this post dedicated to the lovely ladies and gentlemen of ANT 395 Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Proposing a revised title after doing a reading for class:

from “Behind the Knotted Veil: Love, Language and Liminality among the ______”

to “Behind the Knotted Veil: Four _____ Narratives on Love, Language, and Liminality”.

Why? We read an article for class (the Space and Place seminar) that pointed out something rather important:

“The idea that ‘a culture’ is naturally the property of a spatially localized people and that the way to study such a culture is to go ‘there’ (‘among the so-and-so’) has long been part of the unremarked common sense of anthropological practice. Yet, once questioned, this anthropological convention dissolves into a series of challenging and important issues about the contested relations between difference, identity, and place.” – Gupta and Ferguson 1997 p. 3

What are these relations? They are “… three major themes that bring together a set of crucial issues about the interrelations of culture, power, and place: place making, identity, and resistance.” (Emphasis mine.)

And another quotation I liked: “Rather, the point, well acknowledged but worth restating, is that all associations of place, people, and culture are social and historical creations to be explained, not given natural facts.” – p. 4

I haven’t finished the article yet but I’m still very excited about it. The reason is because I want to construct a culture that is not constructed with artificial boundaries (though still constructed according to current theory). I want to write stories from specific speakers, collected around a given issue or power dynamic, but that do not attempt to represent this particular culture as a homogeneous whole–precisely because it is changing, and there may well be future stories that examine the future for this particular fictional society.

Tactics for heterogeneous representation of the fictional culture:

1. Local variations in vocabulary (“seed” and “earth” vs. “windblown” and “pillar”; perhaps “cloud” and “lake” with the marriage ceremony being referred to as a “raining”)
2. Varying social backgrounds for the four voices: small mesa joining another small mesa; small -> large, large -> small, large -> large (though rarely intra-mesa due to exogenous marriage rules (which get increasingly bent as population increases after industrialization)).
3. Use narratives to illustrate ownership changes and power shifts

More tactics to come as I think of them.