Biannual Mega Seminar Part 1 | Kirsten Marie Raahauge

To Begin Again

At the biannual Mega Seminar for anthropologists at The Sandbjerg Estate 24.-26.8.2021, Kirsten Marie Raahauge participates with papers and as a convenor. This year, the topic of the Mega Seminar was To Begin Again.
On the uses and abuses of history for Danish anthropology, session 1B at the Mega Seminar, To Begin Again. Monday the 23th of August 2021, 15.30-18.00
Convenors Kirsten Marie Raahauge (KA) & Victor Cova (AU)

Abstract: Beginning again may mean returning to half-forgotten traditions just as much as try- ing to get a fresh start. Both are fraught with self-deception: that we can get back to the old ways of doing and thinking as if nothing had happened, that we can get away from it all. The story that Danish anthropologists tell each other if often of the second variety: there was once a war between structuralism and Marxism, and then in the 90s we just moved on to something else entirely. This earlier Danish anthropology is often taken to be so remote that it is barely taught, if at all, to younger generations of scholars. Yet as anthropologists we know that change and continuity often manifest where we expect them less, continuity where we thought we had changed, change where we thought we were most faithful to what came before. As Nietzsche argued in his essay On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life, the point is not to remember it all as it really happened, or to forget it all, but to choose what to remember and what to forget so that we may go on living. This panel proposal asks what does remain of the "old" anthro- pology and what really has changed from the time of the war of "isms", but also what could and should be brought back that was forgotten, as well as what remained, disguised, that should finally be overcome.

The format is simple: participants should choose an article by a Danish anthropologist other than themselves published before 1990 that particularly exemplify the breaks and continuities with the sort of anthropology they do or wish they could do today. It may be a particularly good example of the sort of anthropology you are glad you don't have to read anymore, of the sorts of intractable debates you are sad are still taking place under different names, of the sorts of long term fieldwork you wish you could do, or the article that made you want to become an anthropologist in the first place and that has remained a model ever since. With this panel we hope to provoke an internal reflection on the history of Danish anthropology as a living intel- lectual tradition constituted through and through by dialogues and borrowings with oth- ers (France, Norway, Sweden, Germany, England, Australia, North America, Brazil...) and which has come to play an increasingly important role in global anthropological debates.
 
Abstract: BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA. SPATIAL ANTHROPOLOGIES BETWEEN STRUCTURALISM AND ALL THE NEW MATERIALISMS

Kirsten Marie Raahauge

In Niels Focks’ brief, easily read article on the Waiwai house (1986), he proposes a transparent reading of this specific house as a signifying space, yet he also points to the larger contexts that it is embedded in and that some of its signifying capacities are connected to, thus bridging the small world of the house and the vast world of the surrounding universe. As a young student of anthropology, this made sense to me, along with other less easily discernable semiotic or structural analyses of places in the world. Now, many years later, these old-fashioned ways of making sense of the messy world are ridiculed for their simple and transcendent belief in the possibility of finding some kind of order or pattern, and also for having a transcendent approach to notions and systems that are invented in Western philosophies, anthropologies and other positioned -ies and -isms. Much of the critique is well put, and a lot of caveats are well placed, such as the one noted by anthropologist Jesper Schou in Synsvinkler (1993); he simply quotes Pierre Clastres, thereby displaying the obviousness of the challenge: “Pour la premiere fois, je pouvais observer directement, car elle fonctionnait, transparente, sous mes yeux, l’institution politique des Indiens.” Contemporary interpretations, at least in my corner of the world, focus on new materialism, agencies, materialities, peripheries, networks, absences, vibrant matter, affects, spatial impact and natureculture-entanglements. While this boosts new energy into the academic debates and gets rid of old-fashioned distortive images of the world, it also evokes a sensation that something has been lost. The precision of academic lingo? The framework for how to talk about what? The transcendency of dealing with imaginaries or cultures? Or something else? What was lost, when old-fashioned ways of making sense fragmented into “something else entirely”? Is it lost at all? Is it still the same, hidden in the new ways of making sense of the world?

Fock, Niels 1986 Et sted i skoven - en verden - et univers. I: Jordens folk, Årg. 21, nr. 2 (1986), S. 61-69
Schou, Jesper 1993 Kolofonen-citat. I: Synsvinkler. Tidsskriftet Antropologi, nr.27 (1993), kolofonsiden

Paper: BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP BLUE SEA. SPATIAL ANTHROPOLOGIES BETWEEN STRUCTURALISM AND ALL THE NEW MATERIALISMS
Kirsten Marie Raahauge

MEGA-seminar at Sandbjerg Slot, 23-25.8.2021. Session: 1b: On the uses and abuses of history for Danish Anthropology, chairs Victor Cova (AU) & Kirsten Marie Raahauge (KADK/KA)

Back in the 80’ies, in Frederiksholms Kanal, at The Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, you could study to become an ethnographer – the confusion concerning names and titles was huge, but at least it was based on internal discussion of what the words meant, not on branding. While still a student here, I became part of the editorial board of the journal Tidsskriftet Antropologi. Apart from working a lot with anthropology through this board, we also had some late-night parties – after each meeting in fact – especially the Christmas parties were memorable.

Here, a recurrent theme would be whether the world can be studied directly, so to say, without including language as a part of it. The subtext being that the world is only recognized through the signs we understand it by. Of course, this was spurred by the common interest in semiotics that many of us shared, reading Juri Lotman, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristava, Jaques Lacan, Roman Jakobsen, Roland Barthes, Gregory Bateson, Mario Perniola, Jean Baudrillard, Algierdas Greimas etc. And Per Aage Brandt, Kasper Nefer Olsen and Frederik Stjernfelt from the Danish scene of semiotics. Many had become somewhat reserved towards structuralism and really hostile against Marxism. So, one of the persons joining the Christmas party would start by proposing that we cannot study anything without it being part of the semiosis of language, and the other would take a bic pen and drop it to the table, saying that the world exists to be studied right here and that he proved it by this act. The third, who later became my supervisor, was the wisest, he said that either way, if you persisted on having this as your main discussion, you would either go to Auschwitz (the first argument) or to Gulag (the second argument). As I remember it, it happened several times, always with the same three protagonists. They were my friends, they were older than me, and I was entertained, a little amazed and in fact also somewhat baffled that it was this kind of stupid cul de sac that semiotics could lead to. In fact, when I wrote my konferens (thesis) about space perceptions of the Incas, one of the discussions in the editorial board would be whether the Incas succumbed to the Spanish conquistadores so speedily, because the Spaniards arrived in huge vessels that could not be understood by the Incas, because there was no word for these ships. Maybe, even, they could not be seen by the Incas.

In this age of semiotics, the battle between structuralism and Marxism was history, at least 5-10 years old. Semiotics was conquering over structuralism in those years. The fatal blow was when Jens Sjørslev, once a post doc at the department in Frederiksholms Kanal, gave his lecture about semiotics, while the structuralist Niels Fock was present. Fock was “docent” at the department, known for his Wai Wai studies and very, very influential in the theoretical development of the department. Structuralism was ridiculed for its old-fashioned rigidity, at the séance that was almost a ritual usurpation of the previous father figure. Fock took it gracefully laidback, although a little confused about the emotional importance and the lack of logic of not agreeing on the structural perspective. The structural and semiotic theories were relevant concerning a larger overview over your subject matter, and also concerning acknowledging a transcendent principle governing your thought. When interested in space, these theories were rewarding, since they gave you methods to deal with the complex and layered relations between sociality, imaginaries and the spaces that we inhabit. My interest with space had to do with the hypothesis that it is less subject to relativism than other aspects of anthropology, such as religion, politics or kinship. This is disputable, and it has become less important over the years, since the problem is not important. Now I am more interested in how space is folded into the social web, impacting and being impacted by each other.

Phenomenology was not important enough for any battles to take place in those years. This ridiculous soft thinking about subjectivity, lifeworlds, “Bewustheit”, appearance, being, phenomenon, bla, bla, bla, was too subjective, not translatable into anything, and not able to overview anything, too soft. At a huge semiotic conference, I attended some years later, the director of the Husserl Archive gave a lecture on Husserl, while the delegates were talking to each other, quietly, not paying much attention to the subjective and emotional content of the lecture. It was there as a sign.

In those days, it was really important, whether you were still a Marxist (and thus ridiculous, at least in Copenhagen, it was a quite different environment in Aarhus, I guess), a structuralist (thereby old-fashioned), a semiotic (which meant hip) or a phenomenologist (meaning rather invisible). The theoretical infights were brutal, raging, and always very, very serious. Luckily, I came to the institute as the power of the -isms was dwindling. The students in the 80’ies and 90’ies were anti-ideological, pragmatic, and acknowledged the necessity of theories, but also the importance of not forgetting the actual world around us. So, when Anne Knudsen, herself rather bent towards psycho-semiotics, wrote that the empirical world is more difficult to grasp than any theory, many of us agreed and thought of ourselves as part of that new anti-ism of theoretical-and-pragmatical turn towards empirical stuff plus hip theory of course. I liked the coolness of sign theory and also of structural theory, but it was not dogmatic, as it had been for the students just five years older than me. Furthermore, those theories gave me interesting ways to think about space.

We had heard about the battles between Nicolaisen and Fock, and later, we witnessed the battles between Fock and Friedman. None of them became professors, since one obstructed the others professorship, according to rumors.

Then, the 90’ies came.

APPLIED OR THEORETICAL?
In 1990 Kirsten Hastrup was given a professorship in anthropology. In 1998, Susan Whyte became professor in applied anthropology, suddenly turning Hastrup into a professor in theoretical anthropology. This gave rise to many discussions, Steffen Jöhncke and I discussed it a lot – now, the important matter was not a theoretical approach, neither the actual world you studied, rather it had to do with internal ideas in anthropology about theoretical-as-opposed-to-applied-knowledge. As if it were an either or. Really confusing and not very logical.

HYPHEN-ANTHROPOLOGY
Around that time, in the bookstore Foyles in London, I was looking for anthropology, not being able to find the department, because it was not there. Instead, the discipline had been subdivided into themes. In those years, the popularity of so-called hyphen-anthropology was suddenly very manifest. The discussion was not theoretical, not about the actual world, not about applied methods, it was about what kind of sub-category, you belonged to: medical-anthropology was the most popular, but you could also be labelled gender-anthropologist, childhood-anthropologist, organization-anthropologist, or food-anthropologist – I have thought of myself as a spatial-anthropologist, and in that way I have succumbed to the trend that I find devastating for anthropology as a discipline. I talked a lot to Christan Kordt Højbjerg about it; we were very worried about this fragmentation of the discipline of anthropology, since it was not about theory, not about region, not about the world out there, not about methods, but about small little compartments that keep us from seeing things in their context, as a part of a whole.

NORMATIVITY
As I remember it, it was in the same years, maybe it was in the zeroes, that there was a normative turn in anthropology. The dogmatic, stringent, supposedly objective theories such as structuralism or semiotics were not popular anymore. Now, you had to take subjective positioning more into consideration, not pretending to gaze at the world from a Gods eye perspective. Furthermore, plural voices became important, not only empirically, but also concerning the analytical gaze. This turn of course was connected to applied anthropology, which meant that the value of your study was partly judged by its beneficial aspects towards other people.

PHENOMENOLOGY
In the same period, phenomenology became popular, wiping away the remains of the stiff and creaky structural perspectives still lingering here & there. As you might know, in 1962, Lévi-Strauss dedicates La Pense Sauvage to Merleau-Ponty, since phenomenology and structuralism are complementary perspectives. I guess many of us missed that point.

After that, the ontological turn and the perspectivist turn, and, I guess, both the ANT, the STS, and the new materialist turn came to the institute. That is for others in this room to talk about. I left the institute many years ago, so I am not aware of the newest fashions, trends and turns over there, I have enough to do following the trendy architects and designers at my own little Versailles. The way they explore the world would have been keelhauled due to lack of stringency, had it been among the anthropologists of the 80’ies. Here, the talk of the town is about “caring”, “non-human species”, “vibrant matter”, “affect”, “ecologies”, “the Anthropocene”, “networks”, or “sensation”. All of these notions are part of a course that I am heading in a couple of weeks.

Loss and Gains
That was the anecdotes about the theoretical turns at the Department of Anthropology in the 80’ies and 90’ies as seen from my position. You might disagree, I might have some false memories here & there, furthermore the turns are of course not to put into a strict time framework. None the less, I think, that some points might be made about what we lost and what we gained, and what is still there in new disguises.

Applied or theoretical
Is this still conceived of as two different approaches? I am not sure, but I do not think so. At least I hope not, since it is obviously a false dichotomy. Now, it seems that anthropologists often think of themselves as both-and, not either or. Maybe, this split is returning to the stability of before. Maybe, the split is healed, because nobody cares about these battles anymore. This divide meant a loss of stringency, and also fuel to the discussion about normativity.

Hyphen-anthropology
This, I think, is a real problem. The archipelago of hyphen-anthropologies has grown, and the rise of new theoretical approaches tend to be applied in some of the compartments, not others, making it a divide that is not only thematic, but also theoretical, methodological, and to some extend empirical, since some parts of the actual world out there are studied with more impact through this or that theoretical approach or thematic heading. So, the super-body of anthropology is fragmenting, while the compartments of hyphen-anthropology are becoming stronger. Strangely, these days we do not talk about it as hyphen-anthropology anymore. We just do it. That is definitely a loss, since the idea of anthropology as a discipline is dwindling, but I am sure that a lot of knowledge is produced out there in the hyphens. On the other hand, this fragmentation of the body of anthropology was to be foreseen, if we follow Baudrillard: signs and codes are whirling in the third order of simulacra, referring to themselves, leaving das Mensch as only a sign carrier. This can also be detected in the rhizomatic connections between signs of anthropology becoming important in themselves and thus fragmenting into still new semiosises.

Normativity
The pretense to be neutral inherent in structuralism and semiotics was of course problematic and the focus on the inherent normativity in all work by way of dealing with positioning, gate keeping, multiple voices etc. was a way to surpass this problem. Still, a new problem arises from this: if only the projects with a do-good-agenda are to be studied, we have to deal with the problem of deciding what “good” means, and who should prosper from our good anthropology. Furthermore, this approach contains the problem of becoming blind towards the aspects of the world that “we” consider bad or evil, and also, we must discuss, who the “we” are and why the “we” of anthropology should be the “we” to judge. Steffen Jöhncke, whom I mentioned before, has written about it in Tidsskriftet Antropologi under the heading Antropologikirken or The Church of Anthropology. Another problem concerning normativity and research is the fact that desires, imaginaries, affects that are both good-and-evil have a huge impact on the ways of the world. This is true for the world we study as well as our own motives for studying it. At the Academy where I work, I have started working with Dark Design in order to deal with these questions. Anthropology is the master of disciplines, concerning the strange, evil-and-good actions, events, rituals, imaginaries, ways to understand the world, its places, things etc. etc., and we should also turn to the kinds of normative questions that deal with other norms than our own gentrified, middleclass, correctness. So, I would argue that while we gained a much more refined apparatus concerning the inherent and ascribed normativities, we are part of, we lost a huge part of anthropology by becoming normative.

Phenomenology
Phenomenology was the other perspective, neglected way back in the 80’ies and onwards, but coming back in the zeroes. It is obviously important. I think that it emerges in a new way in these years, merging with the more sign oriented theoretical approaches into a post-phenomenological theory, at least in my hood. All the stuff about caring, and about dark design, and about sensation and affect is a new way to deal with phenomenology, to some degree liberated from the notion of “subjectivity”. Or what do you, post-phenomenologists say?

The sign is back!
In fact, the structural and semiotic theories that were once so popular have emerged in new shapes. The first time, I read Latour, I proposed to an ANT-researcher that this was Greimas on speed. He totally agreed. The sign is back. Signs and connections are now combined with ideas of caring and affect in a strange blend that I am not sure, what I think of. Is it still a stringent gaze that knows its notions and borders, as in the days of Marxist, structuralist, and semiotic battles? Or is it inherently eclectic? And how do we define “caring”? Can it stand the not-test? Are there principles that work as guidelines for being in or out of academic thought, or has it become some kind of etical principle? Or even sometimes an aesthetic principle?

The rage and the humor
Often, I ask my students at the academy what they are driven by. Any theories, visions, utopias, ideas of something that they fight for? Often, the answer is that they would like to make the world a better place, and then we are back to the questions of normativity, dark design etc. Another thing is that they do not have a vision of what they want. I did not either, but I suppose that many did. And that is one of the most obvious things being altered after the fall of the grand ideologies: no vision, and no idea of a total body of theory. This might be a gain, ideologies are dangerous, as we all know, but on the other hand, it is a loss of navigation points, of principles for Bildung and of disciplines, in other words of a transcendent point of departure. It is also a loss of humor. I am not sure, how this is connected to humor, but I think that humor is tied to some kind of idea that you can get closer to other positions by way of alienation. The figure of the abject, of the absent, of the alienated is what gives rise to being close-and-distant, makes you aware that you are caught between the devil and the deep blue see, no matter what you do. You never hit the nail on the head, no matter how large your hammer is, or how many fragmented hammers you have got.

As for the wai wai text. I chose it since it was written by Niels Fock, who died a couple of days before Victor invited me to co-chair this session. Furthermore, it a classic example of structural thinking about space. I have always liked it, but it also shows the lack of this way of thinking.