Short contribution on the meaning of geometrical anthropology.Peer reviewe

Green, Sarah Francesca

Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto

| | This post is part of the series My interest in location, which has more recently developed into an interest in geometries, began withearthquakes, both literal and political, in the Greek-Albanian border region of Epirus. In 1992, I was askedto explore residents’ attitudes toward their tectonically unstable landscapes. There are regularearthquakes, land fractures, and landslides in the region, and my task was to find out how rural people wholived off the land dealt with this unstable ground beneath their feet. Geoff King, a geophysicist who waspart of the research project, visited Epirus and told me about mountains bobbing up and down, lakes fillingand emptying, and the seabed ending up blended into the soils on the top of hills (King, Sturdy, andWhitney 1993). Later, goats would seek out those churned places in the hills to get enough salt in their diet.All of this gave me a sense of a literal topological landscape, as opposed to the more metaphoricaltopologies often discussed in the social sciences (see Allen 2011). The skin of the earth was being stretched,twisted, crumpled, folded, cracked, and bent like an old and decaying rubber sheet. Confronted with thesheer scale at which geophysics operates (the Earth’s crust undulating over a period of hundreds ofmillennia), the people of Epirus, who were the focus of my own attention, seemed like two-legged ants,each living for less than an instant and moving around on this sheet with their animals. In fact, theyseemed indifferent to their constantly morphing landscape, which was a problem for me, as I was supposedto be researching their attitudes toward it (see Green 2005, 26–29).These transformations were one thread I was following. But there were others, as this was the early 1990sand a different kind of shape-shifting was going on at the same time. In late 1991, the Albanian communistregime collapsed and the Greek-Albanian border reopened after almost fifty years of tight closure. Thatpolitical earthquake changed the shape of the region overnight, making a previously invisible andimpassable section of it suddenly come into view. These were political topologies at work.Experiencing how Epirots lived with and spoke about all of this gave rise to my long-term interest inborders, both political and physical, and in how shifts in borders can change how people are located in theworld. What I learned in Epirus was that the shape of places changed regularly, and that it mattered to thepeople who inhabited them.Yet the geometry of these issues still eluded me, for I was focusing on the people and their relations withplaces rather than taking the spatial element literally. At the time, I drew on the research of MichaelGeometries — Cultural Anthropology https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1238-geometries1 of 4 13.2.2018 10:41Herzfeld (1986, 1997) to think through the ideological and historical changes that generated shifts in thepolitical relationship between people and places. I also drew on the work of Marilyn Strathern (1992, 1996)to explore how the logic of people’s own social relations might cross-cut the politically imposed logic ofnationality. Working with these ideas made it possible to understand how the Greek-Albanian border madespatial sense in one way (according to the logic of nation), but not another (according to the logic ofkinship).There was more to say, though. I came to understand that the Greek-Albanian border not only contradictedthe spatial logic of social relations between people and place; it also contradicted the previous Ottomanpolitical logic in that region. At that point, geometry entered my work for the first time. I drew on themetaphor of fractal geometry to understand the difference between the political logic of the Ottomanempire as opposed to that of nation-states (Green 2005, 128–58). But I was still thinking metaphoricallyand in terms of representations, not in terms of the performative creation of spatial location. For instance,I argued that the ideologically inflected meaning of “the Balkans” had developed to represent chaos—toxicconditions that repeated themselves infinitely and in the same way at every level, defying both scale andthe logic of a three-dimensional Euclidean world in which shapes could be neatly separated out into lines,squares, circles, and triangles. According to this perspective, borders would never settle down but wouldconstantly morph into something else.More recently, and drawing on Doreen Massey’s (2005) ideas about space and power geometries, itoccurred to me that such geometries (Euclidean as well as fractal) might be worth thinking about not onlyas a metaphor for diverse logics and political ideologies cross-cutting one another, but also in moreperformative and three-dimensionally spatial terms: as the coexistence and creation of overlapping,layered, and perhaps entangled locations in the same space (Green 2015, 2017). Watch this space, as theysay.Allen, John. 2011. “.” Dialogues in Human Geography 1, no. 3: 283–98.Green, Sarah. 2005. Notes from the Balkans: Locating Marginality and Ambiguity on the Greek-Albanian Border. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press._____. 2015. “Making Grey Zones at the European Peripheries.” In Ethnographies of Grey Zones inEastern Europe: Relations, Borders and Invisibilities, edited by Ida Harboe Knudsen and Martin DemantFrederiksen, 173–86. New York: Anthem Press._____. 2017. “Thinking through Proliferations of Geometries, Fractions and Parts.” In RedescribingRelations: Strathernian Conversations on Ethnography, Knowledge and Politics, edited by AshleyLebner, 197–208. New York: Berghahn.Herzfeld, Michael. 1986. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. NewYork: Pella Publishing.Geometries — Cultural Anthropology https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1238-geometries2 of 4 13.2.2018 10:41_____. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge.King, Geoffrey, Derek Sturdy, and John Whitney. 1993. “.” Geological Society ofAmerica Bulletin 105, no. 2: 137–61.Massey, Doreen. 2005. For Space. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. New York:Cambridge University Press._____. 1996. “ .” Journal of the Royal AnthropologicalInstitute 2, no. 3: 517–35.Editor ReviewedPublished OnOctober 24, 2017Cite AsGreen, Sarah. "Geometries." Theorizing the Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology website, October24, 2017. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1238-geometriesConversationThumbnail byCreated ByKatie UlrichShareGeometries — Cultural Anthropology https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1238-geometries3 of 4 13.2.2018 10:41Please to commentGeometries — Cultural Anthropology https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1238-geometries4 of 4 13.2.2018 10:41

Geometries

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/10138/232326/1/geometries.pdf

Geometries

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Helsingin yliopiston digitaalinen arkisto