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BRUCE GRANT New York University

PLAYLISTS: Cultural Anthropology

Toward a current project on idioms of authoritarianism in post-Soviet space, a few chestnuts, and a few new works . . . Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph (Princeton, 1977) (for remembering that not all starkly cast transitions are as stark as they rst appear to be) Hocart, Kings and Councillors: An Essay in the Comparative Anatomy of Human Society (Barbey, 1936) (for revisiting some of the best early work in political anthropology) Rev, Retroactive Justice: A Prehistory of Postcommunism (Stanford, 2005) (for transforming the idioms of political necrophilia across the formerly socialist world into storytelling with a mordant bite on contemporary forms of authoritarian rule) Wedeen, Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (Chicago, 2008) (for timely comparative perspective)
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 26, Issue 4, pp. 697706. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2011.01122.x
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Zizek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago, 2005) (for taking some of the earlier messages of Zizeks bright essay, A Plea for Leninist Intolerance ( Critical Inquiry, 2002) into the psychosocial realm.)

JUDITH FARQUHAR University of Chicago

Geoffrey Bowker, Memory Practices in the Sciences. This is an informed and polemical investigation of the impact of modern and contemporary information technologies on our ability to perceive, think, or know anything. Bowkers reporting and analysis strike at the heart of the politics of knowledge; this is a book I intend to re-read annually so I wont forget its insights or fail to heed its warnings. Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A free and wild creation of concepts. I havent read this yet, but Stengers always rewards slow reading. The most recent of her essays Ive read is The Doctor and the Charlatan and, like all her work, it lays bare fundamental ethical and epistemological issues for any scientic or medical practice, relevant to all contemporary communities. By thinking with Whitehead in this newly translated magnum opus, she promises to show how pragmatic philosophies like anthropology can grow and transform through engaging with a free and wild metaphysics. Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. Mo Yan is Chinas greatest living novelist. His vision is darkly witty and, like some classic Chinese philosophers, he corrodes all platitudes with his carnality and relativism. This large novel about a murdered landlords passage through a number of animal reincarnations is especially funny and suggestive about multispecies experience and encounter. I like to read Mo Yan as a theorist of

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contemporary Chinese experience, hes way ahead of anthropology. Roland Barthes, Mythologies. If you havent taught it lately, read it again anyway. Its well attuned to the excessiveness of meaning and very smart about how signicance is made in mediated popular culture. It is, moreover, the locus classicus of the proper 20th century use of the word bourgeois. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Working through a series of historical case studies of Haiti and the Caribbean, this work settles a number of persistent worries about the powers of narrative and historiography. This theory from the ground up reminds us why so many ethnographic questions can only be answered by history. Jonathan R e, I See a Voice: Deafness, language, and the senses a Philoe sophical History. R e is a founder of the journal Radical Philosophy, a great writer, e and unlike most philosophers a ne historian. This breezy yet thorough study of the development of language teaching for deaf people has both phenomenological and political ambitions, and should be read by anyone interested in language or embodiment.

JUDITH (JACK) HALBERSTAM University of Southern California

Reading for a new book I am nishing titled Gaga Feminism lled with silliness, revolt, manifestos and wonder: David Graeber, Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology great little book, risky and helpful for a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project.

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Russell Brand, My Booky Wook I am serious! Funny take on sex and celebrity. Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith You have no idea how kooky PH was. Maybe you dont want to know. I do. Timoth Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin I do read real books too. . . Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness Happiness is not all it is cracked up to be.

GEORGE E. MARCUS University of California, Irvine

Selected Reading AprilJune, 2011

NOURISHMENT FOR MY ANTHROPOLOGICALLY MEDIATED SOUL: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (Less is much, much more.); Glimpses into My Own Black Box: An Exercise in SelfDeconstruction by George W. Stocking, Jr. (a brave, remarkable memoir that has stayed with me); This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust (a completely different, and exotic exposure of nineteenth century American culture enabled by the slaughter of the Civil War); Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives by David Eagleman (ingenious after work writing by a lively neuroscientist in Houston, currently having his moment(s) on the interview circuit); The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rabul Bhattacharya (the voices of Guyana that I recognize from my rst callow effort at eldwork there in 1967). CURRENT PROJECT PROBES: Shelter Blues: Sanity and Selfhood among the Homeless by Robert Desjarlai (1997).

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Selected by my colleague Keith Murphy for our rst ethnocharrette at the Center for Ethnography, UC, Irvine, on Wednesday, June 8, 2011an effort with students to use studio design methods to make something of an ethnographic work. An extraordinary early work that I had missed somehowan exploration of the affordances of phenomenological inquiry in ethnographic research. (I write before the charrette event, but have beneted greatly reading Shelter Blues in anticipation of our studio treatment of it). On China by Henry Kissinger (2011) and The Protracted Game: a Wei-ChiI Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy by Scott Boorman (1971). I came across a sophisticated, but deeply essentializing attempt by Henry Kissinger to use the game of Go to characterize Chinese strategic thinking, and I became interested in the analytic and extended use of this trope in the history of Cold War (and post Cold War) American diplomacy. It sent me back immediately to a rereading of Scott Boormans interesting book of 1971, which made the rounds at Harvard when I was a graduate student. I want to trace the career of this representation as the U.S. relation to China has evolved. Legislative Theater (1998), Theater of the Oppressed (1985), and Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992), all by Augusto Boal. Reading these now are in aid of my effort to collect a range of efforts in a number of elds, with a kinship to the evolved tradition of ethnographic eldwork currently practiced in anthropology, to develop interventions that alternatively animate the scenes of contemporary research. I have proffered, for better or worse, the notion of the staging of para-sites, alongside the course of current projects of eldwork. There are a number of precedents, but Boals experiments are proving inspirational. An Anthropology of Ethics by James D. Faubion (2011). The price of admission is high given Faubion s erudition and distinctive voicebut fully worth the effort. Anthropological
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writing today is saturated with ethical concernbut what is ethics as an anthropological problem? The route is through Foucault in the most informed way, and what is on offer is a way to actually construct or think through ethical positions in research rather than to follow or assert them in a rule-based manner. Thus, a primer on how to do ethics in the pursuit of theory, eldwork, and writing in the ethnographic paradigm.

DONALD MOORE University of California, Berkeley

Darwish, Mahmoud. If I Were Another: Poems translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah. (2009, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Spanning poetry penned between 1990 and 2005, Darwishs posthumous collection enunciates ethico-political positions traversing landscapes of belonging, displacement, and dispossession. At times necropoetical and vitally vigilant of lifes fragility, these selections explore exiles existential entailments and exclusions. Memoryscapes evoked range from situated sufferings mapped to Palestinian terrain and its diasporic routes to indigenous insurgencies in the Americas engendered by colonial conquest and its aftermaths. Often lyrical and braiding Su styles through Darwishs distinctive voice, his moody musings explore mortality, injustice, and the entrustment of the impossible. For Darwishs enactment of poetic vision, including an excerpt from If I Were Another, see his performance (as himself) in Jean-Luc Godards 2004 lm Notre Musique. Or listen to Lebanese oud player Marcel Khalifs musical rendering of Darwishs e verse from earlier eras such as Rita wal-Bunduqiya (Rita and the Rie. 1983, Promises of the Storm, Paredon Records).
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Fusco, Coco. A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (2008, New York: Seven Stories Press). How are contending anthropological genealogies implicated in contemporary practices, representations, and debates regarding torture? Fusco has long scrutinized ethnographic gazes of distinctively othered exotics in her performance art and essays, scrutinizing and swerving anthropological perspectives. In 1992, in Madrids Columbus Plaza as part of that citys quincentennial celebration of its imperial heritage, she and Guillermo Gmez-Pea ino n carcerated themselves in a cage minded by zoo guards. Passersby in public space witnessed the scantily clad couple performing as authentic exotics from Guatinau, a ctitious island in the Gulf of Mexico; many spectators missed the satire, believing the performers to represent an actual people, place, and culture. Fuscos 2008 Field Guide shifts from Guatinau to Guantanimo while linking legacies of Algeria to Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, and the U.S. war machines techniques and technologies of violence. At once mimicking military counterinsurgency manuals and countering their strategic aims, her contra-contra perspective troubles torture, gender, and hegemonic representations of both a Bush League and an Obamarama-infused War on Terror. Mani, Lata. The Tamarind Tree. Illustrations by Srividya Natarajan. (2008, Chenna, India: Tulika Publishers). This succulent story melds caringly crafted text and evocative illustrations inspired, in part, by a young nephews request to his aunt-the-author for a compelling tale. Mani is a generatively game-changing anti-imperial and feminist scholar of colonial discourse, whose academic career was violently impaled in 1993. While driving from her home to teach at UC Davis, a stolen Pepsi Cola truck pursued by police and travelling at 100 m.p.h. struck her car, causing a brain injury and severe impairment. In 1993, when the accident occurred, Manis
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germinal book Contentious Traditions was 2 weeks away from going to press; the books appearance in print 5 years later is testament to her own exceptional agency, and her life partner, Ruth Frankenbergs ethics of care. Manis 2001 Interleaves recounts her spiritual journey in the wake of a devastating disability. The Tamarind Tree offers a hopeful harvest, a tale of childhood adventure bearing witness to an inspiring trajectory in the wake of personal tragedy and embodied incapacities that soulfully strides away from academic genres of representation. Mbembe, Achille. Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur lAfrique dcolonise. Paris: La Dcouverte. e e e Mbembea brilliant analyst of postcolonial political technologies, power, and subjectivationhere draws inspiration from Martinicans Frantz Fanon and Aim Csaire e e to explore critical questions animating governmentalities, racisms, and legacies of colonial violence, especially in relation to the long winter of imperial Frances African entanglements. While grounded principally in reections upon Africas wretched of the earth, as well as French epistemological occlusions and political exclusions, these essays also echo west across the Atlantic, conjuring spirits haunting Frederick Douglass dark night of slavery that transformed humans into brutes. Mbembes analysis of Afropolitanisme refracts the shimmering sun of Csaires Caribbeana creolizing cartography where poe etic justice and political enlightenment struggle to shine through historical clouds of blood, violence, and colonial genocide. Sortir de la grande nuit illuminates competing practices of sovereignty, militarism, and dispossession routed through Africa while awakening readers to alternative visions of alterity, humanity, and conviviality infused with African diasporic sensibilities. Scott-Heron, Gil. Now and Then: The Poems of Gil ScottHeron (2000, Edinburgh, Scotland: Payback Press).
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As GSH segued from my Spring 2011 syllabus to Mays obituary pages, I found myself again returning to his Spoken Word pieces, gems gathered from 1970 to 1994 in this collection. Much as Fanons writings speak presciently to our contemporary moment of danger, GSHs sage, soulfully-bluesy musings from previous eras read and sound spot-on as critiques of current practices of racism, injustice, and political hypocrisy. His scorching critiques skewered South African and U.S. policies that racialized space and spatialized race, speaking to current discourses of U.S. Homeland Security and its Bantustan buttresses; he teamed up with Brian Jackson to release From South Africa to South Carolina (1976, Arista Records) and became, in the mid-1980s, a member of the collective venture Artists United Against Apartheid that funneled funds to the ANCs Oliver Tambo. While he humbly rejected hagiographies that dubbed him the Godfather of Rap, or the premier African-American griot of the ghetto, his inuences on subsequent styles of politicizing verse and Spoken Words sonic, rhythmic relationship to music remain powerfully resonant today. GSHs tragic addiction to crack cocainenurtured by the socio-economic and racialized inequalities he compellingly critiquedmade his lifes later chapters a Karmic comedown from his prime years when ensouled infusions of radical hope crackled off live microphones, vinyl, cassettes, CDs, and printed pages from the late 1960s through the mid 1980s.

DIANE M. NELSON Duke University

Im writing a book, set in Guatemala, about number, accounting, Mayan and other zeroes, nance, hopes for the good life, and the (for most of us) elusive promise of accumulation. And, I guess, about the banality of the evil of neoliberalism and its crises. Leading me to

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ponder old questions of the seen and unseen, of underlying logics and the struggles for human meaning-making. In this vein Ive been reading the following: Melinda Coopers Life as Surplus (Univ. of Washington 2008), a really mistressful and productive working through of bionecropolitical-economy ercely linking nance, biotech, neoliberal imaginaries and embodi/meant. Like many people trying to understand the 2008 crash Im perusing Matt Taibbis Griftopia (Spiegel and Grau 2010) (you had me at great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. . .) and the slightly less amboyant Michael Lewiss The Big Short (Norton 2011) (with the lm Inside Job as visual aid). Great ethnographic takes on the same carnage: Karen Ho Liquidated (Duke 2009), Caitlin Zaloom Out of the Pits (Chicago 2006), and Randy Martin Financialization of Daily Life (Temple 2002). Explaining the genealogy of Western everything Brian Rotmans Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford 1987), about zero making possible King Lear, the vanishing point in painting, and imaginary money, the conditions of possibility for derivatives. Most fun, China Mievilles weird ctions: The City and the City (Ballantine 2010), about two different cities, deeply invested in their difference, existing in the same geographic space though at different moments of capitalism, and the enormous efforts involved in learning not to see (even for the police) and Kraken (Ballantin 2010), about unseen but deeply felt worlds coexisting in London, apocalypse, and (continuing a theme!) squid cults.

Erratum to Cultural Anthropology 26.3:462 (August 2011) The island of Sumba is in Indonesia, not Papua New Guinea.

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