Culture, Content, and the Enclosure of Human Being

References (25)

1. The city of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, is typically celebrated as the mythic site of Brazil's African soul. It thus appears in nationalist thought as the proper place for defining tradition and locating blackness in "racial democracy," or the purportedly redemptive claim to Portuguese, African, and Native American hybridity essential to Brazilian modernity. The state government of Bahia has sought to reinforce this contested narrative through a reconstruction of the Pelourinho, Salvador's colonial-era downtown, which served as the capital of its Brazilian territories and was the South Atlantic's most important port until 1763.
2. See John Collins, " 'But What If I Should Need to Defecate in Your Neighborhood, Madame?' Empire, Redemption and the 'Tradition of the Oppressed' in a Brazilian Historical Center," Cultural Anthropology 23 (2008): 279 -328.
3. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), on the overlaps between architecture, and especially domestic architecture, and conceptions of personhood and political subjectivity in post- Enlightenment thought.
4. For a discussion of the complex calculations that go into people with AIDS' approaches to personhood and care, see João Biehl, Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
5. One especially troubling aspect of this tendency involves the delineation of parks or nature reserves in the name of a "common good," and often with IDB or World Bank sponsorship, by means of the appropriation of untitled land that under international human rights law belongs instead to indigenous peoples or Maroons. Richard Price's Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), is a complex ethnographic account of these troubling contradictions. See also Jake Kosek's Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), which argues against a dichotomous conception of nature and culture while following racially marked local residents' contested uses of and claims to common lands now administered as a possession of a U.S. national state.
6. The World Bank's Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development Web page illustrates culture's configuration as an economic resource. See World Bank, "Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Tourism," web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/TOPICS/ EXTURBANDEVELOPMENT/EXTCHD/0,,contentMDK:20204614~menuPK:430438 ~pagePK:210058~piPK:210062~theSitePK:430430,00.html (accessed April 11, 2010).
7. In "Does Multiculturalism Menace? Governance, Cultural Rights, and the Politics of Identity in Guatemala," Journal of Latin American Anthropology 2 (2002): 34 -61, Charles Hale argues that a fetishization of cultural diversity helps veil more basic exclusions fomented, at least in part, through such celebrations. For a discussion of how the plays of interiority and exteriority I attach here to neoliberal multiculturalism function in terms of race, see John Collins, "Recent Approaches in English to Brazilian Racial Ideologies: Ambiguity, Research Methods, and Semiotic Ideologies," Comparative Studies in Society and History 49 (2007): 997 -1009.
8. Richard Handler, "Who Owns the Past? History, Cultural Property, and the Logic of Possessive Individualism," in The Politics of Culture, ed. Brett Williams (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 63 -74 ; and Richard Handler, "On Having a Culture: Nationalism and the Preservation of Quebec's Patrimoine," in Objects and Others: Essays in Museums and Material Culture, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 192 -217. Rosemary Coombe provides an influential theorization of legal struggles around cultural property in The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
9. UNESCO, World Heritage Information Kit (Paris: UNESCO, 2008), 7.
10. Ana Lucia Meira deploys Pierre Bourdieu's concept of distinction in relation to cultural heritage in O passado no futuro da cidade: Políticas públicas e participaçâo dos cidadâos na preservaçâo do patrimonio cultural de Porto Alegre (The Past in the Future of the City: Public Policies and Citizens' Participation in the Preservation of the Cultural Patrimony of Porto Alegre) (Porto Alegre, Brazil: Editora da Universidade Federal de Rio Grande do Sul, 2004).
11. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
12. UNESCO, Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (Paris: UNESCO, 2003), 2.
13. UNESCO, "What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?"
14. Lisa Breglia, Monumental Ambivalence: The Politics of Heritage (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 6.
15. See, for example, Thomas Abercrombie's Pathways of Memory and Power: Ethnography and History among an Andean People (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), which explores the alignment of past and present through ritual libation.
16. Classical analyses of gift economies and their roles in establishing social solidarity around forms of reciprocity in relation to inalienable goods include Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), originally published as "Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l'échange dans les sociétés archaïques," ("The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies") Année sociologique (1923 -24); and Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge, 1922).
17. This insight into patrimony's ability to straddle gift-and commodity-based economic systems, and thus its role in revealing their imbrication as opposed to some essential separation, is developed by Elizabeth Ferry in Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). In response to the ways in which workers render cooperative property both alienable and inalienable, thus making it a commodity and an enduring resource, Ferry argues that heritage permits people to boomerang between a marketplace and the preservation of collective property and associated identities. See also Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
18. Property's and subjectivity's mutual influence is emphasized in this essay's epigraph from Marilyn Strathern, Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press, 1999), 199.
19. Alexander Bauer, "New Ways of Thinking about Cultural Property: A Critical Appraisal of the Antiquities Trade Debates," Fordham International Law Journal 31 (2008): 689 -724.
20. Michael Brown, Who Owns Native Culture? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 242.
21. Rosa Congost's "Property Rights and Historical Analysis: What Rights? What History?" Past and Present 183 (2004): 73 -106, is an overview of approaches to property in European historical traditions that pushes beyond a view of ownership as possession and takes into account the multiplicity of possible relations contained within, and hence rights to, property.
22. Ferry, Not Ours Alone, 20.
23. Such an illusion of content or intrinsic value is related to the market and its abstractions. Therefore, like commodity fetishism in general, it plays a basic role in ideology.
24. This is not to argue that attention to the ways that labor girds value in the packaging of entities dubbed culture or nature is not critical to understanding the manners in which states oversee everyday life. On the contrary, my analysis rests on the suspicion that the bureaucratic management of the quotidian is itself a form of labor. However, in this short work, rather than exploring how the management of culture is a form of work or, conversely, working to unseat a labor theory of value, I seek to begin to conceptualize space for subsequent, more detailed analyses of the entanglements of nature, culture, labor, and land. I do this by concentrating on the specific techniques employed by states that direct bureaucratic labor at the alienation of aspects of everyday life not typically construed as work but as "natural" backdrops to the social. For valuable insights into this process, see especially Genese Sodikoff, "The Low-Wage Conservationist: Biodiversity and the Perversities of Value in Madagascar," American Anthropologist 111 (2009): 443 -55; and Fernando Coronil, "Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism's Nature," Public Culture 12 (2000): 351 -74.
25. Jacques Derrida, Ethics, Institutions, and the Right to Philosophy, trans. Peter Trifonas (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002).