we see that free speech is in practice a much wider and more diverse phenomenon than its abstraction as a category of liberal thought implies.

Conclusion

While anthropologists have not as yet written much on the subject of freedom of speech, this entry points to anthropological studies of language, voice, ethics, subjectivity, and media that can help to complement, critique, and contextualise political, scientific, legal, and philosophical accounts of the subject. One upshot of these studies is to put canonical liberal visions of freedom of speech in comparative and historical perspective, as one amongst a range of ways of imagining the proper relationship between subjects, speech, and freedom. Another effect of these studies is to highlight the ways in which visions of free speech—whatever cultural form they espouse—take shape within and against specific material and embodied possibilities and constraints. In these ways, anthropology can enrich our understandings of free speech as a multiple, contested, and frequently unattainable horizon of desire and action.

Note

The writing of this article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 683033).

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Note on contributors

Matei Candea is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2013-2016). He is the author of Corsican fragments: difference, knowledge and fieldwork (2010, Indiana), and editor of The social after Gabriel Tarde (2010, Routledge) and Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (2015, Manchester University Press) with Jo Cook, Catherine Trundle and Tom Yarrow. He has published a number of articles on politics, identity, hospitality, human-animal relations, behavioural science, and anthropological comparison.

Matei Candea, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, mc288@cam.ac.uk

Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After difference: queer activism in anthropological theory (2018, Berghahn).

Paolo Heywood, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Dawson Building, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, paolo.heywood@durham.ac.uk

Fiona Wright is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She works on care, activism, dissent, and ethics, and how they are linked to sovereignty and violence. She is the author of The Israeli radical left: an ethics of complicity (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press).

Fiona Wright, Advanced Care Research Centre, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh, 9 Little France Road, Edinburgh BioQuarter, Edinburgh, EH16 4UX, fcw28@cam.ac.uk

Taras Fedirko is a British Academy Research Fellow in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He is the editor of Grammars of liberalism, a special collection in Social Anthropology with Farhan Samanani and Hugh Williamson. His research focuses on middle-class professionals involved in promoting political liberalism at the core (Britain) and semi-periphery (Ukraine) of global capitalism.

Taras Fedirko, Department of Social Anthropology, 71 North St, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, tf68@st-andrews.ac.uk

[1] It is also worth noting that stark contrasts between ‘Western/liberal’ and ‘Muslim’ language ideologies or perspectives on the Danish cartoon controversy overwrite the diversity of understandings within each of these ensembles, which are hardly mutually exclusive—as these anthropologists themselves acknowledge (Keane 2009: 57; Asad et al. 2013: viii). For a different anthropological reading of the case, which puts the emphasis on how specific actors worked to produce a global sense of a singular ‘Muslim reaction to the cartoons’, see Favret-Saada (2015).

[2] An instrument of socialist reflexivity and resistance, the notion of samokritika became a tool of punitive power towards the end of the 1930s, when it shaped the stakes and form of (forced) confessions of defendants during the infamous Stalinist show trials.

[3] This and other anthropological work on voice is explored by Marlene Schäfers (this volume).

Feasting

Felix Stein — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 09:01:32 +0000

Chloe Nahum-Claudel

University of Cambridge

Initially published 12 Oct 2016

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

Abstract:

Feasts are special meals (food out of the ordinary in kind or quantity) shared among an enlarged circle of people. They are occasions for many kinds of activities, not only eating and talking, but musical performances, formal speech, prayer and sacrifice, politicking and commerce. Feasts are ubiquitous throughout the world and human history: consider museums filled to brimming with the knives, jugs, cups and platters of past feasts. Archaeologists have dominated the study of feasting over the last thirty years, using it as a means to approach the most important questions of their discipline in new ways. In socio-cultural anthropology by contrast, the study of feasting as a discrete and clearly defined phenomenon does not exist. This means that insights into feasting are buried in the ethnographic record and tangled up with theorizations of more prominent themes like ritual, ceremonial exchange, and sacrifice. This essay is a dig for some of this buried treasure. It takes a semiotic approach to show that feasts have world-making effects because they both achieve concrete goals – mobilising resources, exciting passions, negotiating political positions – and realise deeply held values.

Introduction

Feasts are ‘total social phenomena’: complex happenings that are at once religious, mythological, economic, social, and aesthetic in nature (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 49, 101). This opening assertion immediately suggests similarities between feasts and rituals. Both are highly structured events that are densely meaningful and intensely memorable to participants. They involve a high degree of social coordination (bringing people together and organising their work) and the accumulation and expenditure of significant resources. They shape the arrangements in which we live and the values we live by. This makes them windows onto everything that is of prime interest to anthropologists; what better way to understand a people than to attend a feast or a ritual? Unlike rituals, however, about which anthropologists continue to publish reams and reams, never tiring of proposing new definitions and disputing ritual’s significance within wider human experience, ‘feasting’ does not exist as a defined area of study in socio-cultural anthropology.

Where feasts have received attention is in literatures about parts of the world where they are the exemplary form of ritualised sociality. This is the case with Chinese banquets and associated guanxi practices (e.g. Yang 1994; Kipnis 1997; Yang 1994) and Georgian supra – sumptuous meals presided over by a toast-master (e.g. Manning 2012; Mars and Altman 1987). It is worth noting that both are relatively similar to historical European feasts: luxury foods and alcoholic drinks are consumed at laid tables and gender distinctions and social hierarchies are marked. However, we need to begin by defining feasting in a way that encompasses greater diversity than these relatively kindred forms, whilst remaining specific enough to distinguish feasts from other important events.

Let’s start with the obvious features that distinguish a feast from other events: feasts always involve the sharing and eating of food, even when it may be underemphasised compared to the other activities going on around it such as gifting, music-making, dancing, and oration. It is useful to keep the specific – edible, drinkable – materiality of feasts in mind. Especially apt, therefore, is the archaeologist Brian Hayden’s definition of the feast as ‘any sharing of special food (in quality, preparation, or quantity) by two or more people for a special (not every day) event’ (Hayden 2001). Many rituals contain a feasting element but at the centre of the feast is always food and drink.

Even a review essay must take some theoretical perspective and so I will start by making explicit three propositions that define my approach. First, as mentioned above, we need to pay attention to food and eating to make space for the feast within the wider frame of ritual. Second, feasting is universal: it is found worldwide and throughout human history. It is both ‘primitive’ in the sense that it is there at the origin of human culture, and booming today when restaurant expenditure in the USA and the UK is soaring at the expense of meals cooked and eaten at home, and programmes like ‘Come Dine with Me’ highlight the risk and excitement of food-mediated interactions with strangers, and ‘Bake Off’ unites the British nation.

Of course, whether you think feasting is universal or not depends on how you define it in the first place. I like the archaeologist’s roomy definition because it allows us to explore what is shared even with primates and hominid ancestors; what is specifically human; and then the myriad cultural variations within this. Writing in this vein I distance myself from the idea that feasting only exists in certain kinds of societies and historical epochs. For example, some anthropologists define feasting in a more limited way and argue that it arrived in human history with forms of social stratification (see Hayden 2014: 44), flourished in Classical and Medieval Europe and was then crushed by a subsequent history of rationalization and secularization so that today ‘feasting is no longer part of our experience’ (Valeri and Hoskins 2002: 6). In order to counter this view, in the first section of this essay I draw briefly on biological anthropology and archaeology to explore the evolution of feasting behaviour and throughout I freely compare examples from various historical epochs and parts of the world.

The third and final proposition is that feasting is better understood as ‘foundational’ rather than ‘functional’, and this requires a little explanation. ‘Functionalist’ perspectives tend to see feasts as responsive to pre-existing conditions in the world which feasts uphold or reproduce. So hierarchy may be supported by status competition between feast sponsors, or stratified seating arrangements among guests; communitarianism by the sharing of food from a common pot; or ecological balance by the resource-control that cyclical feasts enable. In contrast, the foundational perspective suggests that feasts make rather than reflect qualities of the world. The organization of labour, resources, time, relationships, and pleasure in feasting generates particular kinds of social arrangements, values, economies, and temporalities. This reorientation from function to foundation is associated with symbolic anthropology, which in general terms assumes that every time we speak or act as humans, our specific and concrete actions evoke the wider categories that organise social life and therefore have the capacity to recreate and transform them (see e.g. Stasch 2011). In the second section of this essay I will show that many anthropological accounts can be read as either making functional or foundational claims. Finally, I show how the foundational lens accounts for various aspects of feasts: the moral and political contestation they provide an arena for; the work and resources they marshal; and the invisible powers they engage. Because feasts are important at multiple levels of experience simultaneously (biological, economic, political, cosmological, social), they tend to realise fundamental characteristics of the world.

Preparations for a feast in rural Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea in October 2015[1]

The earth oven is opened and the food is displayed prior to speech-making and careful distribution

The cultural nature of feasting

Scholars of human evolution suggest that feasting is shared by primates, hominid ancestors, and humans. Just as a Cambridge College feast has its alpha male (usually ‘the Master’ even if he is a she) who sits surrounded by an elite group and eats and rises first, so too during chimpanzee feasts, such as that observed by Jane Goodall in the late 1960s, rank and status are acknowledged and displayed, with meat passing from higher to lower ranking males (Jones 2008: 34). Contemporary primates nonetheless lack fire with which to cook food and this is a limitation they share with our more distant hominid ancestors who also feasted on raw meat. At the site of Boxgrove, near Chichester in southern England, archaeologists uncovered evidence of a feast on 400 kg of raw wild horse meat, held half a million years ago by Homo heidelbergiensis, a hominid predecessor of Neanderthals, who were probably the first hominids to control fire and cook, at least as long as 80,000 years ago (Jones 2008: 78). Jones suggests that it was when our ancestors began to share food face-to-face around glowing hearths that feed became food and the threat and danger of fire, direct eye contact, and the exposure of teeth, was turned into a sociable event (Jones 2008: 1–2).

This takes us to the influential sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel, who suggested in a 1910 essay on the ‘Sociology of the meal’ that it was in meal-taking that humans rose above their identities as selfish organisms to become social persons. Simmel noted that, strictly speaking, food could not be shared because the same food cannot be put into two mouths. However, if eating is an inherently exclusionary and selfish activity, humans, he said, had transformed it into a habit of gathering together to take common meals (Simmel 1997 [1910]: 130). Simmel’s juxtaposition of selfish organism and social person is an early example of how the meal has served as a paradigm for human culture. This argument was elaborated in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas in the 1960s and 1970s. Lévi-Strauss showed that cookery was a language-like system (Lévi-Strauss 1964, 1968), Douglas’s focus was on the structure of meals. She stressed that unlike grazing cows who ruminate constantly, human’s meals are routinised and ritualised, marking the passing of time and drawing spatial boundaries and social distinctions. In short, ‘food is not feed’ (Douglas 1977: 7). To take Douglas’s best known example, the American family has a daily cycle of three meals with allotted times and formats for each, as well as an annual cycle marking festive occasions and a third, longer-term cycle, marking the life-cycle transitions of family members. Additionally, there are seating arrangements, dress codes, and tacit rules about the order in which foods should be consumed (Douglas 1972). Imitating Douglas’s style of analysis, archaeologist Martin Jones observes that feasts in his Cambridge College involve especially elaborate boundary mechanisms. He counts thirty-three items of food-sharing technology arrayed for his use at a feast; notes that his body is encased in seven items of extra attire, which he wears only on feasting occasions; observes the panels which separate areas of food preparation, service, and consumption; and comments on the seating arrangements, which carefully mark his status relative to others, many of whom are strangers (Jones 2008: 32).

In summary, anthropologists have long argued that the sociable sharing of carefully cooked food, in delimited times, spaces, and social circles, is at the heart of what makes us human.

Function versus foundation

The hardiest assumption about feasts is that they are functional in some social or biological way: they create social solidarity, enhance the feast-giver’s status, or help humans adapt to their environment. This was an important argument for anthropologists to make in the colonial era when other people’s feasts were often perceived to be irrational and wasteful and were sometimes even prohibited. Various functional explanations for feasting behaviour flourished in the decades after World War Two when anthropologists flocked to the densely populated highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and documented the devotion of massive resources to periodic pig feasts. Reflecting the Australian colonial administration’s disapproval (and anticipating the attitude of her readers), anthropologist Marie Reay introduced the Kuma ‘Pig Ceremonial’ thus:

People hoard and fatten their pigs for years in preparation for the Pig Ceremonial … A clan kills practically all its pigs at once, and people who are starved of pork and fat then stuff themselves with it to the exclusion of other foods … Few opportunities for eating pork remain for two or three years after this orgy (Reay 1959: 21).

Reay’s book is actually about why these practices make sense in terms of the religious beliefs of Kuma people and their social priorities: the pig kills created fertility, prosperity, and renown. In a materialist rather than a culturalist tradition, Rappaport (1967) argued that pig-raising strategies were a rational way of converting vegetable crops into high-quality animal protein. He attempted to prove, based on both qualitative and quantitative types of analysis, the adaptiveness of social constraints surrounding the consumption of pigs in terms of population control and the satisfaction of human nutritional needs. Yet others emphasised the political importance of periodic pig kills, which brought together autonomous groups from a large region and were the context for alliance-building; the show of clan solidarity and strength; and the stage for individual and group status competition (Meggitt 1974; Strathern 1971). All these approaches share assumptions of functionalism, i.e. that things generally fit together coherently and ‘work’. They can all also be read as foundational since they stop short of reducing feasting to a single, dominant function.

Perhaps the best illustration of engagement with functionalist arguments alongside the articulation of a more foundational perspective is Michael Young’s ethnography, Fighting with food (1971). Young’s book about Goodenough island life focuses on the way that an abstract system of values and an esoteric domain of magical knowledge are motivated by, and find their most compelling expression in, feasts. Goodenough Island is one of many in the Massim archipelago, which lies off the south-eastern tip of New Guinea. A Goodenough festival’s climax was a large distribution of pigs and vegetable food to visitors assembled in the sponsor’s village. Visitors gathered around platforms and stands on which food was displayed, listened to the sponsor and other chiefs’ speeches and then watched as the display was disassembled and guests received food. With his gifts of food-wealth the chief repaid debts he had accrued and marked new debtors, among them enemies who received the food along with a message about the offences they had committed against him – adultery, abuse of hospitality, theft, insult, and meanness. The distribution was therefore a great drama in which ‘visitors delight in unexpected scandals or delicts suddenly brought to light’ (Young 1971: 244). Aside from its entertainment value, the festival was, Young said, an ‘instrument of social control’, which worked by public shaming and the obligation to repay. He suggests that it worked rather well, providing a mode of redress which did not resort to physical aggression or warfare (Young 1971: 264). He suggested that one of the reasons Goodenough islanders in the 1960s took competitive food exchange to such an extreme was the colonial suppression of warfare (Young 1971: 233, 250). Feasts worked as a kind of system of justice and conflict resolution that was better than anything colonial officials could think to impose. Young therefore suggested that colonization could lead to feasts’ flourishing rather than to their inevitable extinction. This is a trend other scholars have also noticed in other parts of the world (e.g. Kirch and Sahlins 1992; Masco 1995) where there have been colonial booms in feasting and exchange activity. On the basis of his historical analysis of Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, Masco suggests that feasting tends to flourish during phases of great historical upheaval because it allows people to work through the new conditions they find themselves in and thereby to seize control of their lives (Masco 1995: 57). Masco and Young therefore both show that feasts are foundational to both people’s enduring identity and their capacity to direct historical change.

While Young is keen to demonstrate the rationality of feasts and festivals in terms of their equivalence to Western legal and political systems, much of his book is about elucidating the value system in which food serves as political currency. Festivals brought political credit and fame to sponsors who proved that they could incarnate the paramount moral values of industriousness, self-discipline, and magnanimity (Young 1971: 252). As the crucial events in Goodenough people’s lives, much of their everyday behaviour is oriented to cultivating the right kind of knowledge and moral disposition to enable them to succeed at feasting. For example, Young describes how men test their mettle and the power of their anti-hunger magic by keeping their best yams to rot, uneaten, inside their houses. This is one way in which they harden themselves into virtuous food abstainers who never admit hunger or allow themselves to be seen eating in public (Young 1971: 159). It is in the context of these values, for which feasting is the ultimate stage, that the giving of food between adult men is an aggressive act which shames the recipient. This is why at the Goodenough festival’s climax, upon the distribution of great plenty, nobody eats.

Eating and not eating

On Goodenough island and in Highlands of Papua New Guinea, the drama of the feast is in the gathering together, display, and distribution of food and not in the eating itself. Portions of food may be deliberately too large to eat or they may be distributed raw or undercooked (Rubel & Rosman 1978: 305). In the Goodenough extreme, eating is explicitly taboo. Perhaps a more common pattern is that hosts, as sponsors and owners of the feast, serve guests but do not eat themselves. What happens then is that food serves to oppose two groups of people (givers and receivers). This is the case in most Amazonian feasts where hosts are defined by their role as givers of food or drink, and guests as eaters and drinkers. I will give two examples, one in which hosts are forceful and the other in which they are humble.

The Tamara festival of the ’Wari of Western Amazonia begins when guests from other subgroups arrive singing at a foreign village only to be humiliated by hosts, who stuff food into the incomers’ mouths pitilessly while insulting the quality of their singing. The guests passively accept this treatment and continue to complain of hunger despite the large quantities they are fed (Vilaça 2010: 64–5). What is going on here is that guests are being treated as the animal prey of hosts, and the mutual stranger status of the two groups is being affirmed.

Among the Enawenê-nawê with whom I work and who live south-eastwards of the ’Wari in Brazilian Amazonia, in each season of the year there is a different opposition between offering and consuming parties within a single village: women serve men, men serve women, or the men of one clan serve the men of the remaining eight clans. As in the ’Wari case, the emphasis is precisely on the reversibility of the oppositions enacted through relations of production and consumption – the point is to take turns and to create a dynamic of reciprocity. Unlike in the ’Wari Tamara festival, Enawenê-nawê hosts are humble because they are providing nourishment to others who incarnate spirits whom the hosts wish to sate and gratify. Both these cases contrast with others in which the identity of eaters and servers is fixed by hierarchy or gender and is usually non-reversible. A very clear example of this is the Georgian feast (supra) in the form it took in late Soviet times, when men sat at tables to eat from ever-full platters and to drink wine from bottomless cups, while women garnered resources, cooked, and stood ready assiduously serving and pouring (Manning 2012: 153–5). There was no supra in which women sat while men served them.

The ethnographic and historical record gives us every permutation of shared and restricted commensality. I will end with two extremes, both taken from European contexts, past and present. In a transfiguration of former medieval feasts at which noble men shared the King’s table, at Versailles the King began to take his meals seated alone, surrounded by standing courtiers – making this feast a public event with no commensality (Freedman 2015: 103). In contrast, the paradigmatic act of sociability at European formal dining occasions is the act of standing to toast the embodiment of a shared ideal (‘The Bride and Groom’; ‘The Queen’) around a table, touching glasses (or merely lifting them) and making eye contact (or gazing into space) before everyone simultaneously drinks. Toasting, which links two uses of the mouth (communication and consumption) is a concrete expression of accord in mind and communion in body. It can be convivial and heartfelt, or formal and even strained, but its affordances are the same. Waiters and waitresses don’t join the toast, so that one-way offering and sharing coexist.

Risky, anti-social feasts

If feasts are fundamental to the creation of the world in which people live then why are they so prone to fail? They can descend into drunken blowouts, jeopardising all the good outcomes that they promised, or alternatively they can fall flat, remaining so formal and constrained that they never generate the ‘effervescence’ which sociologist Emile Durkheim (1995 [1912]) saw as their ineffable brew. Feasts may also meet with disaster and have overtly dysfunctional outcomes: sponsors can produce too little food or drink for their guests, hostilities can break out, and there is the ever-present threat of poisoning – in London’s Mayfair or in Brazilian Amazonia. I suggest that the very fact that feasts are so prone to fail is a sure sign that they are efficacious and consequential.

Fights at festive family meals are a staple of novels and dramas. A great example is the Danish film, Festen (directed by Thomas Vinterberg), which is an exploration of the perversion of family values through the souring of the feast. It follows the unravelling of an upper-class dinner party on the occasion of the senior male of the family’s sixtieth birthday. Sinister family secrets are revealed as tensions build painstakingly over many courses and increasingly malevolent toasts. There is probably always a degree of brinkmanship entailed in orchestrating feasts. One of the reasons for this is that hosts tend to work to the boundaries of what they can pull off. Freedman (2015: 103–4) provides various medieval examples of hungry stampedes trampling the food, of melting confectionery sculptures, and of other dramatic failures born of audacious ambition.

The spectre of poison is the ultimate spoiler. In medieval times, specialist tasters ritually tested food before it reached the mouths of nobles and royals. The Amazonian Kuikuro also ritually test drinks for poison but their motives are more communitarian. Like many Amerindians, the Kuikuro make their special drinks from the juice of bitter manioc, which is high in cyanide and can be lethal to humans when raw or undercooked. The cyanide is gradually transformed into sugar through prolonged boiling. The Kuikuro dramatise the danger of poisoning and its overcoming by designating a man as a formal taster. He very publicly assumes responsibility for protecting the community and its guests. He sips the drink after it has been boiled for some time and always pronounces it to be, as yet, unsafe to drink. Only once it has been re-boiled and tested a third time does the official taster pronounce it safe to drink (Dole 1978: 232). The drink is then passed among all the guests, a sharing which, after such an ominous start, emphasises their peaceful coexistence.

Undoubtedly the most spectacular and laborious of the feasts held by the Amazonian Enawenê-nawê is a reunion between two halves of the population, on the one side the hosts and all the women of the village, and on the other, the fishermen who return from an approximately sixty-day fishing expedition. The hosts do everything they can to find out when the fishermen are likely to return so that women can correctly time the production of about 4,000 litres of a manioc and corn porridge called ketera. The fishermen have been far from their gardens living off dry bread and flour, and they are said to eagerly desire this drink. Indeed, the homely drink is a necessity for successful reunion, since it reminds the men of the human mores they have side-lined at the fishing dams. Inconveniently, the drink has to be made fresh and the process takes a minimum of eight hours from start to finish. This means that if women hear a distant hum of engine noise which indicates the possibility of the fishermen’s imminent arrival, they will wake in the night to start frantically grating manioc. This is a work of anticipation. The whole event is defined by uncertainty about the timing of the fishermen’s arrival which is coupled with their potentially dangerous disposition. The huge quantity of ketera and its laborious preparation makes a show of indomitable preparedness in the face of all this risk and anxiety. If this feast was not prone to go disastrously wrong then the reunification of the community would not be such a climactic achievement.

Morality and politics under negotiation

I have now established that feasting neither necessarily upholds or upends social and political orders; rather, it is part of their making, their maintenance, and sometimes also their undoing. In fact, feasting seems to be a key infrastructure for specifically political action. A feast can serve any end – reformist, conservative, or revolutionary – but what is always true is that feasts are a flash point for political and moral contestation. On the side of revolution, Mao Zedong forbade large banquets and ancestor commemorations when he became chairman of the new people’s republic in 1949 (Goody 1982: 173) and during the Cultural Revolution he closed both restaurants and brothels in a renewed attack on indulgence (Goody 1982: 149). At the other pole is conservative luxury. Sumptuary laws like those issued by Edward II in 1283 limited the number of courses that were permitted at any feast and controlled the populace’s access to food and drink. These laws were intended to preserve the existing hierarchy by restraining feasting by persons of inferior rank, who were perceived as threatening upstarts, imitating the great men of the kingdom (Goody 1982: 141). In ancient Greece we find something intermediate; a constitutive tension between luxury and puritanism within the elite. In Homer’s epic poems, elite heroes feast on the simple fare of bread and platters of meat. This made them equals, joined by the fellowship of the table where eating and drinking, talking, fighting, and politics were inseparable so that access to the table equalled access to power (O'Connor 2015: 92–6). Homer’s depiction of frugal, egalitarian commensality in the male public sphere was probably an idealised one but it inspired later generations for whom feasts, banquets, and all-male drinking parties remained key political fora and had to be continually reformed against the subversive threats of excess and luxury (O'Connor 2015: 109–11).

Politics and feasting are perhaps nowhere more self-consciously entwined than in Georgia, where debates about the proper form of the traditional feast, the supra, are always about authoritarian governance, and where attempts to reform the supra aim at nothing less than transforming statehood (Manning 2012: 148–76). In the 1980s, supra were feats of endurance, lasting up to eight hours during which toasts were interspersed with singing, dancing, and recitations (Mars and Altman 1987: 272–3). There could be twenty or more rounds of toasts in an evening (each requiring a man to drain his glass). Because everyone present was mentioned in at least one toast and the toasts passed through the clinking of glasses from one speaker to the next, the assembled company became linked across distant tables (Mars and Altman 1987). Stalin is famed to have ruled from his lavish dinner table (Freedman 2015: 106) and was a Georgian by birth, and Manning suggests that every Georgian toast-master is under Stalin’s shadow as the ‘dictator’ of the feast table. In the post-socialist era, people disagree vociferously about whether the supra is a noble, indigenous form of civil society or a vehicle for authoritarianism masquerading under the guise of a harmless tradition (Manning 2012: 172). Critics comment that the toast-master is elected but that his election is a farce since there is only one candidate and he always wins unanimously (Manning 2012: 167–8). Manning mentions a young professional woman telling him in 2001 that rather than having a supra for her birthday party she had celebrated with a ‘democracy’. This she described as a feast at which there was no toast-master to tell people what to do (Manning 2012: 169).

It is easy to see all this as mere metaphor, but both Manning and Altman and Mars, whose work I have drawn on here, make the stronger argument that politics happens in and through the supra. Thus the ‘cultured supra’ (not a drunken orgy) was actively propagated throughout the Soviet Union as good socialist culture and it was under late socialism, with its relative bounty, that supra flourished (Manning 2012: 175–6). Later, the proliferated supra had unintended consequences for Soviet rule. The supra in 1980s Georgia allowed people to be good socialists in a way that worked for them. Through the linkages established through toasting, people obtained scarce jobs, permits and licenses, and places at university for their children (Mars and Altman 1987: 278) which were hard to get through the strictures of state bureaucracy.

Feasts can always uphold or threaten the naturalised pecking order among classes and kinds of people, and to end this section I want to reflect briefly upon the banning of native peoples’ feasts by colonial governments. We have seen that feasting and status competition are a major part of European cultural heritage, so why was feasting among the newly discovered peoples of the colonies often met with surprise, disdain, and even criminalization? Marcel Mauss answered this question in one way in his 1925 essay The gift. He said that Native peoples were being judged according to the standards of Enlightenment rationalism and its theories about the kind of economy that was ‘natural’. For rational utilitarian thinkers this was an economy which provided for men’s needs (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 92). Colonists had difficulty accepting that economies that were supposed to be ‘primitive’ were elaborate prestige contests rather than being organised around a struggle for survival (Mauss 2002 [1925]: 96).

A more cynical or real-political explanation emerges from the outlawing of potlatch in the American northwest between 1884 and 1951, which is a famous example of the resolute colonial repression of feasting. Potlatch was an exchange practice led by ranked nobility who distributed property and food to validate their status which was based on their connection to the supernatural powers that controlled the fecundity of the natural world (Masco 1995: 44–7). Before the mid-nineteenth century animal furs, canoes, mats, meat, and slaves were the currency of potlatch and gradually, over the next hundred years, trade goods and then money replaced them (Masco 1995: 51–53, 69–72). In 1889 the founding father of American anthropology, Franz Boas, famously criticised the ban on potlatch by arguing that the potlatch was very similar to the economies of ‘civilized communities’, involving finance and debt calculations (High 2012: 368). As Masco (1995: 65) shows, Boas’ argument was unlikely to be persuasive since it was precisely because the administration recognised that potlatch incorporated capitalist practices to support a ritual economy which was outside of European control that they wanted to stamp it out. They correctly singled out the potlatch as the Kwakwaka'wakw people’s dominant world-making practice. Attacking it was their way of destroying the native cosmology and turning hunters into ‘productive’ farmers and Christian citizens (Masco 1995).

The potlatch has been approached and re-approached from every angle in every era of anthropological scholarship, which shows that feasts work at multiple levels, are dense with meaning, and are constantly shape-shifting as they transform historically. However, it is surprising that while the potlatch is always called a ‘feast’, very little of this scholarship (with the exception of Walens’ Feasting with cannibals, 1981) is about the food or the eating. Perhaps this is because it seemed obvious to anthropologists that ‘traditional’ peoples should hunt and feast to generate further plenty and exceptional that they should have developed modern systems based on debts and interest.

Production before the feast

We now need to turn back the clock and go behind the scenes of feasts. Instead of analysing feasting from the moment the table is laid or the food displayed, we need to explore the organization of time, labour, and resources that go into feasts. The causal nature of feasts’ world-making capacity comes to light in these processes. Rupert Stasch’s (2003) ethnography of the West Papuan Korowai’s sago-grub feasts is a great illustration of the way that bringing about a feast generates people’s core values and reshapes their social and physical environment. It is also a good example of an analysis which concentrates on feast preparation, as opposed to consumption. Stasch’s emphasis is proportional to the Korowai’s own: these feasts marshal resources amassed over a decade and involve two months of intensive work but are all over in 24 hours.

Korowai usually live in single or paired small households, separated from their nearest neighbours by stretches of forest. This small circle continuously processes sago palm starch from the stands within their clan’s territory to meet their basic food needs, at a rate of about one palm every ten days (Stasch 2003: 360). About once a decade, however, different families associated with a clan build houses in a huddle and work together to prepare a feast. They fell up to 1,000 mature sago palms and break open the trunks so that, over a month or so, fat, juicy grubs develop in the exposed pith (Stasch 2003). As the grubs develop, the feast sponsors build a longhouse in which to host invitees. So that the guests are well-fed, the grubs need to be harvested when they are fat but because of the nature of grub development, this is just before they turn into beetles and fly away (Stasch 2003: 372). Grub maturation is inherently uncertain and difficult to time, depending on a range of unpredictable conditions. It is readily scuppered, for example, by the flooding of sago groves (which are low-lying and prone to flood). All of this means that the Korowai have apparently got themselves into a tricky situation because good relations with allies depend on a plentiful and timely crop of grubs, which can never be assured (Stasch 2003: 369). Stasch’s argument in this article shows that perverse as this all seems, grubs are well-suited to the ambivalent quality of Korowai social relationships. The riskiness of a feast based on such a tricky food-stuff ensures the continuing unstable nature of Korowai inter-local alliances and the brinkmanship characteristic of all Korowai socialising.

Stasch’s concentration on the symbolic weightiness of the work that leads up to the feast, which thrusts the Korowai into a mode of production and sociality that is profoundly contrary to their everyday lives, leads me to a second way in which feast preparations are constitutive of social life. The intensified work that is involved in preparing for a feast creates time apart from workaday life long before the guests arrive. Based on Enawenê-nawê ethnography I have argued that intensified production does not so much lead up to a feast, but in a sense is the feast (Nahum-Claudel forthcoming). This is very tangible in the Enawenê-nawê context, where inebriating drinks are shunned, feast foods are just ordinary foods, and people always eat them in moderation. Unlike elsewhere in Amazonia, there is no Bacchic catharsis through coerced gorging on beer, copious vomiting, or paralysing intoxication (e.g. Stolze-Lima 2005: 311; Sztutman 2008: 230; Vilaça 1992: 189; Viveiros de Castro 1986: 354). Rather than consumption, energised collective work itself provides life’s thrills and pleasures. Thus the annual ceremonial calendar involves many ritualised work events which seem to be about celebrating productive activity itself, by synchronising, staging, choreographing, and musicalising ‘mundane’ forms of subsistence agricultural and cooking work. One of these involves all the women of the village waking to pound dried corn seed and manioc fibre in hardwood standing mortars in the dead of night. They pound in an accelerated, syncopated rhythm and, because so many of them do so all around the circular village, the ground shakes.

If feasting is the pleasurable tonic that makes workaday life bearable and marks barren expanses of time with memorable events, it is also the case that production before the feast generates the energetic ebbs and flows that are so important to social life, cognition and the vitality of peoples’ bodies. In the words of Olivia Harris, who came to similar conclusions about agricultural work parties in the Bolivian Andes, work to produce food can itself be a ‘celebration of human energy, creativity and capacity to make and expand relationships’ (Harris 2007: 143).

Invisible guests with power over life and death

From the food-laden alters at Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations to the ambrosia poured for the gods in ancient Greece, at feasts all over the world food and drink is shared with gods, spirits, and ancestors; prayers are spoken, food is consecrated, and libations are spilled. Eating and drinking become the medium for a connection between two dimensions of the world: phenomenal and invisible, living and dead. Hubert and Mauss’s book (1964 [1898]) has been the starting point for thinking about sacrifice in anthropology along with Detienne and Vernant’s (1979) landmark analyses of Classical sacrificial practices. In broad terms they demonstrate that feasts are means to influence the forces that people understand to have ultimate control over the world of the living. There can be no clearer statement that feasts are foundational than many peoples’ certainty that on them rests the health of the population, the fertility of the earth, and the migrations of fish and game.

How is it that people and invisible guests can eat the same food? A common pattern is exemplified by the Kuma of Highland Papua New Guinea, where the immaterial part of the pig (the ‘shadow pork’) is devoured by ancestral ghosts while the surviving relatives feast on its flesh and fat (Reay 1959: 142). This assures that everyone’s appetite for pork is satisfied so that ghosts refrain from harming their surviving relatives. The Cree of Manitoba, Canada describe much more complex and various channels of communion with different kinds of invisible agents (spirits, the souls of game animals, and living game animals) at play during their ‘eat-all’ feasts (Brightman 1993: 224–35). Here tensions exist between blockage and communion, exploitation and reciprocity. Brightman describes a 1977 feast at Watt lake in which four boiled beavers (and all the stock), macaroni cheese, bannocks and doughnuts were eaten to the point of nausea and beyond. At the same time that Brightman writes about the feast in terms of the sacrificial gift which anticipates a future return of plentiful game, he shows that the feast is a coercive act rather than a reverent one. By gorging on meat – eating or burning every last scrap within a space that is blocked off from animal spirits – humans hide their exploitation of animals while they engage in a ‘collective and aggressive act of magical control’ over them (Brightman 1993: 235). The channel of influence is not only both open and closed, it is also two-way since as well as feeding spirits, people incorporate the essence of the game they eat to endow themselves with hunting prowess.

There is an unusual degree of elaboration of human-spirit commensality among the Enawenê-nawê, where food is considered to be owned by, and therefore always owed to, predatory spirits (see Nahum-Claudel 2012, forthcoming). The Enawenê-nawê live with this causal connection between food production, consumption, and mortality by sharing with the spirits every day. Mundane commensality is therefore feast-like because it involves the public display, distribution, and consumption of food and drink in the village’s public central arena. This implies that almost all fishing, agriculture, and cuisine is devoted to large-scale catering, minimising the amount of food that is consumed privately and selfishly inside the house – the kind of eating that incites the spirits’ aggression and leads to soul loss. What all these examples show is how metaphysical conceptions of socio-political relations, not only between living people but between beings in general, are worked out through accumulation, expenditure, commensality, and feeding.

Conclusion

Feasts mobilise people’s values, their morality, and understanding of the world of which they are a part. They have particularly powerful world-making effects because they are both irreducibly concrete – satisfying hunger, exciting pleasures, coordinating the political-economy, and embedding themselves in the organization of time and memory – and expansively meaningful, simultaneously expressing and generating deeply held values. It is because feasts have this force that they can fail in so many ways: from the mundane to the disastrous. And it is because feasts work at so many levels that they have been so open to competing understandings about their function. Feasts do do a lot of things and it is a matter of perspective whether we choose to approach them in terms of their effects on other domains of life, conceived as separate and outside of them, or as internally linked, in causal and conceptual ways, to the whole of life. Within this broad argument, I have shown that the ‘total’ feast takes many forms and have surveyed a range of feasts to open up questions and suggest the following important lines of contrast.

The sharing of food is not a simple matter of a feast’s definition (as it is for Simmel’s meal) but rather a matter of cultural value: people may share communally or feed one another to generate oppositions which may be fixed or reversible. Feasts can uphold the order of things – maintain solidarity or affirm status hierarchies – but they are rarely free of political and moral contention. The questions, Who feasts? On what? And to what end? are pressing ones for political authorities and their opponents alike. Feasts can usefully focus broader debate or be flash-points for conflict. These high stakes make feasts risky undertakings.

A feast’s consummation is often rather transitory in contrast to the elaborate labours that lead up to it. Moving from the feast as event to process highlights the importance, which has long been recognised in anthropology, of exploring the constraints and possibilities offered by a feast’s productive base, be it sago grubs or luxury food and wine. How are resources amassed? With what technology and organization of time and division of labour? These factors should not be understood as external determinants but rather as the social and physical matter that is consciously moulded by people as historical agents. Again, it is because feasts mobilise passions, values, resources, and people all at once and with intensity, that they are great contexts for experimentation and reform. Through them people work out ways to accommodate the forces that constrain them while realising their wider ideals. Finally, feasting invariably transcends the social, and eating and drinking appear to be particularly powerful mediums through which to attempt to exert control over invisible agencies that encompass human life – be it the state, the feudal order, the ecology, or the spirits and ancestors who determine life and death.

References

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Detienne, M. & J.-P. Vernant 1979. La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec. Paris: Gallimard.

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Durkheim, E. 1995 [1912]. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.

Freedman, P. 2015. Medieval and modern banquets: commensality and social categorization. In Commensality: from everyday food to feast (eds) S. Kerner, C. Chou & M. Warmind. London: Bloomsbury.

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Hayden, B. 2001. Fabulous feasts: a prolegomenon to the importance of feasting. In Feasts: archaeological and ethnographic perspectives on food, politics, and power (eds) M. Dietler & B. Hayden. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.

——— 2014. The power of feasts from prehistory to the present. Cambridge: University Press.

——— & S. Villeneuve 2011. A century of feasting studies. Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 433-49.

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Nahum-Claudel, C. 2012. Enawene-nawe "potlatch against the state". Social Anthropology 20, 444-57.

——— forthcoming. Feasting with killers: vital diplomacy in Amazona. New York: Berghahn.

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Stasch, R. 2003. The semiotics of world-making in Korowai feast longhouses. Language and Communication 23, 359-83.

——— 2011. Ritual and oratory revisited: the semiotics of effective action. Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 159-74.

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——— 2010. Strange enemies: indigenous agency and scenes of encounters in Amazonia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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Note on contributor

Chloe Nahum-Claudel is a postdoctoral research fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. She has fieldwork experience in Brazilian Amazonia and Highland Papua New Guinea. Her work explores agriculture and the cosmology of livelihood; human relations with non-humans; cookery, food and eating; ritual, and the nature of work; and politics in non-state societies. She is the author of Vital Diplomacy: The Ritual Everyday on a Dammed River in Amazonia.

Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. cn253@cam.ac.uk

[1] The feast was sponsored by the author (pictured). Women prepare bananas and sweet potatoes for the earth oven while men butcher the pig and prepare a blood cake.

Landscape

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

Paola Filippucci

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

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

Abstract:

When we think about landscape, we tend to think of natural scenery, empty of people; of a view, spread in front of our eyes; or of a backdrop, a stage for people’s movements and activities. The anthropology of landscape challenges all of these ideas. By sharing and observing local lives through ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists have realised that landscapes matter deeply to people: they care about the landscapes they inhabit, materially shaping them and attaching meaning to them. Anthropologists have come to argue that people do not only live in landscapes but also through them: landscape is an intrinsic part of, or even actor in human social and cultural lives, constructed by them both physically and symbolically and, reciprocally, helping to make and unmake relationships and identities.

Landscape in the social sciences

The importance of landscape in human affairs was, perhaps predictably, recognised and studied by cultural geographers and archaeologists before anthropologists. Geography is of course centrally concerned with space, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s a number of studies focused on the experiential, subjective, phenomenological aspects of space and place (e.g. Buttimer & Seamon 1980; Tuan 1977); and on the symbolic meanings attached to landscape in the European tradition (e.g. Cosgrove 1985; Daniels & Cosgrove 1988). In particular, Cosgrove and others noted that the English term ‘landscape’ comes from the term of Dutch origin landschap, referring to a painted view of (usually rural) surroundings. As Hirsch notes (1995: 2), this means that the concept of landscape, if used unproblematically and uncritically, carries with it a range of culturally specific assumptions: that it is a visual phenomenon, implying a viewer and a view and so a disconnection between people and space; that it has aesthetic value, embodying a pleasing or ‘picturesque’ form; and that it is rural or to do with ‘nature’ and land rather than with people and urbanised surroundings. We will see below how Hirsch rethought the concept in a bid to produce a more culturally sensitive notion of ‘landscape’.

The other discipline that historically has had a close interest in landscape is archaeology. Particularly in Britain, landscape became a central focus of archaeological attention in the inter-war period. The journal Antiquity, founded in this period, introduced the potential of aerial photography, developed during the Great War, in making visible archaeological remains buried in the British countryside, and encouraged archaeologists to view and interpret sites and remains as part of structured, evolving ‘landscapes’, inaugurating the notion of ‘landscape archaeology’ as a way to grasp and understand ancient ways of life. In a fascinating analysis of these developments, Hauser (2007) suggests that this was in part a response to the sight of the devastation of the Great War in France and Belgium in particular, which led artists and others (including archaeologists) to reimagine and cherish Britain as an antique land, with a landscape that embodied its history and heritage and could and should be protected against the new technologies of war and destruction.

More recently archaeologists have discussed the heritage value of landscape in Britain and beyond: in particular, Bender (1993) introduced the idea, central to understanding the role of landscape anthropologically, that groups of people attribute different values to the same landscape; for this reason, landscapes are a focus, and indeed a means, of political contestation and of the formation of different and competing identities. For instance, Bender showed that the landscape of Stonehenge was in the late 1990s (and remains today) the focus of competing interpretations and claims by heritage agencies acting on behalf of the British government and also by ‘pagans’ and others such as tourists, each looking for rather different meanings and value within the same surroundings. This volume also introduced the idea that landscapes are not simply passive screens onto which people project values, but they can be actors in social and political conflict. Focusing on Belfast during the ‘Troubles’, anthropologist Neil Jarman (1993) shows that ideological divisions became embodied in the physical surroundings of the city, creating a feedback loop between space and people: boundaries between the warring groups were not only reinforced by erecting barricades and setting fire to homes, but barriers also became focal points for violent action and so fostered the cycle of violence and division (1993: 111-2). Landscape is not just a backdrop but exerts a sort of ‘agency’ in the unfolding of violent politics: because of its symbolic associations as well as its physical qualities (e.g. in creating barriers, regulating movement, etc.), space contributes to the production and reproduction of violent relations, and insight that helps to analyse many current conflicts, such as that in Israel and the Palestinian territories (see, e.g., Weizman 2007).

So, what anthropologists and other social scientists mean by ‘landscape’ is the human interpretation and manipulation of the physical surroundings in which our individual and collective lives unfold. A ‘landscape’ is something constructed by humans in the course of their daily lives and interactions, both physically and also symbolically, by being invested with meaning, memory, and value. But moreover, anthropologists argue that the two – investing with meaning and shaping physically – go hand in hand and cannot really be separated. One way to conceptualise this is the notion of ‘dwelling’ introduced by Ingold (1995). With this term, borrowed and adapted from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Ingold sought to challenge a separation between the cognitive organization of space (e.g. the creation of mental plans or designs) and its physical shaping through building. Ingold argues that humans ‘dwell’ in the world, i.e. produce and reproduce human lives and relations through practically engaging with their physical surroundings. So for Ingold, ‘building’ – humanly modifying space – is an integral aspect of ‘dwelling’: the physical outcome of the thoughtful, but necessarily embodied and emplaced business of social living, rather than an activity led by a disembodied intellect surveying its ‘environment’ as an object (see also Ingold 2000). This perspective invites us to view humans and physical surroundings as part of the same system: as Ingold puts it, the dwelling perspective treats humans as ‘animals in their environment’ rather than self-contained individuals engaging with the physical world as an object; dissolving ‘the orthodox dichotomies between evolution and history, and between biology and culture’ (1995: 77).

Ingold’s approach has been used productively especially by archaeologists as well as anthropologists working with nomadic hunter-gatherer populations (e.g. Ingold & Mazzullo 2008), perhaps because it seems to imply a sort of seamless harmony between people and their surroundings that is difficult to envisage in the case of urbanised and/or larger-scale populations (but cf. McFarlane 2011). However, the idea that ‘landscape’ should not be understood as a thing independent of people, or even as a thing made by people, but as the outcome of the physical and symbolic implication of people with their surroundings, informs other anthropological approaches of wider applicability. In particular, anthropologists’ comparative perspective and the encounter with non-European cultures leads them to question the very notion of ‘space’ as ethnocentric and to rethink what ‘landscape’ might be in even more radical ways.

Anthropological beginnings: ‘space’

The basis for anthropology’s refusal to take ‘space’ for granted as an objective reality external to humans’ activities and perceptions can be traced back to Durkheim’s seminal discussion of the social origin of the categories of human thought in his Elementary forms of the religious life (1912). In this text Durkheim addressed space as one of the fundamental ‘categories of understanding’, alongside time, number, cause, substance, and personality: these are ‘the solid frames that enclose all thought’ because without them no thought is possible (2001 [1912]: 11). Unlike Kant and other philosophers, however, Durkheim did not consider these categories to be innate, but rather ‘social things’, products of social life, and, in origin, of religious life and thought (2001 [1912]: 11). In the case of space, Durkheim argued that it is only perceptible as such insofar as it is divided and differentiated – into left and right, inside and outside, above and below, and so on: ‘inherently, there is no right or left, above or below, north or south and so on’ (2001 [1912]: 13). These divisions for him arise as people give an ‘affective colour’ to regions, adding that members of the same society hold in common these divisions, implying ‘that they are social in origin’ (2001 [1912]: 13). So the organization of space in each society is modelled on social organization ‘and replicates it’, not vice-versa; spatial divisions like left and right are not innate but originate from social and indeed religious thought. Indeed, for Durkheim the ‘sacred’ at the centre of religious thought is a form of spatial classification, insofar as he defines it as that which is ‘set apart’, separated conceptually but also, often, spatially, from the ‘profane’ (2001 [1912]: 36).

Durkheim’s ideas inspired some classic early studies of socio-spatial organization, such as Mauss’s ‘Essai sur les variations saisonnières des societés Eskimos’ (1904–1905) and, within British social anthropology, Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940). While neither refers to ‘landscape’, both suggest that the way people inhabit their physical surroundings is an important aspect of their society, but not as a determining factor: soil configuration and climate, writes Mauss, do not determine people’s decision to live dispersed or instead in groups: this is determined by social factors such as their technological skills (which control how they exploit natural resources) and their ‘moral, juridical and religious organisation’, which determines whether they can form groups, of what size and so on (Mauss 1983 [1904–1905]: 393, author’s translation). In his study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard writes about their ‘oecological space’, which he describes as the relationship between the ‘character of the country’ and ‘the biological requirements’ of the members of local groups: e.g. availability of water, the presence or absence of tsetse flies or of rivers and so on make the distance between local groups more or less impassable and so expands or shrinks ‘mere physical distance’ (1969 [1940]: 109). However, Nuer additionally give their spatial distributions ‘certain values which compose their political structure’. In particular Nuer lives are governed by ‘structural distance’, ‘the distance between groups of persons in a social system, expressed in terms of values’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Such values determine more centrally than physical factors the closeness or otherwise of villages from one another: ‘A Nuer village may be equidistant from two other villages, but if one of these belongs to a different tribe and the other to the same tribe it may be said to be structurally more distant from the first than from the second’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Social and political affiliations override spatial and territorial ones.

Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Nuer is not entirely consistent on this point. For instance in some of his other works, it appears that physical proximity and cohabitation are important bases of social unity and solidarity in this society, so that physical space does matter to the Nuer as they structure their society, and is even constitutive of their ‘kinship’ structure (1950: 364; cf. 1951; cf. Kuper 2005: 205). However, whether or not it corresponds with ethnographic reality (cf. Kuper 1983: 95), the discussion of ‘time and space’ in The Nuer introduces the intriguing idea that anthropologically speaking ‘space’ need not be linked with physical surroundings at all, but could be a dimension of human life and identity defined and charted by values and relations, in this case those associated with kinship (more specifically descent from common ancestors) and political organization. So, in order to describe and analyse the Nuer’s culturally specific conception and perception of their world, Evans-Pritchard formulated a non-literal concept of ‘space’, abstracted from territorial factors and linked instead with personhood, itself an abstract and culturally variable social construct (cf. Carrithers, Collins & Lukes 1985; Mauss 1983 [1938]).

Although Durkheim’s notion of the social origin of knowledge was later criticised (see Bloch 1977), arguably a long-lasting contribution of these early studies for the study of ‘landscape’ is to suggest not only that people interpret physical space in different ways, but also that anthropologists need to problematise the very concept of ‘space’, treating it as a social construct with a culturally variable content. This insight is central to more recent anthropological studies of landscape.

Rethinking ‘landscape’

The division between sacred and profane space (and time) introduced by Durkheim is at the heart of William Christian’s study of a religion in a Spanish valley, published in 1972 (1972: xv). The book focuses on shrines and on the ‘supernatural rationale’ for their location in the landscape, presenting them as ‘control points at which the people attempt to influence the penetration of foreign material into their countryside’ (Christian 1972: xv). Christian inverts the earlier anthropological convention of landscape as an inert backdrop to the people studied by piecing together the social and cultural world of the population of a northern Spanish valley starting from their landscape. In this study, the environmental setting is understood as an integral element of the society, a ground for it in the most profound sense of providing the means of articulating physically, conceptually, and imaginatively the relationships among persons and also, centrally, between ‘person and God’ (referred to in the title of the book), people and the powers that preside over their world, be they ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’.

For instance, in a setting in which people move seasonally between village and uplands, changes of scenery are said to correspond to changing ‘moods’ among the population: in the upper pastures in spring and autumn, the mood is ‘airy, open and honest’ as people, ‘free from the village’, share food and tools, work together, often breaking into song (Christian 1972: 2). Back in the village, especially in winter, when the young are away on seasonal jobs and people live at close quarters, life ‘is more difficult’, the mood is of ‘competition’, ‘there are people with whom, for one reason or another, one does not speak’ (Christian 1972: 3). The landscape also articulates the villagers’ identity and positioning in the wider world. The villagers have a ‘series of identities’ including the house and family, the village and parish, the valley, the region and the nation-state (Christian 1972: 42). These correspond to the ‘matrix of human relations’ on the ground, formed of ‘what brings people together and what marks them off from each other’, visible in how people behave and communicate, name and create physical and symbolic boundaries (Christian 1972: 11).

For Christian, this also, importantly, helps us to understand people’s relations with the divine: the matrix of their relations ‘provides the context into which relations with the divine must fit’ (1972: 11). So, corresponding to the geographical levels of the inhabitants’ life and identity are specific divine figures (saints, or advocations of the Virgin Mary) to whom they pray, ‘implanted’ in the landscape through shrines: to levels of identity, correspond, in a memorable phrase, ‘territories of grace’ (Christian 1972: 44-5). Christian makes clear that, especially in the case of devotions that are unique to this valley and its population (as opposed to the ‘generalised’, national-level devotions) the shrines are one with the landscape: the images and their powers are immovable, people must go to them: the shrines are ‘transaction points in the landscape between the human group, the land, and the powers that influence the success of the group’s enterprises’ (1972: 45). In practice, the saints are approached as ‘patrons’, intermediaries towards God but also more broadly foreign, external powers, ‘above and below’ the here and now of the village, an aspect for Christian alluded to by the location of many shrines at ‘critical points in the ecosystem’ such as mountain peaks, springs, and caves (1972: 181). Also, like living patrons, saints are applied to individually and from different levels of identity, so that the heterogeneity (both physical and spiritual) of the landscape is one with the heterogeneity of local society. Overall, this study resonates with Durkheimian approaches but also, in its attention to the landscape (physical and spiritual) as a principle and means of heterogeneity rather than unity, it anticipates themes found in the ‘anthropology of landscape’ that started in the 1990s (for another, more recent study that directly rethinks space in relation to the Durkheimian ‘sacred/profane’ dichotomy, see Munn 2003).

The anthropology of landscape

In the mid-1990s, two edited collections (Feld & Basso 1996; Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995) and a reader (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003) mark the self-conscious bid to develop a distinctively anthropological approach to landscape. Their central aim is to ‘unpack Western concepts’ of landscape, place, and space (Feld & Basso 1996: 6; cf. Hirsch 1995: 2) and make theoretically visible ‘spatial dimensions of culture’ (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003: 1). The most concerted (and complex) effort to do this is found in Hirsch and O’Hanlon’s volume in which Hirsch argues that the notion of ‘landscape’ as physical surroundings is culturally specific to the modern West (1995: 5). In order to develop a cross-culturally valid notion, he proposes an ego-centred approach in which ‘landscape’ is not a relationship with physical surroundings, but the relationship between two ‘poles of experience’ through which people negotiate everyday social life and practice (1995: 4-5, 22).

Specifically Hirsch defines ‘landscape’ as the ongoing ‘cultural process’ (1995: 5) by which we mentally and imaginatively locate ourselves in the world, through envisaging a ‘background’ and a ‘foreground’ to our existence at each moment, and their dynamic and changeable interplay. This can be understood spatially: being ‘here’ (at a specific location) is understood and experienced at each moment in relation to one or more ‘there’, which form its horizon in terms of my own experience (e.g. in my daily routine the ‘horizon’ for being ‘here’ at the office is being ‘there’ at home; in terms of my movements this month, the horizon for being ‘here’ in Cambridge is being ‘there’ in Italy and so on). However, for Hirsch moving away from a Western understanding of landscape means that we must take into account that people understand persons and their location in the world in culturally specific ways. This helps us to see that the familiar Western ‘place’ and ‘space’ are culturally specific metaphors for mutually constituted vantage points that do not need to involve land, objectively and physically understood, at all. Instead, cultures have specific ways of envisaging the dialectical tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’, understood as the more and less immediate reaches of human agency and personhood, practice and ideal, everyday experience and the ‘background’ to it. For instance, the ‘distant horizon’ for the here and now, which in Western understanding is objectified as ‘space’ and understood through the text-based metaphor of the ‘map’, can in other cultural settings be objectified and understood as a horizon made, for instance, by the stories, memories, and traces of the activities of ancestors (in Amazonia: Gow 1995; in Australia: Layton 1995; Morphy 1995), or by cosmic non-human energies accessed and harnessed via chiefly or shamanic powers (in Mongolia: Humphrey 1995). This approach also helps to denaturalise and relativise the Western notion of ‘landscape’. This seems literal and culturally unmediated (e.g. as a subject’s view of an object, ‘land’, which is given independently of culture and is immediately available to the senses, particularly sight). However, if we adopt Hirsch’s perspective, we can argue that what we call ‘landscape’ is not so much a thing ‘out there’ as the tension between the here and now of the viewer and ‘imagined worlds of being and potential’: for instance Green’s chapter in the volume by Hirsch and O’Hanlon shows that in nineteenth century France the emergence of the idea of ‘paysage’, identified with the countryside and as a space for ‘nature’, was part of how people rethought their position in society, formed a consciousness of class in an urban and urbanising context (Green 1995).

Gell’s contribution to the same volume introduces another way in which ‘landscape’ can be relativised. In an account of Umeda, Papua New Guinea, Gell argues that the actual physical environment which Umeda inhabit shapes the way in which spatial distance and proximity can be experienced. Umeda live in small clearings in thick forest and this ‘imposes a reorganisation of their sensibility’ (1995: 235), which makes hearing (and smell) a much more reliable means of sensing distance and proximity than sight. For instance, it was said that the first group of Umeda ever to visit the coast could not perceive the sea as a receding space, but instead perceived it as a vertical wall of water (1995: 235). Because of this, for Gell the Umeda landscape is first and foremost a ‘soundscape’ arising from the interplay between ambient sound and the body through different qualities of word-sounds which encode the experiences of ‘ambient sound’ and the body as a ‘sounding cavity’ (1995: 240). This is ‘mapped’, i.e. represented, not through visual means (such as maps or other visual images) but by sound ‘images’, specifically through verbal sounds in the local language that iconically render via the culturally specific connotations of consonant sounds the physical extremes of proximity and distance, of the village clearing, and the encircling forest and mountain escarpments. For instance, the sound ‘s’ found in sis for 'mountain' carries connotations of sharpness, danger, etc., making ‘audible’ the mountain, depicting through sounds the physicality of the sharp, tall ridges that constitute the ‘distant horizon’ of Umeda villages (1995: 242). Gell does not, like Hirsch, relativise ‘landscape’ by abstracting the concept from people’s embodied location in the world: instead, he roots culturally constituted landscape in the interplay between the sensing body and its particular surroundings (1995: 252; cf. also Feld 1996).

The interplay between body and surroundings is also explored in Feld and Basso’s volume (1996), which focuses on the idea of ‘place’ and on how from a subjective point of view, people transform ‘sheer physical terrain’ into an ‘existential space’ through their imagination and memory (Casey 1996: 14). In other words, the sensing, attentive subject and the geographical object come together. This crucially occurs through the body, as the vehicle for what could be termed the thoughtful sensing of the environing world (cf. Ingold 2000). For Basso, in culturally diverse ways people attend to their surroundings and in practice certain locations can trigger strong emotions or thoughts ‘of a richly caring kind’ (Basso 1996: 54). So he argues that the relationship with places, like all relationships, is reciprocal: ‘as places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed […] when places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind’ (1996: 55). Through this, ‘places come to generate their own fields of meaning’ (1996: 56). Basso illustrates this by showing the central role of places in how Western Apache develop ‘wisdom’. Apache define ‘wisdom’ as a heightened mental capacity that enables people to avoid harmful events by detecting hidden threats. It is developed by thinking about stories that instruct about wise and unwise ways of behaving, judging situations, etc. These stories for Apache ‘sit’ in places: that is, they feature and are associated with named places, which people visit bodily or in the mind in order to access and recall the narratives on their way to wisdom (1996: 73). Visiting, observing, and learning the names of places is the means to develop wisdom, so that for Basso the Apache’s ‘interior landscape’ – their sense of self and moral imagination (1996: 86) – is crucially constructed in constant interaction with the exterior one.

‘Landscape’ in a changing world

The case study above takes us back to the idea, introduced in an earlier section, that landscapes can be seen as actors in human individual and social life, directly involved with the making and unmaking of relationships and identities. We can see that not only do people use and interpret their surroundings as part of living and inhabiting, but land and surroundings help us ‘interpret ourselves’, so to speak: they feature in narratives we make about ourselves, help us tell ourselves ‘who’ we are individually or collectively. We can talk about being ‘attached’ emotionally to places and landscapes, but it’s almost more as if they were ‘attached’ to us, ‘ours’. There is a dialectic of recognition between familiar surroundings and those for whom they are familiar – the land comes to ‘resemble’ us as we inhabit it, it becomes charged with value insofar as it embodies an image of ourselves. While this may perhaps seem confined to populations, such as Apache, who live both physically and spiritually ‘close’ to the land, this is not the case:

Now that the heat of battle is extinguished, this chaos of soil and stones under a sky so gloomy seems absurd. Thought no longer finds ar elationship between that, which resembles nothing, and we, who have lived so many things in the course of our lives. (Pézard 1974 [1918], author’s translation).

These words, written by an army officer about the devastation in rural Eastern France during the Great War, show that even in this least ‘traditional’ of contexts, landscape is a ground for meaning and identity, so that its destruction causes shock, disorientation, and profound estrangement. So, too, it is in our industrialised, ‘modern’ societies that ‘place annihilation’ (Hewitt 1983) has become one of the most lethal weapons in contemporary warfare, which since World War I includes among its aims the eradication of whole enemy cultures and ways of life (Kramer 2007). It could also be argued, following Pierre Nora (1989), that catastrophic experiences of rupture and dislocation in modernity make people more, not less conscious of ‘places’ (both physical sites, and sites of the imagination) as repositories for belonging and meaning (cf. Filippucci 2010). This includes the conditions of contemporary modernity in which individual and collective experiences of, and relationships with, space are said to be transformed and unsettled by increasingly powerful technologies of speed, virtual connection, and destruction, leading peoples and identities to be displaced and delocalised or even acquire ‘a slippery, nonlocalized quality’ (Appadurai 1996: 48; cf. Connerton 2009; Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Harvey 1989).

So, in conclusion, the study of ‘landscape’ is shown to be anthropologically fertile, a ground for theoretical innovation, and for disclosing core aspects of the human social and cultural experience in a changing world.

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Note on contributor

Dr Paola Filippucci is a Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She studies war memory and commemoration in Europe, focusing on the First World War and its material legacy on the former Western Front. The impact of armed conflict on landscape is a central theme.

Dr Paola Filippucci, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. pf107@cam.ac.uk