In this essay, I trace the operations of a moral optimism and a skepticism that lie, uneasily, at the foundation of sociocultural anthropology. As other authors of year-in-review pieces have noted, anthropology is motivated by a moral optimism pointing toward the possibilities of an ethically and politically better life. Equally as fundamental, I argue, is a rigorous skepticism interrogating the shifting conditions that give life to anthropology's possibility. Here, I follow the productive tension between these two stances through the sociocultural anthropology of 2014, loosely grouping that work under the rubrics of "ends," "immediacy," "ecology," and "refusal." Throughout, I make a push for increased attention to our ethic of skepticism as means of tempering the discipline's moral optimism. [optimism, skepticism, immediacy, connection, year in review, sociocultural anthropology] RESUMENEn este ensayo, delineo las operaciones de un optimismo moral y un escepticismo que yacen, incómodamente, en la fundación de la antropología sociocultural. Como otros autores de los artyículos del año en revisión lo han notado, la antropología está motivada por un optimismo moral señalando hacia las posibilidades de una vidaética y políticamente mejor. Igualmente fundamental, argumento, es un escepticismo riguroso interrogando las condiciones cambiantes que dan vida a la posibilidad de la antropología. Aquí, sigo la tensión productiva entre estas dos posiciones a través de la antropología cultural del 2014, agrupando en líneas generales ese trabajo bajo las rúbricas de "fines", "inmediatez", "ecología", y "rechazo". A lo largo, presiono por una atención creciente a nuestraética de escepticismo, como un medio de temperar el optimismo moral de la disciplina. [optimismo, escepticismo, inmediatez, conexión, año en revisión, antropología sociocultural] ON SKEPTICISM AND OPTIMISMIn this essay, I review work in U.S. sociocultural anthropology from 2014. At the same time, I argue for attention to a skepticism that lies at the heart of our discipline, frequently overshadowed by the equally longstanding moral optimism that fuels our discipline's forward tilt. Michel de Montaigne begins his 16th-century essay "On the Cannibals" by questioning the chauvinistic tendency for anyone to call "barbarous anything he is not accustomed to" (1991:231). He argues, in counterpoint, for seeing the barbarism of the "we": "Those 'savages' are only wild in the sense that we call fruits wild when they are produced by Nature in her ordinary course: whereas it is fruit we
The smell of real leather: as you slide on new shoes, or slip into a new car. Luxury. Refinement. Juxtapose this with the person who inappropriately smells of leather, of animal flesh. The nose curls with even the thought: contagion and filth, a different kind of person. These divergent sensibilities of the smell of leather exist alongside each other in contemporary Japan, each requiring a discriminating nose to demarcate sets of smell and sets of people. Set against this backdrop of aromatic bivalency, this paper examines how smell and the capacity for olfaction become key elements in the identification of stigma in Japan. I explore the ecology of interrelating sensibilities that compose the politics of stigma. The Buraku people have historically been marginalized in Japan because of associations with stigmatized industries such as leather and meat production. Since the 1970s, the groundwork for asserting such associations has been dramatically reconfigured. This paper focuses on the changing practices by which such attribution occurs, the demands these practices make on capacities for olfaction and the qualities of scent, and the role ceded to private detectives as purveyors of evidence.
This introductory essay charts the analytic potential of a concept of commensuration that goes beyond issues of metrics per se, but without diffusing itself into a general metaphor for cultural difference. Commensuration, we argue, is not just a basic psychosocial process, but has also emerged, in the context of “globalization” with its multifarious and wide-ranging flows, as an ideological value in its own right. Explicit negotiations of commensuration, then, have become increasingly fraught, increasingly pivotal practices as group boundaries of all sorts—separating ethnic groups, socioeconomic classes, nations, or “civilizations”—are relentlessly re-erected and re-arranged on the miniscule ethnographic scale of everyday engagements with semiotic forms marked as coming from beyond those boundaries. After laying out the nuts and bolts of our approach, we explore commensuration (and introduce the subsequent collection of essays) via three topical foci: commensuration’s role in securing movement as a semiotic effect; how sovereign power authorizes commensuration and thus comes to be at stake in it; and, finally, the destabilizing and yet productive ways in which failure haunts commensurative projects.
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