Racial burdens, translations, and chance

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeEditorial NoteRacial burdens, translations, and chanceMariane C. Ferme, Andrew B. Kipnis, Raminder Kaur, and Luiz CostaMariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author , Andrew B. KipnisChinese University of Hong Kong Search for more articles by this author , Raminder KaurUniversity of Sussex Search for more articles by this author , and Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author Full TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreTwo signal events have had a global impact during the time it has taken to produce this issue: the global COVID-19 pandemic that began spiking between late 2019 in China and early 2020 in Italy, and the spread of protests against state violence on black and brown bodies in the United States and elsewhere. The latter events were sparked by the May 25, 2020 videotaped killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by a police officer casually kneeling on his neck and prone body for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. It echoed similar documented episodes of police violence and chokeholds before this event, and sparked the reporting of many other undocumented ones. Coming as it did on a major American holiday, and at a time in which media consumption was heightened by COVID-19-related shelter-in-place orders in many states—and in which information was emerging about the health disparities in this disease’s impact—this event catalyzed a response that continues unabated at the time of this writing, in towns large and small, by people of color and their allies demanding the vital right to breathe.We acknowledge the global Black Lives Matter movement and the many protests that manifest commitment to its values by a vast range of demographic groups with our cover for this issue, an image of one of the many events rallying people in the streets to this cause. We reiterate, too, our stance in favor of more inclusive publication and citation practices, outlined in our first editorial (see Ferme, Costa, and Durham 2019), which have informed our work in the intervening time. Anthropologists have responded with reflections on the legacies of racism and white supremacy in various institutional settings and in framing concepts, including in our flagship journals. In particular, there has been a demand to “say the name” of the victims of these brutalities, and to engage in specific practices of memorialization on their behalf, paralleled by a corollary call for deleting or relegating to the background other names and icons linked to an odious and discriminatory history. Prominent institutions and universities have announced the renaming of buildings memorializing racist individuals, and protesters or municipal bodies have removed statues and other historical markers associated with legacies of white supremacy in different parts of the postcolonial world. We have invited the organization of a Currents section devoted to racialized institutional violence and policing in the United States and elsewhere for an upcoming issue, and welcome inquiries from scholars with expertise on these topics to contact us if they are interested in joining the project. We also will be devoting a Colloquium in our next issue to repatriation and iconoclasm, occasioned by dialogues between President Emmanuel Macron and African intellectuals over the repatriation of objects taken from the continent and housed in French museums.In these troubled times, we are especially pleased to publish last fall’s Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture, delivered by Laurence Ralph at the University of Rochester. Its title, “Black Cargo,” inspired by the subtitle to Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon (2018), disrupts the conventional referent—enslaved Africans forcibly transported to the Americas as ship cargo. Instead, the lecture focuses on the hidden cargo within enslaved Africans, the rich trove of stories transmitted intergenerationally in oral folklore within families and broader communities. The occasion for Ralph’s exploration of African American storytelling—a tradition strengthened by the prohibition against the formal education of enslaved people—was the belated and posthumous publication of Hurston’s Barracoon. The book was based on Hurston’s conversations with Cudjo Lewis (formerly named Kossula), purportedly the last survivor of the schooner Clotilda, which in 1860 secretly brought to the vicinity of Mobile, Alabama, a cargo of more than a hundred enslaved Africans, fifty-two years after slave transports to the United States had been banned.In the book, Hurston is attentive to the meandering nature of actual storytelling, and does not elide the detours taken by Lewis’s narrative, which makes it sometimes difficult for a reader to follow. She also alludes to the context that led to the book’s production—a palimpsestic bookend, as a posthumous publication, to a scholarly career that was inaugurated with the appearance in print of her first article, “Cudjo’s own story of the last African slaver” (1927), about the very same man. In Hurston’s memoir ([1942] 2006), in the book, and in the various writings prompted by its belated “rediscovery” and publication, reference is made to the accusation of plagiarism following the publication of the article that prompted this young scholar to return to the story, revisiting Cudjo Lewis, expanding her research, and writing more at length on the topic (see Cep 2018; Sexton 2003: 190). Thus the vicissitudes of Hurston’s first and posthumous work on the life of Cudjo Lewis also serve as an exemplary story of self-improvement and scholarly apprenticeship, while laying bare the unusual pressure under which she labored, as an underfunded scholar of color, to publish the results of her sponsored research projects. Concurrently, the differences between her article and book on the same subject underscore the ways in which, over the arc of her career, Hurston became more assertive in developing an alternative authorial voice, to disrupt the strictures of more formal academic writing under which she labored at the beginning of her scholarship.Laurence Ralph uses Barracoon, and Hurston’s gift for immersing her readers in the everyday speech of common African American people in the South, telling stories, fibbing, and provoking each other, as a model for his own “ethnographic journey” among Black Chicago residents subject to racist police violence. His storytelling also explores the broader history of policing in America. In his own narrative, which explores the possibilities of different forms of witnessing, Ralph’s focus is on Black Chicagoans’ perceptions of the police, told by his interlocutors—here, primarily an activist-teacher he calls Kenya Davis. In her storytelling, Kenya tacks back and forth between her own experiences of encounters with “the law,” and signal events in the city’s policing of African Americans, particularly the shooting (sixteen times) of Laquan McDonald in 2014 by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. Kenya’s coming-of-age as an activist in the Chicago Black community is narrated by her in relation to these events, which inform her and her community’s “nervousness” any time the police are around. In his own artful storytelling, Ralph interweaves testimony from Van Dyke’s trial transcripts with historical material that highlights the racialized fantasies informing this nervousness and mutual fears. Threaded throughout Ralph’s storytelling is an exploration of American debates around the use of excessive force by the police as far back as eighteenth-century Louisiana, with the organization of slave patrols to pursue “fugitive” slaves and thus allay white fears of slave revolts, partly encapsulated in the legendary status of Bras-Coupé in African American folklore.We also publish in this issue the annual Claude Lévi-Strauss Memorial Lecture, delivered in October 2019 by Heonik Kwon in Paris. The lecture engages closely with Lévi-Strauss’s work for UNESCO, particularly his essay on Rousseau and the notion advanced there of anthropology’s role in calling for world peace following World War II, inspired by Kant’s essay, “Perpetual peace: A philosophical essay.” Through the lens of UNESCO’s proximity to anthropology and its role as a source of support for the work of anthropologists during the Cold War, Kwon reminds us of two key historical processes following World War II: decolonization, and the concurrent power shift away from Europe and towards North America that inaugurated the so-called “American Century.” In a parallel move, anthropologists turned from a preoccupation with kinship and its role in articulating politics and organizing alliances—central to Lévi-Strauss’s work—to a focus on the nation and national cultures.In another important essay occasioned by his work for UNESCO, “Race and history” ([1952] 1976), Lévi-Strauss had further made an impassioned plea against racial thinking, by juxtaposing it with cultural diversity. Since “there are many more human cultures than there are human races,” he argued, and “two cultures developed by men belonging to the same race may differ as much, or more, than two cultures belonging to racially distant groups” (Lévi-Strauss 1976: 325), it follows that cultural differences, and not racial ones, should be the focus of attention, and in this anthropology leads the way among the social sciences, particularly because of its critical stance towards ethnocentrism. This call for the subordination of race to culture reads as somewhat anachronistic today, in the face of demands that institutional, systemic forms of racism be critically acknowledged and foregrounded, along with their banalized effects on everyday livelihoods in the form, for example, of health, economic, and educational disparities, and life expectancy. But other aspects of Lévi-Strauss’s essay on race and history maintain their relevance, such as the notion that most cultures exhibit some form of ethnocentrism, or “the pure and simple repudiation of cultural forms … which are the most removed from those with which we identify” (ibid.: 328). He also pointed out that all-encompassing concepts such as “humanity,” which are frequently deployed by internationalist organizations like UNESCO and the United Nations in their programmatic statements, and which do not distinguish by race or civilization, appeared very recently in our history.We dedicate the first Currents collection of this issue to the Hong Kong protests that began in 2019, and led, at the end of June 2020, to the passage of a new security law by the Chinese central government, which will curtail significantly such activities in the future. From the perspective of the Euro-American left, the 2019 protests in Hong Kong refract global politics through a disturbing lens. On the one hand, a hopeful celebration of democratic principles and the freedoms of expression and assembly seem to defy a global authoritarian trend. On the other hand, the protesters’ nativism seems uncomfortably similar to that of anti-immigrant political forces in pro-Brexit England, pro-Trump America, Le Pen’s France, and Orban’s Hungary. In the ethnic politics of the West, how can one make sense of accusations that Hong Kong protesters are anti-Chinese racists? What can be said to those who see Chinese power as the only alternative to Euro-American hegemony? In this issue, eight anthropologists who live and work in Hong Kong wrestle with the deeply felt political emotions they experienced during the 2019 Hong Kong protests. Andrew B. Kipnis, from the editorial collective, examines the disjuncture between the politics and the lived experiences of one group of immigrants from Mainland China to Hong Kong; Ho Wing Chung and Hung Choi Man describe how the education system and everyday life in Hong Kong generate feelings of hatred for Mainland China among Hong Kong youth; Minhua Ling depicts how recent Chinese immigrants in Hong Kong live separate and discordant lives from long-term Hong Kong residents, and discusses the role of social media systems in exacerbating this separation; Jun Zhang analyzes the legacies of British colonialism in the social and political inequalities of contemporary Hong Kong and the ways in which these legacies are ignored in the rush to blame China for all of Hong Kong’s ills; Ka-ming Wu scrutinizes the links between the political emotions of the protests and the transportation infrastructure of Hong Kong, demonstrating how the experience of infrastructure is never politically or emotionally neutral; David Palmer explores the excesses of racism and violence in the protests and their relation to Cold War-style Western fears of Chinese dominance; and, finally, Pun Ngai critically dissects the tactics and visions of the protesters from the perspective of a labor organizer. These seven perspectives on the protests reveal considerable divergence in the social and political vantage points of the authors. As in the fable of the blind men and the elephant, their descriptions seem to involve very different aspects of a whole, but, unlike the fable, ways in which the constitutive elements might at least partially fit together can also be imagined. As mainland China imposes its “National Security Law” on Hong Kong, the protests may finally come to an end; the people of Hong Kong may become as quiet as Uighurs in Xinjiang. But such a silence makes the academic reflection on these protests all the more crucial.While democracy in the former colonial power, Britain, might be idealized in the context of Hong Kong, the second Currents section reveals how far such political imaginaries are from actuality. It focuses on ethnographic and autoethnographic ramifications of Britain’s exit (Brexit) from the European Union (EU) based on a closely won referendum result in 2016. The outcome has since been converted to the “people’s vote” to push through what have been described as antipeople measures to stop public scrutiny and debate. This included attempts to legislate “Henry VIIIth powers” that would have allowed cabinet ministers to amend laws without a parliamentary vote, the proroguing of parliament to stop ministers conferring, and, subsequently, backroom video and socially distanced conferencing with European and other leaders while public attention is focused on the COVID-19 pandemic.Brexit realities and tribalist politics have had momentous implications for how democracy is imagined, executed and—ironically—challenged as “anti-democratic.” January 31, 2020, was declared Brexit Day, heralding a year-long transition to forge new relationships with the EU among other world regions—“deal or no deal.” In a divided nation, this was a major event for those who applauded Britain’s withdrawal as if they had received independence from oppressive powers. For others, it was a nonevent, or even a disturbing harbinger of British isolationism, undermining the decades-long experiment of a united Europe, with grave implications for the future. The Currents contributors note the (re)interpretation of histories, presents, and futures in navigating “everyday Brexits” (Anderson et al. 2019: 2)—once only an imaginary neologism, now part of ruthless political realities. They consider Brexit certainties and uncertainties as they affect minorities in the UK, as well as the English as they become a minority outside of the UK. Raminder Kaur, from the editorial collective, brings an intersectional lens on Brexit phenomena, while noting the ways in which Brexit resurrects “more of the same” empire-pride and xenophobia. Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan focuses on Brexit-inflected conversations on race, racism, and anti-racism in British higher education with an ethnography of his university in southeast London. Morteza Hashemi highlights how Scottish Shia Muslims mobilized civic engagement and reinterpreted Shia history for strategies of survival in a hostile, Islamophobic environment. Daniel Miller observes a fundamental shift in Irish perceptions of the English, leading to a re-examination of colonial legacies with respect to the former colonial power. Felix Ringel asks what is Brexit(s) as an ethnographic object, while arguing for the need of an anthropology of the future with respect to life in the postindustrial era, based on his fieldwork and experiences in Germany and northeast England.In the article by Sergio Jarillo, Allan Darrah, Carlos Crivelli, Camillus Mkwesipu, Kenneth Kalubaku, Nagia Toyagena, Gumwemwata Okwala, and Justin Gumwemwata, we wrestle with some of the fundamental issues of the discipline in one of anthropology’s primordial locations: the Trobriand Islands. At first glance, the Colloquium is about the specific contents of belief in spirits and their reincarnation among Trobriand Islanders. But the commentaries by Francesca Merlan, Michelle MacCarthy, and Mark Mosko, and the response by the authors of the original article, bring forth a slew of questions. What is at stake in the category of belief? Whose beliefs matter? How are beliefs individual and how are they collective? What is the relation of one belief to another? Of belief to wider social institutions? Of belief to ritual? Of belief to authority? Of belief to power? What sort of methodologies can answer these questions and how do differences in methodological approach relate to anthropological beliefs about belief? Such questions have reverberated in many anthropological settings. They echo in Talal Asad’s (1993) critique of Clifford Geertz’s (1973) definition of religion, where Asad accused Geertz of using a modern Western category, in which the place of “belief” loomed large, to distort our understandings of places and times where belief was unimportant. They are also discernible in the debate between Evelyn S. Rawski and James L. Watson (1988) over whether it was “orthodoxy” or “orthopraxy” that mattered most to the imperial Chinese regime in the conduct of funerals. But one of the earliest places where such questions were addressed was in the Malinowskian corpus on the Trobriand Islands. These questions inform later ethnographies on the Trobriands (Lepani 2012; Mosko 2017; Weiner 1976) and reach a new apex in this issue’s symposium.This issue’s second colloquium is organized by Frédéric Keck around a retranslation of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s 1926 article, “Mentalité primitive et jeu de hasard,” or “Primitive mentality and games of chance,” with the participation of Brittany Birberick, Roberte Hamayon, Keith Hart, Ghassan Hage, and Frédéric Laugrand. We have commissioned a new translation by Catherine Howard, who notes that this particular text offers an opportunity for reflecting on the surplus of translation, on the ways in which superficial similarities that belie semantic differences between French and English help sharpen and expand the discussion of the original work on the psychological, imaginary, and cultural stakes of different forms of gambling. For instance, Howard notes—and Hamayon elaborates on this in her own contribution—that Lévy-Bruhl’s hasard, in French, does not have the dangerous connotations of hazard in English, but veers instead towards chance and unpredictability; the French chance in the original text, for another example, is best translated as luck (Howard, pers. comm., March 31, 2020). Luck was not a concept that Lévy-Bruhl was interested in exploring here. Instead, he focused on the certainty about outcomes brought to gambling in societies where these are informed by ritual practices and mystical beliefs. As Keck points out in his erudite introduction, which situates this essay within Lévy-Bruhl’s oeuvre (and also in relation to French political and intellectual history of the period), by this point in his scholarly career Lévy-Bruhl was more interested in “signs of the future which lead to mystical perceptions of invisible entities” than in the cognitive dimensions that had preoccupied him in his earlier work.In these contexts, the failure to win indexes insufficient ritual preparations before gambling, or mistakes in dream interpretation, and not the absence of skill or luck in engaging in a game of chance. This aspect of Lévy-Bruhl’s essay is highlighted in Hamayon’s contribution to the colloquium, which pushes further the disaggregation of luck from games of chance to stress that luck is more “the art of knowing how to seize the opportunity … to take advantage of gaps of uncertainty,” and hence the result of a kind of skill in shaping future outcomes. This skill is possessed by the professional gambler, the financier, and other figures on which Lévy-Bruhl does not dwell much: his interest lies with “pure gamblers,” so consumed by the passion of the game itself “that they would rather gamble in the face of almost certain loss than not gamble at all.”Keith Hart uses his own experience as a gambler to underscore the point that one only bets “on things [one] knows very well” if one is to make one’s living at it, and addresses the problematic way in which Lévy-Bruhl constructs his argument centering around ideal types. Lévy-Bruhl’s gamblers are animated by either reason or passion, whereas Hart points out that the opposition “collapses in the face of empirical reality,” in which both play a part. Hart reminds us of an essay by Meyer Fortes on “Divination: Religious Premisses, and Logical Techniques,” included in his book on religion, morality, and the person among Tallensi (1987), in which the diviner’s role in managing the relationship between the occult and the patent for his clients is key to the kind of “gambling” performed in divination. Hart also analyzes money as another “great unknown in our lives,” and as such worthy of reflection in relation to gambling. As Lévy-Bruhl himself pointed out in his expansive reflections on games of chance, plenty of bets are made in the process of making money. Keck suggests in his introduction that in some ways Lévy-Bruhl’s characterization of practices in the world of finance as a kind of gambling were harbingers of the collapse of the financial markets in 1929. In his own reflections on this matter, Hart draws a productive distinction between money-makers and money-takers, and focuses on the former as animated by beliefs as strong as those holding a religious faith, where calculation hedges future uncertainty.A future orientation infuses the perspective of Birberick and her interlocutors on the South African game of fafi, where each set of bets by an individual gambler must be seen in the sequencing of “pulls” that make them experience the game as a dynamic progression, even in the face of present losses, and informs an ethical commitment to making appropriate, not-too-low wagers, in order to be perceived as knowledgeable players of the game. Ghassan Hage begins with the “gamble” taken by his Lebanese interlocutors in deciding to emigrate in hopes of a better future, to frame his reflections on the prevalence of gambling among them in the diaspora. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of illusio—“a mode of investing oneself in a social path”—and of the related lusiones, the “odds and chances of success,” which are what is at stake in gambling, Hage suggests that Lebanese migrants engage instead in a form of meta-illusio, for what they invest themselves in is the possibility of a particular path to a better future. In the pursuit of this path, they seek propitious prayers, blessings, and religious charms collectively subsumed under barakat, which ends up making “diasporic success … more of a saint than … a lucky person or a great practical planner.” Haunting Lévy-Bruhl’s essay, and several of the contributions to the colloquium around it—particularly Hamayon’s contribution and the discussion of Fortes in Hart’s piece—is the relationship between divination and gambling, a subject taken head-on by Frédéric Laugrand. Based on his work among indigenous people of the Canadian Arctic and the Philippines, the author finds that there, similar to elsewhere, “science and economy cohabit quite well with mediums … and diviners,” and that gambling and divining, in particular, are different but contiguous practices.Neurophysiological research has shown “anticipation as a normal mental process for understanding events among humans … and nonhumans, such as animals and plants,” and Laugrand points out that science increasingly is taking over areas of prediction that were once the domain of diviners, for instance in epidemiology and meteorology. There are many different ways of analyzing premonitions about the future in the Canadian Arctic, from bodily sensations like ringing ears or twitching eyes, to formal consultations with diviners, and distinctions are drawn between good and bad premonitions. In a similar manner, Ihaloy people in the Philippines, who live in a world plagued by natural disasters, regularly check for signs anticipating good or bad luck, and understand the former to be a gift from pleased ancestors, and the latter as signs of wrath from the gods. But in both settings, gambling is seen as a social activity, not the individual pursuit of wealth that Lévy-Bruhl understood it to be. Winners of Canadian bingo games share their take with others, and Ilahoy subject winning gamblers to rituals or expectations aimed at limiting their wealth. In the end, Laugrand agrees with Mauss’s assessment of Lévy-Bruhl as being “more a philosopher than an ethnologist,” and he, as such, preferred in this essay to analyze “similarities between ethnographic facts … [than] differences … from a single society.”Leading this issue’s research articles is Brittany Birberick’s “Seeing Numbers,” a deeper analysis of the articulation of games of chance—gambling—sociality, economic possibilities, and dream interpretation in inner-city Johannesburg, South Africa. The game of fafi, or omchina, brings together people of Jeppestown on a daily basis in a neighborhood park, to wait for Chinese “runners” who bring around the bags with winning numbers. Introduced by Chinese immigrants who first came to South Africa to work in mines during the nineteenth century, fafi resembles other games of chance elsewhere in the world, where particular dream images are linked to numbers, which are then used for gambling. Among these is the smorfia, practiced in the city of Naples, in Italy, where standard dream images linked to numbers are used to play the daily lottery (see De Sanctis Ricciardone 1987: 122). Like many similar practices (the word, smorfia, derives etymologically from Morpheus, ancient Greek god of dreams), this kind of numerology is historically linked to dream interpretation, and involved manuals written to guide it since ancient times, with important Jewish Kabbalist and Muslim texts among them. But it also produces spaces of sociability and communication, as bettors help each other analyze dreams, and share strategies.Cheryl Mei-ting Schmitz focuses on translation in the midst of a labor dispute at a Chinese firm in Angola. Questions of what can and cannot be said, of politeness and witchcraft loom large. If politeness allows the preservation of relationships amongst indirectly spoken unpleasantries, how can politeness be maintained when the unpleasant reality to be faced is the severing of a relationship? How does discussion of witchcraft become a mode of indirect speech? Where discussion of witchcraft is a mode of indirectness, how can it be politely translated in a context where the very mention of witchcraft accentuates the incommensurability of cosmologies of the different parties? Schmitz wrestles with such questions as she considers the limits of both accurate translation and the social role of the translator in a power-laden confrontation.Mirco Göpfert brings us to the police bureaucracy of Nigeria, to understand the issue of “epistemophilic obsessions.” In the gendarmerie, information is power, or, at least, so it seems. Detectives need to know how their society works to solve crimes. They must understand the secrets of criminals, of the people who interact with them, and thus of almost everyone. But their need to know the secrets of others leads them to keep secrets themselves. They must protect their key informants to keep knowledge flowing, and at times they bluff about knowing secrets that they don’t. But the police obsession with secrecy does not stop with crimes in the neighborhood. The police also need to understand their own bureaucracy, especially their superiors, on whom their career advancement depends. Why do the leaders close their doors and keep their file cabinets locked? What secrets are they hiding? Research in such an environment leads Göpfert to analyze the epistemophilic obsessions of our own profession. Indeed, not only is there a wealth of anthropological studies of societies and enclaves within them where institutional secrecy is prevalent, but there is also the tendency to claim special access to more prosaic forms of secrecy as an index of linguistic and cultural competence in the field (e.g., Piot 1993: 354). What secrets do ethnographers covet? Who is hiding information from us and who must be trusted? What secrets must we keep and when should we bluff about having secrets? And how does demonstrating access to secret knowledge play into our claims to ethnographic authority and expertise?Issues of translation and incongruence return to the fore in Arpita Roy’s article about discordant discourses of nature at a pilgrimage center of temples and hot springs in the Indian town of Bakreswar. There, discourses coexist, intersect, and cause friction about scientific properties of the waters, the religious miracles of their cosmogenesis, and th