Papers by Andrew Brandel
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024
The relationship between anthropology and literature has attracted renewed theoretical energy in ... more The relationship between anthropology and literature has attracted renewed theoretical energy in recent years (Brandel 2020; Debaene 2014; Fassin 2014; Reed 2018; Wulff 2016), developing and deepening connections with, for example, anthropological theories of art (Reed 2011), religion (Furani 2012), subjectivity (Olszewska 2015), and ethics (Bush 2017), as well as with allied fields and traditions, including postcolonial theory (Sadana 2012), Bourdieuan sociology (Dalsgård 2021), media theory (Rosen 2022), and ordinary language philosophy (Brandel 2023). Among the most fruitful trends in current research has been a revitalized emphasis on the possibilities for collaboration between writers and anthropologists, which has generated critical debate on the ethical and political limits of conventional methodologies (Schielke & Shehata 2021). The following set of conversations reflect and refract these trends in different ways, while proposing further openings for future work, particularly around questions of translation, creativity, care, and particularity. Each of these dialogues took place between anthropologists and writers with long-standing relationships, as members of collaborative research teams, co-authors, companions, mentors, and fieldwork interlocutors. Their differences in form reflect their range of commitments and approaches to the study of creative language practices. Participants were provided with an initial set of orienting questions and provocations, including about what brought the groups together, about the basis for the comparisons they draw between their work, and a reflection on whom they write for and why. They were edited and assembled with the help of one of the editors, Adam Reed.
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Open Philosophy, 2023
The impetus for this special issue comes less from conventional debates in philosophical aestheti... more The impetus for this special issue comes less from conventional debates in philosophical aesthetics itself and instead from one area of recent work on ethics. More specifically, our turn to aesthetics has been inspired by a rich conversation that has emerged in recent years between anthropology and philosophy on the idea and importance of the ordinary. Oftentimes, the ordinary continues "to be treated as a residual category of routine and repetition punctuated by the disruptions of the event." 1 Many similarly continue to think of ethics as principally concerned with rules and their infringement, as a domain constituted by judgements made some distance from the everyday. But this new body of work has powerfully questioned these assumptions. Veena Das explains that ordinary ethics by contrast examines "What is it that blocks our ability to see the everyday and hence to imagine the ethical as inhering in the quotidian rather than standing out and announcing its presence though dramatic enactments of moral breakdown or heroic achievement." 2 In this sense, she writes, it "allows us also to think of the unethical as growing within the forms of life that people inhabitit is, thus, not a matter of eliciting opinions about what behavior is considered ethical or unethical, or of cataloguing cultural practices on which we can bring judgment from an objective, distant position but rather of seeing how forms of life grow particular dispositions." 3 As these debates continue to develop, we began to see a further need for thinking about the possibility of ordinary aesthetics, a field which though intimately tied up with ethics, merits its own inquiry. Lest we be misunderstood, we do not mean to suggest that ordinary aesthetics moves us into some distinct or rarefied arena of human life (i.e. away from ethics). As Wittgenstein famously writes, "aesthetics and ethics are one." 4 In the Lecture on Aesthetics, he elaborates further that "in order to get clear about aesthetic words, you have to describe ways of living. We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgements like 'this is beautiful,' but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgements, we don't find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity." 5 What gives life to aesthetic concepts then is their embeddedness within human forms of life. It is part of the texture of the everyday, in poetry and painting for sure, but also farming, caring for a friend, and watching serials. We see ordinary aesthetics therefore as picking up and taking forward several threads that have been identified by research in ethics and posing new questions. But we can specify this connection still further. In describing her work over many years with the family of a woman she calls Sita, Das speaks, for instance, about numerous moments of small talk in which a family grudge would appear and then quickly disappear. The tensions between relatives, however, never drew Sita into open fights. "There were many stories of resentments that were woven into the texture of these relations
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Anthropology and Humanism, 2023
This introduction orients the reader to the experiments with thinking inter-disciplinarily in thi... more This introduction orients the reader to the experiments with thinking inter-disciplinarily in this special section of Anthropology and Humanism. A long history of shared conversation between science fiction and anthropology has both been shadowed by colonialism and offered promising resources for remaking the world. We invited anthropologists, film critics, and literary theorists into conversation without assuming in advance to know what constitutes a genre like science fiction. Instead, we focus on how science fiction emerges in diverse contexts. Science fiction gives us pleasure; it has insurgent qualities which are not yet captured. Our appreciation of it grows from its engagement with the ordinary and the quotidian. It may engage time in ways other than the past-present-future, making us realize the impossibilities we have internalized and naturalized in our account of things. Ultimately, the collective realization of the authors in this section is that science fictionality is a fugitive element in the world. We need it for fabulation, to generate new ways of telling stories to forge new impossibilities. [science fiction; anthropology of time; anthropology and literature; the ordinary; fabulation] Anthropology between the Past and the Future Johannes Fabian (1983/2014) famously alerted anthropologists to the way conventional uses of time as history located "all living societies … on a temporal slope-some upstream, others downstream." In anthropological discourse, Fabian argued, variegated and ultimately "muddled" uses of time "naturalized
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Sophia, 2023
How is meaning conceptualized within a language in terms of capacities and potentials of words an... more How is meaning conceptualized within a language in terms of capacities and potentials of words and sentences? Analyzing words within the sentence as event-makers in Sanskrit and as creating new possibilities and of divining events in Chinese, this paper argues that writing commentaries, making translations, reciting texts and transcribing them, belong to a family of activities that we normally do with language. Thus, movement of every element of language from one place to another whether within a word, a character, a sentence, a text or between two languages is not something added from the outside, it is internal to the experience of language. We ask what bearing might such an insight have on dominant theories of translation and the untranslatable in contemporary theorizing that has been framed primarily in terms of the history of Europe's understanding of itself.
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Anthropology and Humanism, 2023
The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the fil... more The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I read the texts against the grain of its public reception by critics and scholars for whom it offers an obvious critique of Germany's contemporary susceptibility to the allure of charismatic fascism. I argue that it is this obviousness itself that comes under pressure through the two texts: if critics worry that satirizing Hitler even for the sake of such a critique will normalize memory of the Holocaust, it is the ease with which even critics accept the central science fictional device-Hitler's inexplicable return to contemporary Berlin decades after his deaththat demands critical attention. Reading a film or a novel's reception anthropologically, in this paper, I make a case for an investigation into what is taken to be obvious and what it is that blocks such an inquiry. [popular culture; Holocaust; parody; public memory; alternative history] Parsing the Trivial, Obvious, Normal, and Ordinary Timur Verme's novel Er ist wieder da (2012) opens in the voice of a befuddled Hitler coming to terms with his surroundings and the apparent collapse of the Reich while he narrates recognizing elements in the city that surrounds him. Something was absolutely unusual. I found myself evidently still in Berlin. … I remembered the city being very dusty-or else field-grey, with considerable mountains of rubble and damage. But there was nothing of the sort before me now. The rubble had vanished, or at least had been removed, the streets cleaned. Instead, there stood along the edges of the streets numerous, even uncountable colorful wagons that were probably automobiles, but they were small, and seemingly so advanced in their design the Messerschmitt plant must have had a leading role in their manufacture. 1 (Vermes 2012, 13-14) The rhythm of Hitler's words is frenetic though their tone is self-assured, a pattern presumed by many to have been modeled on the verbosity of Mein
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Ethnos, 2019
Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by... more Anthropology has troubled longstanding assumptions about experiences of catastrophic violence, by revealing the limits of trauma theory’s insistence on the cathartic value of public expressions of pain. Ethnography has revealed how the suffering inflicted by such events becomes stitched into the fabric of everyday life. In this paper, we take this insight further by exploring the different genres through which experiences of violence are shared with future generations. If much attention has been paid to the narrative forms that traumatic plots take from the perspective of adults, our work is motivated by a fidelity to the voice of the child, and the ways in which they piece a world together from the debris of social life that they find around them. We are interested in exploring what this piecing together of the world might reveal in terms of the embedding of memories of violence in the textures of everyday life.
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Current Anthropology, 2020
This article examines Berlin's ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the te... more This article examines Berlin's ascendance to the status of a global city and in particular the tethering of this discourse to the city's attraction for institutions of world literature. Drawing on fieldwork between 2011 and 2017, it offers a new, critical vantage on the multiple trajectories that migrants follow into and through Berlin, as well as how these paths collide. Training ethnographic attention on one important site in which these crossings occur-a literary workshop in a gentrified borough of the former Eastreveals long-standing assumptions about the social lives of texts and urban relationships, in which ephemeral forms are understood to be degraded or weak. Mobilizing instead a poetic language of prosody allows us to see how different kinds of circulations are stitched together in the making of everyday life.
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Oxford Encyclopedia of Anthropology, 2019
Literature is often understood to be one of anthropology's most recurrent and provocative compani... more Literature is often understood to be one of anthropology's most recurrent and provocative companions in thought. The relationship between the two has taken a number of different and variously interrelated forms. Perhaps the most familiar of these is the theorization of the anthropologist's status as a writer; this work tends to take its cue from certain strands of postmodernism, and invokes literary techniques as tools through which to address concerns around representation and the evocation of lived experience. A second important, if often overlooked, area of research involves the study of literary practices including reading, writing, performing, sharing and listening, whether by means of ethnographic fieldwork or anthropological modes of textual analysis. Finally, there are the myriad relationships that anthropologists have maintained with particular literary figures or texts, and that have proven essential to their thinking and to their lives. During the past century, literature has proven to be one of anthropology's most enduring companions in thought. Systematic attempts to think across the various versions and implications of this relationship have been undertaken with greater frequency. In one of the best cited examples, Vincent Debaene (2010) catalogues some of the many terms that have been used to describe the intimacy of their connection, particularly in Paris during the middle of the last century-terms like exchange, circulation, and permeability. But rather than assume "anthropology" and "literature" are ready-made categories entering into various kinds of encounters, Debaene calls for a greater attention to the ordinary uses of each word in specific contexts of entanglement. Unsurprisingly, the presence of "literature" in anthropology occupies not only diverse terrain, but also tends to arise at critical junctures in reflection on the scope of the discipline. Of course, this is true of "anthropology" in literature too-many have pointed to the fieldwork practices of great writers like Rimbaud and Pushkin for example (Bensa and Pouillon 2012; Viart 2016). Considered attention to particular uses, however, allows us to resist overarching definitions of anthropology or literature, while also complicating the assumption that literature can be simply absorbed into or expunged from ethnography. The aim of this article then is to highlight some of the very particular ways in which anthropology is entangled with literature, and yet still endeavours to recognize itself as anthropology.
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Anthropological Theory, 2019
Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the
societies where they have ca... more Anthropologists have long relied on powerful concepts operant in the
societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings
of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and
which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given a coherence by
ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how
anthropological icons like hau, mana and the shaman, are created, and
suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that
do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which
are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity
within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this
argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma,
Trobiander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries
alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always
stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the
form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between
these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory
begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary
experience of social life.
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Anthropology of This Century, 2018
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A reply to burgeoning fields within anthropological and sociological theory on "world," "global" ... more A reply to burgeoning fields within anthropological and sociological theory on "world," "global" and "post-Western" perspectives.
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A reply to colleagues in political science working on problematizing older models of governance a... more A reply to colleagues in political science working on problematizing older models of governance and power through the newly formulated concept of limited statehood.
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Book Reviews by Andrew Brandel
Verso Blog, 2019
Emily Apter's Unexceptional Politics "is a sprawling and remarkable mapping of the terrain... more Emily Apter's Unexceptional Politics "is a sprawling and remarkable mapping of the terrain of terms, idioms, and actions that constitute the philological and conceptual depth of our contemporary political lives." These commentaries were presented as part of a roundtable discussion on the book as "an entry port, a spur for continued engagement with the rich range of concerns that Unexceptional Politics raises."
One way to grasp the nature of politics is to understand the key terms in which it is discussed. In Unexceptional Politics (2017), Emily Apter develops a political vocabulary drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, brinkmanship, and parliamentary procedures that obstruct and block progressive politics.
The four commentaries below were presented as part of a roundtable discussion on the book at Johns Hopkins University in 2018. An introduction has been provided by Swayam Bagaria.
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American Ethnologist, 2019
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Todd Meyer's abstract: Andrew Brandel has organized an extraordinary and diverse set of commentar... more Todd Meyer's abstract: Andrew Brandel has organized an extraordinary and diverse set of commentaries on Nayanika Mookherjee’s The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 (Duke University Press, 2015). Each intervention is a path that moves outward from Mookherjee’s remarkable study, finding ways through the brambles of memory and history.
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Conferences (organization) by Andrew Brandel
In Part Two, speakers will ask how we might rethink the relationship between “reality” and the im... more In Part Two, speakers will ask how we might rethink the relationship between “reality” and the imagined, their interdependences and their divergences. If our notion of experience is opened up to the imagined as a necessary component of the real, how might this affect our understanding of concepts? The cases taken up by the panelists in this session will draw on ethnographic work on dreams, literary practice, the occult, and ritual, in which the boundary between the normative particularity of concepts and the limits of experience, or between “real” and “imagined’” is porous. How does the imagination of a different world or state of affairs affect/effect/infect our concepts? How might different configurations of the relationship between concept and experience complicate our assumptions about divisions of “imagination” and “reality”, and thereby also between thought and action? Are conventional theories of the world as offering “resistance” to concepts sufficient for theoretical purposes in contexts when contesting notions of reality might be at stake? How might such considerations also help us to think anew about the stakes of anthropological work and its relationship to its readers?
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Papers by Andrew Brandel
societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings
of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and
which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given a coherence by
ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how
anthropological icons like hau, mana and the shaman, are created, and
suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that
do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which
are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity
within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this
argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma,
Trobiander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries
alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always
stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the
form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between
these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory
begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary
experience of social life.
Book Reviews by Andrew Brandel
One way to grasp the nature of politics is to understand the key terms in which it is discussed. In Unexceptional Politics (2017), Emily Apter develops a political vocabulary drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, brinkmanship, and parliamentary procedures that obstruct and block progressive politics.
The four commentaries below were presented as part of a roundtable discussion on the book at Johns Hopkins University in 2018. An introduction has been provided by Swayam Bagaria.
Conferences (organization) by Andrew Brandel
societies where they have carried out fieldwork to unlock the meanings
of various, even seemingly disparate, practices and experiences, and
which, in virtue of their sharing a name, are given a coherence by
ethnographic and ethnological texts. In this essay, we examine how
anthropological icons like hau, mana and the shaman, are created, and
suggest that there might be fragments encountered during fieldwork that
do not, in themselves, necessarily add up to a coherent whole, but which
are fit into stories of these kinds because of the pressure of narrativity
within conventional notions of anthropological theory. To illustrate this
argument, we draw in particular on Malinowski’s stories of the baloma,
Trobiander spirits of the dead, reading his well-known fieldwork diaries
alongside his published account, in order to show how life is always
stitched across multiple registers of storytelling, some of which take the
form of narrative and others that do not. Attending to the space between
these modalities, or to their crossings, a different picture of theory
begins to emerge, and which hews a bit closer to our ordinary
experience of social life.
One way to grasp the nature of politics is to understand the key terms in which it is discussed. In Unexceptional Politics (2017), Emily Apter develops a political vocabulary drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, brinkmanship, and parliamentary procedures that obstruct and block progressive politics.
The four commentaries below were presented as part of a roundtable discussion on the book at Johns Hopkins University in 2018. An introduction has been provided by Swayam Bagaria.
Part One: Diagnosis, Therapeutics, and Prognosis
In Part One, panelists will explore how the application, creation, and transformation of concepts occur within scenes of medical or scientific decision-making. Their papers will examine issues of diagnosis, therapeutic judgment, and prognosis, where a certain attentiveness to the present is often inflected by an element of orientation toward the near future, and which, in turn, exert different kinds of pressures on the use of concepts by practitioners and patients. How might these horizons impinge upon, extend or restrict the application of relevant concepts? How do concepts live in the domain of possibility as a component, even an essential component, of the real? Would there be ways of theorizing from clinical situations through which the normative effects of concepts might be smoothened, thereby allowing disruptive and troubling elements of ethnographies to be taken into account rather than simply eclipsed in the escape to theory? Can we think of concepts not only as epistemic tools, but also in the affective and existential registers, as at issue for life and death? How does the case display the norms through which physicians and patients apprehend its specificity?
Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip.
Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal
https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294275/living-with-concepts/
Registration for the webinar:
https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tiflOj5-TZqLZ6fDZ9hTOQ
http://www.fordhampress.com/9780823294275/living-with-concepts/
Thinking from Elsewhere seeks to expand the horizon of thinking by departing from the increasing compartmentalization of anthropological knowledge into familiar subfields and regional traditions. An “elsewhere” signals an alterity within that may depart from and fragment categories such as west and non-west. An elsewhere may be found within dominant forms of knowledge and in the experimentation with forms of life. Thinking is entangled with elsewheres, which can appear in the form of concepts but also in movements of the heart, the soul, and the body; in forms of relationality; in ancient texts brought back to life; in clinical encounters and afflictions; in the everyday labors of living amidst precarity; in works of literature and film; in expressions of the earth; and in other ways worlds are corroded or made habitable.
Thinking from Elsewhere welcomes boundary-pushing and daring manuscripts that expand our picture of thinking through scrupulous attention to and engagement with a milieu. We encourage manuscripts that take ethnography as generative of anthropological concepts. We also nurture work that extends and displaces anthropological thinking through the route of archival work, as well as through engagement with film, contemporary art, literature, and philosophy. We are interested in the kinds of elsewheres that a new generation of anthropological knowledge might fathom. We are particularly open to manuscripts emerging from centers of anthropology outside of the US, UK, and France.
Thinking from Elsewhere is an award-winning book series in anthropology from Fordham University Press. For more information, a longer series précis, or to arrange submissions of proposals or manuscripts, please contact the series editors at clarahan@jhu.edu, bhrigupati_singh@brown.edu, and abrandel@fas.harvard.edu.
https://www.fordhampress.com/series/thinking-from-elsewhere/