A timely encounter and a loss

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Previous articleNext article FreeIn MemoriamA timely encounter and a lossMariane C. FermeMariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author University of California, BerkeleyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn Memoriam, Nancy Munn (April 13, 1931–January 20, 2020).We take the unprecedented step of publishing a review by Nancy Munn alongside Jens Kjaerulff’s article, for which it was written. We recognize the remarkable timing of a particular conjuncture of events—Nancy’s passing some three months after submitting her review—and want to share with our readers a model of respectful and enabling intellectual engagement between reviewer and author.On January 20, 2020, while Jens Kjaerulff’s article was in production, Nancy Munn died in a Chicago hospital. I had asked her to review Kjaerulff’s article, “Situating Time: New Technologies at Work, a Perspective from Alfred Gell’s Oeuvre,” a few months back. She agreed to do so, despite the pressure she felt to complete her own book. What arrived via email in late October 2019—accompanied by a request to have her “name as the source of this report made available to the author,” if that was possible—were six dense, single-spaced pages of analysis that made the Hau editorial collective unanimously express the desire to publish her review along with the article. I emailed Nancy for permission to do so, but she was already ill and in hospital and could not respond. I am grateful to Anne Chien, Jean Comaroff, Judith Farquhar, Jennifer Cole, and Nancy’s friends and colleagues for caring and accompanying her, and for permission to publish her piece, one of the last things she wrote.Having entered an intellectual dialogue with an anonymous author through the double-blind peer review process, Nancy Munn, this exemplary scholar’s scholar, delved deeply not only into the author’s analysis of ethnographic case material and theoretical sources—reprising in particular Gell’s work down to verse, chapter, and page—but also into the sources of Kjaerulff’s sources (Husserl, in particular), which were also key interlocutors for her own work on the anthropology of time. Her gentle parentheticals suggested revisions to strengthen further what she deemed “an exceptional paper.” She encouraged the author to make his claims bolder, and to structure content and conclusions to highlight what she thought was an original and deep analysis of the ways in which Gell’s thought could encompass temporalities of labor in the Danish IT economy.In her review, Munn engages deeply with the theoretical analysis, but is also always attentive to its fit with the evidentiary details (this is another category of parenthetical queries to the author in the text that follows: requests for clarification of ethnographic details, such as whether IT worker “Edward” works at home or in an office, and under what circumstances, for instance). There is another twist in the timeline of this story, which emerged after I informed Kjaerulff of Nancy’s passing. His response referred to the “inner dialogues” he had had over the years with her work on questions of time and value, particularly surrounding this piece. Kjaerulff wrote that he found that Gell’s book on time had been “misunderstood, misrepresented, and … neglected,” and this was a key reason for working through its main arguments in analyzing his Danish ethnographic setting. Gell—whose untimely death deprived him of the opportunity to build upon his two signal books—and Munn shared scholarly interests in time and aesthetics, as well as ethnographic research in overlapping parts of the world. They were important interlocutors for each other’s work. In a strange twist of fate, until finding a sympathetic reviewer in Munn, Kjaerulff’s article itself almost risked the fate of Gell’s work, due to delays in editorial decisions and reviewer mismatches at other publications. “It felt like a vindication, not only of my manuscript, but in effect also of Gell’s book on time”—he wrote—that Munn was the reviewer to finally see the value in his article. A timely encounter of writer and reader, indeed.Central to Nancy’s life work was the notion that space and time are always necessarily commingled. She worked through her foundational ideas about this relationship in The fame of Gawa (1986), originally delivered as the Henry Lewis Morgan lectures at the University of Rochester. In the book, she adopted C. S. Peirce’s concept of “qualisigns”—namely, “certain embodied qualities that are components of a given intersubjective spacetime … whose positive or negative value they signify” (Munn 1986: 17)—to analyze Kula prestige objects, foods, canoes, elements, and people, as well as of processes such as consumption and exchange. Intersubjective and spatiotemporal elements informed the qualities of water (light) in contrast with earth (heavy), and the bundled qualisigns associated with these elements informed the properties of canoes and navigation in an aqueous domain on the one hand, in contrast with yams and their farming on land on the other hand.The seasons of trips to visit trading partners on other islands on Gawan canoes, the durability of particular substances and ephemerality of others, the scope of circulation of a particular named Kula valuable are integral to the production of something as intangible and yet material and consequential as fame. Her insight that fame, or reputation, and the relations produced or endangered by its qualities were really the driving force of the expansive Kula circuit was the most original contribution to the study of this Melanesian phenomenon since the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski 1922). As a student in several of her seminars at the University of Chicago during the years leading up to the publication of The fame of Gawa, my thinking was profoundly shaped by Munn’s elaboration of the spatiotemporal dimensions of material substances and places in the making of meaning.Nancy Munn also wrote important articles on the subject of time, including “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay” (Annual Review of Anthropology, 1992). More recently, “The ‘Becoming-Past’ of Places: Spacetime and Memory in Nineteenth-Century, Pre-Civil War New York,” published in this journal’s pages in 2013, anchored these thoughts in her ethnographic preoccupation with the historical sites of New York City, her hometown. At a time of rapid change in which New York was turning from a sprawling urban-country hybrid space into a planned city on a grid, its inhabitants often wrote in the media and other venues about how spaces in which classic buildings were about to be torn down to make way for streets and avenues would conjure their memories in the future. Unable to keep pace with change, they imagined the buildings they could still see as already gone. Munn evoked in imaginative prose the accelerated spatiotemporal experiences of New Yorkers in the midst of industrialization.William F. Hanks, a former colleague of hers at the University of Chicago, wrote the following upon hearing of her death:Nancy and I grew close through teaching together and sharing our work. She played a formative role in shaping my thinking—just at the time when I was rethinking and expanding outward in anthropology. As I came to know practice theory and [Pierre] Bourdieu, I learned that he really respected her also, and she remains for me a complete master of ethnology and of scholarly passion. I think of her rocking chair with the portable work-surface she would put on the armrests like a tray, on which to work. And all the Post-its with notes that bristled from whatever books she was reading. It brings to mind Wallace Stevens’s “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm”:The house was quiet and the world was calm.The reader became the book; and summer nightWas like the conscious being of the book.The house was quiet and the world was calm.The words were spoken as if there was no book,Except that the reader leaned above the page, …There is something in the space projected in this poem that is so quiet and concentrated, so patient and methodical, and such a good fit to Nancy—leaning over a book on a summer evening in the front room of her apartment.Books (and student papers) “bristling” with Post-its, the patient, focused concentration, the seriousness of purpose of Nancy’s intellectual engagements made her a formidable—and sometimes frightening—interlocutor in the memory of this former graduate student. But any fear of her critical eye on one’s own work was tempered by the demands she placed on her own, and by her whimsical side—the collector of Victorian children’s books, outlandish toys, and the cheerful flotsam and jetsam of Melanesian fish traps and seafaring objects in her apartment’s front room.Nancy Munn will be remembered with affection by many whose lives and thinking she touched. She was a model of ethical and thoughtful engagement with intellectuals, regardless of institutional position, perhaps precisely because she was attentive to the ways in which fame builds and destroys social reputations.Figure 1. Nancy Munn, Peninsula Hotel, Chicago, 2015. Photo credit: Jennifer Cole.View Large ImageDownload PowerPointReferencesMalinowski, Bronisław. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMunn, Nancy. 1986. The fame of Gawa: A symbolic study of value transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 1992. “The cultural anthropology of time: A critical essay.” Annual Review of Anthropology 21:93–123.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar———. 2013. “The ‘becoming-past’ of places: Spacetime and memory in nineteenth-century, pre-Civil War New York.” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3 (2): 359–80.First citation in articleLinkGoogle ScholarStevens, Wallace. 1990. “The house was quiet and the world was calm.” In The collected poems, 358. New York: Vintage Books.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 10, Number 1Spring 2020 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/709199 © 2020 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.