Fake: Anthropological Keywords

142 Pages·2018·1.64 MB·English

by  Jacob Copeman, Giovanni da Col

FAKE
FAKE
Anthropological Keywords
Edited by Jacob Copeman
and Giovanni da Col
Hau Books
Chicago
© 2018 Hau Books, Giovanni da Col, Jacob Copeman,
Veena Das, John L. Jackson Jr., Graham Jones, Carlo
Severi, Alexei Yurchak, and Neil Thin
Cover and layout design: Sheehan Moore
Editorial office: Michelle Beckett, Justin Dyer,
Sheehan Moore, Faun Rice, and Ian Tuttle
Typesetting: Prepress Plus (www.prepressplus.in)
ISBN: 978-0-9973675-7-7
LCCN: 2018962821
Hau Books
Chicago Distribution Center
11030 S. Langley
Chicago, IL 60628
www.haubooks.com
Hau Books is printed, marketed, and distributed by The
University of Chicago Press.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free
paper.
Table of Contents
Contributors list vii
Preface ix
chapter 1
Fakes, damned fakes, and ethnography 1
John L. Jackson, Jr.
chapter 2
Deep fakes 15
Graham M. Jones
chapter 3
Being false to oneself? 31
Veena Das
chapter 4
Fake as knowledge and relationship 49
Carlo Severi
chapter 5
Exposing fakes 63
Jacob Copeman
vi FAKE
chapter 6
Fake, unreal, and absurd 91
Alexei Yurchak
chapter 7
“True self” fantasies 109
Neil Thin
Contributors list
Jacob Copeman is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthro-
pology at the University of Edinburgh. He is coauthor,
with Dwaipayan Banerjee, of Hematologies: The Political
Life of Blood in India (Cornell University Press, 2019).
Giovanni da Col is Research Associate at SOAS,
University of London and Founder and Editor of
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory as well several vol-
umes and collections on the anthropology of hospital-
ity; luck and fortune; the anthropology of future; the
history of anthropology; animism; and the spirit world
in Tibet and Southwest China.
Veena Das is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of
Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University and
author of Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty (Fordham
University Press, 2015) and Life and Words: Vio-
lence and the Descent into the Ordinary (University of
California Press, 2006).
John Jackson Jr. is Dean of the University of Pennsyl-
vania’s School of Social Policy & Practice and author of
Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew
Israelites of Jerusalem (Harvard University Press, 2013),
viii FAKE

Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary
Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2001), and
Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (University of
Chicago Press, 2005).
Graham Jones is Associate Professor of Anthropology
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author
of Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician’s Craft
(University of California Press, 2011).
Carlo Severi is Directeur d’études at the École des
Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is
author of Capturing Imagination: A Proposal for an
Anthropology of Thought (Hau Books, 2018), The
Chimera Principle: An Anthropology of Memory and
Imagination (Hau Books, 2015), and co-author of
Naven ou le donner á voir (París: CNRS, 1994).
Neil Thin is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology
at the University of Edinburgh and author of Social
Happiness: Theory into Policy and Practice (Policy Press,
2012).
Alexei Yurchak is Professor of Anthropology at the
University of California, Berkeley, and author of
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The
Last Soviet Generation (Princeton University Press,
2006), winner of the 2007 AAASS Wayne S.
Vucinich Book Prize, American Association for the
Advancement of Slavic Studies, and the 2015
Prosvetitel (Enlightener) Book Prize.
Preface
Giovanni da Col

This booklet originates out of a panel co-organized
by the American Ethnological Society (AES), Hau,
and L’Homme at the 2016 Meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in Minneapolis. The
aim was to hold an annual event debating terms play-
ing a pivotal and timely role in cross-cultural anal-
ysis. While rejecting the notion that one can describe a
keyword as a cross-cultural heuristic, and despite
agreeing that much of culture and society hap- pens in
“what goes without saying,” the debate wanted to
highlight how the struggle in the use of language to
encompass human experiences may give expression to
realities that carry family resemblances. The organizers
concurred that one of the crucial tasks of anthropol-
ogy is to highlight the negation or inversion between
familiar terms, a disjunctive homonymity that could
be resolved by the formulation of novel worldviews or
theoretical translations and advancements.
Fakes, forgery, counterfeits, hoaxes, frauds, knock-
offs—such terms speak, ostensibly, to the inverse
of truth or the obverse of authenticity and sincerity.
x FAKE

Do all cultures equally spend an incredible amount
of energy and labor on detecting differences between
the phony and the genuine? What does the modern
human obsession with fabrications and frauds tell us
about our- selves? And what can anthropology tell us
about this obsession?
Fakery, forgery, fiction, as well as the verb “to feign”
stem from Latin verbs referring to the productive,
creative, and inventive activity of shaping and mold-
ing, facere, fabricare, and fingere, and cannot be clearly
distinguished from poetic and poietic activity. A very
strong commitment to authenticity appears in many
contemporary manifestations of religious radicalism,
yet a fundamental ambivalence towards reality inhabit
several cosmologies and may be found in the Sanskrit
concept of māyā,“illusion,”“magic,”“trick.” Fakery and
tricksters may serve to outwit others, but along with
this negative and unfavorable connotation of decep-
tion or ruse the concepts may open up creative acts
or achievements of something good. Everyday life
dwells in a totalizing and unambiguous commitment
to sincerity and authenticity, and Western philosophi-
cal and ethical conceits about deception tend to stand
in contradistinction to regimes of “truth” and function
instrumentally—i.e., through misdirection and/or fal-
sification for either negative or positive ends, a trope
that goes back as far as Plato’s “noble lie.” Yet ritual
theory and anthropological studies of playing teach
people to experience the world as deceptive, ambig-
uous, and uncertain and accept the productive role of
the subjunctive, the fake, and other—“as if ”—modes
of relationships with the fabricated.
Although ideas of malpractice as incompetence
or ignorance are found in many different ancient and
modern contexts, the idea of fake as a simulation of
an authentic/original behavior is more difficult to find