Sarah Palin, National Oriental

Sarah Palin's Alaska is overwhelming me. The format of the show is the travel narrative: Sarah & co. fly to various parts of Alaska to see the sights. This travel narrative format makes every excursion a paradox, since Sarah is supposed to be both an Alaska native and to a certain extent a foreigner and every scene involves her simultaneously claiming to be an insider but also an adventurer. She is also at pains to defend her status as a "real hunter," "real Alaskan," a "real fisherman" and of course a "real American" with "strong values." She's constantly under attack and, just like in her political life, bothers to defend herself on the show. E.g., the season's final episode is a recap episode with additional commentary, including responses to mail they received after the "controversial" episode where Sarah shoots a caribou. Having been accused of not being a "real hunter" she proves her authenticity by taking the caribou antlers to the taxidermist so that she can further identify as an Alaskan.

"This is classic Alaskan decor. I don't know too many homes without a bear rug or antlers on the wall. Most Alaskan homes have something that brings the outdoors in."

Sarah's attempt to negotiate her own identity as a "real American" first by hunting then by demonstrating that she knows how to handle the animal aesthetically results in a dramatic restriction of Alaskan identity and a bizarre claim about the identity of Alaskans.

Sarah grapples with the phallus

Since it is obviously not true that all Alaskans have taxidermy on their walls it follows that there is a set of "real Alaskans" that Sarah belongs to and which, presumably, other residents of the state of Alaska do not. Her essential claim to be a part of the Volk then forces her to exclude a portion of precisely the demographic she identifies as traditional, natural, and of course real. The identification of the real and authentic involves the drastic shrinking of that category. Ultimately this logic would yield no demographic at all, but simply a field of singularities. Her identity and adequacy is thus tensed between an auto-Orientalizing, essentialist narrative of Alaskan and American identity and a logic that isn't productive of collectives, but of singularities that are capable of reversing the moral value of individuality and uniqueness.

"Some people would probably consider Alaskans as having this unique way of decorating our house, you know, because we have a trophy there on the wall. Well, unique maybe to others is the way we talk. Some people think we have an accent. Some people think it's unique that once in a while I make up a word."

"Unique" presumably means unusual or abnormal, but her normalcy is precisely what she's trying to demonstrate. Her thoughts on Alaskan traditional aesthetics are capable existing on a continuum with her individual behavior, the much-contested "refudiate" and whether or not it's a quirky neologism or an inability to speak the national language and thus belong properly to the class of those capable of successfully identifying as American.

Regular folks as such sit down for a moment of national mediation.

The contradictory travel narrative where the politician is tensed as a moment of national generality mediating between the authentic inside and the manufactured, political, economic outside is of course an essential part of modern American presidential campaigns. What we demand more than ever today is an impossible identity with the national politician that causes him to prove again and again his concrete identity in such a way that identities get voided of content.

Psycho-Analysis: What Is It?

Prince Paul may have been the first to ask - but Sturgeron Prandleforth shows he certainly won't be the last!

Naturalism, Analogism, Symbologism

I like Descola too, and am likewise especially taken with his grid (or perhaps we should call it his Generative Grammar?). TH's Question 1 - that is, how does Descola's schema account for the conditions of possibility of his own anthropology? - is one that would be interesting to pursue further, perhaps with access to his other writings. It is especially intriguing in that the alleged functionalist symbiosis with analogical societies would involve a discontinuity with the (Naturalist) local ideology of the functionalist anthropologists, presumably occasioned by putting on their anthropologist hats. This in turn would suggest that multiple positions on the grid are in fact available within a given society (or perhaps this is only rendered possible by the social forms of organized inquiry particular to modern/Naturalist societies, which may just be another way of saying that "Naturalism is an ontology capable of generating analytical systems that are not only capable of grasping themselves but all other possible ontologies"). This problem seems germane to (the critique of) symbology, which would probably have to understand in Descola's terms as an occasionally assumed, impoverished analogism underpinned by a practical naturalism. In order to pursue this line of thinking, it would be necessary to extend Foucault's investigation of analogism and naturalism as historical forms whose genealogy we can investigate, specifically the latter as a mutation of the former; analogism as it persists in symbology could then be understood as a collective memory of the form of organization whose suppression enabled our current classificatory schemas and social collective, retaining an unconscious structuring force as a kind of " limit-experience" of the social, to use a Foucauldian phrase. This would tie in nicely with Foucault's account (in OoT, not HoM) of the madman as "the man of primitive resemblances" (49). In some sense, the madman (exemplified by Don Quijote) is the lone analogist in a naturalist world. Madmen, as Jared Lee Loughner has reminded us of late, generally sound like symbologists, and this is no mistake if, as I am suggesting, both bring to the surface in different manners the unconscious remains of a largely suppressed analogical imagination. As I closing hypothesis, then, I would like to posit that symbological literature may be best understood in these terms as a colonization and instrumentalization of the limit-experiences associated with the analogical system by the local ideologies of naturalism proper to the late capitalist world order.

Really Existing Cacognosis

Last night, D, a neighbor with whom I had always had relatively pleasant relations, subjected me to an aggressive attempt at proselytization. What follows are what I take to be the most significant of my observations:
1) D believes that the events narrated in the gospels are well-established facts. He claims that their historicity is corroborated by hundreds of witnesses, and denying the reality of Jesus's life, death, and resurrection would be as absurd as denying that the Second World War happened. My attempts to point out that a journalistic reporting of pure, unadulterated facts of the sort he was implying that the gospels were doing was more or less generically and epistemologically foreign to the 1st century Eastern Mediterranean, needless to say, did not really register.
2) D also believes that "no one else has ever claimed that someone was resurrected," and therefore it is unimaginable that several witnesses could have claimed that this happened without it actually being the case. My assertion that the motif of resurrection is common in, for instance, Greek and Hindu mythologies did not seem relevant to him since, of course, we are talking about historical facts and not myth. This made clear what I had already recognized: that for him, there is nothing even remotely metaphorical or symbolic about the gospels.
3) D presented me with a series of multiple choice-like options: either Jesus was God as he claimed, or he was a madman ("he couldn't have been just a 'great thinker,' because great thinkers don't go around claiming to be God"); either you believe in heaven and hell, or you believe that we simply turn to dust at death, etc. When I attempted to answer "none of the above" or respond that the question simply had no meaning for me, D insinuated that I simply had not thought about these things out of sheer apathy.

At risk of belaboring the obvious, I would like to note the following. All are points which I had never ceased to be aware of on some level, but it was illuminating to have them forced into my consciousness in such a violent manner:
1) D's claims about the warrant for his beliefs are exactly the same as those of militant atheists/secularists. He claims that he simply has the facts right, and appeals to the indisputable authority of the texts and institutions attesting to those facts in order to establish that their truth is simply transparent and indisputable to any reasonable person. It was important for me to be reminded of this, since it reminds me that literalist Christians and literalist scientific ideologues ultimately speak the same language. D, like Dawkins, believes that people who do not accept the truth he is promulgating are simply too apathetic and/or obtuse to accept the facts.
2) D would seem to be a real-existing cacognostic, at least in terms of our grid, in that he believes that the gospels have real historical referents and that these referents are strongly relevant. This reminds me that we need to think more about the socio-political significance of the fundamentalist as cacognostic in symbological fiction. Fundamentalists, as in the cases of Silas and the Camerlengo, can be cacognostics, or they can be quite distinct from the cacognostic as in the case of Senator Kurtz and some of Reilly's and Navarro's characters; but one of the things that symb-pologists (B) praise about DVC is that it is supposedly anti-fundamentalist (even though it shares the literalist epistemology I encountered in D). Given the symbiosis of fundamentalists and late capitalism, I hope this line of inquiry re: fundamentalism might productively intersect with the investigation of Vulgar Economic Determinism I proposed in my previous post.
3) The impossibility of this conversation, the sense that we were simply speaking two different languages, was far more extreme than I could have expected. It was especially notable to me that what I might have taken to be my most sophisticated and well-thought out positions (for instance, my claim that while I believe that there is "a truth" to the ideas of heaven and hell, but that that truth does not make me think that I will go to one of them when I die [i.e., although I did not put it this way, they possess a social truth, not a literal truth]; my argument that we cannot even know with absolute certainty even the "facts" of what happened last week in our own town, since facts are the result of people's cumulative narrations, much less the "facts" of some obscure events that occurred two thousand years ago in a radically different cultural and historical milieu) were clearly interpreted by D as expressions of ignorance and apathy. He didn't even do me the honor of considering me a dangerous relativist, he simply thought I was badly informed!
4) "The question of the neighbor." I sense that what I just described as the impossibility of this conversation is entirely emblematic of many of the problems we have been discussing here and on the other blog. So my question: How do I interact with the neighbor? Do I attempt to continue this impossible conversation? Do I instead attempt to confine our discussions to the weather? is one with many ramifications. And it is one I am, for the moment, completely unprepared to answer.

Natural Duelists!

For our collective enlightenment I have saved two pieces by Rita Astuti to the Dropbox.  I have only read the first (chronologically - it's also shorter), the 2001 memorial Malinowski lecture entitled "Are we all dualists?"  This must be from before the scales fell from her eyes, since as far as I can tell she's using the sorts of cognitive psychology experiments Tevans-Britchard described to prove something a little more conventional, viz. that the Vezo are dualists in the conventional Cartesian sense, but (crucially) that they are not born that way.  She seems to implicitly endorse a linguistic model of culture and to think that her results demonstrate the pluripotency if not totipotency of the human infant psyche, rather than its limits.  The main point appears to be that you can't take what people say about, in this instance, their ontology at face value, but rather have to apply tests which will allow you to observe the "inferential reasoning" which they are actually using to discriminate between various categories of being.  This subterranean ontology still appears, in this lecture, to be very much like a language.

I am expecting something wildly different from the second piece, which I assume TTTB has either read or heard a version of in person, and which is called "Constraints on conceptual development: a case study of the acquisition of folkbiological and folksociological knkowledge in Madagascar (2004, co-authored with Gregg Solomon and Susan Carey).  It's a little long but is double-spaced, and I am guessing will provide some fertile points for further discussion of the limits of human cognition and the potential contributions of cognitive psychology and neuroscience (as opposed to their symbological counterparts.

Needless to say, I am a babe in the woods with this material and if Sir Tevans-Britchard has alternative recommendations I defer entirely to his hard-won expertise.

CORRECTION:
I can't save the Malinowski lecture, but it's freely available at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/471/