HEADS AND TAILS REVISITED

This research report revisits Keith Hart’s work on the mutual implication of token and commodity theories of money, focusing on his classic Malinowski lecture on the coin’s two sides. Hart associates ‘heads’ with political authority and token theories and ‘tails’ with quantitative value, market exchange and commodity theories. Yet, even as he argues for the necessity of a rapprochement between the intellectual approaches delimited by the coin’s two sides, the coin conceit as he elaborates it is unprepared to deal with the quotidian intermixing of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ one encounters in actual rather than theoretical coinage. Starting from the problems posed by actual coins to the apparent clarities of Hart’s coin, this essay argues that on a material, micro-level the relationships between state power and market exchange on the one hand and ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ on the other are rather more contingent in practice than in theory. On this level, actually-existing forms of Western money are only poorly parsed by the ‘sidedness’ of the coin conceit. The a priori divisions between power and quantification, symbols and amounts, as well as their topological mapping onto discretely divided material surfaces freighted in the virtualism of ‘heads’ and ‘tails’ are a poor fit with complex amalgams of numbers, power, states, symbols and exchange we may read off the surfaces of particular coins

Unmade in China : reassembling the ethnic on the Gansu-Tibetan border

This essay articulates an actor-network theory (ANT) inspired approach to the analysis of emergent arrangements of human difference in contemporary northwest China. Drawing inspiration from Law's work on method and Latour's program for reassembling the social, it enacts human difference as a fluid object in which every element is potentially situationally inessential. Moving beyond the focus on 'ethnic' (minzu) categories of much recent work on minority areas of China, it employs an inductive associographic method in order to provisionally disarticulate and reassemble the 'units of common participation' in Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture. Ultimately, it both makes a case for the usefulness of after-ANT modes of description for work on classical (i.e. non-Science, Technology, and Society-derived) anthropological topics and pushes anthropologists of human difference in China and beyond to pay attention to the ways in which the shapes of their tools may affect the shapes of their projects.26 page(s

The Scale of scatter : rethinking social topologies via the anthropology of 'residual' China

After the 'Bamboo Curtain' closed China to foreign social scientists in 1949, anthropologists shifted their attention to those 'residues' of China beyond the control of the People's Republic. In the process, formerly heterodox and out-of-the-way locales such as Taiwan and the New Territories of Hong Kong were made into the exemplars par excellence of Chinese culture. In this paper I argue that the peculiar spatialities of this Cold-War-era anthropology of 'residual China' have potentially generative consequences for a rethinking of the after-actor-network-theory (aANT) focus on social topologies. In particular, these spatialities' simultaneous enactment of the presence and absence of Chineseness evinces parallels with and prompts revisions to the notion of a "fire topology". These revisions in turn suggest the necessity of inventing novel topological models for (more-than-) human realities in order to work against both the creeping naturalization of after-actor-network-theory analytic frames in particular and the routinization of theory more broadly.17 page(s

Tibetan diaspora, mobility and place : 'exiles in their own homeland'

This article elaborates a theoretical framework for making sense of Tibetans in Tibet who live as 'exiles in their own homeland'. Placing questions of mobility at the centre of anthropological approaches to diaspora, it subjects 'the fact of movement' to critical scrutiny. In so doing it calls into question three fundamental assumptions of recent work in both 'new mobilities' and the study of diaspora more broadly: first, that people move and territory does not; second, that 'place(s)' and 'movement(s)' are different sorts of things, and clearly distinguishable; and, third, that movement takes places only in Euclidean space. Beginning by placing recent Tibetan experiences of exile and diaspora in comparative context, it then works through recent deconstructions of the boundary between movement and place, a critique of Western ethno-epistemologies of movement, and Law and Mol's work on social topology as theoretical orientations that might allow us to make sense of mobile homelands and diasporas in situ.22 page(s

Tibet as incidental to Tibetan studies? : views from various margins

12 page(s

Towards a “contrapuntal” anthropology of the global

This essay explores the paradox of how Aihwa Ong’s classic work on Chineseness managed to remain in but not of China. Identifying the central importance of Edward Said’s notion of “contrapuntal analysis” to Ong’s approach to both Chineseness and modernity in general, it suggests the usefulness of this method for an anthropology of the global that seeks to make sense of a world in which American paramountcy is no longer guaranteed

What is this "Chinese" in Overseas Chinese? : sojourn work and the place of China's minority nationalities in extraterritorial Chinese-ness

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the sojourn work that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese diaspora, national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness.24 page(s

Dreamworld, Shambala, Gannan : the Shangrilazation of China's "Little Tibet"

23 page(s

Tibetan peregri-nations : mobility, incommensurable nationalisms and (un)belonging athwart the Himalayas

Putting into context the sentiment expressed by Tibetans on both sides of the Himalayas that true Tibet is located elsewhere, this essay focuses on an under-commented-upon consequence of Tibetan trans-Himalayan mobilities since 1959: the creation of two incommensurable modes of nationalism. One of these is territorial, the other embodied in the form of the Dalai Lama himself. The result of this dual nationalism has not been mutual compatibility and an increase in potential modes of Tibetan belonging, but mutual interference and a broadened scope for unbelonging. As such, the dispersed spatiality of community it enacts is reminiscent not so much of the romantic, organic unity of Herderian modes of (methodological) nationalism as it is of Heine's experiences of manifold unbelonging and contemporary German-Jewish articulations of a 'portable homeland'. Ultimately, to reckon with such originary unbelonging, theories of diaspora and mobility must treat concepts of both home and mobility as mixtures of stability and instability, movement and stasis.17 page(s

Not “multiple ontologies” but ontic capaciousness: Radical alterity after the ontological turn

This essay articulates a framework for understanding radical alterity in the aftermath of the abandonment of strong claims about ontological pluralism in recent works by key figures in anthropology’s Ontological Turn. Arguing that both ontological anthropologists and their critics have overemphasized the ideational at the expense of material practice, it builds on the insights of STS-influenced work on ontology to develop a materialist case for the continued relevance of radical alterity to the anthropological endeavor. In so doing it advocates replacing a crypto-Protestant emphasis on “strange beliefs” with an attention to the materio-cultural precipitates of successful practical action in the world. In service of this goal, it elaborates a notion of “ontic capaciousness” that attends centrally to practice in a single, yet multiple, world in which multiple modes of successful practical engagement with the unknowable really Real result in the working up of disparate relatively durable and incommensurable actionable reals