Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Modernity

Time

Felix Stein — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:25:09 +0000

Bronze cast by Hugo Wolfgang Rheinhold, c. 1893, depicting multiple temporalities in tension. Picture by Wikimedia.

Initially published 10 Jun 2025

Abstract:

Time, from an anthropological perspective, is culturally specific and inseparable from our understanding of the world and our place in it. Anthropology charts how and to what extent time is culturally constituted, and how, increasingly, these cultural constructs coexist, come into conflict, and colonise each other. This entry introduces time as a field of anthropological inquiry, including its emergence in philosophy and evolutionary thought, and the dialogue between physics’ relativity theory and anthropology’s cultural relativist approach to time. The anthropology of time has asked whether it is a multiple cultural and social construct, and how its multiplicity may be explored ethnographically, be it within a given society, in contexts of socio-cultural contact, or in the context of globalisation. Being attuned to temporal multiplicities enables anthropologists to improve how social and cultural research is conducted and to ask under which circumstances temporal multiplicities can be productive for anthropological theory and practice. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Introduction

Time is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. Ancient and contemporary philosophers have not come to a consensus as to whether time exists independent from the entities and activities within it (Bardon 2024). Physicists of the twentieth century, notably Albert Einstein, made waves by reaffirming that time was not independent of the world, but was in fact conditioned by matter and movement. Their ideas soon reached the humanities, notably philosophy (Bergson 1924; Cassirer 1922) and anthropology. For example, Russian anthropologist Vladimir Bogoraz took Einstein’s famous insight that time is not absolute but depends on the observer, to theorize indigenous accounts of time like those of the Chukchi people in the Russian Far East, whom Bogoraz had studied in the late 19th and early 20th century (1923, 57). He recounts the following story:

A shaman went to distant lands, half-legendary or even entirely fairylands. After a year or two he returns. He is at full strength, in the full bloom of his health, but his home village has completely changed. His dwelling collapsed. His wife and young son disappeared. On the road he meets an old man with a grey beard and asks him about his son. It turns out that this old man is his own son. The shaman came back younger than his son. The two years of traveling … have passed like a whole human life. (1923,19)

In providing these and other stories, Bogoraz was in dialogue with physics’ relativity theory as well as with the work of US-based anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas had argued as early as 1887 that ‘civilisation is not something absolute, but… relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilisation goes’ (1974, 64). Such ‘cultural relativism’ and physics' relativity theory inspired emerging anthropological interest in how people around the world conceive of time. It also inspired comparative literary theory such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1975) who borrowed the concept of the space-time or ‘chronotope’ from Einstein to postulate that space and time are inseparable from our understandings of the world and our place in it.

What this scholarship adds to physics is that time depends not just on the position of the observer but also on the observer's categories of thought, and their society and culture. The view of time as largely socially constructed was formulated systematically by the early twentieth century French sociologist Emile Durkheim ([1912] 1995). He acknowledged that time—along with other ‘principal categories of thought’ such as space, cause, and group (‘species’)—was so fundamental to human lives that it seemed almost inseparable from the functioning of human intellect. Given that human societies were ultimately part of nature and nature has some ‘objective value’, so too do the principal categories of thought, such as time, that humans have developed. However, Durkheim insisted that time was still largely a product of collective thought, as the ways we understand time are strongly determined by our social and cultural methods of dividing, measuring, and expressing it. Our division of time into days, weeks, months, and years corresponds to the regular recurrence of rites and ceremonies, which are ultimately social. As Durkheim put it, ‘it is not my time that is organized in this way; it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization’ ([1912] 1995, 10). For Durkheim, time thus had a mostly social origin even if it was never completely arbitrary.

Durkheim’s argument—that time is a largely social category that, once constructed, exerts power over society—still holds for many anthropologists today. Together with insights from Einstein’s relativity theory and Boas’ ‘cultural relativism’, it allowed scholars to investigate how people around the world make sense of time and to illustrate that seemingly common-sense understandings of it have many viable alternatives. This entry shows that alternative views of time ‘co-evolve’ with Western concepts of it (Fabian 1983) such as the global scale of universal time that underpins world capitalist economies. For anthropology, time is not one but many. This entry charts how this temporal multiplicity has been understood in a changing landscape of anthropological approaches to time, including current work on two forms of relations within such temporal multiplicities: the first consists of relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and assertions of change can be made against it. The second concerns relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Evolutionism, diffusionism, and fieldwork

Even before time became one of the key topics of anthropological research, it already defined the discipline as it was emerging in the nineteenth century. Anthropology aimed to shed light on human history, as explored in Ancient Society (Morgan 1878), that which predated the emergence of the state and industrialised modernity (see also Maine 1861 and Tyler 1871). Yet, unlike archaeology, anthropology was interested in cultures and societies that were contemporary to it and accessible through ethnographic study. These contemporaries, such as Australian Aborigines, were assumed to illustrate ‘early’ stages of social and cultural evolution. The Native American Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were held to illuminate the ‘Heroic age’ of Ancient Greece (Morgan 1851, 120–40). Interested in the ‘lines of human progress’ (Morgan 1878), anthropologists conceived of themselves as located at its forefront, understood to be in Europe. From there, ‘sailing to the ends of the earth’, a scholar was deemed to be ‘in fact travelling [back] in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age’ (Degérando [1800] 1969, 63). Such a temporal ordering of other people’s lives reflected Western intellectual culture, where evolutionary stages were based on oversimplified dichotomies of the ‘primitive’ versus ‘civilised’, ‘backward’ versus ‘modern’, and ‘undeveloped’ versus ‘advanced’.

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, such temporal distinctions were increasingly contested on political grounds, since the subjugation and colonisation of others were frequently justified by postulating others’ ‘backwardness’ (Asad 1973). But on conceptual grounds, this temporal classification had already been contested since the late nineteenth century. The Victorian polymath and originator of eugenics Francis Galton famously argued that evolutionism, which classified human groups along temporal stages with Western cultures as the final stage, overlooked how cultures and societies influenced each other. For example, the line of socio-cultural progress may not stem from ‘simpler’ origins in the remote past to greater complexity in more recent times, but rather from recently ‘civilized’ or colonised originals to equally recent ‘duplicate copies of the same original’ that were nonetheless more ‘primitive’ (Galton 1889).

This was not to say that all insights by evolutionist scholars were wrong. One of the central contributions of evolutionary anthropology’s temporal classification was the discovery of matrilineal kinship and the political prominence of women in many societies. Far from being ‘natural’, patrilineal kinship and rule by men (‘patriarchy’) was shown to be a result of relatively recent accumulation of wealth and development of private property (Morgan 1878; Engels [1884] 1990). Galton’s objection drew anthropological attention to how often this change from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ was not a matter of evolution but that of influence by dominant neighbouring cultures (Rivers 1914, volume II: 90–149). Tracing these lines of influence—the geographical spread of cultures from assumed ‘cradles of civilization’ to their imitative peripheries—came to be called ‘diffusionism’. Diffusionism reinforced the idea that space was enmeshed with time:

Since all historical events occur in space, we must be able to measure the time they needed to spread by the distances that were covered or a reading of time on the clock of the globe (Ratzel 1904, 521, cited in Fabian 1983, 19).

In the twentieth century, time remains a key research tool but in a different sense than in evolutionism or diffusionism. Anthropology develops a temporally distinct understanding of research as being based in ‘fieldwork’, holding that ‘time in the field’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016) should take ‘a year or more’ (Rivers 1913, 7). Initially, field research was often much longer—frequently due to political circumstances that were as a rule un- or under-stated in academic publications. Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)—a study of early twentieth century travel and exchange off the eastern coast of New Guinea—became a manifesto for the method of ‘participant observation’ requiring that researchers not simply interview the people they study but participate in their lives. In creating this method, it was not frequently acknowledged that Malinowski’s fieldwork had only taken this long because he was not allowed to return to Europe during the First World War. As an Austrian citizen, Malinowski was considered an ‘enemy subject’ working on British colonial territory (Young 1984; Baker 1987). Bogoraz’s ethnography mentioned above took place under similarly prolonged circumstances, as it was conducted while he was in political exile in 1889-1899 for socialist activism in imperial Russia (Ssorin-Chaikov 2008).

Temporal multiplicity

Ethnographic fieldwork for ‘a year or more’ made time a research question rather than an answer. Instead of disassembling cultures into multiple layers of human evolution with cultural ‘survivals’ reflecting stages that were ‘once in existence’ (Engels [1884] 1990, 37), or tracking cultural traits over geographical space to measure their diffusion, anthropologists began to explore societies and cultures as largely coherent and self-referential units. This was done by following their internal logic, including when it comes to time.

For instance, kinship had previously been conceived through the lens of either an evolutionary timeline from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ (Morgan 1878) or lines of diffusion on ‘the clock of the globe’ (Ratzel 1904). Now that anthropologists studied groups of people ethnographically, kinship became key to understanding their culturally distinct forms of temporal organisation. A classic example of this is the study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan by British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (1940). Evans-Pritchard argued that the early twentieth century Nuer largely measured time in terms of socially relevant activities, determined by ecological change, such as where they reside during the dry and the rainy seasons of the year. However, the Nuer also conceived of time in a structural way, thinking of it as largely static. In this conception of time it formed an ‘unalterable’ distance ‘between two points, the first and last persons in a line of agnatic [father-based] descent’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 108) and an equally ‘unalterable’ distance between the mythical beginnings of the world and the present—so that the ‘tree under which mankind came into being was still standing in Western Nuerland a few years ago’ (1940, 108). Evans-Prichard’s work shows that time is frequently multiple—differently understood and structured not just from culture to culture but also within cultures, e.g. ecological and structural time.

Similar findings were made elsewhere. In the late 1950s, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz charted ideas of timelessness in Bali which, according to him, underpinned the Balinese calendar. Geertz examined a complex calendar which did not add up to a directional duration of years, as Western calendars would do. Instead, it featured timelessness comprising static cycles, important for religious rituals (Geertz [1966] 1973, 384). However, Geertz noted that Balinese timelessness did not prevent this predominantly Hinduist society from simultaneously noting chronological time such as exact dates, everyday occurrences, or recent historical events. Ritual timeliness coexisted with chronological or linear notions of time. Yet according to Geertz, this chronological time was of ‘distinctly secondary importance’ ([1966] 1973, 391, ft29) to the people he studied. It had emerged not ‘from within’ Balinese society but ‘from without’; that is, from a developing national state ‘whose centre of gravity lay in the cities of Java and Sumatra, where modern notions of time went hand in hand with ideas of a new nation and of youth culture’ (409–10).

Ethnographic studies of time-reckoning in 1930s Sudan and 1950s Bali showcased the many ways in which groups of people can make sense of time. This led to a debate in anthropology on whether time, particularly in its practical, everyday dimensions, is universal or culturally specific (Bloch 1977; Leach 1961; Howe 1981; Gell 1992). As part of these debates, anthropologists’ own temporal assumptions would eventually come under critique.

Temporal othering and global processes

By the 1980s, the relative autonomy of ‘field sites’ that many classical anthropological studies relied on came under question. Much anthropological work had constituted its subjects as ‘the temporal Other’ (Fabian 1983) to modernity. Ethnographies had explicitly or implicitly contrasted the lives of ‘non-modern’ peoples to that of the assumedly modern readers of anthropological work. Our lives responded to history books, calendars, and clocks, while ‘their’ lives were marked by timelessness and the falsely assumed absence of history (Wolf 1982). To remain ‘objective’— true to the reality anthropology charted—scholarship had required distance as evidence that the subjects of study were ‘independently constituted’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2) from the people who studied them. Now, Anthropology had to rethink its own temporal assumptions. Anthropologist became acutely aware that history in fact included the impact of societies where they were coming from on societies that anthropologists explored. Emerging scholarship now had to account for existing relationships of power between anthropologists and the people they explored, which altered the social situations where anthropologists were present as participant observers. This evinced a ‘critical ambivalence’ of the discipline’s desire for objectivity as anthropology faced itself as having been already a part of its own subjects of study’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2).

Several concrete solutions were developed to minimise temporal biases in anthropological research. Firstly, ‘fieldwork locations’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) were no longer thought of as being unaffected by modernity, Western cultures, or capitalist economies. They were no longer deemed to be ‘frozen in time’ or profoundly temporally distinct from Western, modern time. Places where anthropologists conduct fieldwork now appeared not as relation-neutral dots on the map or locally-specific cultural settings but rather as themselves historically produced within broader relations such as capitalist demands for resources: from gold and fur to rubber and oil, from sugar and land to workers or slaves (Mintz 1985; Wolf 1982). Following this insight, ethnography became increasingly ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus 1995), stressing that anthropology in a globalised world is about always-already interconnected spaces between what takes place ‘at home’ (of anthropologists) and in ‘the field’, i.e. the home of their research subjects. This new stance came about through research such as anthropological histories of working-class diets in Britain, which explored how British diets were linked via the North Atlantic Triangle to the changing social organisation of labour in Caribbean plantations, where sugar was produced, and to West Africa, where slaves were traded in exchange for European weapons and other goods (Mintz 1985).

A second remedy to anthropology's temporal biases was the idea of ‘multi-temporal ethnography’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016), a research approach that considers the multiple temporalities of research on the one hand and the multiple temporalities of people that are being researched on the other. Ton Otto’s (2016) ethnography on the Baluan Island in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s gives a clear example of this. Otto was invited to a funeral, after which he decided to walk back to the cemetery to take photos of the grave. For him, time for the photos was part of the ethnographic chronicle of that day. For his hosts, however, returning to the grave so soon after the funeral was dangerous, as the spirits of the dead might return to the funeral site too. The shared time between the ‘ethnographic present’ (research temporalities, including fieldwork photography) overlaps with other forms of presence—such as Baluan temporalities of kinship renewal. Otto describes how his return made his research subjects suspicious of his ritual powers to deal with the haunting pasts of the spirits of the dead. This made Otto not just an observer but also a participant in the Baluan time that he observed.

Global processes affect the shared time between the anthropologists and the people they study. Fieldwork time was institutionalised as part of annual academic rhythms, with a year in the field becoming a norm within the PhD in anthropology. Current work pressures and neoliberal employment insecurity generate more fast-paced research, as well as ‘patchwork ethnography’ (Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020) where shorter fieldwork periods are spread over longer, ‘punctuated’ (Guyer 2007) academic time (Faubion and Marcus 2009; Marcus and Okely 2007). PhD fieldwork stops being a period of academic isolation between anthropology student and supervisor. Instead, it is broken up by continuous email exchanges, proposal writing, and joint ‘improvising theory’ (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). At the same time, this happens amid ‘profound temporal turbulences’ in social and cultural settings that anthropologists explore—when (and because) anthropologists ‘can no longer make assumptions about what is necessary for their method to produce rich ethnographic data—a temporally stable scene and subject of study’ (Rees 2008, 7; Rabinow 2008). The anthropological field study also happens in the context of ‘the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now’ (Marcus 2003). One of Marcus’ examples is the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy caused by a chemical accident which attracted ethnographic research in the area from 1988, yet resulting in a book publication only in 2001 (Fortun 2001).

Globalised capitalism and temporal multiplicities within groups

As a part of global capitalism, the temporalities of people’s bodies, social lives, and consumption are increasingly subsumed to the rhythms of the markets. The globalisation of sushi, for example, shows the market value of tuna depending on how quickly it can be flown to Japanese and global high-end consumers (Bestor 2008). Despite the appearance of sushi and sashimi as traditional Japanese cuisine, it is a mass capitalist invention made possible by international jumbo jets and, within Japan, trucks with highly efficient commercial refrigeration. This research into ‘just in time production’ (Harvey 1989) and more broadly the anthropology of globalisation confirms Karl Marx’s insight that globalised capital and the market-driven industrial division of labour ‘annihilates space by time’ ([1857-1859] 1973, 535). Locations of production and consumption become increasingly closer to one another by sped-up travel.

Ethnographies such as Theodore Bestor’s reveal homogenised timetabling on a global scale, which anthropologists and historians of science research as ‘empires of time’ (Aventi 1990; Galison 2004). In 1883, the adoption of Standard Railway Time for North America meant that the residents of Cornwall, Ontario, had to set their clocks back five minutes and forty-five seconds to achieve synchronicity with the rest of the rail network (Stein 2001). That same year, a convention of railroad executives in Chicago standardised five time zones for North America on the basis of British Greenwich Mean Time. This was a precursor to the International Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington, DC, where the global scale of universal time was agreed upon to consist of 24 time zones, counted from the initial meridian for longitude passing through the Greenwich Royal Observatory, with a universal calendar based on a 24-hour day beginning at midnight in Greenwich (Stephens 1983; Ogle 2015; Kern 2003).

As such, a calendar is homogenised globally; it comes with the homogenisation of ‘the money economy’ which was demonstrated to come hand in hand with ‘the universal diffusion of pocket watches’ (Simmel [1903] 1950, 412), alongside the equally homogeneous and clear-cut boundaries between work and rest, busyness and idleness—including culturally new experiences of boredom, as in the case of Australian Aboriginal Walpiri after clock time was introduced to them (Musharbash 2007). Ethnographies have shown how quantitative time creates qualitative temporal relations. For instance, Karen Davies (1994) illustrates the tension between clock or linear time, which takes its cues from economic principles (wage labour, punctuality), and what she calls ‘process time’ or temporal relations oriented on respect, empathy, and affection for care-receivers in Swedish day nurseries. Michael Crawley explores Ethiopian long-distance runners who use digital self-tracking devices and identify themselves not as individuals competing in natural time but as parts of groups who expend energy synchronously and suffer together ‘on the part of the self … [and] on behalf of others’ as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians (2021, 662).

Standardised forms of reckoning time were imposed on different cultures and societies at different times (Aventi 1990; Stern 2012, 2021) and locations (Shresta 2015). Current research on this harkens back to the classical point made by sociologist Pitirim Sorokin that while temporal standards take the form of quantitative time, they coexist with ‘full-blooded’ sociocultural time within different social groups consisting of their own rhythms, pulsations, and conventions, including calendars. For example, the Harvard University calendar is quite different from the Boston working-class calendar ‘in regard to holidays, beginning and the end of the “school” and factory year’ (Sorokin 1943, 197).

Temporal hierarchies

The temporal multiplicities that we see playing out on a global scale filter down into people’s daily lives as hierarchies. For example, in late August 1994, I was traveling in Central Siberia with Evenki hunters and reindeer herders to the Katonga village on a tributary of the Yenisei River that divides Western and Eastern Siberia. My co-travellers were to bring their children to boarding school by September 1 for the beginning of the school year (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 26). The trip lasted two days and began in the ecological time of hunting and herding, which was imprecise from the perspective of the school calendar. Travel itself, with the hunters, herders, and their children riding reindeer, depended on how difficult it was to cross rivers, and how far we were before it got dark. We ended up being several hours late for the start of school.

September 1 designates a ‘day of knowledge’ in the Russian national calendar. It marks the beginning of the school year that has quantitative dimensions marking hours and minutes for lessons, breaks between them, fixed times for meals—all that being very different from both the activities and daily schedule in reindeer herding and hunting camps. The ‘day of knowledge’ celebration involved a pupils’ parade and calling out all new students by name, upon which they were to step forward from their line and loudly reply, ‘Here!’ When a pupil is absent, the head teacher would say, ‘Ah, [he or she is still] in the forest’, marking a hierarchical difference between the time of the state and that of people’s ordinary lives. Hierarchy can be used to structure all aspects of temporal multiplicity, be it what goes after what (‘sequencing’), exactly when things are done (‘timing’), and through what visions of the past, present, and future activities should be interpreted (Munn 1992, 116).

Hierarchy can even govern more subtle temporal multiplicities. Anthropologist Nancy Munn, who studied the ritual trade of kula shells on the eastern coast of New Guinea during the second half of the twentieth century, showed that gift-giving generates its own time. As an ‘action system’, it produces temporal circles of cyclical obligations to give and reciprocate, and the line-like time of movement of canoes between islands. Munn argues that this inter-island movement and the circulation of shells among people ‘was not in or through time and space, but that they form (structure) and constitute (create) the spacetime manifold in which they “go on”’ (1983, 280). Hierarchy plays a role here, as both obligations and canoe movements can be ‘relatively slow’ and difficult or, conversely, ‘speedy’ and easy. They depend on people’s navigational skills, correlating the social skills and power (‘fame’) of people who give and receive gifts.

In the Evenki case, moving from the forest to the village school was conceived during the Soviet era as symbolising ‘the great removal’ up another line-like process: the evolution from ‘primitive’ to ‘scientific’ communism (Bloch 2004; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 140–69). There are also two cyclical times at play here: that of the school calendar and that of the annual ecological movement in Siberian reindeer herding. Being punctual or not in quantitative time makes visible hierarchical arrangements of the disciplined and the undisciplined, village versus forest lifestyles, educated teachers versus ‘ignorant’ children—and ultimately the school teachers’ temporal distinctions of modern and non-modern.

When the movement is ‘relatively slow’ and difficult (we were late), school teachers were to wait for the children that were travelling with us. In this example, the teachers, i.e. people in power, were made to wait. Yet, according to recent ethnographies of waiting, waiting is usually something that people in more vulnerable structural positions must do, such as waiting in line for medical or social services or staying at a refugee camp as ‘a waiting zone’ outside of society (Auyero 2012; Janeja and Bandak 2018, 7; Jacobsen, Karlsen and Khosravi 2021). Ethnographies of time reveal waiting as a technology of governance where power is exercised through claims on other people’s time (Bourdieu 2000, 227–30). Under state socialism, making people queue became ubiquitous of not just chronic shortages of goods and ‘distributive power’ of sellers and the apparatchik (Verdery 1991), but of the ‘etatization of time' (Verdery 1996: 39-58), i.e. the increase of state control over it. However, in this Evenki case, power is exercised over people of authority such as teachers and state bureaucrats. Waiting for the Evenki to be on time is part of a longer waiting for them to move up developmental time—waiting for history to be made.

These examples highlight the hierarchical relations between different understandings of time. One kind of time, such as ecological time or waiting time, works to affirm or challenge or indeed frustrate other kinds of temporal organisation, such as calendar school time or the time of progress. Current anthropological work focuses on relations within temporal multiplicities, which are at least two: relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and in doing so falsifying or replacing others, and relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other.

Change and exchange

One notorious example for how one conception of time replaces another is the conflict between Christianity and Western science. Christian and Western scientific understandings of time are not completely opposed. The concept of singular, natural, linear time has one of its points of origin in Christianity, as a projection of Christ’s biography onto generational biblical time from Adam to Abraham (McCarthy 1997). Christian teachings also underpin the term ‘temporality’ that refers to the condition of existing within a time that is itself temporary. ‘Temporality’ originally meant worldly or secular possessions or revenues of the church or clergy as opposed to God who is ‘eternal’, that is, timeless. The term ‘temporality’ became useful in anthropology to refer to the notions of time that themselves change historically and across cultures, highlighting time-related specificity (Guyer 2007; Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016).

Today, natural time tends to claim truth over Christian time with regard to our understanding of when the world originated and of where time might lead. Natural time also states what is timeless, namely, the laws of nature. Changing from Christian to natural time is often conceived of as part of ‘progress’, as opposing these two conceptions of time is associated with broader intellectual and political questions of what constitutes scientific truth. The time of ‘predestination’ (Weber [1905] 1992) and of religiously sanctioned hierarchies (Kantorowicz 1997), differs from the Darwinist survival of the fittest. Conflicts between conceptions of time have been reflected in state ideologies and popular culture, including fiction (Beer 1980) and material artefacts. For example, the statue in picture 1 is a famous 1893 bronze cast made by German sculptor Hugo Rheinhold, entitled 'Ape with skull', about 30 centimetres high. On it, the biblical quote 'eritis sicut deus' (‘you will be as gods’) warns us against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It restates the temporality of the fall from Eden as that of ascent of Man. The inscription features in the open book of a pile of the works of Darwin, atop of which sits an ape contemplating a human skull and holding a drawing compass with one of its feet. The statue illustrates different conceptions of time in competition with one another.

Picture 1: Ape with skull, source: Wikipedia.

ape.jpeg

Moreover, it demonstrates how meanings of time are created by where such artefacts are placed. Copies of this bronze cast are on public display at institutions of biology and medicine such as the Boston Medical Library, the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology, the Medical Library of Queen’s University, Canada, etc. Yet, the original holds pride of place in the Kremlin Museum's collection of Vladimir Lenin's belongings. The political leader of Soviet Russia had received it as a gift from a young American businessman, Armand Hammer, who visited him in 1921. As a gift, the figurine received an unintended yet well-fitting Marxist meaning: ‘You will be as gods’ was taken to refer to building a new and radically different society. The Museum catalogue highlights this gift as a sign of international ‘affection and respect… of the world’s first socialist state’ (emphasis added; Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 2; 48)—a gift of gratitude following the gift of revolution.

Even secular conceptions of time are frequently opposed. Marxist perspectives of time have been challenged by capitalist understandings of it. Eastern European socialism lost out to capitalism, in part because it constituted a different temporal logic. Socialism placed frequent focus on longer, even historic temporal scales, while capitalism placed a great premium on turnover times when producing goods, and remains obsessed with the constant compression of decision-making and other productive activities (Verdery 1996, 35). Socialism and capitalism also constituted different “chronotopes” i.e. unities of time and space specific to a particular narrative of who is ahead and who is history (Sosnina and Ssorin-Chaikov 2009). While capitalism always moves ‘forward’ in time towards neoliberalism, postsocialism can in some locations be seen to remain at least partially stuck in times of Soviet or imperial rule (Hann 2002; Müller 2019).

Thinking of time in terms of exchange highlights additional temporal aspects. Timing makes all the difference in exchange, not least when exchanging across different temporalities. Consider the following example where two kinds of time—those of the market and of gifts—work together. In 1921, the Volga River region and the Ural Mountains of Soviet Russia experienced a massive famine. Armand Hammer (mentioned above), an American graduate of Columbia Medical School, visited the country, bringing medical supplies for the relief of a typhus epidemic that accompanied the famine. In the Urals he was surprised to see stockpiles of various commodities such as fur and precious stones, which could be used to purchase grain internationally and alleviate hunger. Hammer was told that the time that it would take to trade these commodities would make the delivery of grain too late to save lives. He solved this by telegraphing the US to ask for credit to purchase grain and ship it to Russia. In addition to obtaining credit, Hammer conducted his trade at a time when the US market price for grain was at its lowest. Grain, a commodity for which he ultimately received payment from the Soviet authorities, immediately circulated as humanitarian aid. It became a gift given by the Soviet state with the help of US credit to alleviate starvation. In this example, time can be considered Hammer’s main gift. He provided timely grain, obtained timely credit, and purchased grain at the best possible market time. As he arranged this gift of grain, the temporalities of markets and gifts complemented each other, and ultimately became intermeshed. Market and gift temporalities existed in parallel and were used as resources for one another. After Hammer arranged this, Lenin invited him for a visit, making him an offer to start American commercial operations in Soviet Russia, while Hammer gave him the above sculpture in return (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 39–42).

Exchange across temporalities also occurs in other contexts. Studying container ship navigation on the Hooghly river in India, Laura Bear (2014) charts how multiple temporalities of global capitalism and river ecology converge. Navigating container ships means dealing simultaneously with the ecological time of the highly unstable Hooghly river, with temporal demands of the international shipping trade, with the rhythms of bureaucratic decision making, and with the temporal affordances of predictive shipping technology. The mastery of ship navigation mediates between them, as river pilots attempt to reconcile ultimately incommensurable temporal rhythms through a slowly acquired art of navigation. Doing so is increasingly difficult in times of a cost-cutting public sector, which raises the risk of accidents. If a ship runs ashore, the accident may be understood in terms of the pilot’s lack of experience, and result in individual punishment and stigma. Yet, navigation is much more than an individual act. It is an attempt to balance the heterogenous times of capitalism (Bear 2016) with the temporalities of bureaucracy, infrastructure, and the natural world.

Other examples of the fruitful interplay of temporal multiplicities comes from studies of highly financialised environments where stockbrokers draw on global time differences between stock exchanges in, for example, Tokyo, Chicago, and London (Miyazaki 2003; Zaloom 2006). The same commodity—such as grain and its futures —may have its prices fluctuating differently in these different stock exchanges. Commodity futures can themselves be seen as different temporal states, the trade of which can drive markets up or lead to market crises (Stout 2016). Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that ‘time is money’ (Weber [1905] 1992, 14-16) applies, as some ethnographies demonstrate, even to the temporal difference between offices within the same global company. When headquarters in the West go to work, regional offices in an Eastern time zone may face pressure, and hierarchical exchange relations between them may mean that work time in the East spills over to ‘private’ home time (Karasyeva and Momzikova 2019). Within many financialised companies, the speed of work becomes a commodity in and of itself, both in face-to-face exchange, in screen-based trade (Zaloom 2006), and in the work of management consultants, frequently hired to speed up corporate activity (Stein 2017; 2018). In these contexts, work speed drives upward mobility and constitutes the social capital of ‘go-getters’ in banks and other corporations (Chelcea 2015; Ho 2009).

Conclusion: Time and the Anthropocene

The anthropology of time has provided us with rich insight into the different ways in which humans make sense of time, into how temporal multiplicities coexist and compete with one another, and into how anthropological research must be aware of its own temporal assumptions. One of the futures of the anthropology of time is in addressing the ecological insecurities of the Anthropocene. For instance, Lukas Ley’s recent ethnography charts rising ocean levels that affect the urban landscape in Semarang, central Java, where housing and urban infrastructure are being built on ‘borrowed time’ (Ley 2021). A similarly temporal sense of urgency to ‘think like a climate’ explores new motivations to use energy efficient housing which may shield its inhabitants from a climate-insecure future (Knox 2020). The Anthropocene compels us to think from the point of view of ‘deep time’ (Irvine 2020) that refers to long-term temporality of Earth as a planet. We need to compare conflicting temporal scales of geological time and the temporal dangers of capitalist extraction, production, and consumption (Chakrabarty 2018; Povinelli 2016). Capitalist time frequently works through the ‘evacuation of the near future’ (Guyer 2007) which includes creating incentives to consume now and to generate new forms of debt that one might repay later, but which one might also try to refinance and defer perpetually. The risks of human impact on the climate signal that this ‘evacuation of the near future’ may itself be evacuated. The Anthropocene invites ‘critical thinking … across some of the divisions that existed before’ (Haraway at al. 2016, 541; Moore 2016; Mathews 2020; Chakrabarty 2018). However, it also foregrounds its own secular and singular and true meaning of time over other temporal multiplicities if they are used to deny the risks of ongoing climate change. The possibility of human decline challenges us to consider not just the time of our lifespans but also the greater finality of human life and human time, no matter how it is culturally conceived.

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Note on contributor

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. His publications include books: The social life of the state in Subarctic Siberia (2003, Stanford University Press) and Two Lenins: A brief anthropology of time (2017, HAU Malinowski Monographs), and articles: “Rethinking performativity: Ethnographic conceptualism” (2020, Journal of Cultural Economy); “Reassembling history and anthropology in Russian anthropology” (2019, Social Anthropology); “Hybrid peace: Ethnographies of war” (2018, Annual Review of Anthropology). He edited the exhibition catalogue Gifts to Soviet leaders (2006, Kremlin Museum) and a “Forum on the New Far Right” (2021, Social Anthropology).

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Medical pluralism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 17 Jun 2021 18:37:25 +0000

Venera Khalikova

Chinese University of Hong Kong

Initially published 17 Jun 2021

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

Abstract:

Medical pluralism describes the availability of different medical approaches, treatments, and institutions that people can use while pursuing health: for example, combining biomedicine with so-called traditional medicine or alternative medicine. If we look closely at how people deal with illness, navigating between home remedies, evidence-based medicines, religious healing, and other alternatives, we can notice that some degree of medical pluralism is present in every contemporary society. As a concept, medical pluralism lies at the heart of the discipline of medical anthropology, which owes its birth to the study of non-Western medical traditions and their encounters with biomedicine. This entry describes the history of debates in the scholarship on medical pluralism, the search for an appropriate terminology, and current theoretical and methodological developments. In the 1960–1980s, many studies were focused on patients and their strategies of choosing a ‘medical system’ from a plurality of options. In the 1980–1990s, the notions of medical systems and medical traditions came under severe criticism for their inability to describe how medical thought and practice change over time, often being too eclectic to fit single systems or traditions. As a result, anthropologists began investigating patient-doctor negotiations of treatment, their diverse health ideologies, as well as the role of political-economic factors in shaping the hierarchies of medical practice. Additionally, scholars began examining the processes of state regulation and institutionalisation of medical traditions (for example, as ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ [CAM] in Europe and North America). This opened the field of medical anthropology to new debates, terminology, and geographical horizons that are trying to account for the pluralist nature of medicine in the twenty-first century. Transnational migration, the Internet, the rise of alternative medical industries, and the global flow of medical goods and knowledge all serve as catalysts for ever-more pluralistic health-seeking practices and ideologies.

Introduction

Medical pluralism describes the availability of different approaches, treatments, and institutions that people use to maintain health or treat illness. Most commonly, medical pluralism entails the use of Western medicine (or ‘biomedicine’) and what is variously termed as ‘traditional medicine’ and ‘alternative medicine’. For example, cancer patients might complement chemotherapy with acupuncture and religious healing; or women who want to get pregnant might combine hormonal treatment with home remedies and Yoga. Scholars of medical pluralism have used different terms such as traditional, indigenous, folk, local, or alternative medicine, but since they all imply distinction from biomedicine, this entry will refer to them as ‘nonbiomedical’ practices.

As a theoretical framework, medical pluralism was developed in the second half of the twentieth century to examine local medical traditions in their diversity, co-existence, and competition, especially with biomedicine. These studies were central to the establishing of the field of medical anthropology. In the context of today’s globalisation, medical pluralism retains its analytical importance, especially in the examination of people’s search for alternative cures locally and transnationally, the growing consumer market of ‘holistic’, ‘traditional’, and ‘natural’ treatments, and the attempts of many countries to incorporate alternative treatments into national healthcare.

While early anthropologists used to focus on local medical traditions in non-Western societies, contemporary scholars examine the place of plural medicine in all societies, including Europe and North America. This shift expanded the scope and terminology with which we describe medical pluralism, for example, by including ‘integrative medicine’ or ‘alternative and complementary medicine’ (or, ‘CAM’). Although there are differences in the usage of these terms, broadly speaking, integrative medicine means that one medical provider offers both biomedicine and nonbiomedical elements as part of a holistic treatment course, while CAM refers to procedures outside biomedicine.

Anthropological studies examine nonbiomedical practices from multiple perspectives, illuminating the role of patients, doctors, markets, and governments in shaping them. As this entry will show, medical pluralism as a concept enables analyses of medicine beyond the dualism of Western/non-Western, modern/traditional, or local/global, by showing how all medical knowledge and practice, be that biomedicine or some regional tradition, is inherently plural, ever-changing, and culturally porous. Such realisation was a result of scholarly debates that problematised the concepts of a medical ‘system’, ‘tradition’, and ‘pluralism’ themselves, as explained in the first section of this entry. The entry then describes the studies of how medical pluralism is influenced and regulated by the state, followed by the studies of medical pluralism in relation to the discourses on modernity, science, and efficacy; gender; and globalisation.^[1]

Medical ‘system,’ ‘tradition,’ and ‘pluralism’

Anthropological interest in non-Western medicine dates to the early twentieth century when W.H.R. Rivers (1924) proposed that medicine should be treated as a separate system of knowledge. However, it was only in the 1950s that medical systems began emerging as a focus of anthropological studies. Although the term ‘medical pluralism’ had not yet been introduced, scholars like George Foster (1953) showed the importance of accounting for the impact of colonial and global processes on local medicine, which can result in the eclecticism of medical concepts and therapies as practiced in people’s everyday lives.

The studies of medical pluralism proper began in the late 1970s–early 1980s, when anthropologists launched a comparative study of Asian medicine, exemplified by an influential volume, Asian medical systems (1976), edited by Charles Leslie. The title and content of this volume, as well as the definition of medical pluralism as ‘differentially designed and conceived medical systems’ in a single society (Janzen 1978: xviii), show that a central concept in these studies was ‘system’ (see also Kleinman 1978; Leslie 1978, 1980; Press 1980). In line with how anthropologists studied kinship systems or religious systems, medical anthropologists sought to understand and classify heterogeneous medical knowledge and practice as holistic ‘systems’. This often entailed the assumption that each medical system is characterised by unique epistemology, disease etiology (origins and causes of diseases), and corresponding diagnostic and healing methods. For example, Unani medicine, which is a Greco-Arabic tradition practised in contemporary South and Central Asia, is a medical system because it has an elaborate understanding of body and bodily processes as affected by four humors (elements) which need to be maintained in certain balance to avoid sickness. If a person falls sick, a trained Unani specialist can employ a variety of techniques to identify the type of abnormality in the balance of humors and prescribe a treatment to restore a healthy humoral state.

In attempts to classify medical systems, scholars used various criteria. Some took a geographical scale to make a distinction between local systems (folk medicine), regional systems (like Unani medicine or traditional Chinese medicine), and cosmopolitan medicine (Dunn 1976). Others used disease etiology, proposing that all medical systems are either ‘personalistic’, when a disease is explained as a result of a purposeful action of a human, god, or other actors, and ‘naturalistic’, when a disease is thought to be caused by non-personal forces such as weather or humors (Foster 1976). Other scholars chose writing as a criterion to distinguish ‘little-tradition medicine’ that did not have written accounts from the ‘great-tradition medicine’ that was based on medical texts (Leslie 1976; Obeyesekere 1976, borrowing from Redfield 1956).

However, the attempt to present medical knowledge as consisting of independent, ‘differentially designed and conceived’ systems was quickly recognised as problematic because it downplayed important mutual developments and influences: for example, so-called folk medicine can borrow ideas and methods from regional medicine like Ayurveda, which itself can be influenced by other regional medicines and cosmopolitan biomedicine. Similar problems arise when medical pluralism is defined through the notion of ‘tradition’, for example, as ‘the coexistence in a single society of divergent medical traditions’ (Durkin-Longley 1984: 867). Without critical reflection, the term ‘tradition’ can inadvertently present medical knowledge and practices as something continuous and unchanged since ancient times. In reality, medical ‘traditions’ are ever-changing and quickly respond to socioeconomic processes, which makes them just as modern as biomedicine. Moreover, the idea of ‘divergent traditions’ can be overly reductionist because it presents medical knowledge and practices as belonging to distinct, separable entities uniform throughout large culture areas, while in fact they are often intertwined, heterogeneous, and varied.

It is therefore not surprising that medical anthropologists have struggled to define medical pluralism itself. How can we write about a plurality of traditions, if traditions are themselves plural? To address this problem, scholars have emphasised that medical ‘systems’ and ‘traditions’ are to be understood as analytical constructs, not as real separable areas of medical knowledge with apparent internal homogeneity and rigid boundaries (Nordstrom 1988; Waxler-Morrison 1988). It has also been argued that the idea of distinct ‘systems’ or ‘traditions’ is divorced from how patients and even doctors themselves understand and use various medicines (Khalikova 2020; Naraindas, Quack & Sax 2014; Mukharji 2016). For example, Marc Nichter documented how healers in South India provided a unique blend of therapies and medicines tailored to patients’ pockets and preferences (Nichter 1980). This phenomenon of mixing and blending different medical approaches is sometimes termed ‘medical syncretism’ (see Baer 2011: 419).

Beside medical syncretism, scholars have experimented with other analytical conceptualisations such as eclecticism and hybridity (Brooks, Cerulli & Sheldon 2020) to highlight how seemingly distinct medical traditions can be practiced in eclectic and entangled ways, where every doctor-patient encounter entails a negotiation of diverse medical ideas and treatments resulting in a unique outcome to the extent of unrecognisable amalgamation. Other scholars prefer the notion of the ‘therapeutic itineraries’, i.e., ‘precise pathways taken by patients’, as well as their reasons for choosing and staying with chosen treatment courses (Orr 2012). Yet other anthropologists use the term ‘medical diversity’ to describe mixtures, borrowings, and intersections of various therapeutic ideas, methods, and attitudes (Krause, Alex & Parkin 2012).

All these examples highlight that the studies of medical pluralism quickly pushed anthropologists to examine how medicine is practiced. Even before postmodern critiques of the notion of culture as a bounded entity, and before the emergence of theoretical frameworks that emphasised practice and agency, some medical anthropologists had already began examining medicine as it unfolds in practice: in doctor-patient relations and patient’s health-seeking strategies. Studies of the ‘hierarchy of medical resort’ (Romanucci-Ross 1969), for example, questioned when and why people choose one therapeutic option over another: Do people ‘shop around’, seeking multiple therapies for a single disease, or do they use different therapies for different kinds of illness? Do patients use various treatments simultaneously or sequentially? As a result of studying such questions, scholars demonstrated the importance of cultural, medical, and socioeconomic factors that lead to various scenarios. People’s choices can depend on a disease type, its folk interpretations, patients’ social status, their worldview, available information, as well as the cost and accessibility of treatment (Gould 1965; Beals 1976).

Another line of studies utilised decision-making models—a term borrowed from cognitive anthropology. These models embody a concern with how people choose a treatment, rather than what they choose and in which order (Garro 1998; Janzen 1978; Young 1981). The emphasis is on cognitive aspects of health-seeking behaviour, conversations about medical options, and the pragmatic aspects of decision-making. For example, people often make medical decisions by consulting their relatives or accepting what is given to them by senior family members: parents choose treatments for children, husbands for wives, and adults for elderly parents. This centrality of kinship in medical pluralism was an important finding of the studies of therapeutic decision-making (Janzen 1978; 1987).

Another milestone in the theorisation of medical pluralism was the recognition that it is present in Western societies too. While traditional medicine was initially mostly studied in non-Western and postcolonial societies in contrast to a single ‘cosmopolitan medicine’, scholars soon demonstrated that even in seemingly homogenous or developed societies like the US, medicine is pluralistic by nature (Leslie & Young 1992; Kleinman 1980). If we look closely at how people deal with illness, alternating between biomedical drugs or home remedies, psychotherapy or religious healing, osteopathy or chiropractic, and other alternatives (Naraindas 2006; Zhang 2007), we can see that medical pluralism is present in every contemporary society. Moreover, biomedicine itself is pluralistic: its practitioners ascribe to various conceptions of health and illness, healthcare services differ significantly, including across the private and public sectors, and established and experimental biomedical treatments co-exist and compete with one another.

Thus, rather than juxtaposing Western and non-Western therapies (as was done by Rivers in the early twentieth century), medical anthropologists since the 1970–1980s have been interested in both differences as well as similarities between biomedicine and other medical approaches. Medical pluralism thus provided an important framework that broke away from a reductionist dichotomy of biomedicine versus ethnomedicine, or the West versus the rest. From this perspective, biomedicine could be studied as yet another tradition, one of many options that patients around the world use.

However, biomedicine is not a neutral option at par with other medicines. Scholars of medical pluralism have highlighted its hierarchical nature: nonbiomedical traditions often occupy a subordinate position to hegemonic biomedicine in terms of social prestige, education, employment opportunities, and funding (Baer 1989, 2011). For example, biomedical doctors often secure higher salaries and social respect than alternative medical providers (but not always, see Kim 2009). Critical medical anthropologists have argued that the spread of biomedicine across the world is premised on coercive factors, including the colonial past and biomedicine’s alignment with the state power, rather than on ‘natural development’ or medical superiority of biomedicine (Lock & Nguyen 2010; Young 1981).

Nevertheless, contrary to the logic of modernisers who argue for biomedicine’s technological advantage, local therapies did not die out. Why not? Some scholars suggested that this had to do with people’s dissatisfaction with biomedicine and perceptions that traditional medicine is better suited for local illnesses, safer and does not produce side-effects (Farquhar 1994: 19; Lock 1980: 259). Other scholars emphasised the doctors’ perspectives: alternative and biomedical practitioners occupy different medical niches and catered to distinct clientele (Waxler-Morrison 1988; Leslie 1992).

The above-mentioned questions and answers were shaped by the fact that most theoretical work on medical pluralism was based in colonial and postcolonial contexts. Colonialism had a colossal impact on scholars’ interpretations of local medical knowledge and practice. Both in public health policies and writings of early medical anthropologists, a frequently idealised Western medicine was conceived of as a yardstick against which other healing practices should be evaluated. Today, scholars are increasingly critical about the dichotomies of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ medicine, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ medicine, or even ‘science’ and ‘belief’. Moreover, contemporary medical anthropologists pay attention to the hierarchies that exist among nonbiomedical systems and within biomedicine itself.

Nevertheless, the residue of such dichotomies can still be found in the academic literature and in public discourse, where the new terms of ‘complementary and alternative medicine’ may unwittingly reinforce the subjugated place of nonbiomedical knowledge and practice. Often the subjugated place results from the lack of legitimation of nonbiomedical therapies by the state. How and why the state regulates medical pluralism is, therefore, another prominent area of scholarly inquiry. Studies that focus on global political economic inequalities often do so to disentangle the multiplicities and hierarchies of medical practice, especially as influenced by state ideologies and transnational markets.

The state

Today, most governments take an active role in regulating medical pluralism: they can either ban alternative medicine as ‘quackery’ and ‘pseudoscience’, provide ways to integrate it partially into biomedical infrastructure, or provide it with full support as a standalone institution (Adams & Li 2008; Berger 2013; Kloos 2013; Lock 1990; Scheid 2002). How do governments make such decisions? Why are some medical traditions denied legitimation while others are promoted? What is at stake when a nonbiomedical tradition is officially recognised? What kind of transformations occur in its ontology and epistemology after its legitimation and institutionalisation? What are the implications for practitioners, patients, and society in general? These are some central questions raised in the studies that investigate the relations between medical pluralism and the state.

A government’s support for nonbiomedical treatments can be a strategic move to conform to international directives, especially after the 1970–1980s, when the World Health Organization (WHO) promoted the integration of traditional therapies as ‘a means of accessing gaps in service provision’ (Hampshire & Owusu 2013: 247-8). ‘Filling the gap’ is a common trope in official rhetoric in countries with large rural populations where biomedical services and institutions are limited. Here a standardised, regulated alternative medicine is presented as a necessary means to achieve a common good. However, more critically, the recognition of alternative medicine can also be seen as the government’s failure to provide accessible and affordable biomedical care, pushing people to rely on services of ‘a large, unregulated, unqualified medical cadre of practitioners’, as argued by some scholars in the case of India (Sheehan 2009: 138). Similarly, in post-Soviet Cuba, the government partially incorporated traditional herbal medicine into the healthcare system as a strategy to disguise massive shortages in biomedical pharmaceuticals after the decline in supply from countries of the socialist block (Brotherton 2012: 46).

In multicultural contexts, the legitimation of alternative medicine can be also taken as the government’s responsibility to satisfy popular demand. Often associated with migrant populations, plural and ‘culturally sensitive medicine’ is at times demanded as citizens’ rights. Some scholars have pointed out the importance of providing non-discriminatory medical services to migrants, especially to those who may not share a biomedical model of health and disease (Chavez 2003). Others go as far as to argue that integrating nonbiomedical healing should be a goal for modern democratic governments as that would recognize the rights and identities of minority groups. For example, the official healthcare system in Israel includes many alternative medical modalities, but not Arab herbal medicine, indicating that the cultural preferences of the Arab minority may remain undermined (Keshet & Popper-Giveon 2013).

An important insight from the literature on the state shows that governments are selective about the degree of legitimacy and support they provide to medical traditions. Thus, medical pluralism can become a mechanism for and the end product of carefully planned and instituted government efforts for managing population and economy. For example, by analysing the New Order government of Indonesia under President Suharto, Steve Ferzacca (2002) proposes to understand medical pluralism as a form of state rule. Ferzacca demonstrates how the Indonesian government manipulated the plurality of medical practices by recognising and promoting only those that fit into the overarching ideology of ‘development’.

Another example of selective legitimation of nonbiomedical knowledge and practice is demonstrated by Helen Lambert (2012). She highlights how medical pluralism is characterised by the ‘hierarchies of legitimacy’ when the government grants support to Ayurveda, Yoga and other text-based medical systems, while the practitioners of local traditions, like bonesetters in India, remain at the ‘margins of government legitimation’, even though they are seen as experts in their local communities.

This is important, because to nonbiomedical doctors, official recognition brings visibility, further societal acceptance, and legal employment (Blaikie 2016). Once a medical tradition is granted official status, its practitioners can demand higher salaries, better facilities, funding, and more opportunities. In contrast, healers who are left outside government legitimation face the danger of losing community respect, losing clientele, and gradually disappearing (Hampshire & Owusu 2013; Kleinman 1980). At the same time, Linda Connor (2004) argues that state legitimation does not necessarily affect people’s medical preferences: in an ethnographic study of residents of Australian suburbs, she demonstrates that people often choose nonbiomedical treatments outside the official healthcare settings for their perceived effectiveness and imagined ‘natural’ qualities in contrast to pharmaceutical drugs.

A related outcome of the professionalisation of traditional medicine is the marginalisation of women’s knowledge. In Ghana, Kate Hampshire and Samuel Owusu (2013) have observed that the government’s efforts to ‘professionalise’ traditional healing have led to the dominance of male practitioners who had means and connections to become ‘professional’ doctors. In contrast, women lacked those means, which created a context for a potential loss of their traditional knowledge, particularly concerning children’s illness.

However, even officially sanctioned and integrated medical traditions face many challenges, including the problem of ‘translation’, when the state, biomedical healthcare, or the market appropriate local medical knowledge by ignoring, undermining, or transforming its value system (Bode 2008; Cho 2000; Craig 2012; Janes 1995; Saks 2008). For example, due to ideological pressures from the Chinese government, certain procedures of Tibetan medicine have been pushed to the periphery of practice as being ‘religious’ and ‘unscientific’ (Adams, Schrempf & Craig 2010). In a similar way, in India, bhūtavidyā — one of the eight branches of Ayurveda, which deals with non-human entities — has been discounted by many contemporary Ayurvedic patients and doctors (Naraindas 2014: 112-3; Hardiman 2009).

Even if institutionalisation does not result in a distortion of meaning and repertoire of traditional medicine, it nevertheless transforms flexible healing practices into coherent units of standardised therapies, imposing therapeutic normativity and orthopraxy. This means that only select medical texts, ideas, and procedures along with their ‘correct’ interpretations get to be included in medical education and training; doctors must follow these normative ways of doing medicine if they wish to remain in institutional settings. For example, the institutionalisation of traditional Chinese medicine in the 1950s was accompanied by measures to ‘define, delimit, name, and “purify”’ select practices to comply with the communist ideology (Farquhar 1994: 14-5). Also, the professionalisation of traditional medicine affects how medical knowledge is transmitted and learned. While traditional medical knowledge is often passed through apprenticeship from a teacher to one or several students, state involvement often brings the introduction of a college system, which may break a vertical structure of teacher-student and elder-younger relations (Farquhar 1994: 15; Smith & Wujastyk 2008: 7).

As various political and social actors have high stakes in promoting a particular medical ideology, medical anthropologists have been careful to show the existence of heterogeneous powers within governments as well as rival groups of citizens, their competing claims about medical traditions, and various ideological positions embedded in those claims (Khan 2006). For example, because of the co-constituted relations between Western imperialism and biomedicine, the ‘revival’ of ‘indigenous’ medical systems is often embedded in anti-colonialist and nationalist discourses (Langford 2002). In other words, postcolonial states articulate their aim to recuperate local medicine as a sign of liberation from structures of colonial rule. This goal becomes particularly complex in the countries with more than one nonbiomedical system, through which nationalist ideologies can be activated (Alter 2015; Khalikova 2018).

Modernity, science, and efficacy

Discourses on nationalism and national medicine are often interlaced with debates about modernity (Croizier 1968; Khan 2006). An important insight from this literature is the problematisation of the terms ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. While twentieth century anthropologists tended not to look at nonbiomedical practice as already modern, by the end of the century, scholars began exploring ways in which the modern and the traditional were co-constructed and fluid.

Based on her research on three medical traditions in Bolivia—cosmopolitan medicine, indigenous Aymara medicine, and home remedies—Libbet Crandon-Malamud (1991) introduced the notion of 'medical ideologies' to show that when people say something about their illness, they are also saying something about themselves and making statements about political and economic realities (1986: 463; 1991: ix, 31). Consequently, people’s beliefs and debates about therapeutic authenticity, efficacy, and legitimacy of a medical tradition can explain a lot about a society in a local and global context.

In many parts of the world—but especially in postcolonial countries struggling with the cultural and political legacies of colonialism—doctors and patients attempt to reconfigure traditional medicine through the notions of modernity, science, and technological progress. Medical practitioners often employ ideologies of both modernity and tradition, in response to demands and expectations from patients, government policies, and other actors. The same holds true for the notion of science. For example, Vincanne Adams has documented how practitioners of Tibetan medicine in China have to use the language of science in order to conform to the science-oriented ideologies of the communist state, while maintaining that Tibetan medicine is efficacious and scientific in its ‘own’ way (i.e., not measurable by biomedical standards). Thereby, they satisfy the aspirations of the local population for culturally appropriate therapy and demands of the international market for a ‘unique’ Tibetan medicine (2002b: 213).

But why do patients seek alternative medicine? Does it work? The problem of efficacy has been important in the study of medical pluralism since its conception (Leslie 1980), but anthropologists still lack a consensus about what ‘efficacy’ means and how it should be analysed (Waldram 2000). If we take efficacy to be a statistically measurable capacity of a drug to produce a desired relief, then in general scholars of medical pluralism tend to avoid making claims about whether or not alternative treatments are efficacious (Ecks 2013: 12; Langford 2002: 200). Instead, scholars have been more interested in understanding the ‘perceived’ efficacy by bringing attention to the feelings, subjective experiences, and views of patients and doctors as they rationalise their use of alternative medicine (Poltorak 2013).

Patients often ‘shop around’, alternating between therapeutic options, until they find what works for them. Here, the concern may be not about whether alternative medicine brings measurable therapeutic relief or not, but what kind of effects it produces. For example, in India many people insist that nonbiomedical treatments such as Ayurveda and homeopathy work but do so gradually and therefore are mild on the body, while biomedicine provides immediate relief but has numerous side-effects (Langford 2002). In other words, both alternative medicine and biomedicine can be seen as efficacious, but in different ways. In North America, patients who are dissatisfied with biomedicine turn to alternative medicine because it is seen as instilling a sense of ‘safety, comfort and well-being’ by appealing to nature, wholeness, and harmony, providing treatments in pleasant surroundings, whereas biomedicine is criticised ‘for its failure to engage the personal and cultural dimensions of suffering’, and for involving ‘painful, disorienting, and disturbing treatments aimed not at comfort but biological efficacy’ (Kirmayer 2014, 38-9). Such juxtaposition of alternative medicine as warm and personal, while biomedicine may be cold and institutional, frames many cultural discourses about how and why different treatments work.

Probing the questions of efficacy of alternative medicine even further, Sienna Craig argues that the very question ‘Does a medicine work?’ is a fabrication of a hegemonic, clinical perspective; instead, one needs to ask, ‘What makes a medicine “work”? How are such assertions made, by whom, and to what ends?’ (2012: 4). Craig argues that the question of efficacy serves as a mechanism for ‘translating’ nonbiomedical knowledge into the language of biomedicine and science, which is itself an outcome of global governance of medicine (such as by the WHO) and neoliberalism. In other words, scholars highlight that the efficacy of biomedicine is embedded in its social and economic power. This means that efficacy is not a neutral objective category, but something that needs to be interrogated with regard to what counts as evidence and who gets to define it.

As reminded by Margaret Lock and Mark Nichter, social claims of efficacy can have actual impact on patient’s health, since the ‘attributions of efficacy, however determined, and be they positive or negative, influence treatment expectations and thus effectiveness in their own right’ (2002: 21). Therefore, anthropological studies often explore various truth claims, the semantics and language of efficacy: how efficacy is spoken about in local terms, how it is invoked by patients and doctors themselves, and how various ideas about efficacy can influence the health outcomes. This includes negative health outcomes too, when claims of the efficacy of alternative treatments can create an atmosphere of distrust towards established biomedical treatments (such as vaccines). Hence, it is important to recognise that the existence of plural medical options can cause confusion and be detrimental to people’s health: while shopping around for a therapy that appears right to them, patients may delay using medicines with proven effects.

Gender

For most of the twentieth century, the studies of medical pluralism contained only scattered references to women—for example, as primary users of alternative medicine or as traditional healers. Today, there is a growing body of literature that critically addresses gender and gender ideologies in the context of medical pluralism (Cameron 2010; Fjeld & Hofer 2011; Flesch 2010; Menjívar 2002; Schrempf 2011; Selby 2005; Zhang 2007). A related area of scholarship is focused on reproduction, traditional birth attendants, and the issues of gender equity in pluralistic medical settings, particularly within the institutions of intercultural medicine in Latin America.

Many medical traditions such as Tibetan medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurveda, Unani, and biomedicine used to be the spheres where female doctors, teachers, and authors of medical texts were absent or rare (but see Fjeld & Hofer 2011). In the twenty-first century the situation has started to change, and more women have become practitioners of these previously male-dominated medical traditions. Yet this can also create new inequalities. For example, by examining an increase in female practitioners of Ayurveda in Nepal, Mary Cameron (2010) argues that the ‘feminization of Ayurveda’ has been entangled with the official marginalisation of Ayurveda in the context of biomedicine-dominated healthcare system. In other words, a positive change, such as the increased acceptance of women as alternative practitioners, is negated by the loss of prestige of Ayurveda in Nepal (although this is not the case in India). Another problem is that the increase of female practitioners in alternative medicine can reinforce the stereotypes of women’s ‘innate’ ability to heal and their proximity to nature, as documented in Hannah Flesch’s work (2010) on female students studying Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine in the US. Thus, these studies illuminate that the discourses on alternative/traditional medicine are often gendered.

Other scholars have shown how nonbiomedical health-related practices can be linked to ideas of masculinity and socio-political ideologies. By examining traditional male wrestlers in India, Joseph Alter (1992) has discovered that their practices of celibacy, self-control, and dietary regimens are linked to their unique interpretations of modernity, masculinity, and nationhood. While many Indian citizens conceive of biomedicine as a link to modernity and good health, traditional wrestlers engage with nonbiomedical practices to strengthen a national physique and achieve culturally appropriate masculinity by countering the harmful impact of Western consumerism and sexual liberation.

Globalisation

The studies of medical pluralism and globalisation emerged in the early 2000s in an attempt to make sense of medical practices in the face of transnational migration, medical tourism, the global flow of alternative pharmaceuticals, the spread of the Internet, and other processes that have problematised national and cultural boundaries, creating avenues for the global exchange of local and ‘new age’ medical knowledge (Lock & Nichter 2002; Krause 2008; Wujastyk & Smith 2008; Hampshire & Owusu 2012). Certainly, transcultural connections were forged intensively during the colonial era and even earlier; however, the close interconnectedness of the world is a relatively recent phenomenon, which both allows and compels people to render their therapeutic itineraries ever more diverse and geographically dispersed. This complexity has compelled scholars to rethink the concept of medical pluralism as no longer confined to a single society but as spanning national borders (Raffaetà et al. 2017). Rather than being limited by medical options within a certain locality, contemporary health-seekers can avail of pluralistic medical approaches, experts, and institutions by crossing borders physically and virtually.

On the one hand, nonbiomedical practices are taken outside their place of origin, as exemplified by the popularity of German anthroposophic medicine in Brazil, the proliferation of Yoga centres outside India, or the spread of acupuncture outside East Asia (Alter 2005; Kim 2009; Wujastyk & Smith 2008). Unlike many twentieth century studies of the influences between the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ (as per World Systems Theory), contemporary scholars explore South-South and other global connections: for example, the incorporation of traditional Chinese medicine into pluralistic medicine in Tanzania (Hsu 2002; Langwick 2010). Additionally, there is an emerging literature on the impact of new communication technologies on plural medicine (Hampshire & Owusu 2012; Krause 2008). Such research addresses ‘telemedicine’, self-help Internet blogs, email consultations with overseas nonbiomedical doctors, and other technologies (for example, digital apps on meditation and Yoga) that have significantly shaped the ways in which medical pluralism is conceived and practiced.

At the same time, patients themselves travel around the world in the search of nonbiomedical treatments. Here, some scholars distinguish medical tourism, associated with biomedical treatment, from health tourism or wellness tourism associated with traditional and alternative medicine (Reddy & Qadeer 2010: 69; also Smith & Wujastyk 2008: 2-3). For example, health-seeking tourists may travel to India in pursuit of ‘authentic’ Ayurvedic therapy, Yoga, or spiritual healing (Langford 2002; Spitzer 2009).

Therapeutic trajectories of migrants in host countries is also a particularly fast-growing area of research, especially because migrants carry different medical ideologies and attitudes that might raise concerns in the sphere of public health, health policy, and public discourses (Andrews et al. 2013; Cant & Sharma 1999; Chavez 2003; Green et al. 2006; Krause 2008). Some of these studies examine how minority groups seek satisfactory treatment in biomedicine-dominated contexts. For example, Tracy Andrews and others (2013) examine how adult Hispanic migrants in the US make therapeutic decisions for their children in a pluralistic healthcare setting that includes both biomedical providers and famous Mexican healers in the vicinity. Many studies emphasise that migrants resort to alternative practitioners, particularly from their community, because of language difficulties, cultural preferences, a search for a specific herbal or spiritual treatment, or fear of being looked down on by biomedical practitioners (Green et al. 2006, Andrew et al. 2013; Lock 1980: 260; Chavez 2003: 201, 219). These challenges can motivate migrants to postpone immediate care and instead make trips to their countries of origin to receive medical treatment. Therefore, medical anthropologists often point out the importance of providing non-discriminatory medical services to migrants, especially to those who may not share a biomedical model of health and disease, and advocate for health policies of ‘integrative’ and ‘culturally-sensitive’ healthcare (Green et al. 2006; Chavez 2003).

In addition to the focus on patients, scholars of globalised healthcare also investigate the transnational mobilities of medical practitioners and material objects. ‘Traditional’ medicines, healing crystals, talismans, and other paraphernalia, which are not exchanged through formal channels of commerce, often follow along the lines of an informal economy of transnational connections (Hampshire & Owusu 2012; Krause 2008; Menjívar 2002). Kristine Krause (2008) provides an example of ‘transnational therapy networks’ that connect Ghanaian migrants in London, their relatives and friends in other European counties, and traditional healers in Ghana who may ‘directly deliver their products’ to owners of Afro-shops in the UK. In these transnational channels, money, drugs, and prayers are sent between members of the African diaspora in Europe and their friends and suppliers in the countries of origin.

Inspired by the work of Arjun Appadurai (1988) and other scholars of materiality, medical anthropologists have expanded their inquiries of medicine as knowledge and practice to the examination of physicality and the ‘agentive properties’ of medical objects: pills, intake forms, ultrasound prints, medical charts, stethoscopes, syringes, and other equipment are not passive objects but active agents in clinical interactions, as they can influence people’s behaviour, compel action, communicate, instil fear or trust, and even heal. For example, contemporary alternative doctors frequently adopt material objects from other medical traditions, especially from biomedicine: in India, some patients who visit an Ayurvedic doctor demand to be examined by a stethoscope, believing that a touch of a stethoscope has a curative outcome (Nichter 1980). Thus, a stethoscope is not a silent object in a doctor’s room but an agent that speaks, calls for action, and brings confidence.

Such studies of materiality provide the crucial insight that medical pluralism is often unmarked: sometimes neither doctors nor patients see their encounters as pluralistic. As shown in Stacey Langwick’s work in Tanzania, a ‘traditional’ healer may routinely use a syringe and ask to bring an X-ray from biomedical hospitals. The presence of ‘modern’ medical technologies can ‘challenge the self-evidence of boundaries between traditional and modern medicine’ (2008: 429).

Unlike the above research on unauthorised, informal transnational flows of medicines, there is a new scholarship on the commercial flow of ‘alternative’ pharmaceuticals and the operations of alternative industries beyond national borders. Building on previous studies of marketisation of alternative medicine in domestic contexts (Adams 2002a; Banerjee 2009; Bode 2008; Craig 2011, 2012; Kim 2009), this scholarship highlights the transformations under the pressures of a global neoliberal economy, when many nonbiomedical practices can no longer be dismissed as local, marginal, or alternative traditions. It makes the case for recognising them as transnational, mainstream, innovative, and profit-driven industries (Kloos 2017; Kloos et al. 2020; Pordié & Gaudillière 2014; Pordié & Hardon 2015).

Conclusion

Developed in the 1970s–1980s, the concept of medical pluralism offered novel ways of understanding diverse medical practices and their relations with biomedicine. It went beyond the early twentieth century descriptions of indigenous healing beliefs and was a crucial concept for establishing the field of medical anthropology. By attempting to overcome the dualistic representation of Western/modern and non-Western/traditional medicine, scholars of medical pluralism demonstrated that the diversity of medical ideas, approaches, experts, and institutions exists in every complex society, even in the West. Rather than merely focusing on health and healing, medical pluralism highlights the heterogeneity, multiplicity, and competition that permeate medical thought and practice. Although many scholars have challenged the notion of ‘pluralism’ and suggested replacing it with other terms such as eclecticism or diversity, medical pluralism remains a valuable framework.

Many anthropologists have come to criticise the ideas of medical ‘systems’ and medical ‘traditions’ as being overly rigid, even essentialising. Instead, they moved towards the exploration of doctor-patient negotiations, paying attention to whether different actors see therapies as pluralistic, what therapeutic plurality means, who benefits from their promotion, and what kind of inequalities exist between various categories of medicine. Most prominent examples of such inequalities include the hegemonic position of biomedicine supported by science discourses due to which nonbiomedical knowledge and practices are dubbed ‘alternative’ and ‘complementary’, if not entirely fake.

However, the studies of medical pluralism also show that, paradoxically, traditional and alternative medical practices did not disappear under the dominance of biomedicine. Although sometimes lacking official support, they are widely sought out around the world not only by rural populations but also by consumers with wealth and power. The analyses of pluralism as resulting from medical tourism, the spread of the Internet, and the pharmaceuticalisation of indigenous therapies have become important areas of study. This scholarship acknowledges that multiple actors such as medical providers, tourists and migrants, corporations, national leaders, and other categories of citizens—all have their own stake in various medical traditions. Therefore, instead of a narrow focus on colonial and postcolonial situations, researchers explore ‘new’ (Cant & Sharma 1999) and ‘transnational’ (Raffaetà et al. 2017) forms of medical pluralism. The pressing need to account for local and global media, migration, and the rapid growth of medical and other technologies have also forced scholars to change their methods. They moved from studying health practices in a single community to ‘following’ people, objects, and ideas across borders (as per Marcus 1995), showing that people’s therapeutic options have become truly transnational and even more pluralistic. The intensified pluralism is also visible if we account for the ‘virtual’ field in which both biomedicine and nonbiomedical healing is increasingly offered. As a result, scholars have also moved from the descriptions of nonbiomedical practices as small, local, low-cost, marginal alternative traditions to recognising them as large, profit-driven, and mainstream ‘industries’ that occupy substantial market segments domestically, while also rapidly expanding globally. All of this demonstrates that medical pluralism does not just remain an important feature of modern life, but that it is constantly changing in form and content.

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Note on contributor

Venera R. Khalikova is a cultural anthropologist and Lecturer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. Her previous work on medical pluralism and the politics of Ayurveda in North India have appeared in Medical Anthropology, Asian Medicine, and Food, Culture, and Society. Her current interests include the study of migration, race, and gender among Indians in Hong Kong.

Dr Venera R. Khalikova, Department of Anthropology, Chinese University of Hong Kong, NAH 322, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong. venera.khalikova@cuhk.edu.hk

[1] For additional reviews of this concept in anthropology as well as sociology and history, readers can consult texts by Hans Baer (2011); Sarah Cant & Ursula Sharma (1999), Waltraud Ernst (2002), and Roberta Raffaetà et al. (2017).

Sharia

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

Morgan Clarke

University of Oxford

Initially published 29 Nov 2020

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

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Sharia discourse and history

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharia ethnography and modernity

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

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

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

Islamic family law and legal pluralism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Global assemblages

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

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

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

Sharia and the anthropology of ethics

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

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

Conclusion

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

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

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

Magic

Felix Stein — Fri, 25 Oct 2019 11:03:55 +0000

Matteo Benussi

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Initially published 25 Oct 2019

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

Abstract:

Attempts to define and describe magic must reckon with this concept’s slipperiness, as magic is often understood against what supposedly it is not: typically, ‘proper’ religion and ‘rational’ science, even though both religion and science are objects just as elusive. Despite its ambiguous status and the prejudices attached to it, or maybe precisely for these reasons, magic has long enthralled scholars in the human sciences, and anthropology in particular. After first exploring the genealogy of magic as a concept, this entry will examine the manifold ways in which occult knowledges and practices play a role in the life of many societies. It will touch on the role of vernacular magic in experiences of crisis, and dwell on how anthropology has found a way to appreciate the ‘truth’ of magic. It then explores magic as a ‘craft’ – a set of techniques through which practitioners creatively shape their relationships with the world and their own selves. Emphasis will be given to magic’s documented potential to activate the imagination. The case of ceremonial magic and its revival will allow the reader to appreciate the modernity of magic. The entry concludes with a reflection on the recurrent attributes of magic – often identified as a particularly experimental, do-it-yourself, and manipulation-based form of spiritual action – and its compatibility with a post-secular age that has not renounced enchantment.

Defining magic

Magic is one of the most puzzling phenomena studied by social scientists, which has inspired and challenged generations of observers. Is magic irrational, maybe even delusional, the product of minds that cannot think straight? Despite widespread prejudice, most specialists nowadays think this is not the case. Historical and ethnographic research has revealed that many reasonable, lucid, and intellectually sophisticated people, including great philosophers and artists of the past, dabbled in magic (Yates 1964; Saunders 2010; Jütte 2015). One may wonder: perhaps such people, despite their discernment, were ignorant of modern science – is magic ‘primitive’ or ‘barbarous’, then? This too is unlikely. Categories like ‘primitivism’ and ‘barbarity’ would not get us very far in exploring magic, not only because anthropologists consider such evolutionist concepts inherently misleading and derogatory, but also because all types of societies, including ones characterised by highly complex technology, organizations, and scientific knowledge, appear to have room for magic. Understanding magic, then, requires that we be prepared to shed or at least bracket ingrained prejudices. But how do we define magic, to begin with?

The word ‘magic’ evokes a vast array of associations: from the solemn, white-bearded sage, endowed with mystical power in fairy tales and fantasy films, to sinister witches and sorcerers surrounded by grimoires, occult sigils, potions, and astrological charts; from ‘cunning folk’ healers, combining incantations and herbal remedies, to stage magicians asking us, with a wink, to let our senses be deceived. Yet explaining clearly what the many tropes associated with the concept of magic have in common is easier said than done. The concept has been used in association with divergent practices such as folk medicine, divination, palmistry, necromancy (communication with the dead), astrology, alchemy, spiritualism, occultism (the study of hidden or paranormal things), illusionism, neo-paganism (the worship of natural forces, often modelled after ancient religions), and New Age spirituality. To complicate things, the field of magic as the term is commonly understood – including amongst many of its practitioners – has come to incorporate elements that elsewhere would fall under the category of ‘religion’, such as Kabbalah (a Jewish mystical tradition) or Yoga (a set of spiritual doctrines emerged from within Indic Dharmic faiths). A plausible working definition of magic, loose enough to accommodate at least most of the nuances associated with it, may describe it as a set of activities and technologies intended to manipulate invisible or immaterial agencies and energies, not recognised by science, to an advantageous end. However, there are risks inherent in defining such elusive a subject as magic.

The word ‘magic’ has long evoked negative connotations, associated with the exotic religious customs of a threatening Other. The vocabulary and concept of magic have a distinctly Western genealogy: the word comes from the Greek mageia, which, in ancient Greece, was used to describe the priests (magav) of the arch-inimical Persian Empire (Graf 1995; Bremmer 1999). In this ancient sense, the word was associated with practices that were outlandish because they were foreign. Over time, however, and partly due to the influence of Christianity, the idea of magic became attached to spiritual or remedial practices that, while originating from within Western societies, were classified as eccentric, illegitimate, or dubious because of their external/marginal status vis-à-vis religious and scientific orthodoxy. In early modern Europe, arcane knowledge and practices were also associated with marginal groups like the Jews or peasants (Ginzburg 1991; Jütte 2015). Despite this shift in orientation, the concept of magic retained its association with notions of weirdness, mysteriousness, and unorthodoxy (Stratton 2013). When we use the category, therefore, we must be alert to both its potentially negative connotations and its shifting boundaries.

Another, related danger inherent in the vocabulary of magic is connected to its usability in non-Western contexts. For instance, let us take the Islamic notion of siḥr, usually translated as magic or sorcery. Siḥr partly resembles Christian understandings of magic as unorthodox dealings with the occult, and therefore illegitimate and sinful. However, alongside familiar items like goetia (commerce with demons) and astrology, siḥr also includes slander, malicious gossip, the ‘charismatic seduction of crowds’ (Knight 2016: 16), and other arts of deception which would not be considered ‘magic’ in most Western understandings. When it comes to magic, nuance risks easily getting lost in translation.

Furthermore, distinguishing between ‘unorthodox’ magical practices and ‘legitimate’ religious ones is particularly problematic in the case of religious traditions that are not based on highly codified doctrines and liturgies, and therefore do not encourage distinctions between prayer, incantation, or spell to the same extent as Christianity, in particular, as we shall see, in its Reformed versions. For instance, in certain Tibetan Buddhist contexts, religious specialists take part in propitiatory rituals to conjure or restore ‘fortune’ (Humphrey 2012) that in Western settings might easily be classified as magical spells and rituals.

Magic, science, religion… and anthropology

It is impossible to omit the role of anthropology itself in construing the idea of magic that was to become dominant in the modern era. In other words, we must consider that anthropology as an academic discipline has greatly contributed to establishing what counts as magic and what does not in today’s mainstream consciousness, including amongst many practitioners of magic.

The early-nineteenth-century rise of scientific interest in magic was both fuelled and conditioned by Europe’s encounter with hitherto unfamiliar spiritual traditions in the colonies. Nebulous concepts like ‘shamanism’ and ‘fetishism’ both enthralled and repelled European intellectuals, divided between an optimistic embrace of empirical science and technologic progress and a hard-to-kill Romantic fascination with all things mysterious and arcane (Pels 2003). Both the asymmetries of the colonial encounter, with Europe seeking to justify its exploitation of faraway peoples as a ‘civilising mission,’ and the intellectual establishment’s anxieties over the popularity of phenomena like occultism, thus conspired to turn magic into a veritable culture-war item. If colonialism ‘required’ the foil of native magic as a pretext for domination (Wiener 2003: 140), magic never stopped haunting the metropole itself through the mediation – or mediumship? – of homegrown Spiritualists and Theosophists, generating in turn the reaction of scientific-minded debunkers. The latter group encompassed novel professional figures as diverse as besuited stage illusionists, proponents of a disenchanted version of magic as pure entertainment and skill, and erudite scholars of ‘native trickery’: early anthropologists (Jones 2017).

Building on the reports of missionaries and explorers, Victorian-era anthropologists (of the mid- to late-nineteenth century) busied themselves with creating hierarchically organised taxonomies of social facts they had second-hand knowledge of, and that corresponded, in their view, to more or less well-defined ‘steps’ in an evolutionary ladder of human cultures. Influenced by the styles of reasoning of their time, these scholars classified magic, religion, and science in different categories, corresponding to progressive ‘stages’ of cultural complexity, with magic attached to ideas of archaism and childlike irrationality. From a magical stage, human groups would progress to a religious stage, followed by science supplanting religion at the top of the evolutionary hierarchy.

Where did the assumption underpinning nineteenth century academic conceptualizations of magic come from? Later scholars of magic (Tambiah 1990) have identified a mindset imbued with Protestant sensitivities, and the prestige of classical heritage and erudition, as crucial factors in shaping magic as an object of social-scientific study. Some of the most influential pioneers in the study of religious life had a Protestant background, in particular E.B. Tylor, who famously defined religion as ‘belief in Spiritual Beings’ (2008: 25). Scholars like Tylor, however, were reluctant to put religion – a respectable sphere of contemplation and worship – on the same footing as ‘base’ magic. It has been persuasively argued (Tambiah 1990: 12-5) that evolutionistic ideas of magic as distinct from and inferior to religion were likely fuelled by Protestantism’s deep dislike of occult practices and Biblical characterizations of magic as diabolical. This Protestant legacy contributed to the consolidation of a narrow idea of religion as a system of abstract beliefs (cf. Tylor’s definition), culminating in theology and metaphysics, as opposed to magic with its hands-on, result-oriented manipulation practices. A distinction between prayer (religious) and spell (magical) epitomised this opposition.

As far as the second source of influence – the Hellenic tradition – is concerned, Classical Greece grouped what we today call magic (understood as the occult manipulation of invisible forces) together with philosophy, the manipulation of concepts, and medicine, the manipulation of bodily substances. These activities were quite distinct from the sphere of religion understood as the worship of the Gods. While the first realm was characterised by an inquisitive, experimental attitude, the realm of divinity was not seen as an arena of human disputation. Stanley Tambiah (1990: 8-11) has argued that, given the prestige of Hellenic traditions in Western academia, a separation between magic and religion ended up influencing Victorian anthropologists such as James Frazer. In his pioneering research into magic, Frazer came to consider magic a failed attempt at science, as both systems were thought to share the idea that the universe is regulated by impersonal forces that can be intervened upon, harnessed, and manipulated. However, magic was understood to be based on incorrect ideas about these forces, as well as distorted and incomplete factual knowledge of the world (Jarvie & Agassi 1970).

Scholars in the turn-of-the-century French sociological tradition came up with yet different reasons to push magic to the margins of spiritual life. Émile Durkheim, one of the key figures of the early social science of religion, defined religion as a set of beliefs and practices concerning sacred things and shared by a moral community: a ‘Church’. He expressed the view that magic, while consisting of belief and rites like religion, though ‘less developed’, should be considered distinct from the latter because, being chiefly an individual endeavour, magic fails to generate proper ‘Churches’ (1995: 39-42). This notion too contributed to framing magic as something eccentric, peripheral, and somewhat lacking vis-à-vis religion, despite being tightly connected to it.

Later scholarship, based on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive time spent in the company of magic practitioners observing how magic is carried out in practice, became more interested in understanding magic rather than debunking it. Resulting approaches tended to call into question the notion that clear-cut divisions, let alone hierarchies, between magical, religious, and scientific worldviews can be objectively established. Furthermore, a consensus has emerged amongst anthropologists and religious studies specialists that deciding where religion (e.g. belief in spiritual beings), folk knowledge (e.g. non-biomedical healing systems), or ‘natural philosophy’ (e.g. astronomy) end and magic begins, has more to do with cultural boundary-making and social normativities than with any ‘objective’ reality. In innumerable historical and socio-cultural settings, drawing clear lines would be impossible. In Renaissance Europe, magic was performed by clergymen, scientists, and philosophers, while twentieth-century occultists, guided by a keen interest in scientific discoveries, moved in a grey area between science and magic producing ambiguous yet highly successful concepts such as ‘animal magnetism’, ‘mesmerism’, or ‘psychic energy’. In colonial Africa, sorcery was part and parcel of communities’ everyday religious and ritual life (Evans-Pritchard 1937). In 1980s Euro-America, witchcraft was rediscovered by tight communities of college-educated urbanites. These cases invite us to abandon the deeply ingrained stereotypes about magic as spiritually aberrant, irrational, and irredeemably ‘other’ that influenced early anthropology.

In spite of the fallacies of evolutionism outlined so far, the works of Victorian anthropologists remain relevant today. Some of their ideas are still compelling and they are frequently referenced by contemporary occultists themselves. One example of such lasting contributions is Frazer’s typological distinction between imitative magic, based on similarity, and contagious magic, based on contact. In the case of imitative magic, actions, objects, or enactments that resemble a given thing, person, or event, are understood to have an effect on the latter (e.g., enacting a hunt to secure abundant game); contagious magic, on the other hand involves using items once connected to the intended target of magical action (e.g., using someone’s clothes or nail pairings to cast a spell on them). This distinction has become a staple in magical studies and even within magical milieus. More broadly, early social scientists’ characterization of magic as a quintessentially pragmatic, experimental endeavour, an attempt to harness and manipulate occult forces – getting one’s hands dirty with the occult, so to speak – retains most of its validity today, even if we might not want to see this as absolutely incompatible with, or subordinate to, canonical religion or academic scientific thinking.

Dealing with the negative: maleficium and modernity

If drawing clear boundaries and establishing hierarchies with respect to magic may be difficult, how does contemporary, fieldwork-based anthropology go about understanding it? Especially after anthropology’s methodological revolution in the 1920s that established ethnographic fieldwork as the paramount avenue to investigate social and cultural life, anthropologists have become particularly interested in understanding magic in and through practice – in other words, in figuring out what people do exactly, when they do magic.

Focusing on the uses and meanings of magic in concrete social settings has had the effect of showing us that magic, far from being something archaic, lies at the heart of global modernity. As people from Latin America, to central Africa, to Mongolia, to the US and Europe become engulfed in urbanization, capitalist markets, and dreams of social mobility, ideas about the occult gain currency. They reveal deep connections between personal experiences of distress and anxiety, historical transformations marked by dynamics that exceed the ordinary and the visible, and lasting yet flexible cultural models of the cosmos which include both visible and invisible forces (Geschiere 1997, Harding & Stewart 2003, Buyandelger 2007, Barkun 2013). Magic, thus, serves as a powerful resource through which people across the globe cope with their lives in a complex, unpredictable, and often intractable world.

Indeed, scholarship based on immersion in concrete socio-cultural settings has, from its inception, recognised magic as an existential resource people draw upon ‘to compensate for the uncertainties of chance and to forearm against bad luck’ and ‘create confidence, enhance hopes and anticipations’, as fieldwork pioneer Bronislaw Malinowski wrote describing vernacular propitiatory agricultural spells amongst Trobriand islanders (1935: 217, 246). Malinowski thereby suggested that magic becomes psychologically salient when humans are confronted with the problem of the unknown: a spell is a linguistic buffer against anxiety in the face of an ever-present threat of misfortune. Malinowski’s explanation of the psychological function of magic – as part of an explanatory approach called ‘functionalism’ – has spearheaded studies that focus on cognition, some of which will be discussed in the next section (Luhrmann 1989).

In a watershed study conducted in the 1930s, Edward Evans Evans-Pritchard investigated witchcraft and anti-witch vengeance magic among members of the Azande ethnic group of current day South Sudan. The concept of witchcraft, i.e. the capability to cause harm to others through mystical means either deliberately or unwittingly, was described by him as providing members of the Azande with ‘a natural philosophy by which the relationship between men and unfortunate events is explained’. In addition to offering practical means of dealing with misfortune, Azande witchcraft theory also pointed to a system of values regulating human conduct (Evans-Pritchard 1937: 18). Hostile or envious attitudes carried the risk of attracting ruinous witchcraft accusations. Furthermore, misdeeds could result in retaliatory magical attacks. Azande witchcraft theory thus inhibited socially disruptive behaviours, thereby strengthening the stability of what Evans-Pritchard saw as a social system. Interestingly, witchcraft accusations did not undermine social cohesion in this analysis. Instead, witchcraft could be seen to contribute to social stability.

The Azande, however, were perfectly aware of non-magical causal links. Witchcraft was not meant to explain all aspects of how a certain misfortune occurred. For example, when a building collapsed and killed somebody, any Azande could easily figure that its supporting structure had been weakened by termites. However, magic offered a framework to explain why something happened to a particular person and not someone else. Evans-Pritchard famously described this as the theory of the ‘second spear’. If a man is killed by an elephant, the elephant – the direct cause – is the first spear. Maleficium (causing evil through occult means) is the second spear. The elephant rammed into him, and not someone else, because he, not someone else, was bewitched.

This study revolutionised understandings of magic by framing it as a socially appropriate and culturally meaningful answer to the problem of a negative unknown, rather than a cognitively inadequate one. It emphasised that the Azande were not credulous, but people who prized inquisitiveness and rational thinking, and whose mental processes where not dissimilar from those of Evans-Pritchard’s fellow Europeans. Indeed, a major implication in Evans-Pritchard’s work is that it draws attention to the fact that all humans are likely to ask the question ‘why me?’ when visited by misfortune, with recourse to supernatural strategies. Azande witchcraft was not, after all, so exotic. This realization led to the emergence of sustained debates on the ‘rationality’ of magic that have been engaging anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers of various backgrounds and orientations (Winch 1970, Jarvie & Agassi 1970, Sperber 1982, Lewis 1994, Boyer 2002) ever since. These on-going debates have helped establish that multiple forms of rationality, apt to address complex moral, relational, and emotional problems alongside technical ones, are at play in all human societies. ‘Apparently irrational beliefs’ may appear much less outlandish once considered as parts – and expressions – of broader social and cultural logics.

In addition to recognising the social meaning of magic, anthropologists have also drawn attention to its therapeutic efficaciousness vis-à-vis experiences of the negative, especially illness and trauma (Lévi-Strauss 1974; Lindquist 2005; Favret-Saada 2015). Writing on folk magic in the deep rural south of Italy after World War II, Ernesto De Martino (2015) shed light on the experiences of anguish that characterised communities caught between impoverishment and rapid modernization – and especially the most vulnerable groups, labourers and women. He wrote, ‘[t]he root of … any form of magic, is the immense power of the negative throughout an individual’s lifetime, with its trail of traumas, checks, frustrations, and the corresponding restrictedness and fragility of the positive’ (2015: 87). In circumstances such as illness, exploitation, or uprooting, vulnerable individuals and communities faced a radical existential uncertainty that manifested itself in altered states of consciousness ranging from frenzy to catatonia, a condition called tarantism (literally a ‘tarantula’s bite’). De Martino investigated the vernacular magic-based emergency procedures, most prominently spells and ecstatic dances (Tarantella), activated in these cases. Folk magical techniques are, in De Martino’s view, procedures that facilitate recovery from crises, helping to overcome illness and existential dread. Magic enables people to makes sense of suffering, and offers a ‘first aid kit’ of materials, spells, exorcisms, and ritual specialists capable of reabsorbing the negative and thereby restoring a sufferer’s sense of self. De Martino mixes a phenomenological approach characterised by a focus on first-person experience, useful to grasp the intimate, personal dimension of magic, with a Marxian concern with the ‘structural’ dimension of the problem of suffering.

Related post-Marxist approaches have further illuminated magic’s relation with political-economic dynamics, such as the rapid development of capitalist markets disrupting pre-existing social arrangements and spreading anxieties across social bodies. Michael Taussig (1977), for example, has explored how in the 1960s, impoverished labourers in Latin American mines and sugar plantations employed the occult idiom of ‘the devil’ and the trope of the Faustian pact – the risk of losing one’s soul – to make sense of their work. These ideas were used to express intellectual and moral statements about the ‘hidden’ mechanisms of aggressive capitalism, such as uncompensated labour, the extraction of surplus value with the amassment of wealth into a few private hands, and commodity fetishism.

Indeed, devil talk turns out to be a surprisingly sophisticated tool through which unschooled peasants and miners could formulate theories and critical judgements about their political and economic reality of exploitation. Inspired by such studies, as well as Max Gluckmann’s notion of ‘magic of despair’, anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff have further contributed to our understanding of the political economy of magic and witchcraft though their notion of ‘occult economy’ (1999), i.e. imaginative and material practices connected to the use of magical means to achieve utilitarian ends. Phenomena such as witchcraft ‘epidemics’, urban lore on zombie labour, or occult-related conspiracy theories are, the Comaroffs submit, ‘symptoms’ of occult economies ‘waxing behind the civil surfaces’ of development. Cultural tropes such as the undead slave and the blood-sucking warlock become urgently salient when entire populations are drafted into regimented, mindless, and exhausting forms of labour or confronted with exploitative, seemingly invincible corporations. The term ‘occult economies’ thus indicates people’s ‘recourse to the occult in situations of rapid social transformation, under historical conditions that yield an ambiguous mix of possibility and powerlessness, of desire and despair, of mass joblessness and hunger amidst the accumulation, by some, of great amounts of new wealth’ (1999: 283): it is easy to see why although the Comaroff’s main focus is Africa, their approach has been applied to multiple contexts across the global South.

Working on the invisible: the magus craft

Despite the importance of studies that explore magic as a phenomenon straddling the personal, the cosmological, and the socio-historical, some scholars have argued that insisting on its negative aspects does not tell us the entire story. The occult is more than a symptom of suffering, turmoil, and distress. Indeed, a well-established scholarly tradition focuses on magic as an occult technology – a ‘craft’ – used to bring about desired change in both self and world. These approaches should not be seen as antithetical to the ones discussed above, and indeed the two aspects often coexist within the same instance, as the change being pursued with magical means may aim to restore balance and wholeness in the face of affliction or illness. Bearing in mind that distinguishing between ‘negative’- and ‘craft’-oriented approaches to the study of magic is to some extent an analytical artifice, this section will foreground examples of the creative and positive dimension of magic.

The case of ceremonial magic and especially Western esotericism is particularly helpful to appreciate magic’s ‘craft’. While all types of occult practices and knowledges are learned with varying degrees of mastery, Western ceremonial magic, being based on written bodies of tradition and often socialised through relatively organised communities, offers an ideal case study of magic as a set of techniques for the transformation of both the self and the world.

Many consider the Renaissance the golden era of European ceremonial magic. From the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries CE, polymaths and thinkers such as Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Giordano Bruno, Isabella Cortese, or John Dee devoted considerable energy to the investigation of both the visible and the invisible dimensions of the universe. These figures, at once proto-scientists, theologians, and explorers of the occult, played an important role in defining the field of ‘erudite’ Western magic, drawing on repertoires as different as astrology, Christian theology and ethics, Greek mystery religion and philosophy, and Jewish mysticism (Yates 1964, 2001; Culianu 1984; Jütte 2015). The Renaissance model of the cosmos featured an ethereal dimension, called pneuma, existing between the physical and the spiritual realms. All persons and things, although materially separate from each other, were understood to be invisibly interconnected at the ‘pneumatic’ level, clinging to each other in secret correspondences that escaped the base senses. Anthropologists working on magic have identified comparable models of reality in a vast number of societies. Lucien Lévy-Bruhl has classically defined this model ‘participatory’ (1999); more recently, Philippe Descola has proposed the notion of ‘analogism’ to describe models of the world in which all things are thought to be invisibly interlinked (2013).

Importantly, accessing the etheric dimension required sophisticated training of one’s imaginative and affective faculties. This involved rigorous spiritual discipline, encyclopaedic knowledge, articulated ceremonials, and the craft of handling matter according to its occult, etheric properties. In what is known as ‘desire magic’, for instance, Renaissance magicians would use their ability to discern and activate ethereal interconnections between objects, including persons, to influence the latter’s psychic life.

Intriguingly, this has originated the hypothesis that Renaissance magic is best understood not as a prefiguration of natural science, but rather of advertising, propaganda, and ‘mass psychology’ – the use of affective means to induce inter-psychic dynamics (Culianu 1984: 88). Indeed, the fact that there seems to be a strong family resemblance between ‘magic’, understood as the ability to generate and control interpersonal affective states, and mass publicity phenomena – from charismatic leadership to the attractiveness of brands – has long been recognised by anthropologists (Mazzarella 2017).

The advent of Protestantism likely drove ceremonial magic and its etheric intermediate dimension underground, ushering in an order of the universe premised upon a stark separation between the terrestrial and divine realms (Orsi 2002). However, the extent to which this transformation was successful is disputable: as we have seen in the previous section, modernity remains far from magic-free. Anthropological research (Luhrmann 1989, Lewis 1996) has revealed that ceremonial magic did not altogether disappear; rather, it withdrew to the counter-culture, where today it is actively pursued by new generations of practitioners. In contemporary Euro-America, occult circles of various types, such as Wiccan and neopagan covens, consciously attempt to revive Renaissance magic. Yet unlike their predecessors, latter-day Western occultists inhabit a post-Enlightenment, Cartesian mainstream anxious to exorcise the unruly spectre of magic (Pels 2003) or at least push it out of sight – either into the disreputable category of the ‘primitive’ or into the sanitised realm of ‘art’ (Mazzarella 2017).

Under these unfavourable conditions, anthropologists are interested in exploring how people who are socialised in a secular, non-magical, scientific cosmos, actively learn to ‘believe’ in magic. In other words, through which activities ordinary, scientifically literate Westerners reorganise their cognitive processes in order to ‘see’ the invisible workings of magic, in the mundane flux of everyday life. Anthropologists have described the transformative processes whereby magicians accustom themselves to finding magic persuasive as a work of cognitive cultivation. They have proposed concepts such as ‘interpretive drift’ (Luhrmann 1989) and ‘magical consciousness’ (Greenwood 2013; 2014) to characterise changes in magicians’ thinking styles.

Although magical forces are unpredictable, practitioners attempt to become alert to, and manipulate, them through disciplines requiring assiduous training, such as meditation, visualization, and dream interpretation. Ritual is equally important to ‘forge magical selves’ (Pike 1996). Consider the following example reported by Tanja Luhrmann: in the 1980s a London-based sorcerer performs a ceremony to propitiate fortune in finding accommodation (even then a notoriously tall order in the city’s housing market). A few days after the ritual, ‘no house is forthcoming, but a packet of advertising leaflets on house maintenance arrives in the post. This is reported with pride and self-mockery – the rite worked, but not quite with the intended results’ (Luhrmann 1989: 130). Recognising and attributing importance to hidden connections does not imply naiveté on the sorcerer’s part. Rather, doing magic entails a degree of irony, and a valorization of the imagination. Fantasy is not dismissed as mere ‘pretend’, but valorised as a ‘serious play’, a realm in which things and events are meaningful and wondrous. As Greenwood put it, while participating in magical consciousness, the question of belief in the ‘real’ existence of spiritual forces and beings frequently becomes ‘irrelevant’ (2014: 203).

What often counts for practitioners is that magic offers an avenue to positively engage with the world, while at the same time cultivating cognitive skills and imaginative or emotional resources that otherwise would remain inert. Owing to its ability to generate desirable affective states, William Mazzarella (2017) surmises, magic makes reality more enjoyable and pleasureful – even the mundane encounter with a packet of leaflets is experienced with delight – and this has positive repercussions on a sorcerer’s self. Ethnographic studies suggest that not only the goals, but also the methods of magic are considered invigorating by practitioners. When it comes to ritual, for instance, ceremonial magic allows ample scope for creativity compared to mainstream religious organizations: ceremonies change over time and magical milieus borrow from multiple traditions such as mythology, folklore, academic literature, and pop culture. Far from being seen as problematic, eclecticism in ritual is often proudly declared, an emphasis on creativity and bricolage understood as empowering (Magliocco 1996: 99; 2006).

While in this section we have focused on Western magic, it should be stressed that this form of ‘erudite’ occult craft is by no means the only one that underwent a revival in recent years. Consider, for example, the Book of Changes or I Ching – a classic Chinese divination text dealing with techniques of prognostication based on casting lots. Straddling philosophy, metaphysics, and soothsaying, I Ching has been described by some modern scholars as evidence that imperial-era Chinese literati were immersed in a ‘magical worldview’ (Chun 2014: 30). While, historically, divination has not been pushed underground or stigmatised to the same extent as Renaissance magic, I Ching was nonetheless harshly critiqued as superstitious during socialist-led modernization. Recently, however, I Ching divination made a comeback amongst middle-class urbanites, with some seeing it as having ethical value in view of its association with ‘traditional’ Chinese virtues. Others appreciate it for complementing scientific knowledge without being incompatible with a rational picture of the world (Matthews 2016, 2017). This example shows that in non-Western settings, too, occult disciplines may come to be cherished as helpful tools for ‘positive’ self-development and satisfying engagements with the world.

Despite the mainstream’s uneasiness with occult crafts such as ceremonial magic and divination, their stubborn refusal to simply vanish into thin air points not only to the inherent contradictions of modernity, but also to the value that practitioners attach to such crafts. Regardless of what individual scholars may think of the truth of magic, anthropology seeks to understand what makes it valuable in the eyes of its practitioners.

Re-enchantment and the future of magic

Mainstream ideas of magic and sorcery are linked to the stereotype of the broomstick-riding witch that crystallised during the Euro-American witch-hunts (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries). While witch trials are often described as ‘mediaeval’, it is now well established (Ginzburg 1991) that during the actual Middle Age, ecclesiastical authorities were dismissive of magical threats, as they were certain that only God had sovereignty over the unseen. It was only as Europe entered early modernity that wizards and sorceresses became a real problem and the witch-hunts started. Recent interpretations (Stephens 2002; Silverblatt 2004) suggest that the reasons for this lie in an attitude of scepticism and inquisitiveness as well as a novel bureaucratic rationality, which began to pervade early-modern European society. Institutions such as the Inquisition sought ways to methodically explore the supernatural and systematically inquire into an occult realm. The latter had already started receding from the consciousness of Western elites, and was increasingly associated with marginal populations such as women or racial minorities. Paradoxically, even though in retrospect the witch-hunt bloodsheds may strike us as irrational, they may have been driven by a dispassionate experimental and bureaucratic mindset, rather than impulsivity and credulity. The useful lesson that this historical case can offer us is that enchantment and disenchantment are often intertwined in unpredictable ways.

This is not any less true today. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influential European intellectuals like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Max Weber appeared convinced that a worldwide increase in literacy, better living conditions, and growing acquaintance with modern science, would make people gradually forget their consolatory but false beliefs in spirits, gods, witches, and magical forces (Casanova 1994). On the other hand, it has been noted that occult-related themes often associated with these thinkers’ works – such as fetishism, the uncanny, or charisma – haunt and complicate simple visions of progress (Pels 2003; Morris 2017). And indeed, empirical observation of recent social phenomena – such as the aforementioned global boom of occult economies or the worldwide success of Wicca and neopaganism – show that the world may not be bound to become a disenchanted and secular place after all. Contemporary scholars even propose to understand the modern as being ‘re-enchanted’ (Partridge 2005). In such a re-enchanted world, many practitioners take ‘occulture’ – an eclectic milieu mixing esotericism, pop culture, and urban mysticism – to be perfectly compatible with logical thinking and a sensible outlook on life. They also treat magic as a valuable resource to address existential predicaments, foster resilience in the face of the negative, expand their cognitive resources, work on their spiritual selves, explore fantasy and creativity, and generally improve their relationship with the world.

Though scholars agree that late modernity has witnessed a resurgence of organised religions as well, magic, with its experimental, do-it-yourself character, appears particularly well-aligned with the post-secular spirituality of the twenty-first century. ‘Church’ religions remain powerful actors, but modernity has limited their hegemonic claims over the spiritual, enabling new opportunities for mystical, alternative, individualised spiritualities to blossom. From this point of view, Durkheim’s judgment of magic as a quintessentially personal spiritual endeavour was not so mistaken, and indeed late-modern spirituality has been defined by an influential commentator as ‘post-Durkheimian’ (Taylor 2002). Social research has shown, however, that magic is perfectly capable of fostering communities, even if it is as yet impossible to predict how, and whether new, ebullient magical milieus – like neopaganism or Wicca – will consolidate. In any case, scholars have argued that magical spirituality should not be considered any less genuine just because religionists do not ‘sit in pews’ nor ‘believe in systematic theologies’ (Partridge 2005: 2). What seems beyond doubt is that magic is not set to vanish into thin air anytime soon.

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Note on contributor

Matteo Benussi (PhD, Cantab.) is a social anthropologist specialising in the study of religion, ethics, and post-secularism. He has conducted research on vernacular spirituality and ritual in Ukraine as well as on Islamic piety movements in Central Eurasia/Russia, and has lectured on the anthropology of religion at the University of Cambridge. For his current research project on memory and morality amongst Russia’s Muslims, he divides his time between the Universities of Berkeley and Venice (Ca’ Foscari), and his fieldwork site in the Volga-Ural region of Russia.

Dr Matteo Benussi, Department of Humanities, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Dorsoduro 3484/D, Venice, Italy. matteo.benussi@unive.it

Cargo cults

Felix Stein — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 11:51:14 +0000

Lamont Lindstrom

University of Tulsa

Initially published 29 Mar 2018

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

Abstract:

Cargo cult—the term—appeared in 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists rapidly embraced the neologism to label the Melanesian social movements that had come to their attention during the colonial era (which began in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century) as well as post-war movements that captured ethnographic attention. A southwest Pacific example of messianic or millenarian movements once common throughout the colonial world, the modal cargo cult was an agitation or organised social movement of Melanesian villagers in pursuit of ‘cargo’ by means of renewed or invented ritual action that they hoped would induce ancestral spirits or other powerful beings to provide. Typically, an inspired prophet with messages from those spirits persuaded a community that social harmony and engagement in improvised ritual (dancing, marching, flag-raising) or revived cultural traditions would, for believers, bring them cargo. Ethnographers suggested that ‘cargo’ was often Western commercial goods and money, but it could also signify moral salvation, existential respect, or proto-nationalistic, anti-colonial desire for political autonomy. Although some one-time cargo cults have been institutionalised as indigenous churches or local political organizations and remain active, few new movements of the classic cargo sort emerged after most of the Melanesian colonies achieved national independence in the 1970s. Cargo cult stories, however, today continue to circulate widely beyond Melanesia, serving as useful metaphors of contemporary unrequitable desire, both ordinary and peculiar.

Introduction

Anthropologists have invented or cultivated a number of important keywords, including ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘worldview’, ‘socialization’, ‘ethnography’, and ‘rite of passage’. Among these terms is ‘cargo cult’ which, although more particular in scope, has enjoyed surprising popularity both inside the discipline and beyond. Peter Worsley, who compiled an early overview of cargo cults in The trumpet shall sound (1957), offered what had already become the standard definition. Cargo cults are:

strange religious movements in the South Pacific [that appeared] during the last few decades. In these movements, a prophet announces the imminence of the end of the world in a cataclysm which will destroy everything. Then the ancestors will return, or God, or some other liberating power, will appear, bringing all the goods the people desire, and ushering in a reign of eternal bliss (1957: 11).

In the Melanesian islands of the southwest Pacific, ‘cargo cult’ provided a handy label which could encompass a variety of forms of social unrest that ethnographers elsewhere tagged millenarian, messianic, nativistic, vitalistic, revivalistic, or culture-contact or adjustment movements. After the Second World War, anthropological attention (including Worsley’s) had shifted from functionalist accounts of simpler social systems to issues of social change, and how to describe and explain that change. The label presumed that these Melanesian movements typically focused on the acquisition of ‘cargo’ or kago (supplies, goods) in the Pidgin Englishes of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides). Anthropologists offered a variety of explanations for cargo cult outbreaks, within the broader context of global social transformations that the War had caused. Simple greed and cupidity, fundamental Melanesian cultural and religious belief systems, or colonial inequality and oppression variously accounted for cult outbreaks. The term fell out of anthropological favor by the 1970s when Melanesian colonies obtained national independence (Fiji in 1970; Papua New Guinea in 1975; Solomon Islands in 1978; and Vanuatu in 1980). Active social movements continue, however, in colonised West Papua, the western half of New Guinea that Indonesia annexed in 1962. Some have tagged these anti-Indonesian liberation movements as cargoistic (e.g., Giay & Godschalk 1993; Timmer 2000), but caution is warranted insofar as the label undercuts the political gravity and legitimacy of organised liberation efforts. Although most anthropologists have abandoned ‘cargo cult’ as misleading, and even embarrassing (although, see Otto 2009 and Tabani 2013, who defend the label’s merits), the term enjoys a post-ethnographic afterlife and continues to pop up frequently in popular commentary and critique.

Cargo cult erupts

Anthropologists briskly adopted, but did not invent, the term ‘cargo cult’. The label first appeared in print, as a calumny, in the November 1945 issue of the colonial news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (Bird 1945). Norris Mervyn Bird, an ‘old Territories resident’, wrote to express worries that wartime upheavals, a more liberal postwar colonial regime, and ill-digested Christian teaching would unsettle local people and spark cargo culting. Bird introduced the term as an alternative to an earlier cultic label, ‘Vailala Madness’:

Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as ‘Vailala Madness’, or ‘Cargo Cult’. . . . A native, infected with the disorder, states that a great number of ships loaded with ‘cargo’ had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the ‘cargo’ for his own use. . . By his very nature the New Guinea native is peculiarly susceptible to these ‘cults’ (1945: 69-70).

F. E. Williams, Government Anthropologist employed by the Australian Territory of Papua, had investigated curious incidents around Vailala in 1922 (Williams 1923). Predictions circulated about the return of ancestral spirits on ghost steam ships carrying desirable cargo. Enthusiasts abandoned the traditional male initiation ceremony and destroyed ritual artifacts, mimed Australian tea parties at flower-bedecked tables, and took up marching, drilling, and ecstatic dancing. By the time Williams arrived to investigate, colonial officials and others had tagged all this as ‘Vailala Madness’, and Williams adopted the label as ‘the most distinctive and suitable’ of various alternatives (Williams 1923: 2).

‘Cargo cult’ bested ‘Vailala Madness’ as a movement cover term as it was not tied to a particular locale, elevated madness to cult, and featured catchy alliteration. Australia-based anthropologists including Lucy Mair and H. Ian Hogbin, who then lectured at the Australian Army School of Civil Affairs in Canberra and had served as anthropological consultants during the War, embraced the label, importing this into anthropological circles (see Mair 1948; Hogbin 1951). ‘Cargo cult’ quickly spread through Australian academia and beyond as anthropologists and journalists borrowed the term to label almost any sort of organised, village-based social movement with religious and political aspirations—movements that were increasingly on the colonialist and academic radar throughout Melanesia, as elsewhere. Anthropologists retrospectively applied the new term to pre-1945 Pacific movements, including Vailala Madness itself.

Although anthropologists had occasionally grappled with social change (e.g. Malinowski 1945), post-War transformations focused ethnographic attention on disorder and disruption, including social movements. Several important analyses of historical movements appeared in the 1950s, including Norman Cohn’s The pursuit of the millennium (1957) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive rebels (1959). The Melanesian cargo cult expanded the catalogue of notable global movements, old and new, including Handsome Lake’s (Wallace 1956) and the Ghost Dance in North America, China’s Boxer Rebellion, Kenya’s Mau Mau, and more (see Lanternari 1963). By 1952, seven years after Pacific Islands Monthly introduced the versatile label, South Pacific Commission librarian Ida Leeson found enough ethnographic and administrative material on cargo cults to produce a robust bibliography. Peter Worsley’s comparative compendium, The trumpet shall sound: a study of ‘cargo’ cults in Melanesia, which tracked 60-some movements across the southwest Pacific from Fiji to New Guinea (including West Papua), followed in 1957.

Celebrated cultists

Melanesian social movements before and after the 1950s were each distinct and particular, but similar enough to come under the cargo cult label. Steinbauer (1979) tallied 185 of these. The new term disposed observers to find common elements and themes, including: desire for cargo (however imagined); expectation of spiritual assistance, whether from the ancestral dead or Christian figures, as locally reimagined; mimetic ritual reflecting European colonial or wartime practices (flags and flagpoles; marching and drilling); the washing and other manipulation of money; and ecstatic dancing and other forms of paroxysm. Cargo prophecy varied from movement to movement, although a common assertion was that ancestral spirits (who governed natural forces and fertility) were equally implicated in the production of manufactured goods. A technologically wise ancestor, perhaps, had sailed off to America, or Europe, or Australia and there was taught the secrets of cargo. Or, wily Europeans were filching cargo that ancestral spirits were beneficently shipping to their descendants.

The period between 1956 and 1964 was cargo cult research’s golden age. During these years, five important cargo ethnographies were published: Jean Guiart (1956) on Tanna’s (New Hebrides) John Frum Movement; Margaret Mead (1956) and Theodore Schwartz (1962) on the Paliau Movement, Admiralty Islands; Kenelm Burridge (1960) on movements in Madang Province; and, not too far away, Peter Lawrence (1964) on the Yali Movement. One might also include here Robert Maher’s (1961) New men of Papua: a study in culture change about the Tommy Kabu Movement of the Purari River delta area, except that Maher did not use cargo cult idiom to frame his analysis. The term only appears as a bit of an afterthought on the book’s final page, where Maher warns that Purari people, although pragmatic, might turn to cargo culting should their desire for social change be thwarted. Malaita’s Maasina (Marching) Rule also was labeled a post-war cargo cult, although Keesing (1978; see Akin 2013) and others argued that it was rather a nationalist movement with only minor spiritual rudiments.

On the island of Tanna, the shadowy figure who people called John Frum (or Jon Frumm, or John Broom) appeared in the late 1930s and instructed new devotees to return to original lands, resume kava drinking and dancing, and in general maintain island tradition, or kastom (Guiart 1956). Presbyterian missionaries had attempted to prohibit kava (Piper methysticum) drinking as men, when under its mild psychoactive influence, communed with their ancestral spirits, with local kava-drinking grounds serving also as burial grounds. John Frum foretold reversals of land and sea; mountains and plains; and black and white. He also predicted American material assistance that, indeed, eventuated in 1942 when US forces landed to establish military bases in the archipelago. A series of mostly male leaders (in spiritual contact with John Frum) originated movement rituals shaped by both Christian liturgy and wartime experience. As did Vailala adherents and cultists elsewhere in Melanesia, movement rituals included marching and drilling, flags and poles, and flowers. Followers gathered weekly, each Friday evening, to dance through the night. On 15 February 1957, leaders raised two red flags hoarded from American ammunition dumps, and this day remains the main annual movement holiday. Over the years, John Frum talk of cargo has shifted from new money and goods, to local autonomy, to economic development projects (Lindstrom 1993).

On Manus and neighboring Admirality Islands, the Pacific War likewise stimulated and shaped the Paliau Movement (known subsequently as The Noise, Makasol, or Wind Nation). Paliau Maloat, a mature man returning home from conscript service with the Japanese military, and drawing on Christian teaching, proposed a ‘New Way’ wherein people could better pursue economic development through cooperation. He proposed that people from different communities join to share garden and sea resources, working together to advance economically. Younger followers, claiming spiritual contact with Jesus, predicted Christ’s imminent return alongside the ancestral dead. Expecting impending arrival of cargo planes, ships, bulldozers, sheet metal, money, and tinned food, followers destroyed property, danced ecstatically, shared ancestral inspirations, and waited (Schwartz 1962: 227, 268). Over the years, the movement morphed into a political bloc (Makasol) and independent church (Wind Nation) (Otto 1992). Paliau was elected to Papua New Guinea’s pre-independence Parliament in 1968 and then to the Provincial Council in 1979. Wind Nation and Makasol continue to enjoy some support on Manus.

In Madang, Peter Lawrence (1964) followed the history of regional social movements through five phases, between 1871 and 1950. Road belong cargo’s opening chapter on the ‘native cosmic order’ is a magisterial summary of the cultural context of these disturbances, culminating in the poignant story of Yali, Madang’s most recent and celebrated prophet.

Yali Singina from Sor village on Papua New Guinea’s Rai (Madang Province) coast, like Paliau, was caught up in the Pacific War, working with Australian forces including coast-watchers (during the Pacific War, Australian and American servicemen, with Indigenous support, manned a chain of remote outposts, reporting on Japanese military movements.) At war’s end, also like Paliau, Yali returned home to push economic development through cooperation, attracting followers across Papua New Guinea’s Rai Coast. Weekly on Tuesdays (the movement’s holy day), ‘flower girls’ decorated ritual tables:

At the core of this cult was ritual sexual intercourse between Yali and these women, following which the sexual fluids were collected in a bottle decorated with specific flowers (codiaeum variegatum). The bottle was placed on a table in the hope that the ancestors worshipped would offer their help by producing money at the bottom of the bottle (Hermann 1992: 58).

Yali also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the colonial House of Assembly. His son James Yali, however, was elected several times to Papua New Guinea’s national Parliament.

The Mambu Movement, which developed in the Bogia region on the western side of Madang Province in the 1930s, was still active in the 1950s when Kenelm Burridge (1960) arrived to undertake investigative cargo fieldwork. Mambu, a former plantation worker and Catholic convert from Apingam village, near Bogia, had disappeared during the Pacific War, but his prophesies continued to echo around the region. These foretold that ancestral spirits living inside Manam Island’s volcano were preparing cargo for shipment to the faithful, and that followers would no longer need to pay colonial head taxes. Waiting for tinned food, axes and bush knives, soap, cloth, and the like, people built cargo sheds near cemeteries and cult temples adorned with red flags, abandoned mission churches, gave up minding their crops and drying coconut for the market, underwent cultic rebaptism in water, enjoyed promiscuous if ritualised sexual intercourse, and adopted European clothing. Colonial authorities jailed Mambu for six months, as they would Yali and also John Frum leaders on Tanna, to little avail, as upstart prophets and new movement leaders carried the message over several decades.

Following Lawrence, anthropologists have suggested several aspects of Melanesian cultures that shaped these renowned cargo movements, along with many others. These cultural elements include the traditional importance of wealth, presumptions of necessary spiritual contribution to economic production, a disjunctive temporality, and village polities wherein big-man leadership facilitated that of cult prophets.

New cultic orders

Many movement leaders and prophets, where these existed, were typically concerned with social harmony and order, insisting on new orders for cargo to arrive, and blaming disorder when it failed to do so. Worsley argued that cargo cults functioned to ‘weld previously hostile and separate groups together into a new unity’ (1957: 228); and that ‘by projecting his message on to the supernatural plane’, a cargo cult leader demonstrates that his authority ‘transcends the narrow province of local gods and spirits associated with particular clans, tribes or villages’ (1957: 237).

Ethnographers have repeatedly documented Melanesian dreams of unity alongside attendant fears of social disintegration—the difficult political balance between ideals of social harmony and competitive status games. People’s ongoing pursuit of status and power subverts the sociability they strive to achieve. Social movements cultivated new orders, new ways, and new men that might transcend Melanesia’s fissiparous social systems. The prophet of the Kekesi Rites—an early twentieth century Papuan movement – commanded: ‘the people are to observe the moral code of the tribe’ (Chinnery 1917: 453). Within the cult, totalitarian social orders could be imagined as a new ‘Law’ (lo in Pidgin) or social regime (Lindstrom 2011). Burridge called such totality ‘rigorism’, noting that ‘every millenarist believes he has grasped the secret and is driven to enforce it on others’ (1969: 127, 135; see also Guiart 1962: 133). Worsley, too, documented the new orders’ new moralities:

All prophets, therefore, stress moral renewal: the love of one’s cult-brethren; new forms of sexual relationship; abandonment of stealing, lying, cheating, theft; devotion to the interests of the community and not merely of the self (1968: 251; see Burridge 1969: 165).

Marching and drilling, and communal dancing, embodied these new social unities and orders that cults, at least for a time, made possible.

Cult luminaries frequently instituted regularising, and sometimes repressive, mechanisms to protect a new Law’s totality. Some leaders commissioned guards, police, and courts to enforce this (Guiart 1956: 173). Sex and sorcery were particular worries, given their capacity to roil social order. In some movements, sexual morality was relaxed, and customary restrictions of exogamy and incest ignored (see, e.g., Worsley 1957: 251; Kolig 1987: 189). During Espiritu Santo’s Naked Cult, for example,

the sexual act was to take place in public, since there was no shame in it; even irregular liaisons should be open affairs. Husbands should show no jealousy, for this would disturb the state of harmony which the cult was trying to establish (Worsley 1957: 151).

In other places, cultists concluded that the best way to deal with sexual conflict is not to have any sex at all. New Laws and orders also often promised to vanquish sorcerers and the disruptions they caused.

Money, too, which people found alien and difficult to acquire or comprehend, was often targeted as a threat to unity. Burridge (1969) argued that money, as this became a new measure of personal value and prestige, created Melanesian moral crises and sparked cargo cults. Leaders of many movements, including John Frum bosses on Tanna, urged followers to rid themselves of old money by hurriedly spending it all or dumping it at sea (Guiart 1956: 155; Worsley 1957: 154-55). Prophets instead promised new money that would replace colonial coinage. When every believer acquired money and other desired cargo, people would be free at last from the onerous personal debts and economic obligations that the region’s complex reciprocal exchange systems engendered.

Cargo cult explanation

Beyond describing cargo movements, anthropologists also ventured to explain them. Cargo theorists argued whether cults spontaneously combusted in many communities given a shared, volatile Melanesian culture, or whether cultic elements originated in fewer places and then diffused across the region. They also compared the roles of charismatic prophets; whether cults were nativistic (concerned with reviving waning traditions) or iconoclastic (focused on replacing local culture with modern [Western] substitutes); who, exactly, was charged with bringing home the cargo (returning ancestral spirits; the American military); why cults broke out in certain areas but not others; and also what ‘cargo’ meant. Was this simple cash or tinned foods? Did cargo stand for proto-nationalist desire for autonomy, the removal of colonial authority, even independence? Or did cargo represent existential concerns with respect and spiritual salvation?

Explanation hinged particularly on what, exactly, cargo signified. What was the object of Melanesian desire? Some in early days took cargo literally, as did Lucy Mair: ‘the motive force of cargo cult is a feeling of hopeless envy of the European with his immensely higher material standards’ (1948: 67). Seemingly cupidinous Melanesians of course desired European commodities including tinned foods, cloth, tools, money, and (perhaps curiously) refrigerators (Lindstrom 1993: 139-42). Simple education could thus ‘cure’ cargo culting when Melanesians learned the value of hard work and the intricacies of modern manufacture (e.g., Burridge 1960: 228).

Anthropologists, however, soon complicated cargo explanation, rooting cargo cults within essential elements of Melanesian culture itself (e.g., Lawrence’s [1964]), or colonial oppression and disruption of local communities, or both. Those who argued that fundamental Melanesian culture led to culting focused on key elements thereof. These included concepts of economic production that presumed the necessity of both human and spiritual effort; the significance of various forms of wealth for personal prestige; belief in spiritual inspiration rather than individual creativity to account for novel ideas; notions of episodic time with expectation of sudden jumps from one period to another, rather than of constant temporal progress (McDowell 1988); and big-man leadership systems that easily incorporate charismatic prophets as big-manlike leaders. Some, because of these cultural elements, argued that Melanesians are inherent cargo cultists, inexorably imbued with ‘cargoism’, ‘cargo thinking’, or ‘cargo sentiment’ (Harding 1967). Or, reverting to earlier Vailala Madness themes, even a cargo psychology, whereby pervasive, underlying anxiety or schizophrenia (Burton-Bradley 1973; Lidz, Lidz, & Burton-Bradley 1973), paranoia (Schwartz 1973), or other mental disorders induced cargo culting. Following this train of thought, a few suggested that cargo culting is an antique Melanesian phenomenon, antedating the arrival of European colonialists (Berndt 1954: 269; Salisbury 1958: 75; cf. Iteanu 2017).

Others, while acknowledging that aspects of Melanesian culture facilitated cargo cults, pointed instead to the existential and political effects of colonial domination. The desired cargo, here, was emancipation of spirit and body. Burridge (1960: 215) was exquisitely sensitive to the painful condition of Papua New Guineans, distressed by European colonialism and racism. They desired to be New Men because Australians mostly treated them as animals or children. Drawing on substrate culture, they thus spun out cargoist ‘myth-dreams’ to self-medicate: ‘The most significant theme in the Cargo seems to be moral regeneration: the creation of a new man, the creation of new unities, the creation of a new society’ (1960: 246-47).

Some writers, more religiously inclined, took cargo desire to symbolise human yearning for spiritual salvation. John Frum, Mambu, and the rest were indeed avatars of Jesus to their followers (Steinbauer [1979] favored the term ‘new salvation movements’). Cunning missionaries therefore might step in and redirect cargo desire to Christian ends.

Those with a more critical perspective rooted cargo cults in post-war political and economic relationships. Rather than pointing at Melanesians and Melanesian culture for cargo culting, cults erupted because of insufferable social conditions. Some, like Mr. Bird, continued to cast cargo cult blame on liberal Christian missionaries whose preachings about man’s brotherhood natives might ill-digest. But most explained cargo culting as a desperate reaction to colonial inequality and oppression. They were, as Guiart put it, ‘forerunners of Melanesian nationalism’ (1951: 81). Worsley’s observation that cults functioned to weld scattered, autonomous local and kin groups together into wider ‘new unities’ (1957: 228) echoed the contemporary political expectation that classes-in-themselves might transform into classes-for-themselves, on the road towards some sort of future political independence. Explanations by the 1980s favored the critical stance: ‘Cargo thinking was a product of the forced interaction between two economic systems, the gift economy and the capitalist economy, with their religious support structures’ (Buck 1989: 164; see Kilani 1983). When taken to be spawned by colonial inequalities, as social disruption caused by an intensifying world system, cargo cults were reframed as a Melanesian sort of ‘globalization movement’—this term replacing earlier adjustment or culture-contact movement labels.

Sackett (1974), along these lines, proposed to explain why cults occurred in some places but not others. Key factors were distance and degree of local and colonial authority. Remote communities at the fringes of administrative systems had yet to develop hostility towards them. Those located nearby colonial centers had better access to cargo, in its material form, and the knowledge of ruling regimes. But those at some middle distance who suffered colonial meddling and lacked access to cargo (goods and knowledge) were ripe for cargo culting (this essentially is a theory of relative deprivation [Aberle 1962]). Moreover, cults mostly flared up in locales with weak local authority structures. Effective leaders, where these existed, could step up to quash any upstart, troublesome cargo prophet. This might also explain the post-1970s decline in cargo culting, insofar as authority structures have strengthened and social distances shortened.

Cargo cult embarrassments

Anthropologists since the beginning have not been altogether comfortable with their adopted term. ‘Cargo’, they knew, meant more than mere manufactured goods. And ‘cult’ could be discourteous, even insulting, deprecating people’s fervent beliefs. ‘Movement’ often read better than cult. Some ethnographers refused to use the term, defaulting instead to local appellatives (e.g., Rimoldi & Rimoldi 1992), or relying on Pidgin English kago to signpost cargo’s complexity. Kaplan (1995) insisted that Fiji’s Tuka Movement was ‘neither cargo not cult’.

Others have deconstructed cargo cult as a misleading analytical artifice, an observer’s false category. It bundles together diverse and particular uprisings, disturbances, and movements that may have little in common (McDowell 1988; see Lindstrom 2004). Hermann argued that ‘“cargo cult” should be written under erasure for the good reason that it is an inadequate concept’ (2004: 44). The scare quotes that often bracketed the label when cargo cult emerged in the 1940s are back, as ethnographers distance themselves from its discomforting implications. Others, however, defend the term as ethnographically useful, even if it has been applied to ‘heterogeneous, uncertain, and confusing ethnographic reality itself that, after all, cannot be claimed to exist in the minds of Western observers alone’ (Jebens 2004: 10). Although some find cargo cult to be at least historically useful, setting the bounds for comparative analysis, few ethnographers apply the label today. This partly reflects disciplinal embarrassment but, more directly, shifting forms of organised and disorganised Melanesian desire that, today, takes the form of charismatic, ‘health-and-wealth’ Christianity, new interests in Islam or the lost tribes of Judaism, bingo and numbers games, and dubious Internet money-making scams.

Cargo cult echoes

Several Melanesian movements remain active but, whatever their ‘cargoist’ heritage, these certainly no longer are cargo cults – rather, they have institutionalised themselves as indigenous churches and/or regional political organizations. These include John Frum on Tanna, Makasol/Wind Nation in the Admiralties, the Peli Association of the eastern Sepik region, the Pomio Kivung and Kaliai movements on New Britain (Lattas 1998), Tutukuval Isukal Association of New Hanover, and the Lo-Bos Church descending from the Yali Movement in Madang. To these, some would add Vanuatu’s Nagriamel Movement and New Georgia’s Christian Fellowship Church. Some adherents, like John Frum supporters on Tanna, earn a little income by performing as cargo cultists for bemused international tourists.

Cargo culting may have died away in Melanesia but cargo cult—the term—has jumped into global popular media where it thrives, alive and well. As in Melanesia, cargo culting anywhere can be appreciated or deprecated. Cargo cult originated as invective, and it retains its sting. Any sort of woeful or forlorn desire for material goods or other coveted objective, joined with a seemingly irrational program to obtain this, can be blasted as a wrongheaded cargo cult. It is instructive to run an Internet search on the term (text and image). This turns up a wild tangle of popular cargoist discourse. One finds entire parliaments of cargo cult politicians, cargo cult computer code, cargo cult development plans, cargo cult trade policies, cargo cult science, and much, much more (Lindstrom 2013). Brexit is cargo cult (Kuper 2017). Donald Trump is a cargo prophet (Davis 2017). Melanesians themselves continue to lob the term at one another, when outraged by the ludicrous plans or claims of political rivals.

Oppositely, cargo culting and wild desire can signify personal development, creativity, and individual freedom: the noble resistance to oppression by the state, global forces, or any intrusive authority. Just as John Frum supporters on Tanna battled colonialism, so might we all defy troublesome authority. Moreover, cool cargo cult can boost market share. Far beyond Melanesia, we might enjoy cargo cult rock band music, purchase cargo cult art, or read cargo cult literature. Fervent consumers sip John Frum rum, spray John Frum perfume, or enjoy the 2015 Portuguese film John From which, of course, featured rash, unrequited love. Held in the Nevada dessert, the trendy Burning Man Festival’s 2013 theme was Cargo Cult. John Frum got torched.

If Melanesian cargo cults have faded away, why have cargo cult stories persisted and spread? Our interest in cargo cult tales reflects normative modern desire as much as it does anything actually happening in the Pacific (Lindstrom 1993). Cargo stories are desire stories. They function to remind us how modern, consumerist desire operates. This is desire—for things as for others—that is never sated. We seek perfectibility but we would be astonished should we one day actually achieve this. Self-development is a lifetime’s work. We find reassurance and desirous echoes in strange tales of people who are madly in love with what they cannot have. The marketplace, where one may never stop shopping, never fully satisfies. Even when cargo does arrive, this fails to quash desire and may even make things worse. It turns out to be not at all what one really wanted in the first place and, worse, often causes unexpected injury and suffering when it arrives. If cargo is potentially dangerous, culting and myth-dreaming are honorable, even essential human capacities. Unending desire is our human duty. Although cargo cults have vanished in the southwest Pacific, cargo cult stories of foolish, unrequited, but necessary and understandable love, remind us of our modern condition.

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Note on contributor

Lamont Lindstrom is Henry Kendall Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Cargo cult: strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond (1993, University of Hawai'i Press) and various other cargo cult explorations.

Prof. Lamont Lindstrom, Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa, 800 S. Tucker Dr, Tulsa, OK 74104, United States. lamont-lindstrom@utulsa.edu

Tourism

Felix Stein — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 14:57:29 +0000

Rupert Stasch

University of Cambridge

Initially published 30 Nov 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17tourism

Abstract:

Tourism is a new phenomenon in world history, but today more people travel long distances for this purpose than for any other. This entry traces some main contributions anthropologists have made to understanding tourism interactions since starting to study them in the 1970s. One common theme of much of this work has been that tourism often involves the extension of tourists’ home-society ideas and systems into times and spaces of the trip, even though the activity is conceived of as an escape from regular life. The pleasure and value that tourists find in their trips can be explained by an anthropological model of ritual as the embodied, microcosmic enactment of a larger macrocosmic concept. Staging, commodification, and spectatorship are some of the more specific processes that anthropologists have studied, by which tourists’ home systems are projected outward into other spaces. In the 2000s, however, some anthropological work has focused on how tourism encounters generate new structures of experience and social involvement not determined by the orientations of any one set of participants. This work emphasises how actions and experiences of different participants are interdependent, in ways not well-grasped by a stark dichotomy of ‘tourists’ versus ‘hosts’ as whole blocs. This work also emphasises the psychological complexity of all persons' experiences in the encounters.

Introduction: contexts and contradictions

If tourism is defined as leisure travel carried out by broad sectors of a society, it has only existed since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet total international leisure trips have surpassed a billion per year since around 2010, and international and domestic tourism together account for a great portion of global economic activity.^[1] Tourism’s rapid rise from nonexistent to the largest travel practice on earth is closely tied to other new social conditions that arose in Europe across the nineteenth century and now define modern life worldwide. Outlining tourism’s links to these processes is one way to grasp basic features of what tourism even is. These links also give a useful entrée into anthropologists’ specific contribution to the academic study of tourism.

The idea of ‘leisure’ itself came into existence as a shadow or inverted mirror of wage labour, business enterprise, and the structuring of society around market- or state-organised industrial production. In the British Industrial Revolution and its successors elsewhere, societies went from being organised around agriculture to being organised around factories, workers’ sale of their labour, and the purchase of mass-produced commodities. Meanwhile, the French Revolution and other political ruptures demoted the interests of hereditary aristocrats in favor of the interests of businessmen, partly through the spread of ideas about individual freedom innovated by Enlightenment philosophers. These modern revolutions offered people a dream of freedom that was contradicted by their lives’ actual organization around clock-regimented wage labour and the management of enterprises. One early expression of this contradiction was the rise in the late-eighteenth century of the artistic and literary movement of Romanticism, which emphasised the artist’s self-isolating turn away from society, toward his own interior ideas and feelings or toward a sublime and wild nature. Romanticism’s highest good is the exercise of the individual creative will in a personal quest outside of the bonds of established order, as in William Blake’s assertion that ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s’. Ideas initially pioneered by Romantic intellectual and artistic elites later became the mass practice of tourists: the purpose of leisure travel is to get out of regular routines.

In tourism, people thus rather paradoxically seek to flee realities that they have created and that have created them. Many types of tourism are explicitly motivated by desire to escape from work, or even from market-mediated forms of social experience more broadly. Yet tourism is itself an intrinsically industrialised activity, dependent on market-organised infrastructures of transport and hospitality. That tourism has these kind of tensions at its heart is readily visible in basic features of its commercial structure, and in the divided consciousness of tourists themselves. A perception that tourists take their society with them in the act of seeking to escape it is summed up, for example, in popular ideas of the ‘tourist bubble’ or wishing to travel ‘off the beaten track’. So too, tourism professionals and tourists themselves constantly innovate new tourism destinations, trips, or whole tourism subgenres, the value of which is defined by their distinction of being less ‘touristic’ than other alternatives. The category of ‘tourist’ is intrinsically stigmatic, in tourists’ own consciousness. The figure of the tourist circulates widely in many societies, as an image of a bad actor who engages superficially and insensitively with objects of his or her travel (even though special experience of those objects is the travel’s purpose). Tourism is slightly at war with itself. The same motivating logic that makes the activity worth pursuing, and gives people ideas about pursuing it better, also gives people shame and regret.

A trickle of pioneering anthropological works on tourism began to appear in the 1970s (e.g. Smith 1977). This grew to a flood in the 2000s, and the more recent phase of work has been distinctive in including many full-length books by fieldworkers who had focused on tourism as the main subject of their long-term research (Causey 2003, Tucker 2003). Anthropologists’ slow start in studying tourists may have reflected our special investment in distancing ourselves from this popularly stigmatised other with whom we uncomfortably share a defining focus on travel and sociocultural displacement. The more recent routinization of tourism as a research topic has been supported by anthropology’s wider complete shift, toward the end of the twentieth century, from defining its core subject matter as human life outside of institutions of sociocultural modernity, to putting those institutions at the center of its concerns.

Anthropological work on tourism is now so diverse as to defy summary. One frame for seeing unity across this work, though, is the already-noted pattern that while tourism’s goal is the experience of something outside tourists’ own system, in practice it tends to unfold as the imposition of tourists’ systems into places they engage with. In the next two sections of this entry, I sketch some ways that anthropologists have found this pattern to occur across even more levels than is openly acknowledged by tourists themselves. Across the entire entry, I draw many of my illustrations from studies of cultural tourism, in which the way of life of residents of a certain place is itself the focus of the tourists’ attention and desire in making their trips. A more complete survey of the anthropology of tourism would consider a much broader range of tourism varieties (see, for example, Leite & Graburn 2009; Leite & Swain 2015).

Tourism as ritual: directly experiencing a macrocosm

One way anthropology was pre-adapted to the study of tourism is that anthropologists have long specialised in studying social deviations and inversions that relate systematically to structures of normal life. Ritual is a classic topic in this area, and anthropological thought about ritual offers special promise for elucidating tourists’ paradoxical double-movement of both loosening and intensifying their relation to their society’s dominant structures.

Nelson Graburn (1977) described tourism as a ‘secular ritual’ specifically on the grounds that travelers’ activities invert or suspend norms of the rest of life. Trips to a destination like Las Vegas, for example, involve a dramatic scrambling of regular norms of dress, eroticism, architecture, sleeping, and the interdependence of consumption and labour. This pattern of a break with visitors’ normal practices and experiences at home is partly emphasised, for example, in the highly successful tourism marketing slogan, ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’. To visit this city as a tourist is to enter a time and space of money’s hyper-circulation and hyper-expenditure, in activities of looking, eating, drinking, shopping, touching, and gambling, all separated from the paid jobs through which most visitors earn money for consumption-based living in their normal places.

There is something more specific to tourism and ritual, though, than the bare element of an inversion or break. Rituals are further set apart from the rest of life by how immediately and vividly they make ideas of a general macrocosm seem present in the microcosm of embodied sensory experience (Stasch 2011). Any given leisure trip, like any given ritual, raises an interpretive question of what broader concept is emphasised through the specific break with normal life that participants undergo in it. For example, the concept of a trip to Las Vegas is one of heightened involvement with core structures of the whole capitalist social world of the mediation of sensation by money. In this heightening, some features of life in such a system are specially revealed or intensified, such as the chanciness of financial success or ruin, the routine purchase of bodily pleasures using money, and the idea of turning money into more money. Other features of life in capitalism are specially hidden or distorted, such as the dependence of consumption and wealth on processes of someone actually making the food and other articles people buy.

Another example of the importance of an overarching macrocosmic story to the spatiotemporal structure of tours is described in a classic article by Edward Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994), about the Kenyan destination of Mayers Ranch, a homestead and garden complex owned by a British-descended family who, in the colonial era, had run cattle on a larger bloc of surrounding land. When the ranch operated as a tour destination in the 1980s, package travellers would arrive by bus each afternoon from Nairobi, mingle on a lawn near the Mayers’ house, then descend to a performance space in a nearby village occupied seasonally by Maasai and Samburu on paid retainer from the owners. The tourists would watch and photograph these Maasai and Samburu perform dances, buy their handicrafts, then ascend again to the Mayers’ lawn for tea and biscuits, walk around the surrounding English garden complex, and chat with the owners. Finally, the visitors boarded buses to continue on their wider Kenya itinerary.

The macrocosmic story experienced by visitors was thus one of division of the world into two imagined whole ways of human being: savage or pastoral tribal people on the one hand, and cultivated British colonial landowners on the other. The pleasure of a visit flowed from the site’s close juxtaposition of spaces of Maasai dance and English gardening, respectively embodying qualities of wildness and orderly control. Each space threw the other into relief. Relations of colonial difference and domination across world history—and all the ways humans have ever been different from each other and mutually involved—are complex, ambiguous, and difficult to know. Mayers Ranch, though, gave visitors a clear experience of two contrasting types. Visitors experienced this simplified drama not mainly through explicit statements of its terms but through concrete sensations of sight, touch, hearing, and taste, and through their own bodily movements between different physical areas of the ritual site. This pattern of travelers experiencing large cosmological stories in a dense array of coordinated bodily, personal sensations is a main insight that emerges from comparing tourism with ritual.

Big concepts realised concretely in a leisure trip generally come from the society of the tourists. A macrocosmic story experienced on the personal scale of a tourist’s own bodily perceptions might feel like it flows toward the visitor from the visited destination, but usually travelers have acquired their desires and expectations about that destination from literature, mass media representations, and traditions of photographic imagery circulating densely in their home social networks (e.g. the case of Tahiti, discussed by Kahn 2010). Anthropologists have used diverse analytic terms for discussing these patterns of how destinations are linked to stereotyped qualities and concepts, and have looked at diverse practical processes by which the concept of a specific destination is built up and reproduced. One influential category, for example, is that of ‘place-images’ (introduced by geographer Rob Shields, 1991), while a more recent prominent terminology is that of ‘imaginaries’ (e.g. Salazar & Graburn 2014). Whatever the chosen vocabulary, much anthropological work centrally involves putting tourists’ ideas about a destination under scrutiny, as features of the tourists’ own consciousness and own ideological world.

Staging, commodification, and spectatorship

Many factors contribute to a trip’s effect of giving tourists pleasurable, emotionally or morally moving experiences of a macrocosmic story in embodied form. So far, I have emphasised the ideas that tourists carry with them and project onto what they see. But there are also effects fostered by spatial and social displacement itself. When people pass into new places for short periods of time, they are often in a state of simultaneous hyper-ignorance and hyper-knowing. They understand little about what is around them, by comparison to people who live in the place, or by comparison to the tourists’ knowledge of their own normal living environments. But for the same reasons, tourists perceive what is around them with feelings of sensory freshness and heightened potential meaningfulness. Under such conditions, the models, concepts, or macrocosmic stories held by tourists themselves may enjoy a kind of persuasiveness that is less available to a person more deeply familiar with a place.

Additionally, destinations are actively shaped by host communities and professional mediators to match visitors’ expectations and desires. A tourism destination that I have studied is the home place of Korowai people of Indonesian Papua, who are widely celebrated for their ‘treehouse’ architecture and for the other ways that they are thought to embody an archaic condition of tribal, ‘Stone Age’ humanity, characterised by close integration with the surrounding rainforest environment and isolation from global consumer culture. From prior exposure to vast bodies of amateur and professional photographic imagery, tourists have been trained into knowing the concept of tribal humanity by a certain visual look, centered especially on absence of manufactured clothing. In their trips to the Korowai area, this is what tourists most scan for, and are most affected by. Predictably, tour guides and Korowai themselves have conventionalised a practice of staging nudity and traditional dress just for tourists’ benefit, and of clearing out imported articles from houses when tourists are known to be coming. Sometimes tourists know about or explicitly request this staging of appearances, or come to infer that it might be taking place. More often, the visitors are unaware of the special arrangements in place around them, or they ‘do not want to know’ (as one guide described to me the psychology of some clients).

The idea that hosts and destinations are remade in the image of what tourists want is probably the most frequent turn of interpretation developed by anthropologists specifically studying cultural tourism. An early theoretical account of processes of ‘staging’ was given by Dean MacCannell (1976). He posited that the core macrocosmic concept cutting across all tourism was the extreme differentiation of consciousness and activity characteristic of modern society. This differentiation is reflected in people’s pervasive sense that they do not actually know the conditions of their own lives. They expect that any given experience they are having is a ‘frontstage’ appearance, underpinned by ‘backstage’ realities that are hidden from them. MacCannell identifies sightseeing as ‘a ritual performed to the differentiations of society…a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience’ (1976: 13). The practical social pattern that results is routine organization of tourism destinations to give visitors an experience of ‘staged authenticity’, by which MacCannell means a systematically produced feeling of passing from a frontstage appearance to a more authentic condition of knowing backstage realities. Tours of commodity production sites like airplane factories, movie studios, or wineries are one kind of match to MacCannell’s template. But an idea of ‘authenticity’ does seem to be a defining preoccupation of human consciousness in modern societies generally (Trilling 1972). This idea was elaborated with special intensity by the Romantic movement, and is often a good descriptive match to tourists’ motives in visiting a variety of destination types. For example, tourists’ visits to Korowai under the sign of experiencing a timeless, anachronistically unchanged ‘Stone Age’ society could be described, in MacCannell’s terms, as following a dream of access to the ‘backstage’ of all of humanity.

Since ‘authenticity’ is tourists’ own problem, practical patterns of staging of authenticity are another example of tourists’ cultural condition extending outward to shape most aspects of actual tourism interactions. The main point of MacCannell’s account is not a game of the academic analyst smugly puncturing the tourists’ illusions, but just a realistic description of the social, communicative organization of the tourism process, in which the most active and knowing roles are often held by participants other than the tourists themselves. Patterns of tourists experiencing a general macrocosmic concept in their immediate sensory experiences of a destination depend on a great deal of socially distributed work. Visited people and mediating specialists co-construct this experience with and for the visitors. ‘One person’s leisure becomes another person’s labor’, as Jenny Chio says about ethnic minority villagers in China, for whom hosting urban Han visitors is now central to their livelihoods and to the physical appearances of their settlements (2014: 9).

Two related themes that anthropologists often document when studying tourism are commodification and visual spectatorship. Destinations and the people or attractions there are often valued because they seem to stand outside systems of commoditised social relating and material provisioning central to the tourists’ home worlds. The tourists are interested in people who produce their material livelihoods directly from their surrounding environment; they are interested in the sublime aesthetics of the natural environment, or the sublime bodily feelings of athletic acts in that environment; they are interested in visited people’s spirituality, their family relations, or their direct embodiment of an ethnic heritage. At the same time, visited people and specialist mediators in tourism encounters are often strongly focused on tourists’ wealth, and the payments or other economic benefits that flow from tourist visits. Greenwood (1989), Bunten (2008), Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), and many others have analyzed tourism as leading to the invention or standardization of local tradition in forms that did not exist independently of tourism itself, and as leading to the commodification of formerly noncommoditised areas of cultural life (as in the new market value of Korowai nudity). These authors have also described how visited people navigate difficult fractures of consciousness and practical tradeoffs between alternative definitions of what is good in life, under the structural conditions of the tourism system.

On the subject of visual spectatorship, consider the documentary film Cannibal Tours (O'Rourke 1988), which is anthropologists’ most widely shared reference point about tourism, due to its frequent use in teaching. The film depicts German, Italian, and American shipboard tourists visiting Sepik River villages in Papua New Guinea. Part of what makes the film painful to watch is how committed the tourists are to interacting with their hosts mainly in a frame of spectatorship and photography. They look at the visited people as objects, from a position of voyeuristic separation. This commitment to a certain frame of visual interaction blocks tourists from perceiving the hosts’ actual ideas, feelings, and ambivalences around tourism, which the film also depicts and which are quite different from what the tourists project onto those hosts.

The prominence of photography and spectatorship in Cannibal Tours is typical of many other tourism interactions. Almost all tourism involves an expanded emphasis on activities of looking, with tourists tending to be positioned as lookers and visited persons or sites as looked upon. The expression ‘the tourist gaze’ was coined by sociologist John Urry (1990) in part to refer to this pattern. Many anthropological studies of specific tourism destinations have dwelt in detail on the importance of certain patterns of sight in the encounters. There are many reasons that spectatorship and photography expand in this way. As has been already noted, ideas of destinations are acquired in advance through the circulation of visual images. So too, in the time of their visits, tourists often think of how their experiences can later be communicated and used socially in their home locations, and photography is suited to those goals. Tourism arose historically in close relation to the nineteenth-century rise of world fairs, public museums, department stores, and other institutions of ‘the exhibitionary complex’ influentially described by Bennett (1988). These institutions turned on a separation of seeing subject from seen object, and on an idea of this ‘spectatorial’ seeing as immediate knowing. The ongoing strength of the link between tourism and looking seems to flow from a basic compatibility between tourism’s grounding in a Romantic model of breaking out of normal experience in order to be affected by a sacred other order, and a widespread modern cultural understanding of sight as a channel of knowing by which the knower has a frictionless or ‘free’ experience of the seen object. There is a match between the feelings of perfection and purity surrounding a photograph’s realistic representation of what it depicts, and the ideal of visited places or people as themselves perfect, pure, and uplifting.

One common anthropological contribution has been to make practices of sight at the center of tourist activity stand out as culturally and socially peculiar, by documenting visited people’s responses to tourists’ visual orientations. Maasai and Samburu people who worked at Mayers Ranch referred to the end of each year’s tourism season as ‘clos[ing] the picture’ (Bruner & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994: 461). This is an indication of how aware they were that their own bodily presence and actions on the site were already a picture, organised for the visitors’ anticipated spectatorship, before any specific photograph was taken of them. People of Sumba in Indonesia, in a symbolic echo of their experience of tourists’ photography, repeat fearful rumors of ‘long-haired foreigners’ who hang local children upside down in order to drain their blood into ‘metal boxes’, then take the blood home to their electronics factories to wash the radios, televisions, and other devices made there, giving them their superior quality (Hoskins 2002). Miao and Zhuang villagers studied by Chio (2013; 2014) methodically if cautiously follow the Chinese state’s exhortation to make a spectacle of themselves, such as by covering concrete buildings with rustic wood. They are reflexive about the primacy of vision as their meeting ground with tourists, and about the gaps or articulations between visual appearances and other levels of their overall embodied lives, such as economic goals.

The themes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship connect closely with each other and can be seen as alternate faces of a single complex. Even from my brief outline of these themes, we can appreciate the following broad characteristics of that complex. Tourism itself is a kind of system or culture. It is a system that sets up a frame of difference and separation, as well as relating and engagement, between tourists and the people, places, or objects on which their travel is focused. The position of tourists themselves tends to exert more power than other positions, in setting the terms of relation. Complexly, though, visited people and tourism professionals sometimes have more active and knowing roles than tourists, in the processes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship by which tourists experience a personal ritual enactment of a macrocosmic story.

Host-guest interdependence and the creation of new social systems

I noted earlier that tourists tend to be aware of tourism’s paradox of imposing into the world the very structures they seek to escape through their travel. So too with respect to the more specific analytic themes just discussed: not just academics, but publics at large are sensitive to the likelihood of tourism interactions being voyeuristic, tourism performances being artificially staged to match tourists’ desires, and tourism deepening the commodification of social life in visited destinations. The fact that tourists themselves are often aware of these possible patterns suggests not only that the patterns are true, but that other things could be true as well. If part of the culture of tourists is critical disgust toward the figure of the ‘ugly tourist’—who projects his or her assumptions and habits into visited settings, through the processes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship—then there is more to the culture of tourists than the unreflexive projection of their assumptions and habits into visited settings.

While staging, commodification, spectatorship, and ritual realization of tourists’ own macrocosmic stories are major patterns of how tourism is organised, the overall anthropological status of these patterns is that they are questions. Researchers have asked whether and how much these patterns actually occur, and what else occurs as well. My initial statement, that tourists take their social system with them when they travel, should likewise be turned into a question, or a series of linked questions. Can a person leave his or her social system, and in what ways? How much and in what ways is a framework of categories something that people live their lives within? How do categorising frameworks deal with, suppress, or otherwise relate to forms of life that are foreign to them? To what extent does physical location in a given place mean being ‘inside’ a certain social system, framework of categories, or macrocosmic story? Or, conversely, to what extent does being inside a framework of categories mean being in a physical location? In what ways is movement between places something a person does from a stable ongoing position ‘inside’ social systems, categorising frameworks, and stories? In what ways is such movement something that breaks apart existing forms of life and assembles fundamentally different ones? These are questions that tourists themselves investigate practically in their travel, as do hosts and mediators who work with the visitors. They are also questions addressed analytically in anthropological studies.

One illustration of these issues is the shift in interactional relations between tourists and hosts that was regularly fostered by a specific Aboriginal tour guide’s telling of an autobiographical story while working at an indigenous-owned tourism enterprise in northern Australia, during Anke Tonnaer’s fieldwork there from 2004 to 2006. Referring to this guide as ‘Jimmy’, Tonnaer describes how he led groups of non-Aboriginal day visitors on a two-hour ‘bush walk’ (2016). This walk was focused on traditional foods and medicines that could be gathered from the land. In this way, the walk gave tourists a vivid embodied experience of the main macrocosmic model orienting their trips, namely an idea of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people as separated by a temporal chasm of the archaic versus the modern, symbolised by the intimate links between Aboriginal people and wild nature (this is similar to the model we have already seen to be broadly experienced by tourists visiting Mayers Ranch). However, at a certain point on the walk, Jimmy would often point out to guests the remnants of a stone oven, and explain that it dated to a period when the area was part of a ranch. This in turn would trigger his narration of the personal memory of how his own sister had been the offspring of a white ranch worker and Aboriginal mother, and at a young age was removed from her Aboriginal mother into church custody, never to return. This removal was carried out under the wider Australian policy that the tourists would have associated with the history of the ‘Stolen Generations’ (though Jimmy did not reference these categories in relating his personal memory). When Jimmy would tell this story of loss, each tour group would fall into a pronounced silence. Tonnaer perceives the story to have been very moving to them, provoking not only feelings of compassion for Jimmy’s experience (which they would sometimes put into words), but also a more general transformation of ‘the temporal rift between the tourist self and cultural other on which the cultural touristic experience was largely based’ into a relation of ‘coevalness’, or joint involvement in a common and difficult past (180). Tonnaer also considers that the visiting tourists ‘often wanted to listen’ to Jimmy’s story (182, emphasis in original). Being told this story did not make their visit less valuable, but rather was a fulfillment of their tourism’s goals, albeit not goals that had been known or scripted in advance in a specific form. The pattern of interactions between Jimmy and participants in the walk ‘points to a more complex makeup and diverse set of perhaps inchoate motivations of tourists in their desire to meet an Aboriginal person that cannot be captured entirely by the longing for an experience of cultural ancientness’ (Tonnaer 2016: 182).

One tendency of anthropological work on tourism in the 2000s has been skepticism about the dichotomy of ‘tourist’ versus ‘visited people’ as whole blocs, of a kind that informed my discussion in earlier sections. Instead, researchers have focused on differences among tourists, and among visited people, that are also centrally important to tourism interactions; on the complexity of tourists’ own consciousness and actions if these are studied ‘in the round’ rather than as if the tourists were ‘part persons’ (Graburn & Barthel-Bouchier 2001); on the elaborate systems of mediating roles and institutions on which encounters between hosts and guests or destination objects actually depend (Salazar 2010; Satsuka 2015); and on the forms of cosmopolitanism and self-awareness regularly found in the lives of visited ‘local’ people, contrary to stereotypes of tourists as mobile and hosts as immobile and whole (e.g. Causey 2007; Notar 2008; Chio 2014; Swain 2014). Stark divides between visitors and visited are often prominent in the discourse of tourism participants themselves, and the contrasts in economic or political freedom of movement between them should not be downplayed. But it is also important to understand how the identity categories on either ‘side’ of an encounter—and the further identity categories differentiated within those sides or at their edges—are produced through tourism interactions, and do not only preexist them (Meiu 2017).

Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett at one point state that ‘we might say that a new Maasai-and-Samburu-dancing-for-tourists-at-Mayers culture has evolved from the interaction of the Maasai with the Mayers and the tourists, tour agents, film crews, travel writers, and anthropologists’ (1994: 447). This type of insight has been explored with increased subtlety in recent scholarship. Consider an unanticipated outcome of international Jewish tourism to Portugal as described by Naomi Leite (2017). The tourists’ goal was to visit and learn about the famed isolated communities of ongoing underground Jewish practice that had been discovered by folklorists in outlying rural locations in the early 1900s, many centuries after the forced conversion of all Iberian Jews to Catholicism. For certain international tourists, though, what turned out to be the most moving aspect of their visits to Portugal were their encounters with new self-formed communities of urban Jewish-identified persons. The people in these urban networks had not been raised as practicing Jews, nor in many cases even told by anyone they were Jewish. But as adults, they independently came to the conviction that they are Jews by descent, and formed an intense desire for religious knowledge and belonging in this inferred identity. For the tourists, meanwhile, Portuguese historical patterns of Jewish rupture or perseverance were resonantly metaphoric of their own complex relations to Jewishness. The tourists were in a position to help the young urban Portuguese self-identifying Jews, and of wanting to help them. They could offer knowledge, institutional standing, and connections to actual Jewish religious practice. The tourists made repeat visits, set up organizational support networks, and facilitated the urban Jewish-identified individuals’ international passages to Jewish legal recognition as co-religionists.

While this case is an extreme example of forging new ties (and it involves historical processes much larger than tourism), it is increasingly common for anthropological work to focus on tourism participants’ complex mutual involvement, and on the new systems of ideas and social relations they create together, alongside documenting patterns of the kind I discussed earlier of tourists dominantly projecting their home systems of buying and knowing into new settings.

Yet while in many cases a space of tourism encounter is best described as a new and systematic reality of its own, still the participants in this novel system often have different understandings of their relations. Returning to issues of voyeurism and photography, for example, a striking case of disparity of understandings is described by Alex Gillespie (2006). In this study of interactions between foreign tourists and Ladakhis in northern India, Gillespie shows that while tourists routinely say Ladakhis dislike being photographed because it objectifies them, Ladakhis themselves actually approve of tourist photography, as an appropriate celebration of the value of Ladakhi life. The tourists are actually oriented to the views of other tourists about photography, even though they attribute those views to Ladakhis. In a similar structure of mutual misunderstanding, Korowai of Indonesian Papua often say that tourists’ motive in coming to visit them is that they know Korowai are ‘people without articles’, and because of this feel love or longing for Korowai and a desire to come give to them the articles they lack. It is actually true of tourists that they love Korowai because of their separateness from global consumer culture. But the idea that this leads the tourists to want to give Korowai articles is not accurate. Instead it is something Korowai infer from tourists’ payment behavior, against the background of Korowai people’s own norms of regularly sharing with relatives who lack something. It is a widespread irony of structures of working misunderstanding between tourism participants that the tourists desire to be more like the people they visit – in having a close relation to something like ‘nature’ or ‘tradition’ – while visited people desire to be more like the tourists, in having a close relation to wealth and other aspects of urban modernity.

Conclusion: the psychological complexity of images of others

Anthropologists’ commitment to long-term fieldwork is particularly well-suited to the documentation of the marked disparities of understanding held by different tourism participants. The experience of visited people was hardly taken into account in scholarship on tourism in any empirically-grounded manner until the recent wave of new ethnographic studies. The documentation of hosts’ experience has been the deepest contribution of anthropological work on tourism to date.

Because of the transience of encounters between tourism participants, and the force that is thus exerted by stereotypes, images, and speculative reasoning in shaping participants’ experience of each other and their actions, anthropology’s rich theoretical tradition of the study of symbolic representations has been an underlying foundation of anthropology’s contributions. I would suggest in closing, though, that there is a psychological complexity to all people’s relations to the images guiding their knowledge and action that has been difficult for scholars to give its due. This psychological complexity is illustrated by tourists to Ladakh who project onto Ladakhis their fellow tourists’ feelings of the shamefulness of photo-taking; tourists who see Portugal’s urban ‘Marranos’ as a collective embodiment of the macrocosmic story of Jewish destruction and survival (and so do not probe too deeply into any one individual’s upbringing); and tourists to northern Australia, who mainly think of Aboriginal persons as archaic people of nature, but also bear a half-formed desire to understand histories of colonial connection and domination. This layering of what people think or know—the ways in which they could be said to know more than they think they know, or less than they think they know—seem important to the smooth unfolding of tourism meetings, and the unfolding of similar transient encounters across major social gaps in general. Perhaps more nuanced understandings of this issue will be something else that grows out of anthropological work on tourism in the future.

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Note on contributor

Rupert Stasch teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is the author of Society of others: kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place (2009).

Dr Rupert Stasch, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. rs839@cam.ac.uk

[1] Promotional organizations like the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) regularly issue online reports describing tourism as accounting for between 3% and 10% of global GDP, as being the world’s largest service sector industry (compare Lew 2008, Williams & Lew 2015: 3), and as almost exceeding in size the world’s largest goods-focused industries other than fossil fuels.

Mediterraneanist anthropology

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

Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Columbia University

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

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

Abstract:

The Mediterranean is one of the most underrated areas in anthropological imagination. On the one hand, its shores have furnished the most complex formulations of the unfolding dynamics of society and culture in time. On the other hand, most Euro-American treatises of alternative social worlds fly over the Mediterranean en route to places taken to be more radically different. After a short view of the historiographical debate regarding the Mediterranean, this essay addresses some of the key the issues that occupied Mediterraneanist anthropology since the Second World War, and which have consequently framed wider debates in anthropology. First among them is the rise and fall of claims about the transnational cultural unity of Mediterranean (or any other geographical area): how such notions of cultural unity related to assumptions that Mediterranean societies were ‘frozen in time’, and what traits and modes of thoughts anthropologists claimed this cultural unity to include. A second set of questions deals with patron–client relations and their related patronage and clientelism, which at a certain moment came close to defining Mediterraneanist anthropology. The essay concludes by outlining the sort of theoretical complexity that Mediterraneanist anthropology has articulated. Acknowledging this complexity should urge us to reconsider anthropologists’ aversion to the regional scales of analysis. It will also provide us with a recipe for scaling up our own tools to match the transnational complexity of the projects and processes that demand our scholarly attention.

Introduction

The communities of the Mediterranean possess both more similarities between different countries and more diversities within their national frontiers than the tenets of modern nationalism would have us believe (Pitt-Rivers 1963a: 9-10).

Is there one Mediterranean or are there many? Should we follow those among its travellers and ethnographers who claim that they have found cultural traits that unite the sea’s shores into a ‘cultural area’, or should we instead limit our understanding of the sea’s unity to geographical characteristics? How should we treat any similarities we might find across space and time? Should we consider them as proof of the sea’s existence as an empirical entity? Or should we alternatively treat them as reasons to use the sea as a conceptual gadfly to our landlocked, unity-miring anthropological imaginations? More broadly, what makes regions ‘exist’ in any rigorous or interesting sense – commercial links, overarching political institutions, traversal social relations, or cultural similarities? And how do we know that we’ve shown enough to establish the existence of any of these measures?

It is generally agreed that no area of sufficient coherence today in the zone of the Mediterranean could be profitably compared with contiguous areas that existed in the past or in other parts of the contemporary world; that, in other words, other areas, in the past or elsewhere did have the sort of unity the Mediterranean lacks. Anthropologists had once searched for the cultural unity of the Mediterranean (Péristiany 1966; Pitt-Rivers 1963b), but then dismissed this search as a form of orientalism (Galt 1985; Herzfeld 1980; 1984; 1985b).^[1] The dismissal of Mediterraneanist anthropology severed the aggregate of ethnographies along the sea’s shores from each other as well as from a coherent concept of the contemporary area as a whole. In this, the debate in anthropology aligned with similar judgements about the relationship between modernity and the Mediterranean in history: when one began, the other ended. On the one hand, the contemporary Mediterranean was not supposed to show any cultural unity that would merit calling it a ‘culture area’. On the other hand, the things that people took to mark any Mediterraneanness of people, things, and places also marked them as non-modern.

Historiographical debate

If European modernity includes a nationalist political order, then does the advent of such modernity entail the end of any Mediterranean non-national (imperial, cosmopolitan, or otherwise transnational) order? Is the Mediterranean pre-modern by definition? When we claim to study an object as vast and complex as an entire transnational maritime region – or at the very least to examine trends, similarities, and relationships within that region – we need to pay careful attention to the relationships that both our sources and we draw between that region’s past and present. Modern social sciences have assumed that supra-local units of study follow concentric units of political, social, economic, or cultural order. This sociological imagination, otherwise known as methodological nationalism, actually fits comfortably within a wider set of seemingly homogeneous units, of which nations form only an intermediate scale: from households and villages to the globe. Seas in general, and the Mediterranean in particular, disturb this view of the world as a set of concentric social units of ever-widening, ‘nested’ scales (Brenner 2001).

There is a near consensus among historians that the Mediterranean they reconstruct from pre-modern times no longer exists, though some aspects of such pre-modern Mediterranean worlds – as well as the main preoccupation regarding the Mediterranean’s unity and attempts to unify it – have made it to our times (Greene 2010). Historians debate the dating of the shift from a Mediterranean to a modern world, but their accounts contain such a shift. Perhaps the most famous shift is the ‘Northern Invasion’ of Atlantic European fleets into the Mediterranean and the development of national rivalry, which thus ended a bipolar Christian–Muslim world (Braudel 1972: 615-42). This Invasion, which Braudel dates to the turn of the seventeenth century, brought about the ‘waning’ of the early-modern Mediterranean with its binary religious divisions, sails, corsairs, and the slave trade (Tabak 2008). Molly Greene complicated this image of change from a bi-religious to a multi-national order by showing how nationality did not replace religion but joined it as a dimension of commercial and political relations (Greene 2002). This complex image postpones the end of the Mediterranean throughout the seventeenth century. Molly Greene’s analysis of the early modern Mediterranean, based on the balance between Ottoman and European powers, takes us to the end of the eighteenth century with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (Greene 2014). It thus challenges other attempts to define the Mediterranean as a ‘colonial sea’ – as a maritime region defined by the historical project of European colonial expansion – which would be squeezed between the late eighteenth century and the 1950s – modern and not contemporary at the same time (Borutta & Gekas 2012).^[2] For other historians, the distinctiveness of Mediterranean history – the combination of relatively easy seaborne communications and a fragmented topography of agricultural microregions – lost its central role since the late nineteenth century with the advent of steam shipping and national economic consolidation projects (Horden & Purcell 2000: 3). When the industrial and economic dimensions of modernity are the focus of attention, the Mediterranean becomes northwestern Europe’s pre-1800s periphery, which was abandoned with the Atlantic expansion and colonization (Pomeranz 2000: 24-5). In other words, the ‘Northern Invasion’ anticipated a northern abandonment: northwestern Europe’s turning away from the Mediterranean to ‘the New World’. Whether modernity stands for European transoceanic colonial expansion, nationalization, or nation-states’ sea-shunning consolidation, it is said to have sealed the sea’s fate (Pamuk & Williamson 2000: 4).

Historians date the Mediterranean’s latest death to as late as the 1920s and 1940s, when cosmopolitan port cities – the most recent of its historiographical emblems – perished in the wake of nationalism, ‘a theory of political legitimacy, which requires that ethnic boundaries should not cut across political ones’ (Gellner 1983: 1). More generally, because historical accounts define the Mediterranean on the basis of historically delimited characteristics that are said to expire before modernity, applying any conception of the Mediterranean from the historiography of earlier periods to the present runs the risk of anachronism. It matters less whether the aspects or areas of the Mediterranean are believed to be immune to change (as Braudel would have it; 1972: 1239) or to incorporate coping strategies for instability and unpredictability, that is, incessant change (Horden & Purcell 2000: 13). Even for those scholars who study the Mediterranean in modern times, it is clear that modernity came to the Mediterranean (Abulafia 2003; Burke 2010). This sort of diffusionist thesis writ transnationally does not avoid the problematic ascription of modernity to some places and not to others. It rather transforms the question of who is modern to the question of who was so first.

Cultural unity

That historiographical definitions of the pre-modern Mediterranean would not stretch to the present should not surprise us. Anthropologists’ rejection of a Mediterranean modernity, however, raises different questions about our disciplinary imaginary of transnational regions and how we claim to access them ethnographically. How is it that a part of the world that is so famous for its maritime past has not enjoyed any anthropological attention to its brimming transnational present? Is there anything specifically Mediterranean about everything that is happening over the last decade or so in the Mediterranean? When we study unauthorised migration to Europe, path-breaking trans-marine infrastructures, or the Arab Spring and European reactions to it (just to mention the usual suspects), should we treat them as transnational events tout court without any regional specificity? More generally, what anthropological preoccupations made societies around the Mediterranean stand not for transnational or transregional processes but instead emblematise almost their ultra-local opposite?

The Mediterranean is one of those parts of the globe with which anthropologists have had the most productive, provocative, and at times bewildering engagement. As John Davis shows in his book – the most comprehensive account of Mediterraneanist anthropology to date – the Mediterranean ‘attracted anthropologists almost before any other region of the world’ (Davis 1977: 1). The list that Davis cites clarifies this ‘roll-call’: Maine’s Ancient law (1883), Fustel de Coulanges’s La cité antique (1864), Robertson Smith’s Kinship & marriage in early Arabia (1903), Frazer’s The golden bough (1925), Durkheim’s De la division du travail social (1893), as well as several works by Westermarck (e.g., 1899; 1911). Yet after this early phase of interest, the Mediterranean ceded this place.

On the one hand, its shores have served ever since as ethnographic breeding grounds for classic themes like hospitality (Candea & Da Col 2012; Herzfeld 1987b; Pitt-Rivers 2012; Shryock 2012), patronage (Gellner 1977; Gilsenan 1996; Silverman 1965; Weingrod 1968), and networks (Blok 1973; Boissevain 1974). On the other hand, the most ambitious treatises about the elementary forms of kinship stayed away from the Mediterranean (to mention two examples, Lévi-Strauss 1969; Sahlins 2013). Instead, they followed neater examples of what Germaine Tillion called ‘republics of brothers-in-law’ (1983). In this scheme, ‘republics of brothers’, which Tillion called modern nation-state political order, establish unity and solidarity within ‘the same national formation’ on the social relations of sameness, hence ‘brothers’. Anthropological examples from far afield set the logical alternative to this order – of sociality across difference and relationship across it, as among ‘brothers-in-law’ (for a recent version of this alternative, see Viveiros de Castro 2004). Not the Mediterranean. Here a ‘particular endogamy (that is, preferential marriage between the children of two brothers)’ and the ‘debasement of the female condition’ are widespread across religious and national borders (Tillion 1983: 16-8). Her argument focused on parallel cousin marriage and patriarchal family structure, but the relationship Tillion drew between the Mediterranean and anthropology’s geography of disciplinary interests holds more widely. This complexity ended up marginalising the Mediterranean’s role in anthropological scholarship (Herzfeld 1987a).

The Mediterranean as frozen in time

During the heyday of Mediterraneanist anthropology – roughly 1960s–1980s – the debate pitted against each other three general positions about the anthropological making of the Mediterranean. Some anthropologists followed Braudel in viewing entire swaths of the Mediterranean rim as ‘museums of Man’ (quoted in Horden & Purcell 2000: 463), which survived to the present because they were detached enough from their modernising surroundings. Social institutions like the hamoula in Palestine (Cohen 1965),^[3] patronage, honour, and family among the Sarakatsani in northwestern Greece (Campbell 1964), and the complex of norms, values, and social structure in rural Andalusia (Pitt-Rivers 1971) were depicted as timeless emblems of an erstwhile social world (Davis 1977: 242). This approach implicitly claimed that some places around the Mediterranean froze in time.^[4]

This view of places out of time soon encountered its critique: absolute seclusion is historically impossible for long periods of time, definitely in this part of the world (Wolf 1982); the same people who declare pristine removal from history and human contact often live in complex relationship with those forms of contact exactly (Candea 2010; Driessen 2005); and their declarations often mesh with nationalist attempts to locate the nation’s essence out of foreigners’ reach, however the latter may be defined (Herzfeld 2005a). To claim the Mediterranean remoteness of such places amounts to adopting their residents’ self-proclamations and the latter’s echoes in nationalist discourse, but it could not serve as an anthropological perspective on the entire region.

If we rule out the possibility of defining the Mediterranean on the basis of seemingly emblematic entire contexts – of locating it in ‘places out of time’ – how may we define it? In what dimensions of social action and relations could we locate the ingredients of a regional unity, if we should locate such unity at all? A significant part of the Mediterraneanist debate revolved around this question. In the volume that initiated the debate, Pitt-Rivers combined the role of historical contact with the plea for a comparative analysis of circum-Mediterranean ‘problems of social organization’ under ‘social change’.^[5] In his words, since ‘there are few points on the Mediterranean coastline which have not long enjoyed contact of one sort or another with the opposite extreme’, and since ‘the greater part has been, in one century or another, subject to both Islam and Christianity’, then ‘such observations … must lead us to question here the popular conception which assumes, at the same time, that peoples can be studied under the title of their national flag as geographical entities, and explained in terms of their history. The communities of the Mediterranean possess both more similarities between different countries and more diversities within their national frontiers than the tenets of modern nationalism would have us believe’ (Pitt-Rivers 1963a: 9-10). This phrasing of the Mediterraneanist pursuit differs significantly from the ‘time immemorial’ approach.

Mediterranean traits

Ultimately, social comparison gave way to cultural unity (Silverman 2001: 45-50). Some anthropologists argued that habits of thought and action continued from the past while the contexts of action changed. There was no road to take or wall to pass that would take us into veritable Mediterranean worlds. Mediterranenity resided in traits, not in places; ‘a bundle of sociocultural traits’ that served as emblems of the Mediterranean: ‘“atomistic” community life; rigid sexual segregation; a tendency toward reliance on the smallest possible kinship units (nuclear families and shallow lineages); strong emphasis on shifting, ego-centered, noncorporate coalitions’ (Gilmore 1982: 178-9). Other such traits included ‘an intense parochialism or campanilismo’, inter-village rivalries, communities’ local cults of patron saints who are identified with the territorial unit, ‘a general gregariousness and interdependence of daily life characteristic of small, densely populated neighborhoods’, and ‘a widespread belief in the evil eye’ (Gilmore 1982: 179).

Beyond a mere consideration of ‘continuity and change’, the discussion of ‘Mediterranean modes of thought’ contained a double move: it revealed similarities between circum-Mediterranean societies and it distinguished them from other places, most clearly Northern and Western Europe (and less so with other of the region’s ‘corners’). The axis for this charting was the above list of traits, which at times apparently contradicted each other (e.g., ‘tendency toward reliance on the smallest possible kinship units’ vs. ‘strong emphasis on shifting, ego-centered noncorporate coalitions’), and nonetheless provided sufficient anthropological material to sustain a heated debate about the cultural unity of the Mediterranean in modern times.

Modes of thought

Most of all, social anthropologists found the strongest sense of similarity in ‘the continuity and persistence of Mediterranean modes of thought’ (Péristiany 1966), specifically the ‘honour-and-shame syndrome’ or ‘the flamboyant virility complexes of Mediterranean males’ (Gilmore 1987: 16). As an analytical category in anthropology, honour was fixed at the regional scale: above the various national-language or dialectical names and the local instances of its observation, and below the universal scale of abstraction – of prestige, a category claimed to contain no socio-cultural specificity (‘There is of course no society, anywhere, without prestige’; Davis 1977: 89). As such, they were later critiqued (Herzfeld 1980): why should we gloss onore, nif, and egoismos as the English honour? The honour and shame complex was defined as a behaviour of ‘competing to remain equal’ (Bailey 1971: 19); as an ‘emphasis … on the virginity and the chastity of women’ (Schneider 1971: 2); and as ‘a system of stratification [that] describes the distribution of wealth in a social idiom’ (Davis 1977: 98), to cite only key examples. The first of these definitions makes honour an egalitarian struggle up a hill of material or other forms of stratification: the poor and the rich can both be honourable; better yet, in some situations, the poor can emerge as more honourable than the rich (Bourdieu 1966; Herzfeld 1985a). The second definition explains regional prevalence of an attitude by a recurrence of a structural feature of its political economy: ‘a highly competitive relationship between agricultural and pastoral economies’ and ‘the absence of effective state institutions’ (Schneider 1971: 2-3). The third definition claims the opposite: it reduces a form of behaviour to the social standing that it is claimed to mark.

The second and third approaches share an important feature: they locate their object of study – honour – in the relationship between an attitude and a social structure. If every form of society has prestige, then in those societies in which honour is emphasised, the patriarchal pursuit of the maintenance and enlargement of patrimony links certain emblems (patrimony, female chastity, and virginity) into the joint objet of entire sets of those societies’ members. Whether the emblems of honour marked social stratification or the integrity of patrimony, the social conditions for such marking were observable in the ethnographic present and its (equally observable) historically-dependent context.

Patrons and clients, mediators, power brokers

Our Mediterranean has by now changed significantly from the Braudelian ‘museum of man’: it is neither patches of a world out of history nor a set of behavioural relics from a pre-modern past. What if the social situations that anthropologists observed stemmed from people’s reactions to the changes modernization had wrought on societies around the Mediterranean – a part of the process, not what preceded it? For such an approach to maintain a specifically Mediterraneanist dimension, the regional unity should reside in a shared historical context. This was definitely the case for the various national semi-peripheries that hosted many anthropologists during the 1960s and 1970s: provincial capitals, agricultural centres and, more generally, social settings that echoed the Mediterranean’s own role in anthropologists’ imaginary map of world cultures – somewhere in the middle between the modern ‘We’ and those radically-different ‘They’. The kinds of patriarchal actors under consideration did share several historical and political economic conditions, which made them all accessible and interesting subjects of anthropologists’ work, roughly during the Cold War (Schneider 2012). Yet would such a regionally shared historical moment suffice for constructing the Mediterranean as an anthropological object? Should our definition of the Mediterranean be made of elementary units that are unique to the area? Or should the region’s definition emerge only through the specific combination of otherwise universal anthropological elements?

Before we delve into the debate about it, we may construct a composite image of the kind of social relations that captivated anthropologists in those years, and which made patron–client relations a famous Mediterraneanist theme. Patrons and clients were often people from different social strata, who forged an enduring relationship of mutual, albeit diagonal, obligation; in some cases one side attempted to forge such a relationship and failed to do so or to attain the wished-for outcomes from it (Silverman 1968; Weingrod 1968). The relationship often received justification and shape from idioms of fosterage, baptising, Godparenthood, and the like – with the patron serving as co-parent of the client’s child (Campbell 1964; Parkes 2004). On the basis of such a relationship, clients expected to receive access to resources that patrons controlled and patrons expected to receive their clients’ allegiance in matters ranging from political support to armed conflicts (Palumbo 2004). In terms of circulation and distribution of resources, patronage facilitated redistribution through the construction of a social relation that was supposed to sustain it. This is not to say that patronage is antithetical to relations of employment or fraternal reciprocity. On the contrary, this social relation could be used by both sides in an attempt to frame as redistributive relations of exchange or reciprocity (or its violent opposite: Gilsenan 1996; Schneider & Schneider 2005). This reframing capacity served people located at the nodes of post-war redistributive administrations: the entwined threads of party apparatuses, national development and reconstruction funds, and government offices (Boissevain & Friedl 1975; Pitkin 1967). The same persons who appear here in their role as patrons play the roles of mediators or power brokers in other perspectives on the same political scenes during the same period (Schneider & Schneider 1976).

Scholars have discussed these issues in varying degrees of explicitness regarding issues like local-patriotism (campanilismo), tribalism, patronage/clientelism, and ‘amoral familism’. Patronage occupied a particularly distinct place in these debates. It foregrounded the social structure of political action in such settings, which scholars contrasted with their image of European modernity. Here again the question of modernity surfaced: was patronage an ancient obstacle in the modernising spread of state institutions and national hegemony? Or was patronage a reaction to these trends – which subject groups or their leaders might have experienced as external infringement on their local autonomies? Here, the opposition between Mediterranean and modern/European/‘our’ politics was explicitly phrased at the outset:

The kind of patronage which does concern us is a form of power. In part, it intrigues us because we disapprove of it. Why? It offends both our egalitarianism and our universalism. Patrons and clients are generally unequal. Patronage relations are highly specific. They fail to illustrate the principle that like cases should be treated alike (Gellner 1977: 1, original emphasis).

Gellner’s preface does not exhaust the varying approaches to patronage in the volume that it opens. Some scholars focused on dyadic patron–client relations as instrumental ‘lop-sided friendship’ between peasants and their patrons (Pitt-Rivers 1971: 140; Campbell 1964; Wolf 1966). Others treated patronage structurally as a gap-filling mediation between communal and national scales of politics (Silverman 1965). Finally, some works explained actual patron–client relations through their conditioning by ‘a self-perpetuating system of belief and action grounded in the society’s value system’ (Boissevain 1966: 30). These different anthropological takes on social action and relations more generally materialised in disputes regarding every axis of the analysis. Some authors emphasised ‘personalized, affective, and reciprocal relationship’ (Lemarchand & Legg 1972: 151), while others stressed the workings of power in party politics in ‘developing areas’ (Weingrod 1968). Students of national political systems used patronage as an analytical concept to understand clientele systems as extended forms of relations in states’ political cultures (Powell 1970), while others compellingly argued that a ‘local ideological-normative model cannot be used to analyse itself’ (Gilsenan 1977: 168). If some focused on clients’ point of view to explain patronage as a strategy for securing protection and subsistence (Campbell 1964), others cautioned that clients’ compliance with their relations to patrons should not be confused with patrons’ legitimacy, which would otherwise be smuggled into our definition of what is structurally clients’ forced compliance with their exploitation (Scott 1977; Silverman 1970).

As often happens, the debate about patronage waned without conclusion. Yet the attention to national party politics and bureaucracies, as well as to the inter-classist role that client–patron chains played in articulating peripheral social settings to national centres (Gribaudi 1980; Schneider & Schneider 1976), already diminished patronage’s role as a Mediterraneanist emblem. Unlike the honour and shame theme, which persisted as a culturalist emblem of Mediterranean unity, patronage turned from a delineator of ‘non-modern’ places and peoples into a geographically unbound dimension of socio-political action (Gilmore 1982: 194). Perhaps because of that, anthropologists’ search for the Mediterranean continued elsewhere, and the analytical questions that had once gripped social anthropology of patronage remained unanswered (Piliavsky 2014; Waterbury 1977).

This issue repeated itself in other aspects of Mediterraneanist anthropology. One of the leading figures in the development of practice theory and in importing its nascent conceptions from anthropology to sociology was Pierre Bourdieu, whose early work on Kabylia contributed to two of the pivotal volumes in Mediterraneanist debate (Bourdieu 1963; 1966; and, see Scheele 2008). Yet once culture turned from code (or values, or norms) to logics of practice or a practical sense, it stopped being fixable either as modern or as Mediterranean. In other words, Mediterraneanist anthropology disowned the theoretical advances it had begotten, because the latter replaced the object of dispute with tools of analysis that were no longer useful in declaring whether people, places, or relations were Mediterranean or modern. The same could be argued also for the development of network theory, especially through its expansion on both sides of the Mediterranean, and always in pursuit of methodological ways to analyse social relations in ‘complex societies’ (Blok 1973; Boissevain & Mitchell 1973; Geertz, Geertz & Rosen 1979). Here too, the higher the theoretical purchase and applicability of the concept, the shorter its life among Mediterraneanists.

Aftermath of the patron–client debate

The resulting image of the Mediterranean that emerged from the heyday of anthropological interest was based on cultural similarities across the region, most of all ‘honour and shame’, for which Mediterraneanist anthropology is remembered to this day (Bromberger 2006; Sant Cassia & Schäfer 2005). For the few studies that did focus on cross-Mediterranean connections and comparison, it was connections between ‘cultures’, rather than the cultural conditions of connection: similarities between discrete entities rather than graded resemblances in practices across time and space (Davis 1977). With the exception of Jane Schneider’s classic ‘Of vigilance and virgins’ (1971), anthropologists circularly concluded that connections and proximity both generated and were based on cultural unity (Galt 1985). British social anthropologists ‘turned cultural’ not once they had encountered their transatlantic colleagues, but when they found ‘values’ and ‘modes of thought’ – like honour and shame conceived as the cultural traits shared by individuals – more fitting than underlying structures for the craft of regional comparison (Schneider 2012).

This ‘cultural shift’ towards unity and its flattening effects were gradual. The advocates of the cultural unity approach abandoned the view of the Mediterranean as a breathing, negotiable zone, in which people acknowledge their similarities as they make and break political relations among themselves and together against others. Their opponents denounced this reification altogether, rather than search for the underlying structural processes that made the Mediterranean into a transnational constellation and the idioms that inform political relations in such a constellation. In other words, the ‘culture area’ argument constructed transnational regions like the Mediterranean not on the basis of the dynamics that their diversities permit, but on the common denominator the observers drew, and then fixed that denominator as the essential character of the area.

Moreover, the debate among Mediterraneanists ended up reaffirming notions of inherent difference between the West and the Rest. If the Mediterraneanist debate entertained similarities between some parts of the three continents of Asia, Africa, and Europe, the dismissal of such similarities fixed Europe as culturally incomparable with its Mediterranean neighbours. By preferring Europe and its post-war nation-states as spatial categories over the Mediterranean, anthropologists opted for a scientific imagination made of discrete spatio-political entities, not structural relationships. This choice reiterated the reifying fallacies wrought on tribes, then on nations, only now on national and supra-national scales. As a result, the Mediterranean has become a favourite case in historiography of past maritime worlds of cultural contact and exchange (Abulafia 2011; Armitage 2009; Subrahmanyam 1998; Wigen 2006), as well as a frequent example in critiques of orientalism (Herzfeld 2005b).

Conclusion: Theory from the Mediterranean?

The Mediterranean is triply absent as an anthropological subject nowadays. First, it is rarely considered as an adequate scale of analysis (as are most, if not all, other candidate-regions: Ho 2006; Matory 2005). Second, it serves as a theoretical morality tale for what kinds of generalizations we should not pursue. Third, the category of the region is absent even from the analyses of processes and situations that are taken to be Mediterranean by other disciplines and wider treatments. In the absence of a vibrant Mediterraneanist anthropology, ethnography in the region blooms. After all, unauthorised migration, conflicts of various types and scope, transnational infrastructural projects (like pipelines and highways) and other events and scenes known to raise anthropologists’ interest abound (for key examples, see Ballinger 2003; Cabot 2014; Cole 1997; Feldman 2011; Green 2005; Rogozen-Soltar 2012; Silverstein 2004). Nevertheless, we rarely examine these situations in relation to each other and to the wider transnational constellation. Can we find a way to use the social-historical complexity that the current state of affairs across the Mediterranean offers for a wider anthropological lesson? Do we need to sacrifice the area’s specificity – however we choose to define it – on the altar of such a broader lesson, or is there a way to harness such a specificity, perhaps even to harness its specificity theoretically?

A possible answer to these questions comes out of a consideration in an earlier section – the Mediterranean seems to have fared best in anthropological literature not through radical alternatives to anthropologists’ perceptions of the way of life in their own societies (Fortes & Evans-Pritchard 1940; Malinowski 1927; Mauss 1923), but through baffling variations and permutations of them. This anthropological view of the Mediterranean as a repository not of radical alternatives to modern/Euro-American sociocultural settings but as a much closer cognate is perhaps most lucidly reflected in the conceptual relationship between anthropologies of gifting and of hospitality (Candea & Da Col 2012: S1-2; Pitt-Rivers 2011; 2012). Anthropologies of both hospitality and gifting have focused on turn-taking acts. Yet work on hospitality includes another key element: the notion of the mastery of the spatial realm, adding questions of sovereignty to those of reciprocity (Shryock 2012: S24). The skeletal gifting scene includes two persons and things that they ritually pass to each other. The relationship between gifting as an institution and reciprocity as a principle is one of the most famous issues in anthropology (Algazi, Groebner & Jussen 2003; Bailey 1971; Godelier 1999; Laidlaw 2000; Lambek 2011; Munn 1986; Parry 1986). Yet this theoretical thread privileges the role that gifts themselves serve in constituting the identity, fame, price, reputation, prestige, or otherwise social worth of the gifting parties. In contrast to this, the skeletal hospitality setup includes two persons and things that pass between them, at least those things that the host gives to the guest (food, famously), but they also include all persons coming under the host’s authority as well as the space into which the guest enters. Through these added elements in the ritual staging of social relations, the hosts’ reputation comes to depend not only on what he or she gives, but also on how intact they manage to maintain the spaces they claim to control.

This double preoccupation is illustrated in the different emphases that Pitt-Rivers and Herzfeld stress. Pitt-Rivers focuses on ‘the law of hospitality’, which he defines as ‘the problem of how to deal with strangers’ (1977: 94). Herzfeld focuses not on the relationship of household-stranger but on the homology among the levels of the wider set of collective identities, from the village to the nation (1987b: 76). As hosts and guests demand, enact, and recount scenes of hospitality, they move along this set of concentric identities, in a way that permits ‘moral englobing of political asymmetry’ (1987b: 86). Hospitality conjoins reciprocity and power, morality and politics, generosity and sovereignty (Dresch 1998; 2012; Herzfeld 1987b; Pitt-Rivers 2011; 2012; Shryock 2008). Where hosting is a key ritualised scene for claiming the moral high ground and staging political relations, people’s careers as leaders rise and fall through the stagecraft of hospitality, and is definitely so narrated (Shryock 2004). As a result, gifting is still an anthropological classic emblem of reciprocity tout court, presenting it as a pure aspect of social life, while hospitality – exactly because it combines spatio-political issues with those of reciprocity – has had a rockier path in anthropology and is also a theoretical matter of a double, not sole thread. It should not surprise us at this point that Mauss discusses societies far afield, while Pitt-Rivers concentrates on societies from around the Mediterranean.

We started this discussion with the Mediterraneanist interest of anthropology’s early generations, yet the Mediterranean has also served in complicating anthropological theories beyond the theme of hospitality, when scholars performed a sort of theoretical doubling of mono-thread theories developed elsewhere. If Mauss’s gift met its Mediterraneanist counterpart in Pitt-Rivers’s hospitality (and grace), then the same could arguably be said for Lévi-Strauss’s ‘savage mind’, which Bourdieu’s habitus began to complicate between Algeria and southern France (Bourdieu 1966; 1972; 1979); Goody’s work on the family and marriage in southern Europe (1983); De Martino’s historical anthropology of magic and religion (2005; 2015); as well as Campbell’s and Herzfeld’s formulations of Evans-Pritchard’s segmentation strand of segmentation theory (Campbell 1964; Herzfeld 1985a; 2005a). If the Mediterranean has actually inspired welcome theoretical complexity (of kinship, magic, perception, political structure), then perhaps both the scale of analysis if offers and current events in and around it could also benefit from our analytical attention on similar terms?

An anthropological approach to the current affairs around the Mediterranean can achieve both goals: show how we can reconstruct the ethnographic relevance of regional scale of action and examine current affairs in the Mediterranean using the tools of analysis that Mediterraneanist anthropology has honed over the years. In contemporary accounts of the Mediterranean, the two most frequent features are tourism and unauthorised migration. Authors discuss both under the theme of locals’ xenophobia, which faces north and south respectively (Abulafia 2003; Boissevain & Selwyn 2004; Feldman 2013). Yet accusations of xenophobia fit within both threads of the anthropology of hospitality we’ve examined: it is one prescribed solution to ‘the problem of how to deal with strangers’ as well as a moral judgement of those who pursue it (through either commission or omission). Anthropologists of hospitality in close quarters have shown how hosts try to prove their honour by showing the integrity of their domestic spaces and their mastery over ‘the threshold of welcome or trespass’ (Shryock 2012: S24). Anyone following the international news cycle over the past four years will have noticed that the same splitting of the world into the moral and the political has been unfolding on a much vaster scale, in European management of unauthorised migration in the Mediterranean. The transnational dynamics of hospitality provide us with an outline for a historical anthropology of how the scales of action, responsibility, and sovereignty shift both upwards and downwards. Here, European states promote their own national pride and are members of a union that holds universalist pretensions as a beacon of universal hospitality. These states’ governments both try to collaborate with each other (as members in that union) and exchange accusations of xenophobia, bad hospitality, and irresponsible management of their domestic realms. Such an analysis may provide us with the Mediterranean neither as the unchanging structure of cultural unity nor as a time-bound historical object, but rather as the ever-changing constellation that emerges from the various political projects and moral proclamations that clash and combine with each other. If we revisit the fruits of the region’s past anthropology, if we expand its scope, first to construct and then to address processes on a transnational scale, then we may regain both a Mediterraneanist anthropology and an anthropological Mediterranean.

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Note on contributor

Naor Ben-Yehoyada is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University and Associated Researcher at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche–Iamc, Sicily. He received his MA from Tel Aviv University and his PhD from Harvard University in 2011.

Dr Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, United States. nhb2115@columbia.edu

[1] The term ‘orientalism’ comes from the title of Edward Said’s book, in which he critiqued the set of fictional representations of ‘The East’, which reduced it to stalk figures of ‘Oriental peoples’ and ‘places’ (Said 1978). Herzfeld explicitly adapted it as ‘practical Mediterraneanism’ (Herzfeld 2005b; see also De Donno 2010).

[2] Edmund Burke III remains one of the only historians to insist on extending the Mediterranean into modernity. Yet, his opposition to culturalist explanations notwithstanding, the unity of the modern Mediterranean that he proclaims requires significant historical leaps and ends up reiterating old claims about some sort or another of the region’s backwardness (2012: 920).

[3] In Rosenfeld’s terms, ‘a patrilineal descent group or patrilineage, related families or extended families being organised in a lineage of the segmentary type’ (Rosenfeld 1974: 243).

[4] See Carlo Levi’s (1947) account of his obligatory sojourn in a couple of villages in Lucania in 1930s fascist Italy for a most poetic rendition of this point.

[5] This formulation survived not within the culturalist direction that the Mediterranean unity debate took, but rather in the works of scholars like Jane Schneider (Schneider 1971; 1990) and Jack Goody (Goody 1983).