(Re)connecting with anthropology and anthropologists in New Orleans

On Thursday:
Sabrina Peric (on the flight) - fascinating story about Arcelor/Mittal in Bosnia
Karen Strassler - may come our way around Thanksgiving
Beth Drexler
Leif Jonsson
Jonathan Padwe - offered to read his job letter
Ian Baird (Geography, U Wisconsin-Madison, Laos)
Lawrence Cohen - fascinating story about riots caused in Malaysia by his GLQ article on obscene cartoons in the Hindi press, his own follow up article, and the article written by the GLQ editor reflecting on the event; he also suggested I look at the translation Wiki spawned by Savita Bhabhi
Teja Ganti - she was interested to hear about my media space talk and asked for a copy

On Friday:
Deirdre de la Cruz (at the panel) - need to write up my pathetic discussant comments and send around
Sara Friedman - need to send her the media space article abstract
Li Zhang
Barney Bate - compared notes with him about decision not to go up for tenure at Yale
John Kelly - held forth interestingly about his own tenure process at Princeton and about the rigors of teaching and studying at the University of Chicago; I think I'll send him my Rhetorical Indios article
Andrew Willford - has a new project on neurology and seizure disorder in upstate NY
Jonathan Parry - told me about his wife's Rajasthan Patrika documentary, the follow-up to his Ankalu article in a book on everyday lives of the state, and his own ongoing work on suicide
Rosalind Morris - entertainingly described the Deleuze panel, Mike Fischer's brilliant remarks as a discussant, and told me the Thai word for the action of time's passage on intensifying and exacerbating a breach in social relations; now I want to email her to ask her what it is! 
Joshua Barker - long, lovely dinner in which we discussed our respective marriages, manuscripts, adventures in neurology, and my strategy for keeping a foot in the academy
Leda Martins - long conversation in which we caught up about family and she told me about her autistic nephew, and I offered to send her some materials
Michelle Bigenho - asked me and Leda to consider running for spots on the POLAR board!

On Saturday:
Nick Harkness - he gave me a wonderful paper that made me realize the possibilities for engaging with prosody and utterance in the performance of trance. Alireza's paper, which followed it, had a similar quality of methodical, precise brilliance (I should tell him so)
Danilyn Rutherford - paper had a marvelous section on her nonverbal daughter Millie's speech therapy as well as an interesting discussion of lingering mentalism in Webb Keane's social account of belief - a discussion whose flaws or at least equivocations (regarding the sense of "belief") was very deftly diagnosed by Janet's brilliant discussion of the panel.
Michael Silverstein - was in the audience and responded to Janet and Danilyn by going deeper into the familiar polysemy of "belief" with respect to "belief that" and "belief in" (represented by the following examples: "I believe x," which is equivalent, when x is a proposition,  to the affirmation, "x is true"; "do you believe in gravity," which is equivalent to something like "do you think that gravity affects you?") He went on to invoke Erving Goffman's idea of "interactional ritual" by pointing to the ritual nature of a belief statement of the former sort, which must presume that which it effectuates, thus tying the problem of de-mentalizing belief to the performative nature of social life and interaction in general (??) Here I interjected a reference to Poullon's article (which I must email to J. and D.), which was worthwhile if only because S. then responded by tying this to Pierce's project, which he characterized as one of showing the ultimate impossibility of upholding a distinction between what goes on "in the mind" and what goes on "in the world."
Erica James - A most serendipitous meeting that capped off a wonderful few days by bringing me back to the move we are considering to New Hampshire. Erica told me about school districts, house buying, commuting, the attractions of NH, and made a powerful plug for living by the ocean.

Other: I heard Webb Keane give brief paper responding to Maurice Bloch's work from the vantage point of his own work on linguistic anthropology, semiotics, and the anthropology of Christianity; and I learned that Jim Siegel is very much involved in dealing with Saranya's dyslexia.

Nehru's niece slams Varun Gandhi

Varun Gandhi On His Controversial Speech

Varun Gandhi vows to "cut heads" of muslims in India

Inspiration from Maria Aguilar's Dissertation Project

Might there be a way to combine perspectives from Renaissance humanism and postcolonial anthropology in analyzing the (apparent) movement of Mary of Agreda's Marian theology from early modern Spain to the twentieth-century Philippines? Although this idea remains vague in her prospectus, the notion that there is some kind of analogy to be be made between the positionalities from which humanist and postcolonial critics revisit "imitation" in their respective projects stirs something in me.

While this might be a blind alley, I could at least follow this as far as re-reading Hermans and Stecconi, who show that imitation and translation were closely linked in Renaissance humanism. Does the notion of syncretic "movement," which the panel interrogates, incorporate both these ideas in some form? (By the way, it would be interesting to look at H and S on the differentiation of these concepts. Off the bat, it seems to me that imitation implies material movement  (e.g. imitating a face) while translation carries a more wondrous sense of immaterial movement.)

Also, I am imagining a visual diagram for the purposes of clarifying the presentation. It is a grid composed of boxes, 3 for Spain, Mexico, and the Philippines on the horizontal axis (which represents space), and 5 for the fifteenth through twentieth centuries on the vertical axis (which represents time). Putative movement would be shown across space and time by dotted lines.

Is "Contact Zones" my Bridge Concept?

This morning, I came across a serendipitous convergence amongst the secondary sources I have been reading for two different projects (my upcoming departmental talk on media/language spaces and the "millenarian subjectivities" chapter of my book manuscript). It's the idea of "contact zones."

According to Lomnitz in Deep Mexico, Silent Mexico, contact zones are concrete arenas integrated into a broader space (in both metaphorical and physical senses) of national identity production. Contact zones are the interface between, on the one hand, state institutions that define rights and obligations for citizens and produce images and narratives of nationality, and, on the other hand, processes of local and class identity production that are equally critical (p. 130, cited in Demont-Heinrich 2005, 80).

Linke doesn't cite Lomnitz in her Anthropological Theory article (entitled "Contact Zones: Rethinking the Sensory Life of the State") but holds a similar interest in concrete, local arenas of practice as they instantiate the broader political field. What is distinctive about her approach is its emphasis on the sensory and affective dimensions of this interface. The contact zone, for her, is where "the political field asserts its presence through bodily experience and engrafts itself– even if only through the ‘taste of words’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 293) – in and through the memory of the senses" (2006, 206). More succinctly, in zones of contact "the political field assumes a somatosensory gestalt."

Things to work on next:

1. Dig into the genealogy of the "contact zone" term. Does it begin with Mary Louise Pratt?
2. Consider whether the idea of "contact zone" might be useful as well for my AAA paper on circulation and syncretism. For one thing, perhaps it could assume some of the vital conceptual work around movement that has made the framework of circulation theoretically appealing, while at the same time allowing one to step back and look critically at the trope of movement itself. Also, if the idea does begin with Pratt, then it might work especially well with  material I'm working with in this paper (Mary of Agreda's Virgin Mary and the Mahal na Ina).
3. Explore the idea of the "contact zone" as a framework for my Mourning Bilingualism talk. In what ways are both Lomnitz' and Linke's approaches helpful ways of conceptualizing media/language "spaces" in metaphorical as well as actual terms? (In this connection, one thing I was just thinking is that what really sets off these spaces from each other in concrete terms is the visible difference of Devanagari and Roman scripts, which marks an absolute boundary even as that boundary is continually breached within each space by virtue of the extensive and ongoing transliterated borrowings. This is both a sensuous matter as well as an one with a great deal of institutional force behind it, at least historically. Currently, the border between these spaces is being renegotiated within the contact zone of the mobile phone screen - and here I wish I knew more about patterns in the adoption by Hindi speaking mobile users of font and inputting systems.)
4. Might it be helpful to incorporate the idea of Mt. Banahaw as a "contact zone" into the chapter on millenarian subjectivity that I'm currently working on? For example, it might provide a clear way to flag the simultaneously physical and metaphorical levels on which Mt. Banahaw is being figured as "space" within this specific chapter, if not in the book as a whole.
5. Consider developing "contact zones" into a the cornerstone of my tenure narrative statement, a concern that bridges my first and second projects despite the seemingly great discrepancy in setting and topic.

Ideas for Upcoming Departmental Talk

The title of the talk is "Mourning Bilingualism, Celebrating Translation: Tracking Ideologies of Movement Across Indian Media/Language Spaces.”

Ethnographic Materials:

Varun Gandhi's outburst

Mrinal Pande

Wall Street Journal Hindi Blog

Rahul Gandhi's Lok Sabha speeches at the time of the non-confidence motion

Aarushi murder case

Webduniya

Ram Guha's "Death of Bilingualism" article and the Birth of Bilingual Spaces

Secondary Literature, Theoretical Ideas:

The notion of "emotional geographies" as applied to language "spaces"

Two articles by Cristof Demont-Heinrich on the U.S. prestige press and Switzerland: "The Ideological Construction of the Juggernaut of English," and "Language and National Identity in the Era of Globalization." In addition to his lucid and smart analyses of two big subjects that are extremely relevant to me, CD-H brought several useful concepts from other scholars to my attention: "cultural commodity circuits" (from an article on Napster, could be helpful for thinking about Slumdog Millionaire and "contact zones" (Lomnitz, presumably from Pratt?) might be very helpful for thinking about the relationship between different language "spaces."