Rosalind C. Morris

New worlds from fragments : film, ethnography, and the representation of Northwest Coast cultures

* Preview: Persistence of Vision. Through a Glass Darkly: Terms and Problems for Analysis * Celluloid Savages: Salvage Ethnography and the Narration of Disappearance * Totems and the Potlatch People: Absence, Presence, and the Denial of History * Remembering: The Narratives of Renewal * Wider Angles: Toward a Conclusion

Modernism's Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand

funny thing happened on the way to the STET (the Stock Exchange of Thailand). In November 1997, I returned to Thailand amid a financial catastrophe that has since been labeled the Asian economic plague, to begin an ethnography of capitalist crisis. I imagined that it would be a project on the politics of transparency—that ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state where once it was the function of the state to regulate the market. I was, and am, interested in how capitalism in Thailand disguises itself as mere monetization, and how money’s total and totalizing mediations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and eternal present-being. I wanted to pursue the ways in which the rhetorics of transparency and visibility have been conceived in aesthetic domains where calls for the end of mimetic representation mirror and reiterate calls for disclosure and objectivity in the economic domain. Before I got to the STET, however, a nationally renowned spirit medium named Chuchad appeared on a cable network talk show, hosted by a former academic, and confessed to twenty-six years of fakery. In a narcissistic act of teletechnic encompassment that the doubt-ridden Quesalid could probably never have imagined, Chuchad not only theatricalized his newfound skepticism but also invited all mediums to join him in renouncing their dissimulating practice.1 Ulti-

Photographies East : the camera and its histories in East and Southeast Asia

Introducing Photographies East , Rosalind C. Morris notes that although the camera is now a taken-for-granted element of everyday life in most parts of the world, it is difficult to appreciate “the shock and sense of utter improbability that accompanied the new technology” as it was introduced in Asia (and elsewhere). In this collection, scholars of Asia, most of whom are anthropologists, describe frequent attribution of spectral powers to the camera, first brought to Asia by colonialists, as they examine the transformations precipitated or accelerated by the spread of photography across East and Southeast Asia. In essays resonating across theoretical, historical, and geopolitical lines, they engage with photography in China, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand, and on the islands of Aru, Aceh, and Java in what is now Indonesia. The contributors analyze how in specific cultural and historical contexts, the camera has affected experiences of time and subjectivity, practices of ritual and tradition, and understandings of death. They highlight the links between photography and power, looking at how the camera has figured in the operations of colonialism, the development of nationalism, the transformation of monarchy, and the militarization of violence. Moving beyond a consideration of historical function or effect, the contributors also explore the forms of illumination and revelation for which the camera has offered itself as instrument and symbol. And they trace the emergent forms of alienation and spectralization, as well as the new kinds of fetishism, that photography has brought in its wake. Taken together, the essays chart a bravely interdisciplinary path to visual studies, one that places the particular knowledge of a historicized anthropology in a comparative frame and in conversation with aesthetics and art history. Contributors . James L. Hevia, Marilyn Ivy, Thomas LaMarre, Rosalind C. Morris, Nickola Pazderic, John Pemberton, Carlos Rojas, James T. Siegel, Patricia Spyer

Images of untranslatability in the US war on terror

This paper is considers the use deployment of images and the discourse of noise in the War on Terror. I argue that the deployment of imagery, often in lieu of language, rests on particular developments in the mass media, and on the emergence of what Paul Virilio has termed ‘technical fundamentalism’ (2002a: 53). Technical fundamentalism is then considered in relation to and as a counterpart to terrorism, as a contrasting mode of valorizing technique which is nonetheless distinguished by its image politics and by its conceptualization of signification in general. Comparing the photographic ideology of images that dominates Western image politics with approaches that recognize in images a capacity to explode outward and to be read as signs of a future repetition, I suggest that the War on Terror is being carried out from the US within a framework which is stereotypically fetishistic. This framework is one in which an imaginary investment in images obstructs social relations based in fully symbolic, which is to say, linguistic practice. I argue further that the symptoms of this fetishization can be seen not only in a general proliferation of images and in their differential mobilization, but in the emergence of a discourse of ‘noise’ and in the representation of the speech of others as being either mere noise or the signs of a meaninglessly violent intention. Equally important, it is associated with the rise of narcissistic politics writ large: a demand for mirroring on the part of ones interlocutors and an incapacity to imagine real otherness, the consequences of which can be seen, on the one hand, in refusals to negotiate in the pursuit of peace and, on the other, in the elevation of suicide to a political mode.

Accidental Histories, Post-Historical Practice?: Re-reading Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance in the Actuarial Age

To read and reread Jean Comaroffs Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance today, more than two decades after its publication, is to be reminded of what historical anthropology can be, and to confront what it seems no longer capable of being. In this essay, I return to Comaroffs explicit analysis of the conjuncture of blood and money, and the less theorized figures of the car as the sign of foreign economic power in order to think again about the relationship between apartheids economic history and postapartheid social forms. Exploring automobility as the condition of possibility for the peasant proletariat, I examine the doubled structure of fear and desire that has come to inhere in the figure of the car and the value of speed with which it is always associated—a value that functions both as the index of sovereignty and as the engine of its encompassment by global capitalism. South Africas posthistorical predicament, like that which preceded it, remains deeply racialized. Today, however, the interpellation of subjects often takes place through private institutions, which operate in the space between accident and contingency, through the management of fear and the calculation of risk. These forces were shrewdly intuited in Comaroffs perspicacious analysis, long before speed acquired its autonomy and actuaralization had assumed its place as the dominant science of the new govenmentality.

Giving Up Ghosts: Notes on Trauma and the Possibility of the Political from Southeast Asia

In Bao Ninh’s 1991 novel The Sorrow of War, ghosts of the Vietnam War dead return to trouble the dreams and the daytime moments of the living, appearing as soft corpses beneath the wheels of cars or laughing in the decimated groves where napalm was sprayed.1 Elsewhere, on the banks of the Salween River, as described by Pascal Khoo Thwee in From the Land of Green Ghosts, the groaning specters of the battle dead in Myanmar’s insurgencies appear at night to wake the young rebels but vanish like smoke when confronted.2 In Singapore, rapacious widow ghosts visit Thai construction workers, causing several deaths and terrifying villagers in the area whence the workers hailed. In theatrical acts of civil disobedience, Thai democracy protestors conjure the spirits of those who have been killed by the police or the military and invite regional spirits to join with them in acts of political vengeance.3 In Indonesia, beneath the rivers where the bodies of the com-

Mediation, the Political Task: Between Language and Violence in Contemporary South Africa

Two paradigms of communication confront each other in South Africa today. One posits an ideal public sphere that recognizes the task of mediation but also requires its effacement. The other, frustrated by deferral, seeks to bypass mediation through apparently immediate forms of speech that range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead. When viewed ethnographically, these competing conceptions and aspirations cannot be linked to particular technologies. On the contrary, the social scene is technologically heterogeneous. Epochal and ontological schemata of mediatic displacement must thus be rethought. In this paper I pursue such a rethinking on the basis of long-term ethnography in the gold-mining region of South Africa following the infamously violent assault on striking miners at Marikana.

Remembering Asian Anticolonialism, Again

Gertrude Stein once remarked that history must be understood not as the passage of time, but as the killing of centuries. This killing of centuries takes a very long time, she added, and she discerned the final death throes of the nineteenth century—a period in thrall to science and the idea of civilizational progress—in the middle of World War II. Being an American Jew in France, that denouement was realized, for her, by Hitlers Germany, in the moment that it fell to American industrial war making. But Steins insight might as easily and as correctly be applied to the analysis of anticolonialism and the collapse of European rule in South and Southeast Asia. It was there, after all, that the ideology of a civilizational mission was revealed in all its hypocrisy. Such, at least, is the impression one gathers from reading the works of Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Leela Gandhi, and Benedict Anderson, each of whom offers a perspective on the history of empires end, and the rise of revolutionary and nationalist independence movements in Asia. As counterpoint to their insistently particularizing narration of these movements, James C. Scott sketches a deep history of recurrent antistatism as the context in which European empires made their ill-fated claims to civilizational exceptionalism, and in which anarchism could emerge as a technics of ungovernability.

Crowds and Powerlessness: Reading //kabbo and Canetti with Derrida in (South) Africa

What links the post-Enlightenment humanist discourse on the animal to that on Africa? What traces of being otherwise can be excavated from within the linguistic memory and narrative traditions of those who have, historically, been asked to signify “Africanity”? And when is the possibility of being otherwise that against which purgative violence is organized? Reading back from contemporary South African discourse on the human and the African, as framed by the problem of foreigners, animals and their rights, this chapter revisits Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd’s material on /Xam mythology. Reading in light of Derrida’s late work, The Animal That Therefore I Am, it not only seeks the traces of /Xam thought about possible conceptions of human-animal being, but also seeks to bring that thought to bear on Elias Canetti’s rendering of /Xam myth in his monumental work, Crowds and Power. Under the specter of “xenophobic” violence, as it materialized in South Africa in 2008, we conclude here by considering how and why the predicament of being simultaneously modern and African is articulated in contemporary South Africa as a question of the animal as citizen, by figures as diverse as Thabo Mbeki and J.M. Coetzee.

Introduction: Publishing and the Creation of an Alternate Economy of Value

In Mizumura Minae’s semi-autobiographical novel Shishōsetsu from Left to Right (The I-Novel from Left to Right, 1995) the narrator’s mother wheedles an old, vermillion-covered series of books out of a relative in Yokohama before setting o√ for the United States. The one indication we have in Shishōsetsu from Left to Right about the mother’s motivations for making a special trip to borrow a mountain of forty-year-old books comes when we are told that she had obtained the series ‘‘for her daughter, whom she would be raising in the United States.’’∞ This simple phrase captures the mother’s expectations of the series, which will become a singular resource for her daughter, a literary youth who will have little access to other sources of Japanese-language texts. As such, the series would partially predetermine the act of reading both materially and conceptually. Materially it would limit what could be read by its contents; conceptually it would influence how those contents could be interpreted through its organizational framework. That framework—modern Japanese literature— implies that the texts not only have an organic relationship with one