Anthropology's Seen and Unseen

In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”: Spiritualism. Based on the explosive growth in seances in Europe and North America, Spiritualism conjured a world beyond the grave where the dead continued to learn and improve themselves while enjoying each’s ghostly society. When the dead deigned to visit the living, it was typically to help and to advise: “this haunting could teach the living how to build a more perfect society in the here-and-now” (Forbes 2016: 445). So, for Wallace, this really was a new direction for the field–an inquiry into the unseen and, simultaneously, into a future that awaited humanity, both in the afterlife and in the perfection of human life on this planet.

 

To give away the ending, Wallace was not successful in establishing his “new branch of anthropology.” Huxley wasn’t buying it, and other anthropological colleagues eventually turned against him as well. After wavering a bit through his own field investigations of London seances, E.B. Tylor weighed in against Wallace, relegating Spiritualism to a “survival” from more “primitive” times. But Spiritualism held some fascination for Tylor as well, even as he tried to distance anthropology from it. In the end, though, what would become “anthropology” as we know it would only engage with Spiritualism as a symptom of something else, in the same way that magic, religion, and ritual would yield to an understanding of deeper truths. Or is there something more? As Pels and others have argued, this episode reveals something more about the way anthropology regards its object.

 

On one hand, the two couldn’t seem more different. On the other, anthropology and Spiritualism–both middle-class endeavors arising in the context of 19th century empire, suggest a variety of homologies. The most salient, perhaps, is the idea of culture itself. Yes, “culture” surrounds us in countless material forms–but at the same time, it does not. A behavior, an object–to be sure, these are “cultural,” but where is that “culture”? As Delaplace points out, “Describing “culture” should also include an actual account of its “wholeness”: the invisible thread, as it were, which bundles up these cultural components into a totality” (2019: 37). In other words, “culture” is the results of the anthropologist’s revelation, the end results of an analytical process that renders an unseen world of connections and isomorphisms visible to the anthropologist’s audience. Spiritualism would make the same claims–the technologies of the seance were precisely those revealing a concealed world: spirit rapping, table levitation, automatic writing, spirit photography.

 

And, like Spiritualism, anthropology also involves concealment. During the 19th century, the Spiritualist medium utilized a number of contrivances–dimly lit rooms, screens, capacious tablecloths. Whether or not you believed in Spiritualism, these were the preconditions for the spiritual knowledge. For anthropology, the trick of culture was the revelation of relevant behavior and the concealing of what was considered extraneous. In photography, for example, “the epistemic virtue of ethnographic photography entailed the ability to hide certain things” (Delaplace 2019: 39). Franz Boas and George Hunt would work to (playfully) conceal the evidence of settler colonials from their portraits of indigenous life. And Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead would both conceal the impact of evangelical Christianity on people at their fieldsites, all with the ultimate goal of representing “authenticity” in native life.

 

This kind of concealment, of course, is no longer part of anthropology. Or is it? When we look back at the prevalence of reflexivity in late twentieth century anthropology, we might be led to believe that anthropology had gone all-in on revelation. Anthropologists located themselves amidst intersectionality and intersubjectivity, lifting the curtain and turning on the lights, as it were. There were still concealments, however. Or, to be more exact, the revelations of reflexivity facilitated other dimensions of the unseen. Consider, for example, the dominance of a handful of elite departments in producing the vast majority of academic anthropologists, and the embeddedness of those universities in structures of US empire (Speakman et al 2018). Or, alternately, the similarities between anthropological work and extractivist industries commodifying indigenous knowledge and practices for a rapacious capitalism transforming all life into exchange value. These undercurrents are concealed, as the precondition, perhaps, for the revelation of other anthropological “truths”.

 

There is, therefore, a dynamic in anthropology that we can trace from the 19th century–one that extends between the seen, the unseen, revelation, concealment and, as Taussig had written, “the skilled revelation of skilled concealment” (Taussig 2003: 273). To be sure, this configuration changes over the course of anthropology's history. But it’s the imbrication of anthropology in this dynamic that betrays anthropology’s embeddedness in capitalism and western imperialism as a whole for, as an economic system, capitalism depends on concealment for its strength: the alienation of labor, the destruction of the global south and, ultimately, the untimely end of human life on this planet. All of these must be concealed for the revelation of value and the novelty of production.

 

Marx, of course, realized this at the fore, and his Capital contains references to the very same Spiritualist practices that perturbed Wallace and Tylor in the 1870s. A table is “just” some wood joined together, he explains:

But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will. (Marx 1990: 163-164)

This was, of course, an allusion to the “table lifting” practices in seances. The commodity itself issues from the dialectic of revelation and concealment, and the 19th century’s human sciences soon craft their own “dancing tables” discerning culture, society and the psyche through the very same transformational calculus. Yet even in this critical revelation, we would be wise to think about the concealments that enable this insight.

Ghostly Encounters on Google: Spirit Photography, Reverse Image Search and Urban Critique in Baltimore

In 1866, Alfred Russell Wallace proclaimed a “new branch of anthropology” premised on the Spiritualist movement that was then exploding in popularity in England. For Wallace, that anthropology would revolve around a growing body of highly disputed evidence of life after death. While séances were one major site for the evidence of spirits, other technologies were also important to the new religion, including spirit photography, where ghostly figures or more amorphous, ectoplasmic emanations would appear in photographs next to (living) humans sitting for their portraits. Although these photographs brought solace to those missing their loved ones, they were also windows onto a future utopia; after all, the afterlife was a place where humans would continue to grow and develop into more perfect beings, beings who had come back to help guide their still living compatriots. While these photos appear to us today to be clumsy double exposures, they suggest—along with their twentieth-century counterparts in Dadaist montage—a source of social critique. And, indeed, Spiritualism was readily embraced by social progressives of the day for just these reasons. Interpellating other images onto a photograph both breaks the illusion of objectivity in realist photography which is grounded in the indexicality of the photograph (first discussed by Charles Saunders Peirce) (Peirce 1894: 4). In so doing, spirit photography anticipates the challenges digitization, manipulation and algorithmically generated images raise to the indexical truth-value of the image.1 In this essay, I extend Wallace’s “new anthropology” to urban applications of reverse image search, where search engines apply a combination of indexed images, neural networks and machine learning in order to identify the same or similar images across huge databases. Although mostly utilized for locating copyright infringement, uncovering catfishing or identifying locations, reverse image search also suggests a series of alternative “spirits” to photos of urban spaces. In Baltimore, where my research has concentrated on issues of urban gentrification and abandonment, reverse image searches of Baltimore’s spaces reveal other possibilities—alternatives to urban divestment. For example, a search based on a photo of a boarded-up block of stores in West Baltimore generates images of bustling mercantile districts in cities all over the world. Each of these images, in turn, is an argument against the neoliberal algebra that has laid waste to cities and compounded poverty and segregation. By overlaying images of Baltimore streets and facades with these ghosts of other urban possibilities, I attempt to summon an anthropology of critical future possibilities. In so doing, I identify another role for digital technologies: one that conjures absent possibilities into urban presents through regimes of Big Data that would otherwise be used for surveillance. The end of the essay finds me revisiting Wallace’s “new branch of anthropology,” not to revive his call for the study of ghosts, but for our work to include spirits of the future in our critiques of present inequality.
Just published in Semiotic Review

Uncanny Anthropology

 

(The Somerset onion, from the Pitt Rivers Museum)

In his lyrical essay, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (1982), Marshall Berman defines modernism broadly, as “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world” (6).  By that he includes art, poetry, but also political economy and philosophy; as an urban people, we are a moderns engaged in this daily struggle of sense-making and homeliness.  How we live in the world is a question that exercises artists, revolutionaries, cosplayers: in short, all of us suspended in a world not of our own choosing. 

But that modernist impulse is not without its push-back.  “Making ourselves at home” means finding the reality distinctly “un-homely,” or, as Freud defined it in his 1919 essay, as “uncanny” (unheimlich): that is, the hidden, mysterious and unexplained that invades the feeling of familiar, expected comfort.  The two ideas, as Freud explained, are related: “homeliness” has “unhomeliness” concealed within it like a family secret.  It is the unheimlich that is at the core of Benjamin’s bourgeois interior.  In his “The Exterior as Interieur,” Tom Gunning (2003: 107-108) goes back to an incident in Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” when the narrator, while bed-ridden and convalescing, is treated to a “magic lantern” show projected onto the walls of his bedroom:

"But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because the mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room, thanks to which, save for the torture of going to bed, it had become quite endurable.  Now I no longer recognized it, and felt uneasy in it, as in a room in some hotel or chalet, in a place where I had just arrived by train for the first time . . ." 

Of course, the “bourgeois interior” marks an uneasy truce with an outside world, one that continuously intrudes upon the “homeliness” of the inside, rendering the most familiar sights of bed and bedroom suddenly strange.

There can be no better synecdoche for the modern condition.  If we read Marx’s celebrated quote, “All that is solid melts into air; all that is holy is profaned,” as a process, then it is one where we again and again take refuge in comforting truths, solid relationships and familiar routines, only to have these shift beneath us through, of course, perturbations in political economy, but also through the emergence of new discourse, new identities and transforming (and transformative) relationships with things and the world.   In other words, our world constantly confronts us with the uncanny: the comforting familiar that betrays our trust and acts in ways contrary to our experiences.

Anthropology has not always been concerned with the uncanny.  During the twentieth century, much of the power and popularity of anthropology was generated in the frisson of the exotic and familiar—a trope that still recurs in popular media’s occasional re-deployment of “primitive” tropes.  Of course, as many critics have pointed out, each evocation of the exotic led to the reification of culture and to the spurious identification of culture and place: in other words, the very opposite of the uncanny itself.

As James Clifford (1988: 120) writes,

“The ‘primitive’ societies of the planet were increasingly available as aesthetic, cosmological, and scientific resources.  These possibilities drew on something that more than older Orientalism; they required modern ethnography.  The postwar context was structured by a basically ironic experience of culture.  For every local custom or truth there was always an exotic alternative, a possible juxtaposition or incongruity.”   

Despite the violence wielded against the Other through widespread deployment of the “savage slot,” this was still the heyday of cultural relativism and, with it, the power of a cultural critique that denied the universality of narrowly conceived Western rationalism.  Unfortunately, the exotic could also readily appropriated into colonial and racist scaffoldings, only now cultural difference could be part of a process of reification that derogated the Other to the peripheries of development. 

With the critique of this exoticization, and the turn towards public anthropology, an anthropology premised on the juxtaposition of the familiar and the exotic seems like a relic from the past—albeit one resurrected at key moments to justify this or that imperialist enterprise.  Instead, we look to powerful structures and practices that buttress global inequality—once the exotic Other, now the marginalized global. 

We might see this turn as the end of enchantment and the triumph of Weber’s iron cage of rationality: “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world’” (Weber 1946: 155).  If by “disenchantment,” we might include dismantling the various myths of savage and primitive that have been utilize to justify powerful inequality, then good riddance!  However, it hasn’t been that easy.  If some forms of enchantment have been “dispelled,” then others have rushed to take their place: mystifications of power wrought by media spectacles, by commodity fetishism, and by the systematically distorted discourse of the state. 

But there are other ways enchantment intrudes upon the anthropological consciousness.  To go back to one, well-known example.  In his work on behalf of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, and as proof of his theories of “survivals,” E.B. Tylor was continuously on the hunt for proof of magical superstition among England’s peasant classes.  Various magical implements (witch’s bottles, talismans, etc.) made their way to the museum through his network of ethnographers and folklorists.  In particular, one, old pub in Somerset yielded a rich trove of apotropaic artifacts that worked into Tylor’s typological schema perfectly, among them a bunch of dried onions with names written on the skins and pins stuck through.  Workmen found them concealed inside the chimney. 

Tylor then sent his dried onions to John Lubbock to examine, and then Lubbock claims to have sent them directly back.  But Tylor never received them.  After his inquiries at the post office yielded no onions, Tylor decided to consult with ghosts through a séance—a popular, middle-class pastime in England since the Fox sisters had introduced “spirit-rapping” to England in the 1850s.  Through the medium—one that he had come across during his anthropological researches into Spiritualism—Tylor contacted the spirit of a Native American, who told him that he would soon be reunited with the onions (Wingfield).  He never was.

It’s an extraordinary story, and an uncanny story.  Uncanny, of course, because of the séance, and the Native American spirit—Tylor may have believed what he’d witnessed.  But also uncanny because of the onions themselves.  Why did they disappear?  Where did they go?  Why was the post office unable to find them?  Things are, after all, uncanny when their familiarity shifts to strangeness: when the world’s regular workings open up to reveal a deep disquietude.  When the world, in other words, works in other ways than what we expect.

Even though there are many, many examples of the first sort of uncanny (that of the séance), it’s worth looking in more detail at the second.  When do things turn uncanny?  Freud suggested several scenarios: 1) inanimate objects animating; 2) the ‘doubling’ of objects; 3) the repetition of phenomena.  Each of these suggests uncanniness for a post-industrial age where biology becomes an engineered machine, and where the machine becomes fused in a cyborg assemblage.  In other words, the uncanny as a rooted experience of being modern. 

Systems of production, of power, of knowledge; structures of social life and education; discourses of identity, relatedness, nationality: all of these shift into uncanny topologies that reveal deep, contradictory strangeness.  E.B. Tylor’s experience was much the same: the same England that represented (for Tylor) the epitome of rationality and science could still kick up enough uncanny mystery to take him into a séance for answers. 

It is, therefore, anthropology that offers us a perspective on an uncanny world, one that acknowledges the inherent strangeness of our lives with reference to other peoples all over the world who are likewise at the mercy of uncanniness amidst their own home-making.  Similarly, the study of anthropology leads us inextricably to the uncanny; for example, following a commodity chain from its production under exploitative conditions in another country through to its incineration in a polluted neighborhood closer to home is doubly uncanny.  Just as Freud comes across a double of himself in a mirror reflection on a train and finds it instantly unlikeable, confrontations with the double of our commodity lives in their reflection through others turns even these familiar things into sinister reflections.

References:

Berman, Marshall (1982).  All That is Solid Melts Into Air.  NY: Penguin.

Clifford, James (1988).  The Predicament of Culture.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

Gunning, Tom (2003).  “The Exterior as Interieur.”  Boundary 2 30(1): 105-130.

Weber, Max (1946).  From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. 

Wingfield, Chris (n.d.). “Tylor’s Onion.” England: the Other Within [online]. Retrieved from

http://england.prm.ox.ac.uk/englishness-tylors-onion.html on 12/9/2011