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[painthropologist]

Is there a role for public anthropology in the contemporary world?

‘We have tools at our fingertips that could be of enormous importance for human freedom. Let’s start taking some responsibility for it.’ (Graeber 2004: 105)

‘What dispositions toward the world does an anthropologist cultivate and carry between office and field site, library and classroom? Is there a consistency to what unfolds in the name of anthropology across these disparate domains? (Pandian 2019: 48)

Anthropology is a field of study that is well-primed to work with the wider world, and has the potential to positively affect and change it through both theory and action. I argue that there is a pressing need, now, more than ever, for public anthropology to engage with the contemporary world in matters of crises. Particularly, anthropology has the potential to affect discourses, ethics, and practices surrounding healthcare, such as mental health and related topics such as genetic engineering for the betterment of human health. Drawing upon contemporary anthropological theory and ethnography, I discuss the need for anthropologists to actively engage with public health systems, and the potential outcomes of doing so.

As astutely stated by Eriksen (2006: x), ‘there is quite clearly something about the way anthropological research is presented that turns almost the entire potential readership off.’ Rather than being cast to the wayside as another piece of research in a sea of dense, inaccessible academia, public, applied anthropology seeks to engage directly with the world around it, and thereby affect it. It entails a combination of ethnographic theory and practice, with the latter being of particular import as it is enacted with the intention of applying theory to solve or address contemporary issues (Scheper-Hughes 2009). The goal of contemporary anthropologists should branch out from purely understanding the world towards directly influencing and interacting with wider publics (Eriksen 2006), as a form of activism and solidarity. In other words, public anthropology is demanded of by the contemporary world, as its uses, from acting as intermediaries and translators of knowledge to legal and ethical representatives, are plentiful and beneficial to the wider world. In other words, it is ultimately in our best interests as anthropologists to work within an accessible space where accountability matters (Scheper-Hughes 2009) as a means of developing a successful public anthropology movement.

The ideological criticism aimed at the tightly-intertwined applied and public anthropology in both the USA and UK during the 1960s and 70s was largely due to the perceived incompatibility between anthropology’s “primitive” or “tribal” subject matter and the way theory could be applied in other, modern contexts (Bennett 1996), in other words, applied anthropology “at home”. A methodologically strong public anthropology should, particularly in the context of the Anthropocene, ‘confound the idea of human being as somehow unique and exceptional, by insisting on its entanglement with other living beings’ (Pandian 2019: 78). As such, new ways of approaching ethnography, such as multispecies ethnographies (MSE), provide novel and innovative ways of looking at the problems we and our informants face. Collaborative ethnography, whereby the ethnographer works collaboratively alongside informants, is proposed by Lassiter (2005) as a means of increasing engagement with public and applied anthropology. Methodologically, there are many alternatives which allow anthropologists to engage with the public in an accessible manner, as well as ways of being educational without being patronising.

Social media and the public

When we write about ‘publics’ in public anthropology, it is not often that one stops to question what exactly this ‘public’ means. It is a broad term with variable delineations, which vary between the subject matter put forward by anthropologists. Hartigan (2015) discusses plant publics for example, which is form a cultural assemblage informed by anthropological thought. Anthropology therefore has far-reaching consequences in affecting not only other people, but also non-human actors which are intrinsically involved in human life, such as plants in a botanical garden. The burgeoning field of multispecies ethnographies is yet another way by which anthropologists can engage with a range of publics, with a multitude of roles including education, social analysis and policy change (Tsing 2017). In brief, multispecies ethnography involves observing the shaping of multiple organisms’ livelihoods under ‘social, political and cultural forces’ (Kirksey and Helmreich 2010). When anthropologists do research, then, it is important to have a totalising idea of what public it is we are working for and alongside.

‘[T]he needs, both scientific and social, to which anthropological research can genuinely speak transcend departmental and even academic limits’, says Hymes (1969: 6). The COVID-19 pandemic has been a prime example of how public anthropology and virtual ethnography transcend academic limits while largely informing each other, such as through social justice activism spread through online means. The Black Lives Matter movement in the USA, for example, demonstrates how the public is willing to engage with academia, but not necessarily in the way in which academics may expect. For example, Bonilla and Rosa’s (2015: 5) study on online activism, particularly black rights “hashtag activism” in #Ferguson, have noted that ‘[t]hrough social media, users were able to disseminate these accounts to a broad audience and to forge new mediatized publics that demand anthropological attention.’ It is evident, then, that there is a need today for anthropological interaction with publics in critical social movements such as Black Lives Matter. Garnering anthropological, and indeed academic, interest is a means of lending a social movement credibility, and as such, social movements benefit from the input of ethnographers as much as we do from them. 

However, an important point is raised about social media by Bonilla and Rosa (2016: 5): ‘is the study of an event through social media a return to a previous era of “armchair anthropology”?’ Once again, changes to anthropological theory have led to new para-sites and virtual ethnographies, leading one to the conclusion that no, this is not at all akin to armchair anthropology beyond the time spent seated. By being and participating online as ethnographers, we are simply working within different parameters rather than a physical field site. It stands to reason, then, that our capacities as public anthropologists are also different online to how they are in the physical field. Accessing written and visual anthropological sources online has become increasingly easy thanks to promotion on social media through memes and articles, and in turn, interest has turned to anthropology. However, public anthropology must be capable of dealing with the repeated inquiries of “what is anthropology anyway?” preferably by examining the field in a reflexive manner, and thereby enabling a public discourse to reach new conclusions. Social media is therefore a fully tangible, real field site which anthropologists engage with publicly. It is in our best interests to do so with a critical eye and the intent to dispel misinformation and social issues such as ethnocentrism. Contemporary public anthropologists should not be as wary of social media as a field site, as it can also open up the possibility of connecting with the public and developing a collaborative, and therefore purposeful anthropology. 

Some theory about public anthropology

Anthropology is primed to be part of the public forum as it is intrinsically culturally-aware, and thus possible to engage in a conscious manner with issues surrounding it. However, it is inadequate as a field of study if it merely acts as an indifferent bystander, fervently taking field notes but not really doing anything with them that could potentially assist the people it studies. In other words, there is a Malinowskian rift between ‘desk’ and ‘field’ (Mosse 2006). In order to apply anthropology, we must use our theory in an actionable way, such as through acts of solidarity with the subjects we study (Theodossopoulos 2020), or by appealing and making changes to the areas of life which cause them suffering or distress. This is, of course, a simplistic and overly straightforward way of imagining what public anthropology can be. In order for public anthropology to flourish as an applied science, we must acknowledge the role of change. Change here applies both to updating the theory we as anthropologists use as we go, as well as the very sites in which we work. 

Hymes (1969: 5) notes that this change, in the form of an ideological and methodological reconstruction of the field, is one that has occurred and continues to occur in anthropology fifty years since writing. Part of this lies in the way we perform anthropology, and how we think about it. By assuming Graeber’s (2004: 56) stance on ethnogenesis, or the notion that societies are in constant flux, it is the job of the anthropologist to chart this consistent change so that we as a collective humanity may learn something from it. This “something”, spurred by public anthropology, can lead to revolutionary thought and action due to broader understandings of what it is to be “a society”, what the issues are which hold us back, and how we can advance towards a better life without these social, political, or economic yokes. Public anthropology is thus an ideal tool for introducing ideas such as ethnogenesis as a way of seeing and being in the world, and to both learn and take action based on the precautions of history and the present alike. 

Public and medical anthropology

Further to the topic of anthropological engagement with medicine, there are distinctly beneficial ways in which the two can work together for public betterment beyond the realm of medical anthropology. For example, studies of PTSD from an anthropological perspective demonstrate how culture plays a distinct role in expressions and manifestations of trauma, such as in cases of ecological and humanitarian crises (Fassin 2008, Hinton and Good 2016). While psychology may be thought of to take a reductionist approach in diagnosing all trauma as PTSD, this assessment is revealing to the anthropologist in many regards as there are numerous ways of interpreting trauma in socio-cultural and political terms (Fassin 2008). Issues of ethics can also be solved/dealt with through the application of anthropology, which draws on a range of theory including from interdisciplinary such as philosophy and sociology. Issues of ethics are raised at all points of ethnographic research from the beginning and well past the conclusion. As ethics and medicine are intrinsically intertwined, anthropology has the potential to act as an empathetic translator of the medical to the public, and the public to the medical.

The example of ethnogenesis above can be considered quite literally when anthropologically investigating, for example, the CRISPR gene-editing revolution, and its possibilities in developing “improved” humans. At present, little anthropological material deals with CRISPR (Kirksey 2021), with standard journalism and science communications filling in the gap which anthropological theory could be applied to. This is where there is a space for public and applied anthropology to make a significant impact, as this is an as yet unexplored territory for the social sciences. Referring back to my original point about using public anthropology to raise awareness and action surrounding mental health, what if we were to use CRISPR to genetically engineer mentally-well people without the genes for heritable diseases? Anthropologists are an ideal mediator between science and the public, and are in a position to speak authoritatively about issues that would arise around genetic editing on live humans based on the multiple theories and ethnographies that we draw on to our benefit. As such, public anthropology has the potential to contribute to real-world healthcare reforms.

Finally, Bourgois and Schonberg’s (2009) study of heroin addicts in an unnamed city in the USA is an example of how an anthropological lens is beneficial for the development of a holistic and ethical medical and social welfare system. Making suggestions and pointing out the socio-political fissures of America in the late 20th century, such as the absence of post-detox services for previous drug abusers (280), the authors put forward a convincing argument for the pertinence of public anthropology in the modern world. ‘As anthropologists studying people who live under conditions of extreme duress and distress, we feel it is imperative to link theory to practice’ (297), they write, articulating the core philosophy of public anthropology. Theory is beneficial only as far as it can be applied, as without directly involving ourselves in the public sphere, anthropology does not depart from the armchair it formed in to begin with. By making ethnography an insider’s club exclusive to fellow academics, we effectively seal ourselves in an echo chamber of theorising, but without actually proving our research’s worth by applying it to other sites and scenarios. Not only does it to disrespect to our interlocutors by treating them as a pet project, but it also stunts the ability of anthropology to develop as a holistic field of study, one that can be relied upon in an interdisciplinary setting to dispense unbiased yet critical informed views of the world.

Conclusion

Having touched on the ways in which public anthropology may benefit the field of medicine as a means of highlighting and contributing to issues which deal with complex ethics, as well as new methodologies and approaches like multispecies ethnography, the question remains as to why anthropologists should push back against the earlier ideological resistance against applied anthropology articulated by Hymes (1969). Public life can shape anthropology, but to what extent can anthropology shape public life? I argue that in a time where everything we do is public, particularly in the eyes of social media and the internet, it is the duty of anthropologists to fight back against misinformation and ethnocentrism. Anthropologists can be called to the fore as experts and as translators of the socio-cultural, such as Cepek’s (2018) role as testifier and godfather in the adoption of a non-indigenous child by an indigenous Ecuadorian couple. As anthropologists who interact with “the public” in the realm of everyday ordinary life, our every interaction is inherently one of public anthropology. Furthermore, I argue that public anthropology is not only required, but is demanded for by the contemporary world. 

Issues such as healthcare, humanitarianism, and human rights are evidently topics of great debate on social media, and have the potential to influence public anthropology. On the other hand, public anthropology is able to help further develop and advocate for the field of medicine via social media, due to its uniquely holistic perspectives on subjective issues such as ethics and trauma. Public anthropology is able to bridge physical and ideological gaps in social spheres, and can act as a translator and mediator of culture. The anthropology of the contemporary is inherently primed to be public, and shirking the duty of applying one’s field of study is akin to the armchair anthropology of yore. By comparison, social media is a real and tangible field site on which public anthropologists are able to both conduct virtual ethnographies and connect with the public. As such, online activism can benefit greatly from the presence of public anthropologists on social media. Nonetheless, it is a gleeful wish of the author’s that in the future, resolutions could be achieved online by simply typing #Anthropologist into any social media site and waiting for a professional response.

References

Bennet, J.W. (1996). Applied and Action Anthropology: Ideological and Conceptual Aspects. Current Anthropology, 37(1): 23-53.

Besteman, C. (2013). Three reflections on public anthropology. Anthropology Today, 29(6): 3-6.

Bonilla, Y. and Rosa, J. (2015). #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist, 41(1), 4-17.

Bourgois, P. and Schonberg, J. (2009). Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cepek, M. L. (2018) Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia. University of Texas Press.

Eriksen, T.H. (2006). Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg.

Fassin, D. (2008). The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, 23(3): 531-558.

Hartigan, J. (2015). Plant Publics: Multispecies Relating in Spanish Botanical Gardens. Anthropological Quarterly, 88(2): 481- 507.

Hinton, D.E. and Good, B.J. (2016). Culture and PTSD: Trauma in Global and Historical Perspective. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hymes, D. (1969). Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books.

Kirksey, E. (2021). The Dawn of CRISPR Mutants, Sapiens, 27 January. Available at: https://www.sapiens.org/culture/crispr-mutants/ (Accessed 6 April 2021).

Lassiter, L.E. (2005). Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 46(1): 83-106.

Kirksey, E. and Helmreich, S. (2010). The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology, 25(4): 545-576.

Mosse, D. (2006). Anti-social anthropology? Objectivity, objection, and the ethnography of public policy and professional communities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 12: 935-956.

Pandian, A. (2019). A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. USA: Duke University Press.

Scheper-Hughes, N. (2009). Making Anthropology Public. Anthropology Today, 25(4): 1-3.

Theodossopoulos, D. (2020). Solidarity Dilemmas in Times of Austerity: Auto-ethnographic Interventions. Cultural Anthropology, 35(1): 134-166. Tsing, A. L. (2017) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press.

[painthropologist]

Does solidarity represent a radically different approach to providing aid or is it another word for philanthropy?

‘Only those directly affected can determine the limits of what is acceptable when it comes to an attack on human dignity.’ 

Jean-Hervé Bradol (in Fassin 2008)

Solidarity: ‘Unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; mutual support within a group.’

Philanthropy: ‘The desire to promote the welfare of others, expressed especially by the generous donation of money to good causes.’

The anthropology of humanitarianism has grappled with ideas of ethnocentric philanthropy and actionable solidarity, and an anthropology of crises and humanitarianism seeks to distinguish the two concepts. Based on the Oxford dictionary definitions above, solidarity as it is recognised within humanitarianism differs from philanthropy due to the moral and ethical nature and ideologies which separate the two; namely, support and action. In this essay, I distinguish these concepts through a post-Marxist framework, whereby ‘[t]he philanthropy of atheism is therefore at first only philosophical, abstract philanthropy, and that of communism is at once real and directly bent on action.’ This atheistic philanthropy is what we may consider to be our current definition of philanthropy; that is, charity, whereas a communist, actionable philanthropy is more akin to solidarity as it is thought of in the humanitarian sense. This anthropological solidarity lies with working and living equally alongside the oppressed, be that the subjugated proletariat or displaced refugees. By contrast, the nature of philanthropy assumes a hands-off approach whereby aid is gifted and left to the devices of its recipients, who may not necessarily use said aid (particularly in the form of money) for its intended purposes. 

To begin to understand the differences between solidarity and philanthropy, we must first consider the structures and ideologies which form the sphere of contemporary humanitarianism. This essay is primarily concerned with social suffering, which can be caused by a range of political, economic and social issues, is ‘an assemblage of human problems that have their origins and consequences in the devastating injuries that social force can inflict on human experience’ (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997: ix). Furthermore, the humanitarian condition, outlined by Feldman (2012: 157), is inherently biopolitical, as it is concerned with providing for the combined social and mental wellbeing of populations. Philanthropy is thus equipped with the means to provide material aid to cover these biopolitical needs, such as finances, medicine, and housing, but it can just as easily be a tax write-off for billionaires with less concern for active solidarity than charity for the sake of it. How then, is solidarity an improvement upon philanthropy?

Solidarity as action

Solidarity is distinctively activist in nature, and is based on grassroots action as opposed to established notions of charity. Theodossopoulos (2020: 141) describes solidarity as ‘a politically aware alternative to philanthropy’. In building upon the Marxist background of solidarity outlined above, Graeber (2004: 2) pushes the idea further into the realm of an anarchist anthropology, one which is concerned with ideologies such as autonomy, mutual aid, and direct democracy- and therefore solidarity. With these values in mind, there is no reason why they cannot also be applied in the realm of humanitarianism. By combining the diverse perspectives of informants with anthropological theory, anarchist anthropology seeks to understand the human condition and thereby improve upon it. This perspective aligns well with humanitarian solidarity and opposes the sentimental notion of philanthropy in exchange for concrete action. This can be applied, for example, in dealing with crises involving refugees and other displaced groups such as the homeless. 

Firstly, solidarity differs from philanthropy in that sociality is a core feature of its operation. Viewing ‘the solidarity economy as a mechanistic reaction to the hardships people encounter due to austerity misses out on the connectedness that solidarity constructs’, warns Rakopoulos (2016: 147). The development of groups and social networks, which can be existing or temporary, formal or informal, is an aspect of solidarity, especially when providing horizontal services to those they show solidarity to (ibid: 145). On the other hand, philanthropy remains somewhat detached from its recipients; there is little to no direct interaction between the philanthropist and those they donate to (Marx 2009). This lack of interaction marks philanthropy as another form of charity, thus perpetuating bourgeois, asymmetrical divisions of power between the recipients of charity and the philanthropists themselves. In treating solidarity as an expression of sociality, the physical and emotional bonds developed between solidarians and those they support breaks free from the logic of compassion (Fassin 2008) and leads instead to direct, on-the-ground action. Anthropologists as such are primed to be solidarians due to the very nature of ethnographic research. Conversely, one can compare philanthropy to the armchair anthropologists of yore, armed with good intentions but entirely missing the point of engaging with interlocutors directly.

Solidarity dictates immediate action and is ascribed to various practices and actions arising from crisis. As Theodossopoulos (2020: 135) argues, by adopting the term ‘solidarity’, humanitarian groups radicalise their ideological foundations; in this case, through an anarchistic approach to anthropology. By extending the hand of solidarity rather than philanthropy, anthropologists are capable of exposing the injustices of structures of domination that govern the lives of the displaced and thereby instigating political and social action. Furthermore, Fassin (2008: 547) notes that the role of humanitarian organisations is to persuade the public rather than explain the truths of their subjects’ experience. There is a danger that by using emotive language to persuade others to action in areas of crises, facts may be obscured in the process. However, a ‘logic of compassion’ (ibid: 554) informs both solidarity and philanthropy, for it is arguable that there can be neither without compassion. 

By contrast, philanthropy assumes that any aid offered (be that in the form of money, food, medicine, and social services) will be directed straight to the people in need, without accounting for potentially corrupt, trickle-down state systems such as in Stuart Marks’ (2016) lifetime study of globalisation, state regulations, and conservation in Zambia. Speaking of wildlife conservation among the valley Bisa people, Marks cautions against taking terms such as ‘poverty’ at face value; rather, people must consider the condition of poverty as connecting to more distant demands (22). These distant demands are a wider network of needs which humanitarian aid aims to address, but often does so in a generalising, deterministic manner. As with any issue touched upon anthropologically, it stands to reason that actionable humanitarian solidarity must examine the finer details of those we wish to assist in order to adequately assist them at all. This is something which philanthropy lacks, as it serves as a general notion of goodwill rather than targeted, action-oriented humanitarian aid.

Philanthropy in the Marxist sense (Marx 2009, Theodossopoulos 2020: 140) is intrinsically bourgeois and reproduces the hierarchies extant in capitalism. Economically, philanthropy further differs from solidarity through markers such as class difference, asymmetrical giving and reciprocity (Rakopoulos 2016: 149). However, it would be a misconception to state that philanthropy and humanitarian solidarity are mutually exclusive. There cannot be philanthropy without some sentiment of solidarity for the people to whom aid is being provided, and often those working with an ideology of solidarity in mind must acquire aid from somewhere, which can include governments, NGOs and private philanthropists. Conversely, solidarity that is not action-oriented rings hollow, and cannot be considered solidarity in humanitarian terms. It is necessary for solidarians to work alongside, rather than as superiors in power, to the people who they wish to aid. 

Let us consider here Graeber’s (2004: 21) ruminations on Marcel Mauss’ gift economies as ‘an ethical system, which conscientiously rejected most of what we would consider the basic principles of economics’. If we assume that philanthropy, in the form of altruism, is an intrinsic part of a gift economy (or barter economy, where the philanthropist receives a tax break and a sense of self-betterment in return), how useful is their gift if it is not actually applied beyond being more of a show of others’ goodwill? If the gift, in the form of aid, is misused, broken, or lost, what is its significance in our perceptions of a modern political economy where this philanthropic aid is provided? Regardless of goodwill, the philanthropist, through their magnanimity, highlights a distinct power imbalance between them and those receiving aid (Theodossopoulos 2020). This power balance is neutralised when one participates in active solidarity, whereby moral, social, and physical aid is provided on relatively equal social footing, or at the very least the desire to match informants’ particular social footing whilst in the field (Rakopoulos 2016).

Trauma and humanitarian aid: solidarity or philanthropy?

Medical aid and medicalization as an expression of solidarity raises the question of whether NGOs and solidarians are of the same category due to their action-oriented status. Rakopoulos (2016: 147) notes that in areas of medical attention such as clinics, ‘solidarity takes place within the sphere of a precarious shared experience’. With this in mind, trauma acts as a social tie between victims and solidarians or NGO workers (Fassin 2008, Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997). For example, solidarity in the ongoing Palestine-Israel conflict can best be expressed by the humanitarian interventions and outcry related to the situation. In this regard, one can express solidarity through statements as well as action, such as through the deployment of psychiatrists and psychologists by NGOs like Médicins Sans Frontièrs and Médicines Du Monde, who treat injured parties regardless of their alliance. By contrast, philanthropy involves donating to these aid causes and organisations, as opposed to working directly with Palestinians or Israelis on home soil. In what Fassin (2008: 543) terms ‘the politics of compassion’, the intervention of humanitarian aid, in the form of psychologists and psychiatrists, changes the focus of suffering from political to the subjective in the face of violence. This suffering subject is the topic of medicalization, in that the state and NGOs effectively in control over bodies and socio-political networks (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997: xii), and humanitarian aid serves more purpose than philanthropy when challenged in situations such as these.

The expression of trauma is a language that is used to promote humanitarian causes. It is how we respond to this trauma that is significant in humanitarian terms.  Further to this, Feldman (2012: 155) refers to ‘protracted refugees’, meaning those who spend long periods of time living in uncertainty of whether they will be resettled or returned “home”, such as in the case of stateless Palestinian refugees today. Agier (2011: 149) argues that under humanitarian aid, ‘human rights and civic duties are dissociated and even become incompatible.’ If we consider the cultural representations of social suffering, whereby suffering has a social use (to enable them to protest, to spread media attention, and so on) in the case of protracted refugees, we must also be wary of unwittingly enhancing suffering through bureaucratic responses including NGO action (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997: x-xi). It is here that solidarity, rather than philanthropy, is of most help for those who suffer, as solidarians are able to connect with networks of those in need on an interpersonal basis rather than through formal bureaucratic processes, thereby side-stepping the risk of increasing suffering. Culturally speaking, philanthropy and hospitality (Rakopoulos 2016, Theodossopoulos 2020) may be introduced to a situation with good intentions, but without a clear aim and social cohesiveness, these practices once again turn from horizontal acts of solidarity to top-down skewing of power relations in the form of humanitarian aid.

By providing aid, we are both enhancing and ascribing a certain agency to the people we stand with. For example, consider social suffering (Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997: ix) with regards to solidarity, which ‘results from what political, economic, and institutional power does to people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.’ Enhancing the agency of the suffering by providing aid that allows them social mobility is certainly a positive outcome of both solidarity and philanthropy alike (Agier 2011), but philanthropy can negate the needs of groups and individuals due to its impersonal nature. According to Fassin (2008: 544), ‘[t]he aim [of humanitarian work] is to touch people through the stories in which humanitarian workers place themselves as privileged witnesses of the suffering of an oppressed people’. By touching people in the West with psychologists and psychiatrists as witnesses of Palestinian and Israeli atrocities of war, psychiatric witness leads to the subjectification of Palestinian victim-heroes due to the one-sidedness of stories geared towards eliciting compassion. The nuances of adolescent lives becomes objectified as one where their agency is removed, rather than one where they are active subjects as participants in violence. Solidarity here thus comes in the form of witness, through external parties testifying on behalf of victims of war. It has little to do with philanthropic material aid. 

Narratives of the political and the clinical thus intermingle to develop this third ‘witness’ perspective, perpetuated by external humanitarian aid psychologists and psychiatrists. In doing so, what is lost in translation between philanthropy and solidarity in the Palestinian case is that clinical diagnoses underplay the distinctly multivariate causes for trauma. Agier (2011: 148), questions whether we are ‘facing here a reappropriation and re-signifying of humanitarian language by its beneficiaries, when individuals display their refusal to remain locked into the status of absolute victim…’ While Médecins sans Frontières and other NGOs’ psychologists and psychiatrists express solidarity by working with victims of war and displacement, they also succeed in using the narrative of trauma as a means of eliciting philanthropic empathy from a generally Western audience. Both psychiatry and psychology are languages which are used to elucidate victimhood (Fassin 2008: 553), as well as pleas for help by humanitarian workers, for themselves and the patients they treat. Humanitarian workers therefore become actors who are tasked with speaking on behalf of those who Western media deem to be voiceless, and they must negotiate the line between bearing witness to atrocities and speaking of this witnessing truthfully. As such, the language of trauma can be used to describe affect in addition to providing diagnoses for those who benefit most from action-oriented solidarity. When applied to the philanthropy/solidarity debate, this language of witnesses comes into play as language which ultimately triggers the affect which prompts direct action.

Humanitarian aid as neo-colonialism

Recent Unicef intervention in the UK in 2020, which provided domestic food aid for UK children for the first time in the organisation’s history, indicate that neither solidarity nor philanthropy are site- or time-bound. However, direct action through humanitarian aid can also be viewed (or misconstrued) as a form of neo-colonialism, whereby ‘wherever victims of violence and inequality are supposedly deprived of the power to express themselves, international organizations that defend their cause decide to speak on their behalf’ (Fassin 2008: 537). It is the reason why Unicef aid is viewed as normalised in developing nations, as per media descriptions, and shocking in the Global North. The strongly negative reaction to this move by Tory MPs indicate that the UK is thus far unable to grasp that the tables of colonialism have turned on their now impoverished empire, but with morally good, humanitarian intentions in times of crisis. It is interesting to witness the resistance with which the Global North defends itself from accepting humanitarian goodwill, while simultaneously extending the same aid to those viewed as ‘undesirable’ (Agier 2011). This dichotomy is worth bearing in mind when considering humanitarian aid as being hands-on expressions of solidarity. Instead, we must reflexively consider whether our solidarity here is tinged with the saviour complex of neo-colonialism, by speaking on behalf of a naturally assumed mute body of the oppressed (Fassin 2008).  

According to Kleinman, Das and Lock (1997: x), suffering is ‘a causal web in the global political economy’. Solidarity has the potential to ease suffering to a certain degree, be that through social, political, or economic action. However, there is a fine line between philanthropy and neo-colonialism, and solidarity as a grassroots movement must be cautious not to fall into a similar trap. Further to social suffering, one can consider it to be a mediatized ‘presentation of the real’ (ibid: xii). Through today’s accessibility to transnational media, which televises tragedy on endless loop, there is a politico-economic aspect that commodifies suffering as a means of obtaining solidarity or philanthropy. Yet this mediatisation of suffering is reminiscent of the primitives of Clastres’ stateless societies, echoing that we in the Global North should approach our less fortunate fellow humans with respect and compassion, but also with a degree of (un)implied superiority. This perpetuation of colonial thought, regardless of intention, makes even solidarity a moral conundrum in as much as it is an act. Social suffering is thus a useful analytical tool for solidarians, whereby they can reflexively consider the reasons for which they choose to express solidarity, and how they go about doing it. It is, of course, up to the individual to decide whether their partaking in acts of solidarity or philanthropy amounts to the perpetuation of neo-colonialism.

Resistance and anarchy in solidarity

To return to the notion of an anarchist anthropology and its benefits in establishing solidarity, Graeber (2004: 9) suggests engaging in a ‘Low Theory’ existing beyond the academic field, which deals with ‘those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project’. If we consider active solidarity to be a transformative project, anthropologists must approach and understand it with new, untested concepts as opposed to continually attempting to fit a square peg in the round hole of theory, so to speak. Revolution, Graeber (ibid: 40) suggests, is not about sudden upheavals of state and society, but is rather a gradual process. In speaking of solidarity in contemporary Greece, Theodossopoulos (2020: 142) echoes that ‘participating in humanitarian solidarity is not a radical break from neoliberal austerity’. How, then, does solidarity contribute to revolution? 

Solidarity encourages sociality, by forging ‘new forms of social engagement and potentially also mutual understanding’ (Rakopoulos 2016: 145). It is through this sociality that bonds, no matter how temporary or frail, can be made to elicit or support revolution. However, it must be remembered that power is at the core of any instance of resistance, let alone solidarity (Foucault 1978, Clastres 1987). Imbalances in power relations are another marker distinguishing philanthropy from solidarity. Philanthropy is one-sided, with philanthropists acting as benefactors to the disenfranchised in an asymmetrical expression of power and wealth. By contrast, solidarity is more horizontal in nature (Theodossopoulos 2020: 142), meaning that power is more evenly distributed between solidarians and those they support. With this in mind, it is easier to see the ways in which humanitarian aid may be considered a project of neo-colonialism, whereby magnanimous powers, generally from the Global North, provide assistance in the form of goods, money, or ideological solidarity. 

Michael Cepek (2018) raises further issues with government philanthropic assistance among the Cofán of Dureno in Ecuador. Firstly, Cepek recalls an incident of the Ecuadorian government stepping in to provide “pathetic” (5) donations of dried food, soap, and drinking water to Cofán affected by oil spills. As many indigenous people have little social or economic mobility, as is often the case, there is little they can say or do without having an external force dictate their needs through humanitarian aid. This case highlights how indigenous agency is glanced over by aid agencies, in favour of providing what is perceived as necessary rather than consulting the Cofán about what is actually needed to improve their livelihoods. This may be due to their indigenous status marking them as a stateless society (Clastres 1987) despite their ongoing cooperation with the Ecuadorian government regarding their land and rights. It is also an example of how philanthropy, through the graciousness of Ecuadorian state aid, does not equate the solidarity that is required for the Cofán to be self-sufficient and live in an unpolluted environment.

By viewing and mobilising solidarity from the perspective of anarchism, we are able to expose the neoliberal basis of charity, philanthropy, and hospitality (Theodossopoulos 2020). However, solidarity is but a temporary solution to the long-term project of revolution, and may be considered by Marxists after a point to be a continued dependence on external aid analogous to reliance on philanthropy (Marx 2009). Vulnerability, however, is not a stagnant condition, but it rather one that is negotiable and can change over time and between different social actors (Agier 2011). If we view subjects of social suffering, such as refugees, as passive rather than active, we negate the role of personal agency in breaking free from solidarity as a temporary stepping stone towards human dignity. This is something which philanthropy does not offer, as it acts merely as a bandage on the metaphorical gunshot wound of social suffering.

Conclusion

Solidarity and philanthropy, despite bearing many of the same goals, are dissimilar to each other in the ways they engage with the subjects of humanitarian aid. While philanthropy can be considered to be financial or material aid gifted from goodwill, solidarity is the ongoing process of supporting those victims of humanitarian crises, both by speaking with and for them, and by providing the assistance they specifically require, as the opening quote to this essay suggests. I have argued that through the lens of an anarchist anthropology, humanitarian solidarity is but a short-term solution to long-term revolution. Over-reliance on the actions and practices of solidarity, such as in cases of social suffering, reinforce neoliberal hierarchies of power, causing horizontal solidarian action to warp into a more asymmetrical philanthropy. This imbalance of power, enhanced by the transnational nuances of collective social suffering, can tip the scales of humanitarian aid into the realm of neo-colonialism, which brings into question whether solidarity can truly be separated from philanthropic roots regardless of intention. Finally, as solidarity is intrinsically tied to processes of sociality, it is a temporary but effective means of building a successful anarchist revolution and establishing horizontal balances of power.

References

Agier, M. (2011). Managing the Undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Croydon: Polity Press.

Blunden, A., translator. Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. By Karl Marx, Marxists.org, 2009.

Clastres, P. (1987). Society Against the State. Princeton: Zone Books. ISBN: 0942299000

Fassin, D. (2008). The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, 23(3): 531-558.

Fassin, D. (2011). Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Feldman, I. (2012). The Humanitarian Condition: Palestinian Refugees and the Politics of Living. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 3(2): 155-172

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin.

Graeber, D. (2004). Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.

Kapferer, B. and Gold, M. (2018). Moral Anthropology: A Critique. New York: Berghahn Books.

Kleinman, A., Das, V. and Lock, M. (1997). Social Suffering. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Marks, S. (2016). Life as a Hunt: Thresholds of Identities and Illusions on an African Landscape. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Rakopoulos, T. (2016). Solidarity: the egalitarian tensions of a bridge-concept. Social Anthropology, 24(2): 142–151

Storer, R. (2020). Unicef to feed hungry children in UK for first time in 70-year history, The Guardian, 16 December. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/16/unicef-feed-hungry-children-uk-first-time-history (Accessed: 3 March 2021)

Theodossopoulos, D. (2020). Solidarity Dilemmas in Times of Austerity: Auto-ethnographic Interventions. Cultural Anthropology, 35(1): 134-166.

[painthropologist]

An essay on Southeast Asian tourism I wrote for my BA that's full of vitriol

I'm Southeast Asian. You'll see why.

SE547 (Southeast Asian Societies)

Essay: “‘Culture’ in Southeast Asia today is nothing but a tourist attraction.” Critically evaluate this statement by making reference to relevant ethnographic case studies

Student name: Natalia Lee (17881758)

Due: Monday 16 December 2019, 12pm

Word count: 2040

The proliferation of capitalism and globalisation in Southeast Asia from the 1970s has inevitably been the catalyst for an ever-expanding tourist economy in the region. Southeast Asian nations have become exotic, desirable holiday locales to tourists from developed countries. This essay focuses on the ways in which tourism in Southeast Asia today, informed by capitalist ideals, has shaped local cultural identities with regards to indigeneity, gender, and division of labour. Many of these factors stem from pre-existing local cultural practices, yet are reinforced by the need to accommodate culture for touristic appeal. In Southeast Asian nations such as Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand, tourism has greatly stimulated local economies yet has irreparably transformed local culture through rapid adaptation to meet the demands of tourists and governments. I discuss how Southeast Asians have risen to meet these demands, and how various aspects of culture and people themselves have become commodified in the face of a capitalist-driven tourist economy.

UNESCO defines culture as the ‘distinctive spiritual, material, intellectual, and emotional features of society or a social group (Anggraini, 2017: 150). This group identity has been articulated in different ways in the respective regions of Southeast Asia, but has morphed in the advent of modernity and capitalism. Culture, as such, has become commodified in many regards, with many traditional ways of life restructured to match the needs and wants of tourists. For example, traditional Balinese agrarian culture has been preserved to some extent by the desire for tourists to visit the Instagram-worthy rice paddies (Pedersen and Darmiasih, 2015: 151). Simultaneously, Bali’s tourist economy now thrives on providing other forms of non-traditional entertainment to tourists, such as nightclubs and surfing in Kuta (Anggraini, 2017). The tourist economy in Southeast Asia can therefore be viewed as a means of empowering locals through their participation with capitalism, globalisation, and modernity. 

The rise in international tourism, especially towards Southeast Asia, can be attributed to the expansion of the Western industrial economy in the 1970s and 80s (Smith, 1990: 34). Capitalism’s influence inevitably reached Southeast Asia during this period, not only changing traditional modes of production (Ong, 1988: 29), but requiring locals to adapt and create new social identities to cater to the desires of tourists. The increased social mobility in both developed and developing nations around this period thus facilitated political and economic changes that have in turn reformed cultural practices and ways of life in order to accommodate the constant demand for tourist infrastructure and services (Smith, 1990: 38-9). From a politico-economic perspective, tourism can be viewed as a means of nation-building in Southeast Asia, with tourism being Indonesia’s third-most profitable economic sector in the late 1960s under the Soeharto regime (Adams, 2018). While the rapid growth of Southeast Asian tourist destinations has created greater social mobility for many locals from increased income and education, it has also reinforced greater structural inequalities, with the rift between poverty and affluence in Southeast Asia becoming more apparent under tourism’s influence. The economic growth accompanying the expanding tourism industry in Southeast Asia has given many an opportunity to facilitate upward social mobility regardless of existing class hierarchy, and influences the structure and formation of classes within a society. 

Fagertun’s (2017: 338-341) ethnographic study of Jimbaran Bay in Bali discusses the ways in which class formation, based on economic advancement, impacted one Balinese couple, Bu Minah and her husband Pak Darsa. Due to the increasing popularity of Jimbaran among tourists, the couple were able to expand their small business into a hotel. However, business was uncertain due to the increased competition facilitated by an influx of work migrants into Jimbaran, leading to financial difficulties. Furthermore, traditional Balinese culture permits polygyny, whereby men can have multiple wives if they can afford it. Against Bu Minah’s wishes, Pak Darsa was able to afford a second wife with the money they had accumulated from their business, driving her away from the business and their children due to the traditionally patriarchal Balinese family structure. In this case, upward social mobility, enabled by a rapid increase in financial resources from tourism, bypassed the traditional Balinese-Hindu caste system and allowed the couple the financial freedom to enhance their lives. Economic capital breeds social capital, but pre-existing indigenous class and gender ideals still inform the ways in which structural inequality is created and maintained by the tourism industry in Southeast Asia.

One of the main reasons for tourism in Southeast Asian nations like Thailand is for tourists to experience entertainment in an “exotic” setting (Berger, 2013b: 15). Culture becomes a commodified novelty, where traditional practices like dance and musical performance are reduced to package tours, and ritual meaning is obscured by monetization (Fagertun, 2017; Picard, 1990; Acciaioli, 1985). In Indonesia, the term “cultural tourism” was first implemented by the Dutch during the colonial period and subsequently by the independent Indonesian government, as a means of turning the archipelago, especially Bali, into a global tourist destination (Berger, 2013a: 47; Picard, 1990: 42). Based on this logic, “adat [culture] is appropriated for the purposes of the state” and is therefore an impetus for attracting tourists (Acciaioli, 1985: 157). Today, the popularity of “cultural tourism” in the Southeast Asian region is reflective not only of tourist demands, but the willingness of locals to supply entertainment for these tourists, ranging from traditional performances and handicrafts, to more malign “commodities” including the sex trade. There is thus a symbiotic relationship between tourists and locals, where cultural norms and traditions become “a product of interactions” (Sinclair, 1997: 3). Pre-existing cultural contexts are therefore necessary to understand how and why these transactions take place, and closer examination reveals that institutionalised Southeast Asian cultural norms such as the male hegemony and the enduring influence of colonialism are just as much to blame for transforming “culture” in Southeast Asia into a commodity to be exploited by tourists and locals alike. 

This brings into question the nature of “authenticity” in the “culture” marketed to tourists in Southeast Asia. There is a dual nature to the “authentic” culture practiced and experienced by locals, and the “culture” born from tourist demands- what Picard (1990: 43) describes as a dichotomy of “cultural pollution” and “cultural renaissance”. This pollution can be regarded as foreign influences on a society, while renaissance is the revived interest in one’s own culture and traditions (43). Alternatively, traditions and cultural identity have been adopted for political, social, or economic gain by some Southeast Asian peoples. Li (2000: 150) discusses how indigenous identity has been crafted as a political tool in Central Sulawesi, while “the invention of tradition” by self-identified indigenous groups are “a matter of optimal selection” in consumer terms. The consumption of indigenous culture by tourists can therefore be viewed as a created commodity designed to appeal to foreign notions of the exotic. However, cultural identity is not fixed, and is subject to the continuous “play of history, culture and power” (152). To quote Bishop and Robinson (1998: 5), “tourist privilege turns daily life into a spectacle” in Southeast Asia. Tourism’s impact is therefore a progression of culture as it is shaped by modernity and globalisation. Pre-industrial modes of production in Southeast Asia, such as rice farming in Bali and Vietnam, have thus adapted to profit from the tourist economy by marketing traditional agriculture as “exotic”.

Pedersen and Dharmiasih (2015: 151-2) note that the agricultural sector has become an important part of the central Indonesian and Balinese governments’ bid to promote tourism, particularly “eco-tourism” or “sustainable tourism”. The exoticisation of the past is reinforced by the internationally accepted industrialisation of urban areas, and tourists from developed countries flock to observe and participate in pre-colonial, traditional agricultural practices like rice farming in Bali (Fagertun, 2017: 333). Picard’s notion of “cultural pollution and renaissance” once again demonstrates how the culture of rice farming is “polluted” by tourism, while there is a “renaissance” in encouraging traditional farming practices to uphold images of Bali as a pristine, environmentally-conscious society. However, the increased push by the state and independent developers to modernise the island through infrastructural development has led to a significant marginalisation of farmers, involvement of external organisations, and an overall decline in agricultural activity reflected across Southeast Asia (MacRae, 2011).

The shifting role of agriculture as a subsistence economy to a tourist attraction, and the increasingly industrialised modes of production in Southeast Asia are significant. Agriculture and cash cropping were traditionally sectors in which women were permitted to work prior to their roles as factory workers in the 1970s (Ong, 1988: 32). Traditionally, women were also expected to adhere to the Southeast Asian cultural norm of traditionally looking after the family (Jeffreys, 1999: 186). Through participation in the workforce, women were able to challenge traditional values and attained increased social mobility (Truong, 1983: 536). However, the mass migration from rural to urban areas in order to participate in the workforce has created new structural inequalities, and the jobs available unskilled female labourers have led some women to participate in sex tourism as a more lucrative means of gaining economic, and therefore social capital. Truong (1983: 543) theorises that “mass prostitution reflects the structural crisis of the agricultural sector where women were traditionally active”. The role of gender is thus a crucial factor in understanding Southeast Asian culture beyond the veneer of tourism, and the processes underlying sex tourism are a means of analysing the structural inequalities and violence based on traditional notions of the social obligations of Southeast Asian women. 

The phenomenon of sex tourism in nations like Thailand and the Philippines is revealing of how people are also commodified in the tourist trade, and how “local culture” is manifold and much deeper than what is marketed towards tourists. Prostitution of women and children in Southeast Asia is embedded in poverty and culturally-based notions of family obligation (Jeffreys, 1999: 180). Rural poverty today reinforces structural inequalities heavily influenced by economic processes, and the proliferation of rural prostitutes servicing urban areas as a means of survival has made countries like Thailand synonymous with a developed “culture” of sex tourism (Truong, 1986; Bishop and Robinson, 1998). Economic shifts from rural to urban areas in Southeast Asia have forced thousands of vulnerable women to migrate to cities like Manila and Bangkok to find work in order to support their families, as well as the women and children trafficked for purposes of sexual exploitation. In this “culture”, prostitution can be seen as a way for Southeast Asian women to participate in modernity, such as by “working with foreigners” (Bishop and Robinson, 1998: 9). Like any other economic mode of production, the popularity of sex tourism in Southeast Asia is a matter of supply and demand (Truong, 1986: 536). Institutionalised gender inequality, based on the lower status of women, and the historical normalisation of prostitution in Southeast Asia (Jeffreys, 1999: 186-7), implies that sex tourism is perpetuated by locals as much as tourists. A culture of concubinage, slave labour, and debt bondage in countries like Vietnam and Thailand (Truong, 1986; Jeffreys, 1999) make sex tourism a profitable enterprise to pimps and human traffickers (UNODC Global Report on Trafficking in Persons, 2016). Prostitution can therefore be viewed from the capitalist perspective as yet another form of labour, with bodies as an exchangeable commodity (Truong, 1983: 534). These are malevolent aspects to Southeast Asian culture that have become a tourist attraction, to the detriment of thousands of women and children.

Under the influence of capitalism, culture in Southeast Asia has been commodified, but not necessarily just for the benefit of tourists. In participating with modernity and globalisation, Southeast Asia has adapted its various “cultures” to meet the demands posed by governments, economies, and tourism. Traditional practices and indigenous identities have been restructured to appeal to the tourist market. Particularly in urban areas, structural inequalities and the marginalisation of the rural poor are evident, with traditional economic practices like agriculture suffering under domestic mass migration and redistribution of resources to more lucrative sectors like tourism. This is negotiated by locals by adopting tourist-focused business strategies to increase their social mobility, albeit with great risk involved. By participating in modernity, culture has become a tangible product that tourists seek in Southeast Asia, driven by the economic success of developed nations and their desire to seek the “exotic”.

References

Acciaioli, G. (1985). Culture as Art: From Practice to Spectacle in Indonesia. Canberra Anthropology, 8(1&2), 148 – 17

Adams, K.M. (2018). Revisiting "Wonderful Indonesia": Tourism, Economy and Society. In: Hefner, R.W (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Indonesia. New York: Routledge, 197-207

Anggraini L.M. (2017) A Local Sense of Place for Cultural Sustainability: Reconstruction of Place Identity in Kuta, Bali. In: Saufi A., Andilolo I., Othman N., Lew A. (eds.) Balancing Development and Sustainability in Tourism Destinations. Singapore: Springer

Berger, A.A. (2013a). Bali Tourism. New York: Haworth Press.

Berger, A.A. (2013b). Thailand Tourism. New York: Routledge.

Bishop, R., Robinson, L.S. (1998). Points of Departure: Catalysts and Contexts. In: Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle. New York: Routledge: 1-15.

Fagertun, A. (2017). Labour in Paradise: Gender, Class and Social Mobility in the Informal Tourism Economy of Urban Bali, Indonesia. The Journal of Development Studies, 53(3), 313-345

Jeffreys, S. (1999). Globalizing sexual exploitation: sex tourism and the traffic in women. Leisure Studies, 18(3): 179-196

Li, T.M. (2000). Articulating indigenous identity in Indonesia: resource politics and the tribal slot. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 42(1): 149-79

MacRae, G. (2011). Rice Farming in Bali. Critical Asian Studies, 43(1): 69-9

Ong, A. (1988). The Production of Possession: Spirits and the Multinational Corporation in Malaysia. American Ethnologist, 15 (1): 28-42

Pedersen, L., Dharmiasih, W. (2015). The Enchantment of Agriculture: State Decentering and Irrigated Rice Production in Bali. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 16(2): 141-156

Picard, M. (1990). "Cultural Tourism" in Bali: Cultural Performances as Tourist Attraction. Indonesia, 49(1): 37-74

Sinclair, M.T. (1997). Issues and theories of gender and work in tourism. In: Sinclair, M.T. (ed.) Gender, Work and Tourism. London: Routledge: 1-15

Smith, V.L. (1990). Geographical Implications of “Drifter” Tourism Boracay, Philippines. Tourism Recreation Research, 15(1): 34-42

Truong, T-D. (1983). The Dynamics of Sex Tourism: The Case of Southeast Asia. Development and Change, 14(4): 533-553

UNODC (2016). Global Report on Trafficking in Persons 2016. United Nations publication, Sales No. E.16.IV.6

[painthropologist]

"defend your thesis" why are you attacking my thesis

[painthropologist]

Book review: Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Jeanne Favret-Saada, 1980)

This literature review was written in 2020 for my Bachelor's degree in Social Anthropology.

Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (2010) is an ethnographic account of peasant superstitions in the Bocage country when challenged by the modernising France of the 1960s. The monograph deals with the ways in which cosmopolitan and rural French navigate beliefs of spells, witches, and ‘unwitchers’ through the cultural forces which mobilise them. While the monograph principally deals with the narrative and creative function of language in Bocage witchcraft, it is worth considering Deadly Words in the wider context of assessing the impact of modernity in rural France, and what it entails both nationally and in regards to the social mechanisms of mid-20th century Europe.

In order to understand and be privy to witchcraft in the Bocage, the author suggests that one must be credulous, that is, susceptible to be “caught” in spells. Diagnosing witchcraft is usually a manifold process, one which outlines the social stratification of the Bocage. While Christian priests and exorcists are meant to be the first point of contact regarding supernatural activity, peasants are usually dismissed to seek medical attention instead (97). What the author terms ‘ordinary misfortune’ (15) is the line backed by powerful social agencies, such as the Church and medical science. This process of dismissal demonstrates how official incredulity reinforces local superstition and reliance on country unwitchers, which is further compounded by the suspicion Bocage peasants treat urban Others they interact with (106). It also highlights the frustrations which witchcraft believers have with official incredulity, and the violent nature of unwitching can be considered an antagonism to mainstream religion in the Bocage (104). The environment of distrust reflects rural resistance towards the transformative force of modernity, particularly with regards to adopting hegemonic beliefs and practices as a means of integrating with wider cosmopolitan France. Higher social agencies within French society as such ‘constitute both the social order, and since this order prevails, social ‘reality’’ (15).

Post-war France, in its desire to uphold and invent a European image, adhered to the Weberian notion of modernity whereby those unable to adapt ‘would find their society arrested at the point of transition or mired in traditionalism’ (Wolf, 2010: 12). The aspirations to a collective French identity associated with civilized, cosmopolitan and equally modern citizens could thus be threatened by those who belonged to what was considered the France of the past. The ‘backwardness’ of the Bocage, whose people were unable or unwilling to abandon their ‘irrational’ beliefs, presented such a threat to the desired French identity, and superstitions were to be curtailed by skepticism and derision by powerful and official social agencies. As such, civil society at large succeeded in alienating the Bocage peasants by not only subjecting their beliefs to open ridicule in tabloid journalism (33-5), but also by causing them to construct around themselves a further affect of secrecy and suspicion against the cosmopolitan French. Argyrou (1996) argues that in their search for a European identity, Cypriots ‘are constituted as Western subjects’ (183). Likewise, the Bocage peasants can be considered subjects to the force of French modernity, in that they are pressured to adapt to European ideals of rationality and secularism by discarding their superstitions. 

Aspirations to cosmopolitanism have been largely related to France and French culture since the Enlightenment (Delanty & Rumford, 2005: 75), and as such, there is a historical basis to the intrinsic notion of Frenchness equating with cosmopolitanism. This bias is still largely reflected in Favret-Saada’s recounting of the tabloids who ridiculed the Bocage unwitchers (32-6), and the amused scorn with which doctors dismissed those who claimed to be bewitched (97-109). Witchcraft beliefs thereby act as a form of Othering in Bocage society, delineating the boundaries between the ‘nonsense’ local theories ‘which peasants can afford to adopt’ and the ‘attitude of educated people who know how to handle causal relations correctly’ (5). Cultural translation, which ‘transforms, or dislocates, both subject and object’ (Delanty & Rumford: 41), is a key feature of modernity and modernising projects. 

In dislocating social actors and their roles as subjects and objects, in this case Bocage peasants from an increasingly globalised urban France, the Other is a threatening abstract entity which takes form in witchcraft or a unified national identity. According the author, ‘by talking of the native as an object, as someone ‘other’…we reach the possibility of a discourse on a different culture.’ (27). However, this Othering is not unilateral; it also succeeds in marking outsider identities around which Bocage locals can navigate cautiously to avoid betraying their beliefs. Superstitious peasants adopt secrecy as a device to guard them from the critique of outsiders, but in doing so, ‘the bewitched himself only reinforces his own isolation’ by intentionally creating a divide between himself and those who prescribe to modern rational thought. Favret-Saada’s emphasis on the omnipresence of an Other on the topic of witchcraft alludes to the way in which peasants of the Bocage are estranged from the hegemonic behaviours and beliefs of cosmopolitan France. By ascribing herself Other status while in the Bocage, the perspectives of both the local peasants and urban French are portrayed as discordant dichotomies preoccupied with navigating modernity. 

In reflexively considering her cosmopolitan background, Favret-Saada remarks on the cultural difference she experiences during her ethnographic research, chalked down principally to fundamental values such as education and credulity to witchcraft’s existence (106). This clash between educated modernity and traditional superstition is alluded to repeatedly throughout the monograph, through the author’s often self-denigrating reflexivity. Reflexivity is a unique hallmark of Deadly Words. Favret-Saada does not portray herself as intellectually superior to her ethnographic subjects in the Bocage, and does not attempt to disguise her feelings of dislocation in the region as a cosmopolitan citizen of not just France, but of Europe. Rather, she Others herself and those who share her socio-economic background from that of the peasants in the Bocage. Much of Favret-Saada’s reflexivity is demonstrated in the ways she manages expectations of local life against her actual ethnographic fieldwork. Her confusion and disappointment in being unable to immediately access the world of Bocage witchcraft is similar that of Benson’s (2011) British migrants in rural France negotiate their understandings of locality through their culturally-informed imagining of country life. Locality in Favret-Saada’s case, rather than being territorial, is as such behavioural. She is accepted into the Bocage world of witchcraft by demonstrating to the locals that she, as an urban educated French citizen, is also susceptible to being ‘caught’ in spells (14). 

As such, believers of witchcraft are persistently alienated by the growing importance of modernity to French and European identities. The ‘fight to the death’ (95) between a witch and their chosen victim could also be considered a fight to the death of local Bocage culture in favour of a hegemonic Hobbesian civil society of self-mastery, rationality and civility (Delanty & Rumford). Spells are viewed as a sign of the potency of their casters, and magic attacks on the impotent victim reflects a struggle for power centred upon a ‘constantly recurring overlap of biological, moral and economic planes’ (113). Power, potency and social hierarchy are thus intrinsically interlinked in the Bocage; witches are considered ‘superpotent’ and prey on others to assert their force, ‘beginning with one’s inferiors’ (109). The resulting struggle for power can also be viewed as the self-victimising bewitched actively participating in their own subjectification under a greater entity (in this case spells), often associated with a loss of agency and self-identity (Argyrou, 1996). Social hierarchies are as such revealed in questioning the motives of a suspected witch, which are often based on rivalry and discordant relations between local social actors.

To be bewitched in the Bocage is to lose power over one’s agency and self-mastery, thereby becoming an impotent victim. The loss of agency experienced under the rapidly encroaching influence of modernity is not only a threat to the traditional villages, ways of life and social hierarchies, but also to the superstitions they guard against incredulous Others. Deadly Words is a case study into the dying belief of country witchcraft in the face of the Europeanizing France of the 1960s. Urban civil society’s concerns with assimilating to a collectively imagined European image is reflected in the anxieties of the older generations of the Bocage, who relate to notions of power, agency, and Othering through the metaphor of witchcraft. The hegemonic social structures of modernity represent overpowering forces which challenge the people of the Bocage, in the form of official social agencies such as the Church and medical science. Favret-Saada relies on reflexivity in deconstructing her own ethnography, and in doing so reveals how the increasingly hegemonic societal norms of a cosmopolitan, collective French identity are navigated in the Bocage by the bewitched. 

References

Argyrou, V. (1996). The Dialectics of Symbolic Domination. In: Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: the wedding as symbolic struggle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170-183

Benson, M.C. (2011). Negotiating Locality. In: Smith, A.T. The British in Rural France: Lifestyle Migration and the Ongoing Quest for a Better Way of Life. Wiltshire: Manchester University Press, DOI: 10.7228/manchester/9780719082498.001.0001

Delanty, G. & Rumford, C. (2005). Rethinking Europe: Social theory and the implications of Europeanization. New York: Routledge

Favret-Saada, J. (1980). Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Lӧfgren, O. (2012). European Tourism. In: Kockel, U., Nic Craith, M., Frykman, J. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 339-354

Lowenthal, D. (1985). How We Know the Past. In: The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 185-259

Macdonald, S. (2012). Presencing Europe’s Pasts. In: Kockel, U., Nic Craith, M., Frykman, J. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 233-252

Wolf, E. (2010). Europe and the People without History. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press

[painthropologist]

So very pleased to announce my latest academic writing contribution will be published in December this year, which is a chapter in the upcoming anthology by Bloomsbury Academic, 'Germanic and Slavic Paganisms: Security Threats and Resiliency'.

I'd like to extend an enormous thank you to Ross Downing for being an incredible mentor and editor, and for giving me the opportunity to get involved in this anthology.

There was a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and confusion that went into writing my chapter on transhumanism as a mode of circumventing extremist thought in Pagan circles, but I'm very proud of it and of all the wonderful authors who contributed to this tome. I sincerely hope you enjoy it.

[painthropologist]

Hey everyone. I'm really upset rn but much longer description of this fundraiser below the cut as it's quite the ramble.

My private PhD funding was immediately cut without warning this week, leaving me with no option but to crowdfund the next half year of studies (Sept-Jan 2024/5).

As suggested by some friends, I have made a crowdfund for my tuition fees for the next academic year. I have only listed half a year's tuition to start with as I will be on fieldwork next year, and will have a slight reduction in fees over that period. If I need to by then I will start a new fundraiser but I want to be totally transparent about how much money I am raising and where it is going.

I need to have the full amount raised by early September. Anyway this is a massive amount of money and if I even get close I'll be grateful. I am looking at every possible open funding option, I have considered a loan but wasn't eligible (both in SG and UK). This is a really a mortifying last resort. I'm sorry.

Over this period I will be opening my books for editing and writing commissions again. Please watch this space for announcements, I cannot start immediately as I'm currently at a really busy point in the term.

Anyway, thank you for reading this far. I'm holding out hope I get academic funding at some point in the next few months because I can't fathom the thought of my entire life crumbling around me again.

Sceptical about the veracity of this crowdfund? Want to know more about my research? Head over to my public anthropology blog, @painthropologist or shoot me a DM! I love talking academia!

[painthropologist]

Book review: Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (Jeanne Favret-Saada, 1980)

This literature review was written in 2020 for my Bachelor's degree in Social Anthropology.

Jeanne Favret-Saada’s Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (2010) is an ethnographic account of peasant superstitions in the Bocage country when challenged by the modernising France of the 1960s. The monograph deals with the ways in which cosmopolitan and rural French navigate beliefs of spells, witches, and ‘unwitchers’ through the cultural forces which mobilise them. While the monograph principally deals with the narrative and creative function of language in Bocage witchcraft, it is worth considering Deadly Words in the wider context of assessing the impact of modernity in rural France, and what it entails both nationally and in regards to the social mechanisms of mid-20th century Europe.

In order to understand and be privy to witchcraft in the Bocage, the author suggests that one must be credulous, that is, susceptible to be “caught” in spells. Diagnosing witchcraft is usually a manifold process, one which outlines the social stratification of the Bocage. While Christian priests and exorcists are meant to be the first point of contact regarding supernatural activity, peasants are usually dismissed to seek medical attention instead (97). What the author terms ‘ordinary misfortune’ (15) is the line backed by powerful social agencies, such as the Church and medical science. This process of dismissal demonstrates how official incredulity reinforces local superstition and reliance on country unwitchers, which is further compounded by the suspicion Bocage peasants treat urban Others they interact with (106). It also highlights the frustrations which witchcraft believers have with official incredulity, and the violent nature of unwitching can be considered an antagonism to mainstream religion in the Bocage (104). The environment of distrust reflects rural resistance towards the transformative force of modernity, particularly with regards to adopting hegemonic beliefs and practices as a means of integrating with wider cosmopolitan France. Higher social agencies within French society as such ‘constitute both the social order, and since this order prevails, social ‘reality’’ (15).

Post-war France, in its desire to uphold and invent a European image, adhered to the Weberian notion of modernity whereby those unable to adapt ‘would find their society arrested at the point of transition or mired in traditionalism’ (Wolf, 2010: 12). The aspirations to a collective French identity associated with civilized, cosmopolitan and equally modern citizens could thus be threatened by those who belonged to what was considered the France of the past. The ‘backwardness’ of the Bocage, whose people were unable or unwilling to abandon their ‘irrational’ beliefs, presented such a threat to the desired French identity, and superstitions were to be curtailed by skepticism and derision by powerful and official social agencies. As such, civil society at large succeeded in alienating the Bocage peasants by not only subjecting their beliefs to open ridicule in tabloid journalism (33-5), but also by causing them to construct around themselves a further affect of secrecy and suspicion against the cosmopolitan French. Argyrou (1996) argues that in their search for a European identity, Cypriots ‘are constituted as Western subjects’ (183). Likewise, the Bocage peasants can be considered subjects to the force of French modernity, in that they are pressured to adapt to European ideals of rationality and secularism by discarding their superstitions. 

Aspirations to cosmopolitanism have been largely related to France and French culture since the Enlightenment (Delanty & Rumford, 2005: 75), and as such, there is a historical basis to the intrinsic notion of Frenchness equating with cosmopolitanism. This bias is still largely reflected in Favret-Saada’s recounting of the tabloids who ridiculed the Bocage unwitchers (32-6), and the amused scorn with which doctors dismissed those who claimed to be bewitched (97-109). Witchcraft beliefs thereby act as a form of Othering in Bocage society, delineating the boundaries between the ‘nonsense’ local theories ‘which peasants can afford to adopt’ and the ‘attitude of educated people who know how to handle causal relations correctly’ (5). Cultural translation, which ‘transforms, or dislocates, both subject and object’ (Delanty & Rumford: 41), is a key feature of modernity and modernising projects. 

In dislocating social actors and their roles as subjects and objects, in this case Bocage peasants from an increasingly globalised urban France, the Other is a threatening abstract entity which takes form in witchcraft or a unified national identity. According the author, ‘by talking of the native as an object, as someone ‘other’…we reach the possibility of a discourse on a different culture.’ (27). However, this Othering is not unilateral; it also succeeds in marking outsider identities around which Bocage locals can navigate cautiously to avoid betraying their beliefs. Superstitious peasants adopt secrecy as a device to guard them from the critique of outsiders, but in doing so, ‘the bewitched himself only reinforces his own isolation’ by intentionally creating a divide between himself and those who prescribe to modern rational thought. Favret-Saada’s emphasis on the omnipresence of an Other on the topic of witchcraft alludes to the way in which peasants of the Bocage are estranged from the hegemonic behaviours and beliefs of cosmopolitan France. By ascribing herself Other status while in the Bocage, the perspectives of both the local peasants and urban French are portrayed as discordant dichotomies preoccupied with navigating modernity. 

In reflexively considering her cosmopolitan background, Favret-Saada remarks on the cultural difference she experiences during her ethnographic research, chalked down principally to fundamental values such as education and credulity to witchcraft’s existence (106). This clash between educated modernity and traditional superstition is alluded to repeatedly throughout the monograph, through the author’s often self-denigrating reflexivity. Reflexivity is a unique hallmark of Deadly Words. Favret-Saada does not portray herself as intellectually superior to her ethnographic subjects in the Bocage, and does not attempt to disguise her feelings of dislocation in the region as a cosmopolitan citizen of not just France, but of Europe. Rather, she Others herself and those who share her socio-economic background from that of the peasants in the Bocage. Much of Favret-Saada’s reflexivity is demonstrated in the ways she manages expectations of local life against her actual ethnographic fieldwork. Her confusion and disappointment in being unable to immediately access the world of Bocage witchcraft is similar that of Benson’s (2011) British migrants in rural France negotiate their understandings of locality through their culturally-informed imagining of country life. Locality in Favret-Saada’s case, rather than being territorial, is as such behavioural. She is accepted into the Bocage world of witchcraft by demonstrating to the locals that she, as an urban educated French citizen, is also susceptible to being ‘caught’ in spells (14). 

As such, believers of witchcraft are persistently alienated by the growing importance of modernity to French and European identities. The ‘fight to the death’ (95) between a witch and their chosen victim could also be considered a fight to the death of local Bocage culture in favour of a hegemonic Hobbesian civil society of self-mastery, rationality and civility (Delanty & Rumford). Spells are viewed as a sign of the potency of their casters, and magic attacks on the impotent victim reflects a struggle for power centred upon a ‘constantly recurring overlap of biological, moral and economic planes’ (113). Power, potency and social hierarchy are thus intrinsically interlinked in the Bocage; witches are considered ‘superpotent’ and prey on others to assert their force, ‘beginning with one’s inferiors’ (109). The resulting struggle for power can also be viewed as the self-victimising bewitched actively participating in their own subjectification under a greater entity (in this case spells), often associated with a loss of agency and self-identity (Argyrou, 1996). Social hierarchies are as such revealed in questioning the motives of a suspected witch, which are often based on rivalry and discordant relations between local social actors.

To be bewitched in the Bocage is to lose power over one’s agency and self-mastery, thereby becoming an impotent victim. The loss of agency experienced under the rapidly encroaching influence of modernity is not only a threat to the traditional villages, ways of life and social hierarchies, but also to the superstitions they guard against incredulous Others. Deadly Words is a case study into the dying belief of country witchcraft in the face of the Europeanizing France of the 1960s. Urban civil society’s concerns with assimilating to a collectively imagined European image is reflected in the anxieties of the older generations of the Bocage, who relate to notions of power, agency, and Othering through the metaphor of witchcraft. The hegemonic social structures of modernity represent overpowering forces which challenge the people of the Bocage, in the form of official social agencies such as the Church and medical science. Favret-Saada relies on reflexivity in deconstructing her own ethnography, and in doing so reveals how the increasingly hegemonic societal norms of a cosmopolitan, collective French identity are navigated in the Bocage by the bewitched. 

References

Argyrou, V. (1996). The Dialectics of Symbolic Domination. In: Tradition and Modernity in the Mediterranean: the wedding as symbolic struggle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 170-183

Benson, M.C. (2011). Negotiating Locality. In: Smith, A.T. The British in Rural France: Lifestyle Migration and the Ongoing Quest for a Better Way of Life. Wiltshire: Manchester University Press, DOI: 10.7228/manchester/9780719082498.001.0001

Delanty, G. & Rumford, C. (2005). Rethinking Europe: Social theory and the implications of Europeanization. New York: Routledge

Favret-Saada, J. (1980). Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Lӧfgren, O. (2012). European Tourism. In: Kockel, U., Nic Craith, M., Frykman, J. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 339-354

Lowenthal, D. (1985). How We Know the Past. In: The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 185-259

Macdonald, S. (2012). Presencing Europe’s Pasts. In: Kockel, U., Nic Craith, M., Frykman, J. A Companion to the Anthropology of Europe. Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 233-252

Wolf, E. (2010). Europe and the People without History. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press

[painthropologist]

Thinking of sharing some essays I wrote in my BA and MA days, watch this space! They are not pain related, but they're still alright (at least they got good grades, so they can't be too terrible right?)

I have a whole array of different topics across major topics in social anthropology, but none of them are pain related. At this point I've just got to give you all something to read...

[painthropologist]

Just finished an essay on ritual that I would love to share here after my RO is submitted as this will form a good chunk of it. I should just write essays for fun tbh.

[painthropologist]

Tips for Spotting Bad & Bullshit History

There's no way to make sure you never fall for historical misinformation, and I'm not expecting anyone to fact-check every detail of everything they read unless they're getting paid for it. But you can make an effort to avoid the Worst Takes.

Ask yourself – if I wanted to verify this, where would I start? If you look at a statement and can’t actually find any facts to check, then you already know it’s bullshit.

Read the Wikipedia article on weasel words. Some experts say it’s very helpful!

Look for specifics: a who, a what, a where, a when. If one of those is missing or very broad, that’s a red flag. Statements need to be rooted in a time and a place. “People in the past have always…” Nope.

Vague is bad. Unless you’re looking at a deliberate large-scale overview that’s being broad and generalizing on purpose, you want names and dates and places and primary sources, pictures and quotes and examples.

But an example is not a trend. There’s a difference between what’s possible and what’s common, and history is full of exceptions and outliers. Extremely unusual people and events are overrepresented in the historical record (because nobody writes down what’s normal,) and they can tell us a lot about history, but they’re not directly representative of their place or time. Imagine a historian trying to reconstruct the 21st century based solely on Kiwifarm.

If a historian is competent or even just trying, you won’t have to go digging for sources, they will be shoved right into your face. Not out of mere academic rigor, but because a person who found them, either first- or second hand, is proud to have found them. People who have proof want to show you the proof, people who figured something out will want to show you their work, walk you through it. If they don’t, ask yourself – how do you know this? And - why won’t you tell me how you know this?

Someone might have a legit historical source, and then try to stretch it to cover times and places where it no longer applies. What’s true of 12th century England may not be true of 14th century Venice, even though both are “Medieval Europe,” so watch for those stretches.

Anecdotes are fine, they reveal a lot about people’s values and perceptions, pro historians often use them for context, but what anecdotes are not is factual truth. Notice when someone is feeding you cute anecdotes.

If someone attributes a large-scale social or cultural transformation to a single person or event, yeah that’s usually bullshit. Chances are, that person was part of a larger trend, a small link in a long chain. You can still appreciate their contribution, just put it in context!

Second-guess anyone who acts like they possess secret knowledge that the Media or Academia (or somebody) is hiding, they’re usually bullshit. Remember, if something has a Wikipedia article, it’s not actually a dark secret.

Remember that if it happened in the past sixty years, tons of people will still remember it, and you can literally just go and ask them.

Learn to recognise a smear tactic. Did this person really fuck dogs, or was their posthumous biography written by their worst enemy? Should we take it at face value? Also learn to recognise overt propaganda in the opposite direction: is the king that great or does he have a court historian on retainer? Remember that people sometimes *lie* in their autobiographies.

It’s fine to speculate about what “could” or “might” have happened, professional historians also fill the gaps in the sources with the occasional educated guess. But failing to differentiate clearly between fact and speculation is a huge mistake.

Do not seek validation in history. It's not there. I’m not saying you should approach history in an impersonal, apolitical way, of course not. Our present situation influences our interpretation of history, and it should. What I’m saying is, try not to hang too much of your individual or group identity on a historical narrative. Especially if it’s bullshit. You’re worthy and human because you’re worthy and human today, not because of the deeds and misdeeds of people in the past.

[painthropologist]

Hi everyone! For those of you not in the know, Rune Hjarnø Rasmussen (Nordic Animism) released a new book recently, titled 'Aun: Cannibal Kings, Cosmic Healing and the Recovery of a Nordic Tradition'.

The Year of Aun 2023 was a big year for many Heathens as it marked the pre-Christian octennial celebration cycle, based around the ancient Nordic lunisolar calendar. Traditionally, these celebrations would take place at sacred sites such as Uppsala. However, the Year of Aun was celebrated by many people around the world in their own ways.

Anyway, just wanted to give you a heads up about this book as I believe it's essential reading for all Heathens, animists, Pagans, and anyone interested in historical and contemporary Heathenry. Plus, my face is inside!

[painthropologist]

This came up in my memories from two years ago. Pleased to report my writing style has changed little since then.

[painthropologist]

This is a documentary on extreme body modification from 2005 called Modify. Have you seen it? What did you think about it?

[painthropologist]

AMA let's get this blog started! Inbox is open!

[painthropologist]

Hi everyone! I am in very early stages of library research at the moment, and will be undertaking pilot research this summer and proper fieldwork (hopefully) by the end of the year.

I'll dump anything interesting here and treat it as a sort of field diary. Readings, essays, musings, literature reviews, and visual ethnography are what you can expect!

[painthropologist]

Welcome to Painthropology!

Please note that this blog will contain graphic depictions of physical pain ordeals such as hook suspensions. Please proceed with caution if you are squeamish!

My name is Natalia Lee and I am a first year PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. I'm a Heathen (Asatruar), animist, and a member of The Church of Pain. My research interests include ecstatic, sacred, and phenomenal pain, as well as contemporary and historical Nordic religion.

My study focuses on the role pain plays in the lives of contemporary Heathens and adjacent Nordic nature religions in Norway and the UK. This can mean fringe practices like factoring in pain as a physical ordeal ritual, and others who use their religion as a way of negotiating pain in their lives. This can include, but is not limited to, chronic and mental pain. In other words, I'm looking at pain as more than just an intentional act of devotional sacrifice, but also how it affects one's relationships to their religion.

Animism is the belief that everything is connected to nature at a greater cosmic, but also physical level. It is also a core belief of just about every nature religion I can think of. I'm using animism as a framework as I believe it makes for a better understanding of nature religions from the "inside out". A bit of personal bias, if you will. Animism helps us understand pain as pain is part of a natural response to something, and animism is all about understanding nature.

I combine my background as a hobby hook suspension practitioner with my positionality as an anthropologist, a Heathen, and Church of Pain member. My research aims to uncover the complex ways in which pain interacts with its subjects in a religious context.

I hope you join me on my research journey over the next few years. Thanks for looking, and feel free to write in with questions!