A bit of professional pride

“We [anthropologists] have been the first to insist on a number of things: that the world does not divide into the pious and the superstitious; that there are sculptures in jungles and paintings in deserts; that political order is possible without centralized power and principled justice without codified rules; that the norms of reason were not fixed in Greece, the evolution of morality not consummated in England. Most important, we were the first to insist that we see the lives of others through lenses of our own grinding and that they look back on ours through ones of their own.” (Clifford Geertz)

I would only add one thing to that: I dislike it when cultural relativism (initiated by anthropology) is pushed into moral relativism. I will not argue for the "dangers" or poor content of this "postmodern chaos" or anything like that, I will merely say that I, as an almost conservative-oriented anthropologist, simply dislike it.

When being able to read and write was uncool

“The Greek aristocracy at first disdained the technology of alphabetic writing and remained devoted instead to the recitative tradition through which it acquired oral fluency with Homer and the few other “inspired” poets whom it sprinkled into daily conversation. Writing and reading may have been regarded as distasteful for any variety of reasons: because they were tasks and skills antithetical to the askêsis of military life that the typical aristocrat knew; because, in the face of a dramaturgical intensity of an established pedagogy that intimately linked theater, communality and religious devotion, the mechanics of writing and reading could only seem pale and impoverished; because the alphabet may have had its initial Greek invention among Greek merchants or the inscribers of pottery, whom the aristocrat could only disdain. The Greeks themselves – at least in the surviving archive – have remarkably little to say on the subject. Whatever the case may be, literacy in ancient Greece came to be the competency of precisely that stratum which had initially resisted it together with those who came to be their rivals in wealth. It never approached universality, even among the free-born male population.” (James D. Faubion, An anthropology of ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2011, p 63)

And here we ("we" as in contemporary Westerners) are trying to push literacy down the world's throat as the miracle cure for social unrest, poverty, violence and so on, and, even more interestingly, as the miracle push towards "development" and "progress". At least in the humanities, it would have been reasonable to expect a certain atheism by now in relation to the oh-so-worshiped  notion of progress. It's so nineteenth century... 

Of course, it is true that in the world of today, meaning in the social context that we create and maintain, not being equipped with literacy skills is a major drawback; the point was not to deny that. But we shouldn't forget that the context we choose to maintain at a certain point is highly volatile and the truths and "facts" we take for granted (like the intricate link between literacy and development in society or mental capability in the individual) can so easily change.

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But apart from this theoretical point I wanted to make, I can totally imagine myself back then, with the confident and somewhat distinguished attitude that a classy female smoker can arbor today in the grand hollywoodian setting, rolling my eyes at a certain someone who can read and write and looking condescendingly to him for being so vulgar... "No, you can't buy me a Ouzo [actually they didn't have that back then, so replace "Ouzo" with whatever else they drank in those days]... Girls like me don't even talk to boys like you...". Funny thought. Especially considering the contemporary Western (if not already globalized) sapiosexuality.

Geopolitics (new collaboration)

From now on, besides the book reviews for constiinte.ro, you can also find some other writings of mine on this portal, in the format of one-two page news and reviews of geopolitics (as well in Romanian, so I wouldn't recommend it for my non-Romanian friends).

That's it for now.

Always the other and otherness

I (we) tend to talk a lot about "the other" and "otherness" and tend to use this theme as a go-to when explaining anthropological matters. I've wondered a couple of times whether the same things on which a study or another focuses could be perfectly explained (and emphasizing the same causal explanation) not using the whole other narrative. But then the thought just passed slipped my mind, as the reading or writing I was engaged into was most probably required for an objective very "in the now".

Reading Marc Augé - who is a brilliant theoretician of postmodernity and redefined spatiality, by the way, so if you like works like Bauman and post-structuralists like Foucault you should really see some of his writings as well - I came across this interesting passage:

"Snow" and on how we read

Going through my lecture notes on Orhan Pamuk's "Snow", I feel the urge to remark upon two things.

1. My notes (the quotations) tend to target things that "judge" the Islamic culture overwhelmingly, or that at least emphasize the difference. I really think that Islam and the Arab world, generally speaking, are the world's ultimate alterity in the present time. I made few notes on things that struck me as "poetic" and many notes on things that struck me as "unfair" and the whole phenomenology associated with it.
And of course, my question is, first and foremost, this: How much would my lecture notes differ from what they are now if I was from another culture, or differently educated etc? How much does my tendency to be biased by feminist themes and a certain eurocentrism impact what I chose to retain from this book, in terms of "quotable" bits? Is this bias only slight or stronger than I like to think? And finally, did this bias "ruin" this book for me? (I must note that the reading was quite enjoyable in spite of what one could understand from this post and these inquires).

2. I tend to think, not only because of this book but the thing is more visible using this one, that literature cannot be as apolitical as it partially succeeded to be before. Because, in a complete contradiction with the diminished political involvement of present times (political skepticism and the large number of people not showing up to vote, a general cynicism regarding the whole political class etc) the world is more politicized than ever. Maybe it's because of the overrated term of globalization, maybe not. What I'm pretty certain about is the fact that the two go together and are faces of the same coin: the more political the whole society gets (and politics pervade literature and all domains of the thought actually), the more disgusted people become with concrete politics, not being able to ignore their failure any more. So the world is becoming more and less political at the same time.
And incidents like being quick to label things as "discriminative" etc (aka to politicize them), things that before would have been anywhere between common and outrageous, but not necessary political, is just another tendency to confirm that. A heightened awareness is everywhere. And we're a bit injected with hysteria (see the violent political debates from recently) because of it. Nothing is apolitical anymore. And in some regards, this flux of enriched awareness is welcome. But I can't help wondering if it isn't also: first of all, an obstacle to "true"-er feeling and abandoning yourself to it; and second of all dangerous in terms of society itself becoming ultimately unable to settle anything about how things should be run.

About "Miriam" (Completely offtopic)

Not about books or anthropology, just about my name.
I long knew its quite complex and various meanings in different cultures, which I'll not detail here now for lack of space and patience and point; but I was surprised to see The Urban Dictionary's explanations of what "a miriam" is.

So, here goes my least scholarly post on this blog (well, maybe if you consider The Urban Dictionary as part of a larger frame of clashing discourses in a funny way exposed by a blurry elite of a postmodern system of meanings... it could pass as appropriate, were there not still the un-randomness of picking precisely the entry on "miriam" out of it all):

Next paragraphs will completely quote The Urban Dictionary mentioned above.

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On the history of modern cemeteries

"I want to reverse the causal arrow: changing burial practices, themselves imbricated in larger cultural developments, produce, or at least invite new meanings of death. "Concepts of death" might be regarded less as the coalescence of attitudes and beliefs and more as practices which take on meaning as strands in a larger web of cultural transformation. Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution are not among the causes of cemeteries, if anything the converse is true: cemeteries produce a cultural world fit for the new economic order.
Cemeteries, in this account, are to death what Lombard Street was to Bills of Exchange or the stock market to equities: no mere venue but a sign that the underlying cultural assumptions of capitalism had taken root, that what might have seemed outrageous in an earlier age - the ready circulation of commercial paper or limited liability companies or freehold in grave sites, divorced from the Church - could be taken as part of the landscape of everyday life". (T. W. Laqueur, Cemeteries, Religion and the Culture of Capitalism, in Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in honor of R. M. Hartwell,  edited by John A. James and Mark Thomas, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p 139-140).

On how we consume information (I)

"I would argue that this semi-structured organisation through a network of quests and always available self-selected activities within set boundaries matches the way we read and experience the world today. These days we do things in fragments: we surf, channel flip and multitask. We write and read emails and blog posts rather than novels, we listen to 4-6 minute songs rather than symphonies, and we listen to the news in 30 second sound bites. We devour these fragments, flicking through hundreds each day, and we return to many, spending a few minutes at a time on one topic or blog or news story, maybe, but returning to it again and again. This fragmentation doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re more superficial. We return to things again and again, and the cumulation of fragmentary experience may be as deep or deeper as a single but lengthier exposure to something." (Jill Walker in "Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media", Cambridge, 2007).

We return again and again... to the same net pages, blogs, bits, topics, favorite fragments of this spinning, dizzying, alive multi-verse of a world. Which kind of makes it home. And family. New faces of alienation? Or is it the contrary, a tendency to soothe and tame the cold machine-created virtual wilderness? Aren't we all that insane man talking to a rock and pretending it's a lively pet?