“To
make the strange familiar, but to make the familiar strange" is a central
theme of anthropology. Horace Miner, in his 1956 essay on the Nacirema succeeds
in this task so well that few people notice that his descriptions of strange
body rituals and exotic practices is nothing but an abstracted depiction of the
American society and culture. Through his article Miner aimed to criticize the
standard way of scientific representation and how it distorts reality. In a
similar fashion and in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig asks
us to adapt an “optic that perceives the
everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday”.
In other words, the only way to
escape the mystification at the heart of a culture of terror is by recognizing
a certain degree of mystery and fiction as present in and integral to our
everyday-life.
In “Culture of Terror: Torture and
the Putumayo” from 1984 Taussig comes to this conclusion after examining how a
culture of terror as emerged during the colonial regimes of the rubber boom in
the early 20th century is mediated and reproduced through
narratives. Examining reports composed by colonial envoys and conquerors he
concludes that the development of an effective counter-narrative to the
colonial representation of native Indians is only possible by breaking with the
mystifying Western dialectic between evil and good, between savagery and
civilization. The piece is shot through with Taussig’s criticism of the
scientific form of the report that largely perpetuates the amalgamation of truth
and fiction. This blend maintains
its mystical character in spite or because of attempts to rationalize the
practice of the colonizers. Hence, the text reflects Taussig’s criticism of
cultural analysis through the lens of the dominant culture, that is liberal
capitalism and the assumption of objectivity and rationality. Instead, he
advocates an anthropological approach to research that values the subjectivity
and points of view of the object of the study, such as the Indian native, to
render them a subject themselves.
Taussig is particularly critical
of Casement’s tendency to reduce the explanation of torture of the Indian
rubber gatherer to the capitalist logic of profit. Casement claims that means of torture and debt peonage had
emerged due to the scarcity of labour combined with the cheapness of the rubber
so that regularly paying the workers would not have been profitable. The
colonist used torture and other cruel practices as a means of deterring the
Indians from running away or staying below the standard amount of rubber. Casement
then suggests that while being motivated through capitalist interest in the
first place the practices developed a “life of their own” to explain the cruel
excesses with irrational cruelty and mass killing. However, Taussig points out
that Casement disregards the way in which meaning has emerged from a clash of
different cultural logics, construction and symbolism that cannot be reduced to
rationalist argumentation. These have evolved from the encounter of
pre-colonial mythology of the seemingly supernatural qualities of the wild man,
the use of the cannibalistic “savage” as a mirror image to create the own
civilized identity and the reproduction of these mythologies through
narratives. Projections of fear and hatred generated an intense paranoia of the
colonial station-managers that was only bearable by responding with terror
themselves and “degenerating” into the savage.
In Foucault’s tradition, Taussig
attempts to deconstruct the mystifying discourse and analyses how effects of
truth are produced within discourses which are in themselves neither true nor
false. For Taussig though, truth
seems to exist outside and independently of the narrative itself as it is the
narrative that makes truth and reality indiscernible from illusion and fiction.
The dichotomy still exist, we are just unable to grasp its bifurcation. At the
same time he suggests in his concept of magical realism that through this
coalescence, fiction and illusion become an integral part of the reality itself
as they have concrete real-world effects. Hence, the narrative embodies and
mediates the social force and political power of ideational constructions.
On a
different not, in my mind, his continuous reference to the “banality of
cruelty” and the “ordinarinesss of the extraordinary” as well as the “mean of
terror becoming and end in itself” invokes the various attempts to account for
the cruelty of the holocaust. Amongst others, Hannah Arendt and Zygmunt Baumann
have faced a similar challenge as Taussig to “penetrate the veil while
retaining its hallucinatory quality”. They tried to demystify the unspeakable
deeds of the Nazis while not diminishing their gravity through rationalization.
Interestingly,
Baumann sees the holocaust not as a unique event but as a window that allows us
a glimpse of the logic of modernity through the encounter of very ordinary and
common factors. Similar to Taussig arguing that torture and institutionalized
terror were enabled through the very values of civilization rather than through
their abandonment, Baumann sees the Holocaust as the epitome of the logic that underlies
civilization, as a project of modernity.
Likwise,
Baumann also depicts the projection of fear and hatred through the attitude of
society towards strangers. A vision of an ideal society and someone committed
to impose this design like a gardener on a plain was enabled through manifold
processes of authorization, routinization and dehumanization. On the one hand,
one may say that Baumann to a wide extend draws on rationalizing explanations
that Taussig rejects. On the other hand, he illustrates how the mysterious and inconceivable
dimension of the holocaust was inherent and immanent in every-day life and may
still be today, a claim that is much more disconcerting than the weird rituals
of Miner’s Nacirema.
Sources:
Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and The Holocaust. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press. 1989
Horace
Miner, Body Ritual among the Nacirema. In: American Anthropologist,
New Series. Vol. 58,
Nr. 3, Blackwell Publishing, 1956, S. 503–507
No comments:
Post a Comment