Comments on a found text: “Return to Acirema: Fragments regarding twenty‐first‐century Nacirema culture”
2023; Wiley; Volume: 125; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/aman.13871
ISSN1548-1433
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies
Resumo18 July 2101 Dr. Thomas Takagawa Department of History University of Tokyo 7-chome 3-1 Hongo Tokyo 113–8654 Japan Dear Dr. Takagawa, I hope this finds you very well. After the complete elimination of anthropology from universities across the globe, followed by the utter collapse of academic institutions in the former United States of America, I'm endlessly anxious about even the future of our own discipline—the history of science—given its political tones and possible invocations. But never mind this; let's try to live in the present rather than the past, despite the historian's task. While I was conducting archival research on my latest trip to Chicago (ill-advised, I might add, in the dead of February!), I came across this curious collection of papers that an anonymous anthropologist drafted in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Entitled “Return to Acirema: Fragments regarding Twenty-First-Century Nacirema Culture,” it is clearly meant to riff off of the twentieth-century anthropologist Horace Miner's (1956) essay “Body Ritual among the Nacirema.” As we both know, Miner's essay was renowned for the ways it turned the ethnographic gaze inward upon American society, making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. For the better part of the late twentieth century, Miner's essay became a canonical text in college classrooms, demonstrating cultural relativism by applying terms reserved for “the Other” to the American people. We don't see the systematic problematizing of the Other until, e.g., James Clifford and George Marcus's (1986) Writing Culture or Michel-Rolph Trouillot's article on the savage slot in the 1980s and early 1990s, but what I wish to meditate on here is why it is that Miner's essay would spark a series of reappraisals or reiterations. What does that (or what did it) attempt to accomplish? Moreover, why is it that we feel, as historians of this now extinct discipline, that Miner's essay worked and what I found in the archive and have enclosed below for your perusal doesn't? Sure, the papers are ethnographic fieldnotes—even if fragmented—the preferred stylistic form beloved by anthropologists, and they paint, quite successfully, a picture of a decaying society on the edge of some kind of violent rupture. The methodology remains the same as Miner's, but the inclination is distinct—the anthropologist of the late 2010s and early 2020s wants to critique the society, the country, that they've loved and left, so they practice that self-induced estrangement that is the hallmark of anthropological knowledge (thanks to Boas, Malinowski, and others). Yet this fails to be adequate, it seems. This account becomes agonizing—or rather, the anthropologist succumbs to agony rather than pulling off the satire Miner managed in the 1950s. I cannot recall if there was an “affective turn” in anthropology, this is more your expertise than mine, but maybe this is about emotion. Please do me the favor of following my footnotes—of journeying with me as we attempt to decipher this artifact together, speculating collaboratively on what it meant to convey. It's what the anthropologist would've wanted. All my best, Rose Navarrete École des hautes études en sciences sociales 54 Raspail 75006 Paris France [Document appended] Nearly 65 years have passed since an anthropologist ventured off to explore the body rituals of the Nacirema, a people who, until that moment, many suspected stood separate from most of the world.1 The Nacirema, he revealed, were just as prone to what anthropology happily calls “magical thinking” as other communities across the globe. This makes the Nacirema knack for “exceptionalism” all the more toxic and befuddling.2 These are a fearful people preoccupied with multiple notions of purity (and I do mean this both in regards to cleanliness of body and social demarcations that result in vicious racism), who harbor beliefs in witchcraft, whether they actively realize it or not. Despite priding themselves on their high level of social and economic development relative to the rest of the world in 1956, scientific inquiry was stifled by a number of Etihw conservative rulers, whose influence became particularly virulent from the 1970s onward. This divestment from science and education remains. And while the land mass we call Acirema had been previously politically stable, a purported stronghold of democracy, the territory (stolen from Suonegidni peoples, by the way) was on the cusp of a number of social movements in the late 1950s, where marginalized Nacirema—particularly ones from the Nacirfa diaspora—fought for basic civil rights. There is a distinct and palpable rot at the core of Nacirema society, and it is most evident in the steady rise of a collective resentment among its peasants (rural folk),3 who seek to, quite dangerously, marry religion with politics and elect a “divine-king” as ruler. This “divine-king” bears similarities to classical Mayan and ancient Egyptian notions of rulership, which posit that their king is sent from the gods, a deity in and of himself. Imbued with supernatural qualities, it becomes nearly impossible to ever depose of this ruler or critically assess his capacity to govern. Aside from the ascent of a fundamentalist political regime and the stripping of basic human rights, the Nacirema, who often dwell in large cities and possess diverse identities and ancestral spirits, live precariously. Many await police brutality and are murdered directly by state officials or indirectly by inadequate and unstable social, economic, and political institutions. The Nacirema described so long ago are markedly different. There is no doubt in my mind that the gap between then and now will only continue to widen. The elders do not recognize their children and, likewise, the children do not recognize—and, in fact, despise—their elders. For good reason, I would say, too. There is little evidence that their quality of life can improve without sustained warfare at home rather than abroad, as was once the case. Is it too soon to say that the bonds essential to creating and sustaining a society have eroded in this land? To the north, Adanac, another stolen territory, condemns the Nacirema way of life, and to the south, yet a third stolen territory, Ocixem waits nervously for the looming military invasion.4 After all, the driving factor behind all of these crumbling institutions, systems, and structures is an unchecked neoliberal system—capitalism—which places things before people. With their values entirely misplaced, the Nacirema struggle to make sense of their “brave new world.” A set of observations appear below from my fieldnotes. Forgive me for their brevity and distance. Industrial rot. That's what's all around me. Perhaps we can say that “development” came and left swiftly. The abundant corn and soy fields are littered with abandoned barns, silos, and the steel skeletons of elementary agricultural machinery, which is overreliant on chemicals to keep pests at bay. This demonstrates a major miscalculation and misunderstanding of science in this population. Agricultural workers, farmers, and others exposed to these methods are poisoned and suffer from cancer and other illnesses. It can be said that people here relate to ecology in a destructive manner; they do not comprehend and are, in fact, deeply hostile to alternatives for preserving fragile ecosystems. The avocado is an endangered fruit here. Elders assert that the avocado is a source of social and economic ill, sapping potential wealth from their children, especially when combined with toasted bread.5 The bee is also endangered. Without the bee, how will the Nacirema—and the world, more broadly—sustain itself? The fragile ecosystems will collapse if this disabuse of “science” continues. Clearly, the issue is that business entities in Acirema are immune from the rule of law.6 I reckon that the social institutions underpinning Nacirema society require reimaginings, but the atmosphere here is allergic to critical thinking. Driving around the heartland of Acirema, I notice that aside from the industrial rot and dilapidated or abandoned buildings, there are innumerable glossy, modern edifices, which resemble eerie warehouses or factories. A local farmer tells me these warehouses are sacred places of worship. I am struck by the ways the Nacirema have gravitated toward these unremarkable, nearly careless box-like constructions. Rising from the flat, yellow, and desolate landscapes like pimples, these holy-box factories attract hordes of Nacirema who pay homage to their deity, Susej, on his designated holy day of Yadnus. It seems that the religion many of its settlers brought with them has transformed, even radicalized in puzzling ways. Sure, their missionary work of incessant proselytization endures, but with a fresh set of insidious ramifications. Instead of (mis)placing their trust in a sacred text purportedly sent from the heavens, they turn to a single, charismatic man who interprets the text for them, hampering the development of critical thinking skills.7 This man—only rarely is it a woman—tells this segment of Nacirema society exactly what to think and attempts to define morality. Amid calls for love and acceptance, the leader expounds hatred by inciting fear of “the Other”—in this case, those Nacirema who, for the most part, do not look like Etihw settlers. Occasionally, during rituals at these holy boxes, the collective fervor of dancing and singing results in Nacirema uttering curious words that don't belong to any language I have ever encountered. Their charismatic leader heartily declares these episodes—which look very similar to either spirit possession or epileptic seizures—as the “word of Susej.” Yet how does he know the words of Susej if this deity lived more than 2,000 years ago? While the Nacirema seem to be more connected than ever to their main deity, this has not resulted in any kind of social progress or economic security. Their Yadnus rituals of congregating in the holy-box factories, and dancing and singing, as well as abiding by a number of spiritual holidays, does not deliver concrete results. It would appear that either the deity, Susej, is difficult to appease or has outright abandoned them. Perhaps Susej never existed, or Susej's father, Dog—the head of this cosmological pantheon—is angry. I don't have any ideas regarding how to correct this relationship. So, for the time being, the Nacirema will remain in hot pursuit of these “failed rituals.”8 I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in Acirema's Midwestern heartland, but this is because it seems to be the epicenter of unhappiness, the source, if you will, of societal destabilization. The people feel hard done by, and maybe it's true that they've been abandoned by their government. I found out that their plant life—cotton and corn seeds, for example—are patented. Unless the agriculturalists present a large sum of money so they can engage in “organic” farming practices, which simply resemble conventional agricultural practices over the course of humanity's existence up until now, they must enter into an uncomfortable bargain with Otnasnom. This corporate entity leaves the agriculturalist indebted, poisoned, and, ultimately, dead. It is like sucking the souls of those who endeavor to sustain society. I have never seen this level of toxicity in a society, and I have conducted research in France, Cuba, Peru, and Kenya. Acirema possesses a multitiered education system at the elementary and secondary level as well as at the postsecondary. Among the many tiers, there are community colleges, public or flagship universities, liberal arts colleges, and the Association of Vines, or privately endowed universities. The first two—community colleges and public universities—serve the poor or the anemic working class. Community colleges are stigmatized as cesspools of poorly performing high school graduates unable to score high enough on standardized examinations, while public universities are viewed as perfunctory spaces of education for most of the population. In fact, public universities are glorified in Nacirema cinema through the prism of sex—most films about the college experience highlight rituals of drinking and lust. And while the cost to attend these public universities may be nearly equivalent to that of the highly desirable liberal arts colleges and Association of Vines, the education offers no guarantee of success. Education, here, acts as another kind of pedigree; as part of the Nacirema's biography, it determines and shapes their opportunities in the future. If the Nacirema individual can afford to pay nearly a hundred thousand dollars a year, they can secure for themselves a better future—and in that instance, perhaps, climb the illustrious social ladder. Yet, the reality remains, from what I observed, that Nacirema education is segmented so that only the few can afford it. Most of the population borrows an enormous amount of money and remains in debt for most of their adulthood, paying nearly 1/3 to 1/2 of their monthly earnings back to a government that does not provide any social services. Keeping the Nacirema indebted would seem to be a way to prevent societal uprisings, and thus becomes a mode by which those in power can remain in power. There is something rather insidious about this system. So, in other words, much like every other social institution in this land, Nacirema education is structured by the desire to create socioeconomic asymmetry and solidify a stratified society where the illusion of “progress’” perpetually haunts the living and inculcates in them the spirit of capitalism.9 These are a people who, often quite willingly, work more than nearly any other comparable “developed” country for a third of the pay and without basic social nets or vacation. Unlike previous generations, the Nacirema born after 1980 are not “upwardly mobile.” Another phantom, then, haunting Nacirema society is the notion that there is social mobility. The reality, one Nacirema told me, is they will never move up a socioeconomic class, and the “middle class” is nearly absent. Yesterday I took a bus from a state called Awoi to the city of Ogacihc. The bus broke down in the middle of a cornfield three hours south of Ogacihc after hitting a pothole when a herd of cattle suddenly stormed across the highway, startling the bus driver. Unlike the rest of the world, Nacirema public transit is underdeveloped. If I were to ever-so-unkindly invoke the work of the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, I would say that this particular dimension of Nacirema culture stopped developing in the 1950s and could be classified as being nearly barbaric! A low level of “civilization”—to poke fun at a colonialist term that was originally designed to denote societies that included myriad social institutions, such as a writing system, law, religion, education, and warfare. Anyway, to journey the same distance in Eporue would take three hours by highspeed rail rather than nearly nine hours on a decaying bus. I wonder how much of Nacirema life is wasted sitting on this emaciated public transit. When I arrived in Ogacihc, I once again set my heart on testing transportation. To my dismay, significant portions of the notorious “L” train had been shut down. Locals lamented to me that this was par for the course—“just the way it is.” There is a Nacirema complacency with their actively decaying infrastructure and transit system. “Do you remember a moment where everything worked?” I asked in return. I received a blank stare, followed by a headshake. “No,” I presume. Acirema is a giant train wreck, a bus crashing into a ditch, or, perhaps, another kind of accident waiting to happen. While I hailed a taxi, it began to acid rain, and I watched concrete begin to melt as another car collided with a bus. A man with a head injury toddled up to the trash can near me, which happened to be on fire, and began to sing and undress in front of me, the flames, and hundreds of Nacirema commuters, the latter of whom did not, even for a moment, bat an eye despite the fire and, most distressingly, despite the blood pouring down his cheek.10 I haven't been able to sleep for the last few nights. Inside the walls of the moldy apartment, pipes hiccup and contort themselves. I sometimes wonder if it's the ghosts everyone likes to tell me continue to haunt the living, especially in a city like Ogacihc, where its racialized geographies have created geographies of grief—the city becoming a switchboard of luminous death. Rather than a site of emancipatory politics, this is a site of anticipatory politics; the city's residents are always anticipating some form of violence or another, and subsequently, are deeply on edge and exasperated. Every street, every block, each stone, and each brick forms an architecture of absence. Yet, if you listen closely, you can make out a susurrus, the stirring of that “bottomless silence” the Haitian anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) once wrote about. There are many “burdens of the concrete,” I think, and the Nacirema have built cities constituted by particularly grievous concrete burdens. Recognize whose lands these are on which we stand. Ask the deer, turtle, and the crane. Make sure the spirits of these lands are respected and treated with goodwill. The land is a being who remembers everything. —Joy Harjo, “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings” (2017) After spending a month in Ogacihc, I decided to take the sputtering train out to Acirema's west coast, stopping over for a few nights in the state of Anozira, where, in fact, my own grandparents once lived. My grandfather, whose father was a settler from Ireland, had been enchanted by the landscape of sedimented sherbet, unparalleled geological formations puncturing vast horizons that rotate between neon and starlit skies. My grandmother, the child of Croatian immigrants, loved the land for its warmth. But this is a landscape of loss and extraction; there are reminders everywhere of the dispossession and displacement, the “taming of this frontier”—or, rather, harnessing of these elements—has caused for its Suonegidni peoples. Alongside the theft of land and resources, the loss of lives and livelihoods, there was the historic attempt at linguistic erasure, which would have, if successful, denied the world of powerful systems of knowing, believing, and perceiving that define local modes of relationality with humans, but also, most significantly, with and between nonhumans and more-than-humans. There are ways in which land reflects our minds and bodies, and our bodies and minds, in turn, reflect the land. My mind wanders. I trance, watching the sun roll into the evening. How do we gaze upon a landscape when it returns our own gaze with such deep judgment? How do you suture the wounds of a traumatized landscape?11 This is not the first time I ask these questions. I have wondered these things before; in fact, I often ask myself these questions whenever I am home in Belfast. If you've ever exorcised a dozen ghosts, please don't hesitate to get in touch.12 I tried to use the library, but it is only open three days a week and from the hours of 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thirty years earlier, libraries were spaces of conviviality, open most days of the week, bustling with book-related activities for any age. Libraries are democratic social institutions dedicated to education, to understanding, and thus to the mission of cultivating compassion and empathy. To see their demise, the rapid defunding of these spaces, leaves me with a pit in my stomach. I take another decaying bus to the other end of the city and wait for the train to the coast. I eat an avocado sandwich and wonder what illness might befall me now that I am participating in the kind of magical thinking that pervades Nacirema society, and which would like to secretly witness its own collapse rather than reimagine what structures these failing systems. Perhaps my student loan debt's interest will triple; perhaps someone will grab my face again on an elevator at an unnamed museum and tell me that the size of my eyes, the shape of my lips, and arch of my nose do not match my Anglo-Irish surname. Perhaps, if I had stood in this country of my birth, I'd never have known what it meant to feel safe, and how this is a basic human right denied to many Nacirema.13 I'm now in Selegna Sol. In the evenings, I can only sleep a few hours, for some kind of sadness incessantly enters the room and sits on my chest. It sounds like fury, it tastes like oil. It was the archaeologist, Shannon Lee Dawdy (2016), who once wrote, “Ruins from a foreign country may elicit a kind of Orientalist erotics or a dreamy nostalgia for something once familiar, but the ruins of one's own home do something quite different. They reproduce trauma.” This is painfully accurate. I feel a tremendous guilt. I am like the idiot who waltzes into a dark room with a mirror and asks everyone to “take a look,” but the mirror's confused by its own function, the invocation of light always the invocation of darkness. It simultaneously reflects, refracts, and projects. The present and future fragment as the past piles before us all and a voice outside my window asks why everything in this country is garbage.14 The Nacirema experience multiple school shootings every year.15 In fact, they rank number one across the globe for mass shootings. Senseless violence is something I cannot grasp. In her 1940 essay, “Warfare Is Only an Invention, Not a Biological Necessity,” Margaret Mead argued that warfare (a social institution) was a construct, its existence predicated on its imagined necessity. Citing societies where warfare was not a concept and thus did not exist, she attempted to navigate a predominantly “Western” desire for violence and conquest by highlighting its occasional absence among certain societies. Shootings, guns, violence: none of this is necessary, yet the Nacirema seem unable—or unwilling—to imagine otherwise. And thus the pattern continues, factions develop, split between two wildly divergent ideologies that will ultimately go to war in the name of liberty when the truth is that liberty itself is a construct, and if it does not exist now in this land, then it never will, unless a bridge—in place of a wall—can be built between the opposition. A stranger remarked to me that Acirema is a “modern death cult,” but we all know that we've never been modern (Latour, 1993), and a death cult is, perhaps, the pinnacle of a civilization that's reached its glory at the precise moment that the Earth's announced it has had enough. Societal decay aside, there is a toxic thread running rampant through the planet's veins, thanks to unbridled capitalism and (settler) colonialisms. I would like to ask what it means to unstitch this toxic thread, but it might be better to ask how and why we have all, collectively as humans, decided that we are complacent with the ongoing pollution of our world, not to mention the continuous extraction and privatization of natural resources. First, it was gold, then it was petrol, gas, and gems; now, it is water, a resource that is required for the maintenance of life. At the forefront of these battles for the control of and access to water are the Suonegidni again, who have dealt for much longer than Etihw settlers with many figurations of toxicity or pollution. Parallels can be drawn between what unfolded at Standing Rock and what is unfolding in the Mixe lands of Ayutla in Oaxaca, even if the historic circumstances that led to these moments are different. What is abundantly clear is that water is a future artifact. Here we cannot apply the logic of the commodity fetish because to do so would be pointless and water's value cannot be measured. To allow the privatization of water will be our downfall, because once they come for water, they will come for air.16 Since writing this, Acirema's continued to experience aggressive waves of violence against its non-Etihw citizens, while the world, more broadly, has been transformed by the coronavirus. Both of these events have thrown many of the issues recorded in these fragments into bold relief, but little has been done, pragmatically, to grapple with these problems, to provide actual solutions. Life continues as usual—echoes of student loan forgiveness reverberate across the same land that killed women's rights to their bodies—the landmark legislation known as Roe v. Wade. Nearly everything at this temporal juncture has become about control, and perhaps it has always been this way. Human beings are always trying to control something, hence our aspirations to live out fantasies in science fiction of time travel forward as well as backward. We would like to control history as well as the future; in fact, we can often control the former and many political regimes do through the construction of and suppression of narratives. Yet, it is the latter that we can actually attempt to control if we recognize that much of our fate is not governed by those sitting in our governments but instead between and within ourselves. I do not have much left to say; this addendum is mere speculation, but speculation is necessary and when is anthropology not a speculative practice? I have taken my mirror with me, re-entered the room where I was born, and asked: How did I—how did we—wind up here? If there is rot within my society, is there rot within me, and if so, what can I do about it? Everyone and everything is fragmented, and each act of reassembly is a kind of haunting. All this said, I would like us to be haunted by our collective pasts rather than by our failed imagined futures. [Document ends] Dear Thomas, A few final thoughts on this before I stick this in the post to you. Miner's satire of disconnection and enforced estrangement fails when applied to the conditions of the twenty-first century. Partial disconnection results in a kind of unraveling or unmooring for the anthropologist because alienation cannot and should not occur between any human being. This is unviable, unsustainable. One cannot build walls, even for a second. Anthropology is a moral endeavor; the anthropologist has a moral obligation to those they encounter as well as society writ large. As a historian, I know they realize this, but it never takes precedence in the ways it should have. The genre-bending here, whether intentional or not, highlights the malleability of this extinct discipline. You might ask yourself: What is this but an act of grieving? But what I would argue is that this is a mournful invocation of heart-centered ethnography (here I'm thinking of an old text edited by the archaeologist Kisha Supernant and colleagues [2020] in Archaeologies of the Heart). What would it mean if we could go back in time and place empathy at the center of every ethnography, of every methodology? The portrait of the former United States is devastating, but alienating or estranging ourselves from our realities is an avoidant strategy, a dissociative act that forecloses our ability to embody and feel what's actually unfolding around us. All the best, Rose
Referência(s)