Anthropological Futures

424 Pages·2016·2.83 MB·English

by  MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER

Anthropological Futures
MICHAEL M. J. FISCHER
Duke University Press
Durham and London
2009
∫ 2009 duke university press
All rights reserved.
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Publication Data appear on the last
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Duke University Press gratefully
acknowledges the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, which provided
funds toward the production of this
book.
IN HONOR OF
ha-Fischerim, Eric and Irene
husband (1898–1985) and wife (1907–)
participant-observers of the twentieth century changes described
herein, and authors, respectively, of
The Passing of the European Age;
A Question of Place;
Minorities and Minority Problems;
and
Geometry;
Geodesy, What’s That?
and for
new generations of twenty-first century cousins: roboticists,
breakthrough thinking consultants, brain scientists, musicians,
political sociologists, and social workers
students, colleagues, friends,
and always Susann

CONTENTS
Prologue ix
∞ Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems 1
≤ Four Cultural Genealogies (or Haplotype Genealogical Tests) for
a Recombinant Anthropology of Science and Technology 50
≥ Emergent Forms of (Un)Natural Life 114
∂ Body Marks (Bestial/Natural/Divine): An Essay on the Social and
Biotechnological Imaginaries, 1920–2008, and Bodies to
Come 159
∑ Personhood and Measuring the Figure of Old Age: The Geoid as
Transitional Object 197
∏ Ask Not What Man Is But What We May Expect of Him 215
Conclusion and Way Ahead: Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopolitics, and
Anthropological Futures 235
Epilogue: Postings from Anthropologies to Come 244
Notes 273
References 331
Index 379

PROLOGUE
Rekeying Key Words for the Contemporary World
Culture, nature, body, personhood, science, and technology are among
the key words of anthropology, the study of human beings in the world
and in their worlds—including their social and cultural worlds and the
environments, ecologies, and planetary forces with which they inter-
act. Key words, of course, key di√erent registers of meaning. Like
strange attractors, they describe dynamic patterns through which,
since at least the eighteenth century, anthropology has engaged, un-
folded, and refolded itself. Or, to shift keys again, perhaps they are like
proteins with multiple surface receptors to which alternative stem cells
can attach. Anthropology, Immanuel Kant suggested in the eighteenth
century, following David Hume, is foundational to any critical philoso-
phy of use to human beings.∞
Culture is both that which is distinctive, local, colorful, artistic, phil-
osophical; and that which is universally human. Culture is that which
is cultivated (gebildet, civilized, woven) and that ‘‘complex whole
which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any
other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’’
(Tylor 1871: 1). Culture speaks to our aspirations (cultura, a future
participle) and to that which is tied to our nature. Culture is where
meaning is woven and renewed, often beyond the conscious control of
individuals, and yet the space where institutional social responsibility
and individual ethical struggle take place. At issue are not just better
methods but a return to some of the most fundamental moral and
cultural issues that anthropology and cultural analysis have long ad-
dressed: issues of class di√erences, culture wars, social warrants, social
reform and social justice; of mental health and subjectivation; of dem-
ocratic checks and balances, institutions of ethical debate, regulation,
and the slow negotiation of international law; of access to information
x PROLOGUE
and the formation of new kinds of public spheres. Cultural analysis has
become increasingly relational, plural, and aware of its own historicity:
its openness to the historical moments in which it is put to work
makes it capable, like experimental systems, of creating new epistemic
things (chapter 1). Return to fundamental moral and cultural issues,
like the return to religion which Jacques Derrida points out in his
commentary on Kant’s notion of religion at the limits of reason, is
never a return to the same, but more like respiration, a return after
taking a break, a renewal of inquiry.
The cultural skeins of science and technology (chapter 2) make
more realistic the demand for attention to the reconstruction of public
spheres, civil society, and politics in our emergent technoscientific
age. No longer can we rest on broad claims about the alienation of the
market, the technicization of life, or globalization. Just as we have
moved from Mertonian sociologies of science to analyses of what
scientists actually do, so too we need to pay attention to civic epis-
temologies and cultures of politics as they are transduced across the
cultural switches of the heterogeneous communities within which the
sciences are cultured and technologies are peopled with the face of
the other.
Nature (chapter 3) is our other, but also ourselves. Even as ourselves
(my character, my body, my selfhood), our nature is often other, that
which we attempt to control and separate ourselves from, but on
which we are dependent and which always escapes our reach. Like
language, like biology, like the unconscious, nature poses powerful
ethical dilemmas of whom and what to help live and whom and what
to let die. Nature is both a label for the reality e√ect and sites of moral
testing. In chapter 3, nature is unpacked as environment; as con-
tingency, accident, and risk; as biology repaired, enhanced, deformed,
and reconfigured from inside out or nano-, molecular, cellular, and
tissue level up; and as dealing with and accepting alterity.
Our bodies are our nature, and they are culturally inscribed. The
more we tinker and experiment with the body, the more the nature of
bestiality and divinity are redefined, the more bodily markings take on
new connectivities, significations, intensities, and transductions (chap-
ter 4). We have always been able to read the aging body for traces of ex-
perience, but increasingly we now enter the age of biological sensibility.
The haptic and proprioceptic body is natural—the ground of percep-
tion—the body out of control is bestial, the transported body is divine.
Like the old chain of being or the merit-reincarnation sequence of
bestial, natural, and divine, the contemporary topology of natural,
bestial, and divine is like a Möbius strip twisting back on its own
PROLOGUE xi
implications. This biological sensibility informs the productivity of much
contemporary thinking and poesis, weaving back and forth between
contemporary biotechnology and ethical/anthropological stakes that are
signified in the face, the communicating body, and the traumatic body.
These must be understood in their social dynamics—class markings,
gendering, sexuality, racial inscriptions, postcoloniality, asymmetrical
powers, etc.—not just as individualized bodies or codes.
Aging is in our nature, our bodies, our (sense of) personhood (chap-
ter 5). Aging, more often than we like, manifests in otherworldly to-
pologies, surreal and psychodynamically twisting inside out (like Klein
bottles and Möbius strips), with memory, language, and behavioral
fragments oddly sutured and scarred; and revealing of natures we
never imagined existed, certainly not in our sense of who we and our
loved ones are. Even in aging, as in early and adolescent development,
however, transitional objects like linguistic and other symbolic objects
(remembered snatches of Virgil’s Aeneid memorized in childhood, for
instance) are vehicles of self-fashioning, temporary ego stabilization,
recognition of self, self-esteem, personhood, as well as registers of
historical agency and, however uncertainly, reality checks. The geoid
drew me into multiple worlds—earth sciences, mathematical shapes,
ancient Greek and early modern geodesy, new marine and satellite
explorations, detective sleuthing across nationalist guarding of data,
bureaucratic warfare, and gendered conflicts. Eratosthenes is where
the geoid and the quest for the Figure of the Earth (size and shape of
the earth) began. Or was it with John O’Keefe, with stories of the
Vienna Circle, Norbert Wiener, and Vassily Leontiev? Or was it with a
high school geometry textbook? These names evoke a community that
my mother and I can share in her autumn years. They help to orient
her world, rea≈rm her personhood, allow her dignity amidst the in-
dignities of old age. In this community, at this time, it is less important
that sometimes fantasy and the dream world intervene, that logic gets
confused, that reading cannot be managed, that what was once intel-
lectual challenge is now ‘‘too technical.’’ What is important is the self
and its relations, the ability to feel oneself as sentient, as having ac-
complishments, as being recognized. The geoid is a transitional object.
In the past it condensed the geodetic interfaces of surveying and grav-
imetry, of oceanography and astrogeodetics, and of gender in a man’s
world; it condensed the interfaces of bureaucracy and science. But
now the geoid is a transitional object in another sense, a vehicle for
negotiations of old age, a territory for which the geodesy is as compli-
cated as those new geodesies whose technologies outpace their ability
to securely tell noise from signal.