The Argonaut #4

February 2021

Author Name ISSN 2752-3411

The Argonaut 4

1

Letter from the editors

February 2021 Dear friends, Welcome to the 4th edition of The Argonaut, 2021!

Why 4th edition? We have decided to renumber our issues, in order to acknowledge the first issue of an LSE anthropology journal published in 1974, along with the 2015 issue, and the 2018 issue.

We are so proud and grateful to be able to hold this journal in our hands and share it with you all. There were times this year when we doubted that publication would go ahead, so it has made this edition all the more important to us.

No one needs further reminding of the profound challenges that 2020 has brought to our lives, studies and plans for the future. Our thoughts are with the friends and families of those we have lost in the past months, both within and outside our anthropology department.

Anthropology holds this ability to make us travel to other places and relate to others, in spite of being constrained by the boundaries of our homes. This edition takes us to Berlin, Indonesia, Colombia, China and Alberta, brings visual art and music to our senses, and reflects on human rights, nationalism, eating disorders, and the place of anthropology and anthropologists in the world and in academia.

We wish to thank our great editors and sharp designer, our wonderful contributors, and anyone else who made this publication possible. We raise a virtual glass to you all, as plans for publication parties went out of the window some time last February! Nonetheless, we hope you enjoy the fruits of your labour, and continue in your passion for all things anthropological.

This edition serves as an ode to anthropology, our department and all those who have nurtured us and shaped our learning throughout our time at LSE. We owe you all a debt of gratitude.

Thank you.

Poppy Kershaw

Juliette Gautron

Contact juliette.m.gautron@gmail.com

Table of contents

Writing anthropology

2

by Sofia Lesur Kastelein

Exploring Berlin record shops and unearthing musical value

6

by Mia Mancini

Alberta strong and free: The effect of oil on political narratives

12

by Cai Williams

Heartbeat

16

Anonymous entry

«After Sight» – Benode Behari Mukherjee

20

by Benedict Croft

Longboarding in China: Injury symbolism

22

by Juliette Gautron

Queer world: the possibilities for queer culture in a global age

28

by Sean Chou

Dehumanising the dead

32

by Annie Thomlinson

The “you better work” ethic and the spirit of drag

36

by Nadav Wall

Both sides of the big beat

40

by Dimitris Markantonakis

Gender and kinship relations of Indonesian domestic workers

44

by Karen Lee

Cradle

48

by Regina Legarte

A view on nationalism and race at Moosgard

50

by Emmanuel Molding Nielsen

A bizarre relationship: human rights and anthropology

54

by Sean Chou

Indigenous creolisation in the Sierra Nevada, Colombia

58

by Juliette Gautron

Why anthropologists should do journalism

by Karen Lerbech Pedersen

Interludes

Global fusion sounds of the decade

by Benedict Croft

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Writing anthropology

Writing an thropo logy

by Sofia Lesur Kastelein

Often, when reading for a seminar, I will spend fifteen minutes staring at the same sentence. I’ll rearrange sections of it in my head, in the hope that they might make more sense, or open a new tab to check whether a word means something other than what I think it means. Sometimes, this goes on for paragraphs. Sometimes it is the whole article. (I never get close to the point of whole books.) This usually happens when there is a lot of technical language, or a dense use of complicated words, or references to Deleuze. Conversations with friends reassure me I’m not alone in this. It then becomes easy to wonder, how many people are there who understand the reading in question? If a class-full of MSc students, most with an undergraduate degree in the social sciences, are stumped, do you need a PhD to get it? And, if the number of people who can understand a text is so small, why write?

Starting with my frustrations about understanding some anthropological writing, I was curious to hear from anthropologists about how they write, who they write for, and why they write. I approached some people in the department asking to chat about how they think about these kinds of issues. The following is a little of what I learnt from these informal conversations.

•

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Sofia Lesur Kastelein

A common thread, when speaking to people about writing, is that their style changes distinctly depending on whether the intended audience is broad or specifically academic. For anthropologists employed at a university, publishing in peer-reviewed journals or with academic publishing houses is an unavoidable, if not central, part of the job. For some, it is primarily a way to contribute to knowledge about a region or theoretical debates among colleagues, contributions which may eventually change the way people think, speak and act about the world.

However, there can also be a sense of institutionally-imposed obligation to this.

The “Research Excellence Framework” – a way for the UK government to audit universities and determine whether resources are being spent in a way it deems worthwhile – has certain publishing requirements for academics. Roughly every seven years, they are expected to put out “2.5” pieces based on their own research in well-respected publications. These pressures don’t seem too strong in the LSE Anthropology Department.

Most people write more than the requirement in that period, so can choose the best four in terms of publications. There is also a stance among staff that anthropology doesn’t work that way, and that it is important to publish in journals that are regionally relevant but maybe less prestigious. However, there is still pressure from the university to look at where and how much someone is publishing when deciding on a new hire or promotion, which can create a greater sense of necessity or constraint for early-career academics.

When writing for other people within the academy, the writing-style is likely to resemble other texts by the same publication which, in part, may come from the editor’s expectations. This writing tends to be more dense – longer paragraphs, longer sentences, more specialised vocabulary unfamiliar to many – with more references to theories, authors and so forth which assume prior knowledge. Sometimes, using “plain English” and avoiding technical language can really detract from analytical precision and theoretical sophistication. However, often, it seems being widely accessible beyond other academics is not a primary, or even secondary, concern for people when writing for academic publications. As a consequence, no wonder a particular form of dense and self-referential style of writing is widespread.

• “If you could write in any way you liked – with money, institutional standing, etc. being no object – who would you write for and how would you write?” When I asked this question, no one said their ideal audience would be readers of academic journals. Responses all expressed a desire to reach a broader audience, a desire which was encouragingly reflected in the practices of those I spoke to.

Mathijs Pelkmans shared that he writes for “people who want to understand the world” by reading. He explained that this was connected to a desire to tell stories – something anthropologists are well-placed to do – and that these stories can also be theoretical. Practically, this translates into structuring a text in a way that people become gripped by the unfolding of the narrative, such as by starting with something puzzling or controversial that will draw people in and make them think. Then comes the argument and “beautiful illustrations” which might allow the reader to relive the experience at some level. Afterwards, perhaps, he’ll complicate it, as he also writes to push the limits of the audience, to encourage them to think about the world in ways they had not before.

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Writing anthropology

Besides structure, Mathijs expressed that clarity is also crucial for reaching a broader audience. Most people are not prepared to devote hours to reading so, unless anthropologists are willing to shorten what they have to say, they need to write extremely well. Sadly, a desire to reach a broader audience is not always enough. Writing well is a skill and writers can be limited by their own abilities when trying to explain complicated concepts in a straightforward way. Clear writing, although easy to read, can be incredibly difficult to produce.

Insa Koch, meanwhile, told me about how the broader audience of her articles for the LSE Policy and Politics blog results in different writing.

The content and framing is somewhat different, with an emphasis on more poignant, shorter critiques and interventions, links to concrete, “relevant issues”, and more practical suggestions for action. This might require making more direct claims with fewer qualifications, and not being afraid to be a little polemic. Style-wise, this also means shorter paragraphs, less jargon and fewer references.

Speaking to Andrea Pia, he brought up how the conversation about writing for a broader public isn’t just an issue of writing clearly, but also one of access to the writing itself. Most journals are private and charge enormous subscriptions fees to access their articles, which some universities – often in the Global South – and most individuals without institutional access cannot afford. Similarly, books from academic presses tend to be extortionate. As a result, there can be a sense anthropologists from the Global North are “vamipirising” on communities in the Global South – who may not get any access or benefit from the work they helped produce – for the advancement of academic careers. One way Andrea works to overcome this obstacle to reaching a wider audience is through co-founding and co-editing the Made in China Journal which is “Open Access”, meaning it has a publication model which aims to make research available free of cost and without other barriers. (This year, Andrea is running a course on “Public Anthropology” which I sorely wish I were able to take.)

Another issue that came up in conversations was that, to reach a broader public, you need to go beyond just writing. Of course, anthropology has a long tradition of ethnographic film-making and photography, while public-lectures and podcast cameos are not unusual. However, alternatives to writing are not limited to these. Andrea’s The Long Day of Young Peng is a particularly exciting example. The Long Day is an “interactive digital ethnography”, something like a videogame, based on his fieldwork in Lingshui village, Beijing Municipality. Similarly, the beautiful comic adaptation of Alpa Shah’s article “Ethnography?

Participant observation as a potentially revolutionary praxis” decorates some of the walls in our department and illustrates (very literally) another way of communicating anthropology to broader audiences.

Some of anthropology’s constitutive questions – of translation, representation and understanding across difference – are reinvigorated by this experimentation with form and medium.

• Just as the way in which someone writes is not separate from the question of who they write for, these cannot be separated from the matter of why they write in the first place. And, given that not all anthropologists chose to prioritise writing, really, the question underpinning all this is a much broader one: “why anthropology?”. The reasons that motivate us to engage with anthropology will determine who we want our own

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Sofia Lesur Kastelein

work within the discipline to reach and, as a consequence, what form we want it to take.

I avoided asking this last question directly, although I care about the answers profoundly. Precisely because there is so much at stake on it, addressing it publically felt daunting. Instead, as the vast majority of anthropological work I have been asked to engage with as a student has been academic texts, I tried to ground the discussions in the idea and act of writing.

However, talking about writing style without thinking about the point of writing feels shallow and depoliticised. The issues lurking in the background, unaddressed, are huge. There’s learning for the sake of learning, anthropologists’ troubled relationship to policy-makers (with echoes of cooperation with colonial officials) and the ethics of topdown decision-making, debates about anthropologists and advocacy, the production of work which is of use to the people it is about... The list goes on, the dilemmas are complicated and the discussions, with reason, are often heated.

As critiques of postmodernism in anthropology point out, debates around representation and writing are important, but far from the sole – or even the major – issue in anthropology. The contribution to these debates which most inspires me is the feminist one: “precisely because feminists move beyond texts to confront the world, they can provide concrete reasons in specific contexts for the superiority of their accounts” (Mascia-Lees 1989, 28).

Nonetheless, texts have been an ever-present part of my experience as a student of the discipline. I thus sought out conversations on writing, in which I learnt about people’s different styles and what determines them, about platforms for writing, and about alternatives to it. I conclude with the hope that our decisions surrounding such kinds of topics can be grounded in our personal stances on why we think anthropology is worthwhile, and not overly shaped by institutional constraints. To slightly adapt a comment made by Andrea during our conversation: “imagine what you lose if you don’t write the way you want to write.” ◆ I thank Insa Koch, Mathijs Pelkmans and Andrea Pia for the time and thoughts they shared with me.

References Mascia-Lees, Frances, Patricia Sharpe and Colleen Ballerino Cohen (1989). “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective.” Signs 15: 7–33.

5

Title of the article

Exploring Berlin record shops

and unearthing musical value by Mia Mancini So it begins …

While the Berlin Wall was still dividing the city, ethnomusicologists found a hole in the Wall through which they could transport phonogram recordings from East to West. Once the Wall fell, youths took over many abandoned buildings along the former wall as well as power plants and radio stations that were used for the war. At present, a former American espionage centre in the Grunewald is used as an outdoor recreational space for enjoying music and learning about the history of the place.

These examples nicely situate the context in which music developed as a medium for unification and liberation in society. The desire to give birth to ethnomusicology in Berlin was coupled with a broader social impetus for bridging cultures and tearing down prejudices. At present however, with increasing digitalization and gentrification, what remains of this musical heritage? How does Berlin music culture live on and how is musical value produced? In order to investigate the actuality of this historic connection between music and Berlin, I started by visiting a range of record shops.

Records are an analogue, older form of music consumption which require a physical medium to be heard. Despite increasing digitalization and gentrification, a subgroup of society continues to use and exchange vinyl. You might be thinking that a record is no more than a means through which you can acquire music. While it is true that for

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Author Name

some, going to a record shop results in a purchase, this transactional moment does not say anything about why people value music records and what this can teach us about their culture. Musical value has the potential to last beyond the actual listening experience, that is beyond the consuming process. It is this ephemeral quality of music which confirms the insufficiency of a self-contained, transactional analysis.

While the fact remains that record shops must sell each musical piece for monetary value, I found that vinyl culture in Berlin lives on not because of its economic feasibility, but because vinyl users have an intention of preserving the particular musical value they derive from this mode of listening. In fact, most of the Berlin record shops I visited did not look like economically profitable projects. On the contrary, they were relatively small spaces, rarely busy, cash only, located in old houses or buildings cluttered with graffiti and some were even facing threats of eviction due to gentrification. Additionally, the majority of people’s interactions in record shops were made up of things-other-than shopping. From these observations emerged an apparent contradiction: how can cheap digital music be at the behest of commercialization by giants like Spotify while relatively costly music records are enjoyed in non-commercial ways and settings? I found that record listeners are not merely choosing to listen to vinyl to purchase and own them outright.

They are seeking a wider experience and it is this active quest which

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Exploring Berlin record shops

protects the non-commercial nature of vinyl culture, and music culture more broadly. But how did I figure this out? Let’s back-track.

Shop by shop ...

As I entered the record store Audio-in, one of the members of staff walked closer towards the till to greet me, and I noticed he was barefoot, tapping one of his feet on every beat. While I was browsing through records I noticed him jostling around until he found a mechanical artifact which he placed on the table. He gently put on his glasses and a pair of tight black gloves, and then he started cleaning the records with the artifact and a liquid solution, one by one. I asked for a recommendation and commented on the cozy atmosphere of their shop, to which he responded by saying, “it is most important that we provide a gemütlich experience for people”. This unique German word is used to convey a feeling of warmth, belonging, and friendliness. I began to see a system of musical and cultural exchange commanded by human care.

Then, I cycled to Galactic, a record store with no name on the entrance yet expertly organized in the inside. The panoply of ethnic subgenres ranging across progressive Oriental rock, Italian psychedelic art-rock, Jugoslav beat folk and Gabba Hardcore, gave me a feeling that I was walking amid the world’s archive of multicultural music. When I asked the manager why he showcases music of many different cultures, he said: “I find diversity a great thing, we sell everything except the Nazi sh*t which some people sell. My nationality is not so important to me, but the cover and the record being original and clean is so important, that in this sense I am really German”. This was an important moment for me; by learning about music sourcing and vinyl quality I learned about the sociocultural significance of music.

At Latitude, by comparison, a record store in a desolate house, I asked a staff member what he was playing as the track sounded familiar. “It’s because it is a classic from 87!” he exclaimed.

When I asked how much it was selling for, he smirked and told me

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Mia Mancini

it was actually his own. He started flicking through his box of rusty old records and showed me two other records he had bought the last months. While we talked about the richness of vinyl audio quality, he said, “nothing surpasses vinyl quality, but it needs to be second hand vinyl”. He complained that a lot of counterfeit is being sold in town, which he found sad because it diminished the integrity of music and significantly reduced the audio quality of original music pieces.

Buying second hand was a practice which every person I encountered in a record shop mentioned or encouraged. I learned that not only was it was a way of ensuring that the product has high quality audio, but it was also a mechanism for staff to exclude from their inventory any imitations being sold to them for purely commercial purposes.

My interactions with staff prompted conversations which unveiled the physical and cultural value they attach to music records as record listeners. I got to learn about records through their own values, which in turn provided me with an understanding of why record shops in Berlin harbor a particular musical experience for its users that is so intentionally detached from mass scale commercialization.

Importantly, I never got to know staff as traditional sales persons.

Instead, I got to know them as vinyl experts who openly shared important features of record culture in Berlin. I began to see how this record culture was continually shaped to respond to varying encroaching forces while preserving the integrity of music and society.

For my third visit at Latitude, I brought one of my interlocutors with me; she was by no means a frequent record shop visitor yet by all means a music lover. We browsed through the aisles of different genres and selected our records. Then, she decided to buy a record despite the fact she didn’t own a record player. This endearing ethnographic moment merits mention of Deleuze, who understands time as duration, such that even if the musical material lasts for a defined amount time, it is durable enough “to give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself ”. For my friend, her appreciation

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Exploring Berlin record shops

towards the musical material outlived the actual length of the record; she was left with a sensation powerful enough to warrant her buying it – without even being able to listen to it at home.

Reflection and findings This was a window into my summer ethnographic project in Berlin.

In order to understand different forms of musical value, I visited both music venues and record shops as a means of unearthing the lived realities behind the threats posed by commercialization and gentrification that are seeping into the music industry.

Particularly after my excursion into record shops, I realized that the right question to ask was not about the ways people produce musical value in Berlin, but about the ways in which people preserve the authenticity and integrity of music spaces, which they deem indispensable for a good musical experience. Staff and listeners alike were drawn to records because they value them as a safe medium for bringing cultures together and as an impermanent mode of listening. This in turn explained why digital forms have not replaced analogue altogether. Importantly, this is not because vinyl are an economic success but rather because a subcultural group of people value vinyl as an inclusive, omnipresent musical medium.

This is all but conclusive, and perhaps it reads a little optimistic. As a first step my attempt was to trace what people value in analogue vinyl and what this told me about the wider corpus of music culture in Berlin. Therefore, this analysis reflects value, something we think of as inherently good. However, the cultural value people attach to music has arguably been left behind in recent economic developments. In the last month, for example, the record store Latitude was closed down because of investors wanting to quickly resell and redevelop the property. Several music shops and venues continue to have to seek relocation. This means that to some extent, people who continue to value records are performing an act of preservation against intruding economic actors. So, the story continues – will people manage to preserve their music culture or will the pressure of economic giants begin to phase it out? ◆

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Interlude

St Germain St Germain

by Benedict Croft

After a lengthy break from music, the French house and nu jazz producer Ludovic Navarre returns to the scene with this refreshing project fusing Malian instrumentalists with deep French house grooves.

The track ‘Sittin’ Here’ leads with the powerful Wassoulou vocalist Nahawa Doumbia and Griot guitarist Guimba Kouyate who transcend Navarre’s energetic percussive samples underlined with silky subbass riffs to create an overall sound that is subtle yet deeply funky, a sound rarely achieved by global house producers. The most impressive instrumentalism occurs in ‘Hanky Panky’ between ngoni players Sadio Kone and Guimba Kouyate who are able to merge individually complex melodies together creating a texture that appears initially intimidating but that settles into a rich groove pushed forward by recurrent jazz rhythms. Navarre in St Germain demonstrates his ability to create an organic sound by knowing when to take a step back and allow the instrumentalists to simply play, producing the tracks around their musical input to the extent where deep house appears as the natural ally of traditional Malian music. ◆

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Alberta stron

Alberta strong and free

g and free

The effect of oil on political narratives by Cai Williams

I sure hope none of you were wasting your time following the Alberta provincial election earlier this year. I, however, was biting my nails at the contest, a potentially historic moment in the history of Alberta’s political development, yet one that may also reveal shifts and nuances in global understandings of political labels.

Okay, maybe I should get a life and tell you about the Potlatch instead.

Having said that, Alberta is actually pretty important, and here’s why.

Alberta is home to the infamous Athabasca oil sands and contains within its borders the 2nd largest recoverable oil reserves on the planet.

Alberta has become something of a punching bag for environmentalists,

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Cai Williams

and with good reason. For those who are engaged in university-level politics, Alberta represents what may well be your nemesis on more or less every issue. Alberta is neoliberal, inefficient, polluting, conservative, extremist, patriarchal (Van Herk, 2010) and anything else you can fit under a wide prairie sky. However, as anthropologists, I’m sure it goes without saying that this picture is too black and white. In fact, as I will argue, some of it’s downright wrong.

Western Canada, like the western USA, is a land of straight lines. Lines which at once mean nothing, and everything. Alberta is a province that was created, somewhat arbitrarily, in 1905, by the Canadian federal government. It is distinguished as its own province from Saskatchewan, the North-West Territories, and Montana by three straight lines. The existence of an Albertan provincial, even at times national, identity is testament to the fact that even when political entities seem to have been artificially created by a few people in positions of power, the bonds of shared experience lead to real feelings of affiliation and identity which reconstruct those same arbitrary borders as cultural and even ethnic divisions.

As if by accident, Alberta is a land blessed and cursed by its plentiful natural resources. The discovery of oil at the Leduc No.1 well in 1947 spearheaded the solidification of the province’s identity and politics, allowing for political and financial realities that don’t exist anywhere else in Canada. These realities lead many within and sometimes without Alberta to have unrealistic expectations of other economies.

Alberta is stereotyped as a conservative province, this we know.

However, this stereotype is fundamentally incorrect, and not just for the simple reason that it is rarely correct to say that X region is politically conservative or liberal or whatever. In terms of policy specifics, Albertans regularly display strong support for high levels of social spending, as well as socially liberal policies such as support for gay marriage above the levels of many European countries. According to a poll for the CBC, 78% think more should be done to reduce the gap between rich and poor. Calgary and Edmonton are both cosmopolitan cities with a similar proportion of visible minorities to London. One of the most popular Alberta premiers in (its admittedly short) history was Peter Lougheed (1971-1985), who was a Progressive Conservative, and yet who nationalized an airline in an attempt to diversify the economy, created a sovereign wealth fund similar to the Norwegian model, and drastically raised royalty rates, to the chagrin of private oil companies.

This is far to the left of anything that the modern day left wing would dare to do.

And yet, most Albertans are described as ‘fiscally conservative’, which means they favour balanced budgets. What gives this aversion to debt its special vigour in Alberta is not just Alberta’s agrarian nature and historical cultural ties to the libertarian Western USA, but it is also the product of the ways in which individual premiers and ministers of finance manipulated the provincial budget to realize the dream of a debt free province.

In Alberta it is politically toxic to suggest raising taxes. This toxicity is partially explained by the idea of the Alberta Advantage, a combination of low taxes and high spending that is only possible with a ready supply of easy money from oil and gas royalties. This policy’s principal exponent was former premier, ‘King Ralph’ Klein (1993-2006), a man largely responsible for the stereotype of the bombastic, macho, conservative

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Alberta strong and free

Albertan. By the end of his mandate, oil and gas royalties constituted 40% of all government revenue, while provincial income taxes were levied at a flat rate of 10% for all earners (unthinkable in other provinces). All the while, Alberta had some of the highest social spending in Canada. This set of policies created unrealistic expectations of what is fiscally possible.

In the recent Alberta election, the premier-elect Jason Kenney campaigned on a promise to both eliminate the deficit and implement a 9% flat tax rate, however with only marginal spending reductions on ‘efficiencies’. All this sounds very neoliberal, and you’d be right.

However we must remember that Kenney was not necessarily elected for his policies. Kenney was elected mainly because outgoing Premier Rachel Notley was not seen as having been tough enough on the federal government, supposedly resulting in the Trans Mountain pipeline, touted as Alberta’s economic saviour, being delayed. Kenney, due to his pugnacious and populist style of rhetoric, was seen as the only credible option on this file. The carbon tax and the perceived need for its abolition was also a hugely important issue, and Jason Kenney was the only viable candidate promising its abolition. All this has little to do with political philosophy. Albertans seem to like to characterize themselves as practical people at heart, who see the word ‘ideological’ as an insult. As such it should come as no surprise that the political philosophy of Albertan politicians should be so far removed from the concerns of large numbers of voters.

This bizarre fiscal reality therefore has the effect of consolidating Alberta’s borders, arbitrary though they are, as borders of economic rationality in the face of the external threat of chaotic, debt-fuelled liberalism found in the rest of Canada, especially the East. These circumstances have also had the effect of reinforcing the feeling that Canada or the federal government act as constraints on Alberta’s (and Western Canada’s) economic development.

One of the more bizarre implications of Alberta’s wealth is its undercurrent of nationalism. There have been two moments in history in which Alberta separatism became a serious political possibility. The first was in 1982, during an oil price crash which left many unemployed, and some homeless. The culprit was a decline in the oil price internationally, after the province had got accustomed to the boom in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and OPEC’s decision to hike prices. The policy which received a large part of the blame, however, was the decision of then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau to implement a National Energy Policy (NEP), which forced Alberta to sell its oil to Eastern Canada below market rates. The second moment came in the aftermath of the 2014 oil bust. Once again, the culprit was a decline in the international price of oil. Once again, it was a piece of policy made at home, the carbon tax, which got the blame. And of course, it doesn’t help that the current prime minister is Pierre Trudeau’s son.

We can therefore see how Alberta’s nationalism comes alive at times when Eastern Canada is perceived as a hindrance to Alberta’s interests, especially to the ability of the oil industry to survive. Albertan populists are therefore required to ‘stand up’ to anyone jeopardizing the industry, be they liberal policymakers in Ottawa, environmentalists campaigning against the oil sands, or neighbouring provinces trying to block the construction of export pipelines. Alberta nationalism is thus economically based, and strongly linked to one industry. Anybody seeking to negotiate with Alberta is therefore going to have to accept this political and cultural reality for the time being. My worry for the

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Cai Williams

present is what this means for the thousands of Albertans who don’t have anything to do with the oil industry, for those in the burgeoning tech sector, for those who, in the wake of the crisis, retrained as windfarm technicians, and for those cycling from Calgary to Ottawa to protest the lack of action on climate change. My worry for the future is what happens to Alberta’s sense of itself when the economy shifts from fossil fuels, and international investors look at Alberta’s oil, conclude that it’s too deep or too unconventional to extract economically, then turn around and ride off down to the Permian basin. Alberta’s arbitrariness allows Alberta to experiment with its identity, however it also doesn’t give a lot of guidance. Alberta, without a sustainable oil industry, may have very little to fall back on culturally, at least for now. ◆

References CBC news (2019). Activist and her dog set off on walk from Alberta to Ottawa to demand climate action (22/04/2019) CBC news (2018). Albertans aren’t as conservative as you might think, poll suggests (21/04/2019) Global News (2017). Helicopter pilot opens up about Jane Fonda’s oilsands tour: ‘she was being given so much misinformation’ (22/04/2019) Global news (2019). Kenney’s threat to ‘turn off the taps’ to B.C. ‘doesn’t make any business sense’: experts (22/04/2019) Palmer, Howard; Palmer, Tamara (1982). The Alberta Experience in Journal of Canadian Studies Rocky Mountain Outlook (2019). UCP leader Jason Kenney prepared to hold referendum over equalization payments (22/04/2019) Van Herk, Aritha (2001). Aggravating, Awful, Awkward, Awesome Alberta in Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta

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Heartbeat

Heartbeat I’ve always been scared by the beating of the heart. Never in my childhood was I tempted to pick up a stethoscope, toy or real, to eavesdrop on that thumping that is the indisputable proof of human life. I resisted taking my own pulse, even when instructed to do so in middle school health class, hated the throbbing of my arm compressed by a blood-pressure cuff. It is folk knowledge that children are soothed by the beating heart of their parents, the soundtrack to which the infant develops in the safety of the womb. But the heartbeat of my parents, and later my boyfriends or partners, failed to bring me comfort but instead repulsed me and caused me to shift myself away from that drumming, disconcertingly both regular and irregular. I trained my mind to focus on the person - their warmth of their embrace, the familiarity of their features - rather than this foreign, fleshy organ pulsating inside of them.

Only now have I stopped to delve more deeply into this discomfort, my aversion to this most sensual and physical proof of life.

Now I think that perhaps all my life my heart was communicating to me through its beating, repeating a message I chose to ignore. It was telling me ‘you are alive but just as fragile as the parts that compose you’. I didn’t listen to this voice not because I didn’t want to listen to it, but because I was terrified to hear it jump or skip or stop altogether. I was afraid to admit the power of matter over mind, the contingency of me. As I pursued proof of life outside myself, the feeling of being alive became the rush of achievement, the burning lungs and aching limbs of a body in motion, always pushing harder and further and faster – onwards and upwards. And because I ignored the voice of my heart and its message, I didn’t notice when it grew weaker and weaker, reduced to a whisper. I ignored my heartbeat until I couldn’t anymore.

That moment came in a doctor’s office in April, a setting non-descript in its sterility and florescence. The doctor’s words percolated slowly through the filters of my consciousness; my heartrate was dangerously low, and I was suffering from ‘malnutrition.’ I was alone, sitting on the crinkly paper of the patient’s chair. In the half-hour before seeing the doctor, I had been asked by the nurses to undress and lie still as wires were attached to my chest and upper body in a pattern that seemed to me to be random, to stand on a scale which was read from a handheld device that I couldn’t see. A little machine was clipped onto my finger that showed numbers I didn’t know the meaning of, and a bloodpressure cuff was wrapped around my arm, pumped to squeeze like a boa constrictor strangling its prey. I felt the throbbing of my arm as the sleeve released, and it reminded me of my heartbeat. I wished the pulsing to stop, and it did. A nurse dressed in dark blue entered all this collected data – all these facts from which I felt so disconnected – into a chunky IBM laptop on the desk next to the patient’s chair, angled away from me, of course.

16

Anonymous entry

None of this, not even the echocardiogram (the name for the test with the wires, only learned later) was particularly alarming to me. I had been to the doctor’s many times over the past years for various checkups and minor maladies; I went through the motions and did what I was told. I had always been good at that. I made small talk while my body was checked and tested, knowing that the nurses were more interested in the numbers on those screens than the content of our conversation.

They did their jobs and I tried to make it easier, tried to be the perfect patient. I was confident in my ability to pass these tests; I always had before. I was an athlete, ate healthily, stayed away from drugs and alcohol (mostly). I had nothing to hide and gained an assured boost from the doctor’s approval when my vitals came back strong, my weight always on the lower end of healthy. I was an athlete throughout high school and my body reflected that. I played soccer and ran and ate until I was satisfied. The doctor’s office was somewhere where I could succeed without even trying. But this time I had not succeeded or even passed.

I had failed, specifically my heart - that beating inside my chest that I always preferred not to acknowledge – had failed.

It took wires stuck to my body and the words of a stony-faced physician for me to hear and to slowly begin to understand that my heart had not failed me. My body was not now a failure, when previously it had been a success, a source of pride, a vehicle of athletic accomplishment. I was just beginning to comprehend that I was a person of flesh and blood, that the persona I enacted in my daily life – my life of school, sports, social life – was intertwined with this physical body, these organs, this heart. That day, so unexpectedly and unprecedently, my body spoke, and my mind was forced to follow. And from that day forward I began to realise the harmfulness and plain inaccuracy of this distinction, mind and matter.

• Two months after that first appointment, I’m in a place where I never expected that I would be. The physical space is familiar; the lavender walls painted years ago at my sister’s choosing, the simple light-wood bed and dresser, the tall windows facing out across our front lawn and the tall trees that line it. This particular intersection of time and place, however, this moment – me at twenty-one living in the room across from my parents’, writing something decidedly non-academic, at the desk where my sister had drawn her childhood artworks – is something new entirely.

When people survive an accident that could have claimed their lives or reach a goal against the odds, there is a moment – at least in the literary recounts – of self-assessment in which this survivor, this champion, make sure that they still have all their fingers and toes, that they have not lost some vital part of themselves in the process of evading or pursuing.

I have done nothing to warrant a glorious account of what preceded this moment of checking that all my limbs are still intact. I have not escaped a warzone or natural disaster, have not climbed the highest peaks or run the longest distance; yet here I am, for the first time, checking – or rather discerning – that I am a complete person, that in the past years and months of my life I have not lost, have not been deprived - or deprived myself - of anything that I need to keep breathing and moving forward.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from having an eating disorder, it’s that we are not who we say we are. We are not students or athletes or academics or artists or philosophers or economists. We are what is left when all these names are stripped away, when all titles, occupations,

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Heartbeat

possessions, and means of measurement are removed. When I had to let go of all these things during treatment, when I had to give up my academics and my athletics, I experienced the terrifying feeling of being no one, having nothing that distinguished me from the other billions of human beings in this world with hearts beating in their chests and lungs that breathe. I felt empty and fragile, like the hollow shell of the person I once was.

But I went on a journey, one that required the initial soul-wrenching process of letting go the things that once defined me, and I realised that this emptiness was itself an illusion.

We are all full people. These organs that pump the blood through our veins and oxygen through our airways are real. We are not reduced to them when we lose the markers that have guided our paths of growth and development. They allow us to take in the world, to be part of something big and beautiful just by being.

As an anthropology student, I have been taught to value cultural nuance above all else, to examine each person, each event, each practice and custom as relative to its (social) context. In the yet-inconclusive debate of ‘nature vs. nurture,’ anthropologists have, with their many verbose ethnographies, certainly added much weight to the ‘nurture’ side of the scale. Especially hefty have been those concerned with the topic of agency, illustrating the individual – even the person subjected to the most confining aspects of neo-liberalism/imperialism, gendered violence and discrimination, deprivation, etc. – as an agent. Speaking entirely from my own experience, it seems much less accurate to picture people – ourselves or our ‘interlocutors’ – as birds beating our wings in smaller and smaller cages. Rather, I now see myself and those around me as sieves through which the substance of life flows. Our bodies – our hearts, our lungs, our fingers, and toes, our senses – let the world in. If we treat our skin like armour, the substance of life will flow around us rather than through us, and, like a boulder amidst a flowing river, we become stationary, slowly being eroded away by the movement of all that surrounds us. We are unable to enjoy the feeling of being swept along, unable to see beyond the next bend. ◆

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Author Interlude Name

Mogoya

Oumou Sangare

by Benedict Croft

Wassoulou pioneer Oumou Sangare educates the global music scene in Mogoya, creating roots music that sounds intrinsically contemporary.

It is hard to tire of the syncopated funk beats which reference the pop Malian rhythms of the 1980s and 1990s, which Sangare herself helped develop, in a fresh and highly energetic reinterpretation. In true Wassoulou style, Mogoya is a dance music album at its heart, brushed with refreshing electronic elements enabling the production of a later remixed album in 2018 which saw the likes of Natureboy Flako, St Germain and Tony Allen turn their hand to Sangare’s music.

This modern sound is best exhibited in ‘Kamelemba’ where delicately reverbed vocals are interspersed with vintage synth harmonies and occasional sampling, all whilst the traditional instruments of the ngoni and calabash lay an irresistible acoustic groove. Sangare is not one to shy away from the political and this album is testament to that, with her songs discussing themes surrounding the global refugee crisis and the current tense political situation in Mali. Mogoya reaches out for unity through dynamic musical collaborations and pointed social critique to create a work that feels, in every sense, contemporary. ◆

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Title of the article

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Benedict Croft

«After Sight»

Benode Behari Mukherjee David Zwirner Gallery

by Benedict Croft

David Zwirner presents Europe’s first ever solo exhibition of Kolkataborn artist Benode Behari Mukherjee, who studied and taught at Rabindranath Tagore’s famous Kala Bhavana art school in Santiniketan, West Bengal. Mukherjee was born in 1904 with a serious eye condition that in 1956 led to his complete loss of sight, pushing him to explore new artistic fields – most notably that of collage and sculpture. It is on these later works that Zwirner’s exhibition focuses.

Inspired deeply by his own environment and Indian folk traditions, Mukherjee followed in the tradition of his Kala Bhavan mentors, allowing for the collaboration between cross-cultural modernism and indigenous styles. His loss of sight, however, freed his work further from realist constraints, allowing it to be constructed purely by his inner vision and memory. Techniques such as collage allowed Mukherjee to understand shapes and dimensions through touch, with colour being dictated purely by memory.

A collage of the two figures, constructed in 1959, displays Mukherjee’s continued desire to represent his external world, doing this through harsh yet vibrant geometric forms that are given depth through definite lines, which act as a form of counterpoint. Although some of his later works move closer to the complete abstract – with external objects defined through a multitude of singular shapes that evoke the collages of Matisse and paintings of Arp – they remain grounded in Mukherjee’s environmental reality. The collection consists of depictions of forms that are often deemed prosaic, such as cats, goats, and household objects; yet the dynamic use of colour re-energises such subjects, presenting them as no less than crucial forms. Mukherjee’s work, however, is nuanced, with these works not attempting to force a realist interpretation, but instead allowing for powerful insights into his inner vision.

It is, to some extent, difficult to enjoy Mukherjee’s charming pieces, which were once so loved by the villagers and locals of Santiniketan, in the elite setting of the David Zwirner gallery – a white-washed, highceilinged, Georgian townhouse in central London – where they seem to act in compete contradiction to their surroundings. Nonetheless, although they appear small, their brilliance dominates the space, bringing warmth and colour to the heart of Mayfair. ◆

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Longboarding in China

Longboarding in China: Injury symbolism

by Juliette Gautron

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Juliette Gautron

In the longboard community, injuries are common, and a recurring topic of conversation amongst friends, often used as a symbol or as a lesson for others. This article is based on fieldwork I did with Shanghainese longboard crews in 2018 and 2019. I use data collected from my training sessions both in longboard dancing and freestyle, and downhill longboarding, with three different groups. L.B.S. (Longboard Space ) crew from the Yangpu district (longboard dancing & freestyle, and downhill), FDU RUSH group from Fudan University (longboard dancing & freestyle), and the Atomic Krew ( or AK) (downhill). In this article, I explore the meaning of injuries in the longboarding communities of Shanghai and the set of behaviours and symbols attached to them.

To begin, I wish to make a side-note about my position during this fieldwork. In regards to longboarding and injuries, I find it particularly hard to detach myself from this topic and remain objective, as I am deeply involved in the events and conversations I describe and analyse below. By reflecting upon the topic of injuries and physical well-being in longboarding, I realise how deeply biased I am, as I have strong feelings and beliefs about pain and injuries, and I realise that I am at risk of using my own assumptions as “objective truth”.

I first wish to address common misconceptions longboarders are often faced with. From an external perspective, injuries are often considered as the symbol of the irresponsibility and madness of the riders. For some people, those injuries are sometimes ‘deserved’, because longboarding is seen as a dangerous sport without rules. Yet, most longboarding groups, especially in downhill longboarding, have an important set of rules and codes of conduct which must be followed to ensure the safety of all riders. I was told by a friend that they no longer went on trips with a particular rider, as he broke the code of conduct by refusing to wear a helmet or protective gear, by lending inadequate types of boards to beginners, and by bringing beginners on roads which were too steep for them to handle safely.

The Atomic Krew is a good example of how safety protocols can be put in place during every session, sharply contrasting with the idea that many people have of downhill longboarding. Before each trip, one person was in charge of making sure that every participant had an insurance covering extreme sports like downhill longboarding, and collected emergency phone numbers from each member. One could not participate if one did not own or borrow safety gear, the minimum being a helmet (full-face helmet for experienced riders), knee pads, elbow pads, and downhill leather gloves. Two emergency kits were also stored in the van in case of an emergency. At the beginning of each riding day, Tom was in charge of “the safety talk” which re-states the code of conduct: always carry a fully-charged phone with you even when riding, never ride on the left side of the road, slow down before turns, only pass someone when you have good visibility in front of you, clap in your hands if you see a car in front or behind you in order to warn the next rider, check for cars behind you frequently, always give way to cars behind you even if it means having to stop, only ride at a speed that you can handle, be cautious at all times, keep 7 meters of safety distance between riders, etc. There were also a set of gestures to learn in order to communicate without speaking with the riders behind you (eg. slow down, be careful, go ahead). This “safety talk” had a ritual importance and was taken extremely seriously by everyone. Tom, in charge of delivering the safety talk, would ask for everyone to focus and would not start speaking until everyone was silent and giving him their

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Longboarding in China

full attention, including experienced members who had heard this talk a hundred times. Even if all members of the group were fluent in both English and Chinese, he would deliver the safety talk in both languages, if not also in French for some French native speakers. The end of the safety talk signified the right to start riding. The above examples illustrate the responsibility that each individual carried in downhill longboarding and how safety and security was emphasised at every training session in order to minimise injuries.

Although safety and security rules are put in place, injuries are frequent in longboarding. Yet, two categories are important to keep in mind, classifying injuries in order to better understand the set of behaviours and symbols associated with getting hurt: Traumatic injuries require immediate attention and sometimes hospitalisation. These are not only a physical trauma for the body, but tend to result in a psychological trauma as well. Physical damage, on the other hand, does not require immediate hospitalisation. In longboard dancing and freestyle, traumatic injuries are quite rare although still present (eg. dislocated elbows, teared ligaments, broken meniscus), and physical damage is the most common types of injury (ranging from a twisted ankle to bleeding wounds and big bruises). On the other hand, in downhill longboarding, which most of this article focuses on, both categories of injuries are present. Traumatic injuries can range from broken bones to very serious open wounds, and physical damage ranges from twisted ankles to burnt skin, bleeding wounds and big bruises.

When traumatic injuries occur, they are taken extremely seriously and acted upon with great urgency. The injured person is brought to the nearest local hospital to be treated, and anxiety is present until that

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Juliette Gautron

person is under medical care. Traumatic injuries are very rarely joked about, or even spoken about. They are only mentioned to serve as a reminder for everyone to be cautious. The stories of these injuries are used as a deterrent for beginners, or as a way to teach a lesson. For example, the story of Lee was the first injury story Tom told me when I joined AK: It was nearly sunset, and the road was dark. He was the first rider and I was following him. We arrived at a turn where there was a mirror, and I could clearly see the lights of the car coming in front of us. I slowed down and nearly stopped, that was the reasonable thing to do. But Lee kept going and crashed into the car. He broke his foot and leg in pieces, it was really ugly to see. We brought him to the local hospital because it couldn’t wait to drive back to Shanghai. Later, I asked him what happened. And he said that he had seen the car perfectly, but thought that he could dodge it and keep going. He was the best in the crew, and that day he was a bit too confident.

Interestingly, the moment chosen to tell me this story was after a very good run, where my speed was very high and I had shared that I was feeling fairly confident. The story was used to remind me that an excess of confidence is often the prime cause for accidents in downhill longboarding. Later, as we discussed the riding abilities of a new crew member who lacked skills to control his board and did not listen to our advice, Tom told me another story illustrating the potentially dangerous behaviour.

There was a new guy who came with us, Jake, but he would not be able to control his slides. He always ended up crashing on the sides of the road. He was wearing a GoPro, and I told him to look at the video, to understand that he was unable to control his trajectories. But he didn’t listen, and at one point he did a slide and ended up crashing into a huge rock. He was going so fast that his arms didn’t stop him: he broke his arms and his face crashed into the rock. He wasn’t wearing a full-face helmet, so his face was severely damaged. His lips were completely cut in half, his nose was broken and there was a lot of blood. I seriously thought he was going to die. He never questioned his skills and didn’t listen to us.

Once again, this story of a serious injury was used as a way to teach a lesson about a particular behaviour, which often was in contradiction with the code of conduct. The story of a girl, Maya, was another striking example.

You see, this turn, here, at the bottom of “Cow Shit” track? Well this girl Maya was a pretty good buttboarder [going down by sitting on the board], and she was going really fast. A bit too fast for her first time, if you want my opinion. Anyway, at this turn, she lost control and crashed into the safety railing. She wasn’t wearing shin pads and broke both of her shins.

That was 6 months ago, and she’s still recovering.

The telling of Maya’s story took place just after a heated conversation with buttboarders who did not bring shin pads, although they were mandatory items for buttboarding in the code of conduct. These stories are not only a way to teach a lesson, but also a way of proving that by listening to more experienced riders, and following the code of conduct, most injuries can be avoided.

I never had a bad accident. Call me lucky, but I’m always pretty careful. I know my own limits.

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Longboarding in China

Traumatic injuries were taken very seriously, but when the scars that remained were more psychological than physical, opinions became divided and a more critical atmosphere emerged within the crew.

In the case of Lee, his behaviour changed after his accident. When he started longboarding again, although he was still one of the best riders of the crew, he was no longer the first rider (most dangerous position) and no longer rode if it was raining, or if the ground was wet. Through a few conversations with Anthony, Tom and Ben, I could discern a sense of disappointment that Lee had given up his position of leader. Later, Lee refused to come on an exploration trip (type of trip that was craved for, which required strong longboard skills) due to the chance of rain; the crew was left with too few people to make an exploration trip possible, leaving no other choice but to cancel, and plan a trip where beginners were allowed. In this situation, four out of five crew members manifested their disappointment by letting out a small comment about Lee’s unwillingness to ride in the rain. Here, the psychological sequels of an injury marked a turn in the rider’s behaviour. Although his accident was not joked about, his change in behaviour was noticed and frowned upon, especially when it interfered with other riders’ plans.

Physical damage is often ignored during a session and taken care of in one’s own time. Indeed, one would rather ride and enjoy the session rather than worry about a small injury which does not fully incapacitate one’s body. It is seen as superfluous for a rider or for the crew to worry about small injuries when much worse could happen; one’s attention should rather be directed towards more important thoughts such as concentrating on the next runs. Physical damage, as opposed to traumatic injuries, does not serve the purpose of teaching a lesson, does not bear the same gravity and importance, and is rather perceived as “collateral damage”, as well as a logical consequence of dedication to longboarding. When teaching a new beginner, we often explained that injuries were inevitable. However, the degree to which one is injured is within the rider’s control. Small road rashes, other superficial wounds and bruises are inescapable when learning new skills in downhill longboarding, and one should not be scared of this physical damage. Small but visible injuries, such as small road rashes are often seen as a symbol of the sport. When not too severe, these almost have a positive connotation. Instead of being the symbol of a wrong behaviour, physical damage symbolises trying hard and learning: “Bleeding is learning”.

In longboard dancing, although most longboarders wear long-legged trousers to protect their skin, they have a collection of scars on their lower legs, which are the symbol of their hard work. They are visible marks which are a proof of hours of training. During a session with FDU RUSH, I noticed a beginner girl who was very determined and very passionate about the sport. She had failed a few tricks and her board had tackled her ankles a few times. Bruises were appearing on both her ankles along with a tiny open wound on her right ankle. As we spoke about injuries, she told me “I finally got my first skate wound. I’m actually quite proud of it”.

In her words I recognised my own feeling when I received my first “skate wound” the same way she did, which was a deep cut on my ankle due to the carbon fibre of my board, that hours of training had sharpened like a knife. I also recognised in her words a certain pride that riders experience when they are asked about their scars. By dealing with pain with pride, longboarders use physical damage as a symbol of their sport, as a way to differentiate themselves from beginners and to show commitment and belonging to the community.

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Juliette Gautron

By categorising injuries into two groups (traumatic injuries and physical damage), two different sets of behaviours and symbols emerge. On the one hand, traumatic injuries are taken very seriously, rarely spoken about and are used as stories to influence and correct at-risk behaviours.

On the other hand, physical damage has a positive connotation which highlight one’s hard-work and dedication. Dealing with the pain of a small injury is also a way through which one can prove one’s commitment to longboarding and shows belonging to the group. As opposed to the general public’s point of view that longboarders’ visible injuries are the symbol of their lack of rules, at-risk and irresponsible behaviours, I argue that these types of physical damage are worn with pride and showcase the longboarder’s consistent training within a strict framework of rules and codes of conduct, whether spoken or unspoken. ◆

27

Queer World

Queer World: The possibilities for queer culture in a global age

by Sean Chou

How do you invent a “homosexual”?

‘Coming-out’ is the Euro-American paradigm which frames how homosexual identity is constructed in the West. It usually involves the homosexual subject confiding in close friends and family, casting themselves as the ‘gay’ or ‘queer’. But with this revelation come the ambiguous logics of guilt and shame. These are challenging because – while the homosexual subject optimistically hopes to regain selfconfidence and agency by revealing their sexuality – by participating in the ‘coming-out’, they confess the secret of their same-sex attraction. An act of ‘revelation’ is also an act of ‘confession’. The power of the ‘gay’ label becomes essentialized and fixed.

Something striking about the coming-out is the sexual binary. ‘Gayness’ assumes a counter-balancing ‘straightness’. The coming-out becomes a self-reinforcing control mechanism that classifies and regulates individuals and whose bodies they choose to desire and share with.

In ‘History of Sexuality Vol 1’ (1998), Michel Foucault contends the self-confession is a ‘ritual of discourse’ which produces sexuality as a ‘truth-effect’; it lends power to social forces which go on to ‘judge, order, forgive, console, reconcile’ (61-62). But how do we move forwards with this discussion and think more broadly about how sexuality is

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Sean Chou

constructed, not within a specific Western, modern context, but in other cultures and societies?

This article will be made up of three parts. We will begin with a consideration of how the illusion of the public/private binary links with socioeconomic relations. This will feed into a discussion of queer desire in an age of globalisation. This will beg the question: Should theories of globalization have a keener focus on subjective agency, rather than favouring theories of mass flow?

In this article, I use the term ‘queer’ to indicate non-heterosexual, nonbinary conforming gender and sexual identities. The point is not to homogenise these identities or ‘lump them together’, but to indicate the subversiveness, possibility and open-endedness of the queer experience, which leads beyond the necessity of being a card-carrying ‘this-or-that’.

The ‘coming-out’ paradigm, contains the Western logic of the public/ private dichotomy, where public life should be kept separate from private sexual freedoms. The export of this essentializing paradigm to non-Western places can complicate pre-existing queer discourses. For example, the work Silviano Santiago (2002) discusses the coming-out in Brazil. In the 1960s and 1970s, the verb ‘assumir’ (which means the equivalent of ‘to come out’ in English) spread widely to describe the homosexual public identity the person would take on after coming out.

Santiago argues this meant homosexuals had to act as ‘marginal to the social norm’ – which ruled out bisexuality as a possible, normalised sexual preference, and reinforced the secretive nature of being homosexual, hidden from family life (2002: 15).

Santiago goes further to explain how the coming-out is wound up with class logics of exclusion and marginality, as it reinforces the divide between the bourgeois, property-owning class and poor neighbourhoods which do not have the bourgeois concept of ‘privacy’.

Instead, Santiago explores how they revert to alternative social relations not based on a clash of norms (16). In one case, he describes a boy who stays in the tenement but dresses in drag at the carnival in the city, his activities supported by the washerwomen in the tenement who treat him like a person of the same sex. Santiago goes on to criticise comingout as constructing ‘guilt’ in the homosexual subject (18). By aligning the homosexual person with behaviour perceived as gay, it reinforces them as socially ‘other’. Instead, Santiago argues it is more subversive to adopt subtler forms of queer subjectivity – to avoid perpetuating the same logics of exclusion imposed by homophobic opponents.

From this, it is evident sexuality interacts with social factors like class, and we should be aware of how it reinforces existing social inequalities and bourgeois ideological beliefs. We also observe how sexuality does not act solely on an individual level, but acts on a set of social relations, negotiating power dynamics and distribution of wealth.

But how do sexual politics impact the positionality of nationhood more generally?

In Cindy Patton’s case study of Taiwan, Patton discusses how, after 1993, gay men were allowed to serve in the military (2002). Patton argues this allowed Taiwan to position itself as modern, liberal and progressive, in contrast to neighbouring mainland China where homosexual activities were illegal at the time. He argues that the military policy harmed the existing gay rights movement in Taiwan because it ‘pre-empted liberation politics’ and gay men who did not serve in the military were

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Queer World

now accused of being unpatriotic (2002: 195).

It is easy to make comparisons with the recent legalisation of gay marriage in Taiwan in May 2019. While it was a significant milestone for Taiwan as the first country in East Asia to pass equal marriage, we should not forget that the move helps Taiwan to position itself in an international context as a liberal, progressive country, amenable to Western freedoms and economic investment.

Patton argues that the public/private divide does not exist in Taiwan like in the US, where gay rights arose after decline in private, family structures (208). Instead of the civil rights ‘affectivity’ of a minority group, which borrowed strategies used to fight for civil rights for African-Americans in the 1960s, in Taiwan human rights – including gay rights – were ‘feminised’ because feminist movements saw gay people forming part of ‘dissent’ against family traditions like gender roles (206-7).

Liberal universalism assumes human rights are part of an inevitable, historical trajectory of progress and endow individual agents with innate dignity. Rather, as the example of Taiwan demonstrates, gay rights can be seen as part of a state’s nation-building project – and become complicit in hegemonic discourses of assimilation into normative constructs like citizenship and service to the state. Patton says at greater stake is the idea of the ‘Nation’ itself, and presumably its defence against forms of cultural identification like sexuality which transcend borders (202); the Nation has a greater prerogative to defend itself, and will ‘absorb’ social groups like gay people to achieve this.

Patton’s essay takes for granted the imposition of nation-state logics, seen as Western and modernising, as universal and inevitable, as part of a ‘performative homologism’ where nations fight over and leave no territories unclaimed (201). But the globalisation of queer discourses should not be seen as so uni-directional. Tom Boellstorff argues against the theory of globalisation as ‘flow’, arguing that it imposes Western queer terminology onto non-Western countries, and reinforces assumptions of Western cultural hegemony as inevitable (2003: 226).

Rather, he argues for his theory of ‘dubbing’ culture. Boellstorff observes ‘gay’ and ‘lesbi’ Indonesian subjectivities which he argues are separate from Western categories of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’.

Instead, the concept of the ‘dub’ describes how there are two sets of cultural logics. Western queer subjectivities are communicated through mainstream media like TV shows, and Indonesian ‘gay’ and ‘lesbi’ subjectivities. These are national, rather than local or ethnic: in one case, a ‘gay’ man called Hasan first discovered ‘gay’ people through the TV broadcast of a gay demonstration in Indonesia (226-227).

But subjectivities cross between local, global and personal meanings invested into them. The term ‘dub’ encapsulates these contradictions, how terms cannot ultimately reconcile the meanings of sexual subjectivities into a closed totality, but are interpretative, intersubjective and endlessly played upon through multiple discourses.

To return to the coming-out, perhaps an alternative analogy should be used for how queer-ness is constructed. Queerness isn’t a ‘coming-out’ - the onus on queer people to come out interpolates and subordinates us to a social order we didn’t create. It perpetuates forms of domination and pre-existing inequalities.

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But equally, the closet – the coming-out space – should be reclaimed if we can explore meaningful forms of resistance to heteronormativity.

The closet is an inherently performative space, and suggests equally that heterosexuality is performed and ironically a ‘phase’ in many gay people’s lives before they come out as ‘gay’. This reveals the fluid, inherently unstable labels used for sexual identification. But also, how we can understand the public/private dichotomy as ideological, as it perpetuates bourgeois, property-owning logics of public subordination and private domination.

These broad theoretical postulations should not disguise how heterodoxical thinking spreads unevenly in different cultural contexts.

Rather, we should stay sensitive to how alternative, queer identities are constructed ‘on the ground’ – as a nation building project in Taiwan, or distinctly nation-bound categories in Indonesia which are parallel but do not blend with Western, totalising identities.

If we grasp the alterity, potentiality and becoming futurity of queerness, perhaps we learn everything in the world is a bit queer – and better for the diverse, opening subjectivities it promises. ◆

References Boellstorff, T. (2003). Dubbing culture: Indonesian gay and lesbi subjectivities and ethnography in an already globalized world. American Ethnologist, 30(2), pp. 225-242.

Cruz, A. Manalansan, M. (2002). Introduction. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 1-10.

Foucault, M. (1998). The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. London: Penguin Books.

Patton, C. (2002). Stealth Bombers of Desire: The Globalization of “Alterity” in Emerging Democracies. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 195-219.

Santiago, S. (2002). The Wily Homosexual. In: A. Cruz, M. Manalansan, ed., Queer globalizations: citizenship and the afterlife of colonialism, 1st ed. New York: New York University Press., pp. 13-20.

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Dehumanising the dead

Dehumanising the dead

by Annie Thomlinson

If you have seen at least one London bus this academic year, you must have seen an advert for the Body Worlds exhibition. But did you know that all of the bodies displayed are real life dead people?

Last year I read an article by Tony Walter about the exhibition and about how it had revolutionised the way that we approach the dead.

Body Worlds takes the bodies out of the coffins and graves where they are hidden from display and places them at the centre of our attention

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Annie Thomlinson

through the process of plasticination - a preservation technique which replaces the water in the body with a polymer. Walter’s article, written shortly after the first exhibition in London premiered, highlights the controversy associated with this revolutionary way of dealing with the dead; after all ‘the corpse has been identified by anthropologists for almost a century as a problematic object, generating repulsion, awe, symbolism, and ritual’ (Walter:2004 613). However, articles about the current exhibition placed a lot less emphasis on the ethics and cultural understanding of using dead bodies and where they mentioned that the plasticinates were real humans, the focus was more about how it made the exhibition quirky and unusual.

I attended the exhibition a couple of weeks ago to experience it myself and I found that this amoral position on the ethics of displaying dead bodies really came through at the exhibition. Apart from a sign at the beginning which acknowledged that all of the body parts on display were donations from anonymous dead people, the history of the plasticinates lives was not mentioned and the only reference made to the lifestyle of the donors was in reference to their body composition. For example, where there was a very fatty set of organs, reference was made to the fact that these organs had belonged to someone who had lived an unhealthy lifestyle, using their history to make a scientific educational point.

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Dehumanising the dead

This dehumanisation of the body can also be seen in the terms used

by Von Hagens. He refers to the preserved bodies as plasticinates, rendering them material objects rather than formerly living beings. The bodies are also taken apart in such a way which, whilst maintaining the human form, makes them less complete. For example, there was a plasticinate called the ‘split jumper’ where the plasticinate had been put into the splits and the body had been taken apart in such a way that even the penis was cut in half. This manipulation of the body is testament to the deconception of the plasticinate from the person it had belonged to.

The idea of mutilating the genitals of a dead body would be considered deeply disrespectful if it was done to an ordinary dead body, yet the dehumanisation of the body through the plasticination process allows it to be done without complaint. In his article, Walter refers to Hertz’s distinction between wet and dry remains of dead bodies. Hertz argued that whilst the wet remains of a body are the object of mourning, the dry remains are not. The plasticination process makes the bodies hard and rigid so they lose the fleshiness associated with the living, making them dry remains, disassociated with life and, therefore, taking away the aspect of mourning. I wholeheartedly agree with this argument. As a particularly squeamish person myself, unable to stay in class during dissections at biology classes in high school, I did not have the same reaction to the plasticinates. The plastic texture of the bodies made it extremely difficult to imagine that they were once living beings.

If you’re intrigued by this discussion, I would absolutely recommend attending the exhibition. It is not only incredibly informative about the human body - just you wait until you see how small a uterus is- but also from an anthropological perspective it presents an entirely new and unfamiliar approach to death which can only be fully understood when you come face to face with a plasticinate. ◆

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Author Interlude Name

Banglarasta Lokkhi Terra and Shikor Bangladesh All Stars

by Benedict Croft

Banglarasta is the outcome of the world music collective Lokkhi Terra, led by Kishon Khan, combining with Bengali and Baul folk group the Shikor Bangladesh All Stars to produce some of the most interesting global fusion sounds of the decade. Put simply, this project combines heavy dub reggae with the classic folk instrumentation of West Bengal and Bangladesh. In ‘Shaddho Ki Re Amar’ the khol drum and taal cymbals set a traditional rhythmic cycle with characteristic dotara melodies accenting Bangla vocals, whilst deep bass lines, skanking guitars and tight horn riffs push the folk sounds into roots reggae. This short EP exhibits a blend barely explored anywhere else and makes you question why Bengali folk as a musical tradition is so untouched by the global fusion scene. ◆

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The “you better work” ethic and

The “You Better Work” Ethic

the spirit of drag

Season 9 contestant Sasha Velour (seated) pictured with her husband and dog in their Brooklyn apartment for People.

by Nadav Wall 2008 was a tumultuous year in the United States. The stock market bottomed out, unemployment soared, and banks too big to fail did exactly that. Amidst this crisis, a sense of hope for a more just future gained political momentum. Barack Obama dethroned Hillary Clinton as the predestined Democratic presidential nominee and same-sex marriage celebrated early victories in California and Connecticut. That summer, a reality tv competition quietly pitted nine drag queens against each other, sparking a cultural phenomenon that still reverberates in queer communities across the globe today. LOGO TV, a fledgling

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Nadav Wall

Viacom subsidiary targeted at LGBTQ audiences, greenlit the soonto-be canonized program: RuPaul’s Drag Race. The show was a perfect blend of widening LGBTQ acceptance, a politics of hope, and the austere fiscal policies characteristic of the late aughts. The network recognized a financial opportunity in the relatively cheap labor of drag queens who could sing, dance, act, and sew, all while barking quips and throwing shade. The show’s parallel trajectory to the U.S. economic recession and subsequent shaky recovery was no coincidence. In frugal times, who better than a drag queen to milk a dollar for all its worth?

The inaugural episode of the series challenged queens to create “drag [outfits] on a dime” made up of dollar-store items. In the years that have followed, that resourcefulness and economic prudence has been a recurring theme both on the show and in the hundreds of careers that have sprouted in its wake. The most successful queens have proven to be flexible entrepreneurial brands, hawking merchandise through nightclubs and theaters across international borders while producing an end-less stream of social media content to satiate their fervent fanbases.

The avenues to success in this industry, though queer in appearance, provide a compelling picture of the neoliberal virtues and capitalist logics anthropologists have identified that have proliferated in a postrecession landscape. Successful drag queens both on and off the show illustrate what Ilana Gershon calls “neoliberal agency”. They market them-selves as “a bundle of traits and skills—improvable assets—that they own and man-age as a business”. (Gershon 551). RuPaul embodies this tenacity and rewards contestants that follow his lead. He’s a singer, songwriter, actor, author, television and podcast host, model, producer, and now a (questionable) guru. While this entrepreneurial spirit is often satirized on the show, it’s been the winning formula for drag queens hoping to do well in the competition and have longevity in their careers.

“You better work!” has been the underlying political message of the show and a common refrain heard in gay nightclubs.

Popularized by RuPaul in the 90’s and sung 20 years later by Britney Spears in her hit song “Work Bitch”, the phrase has sound-tracked and celebrated the commodification of queer culture. Alumni of the show have found themselves in an overcrowded market, reciting protestant tropes of the privilege and desire to work, and expressing gratitude and professionalism in their career trajectories spanning from dive bars to Hollywood red carpets. For those who have man-aged to stay relevant in a sea of competing acts, success has been astronomical. Drag queens have gone from mimicking “executive realness” in ballrooms a la Paris is Burning (1990) to now giving sought-after management advice in Forbes Magazine. An article published in 2015 by that business magazine instructs readers to “build fan loyalty like RuPaul and America’s top drag queens”. Other industry publications have followed their lead. A queer house no longer just refers to fictive kinship, it is now something you can aspire to and read about in Architectural Digest and People, where prior contestants’ sleek cosmopolitan homes have been profiled.

Much like drag itself, this meritocratic work ethic and its lucrative rewards turn out to be an illusion. Behind the glitz and glam of drag stardom looms a precarious existence. While contestants are encouraged to take performative risks on Drag Race and ex-pose their emotional vulnerabilities, the real risk-taking happens before they ever step on set. Queens have confessed to spending upwards of $30,000 on designer outfits in preparation for the show. To put this figure in perspective, the winning prize in 2008 was a paltry $10,000 (before taxes). Contestants are pressured to take out loans in or-der to meet the increasingly unattainable fashion standards the show’s audience ex-pects. This is a radical departure from drag’s roots, which can be traced back to marginalized queer POC, often homeless, without

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The “You Better Work” Ethic

disposable incomes or access to a creative class of designers and stylists.

Unfortunately, many of the show’s contestants are eliminated early in the competition, left with designer wardrobes never to be seen on television and staggering financial debts to be repaid.

“You are put through months and months of hell, wondering, do you have to quit your day job? Do you have to ask your parents for money?

Do you have to get rid of your house? Just to get on the show and be eliminated first takes thousands and thousands of dollars and you leaving everything that ever made you comfortable behind.”

Season 7 contestant Trixie Mattel — a country musician, makeup mogul, and comedian — on the cover of Autoharp Quarterly.

Although documentaries like Paris is Burning showed glimpses of the financial burdens of drag, the precarity those performers faced was deliberately divorced from their drag personas. Queens living in abject poverty without access to formal employment networks were celebrated for serving opulence and looking the part of an unobtainable lifestyle.

However, this fantasy isn’t as seamlessly constructed by queens on Drag Race. Recent contestants have come under fire for actively selfproducing them-selves while filming. One popular method for making money after the show is selling t-shirts with catch-phrases that were either intentionally or unintentionally said on cam-era. This has resulted in strained efforts by queens to coin catch phrases before departing that can then be milked through an endless roll-out of merchandise and music videos. Some queens have even coordinated outfits and performances to reinforce these catch phrases and reduce their drag to a memorable slogan. Rather than preparing for the show with winning the crown in mind, queens now often focus their attention to a future

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Nadav Wall

t-shirt business to maximize profits in the small window of fame the show guarantees.

A triumph-over-adversity storyline and a memorable sound bite shift the com-modification from performance abilities to the performance of identity, which has be-come a necessity to make a living for queens already in debt during filming. A sympathetic personality and a knack for presenting a well-crafted backstory turn out to be the most valuable skills in a drag queen’s toolbox. Contestants have revealed in tender moments that they are HIV-positive, homeless, disabled, and battle with addiction. Others have bravely talked about being abandoned by their parents, their experiences in and out of prison, and attending sexuality conversion camps at a young age against their will. Many have remarked that through drag, they found an unshakeable confidence and hope that they did not possess beforehand. This gives a new meaning to David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession”. The dissolving worklife boundaries that these queens experience means that they can find surplus value in their own dis-possession as marginalized queer people, so long as they have an arsenal of entertainment and marketing skills to fold their disenfranchisement into.

Although often lauded as revolutionary queer entertainment, Drag Race does not signal a distinctive rupture from the American dream. Familiar tropes of hard work pulling people from rags to riches are abundant on the show, though coated with a palatable queer glaze for an audience that has often been betrayed by American ideals. When debating whether to eliminate a floundering contestant this season who had unsuccessfully applied for the show 11 years in a row before finally being cast, RuPaul remarked that “it would be un-American to send her home so soon”. This nexus be-tween neoliberal agency, queer livelihoods, and American values in the shadow of a paralyzing economic recession is arguably what makes the show such a successful phenomenon.

We’re seeing a similar nexus emerge in rising presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg’s campaign, built on his traditional American military values, vague economic policies that mirror the language of private enterprise, and an alleged queer sensibility. Drag Race might not be the source of hope it started out as, but the creative adaptation to austere constraints it showcases might provide useful clues for what’s to come. Its ebullient spirit — in contrast to a ceaseless commodification of labor and intimacy — relies on a balance of humor and empowerment often missing in most anthropological analyses of neoliberalism. Paying attention to this (however misleading) hope and its contingency on precarity could broaden our understandings of how LGBTQ acceptance has been articulated through capitalist logics that produce very few winners and continue to marginalize everyone else. ◆

References Gershon, Ilana. “Neoliberal Agency.” Current Anthropology. 52.4 (2011): 537-555. Print.

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Huba, Jackie. “Build Fan Loyalty Like RuPaul And America’s Top Drag Queens.” Forbes Magazine Martin, Michael. “An Exclusive Look Inside Alyssa Edwards’s Glitzy, Glittery Glam Room.”

Architectural Digest, 22 Jan. 2019 Price, Lydia. “Inside Drag Race Star Sasha Velour’s Eclectic & Enchanting Brooklyn Home, Where ‘Kitsch’ Meets ‘High-Class.’ ” PEOPLE.com, 4 Mar. 2019, YouTube “Roscoe’s RPDR S11 Viewing Party with Scarlet Envy & Sharon Needles!” (5 Apr. 2019)

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Title of the article

Both sides of the big beat

by Dimitris Markantonakis

The beat is the most important element of the West African musical tradition; the Gods spoke through the drums, which made them the most prominent of all instruments. The tribe encircled them, as they danced to their rhythm (Stearns 1970: 3). Drumming, as we know it, is essentially an African concept; Gene Krupa, his fan Keith Moon, and all subsequent drummers, pounded on European instruments, using West African ideas. These have travelled throughout the globe ever since (ibid: 14-15).

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Dimitris Markantonakis

Hard bop is a jazz style which emphasizes simpler melodic lines, strongly rooted in gospel and spiritual music. Art Blakey was one of its drumming pioneers; leader of the Jazz Messengers, a legendary ensemble that included the who’s who of jazz. Respectively, fellow drummer Tony Allen was a forefather of Afrobeat; a West African fusion of regional traditional music, with soul, jazz, and funk. Allen always looked upon Blakey as his idol.

Tony Allen’s A Tribute to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers was released in 2017 with little fanfare. Everything, from the cover design to the label, and the title, suggests that this EP considers itself a tribute album; it vastly underestimates itself, for it is more than that.

In concert, Allen addressed the audience as a modest fan, rather than an established master; he is thankful and very happy of the opportunity to pay tribute to his musical idol, whose repertoire is difficult, even for legends. “Allen is an Afrobeat guy. Tonight I will show my jazz side (...), the way we can fuse things together, which has been my way of life” (Allen 2016). This album reveals both sides of Tony Allen; Afrobeat, and jazz. These are not at all mutually exclusive.

Moanin’ is fragmented and intersected with Miles Davis’ So What, which further alludes to the uncanny connection between both pieces; Miles lifted his idea from Bobby Timmons perhaps? As a joke, try to whistle the melody of Moanin’ above Why Don’t You Do Right, a Timmons’ favourite, and then So What above both. In Allen’s version, the 4/4 swing is played in double time, while the melody is fragmented and halted; this achieves an 8/4 feeling, that moves back and forth the music line.

This beat is the greatest addition to Blakey’s music. Traditional African music is polyrhythmic, meaning multiple rhythms are played seperately at the same time, combining 3/4, 6/8 and 4/4 time signatures; that would be a simultaneous performance of a waltz, a blues, and a swing; the singing, clapping, and heavy stomping of both audience and musicians, further complexify (Stearns 1970: 4). Afrobeat incorporated this traditional element. Therefore, instead of Blakey’s straightforward 4/4 heavy swing, Allen applies African polyrhythmy to the hard bop idiom, leading to impressive results, and an altogether fresher take to the Messenger’s book.

Which takes us to Politely. Therein, Bill Hardman’s simple yet elegant blues theme is elevated; deconstructed and broken down into several pieces. The straightforward 4/4 swing is fragmented into a complex 6/8 blues, which creates a sense of movement through the chord changes.

Compare it with Blakey’s own live performance from the Club St Germain.

The extended solos from Bobby Timmons and Jymie Merritt, combined with the marvelous interplay between musicians and audience, add nice touches. Allen instead utilizes a constantly alternating tempo; below a steady bassline, and minimalistic piano arpeggios. The two latter create the impression of heavy rain and thunder, while the tom and cymbal hits sound as if shuffling earth, and piercing lighting strokes. Rather than the tranquil, swaggering politeness Hardman originally intended, Allen’s arrangement creates an even darker sense of urgency, almost apocalyptic. My personal highlight of the album.

Dizzy Gillespie’s main melody of Night in Tunisia is broken into repeatable parts, and performed as a series of disjointed riffs. This creates a strong rhythmic feeling, which places the beat into the foreground. I

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Both sides of the big beat

can imagine someone dancing to the tune, on a sidewalk, after hours.

This gives the impression that every single instrument is soloing; not merely the leads, but the entire rhythm section as well, especially the drums. Multiple melodic layers are created, above and below the main theme. For instance, the bass maintains a steady riffing beat, with the piano chromatically improvising around it; the soprano solos through the changes, while the drums shuffle, reshuffle and improvise constantly below; never to merely confine themselves in plain timekeeping, nor to play twice the same line.

According to Leonard Feather’s liner notes (1958), the name of Benny Golson’s Drum Thunder Suite derives from its dramatic use of mallets, which suggest thunder. There is more to it than that. Chango was the Yoruban God of Thunder, known as Shango in Trinidad; he was worshiped by his own secret cult of musicians, to whom they dedicated their rhythms. In Trinidad, Haiti, and Cuba, Shango was mostly favored by drummers (Stearns 1970: 28-29). The composition of the Drum Thunder Suite, resembles the development of one of these cults, through the ages. It is divided in three movements; Drum Thunder, Cry a Blue Tear, and Harlem’s Disciples. Drum Thunder represents the early secret meetings, as they took place amongst the African slaves of the Caribbean; the drumming is heavy, raw and emphasized. Cry a Blue Tear moves us to the early jazz orchestras of the United States.

The paradiddles resemble the early rudimentary technique, as the full drum set had yet to fledge; the strong Latin element, nuances the earlier calypso influences of the idiom. We are essentially in the South, as the

Tony Allen A Tribute to Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers 574439-4 Blue Note, 2017

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Dimitris Markantonakis

African chants are juxtaposed with work songs, Cajun, and Caribbean music. Finally, Harlem’s Disciples is upbeat and mellow; the melody is funky reflecting the state of jazz in 1958; the drumming is still heavy, yet more nuanced. We now listen to modern jazz, from its Messengers.

From the secret slave meetings to the late-hour club sessions, music and culture persist.

In his own take, Allen twisted the above concept inside out, to Africanize Blakey’s tribute to Africa. The drumming is even heavier; the wind instruments are loud and dissonant, resembling both animal cries and Balkan fanfares. The strong bass beat is modern. The movements are not separated, as in the original arrangement, but juxtaposed, to demonstrate the circularity of musical culture; steady flow and a strong continuity. This contrasts the fragmented melodies of all previous pieces.

Paired with a Parisian ensemble, a little larger than Blakey’s usual formations, yet more familiar with his own, Allen takes the sense of Africanism, omnipresent in all of Blakey’s work, to Africanize it even further. This album is a tribute from one master to another, of a kind that deserves its own tribute altogether. Viewing it as a mere tribute, would diminish its status; it is something new, altogether larger, and unalike all that preceded. In the same manner the impressionist painters payed tribute to their old idols, while innovating, Allen breaths fresh air to jazz; one in which tradition and modernism are fused and blurred, conforming to neither. According to a Greek song, all that is old needs to be burned, for the prettiest bud to blossom; the fusion would be that burning. Such is perhaps the route onwards. ◆

References Allen, Tony. (2016) Tribute to Art Blakey. Live concert recorded on the 16th of February 2016 from the Maison des Arts de Creteil, for the Festival Sons d’hiver. Retrieved in 2020 from YouTube.

Feather, Leonard. (1958) Liner Notes in the LP Art Blakey And The Jazz Messangers.

BLP-4003. Blue Note.

Stearns, Marshall W. (1970) The Story of Jazz. Oxford University Press, 1970.

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Title of the article

Gender and kinship relations of Indonesian domestic workers by Karen Lee Over the summer, I conducted fieldwork in a village in rural East Java, Indonesia, as part of the Summer Ethnography Project. My initial aim was to study the gender and kinship relations of domestic workers who have returned home. Irene, my previous domestic worker, stayed with my family for over 10 years, and has returned to this village not too long ago. We shall refer to it as Desa; I mainly interacted with around 30 people, of its approximately 200 residents; my same-street neighbours.

Irene’s family welcomed me into their household.

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Karen Lee

Desa follows no specific marriage patterns: both patrilocal and matrilocal arrangements are in use. If the wife’s family has available land or can accommodate the couple into the family house, the couple may live matrilocally. Conversely, if the husband’s family is relatively more welloff, the couple may decide to live patrilocally. Most of the elders are rice farmers, the regional specialty crop. Many younger women spend several years of their life abroad, as domestic workers, before returning and retiring into domestic life. Some men work abroad as construction workers, while others take jobs locally such as security guards in factories and motorcycle taxi drivers. Those who have gone to university have the option to open their own shop or work in a bank, but salary is minimal.

As Irene has often mentioned to me, the money they earn in East Java is enough to sustain their daily living, and if nothing else they will always have rice to eat, but ambitions such as having a grand wedding ceremony, building a new house, or buying a new vehicle would require the wife to work abroad. If she goes to Hong Kong, she can save up enough to build a house in 2 years (monthly salary for domestic workers in Hong Kong now is around 500GBP). On the other hand, even if men do work abroad, they earn far less than their women counterparts, have to pay in advance and have to be checked more rigorously to get a visa. Therefore, many women work abroad while men remain at home. As Hoang et al. (2012: 737) mentioned in their findings, the nucleation of family has made parental figures the predominant child-carers. During my stay in Indonesia, I have often observed fathers taking care of their children without relying too much on their extended family in the absence of the mother.

My research question stems from the assumption that East Java, with its strong Islamic presence, is bound to speak out against women’s rising economic status. Not to mention that the Indonesian state emphasizes the ideal of men as ‘breadwinners’ and women as ‘homemakers’ (Silvey, 2006). As Elmhirst (2007: 231) succinctly summarized, women are valued as “being able to stay at home, avoid work in the fields and keep their skins pale, whilst men enter the world of work, embrace expansive spatial horizons”. How are these domestic workers going to reintegrate back into their community after spending a long time away from their families? Constable’s (1999: 224) analysis may still ring true after nearly two decades: “migration has provided (domestic workers) with new experiences, desires, options, and visions but with no ready formulas for successfully transplanting them”.

After a month in East Java, I may have found some preliminary answers.

Firstly, my original use of the word ‘reintegration’ is problematic, as migration is not a one-off event to these Indonesian women; they may leave home as early as they finish high school, and work to support their maternal family. Once they have found a marriage prospect they may return to marry. By the end of the couple’s marriage ceremony they may have already spent all their money. Only the skeleton of their new house has been built; the walls have not been painted, the tiles not laid out.

The wife may stay at home to try and conceive, but by the time the baby comes, new expenses are due. They have to start saving for their child’s education, not to mention they have to buy him or her a motorcycle so that the child can travel through rugged roads. The wife would then go abroad again to earn more money. Other arrangements aside, migration is often continuous. Women go abroad, they save, they spend, and they go abroad again. “Reintegration” is therefore a problematic concept. Their time at home is more a vacation from work. After working consecutively to look after someone else’s family for 6 days, or even 7 days straight a week, they return home to take care of their own families; and if their family is grateful, they will be taken care of.

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Indonesian domestic workers

In effect, these domestic workers’ family may not always be grateful for their sacrifices. For Irene, workers resemble “farm animals” at the mercy of their masters. For instance, Adiratna’s husband, who lives across the street, cheated on her while she was away in Hong Kong. His justification being that he was using his own money, not the funds his wife remitted to him. Considering that his income was derivant from the motorcycle his wife bought, his defence did not resonate well with me. Another girl, Citra, lived abroad for years, saving enough for a house, a motorcycle, and a marriage; she even gave birth to two boys. Yet her mother wished and managed to push her back to work, forcing a divorce between Citra and her husband. Such strained Citra’s mental health, according to Irene.

This may seem as a tragic description of the life of the domestic workers.

However, we should also account Javanese relative individualism: Irene’s sister-in-law, Eka, decided to stay in Indonesia even though her family would have welcomed extra income. She was afraid of being alone. Such behavior is also evident in their child rearing practice: Dewi, a neighbour of ours, did not attempt to persuade her son when he decided at the last minute that he would not go onstage to perform during Scout’s Day, ruining his classmates’ chance to perform too. Moreover there are also multiple stories of them wasting their income away, when they are abroad, or disobeying the Quran through same-sex relationships. As Dolan (2002) has emphasized, people’s lived expectations may not necessarily coincide with their lived experiences. In truth, I would like to suggest that Javanese are a much freer people than I have originally presumed. Whether or not they follow the Islamic tenants is entirely up to them.

Irene’s sister-in-law, Eka, decided to stay in Indonesia even though her family would have welcomed extra income. She was afraid of being alone.

This Javanese relative individualism is also evident in their child rearing practice: Dewi, a neighbour of ours, did not attempt to persuade her son when he decided at the last minute that he would not go onstage to perform during Scout’s Day, ruining his classmates’ chance to perform too.

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My hypothesis is that there is no effective sanctioning mechanism even if people do not conform to expectations of good human beings. Since Desa is located 5 hours away from Surybaya, the administrative capital, state presence is minimal. The most people can do is gossip. Routine television shows broadcast the horrors that would be bestowed upon them should they act inappropriately; how their corpse will smell, ooze terrible fluids, and not be able to be laid down to rest in the grave.

Religion acts as one of the more effective sanctioning mechanisms.

Since children go to the mosque at a very young age and attend religious gatherings regularly, the Islamic idea has been instilled in all villagers’ mind. Even if they sway a little, religion can appeal to their good graces again. Through religious chanting, Adiratna’s husband ceased his adultery. Therefore, I may have been mistaken in assuming religion as a starting point of my research. It is more of a solution than the premise of the situation.

I am aware that my analysis is preliminary. After all, I have only spent a month in the field and I am confident there is much more to unveil.

Since I could not speak fluent Indonesian, my main interlocutors were the domestic workers who have worked abroad and thus could speak English, Cantonese, or Mandarin. An analysis from the men’s perspective would have been beneficial.

I have thus proposed that domestic workers do not “reintegrate” back into their home community. The Javanese that I observed seemed to be free-spirited, as Desa lacks an effective sanctioning mechanism against deviance. Religion is one of the more effective mechanisms and encourages people to act properly according to Javanese imagination, but not an absolute guiding principle of the people. After all, as Hoang and Yeoh (2011: 114) have said “in the era of migration and family survival, ‘doing family’ may thus become more important than ‘doing gender’”. Conducting fieldwork presents an excellent opportunity for me to take note of the subtleties of a seemingly homogenous culture. ◆

References Constable, N. (1999). “At home but not at home: Filipina narratives of ambivalent returns”, Cultural Anthropology, 14 (2): 203-228.

Dolan, C. (2002). “Collapsing Masculinities and Weak States - A Case Study of Northern Uganda”, Masculinities matter!: Men, Gender, and Development, Cleaver F. eds. New York: Zed Books.

Elmhirst, R. (2007). “Tigers and gangsters: masculinities and feminised migration in Indonesia”, Population, Space and Time, 13 (3): 225-238.

Hoang, L. & Yeoh, B. (2011). “Breadwinning wives and ‘left-behind’ husbands: men and masculinities in the Vietnamese transnational family”, Gender and Society, 25 (6): 717739.

Hoang, L., Yeoh, B., & Wattie, A. (2012). “Transnational labour migration and the politics of care in the Southeast Asian family”, Geoforum, 43 (4): 733-740.

Silvey, R. (2006). “Consuming the transnational family: Indonesian migrant domestic workers to Saudi Arabia”, Global Networks, 6(1): 23-40.

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Cradle

Cradle by Regina Legarte I am someone’s daughter, but my mother is the universe.

I am not an only child— my family is unbroken.

My siblings are called Orion, Leo, Andromeda, Lyra.

Sometimes we collide, and we apologise through light.

This is how it has been all my life.

Anak, my mother calls to me.

I am not an only child.

I dream in English, but my tongue remembers my mother’s language. ◆

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Author Interlude Name

Land of Gold Anoushka Shankar

by Benedict Croft After a few years of Shankar re-exploring the roots of her music, Land of Gold signalled the return of the electronic and dub-influenced sitarplaying that originally positioned her as a key innovator in the global fusion scene. Shankar’s release of the Home in 2015 was a showcase of her virtuoso ability and deep understanding of traditional Indian raag. This appears to have inspired Land of Gold, which exhibits her most impressive instrumentalism yet. ‘Crossing The Rubicon’ is able to combine pop-like sitar hooks with dynamic passages of intense improvisation contrasted with the warm tones of the hang played by Manu Delago. Later in the track, Shankar opens the floor to shehnai player Sanjeev Shankar who, backed with aggressive drum samples, constructs a haunting war cry that is still able produce a distinctively South Indian sound. The entirety of Land of Gold is deeply political with every track crying out against injustice, often simply through instrumentals and occasionally enhanced with spoken and sampled vocals such as in ‘Remain The Sea’ and ‘Dissolving Boundaries’ which feel almost cinematic and demand sincere reflection. Shankar is an artist at the height of her craft, able to integrate tradition, progression and politics in a way that feels entirely natural and necessary to her sound and, consequently, places her as a giant in her field. ◆

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Title of the article

A view on nationalism and race at the Moosgard Ethnographic Museum

by Emmanuel Molding Nielsen Situated in the bucolic hills of Aarhus bay in Denmark the Mosgaard Museum cuts a striking figure in the landscape. Its pre-history exhibition, the most prominent item currently on display, is interactive, immersive, and deeply informative. Yet, for all its laudable, and for the most part successful attempts at chronicling East Jutland’s prehistory and bringing anthropology to the lay public, the museum’s uncritical engagement with nationalism is naïve and at worst racist.

The good At its best the Mosgaard Ethnographic Museum successfully conveys anthropological debates – that usually wouldn’t find their way off the dusty shelves a university library – to the lay public. For example, in a part of the exhibition entitled ‘Voyage with the Vikings’ the museum presents a stunning array of artefacts from all over the world that had been found in East Jutland the main peninsular of Denmark.

In a nod to world-systems analysis like Braudel (2007) and Wallerstein (1991), the museum effectively argues that if we’re to construct a history of a region – in this case Jutland – then we need to look beyond the retrospectively imposed horizon of the nation state and see the world from the pre-nationalist perspective the region’s inhabitants. By examining objects found at local archaeological sites in the region, we see that inhabitants’ cultural horizons extended anywhere

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Author Name

from present-day York to Greece.

Such object centred histories help to decentre ethnocentric histories and reminds visitors to the exhibit that East Jutland, rather than being the centre of the world, was instead somewhat of a backwater in a far larger ‘world-system’. Despite occasionally unfortunate phrasing like “artefacts from remote corners of the world”, which encourage a view of Denmark as the world’s navel with the rest of the world relegated to “remote corners”, the museum otherwise succeeds in destabilising Eurocentric approaches to history by drawing attention to Jutland’s marginal role in one amongst many world-systems.

The bad Despite historically self-aware titles like ‘the first immigrants’, and the curators’ nod to world-systems analysis, Mosgaard museum fails to take these insights to heart. We see this failure in its ongoing projection of Danish national identity into the area’s pre-history with phrases like ‘the first dane(s)’. At first this might seem benignly misguided, but this projection of national identity into the past is taking place in the context heated anti-immigrant sentiment in Denmark.

In 2018, Denmark introduced the so called ‘immigrant ghetto laws’. These laws – targeting primarily Muslim communities – require children above the age of one to spend at least 25 hours a week away

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A view on nationalism and race

from their parents being instructed in ‘Danish values’. Whilst changes are being made to omit the term ‘ghetto’ after international condemnation, the laws are nevertheless supported by a broad coalition in government including the governing Social Democrats.

Central to anti-immigrant rhetoric in Denmark are appeals to protecting amorphous ‘Danish values’ that are believed to have endured throughout time due to the ethnically and culturally homogenous integrity of Denmark. In light of these debates, exhibitions like that at Mosgaard, and their attitudes to national identity and values, speak directly to contemporary politics.

The exhibit’s historicisation of national identity portrays Denmark in a static light and omits the basic fact that the residents of Jutland in the Stone Age are as far removed from contemporary Danes as can be. In fact, the islands and peninsulas that we today associate with Denmark bear remarkably little resemblance to the geographic features of this area in times gone by. The area today know as Jutland, was, until less than 9,000 years ago, part of a landmass known as Doggerland that connected Jutland, present-day Holland, and the British Isles.

By presenting history in such a way, recent changes brought to Denmark by mass migration are presented as an unprecedented assault on a tradition that stretches back to the stone age. This, of course, is spurious and part of a broader discourse where right-wing populists are able to distance themselves from claims of racism, under the cover of historically justified cultural-nationalism.

A final noteworthy point for consideration is that the residents of the fictional Denmark represented in the beginning of the ‘pre-history’ exhibit are all portrayed as white despite the fact their contemporary Cheddar Man – the equally misleadingly named ‘First Brit’ in a recent Channel 4 documentary – was recently revealed to be black. Seeing as the British isles and Jutland were connected back then, it would at least be worth entertaining the idea that ‘the first immigrants’ were a little more diverse than we make them out to be. For an indication of the amount of, albeit qualified, guesswork involved in exhibits like that at Mosgaard consider the fact that there still remains doubt about the sex of one of the central characters of the Museum’s exhibit, let alone their race.

As an ethnographic Museum and academic institution, Mosgaard should not be sleepwalking into these nationalist tropes, but instead commit to extending the much hackneyed anthropological maxim of making the “familiar exotic and the exotic familiar” (Erikson 2017. pg. 3) to the lay public. For a start, they should commit themselves to denaturalising the nation as a cultural unit by drawing the attention of visitors to the transience of cultural formations. Unfortunately, they seem to be imposing a comforting but ultimately fictitious immutability on them.

And the ugly Occupying the central auditorium of the Museum is the impressive evolutionary staircase. Descending this staircase you stand side by side with uncannily realistic life-sized models our fellow hominids. The staircase starts with Lucy (cir. 3,2 million years) descends to Sediba (cir. 2 million year) and eventually ends at a model of a modern human known as Koelbjergkvinden (cir. 9000 thousand years).

This staircase, however, for all of its impressive design, presents a curious and telling chronology of our evolution. Whilst the figures stand in chronologically descending order from Lucy to the fully dressed human, the evolutionary chronology is somewhat flawed. On the middle of the stair case standing between Homo Ergaster (1.5 million years) and Homo Neanderthalensis (41,000 thousand years) is a Homo

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Sapiens (300,000 years), biologically identical to Koelbjergkvinden in every possible way. Then why is this wax figure placed alongside Homo Ergaster and Homo Neanderthalensis?

Ostensibly it could be argued that this is because the staircase is solely chronological and on the basis of this criteria the placement of the figures is technically correct. However, I would argue that evolutionary timelines are distinctly different to conventional ‘timelines’. First, evolution is not merely temporal, it is biological and therefore designed to reflect degrees of genetic relatedness. Second, evolutionary discourses have historically been rooted in enlightenment notions of both moral and civilisational progress.

This conflation harks back to the days of E.B. Tyler (2010) and Social Darwinism where Europeans, it was argued – due to their technological superiority and undeniable whiteness – were believed to be at the apex of an evolutionary hierarchy which included early hominids and other non-European races. Whilst Social Darwinism as espoused by Tyler is today recognised to be wrong and lacking in any analytic purchase, elements of this discourse still linger on in public discussion and even amongst academics who ought to know better.

Bearing this in mind, why does opting for a timeline, rather than an evolutionary staircase, have troubling stylistic implications? First, the evolutionary staircase leaves one with the impression that we have evolved towards greater whiteness. This is because the modern human, standing alongside the early hominids, on the middle of the staircase is black whereas the modern human at the end of the staircase is the only fully white and clothed person there. One cannot avoid the impression that the figures on display, almost without exception, get progressively whiter.

Furthermore, it’s the white modern homo sapiens at the bottom of the staircase who is most recognisably human sporting both cloths and an impressive array of tools. By contrast, the other human, both older and black, but also undoubtedly an avid user of tools, is naked apart from ritual body paint on one leg.

As such, the evolutionary staircase may not be as good a tool to think with as it initially appears. Rather than providing a biologically accurate account of evolution it inadvertently encourages a dangerous – and ultimately racist – conflation of cultural and racial notions of progress and evolution. This conflation confirms, rather than destabilises the Social Darwinism that still lingers on in our accounts of history.

A better way to present this otherwise impressive exhibit would have been to place the 300,000 year old replica of a homo sapiens besides the other homo sapiens at the bottom of the staircase, this would have rendered the exhibit evolutionarily accurate, and exorcised the exhibit’s racist biases. The covertly racist presentation of this exhibit is clearly not conscious, but at a time when we’re slowly beginning to have a more nuanced conversation about race that recognises the importance of unconscious biases, this is a conversation that needs to be had. If even anthropologists are sleepwalking into racist evolutionary tropes and failing to challenge inaccurate and uncritical national narratives, then who will? ◆ References Braudel, F. 2007. The Mediterranean in the Ancient World. Penguin Books, Limited.

Tylor, E. B. 2010. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom.

Wallerstein, I. 1991. Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down. The Journal of Modern History.

Eriksen, T. H. 2017. What is Anthropology? (2nd. Edition.) London: Pluto Press, pp. 3-19.

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Human rights and anthropology

The bizarre relationship between human rights and anthropology by Sean Chou As an anthropology student, I am used to challenging my personal opinions. This doesn’t stop outside of class. As President of the LSE SU Amnesty International Society, I have dealt with everything from the mundanity of planning meetings, to participation in public actions aimed at grabbing people’s attention.

Core to this is my fundamental belief in human rights. Wherever I go, I take my belief in human rights with me - as something internalised and central to who I am and how I see the world. A lot of this may sound counter-intuitive and contradictory already. Aren’t human rights Western and neo-colonial? Shouldn’t cultures be treated as unique and values relative to different societies? What makes human rights legitimate in societies in the vast case studies that we study as anthropologists? I have personally wrestled with these questions for a long time. It means, however, that I feel a special responsibility to articulate both the critique of human rights, and how alternatively it can provide the framework to talk about the emancipatory possibilities of self-realized human potential across transnational, global borders.

The concept of human rights traces its origin to the Enlightenment era.

While it arguably had earlier origins in the Magna Carta in 1215, the Magna Carta was limited, where for example the right to free trial was only available for freemen. During the Enlightenment, however, many thinkers talked about ‘natural rights’ which each person was naturally endowed with as individuals. This was supported by thinkers like Thomas Paine, who argued that the government could not violate such inalienable rights and defence against such violations by the people was legitimate. As a result, this period led to the creation of documents like the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which contributed to the human rights discourse.

Human rights gathered momentum in the modern era and culminated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This lists 30 articles, including the right to life, to free speech and to free trial.

Anthropology’s ambivalence with human rights could be seen in its response to the 1948 UDHR: the American Anthropological Association released a rejecting statement in 1947 in response to the draft version of the UDHR arguing that cultural differences should be respected, could not be evaluated and prevented human rights from being applied to all cultures.

This forms the bulk argument of the cultural relativist critique. Some authors have gone further in their critique by arguing that the origins of human rights discourse to Western, Enlightenment thought makes it bound to a specific historical and cultural context. According to

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Rhoda Howards for example, human rights are based on liberal and rational assumptions of human nature which neglect collective rights holders like indigenous groups. Meanwhile, Bryan Turner criticised Enlightenment thinkers like Immanuel Kant whose rationalist moral philosophy understate the emotive role of social action within a ‘moral community’. These criticisms suggest human rights are socially constructed and culturally relative. However, Anthropology plays a crucial role in criticising and applying critiques in human rights to ensure that human rights discourse avoids ethnocentric, Westernimperial, top-down solutions to human rights issues.

The cultural relativist critique is in itself limited. Firstly, culture is difficult to define. Durkheimian assumptions of culture as closed, static and continuous are hard to be applied in today’s globalised world, it is difficult to pinpoint cultural contexts which has been left completely unchanged by processes of technology, development, migration and hybridisation of cultures. Furthermore, these arguments are dangerous considering how they are often utilised by authoritarian governments to defend gross human rights violations. For example, in the 1970s, the Tanzanian government introduced a policy of ‘villagisation’ which forced people to live in communal settings, criticising the corrosive influence of Western individualism, while at the same time, government officials enjoyed the influx of Western consumer luxury goods.

Theoretical debates about the relativist/universal divide have been so focused on cultural differences that have prevented taking political action. Thus, it is my belief that human rights is one of many ways in which anthropologists can make a social difference through meaningful political action. Nancy Scheper-Hughes articulates this sentiment well in her stance of ‘militant anthropology’; she talks about an anthropology that is socially responsible that can achieved by conceding our subjectivity in ethnographic research and using our ethical obligations to build activist relationships with subjects who we study as a ‘witness’ rather than ‘spectator’.

How could we think about human rights, then? As a useful fiction.

Indeed, this argument is made by human rights theorist Jack Donnelly who argues that human rights give people the framework and language to articulate grievances against states who violate their rights. Human rights help create a shared sense of solidarity across transnational groups fighting against acts of injustice. Anthropological perspectives can help to inform how human rights are influenced by its Western, cultural origins, and how those can be adapted to suit cultural contexts. This is expanded upon in Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s research of Mauritania.

Eriksen argues that human rights discourse is contradictory due to its dual origin in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods: the French Enlightenment argued that human beings are naturally endowed with human rights, meanwhile German nationalism, influenced by Herder, argued that each peoples (or, Volk) had their own cultural and linguistics particularities which each could legitimately defend. In Eriksen’s study of Mauritania, these contradictions are evident. As a polyethnic society, multicultural discourse (Romantic influence) was balanced with constitutional principles of equality (Enlightenment influence). For example, Muslim Personal Law (MPL) was introduced during the British colonial era and allowed Muslims to follow customary Muslim law in family matters. It was scrapped, however, after opposition in the 1980s which perceived MPL as discriminating against women who found it virtually impossible to get a divorce compared to the relative ease of men seeking divorces. Eriksen argues as a result that political outcomes made by human rights discourse could be ambiguous. Human rights

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discourse could politicise and empower minority groups by giving them ‘symbolic capital’ to self-organise and create political change; or, it could be institutionally imposed and lead to the ‘enforced ascription of political identities’. Finally, human rights benefit from contextualisation within webbed networks of social relations. This is argued by Richard Wilson, who claims that human rights complaints must be embedded in social relations of mutual understanding. Without such active communication, in Donnelly’s terms ‘overlapping consensus’, human rights issues could not be articulated nor addressed.

Considering the background and issues concerning human rights, it can be argued that anthropology’s relationship with human rights is justifiably complicated. As anthropologists, we have a special responsibility to critique and deconstruct neocolonial relations, power disparities and global inequalities which human rights may exacerbate due to their neglect of collective-rights holders, support for institutional solutions and overriding of cultural norms. Nevertheless, such critiques are fruitless without proper examination of how anthropological perspectives may prop up systemic inequities by legitimising nonintervention and nihilistic attitudes towards humanitarian issues.

Rather, we can pay attention to how anthropological interest on cultural and social issues provide unique perspectives on how human rights discourse can be taken up by people we study and used as a tool for social change. Only when we re-orientate anthropology towards a social action-based discipline geared towards achieving positive social outcomes can we re-embed our academic interests in the political arena we participate and engage with everyday. ◆

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Author Interlude Name

Yemen Blues Ravid Kahalani

by Benedict Croft Ravid Kahalani, the founder of Yemen blues, is an Israeli musician with Yemenite parents, living between New York and Tel Aviv, known now for his creative integration of sounds from numerous traditions including Yemenite folk, Jazz, Afrobeat and Middle Eastern takht.

This album announced Kahalani onto the scene, with critics unable to satisfactorily place its musical origins or influences in a way that allowed it to transcend genre, surely the ultimate aim of any fusion music.

Kahalani sings in Yemeni Arabic alongside Ahmed Alshaiba, a Muslim Yemenite oud player making Yemen Blues more than simply a musical collaboration but a cross cultural exploration between Jewish and Islamic traditions. In ‘Jat Mahibathi’, Alshaiba opens with a dūlāb that references typical takht traditions, yet, this is instantly confused by the entry of the darbuka percussion, which, although sounding intrinsically Arabic, feels rhythmically more North African. Then enters Kahalani’s distinctive vocals which provide great intensity through dramatic pitch changes and layered voices which are softened only by brass and flute lines that eventually break out into a trumpet solo, giving the piece an overall jazz-like feel. Yemen Blues is by no means limited to this sound however, with tracks such as ‘Trape La Verite’ referencing folk styles that could be heard from the Scottish Highlands to the Sarawat Mountains of Yemen. It is this diversity which creates a work, that, despite drawing on numerous ancient musical traditions, sounds entirely unique. ◆

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Title of the article

Indigenous creolisation in the Sierra Nevada, by Colombia Juliette Gautron This article stems from a couple of months I spent conducting fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta (Colombia) from July to September 2019, thanks to LSE’s Summer Ethnography funding and The Explorer’s Club grant.

Context The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the world’s highest coastal mountainous region, which comprises a wide variety of climates and a unique biodiversity. “It is actually a mini version of the Earth, where

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nearly every ecosystem on the planet is found: glaciers, tundra, alpine lakes, deserts, tropical rainforests, wetlands, and coral reefs” (Soltani & Arce 2014). Also called The Heart of the World, it is the ancestral land of the Tayronas, from which the four indigenous groups living in the Sierra Nevada today descend. Together, the Wiwa, Kogi, Arhuaco and Kankuamo form the “Four Peoples” (Cuatro Pueblos) of the Sierra.

Central to their cosmology is the belief that the Sierra Nevada is a living, nourishing entity that they must protect and nurture, in a form of reciprocity. Today, the Wiwa, Kogi, Arhuaco and Kankuamo inhabit the Sierra Nevada, and promote this ancestral connection to their “sacred mountain” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1990) in their claims for land rights and protection.

The 1991 Colombian Constitution guarantees the most rights for indigenous populations, within Latin America, stressing the importance of preserving their culture and knowledge. Indigeneity has been defined by the Colombian state as those who “[spoke] indigenous languages and resided in rural areas, and whose mores responded to traditional usos y costumbres (uses and customs)” (Chavez & Zambrano 2006: 13). Furthermore, indigenous groups must have “a common history as well as group cohesion, a deep-rooted affiliation with the ancestral territory, worldview, traditional medicine, kinship ties and characteristic normative system that makes them different from the rest of the Colombian population” (2006: 18). With these definitions of indigeneity, the Colombian government has promoted an indigenous identity which “authorises” the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta to exist within a framework set out by the state. Hale’s concept of the Indio Permitido is enlightening in understanding the effects of an “authorised culture”. “The indio permitido has passed the test of modernity, substituted “protest” with “proposal”, and learned to be both authentic and fully conversant with the dominant milieu” (2004: 19). He is hence more governable, as he exists within a framework set out by the neoliberal state, which ensures that indigenous organisation “does not amass enough power to call basic state prerogatives into question”. Authorised indigenous identity is created and enhanced by the state, and indigenous peoples are encouraged and enticed to adhere to it, through the rewards or political rights they are afforded if they fit in this particular category.

Hybrids?

The boundaries set out by the Colombian state which define indigeneity create the representation of a Hyperreal Indian (Ramos 1994), which turns a blind eye to the different forms of indigeneity which emerge on Colombian soil. Such understandings of indigeneity portray identity and culture as monolithic and static entities, rather than porous, evolving, and subject to change. Instead of these essentialising portrayals such as the Indio Permitido (Hale 2004), Hyperreal Indian (Ramos 1994), or Ecological Native (Ulloa 2004) which push those who do not fit within these categories to be hypermarginalised (Bessire 2014), indigenous reality involves the creation of hybrids and processes of creolisation, in order to navigate the world they live in. Such processes of hybridisation and creolisation involve the creative agency of indigenous peoples, to reinvent and reinterpret themselves in light of their environment.

Simplistic notions of hybridity run the risk of simplifying and essentialising the creative processes which take place when one reinterprets one’s own culture or practices in light of a particular environment. This type of simplification can be found in Killick’s work (2019) on hybrid houses in Peruvian Amazonia, in which he draws from a basic concept of hybrid, as a simple middle-ground between “the traditional” and “the modern”.

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I turn to my fieldwork in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia to highlight in which ways hybrids are not a simple juxtaposition between “the traditional” and “the modern” (which are questionable terms themselves), but how hybrids are in fact anchored in embedded creative processes. Hybrids are created by indigenous who wish to reinterpret themselves in light of their changing environment, often in liminal spaces.

Wiwa uraca My interest in looking specifically at the creation of hybrids came from a particular discovery on house construction. Wiwa houses, or uraca (“house” in Damana, the language spoken by the Wiwa) are traditionally-built with natural materials, and are spiritually cleansed by the Mamo. (The Mamo is the spiritual leader of the community. He has great power and influence over the lives of his fellow villagers. The Mamo is one of the three powerful individuals in a Wiwa village, forming the political configuration of a Wiwa community: Mamo, Autoridad, Clavo.) There are two types of uraca: Umguma, for men, and Ushui, for women. Umguma are bigger in terms of size than Ushui, and the walls of these two types of houses are woven differently. Umguma walls are woven vertically while Ushui walls are woven horizontally. It is a strict rule in Wiwa culture that one cannot enter the house of the opposite sex.

However, this rule was not applied in Awindia. Each house retained the characteristics of either Umguma or Ushui, but included a small portion of the other gender woven into the wall near the door (see pictures below). For example, the walls of Umguma were woven vertically, according to the male gender, but also included approximately 1 meter of wall woven horizontally, thus accounting for women. Similarly, Ushui walls were woven horizontally, but contained a portion which were woven vertically. According to my friends, by including of both genders on the walls, both men and women were allowed to enter or live in any of the houses, regardless of the house’s dominant gender. Indeed, in

Ushui (top left) Umguma (right) Both genders (top right)

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Awindia, 3 houses were inhabited by members of the opposite sex: the father and two sons (15 and 14 years old) lived in Ushui; the mother, three daughters (19, 12 and 4 years old) and one son (2 years old) lived in Umguma; one of the older sons (28 years old) lived in Ushui. I, a woman, lived in Umguma. I was told by the eldest son that this strict gender rule didn’t matter much in this particular setting, because they were a family, and could thus share the houses amongst themselves.

However, he explained that this rule was much more strict in the main community, even within a family, and never had a man entered the house of the opposite gender, and vice-versa.

This particular example shows how the houses in Awindia are a hybrid, which emerged from a creative process of adaptation of one lifestyle to another. Although men and women still lived separately, some changes were made to the traditional house, in order to accommodate for life near the city, and for life in collaboration with a small-scale permaculture project nearby. During periods when most of the family returns to the main community, some of the houses had been inhabited by the project’s staff of different genders, or reallocated in a different way to different members of the family. Awindia as a temporary residence had to adapt to the practicalities of local life. This instance of hybridity cannot be reduced to a simple collage of “the traditional” and “the modern”. As Cohen and Toninato (2010: 9) state, hybridity or creolisation is “not to simply be understood merely as a synonym for cultural mixture, as it also entails a process of internal restructuring, inventiveness and reflexivity”. It is “a highly creative and continuous process”, “grounded in a well-defined socio-historical context characterised by a specific configuration of power relations” (ibid.). Here, the weaving of both genders onto the wall is a creative process to allow what has become the new norm (i.e. both genders being able to inhabit a given house), in a way which is neither reducible to “modernity” or “tradition”, nor to a collage of both.

Creolisation The concept of creolisation helps understand how hybridity can be an identity itself, rather than a middle-ground between two distinct identities. “The processes of cultural mixing (creolization with a small c)” may be “associated with non-Creoles (with a capital C)” (Diaz 2006: 577). Halbmayer’s work on indigenous modernities and their processes of creolisation in the Sierra de Perijá, near the Sierra Nevada (just on the other side of Valledupar) rings true in the context of my fieldwork. “Forms of indigenous modernities that are neither reducible to continuing Amerindian conceptions grounded in preconquest ways of life nor a mere product of Western influence” (2013: 65). Indigenous creolisation is distinct from classical creolisation which focused on foreigners becoming natives in a settler context. Instead, this concept refers to the transformation of indigenous groups, from sustained contact with non-indigenous groups and structures, closely tied to “global or transnational cultural interconnectedness” (Hannerz 2006: 563). These transformations not only reproduce patterns of indigenous hybridity and openness to the Other, “but create a specific form of indigenous creolization that is an integral part of contemporary indigenous modernities and their typical complexities” (Halbmayer 2013: 66). This understanding of indigenous creolisation in the context of the Sierra Nevada recognises indigenous agency in bringing about cultural transformations.

Another example of creolisation in Wiwa culture may be one of its most obvious instances. Most of the time, Wiwa wear traditional white clothing: simple tunics for children, more elaborate dresses for women, and tunics with trousers for men. Yet, men quite often wear

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Wellington boots and jeans with their white tunic, especially when working. In public settings, young men sometimes wear white jeans and white t-shirts instead of their traditional clothes, thus conserving the traditional colour, but not the fabric. This instance of creolisation in clothing is mostly a common occurrence for men, while it is rarer for women.

Both cases of house construction and clothing quite clearly exemplify how indigenous creolisations are “processes of transformation of indigenous groups resulting from contact with non-indigenous power structures, knowledge, tools, and technologies” (Halbmayer 2013: 66), in a context of cultural interconnectedness. Indigenous creolisation is not strictly a middle-ground between “the traditional” and “the non-indigenous”, and cannot be reduced to either one. Indigenous creolisation implies a new re-articulation in which “these elements, though never equal, can no longer be disaggregated or restored to their originary forms, since they no longer exist in a ‘pure’ state but have been permanently ‘translated’” (Hall 2003: 30). Indigeneity is re-articulated in “social, cultural, and biological contexts marked by the introduction of new and formerly unknown elements” (Halbmayer 2013: 67).

Visual creolisation often surprises and unsettles people external to indigenous communities, as it is not in accordance with the overarching state discourse, of indigenous peoples as “the other”. An interesting example from my fieldwork is that of the 15 year old son’s clothing. He often wore a kaki cap, which he was one day told to take off by a policeman who wanted to take a picture of him, as he was passing through the village. The man’s desire to take a picture of the teenager in his traditional clothing without a cap, highlights the misconception that Wiwa and non-indigenous culture are a dichotomy which cannot, or rather should not, be bridged, hybridised or creolised. In the eyes of the policeman, this process of creolisation which I illustrate here by the cap, is out of place. The cap becomes “matter out of place”, “dirt”, or “pollution” (Douglas 1966).

Final reflexions on a non-reciprocal approach to creolisation Ironically, indigenous crafts such as mochilas (types of indigenous bags), are owned by an overwhelming number of non-indigenous, and are sold in every street, if not every shop in the nearby city of Santa Marta.

Creolisation, or integration of indigenous culture into non-indigenous culture poses no problem to non-indigenous people, while the opposite sparks critique and debate. It is interesting to note that what is now considered as traditional indigenous knowledge, practices, or crafts in the Sierra, has often been influenced by Spanish colonisers in the 16th century. As reported by Ereira (2012) and Lopez (2018), the sugar cane press actioned by a horse in the Kogi village they both documented was introduced with the arrival of the Spanish in Colombia. Both the press and the horse were not used by the Kogi beforehand. Yet, panela (unrefined cane sugar) made by the Sierra Nevada’s indigenous peoples, which requires the use of the sugar cane press, is often considered and sold as an indigenous craft. This indigenous product is thus itself a result of ancient processes of hybridisation and creolisation, which integrated new ways of living into the Kogi’s lives. ◆

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Awindia village

References Bessire, L. (2014). “The Rise of Indigenous Hypermarginality: Native Culture as a Neoliberal Politics of Life”. Current Anthropology, 55(3), 276–295.

Chaves, M., & Zambrano, M. (2006). “From blanqueamiento to reindigenización: Paradoxes of mestizaje and multiculturalism in contemporary Colombia”. Revista Europea De Estudios Latinoamericanos Y Del Caribe, 80, 5-23.

Diaz, V. M. (2006). “Creolization and indigeneity”. American Ethnologist 33: 576-778.

Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and Danger. Routledge.

Ereira, A. (1990). The Heart of the World. [film].

Halbmayer, E. (2013). Mission, Food, and Commensality among the Yukpa: Indigenous Creolization and Emerging Complexities in Indigenous Modernities. Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America, 11(1), 65–86.

Hale, C. (2004). “Rethinking Indigenous Politics in the Era of the ‘Indio Permitido’ ”.

NACLA Report on the Americas, 38(2), 16–21.

Hall, S. (2003). “Créolité and the Process of Creolization”. Créolité and Creolization.

Okwui Enwezor et al., editors, pp. 27-42. Kassel: Hatje Cantz Publisher.

Hannerz, U. (2006). “Theorizing through the New World? Not really”. American Ethnologist. 33(4): 563-565.

Killick, E. (2019). Hybrid houses and dispersed communities: Negotiating governmentality and living well in Peruvian Amazonia. Geoforum.

Lopez, F. (2018). “Thomas Pesquet chez les Kogi”. Rendez-Vous en Terre Inconnue.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, G. (1990). The sacred mountain of Colombia’s Kogi Indians.

(Iconography of Religions IX, 2. Institute of Religious Iconography, State University Groningen). Leiden: E.J. Brill.

Ramos, A. R. (1994). “The Hyperreal Indian”. Critique of Anthropology, 14(2), 153–171.

Soltani, A. & Arce, E. (2014). “The Kogi: An Urgent Call from Guardians of the Heart of the World”. Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine 38-1.

Ulloa, A. (2004). La construccióńn del nativo ecológico. Complejidades, paradojas y dilemas de la relación entre los movimientos indígenas y el ambientalismo en Colombia.

Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia Colciencias.

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Journalism and anthropology

Why anthropologists should do journalism (but not necessarily become journalists)

by Karen Lerbech Pedersen

Ethnographic journalism. I was introduced to the term during my first week as an undergraduate student in Journalism Studies almost six years ago. As opposed to more traditional journalism, ethnographic journalism was all about getting under the skin of a given topic, we were told. Often narrative in form, its storytelling approach allowed for a more nuanced coverage. I was intrigued.

In the past few years, ethnographic journalism has been labelled a hybrid genre, having become a niche in Danish journalism. Today, when journalists conduct research spanning over a couple of weeks or months, they describe their work as ‘ethnographic journalism’. In fact, I was one of those journalists, proudly claiming that I took on “anthropological approaches in my journalistic work” in my university application.

Cut to the end of Lent term 2019. Now, having studied the intricacies and methodology of ethnography, I must admit that nothing in my work as a journalist could be classified as ‘ethnographic’ in nature. However, after my eye-opening time at the LSE, I believe anthropology – or more precisely anthropologists – have a great deal to offer to journalism.

I believe journalism and anthropology share some very fundamental approaches to the world; there is a curiosity and a drive to understand the what, how and why. Yet, where journalism by principle is rather

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positivistic, anthropology is hermeneutic. News criteria such as Proximity, Prominence, Timeliness, Oddity and Conflict drive journalists in their work, and though challenged in recent times, the principle of ‘objectivity’ seems to be an enduring one. Many anthropologists, on the other hand, seek questions and doubt, and allow interpretation. In more contemporary ethnography the anthropologist is not afraid of placing her- or himself within the context, acknowledging that there is no objective truth to be told.

It is true that journalism is now facing both challenges and new opportunities. Traditional medias are fighting to survive, and paradoxically enough, so are their younger, digital counterparts. As the media industry has become one, big globalised industry, potential readers, viewers and listeners can be found all over the world. What happens in Germany could be of interest to someone in Singapore.

In a strange way, people across the globe end up consuming the same content, and reading the same stories.

In such precarious times, it seems as if dichotomies have faced some kind of a revival (perhaps they never really left), and it’s more or less impossible to read the news without being met with oppositions; pro or against Brexit, feminism or misogyny, believing or not believing in climate change, pro-vaccine or anti-vaxxer. The list goes on. The sparks of conflict are ever-present, with everyone yelling at each other from their respective sides of the cliff.

This brings me to why I believe anthropologists should do journalism, but not necessarily become journalists. Journalism today confines the author to journalistic norms and practices. An anthropological journalism has the means to go against the stream, and although anthropology is subject to the same critiques as any other discipline, I believe there is much to be gained from combining the two fields.

This is why I will leave the big critiques of anthropology aside for now.

Anthropologists engage with issues in-depth, inferring larger structures at play from observing day-to-day lives. They question what they observe, analysing the gap between what people say they do and what they actually do. Anthropologists question power relations. They see the nuances of human life. They question the dichotomies. Imagine a journalism which did just that.

To circle back to the idea of ‘ethnographic journalism’, which has followed me since my undergraduate studies-- while I still don’t know about ethnographic journalism, I firmly believe in anthropological journalism. I believe it should be encouraged and pursued because it has the ability to challenge the status quo, especially when it comes to journalism – and perhaps even within anthropology as well.

The question now is where to find the columns. ◆

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Image references

Thanks to our readers, authors, and photographers, referenced below.

Cover & inlet Juliette Gautron Exploring Berlin Record Shops Mia Mancini Alberta Strong and Free http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/alberta/peter-lougheed-legacy/gallery+peter+lougheed+family/7224840/story.html https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/workplace-swearing-fword-1.4908753 «After Sight» https://dailyartfair.com/exhibition/10498/benode-behari-mukherjee-david-zwirner https://www.artrabbit.com/events/benode-behari-mukherjee-after-sight Longboarding in China: injury symbolism White Tiger Peak Downhill 2019 Juliette Gautron Dehumanising the Dead Annie Thomlinson The “You Better Work” Ethic and the Spirit of Drag https://people.com/home/inside-drag-race-star-sasha-velours-enchanting-brooklynhome-where-kitsch-meets-high-class/ https://www.misshosay.com/blogs/latest-articles/all-about-trixie-mattel Both sides of the big beat Blue Note (label) Gender and Kinship Relations of Indonesian Domestic Workers Karen Lee A View on Nationalism and Race https://www.kenniskennis.com/site/sculptures/Moesgaard%20Museum/ Indigenous creolisation in the Sierra Nevada, Colombia Juliette Gautron Interludes St. Germain - https://www.discogs.com/St-Germain-St-Germain/release/7581452 Mogoya - https://www.resident-music.com/productdetails&product_id=48732 Banglarasta - https://www.discogs.com/fr/Lokkhi-Terra-Meets-Shikor-Bangladesh-Allstars-Bangla-Rasta/release/8745881 Yemen Blues - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yemen-Blues-Ravid-Kahalani/dp/B008SPEKMS Land of Gold - https://www.discogs.com/fr/Anoushka-Shankar-Land-Of-Gold/release/8502701

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Design Lennart Horst https://le-nn.art

Title of the article

Contents Writing anthropology

by Sofia Lesur Kastelein

Exploring Berlin record shops

by Mia Mancini

Alberta strong and free

by Cai Williams

Heartbeat

Anonymous entry

«After Sight»

by Benedict Croft

Longboarding in China

by Juliette Gautron

Queer world

by Sean Chou

Dehumanising the dead

by Annie Thomlinson

The ethic and spirit of drag

by Nadav Wall

Both sides of the big beat

by Dimitris Markantonakis

Indonesian domestic workers

by Karen Lee

Cradle

by Regina Legarte

A view on nationalism and race

by Emmanuel Molding Nielsen

Human rights and anthropology

by Sean Chou

Indigenous creolisation

by Juliette Gautron

Anthropology and journalism

by Karen Lerbech Pedersen Interludes

Global fusion sounds of the decade

by Benedict Croft

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