Arrival: Anthropology in Hollywood

The recent Hollywood science fiction film Arrival features as its main character a linguist who explicitly references the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativism. Unusually for a mainstream film, Arrival presents the insights of linguistic anthropology as a key to the human‐alien encounter and combines these concerns with other key anthropological insights, particularly in relation to notions of time and the embodied nature of writing/drawing. In this article, the author argues that the film can be useful in thinking about anthropological debates on ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of Sapir‐Whorf and suggests that a careful parsing of the anthropological concepts drawn on in the film provides food for thought about the possible usefulness of popular fictional concoctions for thinking through contemporary issues in anthropology and conveying them to a wider audience.     

Oscar Wilde,Music, and the ‘Opium-Tainted Cigarette’: Disinterested Dandies and Critical Play

This article shows how the musical references in Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray are important to the identity of the dandy, especially in relation to the literary-critical work of Matthew Arnold, whose guiding presence in Wilde's oeuvre has traditionally been somewhat underestimated. Wilde's male characters, although famously fond of music, reveal ‘disinterestedness’ in earnest musical pursuits, similar to the ‘Indian virtue of detachment’ outlined by Arnold in his exploration of ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’ (1864, in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, ed. by Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 26–51). Furthermore, the critical attitude of the dandy–aesthete intersects with the implications that we can read into the posture of the lounging opium smoker. Extensive scholarship has already established the relationship between the East and opium in fictional works by Thomas de Quincey, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. Music is an essential ingredient to this literature, too, both in terms of its narrative presence and because it is a key element in an ongoing, nineteenth-century British exploration of how stylistic innovations could be represented as ‘music’. After disclosing the close connections between dandyism and those nineteenth-century composers whose lives and works were often represented as dandyish (Berlioz, Chopin and Schumann), the essay builds from the tradition of opium-inspired fiction. It suggests Wilde's debt to Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), while also showing Wilde's innovations in making shifts in character and narrative voice into indicators of narcotic consumption.     

The safe spaces ‘in-between’ – plays,performance and identity among young ‘second generation’ Somalis in London

ABSTRACT

The article elaborates on how young UK-born self-identifying Somalis use performance to create ‘liminal’ spaces that allow them to explore and express the often contradictory registers of self and belonging through play and the carnivalesque. The plays they write, practise and perform transform community places into ‘safe spaces’ that open and invite dialogue on the intergenerational conflicts they experience around identity and expected behaviour. Far from being fictions, in making visible the liminality in the daily lives, these young people communicate ‘the reality behind the role playing mask’ [Turner, Victor. 1982. From Ritual to Theatre – The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ, 155]. This research is based on 6 months ethnographic research with the Mustaqbal youth group based in London. It contributes to rethinking ‘safe space’ by illuminating how young people use the ‘stage’ to express elements of their lives they are otherwise unable to voice.     

‘What makes one an Israeli?’ Negotiating identities in everyday representations of ‘Israeliness’*

Abstract. This paper examines the construction of a sense of Israeli identity which is not deducible from the public political discourse. It analyses common verbal representations of ‘being an Israeli person’, namely, what people in contemporary Israeli culture repeatedly say about Israelis, and how they position themselves vis‐à‐vis the commonsensical agreements they exchange, assuming that the massive use of such clichés in certain contexts creates a discursive routine that has ‘a life of its own’, through which people constantly negotiate their self‐images and their sense of belonging. It investigates the ways these representations create solidarity or demarcation and how such current popular representations relate to canonical veteran images of Israeli identity, notably that of the pre‐state ‘Native Israeli’ (Sabra) archetype. The analysis is based on 295 anonymous open responses to the question ‘What makes one an Israeli?’ published weekly in the Weekend Supplement of Maariv, the second largest newspaper in Israel, between 1996 and 1998. The analysis has led to the following observations: (1) Instead of the most expected grand ideological (ethnic, national, religious, etc.) issues of conflict, the responses reveal a ‘pursuit of culturedness’, using an implied scale of mastering good manners and possessing a ‘genuine culture’ which form the dominant parameter of judging the ‘Israeli person’. (2) A tension between mainstream and marginalised groups is shaped by a ‘chase and flight’ dynamic of embracing and rejecting the mythological Sabra image (in asymmetry with these groups' assumed political stances), which image is believed to be a symbol of the once hegemonic veteran elite. (3) This tension paradoxically contributes to the persistence of the canonical image of the Sabra that is currently delegitimised by much intellectual discourse.     

Kaleidoscopism: The Circulation of a Mid-Century Metaphor and Motif

Abstract

This essay traces the mid-century revival of interest in a particular nineteenth-century optical technology – David Brewster’s kaleidoscope – following P. B. Shelley’s coining of the term ‘kalleidoscopism’ to describe the broad popular appeal and enthusiastic uptake of the device in the late 1810s. Through an examination of mid-nineteenth-century fiction, journalism, and scientific writing, this essay explores what it meant to be ‘kaleidoscopic’ in this period and demonstrates how the mechanical structure and physical manipulation of the device informed this meaning. Controlled by the hand of the user, its display offered regulated surprise: a visual environment that did not overwhelm but rather enthralled viewers through its creation of abstracted, symmetrical forms and harmonious colour palettes led by individual taste. Contemporary reference to the kaleidoscope’s display and operation reveals it was increasingly aligned with notions of a stable, controlled, and unified visual environment in which mobility was valued but digression was mechanically impossible; it signalled the mastery of sensory data and the creation of meaning from fractured forms. My discussion uncovers new contexts for its popularity c. 1840–1865 in Victorian fiction, journalism, physiological science, and the fine arts, and discusses two under-studied examples of the kaleidoscopic in the visual art of the Pre-Raphaelites. The essay concludes by exploring Brewster’s speculative application of the kaleidoscope as an early form of cinematic media, contending that this simple optical device provokes a reconsideration of the categorization of Victorian pre-cinematic technologies.     

Space,time and history in the Polish People’s Republic: the trilogy Sami swoi,Nie ma mocnych,Kochaj albo rzuć

Abstract

The article discusses the meanings of popular culture, authenticity and history in People’s Republic of Poland. As an example it uses a popular film trilogy. The trilogy Sami swoi, Nie ma mocnych and Kochaj albo rzu? (‘All friends here’, ‘Take it easy’ and ‘Love or leave me’) was shown in Polish cinemas between 1967 and 1977. The reviews were written just after the premières. The article uses the concepts of time and space elaborated by Mikhail Bakhtin and Doreen Massey to analyze the different chronotopes of the films. It analyses both the films and the reviews as strategies of creating authenticity and creating cultural meanings: the meaning of history and the meanings of rurality. I will show how history and present, memory and society are interwoven in the light of popular production. In addition, I will emphasize the diverse interpretation possibilities resulting from this micro-historical view and the transnational critique of modernism highlighting the small and local which emerged throughout Europe in the 1970s.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 34, Number 1. February 2018

Cover caption, volume 34 issue 1 Front Cover Anthropologists have long ignored or criticized mainstream popular culture, so we have not always realized that something as seemingly mundane as a Hollywood film could contain valuable insights for teaching and thinking about the issues that matter to an anthropological perspective on the contemporary world. Given science fiction's intersections with anthropology in using other ‘worlds’ to gain perspective on our own, science fiction films could be particularly good resources for engaging wider audiences with anthropological insights. While there have been occasional examples of such cross‐fertilizations, such as the writings of Ursula Le Guin, the potential of science fiction as a source for anthropological thinking has been by and large neglected. In this issue, David Sutton shows how the recent film Arrival provides one striking example of the overlap between science fiction, anthropology and popular culture. Films such as this, offer much food for thought and for engagement with anthropological understandings of topics ranging from linguistic relativity to culturally constructed temporalities. At a time when anthropology itself has gained increased visibility in popular culture, it behoves us to think through, rather than reject out of hand, the ways that we might highlight these increased opportunities to promote anthropological understandings. Back Cover: ‘WE ARE ALL POLICE’ A scene from the taxi station at Ataturk Airport, Istanbul, December 2016, after several deadly attacks against police and military members. Turkish flag stickers read as: ‘We are all police; we are all soldiers’. Scholars across disciplines have recently expanded state‐centred understandings of security (i.e. national security) by looking at the human and non‐human elements of security, including everything from food and ecological systems, to political economy, poverty and even everyday life itself. What kind of critical tools do we need to develop in order to understand our increasingly ‘securitized’ world infused with a growing (and increasingly repurposed) police force that includes both human and non‐human agents of policing? In this issue, Hayal Akarsu focuses on the technicalization of police violence through reform and the expansion of police power into unconventional domains. She shows how the very practice of reforming expands the contours of not only policing practice but also the boundaries of police violence – ostensibly what such reforms are supposed to restrain. While her research remains contextualized within the specific histories of the Turkish police, it has relevance beyond Turkey, as many practices once considered as ‘harsh policing’ have increasingly enjoyed the support of the public in different parts of the world. In such a milieu, an ethnographically nuanced analysis can provide us with a more subtly attuned vantage point, enabling us to understand how technologies of security and policing with seemingly liberal genealogies like community policing or broad democratic police reform can coexist or be aligned with ‘non‐liberal’ and even authoritarian modalities of government.     

Uncomfortable proximity. Literary technique,authorial provocations and dog whistles in Michel Houellebecq’s fiction

ABSTRACT

In 2002, following an interview with the magazine Lire where he described Islam as ‘la religion la plus con’, Michel Houellebecq was prosecuted, and eventually acquitted, for ‘injure raciale et incitation à la haine religieuse’. In discussions of Houellebecq’s case, supporters were quick to invoke the ‘special value’ of the literary space for the free discussion of ideas, however provocative or unpalatable. Houellebecq’s acquittal, and support from figures such as Salman Rushdie, have afforded the writer an unprecedented degree of literary freedom. Subsequent novels such as La Possibilité d’une île (2005) and Soumission (2015) show the author fully inhabiting this freedom in order to undertake a provocative critique of Islam. This article explores how both literary technique and authorial presence endorses the controversial ideas of his texts within Houellebecq’s writing and demonstrates how a movement from ambiguously undermining towards reinforcing those ideas can be observed. In particular, the framing of provocative ideas and assertions expounded in his fiction has become less robust throughout his career. This leads to, I suggest, a greater porosity between Houellebecq’s fiction and that of contemporary right-wing essayists such as Alain Finkielkraut and Renaud Camus.     

Masters of Healing: Cocaine and the Ideal of the Victorian Medical Man

This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between cocaine and medical practitioners in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Cocaine is often understood as one of a number of potentially addictive substances to which Victorian physicians and surgeons were regularly exposed, and tempted to indulge in. However, while cocaine has frequently been associated with discourses of addiction, this article proposes that it was also widely represented as a technological triumph, and that the drug was frequently used as a symbol for the scientific and moral virtues of the medical man. The argument draws on popular journalism, medical publications, and fiction to establish the cultural context of cocaine at the fin de siècle. In 1884, cocaine was revealed to be the first effective local anaesthetic, and this article traces the processes by which cocaine came to be regarded as the iconic achievement of nineteenth-century therapeutic science. This aura of innovative brilliance in turn communicated itself to the medical professionals who employed cocaine in their work, so that many patients and practitioners alike depicted cocaine as a most fitting emblem for the idealized selfhood of the modern medical man. This idea also informs portrayals of the drug in fiction, and I conclude with a detailed analysis of L. T. Meade’s 1895 short story, ‘The Red Bracelet’ (published in the Strand Magazine as part of Meade’s series, ‘Stories from the Diary of a Doctor’), as an example of the way in which cocaine functions as metaphor for the physician’s unassailable moral primacy and technical excellence.     

Reading with the Occultists: Arthur Machen,A. E. Waite,and the Ecstasies of Popular Fiction

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominate fin-de-siècle studies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival.     

Performing post-migration cinema in Italy: Corazones de Mujer by K. Kosoof

Following consideration of the most common representations of migrants in Italian cinema, where they are often portrayed as victimised and minor subjects, this article analyses a film by Davide Sordella and Pablo Benedetti, Corazones de Mujer (2008) as a ‘post-migration alternative’. This film considers a different way of depicting ‘foreigners’, and addresses the complex issues of gender and sexuality as they emerge at the interface between Western and Arab cultures. Within the conceptual framework of Judith Butler's ‘gender performativity’ and Rosi Braidotti's ‘nomadic subject’, this article aims to suggest an alternative way of representing migrants in Italian cinema as agents of social and gender transgressions.     

Brazilian boys riding Indonesian waves: orientalism and fratriarchy in a recent Brazilian surf movie

In this article, I discuss the 2016 Brazilian surf movie Um Filme de Surfe by Bruno Zanin and Leandro Dora, featuring surfers Yago Dora, Yuri Gonçalves and Lucas Silveira. This small group of Brazilian surfers and their camera crew travel on a chartered boat to an island in the Indian Ocean to catch an incoming swell, where they pretend to find an unknown surf paradise. While doing so, they orientalise the local Indonesian culture as an exotic, pre-modern ‘other’ who they, the ‘translocal’ modern surfers, encounter and teach about modernity. I will also examine how they perform a ‘bro’ masculinity that forms a ‘fratriarchy’ based on hijinks and pranks. In Um Filme de Surfe, the Brazilian surfers neglect to establish a dialogue with the local Indonesian islanders. They do not represent themselves as postcolonial subjects visiting a fellow culture from the global South; they are the cosmopolitan translocal surfers and the locals are mistaken for Polynesian islanders. I will then discuss how this film broadly reflects the challenge of representing non-white, non-Western surfers in the genre of surf films.     

L’Amour est dans le pré: cultural representations and social hierarchisation of farmers

In this article, the authors analyse socio-cultural representations of farmers conveyed by a popular French reality TV programme called L’Amour est dans le pré, which features ‘real’ farmers and is filmed in the countryside. Their objective is to determine the place and role assigned to farmers within contemporary French society. To study L’Amour est dans le pré’s televisual representation of farmers, they use Blanchard and Bancel’s articulation of the concept of ‘human zoos’ and, more specifically, its implications regarding reality TV. Based on content and discourse analyses of the Portraits episodes of season 7, the authors intend to engage competing representations and ideological appropriation of farmers in a French context, and, more broadly, to identify how this reality television programme illuminates tensions in reconfigurations of nationhood in contemporary France. They show that on the one hand, the programme challenges generic, geographical and social conventions with its carefully choreographed on-site interview, strategic post-production editing and, finally, its interactive weaving of subjectivity and objectivity, representation and observation that generates a sense of proximity and immediacy between farmers and viewers. On the other hand, they demonstrate that the programme reinforces and perpetuates a dichotomised national identity with its visual and discursive idealisation and marginalisation of farmers.     

Popul?r oder elit?r? Anmerkungen zum Kulturbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft

While the Historische Kulturwissenschaft (new cultural history) is introduced as a new way of writing history the question has to be answered what Kultur (civilization) means or how it should be interpreted. The paper deals primarily with the special German notion of ‘Kultur’. The distinction between ‘intension’ and ‘extension’ is made and contrasted with both the narrow and the wide concept of ‘Kultur’. Writing history as new cultural history is shaped at least by five aspects: space, perspective, language, acting and time (particularly memory) which are discussed in this thesis. The intension of ‘Kultur’ in Historische Kulturwissenschaft leads to popularisation. The sense of the popular approach to history emphasizes modality in the conception and writing of history.     

Maciste goes to war: Maciste alpino (1916)

During the war years, both fiction and non-fiction films relating to the war populated Italian screens. This article examines Maciste alpino (1916), one of the best known and best received of the popular Maciste series of Italian silent cinema, in light of several factors: the growing nationalist movement that saw intervention in World War I as the means of creating political consensus; the sophistication and development of narrative, character, and attractions in the Maciste series; and its relation to popular film genres such as comic serials and the emerging strongman genre. Maciste functioned as a modern weapon par excellence, a Futurist mechanized man whose muscled body constituted its own fighting machine. At the same time, through his humor, goodwill, and muscled physique he became a national symbol of Italian wartime might.     

Girls on film: Affective politics and the creation of an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore through film screenings

The interstices between film and politics occupy a prominent place in recent scholarship in political geography and cognate disciplines, focusing on the ways film establishes relations between viewers and characters. Such processes often utilise affective referents to create ‘intimate publics’. This paper focuses on the relations human trafficking films establish between ‘victims’, viewers and anti-trafficking stakeholders in creating an intimate anti-trafficking public in Singapore. I argue that the third world girl is rendered a moral object of sympathy both through trafficking film and performances by anti-trafficking stakeholders in the cinema. However, in comparison to both film viewers and anti-trafficking stakeholders she is cast as muted and lacking agency. Intimate anti-trafficking publics can emerge through the harnessing of negative emotions that, in this case, privilege the plight- but not the agency – of the female child trafficking victim and are inculcated through film storylines and cinematic performances.     

Geographical Imaginations of 'New Asia-Singapore'

‘Geographical imaginations’ constitute an important aspect in geographic research, enriching our understanding of places and societies as well as the contested meanings people have towards spaces. The marketing and development of tourist destinations offers a fertile ground for the exercise of geographical imagination. This paper explores how tourism marketing distils the essence of a place, and ‘imagines’ an identity that is attractive to tourists and residents alike. Such spatial identities, however, are seldom hegemonic and are often highly contested. Using the case of the ‘New Asia-Singapore’ (NAS) campaign launched by the Singapore Tourism Board, we explore the geographical imaginations involved in tourism marketing, and its consequent effects on people and place. Specifically we discuss the role and rationale of tourism planners in formulating the NAS campaign; the actions of tourism entrepreneurs in creating NAS commodities; and the reactions from tourists and local residents towards the NAS images. We argue that the nexus of policy intent, entrepreneurial actions and popular opinions yields invaluable insights into the highly contested processes of tourism development and identity formation.     

Decolonial encounters in Ciro Guerra’s El abrazo de la serpiente: indigeneity,coevalness and intercultural dialogue

This article analyses the politics and aesthetics of the depiction of the encounter between the West and the non-West in Ciro Guerra’s film El abrazo de la serpiente, examining how the film deconstructs colonialist imagery and discourses, and engages with the notion and cinematic representation of indigeneity. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the article identifies and discusses the strategies employed in the film to decolonise the category of the ‘Indian’: challenging the colonial linguistic of domination and undermining the tropes of imperialist representations; staging and re-enacting colonial encounters; and subverting the power relations embedded in colonialist ethnography. The article argues that El abrazo de la serpiente acts as an instrument of political and cultural inquiry into the past and the present, and that it both proposes and enacts interculturalidad and intercultural dialogue as a cinematic approach to native culture. While the notion of indigeneity at play is not unproblematic, the film succeeds in foregrounding Indigenous points of view and ‘points of hearing’, challenging a Eurocentric politics of recognition and evolutionary epistemology in favour of a ‘coevalness’ of the native.     

Shaping Women: National Identity Through the Use of Language in Franco'S Spain

In my article I show how a very particular identity was created for women during the period of Franco's Spain. I will draw upon a varied range of materials from official discourses, particularly the Sección Femenina (the women's branch of Falange); the Álvarez Enciclopedia and other texts such as songs, poems and the popular press. Following Foucault (1980: 30) I analyse an identity based on oppressive discourses whose power ‘reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning process and everyday life’. The nationalistic stress of this discourse is one that encourages women to create a new image of Spanish femininity that should be ‘different’ from the liberated portrayal of women coming from Europe, mainly through the path of growing tourism. The language of these discourses is somehow baroque, elaborated, energetic and highly dramatic. It tries to seek attention through an unnecessary and badly misorientated dramatism. It is cryptic and manipulative and claims to be poetical, but its main intention is to confine women indoors and to make them look at the world through the curtains or from a closed window. On the other hand it made women feel they were the representation of a unique matriarchal nationalism making them appear as the heroines of an essentialist national metaphor: women mothers of the nation. Inherent in Franco's equation of women = femininity = nation is a contradiction that defines women as ‘indoor heroines’ and bases nationalism in a naturalised representation of gender where women are a gendered representation of this nationalism.