PUBLISHER COVER DESIGN The Graduate Students in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria Carlin Bennett EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Cab Design David Strongman SPONSORS MANAGING EDITORS Office of the Vice President Research Faculty of Graduate Studies Faculty of Social Science Department of Anthropology Graduate Students’ Society Linda Outcalt Jennafer Roberts Jenny Shaw Allyshia West Leanne Wiltsie DESIGN PlatForum is published annually (ISSN 1492-4293) by the University of Victoria, Department of Anthropology Graduate Students. All rights reserved. General enquiries may be forwarded to: Managing Editor, PlatForum, University of Victoria, Department of Anthropology,Cornett Bldg, Room 214, PO Box 3050, Stn CSC, Victoria, B.C. V8W 3P5. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the publisher. Opinions expressed by individual authors are not necessarily those of PlatForum, the Department of Anthropology, or the University of Victoria. All authors retain the right to republish their material. The Editors assume responsibility for typographical errors. Copyright 2009. TABLE OF CONTENTS BETH WETHERS 10 Haiku ALAN HANNA 11 Marcel Mauss’ Essai sur le don (The Gift) SHALANDA PHILLIPS 15 Phenomenologies of Fire: Exploring Combustive Ethnography and the Articulating Sensorium KATIE BRESNER 31 The Ainu as ‘Other’: Representations of the Ainu and Japanese Identity Before 1905 ANNE-METTE HERMANSEN 45 Jineteras, Luchadoras and the Awkward Tourist-Anthropologist in Havana: People as Categories JENNAFER ROBERTS 61 Contested Femininities: Social Evolution and the Victorian Construction of the Idealised Woman MICHELLE HARDY 78 Re-representing Rwandan Child Headed Households: Observations on Community Support ROBIN SMITH 92 Exotic, Spectacular Dirt: Archaeology and Tourism D’ANN OWENS 102 The Other Self of Landscape: Considering the Temporality of Lekwammen Territory NIKI THORNE 118 (In)Visibility & (Mis)Representation: First Nations and Social Justice 03 INTRODUCTION Welcome to Volume 10, the 2009 edition of the University of Victoria’s Department of Anthropology graduate journal, PlatForum. This year marks the second year of our new name and new editorial direction, a direction that ventures forth anticipating the changing ways that we as anthropologists produce, consume and circulate our knowledges. The North American discipline of anthropology continues to benefit from a sustained, 40 year engagement with its very own ‘crisis of representation’ that builds upon the work of the critical, feminist and semiotic movements. As graduate students in anthropology, this engagement with the contemporary tenets of the discipline can be liberating, as one may find themselves swept up in an optimistic wave of change, knowing that the theoretical foundations that give shape to how we view our analytical objects are fluid and dynamic, and that by engaging with the minds who challenge what it truly means to be an anthropologist and, in fact, what anthropology itself is, that we are an intrinsic component in this process. As students of a contemporary anthropology, our interests lead us further away from the privileged, foundational discourse whose goal is to describe and understand, and moves us towards an anthropology that recognizes the diverse and often unknowable possible worlds that we live in. These shifting theoretical foundations, our adaptability to change and our unique and inventive methods for conducting research in these ever changing environs 04 are what defines our contemporary discipline. I feel that anthropology will never be a foundational discipline with static paradigms, nor should it be. This is why all of academia benefits from a close relationship to our discipline and why anthropology is so relevant today. Our collaborative knowledges and ways of seeing and circulating knowledge is for others to consume, to build upon, to make their own, and to share with their worlds. But this contemporary climate of possibilities can also be daunting given that our chosen field of study has a fractured and tenuous relationship from whence it came, from where it sits and to where it shall venture forth. As graduate anthropologists we benefit from this constant flux because in it, we are (relatively) free to define ourselves and our academic trajectories according to this mutability. As new ‘ways of seeing’ are developed, we adapt them to our studies, and as the product of our knowledges make their way into the mainstream, it will be because as emerging anthropologists we will have recognized the need to open our doors, finding creative ways of organizing our thoughts and ideas, making anthropology accessible and inclusive to all who share in this great curiosity and concern for humanity. It is precisely the opportunity to view myself and those around me through the ever shifting, often murky lens of this always changing discipline that sustains my interest in anthropology. Never before have anthropologists had so many tools to view a world so ... sharply nebulous. While we have the technology to witness the minutiae of the individual and collective lives of the global community, the platform we stand upon to conduct our studies is fleeting and ever shifting. As anthropologists, we can only ever really say that we were there for that one moment, in the many moments that define our life and times. Sincerely, David Strongman Editor in Chief 05 MISSION PlatForum is a peer-reviewed journal organized by the graduate students in anthropology at the University of Victoria. We accept anthropologically relevant submissions from all university and college students across Canada on a Call for Papers basis. PlatForum strives to be a participatory publication offering an opportunity for students to participate fully in the peer-review, evaluation and publishing process. 06 CONTRIBUTORS KATIE BRESNER is a Toronto-native who received her Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from McGill University in Montreal. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Anthropology at the University of Victoria with a special interest in visual anthropology, identity, rights and representation, and tourism. ALAN HANNA is in the first year of the Master’s program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he also earned his BA. His subdiscipline is socio-cultural anthropology, with a focus on the relationship between First Nations and the Canadian state, Treaty, and Indigenous rights, title and jurisprudence. Born and raised on Kwikwetlem traditional territory in British Columbia, Hanna contemplates his own Plains heritage through the idealized styling of two steel horses he is reviving in his living room when he is not writing papers. MICHELLE HARDY graduated with a B.A. and M.A. in Anthropology from the University of Victoria. Her Masters’ thesis focused on the health concerns of children living in child headed households in rural Rwanda, with a particular focus on what they had to say about malaria. Michelle’s research interests include 07 medical anthropology, structural violence, social suffering and power relations, and the application of anthropology to contemporary issues, both here in Canada and in Rwanda. When not immersed in academia, Michelle enjoys kayaking the west coast of Canada. ANNE-METTE HERMANSEN graduated with her BA in Anthropology from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006. Her honors thesis was titled: Behind the Façade: Negotiating Authenticity in Touristic Encounters in Kenya. She started the MA program at the University of Victoria the same year. In the summer of 2008 she returned from six months fieldwork in Havana, Cuba, where she worked with women who make a living in the informal sector and whose strategies for getting ahead in Cuba’s dire economy often conflate with the kinds of relationships they are able to build to foreigners. Anne-Mette is enrolled in the University of Victoria’s Co-operative Education program and has received a MITACS internship grant to work for Pivot Legal Society, an advocacy organization in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. D’ANN OWENS. is a senior archaeologist with Millennia Research in Victoria, BC and has had the pleasure of working closely with members of both the Esquimalt and Songhees communities since the late 1990s. D’Ann started her MA in 2006 following the birth of her third child. Since that time she has resumed almost full-time work and has had another child. She is investigating social identity as evident in material culture at historic Black and Native-Hawaiian settlements on Salt Spring Island, BC. It is her sincere desire to complete this research before her children begin their studies at the University of Victoria. SHALANDA PHILLIPS is a graduate student of social anthropology at York University. Her scholarly interests have most recently resided in modes of moving and the multifaceted theoretical terrain deployed to texture the bodies therein. JENNAFER ROBERTS completed her Bachelors in Anthropology at the University of Victoria and is currently enrolled in a Master’s program at the same institution. Her interests are located primarily within socio-cultural anthropology, specifically feminist anthropology of reproduction. Her research focus includes women’s bodies as sites of medical surveillance and the politicization 08 of reproductive health and illness, particularly as it intersects with social identity and inequality. ROBIN SMITH received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Victoria in 2009 with distinction. She has since been employed as an archaeological field assistant and lab technician. NIKI THORNE is an activist, and graduate student of Social Anthropology at York University. Her MA research involves a reflexive auto-ethnography of a particular activist community exploring the lived politics of resistance. She completed her BA, honours, in anthropology with a philosophy minor at McMaster University in 2008, and through activist undergraduate field research studied the reclamation of Kanonhstaton, and the surrounding backlash. Niki is a member of the CUPE 3903 First Nations Solidarity Working Group and continues to be involved in solidarity work around struggles for native sovereignty and social justice. 09 Beth Wethers Archaeology without proper field notes is useless drivel. 10 Alan Hanna Marcel Mauss’ Essai sur Le Don (The Gift), 1967 Edition with an Introduction by E.E. Evans-Pritchard Introduction The argument that Marcel Mauss presents in Essai proclaims that a process of exchange among groups and individuals in so-called archaic societies was much more than simply the mere giving and receiving of gifts detached from meaning as it is in many contemporary Western societies. Mauss explains the exchange of gifts and “prestations” as an obligatory action, which contained functional aspects that served to establish and maintain social relations in perpetuity because of the spirit, or essence, the items of exchange possessed. Mauss argues that contemporary Western society would benefit from reevaluating the meanings and spiritual properties that we have stripped away from the processes of exchange. In addition to a summary of Mauss’ key argument on social obligations tied to exchange, I will provide a critical response to his work by highlighting some of the strengths and weaknesses. This analysis begins with a clarification on the translation of Mauss’ use of the term le don, which means the gift, or talent for doing (see www. wordreference.com). This translation of a gift as being an individual’s talent for some activity expands the notion of a gift from being merely an object to give, to include an impalpable yet significant essence, or spiritual property. For example, to have a gift for creating music is to have an invisible propensity to create music. As such, the gift is no longer simply a physical object, but also a metaphysical concept, which embodies a spiritual element. According to Mauss, the use of the terms “‘present’ and ‘gift’ do not have precise meaning” (Mauss 1967:70). What he is getting at is that the reader must be careful not to confuse a contemporary Western understanding of a gift, which is pri11 marily utilitarian and materialistic, with the notion that a gift is not detached from the person giving it, making it “alive and often personified” (10). Mauss also uses the term “total prestation,” which includes services, ceremonies, people and other activities and objects that form an elaborate understanding of the expression ‘gift’ (3). With the gift framed as a personified living thing, the process of exchanging gifts is free to fulfill its many functions in society that Mauss examines, beginning with the creation and maintenance of social relations. Mauss’ conceptualization of gift exchange in non-Western societies opposes Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature theory. To generalize Hobbes’ theory, people live in a crude world as individuals in constant fear and isolation of others. Driven by a fear of violence, they will eventually enter into a social contract to form a civil society for protection. Until then, they will exist in a state of perpetual war. Mauss examines “archaic” (31) societies that he considers to pre-date Western civilization (46), and could therefore be interpreted as existing in Hobbes’ state of nature. However, instead of living in a state of fear, gift exchange establishes friendly relations between and among societies by reciprocating “respects and courtesies” (44). The exchange, or the giving of oneself, carries with it an essence of the giver, which longs to return home regardless of the number of hands it passes through (9). In other words, 12 the spirit of the given gift produces an obligation throughout any number of subsequent transactions that will continue until eventually the original giver is restored to a state of wholeness. The important concept to observe is that the gift itself is producing the desire to be returned home, whereas the obligation attached to giving and receiving is “a moral one” designed to “produce a friendly feeling between the two persons concerned” (18). This had the larger effect of establishing alliances between the societies that practiced gift exchanges (31). One compelling aspect of the exchange of gifts is that the relations created demand to be maintained because the people “are constantly embroiled with and feel themselves in debt to each other” (31). Therefore, relationships between groups are established by the moral obligation of giving and receiving gifts, and subsequently maintained by these same perpetual obligations. As such, these societies did not exist in fear, isolation or war, as Hobbes argued. On the contrary, the process of exchange meant that “hatred and war…must be conjured away so that trade can take place between friends” (23). In order to exchange between friends or otherwise, there must be trust among people, not fear. Mauss examines two forms of exchange in indigenous societies of the Pacific: the kula and the potlatch. The Melanesian kula is a system of exchange that, once established between partners, demands the maintenance of the “association or partnership” (25). Borne out of the obligation of giving and receiving them, the gifts, primarily ornate shell necklaces and armbands, must flow continuously through the cycle of maritime expeditions. Considering that these exchanges are made over the course of seasonal voyages, there is no time limit for repayment. The expectation for reciprocation exists in perpetuity until the partners meet next, whenever that may be. The case is somewhat different for the potlatch of the Northwest Coast. In the potlatch, gifts are given with the expectation of reciprocation in time. Here, the notion of time is relevant, in that “time has to pass before a counter-prestation can be made” (34). The significance of this rule is that time must lapse to allow for the accumulation of interest on the initial giving (40). This idea of interest over time is what Mauss considers to be a priori evidence of a market economy. Herein lies a problem I had with Mauss’ argument: He proposes that these systems represent “a stage in social evolution” leading to the “development of our own economic forms” (46). In my opinion, framing the discussion of indigenous forms of exchange in an evolutionary context weakens his argument, as it creates hierarchies that tend to elevate Western civilization above others. One way that I framed Mauss’ evolutionism was in the relativistic approach that he employed when referring to these archaic systems, specifically the kula system of Melanesia. Mauss referred to the kula as “a highly-developed exchange system,” and that the Melanesians themselves had an “extensive economic life” (30). Therefore, although he uses evolutionist terminology, he does not place archaic systems inferiorly to the Western economic system. Additionally, Mauss comments on the wealth of Melanesian and Polynesian surpluses, and the scale of Northwest Coast potlatch exchanges, calling them “considerable even when reckoned on the European scale” (32, 36). Clearly, Mauss sees these societies as “civilizations” (32) with complex economies that he does not consider subordinate to Western civilization. A third archaic system of exchange Mauss refers to is the early Western economic system. He places the origins of this system in ancient Rome, and traces it through the Hindu classical period and Germanic societies. Calling the Western economic system “survivals” from earlier systems, he makes the link to the archaic systems of the indigenous peoples previously discussed (47). In the Western system, time is delineated into segments for the purpose of calculating interest in a precise manner, and exchange is regulated by the written contract. The result of this precision is that the process of exchange has become mechanical. Mauss remarks that “it is only in our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal,” who is now little more than 13 a “machine—a calculating machine” (74). This can only be the result of stripping meaning from objects and services in our “individualistic economy of pure interest” (73). The value of society that Mauss emphasizes over individual ends stems from a critique of Western society, and leads to the crux of his argument. One of the strengths of Essai is that Mauss acknowledges that Western society is flawed. In one account, he offers the suggestion that our society merely uses wealth as “a means of controlling others” (73). Shortly thereafter he accuses the West of being “serious, avaricious, and selfish” (79). Although he does not denounce the accumulation of wealth as being morally corrupting, he does suggest that “we must become, in proportion as we would develop our wealth, something more than better financiers, accountants and administrators” (75). As my interest in Mauss’ book pertains to the way a process of exchanging gifts creates social relations, I am interested in his views on becoming better administrators. He mentions that his “analysis might suggest the way to better administrative procedures for our societies” (69), which is a tangible undertone throughout the book. He is clearly presenting a challenge for Western society to look at our systems, as opposed to the administration of other societies under colonial control. Mauss is cognizant of how we, as a 14 society, conduct our relations with other societies. He spends time showing how indigenous systems affected these relations in a positive manner, and how Western systems have forgotten this same concept. His portentous statement about the risks of a liberal democratic society is worth recounting in full: “The mere pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and peace of the whole, to the rhythm of its work and pleasures, and hence in the end to the individual” (75). I believe Mauss is challenging Western society to rethink the value of exchange as an alternative to war when he argues that it is through the exchanging of gifts “that the clan, the tribe and nation have learnt—just as in the future the classes and nations and individuals will learn—how to oppose one another without slaughter and to give without sacrificing themselves to others” (80). I believe Mauss’ anthropology through Essai is a proposal to encourage future researchers to look inward and ask questions about our Western societies and to re-learn from older societies what we ourselves have forgotten about how to be in this world. REFERENCES CITED Mauss, Marcel 1967 [1925] The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Shalanda PhilLips Phenomenologies of Fire: Exploring Combustive Ethnography and the Articulating Sensorium Abstract Fire poi refers to a style of object manipulation developed from a traditional Maori dance in which performers swing two or more weights attached to a length of chain or rope. Fire performers wield lit torches, spinning them into streams of pulsing patterns. This paper investigates the sensory dimension of movement through fire. Specifically, combustion is treated as the catalyst through which dancing bodies become increasingly sensitized to, and able to differentiate between, highly excited environments. Approaching fire poi through Bruno Latour’s notion of articulation, this paper explores how combustion organizes and propels particular apparatuses of sensory production. 15 com•bus•tion 1 [kuhm-buhs-chuhn]; (n) 1. the act or process of burning 2. chemical combination attended by production of heat and light 3. violent excitement; tumult Introduction If origin stories somehow validate my current preoccupation with moving, sensing, burning bodies, I will say this: since I was a little girl, I loved nothing more than to sit too close to the fireplace and watch wrapping paper peel off a grocery store-bought fire log, and let my face burn. Combined with the calming tone this recital is meant to cast, my dirty tale seems less than sinister. Today I still love to get too close and feel too hot. Today I assume a more active role in burning things. I started in on this with Kailee, my dreaded sister—dreaded describing both hair and temperament. She picks me up in her dilapidated Tracker, cigarette dangling from her mouth, cursing and hollering and telling me to hurry. We are both dressed in old clothes (the kind you paint in) as we load the car with kerosene and milk crates and buckets, blankets and more warm clothes.2 I wrap my sooty, knotted wicks in plastic grocery bags and I wrap my hair in a bun, stuffing it in a hat. And I forget a flashlight, always. We are going to spin fire, or poi. Stated plainly, we are going to soak greasy wicks in fuel and then light them up, 16 ultimately planning to dance a night away with the similarly twisted. For my part, I intend on thinking this through for once—that is, I am going to explore how combustion organizes and propels particular apparatuses of sensory production. Taking Bruno Latour’s (2004) lead, I ask, how to talk about the body? Or more to the point, how to talk about the moving body, the body that commands and controls the driest of humours? I approach fire poi through an anthropology of the senses by relying on literature stemming from science and technology studies and related disciplines.3 In this vein, Latour’s notion of articulation along with Rachel Prentice’s (2005) extension, mutual articulation, are useful concepts for thinking about the ways in which the body, a dynamic interface, becomes multiply configured by encountering that which differentiates—the new, the hitherto unexplained and unarticulated. Articulation, in this schema, stresses the ongoing encounter through which we learn, accumulatively, to be affected by difference. Mutual articulation, in turn, suggests that this process flows both ways, that both human and non-human transfigure one another reciprocally. I interpret mutual articulation through the lens of combustion, arguing that this fierce arena animates the senses, succinctly. The following essay is then devoted to theorizing that violent excitement: motion and the sensorium in fire dance. How to witness, how to write? I am no modest witness, or at least I hope to be of a particular breed. In contrast to the unadorned truth that presumably permeates the detached and unaffected observer (Shapin and Shaffer 1985), I aim to be “a more corporeal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of modest witness to matters of fact” (Haraway 1997:24). My mode of writing, my mode of witnessing, my mode of worlding—I aspire for each to be anything but naked in the sense that that naked way of writing conspires to conceal by fostering a genteel atmosphere of pure and factual disinterestedness. The essay here produced is instead aligned with Haraway’s (1988) notion of situated knowledges, a method of meeting the world locked into partial perspectives, limited locations and a deep sense of accountability (see also Barad 1997; Fox Keller 1987; Harding 1986). It favours the “noninnocent, complexly erotic practice of making a difference in the world, rather than displacing the same elsewhere” (Haraway 1994:63) and is centered on a deeply experiential reckoning of spun fire where I rely on my own ways of thinking, feeling, sensing. A saucy account of human behaviour inspired by, but unfaithful to, Merleau-Ponty’s (2007 [1945]) phenomenology is fitting given its emphasis on the sensing body in motion (see also Csordas 1990; Kozel 2007). The kind of phenomenology evoked herein is then one textured by flesh and of the senses, a “more meat-and-bones approach to the body” (Foster 1992:480). In this article, I move through the dancing body’s production of light, smoke and stink, an awareness of which comes into being in part through the sensitization of one’s entangled faculties of perception, faculties that likely total more than five. Vision, in situated knowledges, is deployed with an insistence on the “embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim[s] the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988:581). This essay is informed by an embodied anthropology which insists that what matters is matter (Barad 2003). Yet Haraway asks, “What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?” (1988:587). Seeking to destabilize the centrality of sight in ethnographic writing, I take on a wider exploration of sensory domains. This essay is driven by my own sensorium, situated and written as a first-person narrative (Stoller 1989); it focuses on an interplay between the senses instead of considering each in isolation (Howes 2003:XXII); 17 and finally, it takes Donna Haraway (1997:36) quite literally when she writes that “one must be in the action, be finite and dirty, not transcendent and clean”. Fodder for the fire Of fire, Gaston Bachelard has written that “[a]mong all phenomena, it is really the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and it is apocalypse” (1964 [1938]:7). To this list, I would add that while fireside reverie welcomes stillness and repose and a hypnotism Bachelard well noted, in other domains it motivates the mobile to move, hop, sway, twist and play—admittedly an inadequate kinaesthetic catalogue. Fire poi refers to a style of object manipulation developed from a traditional Maori dance in which performers swing two or more weights (poi is the Maori word for ball) attached to a length of chain or rope. Fire performers wield these weights, these lit torches chained to looped handles, spinning them into streams of pulsing, throbbing, beating patterns (Allen 2004; Bayliss, Sheridan and Villar 2005). Upon first witnessing fire spun, I was redirected toward the light like a little lost moth who had, ever so abruptly, again retrieved her purpose. My sister had returned to the city of St. John’s from a festival in central Newfoundland with reports 18 of a woman who danced on a platform with unexplained fireballs. St. John’s being the size that it is, Kailee was interviewed by this enigma a week later for the position of sales associate at Showcase in the Avalon Mall. She got the job. I came to know her new employer as Corinne, someone who knew things I clearly had not yet thought to think about and who brought with her tales of Toronto and a seemingly endless arsenal of toys so naughty and so unlike anything I had seen before. With respect to these naughty toys: I was intrigued and not shy and so I researched, observed and practiced, eventually becoming more or less proficient in the art of fire dance. In the process, I kindled an atmosphere conducive to the slow sensory awakening so central to Latour’s proposal for an articulatory framework. Here thermal environments of disorienting turns and stops confuse stench, taste and spectacle, contributing to the manufacture of a decidedly holistic laboratory. Fire dance assumes a deeply sensuous quality for the practitioner, and to this end I ask, what are its haptic, aural and olfactory dimensions, to name a few? I propose that the senses evoked through spun fire play an integral role in developing the embodied awareness of performers, senses which articulate over time to cultivate increasingly nuanced relationships between dancer, environment and technology. It is time to pause and contextualize the larger theoretical implications of Pictured is my earliest mentor Corinne. It is my hope that the photographs featured in this essay both illustrate spun fire as a practice obviously foreign to many readers, while invocating decidedly thermal imaginaries with which to consider the sensing body in motion. fire dance by briefly illuminating a begrimed and blackened night of poi for the uninitiated. Straining, reaching, whirling: a non-innocent noctuary It inevitably begins with a telephone call from a friend to rendezvous at the moment when the light recedes and something different, something darker, emerges. It is an invitation, as Erin Manning (2007:2) notes, to meet “at the edges of neighbourhoods, at the magic time between dusk and dawn, in the periphery of the social order.” Kailee and I are pressing through the winding roads of old St. John’s, navigating one-way streets and urging the Tracker up too-steep hills. We materialize at a sparsely populated baseball pitch, usually. And Kailee lights a cigarette, as she always does. I hear her suck and the paper burns back, the cherry glowing red, trailing, tracing in the dark. I watch and breathe and then light my own. We stand together like twin chimneys on a duplex, sucking and blowing, billowing. It is so very quiet, our modest city’s soundscape somehow, strangely, muting even the barmps of busy movers. (Editor’s note: to “barmp” is to toot your car horn) It is a still night and our cigarettes produce perfectly vertical smoke signals. We are watching on, waiting, greeting the mischievous as they approach alone and in twos, later in groups. There are jokes and hugs and sometimes snubs. We do not all love each other and many of us do not spend any more time together than this. I certainly could not claim to speak for their experiences now. But when this happens, this potent 19 night’s dance, we are obliged to show up to play and share and show each other up. Kailee and I and a few others eventually pour kerosene into a communal dunking bucket and let our wicks soak. I claim a spot and roll out my blanket, remembering to share with those who forget how wet the grass in St. John’s always is (I plan to borrow their flashlights later, in return). There is more catching up and being introduced to friends of friends of friends. And there is, inevitably, more smoking. Uncomfortably, we are waiting, wasting, looking at each other and leaving wicked things left unsaid. But finally, it is time. We glance about, sideways. One by one, at least early on, the field people take turns shaking off and lighting up. I walk over to the bucket placed a few meters away, its location so chosen in an earnest attempt to not inadvertently detonate a kerosene bomb. I wrap my hands around the slippery chains strewn over the bucket’s lip, holding them up and letting kerosene run off their spongy ends. I wiggle my fingers into the double-looped nylon handles and I spin them then, unlit, making sure to force out every bit of excess fuel. Wet kerosene flicks my face and I twirl nervously. And when I am mostly confident to have accomplished this feat, itself aimed at preventing the dangerous rain that happens when accidental drops of flame 20 spit off toward an audience, I light my wicks. They catch, slowly at first. The knotted ends are engulfed and I dangle them from ballchains, holding them at arms’ length as heavy smoke billows upwards. It is thick and dark, a chemical cloud. I swing to dissipate it or else risk inhaling the noxious fumes, a task in which I doubt I am consistently successful. And so I sway, back and forth. When I move, the poi absolutely roar, so startling is the sound of these orbiting torches. Kailee’s boyfriend beats a deep drum. Tap, tap, click, tap. Tap, tap, click, tap. When I was new, I could never hear the drums. A little more seasoned, I now find his rhythm, separating the roar from the clicks and the taps. A whistle starts in, but I dance with the drums, with the deep, low base. The fire is brilliant, blinding, bright. As disorientating as the roaring, these lights confuse new spinners; hesitant, I once stood startled amid a lively cage of light and smoke, unsure of what to do. But, having practiced, I am cognizant of onlookers, finding my audience, making sure to move on a plane that affords the best view. I pace myself, carefully, carelessly, intuitively. I begin with long, slow, flowing moves, moves kept away from my body while the flames are robust. I think through my repertoire haphazardly. I dredge up contortions half-forgotten and I hold my breath in anticipation, in strain. I turn and reach, sending outstretched arcs of fire into the dark. I spin on my heel, and with my entire being. Throughout, the fire has been shrinking as if something unseen is choking the burner’s gas. And so I transition to more complicated techniques for the benefit of those who may appreciate the difficulty of what I am doing. The flames burn down, getting quieter. I begin to manipulate my torches inside my arms and around my waist and behind my back, to places I cannot see and can barely reach. Finally, I stop dancing altogether. I stand still, spinning too fast, willing the fire to let go. Extinguished, I stink. The fire has melted away the tiny hairs on my arms, replacing them with oily smears of soot. Stray wisps of head hair, those either forgotten or freed, have burnt up, becoming black and brittle crumbs to be picked out in the shower. Though I will not know it till I get home and look in the mirror, my eyelashes have sometimes shrunk back to short stubs. I stink with that acrid burnt hair stench; combined with the aroma of kerosene and a night of eating cigarettes, I have become undone. I often have a headache after spinning fire, though I cannot be sure if it is due to the chemical fumes or from holding my breath while I strain and reach and whirl. I sit back and let someone else assume the spotlight. Articulating the sensorium As stated, the principle goal of this paper is to tentatively explore the sensory dimension of movement through fire. Taking an analytic turn, I treat combustion as the catalyst through which dancing bodies become increasingly sensitized to, and able to differentiate between, highly excited environments. Beginning with an understanding of the body as ontologically fluid, Latour treats it as “an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected by more and more elements” (emphasis omitted, 2004:206). To do this, he tables his experience of becoming un nez, a nose, a pupil learning to be affected by the perfumier’s odorous kit. The student begins with an undifferentiated reaction to any particular aroma, treating one experience as no different than the next. In time, however, the pupil learns to recognize and react to stimuli, in this instance, the various potions of the malettes à odeur. The kit, the chemicals, the nose, the pupil—all combine to articulate a newly sensitized body, a dynamic body made attentive to a now differentiated, layered reality in flux, one not ontologically stable, but interested and intra-active.4 Articulation refers to this exact process of differentiation, the process of “bodies learning to be affected by hitherto unregistrable differences through the mediation of an artificially created set-up” (emphasis omitted, 2004:209). The artificially created set-up coexists with the students and thus serves as the locus of a pedagogy devoted to engaging bodies in the progressive registration of difference. Having a 21 living, moving body, for Latour, necessitates accepting the presence and the immediacy of these pedagogical devices. Building on Latour’s work, Prentice (2005) investigates recent developments in virtual technologies of surgical training, specifically, the use of simulations in “teaching the fine motor movements needed to clamp, cut, or suture virtual tissues, and giving students and surgeons opportunities to practice their skills in silico before trying them in vivo” (2005:838). Prentice argues that paying attention to the processes whereby surgical simulator training devices are developed highlights a relationship between surgeon and patient easily overlooked in the traditional training environment—that is, the process through which both the bodies of surgeon and machine are mutually articulated. All must be calibrated so that the model body responds in ways that facilitate and validate students’ surgical skill. Foregrounding non-human and human actors as co-constitutive in this schema, mutual articulation becomes a productive point of departure for thinking theoretically about spun fire, a realm where dancers are shaped through training and practice, and the poi themselves are irrevocably charred and changed. Both Latour and Prentice are situated within a rich field of related scholarship. Science studies scholar Lucy Suchman (2007) notes a shift in the22 orizations of the social and the material starting in the 1980s in which a number of scholars critiqued the idea that humans and nonhumans are at once discreet, pre-existing and unaffected by one another in any crucial way. The meeting of human and nonhuman has since been intensely explored with an emergent theme being the mutually constitutive nature of these interactions (for example, see Haraway 1997; Latour 1993; Pickering 1995). Within the context of her own work with human-like machines, Suchman asks (2007:257-258), “What if our starting place comprises configurations of always already interrelated, reiterated sociomaterial practices? What if we understand persons as entities achieved only through the ongoing enactment of separateness and always in relation with others?” Karen Barad’s (2003) proposition for a ‘posthumanist performativity’ is crucial in this regard. She outlines a theory of intra-action in contrast to interaction. “Whereas the construct of interaction suggests two entities, given in advance, that come together and engage in some kind of exchange,” Suchman notes of Barad’s work, “intra-action underscores the sense in which subjects and objects emerge through their encounters with each-other” (2007:267). As an example, the work of anthropologist Natasha Myers stands as one productive domain for exploring embodied intra-actions. She investigates the body work of scientists as they generate three dimensional models of protein structures. Myers writes that “[t]hrough the labour of constructing, manipulating, and navigating through protein models onscreen, researchers are literally able to come to grips with—and make sense of—molecular forms and functions” (2008:166). Many researchers come to embody the models they work with through “the performative gestures researchers use to communicate protein forms and mechanisms in conversations within and outside of the laboratory” (2008:166). The gestural dimension of articulation enables modellers to become sensitized to the phenomena they seek to represent. Moreover, through this process of articulation, the models help remake the modellers by facilitating new body talk, new ways of inflection and expression rendered corporeal. Keeping note of the importance of related theoretical work by the aforementioned scholars, this essay focuses explicitly on the notion of articulation and one route through the sensory domains conjured by igneous stimuli. Interested interfaces Taking the body as an interested interface continuously forged in its encounter with phenomena, I mobilize Latour’s notion of articulation in relation to spun fire so as to explore the dynamic nature of dancing bodies rendered increasingly sensitive to their surroundings. In particular, I am interested in the relentless confrontation of senses to stimuli. Sens- es become refined, indeed become, through such sustained contact. For example, Foster (1992) discusses the tangible bodies of dancers as derived, in part, through “sensory information that is visual, aural, haptic, olfactory and, perhaps most important, kinaesthetic” (1992:482). She describes the embodied sensation of dancers moving at length: They hear the sounds produced by locomotion, by one body part contacting another, by the breath and by joints and muscles creaking, popping and grinding as they flex, extend and rotate. They feel the body’s contact with ground, with objects or persons and with part of itself and they sense its temperature and sweat. They smell sweat and breath. They sense kinaesthetic indications of the tension or relaxation, tautness or laxness, and degree of exertion for every muscle, the action of any joint and, consequently, the proximity of one bone to another, the relationship of any part of the body to gravity and the entire body’s equilibrium (1992:482). Earlier I attempted to draw out a visceral account of spun fire by focusing on its sensory properties. I want to now explicitly reconnect the sensory events specified to the notion of articulation. Visual, auditory and olfactory systems intertwine to evoke a fullbodied experience of moving with fire. Of my first burns in Corinne’s backyard: I remember squinting my eyes from too much light, too sud23 denly; equally startled by the roar burning generates and by my own realization that I was not prepared— that spinning fire is entirely more intense than I could have anticipated— I would then hesitate, so unsure, so worried, feeling my confidence drop away with the stark realization that I had no idea that it would be this loud, this hot, this disorienting. Breathless, I struggled to control centrifugal forces, shouting with fear, shrieking in delight. Waiting, tentatively, in a wide-eyed stance of smoky bewilderment, I was always so lost. And yet, as I tasted and smelt and sensed my surroundings, burn after burn after burn, I gradually acquired the ability to differentiate between a monolithically intense array of light and noise, learning to see past the environment I had helped produce and to acquire a sense of my larger surroundings. Prentice notes that the “sensing body becomes increasingly articulate as the senses learn to register and differentiate objects” (2005:841). With time and patience and practice, fire illuminates a previously hidden audience. Those watching hear the music loader than the fire and the appeal of a performance resides in my ability to use this deafening circle of flame advantageously. Moving beyond the monopoly of combustion, that chemical orchestra, I learn to pick up the sidelined drums and whistles, to sense with and through the chaos and to locate an audience as I feel through that improvised soundtrack. It is only in my continuous encounter with an 24 overwhelmingly intense environment that I can eventually differentiate between competing sounds and sights. By articulating the senses, I eventually perform. When ignited, my knotted wicks and searing chains elevate in intensity, in danger. The haptic dimension of sensory data should figure prominently in any milieu where heat stands as a driving impetus. In describing a still night, one without wind, safety registers cutaneously. The laboratory is less one variable and I can focus on my own flailing, my own failures. I know that the dangers of being burnt are reduced. Learning either to execute moves properly or to effectively dodge mistakes is thus a skill cultivated in time. I receive a corrective lesson as tool and body collide and, here, spinning becomes a kinaesthetic kind of awareness. Foster notes that: The body seems constantly to elude one’s efforts to direct it. The dancer pursues a certain technique for reforming the body, and the body seems to conform to the instructions given. Yet suddenly, inexplicably, it diverges from expectations, reveals new dimensions and mutely declares its unwillingness or inability to execute commands (1992:482). I work on a particular technique, stretching and contorting as much as I can; I strain to grasp an embodied conception of a move—butterflies, weaves, corkscrews and buzzsaws—practicing and trying and often failing. When I succeed, the poi continue to flow. They do not stop unless I will them so, the patterns of motion required to launch such tracks of flight now engrained into my muscle memory. I know in an utterly visceral way that they will continue to flow. It is precisely here—at the juncture of moving, sensing, burning—that the mutuality of articulation becomes most salient. Combustion inscribes itself dramatically on my toys. Brand new wicks are clean and taut, yellow rope coiled through careful craftsmanship. But with one single night of use, they are irrevocably transformed. I dunk them in a liquid hydrocarbon and wait for the Kevlar to release its tiny bubbles. I brush them with a plastic Bic and then avoid the dirty plumes. I burn and I play and, eventually, I smother. What remains are different crea- tures than those I first ignited. They are warm and black and damp with fuel, and they soil any surface with which they come in contact. Bachelard writes that: [t]he changes wrought by fire are changes in substance: that which had been licked by fire has a different taste in the mouths of men. That which fire has shone upon retains as a result an ineffaceable color. That which fire has caressed, loved, adored, had gained a store of memories and lost its innocence (1964 [1938]:57). Yet fire also marks the dancer’s body. Besides the training required to extend the possibility of movement and its direct impact on shaping the body’s flexibility, coordination and musculature, burns leave scars on skin and soot on clothes. I am marked by combustion, my newly shortened eyelashes taking weeks While it is difficult to effectively capture jumping and twirling in stills, let alone the technicality of spinning fire, the photographs here featured rely on long arcs of light and Corinne’s weaving hands. 25 to grow back. Along with common sears most often on my arms, usually resulting from the heated metal components of poi (nuts, bolts and chains), I once caught my back on fire. I am visibly transformed by burning, as I have transformed my wicks and my chains. Both the performer and the technology act upon one another, as the former sets fire to the latter and as the latter burns the former. More dramatic than most domains, articulation works efficiently—that is, mutually—in both directions through a fire dance. When Prentice discusses the mutual articulation of human and nonhuman actors, she is making explicit the two-way process by which articulation can operate. Spun fire and all it involves act as that artificially created set-up that Latour seeks. Without it, there would be no fire, no bodies rendered sensitive and no articulation. Learning to spin is entirely entangled with learning to become sensitized to difference. Articulation will always already be twoway in this precise domain given the presence of a malleable pedagogical instrument. The bodies of fire spinners are then shaped by tacit practices of moving with fire, while the technologies they wield are likewise affected. “The model articulates what the user’s body knows,” writes Prentice, “which helps the user articulate what the model is” (2005:589). Combustion thus emerges as an environment that provides the articulatory impetus through which apparatuses of sen26 sory production are set into motion. The sensing body in motion and the technologies involved in this sensing and this moving are enmeshed, entirely. If combustion, as an artificially created set-up, helps to articulate the senses, then human and non-human find themselves in a formative dance. And yet, at least one objection remains: simply because a process can be said to be mutual, that the changes evoked affect all entities involved, we often need to be reminded that these changes are not equal—that while entities are affected, these changes are of a different order. Lucy Suchman says as much: “Mutualities… are not necessarily symmetries. My own analysis suggests that persons and artifacts do not constitute each other in the same way” (emphasis omitted, 2007:269). Even if the senses articulate rendering bodies increasingly complex, and even if wicks are burned and kerosene consumed, we cannot claim that these changes are one and the same. The senses are affected through fire dance and human bodies likewise changed, yet the poi are of a different magnitude—poi are nonhumans alright, but material commodities perhaps fetishized in unintended ways through these intra-actions. Thus, erasing difference, in this instance at least, ignores the political materiality basic to these relationships. As Suchman notes, what we need is “a story that can tie humans and nonhumans together without erasing the culturally and historically constituted differences among them” (2007:270). It is as important to realize the mutually constitutive nature of human and nonhuman interactions and the often arbitrary boundaries that separate us from one another, as it is to critically engage the historical specificity that has engendered these kinds of demarcations to begin with, for better or for worse. Combustive ethnography This paper has sought to situate fire dance theoretically through the concept of articulation as proposed by Bruno Latour and as extended by Rachel Prentice. Focusing on the production of sensory apparatuses through the moving body’s encounter with environmental stimuli, I have argued that combustion serves as the place of a pedagogy that renders bodies increasingly complex. We should note now that, according to Latour, “there is no end to articulation” (2003:211). Simply put, I take this to mean that as the curious creatures we so often are, worlds of difference exist, and that we will continue to encounter these differences and thus continue in the progressive registration of these differences. We cannot simply stop learning to be affected by things we have not yet fully reconciled. In the scope of spun fire, this insight has special resonance: if the senses articulate more generally by encountering new and stimulating environments, can a person simply become accustomed to burning, and cease learning to be affected? It is my experience, at least, that the opportunity to learn does not easily expire and, when it does, it is often up to the practitioner when difference is no longer sought. “For myself,” writes Latour, “I want to be alive and thus I want more words, more controversies, more artificial settings, more instruments, so as to become sensitive to even more differences” (2004:211-212). While this noctuary and the corresponding analysis contained herein is devoted to furthering an anthropology of the sensing body in motion, of fire and of the night, it is the seeking spirit that fuels any articulatory adventure. If it is then through the practice of moving, sensing, burning that we come to encounter and incorporate difference in this domain, at least, then I very much want to be alive. And thus I want more dance, more fumes, more melting hairs and scars and friends and fire. I want it a fortiori. I want it every night. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I thank Professor Natasha Myers, Jessica Caporusso, Megan Kinch and the anonymous reviewers of this volume who all patiently read drafts of this essay, even in its most rudimentary forms. More intimately, I thank two very different women: Kailee Phillips, for her uncommon intensities and her daily explosions, both little and big; and Corinne Pomroy, for the aesthetic template she has cultivated for living with the strongest kinds of grace. 27 Notes 1. Definition derived from Dictionary.com, a free online dictionary powered by InterActiveCorp. 2. Those familiar with fire spinning practices may note many distinct differences between their experiences and the ones recorded here: camp fuel and not kerosene, chain links instead of ball chains, leather corsets replacing the ‘kind of clothes you paint in,’ and so on. I focus on the flavour of spun fire in St. John’s, Newfoundland, while remembering that these practices, like any other, vary according to the ethnographic context in which one finds oneself. 3. I offer a partial role call of those who have most readily influenced me, but by no means constitute a conclusive collection of even the most preeminent scholars working with and through science and technology: Barad 1997, 2003; Downey and Dumit 1997, Haraway 1988, 1991, 1994, 1997; Helmreich 2007; Latour 2003; Mol 2002; Myers 2008; Petryna 2002; Prentice 2005; Suchman 2007. This article largely limits some of my early thoughts on fire to science studies in anthropology. As a preliminary statement on spinning, I recognize this paper does not consider work on affect and how the senses can be understood in a vastly different fashion. Such an engagement 28 would have produced a very different article. I ask the reader to forgive me this omission and to be patient as the partitions that surround the breadth of theory I am ready to write gradually expand. 4. While space does not permit a full exploration of Barad’s agential realism, the notion of intra-action is defined on page 22. REFERENCES CITED Allen, Anthony J. 2004 Playing with fire: an unex pected collaboration. Organized Sound 9(3): 231-234. Bachelard, Gaston 1964 [1938] The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Boston: Beacon Press. Barad, Karen 1996 Meeting the Universe Half way: Realism and Social Constructivism without Contradiction. In Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science. L.H. Nelson and J. Nelson, eds. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 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Harvard University Press. Manning, Erin 2007 Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 2005 [1945] Phenomenology of Perception. Forest Williams, trans. Routledge & Keegan-Paul Ltd. Mol, Annemarie 2002 The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press. 29 Myers, Natasha 2008 Molecular Embodiments and the Body-Work of Modelling in Protein Crystallography. Social Studies of Science 38(2):163-199. Pickering, Andrew 1995 The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Petryna, Adriana 2002 life Exposed: Biological Citizenship after Chernobyl. New Jersey: Princeton Press. Prentice, Rachel 2005 The Anatomy of a Surgical Simulation: The Mutual Articulation of Bodies in and through the Machine. Social Studies of Science 35:867-894. Shapin, Steven and Simon Shaffer 1985 Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stoller, Paul 1989 The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. University of Pennsylvania Press. Suchman, Lucy 2007 Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 30 Katie Bresner The Ainu as ‘Other’: Representations of the Ainu and Japanese Identity Before 1905 Abstract The Ainu of Japan have endured a history of subordination, exploitation, and assimilation, pushed to the margins of society by Japanese imperialism. This article traces a series of visual representations of the Ainu before the Meiji Period up until the early twentieth century. Focusing on the Japanese perceptions or ‘ways of seeing’ the Ainu, this article seeks to demonstrate how closely these were connected to the political and social changes in Japan during this time period. In particular, the changes that occurred with the end of Japanese isolation and the impact of photography and Western science on Japanese and international perceptions of the Ainu are examined. Using the example of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904, how photography and presentation transformed the ‘ways of seeing’ the Ainu is demonstrated. 31 Introduction The Ainu of Japan have endured a history of subordination, exploitation, and assimilation, similar to the experiences of countless other indigenous groups worldwide who have been pushed to the margins of society by dominant forces. Due to the absence of a traditional written language, the effective history of the Ainu began with the writings of travelers and traders who encountered the Ainu on the northern islands of Hokkaido (formerly called Ezo, before the Meiji period), Sakhalin, the northern tip of Honshu, and the Kurile Islands. From these encounters a particular perception or ‘way of seeing’ the Ainu developed, set in the context of a Japanese cognizance of the world, reflected in the writings, drawings, and paintings from this time period. Foreigners from the West formulated images of the Ainu influenced by Japanese representations of them, as well as through Western experiences with other indigenous groups and their own worldview. In time, both Japanese and international perceptions of the Ainu were altered and they continued to adjust with the flow of political and social changes in Japan. After the introduction of the camera and the later political changes during the Meiji Restoration, a new ‘way of seeing’ the Ainu emerged in Japan. This was due in part to the influence of Western science and its methods of categorization and ranking, as well as its faith in the absolute truth and fact of the photograph. 32 In this essay I will trace the changes in Japanese perceptions of the Ainu and highlight the significance of photography in shaping the ‘way of seeing’ the Ainu at the turn of the twentieth century. I will first discuss the early representations of the Ainu and how they were regarded with aversion and as a distant curiosity. Secondly, I will discuss the Meiji Restoration (1868), its impact on the Ainu, and how this turning point in Japanese history changed the representation of them. Most significantly, I will show how the opening up of Japan in the Meiji Period to foreign trade, the colonization of Hokkaido, and the impact of photography modified the status of the Ainu as ‘ways of seeing’ changed for the Japanese and were morphed into a Westernized model for comprehending the world. Finally, I will discuss the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 where an Ainu group was put on living display. The 1904 Exposition is useful in order to gain an understanding of Western ideology at the eve of the twentieth century and, I argue, was the physical manifestation of the change in the ‘way of seeing’ the Ainu that was initiated by photography during the colonization of Hokkaido in the Meiji Period. Early Japanese Representations of the Ainu The representations of the Ainu predating the Meiji Restoration from Japan and from visiting Europeans created a general image of the Ainu as northern curiosities. Japanese representations of the Ainu were remarkably stable from the early Christian era to the dawn of the Meiji period, emerging from a foundation in Confucian social theory, agrarian reform, and political considerations. These representations typified the Ainu’s ‘otherness’ by highlighting their different ways of life from the Japanese, as well as their physical dissimilarities. Physically, the hairiness of the Ainu and their seemingly Caucasoid features would serve as a preoccupation for those writing and thinking about them from preMeiji times well into the twentieth century. Not only is hair mentioned in virtually all of the early descriptions of the Ainu (Ölschleger 2008: 1-2, 6, and 9; Siddle 1996: 49; and Ohnuki-Tierney 1998: 45), but later became a defining characteristic in studies in anthropology and evolutionary history attempting to uncover the supposed Caucasoid links in Ainu heritage (Ölschleger 2008: 14-17; and Kodama 1970: 263-268). Hair also played a key role in perpetuating myths and stereotypes about the Ainu. For example, the belief that they were descended from dogs and more animal than human was evidenced by their body hair (Siddle 1996: 42-44 and 37). Traditional customs were also fodder for highlighting difference. Unlike the Japanese who had adopted rice agriculture as early as 400 B.C. (Ohnuki-Tierney 1998: 32), Ainu subsistence and culture was based on a different relationship with the land, characterized by hunting, fishing, and gathering, with salmon and deer being the most significant of foodstuffs. Richard Siddle describes a “mass importation of Chinese culture and ways of thought” in Japan that occurred between the sixth and eighth centuries (1996: 27). This included a moral order which separated the civilized from the barbarian; civilized being defined in terms of Chinese, then Japanese customs (Siddle 1996: 28). Those with different hairstyles, dress, diets and customs were deemed barbaric. As Buddhism was adopted into Japanese culture in the sixth century, the eating of meat was considered taboo (Siddle 1996:28), which proved to confirm the cultural and moral inferiority of the meat-eating Ainu. However, before the Meiji period, the Ainu were feared by the Japanese because of their differences. Seen as ‘barbarians’, the Ainu were “outside of the moral order” (Siddle 1996: 27), and thus beyond the scope of Japanese control. ‘Barbarians’ in the traditional Chinese sense meant those who were “hairy, non-human, flesh-eating savages” (Siddle 1996:27). The “nonhuman” Ainu were akin to supernatural beings like ghosts, demons and goblins, typical of ideas of the Other in Japanese-Chinese mythology (Siddle 1996: 11). Ainu were represented in the same way as such creatures in painting (Siddle 1996: 30). Ainu-e, Japanese paintings of 33 Image 1. A Whale-Hunting Expedition Late 18th to Mid 19th Century Courtesy of University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology the Ainu, emphasized such ‘creature’ or animal-like qualities. Their hairiness was exaggerated by a wild hairstyle, a single black streak for the eyebrows, and hair covering the entire body. Image 1 is typical of Ainu-e imagery. Nine Ainu men are shown hunting for whale. All have tufts of black hair and beards, many wear earrings (which Japanese men at the time did not) and all are hunched over with compressed faces and sanpakugan eyes. Typical of early Japanese art, sanpakugan eyes were reserved for animals that represent “ill-fortune” (Dubreuil 2004: 16), like oni (giant, troll-like demons), dragons, and tigers (Ohnuki-Tierney 1998: 46). This visual cue, along with their hunched backs, linked the Ainu to this mythology and associated 34 them more closely to animals than human beings. As trade increased and the rich natural resources of Hokkaido (Ezo) were being recognized, the number of wajin (Japanese settlers) on the island multiplied and interactions between wajin and Ainu increased. This lead to a disruption in traditional Ainu living as the Ainu were often denied access to resources, forcing them to become reliant on Japanese goods (Siddle 1996: 31-37 and Dubreuil 2004: 9). With these social changes and the concurrent official colonization of Ainu lands in 1799, the militarily and economically defeated Ainu were now being represented in a new way, or rather, old characteristics of the Ainu had been forgotten. The Ainu had lost their once ironically protective aura as wild, dangerous, untamed people outside of the social and moral order. Now ‘pacified’, the Ainu were considered by Bakufu officials to be naïve and childish (Siddle 1996: 39-40). Once previously denied a capacity for ‘civilization’, the assimilation of the Ainu into Japanese culture was seen as a very real and pertinent task for the Japanese government – not only to ‘protect’ the Ainu from Russian expansion, but also to develop their resource-rich territories (Siddle 1996: 41). The process of colonization was accelerated after the Meiji Restoration, yet up until this time the image of the Ainu as animal-like barbarians remained essentially stable. All that really changed literally and ideologically was the level of power the Ainu exercised and were perceived to have by the Japanese. The Meiji Restoration and the Colonization of Hokkaido The Meiji restoration ended nearly two hundred years of isolation policy in Japan which led to the opening up of the country to Western modes of thought, science and technology. The ‘modernization’ policy that followed also meant empire building since colonial ambition was regarded by the Japanese as a hallmark of civilization, as exemplified by many European nations by the late nineteenth century. The annexation of Okinawa, the northern Japanese islands including Hokkaido, and later Korea and Manchuria, was justified by a new way of thinking in Japan. This new way of thinking was the imperial ideology that came along side the restoration of the authority of the Emperor, now modeled more closely after European monarchies (Fujitani 1996 and Ferguson 2006: 51). This imperial ideology bound the people of the Japanese Empire biologically through a theory of bloodlineage, as well as ethnically and culturally under the father-figure of the Emperor, making Japanese rule over them nothing but ‘natural’. The idea was that through assimilation into the Japanese Empire any remaining cultural boundaries could be transcended and would eventually vanish, leaving behind one Japanese race (Howell 2004: 5). The concept of ‘race’ inherent in this doctrine was also a Western import. With this new concept in mind, the Japanese began to reconsider certain aspects of the traditional Confucian worldview: The old hierarchy of humankind, which separated the cultured from the barbarian on the basis of Confucian moral values, was replaced by a new one rooted primarily in the criteria of visible wealth and strength, but linked to Christian and Enlightenment values as well. By the early 1970s the modernizing elite accepted the Western notion that human societies could be ranked along a continuum from “savagery” to “civilization”, each repre35 senting different stages in the “progress” of human kind (Duus 1997: 28-29). The dominant social theory in Europe at this time was rooted in Darwinian evolutionary theory and the concept of the ‘survival of the fittest’. The building of empire in Japan meant that the Japanese had to find their place within the racial hierarchy of the world amongst the other civilized races (Siddle 2003: 451). The Ainu played an important role in the establishment of Japan’s racial identity as they were used as objects of comparison from which the Japanese could measure and assess how civilized they had become. The Ainu were what the Japanese were not. The Ainu as a race were relegated to one of the lowest levels on the conceptual ladder of human groups amongst the other ‘primitive’ peoples of the world. Like other primitive peoples and according to the law of the ‘survival of the fittest’, the Ainu were a relic of mankind’s past and doomed to extinction or full assimilation as they struggled to cope in the rapidly changing world. Despite these changes in Japan and the assimilationist policies forced upon the Ainu, the traditional ‘way of seeing’ the Ainu did not really change. It was not until the widespread use of photography that the Ainu would be secured into the racial schism of the West. 36 Photography, Racial Science, and Ways of Seeing The induction of the camera to Japan had occurred in the 1850s (Kinoshita 2003: 16-23) and became more popular with time as international interest in Japan and trade relationships blossomed. While there was a large commercial photography market in Japan in the late 19th century, the camera was also used as a tool of science in a number of disciplines including anthropology, as it was in the Western world. Like commercial photographs, many argue that ethnographic photographs were also taken in a manner that fulfilled the needs and expectations of their audience (Steiner 1987: 81; Maxwell 1999: 9-10; and Guth 2004: 51). As Steiner explains, photography and modern anthropology correspond chronologically in their foundations and, “since the discipline’s formative years, anthropologists have used photography to visually record the peoples, sites, and events encountered in the field, as well as the artifacts brought back to the museum or laboratory” (1987: 81). Distinguishing between commercial and ethnographic photography from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sometimes proves difficult, yet both forms of photography emphasized difference and exoticism in their subjects and both were deemed as authentic, true, and ‘scientific’ representations of people, places, and things. Image 2. A Group of Ainos ca. 1868; Beato, Felice A. Courtesy of Smith College Museum of Art The Ainu were no exception. Image 2 depicts six Ainu with a Japanese man seated behind them. They are seated on the floor dressed in traditional clothing, and all have long hair and facial hair. The Ainu contrast with the Japanese man behind them, who is sitting slightly elevated, clean shaven, and wearing a kimono. Image 3 shows an Ainu woman, head and shoulders prominent like the men in Image 2. She is also dressed traditionally and has thick black hair and tattooed lips (despite this practice being prohibited in the 1860s by the Japanese government). While little is known about Image 3, it is very similar to ethnographic photographs (see Pinney 1992) and may have been intended as such. It also shares similarities to Image 2, which was a commercial photograph, especially since the subject(s) in both visually exhibit cultural practices deemed ‘odd’ and quintessentially Ainu by the Japanese. It was not long after the Meiji Restoration that photography was being used for the purposes of scientific documentation and became an important part of Hokkaido’s Colonization Program (Kinoshita 2003: 31-33). This project included photographing the Ainu though its main purpose was to capture Hokkaido’s Image 3. Ainu Girl Published in 1935 Courtesy of the Secret Museum of Mankind 37 development. Regardless, the vast majority of these images do not come with captions or specific dates or identify the photographer. They are absent of when, where, why, or who are being photographed, making it difficult to comment on individual photographs specifically. However, by keeping in mind the historical and political context in Japan at the time that these photos were taken, as well as the exhibition of the Ainu on the world stage, it is possible to extract the intention and ideology behind photographing the Ainu. Despite the Hokkaido photography project being about documenting progress, it is interesting that the photos of the Ainu are not of the successfully assimilated individuals, but of stereotypical ‘primitive’ Ainu. One must be careful interpreting these images since the actual context of them is lost. Whether or not they were officially part of the government’s photography project is unknown. Nonetheless, it seems as though the images keep in line with other Ainu representations by “exaggerating their features which are different from the Japanese” (Cheung 1996: 262). There is a conscious pursuit for ‘purity’ of a cultural other (Pinney 1992: 76). As Guth argues, these images confirmed the Western and Japanese stereotypes of the Ainu in two ways. First, they highlighted the utter disparity between the Ainu, the West, and the Japanese, and second, emphasized the Ainu’s status as “hairy, halfcivilized curiosities” (2004: 70). As 38 Cheung argues, they are depicted as living in isolated, primitive societies (1996: 263) far away from civilization which contemporary photographs of Hokkaido’s development show as blossoming on the same land. The historical context of the time was much different than the photographs reveal. The Ainu were reliant on Japanese goods, were being pushed into farming, or were working in the coastal towns. These images look closer to the images of Ainu-e as the figures are dressed in their traditional garb and there is a distinct lack of setting. Deliberate exclusion and inclusion of various elements in the picture frame was common in anthropological photography (Pinney 1992: 76). The aim was not to photograph the Ainu as they were, but how they ought to be: the ‘primitive’ Ainu were what was relevant to anthropological study, not an Ainu in the process of assimilation into Japanese culture. The images create a particular picture of the Ainu in order to position and legitimize them as an uncivilized race, incapable of progress with the rest of Japan. Photographic representation of the Ainu confirms a convergence of Western and Japanese ‘ways of seeing’, simultaneously justifying the hierarchy of power between the three groups supported by the facts of science found in social evolutionary theory. This evolutionary hierarchy and ‘way of seeing’ was brought to life before the eyes of the world at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904. The Ainu in Living Colour: The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 What photography did to change the characterization of the Ainu from Japanese visions of animalcreatures to ‘primitive’ people and specimens of Western science was expressed and physically manifest for six months from May to December of 1904. The change in view defined through photographs was displayed to the eyes of the world in St. Louis, Missouri that year. Like other world’s fairs, the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 was a celebration of the success of the host country and an opportunity to display its marvels and accomplishments in a number of fields, such as technology, agriculture, entertainment, and architecture. As Corbey explains, “world fairs quickly became inseparable from imperialism and nationalism” (1993: 339). Discourse on the dominant science of social evolution, namely the white EuropeanAmerican race as the highest form of civilization, underlined these expositions (Coombes 1988; Domosh 2002; Corbey 1993; and Maxwell 1999:1-9). Through the rhetoric of entertainment and education, these fairs often had ‘living displays’ of socalled ‘primitive people’ in order to teach the public of their evolutionary history and juxtapose them with the displays of Western industry located in the same physical space of the fairground. The anthropological exhibit at St. Louis had over two thousand ‘primitive’ people on display (Breitbart 1997: 3), nine of which were Ainu. Two children, three women, and four men (one of which was almost prevented from attending because he was seen as too ‘Japanized’) made up the Ainu group (Vanstone 1993: 81-84; Breitbart 1997: 65; and Parezo and Fowler 2007: 84-85). Like other indigenous groups at the fair, the Ainu were required to build a traditional home to live in on the fairgrounds, wear their traditional clothes at all times, and go about a daily routine of cooking, singing, dancing and producing crafts and tools (Parezo and Fowler 2007: 100 and 103). The Ainu also participated in parades, performed ceremonies and rituals for spectators, and even competed against other ‘primitive’ groups in the St. Louis Olympics Anthropology Days. The Ainu made money selling arts and crafts to fairgoers such as mustache lifters, arrowheads, hunting knives, swords, baskets, carved wooden plaques. They also made money by posing for pictures and in tips from their performances (Parezo and Fowler 2007: 103 and 212). The living displays were organized and categorized according to social evolutionary science. The fair set up twenty-six anthropological villages in addition to the Indian School, Anthropology Building, and Philippine exhibit, all located on the Western edge of the fair grounds – the symbolic reference to the once ‘wild’ 39 American West was obvious (Christ 2000: 679). These people were not only there for the education and entertainment of fairgoers, but also participated in anthropological studies where they were measured and photographed as scientific specimens (Breitbart 1997: 18 and Corbey 1993: 354-355). The anthropology villages were arranged consciously so that a visitor moving from south to north would see the world’s most primitive races first and move upwards to the most civilized, with the Ainu at the southern-most end and Native American groups and the Indian school to the north. For W.J. McGee, who organized the ethnological exhibits, “each group illustrated ‘steps in the development of intelligent Man, and is at once an object-lesson in the illwritten history of the human past and an object for beneficent example and effort for Man has no higher duty than that of mending the way of human progress’” (Parezo and Fowler 2007: 100). The physical organization of the exhibits was the expression of this particular way of knowing and understanding the world and ones place within it. The visitors to these exhibits were meant to view the displayed people keeping in mind this evolutionary paradigm. In the same way that photography was orchestrated to capture an authentic, truthful image of its subject, so too was authenticity important to the fair’s ethnological program 40 which was why the ‘primitive’ groups had to be dressed in traditional clothing at all times. However, keeping them in a state of their stereotypic ‘primitive’ was not as easy in a living display as it was to capture in a moment in a photograph. For example, as Parezo and Fowler report: McGee spent hours ensuring that Natives did not borrow from each other or use the manufactured goods and clothing they acquired while in St. Louis. Since participants wanted souvenirs just as much as visitors, it was a futile effort. The best McGee could do was request authenticity from 9:00 to 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 to 4:00 p.m., when groups were officially demonstrating. (2007: 100). The living displays’ detailed history and the context of this world fair bring to life the issues of authenticity and truth to imagery that is not apparent in photographs. By requesting ‘authenticity’, McGee was requesting the performance of culture as if removed from space and time, in an ‘ethnographic present’ like a living photograph - which is hardly authentic at all. These efforts worked in the same way as the staging of photographs and the conscious inclusion or exclusion of elements from the picture frame. Like the other Native groups at the fair, the Ainu were placed in a position for comparison, not only with each other but more importantly with the West. Their physical being was in St. Louis for subjectification by the Western viewer and objectification by Western science in the same way it was in a photograph, but in an even more alienating way as they were wholly present to inspecting eyes. St. Louis was different in that the Ainu were participating by choice. In the Hokkaido photographs, one cannot discern whether or not the people in the images approved of being photographed. From the viewpoint of the American and European visitors, their position of superiority and authority as spectators and members of civilized white society was undeniably reinforced by the juxtaposition of the anthropological exhibits and the other exhibits on the fairground. Of particular interest was the Japanese pavilion which, as Carol Ann Christ argues, was designed to “promote a new, alternative reading of Japan’s political position, one that assigned it the titles of imperial nation and colonial power” (2000: 677). Japan exhibited itself at St. Louis in a particular manner in order to be seen by the Western powers as the dominant civilization in East Asia. The Japanese positioned themselves in contrast with other East Asian nations at the fair, particularly China. Through their claims to the Ainu and Formosans as their colonial subjects, the Japanese delegation aimed to achieve a level of equivalency to the United States in Asia, as the distributer of civilization to the inferior races (Christ 2000: 680 and 687). The Japanese were also on the world stage, but for the purposes of boasting their progress in opposi- tion to the view of the Ainu as being static in time. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, founded in understanding the world through the lens of evolutionary science and social Darwinism, solidified this particular ‘way of seeing’. Its microcosmic display of the world’s indigenous people, arranged according to this ideological order, justified the perceived truth in this particular ‘way of seeing’. The fair emblematized the ‘way of seeing’ that was developed by photography and brought it to life in such a way that its truth could hardly be denied. Conclusion The camera and the scientific discourse that it grew out of was instrumental in changing the way the Japanese viewed themselves and the world. The traditional Japanese view of the world’s people, a dichotomous separation between themselves (the civilized) and everyone else (the barbarians), was only slightly refined and made more complex by the influence of the Western scientific theories of social evolution. It required the Japanese to place themselves within the social hierarchy of the world. Through the need for modernization from the recognition of their vulnerability in the opening of their country to the technologically, scientifically, and militarily superior Western nations, the Japanese saw opportunity in a program to master Western forms of knowledge. While a new Japanese identity fit for the 41 modern world was being formed, so was the identity and status of the Ainu being transformed in relation to it. Their status as inferiors was amplified as they were no longer ideologically inferior to just the Japanese but now to most of the known world. Photography framed this as fact. The ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘ways of knowing’ imported from the West used photography to frame the Ainu in a particular way, to mirror ideology and to mirror this ‘way of seeing’, telling very little if nothing at all about the Ainu themselves and their own perspectives on their situation and status. Photography silenced the Ainu and reaffirmed their powerlessness while simultaneously providing evidence for the justification of their subordination through the language of science and technology. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition publicized this particular ‘way of seeing’ the world and organizing its people on a linear scale from the primitive to the civilized, which like photography, provided an evidentiary basis for this ideology. The Ainu as ‘primitive Others’ was not merely a painting on a scroll, or an interpretation of a photograph, but a fact of life demonstrated by the Ainu themselves living and breathing in St. Louis in 1904. 42 Cheung, Sidney C.H. 1997 Photographing the Ainu and the Emperor: Modernity in Meiji Japan. CHUK Journal of Humanities 1(Jan): 252-268. Christ, Carol Ann 2000 The Sole Guardians of the Art Inheritance of Asia: Japan and China at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Positions East Asia Cultures Critique 8(3): 675-709. Coombes, Annie E. 1988 Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities. Oxford Art Journal 11(2): 57-68. Corbey, Raymond 1993 Ethnographic Showcases, 1870-1930. Cultural Anthropology 8(3): 338-369. Domosh, Mona 2002 A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, ‘Race’, and Empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition. Cultural Geographies 9: 181-201. Dubreuil, Chisato O. 2004 Ainu-e: Instructional Resources for the Study of Japan’s Other People. Education About ASIA 9(1): 9-17. REFERENCES CITED Duus, Peter 1997 The Japanese Discovery of America: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford Books. Breitbart, Eric 1997 A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ferguson, Niall 2006 The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Fujitani, Takashi 1996 Fabricating Imperial Ceremonies, Civilization, Prosperity and Power. In Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. 105-154. Guth, Christine 2004 Picturing Japan. In Longfellow’s Tattoo’s: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Pp. 51-88. Howell, David L. 2004 Making “Useful Citizens” of Ainu Subjects in Early Twentieth-Century Japan. The Journal of Asian Studies 63(1): 5-29. Kinoshita, Naoyuki 2003 The Early Japanese Photography. In Ann Tucker, ed. The History of Photography in Japan. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pp. 16-35. Kodama, Sakuzaemon 1970 Ainu: Historical and Anthropological Studies. Sapporo: Hokkaido University School of Medicine. Maxwell, Anne 1999 Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities. New York and London: Leicester University Press. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko 1998 A Conceptual Model for the historical Relationship Between the Self and the Internal and External Others: The Agrarian Japanese, the Ainu, and the Special-Status People. In Making Majorities: Constituting the Nation in Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Fiji, Turkey, and the United States. Dru C. Gladney, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ölschleger, Hans-Dieter 2008 Ainu Ethnography in the West. In Critical Ainu Studies: Changing Academic and Public Perspectives. Mark Hudson, Ann-Elise Lewallen and Mark. K. Watson, eds. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Parezo, Nancy J. and Don D. Fowler 2007 Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Pinney, Christopher 1992 The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography In Anthropology and Photography, 1860-1920. Elizabeth Edwards, ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pp. 74-95. Siddle, Richard 2003 The Limits to Citizen ship in Japan: Multiculturalism, Indigenous Rights, and the Ainu. Citizenship Studies 7(4): 447-462. 1996 Race, Resistance, and the Ainu of Japan. Oxon: Routledge. Steiner, Christopher B 1987 From Site to Sight: Anthropology, Photography, and the 43 Power of Imagery. African Arts 20(3): 81-82. Wedgwood Kennedy SC 1982:38-2 (48) Vanstone, James W 1993 The Ainu Group at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 1904. Arctic Anthropology 30(2): 77-91. Image 3 “Ainu Girl” Date/Photographer Unknown Published in the “Secret Museum” in 1935; New York: Manhattan House Reprinted Courtesy of the Secret Museum of Mankind under Creative Commons License Last Accessed July 6, 2009: http://ian.macky.net/secretmuseum/ Yaguchi, Yujin 2000 Remembering a More Layered Past in Hokkaido: Americans, Japanese, and the Ainu. The Japanese Journal of American Studies 11:109-128. Images Cited Image 1 Detail of Scene 14 “A Whale Hunting Expedition” in Album: “An Ainu-e Scroll: Japanese Paintings of Ainu Lifeways” part of the Grayson Archery Collection Watercolor on paper Late 18th to mid 19th Centuries Reprinted Courtesy of University of Missouri Museum of Anthropology MAC 1995-0389 Image 2 “A Group of Ainos” ca. 1868 Beato, Felice A (ca. 1825-1904) Album page: 13 1/2 x 18 3/4 in.; 34.29 x 47.625 cm; image: 4 x 6 in.; 10.16 x 15.24 cm Albumen print with hand coloring Reprinted Courtesy of Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts Purchased with the Hillyer-TryonMather Fund, with funds given in memory of Nancy Newhall (Nancy Parker, class of 1930) and in honor of Beaumont Newhall, and with funds given in honor of Ruth 44 Anne-Mette Hermansen Jineteras, Luchadoras and the Awkward Tourist-Anthropologist in Havana: People as Categories Abstract In this article I argue that research ethics applications, although necessary, are problematic for aspiring anthropologists because they curb the imagination and provide a rigid template for conceptualizing one’s research project and categorizing one’s research participants. The process of applying forces applicants to invent social units that do not necessarily hold empirical validity. To exemplify I describe my own, unsuccessful search for jineteras in Havana, Cuba. Jinetera is a stigma applied to some women who have relationships to foreign men that are sexualized and commercialized to various degrees. I will unpack this category and show that the stigma itself is useless in defining individual women’s life strategies. However, categories (of people) are not in and of themselves useless. The second part of my argument concerns the utility of taking our informants’ categories seriously, not to replicate them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering some properties of the relationships between our informants and their surroundings, including their relationships to researchers. To demonstrate this, I use my own position during fieldwork as the awkward tourist-anthropologist. In conclusion I argue that the strength of anthropology lies in explaining social relationships, not in listing people according to already defined categories. 45 The target population of this research will consist of a cross section of Cuban women who frequent the dance venue Casa de la Música where they meet foreign men, with whom they might develop romantic relationships of various degrees of intimacy, duration and commercialization. Excerpt from my Application for Ethics Approval for Human Participant Research, submitted to and approved by the Human Research Ethics Board, University of Victoria, December 2007 I don’t really know who my informants are, because a lot of the information I get, [...] I get it from people who wouldn’t say themselves that they have had relationships of exchange to foreigners that were romantic in nature. Letter to my supervisor Hulya Demirdirek, February 2008 Introduction The quotes above are taken, respectively, from my Application for Ethics Approval, which I had to submit before beginning my fieldwork, and from my field notes, written at a point in time when I was well into my fieldwork of six months in Havana, Cuba. These two contrasting quotes point towards two complimentary threads that I will weave together in this article. The first is that although necessary, Applications for Ethics Approval through the university Human Research Ethics Board (HREB) are problematic for aspiring anthropologists because they curb the imagination and provide a rigid template for conceptualizing one’s research project and categorizing one’s research participants.1 The problem, I will argue, is that HREBs force applicants to invent social units that do not necessarily hold empirical validity. As an example I shall describe my own, unsuccessful 46 search for jineteras in Havana, Cuba. However, categories (of people) are not in and of themselves useless. The second thread that I will weave into my argument in this article concerns the utility of taking our informants’ stereotypes seriously, not to replicate them, but to use them as vehicles for discovering some properties of the relationships between our informants and their surroundings and between ourselves and our informants. To demonstrate this, I will use my own position during fieldwork as the awkward touristanthropologist. In conclusion I argue that the strength of anthropology lies in explaining social relationships, not in listing people according to already defined categories. Developing the Field I arrived in Havana armed with a proposal to investigate relationships between Cuban women and foreign men. Relationships between locals and tourists, which play out in a hyper-sexualized setting and an economic grey zone, have become so commonplace in Cuba that reporters have named the tropical island a new hot spot for sex tourism. Locally the phenomenon is known as jineterismo, which literally translates as “horseback-riding,” but which refers to different kinds of hustling and prostitution and the way in which some Cubans since the 1990 have been able to “ride” the country’s new dollar economy symbolically and maybe tourists more literally in order to take economic advantage of their personal connections.2 I wanted to understand how women, whose romantic relationships with foreigners are sexualized and commercialized to various degrees, play an active role in initiating, defining and developing these relationships. Based on previous trips to Cuba (for pleasure), I suspected that one important avenue through which Cuban women were able to establish romantic relationships with foreign men was dance. Salsa 3 and other Cuban dances are highly popular both in and outside of Cuba, and have indeed come to stand for the essence of Cuban sensuality and sexuality, as perceived by foreigners. Dance shows, dance courses and dance clubs attract huge numbers of foreigners who are fascinated with both the movements of salsa dance as well as with Cuban salsa dancers. I proposed to study the interactions between Cuban women and foreign men in two salsa clubs in Havana, because I wanted to know how desire was produced and reproduced in the interactions between Cuban women and foreign men and the role of dance in this process. My fieldwork lasted six months from January to June 2008 and I spent on average two nights a week in different clubs in Havana, mainly two tourist favorites both called Casa de la Musica.4 I spent the rest of my time with a circle of ten women who became my principal informants as well as with my host family with whom I would reflect on my daily experiences and discuss different perspectives on my research. My informants had little in common, apart from obvious characteristics such as the fact that they were all Cuban women living in Havana. Some of them had children and some did not; some of them knew each other, most did not; some of them had relationships to many different foreign men, some of them had a permanent relationship with a foreign man and some of them had relationships to Cuban men and so on. None of them frequented Casa de la Musica, because they could not afford it, but they did go with their friends and lovers (and me) to other, cheaper recreational spots. Most of the time I hung out with them individually, in their homes, talking about their lives; both those aspects of them that concerned their relationships to foreign and Cuban men, as well as any other issue on their minds at the time. 47 None of my informants auto-identified as jineteras, and although they shared their experiences with foreign men with me and willingly discussed the emotional, sexual and economic properties of these relationships, they did not classify themselves as women of a certain kind—jineteras. In the next sections I shall explore why it was not their refusal of belonging to the category, which was problematic, but rather my own insistence on trying to fit them into a category. People as Categories When writing an Application for Ethics Approval, the applicant is asked several questions about the participants in the proposed study. One section concerns the shared salient characteristics among the research participants and why that sample is of interest to the researcher.5 Depending on how familiar she is with her chosen site, the answer to this question inevitably has to be more or less made up of the researchers imagination. In a book that tracks and analyses the correspondence between herself and her student conducting fieldwork in Australia, Liisa Malkki describes how social units often come across as natural and self explanatory categories in anthropology. In a reference to Wim van Binsbergen she questions the validity and utility of references such as “the tribe,” “the village,” “the ethnic group,” or indeed “the nation” as unproblematic social units that the ethnographer can study 48 (Cherwonka and Malkki 2007:74-75). Such generalizations are tempting in their simplicity, but dangerous in as much as they eliminate variation within groups and function as identity markers that individuals of a group might not relate to (Anderson 2004:71). In fact, I would argue that these categories are mystifying in their simplicity: who are “the Cubans” for instance? No one is short on stereotypical ideas of what Cubans are like, (sexual, emotional, great fun, passionate, machistas— just to name a few popular stereotypes), but such stereotypes tell us little about individual life projects and reduce human behaviour to an expression of geographical-cultural belonging. Malkki however, also notes that such very general social units are often commonly accepted and appropriated among the people in question. My host family would be happy to tell me “what Cubans were like” and how their family represented such an essential Cuban national identity (cubanidad). One day my host mother said: “You will notice that Cubans smile even though they have many problems. This is because it is the only way to survive.” Such a statement is generalizing almost to the point of provocation, but was importantly uttered by a Cuban. In conclusion Malkki writes: “That certain social categories and groupings that are socially or common-sensically meaningful is important to know, of course, but it does not follow that these should be swallowed whole as analytical units” (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007:75, ital- ics in original). HREBs play a key role in developing, in the mind of the anthropologist, the categories that are swallowed whole as analytical categories, although they might not be developed based on empirical explorations. The general intent of ethnography is to approach the field and one’s informants with an open mind and with few assumptions in order to learn the emic terms and categories from doing fieldwork. Unfortunately, the institutionalized process of obtaining ethical approval puts the carriage in front of the horse in the sense that the researcher has to develop her categories before she has had a chance to learn them through fieldwork. Rena Lederman, who has edited an entire issue of American Ethnologist dedicated to the subject of ethics and the problems with Institutional Review Boards (IRB), the American equivalent to HREBs, writes: Situating themselves in everyday both as persons and researchers, ethnographers expect to learn how their interlocutors negotiate the tangles of social life by observing, listening, and getting partially caught up with them. Expectations of these sorts—the very framework that gives good work in ethnography its complementary value relative to other kinds of social research—simply cannot be translated in terms designed for experimental biomedical and behavioral science, in which good work depends on creating a demarcated, controlled space of research. (Lederman 2006:489) The questions in the Application for Ethics Approval are designed in such a way that they correspond to research done in a controlled space of research or even a clinical setting, not the kinds of fieldsites that anthropologists tend to work in. In the US the situation may be “worse,” according to a number of authors in the issue of American Ethnologist particularly dedicated to the theme of ethics. These authors use “worse” in the sense that IRBs more rigidly limit the parameters for conceptualizing fieldwork and research participation than is the case in Canada. Interestingly HREBs do not exist in many European universities. Although ethical issues of fieldwork need to be considered in every research project at these institutions, this is often a task taken up at departmental level. Daniel Bradburd, a contributor to the issue of American Ethnologist mentioned above, argues that “the rules appear to exist to legitimate and protect the university more than the subject” (Bradburd 2006:497). I will refrain from commenting further on this particular claim, but it is clear that HREBs have caused anthropologists grief for a long time because of their somewhat clinical perspective to what it means to conduct research with “human subjects” (Lederman 2006:487). The grief they cause novice anthropologists is a deep frustration and confusion as to with whom and how many one is supposed to speak in the field; a concern reflected many times in my field diary. 49 The influence that HREBs assert upon researchers is not only to think people into categories, but to think them into specific categories. As such we tend to think of our informants as “research participants” and the researcher becomes obsessed with finding exemplary members of a given category (Anderson 2004:79). Another fallback of the ethics application procedure is that in publications the ethnographer might limit contextual information about her informants to a bare minimum and restrict their narratives in an attempt to protect their anonymity, but thereby reducing the richness of the research. For me the consequence of going through the application procedure was an almost permanent unnerving feeling of not having been able to sample a) the right kind of informants and, as a result thereof, b) the right number of informants. The women I worked with did not fit well into my idea of how jineteras looked and behaved. They were too poor, too old, too young, too content, and too unsuccessful in keeping long-term relationships with foreign men. Furthermore my impression of the women changed over time as particular individuals slipped into the category of ‘friend’. It took me quite a while to discover that it was not the women who did not fit the category, but the category that did not fit them. This realization not only made me question the utility of going through the ethics application procedure, but also made me more interested in understanding what made the 50 category jinetera difficult to apply to real people. This was especially interesting as I was not short of informants who would willingly point out others as jineteras. Next, I will show how the category in this sense turned out to be a fruitful one, not in and off itself, but as a vehicle for understanding social prejudice and stigma in Cuba. Jineteras and Luchadoras As alluded to above, the term jineterismo refers to the phenomenon that made up the context for my research interests. Individuals engaging in jineterismo are called jineteros (men) or jineteras (women). It would be appropriate to refer to the term jinetera as a stigma, its properties depending on “a complex interlocking of discourses of morality, race, class, gender, and nation” (Rundle 2001:3). According to Mette Berg Rundle, the term jinetera ultimately challenges the revolutionary narrative of economic, political, gender and racial equality in Cuba. Jineteras are portrayed as foolish young girls or selfish, greedy women who have not only gained headway in the Cuba’s new dollar economy through illicit means, but are also flashing their newfound fortune for everyone to see. My host family and friends that wanted to help me with my research would often point out supposed jineteras to me, telling me that they were easy to spot because they wore fancy clothes and had expensive habits (for instance taking cabs and drinking whiskey). Cuban women who had relationships to foreign men received presents from them: perfumes, purses, clothing, jewelry etc. These items were ‘luxury goods’ because they could not be purchased in Cuba or were too expensive for the average Cuban to afford. The situation often resulted in my informants experiencing stigmatization as jineteras. Importantly, an array of circumstances and factors contributed to singling out the women I talked to as jineteras in the eyes of others: their skin colour (while some of them were black and some mulatas, only one was white), their origin (from poorer suburban neighbourhoods in Havana or the country side), their work situation (or lack of), their family situation (most of them were single mothers) or any combination of these. It was an interlocking of these factors and their association with low social status that solidified the stigma as jinetera for my informants. We can understand stigma as an attribute, a behavior or a reputation, which is socially discrediting to the stigmatized person (Cecilia Benoit, personal communication). Stigma usually overshadows other aspects of a person’s identity, which are invalidated by the stigma. As an example, if a woman who participates in commercial sex is being called a “prostitute,” this pejorative pertains to all aspects of her life, so that even if she has children, studies, is an artist or holds other jobs, people will still know and refer to her as a “prostitute”. Calling the same woman a “sex worker,” on the other hand, indicates that her participation in commercial sex is but one aspect of her life: a way for her to make money to support other aspects of her identity. The term jinetera functions much as that of prostitute. It refers to a specific kind of woman who engages in specific kinds of activities motivated by a desire for money or “luxury goods”. It hides the fact that many Cuban women who have relationships to foreign men, do so on occasion when the opportunity arises and may simultaneously occupy other professional or social roles.6 My informants’ emphasis or suppression of certain features of their life contributed greatly to the way in which others perceived them. As I will show below, this was important because the women did use the stereotypical image of the jinetera to prove that given their own circumstances they did not belong to this category, but rather to the more respectable category of luchadora. In the public imagery the jinetera embodied the “newly rich” in Cuba, and was believed to engage in illicit activities that were damaging to her health and wellbeing simply to obtain luxury goods. This image of the jinetera is best understood in opposition to the image of “every” Cuban woman or at least “good” Cuban women as being luchadoras. The luchadora is also a well-known figure in Cuban society, even older than that of the jinetera. The noun refers to the emic term “the struggle” (la lucha), which has be51 come the common understanding and description of daily life in Cuba, especially after the onset of the economic crisis known as The Special Period in Times of Peace (El Periodo Especial en Tiempos de Paz) in the mid 1990s. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the complete disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, Cuba experienced a severe economic crisis. The country had relied almost entirely on the trading relationships with their big sister in the East and when the Soviet Union failed to deliver oil supplies to Cuba along with monetary support through the CMEA7, Cuban living standards declined radically. During this period (which never officially came to an end) Cuban citizens grew accustomed to state regulated power outages, a reduction by more than half of the available public transportation and extreme shortages of food and other household necessities. Since the mid 1990s, Cuba has introduced aspects of a market economy and seen a boom in the tourism industry, hoping this will save the economy. However, daily life in Cuba is still presents itself as a “struggle” to make ends meet for many families and requires the ability to “invent” (inventar) alternative life strategies. It is in this scenario of shortage and struggle that the figure of the luchadora, the woman who fights or struggles, acquires meaning. Through sacrifice, black market activities and hard work Cuban women (ideally) try the best they can to resolve their 52 economic problems and feed their families. Concretely Cuban women do this in various ways, but what is important is that the term luchar and the idea of the luchadora are widely recognized and positively associated with hardworking women, devoted to their families. Recounting of my first meeting with Dolores will serve to highlight the way in which Cuban women can play with well-known emic categories to present themselves in a desirable way and escape the stigma of jinetera. Dolores was a friend of my hostess and one day when visiting with family in the neighbourhood where Dolores lived my hostess told me that we should go see her because she “had the kind of experience I was interested in”. My hostess was referring to the fact that I had said I was interested in the phenomenon of jineterismo and in talking to women who had relationships with foreign men. As my hostess introduced me to Dolores she said, directing herself to Dolores and I simultaneously, that I was interested in studying “jineterismo and all that” and that I would like to speak to Dolores (at this point my hostess directed herself to Dolores only) because “you also struggled for a while” (tu también luchaste por un tiempo). My hostess showed great sensitivity in phrasing her request on my behalf this way because even when it was common knowledge that Dolores had acquired every piece of furniture in her house through activities of jineterismo, my hostesses did not directly tell Dolores that I wanted to talk to her about her experiences in prostitution. Instead she framed her actions as acts of “struggle” and “sacrifice” for her children, both terms that have positive connotations in Cuba. Dolores quickly picked up on this, and although she would become a key informant and willingly talk to me about her experiences with foreign men, she always referred to herself as luchadora. She often made reference to the hardship she endured and her many ways of trying to resolve her economic problems. Was Dolores a jinetera or a luchadora? She did have the experience I was interested in knowing about, but was not willing to fit herself into the category of jinetera. This insistence on defining herself as luchadora taught me a lot about her situation and the stigma that being a jinetera entails. Dolores insisted on being a luchadora and cleverly counteracted the stigma of jinetera by inverting the traditional understanding of the term luchadora from being a term describing the struggles of revolutionary women, to describe her struggles as a woman who had had to prostitute. Dolores conflated the two categories and argued that she was a luchadora because she had been a jinetera. my proposed category of research participants. Her experience with dating foreign men was in the past, and she did not want to talk much about it. She had more pressing and current problems with her Cuban husband that we often discussed. It took me a long time to realize that the category of jinetera was inappropriate, and undesirable as a stigma. Through the process of applying for ethical approval I had gotten stuck in my head that I was looking for jineteras in Havana, although in hindsight it is clear that I needed to understand the discourse of jineterismo and the way it was applied in social relationships before I could understand the function of the category jinetera in such relationships. Whether I could call anyone of my informants a jinetera post fieldwork is irrelevant, as the lesson learned was that jinetera is a stigma no one will willingly subscribe to. The good news is that the strength of anthropology lies in discovering, explaining and analyzing the kinds of social relationships that can lead to an understanding of social categories and phenomena. The bad news is that the Application for Ethics Approval asks the researcher to list categories, rather than developing their own productive questions in order to explore social relationships. The Tourist Category Despite these insights that I gained from talking to Dolores and trying to understand her situation, I was frustrated because she did not fit in to It turned out that the most relevant categories to “discover” in the field, were not only those that my informants occupied, or that I thought 53 they occupied, but also the categories available to me. My experience included a constant nagging feeling of being more of a tourist than an anthropologist, or the awkward ‘tourist-anthropologist’ as I refer to it. This proved fruitful for understanding the possibilities for relationships between my informants and I, but also between my informants and others—such as the foreign men that the Cuban women engaged with. George Simmel has written a wonderful article called “The Stranger” that many anthropology students are familiar with. Simmel argues that the stranger is a sociological figure, a special position within cultural and social units occupied by those who do not belong to the group per se, but manages to obtain rapport with its members and play an important role in their social life. The stranger, as Simmel poetically puts it, is “the person who comes today and stays tomorrow,” a person who immerses himself in the lives of a foreign group of people and becomes part of the group although he does not have social obligations or owns property within the group. The moral of the story is, that even if we as anthropologists are strangers to our informants, we obtain exclusive access to other peoples’ worlds and find ourselves at the core of “culture”. In fact we gain this access because we are strangers. As Simmel writes: “He [the stranger] often receives the most surprising openness – confidences which sometimes have the character of a confessional 54 and which would be carefully withheld from a more closely related person” (Simmel in Frank 1950:404). This description of the relationship between the stranger (or fieldworker) and her informants might represent the “anthropologist’s dream,” at least for many students who have listened to endless anecdotes from their professors’ time in the field. In my experience, however, I remained a stranger to my informants. This was because my relationship to my informants was based on my position as a foreigner in Cuba and because their lives played out on many stages, and not one “secret” backstage existed for me to gain exclusive access. During my initial encounter with and analysis of the tourism scene in Havana I was tempted to replicate the stereotype of the tourist, mostly in order to demonstrate that I was not one. In my own imagination, the tourists were those old, white men that came to the resorts in Varadero and to Havana to enjoy all kind of luxuries, without knowing that none of this was accessible to Cubans and without speaking Spanish so as to understand the nuances in local ways of communicating. In my own opinion, I distinguished myself by being a young, Spanish speaking, female researcher, somewhat adept at Cuban ways of talking and walking. In hindsight my attempt to escape the category of the tourist, just as many tourists try to escape themselves, shows that I, along with my informants, tended to think of foreigners stereotypically. These stereotypes are no more nuanced than the same stereotypes tourists apply to Cubans. I had a hard time accepting that to most of my informants and to my host family I was just “passing by”. I was little different from a tourist, and although I developed lasting friendships during fieldwork, they had met someone like me before. I was often advised to do the same things I heard other tourists being advised to do, although I ambitiously tried to come off as a “poor student” who could not afford to go see the most famous tourist attractions such as the world famous cabaret Tropicana. Being a tourist is difficult for an anthropologist, because of the moral values we attach to tourism in comparison with fieldwork. Tourism is superficial, uninformed, disinterested, exploitative and so on. I soon learned, however, that “the foreigner” (extranjero) was a very prevalent and important emic category in Cuba, and I slowly warmed up to the fact that the category might be a useful one to explore in order to understand relationships between Cuban women and foreign men. Furthermore, I was in a unique position to do so because I was one. Much of everyday socio-economic life in Havana revolves around tourism and a majority of the residents have daily direct or indirect contact with foreigners, as they sell objects to them, guide them around town, try to engage them in conversation to see if they can do business with them, make catcalls after for- eign women who pass by and gossip about foreigners’ consumption of luxury goods. Other locals try to avoid foreigners because they find the massive presence of tourists invasive or because they are afraid to be interrogated by police if they hang around with foreigners, as such interactions are subject to severe control by Cuban authorities. Early scholars in tourism studies believed tourism to render interactions between “hosts” and “guests” superficial and disingenuous due to its temporality and the obvious socio-economic inequalities between local populations and visitors (Boorstein 1964; Smith 1989). However, the situation in Havana proves that tourism and the institutionalized role of the foreigner enables personal relationships between Cubans and tourists, though it also causes certain strains on these relationships. In what has been called Cuba’s “tourism apartheid” physical space is sharply divided between the places that Cubans have access to and those that only foreigners can enter, such as hotel lobbies, certain beach and pool areas, some restaurants, clubs and stores. Cubans also desire to enter such places, and often find their way in, not least with the objective of getting in touch with foreigners and enjoy the luxuries of such exclusive spaces with foreign friends, who pay for their Cuban companions’ entrance and entertainment. Despite official restrictions on movement and contact between Cubans and foreigners, in effect such divisions actually cre55 ate a desire for establishing contact between Cubans and foreigners and facilitate exchange. A foreigner can invite his or her Cuban friend/guide/ host/lover to a bar in an attempt to become acquainted and build a closer relationship and the Cuban person on their part can have a specific desire to interact with their foreign acquaintance in a space where they are usually not permitted to enter. Foreigners are also often invited to private parties, and are expected to show up with extra provisions of rum and beer, and so they often end up almost hosting the party they are attending as guests. In this situation the foreigner may feel as if they gain exclusive access to a private space, while at the same time their access has been prompted by their status as a foreigners and the expectations that they will bring provisions to the party. Official policies attempt to minimize and regulate contact between foreigners and Cubans, for example by requiring tourists to stay in official tourist lodging only and pay higher fees in dollars for cultural entertainment such as theater or cabaret performances, than the regular price in pesos. These restrictions and regulations, however, in their own way provoke tourists to seek out experiences that are unregulated and again, enable rather than restrict contact and relationships between tourists and foreigners. The emic categories that I discovered in the field depended in part on which relationships were open to me. I discovered the category of 56 the foreigner, or rather its importance in the setting in which I did my fieldwork, because of my own relationships and the opportunities that being a foreigner allowed me. For example, my host family invited me to stay with them, fully knowledgeable about my research project and with a certain interest in helping me complete it, but they were without doubt also motivated by the fact that I would pay rent throughout my stay. We developed a close relationship, but a certain ambiguity always existed because of the obvious socio-economic differences between us. I was in some ways treated as a daughter, and expected to partake in housekeeping. At other times expected to behave as a foreigner, for instance by taking dance classes from my hostess. Ambiguity is often a productive focus point for analysis in anthropology. Unfortunately the categories available in the Application for Ethics Approval do not allow for such ambiguity and do not allow the researcher to envision creatively what kind of possible relationships they will be able to establish in the field. Conclusion In this essay I have drawn on examples from my own research in order to demonstrate the problems that the process of applying for ethical approval poses for novice anthropologists. This process reverses the anthropological method of inquiry and asks the researcher to define and explain social categories be- fore they have been discovered in the field. I am not pointing towards the problem in order to argue that HREBs are disruptive of anthropological research initiatives to the point that we should do away with them. The protection of research participants’ wellbeing is of outmost importance as is the health and safety of the researchers and this is the stated objective of the work of the HREBs. Furthermore, anthropologists continuously find themselves in situations were ethical standards are absolutely necessary and guidelines are needed. Especially inexperienced fieldworkers should be obligated to consider the ethical implications of their work. I have focused my critique on the process through which students of anthropologists are forced to do so. In this process the complexities of the kinds of ethical issues anthropologists may encounter in the field are obscured by the seemingly “easy” application of categories and definitions of relationship. Categories are problematic, not only because they reduce our sense of variation within groups and individual differences in people’s life projects, but also because they come across as self-explanatory, “natural” categories, that need not be criticized. We need not criticize such categories to do away with them, but to discover their meanings and significance in social relations (Anderson 2004:72). also led me to think about the usefulness of taking our informant’s and our own, sometimes stereotypical, categories seriously. We must think of social categories (such as jinetera) not as fixed local identities, but as volatile processes that will continue to unfold (Lancaster 1997:7). This might be especially true in the context of Cuba, a postrevolutionary society in transition. Anthropologists should look at fluid social relationships, because that is what we are good at. Beyond this, my discussion of the role the Application for Ethical Approval in the research process has 1. I am emphasizing that the process may be particularly troublesome and frustrating for novice anthro- In conclusion I will suggest that the Application for Ethics Approval for Human Participant Research is valuable, but other questions need to be asked in the application form if it is to become truly relevant to anthropology. These questions need to concern social relationships rather than categories of people, including the possible relationship between researcher and research participants. For example: What kinds of relationships are you going to investigate? What kinds of relationships do you envision yourself having? Anthropologists know that they are implicated in the categories that their informants occupy, because of their research relationship, and this form of self-reflection is a strength in anthropology that should be of inspiration in the work of HREBs. Notes 57 pologists because I suspect that senior scholars, who have gone through the same process numerous time, are more strategic and less emotionally affected by the experience. 2. Jineterismo is a catch-all term that covers a wide span of activities in the informal sector, only some of which carry sexual meanings. Street vendors that sell overpriced cigars to tourists or people who offer unauthorized guiding services to foreigners also risk being singled out as jineteros (men) or jineteras (women) both by their peers and the police. Even academics, who use their professional networks to present their work abroad could be accused of jineterismo or may even jokingly refer to themselves as such. 3. Salsa music and dance has achieved fame and popularity around the world in recent years, but the musical phenomenon has roots back to the 1960s and 1970s where it originated in the Latin American neighborhoods in New York. It incorporates a variety of Caribbean musical styles, such as son, guajira, mambo, charanga, boogaloo and rumba. The name salsa, Spanish for “sauce”, refers to this agglomerate of formerly different ingredients to a new and indiscriminate blend (Wieshiolek 2003:120). Salsa is known 58 in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America as a popular music and dance, but has never been domesticated and regulated as a ballroom dance, such as waltz, foxtrot or quickstep (Weishiolek 2003:122). In Cuba, salsa is not taught in the national dance schools as are ballet, folklore and modern dance, but most Cubans will claim that they dance salsa or that they know enough to admit that they are bad at it. 4. Casa de la Musica is a dance club chain, and a franchise can be found in every major city in Cuba that attracts foreign visitors. However, all major business is state owned in Cuba and Casa de la Musica is therefore not a competing brand, but rather a well-known and popular cultural institution. 5. Question 2a: “Briefly describe the target population(s) for recruitment. Ensure that all participant groups are identified,” 2b: “Why is this population of interest?” and 2d: “What are the salient characteristics of the participants?” (University of Victoria’s Application for Ethics Approval for Human Participant Research, submitted to and approved by the Human Research Ethics Board 2007). 6. Interestingly, the verb “jinetar” is commonly used to describe, often jokingly, the things people have to do to find solutions to their problems (resolver). I once overhead an professor of mine at the University of Havana laughingly ask a colleague who he would have to “jinetear” in order to get his new book published outside of Cuba. Using the verb, jinetear, rather than the noun, jinetero/a, indicates that it is something one does occasionally, not an aspect of one’s persona. When certain women are singled out as jineteras, the stigma is much more powerful. 7. From its foundation in 1949 till its demise in 1991 the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance (in Spanish called Consejo de Ayuda Mutua Económica or CAME) was an economic trading organization between designed to create corporation and facilitate trade between socialist and communist states. The CMEA membership spanned the Soviet Union along with other eastern and non-eastern socialist countries, although the organization was dominated by the large economy of the Soviet Union. Cuba was a member of the organization since 1972 and benefited greatly from this, particularly by exchanging oil for sugar with the Soviet Union. Cuba expierenced a immediate hard currency crisis when the CMEA ended all special concessions to Cuba in 1992 (Susman 1998:187). References Cited Anderson, Sally 2004 Kategorisering: Fællesmængder og særpræg hos børn. In Kirsten Hastrup (ed.): Viden om Verden: En Grundbog i Antropologisk Analyse. Denmark: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Bradburd, Daniel 2006 Fuzzy boundaries and hard rules: Unfunded research and the IRB. American Ethnologist 33(4):493-498. Boorstein, Daniel 1964 The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Harper and Row. Cherwonka, Allaine and Liisa H. Malkki 2007 Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Human Research Ethics Board (HREB) 2006 Human Research Ethics Board Application for Ethics Approval for Human Participant Research. University of Victoria. Lancaster, Roger 1997 Sexual Positions: Caveats and Second Thoughts on “Categories”. The Americas 54(1):1-16. Lederman, Rena 2006 The perils of working at home: IRB “mission creep” as context and content for an ethnography of disciplinary 59 knowledge. American Ethnologist 33(4):483-491. Rundle, Mette B. 2001 Tourism, Social Change, and Jineterismo in Contemporary Cuba. In The Society for Caribbean Studies Annual Conference Papers vol. 2. Sandra Courtman (ed.) Simmel, Gorge 1950 The Stranger. In Kurt Wolf: The Sociology of George Simmel. New York, London: The Free Press. Smith, Valene (ed.) 1989 Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Susman, Paul 1998 Cuban Socialism in Crisis: A Neoliberal Solution? In Globalization and Neoliberalism: The Caribbean Context. Thomas Klak (ed.) Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Wieshiolek, Heike 2003 ‘Ladies, Just Follow His Lead!’ Salsa, Gender and Identity. In Sport, Dance and Embodied Identities.Noel Dyck and Eduardo P. Archetti (eds.) Oxford, New York: Berg. 60 Jennafer Roberts Contested Femininities: Social Evolution and the Victorian Construction of the Idealised Woman Abstract In this essay, I focus on the ways in which social evolutionary theories reified and legitimated socially constructed gendered inequalities between middle-class Victorian men and women. First, I begin by summarising the tenets of social evolutionary theory as they were expounded by Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. In the second section, I highlight the manner in which Victorian feminists mobilised against dominant masculinist evolutionary perspectives to form a counterargument promoting the authority of women. Finally, I utilise dominant masculinist and feminist discourses of social evolution to discuss the social production and political implication of scientific knowledge. Through my analysis of dominant masculinist evolutionist and feminist discourses, I argue that social evolutionary theory was situated, contingent, and contested. 61 Introduction Social evolutionary theory in the late-1800s and early-1900s served to legitimize socially constructed gender inequalities in Victorian society. The scholarly work of scientists in Victorian society set out to support the “...conventional vision of perfection in family life; it was not, perhaps a natural institution, but it was the result of a long and painful evolutionary struggle away from nature” (Deutscher 2004: 24). An analysis of social evolutionary thought as it constructed Victorian feminine identities is significant because it provides a site whereby we can come to understand the scientific legitimisation of social and political agendas. It also allows us to understand how scientific discourses reify social inequalities, particularly gendered inequalities, in the past and the present. In this paper, I attempt to address the ways in which social evolutionary theories were inscribed in white, middle-class Victorian women’s gendered identities in the late-1800s and the early-1900s. To attend to this goal, it is pertinent to focus on three different aspects of social evolutionary theories as they were constructed in Victorian society. In the first section of this paper, I discuss Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer’s construction of social evolution. For Spencer, civilisation was linked to patriarchy. Indeed, he considered male domination, through patriarchy, to be situated in the 62 “thorough domestication of women” (Fee 1975:38). In the second section of the paper, I discuss the way in which Victorian feminists challenged dominant evolutionary theories that reified gender inequalities. I focus on the way in which three feminists, in particular, critique the construction of male superiority by reconceptualising social evolutionary theories to demonstrate the natural authority of women, particularly white, middle class women. Finally, I utilise dominant masculinist and feminist discourses of social evolution to discuss the manner in which scientific knowledge is socially produced and politically implicated. Both the Victorian male social evolutionists and the feminists mobilised the authority of scientific knowledge to advance their political agendas with the tacit assumption that scientific knowledge was neutral. Through my analysis of dominant masculinist evolutionist and feminist discourses, I assert that the science of social evolution was situated, contingent, and indeed, contested. Evolutionary Science and the Construction of the Feminine Ideal Before the concept of evolution could become inculcated in public thought, it first needed to “...prevail within the realm of science itself” (Hofstadter 1959:16). By the early 1870s, Darwin’s theories of evolution through natural selection and transmutation of the species permeated the realm of science and success- fully dominated the minds of American naturalists (Hofstadter 1959:18). It should be noted that it is not my goal here to summarise the tenets of Darwin’s theories of evolution, but rather to discuss his conceptualisations of sexual differences between men and women as they were situated within these theories. Darwin saw distinct and innate differences between men and women’s mental and physical capabilities. In his works, The Descent of Man and In Relation to Sex, first published in 1871, Darwin took on the task of describing the biological roles of men and women as they were embedded within a general evolutionary scheme of all organisms. He opined that man in comparison to woman was not only more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic, but he also had a “more inventive genius” (Darwin 1890: 557). Man’s general superiority over woman rested within his overall physical strength as a derived characteristic from “half-human male ancestors” (Darwin 1890: 563). Darwin maintained that men, “as a general rule, have to work harder than women for their joint subsistence, and thus their greater strength will have been kept up” (1890:563). Men were, thus, more biologically inclined to be stronger because it was necessary for the survival of men and women alike. While Darwin suggested inherent physical differences between the sexes, he also ascribed differences of mental faculties as well. Woman, he believed, differed from man “... chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness...woman, owing to her maternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent degree; therefore it is likely that she would often extend them toward her fellow creatures” (Darwin 1890: 563). It is here that we begin to see how the biological role of women was thought to contribute to their expected role in society. For Darwin, the defining distinction between men and women’s intellectual capacities was demonstrated in men’s ability to attain “...a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up...whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the sense and hands” (1890:564). Darwin asserted that the capabilities of women were located in “their powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation,” characteristic of the “lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation” (1890:563-564). Darwin’s analysis of the biological roles of men and women were espoused by Spencer and applied to the contemporary Victorian social roles of men and women. In mobilising Darwin’s ideas of evolution and natural selection, Spencer attempted to situate them within his own theories of gendered social roles of men and women, middleclass white men and women, in particular. For Spencer, biological processes informed men and women’s social roles. Spencer regarded the 63 comparatively lower rate of multiplication of humankind to other animals as necessary for its higher evolution (Spencer 1895:479). In Principles of Biology, published in 1895, Spencer situated variations in human fertility within general laws of fertility for all organisms. He theorised that there was a specific period in the life cycle of individuals in which they would be most reproductively successful. Reproductive success was marked by the ability to produce healthy infants. He believed that a woman’s prime reproductive years were between twenty-five and twenty-nine years of age. Infants born to women either younger or older than this age bracket, he argued, would be smaller in weight and height and therefore less healthy (Spencer 1895:480). Spencer insisted that individuals should focus on the reproduction of the (civilised) human race, rather than on themselves. By doing so, “... the cost of individuation being much reduced, the rate of Genesis is much increased” (Spencer 1895:482). Spencer was particularly concerned with what he termed the “antagonism between individuation and reproduction,” which he defined as “a tax which, though it is pleasurably paid in fulfillment of the appropriate instincts and emotions, and is in so far a fulfillment of individual life, is nevertheless a tax which restricts individual development in various directions” (1904:533). Though not clearly defined, Spencer conceptualised individuation as the pursuit of an individual’s goals, 64 achievements, and ultimately, an individual’s development. For him, individuation in women particularly manifested itself in mental or physical labour and had the potential to disrupt their reproductive abilities. Thus, he declared that “absolute or relative infertility is generally produced in women by mental labour carried to excess” (Spencer 1895:483). This deficiency in reproductive abilities was a result of the over-taxing of a young woman’s brains. This over-taxation, in turn, produced serious physical reactions, including a greater frequency of sterility, an early cessation of childbearing, and an inability to nurse an infant (Spencer 1895:486). While Spencer argued women should give up their individuation to perpetuate the human race, he claimed men’s “greater cerebral expenditure” did not necessarily destroy or diminish their reproductive power (Spencer 1895:486). Men, therefore, could successfully pursue individuation, while contributing to human reproduction without detrimental affects to themselves or their offspring. Spencer’s affirmation of a man’s dual ability to pursue individuation and contribute to the perpetuation of the human race manifested itself in male authority over females. This is a particularly salient theme in the institution of marriage. In Spencer’s Principles of Ethics, published in 1900, he argued that because men were the primary economic contributors within a marriage, the “discharge of domestic and maternal duties by the wife may ordinarily be held a fair equivalent for the earning of an income by the husband” (1900:161). For women, who must reciprocate in what he termed “marital beneficence,” “indebtedness to the bread-winner has to be recognized and in some measure discharged...” (Spencer 1900:341). This, he suggested, could be achieved by taking care of household duties, which makes domestic life, life within the household, run smoothly (Spencer 1900:341). Women’s primary biological role of reproducing the human race led Spencer to declare women the primary caretakers of children. Their domestic role in the household, therefore, necessarily restricted their activities to the home and limited their “individual development” (Spencer 1900:337). Pregnancy and ultimately the transition into motherhood resulted in a mental degradation occurring in women. The lack of individual development in women led Spencer to suggest that men ultimately had authority over women because they were more “judiciallyminded,” particularly in situations of disputes (1900:161). Spencer extends this argument beyond the domestic sphere by suggesting that women did not have the same political rights as men because they did not contribute to or carry the same responsibilities as men outside of their roles as mothers (1900:166). Spencer conceived chastity to be the foundation upon which Victorian marriages rested. He believed that sexual relations needed to be favourable to the rearing of offspring; straying from chastity, as a criterion of “evolutionary ethics,” (1904:448) would result in the degradation or extinction of the human race (1904:449). As such, chastity was a “higher conception,” that did not extend to the “lower societies” (Spencer 1904:449). Spencer argued that chastity, particularly of women, furthered the superior social state of man. Chastity was conducive to the nurturance of offspring and it allowed for the development of “higher sentiments which prompt [monogamous] relations” (Spencer 1904: 463). For a woman, this biological role manifested itself in her social role as a mother; indeed, not fulfilling it could result in the “not infrequent occurrence of hysteria and chlorosis [which] shows in that women...are apt to suffer grave constitutional evils from the incompleteness of life which celibacy implies” (Spencer 1904:534). What this suggested was that a woman was apt to ill health if she did not fulfill her reproductive, biological role as a mother. Marriage provided the arena in which a woman could fulfill this role, while reinforcing the importance of chastity. Marriage resulted in a moral transformation, whereupon even the most vain, thoughtless girl could become a devoted wife and mother (Spencer 1904:535). Spencer suggested that the welfare of offspring should take precedence over the welfare of those who produce them (1904: 544). “The ethical code of nature...allows no escape of parents from their obligations” (Spencer 65 1904:547). For Spencer, “no conclusion can be sustained which does not conform to the ultimate truth that the interests of the race must predominate over the interests of the individual” (1904:544). Ultimately, Spencer’s discussion about the altruism of parenthood and the necessity of restricting individuation for the perpetuation of the species rested in the role of women as mothers. Thus, it necessarily fell to women to subordinate their individuality. Spencer claimed that the perpetuation of the human race necessitated women subverting their individuality to motherhood; yet, he was insistent that men and women should treat each other with equal consideration. In The Man Versus the State, Spencer argued that within the institution of marriage, men should recognize “that there is a fatal incongruity between the matrimonial servitude which our law recognizes and the relation that ought to exist between husband and wife” (1895:76). Although the imposition of one human being’s authority over another is “essentially rude and brutal,” (Spencer 1895:73) he insisted that a woman’s rights, that is, the “freedom to exercise the faculties,” (1895:73) should be measured in relation to her mental intelligence. This establishes an obvious tautological argument that Spencer both relied upon and failed to recognize. Spencer’s tautology rests within five interconnected features that are 66 mutually dependant on each other: First, Spencer argued that women must subvert their individuation to perpetuate the human race. Second, individuation was conceptualised as dangerous to women because it had the ability to disrupt their reproductive duties. Third, the subversion of women’s individuation to their biological roles as reproducers resulted in a decline of brain power. Fourth, because the pursuit of individuation did not detrimentally affect men’s ability to reproduce, they were freely able to cultivate their own individuation, while perpetuating the human species. Finally, it was women’s limited mental capabilities, as a result of their reproductive duties, that rendered them inferior to men’s superior mental and physical abilities. The Feminist (Re)Interpretation of Social Evolution and Gendered Faculties In the late 1800s, feminist movements began to challenge the reification of male superiority promulgated through social evolutionary theories. In this section, I focus on the feminist critique and reconceptualisation of social evolution by three women in particular: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Eliza Burt Gamble, and Antoinette Brown Blackwell. All three women attempted to dismantle what they conceptualised as a version of social evolution that promoted the subversion of female qualities perceived to be threatening to male superiority. By mobilising the rhetoric of social evolution and by embracing theories of human progress, each woman was able to construct an argument that repudiated the naturalisation of gendered inequalities put forth by male scientists. Gilman, Gamble, and Blackwell formulated a retort, legitimized through the language of science, which simultaneously rejected the superiority of the male sex and promoted the natural authority of women. Yet, at this juncture, it is imperative to note that while these feminists challenged gendered inequalities, they reproduced the social inequalities that existed between women of differing social identities, including class, ethnicity, and ability. Indeed, their reconceptualisations of social evolutionary theory benefitted a select group of women situated in a relatively privileged position in middle-class Victorian society. In Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s book, Man–Made World, published in 1911, she acknowledged the superiority of men over women, but argued this “pre-eminence to be a distinction of humanity and not of sex, fully open to women if they use their human powers” (1911: Preface). For Gilman, the distinction between a common humanity, in Victorian civilised society, and a differentiation between the sexes was an important one. She (1911:13) maintained that the scholarly work of sexual differentiation, put forth by Spencer and Darwin, served to obscure a common humanity. As such, she argued “our humanness is not seen to lie so much in what we are individually, as in our relations to one another; and even that individuality is but the result of our relations to one another” (1911:16). Social evolution relied on the innate biological abilities of males and females, which in turn dictated human behaviour and social roles. Gilman disputed this biological determinism and put forth that social identities were constructed through the relations between individuals. She held that the course of human history had been made and written by men and had thus been constructed through what she termed an “androcentric culture” (1911:17). Indeed, “the mental, mechanical, the social development was almost wholly theirs. We have, so far, lived and suffered and died in a man-made world” (Gilman 1911:17). Through the androcentric lens of the masculinist perspective, women had been accorded the inferior position. Thus, Gilman’s purpose in her critique of social evolutionary theories was to discuss the way in which human life had been dominated by male authority. For her, the “human scheme of things rests on the same tacit assumption; man being held the human type; woman a sort of accompaniment and subordinate assistant merely essential to the making of people” (1911:20). Masculine nature, within the androcentric culture, was representative of all human nature. For Gilman, the androcentric conceptualisation of human nature manifested itself in women’s prescribed roles in society. She emphasized that: 67 To the man, the whole world was his world; his because he was male and the whole world of woman was home; because she was female. She had her prescribed sphere, strictly limited to her feminine occupations and interests; he had all the rest of life; and not only so, but having it, insisted on calling it male (Gilman 1911:23). Gilman, in her analysis of the institution of marriage, took Spencer to task. Spencer asserted that the institution of the family was a manifestation of men and women’s reproductive roles. Spencer envisioned marriage as characteristic of a sacrifice of individuation. This sacrifice affected women primarily because of their fragile mental capacity, which had the dangerous potential of disrupting their reproductive abilities (Spencer 1895:486). Spencer maintained that the sacrifice of individuation was integral to the improvement of the human race. Yet, Gilman argued that although this subversion of individuation was necessary, it had been perverted by the agenda of men. Men, Gilman asserted, manipulated the institution of the family from one that was dedicated to the “...best service of the child to one modified to [man’s] own service, the vehicle for his comfort, power and pride” (1911:27). Thus, the role of mother shifted from the “original and legitimate base of family life,” to a role of servitude as a “... means of pleasure to the man, as his property” (Gilman 1911:32). For Gilman, interpretations of evolu68 tionary science, particularly of sex differentiations, were corrupted by the androcentric culture. Not only were these interpretations corrupted, they were injurious to human progress. Gilman believed that “we rob our children of half their social heredity by keeping the mother in an inferior position; however legalized, hallowed, or ossified by time, the position of domestic servant is inferior” (1911:39). Gilman deemed, with Spencer, monogamous marriage to be the embodiment of progress and superiority of Victorian society. Contravening Spencer, however, she argued that “marriage is our way of safeguarding motherhood; of ensuring ‘support’ and ‘protection’ to the wife and children” (1911:168). Gilman conceptualised the progress of human civilisation as resting within the abilities of men and women. She believed that few men could “overlook the limitation of their sex and see the truth; that this business of taking care of our common affairs is not only equally open to women and men, but that women are distinctly needed in it” (1911:223). Where Spencer and Darwin claimed that sex differentiation was representative of human progress, Gilman emphasized the importance of equality between the sexes. She envisioned Victorian society as the manifestation of the idealised, intelligent mother. Arguing that because the family was conceptualised as a unit of the state, she believed the state should be run on that basis. For Gilman, a “government by women, so far as it was influenced by their sex, would be influenced by motherhood; and that would mean care, nurture, provision, education” (1911:190). She considered human society, particularly Victorian society, as poised to make the world better in a single generation. Progress, however, could not occur if women continued to be subordinated to men. Women were arguably better equipped to promote the progress of the human race: men were handicapped by their masculinity, competitiveness, and antagonism. These characteristics were so interwoven within androcentric conceptualisations of human progress that woman were unable to claim any “equal weight and dignity in human affairs” (Gilman 1911:237). Ultimately, Gilman asseverated that if women could recognize their true position in society as mothers, as opposed to subordinating themselves to men, they would come to understand that “...in line with physical evolution, motherhood is the highest process; and that [women’s] work, as a contribution to an improved race, must always involve this great function” (1911:245). While Gilman attempted to challenge gender differentiation as a marker for racial progress, Eliza Burt Gamble subscribed to it. In Gamble’s book, The Evolution of Women, published in 1894 (cited in Cohart 1957), she based much of her theories of social evolution on the work of Darwin. While she subscribed to these theories of evolution, she disagreed with Darwin on one essential point. For Gamble, it was females, not males, who represented a higher stage of development (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957:9). Gamble states: ...after a careful reading of The Descent of Man, by Mr. Darwin. I first become impressed with the belief that the theory of evolution, as enunciated by scientists furnishes much evidence going to show that the female among all orders of life, man included, represents a higher stage of development than the male (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957: 11). Gamble suggested that females exhibited traits that allowed for progression, and that “...from instinct of nurture and protection for her young come the social instincts writ larger and from these habits the origin of moral sense and conscience” (Hoeveller 2007:171). For her, the construction of female inferiority in social evolution was the result of two processes; one was the result of biological processes and the other was situated in what she termed the “doctrine of male superiority” (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957: 11). I will elaborate on both. Gamble conceived two foundational points for conceptualising the biological evolution of sex differentiation. The first point posited that the lowest forms of a species displayed little sexual differentiation and females in these forms tended not to participate in or acknowledge courtship displays. In these instances, the onus was on males to persuade 69 females to participate (Hoeveller 2007:170). The second point asserted that in the higher forms, males displayed elaborate features to entice females, who tended to favour these features (Hoeveller 2007:170). This evidence, she held, suggested that the improvement and progress of human societies rested heavily on female participation in selecting mates (Hoeveller 2007:170). Gamble believed that this evolution of sexual differentiation in males was located in their “...greater aggression and competition for females and a greater disposition to individual self-preservation and a greater habit of sexual gratification” (Hoeveller 2007:170). This excess of sex characteristics, as argued by both Darwin and Gamble, had the potential to disadvantage males. While Darwin considered natural selection a means to prevent this excess, Gamble believed that sex differentiation “deprived males of a progressive role in evolution” (Hoeveller 2007:170). Gamble came to see the development of aggression in males as a means of survival and a reinforcement of dominant male traits; thus men’s strength manifested itself in their roles as hunters and warriors (Hoeveller 2007:172). Through this process, women became increasingly economically dependent on men. Gamble reasoned that through this evolution of differentiation the sex roles of men and women became ordered and perverted in contemporary Victorian society (Hoeveller 2007:172). Marriage exhibited this unequal differentiation between the 70 sexes, where men had control over women. Gilman theorised that “so long as woman was the selecting agent in evolution, sexual differentiation had manifested itself in the male. After the reversal, woman, in her subjection to the male, had assumed the burden of pleasing him through the senses...” (Hoeveller 2007:175). Woman’s fundamental role in mate selection thus became the “primary cause of the very characters through which man’s superiority over women has been gained” (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957:16) The “doctrine of male superiority,” similar to Gilman’s “androcentric culture,” was situated within preevolutionary inquiries of man’s superiority. These inquiries were based on theological dogmatism and metaphysical speculation (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957:12). Gamble argued that the “doctrine of male superiority” accorded man as “...the real or direct object of special creation, while woman is only an afterthought—a creature brought forth in response to the needs of man” (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957:12). Gamble envisioned scientific inquiry as a means of repudiating the theological and metaphysical prejudice of male superiority. She saw the authority of science, through its objectivity and rationality, as a way to invalidate the constructed authority of theology. Evolutionary science would allow for the use of facts, and deductions from those facts, to diminish the theological and meta- physical theories that insisted on privileging men over women. But, even within the positivism of science, Gamble ardently contended, “...we find that prejudices which throughout thousands of years have been gathering strength are by no means eradicated, and any discussion of the sex question is still rare in which the effects of these prejudices may not be traced” (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957: 12). While male scientists continued to construct the inferiority of women through biological processes, Gamble argued that the female, not the male, was the primary unit of creation. Males were simply “supplementary or complimentary” (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957:17). She envisioned evolutionary science as a means to substantiate the idea that females were more highly developed than males. While men in contemporary Victorian society dominated women, Gamble asserted that the evolution of male dominance was stagnating and would go no further (Gamble 1894 cited in Cohart 1957:176). Indeed, she believed that humankind would never advance or progress until “...women recover their original liberties, until, that is, they bring their ‘natural instincts’ into every department of human activity” (Hoeveller 2007:176). Like Gilman and Gamble, Antoinette Brown Blackwell disputed evolutionary science’s androcentric construction of female inferiority. Blackwell mobilised Spencer and Darwin’s theories of evolution to argue that sex differentiation between males and females did exist, but challenged the reified inequality their theories created. She disputed the unequal roles between men and women, arguing that sex differences should represent an equilibrium (Munson & Dickenson 1998:118). Darwin and Spencer’s theorization of human evolution emphasized the necessity of women focusing their energies on fulfilling their natural reproductive role. Women were expected to produce and nurture healthy infants to advance the human race. This demanded that women limit their physical and intellectual endeavours. Blackwell challenged this scientific discourse by claiming that male scientists were biased and women’s personal experiences provided an integral role in revealing that bias (Munson & Dickenson 1998:110). Blackwell incisively responded to this discourse by arguing that men had no authority to write about the realities of being a woman. Scientists had no authority to construct arguments about women’s social and biological roles because they had never experienced what it meant to be a woman (Munson & Dickenson 1998:116). For Blackwell, the dominant social evolutionary theories regarding women’s roles had not been deduced scientifically, rather they had been constructed dogmatically (Munson & Dickenson 1998:117). She asserted that women’s perspective could serve as a“...corrective to the illogic of contemporary science,” because it was the gendered biases of male scientists that led them to 71 make unsubstantiated claims (Munson & Dickenson 1998:117). Blackwell contested the denial of women’s access to education because it not only limited the potential of each individual woman, it also limited the progress of the entire human race (Munson & Dickenson 1998:119). She believed that if women could exercise their intellectual abilities, they would improve their minds. Those improvements would become biologically imprinted and thus passed on to their offspring (Munson & Dickenson 1998:119). Ultimately, she premised that women’s inferior intellectual abilities were not products of innate, biological differences. Rather, she declared that this “impoverishment of women” was a result of Victorian patriarchal society and utilised the construction of androcentric scientific knowledge as an illustrative example (Munson & Dickenson 1998:119). The Authority of Science and the Social Production of Knowledge The mobilisation of scientific discourse by feminists at the turn of the twentieth century provides an arena in which to conceptualise the social production of scientific knowledge. Not only were feminists embracing the rhetoric of evolutionary science, they were simultaneously utilising it to challenge masculinist authoritative knowledge and privilege. Social evolutionary scientists responded to feminist challenges with “...a de72 tained and sustained examination of the differences between men and women that justified their differing roles” (Russett 1989:10). This examination was in one regard, an endeavour to simultaneously concretise valued Victorian gender roles and to measure the progress of all other societies in relation to these roles. The reification of scientific knowledge as objective and rational enhances its authority. Historical and social processes between the late-1800s and early-1900s serve to highlight the constructed reality of the science of human evolution. Situating evolutionary science historically and socially enables us to recognize the tacit and embedded structures of power, inequality and politics. It also enables us to conceptualise how scientific knowledge is constructed in different ways and by different people. Scientific discourses are discourses of power and, as such, privilege some while disadvantaging others. For white, middle-class Victorian men, evolutionary science legitimised gender inequalities privileging male authority and power. For white, middle-class Victorian women, evolutionary science provided a space to refute gender inequalities and to argue for the recognition of female authority and power. Within this debate, the tacit assumption was that scientific knowledge was the knowledge of undisputed facts. Yet, the production of social evolutionary theories cannot be removed from the context and conditioning of “personal and family, history, class and personal identification, and re- ligious, marital, and social concerns” (Stocking 1987:233). Thus, while scientific knowledge is assumed to be objective, I argue that it is constructed, contingent and positioned knowledge. By emphasising larger social processes of Victorian society, we can begin to deconstruct the articulated authority of evolutionary science. Stocking argues that social evolutionism has been conceptualised as “...an ideological reflection of economic exploitation and class conflict in an age of rapid capitalist economic development and imperial expansion” (1987:187). Victorian values of sexuality were simultaneously bound up in morality and economics. The moral valuation of abstinence from sexual activity, exclusion from procreation, and chastity were mobilised in evolutionary thinking (Stocking 1987:200). The relationship between sexuality and economics manifested itself in the necessity of suppressing sexual desires. Energy focused on sexual gratification could not be directed toward economic productivity. Thus, as a reflection of capitalist economic development in Victorian society, “...progress consisted not simply in a growth of reason, but in the repression of sexual instinct” (Stocking 1987:220). Social evolutionary theories did not construct the importance of domesticity as signifier of both morality and social progress; rather they reflected entrenched Victorian values. Indeed, Stocking suggests “the respectable middle- class ideology of economic sexuality did not of course emerge full-blown in the 1850s. Well before Victoria assumed the throne, Victorian sexual morality was already a powerful cultural force...” (Stocking 1987:217). Victorian sexual repression manifested itself in the value of female domesticity, which was in turn, was emphasized as the “...high point of evolutionary progress” (Stocking 1987:205). Social evolutionary theories were constructed from and served to maintain the status quo of middle-class Victorian society. Social evolutionists worked to fit their data of sexual differentiation into a larger theoretical framework so as to construct a universal law to humankind (Russett 1989:49). Yet, as Levy claims, social evolutionary theories, particularly within anthropology,“...in consort with sociology and domestic fiction, contributed more to the definition of middle-class [Victorian] family than to that of the family of man” (1991:50). By conceptualising the way in which social knowledge informs scientific knowledge, we begin to recognize how social inequalities are embedded within scientific discourse and practice. The construction of scientific laws in relation to the progress of human kind cannot be removed from the context of “middle-class power” (Levy 1991:32). The professionalization and industrialisation of sciences, in relation to economic development, resulted in women becoming“...systematically and sequentially excluded from the new 73 occupational structures which, at their apex, were linked to new forms of economic and social power” (Rose 1994:100). Because middleclass women were particularly relegated to the domestic sphere, as science increasingly represented the public sphere, women could no longer participate in the same ways. The “gentlemanly scientific culture” (Rose 1994:100) actively worked to emphasize the importance of the separation between the sexes. Reed argues that “since men hold the dominant place in all spheres of modern social and cultural life, while women have been reduced to a narrow, dependent life in home and family, a false proposition has been set forth to account for this” (1975:44). As such, the reproductive work of women was mobilised by scientists to keep middle-class women within the domestic sphere. Though, “scientists never engaged in a conscious conspiracy against women, and they were by no means uniformly misogynistic” (Russett 1989:190). Rather, as Gilman, Gamble, and Blackwell suggested, science was based upon a foundation that was in itself androcentric and patriarchal. The desire to disregard women as individuals was not isolated solely within scientific discourse. Yet, as Russett maintains, “...the normal practice of science itself strongly reinforced this stance. Scientists classify and categorize and generalize and this often means that the scientist’s vision is fixed on the larger collectivity rather than on the single individual” (1989:193). Because the science of social evolu74 tion was situated with the classification of humankind as a whole, men and women were separated into homogenous groups, comprised of basic elements (Russett 1989:193). This classificatory scheme and the necessity of generalisations justified the construction of fundamental gender differentiations on a grander scale (Russett 1989:194). The stratification of middle-class men and women was held up as an example of the evolutionary progress of Victorian society, as though it reflected inherent biological differences between men and women (Hubbard 1990:123). Arguably, these gender differentiations were based on constructions of those in power and those who had the authority to conceptualise and reify these ideas. Thus, male scientists used what they conceived of as innate biological differences to rationalise, but not explain, social differences between men and women and the inequalities borne out of them (Hubbard 1990:124). As Russett succinctly demonstrates: In denying to women a coequal role in society, scientists sought to stabilize at least one set of relationships by inserting lesser orders [women and savages] between themselves and the apes, to distance themselves from the animality and erosion of status that Darwinism seemed to imply...women and the lesser races served to buffer Victorian gentlemen from a too-threatening intimacy with the brutes. (1989:14). Science, as a product of social practice and discourse, veils power differentials in the rhetoric of biology. Through the process of transforming social values, practices, and beliefs into scientific knowledge, structures of power are naturalised and made invisible. Thus, “differences, be they biological or psychological, become scientifically interesting only when they parallel differences in power” (Hubbard 1990:129) Conclusion Throughout this paper, I have discussed the ways in which social evolutionists at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, utilised scientific discourse to concretise differential gender roles in Victorian society. Spencer and Darwin provided an arena in which gender inequalities were not only naturalised, but necessary for the survival of the human species. At the same time, middleclass Victorian feminists countered the naturalisation of gender inequality within the same scientific arena. Gamble, Gilman, and Blackwell utilised the language of evolutionary science to dispute the dominant androcentric explanations for male superiority. Gamble, Gilman, and Blackwell contended that it was not biology that was accountable for gender inequality; rather, it was the androcentric interpretation of scientific facts that rendered women inferior. Indeed, they believed that evolutionary science would provide a legitimate space in which to redress these inequalities. Social evolution, for feminists, provided an arena to argue for women’s rights, where religious dogmas had silenced them. I have established within this context, that scientific knowledge and discourse can never be neutral or apolitical. Rather, by focusing on the production of scientific knowledge within a particular social and historical moment, I hope to have demonstrated that scientific theories are always constructed within larger social processes. While the authority of science is situated within its perceived neutrality, my analysis of social evolutionary theories in Victorian society demonstrates that scientific knowledge can serve a powerful political role. For Victorian feminists and male social evolutionists, it was the tacit neutrality and objectivity of science that legitimised their divergent political agendas. While I have attempted to provide an analysis of the science of social evolution as it impacted Victorian women, there is much that I have not addressed in this paper. In particular, I have not addressed the way in which middle-class Victorian feminists relied on and perpetuated constructions of “primitive” people to“...create an effective and persuasive body of feminist theory” (Bederman 1995:122). Gilman, in particular, utilised the notion of civilisation and civilised people to demonstrate that“...human advancement 75 was not a matter of gender difference but of racial difference” (Bederman 1995:124). It is important to acknowledge here that while Victorian feminists strove to question and problematise the tacit superiority of men, they relied on racialised constructions of civilised and primitive societies to do so. Feminism, within Victorian society, focused narrowly on the rights of middle-class Victorian women. In this regard, an in-depth analysis of class-based differences is necessary to understand the inequalities perpetuated within and between classes, particularly inequalities between women. Acknowledgements This essay was originally submitted for a seminar in the history of anthropological theory. I am indebted to Lisa Mitchell for her guidance in helping me narrow my research focus. Marjorie Mitchell is an expert in slashing and burning in the fields of verbiage, as she once eloquently put it. Her linguistic prowess and keen eye have helped to make the arguments in this paper stronger. I am grateful to the reviewers of this paper, for their constructive feedback and editing. References Cited Bederman, Gail 1995 Manliness & Civilisation: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 18801917. Chicago: The University of 76 Chicago Press. Darwin, Charles 1890 The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray. Deutscher, Penelope 2004 The Descent of Man and the Evolution of Woman. Hypatia 19(2):35-55. Fee, Elizabeth 1975 The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology. Feminist Studies 1(3/4): 23-39. Gamble, Eliza Burt 1957 [1894] The Evolution of Woman. In Unsung Champions of Women. Mary Cohart, ed. Pp. 9-24. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 1911 The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture. New York: Source Book Press. Hoeveller, J. David 2007 The Evolutionists: American Thinkers Confront Charles Darwin, 1860-1920. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Hofstadter, Richard 1959 Social Darwinism in American Thought. New York: George Braziller, Inc. Hubbard, Ruth 1990 The Politics of Women’s Biology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Levy, Anita 1991 Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 18321898. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Munson, Elizabeth and Greg Dickenson 1998 Hearing Women Speak: Antoinette Brown Blackwell and the Dilemma of Authority. Journal of Women’s History 10(1): 108-126. Reed, Evelyn 1975 Woman’s Evolution: From Matriarchal Clan to Patriarchal Family. New York: Pathfinder Press, Inc. Rose, Hilary 1994 Love, Power and Knowledge: Towards a Feminist Transformation of the Sciences. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Russett, Cynthia Eagle 1989 Sexual Science. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Spencer, Herbert 1895 Principles of Biology, vol. 2. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Spencer, Herbert 1895 Social Statistics and The Man Versus the State. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Spencer, Herbert 1900 Principles of Ethics, vol. 2. London: Williams and Norgate. Spencer, Herbert 1904 Principles of Ethics, vol. 1. London: Williams and Norgate. Stocking, George W. 1987 Victorian Anthropology. New York: The Free Press, A Division of Macmillan, Inc. 77 Michelle Hardy Re-representing Rwandan Child Headed Households: Observations on Community Support Abstract In this article I touch on one aspect of my research with orphans living in rural Rwandan child headed households. Images of children living without adult caregivers prompt perceptions of vulnerability and victimization, perspectives often supported in popular and academic literature. While this article does not seek to refute these perceptions, I suggest that a purposeful investigation into the children’s social context illustrates what types of support are available to these households from the members of their local community, and how the nature of that support is linked to the social position of the community member. This, in turn, provides significant contextual information on the lived reality of the children that is useful for strengthening existing support and encouraging new efforts. 78 Image 1. Photo editing allows for the removal of any context information that signifies support to orphans. Photo by author. ©2008 Introduction Representations depicting vulnerable children in low-income contexts abound in advertisements by aid organisations soliciting funding. Some of these ads center on orphans, a social group that I have focused on in my own anthropological research. Over the course of four months in 2008, I conducted research with children who were living without adult caregivers in rural child headed households (CHH), who have been orphaned because of civil unrest, genocide and AIDS in Rwanda, Central East Africa. I focused primarily on the children’s perceptions and experiences of health, and how these differed depending on their access to resources, their age, their position in social and household hi- erarchies, and their gender. However, a minor focus of this project was the nature of support or care given by community members to children living in CHH. I had noted the political representation of the CHH in the literature I reviewed before leaving for Rwanda. Research sponsored by nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) and multi- or bilateral organisations emphasised the social marginalisation of children living in CHH (Thurman et al. 2006; Veale 2000, Veale et al. 2001). Andrea Veale’s (2000:236) research indicated that Rwandans saw the previous societal norms of collective care and responsibility for children as having changed. In the workshops Veale (2000) facilitated, 79 many people stated they felt their situation, their poverty and their daily responsibilities prevented them from caring for vulnerable children such as those living in CHH. Participants also pointed to the marked rise in societal distrust since the genocide, conflict over land and inheritance, and family restructuring due to the death of some members, all of which resulted in diminished collective support (Veale 2000:236). Prior to the genocide, children had been integral to community life; however, due to widespread community distrust, children had since lost their “unifying central place in society” (Cantwell 1997:57). I do not dispute the literature’s representation of children living in CHH as marginalised; however, perpetuating the image of the vulnerable orphan is necessary to maintain funding for NGOs. After the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, there was an influx of NGOs into the country. Many organisations still operate in Rwanda, addressing multiple issues such as AIDS, malaria, or poverty, as well as the many CHH. Attentiveness to the complexity of the social context of the CHH would help to understand the resources that are available to them, and could assist with supporting greater community involvement in the lives of children living in CHH, rather than perpetuating a continued reliance on NGOs. Furthermore, as community relations continue to shift and are transformed over time, new analysis into forms of support are necessary in order to 80 ensure that programs and policies are based on current social relationships. For example, there has been a shift from patrilineal to bilateral inheritance of land, which means that girls living in CHH are now entitled to inherit land. This has resulted in increased tension in rural communities and among families, where access to land is increasingly limited. In this article, I focus on the forms of community support that were available to the children I conducted research with, and how that support was associated with the social position of the community member providing support. While I anticipated finding a great deal of diversity in the children’s perspectives and experiences of their health, the variation in the nature of support among community members, their perceptions of CHH, and how this was associated with the community member’s positionality was an interesting discovery. I use “positionality” in reference to what Donna Haraway (1997:304, n. 32) describes as standpoints: “cognitive-emotionalpolitical achievements, crafted out of located social-historical-bodily experience—itself always constituted through fraught, non-innocent, discursive, material, collective practices.” A full and rich standpoint analysis is beyond the scope of this article, but I use this approach to examine how the social position of the community member involved with the CHH provides a particular perspective on the life of the children. My findings suggest a somewhat dif- ferent conclusion than that reached by the literature I had reviewed, and provide further insight into the contextual reality of the CHH. Anthropological Critique of Identity Making Anthropology is highly critical of practices and policies that are based on assumptions of homogeneity within social groups (see Farmer 2005; Warren and Bourque 1989). These assumptions serve to strip people of identities, of context, of position, and of the complex array of power differentials in which they are situated. Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan (2005), a social anthropologist who offers a critically engaged analysis of development projects in low-income contexts, examines the assumptions of homogeneity that underlie the programs of NGOs. For example, participatory rural appraisal methods rely on focus groups, which are used to elicit community perspectives. These groups are formed on the basis of simple social criteria such as “youth”, “women”, or “rural farmers”. Olivier de Sardan (2005) argues that this approach does not consider the nuances and politics within social groups, and that we should instead seek to recognise and acknowledge the social dynamics and strategies within communities, and how social knowledge is complex and diverse. People hold multiple and shifting identities that serve to both constrain and enable them. For example, in Rwanda, although in principle women have full legal status under Rwandan law, they are in practice wards of their husbands, fathers or brothers. Unmarried mothers are considered “femmes libres”—loose women, and their families have no obligation to provide for them. Their socioeconomic situation may be very different from married women, who derive wealth and power from the position of their husbands (Jefremovas 1991:383, 390). Defining groups as homogenous allows for the organisation of people into identifiable social groups associated with a list of specific needs, in order to legitimise program outputs or justify the implementation of policies. Identity and roles are ascribed and enforced through multiple forms of governmentality, and serve as a way to manage human conduct (Foucault 1991). This allows for the justification of the interventions that have been chosen by the state, or institutions and agencies (Ferguson and Gupta 2006:114-115; Nguyen and Peschard 2003:456459). However, attentiveness to the multiple roles and identities within social groups should not be reduced to a “simple, romantic argument about ‘giving the people a voice’” (Malkki 1996:398). Underneath the repressive nature of programs and policies is a deeper history of layers of silencing (Malkii 1996:398) that has roots back to colonisation. Global socioeconomic practices and politics underlie the current situational framework of CHH in Rwanda today. Discussion on these issues, however, 81 is beyond the scope of this article. Instead, I focus primarily on the heterogenic nature of social support of children living in CHH. Characteristics of Social Support In nine of the fourteen CHH I interviewed1, at least one of the children identified a community member who assisted them in some way.2 With the consent of the children, I interviewed these community members, asking them further questions about the nature of their support to the CHH and their perceptions of the children. Of the nine community members I interviewed, one was involved in local leadership within the community, another was a volunteer mentor for CHH associated with an NGO, some were relatives who live close by, and others were neighbours of the children. The interviews revealed that the role and status of the community member, as well as their gender, influenced their perspective and response to the CHH. Other themes that emerged touched on societal tension and social ideas about age and gender that influence societal attitudes and responses to CHH. Christophe3 was a volunteer leader of an umudugudu.4 Claudine, the eldest in a CHH of three orphans, had mentioned that he had given her and her siblings health insurance. He emphasized the formalized community structures and governmentsponsored initiatives that were sup82 posed to offer support to the CHH. Michelle: Does anyone teach them (Claudine and her younger siblings) how to take care of their health, how to take care of their body, to make sure they do not get sick? Christophe: In the umudugudu committee leadership, there is one that is responsible for the welfare of the community. He teaches them to take care of themselves, to leave bad habits, so they may go to school and leave bad things. Michelle: How does the umudugudu help them? Christophe: We prevent ourselves from backbiting5 them, so they will not be traumatized. When it is time for cultivating, we prepare umuganda6, and people go and cultivate for them. Another thing is putting them on the list of the poor, so they get help. They get mutuelle.7 And if there is any food from the high leadership, they can easily be the first to receive the food. Michelle: So the poor in your umudugudu receive mutuelle for free? Christophe: Yes, free – no price. The criteria we follow is that we start with the orphans, then we start with those who don’t produce: widows, old women and old men. We have a limit; we can only give out 23 mutuelle cards. I took note of the theme of self-care: according to Christophe it was the children’s bad habits that affected their health. This theme of individual responsibility for health emerged in some of the other interviews with community members as well. Epiphanie was a volunteer mentor for an NGO and was teaching children in one of the CHH to care for themselves. She was also the community health promoter in her umudugudu, and regularly taught government sponsored health messages. Michelle: What should children do to stay healthy? Epiphanie: Maintaining their health and their body weight, following the government orders—the government is sensitizing people to construct shelves to put their plates on, that can prevent their utensils from getting dirty, and to build beds, so they sleep on a bed. And even using a mosquito net—it can prevent them from getting sick. This idea of being responsible for one’s own health did not mean that Christophe and Epiphanie were unaware of the challenges facing the children. They did identify some barriers to health care associated with the children’s impoverished environments. However, as people in leadership positions, they influenced community interaction with children living in the CHH. If their perceptions of health were founded on self-care, and associated with formalised avenues of support such as through NGOs or umudugudu initiatives, they might do little to mobilise informal support of sick children in CHH. Kleinman et al. (1997:1x) have noted that “forms of power themselves influence responses to social problems.” The reliance of Rwandan communities on formal, authoritative and hierarchical forms of social relations inhibits spontaneous and collective communal efforts to interact, or to support children whose family structure is tenuous (Veale 2000:237). A few of the community members identified as sources of support by the children were relatives. One was the uncle of a household of boys and was their oldest paternal male Image 2. With Christophe, a volunteer community leader, under a photo of President Kagame. Photo by author. ©2008 83 relative. The two oldest boys were trying to pay off debts incurred by their father during the genocide, and were selling off family land to gain some disposable income. This had created tension between the boys and their older siblings who had since married and moved out of the house. The uncle, Remy, gave advice regarding the land and mediated between the boys and their older siblings. He shared with me some of the challenges that he saw in this household. Remy: The problem that they are facing is that there are many in the house, and they don’t have enough food. The other thing is that people come and attack them and say “your father destroyed this and these things, we need payments for them.” You can never say that you don’t have anything when you have land, a cow. However, you need these things to live, you can’t sell them. It is a challenge. In most cases, they charge them the animals their father ate, or the tiles he took. But in most cases, it is the animals that he ate. From Remy I learned that the repercussions from the 1994 genocide were still being played out in the lives of the children living in CHH. I also noted how he was called upon to settle disputes in the family, indicating that paternal lineage relations persist in rural areas. The head of a patrilineal group is the father of brothers, or his successor whom he 84 designated before his death. Households belonging to the same lineage usually live near one another, unless one member has acquired land outside of the succession process. Lineages typically have a two to three-generation history (de Lame 2005:129-130). What I learned from my conversations with the household of boys, and from Remy, had particular relevance for the analysis of marginalization of the children in CHH. I had noted that households headed by girls, who had less access to land than those households headed by boys, were also more likely to say they had little social support. Until very recently, patrilineal inheritance was practiced in rural Rwanda, and land was divided up among male descendents. Women who married normally moved onto their husband’s property. Most of the children in the sample lived in close vicinity to their paternal relatives, and had little contact with their maternal relatives. The paternal relatives may have felt little responsibility for the households headed by girls, because they assumed these girls would move away when they got older, and the girls did not represent the permanence of the lineage. Now, with the imposition of bilateral inheritance, the households headed by girls may represent an additional stress on limited resources, and provoke more tension and animosity from paternal relatives. Image 3. Rwandan agricultural landscape. Photo by author. ©2008 Among the children I talked to, a few of them from three different households identified their aunts as sources of practical support when they were sick, and assisting them with their basic needs. Two were widowed with children, and the other, an unmarried mother of two children, was dependent on her parents, and lived with them. As single mothers, all the women were vulnerable members of Rwandan society. One told me that she was in conflict with others in her community because they wanted her to return to the area of her birth so they could take her land. The aunts were responsible for the care of their children and their households, as well as trying to earn a living. All the women lived in close proximity to the children, and saw them on a regular basis. The perceptions that these three women had of the children in CHH underscore the poverty faced by the children. They were deeply aware of the children’s extreme lack of food, material items and economic resources, perhaps because they too, had little access to these resources. Grace: The biggest problem that they have is the standard of living. There are four things that they struggle with. They need clothes, they need medical insurance, they need to have a house and food, and they need someone to be near them to advise them and to encourage them. This is the same struggle for all children without parents. The women talked about the prac85 tical support that they gave to the children. Their responses reflected what the children had told me about the type of assistance they received from their aunts. Rachel: I help them in different ways. If they come from school, and they don’t have any food, I give them food to eat. I give them water if they don’t have water. Or on Sundays, when they do not have firewood, I go with them to collect firewood so that they won’t be lonely, and so they won’t say “If we had someone to help us, I could do it quickly.” Mechthilde: I see them every day. When they fall sick, I come to visit them; I cook porridge for them, so that they will feel better. When their parents died, I tried to teach them how to cultivate. They would come to my house, and cultivate, and I would come to their house to cultivate. However, one of the women told me how her own poverty and circumstances constrained her in the type of support that she could give to her nieces, Cesarie and Yvette. Grace: Sometimes they do not have enough food, or ask for advice about a problem. Cesarie works at the market, and many times she has no money, and many times she comes here and says she has no money. She came here asking me for 1,000 RWF ($2 CAD) today, and I didn’t have any to give her. She 86 left and she was furious. Generally, I help with food. But when they have visitors, like boys, they come to me and ask me for advice, because they know their behaviour. If they have problem with wood, I give them some wood to cook with, or when they have conflict between themselves, I try to help them to resolve it together to unite them. Food is the biggest problem I help them with. I may have sweet potatoes in the field, and I give some to them. Or perhaps they come here and there is food, and they eat them, and it is finished, and so we have none. This theme of lack and the difficulty in sharing what little one has with CHH is a significant barrier to community assistance of CHH. Widespread poverty may result in communities projecting the responsibility of CHH onto relatives, or associating assistance with charitable acts done by “Christians,”8 as one community member told me. Others see the children as the responsibility of the government. Grace’s comment on her nieces’ male visitors touches upon the vulnerability of females orphans in rural Rwanda. Other studies in Rwanda have indicated that female orphans are susceptible to sexual abuse by male community members (ACORD 2001; Veale et al. 2001). Consequently, girls may then be confronted with health challenges related to sexual and reproductive health in a context that often does not provide acces- sible and adequate health care. A neighbour of another CHH talked at great length about the vulnerability of girls in CHH who were living in her area. Esperance noted that the constraints of their circumstances had prompted them to engage in health-risk behaviour. Esperance: Sometimes when she (one of the girls living in a neighbouring CHH) does not have enough money, she goes to engage in prostitution to make money in town. In general, something that causes a girl like that to go to town and to make money through prostitution, is because of a lack of money. She is living badly at home, there is nothing to eat at home, so she prefers to go where she can find money. It is a bad life here in Rwanda. Esperance showed significant sensitivity to the influence of scarcity on the girls’ decision to enter the sex trade. This awareness is significant and is in contrast to what Christophe said about “bad habits.” She also talked about gender roles in rural Rwanda, and the particular constraints placed on rural women. Esperance: The man is the leader of the house. The woman cooks, she makes the husband’s bed, she sweeps. The man controls the house. If necessary here in Rwanda, a woman can work to get money to buy clothes for her husband. Girls must cook, wash dishes, girls sweep and wash clothes. The boys get firewood, and both children get water. In contrast to men who have more opportunity to engage in rural society outside of the household, rural women’s household roles isolate them from interaction in the community. Consequently, because girls have been associated with household chores and nurturing activities in rural Rwanda, females living in CHH may not have appeared to need as much assistance as boys. In fact, girls that headed households were less likely than boys to say community members assisted them with food preparation when they were sick. They also appeared to be more susceptible to isolation, because they had less opportunity to connect with people outside of the family home, and because community members assumed they were capable of doing household chores.9 Conclusion Representations that generalise and homogenise ignore particular barriers that face certain social groups. These representations serve to legitimize interventions that often do not address the particular constraints faced by vulnerable people. Earlier research on Rwandan CHH has offered a politicised view of the orphans, characterising them as vulnerable, and without support. This research (Thurman et al. 2006; Veale 2000; Veale et al. 2001) has also detailed how community suffering has led to the marginalisation of CHH. This article does not discount 87 Image 4. A kitchen area/stove in one CHH, with a pot full of sweet potatoes. Photo by author. ©2008 this representation, as I also found evidence of this marginalisation among the CHH in my research focused on the health concerns of the children. It was apparent that some community members who I interviewed continued to place the locus of responsibility for CHH on the government, on the relatives of CHH, or on church-based initiatives. However, some community members are involved in supportive relationships with CHH. Attentiveness to the nature of their support, their positionality and the social ideologies they held, provided particular insight into contextual factors and socio-economic dynamics that mitigate children’s ability to access health treatment and prevention. 88 Practical support for CHH was especially evident among those community members who were living in similar resource-scare conditions as the children. In my research, these were the aunts of some of the children, who were all single mothers, and who not only were actively involved in caring for their nieces or nephews, but they were more likely to identify the specific barriers to the children’s health. This was in contrast to the community members who were in positions of leadership in rural communities, who suggested that the children living in CHH were responsible for their own health. A discourse of self-care serves to place the blame for poor health on the individual, and may overlook the barriers to health care. This perception is in contrast to that articulated by one woman, a neighbour of a CHH, who noted how a lack of economic resources influenced one of the girls to enter the sex trade. In this case, attentiveness to gender suggests that this woman’s own positionality may have given her particular insight into the constraints in her younger neighbour’s life. The diversity of support and the perceptions of community members regarding CHH is influenced by social position and social ideologies, as well as social tension associated with land scarcity and widespread poverty. Further research into community support is integral to understanding the CHH’s social context, and to furthering local government and NGO efforts at enabling CHH’s access to community based resources. This research might examine the long-term impact of NGOs on community initiatives aimed at CHH, and explore community reliance on formal initiatives to assist CHH. Understanding these issues better could lead to improvements in how communities are mobilised to support CHH. Efforts that ignore these factors offer “neither protection for individual children nor the potential to transform the relationships of inequality that dominate their lives and produce their suffering” (Mitchell 2006:367). Acknowledgments This article is based on fieldwork conducted in rural Rwanda over the course of four months in 2008. Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the University of Victoria through financial awards and scholarships. I am extremely grateful for the enthusiastic participation of the children living in CHH who participated in this research project and welcomed me into their homes; the community members who answered my many questions; and to Joseph and Beth for their translation and valuable insight. I also wish to acknowledge the Republic of Rwanda, and in particular, the district office in the South Province, for granting me permission to conduct this research. Lastly, I acknowledge the valuable critique given by two reviewers of this article. NOTES 1. I interviewed the children in the households as a household unit and individually. 2. However, not all the children in the household identified the same member, and not everyone in the same household identified someone as a source of support. 3. To ensure confidentiality, I have given pseudonyms to all research participants. 4. A collection of 50 houses, governed by locally elected unpaid leaders. 5. “Backbiting” is a term used to describe malicious talk. 6. Community work projects. 89 7. Government health insurance. 8. By using the term “Christian”, the community member was referring to Rwandans who were involved in church-based groups that may offer support to vulnerable groups in their communities. 9. Ethnographic research (de Lame 2005) which discusses Rwandan gender roles indicates that throughout their childhood, girls are taught to care for the household. References Cited ACORD: Agency for Cooperation and Research in Development 2001 Research into the Living Conditions of Children Who are Heads of Households in Rwanda. 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Olivier de Sardan, Jean-Pierre 2005 Anthropology and Development: Understanding Contemporary Social Change. NY: Zed Books. Sommers, Marc 2006 In the Shadow of Genocide: Rwanda’s Youth Challenge. In Troublemakers or Peacemakers? Youth and Post-Accord Peace Building. Siobhán McEvoy-Levy, ed. Pp. 81-97. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Community, Work and Family 3 (3):233-239. Veale, Angela, Padraig Quigley, Théoneste Ndibeshye, and Célestin Nyirimihigo 2001 Struggling to Survive: Orphan and Community Dependent Children in Rwanda. Ministry of Local Government and Social Affairs and UNICEF. Electronic document, http:// www.unicef.org/evaldatabase/ files/RWA_2000_001.pdf, accessed September 12, 2007. Warren, Kay B. and Susan C. Bourque 1989 Women, Technology, and Development Ideologies: Frameworks and Findings. In Gender and Anthropology: Critical Reviews for Research and Teaching. Sandra Morgen, ed. Pp. 382-410. Thurman, Tonya R., Leslie Snider, Neil Boris, Edward Kalisa, Eleazer Nkunda Mugarira, Joseph Ntaganira, and Lisanne Brown. 2006 Psychosocial Support and Marginalization of Youth-headed Households in Rwanda. AIDS Care 18 (3):220-229. Veale, Angela M. 2000 Dilemmas of ‘Community’ in Post-Emergency Rwanda. 91 Robin Smith Exotic, Spectacular Dirt: Archaeology and Tourism Abstract With the recent growth of the archaeological tourism industry archaeologists are facing new issues arising from the intersection of scientific research and commercial tourism. Often these include physical danger to sites, threats to scientific integrity from new and powerful stakeholders and concerns about commercial repackaging. Though it is generally thought that site tourism is intrinsically at odds with conservation some teams have found innovative strategies to circumvent the potential pitfalls and turn tourism to their advantage. This paper examines some of these strategies, their successes and failures, and some of the issues surrounding contemporary archaeological tourism. It also explores two different major types of tourism. While archaeological tourism can undoubtedly pose many challenges it also offers a unique opportunity for research, and researchers, to engage with a wider community, and the most successful projects seem to be those that are most willing to embrace this prospect with sensitivity and enthusiasm. 92 Introduction Cultural tourism has existed in various incarnations since at least the time of the Roman Empire (McKercher and du Cros 2002:1). In the nineteen-nineties, the intersection of cultural tourism with the newlyestablished, hugely profitable adventure travel industry gave rise to the field of archaeological tourism. Archaeology, its practise and findings, has been associated with glamour and excitement since its early days a century or more ago, when archaeologists were more often relic hunters and explorers than scientists and academics. In the eighties this was reflected in the Indiana Jones movies; today TV shows such as Digging for the Truth attest to the fact that this image is alive and well. Visitors have been paying to tour archaeological sites since the nineteenth century (McKercher and du Cros 2002:2), but with the development of archaeological tourism these tours became more than simple sightseeing and expeditions that focussed almost exclusively on cultural remains, archaeological findings and the practise of archaeology itself were established. Tourism has brought enormous amounts of revenue to archaeological projects and spread awareness of conservation efforts globally. It has also created a huge, demanding, profitable, and therefore powerful industry with vested interests in many archaeological projects that often run counter to those of researchers and conservationists, which has left in its wake disasters such as an Incan city with a highway running through it (see below) and fleets of visitors scrambling over the crumbling remains of Stonehenge and Great Zimbabwe. Inevitably, tourism and archaeology make an uneasy pairing, and archaeological tourism is an industry fraught with controversy. Despite the fact that the tourism industry is fast becoming one of archaeology’s most influential and important partners, it is only recently that academics have begun to pay serious attention to the issues surrounding archaeological tourism. Very few books and papers have been written on the topic, and those that have are rare and difficult to come by: the UVic library, for example, does not stock any titles specifically dealing with archaeological tourism and even the inter-library loan service only has access to two or three, each of which required transfer from a different university. Apparently, UVic’s collection on this topic is not much smaller than the average public or university library. In the past few years, publications by Philip Duke (The Tourists Gaze, The Cretans Glance: Archaeology and Tourism on a Greek Island) and Uzi Baram (Marketing Heritage: Archaeology and the Consumption of the Past) have addressed this topic more directly. Despite its size, archaeological tourism is still emerging as an industry; it is still engaged in the act of defining itself. Additionally, tourist companies and ex93 pedition operators are increasingly making use of the internet to advertise their trips and put themselves in contact with prospective clients. Like all web-based resources, then, these tours, their marketing and, consequently, their portrayals of archaeology are changing rapidlyperhaps faster than the speed of publication, which may go some way towards explaining the dearth of academic resources on the topic. Thus, in order to present an up-to-date account of the interplay between archaeology and tourism, I have done much of the research for this paper myself. In doing so I have made use of relevant websites and brochures for tourist companies in addition to academic sources. I have endeavoured to examine the portrayals of archaeological tourism presented to the public as well as the views of archaeologists and researchers. Many of the conclusions are my own. In researching websites and brochures offering archaeology-based vacations and tourist destinations I have come across two major types of tourism. The first I have termed the Exotic Spectacular type, because almost all advertisements for this type of tourism make copious use of these adjectives, and the other I have been referring to as the Dirty Fingernails type, as advertisements almost always use the phrase “get dirt under your fingernails” or “get your hands dirty.” The Exotic Spectacular type of tourism usually involves long-distance travel, and is in practise a type of cultural tour94 ism to which archaeology is largely incidental. Dirty Fingernails tourism is usually local, emphasizes the practise of “authentic” archaeology rather than its findings and markets itself as a chance to experience a fantasy vocation for a short time. Exotic Spectacular archaeological tourism is marketed in exotic, spectacular locations. The most common destinations for tourist packages which I have classified in this designation are Mexico, Jordan, Turkey and Greece, and some sample destinations might include Petra and Machu Picchu. The bulk of “archaeology” in the tours involves visiting monuments and physically large, visually impressive archaeological remains. Especial emphasis is placed on monumental architecture. This type of tourism is perhaps closest to the earliest archaeological tourism, where the touring is simply a form of sightseeing. Despite the focus on impressive remains this type of “archaeological” tourism is in fact cultural tourism, though the cultures in question are no longer extant and so are filtered through the lens of archaeological interpretation. Several companies advertise tours guided by “noted scholars” or “hieroglyphic experts,” for example. The “people of the past” and the “great civilizations of the past” are a recurring theme in promotional brochures: tour operators market the vanished inhabitants of the sites as another exotic, spectacular attraction. This appears to be enabled by an implausibly complete account of the culture and daily life of the past populations in question. One of the great disadvantages of the post-mortem retailing of a culture appears to be that the populations in question receive considerably rougher treatment than those that are still able to monitor the ways in which they are represented. The “othering” processes directed at extinct populations are blatant and intense, occasionally using language and descriptions that would not be acceptable were they directed at living populations (“barbaric,” “warlike” etc.). This othering could potentially lead to a feeling of disenfranchisement with the past, as tourists are shown only the ways in which past populations differed radically from living ones; there is little sense of human history as the ongoing account of a single species. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of this othering is the frequent combination of exotic past cultures and exotic present cultures. Because Exotic Spectacular tourism usually takes place in geographically distant destinations, many tour companies advertise local festivals, vibrant markets, or distinctive local cuisine as part of the “experience” of a new cultural setting. A little exoticising is probably to be expected in vacation and tourist advertising, as few people are likely to select a place to visit based on its similarity to the place they are already in. However, the affiliation of extant cultures with intensely-othered past civilizations could lead to tremendous degrees of direct and indirect othering of the present populations. I have nicknamed the second type of archaeological tourism the Dirty Fingernails type. It is cheaper, more local and concerned with the process of archaeology as much, if not more, than the artifacts which are recovered. It often involves day trips to sites or active excavations and stresses “hands-on” participation. The distinction between this type of tourism, as I have classified it, and what Hester Davis calls “avocational archaeology” (Davis 1990) is blurry and difficult to pinpoint. Avocational or community archaeology is archaeology which is practised or supported by laypeople in their local area and is not for profit. It is usually organized by non-profit community associations (Davis 1990). Avocational archaeology and Dirty Fingernails tourism have a common aim: both attempt to introduce laypeople to the basic method and practise of archaeology. However, avocational archaeology differs from tourism in that it is also intended to provide long-term support to the archaeological project and provide engagement with perceived stakeholders. Though tourism can provide volunteer labour and revenue for projects, the ultimate aim of tourism is benefit to the visitors, rather than the site. Dirty Fingernails tourism, as its name implies, also places disproportionate emphasis on particular types of research: I came across no brochures or websites that advertised time spent in laboratories or with artifact catalogues, for example, yet these are as important to the practise of archaeology as fieldwork. 95 It seems that this type of tourism ultimately benefits archaeological projects more through generating revenue and spreading awareness of site conservation than through the actual work done by tourists. Though the boundaries are fuzzy between Exotic Spectacular tourism and cultural tourism, and between Dirty Fingernails tourism and avocational or community archaeology, I have drawn fairly blunt divisions. My first criterion for the classification of specific activities as “touring archaeology” rather than “doing archaeology” was the lack of a long term commitment to the site or to the archaeology of the area. For example, community archaeological associations are established to monitor and participate in local archaeology indefinitely (Davis 1990), whereas participants in Dirty Fingernails tourism often tour sites of which they have no previous knowledge, limit their involvement to several hours or a day and rarely return: the short time spent on site is not a means to an end but an end in itself. My second reason for the labelling of an activity as “tourism” was the tendency of the two types of tourism fall to either extreme of what could be termed a Spectrum of Missing the Point. Exotic Spectacular tourism places disproportionate emphasis on monumental remains (which are, again, approached as an end in themselves, rather than a means to the collection of information) and completed, comprehensive historical accounts. At the other end of the 96 spectrum, Dirty Fingernails tourism is obsessed with the actual practise of fieldwork: the dirt, the scenery, the hiking boots, the level lines and excavation units, the soggy cheese sandwiches in paper bags and smug satisfaction of telling everyone the next day where the crick in your back came from. Though these elements are undeniably important to the practise of archaeology, they are almost incidental to the actual pursuit of information which is at the heart of archaeology as a discipline. There are obvious dangers associated with archaeological tourism. Sites are often sensitive environments, facing preservation challenges and ill-equipped to handle hordes of untrained visitors with big feet and runny noses. Even making site locations known to the public carries associated dangers of increased vandalism and looting. Vandalism can pose an especial threat in areas of political or national significance, as for example at Dombashava in Zimbabwe where a man destroyed a large panel of rock art paintings by covering them with paint. The vandal, a former National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe employee, was making a statement about his own and his community’s frustration over the failure of the site and its museum to share their income with the community (Deacon 2006:380). Such incidents highlight the heightened need for sensitivity to local and descendant groups as a site becomes more profitable and well-known. Vandalism can also be unintentional, as when site visitors inadvertently exacerbate the natural factors that threaten sites. At the site of Lascaux in France, rock art in a publicly displayed cave was jeopardized when algae and microorganisms introduced on the shoes and clothes of site visitors began to colonize the cave walls (Deacon 2006:382). In this case, the site was preserved while still meeting the needs of the local tourist industry by closing the cave to the public and instead directing visitors to a facsimile of the cave. However, it took fully twenty years to construct the replica, and a fungus outbreak threatened the cave for a second time in 2001 with the introduction of a new air conditioning system. In Spain, the rock art site Altamira also has a replica open to the public, and many other sites in Europe have experienced success with visitor information centres that combine reproductions with interactive elements that would be impossible on the actual site. Such centres can offer richly educational experiences and, with the digital technology now available, replicas do not have to be inferior to their originals, and can in fact offer new information about, for example, the techniques used in cave paintings (Deacon 2006:381). The practical requirements of accommodating large numbers of people often require modifications to a site such as signs and walkways, and these too can pose a threat to site preservation. Machu Picchu became perhaps the most infamous example of this, when outcry erupted over the construction of a cable car service and a luxury hotel on the site, among other amenities, in the 1990s. In September 2000 the Intihuatana sundial was damaged when a crane being used to film a beer commercial on the site fell on it. This incident became a focal point for local groups who felt that the exploitation of the site had progressed out of control; many groups accused the Peruvian government of knowingly endangering the site in order to maximize tourist revenue. Many of the sites on the UNESCO List of Endangered World Heritage Sites are threatened by tourist activity. Site commodification poses another concern when archaeological excavations become tourist attractions. Site visitors often bring with them a market for gift shop baubles and souvenirs which can be difficult to resist for an archaeological investigation in need of funds. Ethical issues arise, especially when the sites in question have spiritual or religious significance to past or extant cultures: how can site managers determine what is or is not an appropriate image to put on a t-shirt? In his account of the conflicts that arose around Çatalhöyük, Ian Hodder discusses the endorsement of the excavation team by a credit card company and the concessions that had to be made to accommodate this sponsorship (Hodder 1998:134). Some, like wearing hats with the company logo at press conferences, appear relatively inconsequen97 tial, while others seem to border on a warping of the truth to fit the sponsor’s mandate. Hodder gives an example of this; a museum exhibit of “Credit cards through the ages” at Çatalhöyük which began with obsidian recovered at the site. The exhibit was proposed by a major sponsor of the site, a credit card company which took the opportunity to advertise their services to the local community. He mentions that both he and the obsidian specialist were embarrassed by the description of obsidian as a “credit card” (Hodder 1998:134). It was, they both admitted, a bit of a stretch. Though this is a relatively benign example, it is clear Hodder was uncomfortable with the exhibit as he felt it represented a bit of tampering with the truth in order to secure the sponsor’s support. Projects can come under enormous pressure to find the funds to continue their research, and the ability of museums and tourist attractions to quickly disseminate information to large numbers of people magnifies the effects of any distortion of the evidence. Generally, many researchers involved in tourism seem to agree that the problems that arise at the intersection of archaeology and tourism can be reconciled or avoided by approaching both the past and the present with sensitivity, and by bearing in mind that archaeology is ultimately the study of people, not pots. Many sites around the world have 98 established a variety of ways to address the problems posed by tourism, such as the construction of replicas or limits on the number of site visitors. With the accommodation of tourism at archaeological sites being limited mostly to forms of damage control, little attention has been paid to the potential benefits of archaeological tourism beyond the obvious advantage of increased revenue. Though notoriety is often associated with the dangers of increased vandalism and looting (see above), greater awareness of a site on a local or international level can also have its advantages. At the local level, site awareness can draw attention to conservation issues for the site in question and others like it, and educating the public about the nature and needs of local archaeological sites can reduce the risk of inadvertent destruction or damage. Awareness can also yield a greater interaction with and pride in local heritage, as people become active participants in the construction of their regional history. Beyond the local level, when archaeological sites become important sources of tourist revenue their conservation becomes the focus of more governmental attention and it becomes a possibility to have legislation enacted which will protect other sites as well (Davis 1990). Thus, the exploitation of a single site- even at the risk of damage, vandalism or looting- could potentially benefit many others. In some cases, where the site in question has been plumbed of as much information as it can possibly yield, it may be a worthwhile forfeit in order to preserve many others which have yet to be fully studied. Ultimately, however, the greatest asset of archaeological tourism is its ability to act as a vehicle for the rapid dissemination of information to the wider populace. Research money is intended to purchase the higher consciousness and greater awareness of the human species in general, not sets of dusty facts available only to that tiny segment of the world familiar with JSTOR. Ultimately we are all descendant communities and so it is our story, our heritage, our historical context, our identity as a single population that is at the root of archaeology as a discipline. “Historical fact” exists only in the past, and so archaeology, working as it must with material remains in the present, faces at all times a gap of interpretation that separates what it is possible to know from verifiable fact (Johnson 1999:13). In the absence of the existence of the past as tangible, knowable fact, archaeological conclusions are relevant only as they interact with, and are constructed by, people in the present. Therefore, the greater the number of participants in this construction, the more relevant the data becomes. When all people interact with findings about their collective past, that past is then created, constructed and interpreted by the entirety of the descendant community. Scholars who jealously guard information out of fear of misrepresentation or misunderstanding on the part of untrained “laymen” should instead adopt the responsibility for educating the public (perhaps through institutions such as avocational organizations or even tourism) in basic archaeological theory to enable them to draw responsible conclusions of their own. Words in books that go unread are useless; archaeologists should have a responsibility to disseminate information to as many people as possible. Though tourism is often sneered at by “serious scholars” and “serious travelers” alike as being vapid or “dumbed down,” it is a fast, effective way to bring large numbers of laypeople in to direct contact with researchers and their work, to educate them and invite them to participate in the active construction of their past. It is this interaction with history- the lessons we choose to draw, its reflection in our present- that takes archaeology from an academic interest to a vital, contributing part of present society and our collective consciousness. Perhaps the recognition of a common past will even bring about a greater awareness of our common present. References Cited Deacon, Janette 2006 Rock Art Conservation and Tourism. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 13:376-396. Hodder, Ian 1998 The Past as Passion and Play. In Archaeology Under Fire. Lynn Meskill, ed. 124-139. New York: 99 Routledge. Johnson, Matthew 1999 Archaeological Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. McKercher, Bob, and Hilary du Cros 2002 Cultural Tourism: The Partnership Between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management. New York: The Howarth Hospitality Press. Web Resources Davis, Hester A. 1990 “Avocational Archaeology Groups: A Secret Weapon for Site Protection.” Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.07.08. Available: <http://www.nps.gov/seac/ protecting/html/4k-davis.htm> Ancient World Tours. Homepage. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.04.08. Available: <http://www.ancientworldtours. com/> Andante Travels. Homepage. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.10.08. Available: <http://www.andantetravels. co.uk/> Archaeological Adventures Arizona. Homepage. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.06.08. Available: <http://www.archaeologicadventures.com/> Arkansas Archaeological Survey. Archaeological Parks in the US. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.06.08. Available: <http:// 100 www.uark.edu/misc/aras/index. html> Archaeological Tours. Homepage. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.03.08. Available: <http://www.archaeologicaltrs. com/> BBC News online 2003 “Row erupts over Peru’s tourist treasure” BBC online. December 27. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.03.08. Available: <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ americas/3335315.stm> CNN online 2000 “Sacred stone in Machu Picchu damaged during beer commercial” CNN online edition. September 12. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.04.08. Available: <http://archives.cnn. com/2000/WORLD/americas/09/11/peru.machupicchu. ap/ > Far Horizons Archaeological and Cultural Trips Inc. Homepage. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.04.08. Available: HYPERLINK “http://www.farhorizon.com/ctrlamer/ctrlamer. htm” http://www.farhorizon. com/ctrlamer/ctrlamer.htm Hirst, K. Kris Hobbyist Archaeology: Getting Your Hands Dirty.”About. com. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.06.08. Available: <http:// archaeology.about.com/od/ vacationsandtourism/a/hobbyist.htm> Maya Expeditions. Homepage. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.12.08. Available: <http://www.mayaexpeditions. com/> US Department of the Interior Archaeology Program. Visit Archaeology” National Park Service. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.09.08. Available: <http://www.nps.gov/history/archeology/visit/index.htm.> Peter Sommer Travels. Homepage. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.03.08. Available: <http://www.petersommer. com/> Sommer, Peter. Designing and Archaeological Vacation for Tourists About. com. Online. Internet. Accessed:03.02.08. Available: <http://archaeology.about.com/ od/vacationsandtourism/a/sommer.htm> UNESCO World Heritage in Danger List. Online. Internet. Accessed: 03.07.08. Available: <http://whc. 101 D’Ann Owens The Other Self of Landscape: Considering the Temporality of Lekwammen Territory Abstract In the past decade, academic publications relating to indigenous archaeology have been numerous yet, rather than writing an archaeology which integrates indigenous knowledge, most publications tend to be about indigenous archaeology—its practice and criticisms. With reference to Central Coast Salish perspectives of time and space within the local landscape, this paper considers the past in the past and the implications such a point of view can have for approaching and interpreting the archaeological record. It is argued that consideration of the temporal dimension of the cultural landscape is more in keeping with indigenous perspectives and can provide for challenging research and a richer understanding of archaeological findings. 102 Although Western theory frequently treats space as time’s antithetical ‘Other,’ time’s Other turns out somewhat embarrassingly to be its Other Self. In a lived world, spatial and temporal dimensions cannot be disentangled… Munn 1992:94 After the Flood when Raven, Mink and the Transformer Hayls (Xε.ls) were traveling around teaching the people how things were to be done, they came to this place, and found a young girl and her grandfather. The girl, Q’ama’ sen, was sitting in the water, crying. “Why are you crying?” asked Xε.ls. “My father is angry with me, and won’t give me anything to eat.” “What would you like?” he asked, “Sturgeon?” “No.” “Berries?” “No.” She refused a lot of things, and that is why these are not found along the Gorge. “Ducks?” “Herrings?” “Cohoes?” “Oysters?” These she accepted, and that is why they are plentiful here. “You will control all these things for your people”, said Xε.ls. Then he turned her into stone, sitting there under the water, looking up the narrows. Her grandfather’s name was Snukaymelt (sn•k’•m•lt) “diving”. Since she liked her grandfather to be with her, he was also turned to stone, as if jumping in carrying a rock to take him to the bottom. Jimmy Fraser in Duff 1969:36 unesco.org/en/danger/> Introduction Indigenous perspectives on archaeology and archaeological practice garnered widespread, public attention with the discovery of ancient human remains along the Columbia River near Kennewick Washington in 1996 and with the subsequent legal challenges and ethical debates relating to their study and disposition. Since that time, academic publications on issues relating to indigenous archaeology have been numerous. Yet, despite the apparent interest in incorporating indigenous perspectives in archaeological investigations, the majority of publications appear to be about indigenous archaeology, and in particular the process of indigenous archaeology, rather than archaeology which incorporates indigenous perspectives and knowledge into research design and implementation, and the interpretation of archaeological findings. Not surprisingly, topics in indigenous archaeology are as potentially varied as archaeology itself. Yet a survey of publications suggests that archaeologists—indigenous or otherwise—are only infrequently publishing studies that incorporate an indigenous perspective. Possible explanations for the dearth of publications are many and varied: the desire to maintain an “objective” and “scientific” approach to the data; a reluctance to tackle the challenges which may arise from differing archaeological and indigenous interpretations; the fear of being labelled a “relativist”. Or perhaps, given the political and legal climate, indige103 nous people are reluctant to share the results of their findings with a broad public audience. Whatever the reasons, it seems likely that archaeology is less as a consequence of its rather univocal approach; as pointed out by Whitely (2002) and as evidenced from the studies that do include indigenous viewpoints, the perspective and knowledge of indigenous people coupled with archaeological inquiry can provide impetus for challenging research and a richer understanding of archaeological findings. In light of this awareness, this paper considers the potential of a local indigenous perspective of the past in the past and the implications such a point of view can have for approaching and interpreting the archaeological record. However, because of the potential breadth of the topic, it is important to make explicit what this paper does not address. It provides no debate as to the definition of “indigenous” nor does it argue the politics or ethics of an archaeology of indigenous cultures or of colonial archaeology. It does not detail issues relating to the management of indigenous heritage sites or the rise of indigenous heritage management offices. There is no detailed discussion of archaeological theories of memory, landscape or space and place, all of which are relevant to the discussion but are papers unto themselves. A cursory overview of the current 104 themes and key concepts in indigenous archaeology is presented as context for the discussion that follows and the reader is referred to additional readings. The temporality of the landscape is reviewed from a theoretical perspective and with particular reference to indigenous perspectives and Coast Salish peoples. It is argued that practice theory provides a theoretical framework within which to investigate the role of the past in the creation of the archaeological record. This paper argues that consideration of the temporal dimension of the cultural landscape in the practice of archaeology and in archaeological interpretations within the traditional territory of the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations is more in keeping with indigenous perspectives and can provide a valuable contribution to the interpretation of observable archaeological patterns. Drawing on the author’s experience, the paper concludes with a discussion of how consideration of an indigenous understanding of the past can be (and is) applied during archaeological studies and can further the understanding of the local archaeological record. Central Coast Salish The Victoria area, on which this paper focuses, is within the territory of the Lekwammen whose descendants are members of the Songhees First Nation and Esquimalt Nation. Traditionally, the Songhees and Esquimalt spoke the Lekwammen dialect of the Northern Straits Salish language family. Speakers of this and four other languages are collectively known as the Central Coast Salish and share broadly similar cultural practices (see Suttles 1990 for additional information on the Central Coast Salish). Other Central Coast Salish peoples mentioned in this paper include member bands of the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (Cowichan, Penelekut, Lyackson, Lake Cowichan, Halalt, and Chemainus) whose territories extend over Vancouver Island from south of Duncan to south of Nanaimo, the southern Gulf Islands and up the Fraser River. Indigenous archaeology Watkins (2005) defines indigenous archaeology as archaeology done by and for indigenous peoples.1 In practice, indigenous archaeology ranges from limited involvement in the archaeological process through to archaeological research initiated, designed, and conducted by First Nations. The majority of indigenous participation in the archaeology of BC falls in the former category, although the number of First Nations seeking a greater role appears to be increasing.2 First Nations members participate as field crew on archaeological survey and excavation projects, First Nations operate heritage management offices and companies staffed by both indigenous and non-indigenous people (e.g. Haida Heritage Guardians; Katzie Development Corporation), have implemented permitting processes (e.g. Stó:lo—see Nicholas (2006) for ad- ditional First Nations with permits), and have incorporated archaeological considerations in land codes and bylaws (e.g. Sechelt). Publications on indigenous archaeology are numerous of late, with entire issues of American Indian Quarterly (2006 Vol. 30 No.3) and Public Archaeology (2005 Vol. 4), and the 2003 Chacmool Conference Proceedings devoted to the subject. Common themes in these and other works include the definition of indigenous peoples, the colonial legacy in archaeological practice and interpretation, the relationship between “scientific” and indigenous knowledge, archaeology and education, the treatment of human remains and the curation and display of items recovered from archaeological contexts.3 Many criticisms of the discipline offered by indigenous archaeologists, which have been summarised by Watkins (2000; 2005) and Nicholas (2006), stem from the political and legal context in which archaeological practice operates and the materialist focus of the discipline. Archaeology is frequently viewed “as a colonialist enterprise with continuing political undertones” (Watkins 2005:441), a viewpoint reinforced by requirements for “proof” of aboriginal history according to non-indigenous criteria and the privileging of material evidence over other ways of knowing the past. First Nations’ members often point out that ar105 chaeology alone is unable to recognise or protect heritage sites such as landforms created by or associated with ancestors or areas used for activities that do not leave material evidence (Watkins 2005, 2000; Nicholas 2006). Within BC, the Heritage Conservation Act (1996) provides automatic protection to archaeological sites predating 1846 but there is no equivalent protection for traditional resource gathering areas, sacred sites, ancestral sites, etc. Recent protests in opposition to developments at Bear Mountain, located west of Victoria, highlight this point. According to First Nations oral evidence, the cave is a scared place and one which should be protected despite the absence of physical evidence indicating use of the area (Dickson 2006; Dickson and Watts 2006; Shaw 2006). Other criticisms relate to the traditional practice of archaeology and archaeological interpretation. Traditional approaches to the archaeological study of indigenous peoples have tended not to recognize the impact of archaeological assessments of site significance (Nicholas 2006) or of archaeological interpretations for indigenous people (see for example Trigger 1980; Nicholas 2006). Many indigenous people are also critical of the tendency for researchers to interpret archaeological data without detailed reference to cultural setting in which they are situated. Nicholas (2006: 364) notes that for many indigenous peoples site context is “a 106 dynamic link between past and present.” These latter two points reflect a significant difference between a western worldview, still very much prevalent in local archaeological practice, which focuses on the results of actions – artifacts, sites, patterning, chronology—over the cognitive and social processes involved in their creation. Despite the volume of published material, the literature on indigenous archaeology provides relatively few examples of archaeology for indigenous people. Rather, the bulk of literature presents either critiques of traditional archaeological approaches or guides to the in-field conduct of archaeology of indigenous cultures. Meaningful consideration of indigenous perspectives in the interpretation of the archaeological record is far less frequent. Several of the most notable examples of the integration of indigenous perspectives are from the American southwest and Australia, where strong oral traditions provide fertile ground for the development of indigenous oriented research objectives. Within BC, Nicholas (2006) notes the efforts of the Office of the Wet’suwet’en and of TmixW Research in addressing the gap between western worldviews and those of the Wet’suwet’en and Nlaka’pamux peoples respectively. The Stó:lo Nation and the Hul’qumi’num Treaty Group (HTG) are two additional First Nations with strong research oriented heritage programs. The Stó:lo have incorporated archaeological findings in their Stó:lo-Coast Salish Historical Atlas (Carlson 2001), a seminal document which provides both contextual and cartographic information for a number of resource gathering areas, trail networks, archaeological sites, ancestor sites, etc. While not interpretive per se, the content of the atlas is reflective of a holistic worldview which sees archaeological sites as one aspect of indigenous heritage. Academic research supported by the HTG (Thom 2005) has been particularly useful for the consideration of local Coast Salish views of the landscape. Temporality of the Landscape One of the criticisms leveled at archaeology by indigenous peoples is that it tends to separate archaeological sites from their cultural context. Archaeology by its nature charts culture in a linear fashion through time, with that which has gone before viewed as inactive, as time past forever, a perspective not in keeping with many indigenous perspectives of time. This chronological blind spot has until recently focused local archaeological investigations on the development of complex chronological sequences in which the influence of the past is limited to the extreme periphery, if considered at all. Even in cultural anthropology, temporality has “often been handmaiden to other anthropological frames and issues” (Munn 1992:93) with vigorous theoretical consideration of the topic a relatively recent consideration (Munn 1992). Theoretical arguments relating to time and the landscape within the scope of this paper cannot do justice to the complexity of the concepts or the content of previous works. The temporality of landscape has been discussed by numerous cultural anthropologists from a theoretical perspective (e.g. Gell 1992; Mizoguchi 1993; Bender 2002; Ingold 1993; Casey 1996; Munn 1992; Halbwachs 1980 [1950]) and from the perspective of First Nations and other indigenous peoples (e.g. Harkin 2000; Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2006; Cooper 1993; Basso 1996; Million 2003; Thom 2005; Morphy 1995; Thornton 1995). Only a very cursory discussion of a few of the key points relevant to the archaeological consideration of the Lekwammen landscape is presented here. Crucial to the discussion is the argument that separation of time and space is an artificial, western based distinction, one that is under significant review in cultural anthropology. Bender (2002:106) states: “Landscapes refuse to be disciplined; they make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time (history) and space (geography) or between nature (science) and culture (anthropology). Academics have been slow to accept this…” Archaeologists, perhaps more than most, have been particularly slow to revise their thinking about time in their analyses. Yet, 107 Ingold (1993:152) argues that “Time and landscape… are to my mind the essential points of topical contact between archaeology and anthropology.” Human lives involve the passage of time and these lifetimes create the landscape (Ingold 1993). As such, the landscape “is constituted as an enduring record of—and testimony to—the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within it, and in doing so, have left there something of themselves…To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance” (Ingold 1993:152-153). Halbwachs (1980 [1950]) also suggests that the past is remembered through landscapes, social relations, and objects endowed with social meaning. Landscape is something that becomes embodied through living: “the landscape becomes part of us, just as we are part of it” (Ingold 1993: 154). As Bender (2002:107) notes, actions are “both ‘of the moment’ and something that extends forward and backward in time and place.” Time encompasses the past and imparts to the future (Bender 2002; Ingold 1993). To privilege space over time, as is often the case in archaeology, is to deny that “time’s pervasiveness is an inescapable dimension of all aspects of social experience and practice” (Munn 1992:93). Examples of indigenous perspectives of time and the landscape are provided by a number of researchers working outside the current study area, most notably in the American southwest. In his ground108 breaking studies among the Western Apache, Basso (1996; 1988) explored the relationship between landscape, social wisdom and morals of ancestral teachings, revealing how the landscape is both socially constructed and imparts social constructs by evoking memory and history. In their archaeological investigations of tribal ethnohistory in the San Pedro Valley, Ferguson and Colwell-Chanthaphonh (2006:27) employ a theoretical framework which is “predicated on understanding cultural landscapes as history and archaeological sites as monuments.” Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson (2006:150) state that “not every social group seeks knowledge of past events that perfectly maps onto Cartesian notions of time and space”, noting that many First Nations arrange material time and space in a complex manner with the symbolic and representational. Closer to the current study area, Harkin (2000:49) observes that for the Heiltsuk of BC’s mid-coast, time and landscape are intimately connected and “ancestral acts are not restricted to the distant past, but resonate through time, which is in any case recursive. Simply reading such referents onto a linear temporal scale is clearly impossible… past events are imminent in the lives of the contemporary Heiltsuk…” Given the above discussion, it’s not surprising to learn that time is an important aspect of the Central Coast Salish landscape. Building on many of these earlier works, Thom’s (2005) analysis of Hul’qumi’num sense of place references the temporality of the Central Coast Salish landscape through its connection with the ancestors. Thom (2005:15) notes that for the Hul’qumi’num, spirits and ancestors form part of the experienced world and their “potential to dwell in places guides human actions”. Oral traditions record the places that ancestors originated or used their powers, and the First Ancestors “provide a spatial and temporal source for present-day structures” (Thom 2005:84). For the Hul’qumi’num and, Thom (2005:77) argues, for the Coast Salish in general: Oral traditions about the First Ancestors of local communities and the mythic journeys of the Transformer who travelled the land, provide some of the basic cultural material by which people develop and express their relationship to the land. Through these stories, ancestors are associated with and embodied in the land. Thom argues further that places become the ancestors, not resigned to the past but rather with agency in the present. By extension therefore, the landscape also embodies temporal aspects of society though its association with the ancestors. For the Central Coast Salish, the associations with place are “foundational to their social organization” (Thom 2005:1), are important to both personal and community identity, and are key to property and territorial aspects of culture that underlie the Coast Sal- ish economy and inter-community relations. Places, objects, dances, and ancestral names provide a dynamic link with the past. They are a means through which the past resonates and is reproduced in contemporary social life. Places—and all that they entail —are a social structuring of the landscape. Recognizing temporality in the archaeological record If associations with time and place are foundational to Coast Salish identity, social organisation, property rights and territory then it is reasonable to hypothesize that the material record and the organization of space will reflect this importance. The importance of time and its recursive properties are key aspects of the theory of practice outlined by Bourdieu (1977). The basic premise of Bourdieu’s theory is that the arrangement and structure of space is reflective of the organizational structures of society; daily activities express and reinforce this underlying cultural schema. Relationships “with the past, and the extent to which practices repeat earlier practices as a form of memory of them” (Hodder and Cessford 2004:18) are an important aspect of theories of practice. As with Ingold’s (1993) argument for temporality, practice theory holds that any particular moment, action, or practice is contingent on what came before and what will come after (Mahar, Harker, and Wilkes 1990; Bourdieu 1977). As 109 an example of the importance of this concept, Hodder and Cessford (2004:19) argue that in order to “understand the daily social practices of the Neolithic we need to examine both their spatial and temporal dimensions.” Practice theory provides a robust framework in which to investigate the importance of the past in the past. Practice theory provides a middle ground between agency and structure in the development, maintenance and perpetuation of society. As people move through structured space and conduct daily or repeated activities such as food gathering, dancing, and socialising with others, they are habituated to specific cultural dispositions. These dispositions or habitus—the social constraints operating within society, ways of doing things, demeanour—become embodied in both the individual and the social group. The structural properties of society are reflected in everyday activities and people acquire an unconscious (non-discursive) awareness of these through socialization. But habitus and societal structure do not operate in polar opposition to each other; rather, habitus is learned through socialization and is reinforced and perpetuated through activities conducted in the course of daily life with structured settings (Bourdieu 1977; Mahar, Harker, and Wilkes 1990; Hodder and Cessford 2004). Theories of practice have particular 110 appeal for archaeologists because of their material applications. If embodied cultural patterns are expressed and reinforced on a daily basis then they can be uncovered archaeologically through analysis of material goods and spatial arrangements. Practice theory has been employed in archaeological studies of mortuary practices (e.g. Mathews 2006; Mizoguchi 1993), culture contact and identity (e.g. Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998; Deagan 1995; Jones 1997), settlement practices (Mackie 2001) and examinations of social memory (e.g. Joyce 2003; Hodder and Cessford 2004), among others. Victoria’s Temporal Landscape Discussions and ritual events shared with indigenous people in the local area and the available ethnographic data indicate that the Lekwammen landscape was and is one imbued with cultural meaning within which time is a significant feature, a perception consistent with both theory relating to the temporality of the landscape and research among other Central Coast Salish people. The temporality of the Lekwammen landscape has not been the focus of specific anthropological or archaeological study; however it is evident that consideration of this temporality is key to an archaeology reflective of indigenous perspectives both in its practice and in interpretation. Given the poignancy of the past in the present, recognition of the temporal facets of the Lekwammen landscape through both explicit and unconscious practices would seem essential to sensitive investigation and meaningful interpretation of the archaeological record of the area. The legend of Camossung presented at the beginning of this paper provides a clear moral to guide people’s behaviour: greed is not acceptable. Camossung is also known to have bestowed powers to those who conducted themselves appropriately and who bathed in a pool located close-by (Keddie 2003). It is clear from this story that Camossung continues to act in the present as a caretaker for several resources found in the Gorge and as a source of personal power. Camossung herself was situated at a significant narrowing of the Gorge Waterway (she was destroyed in the early 1900s to facilitate boat traffic) and in immediate proximity to several archaeological sites which, with deposits extending 4000 years before present (to bring this discussion back to a linear temporal model with which archaeologists are so comfortable), share at least some contemporaneity with the ethnographically recorded legend. Oral histories record that the people who lived on the upper part of the Gorge were known as Swengwhung. Songhees elders Jimmy Fraser, Sophie Misheal and Ned Williams, interviewed by Duff in the 1950s (Duff 1969), reported that these people maintained a village on the little bay. The remains of this village have been recorded archaeologically. It is difficult to imagine living at these camps and villages and not being affected by the presence of Camossung in both thought and action. The narrative of the wives of the stars, recorded by Boas in the late 1800s (Boas et al. 2002), is another example where place, practice and the past intersect. Two sisters were taken into the sky during a break from salmon fishing. While harvesting camas in the sky they dig a hole through which they see the earth far below; they subsequently fashion a rope and lower themselves from the sky, landing on Ngak’un (Knockan Hill). It is said that young men who behave properly, bathe regularly (purify themselves) and avoid women can see the rope the women used leading up to the sky. There are no known archaeological sites directly associated with Ngak’un, although a number of sites are recorded in the surrounding area. Oral histories record several use areas and place names in the vicinity of Ngak’un, reflecting the importance of the area to its indigenous inhabitants. Game and birds were hunted in the region and fish were taken from Portage Inlet and the streams and creeks which empty into it. Nearby Craigflower Creek, Stillwater Creek, and Colquitz Creek were three primary fishing streams, particularly during the annual salmon runs. Elders Edward Joe and Martha Guerin identified Pulkwutsang 111 (Craigflower Creek) as “place of ghost” or “haunted by ghost”, and the bay south of Craigflower Creek as Shtchaalth, meaning “to squeeze something through” in reference to the portage to Thetis Cove on Esquimalt Harbour. In making journeys to Portage Inlet for refuge or for hunting or fishing expeditions, people would have passed by Ngak’un or at the very least it would likely have been visible along the travel corridors, a reminder of shared history and, for men at least, appropriate behaviour with the potential for powers in the present. Places such as those discussed above undoubtedly influenced movement and settlement of the landscape. As Bender (2002: 104) states, a “place inflected with memory serves to draw people towards it or keep them away, permits the assertion or denial of knowledge claims, becomes a nexus of contested meaning.” Camp locations, ritual sites, villages and trail networks are just some of the possible archaeological site correlates of this influence. The temporality of the landscape through its connection with creator spirits and ancestors, “those who have gone before”, also has significant implications for an indigenous approach to the practice of archaeology. The author’s experience with spiritual advisors of the Songhees and Esquimalt communities indicates that, just as proper behaviour in the course of daily activities en112 sures that contact with the spirit world is regulated to avoid potential harm to those in the material world, an awareness of these sensitivities in archaeological practice alleviates anxiety regarding the welfare of the crew and the local community. The potential for disruption to the sense of well-being is most in evident to non-indigenous peoples when ancient burials are encountered or at funerals and memorials. Protocols for excavation of human remains and subsequent reburial ceremonies include use of protective items by field crew and specific behavioural expectations. Excavations are also confined to early in the day when the spirits are less active; by contrast ceremonies such as “burnings” at which food and clothing is transferred to the deceased are conducted in the late afternoon when contact with the spirits is heightened. While the immediacy and influence of temporal aspects of their culture is most poignant when burials are encountered, the connection extends to the landscape and to artifacts recovered archaeologically. Because the ancestors and nonhuman beings dwell within the animals and vegetation which inhabit the landscape and often in the landforms which characterise it, modifications to these have very significant potential to impact the present. The need for a cleansing ceremony given recent impacts to the cave on Bear Mountain is in recognition of this possibility (Dickson, Cleverley, and Rud 2006). In some cases, the protection and practices employed with respect to those who have gone before are extended to the excavation of deposits not known to contain human remains and to artifacts; at the very least recognition of the people whose artifacts are being collected is considered appropriate. This practice is consistent with Nicholas’ (2006:363) observation that for many First Nations in BC, artifacts and sites are “entities that bridge past and present on a timeless cultural landscape.” Conclusion The archaeology of BC is dominated by a culture historical approach which favours consideration of the where and when of the record over questions of how and why. Given the above discussion, consideration of landscape and time from an indigenous perspective is fundamental to any meaningful movement away from this culture historical paradigm. While the importance of time has been debated and discussed for some time in the field of cultural anthropology, these debates have as of yet had little impact on the archaeology of indigenous cultures in the local area (exceptions include Mackie 2001; Mathews 2006). Achieving this shift will require archaeologists to re-examine our conceptions of time. Yet the potential of such consideration for interpretation of the archaeological record is considerable. Contemplation of the temporality of landscape through practice theory may contribute to an enhanced understanding of the social structure and organisation of those who have gone before. As the preceding discussion has demonstrated, the power of place and time clearly influence behaviour. The role of memory, landscape and time may even shed light on some unresolved aspects of the local culture historical sequence and site distribution. For example, spatial analysis with reference to these could contribute to our understanding of the transition from the Locarno/Bowker Creek archaeological culture (3400-2400 years BP) to the subsequent Marpole Culture.4 At the very least it may provide texture to often nondescript renderings of the Lekwammen past, ones which serve to distance the observer from the observed. Consideration of indigenous views of time does not require the abandonment of scientific rigour. Nor is it necessary to fix First Nations peoples and cultures in an essentialist, unchanging state or assume “unique qualities and abilities that set Indigenous peoples apart from European and Euro-American populations”, as suggested by McGhee (2008), in order to question how the past influenced the practices of people in the past. As Whitley (2002) has argued, there is a middle ground position that incorporates indigenous knowledge and results in richer interpretation and explanation of rigorously acquired archaeological data. Ferguson and Colwell-Chan113 thaphonh (2006) have demonstrated the possibilities of such an approach with their research in the San Pedro Valley. The challenge for local and regional archaeological practice with respect to the temporality of landscape is considerable given both indigenous criticisms of the discipline and the dogmatism of the cultural historical paradigm. However, it also provides opportunities for archaeologists to engage in a meaningful way with descendant communities and offers considerable potential for our understanding of the people who have gone before. Acknowledgements This paper is dedicated to Songhees member Eva George, who helped to shape D’Ann’s archaeological practice and her experience of Victoria’s landscape. NOTES 1. For the purposes of this paper, Sylvain’s (2002) definition of indigenous is accepted. Indigenous peoples: have historical continuity with prior occupants; are politically, economically or structurally marginalized; are distinct from the dominant culture; and, are self identified. Under this definition, members of the Esquimalt Nation and Songhees First Nation are considered indigenous. 2. Based on the author’s experi114 ence in the field of consulting archaeology. 3. Also see Nicholas, G. P. and T. D. Andrews 1997 At a crossroads: archaeology and First Peoples in Canada. Archaeology Press, Burnaby, B.C. 4. Hypothesised as a population replacement by Burley and Beattie (1987). References Cited Basso, Keith H. 1996. Wisdom sits in places: landscape and language among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1988. Speaking with Names: language and landscape among the Western Apache. Cultural Anthropology 3 (2):99-130. Bender, Barbara 2002. Time and Landscape. Current Anthropology 43 - Supplement 103-112. Boas, Franz, Randy Bouchard, Dorothy I. D. Kennedy, and Dietrich Bertz 2002. Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America: a translation of Franz Boas’ 1895 edition of Indianische Sagen von der NordPacifischen Kuste Amerikas. Vancouver: Talon Books. Bourdieu, Pierre 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology; 16. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press. Carlson, Keith Thor, ed. 2001. A Sto:lo Coast Salish Historical Atlas. Toronto: Douglas & Mcintyre, University of Washington Press, Sto:lo Nation. Casey, Edward 1996. How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: phenomenological prolegomena. In Senses of Place, edited by S. Feld and K. H. Basso. Santa Fe, N.M. [Seattle]: School of American Research Press; Distributed by the University of Washington Press. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, and James Ferguson 2006. Memory Pieces and Footprints: multivocality and the meanings of ancient times and ancestral places among the Zuni and Hopi. American Anthropologist 108 (1):148-162. Cooper, Zarine 1993. Perceptions of Time in the Andaman Islands. World Archaeology 25 (2):261-267. Deagan, Kathleen A. 1995. Puerto Real: the archaeology of a sixteenth century Spanish town in Hispaniola. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Dickson, Louise 2006. Aboriginal leaders want cave restored. Developer defends actions, questions natives’ motives. Times Colonist, Friday, November 17. Jeff Rud 2006. Natives’ ‘sacred’ cave destroyed. Developers at Bear Mountain committing cultural genocide, aboriginal leaders charge. Times Colonist, Thursday, November 16, 2006 Dickson, Louise, and Richard Watts 2006. Truce reached on native cave. ‘The cave will be protected,’ Bear Mountain CEO pledges. Times Colonist Saturday November 18. Duff, Wilson 1969. The Fort Victoria Treaties. B.C. Studies 3:3-57. Ferguson, T. J., and Chip ColwellChanthaphonh 2006. History is in the land: multivocal tribal traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Gell, Alfred 1992. The anthropology of time: cultural constructions of temporal maps and images, Explorations in anthropology. Oxford; Providence: Berg. Halbwachs, M 1980 [1950]. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper & Row. Harkin, Michael E. 2000. Sacred Places, Scarred Spaces. Wicazo Sa Review 15 (1):49-70. Hodder, Ian, and Craig Cessford Dickson, Louise, Bill Cleverley, and 115 2004. Daily Practice and Social Memory at Catalhoyuk. American Antiquity 69 (1):17-40. Ingold, Tim 1993. The Temporality of the Landscape. World Archaeology 25 (2):152-174. Jones, S 1997. The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present. London, New York: Routledge. Joyce, Rosemary 2003. Concrete Memories: fragments of the past in the Classic Maya present (500-1000 AD). In Archaeologies of Memory edited by R. M. VanDyke and S. E. Alcock. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Keddie, Grant R. 2003. Songhees Pictorial: a history of the Songhees people as seen by outsiders, 1790-1912. Victoria: Royal BC Museum. Lightfoot, Kent G., Antoinette Martinez, and Ann M. Schiff 1998. Daily Practice and Material Culture in Pluralistic Social Settings: an archaeological study of culture change and persistence from Fort Ross, California. American Antiquity 63 (2):199-222. Mackie, Quentin 2001. Settlement Archaeology in a Fjordland Archipelago: network analysis, social practice and the built environment of Western Vancouver Island, 116 British Columbia, Canada since 2,000 BP, BAR international series: 926. Oxford: John and Erica Hedges: Archaeopress. Mahar, Cheleen, Richard Harker, and Chris Wilkes 1990. The Basic Theoretical Position. In An Introduction to the work of Pierre Bourdieu: the practice of theory edited by R. Harker, C. Mahar and C. Wilkes. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire Macmillan. Mathews, D. 2006. Burial Cairn Taxonomy and the Mortuary Landscape of Rocky Point, British Columbia. Master of Arts, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, Victoria. McGhee, Robert 2008. Aboriginalism and the Problems of Indigenous Archaeology. American Antiquity 73 (4):579-598. Million, Tara 2003. The Ghost Dance of Archaeology. In Indigenous People and Archaeology. Honouring the Past, Discussing the Present, Building for the Future. Proceeding of the Thirty-Second Annual Conference of the Archaeological Association of the University of Calgary, edited by T. Peck, Evelyn Siegfried and Gerald Oetelaar. Calgary, Alberta, Canada: Archaeology Association, Department of Archaeology, University of Calgary. Mizoguchi, Koji 1993. Time in the Reproduction of Mortuary Practices. World Archaeology 25 (2):223-235. Morphy, Howard 1995. Landscape and the Reproduction of the Ancestral Past. In The anthropology of landscape: perspectives on place and space, edited by E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon. New York: Oxford University Press. Munn, Nancy D. 1992. The Cultural Anthropology of Time: a critical essay. Annual Review of Anthropology 21:93-123. Nicholas, George P. 2006. Decolonizing the Archaeological Landscape: the practice and politics of archaeology in British Columbia. American Indian Quarterly 30 (3):350-380. place: dwelling, meaning, power, property and territory in the Coast Salish world. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, McGill, Montreal. Thornton, Thomas F. 1995. Place and being among the Tlingit. Thesis (Ph. D.), University of Washington, 1995. Trigger, Bruce G. 1980. Archaeology and the Image of the American Indian. American Antiquity 45 (4):662-676. Watkins, Joe 2005. Through Wary Eyes: indigenous perspectives on archaeology Annual Review of Anthropology 34 (1):429-449. 2000. Indigenous archaeology: American Indian values and scientific practice. Walnut Creek, Shaw, Rob 2006. First Nations bands threaten blockade of Bear Mountain. Natives demand archeological assessment to protect caves, burial sites. Times Colonist, Thursday May 25. Suttles, Wayne P. 1990. Central Coast Salish. In Handbook of North American Indians: Northwest Coast, edited by W. P. Suttles and W. C. Sturtevant. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. Thom, Brian David 2005. Coast Salish senses of 117 Niki Thorne (In)Visibility & (Mis)Representation: First Nations and Social Justice Abstract This paper, based on summer fieldwork made possible through the auspices of an undergraduate student research award, examines the following themes: 1) the construction of First Nations activists as the Dangerous Other, delegitimizing calls for social justice; 2) the construction of indigenous people as helpless victims in need of saving by a colonial government, drawing attention away from centuries of colonial interference in almost every aspect of life; and 3) how patriotism relates to these issues. It is a preliminary work that forms the basis for later graduate work, focused on community organizing and deconstructing delegitimizing representations of First Nations activists. 118 CA: Alta Mira Press. Whiteley, Peter M. 2002. Archaeology and Oral Tradition: the scientific importance of dialogue. American Antiquity 67 (3):405-415. Introduction Much of Canadian patriotism is built upon the policy and mythology of multiculturalism, which is defined in official government ideology as a fundamental characteristic of Canadian heritage and identity (Mackey 1999:2). Canada’s ideology of multiculturalism, however, is dangerous, in that it renders invisible past and ongoing injustices, and hides structures of differential power. In the case of First Nations in Canada, many injustices are made invisible through the discourse of multiculturalism, and when these issues are made visible, indigenous people are often constructed as either dangerous Others, such as ‘terrorists’ or ‘insurgents’, or as victims in need of saving. Broadly put, the topic I am concerned with in this paper is how indigenous people in Canada are understood and represented, or rather, misunderstood and misrepresented, and the impact of these representations regarding struggles for social justice. I begin by briefly outlining my position and research. Next I explore the concept of invisibility and some of the effects of the myth of multiculturalism, followed by a look at two types of misrepresentation that arise when attempts are made to make these issues visible: the constructions of native as victim and native as dangerous Other. As attempts are made to make injustices visible, they are subsumed under these misrepresentations. My argument is that actual indigenous peoples in Canada are rendered invisible through the myth of multiculturalism1 or constructed as dangerous Others or victims, thereby hiding injustices. When made visible, they are misconstrued and issues of social injustice are made invisible through these misrepresentations. A brief background: My position & research This paper is based on undergraduate archival and field research from 2006 to the present. Since 2006, I have been actively researching the Caledonia land dispute—not only the ‘reclamation’/’occupation’, but also reactions, backlash, and representations. My undergraduate research has been framed as an independent study course for Eva Mackey, and then later as full time paid summer research under the auspices of an undergraduate student research award (USRA) through the McMaster Experiential Education department. My research has involved analysis of visual media, newspaper articles and editorials (both dominant news sources such as The Globe and Mail and the Hamilton Spectator, as well as alternative sources such as The Turtle Island News and the Tekewen119 nake, printed on Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve). I’ve also conducted ‘field research’, at the reserve, and during anti-‘occupation’ rallies at Queen’s Park. During this research, I have been an active member of Hamilton Solidarity with Six Nations, and participated in a number of information sessions at Gore Park in downtown Hamilton, and at James St. North (Hamilton) during several of the Friday night art crawls. Since this time, I have moved to Toronto and become involved with CUPE 3903’s First Nations Solidarity Working Group out of York, and remain engaged in this solidarity work. It has become commonplace in anthropology to negotiate one’s own position within research, to account for unavoidable subjectivity, rather than attempting to hold on to the notion of objectivity (See for example Scholte 1972, Salzman 2002, & Robertson 2002). Additionally, there has been much debate in the field regarding the appropriate role of the anthropologist. My position with regards to the Caledonia land dispute is that of solidarity. I feel as though this position is an appropriate role for an anthropologist, and fits well within the call for an ‘engaged anthropology’ (See for example, Scheper-Hughes, Bourdieu). Multiculturalism & Invisibility It is important to begin by outlining what it is I mean by ‘invisibility’. What does it mean to claim that First 120 Nations become ‘invisible’ through the myth of multiculturalism? When I talk about First Nations as invisible, what I mean is: How much do Canadians actually know about the histories, treaties, ‘culture’, for example, of the indigenous people who live here? How many Canadians refer to all of the varied and diverse nations as ‘natives’, not realizing there is any difference at all between, for example, Mi’kmaqs on the eastern coast of Canada and Six Nations of the Grand River? I suppose, what I am getting at is how much do Canadians know about First Nations, other than what they read in the news? In terms of my own personal experience, as an anthropology student engaged in research regarding the Caledonia land dispute, and as an active member of Hamilton Solidarity with Six Nations, it seems to me many Canadians know very little about Six Nations treaties, history, and governance. This is what I mean by invisibility: histories, and historical and ongoing injustices are erased, not seen, not known. Many aspects of First Nations history, and even existence, are rendered invisible, even in dominant systems of education. What do kids learn about natives in school? What are they taught about “Canadian History”? How does this lack of understanding play into the discourses that circulate in terms of the ‘white backlash’ surrounding the reclamation of Kanonhstaton? The next obvious question is: What does multiculturalism have to do with this? The policy of multicultur- alism is actually defined in official government ideology as a fundamental characteristic of Canadian identity and heritage (Mackey 1999: 2). One important aspect of the policy of multiculturalism is ‘tolerance’. It is interesting, and absolutely baffling to me, that somehow the mythology of multiculturalism can conjure up images of equality, while the very language used to describe this notion reveal differentials of power. What does it mean to be ‘tolerant’? Or, as Mackey asks, “How does ‘tolerance’ for ‘others’ work in the construction of an unmarked and yet dominant national identity?” (Mackey 1999:3) Though there are many questions to ask about multiculturalism, for the sake of scope, I am going to concentrate on how a policy of multiculturalism affects the visibility of social justice when it comes to First Nations. The problem with the myth of multiculturalism is that it leads many to believe that everyone who lives in Canada is equal, regardless of their background or culture. However, although Canada certainly is not homogenous in terms of its population, there is no doubt that the white Anglophone majority have cultural, economic, and political dominance (Mackey, 1999:12). When those who are dominant convince everyone else that we are equal, where does that leave those who are in situations of social injustice? If we are made to believe we are all equal, how can we see those experiencing structural inequalities? This leads me to my next section: What happens when those injustices are made visible? Visibility #1: The Dangerous Other The examples of natives depicted as the dangerous Other abound. I’ll focus on Caledonia (Kanonhstaton) in my discussion, though numerous others come to mind, such as Oka (Kanesatake), Ipperwash, Gustafson Lake, for example. There are many ways indigenous protestors are constructed as the dangerous other. In this section, I will begin with a brief discussion of discourse, which is to say how language represents a particular kind of knowledge about a topic (Hall 1992). Following this, I will give some examples of how this discourse has been used, drawing upon the words of members of the Caledonia municipal government at a Queen’s Park Rally in May of 2007.2 In, The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power, Stuart Hall writes, “When statements about a topic are made within a particular discourse, the discourse makes it possible to construct the topic in a certain way. It also limits the other ways in which the topic can be constructed” (Hall 1992:291). When natives are constructed as dangerous others as opposed to justified protestors, key words follow, as part of the discourse. To begin with, is it a ‘reclamation’? Or an ‘occupa121 tion’? One word connotes definitive rights to the land while the other indicates a sense of illegality and danger. Hall writes: “The language (discourse) has real effects in practice: the description becomes ‘true’” (Hall 1992:292). Additionally, rather than focusing on truth or falsity it is important to consider the effect of a given discourse. In this case, constructing the native protestor as the dangerous other is effective in subsuming inconvenient issues of social injustices under a rhetoric of fear. Using the word ‘occupation’ communicates a sense of illegality. Whether the occupation/reclamation is illegal or not, using the word ‘occupation’ limits the topic such that its legal status is not up for debate. On May 2nd, 2007, residents opposed to the ‘occupation’ of Douglas Creek Estates (‘reclamation’ of Kanonhstaton) drove in a slow moving convoy to Queen’s Park, rallying to encourage government support in stopping the ‘occupation’. There were a number of speakers. I brought a video camera, and later transcribed some of these speeches and the crowd’s response. Craig Grice, a member of the Haldimand Council, was one such speaker who received a lot of support from the gathered crowd. To much cheering, Grice says, “The people of Ontario and the nation need to recognize that we have witnessed police inaction and been subjected to acts that have caused a very real sense of community panic.” He mentions the “threat” of blockades, and the 122 “anguish” of community members, calling for “an immediate end and resolution to the occupation” (my emphasis). To more cheering, Grice says, “Truly stated the residents of Caledonia are the victims”. He depicts the community as threatened by the dangerous other, saying, “we must be allowed to return to our lives, free of intimidation and immediate concern for family safety.” Grice talks also about “the harmful impact of this occupation” and questions “the reliability of the police to protect us”. Grice is not the only one to depict unarmed native protesters as dangerous and threatening. The mayor of Caledonia, Marie Trainer, in her speech at the Queen’s Park rally states, “People of Caledonia need normalcy back in their lives. Children need to be able to splash in their backyard pools and camp out in their tents and the sixth line needs policing.” The mayor depicts the children of Caledonia as threatened by the dangerous natives. She speaks of the “fear, intimidation, helplessness” of the Caledonians. The dangers inherent in this type of misrepresentation are fairly obvious. Constructing natives as dangerous and threatening within a discourse of fear invalidates claims to social justice. In making natives visible as the dangerous other, the actual issues, such as the legitimate claim to the land in question under the Haldimand Proclamation of 1784, or the ongoing history of colonial violence, are subsumed and made invisible. Visibility #2: The Victim Since much of my research has focused on media analysis, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of First Nations portrayed as the victim is Kashechewan. The Kashechewan reserve is near James Bay in northern Ontario. Kashechewan has been plastered over all of the major newspapers because of problems with flooding, water contamination, and suicide rates. These are problems. They should be in the news. Where things become problematic, however, is the portrayal of these entire communities as victims, with no regard for the wider historical or political implications. By depicting these communities in such a way, attention is actually drawn away from the wider historical and political implications. In this section, I will begin by outlining a few portrayals of natives as victims in mainstream Canadian newspapers. I will then discuss how these portrayals are problematic with respect to Lila Abu-Lughod’s comments regarding the rhetoric of salvation. Begin by considering a Toronto Star article entitled, “Reserve residents stay put; Ottawa not prepared to spend $500 million to move Kashechewan despite earlier promise.” The author refers to the Kashechewan reserve as “remote” and “flood-prone”. He talks about the “plight of the native community” and the “desperate conditions on the reserve”. He also mentions the unemployment and suicide rates, and alcohol and drug problems. The Toronto Star is known for sensationalism, however, so consider the following comment column from the Globe and Mail entitled, “Trapped in the aboriginal narrative”. Much could be said about the tone and content of this article, however, for the sake of scope, I will focus on the word use. The author says, “You’d have to be brain dead not to be aware of the poverty of the reserves, the awful housing, the bad water, the sickness, the suicides, the hopelessness.” Also consider the title of this Globe and Mail article, “Spring flooding worries Kashechewan community” (my emphasis). The very title of this article depicts Kashechewan as helpless and devoid of agency. Saying that the community is ‘worried’ connotes a sense of not being able to allay those worries. It connotes a lack of empowerment to do anything about their ‘plight’. It makes the community sound helpless and in need of saving. While it is certainly true that there are problems in Kashechewan that need to be addressed, construing natives as victims, as in the case of Kashechewan is problematic because it negates the agency of First Nations. It depicts natives as acted upon, rather than as actors. The newspaper articles I have surveyed give no consideration of the community’s agency, but rather depict the community as in need of saving. Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) raises some important considerations about the rhetoric of salvation in her article, 123 “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” She argues for vigilance regarding the rhetoric of saving people, because of what it implies about our attitudes. She writes: When you save someone, you imply that you are saving her from something. You are also saving her to something. What violences are entailed in this transformation, and what presumptions are being made about the superiority of that to which you are saving her? Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged. All one needs to do to appreciate the patronizing quality of the rhetoric of saving women is to imagine using it today in the United States about disadvantaged groups such as African American women or working-class women. (Abu-Lughod 2002: 788-789) The problem with constructing victims in need of saving is twofold: that they are stripped of their agency, and also in the relations of superiority of those doing the saving. Additionally, by focusing on the community as victims, attention is detracted from wider issues and historical implications regarding issues in Kashechewan. The suicide and alcohol rates are brought up to show the community as in need of saving, but they are not brought up to examine historical injustices that could be contributing to a sense of despair. Lila Abu-Lughod brings up parallels to this as well. With respect to Muslim women, she writes, “the 124 question is why knowing about the ‘culture’ of the region, and particularly its religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the history of the development of repressive regimes in the region and the U.S. role in this history” (Abu-Lughod 2002:784). Similarly, depicting natives as victims in need of saving by Canada is more urgent than exploring the histories of injustice and Canada’s role in this injustice. Conclusions Throughout this essay, I have discussed issues regarding the misrepresentation of First Nations, and the impact of these misrepresentations on struggles for social justice. I have argued that the varying constructions all negate issues of social injustice. The myth of multiculturalism perpetuates a stereotype that we are all equal, with equal opportunities, on an equal playing field. This makes historical and ongoing injustices invisible. Two common portrayals of native communities seeking social justice are that of the victim and that of the dangerous other. Portraying natives as victims is inappropriate both because it reinforces structures of superiority with one community in need of saving, and another capable of doing the saving. It negates agency, portraying First Nations as passive, rather than active in creating their own ongoing histories. The representation of native as victim is detrimental to so- cial justice in that it draws attention away from the wider historical and political implications. Constructing Natives as the dangerous Other subsumes injustices, drawing attention away from social inequalities. Notes 1. Though they are indeed reified through stereotypical images to serve a nationalist project. This, however, is a topic for another paper. 2. Similar sorts of discourses, around the rights of Caledonian citizens, and the ‘oppression’ of mainstream white people in Caledonia is still prevalent, and most recently these discourses have been mobilized around the formation of the Caledonia ‘militia’, or ‘peacekeepers’. For background on this, and links to news coverage, see the First Nations Solidarity Working Group website. http://6nsolidarity.wordpress.com” http://6nsolidarity. wordpress.com Acknowledgements I would like to extend a sincere and heartfelt thanks to Eva Mackey and the Experiential Education Department at McMaster University for making this research possible through an undergraduate student research award (USRA). I am also incredibly appreciative of my friends involved in this social justice and solidarity work—you inspire me (: Thanks also to my anonymous reviewers for your helpful feedback and suggestions. References Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila 2002 Do Muslim women really need saving? 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