Tracing plasticity in the history of anthropological thought

Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, Preface, p. 14

"At the same time, nineteenth-century efforts to use Darwinian biology to explain cultural differences and similarities have come full circle. These efforts at biologizing culture gyrate around the great god's natural selection and reproductive success. Yet everyone knows (or should know) that the most distinctive attribute of culture is precisely its plasticity and its ability to evolve independently of changes in the genome."

Tracing surplus in the history of anthropological thought

p. 362, Marxist Approaches in Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 1975.

"Most of Marx's analysis of relations of production dealt with class societies. He showed that the dynamics of class 'were rooted in the appropriation of surplus-labor-as either living or embodied labor-by a class of non-producers:

The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer (39, p. 217).

Following the work of Balibar (4), a number of Marxist anthropologists, such as Terray (56)and Rey (49), picked up on this citation from Marx and applied it to their analysis of precapitalist societies. They argued that Engels' tendency to define class in terms of a property relation-ownership of the means of production-
is a distortion of the essential determination of class, i.e. the exploitation of the producer by the nonproducer. Rey specifically tried to show that in the "lineage mode of production" in Africa surplus-labor is extracted by elders from dependent junior men.

Rey's emphasis on the category of surplus-labor has been analytically fruitful for anthropologists since it centers attention on the dialectical determination of surplus in a Marxist framework. Whereas cultural materialists and the classical political economists insist that surplus is defined uniquely by technological parameters (productivity and the minimum subsistence requirements necessary for the biological reproduction of labor), Marx, in his analysis of capitalism, argued that the subsistence bundle of workers is socially, not biologically, determined. Both its composition and its size vary with the use-values that workers demand, and can therefore express the outcome of workers' struggle for a larger share of their own surplus product."

esten dosttan kitap onerileri...

In the 17th century, Descartes put forth the metaphor of the machine to explain the functioning of living beings. In the 18th century, La Mettrie extended the metaphor to man. The clock was then used as the paradigm of the machine. In the 20th century, this metaphor still held but the clock was replaced by a computer. Nowadays, the organism is viewed as a robot obeying signals emanating from a computer program controlled by genetic information. This book shows that such a conception leads to contradictions not only in the theory of biology but also in its experimental research program, thereby impeding its development. The analysis of this problem is based on the most recent experimental data obtained in molecular biology as well as the history and philosophy of biology. It shows that the machine theory did not succeed in breaking with Aristotle s finalism. The book presents a new approach to biological systems based on cellular Darwinism. Genes are ruled by probabilistic mechanisms allowing cells to differentiate stochastically. Embryo development is not governed by a determinist genetic program but by natural selection occurring among cell populations inside the organism. This theory has considerable philosophical consequences. Man may be a machine but he is a random one.

Contents: Five Arguments for a New Theory of Biological Individuation; What is a Probabilistic Process?; The Determinism of Molecular Biology; The Contradiction in Genetic Determinism; Self-Organisation Does Not Resolve the Contradiction in Genetic Determinism; Hetero-Organisation; Biology s Blind Spot; A Research Programme and Ethical Principle Based on Ontophylogenesis

The Origin of Individuals, Jean-Jacques Kupjec, 2009.

işgal kültürü

"To begin with the problematic side of #Occupy, I would first of all point to this uncritical reenactment of the old, largely outmoded forms of protest from the past fifty years.  For all my criticisms of the New Left of the 1960s, at least its members had the courage to critique their predecessors in the Old Left.  Perhaps it was the intergenerational animus that existed at that time, but one of things that has disappointed me about this latest movement is that it hasn’t had that Oedipal moment, when they finally kill the New Left.  Only David Graeber seems to gesture in this direction, with his admonition against the “obnoxious, self-aggrandizing macho leadership styles of the ’60s New Left.”

In leveling this criticism, I have in mind the more “carnivalesque” elements of the movement — the puppets, the “Zombie march,” the harlequinism, and the emphasis on spectacle.  While I admit that these have some utility and even some precedent within the practice of revolutionary politics (going back several centuries), these tactics have limited effect.  The quasi-Situationist method adopted by some of the protestors strikes me as being quite prone to narcissism and exhibitionism.  Even with earlier iterations of this festival mentalité, such as the great celebrations of the French Revolution, writers as different as Hippolyte Taine and Petr Kropotkin both considered these displays excessive.  Kropotkin, who regarded Taine as a vulgar bourgeois historian, had to agree that these festivals had their limitations.  “Taine disparages the festivals of the Revolution,” he observed, “and it is true that those of 1793 and 1794 were often too theatrical.”

The theatrical routines I witnessed down at Liberty Plaza prior to the November 15th eviction often seemed to me politically empty.  As I see it, the crucial difference between the subversive potential that thinkers like Bakhtin saw in the carnivalesque elements in the novels of Rabelais and the largely apolitical celebratory atmosphere of modern demonstrations has to do with objective sociological developments that have taken place in the interim.  For the folk essence of political carnivals staged in societies where agrarian peasant culture still predominated has been lost, along with its freshness and ingenuous naïveté.  With the disintegration of the “organic community” described by Tönnies under modern times, the immediate connection such festive practices held with cultural conventions has disappeared.  It has instead been replaced by the contrived political carnival of hypermediated youth culture.  I hate to be a buzzkill, but this atmosphere provokes my polemical temperament."

Interview with Ross Wolfe, http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/interviews/interview-with-ross-wolfe-conducted-by-c-derick-varn/

bizdeki occupy etkisini retrospektif düşünmek için güzel başlangıç noktaları. Türkiye'de bence Ödipal moment hiç olmadı 60'ların 70'lerin solunu öldüren...Starbucks işgalinde Foti Benlisoy geldiğinde 90'ların hep 60-70'ler gölgesinde geçtiğini, bir önceki kuşağı öldürme (simgesel olarak herşeyden önce) cüretinin eksik kaldığını söylemişti....2000'lerde belki de bu gölge iyice çöktü ve bir de Ergenekon dolambaçlarıyla tam bir trajediye dönüştü..."Eski solcunun" bir komedi nesnesi yapılması aslında eskinin yeni bir hakikat ile ikame edilememesinden ötürü. Genelde hep - biraz da hafıza fetişizmine kapılıp - eskiyi unutmak, hatırlamak ile takılı klaınca bu ikame hep erteleniyor. Zizek'in TS Eliot'a referansla dedigi gibi bazen bir gelenege bagli kalmanin tek yolu inancsizlik ile sapkınlık arasında bir tercihtir. Bu tercihi yapmaktan fazlasıyla çekinmek, bence yeni nesildeki tıkanıklık, eskiyi unutmak veya yeterince bilmemek değil. Süreklilik (continuity) arzusu kopma arzusuna ağır basıyor. Belki de modernist bir moment eksikliği bu. Ki modernizm eleştirisi "organik cemaat" sahnelemeleriyle pek güzel uyuşuyor. Hakikatin tarihsel süreklilik ile ilişkisine dair de şu alıntı:

"a truth is the bearer of theoretical movements that form among themselves a historicity both profound and discontinuous. This is why an event always produces, in the minds of those who decide to be faithful to it, a retrospective genealogy of precursors. A precursor, as we know, is something of which we know only later that it came before. There is thus no novelty that does not try to forge a previously unknown historical depth, by bringing together a series of ideas previously dispersed in common consciousness, in order to herald a new lineage of the present. There is no truth, as new as it may be, which does not claim to be realizing an idea that was not already germinal in a largely unknown, or misinterpreted past. A revolution, as Marx already knew, cannot be produced without cloaking itself in the tatters of the past—politics being one of the major places where the new is revived along with the defeated ancestors of their time, whose torch shines again in the present configuration." (History and Event in Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux)

On heritage and colonialism

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/8966/colonial-planning-of-my-grandfather%E2%80%99s-hilltop-

"You see this hilltop? It all belongs to your grandfather.” This phrase was a recurring one on our family drives from Abu Dis to Jericho. I heard it from the first moment that I could comprehend words.  I cannot even remember who said it first. But it has been a constant refrain since childhood. Even today, however, at thirty-four years old, my mother, father, aunt, and grandmother repeat the statement as if they are saying it for the first time. The repetition is an assurance, a call, to never forget. They refuse to forget.  And even after so many years, I still respond with a perplexed “all of it?” as if hearing the news for the first time.  I refuse to forget.  “All of it.”  Today, when I travel alone with no one to remind me, I repeat: "This land belonged to my grandfather."  

Still, despite this historical bond with the land, despite the assurance of that history, despite the will to never forget,  all that lies on that  hilltop is as foreign to me as is the North Pole.  Today the settler at the gate only allowed me to enter a mere two hundred yards to the police station, which sits on the settlement’s periphery, and back. He made it clear I could only spend the time necessary to finish my paperwork.  I could not explore. I could not become familiar with my land.  And therefore, I continue to construct my familiarity with my ancestral heritage from a distance.

.....

From a distance, Ma’ale Adumim appears perfectly planned, each house a replica of the next. The homogeneity is in direct contrast to Palestinian towns, where homeowners, unbridled by urban plans, each add a bit of inconsistency to create the irrational landscape. Perhaps this homogeneity is only true for the part I can see from the road, the settlement’s oldest quarter dating all the way back to the late 1970s. Regardless of its prevalence, the pre-planned homogeneity, meant to give the sense of communal coherence, is the epitome of settler colonialism. It is colonial hegemony. "

A belated audience reaction… City Crossings, Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul

When discussing heritage today, the common place reaction that we give is that heritage is a field of power relations, a field of contestations for claiming the past. Therefore, we tend to ask questions like ‘whose heritage’, ‘who decides on heritage’, ‘who owns heritage sites’, ‘who renews them’ etc. That is, we tend to agree that heritage is always a “discriminatory editing of the past”, rather than representing the ultimate truth of a contextual past.

From this point on, one option is to reject heritage by declaring it an ideological artifice belonging to the powers that be. The second option is to accept it as a possible vocabulary for the oppressed, and to force the possible ways in which the powerless could make use of the term for practical struggles, usually for legal maneuvers, or for the virtue of the fact that heritage provides the subaltern with a vocabulary of opposition that could be accepted by the general public as viable. Yet, it is as if no one is really content with this binary, that sounds all too sociological, and also all too bracketed.

I would argue that the only way to critically engage with this scholarly and political discontent, is to take one step back, and target not heritage as a sociological field of power struggles, contested claims to the past, but target the ideological operation at work that, at a more fundamental level, defines time periods, objects, aesthetic forms, visibilities as ‘historical’ or ‘cultural’ and therefore worthy of heritage. That is, one needs to deal with not the object that is determined by adjectives ‘historical’ or ‘cultural’, but with determinatives. Today we should ask: what are worthy of being ‘historical’ or ‘cultural’ when defined in heritage terms?  How can we decipher this operation?

Even when we stand opposed to the concept of heritage, we tend to affirm its place as a sociological category of problem posing. To put it differently, an anti-heritage stance is not enough; the question is how to annihilate heritage as a conceptual terrain. The point is not to define heritage as a social field of power but to deal with the more fundamental artifice at work, and deconstruct the  ideological operation that defines objects as historical or cultural, which are then defined as worthy of being inherited. When we are stuck at the sociological analysis of the field of heritage politics, what we might be missing is this more fundamental ideological artifice that delimits the historical and the cultural, and defines it with reference to what ‘remains’, and what is to be done with the ‘remains’, or the infinite possibility of meanings to be attached to these remains. As such, the object of heritage claims, whether they are uttered by the powerful or the powerless, is never ‘the past’; but the ‘historical’ and the ‘cultural’ as defined by a present ideology.

The cultural-historical cannot be reduced to what remains, or to a present ideological operation that defines a relationship to past.  This is because past is never only what remains, or that which is possible to ‘be heir to’, therefore possible for being inherited. Past is as much filled with the heirless, those persons, objects, affects, visibilities, aesthetic visions that have never remained, or were not allowed heredity. [Deleuze would call this ‘pure memory’ in Bergsonism] To follow a suspended discussion; heritage is always a heritage of the soil, the land, and not the water or displacement or the dream of what lies beyond the horizon. Or, it is always a heritage of a determination or filiations whether historically true or mythical. What heritage does is to make the past telluric, translate the historical/anthropological into archeological; living into dead. This is how neighborhoods become targets of heritage interventions; social life is translated into living heritage; simply put, dead life. Etymologically, heritage is conditional upon the death of a hereditary ancestor: in heritage politics, the term commits a murder; that is, kills the past that fills the present and projects the past into the archeological.

Heritage inters history, and delimits the historical, limits it to that which remains in material, and wards off the never-actualized, and the always repressed. For this, we need to remember the historiographer’s impasse about the impossible documentation of the subaltern. Subaltern is that which the material culture bears no witness to. The binary of the tangible and intangible that is used in heritage vocabulary is false because the intangible is always already deduced from material remains, it is an interpretation of the documented.

As such, an emphasis on heritage forecloses the desire for the yet-to-come, that which never existed; or, it forecloses the possibility of redd-i miras, rejecting heritage. Especially when voiced through the myths of those who never owned land, heritage limits the imaginations of the landless to grounds and settlements, that is why, even when voiced in favor of the powerless, it can only be framed as ‘right to the city’. It feeds on a mechanism of desire that is already defining of their own landlessness. In Marxist terms, it is a bourgeois ideology that coaxes the non-owners into desiring the world of the owners.

This is most apparent in Turkey where the ruling power has in the recent years started referring to the historical and cultural context as “these soils” (bu topraklar). The more the culture is defined in telluric terms, the more it excludes that which has been displaced without material remains. For what has not remained and always displaced, a better trope is the river, which, surprisingly was never mentioned throughout the whole discussion on waters and seas. Rivers include violent mysteries and utopias at once; and they are nothing but displacements (flows). The bodies of the condemned are lumped to rivers for getting rid of. Rivers flow to a non-place, an atopia without horizons. Rivers carry that which is not seen but not interred, and are sources for imagining the beyond in an irreversible journey. Heritage refers to world as a topology of settlements, whereas rivers witness the world in its virtual multiplicity.

Binlerce senedir nehirler dünyayı görmeye çıkarlar

Binlerce senedir böyle öğrendik dünyanın birçok yerlerinde

            akan ırmakları, büyüyen bitkileri.

Bazı yosunlarla bazı eğreltiotlarıyla bazı balıklarla konuştum,

Dünyayı görmeyen kalmamış

 (ilhan berk)

entelektüel meslektir

Daha önceki bir posttan devam ederek düşünceler:

Teori-pratik sorunu, yalnızlaşan entelektüel (teori) ile halk (pratik) arasında bir kavuşma arayışı değildir.

Eğer entelektüel merkezciliği bırakacaksak, bunun yolu entelektüelin kendi suçluluğu ile coştuğu analizler değil, Bourdieu'nün saha dediği, ya da Gramsci'nin mevzii savaşı dediğine benzer bir şekilde, entelektüelliği bir kurumsal iş alanı olarak görüp içinde mevzi edinme mücadelesi vermektir. Mesela Rusya'da öğretmenler, akademisyenler, sanatçıların "Yaratıcı Emekçiler" gibi bir çatı altında beraber örgütlenme çabası buna bir örnek gösterilebilir.

Emrah Göker'in yazıları bence bunu yaptığı için özel bir yere sahip. Entelektüelin entelektüel-dışı alanla girdiği ilişkisel vektörlerden çok, meslektaşları ve iş-yeri paylaştıkları diğer emekçilerle (memurlar, taşeron çalışanlar) girdikleri iktisadi-siyasi ilişkiler, muhalefet için daha etkin olmalarının ötesinde, sınıf ilişkilerini kanlı-canlı taşımaları açısından ideolojik sis bulutu ile yüzleşmeye daha yatkın.

Tam da o kavuşma fantezisine kapıldıkça, sosyal/beşeri bilimciler zaman zaman çok eleştirdikleri bazı çağdaş sanat girişimlerine daha da benziyorlar.

Entelektüel edimlerin "lüzumsuz", "işe yaramaz" gibi terimlerle aşağılanması, bir tür faydacılık tınısı yapmasının da ötesinde, kot fabrikasında çalışan adamı "arkadaş kot modern ve lüzumsuz şeydir" diye muhalefete çağırmaya benziyor. Halbuki tam tersine, içeriğinin faydalı olup olmaması bakımından değil, sınıf süreçlerinde oynadığı (çift uçlu) rolün tahliline dayanmalı. Mesela Dumenil ve Levy'nin günümüz kapitalizmi için yaptıkları analizde olduğu gibi, bazı orta-sınıf emek biçimlerinin (clerical - ruhani? - sınıf) sömürü sürecindeki ara-rolünün anlaşılması gibi.

İçeriği lüzumsuz o kadar iş-kolu var ki...Ya da lüzumsuz değiller mi? Sanki komünizme dair ilkelci tasavvur her yere çoktan sızmış.