Instituttseminar: Andrew Lattas

Om foredraget 21. september (på engelsk)

The seminar paper will begin by examining the popularisation of cognitive science models that have taken up ethnography to universalise struggles over time, work and cultural values in contemporary western society. The seminar will analyse why a small remote social group - the Baining - have become a popular curiosity for a western audience concerned with the direction of contemporary social change. It will focus on how internet bloggers sought to reground and re-objectify their own western concerns - their modern truths, values, goals and politics - by immersing these within an overarching picture of the diversity of other societies and their contrasting cultural values, thoughts and practices.

The Baining came to function as a symbolic opposite, an extreme human possibility of a work-obsessed society opposed to play, religion and leisure. Allegedly, they even lacked an interest in hidden realities, mysteries and philosophical-intellectual speculations. Seeking to legitimise their use of this caricature, some bloggers noted the Baining's reputation in anthropology as resistant to the ordinary methods and theories of ethnographers who focused on meanings. Some bloggers mentioned Gregory Bateson's early fieldwork difficulties in the 1920s and his speculation whether the Baining had an explicit “formulable culture. Most bloggers, however, drew on Jane Fajans's summaries of ethnography on the Baining.  

Fajans continues Bateson's de-political understanding of the ethnographic encounter by interpreting ethnographers’ difficulties with the Baining as mainly methodological in origin. More so that Bateson, she ignores the possibility that the Baining have actively sought to make themselves “unstudiable”. For Fajans, the difficulties of ethnographers have emerged from them using outdated models of culture, which identified real culture with elaborate and deep forms of symbolic exegesis rather than everyday mundane life. The latter is supposedly all that some societies like the Baining possess. Many academics have helped popularise Fajans’ model of the Baining as part of a new kind of anthropology of the everyday that is a reaction against the deep cultural models of structuralism and phenomenology.

I will use my own ethnographic data to explore the deep symbolic politics of Baining cultural life and in particular how symbolism involving fertility, procreation and women is used to oppose the colonising processes of: modernity, westernisation, the nation state and predatory ethnic minorities such as the Tolai.

I will play my own video clips in silent mode in the background to illustrate what “the most boring culture in the world looks like” in all its pragmatic splendour.

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