Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Temporality

Deleuze

Felix Stein — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 08:38:52 +0000

University of Edinburgh

Initially published 11 Jan 2018

Abstract:

This entry takes on two subjects. First, it addresses the influence that anthropology had on the work of the mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and second, the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s work has subsequently exerted on anthropology. In Deleuze’s encounter with anthropology, he ended up seeing anthropological structuralism as a limit to thought. However, he saw Anglo-American anthropology, and some later French anthropology, as powerful tools for conceiving different arrangements of the world, and he ended up relying heavily on these materials when he constructed his own Nietzschian longue durée speculative anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology has had little interest in Deleuze’s speculative anthropology; however, it has seen both Deleuze’s overall aesthetics and many of his concepts as theoretical engines that could be used piecemeal at will, with little concern for the role they played in Deleuze’s overall thought, or for how having these ideas reterritorialised in anthropology might affect them. In the end, this entry suggests that despite the outsized reception of Deleuze in anthropology, a real encounter with Deleuze’s thoughts have yet to occur; despite this lack of a true, sustained engagement, anthropological use of Deleuzian concepts has still been incredibly productive in the discipline.

Introduction

Gilles Deleuze’s (1925-1995) reception in anthropology has had multiple, and often incommensurable, dimensions. That may not be a problem, however. It certainly wouldn’t have been a slur for this thinker who has been treated in so many different and disjunctive ways, because if there ever were a figure that would be happy being a multiplicity, it would be Gilles Deleuze. This entry will present what anthropology was for Deleuze, and also what Deleuze would be for the subsequent anthropologists that would read him. In the end, it will argue that despite a high degree of mutual interest between the thinker and the discipline, there has not been a real encounter between anthropological thought and the thought of Deleuze; this entry will also suggest that this may be just as Deleuze would have wanted it.

Deleuze was a twentieth century philosopher, known both for his own works as well as for a series of collaborations with the psychiatrist and political activist Félix Guattari.^{^[1]} To reduce this thought to a few rough intellectual axioms, it could be said that the center of Deleuze’s project was prizing difference over identity, privileging immanence over transcendence, the pre-subjective over the subjective; an attention to intensity as the other side of seemingly extensive objects and processes; an interest in the promise of novelty that could be found both in combinatory logic of different objects, processes, and thought; and in underdetermined potentiality that these objects, processes, and thought contained. Deleuze is often presented, especially in an American academic context, as being ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructural’ or as a part of ‘French Theory’, even though these categories are an artifact of Anglophone reception instead of an expression of any common value or signification in the so-designated works (see, for example, Cusset 2008). Even if these categories were intelligible, however, there would be good reason for setting Deleuze and his oeuvre apart from the rest of the mid-twentieth century thinkers that he is often lumped in with. The reason that Deleuze should be set apart is that his work is singular when held up not just against post-war French thinking, but arguably when held up against the history of modern philosophy as a whole. The British analytic philosopher W.B. Moore has stated that Deleuze was a ‘remarkable … polymath’ who achieved a break with previous philosophical tradition that is on the order of the ‘Copernican turn’ effectuated by Immanuel Kant (2013: 542). That Deleuze, of all people, could be credited with such a break could be considered surprising, especially since it would be easy to see him as an intellectually (as opposed to politically) conservative thinker. He spent a large part of his career working in the history of philosophy, and even after he became established as a philosopher in his own right, he continued to write what were essentially pedagogical précis on the works of canonical philosophers such as Hume, Leibnitz, Kant, and Nietzsche. Furthermore, his own original work is self-presented not as a break with western metaphysics, but as a continuation of it, even if he understands himself as expressing a particular ‘minor’ philosophical tradition, one that runs (in his telling) from Spinoza to Heidegger, that he considers to be at odds with the more established modes of philosophy. Deleuze likened his work to that of picking up the arrows of ‘great thinkers’ so that he could ‘try to send them in other directions, even if the distance covered is not astronomical, but quite small’ (1993: xv).^{^[2]}

However, there is no consensus on what direction he was shooting these metaphorical arrows, or how true his aim. He has been seen as both a continuation of traditional philosophy and a break with it, a subjectivist and a realist, a champion of postmodernity and a critic of postmodernity, an ontologist and an enemy of ontological thinking, a thinker of pure difference and a monotonous thinker of ‘the one,’ a Leninist enemy of capitalism and a proponent of an unfettered hypercapitalism.^[3]

If we want to operate in the very ‘un-Deleuzian’ register of blame (Deleuze felt that blame was supersaturated in the toxic Nietzschian affect called ressentiment), then it should be acknowledged that some of the responsibility for this wide variation in the reception of Deleuze’s work lies with Deleuze himself. Deleuze’s writing style and technical vocabulary does not invite any easy understanding. Part of it was his interest in variation, change, and in ‘multiplicities,’ which meant that he was more interested in exploring all the various forks in a line of thought rather than in didactically tracing a thought’s borders.^{^[4]} Further, he has produced a dizzying array of neologisms, and he often purposefully uses already-extant technical terms in idiosyncratic and sometimes perverse ways. His work is full of odd terms such as ‘rhizomes’, ‘arborescent’, ‘smooth and stratiated space’, ‘desiring machines’, ‘the body without organs’. But perhaps the chief reason for Deleuze to receive such a varied and vertiginous reception lies in his critique of what he called the ‘dogmatic imagine of thought’, which he understood to be the grounding assumptions behind almost the entirety of western philosophy. This ‘dogmatic image’ includes a suspicion of the primacy of representation, skepticism that ‘good will’ is all that is needed to reach the truth, and even doubt about the primacy of truth. It was not that he did not believe in truth; he did not deny truth as a mode of thought or measure of validation across the board. Rather, Deleuze observed that most true statements are banal statements, and that relevance, importance, or novelty were often more vital measures of evaluation.

While Deleuze claimed that he was an empiricist in the style of Hume, his work seems distant from the sort of empiricism that constitutes most of ethnographic writing and thought (but, see Rutherford 2012). Therefore, his concern with both nose-bleed level metaphysics and with radical critiques of the history of western philosophy would seem to suggest that any anthropological hybridization with Deleuze would be stillborn. But this is not the case. Not only has there been substantial anthropological interest in Deleuze, but Deleuze himself was also a close reader of anthropology. Deleuze even produced what might be called an ‘anthropology’ of his own, not in the sense of a philosophical theory of man, but more along the line of Kant’s anthropology, a large-scale rubric to think through the forms and histories of various human collectivities. The rest of this entry will consist of rehearsing this anthropology, and of discussing how anthropologists have repurposed Deleuze for their own intellectual project. The reader should be prepared for multiple infelicities in these discussions. Despite Deleuze’s familiarity with the then-current state of the discipline, his anthropology has features that make it indigestible to most contemporary anthropological sensibilities. And while there are some important exceptions, the contemporary anthropological engagement with Deleuze suggests a lack of command of his system of thought. This feature does not invalidate these anthropological works, of course; Deleuze would most likely applaud having his work deployed in different intellectual environments; having it mutated so that it works to new ends; having it vivisected and sutured to other theoretical systems. But this does mean that these theoretical hopeful monsters may in the end not be very Deleuzian, despite their apparent intellectual paternity. In the opening passage of A thousand plateaus, which Deleuze co-wrote with Guattari, the authors invoke the imagine of a wasp and an orchid to illustrate the way two heterogeneous systems could engage in a ‘double capture’, each repurposing the other to their own ends without at the same time assimilating the other or erasing the fundamental differences between them. The wasp treats the orchid as a sexual partner or rival, and the orchid treats the wasp as a pollen vector. The attentive reader, however, will note that there is some ambivalence in French between when one should use the term ‘guêpe’ (or wasp) and when one should use the term ‘abeille’ (or bee), and that while both bees and wasps pollinate orchids, there are few orchids that are pollinated by both species. There is always, therefore, the possibility of confusion and misuse; and we should also remember that for one of the two parties, such a mating is always sterile. What is true for bees and orchids may be true in some cases for Deleuze and anthropology as well; but whether either is necessarily the wasp or the orchid will remain an open question.

What anthropology was for Gilles Deleuze

Engagement with structuralism

Any discussion of Deleuze and anthropology has to begin by addressing the former’s relation to structuralism. Structuralism is a topic too complex to completely rehearse here; it can perhaps be best summarised as the claim that sense is not inherent in any one sign, but is produced by systems of reciprocal differences between two signs, or sets of signs (Stasch 2006). While structuralism as a theoretical framework has its roots in the linguistic work of authors such as Jacobson and de Saussure (Percival 2011), and there were also ‘structuralisms’ in fields as diverse as literary criticism (Barthes 1974), political philosophy (Althusser 1971), and psychoanalysis (Lacan 2007), it seems fair to say that the most influential formulation of structuralism at the period that Deleuze was intellectually active was the anthropological one promulgated by Lévi-Strauss. Like many other Francophone intellectuals of that time, Deleuze had an ambivalent relation with structuralism. As can be seen in his 1967 essay,^{^[5]} ‘How do we recognize structuralism’, there seems to be moments where Deleuze takes this approach up without hesitation or qualification (Deleuze 2004). Deleuze’s essay is expressly written as a dispatch from a particular moment. It is careful to situate where it sits in intellectual history: this essay starts out with the statement ‘This is 1967’. It goes to great care to mark itself as being written in an early moment, and several times marks important elements of structuralism as having still open, though possibly determinable, questions (for example, when discussing the symbolic order, it states that ‘We do not yet know what this symbolic element consists of’) (Deleuze 2004: 173). While not endorsing structuralism outright, he presents a meticulous re-articulation of it using language almost identical to that found in his first two ‘non-history-of-philosophy’ books, Difference and repetition (1993) and Logic of sense (1990a). But this also means that Deleuze’s structuralism, even as it acknowledged its debt to Lévi-Strauss, was very much his own. What interests Deleuze is seeing structure as a net of potentiality, nodes of which are only transitorily inhabited by particular actualised figures. What is more, Deleuze’s structuralism is one that is very concerned with the tempo and rhythm of the time and events that are the expressions of structure: while the architectonic aspects of structuralism are not absent, they are secondary to the variation that occurs in different iterations of a set of structural relations (see Alliez 2005: 92-93). Because of this, is it possible to read Deleuze and Guattari’s later rejection of structuralism in A thousand plateaus not as a retrenchment or reposition, but rather as emphasising that any reading of structuralism must take temporal unfolding into being. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari complain that Lévi-Strauss presents myths where humans transform into animals (and where animals engage in their own strange transformations) as ‘a correspondence between two relations’. Such a framing, Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘impoverishes the phenomenon’, and that myth as Lévi-Strauss presents it is ‘a framework of classification [that] is quite incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments than tales’: Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism has no role for either ‘graduating resembles’, or ‘resemblances in a series’, instead inevitably producing an ‘order of differences’. Worst of all, structuralism ‘denounced the prestige accorded to the imagination’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 236-7). It is not the poles in structural oppositions that interests Deleuze, but rather the extended continuum between them.

This later stance should not be taken as an across-the-board rejection of Lévi-Strauss, or as indicating an actual fundamental incapability between these thinkers. Understanding Deleuze and Guattari as presenting a total critique of Lévi-Strauss might be going too far. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2015), a close reader of both Deleuze and Lévi-Strauss, has stated that the latter’s four volume Mythologique series is more Deleuzian than perhaps Deleuze himself appreciated. The endless variations expressed in Lévi-Strauss’s kaleidoscopic recounting of the imagination of the indigenous Americas suggests not just a controlling logic of difference and differentiation, of translation and transformation. Further, the refusal of any transcending code or horizon that apparently characterises Mythologique by the project’s end is read by Viveiros de Castro as an instance of pure immanence of thought, a mode of thinking that Deleuze prized over transcendence. Of course, one could be skeptical of this reading: others have seen Lévi-Strauss as too caught up in the concrete to throw themselves into a Deleuzian play of pure difference; under this reading, the senior anthropologists unable to make the leap into iterative abstraction (Kaufman 2007) (though again, to some anthropological sensibilities, such a limitation is not necessarily a fault). However, even if one is skeptical of Viveiros de Castro’s reading, it is obvious that, regardless of his attitude towards structuralism as a totality, certain anthropological claims made by Lévi-Strauss were accepted by Deleuze. While some of Lévi-Strauss’ claims were rejected as being too centralised, too interested in locking down transformations in the service of a rationalising logic, others, such as the social organization outlined in ‘Do dual organizations exist’ are ratified (Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 209-10). Likewise, Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking work on kinship is acknowledged, albeit as one that only addresses ‘extension’, which is only one face of a common Deleuzian extensive/intensive diptych (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 157).

Deleuze as a reader of anthropology

Of course, even granting his importance during the time that Deleuze was active, Lévi-Strauss did not exhaust all of anthropology; Deleuze both read widely and borrowed freely from other contemporary anthropologists. ‘Flux’ and the ‘war machine’, important categories in Deleuze and Guattari’s jointly authored works, are both credited to French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (Deleuze & Guattari 1983; Guattari 2008; Biehlo 2013: 584). Likewise, Gregory Bateson’s (2010) concept of plateaus as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ were important enough for Deleuze and Guattari that they used it as the framing conceit in their second major work (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 22). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is in in Capitalism and schizophrenia (1983), Deleuze’s first collaboration with Guattari, where we see Deleuze engaging in depth with anthropology as a body of literature and as a discipline. In this work, we have substantive references to what almost amounts to a mid-century ‘who’s who’ of the field. In presenting his argument, Deleuze and Guattari invoke: Paul and Laura Bohannan’s work with the Tiv on spheres of exchange and the way that they react to the introduction of cash (176, 248); Victor Turner’s work on healing and symbolism among the Ndembu (167, 350); George Deveroux’s conjecture on social structure and sexuality (33, 165); Jeanne Favret on segmentary organization (152); Myer Fortes on filiation, including an off the cuff reference to the classic Oedipus and Job in West African religion (142, 146); Malinowski’s work on Kula exchange, but also his consideration of the (lack of a) Trobriands’ Oedipal concept (53, 159, 171-2); Edmund Leach on possible (again) filiation, on critiques of Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of presentation and counter-presentation, as well as on the relevance of possible psychological origins of social symbols (146, 150, 164, 172, 179); Marcel Mauss on the Gift (150, 185); and so on. This pattern is repeated in A thousand plateaus, where, in addition to many of the aforementioned authors, the list is expanded to include figures such as Marshall Sahlins and Robert Lowie.

This engagement with anthropology and ethnography was something that Deleuze deeply desired to get right. When writing on this subject, he broke form and did something he rarely did: he consulted with actual experts in a different discipline (Dosse 2010: 201). But this engagement should not be taken to mean that the joint project he and Guattari were engaged in was itself an instance of conventional anthropological thought, or in harmony with the mainline form of the discipline. For all its breadth, their reading of the literature has been strongly criticised for being superficial, for having numerous factual errors, for being blind to some of the complicity with colonialism that characterised some of the anthropology of the period, and for being quick to catapult from particular ethnographic depictions, such as leopard cults in the Belgian Congo or Kachin witchcraft, to ungrounded generalities (‘the sorcerer’ or ‘becoming animal’ in ‘Black Africa’), making concrete populations into philosophical metaphors (Miller 1993; see Holland 2003 in defense of Deleuze and Guattari on many of these points). It should also be noted that anthropologists who went to the field familiar with Deleuzian conceptions abstracted from specific collectivities have found it hard to use those concepts to describe the very social practices that Deleuze and Guattari relied upon, and have often had to modify them substantially in order to make them fit (see, e.g., Pedersen 2007).

Deleuze’s speculative anthropology

Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in anthropology should not be taken to mean that they were interested in repeating the form of the anthropological essay or the ethnographic monograph. This is indicated by what they present as the ultimate template for their anthropological project: ‘[t]he great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss’s The gift as Nietzsche’s Genealogy of morals’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 190).^{^[6]} This engagement with anthropology was in service of a longue durée historical anthropology, the sort of stratigraphic, teleological projects as such nineteenth century authors as Lewis Morgan (1907) or E.B. Tylor (1871a, 1871b). The specific history that they want to trace out is that of production, both in the specific Marxist sense, but also as a general rubric which would encompass the creation of other material, with the most central material being libido.

This interest in seeing both capitalist production and the production of desire could make their project seem to be just another example of the sort of Freudo-Marxism that characterised so much of critical thought during the immediate post-war years of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Marcuse 1974). But it is in the details that Deleuze and Guattari’s project separates itself from others of its kind. Rather than seeing Marx’s process as, in essence, an epiphenomenon of Freudian forces, or as reversing the process and privileging Marx as base and seeing Freud as superstructure, Deleuze and Guattari see both Marxist production and Freudian libido as different instances of the same abstract ‘universal primary process’. This is corrosive not only of these two separate theoretical framings, but also of the actors that Freud and Marx saw as central to their respective projects; it also undoes the ‘modern constitution’ of the Nature-Culture split (Latour 2012) in as much as socio-cultural production and psycho-biological drives are subsumed under the same mechanism. In Anti-Oedipus, there is no subject, whether that subject be conscious, unconscious, or a labor-producing class acting in accordance with its species-being. Rather, everything is just an endless concatenation of semi-autonomous units that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘machines’. These machines (rechristened in later works of theirs as ‘assemblages’) include the various biological bodily features that would be considered ‘part objects’ under more mainline psychoanalytic thinking (examples include an ‘anal machine, a talking-machine, [and] a breaking machine’) (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 2) But also actual biological processes, human or otherwise, are machines as well. The category of machines is more capacious than the category of physiology or biology. Machinery in the more traditional sense in included as ‘machines’ in the Deleuzian sense of the word, as are various institutions, social arrangements, and psychological and biological systems. In the understanding of Deleuze and Guattari, the function of all these machines can be grasped as either connective, disjunctive, or conjunctive, and the synthesis of these operations allows for broader operations such as production in the common sense, recording, and enjoying.

The reason that the mechanic nature of things is invisible to us is that these operations are situated on what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘socius’. The socius organises production by being the site where all these disparate machines are woven together, but the socius is also misrecognised as the source of all this production as well.^{^[7]} The socius is an abstract or cognitive space, and as such the kinds of regions where it is ‘located’ can and have changed over time (or at least can and have changed in their account). This brings us to the crux of Deleuze and Guattari’s anthropology. It is shifts in the location of socius, and in the way that the flows on it are organised, which give structure to Deleuze and Guattari’s anthropologic ‘big history’, and demarcates objects of ‘traditional’ anthropological inquiry from the sort of large-scale societies that anthropology only turned to as it matured.

What are these shifts in the socius, and what effects fall from them? In a way that is again not dissimilar to Lewis Morgan’s (1907) Savagery/Barbarism/Civilization triad, Deleuze and Guattari divide humanity’s periods into tribal, empire, and capitalist dispensations. In the tribal period, the socius is understood as being the body of the earth, and flows are situated or ‘territorialized’ on it. In periods of ‘tribal’ organization, both territorialization and the (re)organization and situating of flows on the socius are done through what they call ‘inscription’, which might best be understood as including all forms of ‘leaving one’s mark’ on social life. Inscription is done directly, whether as a mark or as a social action, and because of its unmediated nature it therefore cannot be held to be signification; this means that ‘tribal’ societies are ecologies of effects and not systems of meaning. For Deleuze and Guattari, the business of making kin is the premier form of inscription. It is the creation of kin which organises bodies in relation to one another and to the ground that is worked upon, ‘coding’ the earth. In their eyes, this is the most important mode through which the flows of intensive filiation are made into the code of alliance and affiliation.

In the following period of ‘empire’, the socius shifts from the surface of the earth to the body of the despot, with the body of the despot discussed in a sense not dissimilar to that found in Kantorowicz (1985). Various agents and subjects of the despot take up the role of his ‘eyes’ or ‘hands’ (or whatever other body part that mapped onto the function that was at issue), thus constituting a sort of leviathan where the focus is more on the outline of the total body than of the composite bodies that constitute the subsumed parts. This means not just a reorganization of the socius, and a concomitant ‘deterritorialization’ of the various already-situated machines, but also an ‘overcoding’ of the already-extant mechanic systems from the previous dispensation as they are utilised by and thought of in relation to the primitive tyrant. The stage is eventually supplanted by capitalism. In this stage, capital itself is the socius, and codes are replaced by axioms. Axoims are half imperative, half algorithm, at once demanding, instructing, and measuring the maximization of flows, accelerating them as surplus value is ‘skimmed off’ of these streams. The speed causes ‘everything solid to melt into air,’ (Marx & Engels 1970: 35) and create a torrent of deterritorialization as flows are decoded, mathematised, and mapped onto the individual bodies of workers and consumers that have been assimilated into the socius. This last mapping is to create the minimum territoriality needed to keep capitalism from running off the wheels, and is also the point of entry to the Oedipal complex, a mode of control that is treated as much as an institutional dispositif as a psychoanalytic reality.

It would be a mistake to see this system as being foundational to either Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration, or to Deleuze’s own conception of the order of things. In later works by these authors, machines are replaced by assemblages, and the tribal transforms into the nomadic, a dispensation constituted by disciplined itinerants whose rootlessness operates as a Clastres-like (2007) self-inoculation against the formation of the State. Nor should this be seen as exhausting Deleuze’s concerns. Very little of this material or terminology is referenced in Deleuze’s own work. However, it was in articulating this systemitization of the world that Deleuze had his greatest and most prolonged encounter with ethnography and anthropology.

What Deleuze is for anthropology

Reception of Deleuze’s speculative anthropology

That deep engagement does not mean that this system caters to anthropological tastes. Even the anthropologists that Deleuze was in conversation with as he crafted his system expressed to him anxieties about his epoch-spanning periodization (Dosse 2010: 201). And as has been pointed out by Ian Lowrie, while Deleuze and Guattari’s picture of ‘tribal’ societies does seem to resonate with some classical cybernetically-informed ethnographies of small-scale societies (such as Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the ancestors [2000]), Deleuze’s vision of capitalism as a space and time where mathematics has replaced semiotics seems unlikely to agree with the anthropological palate, and Deleuze and Guattari’s teleological periodization would not be that welcome, either (Lowrie 2017). The social-evolutionary element of the argument is also a bone that many anthropologists would choke on, even though Deleuze and Guattari deny that their schema could be described as social evolution. Finally, their reading of flows and circulation in tribal economies seems more informed by Nietzsche’s concept of debt (which has not received much ethnographic confirmation) than by Mauss’s vision of the Gift (which has) (Graeber 2011: 402).

Depth and breadth of Deleuze’s influence in anthropology

It is not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari’s account has been given very little time by anthropologists. But that should not be taken to mean that anthropologists have accorded the same low level of respect to Deleuze himself. And while Deleuze does not have as deep a gravity well in the discipline as ‘Planet Foucault’ (Boyer 2002), many anthropologists have turned to Deleuze to hash out their ethnography, or to provide the ligaments for their theoretical constructs.

However, any attempt to pinpoint the influence of Deleuze immediately runs up against one difficulty: the fact that Deleuze’s thinking not only has been dispersed to the degree of being almost atmospheric in the present age, but also the fact that his thinking seems, in many ways, to have presaged the present age as well. Foucault infamously once stated that perhaps the present period would be remembered by historians as ‘Deleuzean’ (Foucault 1998: 343). And while Deleuze brushed this off as ‘a joke meant to make people like us laugh, and make everyone else livid’ (Deleuze 1995: 4), it seems that his work in some ways anticipated much of our zeitgeist. The difficulty is that anticipating the zeitgeist, and being an intellectual influence on thinkers who express it, are two different things (and this is putting to the side the possibility – and to be honest, the high likelihood – that the current era is informing our reading of Deleuze in such a way that other readings of Deleuze, including readings that Deleuze himself might have endorsed, are either foreclosed to us or unrecognizable.) There is also the question of what counts as influence, and what simply counts as being a part of an intellectual genealogy. To take one example, the sociologist of science and self-proclaimed philosopher Bruno Latour has not been shy about the influence that Deleuze’s works have had on him; but does this mean that those who have in turn been influenced by Latour should ‘count’ as being influenced by Deleuze at one remove?

We will put to the side a discussion of ‘accidental’ Deleuzians,^[8] and focus on those who have explicitly acknowledged Deleuze as being an important plank in their thoughts. Most anthropologists have declined to take on Deleuze’s thought whole hog (Jensen & Rödje 2010, Markus & Saka 2006), and generally tend to take a single concept and conjoin it to concepts or framings that originate elsewhere. A loose map of anthropologically-repurposed Deleuzian part-concepts would have to include Deleuze’s vision of modern society as he presented it in his essay ‘Postscript on the society of control’, the ‘rhizome’ and ‘the assemblage’ (two ideas of which are given the greatest elaboration in Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari), Deleuze’s understanding of affect, Deleuze’s concept of temporality, and finally his use of virtuality.

The anthropological assemblage

Some of these terms have also been adopted with greater degrees of fidelity than others: the assemblage is likely the instance where use differs most from the original sense (see Marcus & Saka 2006). Assemblage is a term taken from A thousand plateaus. The various translators represented the word agencement as ‘assemblage’, but the more common English translation of this term in other contexts would be ‘layout’ instead (on this point, see also Phillips 2006). This was a bit of a “traduttore traditore” moment. For Deleuze and Guattari, agencement was their term to describe cognitive/linguistic or physical arrangements where each element in the set was in a determinate relation to the others, and which acted in concert. In their minds, assemblages did very specific things, and operated in a particular manner. Assemblages both territorialised some space or material, but also deterritorialised others as it undid whatever organising or emergent logic preexisted it. Further, not only did all assemblages have content (the material organised in a determinate pattern) but all assemblages also had expressions, which could be either physical or communicative. And most of all, each assemblage was specific to a particular ‘strata’, which might be thought of as a particular domain, space, or classification (see Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 503-5). Finally, assemblages can be thought of as particular instantiations of purely abstract relations (or ‘diagrams’: see Bialecki 2016, 2017b; Zdenbik 2012) that can also be found in other assemblages located in different strata. Given all this structuration, one can see why ‘layout’ may have been more on point than ‘assemblage’. Anthropology, by comparison, has taken the assemblage as something different. For anthropology, assemblages are not determinate relations, but conglomerations of contingent, heterogeneous material that by chance or design (mostly the former) have congealed together to form the ephemeral assemblage (Collier & Ong 2004; Marcus & Saka 2006; Rabinow 2003; Rudnyckyj 2010; Zigon 2010, 2011, 2015). Rather than serving as expressions of an iterable, abstract relationship, each anthropological assemblage is an underdetermined, random, and possibly unique, collage.^[9] As Marcus and Saka phrased it, ‘none of the derivations of assemblage theory…is based on a technical and formal analysis of how this concept functions in [Deleuze and Guattari’s] writing’ (2006: 103).

This does not render the anthropological repurposing (reterritorialization?) of the original Deleuzian concept of agencement ethnographically deficient, or their anthropological conclusions manqué. But it is probably a symptom of what divides Deleuze from contemporary Anglo-American anthropology (apart from, of course, discipline, language, subject matter, and history). While both Deleuze and contemporary anthropology share an interest in novelty, they have differing senses for the frequency and ease with which novelty is brought about. Anthropology often sees its objects as ‘haecceities’: as unique and therefore valuable expressions of human imagination, capacity, and resistance. Even when they are treated as tokens of a more general type, they are presented as if they are not just representative, but exemplary: this retains their novelty while still making them of particular interest for those investigating a more general phenomenon. Deleuze was interested in haecceities as well, but he also held that novelty, and particularly novelty in the form of thought, is relatively rare. For him, it was not subjects agentively producing novelty, but rather passive subjects who were forced to produce novelty by the press of events, when all other existing conceptual or material tools were exhausted.

Becoming

Anthropological discussions of ‘becoming’, another Deleuzian trope, can be juxtaposed productively with the anthropological assemblage. In Deleuzian parlance, becoming is about a process of continual transformation without a complete transition into some other form or mode; it is used to characterise an asymptotic movement towards a particular local telos. Unlike assemblages, which seem to litter the landscape, in anthropology many ‘becomings’ are hard won. In an article by Biehl and Locke that is probably the most cited discussion of Deleuzian ‘becoming’ in anthropology, there is no claim to be taking up Deleuze’s thought as ‘a theoretical system of or set of practices to be applied normatively to anthropology’ (2010: 317). Rather, they merely wish to take up aspects of Deleuze’s conception of desire and of a socially-informed but still-specific capacity for transformation as a corrective to Foucauldian conceptions of biopower and governmentality. But the two ethnographic circumstances presented (destitution and psychic disintegration in Brazil, and the collective continuing aftermath of conflict in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina) underline the claim that the sort of transformations that Deleuze is interested in are often the result of a press of circumstances beyond the ordinary. It is of course possible to see these two case studies as a further post-culture-concept anthropological interest in what Joel Robbins (2013) has called ‘the suffering subject’. But it would also be possible to see this not as a focus on abjection and trauma as a human universal, but rather as an impetus to experimentation.^{^[10]} Biehl and Locke do not exhaust the anthropological use of Deleuzian becoming; like the Biehl and Locke essay, becoming is invoked thematically rather than technically, to communicate an interest in variation in and through the repetition of acts and forms, as opposed to some other more totalising approach that would be blind to internal gradations and mutations (see, e.g., Khan 2012, Ahmad 2017). Often these works do not share Deleuze’s arid anti-humanism: they often favor explorations of subjectivity over Deleuze’s interest in the pre-individual and the pre-subjective. But because these works foreground a thematic interest in Deleuze, as opposed to an interest in his technical concepts, to judge them for this seems wrong (putting to the side the fact that judging authors in this way, instead of merely contrasting works as intellectual mechanisms, seems a particularly un-Deleuzian exercise).

Rhizome

Differences between the anthropological assemblage and the Deleuze-Guattarian agencement can also be better understood by contrasting it with anthropological discussions of the ‘rhizome’. For Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes are decentralised networks. In rhizomes, individual nodes in the network can have quite different expressions from one another; the network itself is capable of qualitative variation; its internal multiplicity and variety means that it cannot be reduced to any dualisms or structural oppositions; and, because of its decentralised nature, the rhizome is resistant to being broken apart. The term rhizome is taken from botany (again via anthropologist Gregory Bateson), but it is not limited to the vegetative. Examples of the rhizome include: pack animals, hive insects, human-virus relations, and at one point, the music of Glenn Gould.

Anthropologists have used the rhizome in ways not dissimilar to the ways that they have invoked the assemblage: as emergent systems of pure difference that are characterised by lateral, as opposed to hierarchical, relations. The rhizome is frequently invoked in discussions of globalization, particularly as it interacts with other complex systems such as biology, ecology, and demographic representational regimes (see, e.g., Mauer 2000, Muehlmann 2012, Rosengren 2003). In contrast to most anthropological discussions of the assemblage, though, many authors working on rhizomic arrangements have noted that it has a relationship with other organizational modes that exceed mere opposition. Deleuze and Guattari state that the rhizomes at times become arboreal: if sufficient pressures are placed upon a rhizome, or sufficient cuts administered to it, rhizomes will in effect become trees, with an internal hierarchy controlling the way the rhizome can spread, and the internal organizational logic of its constituent nodes. As it appears in anthropology, various bureaucratic or top-down processes are quite deft in this sort of pruning. Political moves to present a dispersed and open population as a discrete political actor, or to identify, and thus demarcate and bind, ‘at risk’ groups, are shown as repeatedly creating arboreal systems out of dispersed rhizomes (Muehlmann 2012, Rosengren 2003).

Affect

Other anthropological uptakes of Deleuze differ from Deleuze’s prior concept not because of different interests and priorities in the anthropologists engaging with his thought, but rather because of what might be called an ‘interference pattern’ from other conceptual homonyms. An example of this is the almost cosmic-inflation level of growth in discussions of affects in anthropology. Interest in affect, particularly as a force that has a special relation with late-capitalist and neoliberal forms of social organization, has been increasingly common (see, e.g., Mazarrella 2009, Muehlebach 2012, Navaro-Yashin 2012, O’Neil 2013, Richards & Rudnyckyj 2009, Rudnyckyj 2011, Stewart 2007). Influenced either by Deleuze’s account of affects, or more commonly, influenced at one remove by Brian Massumi’s (2002) account of Deleuze’s accounts of affects, they understand affects as a pre-linguistic, embodied intensity.

There is some confusion in discussions of affects: for instance, there is the representational problem in using language to narrate a pre-linguistic, pre-subjective phenomenon (see Bialecki forthcoming). But even more confusing is the simultaneous influence in anthropology of the concept of ‘affect’ as understood by the psychologist Silvan Tompkins, who understood affect as a limited number series of cognitive modules that, in various combinatory constellations, could co-produce the entire run of human emotion (see Tompkins et al. 1995). This second understanding, in which affect is heavily psychologised, as opposed to the Spinoza-influenced Deleuzian reading of affect as a force that either dilates or contracts human capacities at any single moment, has muddied the conceptual waters, as these are actually quite different phenomena (see Schaefer 2015). Most anthropological authors have not been careful to both specify whether they are dealing with affect as a pre-linguistic mix of a Spinozian illocutionary force (affectus) and perlocutionary capacity to be affected (affectio), or whether they are dealing instead with cognitive/psychological modules. This failure to specify has meant that elements of a very American psychological subjectivity can be found in many discussions of what purports to be a pre-subjective, pre-linguistic affective register.

Societies of control

Other discussions, though, have tended to hue closer to Deleuze’s self-presentation of the issues. These tended to either address minor works in Deleuze’s oeuvre, or (interestingly enough) some of his most demanding technical exercises. Let’s take an example of the former first. In a short essay entitled ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, Deleuze (1992b) presented the thesis that the advancement of networking and information technologies in the twentieth century has allowed a shift away from the sort of societies organised around disciplinary enclosures described in the middle period of Foucault; rather than creating standard, generic subjects through individually targeted disciplinary means, the society of control allows for decentralised monitoring and shaping of continually-evolving aspects of the person through processes that are not confined to any one space such as the factory, the barracks, or the schoolroom. As Deleuze says, this is a society of ‘passwords’ and ‘surfing’, where persons are grasped as data and not subjects. This 1992 piece, which seems to have grasped presciently much of the first-world present, has been well received, particularly by anthropologists interested in deploying Foucauldian concepts of discipline and biopower to contemporary neoliberal societies (see, e.g., O’Neill 2015: 230-1).

Temporality and the virtual

As for the more technical concepts that have been taken up with greater degrees of fidelity, we have Deleuze’s presentation of both time and of virtuality. Deleuze’s temporality is marked by its disjunctive logic, where numerous different autonomous modalities of time co-exist, operating at different scales and with different degrees of intensity, and hence creating emergent effects. Deleuze’s Henri-Bergson-informed concept of time as duration, a kind of qualitative flow, has been taken up with success, where the experience of time’s unfolding is seen as a vital part of any process. These discussions, which often also invoke the language of becoming, have been particularly fruitful when addressing creative endeavors (see Pandian 2012). Others have highlighted the clashing constituent elements of Deleuzian temporality, with cyclic temporalities of habit, a temporality of continual fissure with the present already yet continually being sundered into the past and future (or, to put it differently, the present always consisting entirety and only of the past and of the future), and a disruptive temporality of the event which consists of series of breaks with extant states of affairs (see Williams 2012; see also Bialecki 2017: 22-47). Matthew Hodges (2008, 2014) has relied on this polychronic aspect of Deleuze’s account of time to suggest ways in which now-dominant narratives of temporality such as ‘process’ and ‘flux’, which he associates with late capitalism, might actually be challenged, rather than ratified, by Deleuze’s thoughts.

Like temporality, virtuality is another Deleuzian conceptual tool that has received more rigorous amounts of attention. This should not be understood in the sense of ‘virtual worlds’, digital milieus that aim to wholly or partially create creditable simulations of, or rift on, aspects of the larger analogue universe (see, e.g., Boellstorff 2008). For Deleuze, the virtual is a concept that is meant to replace the possible. The problem with the possible is that it seems to be indicating states of affairs that were already complete, but simply lacking reality. This makes the possible, in essence, a static lack. Instead, Deleuze wanted to underscore the virtual as something that is real, albeit in way different from more conventional modes of existence. Rather than lacking existence, the virtual is an extant, open set of potentials that are always ready to be actualised. But the actualization of some virtual form may look quite different in different places and different times. This is not only because the actualizations may happen in different places and different times, and thus be part of different ecologies of sense. It is also because the virtual can be actualised in different manners, through using different material. For that reason, Deleuze stresses that the virtual and the actual do not ‘resemble’ one another; the virtual is not a platonic ideal. Rather, the virtual could be thought of as a series of variables set in a determinate relation to one another, or, as Deleuze put it, a series of multiplicities that are effectively topological, and thus capable of quite different instantiations, in the same way that a donut and a coffee cup are both actualizations of a torus, a purely mathematical entity.^{^[11]} This means, in a sense, that every entity or phenomenon is double faced; on one hand, there is a virtual aspect, a set of relations implicit in an object that can be repeated with or without distention, depending on the state of forces, and then on the other hand, there is the actual object, which in turn gives rise to the set of virtual relations that will be the ‘quasi-cause’ of the next instantiation.

Again, there are several ways to understand what Deleuze meant by this discussion of virtuality. It is clear that the virtual included the conceptual, or at least involves it. Deleuze’s conception of philosophy was as a retrospective mapping of the virtual, a way to trace back the virtual from what falls from an event, and thus identify other possible ways in which that virtuality could have been made actual; this practice of working from the actual to the virtual is called “counter-effectuation” in Deleuze’s parlance (Deleuze & Guattari 1994). To some, this makes the virtual in effect ideational, or at least a prelude to the experience of thinking particular thoughts. For others, though, this suggests that virtuality is a way to speak not merely of human ideational processes, but of all phenomenon (Delanda 2002).

The open nature of the concept of the virtual has again catalyzed different anthropological uses of it as a core idea. For some, the idea of the concept as a way of mapping possibilities has become their understanding of what it is that anthropology works towards, with these new concepts either being framed as creations of the anthropologists that are sufficient to think through ethnographic phenomena in a way that is adequate to the description given by those people they speak to, or by granting the thought of the informants themselves with the same kind of stature and formal qualities that are credited to western philosophy (Holbraad & Pedersen 2017, Viveiros de Castro 2014; see similarly Willerslev 2011). Virtuality and the virtual is also being used by anthropologists to account for variation and difference without having to adopt pure nominalism (that is, a mode of thought characterised by the rejection of universalisms and abstractions; see Bialecki 2012 ). This includes using virtuality to think of the sort of variation and potential inherent in either a particular practice or a mode of religiosity (Bialecki 2012), or variation that results when similar abstract forms or operations are expressed in different material (Bialecki 2016). Suzanne Kuchler (1999), for instance, has argued that the various senses of the word ‘Malanggan’, as used in New Ireland, which includes a memorial right, a carved object used in such rites, and for a larger system of ideas and practices that seems to envelope the rite and the object, are not three separate objects or categories, but instead are all expressions of the same virtual topological form.

Another use of virtuality is to account for the effectiveness of religious and ritual practice. The claim here is that much of ritual and religious activity can be understood as an attempt to work back to the virtual through practice or sensual experience instead of thought, and thus open up ethical, social, or even ontological possibilities that are currently blocked by the arrangement of the current state of affairs (see, e.g., Kapferer 2004, 2007; Viveiros de Castro 2007). It has also been proposed that the engine of religion, if we can speak of such a thing, lies in a virtual pliability found in modes of religiosity that allows for it to take on an infinite number of expressions, all with different material entailments and therefore different effects as they combine with other assemblages (Bialecki 2016b, 2017).

Conclusion

This conversation does not exhaust discussions of Deleuze in anthropology.^[12] But despite the partial nature of this discussion, a pattern should be apparent. The first aspect of the pattern concerns Deleuze’s thought. While shot through with a host of self-invented or repurposed terminology, the logic of each of these terms resonates with each other. The diagrammatic logic of the assemblage and particular instances of the assemblage shares aspects with the virtual/actual distinction, aspects of Deleuzian becoming and Deleuzian temporality seem to parallel one another, and Deleuzian discussions of the society of control seems to be a particularised and historically-situated exemplar of the play of rhizomic and arboreal modes of organising. It would be wrong to consider Deleuze a monolithic thinker, since each of these concepts have their own utility and targets, but one can see how together they seem to be themselves examples of Deleuze’s interest in the intimate relationship between repetition and difference.

The second aspect of the pattern is that anthropology has, for the most part, had a cafeteria approach to Deleuze, taking just an element or two that is to their liking, rather than the whole set of mechanisms. This has created an interesting phenomenon. At what was (at least in terms of the temporality of academic publishing) the same time, two assessments were presented of Deleuze’s reception of anthropology. One assessment was that ‘relatively few anthropologists had made use’ of Deleuze (Jensen & Rödge 2010: 1). The other assessment was the claim that in American anthropology, 2010 was the year of Deleuze (Hamilton & Places 2011). Both assessments may be right. While we are no longer at the point where we can say, as Marcus and Saka once did, that we are lacking ‘technical and formal’ encounters with Deleuze (2006: 103), it is also true that rather than dedicate themselves to the intellectual mechanisms that Deleuze constructed, many anthropologists have decided not to, in João Biehlo’s (2013) words, let theory get in the way of ethnography. This may be for the best: Deleuze, interested in creativity, would honor sly theft over dutiful exegesis. But while such redeployments may be fruitful, they also run the risk of being glib, or of not even understanding how the pilfered tools work at all. It remains to be seen which anthropological borrowings of Deleuze are the pollinated flower, which uses some alien presence to perpetuate its own being, and which borrowings are the wasp, pointlessly copulating with an alien other due to an act of complete misrecognition.

Notes

The author would like to both thank and lay blameless Ian Lowrie and Razvan Amironesei for their contributions on some technical matters. The author, of course, owns all breaks from the image of thought.

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Note on contributor

Jon Bialecki is an honorary fellow with the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His first monograph, A diagram for fire: miracles and variation in an American charismatic movement, is a study of the miraculous and differentiation in American religion, with a focus on ethics, politics, language, and economic practices. He is currently working on his second manuscript, A machine for making gods: Mormonism, transhumanism, and speculative thought.

Dr Jon Bialecki, The Lihosit Research Institute, 8434 via Sonoma #65, La Jolla, California, 92037-2722, United States. Jon.Bialecki@ed.ac.uk

[1] Following a convention that has arisen in the secondary literature regarding Deleuze (despite the fact that even those who inaugurated it feels that it is a grotesquely unfair distribution of credit), in this essay Deleuze’s co-authored works will be treated as if they were an extension of ‘his’ thought, even as we will try to acknowledge when we are referring to collaborative material.

[2] This modesty should not be mistaken for unwavering respect: he referred to his work in the history of philosophy as a ‘sort of buggery’ where he takes the philosopher he is writing on ‘from behind…giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ (Deleuze 1995: 6).

[3] The claim that there are multiple, incommensurable readings of Deleuze may be to understate the argument. For instance, he has been described as continuing Kant’s transcendental project (Voss 2013) even though he has claimed that he treated Kant like ‘an enemy’ (N: 6). At the same time, Deleuze’s work has been described as ‘essentially phenomenological’, and deeply indebted to Husserl (Hughes 2008: ix). But before we see him as rejecting any knowledge of the noumenon, or as centering himself on the subject and on subjectivity, we should also note that he has also been called a ‘realist philosopher’ who broke with idealist ‘postmodernity’ by affirming an anti-idealist, anti-subjectivist ‘mind-independent reality.’^{^[3]} (Delanda: 2). His project has been cited as centered on creating an ontology that purposeful erases the human/nature opposition (Ansell-Pearson 2012), and, conversely, he has been described as writing against ontology, and instead presenting an ethics of immanence and the ‘event’ (Zourabichvili 2012). He has been called a philosopher concerned with the production of difference and the new (Smith 2008). However, his detractors argue that he was actually a ‘monotonous’ thinker, obsessed with a philosophy of the one (Badiou 2000), a gnostic who rejects the actual and the political to favor aesthetics and a realm of never-materializable phantasmic possibilities (Hallward 2006, Žižek 2003). Because of this, many critics claim that Deleuze offers no political project, though at this point the reader will be little surprised to hear that there are differing opinions on this front, too. He has been depicted as someone taking up a democratic, emancipatory Foucauldian micropolitics of short-term tactical action by collectives of disparate parties (Bialecki 2017), as someone whose ascetics and ethics drives him to reject democracy (Mengue 2013, see also Toymentsev 2015), as someone whose politics are essentially Leninist, and as someone who has inoculated himself against any Leninist appropriation (Tampio 2009), as a staunch anti-capitalist, and as a wild-eyed precursor of the accelerationist desire to chase the dragon of late capitalism all the way to its likely ugly, possibly inhuman, end (Mckay and Avanessian 2014).

[4] These ‘multiplicities’ are taken in part from Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, but also from the work of the nineteenth century mathematician Bernard Reinmann; Reinmann’s mathematical concept of space, not as a totalized Euclidian grid, but rather as a series or collectivity of local spaces, each of which may be characterized by different dimensions, and thus escape any global determination; in the standard English translation of Riemann’s work the concept of the constituent elements of a topological space is translated as manifolds, while Anglophone scholars of Deleuze translated the term as multiplicities, following the French translation of Reinmann’s work, multiplicitê. See Plotinksy 2009.

[5] It should be noted that this was a piece that was not published until 1973.

[6] To an extent, this emphasis on Nietzsche could be seen not only as an attempt to address the whole expanse of the history of the species, but also as Deleuze presaging a later anthropological interest in ethics, which has acknowledged the importance of Nietzsche (Laidlaw 2002), though perhaps not fully embracing what a Nietzschian psychology would entail (Bialecki 2016c).

[7] Despite its fictive location, the socius is actually located ‘on’ the body without organs, the term Deleuze and Guattari use for the entirety of production before any ordering or ranking is visited upon it.

[8] Among the anthropologists and anthropological sub-fields that constitute ‘accidental Deleuzians’, one of the most surprising may be mainline American linguistic anthropology; while this does not prove kinship, both Deleuze and linguistic anthropology share an antipathy for structural linguistics and Chomskian linguistic formalism, an enthusiasm for Labov’s sociolinguistics, a high regard for Austin’s speech-act theory, and a facility with the Peircian semiotic triad of icon, index, and sign. This is also almost certainly completely accidental, as suggested by the divergent approaches taken towards other core issues. Take, for example, materiality and language. Linguistic anthropology tends to deal with issues of ‘semiotic ideology’ (Keane 2003), which can be glossed as metapragmatic concerns for the communicative potential and ethical valence of not just speech, but of material culture as well. In contrast, Deleuze handles material aspects of communication through ‘collective assemblages’, a term for ecologies or arrangements which include both material objects and speech acts or writing (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 7). Even greater distance can be found in the respective treatment for affect. Affect, as will be discussed shortly, is a foundational concept for Deleuze, which he takes in the Spinozan sense of a force measured by its intensity and not by way of any extension (Deleuze 1990b, 1992a), while linguistic anthropology (Silverstein 2004) tends to see any differentiation between speech and affect as an idiosyncratic western understanding (see Bialecki 2015, in press).

Another accidental – or perhaps crypto- – Deleuzian field in anthropology is the line of thought that is referred to as the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern, the two most exemplary thinkers in this movement, display certain tendencies in their thought that are strongly Deleuzian, though in different ways. Roy Wagner’s concept of culture as invention, with both the achieved elements and the elements that are understood as fixed and conventionalized requiring continual creation though both effort and through being thrust into new contexts, echoes Deleuze’s concerns for fluid and emergent forms, and for the way that thoughts, practices, and material are at times decontextualized and deconstructed to allow for novelty (‘deterritorialized’) or are at other times set in determinate relation with one another (‘territorialization’, which maps onto Wagner’s counter-invention) (Wagner 1975). Marilyn Strathern’s interest in privileging relation over identity also has a Deleuzian cast, as for Deleuze it is the web of connections, rather than the essence of a thing itself, that often controls how some person, process, or object is expressed; this in part could be an expression of Strathern’s and Deleuze’s common interest in the nineteenth century sociologist Gabriel Tarde. The commonality between these three thinkers has been noted by many of the later authors that they have influenced, with the ‘ontological turn’ often articulating their thought, and justifying their project, through explicit references to Deleuze (see, e.g., Holbraad & Pedersen 2017). But Wagner has never cited Deleuze, and while Strathern has at times acknowledged Deleuze’s work, it has been more along the lines of noting a commonality than acknowledging intellectual descent.

[9] When I make this claim, I am sometimes met with protestations that Paul Rabinow has a more nuanced concept of the assemblage that is closer to that of Deleuze’s own understanding; particularly, Rabinow’s assemblage is presented as a more enduring form. However, as Rabinow himself asserts, his assemblages are ‘comparatively effervescent’, operating on a time scale of ‘years or decades’ which is much shorter than the other conceptual objects Rabinow relates them to (2003: 56). The comparative life spans of social objects can be seen by tracing what appears to be a Rabinowian great chain of social-ontological being, in which ‘problematizations’ (which are thematic, open ended, and sometimes millennia-old running grand challenges, such as ‘discipline’ or ‘sexuality’) trigger the emergence of assemblages, which will in turn either ‘disaggregate’ or mature in an ‘apparatus’. Sandwiched between human conundrums and long running social formations, the assemblage is, like most other anthropological assemblages, again just a short-lived, emergent form.

[10] This should not be read as a critique of Robbins take on Biehl’s 2005 book Vita, nor as an endorsement of it; rather, it is an observation that an anthropology of suffering and an anthropology of the good may have a more intimate connection with one another than appears on the surface (see Bialecki 2014).

[11] See footnote four, infra.

[12] This already overly long entry does not have space to discuss Deleuze’s extensive writings on cinema, which have been used not just to think through the production of film as a creative enterprise (see, e.g., Baxstrom & Meyers 2016; Pandian 2015) but also analogically to think through other social phenomena (see, e.g., Baxstrom 2008; Bialecki & Bielo 2016; Kapferer 2013). We have also not addressed the role of Deleuze in ethnographies of science, multi-species relations, or infectious disease, which have their own engagement with Deleuzian concepts such as assemblage, becoming, or rhizomes (see., e.g., Lowe 2010). Nor have we addressed what a Deleuzian politically engaged and applied anthropology look like.

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.

References

Bennett, T. 1988. The exhibitionary complex. New Formations 4, 73-102.

Bruner, E. & B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994. Maasai on the lawn: tourist realism in East Africa. Cultural Anthropology 9, 435-70 (available on-line: http://www.jstor.org/stable/656384).

Bunten, A. 2008. Sharing culture or selling out? Developing the commodified persona in the heritage industry. American Ethnologist 35, 380-95.

Causey, A. 2003. Hard bargaining in Sumatra: western travelers and Toba Bataks in the marketplace of souvenirs. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

Causey, A. 2007. ‘Go back to the Batak, it’s safe there’: tourism in North Sumatra during perilous times. Indonesia and the Malay World 35, 257-71.

Chio, J. 农家乐 Peasant Family Happiness (prod. J. Chio). Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 2013.

Chio, J. 2014. A landscape of travel: the work of tourism in rural ethnic China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Comaroff, J. & J. Comaroff 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University Press.

Gillespie, A. 2006. Tourist photography and the reverse gaze. Ethos 34, 343-66.

Graburn, N. 1977. Tourism: the sacred journey. In Hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism (ed.) V.L. Smith, 33-47. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Graburn, N.H. & D. Barthel-Bouchier 2001. Relocating the tourist. International Sociology 16, 147-58.

Greenwood, D. 1989. Culture by the pound: an anthropological perspective on tourism as cultural commoditization. In Hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism (ed.) V. Smith, 171-86. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hoskins, J. 2002. Predatory voyeurs: tourists and ‘tribal violence’ in remote Indonesia. American Ethnologist 29, 797-828.

Kahn, M. 2010. Tahiti beyond the postcard: power, place, and everyday life. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Leite, N. 2017. Unorthodox kin: Portuguese marranos and the global search for belonging. Oakland: University of California Press.

Leite, N. & N. Graburn 2009. Anthropological interventions in tourism studies. In The SAGE handbook of tourism studies (eds) T. Jamal & M. Robinson, 35-64. London: Sage.

Leite, N. & M. Swain 2015. Anthropology of tourism. In Encyclopedia of tourism (eds) J. Jafari & H. Xiao, 2nd ed. London: SpringerReference.

Lew, A. 2008. Tourism is NOT the world’s largest industry - so stop saying it is! Tourism geography journal’s tourism place (available on-line: http://tourismplace.blogspot.com/2008/04/tourism-is-not-worlds-largest-industry.html). Accessed 3 Sep 2012.

MacCannell, D. 1976. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Meiu, G.P. 2017. Ethno-erotic economies: sexuality, money, and belonging in Kenya. Chicago: University Press.

Notar, B.E. 2008. Producing cosmopolitanism at the borderlands: lonely planeteers and ‘local’ cosmopolitans in southwest China. Anthropological Quarterly 81, 615-50.

O’Rourke, D. Cannibal tours (prod. D. O'Rourke & L.J. Henderson). Los Angeles: O’Rourke & Associates, Direct Cinema Ltd, 1988.

Salazar, N. 2010. Envisioning Eden: mobilizing imaginaries in tourism and beyond. Oxford: Berghahn.

Salazar, N.B. & N.H. Graburn (eds) 2014. Tourism imaginaries: anthropological approaches. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Satsuka, S. 2015. Nature in translation: Japanese tourism encounters the Canadian Rockies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shields, R. 1991. Places on the margin: alternative geographies of modernity. London: Routledge.

Smith, V. (ed.) 1977. Hosts and guests: the anthropology of tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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

Swain, M. 2014. Myth management in tourism’s imaginariums: tales from southwest China, and beyond. In Tourism imaginaries: anthropological approaches (eds) N. Salazar & N. Graburn, 103-24. London: Berghahn.

Tonnaer, A. 2016. Intersecting journeys of past and present in the ‘bush’: unsettling coevalness in the tourist space of indigenous Australia. International Journal of Tourism Anthropology 5, 172-86.

Trilling, L. 1972. Sincerity and authenticity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Tucker, H. 2003. Living with tourism: negotiating identities in a Turkish village. London: Routledge.

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Williams, S. & A.A. Lew 2015. Tourism geography: critical understandings of place, space and experience. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.

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.

Gambling

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

Anthony Pickles

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

Pioneering anthropological studies

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

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

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

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

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

Contemporary regional foci

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gambling industry and the wider field

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

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

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

A flourishing subdiscipline

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

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

References

Altman, J. 1985. Gambling as a mode of redistributing and accumulating cash among Aborigines: a case study from Arnhem Land. In Gambling in Australia (eds) G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson & L. Sylvan, 50-67. Sydney: Croom Helm.

Basu, E.O. 1991. Profit, loss, and fate: the entrepreneurial ethic and the practice of gambling in an overseas Chinese community. Modern China 17, 227-59.

Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology. New York: Paladin Books.

Benjamin, W. 2006. Notes on a theory of gambling. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) J.F. Cosgrave, 211-4. New York: Routledge.

Binde, P. 2005. Gambling across cultures: Mapping worldwide occurrence and learning from ethnographic comparison. International Gambling Studies 5, 1-27.

Bosco, J., L.H-M. Liu & M. West 2009. Underground lotteries in China: the occult economy and capitalist culture. Research in Economic Anthropology 29, 31-62.

Brady, M. 2004. Regulating social problems: The pokies, the Productivity Commission and an Aboriginal community. Discussion paper submitted to the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, National Australian University, Canberra, Australia.

Caillois, R. 1961. Man, play, and games (trans. M. Barash). London: Thames & Hudson.

Cassidy, R. 2002. The sport of kings: kinship, class, and thoroughbred breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: University Press.

———, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn 2013. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Fair game? Producing and publishing gambling research. International Gambling Studies 14, 345-53.

——— 2014b. Afterword: Manufacturing gambling. Oceania 84, 306-14.

Dostoyevsky, F. 1996 [1866]. The gambler (trans. C.J. Hogarth). New York: Dover Thrift.

Festa, P.E. 2006. Mahjong politics in contemporary China: civility, Chineseness, and mass culture. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, 7-35.

Gariban, G., S.F. Kingma & N. Zhorowska 2014. Never a dull day: exploring the material organization of virtual gambling. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 107-21. London: Routledge.

Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

Goffman, E. 2006 [1969]. Where the action is. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) A.F. Collins, 225-54. New York: Routledge.

Goodale, J.C. 1987. Gambling is hard work: card playing in Tiwi society. Oceania 58, 6-21.

Hacking, I. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: University Press.

Herzfeld, M. 1991. A place in history: social and monumental time in a Cretan town. Princeton: University Press.

Huizinga, J. 1970 [1949]. Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. London: Paladin.

Laycock, D.C. 1966. Three native card games of New Guinea and their European ancestors. Oceania 37, 49-53.

Lesser, A. 1969 [1933]. The Pawnee ghost dance hand game: ghost dance revival and ethnic identity. New York: AMS Press.

Loussouarn, C. 2010. ‘Buying moments of happiness’: luck, time and agency among Chinese casino players in London. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Malaby, T.M. 2003. Gambling life: dealing in contingency in a Greek city. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

McGowan, V. (ed.) 2004. How do we know what we know: epistemic tensions in social and cultural research on gambling, 1980–2000. Journal of Gambling Issues 11.

Mosko, M.S. 2014. Cards on Kiriwina: magic, cosmology, and the ‘divine dividual’ in Trobriand gambling. Oceania 84, 239-55.

Papataxiarchis, E. 1999. A contest with money: gambling and the politics of disinterested sociality in Aegean Greece. In Lilies of the field: marginal people who live for the moment (eds) S. Day, E. Papataxiarchis & M. Stewart, 158-75. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Papineau, E. 2005. Pathological gambling in Montreal’s Chinese community: an anthropological perspective. Journal of Gambling Studies 21, 157-78.

Pickles, A.J. 2013. ‘One-man one-man’: how slot-machines facilitate Papua New Guineans' shifting relations to each other. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 171-84. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Introduction: gambling as analytic in Melanesia. Oceania 84, 207-21.

——— 2014b. ‘Bom bombed Kwin’: how two card games model kula, moka, and Goroka. Oceania 84, 272-88.

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

Pina-Cabral, J. de 2002. Between China and Europe: person, culture, and emotion in Macao. Oxford: Berg.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note on contributor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Temporality

Deleuze

Introduction

What anthropology was for Gilles Deleuze

What Deleuze is for anthropology

Conclusion

Notes

References

Note on contributor

Tourism

Introduction: contexts and contradictions

Tourism as ritual: directly experiencing a macrocosm

Staging, commodification, and spectatorship

Host-guest interdependence and the creation of new social systems

Conclusion: the psychological complexity of images of others

References

Note on contributor

Gambling

​Introduction

Pioneering anthropological studies

Contemporary regional foci

The gambling industry and the wider field

A flourishing subdiscipline

References

Note on contributor

Introduction