Imaginary Ethnographies

Literature, Culture, and Subjectivity

Gabriele Schwab

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231530804
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Through readings of iconic figures such as the cannibal, the child, the alien, and the posthuman, Gabriele Schwab analyzes literary explorations at the boundaries of the human. Treating literature as a dynamic medium that "writes culture"—one that makes the abstract particular and local, and situates us within the world—Schwab pioneers a compelling approach to reading literary texts as "anthropologies of the future" that challenge habitual productions of meaning and knowledge.

Schwab's study draws on anthropology, philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis to trace literature's profound impact on the cultural imaginary. Following a new interpretation of Derrida's and Lévi-Strauss's famous controversy over the indigenous Nambikwara, Schwab explores the vicissitudes of "traveling literature" through novels and films that fashion a cross-cultural imaginary. She also examines the intricate links between colonialism, cannibalism, melancholia, the fate of disenfranchised children under the forces of globalization, and the intertwinement of property and personhood in the neoliberal imaginary. Schwab concludes with an exploration of discourses on the posthuman, using Samuel Beckett's "The Lost Ones" and its depiction of a future lived under the conditions of minimal life. Drawing on a wide range of theories, Schwab engages the productive intersections between literary studies and anthropology, underscoring the power of literature to shape culture, subjectivity, and life.

Part I:

Writing, Desire, and Transference

1 Another Writing Lesson:

Lévi-Strauss, Derrida, and the Chief of the Nambikwara

What else, indeed, have I learned from the masters who taught me, the philosophers I have read, the societies I have visited and even from that science which is the pride of the West, apart from a few scraps of wisdom which, when laid end to end, coincide with the meditation of the Sage at the foot of the tree?¹

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques

In Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss includes a chapter entitled “A Writing Lesson” in which he reflects upon the emergence of writing in the hitherto oral culture of the Nambikwara, an Indian tribe in the Amazon rain forest. This piece has become a cornerstone of Derrida’s theory of writing and his arguments about epistemological, linguistic, and metaphysical phonologism and logocentrism. In part 2 of Of Grammatology, Derrida dedicates a whole chapter to a scrupulous reading of “A Writing Lesson” in which he targets Lévi-Strauss’s libertarian ideology of ethnocentric assimilation/exclusion. In particular, he faults him on the grounds of “an ethnocentrism thinking itself as anti-ethnocentrism, an ethnocentrism in the consciousness of a liberating progressivism.”² It is well known that in response to Derrida’s critique, Levi-Strauss wrote a letter in which he points out that Derrida has read him with the “delicacy of a bear.”³ Interestingly, Levi-Strauss targets Derrida’s misrecognition of the aesthetic dimension of his discourse on the Nambikwara, namely his particular use of philosophy in a style comparable to that of painters or musicians. This charge is all the more interesting because the aesthetic quality of writing and the question whether the aesthetic is intrinsic or extrinsic to writing is at the very heart of the controversy Derrida opens with Levi-Strauss. And it is in the question of the aesthetic that I will anchor my own argument.

Derrida addresses the problem of aesthetic value in the context of the Nambikwara word for writing. Lévi-Strauss had drawn attention to the fact that the Nambikwara called the act of writing iekariukedjutu, a word that literally translates as “drawing lines.” He concludes from this choice of word that writing, for the Nambikwara, had primarily an aesthetic signification. Derrida, in response, criticizes Lévi-Strauss for presuming “that one can isolate aesthetic value”⁴ and, more important, for implying that in writing aesthetic value is extrinsic.

It is precisely the question of the aesthetic that interests me here. While I fully agree with Derrida’s insistence on seeing the aesthetic as an intrinsic value of writing that cannot be isolated, I would like to give the debate a different spin by exploring the role the aesthetic plays as an instance of intercultural transference. I use “transference” in the psychoanalytic sense of an unconscious displacement of affects or ideas. Transference occurs whenever unconscious desires, fantasies, or patterns of being and relating are enacted in an interpersonal or intercultural encounter, including the indirect encounters between literary or artistic objects and their recipients. It emerges as a largely unconscious operation designed to bridge, close, fill, or deny the inevitable gaps in knowing another person or another culture, and to manage the affects such gaps bring forth. Transference therefore relies on imaginary constructions that reduce or transform otherness by giving it a familiar shape. Such constructions may range from highly creative and empathic apprehensions of the other to projective identification, and to foreclosure or paranoid rejection of difference. The imaginary fashioning of others, including cultural others, according to one’s own frame of reference and organization of affect may thus reduce anxieties that emerge in the face of otherness more generally. But often such imaginary operations entail projections of fear, hostile impulses, or even illicit desires and come therefore at the high price of distortion and misrecognition, not only of the other but also of oneself and one’s own role in the encounter.

In intercultural encounters more specifically, transference is stimulated by the mutual unfamiliarity with the other’s cultural codes and rules of communicative behavior as well as the other’s culture of emotions. Transference is, in fact, the very process that grounds what we have come to call the cultural imaginary or the cultural unconscious. The gaps in cultural competence and knowledge and the indeterminacy of performative interactions function analogously to what Freud envisioned as the “empty screen” in the psychoanalytic situation that facilitates projection. We know, of course, that neither in interpersonal nor in intercultural encounters we will ever find a truly “empty screen.” We encounter rather a nebulous or blurred screen replete with gaps and hieroglyphic encodings of unfamiliar signs. Strangers to each other, the protagonists try to read these unfamiliar signs, each according to their own cultural codes, in an attempt to fill those gaps with projections based on their own personal and cultural knowledge. The ensuing projective dynamic can be understood as a transference both because it activates interiorized patterns of cultural contact that have become habitual or unconscious, and because it inevitably entails an imaginary element. The role of the imaginary is, of course, highly ambivalent in that it may facilitate access to the other, or foreclose it by ignoring, denying, or resisting difference. There is also a conscious or unconscious struggle for power at work around the question of which culture will ultimately prevail in providing the framework and values of the interaction.

As “A Writing Lesson” illustrates, fieldwork situations are intensely cathected by the psychic energies of both the anthropologist and the indigenous people and therefore constitute hotbeds of intercultural transference. Let me briefly mention what Lévi-Strauss highlights as the “extraordinary incident” that turned into the writing lesson. The scenes that immediately precede and follow the writing lesson are, in fact, a stunning, highly self-ironical travesty in which the anthropologist exposes himself as a culturally illiterate dupe among the alphabetically illiterate indigenous tribe. Lévi-Strauss’s hilarious report on his expedition into the rain forest with his indigenous Utiarity friends borders on slapstick. The anthropologist had arranged this enterprise to meet and receive information about the Tarundé, who are, like the Utiarity, a subgroup of the Nambikwara. Lévi-Strauss’s choice of a highly self-ironical comic tone stems from a retrospective working through of the intense affects that accompanied his initial experience. His narration in fact barely conceals his strong fear during the event that, at times, borders on paranoia.

The story begins when Lévi-Strauss virtually coerces the chief of the Utiarity to assist him in this expedition to the Tarundé, despite the fact that the two tribal groups had been living in a rather precarious balance. Reluctantly, the chief finally complies after limiting the expedition to four oxen for carrying the presents. Immediately after their departure on the journey, which Lévi-Strauss retrospectively calls a “grotesque interlude,”⁵ his Brazilian companion notices the absence of women and children. “In travel books, such circumstances mean that an attack is imminent,”⁶ writes Lévi-Strauss, thus exhibiting his cultural illiteracy in his utter reliance on the extrinsic literary knowledge of travel books, that is, his own culture’s imaginary construction of indigenous cultures and encounters with the New World. Lévi-Strauss continues the trip in utter apprehension; yet as soon as they catch up with the rest of the group he is forced to acknowledge that, nourished by imaginary tales found in travel narratives rather than by actual experiences with the Nambikwara, his fears were groundless. It is, in fact, fear that induces the anthropologist to relinquish his actual experience of the other culture in favor of a projection drawn from his own cultural imaginary. Continuing the expedition, the Indians lose their way, fail to provide food, and generate widespread discontent with the chief, whom they hold responsible for complying with the anthropologist’s request. Moreover, at the appointed meeting place, it becomes evident to Lévi-Strauss that the chief had coerced the Tarundé to come against their will.

Aware of the adventurous situation,⁷ Lévi-Strauss proposes the very gift exchange that generates the writing lesson. For this purpose, he had brought pencils and writing pads as gifts. Knowing that the Nambikwara had not developed alphabetic writing technologies, he chooses as his first gift to the tribe a stack of paper and pencils, encouraging the people to write. At first they did not use the items, but one day, to his delight, he sees them fill their pages with minute wavy lines, careful imitations, if not abstractions, of the linear sequence of signs they knew from the anthropologist’s own notations. In retrospect, Lévi-Strauss reads this event as the “advent of writing” among the oral tribe. In a sense, he inscribes the “prehistory” of writing within a teleological model of progress when he sets out to play this trick with his indigenous objects of study. It is, after all, designed to demonstrate his superior authority as an owner of what for the tribe is a new technology, namely alphabetic writing.

The actual writing lesson culminates in Lévi-Strauss’s transactions with the Utiarity chief. In the process of the gift exchange, the chief asks the anthropologist for a writing pad and uses it dramatically to change his role as prime native informant. Henceforth whenever Lévi-Strauss asks him for information, the chief, in response, takes his writing pad and begins to write. With a polite smile, he then hands Lévi-Strauss a sheet of paper filled with carefully drawn and perfectly regular wavy lines. Lévi-Strauss interprets this exchange as the effect of a hierarchical distribution of the power derived from the possession of writing. The chief, he argues, understands this power and uses it to gain authority over his tribe:

No doubt he [the chief] was the only one who had grasped the purpose of writing. So he asked me for a writing pad, and when we both had one, and were working together, if I asked for information on a given point, he did not supply it verbally but drew wavy lines on his paper and presented them to me, as if I could read his reply. He was half taken in by his own make-believe; each time he completed a line, he examined it anxiously as if expecting the meaning to leap from the page, and the same look of disappointment came over his face. But he never admitted this, and there was a tacit understanding between us to the effect that his unintelligible scribbling had a meaning which I pretended to decipher; his verbal commentary followed almost at once, relieving me of the need to ask for explanations.

As soon as he had got the company together, he took from a basket a piece of paper covered with wavy lines and made a show of reading it, pretending to hesitate as he checked on it the list of objects I was to give in exchange of the presents offered me.⁸

Lévi-Strauss reads the chief’s simulation of writing as an attempt to gain authority only with respect to his own tribe. He assumes that the chief recognizes writing as an instrument of power and leads his people to believe he shares the anthropologist’s secret knowledge of writing. Lévi-Strauss sees himself, in turn, establishing a secret complicity with the chief. In front of the tribe, he openly affirms the latter’s writing competence, while, in fact, both of them tacitly acknowledge to each other the chief’s mere pretense. Lévi-Strauss further assumes that, in this hierarchical distribution of writing competence, he himself gains power over the chief. The latter’s successful performance in front of his tribe depends, after all, upon the “unspoken agreement”: the anthropologist’s willingness to play along in the game and refrain from outing the chief as an imposter.

I would like to challenge some of Lévi-Strauss’s assumptions about the emergence of writing. My own reading foregrounds the problem of the aesthetic and its creative use as a mode of communication that relies on indirections, detours, performative speech acts, and irony. It is the aesthetic dimension of the chief’s performative speech act, I argue, that allows him to make a political intervention that unhinges the smooth operation of the cultural imaginary in the encounter between the Old World and the New World. As I mentioned earlier, Lévi-Strauss introduces the aesthetic signification of the Nambikwara’s writing practice in relation to the word they use for the act of writing, iekariukedjutu, a word that means “drawing lines.”⁹ Lévi-Strauss infers from this word choice that writing for the Nambikwara has a predominately aesthetic signification. Derrida, in turn, takes issue with this assumption, insisting rightly that the aesthetic quality is intrinsic to writing and not extrinsic, as Lévi-Strauss seems to assume. Thus taking the aesthetic value of writing as a given, Derrida mentions the aesthetic aspect of the chief’s speech act only in passing, without according it much importance. However, in order to draw out the political implications of the chief’s performative speech act we need to closely scrutinize a particularly imaginative use of the aesthetic as it relates to cultural practices of the exchange of gifts and information.

In the context of the chief’s exchange with the anthropologist, the aesthetic unfolds mainly in the performative dimension of the transaction, that is, in the chief’s simulation of knowledge and tacit agreement with the anthropologist to conceal the simulation. I consider this performative simulation to play a crucial role in understanding what Derrida calls the aesthetic category.¹⁰ It is the bilateral effect of the encounter’s performativity that both Lévi-Strauss and Derrida miss in the “writing lesson.” While Lévi-Strauss’s observation that the chief plays a trick on his tribe doubtlessly obtains, he remains oblivious of an entirely different trick being played by the chief with the anthropologist as his target. The chief’s mock simulation of writing is a performative action that operates differently for his double audience. For his tribe he may well pretend that he exchanges written information with the anthropologist, but to the anthropologist he also makes a metastatement about the intercultural exchange that is taking place right in front of everybody’s eyes. Taken at face value, the chief’s act of writing performs a highly ironic mimicry. At a more indirect level, however, it can also be read as a comment about the gift exchange, and particularly the “gift of writing” to members of an oral culture. Thus the metacommunication is carried out within the framework of a highly artful and performative play involving both the tribe and the anthropologist.

It is on the basis of this very metacommunication—not addressed by Lévi-Strauss or by Derrida—that the chief carries out a crucial element of colonial politics. As Lévi-Strauss notices, the chief mimes the practice of writing as an instrument of power. At the same time, however, he indirectly uses that very power against the anthropologist, thus subverting the latter’s claim to superiority. His act of offering information to Lévi-Strauss in (undecipherable) writing plays with the very fact that the anthropologist’s gift of writing has given the chief the power to offer information while at the same time withholding it. The very irony implied in this exchange challenges the anthropologist’s assumed claim to superiority.

Moreover, since he stages the simulation of writing as a performance for a double audience, one could argue that, rather than marking the “advent of writing,” the “writing lesson” constitutes an act of performative communication that uses familiar aesthetic devices such as irony, pastiche, and metaphoric indirection. The aesthetic is thus displayed in the form of a rudimentary artistic, if not literary, function in the chief’s text. While the latter is, strictly speaking, not a literary text, we must agree with Derrida that the chief’s scribbles undoubtedly constitute a use of writing in which the aesthetic is intrinsic. We thus witness the chief as the master of a highly playful performance that uses metaphor, pastiche, and irony to direct an artful ruse against the anthropologist, who tacitly assumes that the sheer imbalance between written and oral cultures puts him in a superior position of power.

Lévi-Strauss’s view that the “writing lesson” demonstrates the “advent of writing” among the Indian tribe falls, as Derrida has rightly pointed out, within a history of ethnocentric classification that relegates the Nambikwara to a prehistoric culture. Yet if we read the episode against the grain of Lévi-Strauss’s evaluation, we may learn a very different lesson that highlights the ruses of an adaptive mind capable of using “writing” as a tool of imaginary inscriptions into the cultural unconscious. Curiously, Derrida, in his critique of Lévi-Strauss, did not pay attention to a highly conspicuous detail that gives the whole episode an ironic turn, namely, the prime role of the gift exchange, which provides the context for the “writing lesson.” If we recall that Lévi-Strauss had urged the chief to immediately proceed to the gift exchange in order to ease a tense situation, the chief’s performative irony in his simulation of writing can hardly be overlooked. Lévi-Strauss, after all, opens the exchange by presenting the “gift of writing” to the tribe’s alleged oral culture. In exchange, he expects the chief to serve as his native informant. But what does the chief give him in exchange? He returns the anthropologist’s gift, albeit in the form of an undecipherable simulation of writing that could be seen, at the same time, as a simulation of the anthropologist’s gift. He returns an equivalent of what he received in the sense that the anthropologist’s distribution of paper and pencils was, of course, not really a “gift of writing” but a ruse that allowed him to use the tribe for an anthropological experiment. In this sense, the gift could be considered as unusable, if not as given in bad faith. In response, the chief performs an exchange in which his simulation of writing dissimulates what, knowingly or unknowingly, appears as a travesty of the anthropologist’s offer. Given that an anthropologist’s “gift of writing” to an oral culture operates within the framework of anthropology as a colo...