Vital infrastructures

Previous articleNext article FreeEditors' IntroductionVital infrastructuresDeborah Durham, Mariane C. Ferme, and Luiz CostaDeborah DurhamVisiting Fellow, Kellogg Institute, University of Notre Dame Search for more articles by this author , Mariane C. FermeUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author , and Luiz CostaUniversidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro Search for more articles by this author Visiting Fellow, Kellogg Institute, University of Notre DameUniversity of California, BerkeleyUniversidade Federal do Rio de JaneiroCorrections to this articleErratumPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAs readers of Hau, we had always appreciated the rich variety of material the journal included. As editors, we're becoming even more attuned to its richness, and the complexities of pulling together such various formats and possibly even forms. Hau includes research articles submitted individually by authors from around the world, familiar to those in many anthropological journals, and subjected to a rigorous double-blind review process. We hope to expand the space devoted to individually submitted manuscripts in the future. We also include work that is not subject to editing or revision—such as the reprints of materials that are now hard to find, translations, distinguished lectures, and colloquia. We publish short reflections on current issues—the "shortcuts" sections, debates between two positions, and symposia on recently published books. Our hallmark, however, has always been the carefully curated and multiply reviewed special sections and special issues on provocative topics that are currently being debated or revisited in anthropology. We want to reiterate our call in the last issue for proposals for new and exciting formats from our readership. As readers, we drank deeply of these rich drafts; as editors, we are discovering the breadth of their sources, the many different technical requirements for their "brewing," and the pleasure of watching them mature into our (now for a limited time) open-access publication.In the third issue of volume 8 (2018), Hau published the first half of a themed collection on "The Turn to Life." The collection was wide-ranging in scope, from philosophical contemplations on the meaning of life itself (Pina-Cabral, Schrempp, Jackson) to ethnographic and personal explorations of "vitality" or the life-force as something that waxes and wanes (Singh), to asking how the anthropological canard of "everyday life" occurs at the conjunction of the social and the subjective-subjunctive. A rich subsection (introduced by Retsikas and Marsden, with articles by Anderson, Pickering, Schneider, Retsikas, Achilli, and Chappatte) explored the ways in which people in specific ethnographic studies seek to enhance their lives through "alternative modes of prosperity." It turns out that by suggesting a focus on "life itself"—a turn to life—our authors were able to raise new questions, bring new perspectives to old ones, and see new things in the lives of people around the world.We carry that turn to life forward in this issue, with a set of articles solicited in 2018 by Giovanni da Col. Two of the pieces examine how what might, in other framings, be considered infrastructure are also forms of life itself, and how transformations of that infrastructural world ("development") also transforms forms of life—the life of a river, and the life of roads. Andrew Johnson describes how, as sources of power become more distant for fishermen on the Mekong River—including upstream hydropower dams and emigrant spouses sending remittances—the powerful river beings that had inhabited its waters become more "spectral," their potency shifting into a less proximate dimension of being. Reminiscent of Ben Okri's novel The famished road (1992), in which a road built at the site of a river continues to be haunted by riverine spirits, including those of prematurely deceased "spirit children" who affect the prospects of those seeking wealth and livelihoods along the route, Matthäus Rest and Alessandro Rippa analyze the ways in which roads are perceived as subjects acting powerfully upon the lives of people they reach and connect. In Pakistan, for example, the Karakoram highway is held responsible for enriching the material lives of people, but also of destroying much of their traditional lives and subjecting them to increased state control. Rest and Rippa do not suggest that the road itself is a living being, so much as that its potency grows—a term associated with "life itself"—out of the interconnections among people who give birth to it and who effectively enliven it. Drawing on the work of Tim Ingold, and traveling roads from Nepal to those of the Austrian Alps, these authors challenge us to recognize the animacy of roads in their forms of becoming and their multiple entanglements with life and lives around them.Neena Mahadev and Michael Puett start not with life, but with death. Mahadev, in her article on Buddhism and Christianity in Sri Lanka, begins with the thirty thousand deaths there in the 2004 tsunami, the suspected murder of a monk, and the suspicions that the dead may have deserved to die because of past misdeeds or the failure to embrace the miracles of the new religion. Death in both Christianity and Buddhism is, however, only a moment toward rebirth, an interruption in persistent life, one shaped by an intergenerational past, and a hoped-for better future. Grace, Mahadev argues, is a vitalistic manifestation that animates the being of "born-again" Christians as they free themselves from intergenerational and personal sin, and seek prosperous lives (and afterlives) free from suffering; karma, by contrast, acts through suffering, and suffering must be embraced in order to find eventual release from desire for things (i.e., prosperity in the conventional sense). Both forms of life, she notes, turn in the current politico-economic context on reckoning with sins as well as blessings, in past and present—a life lived in ledgers, as it were—and seek sudden redemption from suffering, or to use suffering to attain release. Second-century China, as discussed by Puett, was awash with the dead as well, or rather with the pervasive presence of ghosts, who fed on sacrifices, and whose hunger for more caused them to pester (or even kill) the living, thus bringing about more sacrifices so that "death (yin) was overcoming life (yang)." Puett uses this threat to life to critically assess classic anthropological concerns with ritual and sacrifice, looking at ancient China, where humans were "a mess" of diverse energies and souls, hard to tease out or manage, especially as they became disorganized and released at death. But the rituals that attempted to organize the different vital energies had dangers: successful, the organized energies risked being too orderly, too hierarchical, and, in the end, sterile, and therefore not vital at all. Puett suggests that sacrifice, as the core practice in managing disparate and potentially disorderly vital energies, should be seen not, as it so often has been, as a way for society to triumph over death, but instead as a form of empowerment in which unruly power is appropriated through a subjunctive and ultimately always unsuccessful work of organization. But rejecting ritual also fails to bring together the discordance between a well-ordered world and messy lives: too much order kills life. In both Puett's and Mahadev's articles, death becomes a matter of life.Carrying forward, from Hau 8 (3), an investigation into "vitality," Knut Christian Myhre and Fernando Santos-Granero write about "life itself" and its distributions, transitions, and forms of constitution of various kinds of beings. Myhre presents the many complex forms in which moo, life, emerges from movements, processes, and spatial relationships among Chagga-speaking people in Tanzania. Drawing on Wittgenstein's language games, Myhre considers life to be the changeable product of "inflection points" where life-force is brought into play in transformations between its force and life itself. Myhre traces the seemingly innumerable ways in which moo appears in language, to show how life appears in the inflections of vitality, reproduction, and life-force across a range of beings, places, and things. "Life," he writes, "is an effect of conversions and conveyances of horu that occur between persons, houses, animals, and crops to afford the becoming and constitute the being of other persons, houses, animals, and crops." Neither life nor life-force (vitality) is a thing in itself, but each emerges in changeable form as it is engaged in transitions and transformations; it is the play of these "transfers and transformations" that allows for changeable life forms. Similar perhaps to the Chinese case discussed by Puett, here too, fixed, changeless form or formality would be a kind of death, and certainly not life. Building on his pioneering study of native Amazonian "control over the mystical means of reproduction" as a form of power (Santos-Granero 1986), and on his more recent study of historical forms of native South American slavery and servitude in Vital enemies (Santos-Granero 2009), Fernando Santos-Granero points out that various language groups in Amazonia also distinguish between vitality as life-force, and vitality as "vital principle," although they do so differently and relate the two differently. Consistently, though, both may be held in greater or lesser quantity, are subject to scarcity, and may be found in, and transmitted between, not only those things considered "living" in Western thought, but also "inanimate" objects and immortal beings. Because these are two different things—life-force and vitality—there are living beings lacking vitality, and the vitally forceful without life, although many contain fluctuating amounts of each attribute. By contrast with the Chagga case, however, and because vitality and life-force are limited and scarce, the relationships between vital beings and transfers between them are marked by hostility and aggression, with possibilities for diplomacy, leaving some weakened and some strengthened, in a fierce competition among people, animals, places, objects, and the world in general. Santos-Granero's Amerindian system, centered on scarcity, is the inversion of Georges Bataille's "general economy" of life, a system based on the observation that the surplus natural energy produced in the world and beyond (beginning with the sun), its excess, must be "lost without profit; it must be spent … gloriously or catastrophically" ([1967] 1991: 21). Santos-Granero describes this situation as a political economy of life, contrasting this approach with those that see the transfers in terms of "exchanges," ecological balance, or circulations, as Bataille, in dialogue with Mauss, conceived. And because vitality is not only scarce, but potentially present in much of the nonhuman world, from minerals to plants and animals, as well as the well-being of people, the extractive economy brought to the Amazon by Westerners fits only too well within the political economy of predation.This issue's research articles come from a set of mostly younger scholars, whose topics focus on questions of knowledge and power, authority and value, the everyday and the religious, and where and how ethnography happens. This is the basic stuff of anthropological studies, but as happens with the best of anthropology, new ethnography forces us to rethink the concepts and relationships, and to probe what is at stake in doing so. Most baldly—and boldly—we find this challenge in the article by Tomás Bartoletti, in which he asks why we use concepts from the European Enlightenment to understand ancient Greece, relying on "ethnophilological epistemic" objectifications drawn from both Greek texts and early explorer and colonial documents. Instead, he reexamines ancient Greek practice—divination in particular—through key concepts in Andean ritual praxis. Looking at the practice of divination in ancient Greece through a reconstructed understanding of colonial-era Andean divination—w'aka—constitutes a veritable ethnographic theorizing in which analytics can be developed from elsewhere than in canonical social scientific intellectual genealogies. Bartoletti finds that his approach brings to light ideas about a "cosmopraxis of cure" that operates at a juncture of nature, the human, and the supernatural or metahuman; weaving back and forth between ancient Greece and Andean studies, he offers a different perspective on the ways in which nature, human, and the divine are brought together, while also proposing new approaches to the comparative method.Daniel Birchok's article focuses on Teungku Sum, a young Acehnese teacher in an Islamic boarding school, who is in search of his predestined spouse. The ethnographic case is the occasion for asking how Islam in Aceh confounds two ethical dilemmas. These dilemmas—that of the teacher and that of the anthropologist—hinge on how both bring seemingly opposing frames into relation with each other. Apparently disjunct fields like the hereafter and the immediate, destiny and seeking, reflection and urgency are juxtaposed in unstable yet compelling ways, which inform an everyday life in which the secular and the religious are intertwined. Teungku Sum brings together and pulls apart the promise of this world and the promise of the next; Birchok brings together and also pulls apart questions of living an "Islamic everyday" in which living ethically means juggling different temporalities and, through them, a heterogeneous reflexivity for Teungku Sum.What do you do when, having devoted much of your scholarship to exploring the creation and nature of value, you are asked to think about things without value? Michael Cepek takes on this challenge in a way that enriches his (and our own) understandings of value and of the Cofán people in Amazonian Ecuador. Along the way, he also shows the surprising places in which theoretical work can be done. Adding to recent rehabilitations of Pierre Clastres's work in Amazonian anthropology, he is drawn to the notion of "powerless power," a form of resistance to the concentration of power in the state form—and to state intrusions in indigenous life—which suggests to Cepek the possibility of an analogous "valueless value," created by nonhuman action, and which hence does not express the labor of the Cofán people. Valueless value is embodied in the shaman, initiated by a host of foreign and dangerous nonhuman agents, despised for his violence and moral ambivalence, but whose abilities nonetheless provide the conditions for the tranquil existence that the Cofán strive to create through their own human endeavors. Cepek's analysis resonates with Terence Turner's study of the "fearful symmetry" of the jaguar for the Kayapó (Hau 7[2]), which conjugates beauty and ferocity, power and antisociality. It is no accident that the Cofán shaman is linked to the lonely jaguar, while nonshamans are linked to the gregarious woolly monkeys—apex predator and prototypical prey. The paradox that Cepek's article makes explicit is how the former can be a guarantee for the latter.Stefan Binder examines the atheist movement in southern India, focusing on how members of the Miracle Exposure Program attempt to rebalance the value of miracles and magic through staged performances. While others have focused on how atheists debunk miracles performed by babas as sleight-of-hand, like the magic tricks performed by conjurers, to discredit religious belief, Binder draws our attention to the performed lessons about authority, belief, and the location of modernity. The staged performances draw heavily on a pedagogical form, including both lecture and demonstration, but add a regular pattern of question-and-answers, in which the audience is interpellated, much as in a classroom students are by their teacher. The roles are then reversed, and the audience questions the performer. The goal here is to create a questioning mindset, one that locates power with the individual and not institutions of the modern state, such as those of formal education. At the same time, while the program suggests that the babas "conceal" what they know and use hidden knowledge as a form of power, atheist leaders enact a process of revelation that effectively performs their own authoritative knowledge. This leads some audience members—now informed by an epistemology of suspicion and questioning, and a recognition that the teachers have authoritative knowledge in reserve, which is the result of that very performance—to demand that performers reveal the sources of their knowledgeIn the opening seminar of his Écrits, on Edgar Allan Poe's "The purloined letter," Jacques Lacan famously argued that "a letter always arrives at its destination."1 In Poe's story, the compromising, multiply stolen letter defied all but Dupin, with his keen observational and analytical powers, by being hidden for months in plain sight over the mantelpiece in the thieving minister's living room. Ultimately, Dupin subtracts it from the minister, replacing it with a counterfeit note of his own, and returns it to "the important personage" who would have been compromised by the note. Lacan's analysis of this story becomes the occasion to make key observations about language, intersubjectivity, communication, and psychoanalytic methods. Possession of the letter—he notes—is more important than its contents. Why else, he asks (anachronistically, to our postepistolary sensibilities), would a lover insist on the return of love letters after the end of a relationship, when their original function has long been fulfilled? "The sender … receives from the receiver his own message in reverse form. Thus it is that what the 'purloined letter' … means is that a letter always arrives at its destination" (also see Roudinesco and Plon 2006).Lacan's analysis of the vicissitudes of a purloined letter offers a counterpoint to Raminder Kaur's account of the circuitous routes of a "carefully worded" emailed letter whose sensitive subject matter—potential human rights and environmental regulation violations in the construction of a nuclear power plant in India—also raises issues about visibility and secreting on a different scale. Kaur uses the multiple digital locations of this letter as an instance of what Luciano Floridi calls "onlife," or "the new experience of a hyperconnected reality within which it is no longer sensible to ask whether one may be online or offline." At the intersection of online and offline worlds, texts move, enfolding and unfolding through different fora, highlighting relationships, histories, and projects, and sometimes reshaping conversations. Engaging the now-common idea of a multisited ethnography, but in favor instead of a multisituational approach, Kaur revisits the Manchester School's views on the method—a focus on events and situations that highlight tensions and conflicts that usually are latent in the social work that is usually held as an of this approach is article of a social situation in modern in In her own Kaur at the situations that and across and space the emailed letter by a of people from and to and submitted to the also the of the letter in the in to which readers in online and in its as it was by and as it the to a of into the nuclear power to Poe's Lacan's letter not as something by its or as a material but as it becomes and in a of differently histories, and While Kaur is to the people brought together by the of this the of her approach is her focus on the situations in which her would like to draw the attention of our readers to in the of the as in last issue's note. The of Hau is responsible for the we a scientific with Hau the two have the of the and in Hau social are of both Hau and Hau We would like to to whose was in the of our last issue this and we ask that people who at some in the past, been asked to be a of the or to work with Hau in their is it should be at all. The on by in of a social situation in modern Manchester University for the published in and in The famished in and de in and the ritual of in South in Vital and the Amerindian political economy of life. University of in Previous articleNext article by of on of the for The for rights no articles this of

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