POST-HUMAN ANTHROPOLOGY

Abstract

This article discusses recent performative ethnographic work in the Goth/Industrial music scene as the band “Blood Jewel”—http://www.myspace.com/bloodjewelband—and how through the medium of cyber space this has led to different kinds of engagements with ethnographic “subjects.” This experience is the context for theorizing the basis and forward trajectory of ethnographic fieldwork, especially with regard to topics such as the study of sexuality and violence which have proved resistant to standard ethnographic strategies. The cultural meanings of sexual and violent representation, challenges to normative sexualities, and the emergence of digital subjectivities and ontologies are then examined in relation to this ethnographic approach. It is concluded that an anthropology still stuck in the problematic of the European Enlightenment must urgently consider the disappearance of its traditional “subjects” as meaningful ethnographic categories of research and work to contribute to the emergence of a post-human anthropology in which the post-Enlightenment “subject” is re-configured as a participant observer in research.

Key Words:

• Ethnography
• sexuality
• violence
• Internet
• performance

I thank the members of Blood Jewel, Carol Siegel, Jonathan Hill, Peter Sigal, and Toma Longinovic for their valuable and thoughtful discussion of this project. Earlier versions of this article were read at the Department of Anthropology of Rice University, the American Society for Ethnohistory meetings at William and Mary College, the University of Wisconsin-Madison for symposia on “Sexuality & Violence” organized by the Sexuality and Violence Research Circle of the Global Studies Institute and the Humanities Center-Mellon Foundation symposium on “What is Human,” the Latin American, Iberian, Caribbean Studies program lecture series. In particular, I thank my co-presenters for the Digital Subjectivities panel at the American Anthropological Association 106th annual meeting in Washington D.C., especially the organizers Jay Hasbrouck and Mike Wesch.

Notes

1. Popular attitudes are reflected in the Wikipedia entry for “safe sex”:

• Safe sex is the practice of sexual activity in a manner that reduces the risk of infection with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Safe sex practices became prominent in the late 1980s as a result of the AIDS epidemic. Promoting safe sex is now a principal aim of sex education. From the viewpoint of society, safe sex can be regarded as a harm reduction strategy. The goal of safer sex is education and risk reduction … . some sex educators recommend that barrier protection be used for all sexual activities which have the potential for disease transmission, such as manual penetration of the anal or vaginal cavities, or oral stimulation of the genitals.

• Sex by yourself, known as autoeroticism, solitary sexual activity is relatively safe. Masturbation, the simple act of stimulating one's own genitalia, is safe so long as contact is not made with other people's discharged bodily fluids. However, some practices, such as self-bondage and autoerotic asphyxia, are made considerably more dangerous by the absence of people who can intervene if something goes wrong. Modern technology does permit some activities, such as “phone sex” and “cybersex”, that allow for partners to engage in sexual activity without being in the same room, eliminating the risks involved with exchanging bodily fluids. (Emphasis added)

• Non-penetrative sex (also known as outercourse and dry sex) is sexual activity without vaginal, anal, and possibly oral penetration, as opposed to intercourse. The terms mutual masturbation and frottage are also used, but with slightly different emphases. NPS and outercourse are rather new terms, which is why such practices are sometimes still called “intercourse.” Abstinence is of course the ultimately safe option.

2. Two in five Internet users visited an adult site in August of 2005, according to tracking by comScore Media Metrix. 87 percent of university students polled have virtual sex mainly using Instant Messenger, webcam, and telephone (“Campus Kiss and Tell” University and College Sex Survey. Released on 14 February 2006. CampusKiss.com. 17 February 2006). According to comScore Media Metrix, Internet users viewed over 15 billion pages of adult content in August 2005, Internet users spent an average of 14.6 minutes per day viewing adult content online, and there were 63.4 million unique visitors to adult websites in December of 2005, reaching 37.2 percent of the Internet audience. By the end of 2004, there were 420 million pages of pornography, and it is believed that the majority of these websites are owned by less than 50 companies. The pornography industry generates $12 billion dollars in annual revenue—larger than the combined annual revenues of ABC, NBC, and CBS. Of that, the Internet pornography industry generates $2.5 billion dollars in annual revenue (Family Safe Media. 10 January 2006. http://www.familysafemedia.com/pornography_statistics).

3. See also the path-breaking work by Dwight Conquergood (1991, 1993) of the Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University on Latino Gangs and the housing projects of Chicago.

4. Live Video http://www.livevideo.com/BloodJewel, Live Journal http://blood-jewel.livejournal.com/, Facebook http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=512277980, Hatebook http://www.hatebook.org/profile.php, Vampire Freaks http://vampirefreaks.com/Kanaima

5. Such a dialogic and performative approach is also suggested by the work done in search of post-colonial ethnographic methods, in particular the work of Johannes Fabian (1990).

6. Christine Hine's Virtual Ethnography (2000) does a valuable job of laying some of the methodological groundwork for this kind of study. However, unlike Hine, who suggests that “virtual” worlds are somehow not “the real thing” (2000: 65), the model here is of off-line and on-line contexts, all of which are of course “real,” even if of differing and changing significance. Historically, Hine's work appeared before social networking sites and many other aspects of on-line worlds had been widely developed.

7. This situation then sets up a direct conflict between the project of cultural relativity and the presence of cultural values we deem non-progressive. For example, in a recent issue of the Anthropology News (March 2008, p.28), such a conflict is evident in a discussion of how anthropologists should react and think about “gender violence” in Papua New Guinea.

8. See the forthcoming volume edited by Peter Sigal and Neil Whitehead deriving from serial meetings at the American Society for Ethnohistory, Duke University and the University of Madison-Wisconsin. Here a range of case studies are used to illustrate the prevalence of this phenomenon and to suggest various critical reading and research strategies that might obviate the problem.

9. Currently airing on the Travel Channel, Living with the Mek—The Adventures of Mark and Olly seems to have moved the ethnographic idiom firmly into the field of entertainment. Mark and Olly, an ex-soldier and journalist, respectively, thus perform as “ethnographers” through their extended residence, mimesis of cultural behavior, and the commitment to “do no harm” to their bemused hosts, the Mek villagers of Western Papua (Irian Jaya) the copy reads: “Explorer Mark Anstice and travel journalist Olly Steeds must make extreme adjustments to spend four months living with the Mek tribe of West Papua, New Guinea, one of the last indigenous groups of farming hunter-gatherers in the world.”

10. This is not an attempt to write a history of that music scene but rather to suggest how my understanding of it (accurate or not) was important in configuring my current ethnographic work.

11. The mass popularity of the fetish scene, originating in large part from the milieu of the disco and nightclub entertainment and the historical persistence of “burlesque” theater, is evidenced not just in the context of the night-life of most major American cities but also in such established contexts as Halloween, where fetishized nurses, teachers, cheer-leaders, cow-boys, cops and construction workers witches form the staple of costume rentals.

12. The full list of different site-types includes Games, Movies, Ringtones, Celebrity, Grade My Prof., Music, Schools, Chat Rooms, Horoscopes, Music Videos, Sports, Groups, Books, Impact, MySpaceIM, Latino, Karaoke, Jobs, News, MySpaceTV, Filmmaker, Mobile, Profile Editor, and Weather. Some of these are simply listings created by MySpace itself but others, as indicated, offer embedded html that provides additional features such as music-players that track plays and downloads, or secure merchandising for both music tracks and band merchandise. Initial attempts to create a two-tier membership with, for example, bands paying for these additional features, were abandoned because users found ways to write their own html codes and customize their own pages.

13. http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=10252272

14. Aperformance given at the Memorial Union University of Wisconsin-Madison featured an extended fetish act by Yompabaan and Konduktor. Audience interviews and reactions, as this was part of a concert organized on the theme of art, war, and violence, were also filmed.

15. The basic rule is that if you post something then it will be used by others. In legal terms there is no obedience to copyright law at all, and notably those who complain that their graphics are being used by others do develop not successful sites. The milieu is one in which ownership of artistic output is continuously questioned as a principle and understood as antithetical to the spirit of artistic freedom. Although the MySpace administration would undoubtedly like to be able to enforce copyright laws, as this would enhance their value as a commercial site, in practice it is only the notion of “obscenity” that leads to punitive sanction (i.e., the erasure of one's account).

16. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1480148837033408167&q=source:009382334566 24143532&hl=en

17. Evasion of the “MySpace Nazis,” as the administration is colloquially termed amongst users, is both a necessary survival tactics but also a demonstration of one's technical abilities and radical, critical credentials. Each time we have something erased or banned this augments our credibility even as it is artistically very frustrating.

18. It is also in this sense that there is particular resonance for this essay in a journal called Identities, because too narrow a focus on issues of identity—critical though that has been to laying out a radical and progressive political agenda for anthropology as it emerges from its colonial origins—makes certain kinds of phenomena inaccessible, and anyway theoretically limits the project of anthropology in a highly artificial way. And I think this is really important given all the virtual worlds people are creating and participating in and about which anthropology has said so little.

19. Carol Siegel (2005) argues that such a deconstruction/reconstruction, territorialization/re-territorialization of sexuality, necessarily entails the dissolution of traditional and conventional gender binarity. As Siegel suggests Goth-Industrial stars like Marilyn Manson detach(ed) gender from biological sex as part of a project of subversion, often in sophisticated and complex ways. See also an overview of Goth fetish performance and its increasing prevalence in Weinstock (2007).

20. The Post-Human web project (described below) is also an experiment in trans-gendering as it is “me” although “she” is a 31-year-old woman.

21. But perhaps there isn't a way to necessarily know what they liked and why? As Kurosawa's Rashomon teaches us, no one can say what another man does, not even that man himself.

22. A good example of this was our release of the music video Poizone-Toxic Fetish http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=4146731. The content is blatantly sexual but also uses imagery of landscape devastation by war and industrial pollution. Images of the fetish use of gas-masks and rubberized clothing then brings these themes together to suggest that erotic aesthetics and sexual responses can also be political statement, as Michel Foucault has taught us, sex is subversive if it leads to a different knowledge of your own body.

23. Rather the male body is always fetishized in motion, as in sport, or as enactors of violence, as in war. The female body thus radically destabilizes such normative views when it mediates violence sexually. For the aesthetic and artistic project of Blood Jewel, this precisely becomes a way to try to provoke and service critical thinking about sex and violence. In turn, the Blood Jewel project contributes to the scholarly project of developing new approaches to interpreting sexuality and violence, as was very much the case with my earlier work on kanaimà sorcery.

24. As Carol Siegel (personal communication) indicates, there is nonetheless a clear presence of male-bodies on display that break with the normative: “… advertising beginning with the infamous Calvin Klein underwear ads and going on to the bruised and battered look of so many male models now, … photography and video for music promotion (like Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor bondage and torture imagery), set piece images of tortured/bound male bodies in film, S/M performance artists like Ron Athey and Bob Flannagan, the crossover work of women creating porn as if they were gay men for consumption by other women… . All of these things feed into the Goth/Industrial/Fetish scenes in San Francisco, New York, and even here in Portland (sometimes known as leather club capital of the US)… . If you want to see tons of pix of beautiful boys in bondage with a decidedly Goth-slant, try a Laurell K. Hamilton fan site, like http://www.angelfire.com/realm/xandi/Shifters.html where mostly women and girls create images of the male protagonists of Hamilton's best-seller novels' heroine's male submissives.”

25. As other Amazonianists have pointed out (Clastres 1987; Mentore 2004), the silence of the native is intolerable even to a liberal progressive anthropological science, no less than the colonial regimes of the past. It is through dialogical engagement that we come to know who is what, and those asked such questions can fully appreciate what may be entailed in supplying the answers, because Foucaldian governmentality proliferates through the naming and categorization of its potential subjects. The other face to this intolerable silence of the other is of course our current enchantment by the idea of torture and the imagination of circumstances under which they must be made to speak.

26. In Sensuous Scholarship (1997) Paul Stoller challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who use the notion of embodiment to critique Eurocentric and phallocentric predispositions in scholarly thought that considers the body primarily as a text that can be read and analyzed. Stoller argues that this attitude is in itself Eurocentric and is particularly inappropriate for anthropologists, who often work in societies in which the notion of text, and textual interpretation, is foreign. Instead, Stoller argues for the importance of understanding the “sensuous epistemologies” of many non-Western societies so that we can better understand the societies themselves and what their epistemologies have to teach us about “human experience” in general, or, one might add, the fallacy of a generalized human experience at all.

27. As Viveiros de Castro (1992) has argued, being and becoming, rather in the manner of Sartrean being in itself and for others, are thus separate ontological propositions and represent the outcome of time and choice rather than unchanging metaphysical structures of existence. Pierre Clastres (1987) made a similar argument concerning the political historical emergence of society and state in South America and the limits to power in “human” scale society; here it was Hegelian necessity rather than Kantian ontology that was at stake.

28. To paraphrase Bruce Dakowski on Malinowski; “… the very word “magic” seems to recall a world of mysterious and unexpected possibility, partly because we hope to find in it the quintessence of primitive man's longings and wisdom; … . and that whatever that is, it is worth knowing and stirs up the forces of hidden desires and dreams and reveals a lingering hope in miraculous possibility, a dormant belief in man's mysterious possibilities …” (Off the Verandah, dir. Andre Singer, 1985). Embedded in the structures of consumerism Western desire is necessarily incomplete and envious of the “primitive” because the objects of desire are constituted through a cultural frame of permanent psychological “lack” and economic “scarcity.”

29. The humanity of animals in turn receives full expression as we acknowledge not just their political and legal status but also their perverse and non-reproductive sexualities, or “biological exuberance” as it is termed in a recent volume that documents trans-gendering, pederasty, and homosexuality amongst animals (Bagemihl 1999).

30. A chaplain and chronicler to Charles V, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, had written that the Indians were “…homunculi in whom hardly a vestige of humanity remains.. [theywere] like pigs with their eyes always fixed on the ground…” (quoted in Nash 2005: 46), and as a result fit only for conquest and dominion by the Spanish Crown. On behalf of the Dominican order, members of which had lodged complaints against these sentiments, Bartolomé de Las Casas offered a lengthy rebuttal to all of Sepúlveda's writings. In fact, the debate was never face to face and Sepúlveda offered a twelve-point written rebuttal to Las Casas who in turn replied to these rebuttals. Here the matter rested, although such tensions were ever-present in Spanish colonial policy.

31.a. Such universalizing of the category of “human” then paradoxically leads to a depersonalization and deculturalization of the individual subject. This is very evident, for example, from the way in which the United Nations discourse on human rights is actually applied in refugee camps (Finnstrom 2008: 240; Malikki 1995: 378).

31.b. In the sense that the Great Killing of the twentieth century, from the trenches of the Somme, to the death camps of Poland and the churches of Rwanda, has not only led us to forlornly wonder where “common humanity” disappeared to in these desperate moments but also to have created in us a despair at our own capacity for in-humanity. Perhaps then there is actually a positive need for us to pass into post-humanity because the discourse of the human paradoxically led to only mass-death on an historically unprecedented scale. However, a cynical retreat into anti-humanist nihilism, as has been popularly advocated by John Gray in his 2002 best-seller Straw Dogs is also possible.

32. Post-Human's blog contains text that has been revised for this publication, suggesting that the theoretical arguments are no-less successful, or at least do not disrupt the artistic message, among Post-Human's fans. Perhaps the best back-comment received to this blog was simply, “Wow, I'm gobsmacked!”