Don Handelman
Edited by Matan Shapiro
and Jackie Feldman
Moebius Anthropology
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https://doi.org/10.3167/9781789208542. Not for resale.
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Moebius
Anthropology
Essays on the Forming of Form
Don Handelman
Edited by
Matan Shapiro and Jackie Feldman
berghahn
NEW YORK • OXFORD
www.berghahnbooks.com
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First published in 2021 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
© 2021, 2024 Don Handelman
Open access ebook edition published in 2024
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages
for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Handelman, Don, author. | Shapiro, Matan, editor. | Feldman, Jackie, editor.
Title: Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form / Don Handelman; edited by
Matan Shapiro and Jackie Feldman.
Description: New York: Berghahn Books, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020035474 (print) | LCCN 2020035475 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781789208542 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789208559 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Anthropology—Philosophy. | Form (Philosophy) | Phenomenology.
Classification: LCC GN33 .H255 2020 (print) | LCC GN33 (ebook) |
DDC 301.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035474
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020035475
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78920-854-2 hardback
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ISBN 978-1-80539-668-0 web pdf
https://doi.org/10.3167/9781789208542
This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution
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For Bruce Kapferer
and
his cornucopia of wonderful ideas
warmed by a half century
of
heartfelt friendship
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Contents
List of Illustrations
ix
Acknowledgments
x
Introduction
Matan Shapiro
1
Part I. Some Significant Formative Influences
Chapter 1. Henry Rupert, Washo Shaman
17
Chapter 2. Tracing Bureaucratic Logic through Surprise and Abduction
40
Part II. Forming Form: Ritual and Bureaucratic Logic
Chapter 3. Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So?
63
Chapter 4. Bureaucratic Logic
93
Chapter 5. Bureaucratic Logic, Bureaucratic Aesthetics: The Opening
Event of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day in Israel
126
Part III. Cosmological Trajectories
Chapter 6. Passages to Play: Paradox and Process
151
Chapter 7. Framing Hierarchically, Framing Moebiusly
171
Chapter 8. Inter-gration and Intra-gration in Cosmology
191
Part IV. Deleuzian Conjunctions
Chapter 9. Self-Exploders, Self-Sacrifice, and the Rhizomic Organization
of Terrorism
213
Chapter 10. Thinking Moebiusly: Can We Learn about Ritual from
Cinema with Mulholland Drive?
242
Chapter 11. Folding and Enfolding Walls: Statist Imperatives and
Bureaucratic Aesthetics in Divided Jerusalem
269
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| contents
Epilogue. Forming Form, Folding Time (Toward Dynamics through
an Anthropology of Form)
289
Index
346
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Illustrations
3.1. Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.
64
11.1. The Calatrava pylon-parabola at the western entrance to Jerusalem.
273
11.2. The Yad Vashem memorial complex with the old Holocaust
museum in the background and the new Holocaust museum in
the foreground.
275
11.3. The Avenue of the Righteous passing through the new Holocaust
museum.
276
11.4. The mall-wall from the Old City wall, looking toward
West Jerusalem.
280
11.5. The security wall chopping through Palestinian Abu Dis.
282
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Acknowledgments
Were it not for Jackie Feldman and Matan Shapiro this book would not exist. Nearing eighty, I wanted to let go of asking about and contemplating the world as I saw it
through my own parallax perspectives. I ceased university lecturing years ago, mainly
due to increasingly severe chronic illness, yet also to release myself from institutional
strictures that always had pressed and compressed. Jackie and Matan persuaded me to
make another effort—arguing that compiling a volume something like this one was
worth doing. I hope this is so. During the journey of sensing, feeling, and forming
this book, Matan was a welcome sojourner, often offering critique and encouragement. Matan himself is indeed a brilliant brainstormer of paradoxes that provoke and
complement the idea of moebius movement. My warm thanks to him and to Jackie.
This book is dedicated to Bruce Kapferer. More words would only dim my profound appreciation for the brilliance of his scholarship and the warmth of my comradely feeling toward him, now for over half a century.
Einat Bar-On Cohen has held me together for, by now, so many years. She is a
wonderful friend and a fine anthropologist whose embodied and incisive thinking
inspires me. Without her more than willing assistance in so many, many ways I would
not be here to write these acknowledgements. Bless you, Einat.
Yaron Ezrahi, beloved friend, profound theorist of democracy, science, and the
imagination, was my mage during the writing of the Epilogue to this book. And that
took me a long time. Yaron was ready to discuss matters of the mind and heart at the
drop of an intellectual hat (his, mine fits less well); and our talks were full of thought,
reflection, and revelation. Yaron passed in 2019.
My dear friend, David Shulman, polymath that he is, deepened my feeling mind
as we worked together on South Asian materials. And, when long ago he persuaded
me that in south India the footprint of the elephant precedes the elephant itself, he
gave me an inkling of what it is to think moebiusly.
Nita Schechet, a dear friend and an insightful scholar of literature, often joined
me in our neighborhood coffee house for lengthy discussions on the art of the impossible. Her thoughts helped to inform my own on moebius. Nita passed in 2016.
I much appreciate younger colleagues who fill me in on their research and remind
me that there is so much work to be done by talented scholars. In particular I want to
mention Eyal Ben-Ari, Khaled Furani, Tova Gamliel, Lydia Ginzburg, Asaf Hazani,
Nadeem Karkabi, Carol Kidron, Mina Meir-Dviri, Nitzan Rotem, Limor SamimianDarash, Esther Schely-Newman, Avi Shoshana, Nurit Stadler.
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acknowledgments
|
A word on the cover art created by the manga artist, Shiriagari Kotobuki. Mr.
Shiriagari was commissioned by the Hokusai Museum in Tokyo to do his take of a
print of the ukiyo-e artist, Hokusai (1760–1849), from the latter’s series, Thirty-six
Views of Mount Fuji. Mr. Shiriagari took the large barrel being made by a cooper and
turned it into a moebius surface. Making the barrel becomes a (perhaps infinitely)
recursive task, if not a paradoxical endeavor since the cooper no longer can know
whether he is inside or outside the barrel he is forming. To think moebiusly is to be
seamlessly inside and outside the forming of form with near simultaneity. My thanks
to both Mr. Shiriagari and the Hokusai Museum for enabling me to use this artwork.
Don Handelman
Jerusalem, June 2020
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Introduction
Matan Shapiro
Know Your Feeling
In 1998, when he visited his friend the shamanic healer Jonathan Horwitz in Denmark, Don Handelman saw a ghost. He was lying on his back, his eyes closed as
Horwitz chanted, directing energies into and away from the room. Handelman then
felt an urge in him, a sort of presence, and opened his eyes. His pupils expanded as
he found himself gazing at Henry Rupert, the Native American shaman with whom
he had worked as a young student thirty-four years earlier near Carson City, Nevada.
While Handelman was stunned to see Rupert—in flesh and blood although he had
been among the dead since 1973—Rupert was casual and self-assured as he had
been decades before, when they first met. Rupert bent over, putting his mouth on
Handelman’s mouth, breathing air into him. He then looked at Handelman intensely
and uttered: “Know through your feelings, but know!” As he said that, he dissipated
into thin air.
Contemplating on this close encounter in 2018 during a conversation with Jackie
Feldman and myself, Handelman interpreted Rupert’s message as a reaffirmation of
his own intellectual trajectory in anthropology. “Henry,” he said, “was the master of
fusing together analytical thinking about the world and a deep feeling for some kind
of sensory connectivity with everything in it. Washo cosmology was all about the
cohesion of the fixed and the free, and you can decide for yourself where to locate
emotions and where to locate epistemic knowledge in this equation.” He continued:
But the very possibility of this cohesion, the perception of reality as multiple, the idea that the free and the fixed can be fused in creative ways to
inspire some kind of transformation in the world, countermanded everything I had learned in academia as an anthropologist in the ’50s and ’60s,
which was all about making order out of movement by bringing it to a
halt and putting it under control.
That encounter with Rupert in 1998 inspired in Don Handelman a sense of emotional integration combined with lucid conceptualization of something new. As HanThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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2 | moebius anthropology
delman understood this in hindsight, Rupert thus intimated that Handelman himself
was capable of realizing empirically that same simultaneous duality of thinking and
feeling in his ongoing intellectual work. Henry Rupert’s resurgence from the dead in
1998 in that sense reignited Handelman’s own quest to live an intellectual life in the
shaman way, a creative intellectualism of sort. “One only knows in a fuller, perhaps in
a more holistic sense, by knowing that feeling is integral to the existence and movement of organic worlds,” Handelman explained.
The chapters in this book will serve as an index to decipher these somewhat confusing words. They express Don Handelman’s unique intellectual stance with regard
to the nature of human social phenomena. While supplying massive theoretical insights, Handelman’s approach to the social—especially to its structuring—is primarily methodological, a systematic tool for cross-cultural analysis, which he has been
developing over the last five decades. “My best moments and relationships,” writes
Handelman (2014: xv) in a short preface to his book on South Indian cosmology,
“arrive . . . unannounced, quiet presences that sometimes are life-changing. My anthropology then and now is to grab onto a strange line of flight and then to hold on
for dear life. To wherever.” He continues, poetically:
India fills the senses with imaginings, yet these are imaginings within
imaginings, fractal imaginings that are borderless and, for me at least, that
curve mind-work inward, involuting, yet involution that is emergent, always re-emerging elsewhere into another angle of an expanding cosmos to
which I had not had access before. (Ibid.: xv)
Involution, convolution, imaginings, curving, cosmos: Don Handelman does not use
these terms merely as poetical metaphors nor does he refer to them as rudimentary
writing techniques used to sidestep intricate logical conundrums. Rather, he employs
these terms directly and straight-forwardly as analytic “razors” (Handelman 2004) by
which it becomes possible to capture social phenomena in their incessant dynamic, a
dynamic which he refers to as the process of forming of social forms. Here, the often
paradoxical and self-contradictory processes of formulating distinct types of feeling
and knowing, in their creative localized formations, are not only objects of study but
also conceptual-affective experimentations in their own right, which for him, as I
now turn to explicate, must remain at the center of any anthropological analysis of
what Handelman sees as the logic of forming of form.
The Logic of Forming of Forms
Don Handelman was born in Quebec, Canada, in 1939 to a working-class Jewish
family. His parents had emigrated separately from the Ukraine to Canada, where they
met and married. Until the age of fourteen, Handelman grew up in a remote rural
hotel resort his father, uncle, and friends had bought and operated in the small town
of Ste. Agathe des Monts. While it is difficult to assess what drove Handelman to turn
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introduction
|3
to anthropology, he has stated in a biographical interview from the end of the 1990s
(Handelman [1998–99] 2017) that living in the hotel provided him with a very
dynamic perception of the social world at a very young age, as he was able to observe
and feel the transformations between total emptiness off-season and the hustle and
bustle of guests who kept coming and going during the busy periods. He studied in
a tiny Protestant school in the town, and after graduation—he and one girl were the
only students who had not dropped out of high school—moved to Montreal to study
at McGill University. Handelman did poorly in most of his classes, excluding the Introduction to Anthropology course, which he says was less strange to him due to his
teenage passion for reading science fiction novels. He then applied and was accepted
into the MA program in anthropology at McGill (MA 1964), initiating a prolific
research career in anthropology that included two years as a PhD candidate at the
University of Pittsburgh (1964–66) and a doctoral degree under the supervision of
Max Gluckman at the University of Manchester (1966–71), followed by numerous
publications during thirty-three years of work as a professor at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem (1972–2005).1
From his MA days and throughout his long career, Handelman was deeply interested in social organization, a concept he understands not so much in sociological
terms as rules, norms, and conventions, but rather in terms derived from theoretical
physics of the David Bohm variety (e.g., Bohm 1980). For Handelman, “organization” consists of spontaneous becoming, a generative emergence of micro-structures
that are ephemeral, albeit orderly, like climatic storms, with their own density and
pace, depth and intensity and duration. It is from this basic interest in small-scale human interactions and their tendency to form something larger than the sum of their
parts—three people working in a factory (1998: 104–12), a healing ritual involving
Henry Rupert and a young girl (1967), a game in a workplace for the elderly in Jerusalem (1998: 86–101) that he called “the donkey game”—which stands at the heart
of Handelman’s lifelong fascination with “forming.” “Whatever these people were
generating together, even in a short span of time,” Handelman states in the aforementioned biographical interview ([1998–99] 2017: 203), “would probably have its
own forms, its own rules, which were then impacting on the participants and shaping
their interaction.” He continues:
So you couldn’t say about interaction, if you had two people beginning
to interact, that one person plus one person would equal two, whatever
their interaction was, however long it lasted. They’d always be generating
something potentially new in their interaction. They were creating this
kind of structure to their interaction, and that structure was also creating
them as interactors, as they continued to interact. So I tried to think about
it like that.
For Handelman, then, a dynamic of “forming” exists in all things, natural and social
alike, at all times. In its social manifestation, this dynamic is generated by the ongoing
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4 | moebius anthropology
fusion of epistemological and experiential/phenomenological aspects of Being. Social
phenomena are never fully at rest. Yet, at the same time, as they are incessantly forming and un-forming, social processes are temporarily stabilized in concrete forms.
Cultural practice, to use a widespread anthropological concept, keeps collapsing into
itself as it is enacted, always fragmenting into variants of itself. In this process, culture
becomes multiple independent forms with finite boundaries, i.e., density, specific
gravity, and volume. Yet, at the same time Culture is flowing, a comprehensive, holistic totality, smooth as waves gushing in the ocean of History.
Although he had used the notion of “forming” in many texts and manuscripts,
Handelman himself never formulated what “the logic of forming form” might be.
Tentatively, in the gist of the argument developed so far, and while avoiding a fixed
definition as such, I suggest that the logic of forming can be seen as plural and singular at the same time. It is both primordially self-energizing and a determinist creation, that is, depending on whether you experience forming authentically as it is
happening or whether you choose an arbitrary point of emergence for the analysis
of the process of forming.2 The origin of ethnography, in this view, which is also the
origin of analysis and its driving force, is a sort of sudden crystallization, which gains
momentum and flight as it evolves within itself to bend space-time; but as it moves
it also becomes a lever that gravitates to create concrete anthropomorphic figures,
frameworks, and dwellings. While the logic of forming of form moves all the time,
it sometimes indeed creates the illusion of motionless, passive, eternal presence. The
logic(s) of forming of form thereby inhabit human minds, everywhere and always,
which means that they are abstract and tangible at the same time. A vignette from
that short preface on South Indian cosmology (Handelman 2014: xvi–xvii) will elucidate this (see Chapter Eight in this volume):
One twilight I was relaxing on the balcony of a small hotel looking out
at the waters of Big Lake, within which the goddess, Paiditalli, had been
born, the Old City of Vizianagaram on the far side. The liquid depth of
the waters. Porous mountains reflecting in the waters. The conjuncture of
so much transformation and continuation in the lengthy association of
Paiditalli with Vizianagaram, within which she emerges annually through
her own interior fluidity, from her own liquid depths that are her cosmos,
in order to grow anew the fruitfulness and vitality of the city. And I felt,
indeed felt, an inkling, a momentary shadowy glimpse of just how recursive this cosmos is. Of how the depth of a mountain fits into the depth of
a lake, while the porous interior of a mountain (with its swirling caves and
twisting tunnels) can take in the sea. Of how in a plowed field the space
between one furrow and another is a high mountain ridge, while the furrow itself filled with water is a deep lake. Of how, if the spheroid cosmos
is turned on its head, the waters of the lake fall on the land like rain; as
rainwater flows down the mountains into the fields and their furrows. Of
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introduction
|5
how all of these surfaces that are depths fit fluidly into one another, and of
how this fullness of cosmos becomes immanent as Paiditalli appears in the
human world. I went to sleep feeling deepened.
This vignette moves from an immobile and immutable setting—a hotel by the lake
near an eternal mountain—to the fluid convulsion of the goddess in the water, which
makes up the depth of the cosmos in the lake and under the mountain and ultimately
within Handelman’s own mind. From the tangible into the abstract and back again,
the cosmos being at once a real, everlasting space for the living, and an exercise of
the mind, a reflection, a thought process. It is precisely this simultaneity of one thing
being another, and therefore neither (cf. Handelman 1998: 68), a nuance located
between binary oppositions and clearly defined categorizations, which Handelman
develops analytically as the space of and for the generation of meaningful social scientific iterations about knowing and feeling the world. This space is of course paradoxical, or at the very least obscure. Where does the lake begin and the sky end? When
does the furrow distinguish itself from the mountain? Or, to use a famous example
from Bateson (1977: 246), which Handelman himself has once used (2004: 12–13),
what differentiates the swirling of a smoke ring from the air around it?
Don Handelman has consistently and systematically constructed methods to
transform such paradoxical observations into heuristic devices for the cross-cultural
comparison of social, cultural, and behavioral intensities. Handelman’s method begins by identifying the processual emergence of otherness in mindful feelings and
their convoluting, ongoing, motile dynamics. It continues with a description of how
this dynamic consistently forms precarious, ever-changing social forms—a multiplicity of the conceptual and experiential structures inherent to human interactions in
their localized manifestations. Within these terms the social thereby keeps twisting,
turning, torqueing and bending, folding and unfolding, incessantly shaping new possibilities for being otherwise in cosmos.
Yet, as Handelman insists, that very image of a stable “whole” (cosmos, or indeed,
society, culture, etc.) is always simultaneously shaped by flow, trajectory, and movement, the potentiality of change, which continues to recur in human practice as a
result of these unfolding possibilities for transgression (or, if you prefer, immersion
with otherness). The logic(s) of forming of form consequently prevail(s) as multiple
dimensions of a single, infinitely complex, socio-natural universe, which inhabits people’s minds as much as they imagine themselves to be elemental aspects “in” it.
For Handelman, then, the object of study of anthropology is the logic(s) of forming form. As with “curving” (Handelman 2004) or “involutions” (Handelman 2014),
Handelman does not conceive of forming as a metaphor, a representation, or an
allegory, but rather as a natural phenomenon whose tangible manifestation in the
world is felt and known ontologically in body, mind, and soul. Moreover, this is not a
“logic” in a semiotic sense, nor is it a socially produced discipline, common sense, or
“discourse,” as these are understood in traditional cultural constructionism. Rather,
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6 | moebius anthropology
for Handelman, the logic of forming of form is an independent process that is fused
with the social, but also one that manifests in the natural world separately from collective human phenomena. Its uniqueness as a “logic” is that it somehow knows itself
as distinct from other logics, and hence it becomes a form in and of itself, which both
emanates from and results in human experience while organizing humanly possible
worlds in the making of concrete social dramas.
The logic of forming of form, to put this in yet other terms, is a system that emulates itself, but in so doing changes the conditions of its own reproduction. Humans
cannot be said to produce or “create” the logic because, in Handelman’s understanding of reality, there is no cause and effect. Rather, the logic of forming is in itself a
continuous phenomenological instability, whose consequences sometimes gravitate
toward structural rest or constancy, and sometimes not. Human beings in that sense
are the vehicles through which the logic of forming of form manifests, while at the
same time they are active agents that enhance that logic, divert it, and make their
world through it. The logic of forming of form in that sense is inherent to a process
of repetition that enfolds through itself to shape the precise dispositions that allow, as
they transform, for the coming into being of something else. And this is true to the
same extent for Vizianagaram, Jerusalem, and London.
Forming of Form in Ethnographic Analysis
In order to exemplify the logic of forming of form as the fusion of phenomenological
and structural processes, Handelman has repeatedly used the image of the Moebius
Strip, a single surface that has no inside and an outside, top or bottom, but rather,
smooth continuity across regular distinctions. It is easy to make a Moebius by cutting
a narrow strip of paper, twisting it 180 degrees and then connecting the two edges
to form a continuous loop. If a tiny dragon were to walk on the surface of that loop
it would be treading sometimes “on top” and sometimes “below,” crossing from the
“internal” to the “external” side effortlessly and unselfconsciously, as it would not
be transgressing any threshold or boundary at any given time. For Handelman, this
is the most crystalized experimentation of the paradox of “knowing and feeling,” as
Rupert has taught him. He claims (Handelman 2012: 68):
The moebius [sic] surface is paradoxical because mathematical logic demands this, and the phenomenological acquiesces: topologically the surface has one side; phenomenally it is a binary, an outside and an in-side.
“Out” and “in” relate to one another such that phenomenally they are
separate and distinct yet topologically they are one another. Here logical
paradox generates dynamism in every crossing of the boundary which also
reproduces the boundary as paradox.
Hallmarking the paradox as a crucial topic of intellectual contemplation in the
cross-cultural study of the logic of forming of form, Handelman thus suggests that
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introduction
|7
it is not enough to focus on framing on the one hand and experience on the other.
Rather, for Handelman, as amorphous as it sounds, the logic of forming of form is
the infinite complexity inherent in the paradoxical fusion of these distinct human
qualities of perception and conceptualization. What is new about Handelman’s approach, as this compares with other contemporary theoreticians in anthropology,
is that it treats affect as a property of the universe, an interdimensional quality of
cosmological ontology in any of its localized manifestations everywhere in the world,
which circulates simply because it needs to circulate. This Handelmanian “logic” is
opposed to the classical Kantian idea that flow, or the transfer of affect, is initiated
into the world through the power of various types of agents, who are themselves separated from the energy they produce.
Handelman thus characteristically insists that the very process of observing and
then capturing in writing the infinitely complex localized ways by which people learn
to “know their feelings” is already a form of analysis. When we focus on the paradox
of the forming of form, we also understand something about the inherent dynamic
of our own universe as humans, as members of society and as scholars. In that aspect
Handelman’s scholarship differs from Georg Simmel’s (1972) famous depiction of
social forms as objects of analysis; for Handelman, unlike Simmel, there are no external boundaries that define these forms as finite or stable. Handelman strives to move
away from monistic terms—that is, away from dialectical processes—because for him
these latter dialectical processes oblige us to include in our analysis rigid, categorical
definitions, which thereby enforce stable and distinct binaries at the very core of our
own interpretation. For Handelman these binaries are teleological because they force
us to look at almost every social phenomenon through the back-and-forth movement of the dialectic ping-pong happening between them. Contrarily, Handelman
reinvents the work of conceptualization itself through an emphasis on the inherently
motile quality of social phenomena (cf. Holbraad 2012). He identifies the thingness
of the social, that which is distinctively it—the phenomenality of phenomena, as he
calls that “thing” in some of the chapters of this book—in such ongoing motility. For
him, this is the crucial difference between a dynamic theory of the forming of forms
and Simmel’s theory of fully acknowledgeable and finalized forms.3
While seeking to describe the process by which research interlocutors crossculturally conceive and practice their own ethnographic theories, Handelman’s analyses nonetheless also refer to the scholarly efforts required for any anthropological
extrapolation of meaning. While he has not been preoccupied with cross-cultural
comparison in and of itself, he has nonetheless provided insights into a wide variety
of ethnographic realities taking place in such distinct locations as Israel-Palestine,
South India, Nevada, Newfoundland, and Northern Uganda. In a career lasting five
decades, Don Handelman has thus striven to phrase a theory of social dynamics that
would be flexible enough to account both for its own motility and for the spots in
which it finds rest, a self-referential, double-edged method of observation that captures “the logic of forming of form” both as a phenomenon of nature and as a repetThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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8 | moebius anthropology
itive iteration of meaning in different social universes. I now turn to explicate how
each of the essays selected for this volume expresses these efforts while contributing
to the task of their crystallization into a coherent analytical framework.
The Book
Moebius Anthropology is an anthology of Don Handelman’s major critical engagements with some of the ongoing debates in contemporary anthropology on the
poetics and politics of ritual, play, cosmology, and power; widely defined. Don Handelman, Jackie Feldman, and I collaboratively handpicked the different essays out
of a life-work portfolio consisting of dozens of published articles and several books,
while also including three new chapters that have not yet been published. Each of
these essays presents ethnographic insights on the logic of forming of form as this
relates to the everyday subtleties of paradox and the self-perpetuating energy inherent
in the structured dynamics of social action. The book is divided into four sections,
followed by an Epilogue.
The first section, “Some Significant Formative Influences,” includes Handelman’s
foundational ethnographic insights from the 1960s, which later informed much of
his later writings and theoretical extrapolations. “The Development of a Washo Shaman” (on which Chapter One is based) is Don Handelman’s first major published
work, from 1967, in which he traces the life history of Henry Rupert, the Washo
Shaman from near Carson City, Nevada, with whom he spoke at length in 1964. The
essay takes a creative and unusual look not only at Rupert himself but also at the art
of magic-making at large and how it is understood as a creative, processual forming
and unforming of cosmological knowledge. In “Tracing Bureaucratic Logic through
Surprise and Abduction,” a previously unpublished essay, Handelman traces how
his own personal life story has (almost accidentally) become entangled with Israeli
society. In this chapter Handelman also lays the foundations for his theory of “bureaucratic logic,” which receives wider attention in the second section of the book.
The second section, “Forming Form: Ritual and Bureaucratic Logic,” focuses on
the cosmological frameworks underlying the celebration of rituals as form-making
social tools. The section moves from a highly analytic chapter aimed at exploring
the very phenomenality of rituals as “forms that form forms,” through to an analysis of how such forms manifest in different bureaucratic events. “Why Ritual in
Its Own Right? How So?”—a revised version of an essay originally prepared as an
introduction and epilogue for a special issue of Social Analysis (2004)—develops a
unique method to analyze rituals. Rather than look at ritual from the perspective of
the kinds of transformations it evokes in wider society, Handelman suggests we focus
on that which the ritual does in and of itself, within itself. In this view, ritual is no
longer primarily seen as a vehicle for the enactment of certain processes outside itself
but rather as a self-reflexive system with a particular dynamic that must be studied
first and foremost on its own terms. Only after we understand what these internal
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introduction
|9
processes are, and how they do that which they are supposed to be doing, will we be
able to reconnect the ritual to its external social surround and examine it in its wider
holistic sense (cf. Shapiro 2015).4 In “Bureaucratic Logic,” Handelman meticulously
describes the history of a form of “linear” classification brought into Palestine by the
early Zionists, which became the main organizing “logic of forming of form” in the
pre-State-of-Israel years. This form, as Handelman understands it, is premised on the
assumption that different social categories can fit only into a well-demarcated “box”
rather than overlap or interact in a non–mutually-exclusive way. Bureaucratic logic
in the Israeli case is the linear schemes Israeli Jews put to work in order to capture
and act on the phenomenality of social life marred by an ongoing political conflict
with Palestinians, a conflict which is not merely a struggle over land or access to
resources but also a debate over the very inclusion and exclusion of individuals and
communities in the national body. In “Bureaucratic Logic, Bureaucratic Aesthetics:
The Opening Event of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day in Israel,”
Handelman demonstrates the utility of the notion of bureaucratic logic in the analysis of an annual ritual enactment in contemporary Israel. Touching upon the morally
charged issue of the memorialization of the Holocaust in the Israeli public sphere,
Handelman shows how Zionist cosmology endorsed Jewish cosmological framing of
time to generate a ritualized “high peak” in which the entire Zionist narrative can be
experienced as a phenomenological ascension from the depth of the death pits to the
heights of national liberation and independence.
The third section, “Cosmological Trajectories,” includes some of Handelman’s
most innovative theoretical extrapolations of the notion of Moebius and paradox,
which he sees as credible analytical tools for social analysis, especially as this relates
to the comparative study of ethnographically grounded cosmologies. In “Passages
to Play: Paradox and Process,” Handelman analyzes two different kinds of play,
one taking place top-down in the assertion of hierarchy and another taking place
bottom-up through the implementation of paradox in everyday life. The chapter
is based ethnographically on the analysis of Hindu myths and it remains one of
the most influential turns in play theory in anthropology. The next chapter, “Framing Hierarchically, Framing Moebiusly,” is in fact an elaborate debate with Gregory
Bateson’s theory of play and fantasy, in which Handelman meticulously explicates
why “framing” is an insufficient analytical tool for the understanding of play. Instead,
Handelman offers a re-analysis of Bateson, suggesting that play must be understood
as both the conceptual framing of the action at hand as well as its phenomenological
or experiential manifestation at the grassroots level. Remaining with the image of
Moebius, Handelman insists that a unified theory of play, fantasy, myth, and paradox must include the ever-changing dynamic of the forming of form that is at once
external and internal to individual minds. In the chapter concluding this section,
“Inter-gration and Intra-gration in Cosmology,” Handelman elaborates these ideas
further to suggest a new methodology for the investigation of the social world. In this
framework, we must primarily pay attention to local conceptualizations of boundThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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10 | moebius anthropology
aries that are taken to organize the shape of the universe, as well as to the types of
movement that living beings take within it. In what Handelman calls an “organic”
or pantheistic cosmos, humans and entities constantly interpenetrate one another’s
domains. This creates a particular social dynamic, which is premised on intuitive
inclusion and syncretic fusion. Contrarily, in a “monothetic” or monotheistic cosmos, the boundary between humans and the divine is set, given, and predisposed, so
that only God (and His armies) can intervene in the human domain. Consequently,
argues Handelman, the social dynamic typical in these cases is that of exclusion and
rigid classification, which coincides with the idea of bureaucratic logic as an underlying cosmological common sense in the Global North.
The fourth section, “Deleuzian Conjunctions,” exposes Don Handelman’s deep
immersion in and substantial development of the innovative theories of Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari. All three chapters in this section implement the notions of the
rhizome dynamic and the curving of social space-time in truly innovative ways, playing creatively with the tension between inside and outside as if along an imaginary
Moebius Strip that appears in different forms. “Self-Exploders, Self-Sacrifice, and
the Rhizomic Organization of Terrorism” explores the intersubjective nature of selfdestructive acts in suicidal terror, wherein the internality of one’s self literally becomes
the shattering, shredding rage that devastates external realities. Taking an unusual
(and often unpopular) philosophical approach toward this very charged political issue, Handelman analyzes in this chapter what kinds of cosmic worlds (rather than
political goals) are created by this act of self-sacrifice. In this approach the rhizomic
dynamic of terrorism—its complete disregard for commonsensical distinctions between combatants and civilians as well as its affront to the idea of citizenship as something that is contained “within” well-defined external borders—defines a cosmology
of forming contrary to the linear formation of boundaries between self and other. In
“Thinking Moebiusly: Can We Learn about Ritual from Cinema with Mulholland
Drive?” Handelman elaborates the notion of rhizome into and through the notion
of Moebius. He analyzes David Lynch’s masterpiece as an emblem of transformation
dynamics in the incessant forming and unforming of social form, as if it implodes
from within as we watch the movie (or read the chapter) but also explodes forward
and away from us into the screen, or page, and back. Handelman ultimately argues
that the film “visualizes liminality from within itself ” (Chapter Ten, this volume) and
that this may give some insight on how rituals work elsewhere and beyond interactive
media, making cinema itself a form of postmodern ritual process (cf. Kapferer 2014).
In the third chapter of this section, “Folding and Enfolding Walls: Statist Imperatives and Bureaucratic Aesthetics in Divided Jerusalem,” Handelman continues in the
same direction, this time analyzing the spatiality of the city of Jerusalem through an
innovative discussion of boundaries and walls that dissect the city on the one hand
and circumscribe it on the other hand. He argues that the dynamic of “folding” is
essential for the understanding of realpolitik in the city as much as it can illuminate
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introduction
| 11
our analytical imagination with regard to the role of boundaries and barriers in the
making and unmaking of geopolitical realities.
In the Epilogue, Handelman adds the notion of time as elemental to his theory of
the forming of social form, moving from a phenomenological perception of time as
dimension—which is thus external to social life—to the idea that time is a duration,
an ontological quality in and of itself, which is in fact the actual process of forming of
social form. He uses this framework to analyze anew some of his earlier ideas about
forming, curving and cosmology, as well as a re-examination of some of his own
experiences in anthropology and of anthropology, from when he met Henry Rupert
to the present day. As he unfolds the analysis, which draws on complexity theory and
popular physics (especially Ilya Prigogine’s famous argument about “time as arrow”),
Handelman also frames knowledge as process, not a “thing” that can be stored and
classified but rather an ongoing iteration of experience existing beyond epistemology,
an intellectual ontology of the flow of internal and external time dynamics, by which
what is knowable substantiates itself within and through social encounters. It is the
structure of this encounter that is at the center of this book, an encounter between
readers and Don Handelman’s grand theoretical project in anthropology.
The Anthropology of Don Handelman
The anthropology of Don Handelman is paradoxical, but at the same time it is lucid
and coherent in its ongoing effort to produce a dynamic rather than static interpretation of social processes.5 It focuses on the organization of movement, the stable
ephemerality of encounters, a rest in flow, curving, knowing, and feeling. Much like
the knowledge of Washo cosmology, which Handelman acquired from Henry Rupert
in the mid-1960s, it inherently includes a creative touch and a sparkle of brilliance
that is always required for the stabilization of movement. Prophetically, almost, Handelman (1967: 462) concluded his first major publication, which analyzed Henry
Rupert’s life history, with the following words:
We have good evidence of both social disorganization and psychological disturbance among acculturating peoples, and we can tentatively suggest that in many ways cultural processes have overwhelmed individual
defenses in these cases by destroying traditional alternatives and failing
to provide new ones. But what of the creative individual? What of the
individual with great ego strength who is able to choose and combine
traditional and new alternatives, not merely integrating them but developing new syntheses, which may be both personally satisfying and socially
transmissible? Of such persons, and the roles they play, we know little.
Although he probably never planned it, Handelman’s intellectual persona through
the years has begun mirroring Henry Rupert’s own image: a person with great ego
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12 | moebius anthropology
strength able to create new alternatives to existing structures. As he sought to analyze
the situated fusion of knowing and feeling across diverse fields of scholarly thought
and inquiry, Handelman has systematically been advancing Rupert’s own “Native
American” cosmological assertion that holistic predicaments of culture are inscribed
simultaneously and holistically in phenomenological and structural (indeed, conceptual) human landscapes. These landscapes, Handelman reminds us, in themselves
always contain an infinite complexity of muses and therefore they are always inherently contradictory and paradoxical both as appearances in the individual mind and
as collective symbols or reifications. As Handelman told me and Jackie Feldman in
a private conversation about Henry Rupert, with which we began this introduction:
What Henry told me was imperative: “Know through your feelings, but
know.” This was the crux of his wisdom. Structure is movement, interior
movement, so is feeling, interior movement. Disciplines like anthropology
are still suffering the divides created by Cartesian dualisms; but movement
goes wherever it goes, as does the formation of local times.
Handelman’s reading of social phenomena thereby attempts to break away from the
Cartesian divide in endlessly creative ways (see Handelman 2007: 119–40). Here,
both earthly and divine entities always look at themselves from the outside in order
to validate their internal truths. Observable, situated, social phenomena, in other
words, do not circumscribe stable or fixed identities but rather are always already
indicating the emergence of possible realities, lines of flight, which are the structured
organization of the encounter that is the business of anthropology. The intellectual
effort required in order to dissect and understand this ongoing movement, as well
as the moments in which it stabilizes into more-or-less finite forms, necessitates by
default a creative force that engages paradox as intrinsic to the process of analysis.
In its comparative scope—that is, as a methodology—Handelman’s analytic insights have also been developing slowly throughout his professional trajectory. It is a
convoluted methodology, which Handelman kept adjusting and twisting and changing while working on different subjects, never actually aiming at the composition of
a comprehensive theory of the social. Yet, as this book suggests, under the general
framing of a Theory of the Forming of Form, Handelman has, after all, cumulatively
produced over the years a consistent and lasting theory, which puts him side by
side with the most sophisticated thinkers of our discipline in recent decades, from
Marshall Sahlins through Bruce Kapferer and Victor Turner to Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro, Bruno Latour and Marilyn Strathern.6 It is worth mentioning here that Handelman has worked very closely with Bruce Kapferer and Victor Turner, with both
of whom he maintained intimate friendships and fruitful professional cooperation
throughout the years.
While some of the analytical terms and methods of argumentation presented in
this book may sound cryptic at first for readers yet unfamiliar with the anthropology
of Don Handelman, they will become clear as you progress through the chapters. As
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introduction
| 13
a unified collection, the chapters represent Don Handelman’s major contribution to
theoretical anthropology over a period of five decades. This books thus aims at bringing
into the limelight one of the most original thinkers in theoretical anthropology of our
generation, and, by way of doing this, making a significant contribution to contemporary anthropological knowledge production and intellectual critique more generally.
Notes
I thank Jackie Feldman for his useful comments on earlier drafts of this introduction. I also thank
Don Handleman for his eye-opening responses to some of the arguments raised herein.
1. Soon after he arrived in Israel in February 1967 Don Handelman met his future wife, the sociologist Lea Shamgar, who through the years cowrote with him several important texts. Sadly,
Lea died from cancer in 1995.
2. Handelman’s comment to this assertion: “Why determinist? Or is the determinism an illusion
created by lengthy durations of slow movement?”
3. Handelman himself rarely mentioned Simmel in his work. The comparison is my own.
4. Handelman’s formulation of “ritual in its own right” was stimulated by the anthropologist,
Galina Lindquist, whom Handelman describes as his muse of the intellect and emotion during
a decade of intensive interaction. Sadly, Galina Lindquist died of cancer in 2008.
5. Handelman’s comment to this assertion: “Where you use ‘structure’ I would use the ‘organization’ of movement rather than the sometimes ‘more processual’ sometimes ‘more static.’”
6. Handelman’s comment to this assertion: “That is not explicitly stated anywhere—a name as a
theorist is given primarily to those who explicitly call their work theory.”
References
Bateson, Gregory. 1977. “Afterword.” In About Bateson, ed. John Brockman, 235–47. New York:
E. P. Dutton.
Bohm, David. 1980. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.
Handelman, Don. 1967. “The Development of a Washo Shaman.” Ethnology 6: 444–64.
———. 1998. Models and Mirrors: Towards an Anthropology of Public Events. New York: Berghahn
Books. First edition published 1990, Cambridge University Press.
———. (1998–99) 2017. “Surprised by Persistence: Ethnographers Among the Washoe, 1937–
1965.” Interview with Don Handelman. University of Nevada Oral History Program, 155–
220. Retrieved January 2019 from https://archive.org/details/WashoeEthnographers.
———. 2004. “Introduction: Why Ritual in its Own Right? How so?” Social Analysis 48: 1–32.
———. 2007. “The Cartesian Divide of the Nation State: Emotion and Bureaucratic Logic.” In The
Emotions: A Cultural Reader, ed. Helena Wulff, 119–40. Oxford: Berg.
———. 2012. “Postlude: Framing Hierarchy, Framing Moebiusly.” Journal of Ritual Studies 26:
65–77.
———. 2014. One God, Two Goddesses, Three Studies of South Indian Cosmology. Leiden: Brill.
Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Kafrerer, Bruce. 2014. 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology. Chicago: Prickly
Paradigm Press.
Shapiro, Matan. 2015. “Curving the Social, or, Why Antagonistic Rituals in Brazil are Variations on
a Theme.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22: 47–66.
Simmel, Georg. 1972. On Individuality and Social Forms. Edited by Donald N. Levine. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
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Part I
Some
Significant
Formative
Influences
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Chapter 1
Henry Rupert,
Washo Shaman
Author’s Note
In 1964 I received an MA in Anthropology from McGill University for a thesis
entitled, West Indian Voluntary Associations in Montreal (see Handelman 1967). A
workmanlike job, brick on brick, uninspired and uninspiring, enabled mainly by the
caring intelligence of my supervisor, the late Richard (“Dick”) Salisbury, a Papua New
Guinea specialist, himself the student of S. F. Nadel. On my way to the University
of Pittsburgh to begin PhD studies in anthropology I passed that summer in a field
training program in Nevada. There I met the shaman, Henry Rupert, and, through
Henry, I began to learn to perceive and, so, to learn. And to learn through serendipity, accident, surprise, and abduction. Elsewhere (see Chapter Two, this volume, and
Handelman 1993) I’ve described how it happened that Henry (who literally had declared himself dead to anthropologists) agreed to tell me about his shamanism. That
summer with Henry and his family changed my sense of selfness and through this
my sense of what anthropology might become for me. Henry opened my horizons,
expanded my vision. Above all, my discussions with Henry whetted my imagination
(that until then had been devoted mainly to reading science fiction). Put simply,
Henry opened to me a life in anthropology. I left Nevada a different anthropologist.
And there were resonances and reverberations. Matan Shapiro mentions at the
outset of the Introduction to this volume that Henry came to me in 1998 while I was
being healed in Copenhagen by the shaman, Jonathan Horwitz. At that time, while
we were visiting Copenhagen, my beloved friend, the late Galina Lindquist, brought
me to Jonathan. Galina had studied with Jonathan in preparation for her doctoral
fieldwork on neo-shamanism in Sweden (Lindquist 1997, Handelman 1999). Jonathan and his partner at the time, Anette Host, greeted me as an old friend, though
we had never met. Jonathan told me something of his own story. When he returned
from soldiering in Vietnam, Jonathan decided to study anthropology and enrolled
in the graduate program at Columbia University. There he read the essay on Henry,
published in 1967, that is reprinted below. Jonathan told me that this text had had
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18 | moebius anthropology
a powerful effect on him and helped him decide to switch from anthropology to
becoming a healing shaman, the healer I met in 1998. Then and there, Henry recursively returned to me, breathing life into me (once again) and telling me, “Know
through your feelings, but know.” The injunction, its synergistic synthesis, penetrated
me through and through. The Cartesian divide took its leave.
Yet Henry’s appearance did not close the circle. There were resonances and reverberations. His injunction pervaded the last fieldwork that I was able to participate
in, in Andhra Pradesh together with M. V. Krishnayya and David Shulman (see
Handelman 2014: 115–213) and, too, it has nudged me on and off, and perhaps is
most prominent in this volume in Chapter Two on tracing bureaucratic logic and in
Chapter Ten on the David Lynch film, Mulholland Drive. Too, I also should mention
that while he was healing me in 1998, Jonathan had a vision, one that at the time
made no sense whatsoever to me, and that I will not go into here. But over a year later
that vision filled with significance . . .
R
This chapter presents the life history of the last shaman among the Washo Indians of
western Nevada and eastern California. This man, Henry Rupert, presents us with a
unique case of the development of a shamanic worldview through time. More specifically, he offers us an opportunity to examine the shaman as an innovator and
potential innovator, especially with respect to the curing techniques and personal
ideology relating him to the supernatural, the natural environment, and other men.
While the anthropological literature is replete with descriptions of shamanic rituals
and cultural configurations of shamanism in particular societies, as well as functional
explanations purporting to explain the existence of shamanic institutions, little attention has been paid to the shaman as an innovator, although the idea was presented by
Nadel (1946), exemplified by Voget (1950) in a somewhat different religious context,
and briefly touched upon by Murphy (1964: 77). Henry Rupert exemplifies the shaman as a creative innovator and potential “cultural broker,” and his life history will
be presented as an essentially chronological sequence of events, situations, and ideas.
In the period before White contact, the Washo occupied territory between Lake
Tahoe, on the border of present-day California and Nevada, and the Pine Nut Mountains east of Reno and Carson City; in the north their territory extended to Honey
Lake, and in the south to Antelope Valley (Merriam and d’Azevedo 1957; Downs
1963: 117). In terms of social organization, the Washo were composed of three
bands, although the family, sometimes nuclear and sometimes extended, was the
primary unit of social organization; and the family unit decided the yearly round of
hunting and gathering activities, sometimes under the leadership of antelope shamans and rabbit “bosses.” A high prevalence of witches and sorcerers has also been
reported among the aboriginal Washo (Leis 1963; Siskin 1941) in much the same
configuration as has been reported for the neighboring Northern Paiute (Park 1939;
Whiting 1950), with all shamans suspect as potential sorcerers. With increasing
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 19
White occupation of their territory during the late nineteenth century, their seasonal
round was disrupted, and the Washo settled around White habitations and ranches,
working as seasonal laborers, ranch hands, lumberjacks, and domestic servants. It
was into this disrupted cultural milieu, and disorganized social situation, that Henry
Rupert was born.
The Becoming and Being of a Shaman
Henry Rupert was born in 1885, the son of Pete Duncan and Susie John, both
Washo, in Genoa, Nevada. Genoa was an area of lush farm- and ranch-land amidst
the arid Nevada semi-desert which had been first settled by Mormon emigrants from
Utah. In the shadows of Job’s Peak, a 9,000-foot mountain in the Sierra Nevada
range, the Mormons had farmed the desert and transformed it into the rich grassland
it still is today. When Henry Rupert was still very young, about two to three years
old, his father deserted the family. Henry did not meet his father again until he was
twenty years old and his father, a complete stranger, was working as a handyman in
a Chinese restaurant in Carson City. By this time Pete Duncan had remarried; and
father and son remained strangers until Pete Duncan died.
Henry’s mother, Susie John, worked as a domestic servant for a ranch in Genoa.
Most of her time was taken up with her domestic chores, and Annie Rube, Henry’s
older sister, organized and managed the family household and acted as the family disciplinarian. Her husband, Charley Rube, worked as a ranch hand and fisherman, but
he was also an antelope shaman, a man who in aboriginal times was entrusted with
the task of “singing” antelope to sleep during the annual Washo antelope drives. Near
the encampment of Henry Rupert’s family lived Henry’s mother’s sister’s husband,
Welewkushkush, and his wife. Until the age of eight, when he was taken to school,
Henry divided most of his time between Genoa during the winter and the shores of
Lake Tahoe during the summer, usually in the company of either Charley Rube or
Welewkushkush.
During his early years, Henry had a series of dreams which he still remembers
with clarity, and which probably marked him early as having shamanic and mystic
potential. As he describes the situation, he would go to sleep on the ground inside the
family lean-to and dream of a bear who came and stood in the lean-to opening and
stared at him. When he looked at the bear, it would vanish, and then Henry would
fly up into the sky toward the moon. This dream recurred frequently over a fairly
long period. As a youngster, Henry was also subject to spells of dizziness and fainting. These spells also occurred at bedtime, and both the lean-to and ground would
whirl around in a circular motion. Henry would then tell his family to go outside the
lean-to and build large fires to stop the ground from whirling about. However, no
one paid any attention to his demands, and after a while he would recover.1
Welewkushkush, a well-known shaman among the Washo, was already between
sixty and seventy years old when Henry was born, and on a number of occasions
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20 | moebius anthropology
Henry was able to watch him healing. During one of these curing sessions, Henry
observed Welewkushkush dance barefoot in a lean-to fire and emerge unscathed.
Not surprisingly, the youngster respected his uncle greatly both for his curing feats
and for his generous, kind attitude and demeanor toward his patients, relatives, and
acquaintances. Henry maintains that he harbored similar feelings of respect toward
his brother-in-law, Charley Rube, and that the same general attitudes prevailed in his
family relationships. He was never severely disciplined at any time, and only his sister,
Annie Rube, scolded him. Nevertheless, even within this milieu, Henry exhibited
strong feelings of hostility and aggression as well as independence, as exemplified by
the following incident, quoted verbatim:
Someone, I don’t remember who, gave me a little puppy. I liked it very
much. One evening that puppy made lots of noise, and he stealed [sic]
some of the food we were going to have for supper. My elder sister gave me
hell about it. She said: “You don’t need that puppy in here; it’s no good;
get rid of it.” I made up my mind to kill that puppy. I took it to a fence
made out of rocks and I threw a big rock on top of the puppy and killed
it. My mind was made up. When I make up my mind, I don’t change it.
The next evening they asked me where the puppy was. I told them I killed
it, because they told me it had been no good.
During these early years Henry had few friends. He spent much time by himself
wandering over desert and mountain for days at a time, living off the land when he
could, and going hungry when he could not. Given the laissez-faire attitude within
his family, he had to report to no one, nor did he even have to be home at regular
intervals. While not self-sufficient, he was able and independent. On one occasion,
he “hopped” a freight train to Sacramento to see what lay on the other side of the
Sierra Nevada Mountains. He also exhibited a boundless curiosity about the natural
world around him, a world filled with strange forces and beings, and their existence
was often manifested to him. He still remembers sleeping in an abandoned campsite one night and seeing a strange object resembling a cloud pass close by his body
while he was awake, and wondering what it represented. On another occasion, while
walking down a deserted path at dusk, he saw a white object ahead of him. As he
walked forward, it moved. When he stopped, the object also halted. He began to
sweat heavily and was extremely frightened. Finally he gathered his courage, walked
up to the object, and found an old nightshirt flapping in the evening breeze. Yet he
wondered that the object flapped only when he walked forward and stopped when he
desisted. Such incidents were not simple coincidences; they suggested an importance
and significance that he was not yet able to unravel.
In 1892, at the age of seven, Henry received the first conscious intimation of what
his future powers might be. A relative of his mother died; his mother was deep in
mourning and quite despondent. Henry dreamt of the event which would follow,
and the event came to pass during that winter. His mother went from the family
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 21
encampment to a slue on the frozen Carson River, and there she attempted suicide
by trying to break through the ice and drown herself. But the ice was too thick, and
her attempt failed. This was the first time that Henry began to feel that he too might
be gifted in the manner of his beloved uncle, Welewkushkush.
Without becoming unduly analytic at this point, it is pertinent to indicate that
during these first eight years of Henry Rupert’s life many of the elements which resulted in his becoming a shaman were already present. During these early years Henry
was a Washo, but a Washo who camped on the fringes of the dominant White society
upon whom his mother depended for her livelihood. He spoke no English, only
Washo; his mother worked as a menial, a domestic servant; and his father had forever
deserted the family encampment. There is little doubt that these factors engendered
much hostility in Henry. Yet, because of the great degree of freedom allowed him,
much of this hostility was dissipated in his extensive and lengthy wanderings, which
at times almost take on the attributes of a rudimentary vision quest. As a child of a
culturally disrupted and socially disorganized Indian group, he differed little from
many other Indian children in the area, but even at this early age his dreams, visions,
and fantasy world were beginning to coalesce around the conception that he might
have unusual abilities. Also, he had no peers with whom to identify. His models of
socialization and learning were much older and more important; they included a
shaman and an antelope shaman, both very well versed in Washo lore and tradition.
Both of these men, and in fact his whole family, presented him with models of behavior based on kindness and sympathy, and to a lesser extent, understanding. The
aforementioned incident involving the puppy was apparently the one occasion in
which Henry’s hostility was expressed within the family milieu, and even here it was
met with sympathy. Up to the present time, Henry Rupert exhibits strong loyalties
and deep affection toward his immediate family, their children, and grandchildren.
In the phase of his life just described, Henry had models of behavior, models of affect, that he admired and respected, and on the whole, this outweighed his aggressive
and hostile sentiments. But even more important in the long run were the personal
qualities that he exhibited at an early age—his curiosity, independence, and perseverance, which overcame his strongest fears. We shall find these themes recurring again
and again throughout his life.
Some ten miles north of Genoa and two miles south of Carson City is the Stewart Indian School. Today it is a boarding school primarily for Indian children from
the Southwest, but in 1893 it was a center for the “forced acculturation” of Indian
children from the Great Basin under the supervision and control of the United States
Army. As part of its pacification program in the area, the Army required all Indian
children to attend and board at Stewart until they had completed the equivalent of an
eighth-grade education. Children held back by their parents were forcibly removed
from their families by the cavalry. At the age of eight, Henry Rupert was taken from
Genoa to Stewart, where he lived until the age of eighteen. It was here that he received the “power dream” which marked him as a potential shaman; here, too, he met
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22 | moebius anthropology
his future wife, and here he began to formulate the basis of his philosophy of healing
and his rationale for becoming a shaman, both of which were to be greatly expanded
in later life.
At Stewart, Henry experienced an environment vastly different from that of his
years of freedom and independence. Stewart was highly regimented and often brutal.
This was Henry Rupert’s first sustained contact with White society. Discipline was
harsh, and every effort was made at forced acculturation. Order was maintained with
a rawhide whip and detention cells. Children were not allowed to return home for
short respites until they had completed three full years at Stewart. Classes were held
in the mornings and in the evenings. In the afternoons the children were taught a
trade. If a child was late for meals, he did not eat. Here also, Henry was introduced
to White religion through a profusion of Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, and Anglican
proselytizers. All the children were forcibly baptized. Every morning, before breakfast, the children attended services. At breakfast, prayers were sung in Latin. On
Sundays the children went to church in the morning, and in the evening, they attended Bible classes and sang hymns. Some proselytizers even came on Saturdays and
preached all afternoon.
The day after Henry arrived, he ran away, but he was quickly returned. All told
he ran away three times. The second time he was severely whipped on his bare back.
However, Henry did well in school, and he learned to set newspaper type. He found
a friend in the school cook, who often gave him extra food to supplement the bare
school rations. He also developed his own techniques for maintaining some symbolic degree of independence. On one occasion he accidentally broke a spoon and in
consequence was forbidden to eat with a spoon for the next month; he then stole a
spoon and used it. He resisted the blandishments of his schoolmates with regard to
alcohol. The temptation was probably great, since his schoolmates went so far as to
place a bottle of liquor under his pillow. At Stewart, Henry made his first close friend,
Frank Rivers, another Washo; only to Frank did Henry confide his potential powers.
It was also at Stewart that Henry first came to know intimately Indians from other
tribes in the Great Basin—Northern Paiute and Shoshone—and his first girlfriend
was a Paiute. One of Henry’s strongest assets was his ability to absorb selectively
those aspects of White culture which he felt were beneficial to him; thus he was able
to master academic subjects, notably reading and writing, and learn an occupation,
while resisting Christianity, regimentation, and alcohol.
In 1902, at the age of seventeen, Henry experienced his power dream, the event
which marked him with certainty as shamanic material and which conferred certain
abilities upon him. He described it to me as follows:
I was sleeping in the school dormitory. I had a dream. I saw a buck in the
west. It was a horned buck. It looked east. A voice said to me: “Don’t kill
my babies any more.” I woke up, and it was raining outside, and I had a
nosebleed in bed.
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 23
Henry interpreted the dream in the following way. The conjunction of buck and rain
suggested that he could control the weather, since the buck was the “boss of the rain.”
The buck was standing in the west but looking east. The Washo believed that the
souls of the recently dead travel south but that, soon after, the souls of those who have
been evil turn east. The buck looking east was interpreted as a warning against developing certain potentialities which could become evil. The voice in the dream was
that of a snake warning against the indiscriminate taking of life; previously Henry
had killed wildlife, insects, and snakes without much concern. The rain, to which
he had awakened, indicated that his major spirit power would be water. Awakening
with a nosebleed placed the stamp of legitimacy upon the whole experience, since
the Washo believed that this kind of physical reaction is necessary if the dream is to
confer power. The fact that his spirit power was to be water was unusual, since most
Washo shamans had animate rather than inanimate objects as their spirit helpers.
Thus, while water baby was a fairly common spirit helper, water was not. In addition,
weather control was highly unusual among the Washo, being more prevalent among
both the Northern Paiute and the Shoshone.
The dream stressed certain potentials, specifically a Washo calling, that of shaman.
It also confirmed the validity of Henry’s early behavioral role models, Welewkushkush and Charley Rube, and their philosophy of living in harmony with the natural world. In so doing, it de-emphasized those aspects of White society and culture
which contradicted Washo values and behavioral expectations, but it did not forbid
Henry the continuation of his quest for knowledge in the White world. Rather, it
suggested that he pick and choose his way in relation to earlier models, thus serving as
both a warning and a promise of greatness. That it was a power dream was congruent
with Henry’s aspirations and expectations concerning himself and his future.
At this transition point in Henry’s life, shortly before he left the Stewart School,
the dream served as a guidepost which integrated both his childhood years and his
years at the school. His indecisions regarding the future were resolved, and his aspirations of becoming a shaman were crystallized. But his ideology of healing remained
inchoate, for he had not yet acquired the requisite shamanic techniques. He felt the
need to help his people when they were ill, but he knew not how. Nevertheless, he
was aware and insightful, and in learning through what he called the “law of nature”
he set the stage for years of thought and introspection, aware also that discoveries
came slowly: “One little thing may come every eight or ten years; you can’t grab it in
one bunch.”
When Henry graduated from Stewart, he took a job as a typesetter with the Reno
Evening Gazette, and he lived in Reno for most of the next ten years. During this
period, he mastered hypnotic techniques and began curing. But the most immediate
power conferred on him by his power dream was control of the weather, and in 1906
he exercised this power for the first time. During that summer, Henry went to visit
his family in Genoa. While there, he used to hang his pocket watch over his bed.
One evening, before retiring, he had a vision in which snow slowly, but completely,
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24 | moebius anthropology
covered the face of the watch. That winter the snowfall was very heavy and too deep
to enable him to cut firewood. One day, Henry concentrated on removing the snow.
That night and all the next day it rained, resulting in fairly widespread flooding. Although he had told no one of what he had done, his older sister, Annie Rube, accused
him of causing the floods.2
In the winter of 1908 he once again called down the rain, but in doing so he lost
this power forever. The winter was again difficult, and one day he constructed a medicine bundle and dropped it into the Truckee River, which flows through Reno. That
evening the weather turned warm and it rained. However, in tying his medicine bundle, Henry had used the buckskin from his shamanic rattle and replaced the buckskin
on the rattle with a length of thread. This offended the spirit of the buck, the “boss of
the rain,” and Henry was never again able to control the weather.
During this time, Henry attended an exhibition of hypnotism at the Grand Theater in Reno. He was greatly impressed but thought the performance had been rehearsed. He told his friend, Frank Rivers, that he, too, could master the requisite
techniques, and he ordered from Chicago a book entitled The Art of Attention and
the Science of Suggestion. In the evenings, and on Sundays, Henry would go into the
sandy hills surrounding Reno where he would practice his techniques on the stumps
and rocks “as if they were human beings; I imagined they were alive; if somebody
caught me at that they would put me in the crazy house.” He mastered hypnotic
techniques and held regular monthly sessions in the Reno Press Club, where he hypnotized people to the amusement and enjoyment of the assembled reporters. Interestingly, he felt no contradiction between acquiring power in a dream visitation and
acquiring it from a book.
In 1907, Welewkushkush suggested that Henry hire another shaman to help him
train and control his powers. The Washo believed that when the power, or spirit
helper, first comes to a shaman he becomes ill, and that the novice shaman then hires
an older experienced shaman to teach him how to extrude and control the intrusive
spirit-power. Although Henry had experienced only a nosebleed in 1902 and did
not consider this to be a “sickness,” he followed his uncle’s advice and hired the
well-known Washo shaman Beleliwe, also known as Monkey Peter. The experienced
shaman could also help the novice to renounce his power, if such was the latter’s
desire.3 I do not know what the customary period of time was between the power
dream and the hiring of another shaman to control the power, but in Henry’s case
some five years elapsed.
Beleliwe, instead of giving Henry specific advice, told him what he could accomplish with his power. He spoke of the two old women who had first brought the
power of healing to the Washo, and he warned that the power of blood is evil. He
also described some of the feats which shamans could accomplish, citing the cases of
an old woman who had walked up the perpendicular side of a cliff, of Welewkushkush who had walked under the waters of Lake Tahoe without drowning, and of
Southern Washo who danced in campfires. Then he told Henry: “All kinds of sickThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 25
ness will look pretty tough, but it will melt; it seems like you can’t do anything with
it, but it will melt.” However, the actual content of the shamanic ritual had to be
learned by observing other shamans at work. Significantly, Henry’s attitudes toward
Beleliwe were very similar to his attitudes toward Welewkushkush—respect and admiration for both their personal attributes and their work. He told me, “Beleliwe
was a great man; he knew more than the rest put together.” While Henry’s feelings
toward Welewkushkush changed somewhat during the next few years, Beleliwe’s
stature continued to grow. And when Robert Lowie, the distinguished anthropologist from the University of California at Berkeley, visited the Washo in 1926, Henry
not only wished him to meet Beleliwe, but referred to him as a philosopher (Lowie
1939: 321).4
Henry performed his first successful cure in 1907. A brother of Frank Rivers
had died of alcohol poisoning. His mother was deeply grieved and became very depressed. A White doctor was called in but was unable to calm the woman. A few
days later Henry, as he was passing by, heard the old woman crying. He went in,
washed her face, and prayed for her. She recovered. It is significant that this first cure
was performed on the mother of his best friend—within a milieu where his confidence would be bolstered. It is also significant that Henry’s family, with the exception
of Welewkushkush, knew nothing of his shamanic power or his achievements with
weather control until after this first cure. His reticence is an example of the self-doubt
that always plagued him—doubt in his abilities and fear that he would not find the
answers his curiosity demanded—but which drove him to greater efforts.
In his first cure, Henry used techniques generally similar to those utilized by other
Washo shamans. Traditional Washo curing rituals required a shaman to work for
three consecutive nights from dusk to midnight, and a fourth night until dawn. In
the course of the ritual, repeated every night, Henry used tobacco, water, a rattle, a
whistle, and eagle feathers. He began by smoking, praying, washing the patient’s face
with cold water, and sprinkling all his paraphernalia with cold water. He then blew
smoke on the patient and prayed to come in contact with water. A peace offering
followed, in which he paid for the health of the patient by scattering grey and yellow
seeds mixed with pieces of abalone shell around the body of the patient; the seeds
symbolized food, and the shells symbolized money. Next, he chanted, prayed, and
again blew smoke on the patient and sprinkled his paraphernalia with cold water.
Arising, he walked about blowing his whistle, attempting to attract the disease object
or germ from the body of the patient and into his own body, whence it might be repulsed and captured by the whistle. Then he sat down again and blew a fine spray of
cold water over the body of the patient. This ended the first half of the curing ritual,
which was repeated each night.
At some time during the course of the ritual, Henry would receive visions relating both to the cause of the illness and the prognosis. They usually involved either
the presence or absence of water. Thus, a vision of damp ground suggested that the
patient was ill but would live a short while; muddy water suggested that the paThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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26 | moebius anthropology
tient would live but would not recover completely; ice suggested that Henry must
break through the ice and find water; burning sagebrush suggested that the patient
would die quickly unless Henry could stamp out the fire. Over the four-night period
the content of these visions, or occasionally dreams, tended to change. Thus, Henry
might see a fire or a burned-over hillside on the first night, damp ground on the second, muddy water on the third, and on the fourth night a stream of clear, cold water
or the Pacific Ocean rolling over the Sierra Nevada. The portent of the vision of the
fourth night overrode those of the visions seen on the previous nights.
During 1907–08, Henry Rupert acquired his second spirit helper, a young Hindu
male. At infrequent intervals, he used to visit a high school in Carson City which
contained the skeleton of a Hindu, and on one of these visits the spirit of the Hindu
“got on” Henry. Since the Hindu was a “White power,” this precipitated a major
conflict in Henry’s fantasy world and in the most important area of his life, his healing. As a spirit helper, the Hindu demanded to be used in curing sessions. Henry’s
problem was how to reconcile the opposing demands of his Washo and Hindu spirit
helpers. The confrontation and its resolution came in a dream:
I saw this in a dream. The Hindu’s work says: “You will do great things
if you make us the leader in this kind of work.” The two Indian women
say no: “We started this with Henry Rupert; we were the first. He (the
Hindu) has no right here; this work belongs to us.” I didn’t know what to
make of it. I pondered on it for a long time. Finally I decided, and I told
them what I decided: “We all do the same work; let’s help each other and
be partners.” And that is the way it works today; nobody is the leader. The
Hindu wanted to be the leader in this kind of work. The two women said
no. I fixed it.
This dream dramatically illustrates the basic conflict between opposing themes in
Henry Rupert’s life: his desire to expand his potentials for learning and healing by
utilizing non-Indian resources and his desire to follow the childhood models he loved
and respected. His resolution of this conflict was highly sophisticated; he utilized
a more complex level of conceptualization and synthesis in which both opposing
themes were subsumed under a common rubric, that of healing, which applied to
both categories of spirit helpers. This rubric was neither Washo nor “White” but
constituted an ethic which cross-cut different ethnic and racial categories. I prefer
the term “ethic” to “principle” because the synthesis had definite moral connotations
of aiding and succoring others, and because to Henry the fact that he had become
a healer was more important than either his being born a Washo or his forays into
non-Indian knowledge. It was the Hindu who first gave Henry his insights into the
components of the “law of nature” and offered him the code of living which he has
since followed: to be honest, discreet, and faithful; to be kind and do no harm. These
conceptions often ran counter to the behavior of traditional Washo shamans, but
they were consistent with the models of Welewkushkush, Charley Rube, and BeleThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 27
liwe. The ethic of healing which Henry developed was an integrated and complete
synthesis; he was never troubled again by this kind of acculturative conflict.
After Henry acquired the Hindu spirit helper, a number of changes occurred in his
curing techniques—the first of his innovations of which I am aware. Before beginning a cure, he would now place a handkerchief on his head to represent the Hindu’s
turban, and when he blew water on the patient, he prayed to the Hindu to come and
rid the patient of his illness. He also began to place his hands on the patient’s head,
chest, and legs in a symbolic attempt to encompass the whole being of the patient
with his power. He also began to envision himself differently while curing; while sitting by the side of the patient he saw himself as a skeleton with a turban on its head
moving quickly around the body of the patient.
Henry did not perform his second cure until 1909, two years later. It was this
cure which established him as a legitimate shaman among the Washo. The patient
was a Washo whose family was camping on the Carson River near Minden, Nevada.
This man had been treated by both shamans and White doctors without success, although the doctors had diagnosed his case as typhoid fever. Henry, although a novice
shaman, had been consulted as a last resort and was successful in curing the patient.
In 1910, when Henry was working as a gardener and general handyman for a
banker in Reno, he suffered from rheumatism and from broken ribs which had never
healed properly. He went to his uncle, Welewkushkush, to be cured, but the latter
merely presented him with a warning:
He didn’t work on me long. He just blew smoke on me, and we talked. He
said: “The thing that is causing it is right here in your head, and you will
forget all about your stiff joint; you don’t have rheumatism. You might be
very sick and your mind will go into the White people’s world, and I can’t
go there and bring you back.” He blew smoke on my forehead; that thing
traveled in the smoke out of me, and I got well. The thing he drew out
was a piece of printed matter. I didn’t see it; he wouldn’t show it to me. It
was what I had in my head from studying books. He took out the Hindu’s
works. The printed matter belonged to the White people’s world.
Welewkushkush suggested that Henry would receive no aid if he pursued his interest
in the knowledge of White society and implied that he would become ill if he continued; the two worlds, Indian and non-Indian, must remain separate in terms of both
intellect and affect. But the ethic of curing which Henry had synthesized from Indian
and non-Indian elements prevailed over Welewkushkush’s thinly veiled warning. His
independence established Henry as a mature adult prepared to continue to develop
his own philosophy of living and ultimately to restructure Washo cosmogony.
In October 1910, Henry married Lizzie, a Northern Paiute woman whom he had
first met at the Stewart Indian School. Her father, Buckeroo John, a ranch hand and
maker of rawhide lariats, had been a devotee of Jack Wilson, the apostle of the 1890
Ghost Dance. Buckeroo John did not approve of Henry as a prospective bridegroom,
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28 | moebius anthropology
nor did he think highly of Henry’s curing abilities. It was, nevertheless, significant
that Henry should take a Paiute wife at a time when intermarriage was infrequent and
generally viewed with disfavor, especially by shamans and other conservative Washo.
The union produced four children, three of whom today live with their offspring
in the same community as Henry. After his marriage, Henry returned to work with
the Reno Evening Gazette, melting linotypes. But he soon came to suspect that the
lead fumes were poisoning him, and he returned with his family to Genoa, where he
worked as a ranch hand until 1924. During this period, he continued his healing,
becoming increasingly well known.
In 1924, with all their children away at school in Stewart, by now operated by
the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Henry and Lizzie decided to leave Genoa. Rather than
choosing Dresslerville, the major Washo community of that time, Henry decided on
Carson Colony, forty acres of land bought for the Washo in 1916 but unoccupied
except for a few transient Northern Paiute and Shoshone families. In making this
move, Henry isolated himself physically, and later also socially, when Lizzie died
of tuberculosis in 1933 despite Henry’s attempts to cure her. He became more of a
recluse with greater opportunity to meditate upon the problems of healing. “Rupert,
the sophisticated young Washo . . . was a mystic credited with shamanistic ambitions,” says Lowie (1939: 321) of him at this time.
Henry also worked hard, planting and raising an acre of strawberries as well as a
flock of turkeys. In the Depression years he earned as much as $100 a week during
the summer months, and his flock of turkeys was later sold for $5,000. He also spent
many evenings digging a large irrigation pond, which he later filled with goldfish.
But these were essentially years of thought, introspection, and self-examination.
As a child, and later as a novice shaman, Henry had learned the tenets of traditional
Washo religion. This included a conception of a spirit world populated by the departed souls of all animate beings which had populated the natural world. The spirit
world resembled the natural world; it had the same people and a comparable round
of activities. The age of a person in the spirit world was that at which he had died.
The spirits of evil persons were segregated in one section of the spirit world, but
they underwent no particular punishments because of their earthly transgressions.
The spirits or ghosts of animate beings were feared as potential causes of illness because of their ability to intrude into the bodies of the living or to project inanimate
disease-producing objects into them. When an individual died, consequently, his
dwelling and possessions were burnt so that his ghost would be unable to retrace his
path to the natural world.
The Washo had no coherent religious philosophy or theology, but they did have
a number of creation myths and creator figures. Among the latter were the two old
women who fought the Hindu in Henry’s dream. However, these creator figures
played but little part in the placation of the supernatural. In this respect the Washo
dealt with the ghosts of animate beings, and these had the same motivations as living
Washo, including revenge for present or past misdeeds and curiosity which brought
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 29
them back to the world of the living. Hence, for example, parents avoided striking or
spanking a child for fear of angering a dead relative, whose ghost might kill the child
to punish the parents (Downs 1966: 60).
In the process of evolving a general ethic of healing, Henry Rupert reformulated
some of the traditional conceptions of Washo cosmology. According to his new formulation, the substance and composition of the spirit world is very similar to electric
waves or pulses of energy. These are everlasting and ever-present, and all objects in
the natural world are also partially composed of them. To Henry, therefore, spirit and
mind are the same, both being composed of what he called “ethereal waves.” When
an individual dreams, his “mind-power” travels to the spirit world, remaining connected to his material body by a thin lifeline of energy. If this thin thread of energy
breaks, the individual’s mind-power is unable to return to its material shell, and death
results. According to Henry, when a person dies his departing spirit or “ego” remains
temporarily encased in a weak body shell, the “astral body,” but within one month
the “astral body” falls away and the “pure” ego or spirit returns to the spirit world.
The spirit world itself has three planes—the first is a coarse level, the second a
finer level, and the third was the finest or purest level. Normally, when a person
dreams, his spirit or mind-power travels to the first level. Passage into the second
level, either in dreams or death, is impossible unless the individual has been pure in
mind and heart and has followed “the law of nature.” The third level is the domain
of “God,” “creator,” and “omnipotent life.” All spiritual life from the highest to the
lowest is a manifestation of some kind of energy, which has its ultimate source in the
third level of the spirit world. This energy is an essence found in all animate life and
inanimate objects in the natural world and may, in Henry’s terms, be called “soul,”
“ego,” “spirit,” or “mind-power.” The same energy is also the essence of all spirits, in
which it coalesces into certain forms found in the natural world, thereby forming a
connecting link between the natural and spirit worlds. While there is no actual separation of good and evil spirits in the hereafter, only those spirits which are “purer” in
essence can reach the second level. No spirits, however, can reach the third level, the
ultimate energy source.
We thus find, in conjunction with Henry’s general ethic of healing, a general
conception of “power” or “energy” which is the basis of healing. Henry makes no
distinction between the miracles performed by the Old Testament prophets, those
performed by Christ and his disciples, the healing powers of shamans, and his own
work, since the basis of the power is the same in every case, though manifested at
different times and in different social situations. All these people learned to tap the
same source of energy and to channel it for purposes of curing and miracle-working.
This power or energy is not, however, ethically neutral. It is positive and “good,” and
this accounts for Henry’s disavowal of witchcraft and sorcery, which will be described
later. Henry is aware that his conceptions are an act of faith. As he stated to me: “In
my line of work I see it that way. Nobody told me this. Nobody can prove it. That is
what I believe . . . the power is ever-present; it never wears out.”
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30 | moebius anthropology
Because Henry’s ethic of curing was based on contact with the supernatural or
paranatural, it was necessary for him to develop some conception of a general source
of power for curing. His personal restructuring of the spirit world did not rest on a
dichotomy of good and evil but rather on a conception of differing degrees of “good.”
In his ideology, no person or spirit could be completely evil, thus precluding belief
in active malevolent supernatural agencies. It was no longer conceivable that ghosts,
for example, could cause illness by intruding their spirit essence into humans. All
mind-power derived from the same source, and both the source and the power it
represented were beneficent and could not be utilized for malevolent designs. Consequently, traditional Washo beliefs in malevolent ghosts, witchcraft, and sorcery no
longer had a place in Henry’s worldview. However, while human ghosts could not
cause illness, the spirits of animal life and inanimate objects could and did.
How did Henry explain this possible contradiction? Everything, animate and
inanimate, has some form of life, “ego,” or “soul.” All living things require water as
a minimal basis for existence. So, for example, when feathers are not sprinkled with
water at regular intervals, they take water from the person owning them, “drying”
him out and making him ill. Henry did not consider this a malevolent action, but
he held that a person who transgressed, consciously or unwittingly, was accountable, since if the feathers were given water, the patient would recover. In one case
I recorded, that of an old man who could neither speak nor eat, Henry had the
following diagnostic vision on the fourth night of the curing session. He was sitting
at the eastern end of a valley hiding from a whirlwind. Seeing it coming straight
toward him, he was frightened and hid in the willows. The whirlwind stopped in
front of him, and a magpie flew out and lit on a nearby willow. After he emerged
from the trance state, Henry was told by relatives that the patient had at one time
made feather headdresses and that he still kept a trunk of them in a deserted cabin.
Henry said to me:
The trunk of feathers made him sick. I prayed to the feathers and the birds
not to be angry; he thought he was doing right, but he didn’t give them
water. I said: “I will give you water; don’t dry this fellow up.” Next day he
spoke and was okay.
Although the Washo attributed rattlesnake power, the power to sorcerize, to
Welewkushkush, Henry maintained that Welewkushkush had been taught to handle rattlesnakes without personal harm, and that the Washo feared and mistrusted
phenomena which they did not understand. In another case, an old female shaman
was accused of killing both a Washo political figure and a promising young shaman
because she coveted their positions of leadership. According to Henry, however, she
was a fine old woman who understood “the law of nature” and lived according to it,
and she could not be evil since her power was derived from a beneficent source. “They
said she was a witch, but it was just coincidence. They blamed her for heart failure
when she passed by. They couldn’t prove it.”
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henry rupert, washo shaman
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As Henry’s fame as a healer spread, he began to receive patients from a wide variety
of ethnic groups. Though not common, it was not unknown for Washo shamans to
treat Northern Paiute and Shoshone patients, but Henry treated these and Hawaiian,
Filipino, Mexican, and White patients as well. In this transcultural healing he was
successful, doubtless because his ethic of healing gave him increased confidence in
dealing with non-Indians. His status as a healer grew continuously, and he became
known and respected as a successful shaman from the Shoshone Yomba reservation in
central Nevada to Mexican enclaves in Sacramento. His increasing renown attracted
non-Indian patients who had exhausted other alternatives. A number of cases will
illustrate the diversity of his clientele.
In curing a Protestant minister, who came to him with severe headaches, Henry
received the following diagnostic vision. He saw a large auditorium in which were
seated on one side a group of Whites and the minister, and on the other a group
of Indians representing various tribes. Between the two was a large stage on which
dressed steers were falling, forming a large pile of meat ready to eat. Everyone in the
auditorium ate of the meat, except for the minister. Henry told the latter that he
would lose his headaches, but that he had made one mistake. The minister had been
in the habit of serving tea and cake after his sermons, but while his congregation ate,
he did not. This, said Henry, was the cause of his headaches, and the minister admitted the correctness of the assessment. The vision was a sophisticated reflection of the
interrelationship between Henry’s ethic of curing and his restructured cosmology. As
he explained to the minister, the latter’s abstention, in a congregation of both Whites
and Indians who broke bread together, was inconsistent with both Henry’s ethic of
curing and the minister’s status as a servant of God.
In 1942, Henry journeyed to Sacramento to treat an old Mexican woman who
had been diagnosed as having a malignant tumor of the abdomen. On the first night,
Henry was unable to find water. On the second night he saw a burned-over hillside
of which a section had remained untouched. On the third night he saw a small lake
between two hills, and on the fourth, a stream of running water. On the morning
of the fifth day the lump had disappeared from the woman’s abdomen, and she later
recovered completely.
A number of other cases dealt with psychosomatic disorders. In one of these, a
Shoshone boy from Austin, in central Nevada, was brought to Carson Colony to be
treated by Henry. The boy had auditory hallucinations in which he heard three men,
who were following him, constantly threatening to kill him. The cause of the illness
was discovered to be a tooth of a spirit which had projected into the boy’s head. At the
end of the curing session the boy no longer heard voices. In another case, an ex-soldier who had fought in World War II was brought to Henry with severe lacerations
around his neck. This man had visual hallucinations in which two German soldiers
were attempting to strangle him with barbed wire, so that he tore continuously at his
neck in the attempt to remove the wire. Henry treated him successfully. In the case of
a White storekeeper from Fallon, Nevada, with an apparent history of heart trouble,
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32 | moebius anthropology
Henry found a butterfly in the man’s chest and removed it. This man states to this day
that he will not be treated by any other doctor than Henry.5
In 1942, at the age of fifty-seven, when Henry Rupert was working as a general
handyman and night watchman at the Stewart Indian Agency, he decided to retire
to Carson Colony and devote himself full-time to healing. He was acutely aware
that “reality” in healing and living is a matter of relative perception, psychological
set, and social situation. The Hindu spirit helper had told him: “What appertaineth
unto one, another knoweth not.” And on one occasion Henry stated to me: “You
don’t know what I am talking about, and the same is true for anybody who reads this
thing you write. What is real for me is not real for you.” As an example, he cited an
occasion when he was walking across a bridge over the Truckee River in Reno. He saw
a woman who wailed to him that her son had fallen into the river and pleaded with
him to save the boy. Henry was about to plunge into the water when the woman’s
daughter appeared and told him that her mother had periodic hallucinations and
there was no one in the water. Henry concluded: “It was real for that woman; she
thought her son was in the water; but it isn’t real for me. What I know is real for me,
but it isn’t real for anybody else.”
We must remember, in considering the phenomenological basis of Henry’s conception of “reality,” that he was an adept hypnotist cognizant of the importance of
gaining and holding a patient’s attention during a curing session by the use of such
instruments as a rattle and eagle feathers. “I use them,” he told me, “only to gain the
attention of the sick person, nothing more.” When Henry was treating a sick old
Washo woman in Woodfords, California, his Hindu spirit helper told him that her
illness was being caused by the spirit of a dead mole which the woman kept as a gambling charm; the mole spirit wanted repayment for having been killed. The Hindu
came to an agreement with the mole spirit: the woman would have to lose the sight
of one eye, but she would live. Henry described what followed:
As I prayed, I looked to the mountains. One of my eyes started to get dim.
It started to close. I couldn’t see out of it. At the same time, one of her eyes
started to close and started to dim, and that’s the way she left. She could
only see out of one eye for the rest of her life, but she lived a long time . . .
Funny things happen in my line of work, but it’s true.
“Suggestions” made by the shaman in the context of the curing session are clearly
an important factor in the efficacy of certain cures. A case in point was that of a
young Washo who was brought to Henry. He had been unable to walk for a week and
believed that he was stricken with polio. Henry worked on him for a few hours and
then, during a rest period, told the young man that he did not have polio. He cited
a personal experience of his own as an example. When he was working in Reno he
had attended a medicine show, where he was examined and told that he had “heart
trouble due to indigestion.” Henry bought a bottle of medicine and drank some of
it, after which his heart began to beat quickly and his breathing became irregular, but
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 33
he then threw the bottle away and felt normal. After this illustration he again told
his patient that he did not have polio, that his muscles were simply overworked, and
that he should forget the matter. A week later the patient returned, saying that he had
followed Henry’s advice and felt fine.
In the course of his meditations and his dialogues with the spirit world, Henry
also consciously restructured traditional Washo conceptions about the acquisition
of shamanic power. The traditional Washo belief system required that an individual receive shamanic power involuntarily, through a dream or vision, after which
he had the choice of either accepting or rejecting the power. While shamanic power
tended to run in particular families, where children were socialized in an environment charged with the importance of dreams and the supernatural interpretations
of events, shamanic power was never consciously transmitted from one person to
another. Only after receiving power did a novice shaman hire an experienced practitioner to help him master and control it.
To Henry, however, living by “the law of nature” meant being closely attuned to
the forces that created and controlled all beings and things of the world. Since power
derived from a common pool of “energy,” anyone who could tap this pool could use
the resultant power for purposes of healing. In order to accomplish this, however, an
individual had to possess certain personal qualities; he had to be honest, faithful, and
discreet and live a pure life. It is significant that Henry first learned this possibility
of the transmission of power from the Hindu, a non-Washo and non-Indian spirit
helper. According to Henry:
Anybody could learn it, but you have to come under these three things,
and be like a recluse, and follow the law of nature. You can’t be happygo-lucky. If you live by nature, you can understand a little of nature and
help nature do her work. I had to live just so to get what I was looking
for. You can’t get it by being foolish. I got it just by thinking. It took me
over sixty years to learn that. If I had a teacher, I could have learned that
in a month.
Even if a person was not pure enough to tap the power source himself, he might
still borrow another’s power for the purpose of effecting minor cures. Henry lent his
power at least twice, once to a sister and once to a daughter-in-law, with the clear
understanding that their use of the power was only temporary.
During the years when Henry was developing his own philosophy of healing and
conceptions of cosmology he also continued patiently to search for new techniques
and more efficacious curing methods. But he had little success until 1956, when, at
the age of seventy, he undertook to cure George Robinson, a Hawaiian, who had
married a distant relative of his and was living in Hayward, California. Robinson
was also a curer and had been a personal friend for a number of years. Henry regarded him with much the same affection and respect with which he had earlier held
Welewkushkush and Beleliwe.
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34 | moebius anthropology
George Robinson had asserted that nothing was impossible and that nothing
could hurt him, and he paid the price of hubris. He gave a large feast for his children,
but he did not invite a daughter of his wife Juanita by a previous marriage. Juanita,
furious at this slight, decided not to live with George any longer. She began to fast
and said she would die. She told George not to give her an elaborate funeral but to
dispose of her body in the hills for the animals and birds to devour. He tried to cure
her with all the methods at his disposal, but he failed, and she died. Henry attended
the funeral. George buried Juanita with a gold ring, erected a headstone, and had a
cement curbing built around her grave. He did not follow Juanita’s instructions, and
he fell seriously ill. Henry described his condition as follows:
He was dying; he was like a block of wood. Kids jumped on his belly and
he didn’t feel it. He couldn’t pass food; he couldn’t feel pain.
On the first night of the cure Henry was unable to receive any visions of either diagnosis or prognosis. On the second night he saw the cement curbing around the grave.
On the third night he saw the brass medal on the headstone bearing Juanita’s name.
On the fourth night he saw the gold ring and received the following vision of prognosis. He was walking along the bottom of a deep gulch and saw coming toward him a
herd of stampeding cattle. Frightened, he labored to climb the steep hillside. He saw
one clump of sagebrush, grasped it, and sat down beside it. One steer galloped up the
hill, jumped over the sagebrush, and said: “Tomorrow you gonna eat meat.” George
Robinson recovered, and on the following day he was again able to feel pain and eat.
Henry warned him to stay away from Juanita’s grave for four years, lest the grave dry
out the water in his body and again make him ill.
In return for being cured, Robinson made Henry a gift of some of his power,
in the form of a Hawaiian spirit helper named George. Although George lived in a
volcano in Hawaii, his power was at its maximum in the vicinity of Henry Rupert’s
home. Consequently, Henry now preferred to cure at home and would no longer
journey to visit patients except in emergency cases. Henry received from George a
new set of instructions. The most important of these—“Everything comes quick and
goes away quick”—emphasized the speed and efficacy of the new Hawaiian techniques. The content of Henry’s dream themes also changed. He saw a dead and desiccated chicken which returned to life, and the skeletal remains of a horse which also
came alive. Robinson had claimed that he could bring the dead back to life, and these
dreams showed Henry knew that this ability might also be his.
A curing session utilizing the techniques now took place in daylight, and it lasted
no longer than four hours and sometimes as little as a few minutes, depending on
the nature of the ailment. Henry no longer needed visions of diagnosis or prognosis,
and he could also eliminate chants, the blowing of smoke and water on the patient,
and the use of the whistle to capture disease objects. Instead the patient was asked the
location of the pain or swelling and was seated in a chair facing west, the direction
of the Hawaiian Islands. Standing behind the chair, Henry twice called upon George
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 35
for help, each time placing his fingers on the patient’s neck, with thumbs on spine,
for about ten seconds. Then, with his hands again on the patient’s neck, he called out:
“Wake up my body, wake up my nerves and circulate my blood; let my whole body
be normal; let my heart beat, my speech, my eyesight, and my breathing be normal;
and give me strength.” Next, standing in front of the patient, he stated: “This person
says he was sick here; he had pains here; it’s not there now; it’s gone.” Then he placed
his hand on the “pain spot” for some five seconds and asked the patient to take a deep
breath and move his head from side to side. Usually the pain departed, but sometimes
it moved to a different part of the body, in which case Henry again invoked George
and repeated the procedure three or four times. Then, placing his left hand on top of
the patient’s head and his right hand at the patient’s feet, he called to George: “Please
mend this.” Finally, he removed his hands and said: “We will close this.”
According to Henry, the key to these techniques is contained in the following
statement by his Hawaiian spirit helper: “We help nature, and nature does the rest.”
The above is a description of “Hawaiian curing” in its simplest form, as applied by
Henry to ailments which he regarded as easy to cure.
Henry did not discard his previous techniques completely. Though he worked
for briefer periods in his cures, for severe ailments he would use both the Hindu
and George, and he would search for visions of prognosis involving the presence or
absence of water, as well as employing his newer methods. In effect, he had developed a set of functionally streamlined curing techniques, involving less reliance on
ceremonial artifacts, from which he could pick and choose according to the nature
of the ailment. At the advanced age of seventy, Henry relinquished willingly, without
personal conflict, techniques that he had used for almost fifty years.
George posed no problems of integration for Henry. As a spirit helper, his power
derived from the same general source as that of the Hindu, of water, and of the two
old Indian women, and George’s curing functions were incorporated into Henry’s
general ethic of healing, which overrode ethnic, racial, and cultural differences. The
potential for innovation had not ended. From George he learned of a new way to stop
bleeding in serious wounds quickly by placing his hands on the wound. However, the
occasion to test this technique has not yet arisen, and Henry has doubts, not unreasonable or neurotic, as to his capacity to utilize it:
I am kind of afraid of it; I don’t have enough confidence. I have the idea it
can’t be done. I don’t try it because I don’t have enough confidence.
Today, Henry Rupert lives quietly in Carson Colony, continuing to cure, meditate, and tend a flourishing orchard in the desert. The Washo, despite their traditional
fear and mistrust of shamans, regard Henry in a different light, recognizing, perhaps
indirectly, the changes he represents. Leis (1963: 60) states:
Only one [shaman] remained when we studied the Washo . . . and he
was trusted and not feared by anyone. In other words, the sole remaining
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36 | moebius anthropology
shaman was “good” as opposed to the “bad” Indian doctors who practiced
witchcraft.
My own experiences confirm this completely.
Exactly what the social consequences of Henry’s personal innovations are likely to
be is uncertain. It is clear that the Washo have little knowledge of either the extent
or content of these innovations, although they recognize that he does not doctor
in the traditional Washo manner. At present there are no budding young shamans
among the Washo, and it is unlikely that future shamans will take the traditional
path to gaining supernatural power. Although Henry does not proselytize, he offers
an alternative, but the regimen and qualities required are either unappealing or rare.
Nevertheless, the potentiality exists, and this could open a fascinating new chapter on
shamanic healing among the Washo.
Conclusion
The most striking fact in this life history, to me, is the coherence and integration of
the innovations considered. The conceptions, both of an ethic of healing and of a
coherent cosmology, are congruent with one another. Within this framework, Henry
has been able to incorporate heterocultural spirit helpers, new techniques of curing, and proficiency in transcultural curing, as well as to explore the possibility of
transmitting and teaching his healing abilities. Although his childhood models have
greatly influenced his development, he has been able to resist their strictures and to
reconceptualize his thinking on sorcery and witchcraft as causes of illness in terms
of his reinterpretation of Washo cosmology. Throughout the material presented run
themes of curiosity, experimentation, and perseverance, balanced by uncertainty of
success. Henry’s personality unfolds, through the years, slowly and positively, with
few contradictions. It takes the form of learning, testing, and integration, of working for maximal organization of all potentials within the framework of sophisticated
general principles flexible enough to admit defeat in areas where spirit helpers are
unable to operate. Thus, Henry has recognized, through experience, the illnesses he
cannot treat, and has accepted these limitations while delving into potentially more
fruitful areas.
It is highly inadequate to suggest that Henry Rupert adopted shamanism as a
neurotic defense against personal aggression and instability, or simply that he made
a successful adjustment to the acculturative situation in which he lived. The shaman has often been analyzed and typed as a neurotic or borderline psychotic who
performs valuable social functions in a deviant role to which he is shunted to meet
his own neurotic needs (cf. Kroeber 1940; Radin 1937: 108; Spencer and Jennings
1965: 151; Boyer 1962: 233; Lands 1960: 164; Devereux 1956, 1957: 1043, 1961a:
1088, 1961b: 63–64).6 The neurotic defense of the shaman is conceptualized as un-
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henry rupert, washo shaman
| 37
stable, transitory, and inadequate; the experience of becoming a shaman is also often
described as a revitalization experience.
These conceptions are not applicable in the case described. Henry Rupert presents
us with a case of continuous psychological development, growth, and innovation
throughout his individual life span. His first innovations included both a complex
philosophical statement about the nature of the supernatural and natural worlds and
a sophisticated approach to transcultural curing. All his other innovations were integrated into this psychological matrix, and this has remained stable through time
and space. While his uncertainties and fears are considerable, Henry knows that one
cannot face the unknown with certainty, unless it is rooted in rigidity. While man is
fallible, Henry believes that the only path to knowledge is through experimentation,
and his fears have never stopped him from experimenting.
Unfortunately, in anthropology, we have few ways of describing or analyzing the
ego strength or ego integrity of individuals in the cultures we deal with, and ordinarily this does not concern us. We have good evidence of both social disorganization
and psychological disturbance among acculturating peoples, and we can tentatively
suggest that, in many ways, cultural processes have overwhelmed individual defenses
in these cases by destroying traditional alternatives and failing to provide new ones.
But what of the creative individual? What of the individual with great ego strength
who is able to choose and combine traditional and new alternatives, not merely integrating them but developing new syntheses which may be both personally satisfying
and socially transmissible? Of such persons and the roles they play we know little.
And the same is true of the shaman who, as Nadel has suggested, can play a creative
and innovative role. In the case of Henry Rupert, we gain a glimpse of what the quality and content of such a synthesis can be in an acculturative situation.
Notes
First published in 1967 as “The Development of a Washo Shaman,” Ethnology 6: 444–64. Reprinted
with permission.
I did this fieldwork in Nevada during the summer of 1964. All materials presented in this chapter
were originally recorded verbatim through the cooperation of Henry Rupert and, unless otherwise
cited, are based on that record.
1. In this account there is an interesting conjunction of elements of bear, flying, and fire, which
Eliade (1964) maintains are basic to the shamanistic complex, especially in North America.
2. This may be indirect evidence that his family expected Henry to gain power and were quite
ready to attribute the cause of unusual events to him.
3. According to Welewkushkush, the recipient of a power dream who wished to reject the power
covered himself with ashes, prayed to the intrusive spirit to leave him, and then washed the
ashes off with clear water. This ritual was repeated daily over a four-month period under the
direction of an experienced shaman. It should be noted that Henry did not become ill after his power dream and that he waited five years before hiring Beleliwe at the suggestion of
Welewkushkush. This may suggest that Henry performed the Washo ritual mainly to appease
his family and not because he believed it to be necessary.
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38 | moebius anthropology
4. Beleliwe died as the result of curing a tubercular patient in Carson City. He was able to take the
tuberculosis “germ” out of the patient’s body and into his own, but the germ lodged in the back
of his neck, affecting his speech and bodily movements, and finally killing him. I do not know
how Welewkushkush died, but he told Henry that he could cure anything but the common
cold and that it would be the common cold which would finally kill him.
5. An interesting conclusion emerges from these and other cases. It seems possible that in a situation of culture change the doctor-patient relationship depends more on the faith inherent
in the relationship than it does on common cultural background, cultural context, or cultural
symbolism. In none of these cases did the patient know what Henry was doing; they accepted
his efficaciousness as a matter of faith. It also seems likely that such doctor-patient relationships
would not have been countenanced in traditional Washo society, where patients and their relatives were generally familiar at least with the techniques used, the paraphernalia required of a
shaman, and the length of time required for a cure.
6. There are, of course, anthropologists who disagree with this formulation, e.g., Opler (1959,
1961), Honigmann (1960), Murdock (1965). Possibly the anthropologists’ often ungenerous
view of the shaman as a person is related to the way in which they often tend to identify and
sympathize with a whole culture, and thus with the attitudes the majority have toward the
shaman, rather than treating the shaman as a legitimate subcultural variant. It is ironic that
these anthropologists can then return to their own culture and their own subcultural niches and
complain about how society treats the “egghead” and the artist.
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Chapter 2
Tracing
Bureaucratic
Logic through
Surprise and
Abduction
Author’s Note
About a decade ago I was asked to contribute to an edited volume on Israel. The
book’s editor told me to do the chapter in any way I chose. I decided to concentrate
on how the idea of bureaucratic logic came into focus for me. The only way to do
this, I concluded, was to follow myself through the awakening to how the world
I experienced was organized through lineal classification and categorization, and
how so much of this awareness happened through what C. S. Peirce had termed the
logic of abduction, as distinct from logics of deduction and induction which I had
learned as a student but to which I had never given much attention as a practicing
anthropologist. The chapter meanders through glimpses of my early life and, later,
of the locations in which I did fieldwork; nonetheless this was how my relationship to bureaucratic logic emerged. The anthropology editor of the press was displeased and gave me an ultimatum: include Israeli materials only; after all, this
was the topic of the entire volume. Well, this was not how I had become aware of
bureaucratic logic; my search joined Israel to other locations and experiences. Her
demand was sheer poetism. Poetism? A theory or presentation whose only claim for
consideration is that it is aesthetically pleasing. In this instance the anthropology
editor indeed joined together poetism and her own use of bureaucratic logic. Slice
and dice the essay until it fit aesthetically within the volume without any regard for
the truth of my search, as I understood it. I was content to withdraw the chapter
and wait. . . .
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
| 41
R
Surprise: “A taking unawares or unprepared . . . astonishment . . . shock . . .”
For instance, when discovering the border of a lineal category:
In 1949 my parents and a friend drove from rural Quebec to Miami Beach for a
midwinter vacation and took me along. I was ten. In the southern sunshine my skin
became darker, and darkened daily. One afternoon my mother and I went to a department store to look around. Mom went to the ladies’ wear. I was thirsty. Looking
about I spotted taps for drinking water. They were labeled strangely: White, Colored.
During my short, northern country life I had seen hardly anyone “colored,” and I
simply felt that I was white. So I went over to the White tap, bent over, and felt a
hard, painful clip to my head that staggered me as a bored male voice told me, “Over
there, nigger.” Shocked, in tears, I ran to find my mother.
Abduction
“The whole operation of reasoning begins with Abduction . . . Its occasion is a surprise.
That is, some belief, active or passive, formulated or unformulated, has just been broken up . . . The mind seeks to bring the facts, as modified by the new discovery, into
order; that is, to form a general conception embracing them” (C. S. Peirce 1903).
For instance, by beginning to fill in that lineal category, above:
Two years previously, in 1947, Uncle Joe, my mother’s brother, had taken me to
see the Montreal Royals baseball team play at the old Delormier stadium in the city.
The Royals were the Triple A farm club of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The occasion was
the opportunity to see Jackie Robinson play. Robinson soon after went up to the
Dodgers to become the first African-American player in the, until then, White Only
Major Leagues. I was told that seeing Robinson play, breaking the racist color barrier
(as it was called then), was a great event. I was so excited even if I didn’t know exactly
why. Two years later I had a fuller, more mindful feeling of how a racist category
worked and how this moved within me. Until today whenever I think of either of the
incidents the other comes to mind and breath catches in my throat.
Anthropology is the art of making connections among unlikes, within social orderings, among social orderings, through the mindful feeling of the anthropologist.
Empirical connections one would say, emerging from the doubleness of anthropological research, the empirical presence of the site of research and the sense of the empirical within the anthropologist, within and outside the research site. Mindful feeling
is being mindful feelingly since all practice is infused with feeling which enables it to
be the practice that it is (See the Introduction to this volume and Handelman 2004:
101–3). Given the sensuous, cognitive, and social complexities of feeling mindful,
the making of connections among the unlike is neither deductive nor inductive,
neither knowing and on that basis knowing more (deduction) nor supposing on the
basis of knowing and checking whether this is indeed knowing (induction). The art
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42 | moebius anthropology
of making connections among unlikes may be something else, something like C. S.
Peirce’s idea of abduction, and I turn to this shortly.
In relation to another project, I became mindful of how I thought of the idea of
“bureaucratic logic.” In this chapter I want to trace the emergence of this idea. In
doing this I realized that I had to traverse the personal, the social, and the professional, in a line of flight that was anything but linear. Bureaucratic logic is a logic
of classification that is lineal. In lineal classification the boundaries of categories are
akin to straight lines (in three and often four dimensions) tending strongly toward
the uninterrupted and the unbending. Lineal classification forms categories separated
from one another by absolutist boundaries, thereby ensuring that the content of each
category is inclusive and exclusive. Lineal classification has the capacity to rupture,
divide, and separate the strands of any connectivity: thus, splitting persons from one
another though they may be related through socially organic ties, whether of family
and kinship or by other powerful connections. Bureaucratic logic is a mainstay (indeed, a weapon) of the organization of the modern state, its institutions, the governmentalities associated with the organization of social ordering, and the state’s capacity
to control its inhabitants as well as to wield warfare against other populations. Yet
bureaucratic logic has a still wider cachet in the formation of realities of classification,
and I have used it ethnographically, for example, to understand how certain kinds of
“rituals” in Israel and elsewhere are constituted and practiced. Bureaucratic logic is
a major modality of shaping and ordering social (and other) forms especially prominent in (yet certainly not restricted to) modern social orders.
To trace the emergence of the idea of bureaucratic logic I needed to follow myself thought-wise, feeling-wise, probably chronologically, through fieldwork sites in
Nevada, Israel, Newfoundland, and South India, and through a motley clutch of
seemingly unconnected ideas that included ritual, play, welfare practice, bureaucracy,
and cosmology. I also realized that were I to write a fictional anthropology in a spirit
apposite to that of Borges’s story, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” I would call it “The
Art of Connecting Dissimilarities.” The story would be about the recursive nature
of the paths we take and those we don’t, and, so, about the consequential character
of the unplanned yet nonetheless inevitably recursive. Two dynamics are critical for
me in connecting dissimilarities, thereby awakening more fully the anthropological
imagination—abduction (mentioned above) and recursiveness. The effects of the first
may be more immediate while those of the second likely have lengthier temporal
trajectories.
The spirit of curiosity that has informed modern fieldwork anthropology since
Malinowski has been less compatible both with empirically based inductive reasoning
and with the deductive, yet much more compatible in practice with abductive reasoning. Few anthropologists knew this term, and few seem to do so today, yet this is
what they did in practice and perhaps still do. Charles Sanders Peirce, the nineteenthcentury American polymath, wrote of a third logic of inquiry (in addition to the deductive and inductive) that he called the abductive. Peirce understood the abductive
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
| 43
as the form of inquiry best suited to discovery, scientific and otherwise. Unlike both
mainstays of rigorous inquiry that in the first instance depend upon the making of
order, the abductive appositely depends upon the disintegration of coherence, the
questioning of cohesion, the disruption of integration, the valuing of the unexpected.
This is so because the practice of the abductive emerges from the eruption of the unexpected, flowers through surprise, and is activated even by plain astonishment that
puts to the question whatever has been surmised, accepted, expected.
The logic of abduction is not that of deconstruction. Deconstruction (in its own
terms) interrogates the premises of the solidity and certainty of structure that antedate questioning and critique. Contrastingly, the surprise and uncertainty that enable
the abductive response happen because they happen, and, so, they continuously rediscover that social life, social dynamics, emerge from ongoing conditions of indeterminacy, and not from pre-existing order. The practice of abduction, born from
surprise, responds to its astonishment by searching within and through surprise for
interpretation, explanation, and further wonder in relation to the unknown.
If the anthropologist is more or less attentive to and mindful of unknowns, of the
vagaries and uncertainties of fieldwork, while alert to the counter-intuitiveness that
otherness should encourage, then abduction is the design of mindfulness most suited.
In fieldwork, surprises open before the anthropologist in all directions. In an engrossing way the anthropologist as anthropologist exists through the strangeness of others,
and if she can’t or won’t discover this, then anthropology is all the poorer. There is a
conundrum in this for the anthropologist. The surprises that might lead to discovery must themselves be discovered in practice through the doings of those others
among whom the anthropologist lives. Nonetheless he must not reduce surprise to
common-sense understanding, nor should he theorize surprise into understanding.
The first deflates the potential for discovery through surprise; the second straightjackets surprise through the pretense that theory is the imagination at work. There is
an intimacy within the mindfully feeling anthropologist that joins together surprise
and curiosity as the sustenance of the anthropological imagination, awakening and
arousing abductive feeling~thinking. As an old joke has it, after a month in the field
the novice anthropologist thinks he know everything; and after a year in the field he
knows that he knows next to nothing. I believe that the anthropologist who doesn’t
experience surprise (indeed many surprises) in fieldwork and, so, feeling~thinking
abductively, is not likely to do interesting analytical ethnography.
Recursiveness begins with repetition (see also the discussion on time in the Epilogue to this volume). Most simply, repetition is something happening again, given
common-sense perception that repetition is the same (often boring and numbing)
thing over again . . . over again . . . over again . . . over itself . . . (and into itself ).
Repetition innocuously embeds the recursive within itself. Repetition conceals how
repetition loops, and one can say that the loop is constituted by “information,” yet
information of all kinds. Looping carries the information of repetition within it, yet
is it the same information that repeats, as we often insist? Or is looping (called feedThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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44 | moebius anthropology
back in elementary systems theory) always connecting dissimilarity? Gilles Deleuze
(1994) argues persuasively that every repetition constitutes difference. Therefore every return is a new beginning, given that inside every repetition there is the germ of
emerging difference. Nothing is ever exactly the same, and, so, what goes around
comes around . . . yet . . . comes around as different. In this regard Deleuze (1994:
57) quotes the nineteenth-century American poet, Benjamin Paul Blood: “the same
returns not, save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains
but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve,
never an instant true—ever not quite.”1
Within every repetition there is the potential of difference. Gregory Bateson’s insistence (said somewhere) that a difference to be a difference must make a difference
can be qualified by saying that recursivity creates powerful difference little by little,
and that such difference may eventually generate the creative and the chaotic (the
flutter of butterfly wings of chaos theory). Thus the scale of recursive loops may be
tiny (the engraver’s lathe) and may be grand; the existence of loopings (as we often
experience them) may become noticeable only through duration; yet, in Jung’s terms,
they may also become synchronous, the utterly sudden conjoining of unlikes that
immediately make a difference, one that we may call insight, illumination—the proverbial lightbulb lighting up in one’s head.2 The grander loops initially seem more like
lineal trajectories that take off and disappear from one’s ken. One feels that they are
gone forever, over and done with, and yet after perhaps lengthy durations returning
surprisingly, even shockingly with feeling, striking one suddenly in the back of the
head not as a reminder of what was but as the potential of what may be, what may
become. This too is integral to ethnography and of course to the life of the ethnographer, saturated with looping (and more often than not with kinds of loopiness that
intensive interaction with otherness generates).
So, asking me to be mindful of how I came to think up the idea of bureaucratic
logic in relation to Israeli social ordering is asking me no less to consider surprise
and recursiveness that in no small measure shaped my becoming whatever I am as an
anthropologist, and perhaps as the human being I am. This of course is beyond me
in a short chapter, and likely improbable altogether. Yet perhaps I can give a sensuous
sense of where this idea came from within myself by recursively joining some bits of
personal history to surprises through anthropology in different places.
Growing This Way and That
On my way to the University of Pittsburgh to study for a PhD in anthropology I
went to Reno in the summer of 1964 to participate in a field training program at the
University of Nevada, and pretty much by happenstance went to live in a small community of Native Americans who (to summarize complexities) were mainly Washo
(Washiw). In this place lived the aging shaman, Henry Moses Rupert, who during a
brief period gave me lessons on constituting reality that much later became strangely
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
| 45
apposite to the idea of bureaucratic logic. For me getting there, to Nevada, (and, so,
getting here to wherever I am at present) took a personally arduous route.
I was raised in a small town, north of Montreal during the 1940s and 1950s. In
a francophone and devotedly Roman Catholic social surround, my parents preferred
to send me to the anglophone and low-profile Anglican school, a proverbial little red
wooden schoolhouse (painted yellow), with each classroom containing a number of
grades and dormice under the radiators. The school bus daily collected kids spread
out over a twenty-mile radius. Rote learning predominated, education for its own
sake was not valued, and by the age of twelve or so children already were dropping
out to go to work. By the last year of high school only four of us were left, and of
these but two sat for and passed the provincial high school leaving exams, enabling
us to attend university. The other graduate tragically was murdered some years later
together with her boyfriend, leaving me the sole surviving graduate of the class of
’56. My own sardonic joke was that I could hold a class reunion whenever it moved
me to do so.
McGill University in Montreal was an excellent institution of scholarship, yet
to me a surprise in terms of learning and not a pleasant one. Studying for a general
BA degree I discovered early on that I did not understand what the professors were
telling me nor what I was reading. Well, that’s not quite accurate: I could outline and
schematize study materials yet not comprehend the logics of how they fit together,
held together, or were made to do so by scholars. The significance of the interiority
of materials escaped me: perhaps by a hair’s breadth, perhaps by a country mile, but
just about always out of sync and out of reach. The worst (over and again) was trying
to relate to formal systems with their own organization of principled rules, to logics
that were ruled and precise: grammars, numerics, mathematics, and the reasonings of
philosophies. The four years of the BA passed in this way as I accumulated a collection of mediocre grades.
Imagining what to do, thinking of everything I didn’t want to do, I decided with
trepidation to try for an MA in anthropology. The reason—simple and obtuse—was
absurd in terms of choosing (at least temporarily) a career path: during my years at
the university the only grade of A I had received was in the introductory course to
anthropology. Given my grades, the departmental chair of sociology and anthropology thought my application a joke, yet he suggested, indeed fairly, that I take a
make-up year, a double load of courses. If I did well enough, I could enter the MA
program. I did this, though with one close call in a small project I was assigned to
do. The assignment was to design and carry out a questionnaire-based study in a
seminar in social psychology taught by the departmental chair. In my naivete and
ignorance I thought that I had to create the questionnaire instrument (and the ways
in which to analyze its results) rather than using an instrument already well-tested
for its validity and reliability (as, I learned later, all the others in the seminar had
done just this). My little study attained incomprehensible results. Following the
silence that greeted my presentation of this failed effort, the chair turned to the
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46 | moebius anthropology
others, yelping in his yip-yip voice, “Well . . . some of us have it . . . and some of us
don’t!” There was no doubt as to who didn’t have it. At worst I was seen as stupid,
at best, as a stolid dolt. Later on I did my MA thesis which turned out alright yet
without imagination. After I completed the MA one of the sociologists, a Harvard
PhD, came up to me in the corridor, shook my hand and said with a smile, “We
never thought you’d make it.” That was the summation until then of my entry into
academia.
I write the above neither for didactic nor cathartic purpose, nor to strike a triumphal pose in retrospect. Rather, to underline that I had to learn that which so many
years later I would call bureaucratic logic, but to learn this “on my own flesh” (as
the saying goes in Hebrew). I was surprised over and again and learning, yet more
through feeling mindful than through analyzing what was happening to me. Feeling
the academic categories; feeling how to fit into and use these while masking the rough
edges; and feeling that the boundaries of these categories (despite their sometime
appearance of flexibility and give-and-take) are quite sharply demarcated, separating
those within from those without (with the full double meaning of this). Above all,
naturalizing the feeling that academia (for all its stress on creative scholarship) was
primarily about making order in knowledge, or, rather, of making knowledge as order, even in anthropology (with its often necessarily messy fieldwork). The academic
categories and the academic work that fit into them were all about the orderliness of
the lived-in world as it is lived by the peoples that anthropologists studied. The academic task above all was to uncover the cultural~social regularities that enable these
lived worlds to exist, and largely calling for a neatness and exactness in doing this
that I have rejected for quite some time now. Decades later the idea of bureaucratic
logic emerged from this early commotion of surprise, feeling, and trying to survive
(within) academia.
Nonetheless, decades later I had become so accustomed to the demands of my
peers (and myself ) for precision in definition and analysis (“Can you be more precise?”; “What exactly do you intend?”; “How exactly does this work?”; and, above all,
“SAY IT” with precision and exactness, as if all phenomena of the world exist in just
these ways of clarity above all else, for how else could anything be done and known
to be done if not said to be done in this way?).
The years of university were my first sustained, precarious experience of a complex
bureaucratic organization that processed all of us as bits of information to be evaluated, classified, and assigned to discrete categories of (direct) consequence to our
lives. The little yellow schoolhouse didn’t count in this regard. From the bureaucratic
perspective of making and sustaining regularity, surprise (and its corollary of abduction) are unwelcome, since surprise (perhaps) opens toward the potential questioning
and critiquing of whatever has not played itself out according to expectation. Yet
feeling this and trying to adapt were so distant from reflexive, mindful feeling. Above
all, I hadn’t a clue that so much scholarship in the social sciences and humanities
precisely practiced itself into existence in order to do that which academic institutions
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
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did. My Nevada experience, which came to focus on Henry Rupert, added something
(inchoate) in this regard.
Nevada: Practical Lessons in Phenomenology
Being with Henry Rupert was as far from bureaucratic logic as one could get. As a
young man he had taken his family and left the social orders organized and run by
others. He had settled into solitude, raising his children and devoting much of his life
to the development of his healing potentialities. In Chapter One of this volume and
elsewhere I have discussed Henry’s cosmology of healing (Handelman 1967a, 1972).
Without going into this cosmology here, how he came to talk to me after some weeks
of denying that he was a shaman is relevant here. Without realizing the implications,
I confuted an academic anthropological category (the life-history) for one that was
quintessentially Henry (his life, his selfness). Despairing of ever learning about his
shamanism, I instead suggested to him that we do his life-history—family history,
kinship, upbringing, schooling, the kinds of work he had done, and so forth.
The academic category of life-history, despite its pretensions to being open-ended,
could not be other than a representation of aspects of a life, a pragmatic rendition
of a life in parts existing for anthropological purpose, a categorical partiality that
shapes human being as one kind of thingness, indeed as a creation of academic linear
logic. To himself within his selfness, Henry was an entirety, a whole, within which
boundaries were erased and differences were woven through one another. Especially
so for him as I came to learn, since he had revolutionized traditional healing by, for
example, bringing together spirit helpers of disparate logics while doing away with
their opposition to one another (see Chapter One). After I suggested a life-history
we drifted into a long silence. After many minutes he spoke without any preamble:
“My life has always been concerned with psychology. I was never a happy-go-lucky
man like other Indians. I was always something of a recluse. I always tried to follow
the laws of nature.” I was astounded. This moment was the severest jolt I have experienced as an anthropologist, until then and since. I was driven from my academic
typifications, knocked out of the conceit that I had any entitlement to a privileged
vantage point on the lives of others, out of the idea that I had any authoritative imprimatur on the creation of knowledge, out of the Other as object (Handelman 1993:
138–39; Handelman 2016).
I was conversing with a man who had lived his life abductively, not accepting
traditional understandings but trying to come to grips with the surprises of his own
explorations of cosmos, treating these experiences and upsets empirically, as facts to
be apprehended within his own changing comprehensions of the cosmic. I emphasize that his explorations were neither “deductive” nor “inductive.” They were what,
indeed whatever, he encountered in the holism of his world in which every action
was consequential (which separated him from the scientist who almost always distinguishes between his or her disciplinary work and the world as lived and experienced).
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48 | moebius anthropology
My trying to make some (anthropological, personal) sense of Henry’s world was not
a matter of how reality was defined—in other words, if defined as real it is real in
its consequences, to paraphrase W. I. Thomas’s succinct and incisive understanding
of the social definition of the situation, a mainstay of social-science thinking with
strong resonances of phenomenology. Henry told me clearly and concisely a number
of times that his reality was not my reality. In doing so he recursively turned my
academic learning back on itself. In his world, reality was not the outcome of social
negotiation or of consensus, nor for that matter the outcome of relations of social
power. Nor were differences in his reality a matter of arbitrary distinction that were
naturalized through use into common-sense expectations (as the sociologist, Harold
Garfinkel, and others argued).
There are profound differences in how definition is done that are not covered
by theories of the definition of the situation or by present-day constructivism. Nor
are these differences covered by anthropological perspectives on relativism. Henry’s
(changing) cosmos could not become linear without being destroyed. His cosmos
was entirely alive in all its elements, without any necessary or clear distinction between beings and objects (e.g., Ingold 2006). His cosmos was consciously recursive, in that every action effected everything else. And his cosmos was held together
from within itself, a kind of integration for which there is no word in the English
language. A cosmos so unlike the monotheistic that is closed off and held together
from its boundary by an omnipotent God (see Chapter Eight and Handelman and
Lindquist 2011). I understood little of this then nor for many years afterward, yet
in some ways the knowledge was within me. Surprise and the abductive propensity
in the field sedimented in me as they never had during my academic learning. And
indirectly I learned about academia and academic knowledge through Henry Rupert. As mindful feeling, I understood Henry Rupert better than I had the teachings
of my professors.
The academic knowledge of arbitrary boundaries, of categorical typologies, of categories sharply and distinctly separated from one another is the kind of analytical
thinking that makes a virtue of the fragmentation of knowledge, of being, of existence torn into distinct and manageable parts.3 An academic world in which fuzziness
is largely perceived as futile and as the result of lazy thinking.4 After Nevada I tried
to be careful not to confute academic-style classification with that of people I studied, though in my Israeli experiences the two not only crisscrossed but also became
interlocked in varying degrees. Through my Nevada experience I also learned with
some surprise that phenomena that began to interest me deeply as an anthropologist
and a human being were ones that I met in the field and not in book or classroom
learning—the concrete phenomenon absorbed me, not the abstract, yet I found myself consistently theorizing the concrete, thereby (abductively) entering into concrete
abstraction. With Nevada began a lifelong interest in ritual, though I had yet to encounter directly the phenomenon of bureaucracy as part of fieldwork research.
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
| 49
Israel: Ubiquitous Bureaucracy, Taken for Granted
The Israel I encountered first in 1967 (nineteen years after its founding) prior to the
war of that late spring was a highly centralized state, put together top-down in so
many spheres of organization and living, espousing socialist ideals (or at least this
rhetoric), proud of its revolutionary initiatives and its martial prowess, and engrossed
in the “ingathering of the exiles,” bringing together Jewish immigrants from all over
the world. I had come from the University of Manchester (where I ultimately submitted my PhD) as a member of Max Gluckman’s Bernstein Israeli Research Scheme.
The project was intended for the study of what then was called the “absorption of
immigrants,” the ways in which the new state was taking in Jewish immigrants in
very large numbers and their responses to these great upheavals in their lives. My
colleagues on this project mainly studied “communities”—collectivist moshavim and
kibbutzim and new towns established especially for recent immigrants. Underlying
and informing all of these and just about everything else in this country was bureaucratic infrastructure (and so it had been from the first socialist-Zionist efforts here
in the 1920s [Shapira 1976]). The great bulk of anthropological studies of Israel at
the time had pages filled with the doings of bureaucratic institutions (the richest of
these was Dorothy Willner’s Nation-Building and Community in Israel [1969]), yet
as a subject in itself little attention was given to bureaucracy in contrast to politics,
ideology, economics, ethnicity, and so forth. Bureaucracy was ubiquitous, yet was
treated either as the unproblematic, natural servant of all those other structures that
were making the country what it was becoming or was handled as an institution to
be studied mainly in the tradition of Max Weber. This was the perspective of the then
master of Israeli sociology S. N. Eisenstadt and his students, and also pretty much
that of my supervisor, Max Gluckman.
Initially I was no different in my Israeli research. Bureaucracy was treated either
as a backdrop to other doings or was studied as an organization. Though when one
encountered bureaucracy in fieldwork it might arouse more reflexive perceptions, as
in the following instance I recollected from May 1967.
After breakfast in the institute where I am living and studying Hebrew, I
board the crowded, clanking bus to the bank, to change British pounds
into Israeli lirot [currency]. The excitable to the stolid. Three clerks, a line
of metal folding chairs, and forms, many of them. As the first client moves
over to the second clerk, the first sitting in line goes to the first clerk and
the rest of us stand, almost synchronized, and move over one seat. From
clerk to clerk, each with mounds of paper and a host of stamps standing
like chessmen, to be moved strategically from form to form, adding, deducting, checking, checkmating the client over to the next clerk. From
seat to seat we stand, move over, sit. Endgame, toppling under paper,
spewed onto the pavement melting in the sun. Where in heaven’s name do
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50 | moebius anthropology
they keep all that paper, tripled, quadrupled, stacked in packets, packed
in racks, racked on shelves, shelved . . . somewhere, more likely under the
earth. Huge underground storage vaults crowded to their metal ceilings
with paper, silent, orderly, stamped into submission. The paper substrate
of the Zionist State, the textual foundations of its pioneering subjects. . . .
(Handelman 2007: 119)
For personal reasons (I had met my future wife two weeks after arriving in Israel)
I went to live in Jerusalem and had to find a subject or site for my doctoral fieldwork.
Quiet, introspective, I was intimidated by the ferment and fervor of Israel and by the
interpersonal pushiness and aggressiveness of Israelis and came very close to quitting
altogether the Manchester project, though I spent much time walking and wandering
through both sides of the city, the Jewish west and the Palestinian east, learning many
of its ins and outs and ways around.5 I was also learning what I was not: not an anthropologist of projects, not one who conceived of and furthered research initiatives
in the academic world that thrived on research-as-project (and the monies needed to
carry this through). However, wherever I found myself, I would find something that
became intrinsically fascinating and that initially was not recognizable to me through
my book learning to that point. Indirectly this is related to my later formulation of
bureaucratic logic. Bureaucratic logic is a pushy concept, an idea that acts forcefully
in the world—as when I understood much later that, perceived through bureaucratic
logic, bureaucracy itself ceases to be simply the staid and immoveable repository of
piles of regulations and documents and instead becomes probably the most forceful
agent of deliberately making change in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. This
understanding would not have come to me had I not spent a good deal of time later
on in the company of bureaucrats. Nor would this understanding have come without
surprise and the logic of the abductive.
After dithering overlong I grounded (thanks to the help of Emanuel Marx) in a
complex of workshops that employed aged, poverty-stricken men and women. The
work was repetitious, often boring, very low paid and at times demeaning, given the
domineering and patronizing control, attitudes, and interventions of the women who
ran the organization. So it was on the surface of things. With the months, my looking interiorized into seeing, and seeing turned into mindful feeling. Stories, jokes,
humor, songs, ridicule, sadness, tragedy, emerged mindfully into my purview. Erving
Goffman, a seminal thinker on interaction whose work I had met at McGill through
my excellent MA supervisor, Dick Salisbury, found me once more. My PhD thesis
took Goffman’s wonderful idea (quite ignored in anthropology) of the “encounter”
and turned it into a basic unit of social organization, one that only comes into existence with the onset of interaction, emerges and takes shape as the interaction continues, its emergent form affecting and effecting how the interaction proceeds as it is
ongoing, and folds up with the end of that segment of interaction, whether lengthy
or brief (Handelman 2006a and the Epilogue to this volume).
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
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That period of fieldwork closely seeing the how of practice served me well from
then on. Surprise is traced abductively first and foremost through how events are
done or practiced. Perhaps only in this way can surprise be traced socially into its surprising character for the anthropologist and the effects and consequences this has for
him and his work. The greatest surprise I had during that period of research occurred
when I witnessed the creation of a highly playful game in one of the workshops. It
came into existence, into practice, silently, without comment, and after a month or so
of being played intensively disappeared quietly, never commented upon yet fraught
with local significance in that workshop and fragile in its constitution (Handelman
1998: 86–101). Something that had to be seen to be believed, yet something that
could not be interrogated while in existence and something that was never responded
to by players and others after it had disappeared. A transient phenomenon full of
meaning, yet one that if I hadn’t seen it could never have been recouped in retrospect. Play, one of the great unstudied phenomena of academia (even as, ironically,
it is basic to virtually all imaginative scholarly work) had appeared to me, play that
had to be felt mindfully. I spent periods of the next two decades tracing my way
through play and through what Brian Sutton-Smith (1997) called the playful attitude, also bringing this into contrast with “ritual” and entering into phenomena of
play-within-ritual.
Bureaucracy made its appearance as part of this workshop research, not as surprise
but as an inevitability in the kind of state and society that constituted Israel. Since
many of the workers had come to the workshops through the welfare system, trying
to trace their bureaucratic biographies there was integral to understanding at least
portions of their late life-trajectories.6 I related to the organization of welfare—its
social workers, its files—as an institution. I discovered that the people in the workshops were perceived as debris, as the detritus of Israeli society regardless of their past
lives (Handelman 1976). In this I learned too of how merciless this society (socialist
and not) was to anyone and everyone (unless they were wealthy, political, and/or otherwise connected) who was impaired, disabled, deviant, incarcerated (in all kinds of
institutions), or who otherwise rejected societal norms. It was a basic lesson in Israeliness stemming from the brutality of its pioneer heritage and its constant struggle for
progress and disdain for weakness, yet for all that not to be forgiven regardless of the
sacrifices of those who were perceived (and perhaps perceived themselves) as worthy
of being sacrificed. Again, ironically, this elementary lesson has been so overlooked in
studies of Israel throughout the decades, shuffled into, hidden and lost in arguments
over inequalities in gender and ethnicity (and submerged in social class difference,
though the latter is conveniently overlooked by anthropologists). At any rate, I had
by then acquired ideas of ritual, play, and a small sense of bureaucracy, and I began
to position these in relation to one another in terms of what Gregory Bateson (1972)
called metacommunication, communication about communication, metamessages
that implicitly guide one’s voyages through situations, contexts, places, times. In my
thinking the metamessage of ritual bespoke, “This is truth”; that of “This is play”
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52 | moebius anthropology
referred to the multiplicities and falsehoods of “reality”; while bureaucracy didn’t yet
have a metamessage name, for I hadn’t realized just how arbitrary and brutal were its
classifications. Yet I did begin to comprehend just how different were bureaucratic
phenomena from those other modes of organizing reality (or so I thought then).
Newfoundland: Doing Lineal Classification
After I received the PhD my wife and I decided to spend most of a year in Newfoundland where I looked more closely at welfare bureaucracy. After some months
of learning the nuts and bolts of welfare in a city (and province) of very high unemployment I discovered the child welfare department, something of a revelation to me.
At that time, child welfare in North America largely was dominated by the emerging formation of the distinction between child abuse and child neglect, the former
phenomenon more active in directly damaging the child, the latter more passive in
damaging the child. It became clear to me that these categories highly complemented
one another, in that areas not covered by one was covered by the other, together
forming something of a hermeneutic world of damage to children. Part of the job of
caseworkers was to form and practice cases that established whether or not particular
children in particular families qualified for inclusion in one or the other of these
broad categories.
Much of the information (a good deal communicated anonymously) that triggered investigations came from family members and neighbors. Settling scores could
be prominent. The caseworkers often had to adopt an investigative stance toward
case-building. In cases of hard-core abuse the evidence could well be unequivocal.
Other instances of suspicion were much grayer. In these latter instances, caseworkers
had to construct realities that fit the (often conflicting) evidence of a case. I am not
saying that they manufactured realities to suit their tasks. Yet in order to make the
phenomenon called a case, and to make it stick, caseworkers did shape the resources
at their disposal to form a reality within which a person or persons could be held
culpable, at times with harsh consequences. In other words, caseworkers formed cases
within which they could function as caseworkers. I began to see that these were exercises in practical phenomenology on the part of caseworkers (Handelman 1978). In
one of the instances that I was able to document in detail the caseworker succeeded
in obtaining the incarceration of a mother for ninety days of psychiatric observation
in order to remove her from her child so that then the child could be taken into foster
care and not returned to the mother for some time, if at all (Handelman 1983: 22–
31). This mother likely had neglected two of her children who were put into foster
care, but the child in question she called her “love child” and the little girl was in fine
health in all respects. Nonetheless, within the forming of the case-world the mother
was suspect and the child she loved had to be removed from her in whatever way possible. Shaping bureaucratic reality through the case enabled the social worker to act
on and in the client’s world. Henry Rupert and his practical phenomenology looped
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
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into Newfoundland child-welfare case-formation. After the caseworker obtained the
order of incarceration, she reflexively exclaimed, “I could put away my own husband
if I wanted to!” A moment of surprise, yet without an abductive response.
Henry was always aware, especially aware, of his experiences. Shaping his reality
he was self-aware of how he did this and simultaneously fully aware that he became
integral to the innerness of this reality. As I noted, Henry’s cosmos was organic, held
together within itself, through itself, since everything was alive, intra-connected, intrarelated. As such, like many other organic varieties of cosmos, this one had no exterior
boundaries; nothing held it together from its outside (Handelman and Lindquist
2011; Chapter Eight, this volume). So Henry’s practical phenomenology was no less
organic, springing from this kind of cosmos. In the Newfoundland research I realized
more clearly than I had in Israel just how different were the bureaucrats’ forming
of reality (and how like their reality was my own). Bureaucratic shaping was always
piecemeal, always arbitrarily sliced and spliced in relation to bureaucratic categories
into which they needed to fit.
This enabled me to be mindful of the effects of bureaucratic classification on all
kinds of populations—communities, those populations occupied by military rule,
kin groups, families, neighborhoods, work groups, the poor, the infirm, and on and
on. Bureaucratic classification was abrupt and linear rather than organic and continuous. Bureaucratic classification dismantled, ripped apart, and dismembered the
organic. Bureaucratic classification insisted in the main that these rips and ruptures
were neat cuts, virtually surgical, clean, complete, absolute, turning continuities and
continua into total and totalizing differences. Indeed nothing was sacred before such
onslaughts. Bureaucratic classification put these parts, these bits and pieces, together
in different ways, new ways, insisting that they clamp and clump together, holding
them together by forcing them to do so. If all this were so, and I thought it was, then
these dynamics were no less significant than understanding bureaucracy as organization, as institution. I was edging into a logic of organization that sprang from the
lineal classification of categories of inclusion and exclusion—this is the logic I later
called “bureaucratic.”
“Rituals” and Bureaucratic Classification
After Newfoundland I no longer studied bureaucracy per se. I began to focus more
on ritual (and play within ritual), though primarily through reanalyzing case studies
written by others. I had no set goals in doing this; I read a lot of ethnography and
would awaken into analysis when struck with surprise that the analysis I was reading
could be understood quite differently in terms of itself, without importing another
theory to make a different case (Evens and Handelman 2006: 162–63). For some
years I did a variety of these reanalyses, relating to each one as a quite separate piece,
without any urge to move them all in any particular direction. A kind of Deleuze
and Guattari intellectual rhizome, moving this way and that. I had no qualms about
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54 | moebius anthropology
spending many months (and sometimes an entire year or more) on one article and
then beginning another that had no seeming connection to the previous or to others.
In 1979 we went to Sri Lanka to visit Bruce Kapferer, a most dear friend. This was
my first introduction to South Asia and we ended up doing some fieldwork on aspects of a great ritual complex dedicated to the South Indian deity, Murugan (a son of
Shiva). Back in Israel I met David Shulman soon after he had completed his PhD in
Indology. Discussing with David was fun, informative, enlightening. My knowledge
of anything South Asian is largely self-taught and David was always supportive and
helpful, nurturing my fascination as only he can do, and redirecting me whenever unwittingly I veered off the paths of possibility. With David’s encouragement I began to
study a cosmology of Murugan (known in northern India as Skanda or Kartikeyya).
Henry Rupert returned, cosmology once more, yet very different from anything I
had experienced, and just how different I wasn’t really to realize for years. Yet my
experiences with Henry were strangely more in resonance with these materials of
medieval South India than were what I had learned about Western classifications. A
recursiveness I hadn’t an inkling of until it pierced me, awakening thoughts dormant
for a long time; Henry bounding through my life with his ancient vigor. My interests
in cosmology and ritual strengthened one another, powerfully aided by an ongoing
fascination with India (Handelman and Shulman 1997, 2004; Handelman 2014).
Thinking of ritual (and cosmology) in Israel of the early 1980s I drifted into
studies of State and state-related “ritual.” At that time this subject was a near tabula
rasa in Israel. The sociologist of communication, Elihu Katz, and I studied the Israeli
national, civil “rituals” of Memorial Day for the War Dead and Independence Day;
and Lea Shamgar-Handelman and I studied how the national emblem of Israel was
chosen and, at the tiny end of the social spectrum, holiday celebrations and birthdays
in Jewish kindergartens, which we found to be strongly State-related in how they
socialized little children. I began to comprehend two things, surprises indeed to me.
One was that although State and children’s state-related “rituals” were called ritual or
ceremony and the like by anthropologists and other scholars, the interior logics of
how these were organized were utterly different from the rituals of Henry Rupert or
those of traditional India and elsewhere that I had read about. I mean that these modern civil and civic “rituals” and traditional ones had nothing in common as far as I
was concerned; and so the roof concept of “ritual” lost its value for me since it utterly
skewed any radical, comparative, understanding of “ritual” (Handelman 2006b). Another surprise was that the interior logic of State and state-related “rituals” actually
resembled more the kinds of classification I had found in studying bureaucracy in
Newfoundland and those I encountered and read about on a daily basis in Israel, a
state founded in and continuously reproduced through bureaucratic infrastructures
and their social classifications, something quite taken for granted and considered
hardly worth studying by anthropologists here.
We know from many “rites” of tribal and traditional social orderings that their logics
of organization do transformation—of person, of social order, of cosmos. By contrast,
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
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the state, civil, and civic “rituals” I was studying did nothing (in my terms) within
and through themselves; they were more like “presentations” and “re-presentations”
organized through clear-cut classifications of sets of categories, and at times these
classifications were shuffled around as set pieces, like cards in a deck, like snapshots
in a stack. Around this time my friend, Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, told Sue Allen-Mills,
then the anthropology editor at Cambridge University Press, who was going through
universities in the US looking for new book manuscripts, that it was worth visiting
me in Minneapolis where my wife and I were spending a sabbatical year. I told Sue
about my ideas for a more comparative work on “ritual”; she was enthusiastic and
supportive; and I spent the rest of that sabbatical thinking further through these
ideas.
I had read a lot on simple cybernetic ideas of “system” through Gregory Bateson
and others (see the Epilogue to this volume) and began to perceive abductively
that one didn’t need to think of large-scale (Radcliffe-Brownian or Parsonian) social systems in order to see that a social order could have particular domains that
were organized systemically while others were not. So, what of these “rituals” that
did transformation in tribal and traditional social orderings? One way of thinking
through such a “ritual” was to think of it as a small, even tiny, system organized to
create a specific outcome through its own interior relational workings, an outcome
that would be quite different from when the “ritual” began. In these social orderings,
it was through these “rituals” that controlled and directed change was made in social
and moral orderings, and in cosmos. By contrast, the interior organizations of state
and civic “rituals” did nothing apart from exhibiting bureaucratic-like taxonomies
and classifications.
A theory of comparative “ritual” organization, based first and foremost on the
organization of forms of “ritual” and their interior dynamics (and not on cultural or
social contexts) took shape. I threw out the term, “ritual,” and instead used a more
neutral one, “event,” which enabled events as logics of form and dynamics to be compared across cultural and social orderings—and without any kind of event having
primacy or pride of place. One such form was the event-that-models the world (an
event that is organized systemically); another was the event-that-presents the world
(the event organized through the presentation of bureaucratic-like classifications);
and a third was the event-that-re-presents the world (the event organized to do reversals, inversions, and the like, e.g., carnivals and many festivals). So, too, any particular
event could have phases or aspects of any or all of these modalities and variations
thereof.7 And then, surprise once more.
If events-that-model the world were premier loci of making deliberate, focused
change in tribal and traditional social orderings, then where would I find their equivalents in a modern social ordering like Israel, where I lived? To put this otherwise,
how is deliberate, focused change made most routinely and mundanely in a modern
social ordering like Israel? I felt the answer lay in the multitude of social taxonomies
through which people and things are classified and organized. This is the domain of
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56 | moebius anthropology
modern bureaucracy in its myriads of form doing great and tiny acts of classification according to existing taxonomies, but also routinely making changes in existing
taxonomies, altering the categories of classifications, and indeed inventing entirely
new taxonomies. The simple fact is that even a tiny alteration in an existing category
speedily and causally effects (and often affects) the persons who are the objective of
the change, and of course others who are related or connected in various ways to the
former. I cannot emphasize enough just how routine is the making of change through
bureaucracy in modern social orderings. Making change through events-that-model
the world was (and likely still is) a special event, perhaps invoking cosmic forces,
perhaps the sacred, involving careful preparation, and perhaps fraught with danger as
participants enter into and alter the very lineaments of cosmos (Turner 1967; Kapferer 1997). By contrast, making change through bureaucratic classification and the
altering of classification are often so mundane and matter of fact.
Israel was a treasure trove for this kind of thinking about classification. That is,
Israel was good to think with about bureaucratic classification. A moral and social
ordering that valued the initiator, the doer, the actualizer (summarized in Hebrew by
the term, bitzu’ist), while to be passive was to be perceived as a patsy ( friyer); Israeli
Jews never ready to bite the bullet; a State continuing as highly centralized, awash
with bureaucratic decision-making effecting virtually all domains of existence; a powerful armed forces that are deeply organized through bureaucracy; a military power
occupying and grabbing Palestinian lands through endless and endlessly invented
and modified regulations that are first and foremost bureaucratic edicts with the force
and impact of military law.
Bureaucracy invents classifications and makes new distinctions and divisions
within existing ones. In either case time-space is opened in order to contain people
and things defined in certain ways, according to certain criteria specific to inclusion
(and exclusion). In this way, forms of the bureaucratic expand through a kind of cellular division of difference yet sameness—the adding of more units of organization
to itself (a new title, a new office, a new subcommittee). Claude Lefort (1986: 108)
comments that, “it is essential to grasp the movement by which bureaucracy creates
its order. The more that activities are fragmented, departments are diversified, specialized, and compartmentalized . . . the more instances of coordination and supervision
proliferate, by virtue of this very dispersion, and the more bureaucracy flourishes . . .
Bureaucracy loves bureaucrats, just as much as bureaucrats love bureaucracy.”
Michael King’s argument enables extending the impact of the bureaucratic making of order to that made by the law. King argues that, “in the legal system social
events derive their meaning through the law’s unique binary code of lawful/unlawful, legal/illegal . . . These categories are mutually exclusive.” Then he adds a crucial
point, “Any act or utterance that codes social acts according to this binary code of
lawful/unlawful may be regarded as part of the legal system, no matter where it was
made and no matter who made it” (1993: 223). King is saying that in modern social
orderings the implementation of division and contrast in terms of absolute categories
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tracing bureaucratic logic through surprise and abduction
| 57
of inclusion and exclusion has something of the feel, force, and aesthetic qualities of
legal decision and mandate (see also Gray 1978: 141). In my terms, the phenomenal
forms created by bureaucracy have embedded within themselves the feeling of the
force, impact, and aesthetics of the symmetries of law. These distinctions certainly
need not be binary, in the sense of a choice between two and only two possibilities.
The crucial point is the maintenance of the logic of form, the symmetrical, absolutist
distinction between inclusion and exclusion, such that truth is necessarily made into
a singularity, and is rarely if ever a multiplicity.
In the ways that they make intentional, directed change, bureaucracy and law have
important commonalities. And in studying Israeli state and civic “rituals” I learned
just how much these events did not make directed change, unlike “rituals of transformation” in tribal and traditional social orderings. As I said, “rituals of transformation”
and state and civic “rituals” have nothing in common. But in their stress on linear
classification, state and civic events and bureaucracy have a great deal in common;
and I often thought of the former as masking the latter, making the logic of the latter
more aesthetically presentable and palatable, indeed, making it seductive.
In Israel the loci of making directed change through inventing and altering social
classifications lay and lie primarily in bureaucracies of all kinds, while the in-forming
of this kind of ordering and change is widespread. For example, in studying Israeli
Jewish kindergartens in the 1980s Lea Shamgar-Handelman and I (Handelman
2004: 77–90) discovered that birthday parties there consistently taught children to
experience and to witness how, from a societal perspective, they themselves were constituted through a lineal taxonomy of exact age. Through this taxonomy every year
another precise numerical slice was added—a sort of sliced-salami model of age. No
less, children could be de-constituted by taking them apart into a collection of yearly
slices. It seemed that wherever I looked in Israel—for example, the official opening
“ritual” of Holocaust Remembrance Day (see Chapter Five, this volume) or a memorial “ritual” following a civil disaster (Handelman 2004: 3–18, 101–17)—I found
widespread support for the thesis that this social ordering was constituted in large
measure through the making and changing of taxonomies of lineal classification, even
as within me surprise dissipated and the abductive response lessened. Then it was easy
for me to slip into the more formal phrasing of bureaucratic logic, which brought
together all the attributes I have discussed here.
Things come together, but not neatly, not cleanly, not evenly, not according to any
protocol or schedule or research method. Things come together then immediately
are beginning to unravel and open up because the worlds we live in and study are
endless in their ongoing complexity. Things begin to unravel because we cannot do
other than be surprised and surprise, I argue, opens to abductive, mindful feeling . . .
and . . . during these years I also did fieldwork in Andhra Pradesh and through this
discovered cosmologies of female deities that these rituals open from and into (Handelman 2014). The contrast between the organic cosmologies we find in South India
and the arbitrariness and abruptness of bureaucratic logic that slices and forms much
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58 | moebius anthropology
of Israeli ordering is so striking that surprise revives. Now the contrast is leading me
toward the cosmology within which bureaucratic logic was formed (at least in part)
very long ago, that of monotheism as a very broad Judeo-Christian sensibility. And
this may open me again to Israel as a place in which Jewish ontologies and bureaucratic logic may thread through and knot with one another (see the Epilogue to this
volume). To arbitrarily close off this ongoing connecting of seeming dissimilarities
would be poetism—a presentation whose major claim for consideration is that it is
aesthetically pleasing. Here, I render this as closing before its time. Time will do its
closing when its time.
Notes
1. Looking on the net at graphics of computer-driven repetitions one realizes that through astronomical numbers (209 billion iterations in one instance) these become highly complex and
fully support Blood’s poetic reverberations.
2. In the 1930s Bateson (1972) developed his pathbreaking though schematic theory of schismogenesis, in which social difference is generated through the repetition of patterned behavior.
In other words, he argued that recursiveness contains the potential for difference generated
through repetitive, customary interaction.
3. Brought out beautifully through western literature in John Vernon’s The Garden and the Map
(1973).
4. See, for example, Timothy Fitzgerald (2009). Fitzgerald calls Saler’s use of “family resemblance,”
Wittgenstein’s logic of classification, lazy thinking. See also the debunking of “fuzzy logic” by
the logician, Susan Haack ([1974] 1996).
5. I use the term, Israeli, as it should be used, as was once used, and is hardly used any more. Israeli
refers to all who hold Israeli citizenship. Today the term is used almost exclusively to refer to
Jews who hold Israeli citizenship and so to exclude Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship.
6. I was helped by my late wife, Lea Shamgar-Handelman, and this in turn contributed to her
research on the life situations of widows of the 1967 War (Shamgar-Handelman 1986).
7. Later I added Deleuze’s (1993) idea of the “fold” and Maturana and Varela’s idea of selforganization. Folding and self-organization are discussed in the Epilogue to this volume.
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Part II
Forming Form
Ritual and
Bureaucratic Logic
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Chapter 3
Why Ritual in
Its Own Right?
How So?
Author’s Note
Models and Mirrors, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1990 (and reissued with an extended preface in a paperback edition by Berghahn Books in 1998),
was my signature book, my break with the conventional wisdoms that ritual was a
real, phenomenal category. The book argued that ritual was a false category in that it
assumed that all events included within the category shared attributes in common.
Thus the ritual category indexed a pan-human relationship with transcendence and
its sacrality (of which there were many subsumed varieties). I suggested that once
we took an interior perspective on events called “ritual” their differences became
more significant than their commonalities. The perspective I took was to ask about
the interior logics of organization of such events. I found that the more complexly
organized interiors generated and controlled dynamics intended to do transformation within and through the operation of the events themselves. However the more
simply organized interiors did little more than present and represent the world outside the event to itself. The two extremes of event had nothing in common once one
discarded the functionalist assumption that “ritual” is necessary for existence in all
human social orderings. I argued further that events with more complex interior logics of organization were more autonomous of their social surrounds than were those
with simpler interior logics; the latter were simply edited reflections of their social
surrounds. To call “ritual” both the transformative and the representative varieties
was in my view non-sensical.
I offered a simple rule-of-thumb to summarize the difference, using Lloyd Warner’s 1930s discussion of the two-hundredth anniversary procession in honor of the
founding of Yankee City (Newburyport MA) and Audrey Richard’s discussion of the
East African, Bemba Chisungu that transformed immature girls into mature women.
In Yankee City the procession of floats showing chronologically significant historical
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64 | moebius anthropology
events began in the distant past and moved progressively into the present. Through
Chisungu the girls moved from immaturity into maturity. My rule-of-thumb asked,
what happens if each of these events is run backward? Running the historical procession from the present to the distant past produces another representation, another
narrative, of Yankee City, yet one that is fully acceptable. Running the Bemba rite de
passage backward becomes scary. What could this produce? Likely someone or something utterly unacceptable, perhaps akin to the outcome of an event of sorcery. In
terms of their interior logics of organization these two events have nothing in common.
Treating them together as “ritual” only makes sense from a perspective external to the
events themselves, one that summarizes them in terms of their functions for social
ordering, but one that ignores how these events work within and through themselves.
In 2001, the late Kingsley Garbett, then the editor of Social Analysis, asked me
to edit an issue of the journal on the topic of ritual. I returned to the ideas that had
generated Models and Mirrors, but with a major difference. Now, I suggested taking
a “ritual” event out of its sociocultural surround, learning as much as possible from
how it forms itself within itself, in other words how it does this in its own right,
and then returning the event to its surround . . . Potentially this would enable the
comparison of “ritual” events in terms of their relative autonomy from their social
surrounds and, consequently, how these events effected and affected their surrounds.
My formulations were distant indeed from the representational emphasis in Clifford
Geertz’s dominant paradigm of models of, models for (borrowed from the philosopher, Max Black). This chapter (much of which was the Introduction to the special
issue) discusses how my formulation works and how it helps to understand the degrees of interior complexity of the organization of “rituals,” and the consequences of
this for the social surround.
R
Figure 3.1. Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. © 1993 Watterson. Reprinted with permission of
Andrews Mcmeel syndication. All rights reserved.
Calvin understands ritual as well as many anthropologists. Calvin is dramatizing
thematics that I am trying to avoid. Complaining about the peanut butter, spoiled
because his mother did not observe the proper ritual for scooping it out, he is telling
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
| 65
us: do the ritual correctly. It exists because it has a function—control. Perform control
in your ritual, and you will have control in your life. The ritual of how to scoop out
peanut butter is a representation of life. Living produces its own symbols, its own
reflections, and these are the ritual, existing to enact themes of living—here, that of
control. The ritual has meaning, otherwise why the argument between Calvin and his
mother over its importance for living? For Calvin, scooping out peanut butter is akin
to a Geertzian model of and model for living—you scoop peanut butter the way you
live your life. One thing is certain: to understand the peanut butter ritual, one begins
with life, not with a jar of peanut butter. First, though, let’s have a look at the peanut
butter in the jar. . .
Some four decades ago, Claude Levi-Strauss called for the study of ritual “in itself
and for itself . . . in order to determine its specific characteristics” (Levi-Strauss 1981:
669). Levi-Strauss’s concern was to distinguish ritual from myth, his overriding focus
of study. He identified myth with mind and thinking, and ritual with living and the
attempt to overcome any break or interruption in the continuity of lived experience,
the discontinuous made continuous (ibid.: 674–75). Ritual, he wrote, “turns back
towards reality” (ibid.: 680) in that “it is not a direct response to the world, or even
to experience of the world; it is a response to the way man thinks of the world”
(ibid.: 681). Levi-Strauss worried that ritual commonly is conflated with myth—
in other words, that ritual, too, becomes a repository of beliefs and representations
connected to cultural philosophies about the world. In a more Turnerian, Geertzian,
or, for that matter, Leachian idiom, ritual is perceived and made into a storehouse
of symbols and scripts originating in the world outside ritual, activated within ritual
in prescribed ways on predicated occasions, in order to inform and to somaticize
participants with appropriate meanings and feelings related directly to their cultural
worlds outside ritual. In Geertz’s terms, borrowed from the philosopher, Max Black,
ritual acts as a model of and model for cultural worlds, yet never ritual in itself and
for itself, but always ritual as representation—the hegemonic modality for the study
of rite in anthropology. A second, powerful modality, whose logic parallels the first,
is ritual understood as functional of and functional for social order, a line of inquiry
whose interior logic is no different from that of ritual as representation. A third modality, close to the first two in its logic, is ritual understood as yet another arena for
the playing out of social, economic, and political competition and conflict.
The way of thinking on ritual outlined in this chapter is not that of Levi-Strauss,
nor does it pursue his quest for universals, yet it originates from a not entirely dissimilar premise: if one wants to think about what ritual is in relation to itself, how it
is put together and organized within itself, then first and foremost ritual should be
studied in its own right and not be presumed immediately to be constituted through
representations of the sociocultural surround that give it life. William of Occam’s
Razor is apposite here. If one is interested in ritual as phenomenon—in itself, for itself—then be parsimonious, first exhausting what can be learned of ritual from ritual
and only then turning to the connectivities between ritual and wider sociocultural
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66 | moebius anthropology
orders. Attend first to what seems to exist within a particular ritual by, as Gregory
Bateson (1977: 239) put it, declining to pay attention to other suppositions as to
how the ritual is constituted. Nevertheless, as I indicate further on, this is not a hard
and fast distinction but one predicated on degrees of momentary autonomy of ritual
from social order.
Here, the Razor carves parsimoniously in the direction opposite to that which is
near-canonical in anthropology—there, ritual is a treasure storehouse of culture and
society, epiphenomenally shaped to reflect and to reflect on the latter. Though this
may be so for particular rituals, it is a matter not of a priori theorizing but rather of
the analysis of particular ritual forms (Gerholm 1988; Smith 1982). Put otherwise,
what particular rituals are about, what they are organized to do, how they accomplish
what they do, are all empirical questions whose prime locus of inquiry is initially
within the rituals themselves. The Razor slices open vectors of studying ritual within
itself and its doing, within its interior dynamics and practices, and not initially from
within the wider sociocultural fields within which ritual is embedded. To begin the
analysis of ritual as phenomenon in its own right, no assumptions need be made
immediately about how sociocultural order and ritual are related, neither about the
meaning of signs and symbols that appear within a ritual, nor about the functional
relationships between a ritual and social order. It is the phenomenal of the ritual itself
that is the problematic at issue—a question perhaps even more of the logos of the
phenomenon than of the phenomenal. And, more broadly, this problematic may be
phrased as that of the extent, if any, to which particular phenomena have degrees of
autonomy from the worlds that create them; whether such qualities of autonomy are
significant; and, if so, what such significance might be about. The sole way in which
to address this problematic is to make ritual phenomena themselves the locus and
focus of inquiry.
None of the above claims that ritual phenomena exist independently of cultural
and social orders. But the issue is how phenomena do exist as such in the social world.
Phenomena are thus only if they are perceived to exist. Phenomena exist because they
are perceived to be imbued with the real. This immediately implies that phenomena
have degrees of autonomous existence—in other words, though always to varying degrees and through various qualities, phenomena do exist in and of themselves. Nonetheless, these degrees and qualities of autonomy are profound, for they seem to relate
to what may be called the interior complexity of how phenomena are organized. In
turn, the interior complexities of phenomena likely are related to what persons can
do within them, and how they act on those persons.
This discussion continues earlier arguments intended to forgo claims to the value
of any universal, overarching definition or conception of ritual (Handelman 1998,
2006).1 No theory based on representation or functionalism can open to the tremendous diversity of phenomena that are called “ritual,” and to their kinds and degrees
of interior complexity. Yet my argument does not support a simple cultural relativism
of ritual phenomena, aiming instead for a more comparativist perspective toward
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
| 67
the integrity of ritual phenomena as phenomenal. Nevertheless, this orientation also
shifts from a logos of the phenomenal toward one of the phenomenon.
In general terms, I suggest thinking about ritual in its own right through two
steps.2 The first is to separate (to an extent, arbitrarily) the phenomenon from its
sociocultural surround, from its “environment,” in order to analyze it in and of itself.
This analysis is not an end in itself, but it is intended to be taken heuristically as far
as one can. The second step is to reinsert the ritual into its surround, with the added
knowledge of what has been learned about the ritual, taken in and of itself. The first
step is more phenomenological, the phenomenon existing in its own right, together
with the attempt (necessarily impossible) to exhaust the significance of its forming.
The second step is more hermeneutical, including, more broadly, significance and,
more pointedly, meaning, that extend toward the phenomenon from its surround.
These steps illuminate whether—and if so, how—the ritual can be said to have its
own interior integrity, and therefore whether it exists more as a representation of
sociocultural order or more through its own autonomy from such order. In turn,
this may clarify how the ritual as phenomenon relates to sociocultural order, without
necessarily slipping into an inherently functionalist understanding.3 Consider these
steps as a thought experiment, one that requires the suspension of disbelief—the
anthropological disbelief that aspects of ritual may be understood with value, apart
from their cultural and contextual positioning.
Toward Ritual as Self-Organization
It is self-evident that the phenomenal world is constituted by phenomena that are
culturally perceived, if not socially composed. It is less a truism to say that social phenomena are made to have, or to acquire, different kinds and degrees of complexity
within themselves and in relation to their surrounds or environments. Emphasizing
the existential “within-ness” of phenomena points to their irreducibility to the intentions and desires of their makers or shapers. It is essential to underscore here that
though phenomena are of course breakable, they are never reducible without doing violence to their self-constitution. Fragmenting phenomena leave traces of their
self-constitution, but their reduction erases even these. Social phenomena exist as
phenomena, and so they exist in their own right, however fragile and transient this
existence may be. Social phenomena, then, have self-integrity, with its intimations of
integration. But self-integrity, the interior capacity of phenomena to sustain themselves, varies in kind and degree.
What I am calling “ritual,” however loosely, is treated here as a class of phenomena
whose forms, in greatly differing kind and degree, are characterized by interior complexity, self-integrity, and irreducibility to agent and environment. Thinking of ritual
in this way is attempting to recover aspects of its phenomenality, yet doing so in the
domain of the micro, the domain in which ritual phenomena are practiced into their
phenomenality. This is important because the ideas I am using here parallel to some
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68 | moebius anthropology
extent macro-domain discourses—called, variously, autopoiesis, synergetics (Haken
1993; Knyazeva 2003), complexity theory (Turner 1997), self-organization, and so
forth—coming from the physical and biological sciences but resonating or made to
resonate, if somewhat crudely, with “social systems.” The distinction here between
ritual as a micro-domain of organization and the macro-domains of social systems is
crucial, because the claims I make for the organization of micro-level phenomena differ markedly from the requirements needed to think about macro-domain systemics.4
Perhaps the most elementary premise informing all approaches to self-organization is that this is possible only when whatever is being organized is self-referential or
self-reflexive (Baecker 2001)—in other words, when whatever is organizing begins to
put itself into its own organizing, so that whatever is organized until then influences
whatever continues to be organized. Autopoiesis, for example (the term, coined by
the biologist Humberto Maturana, literally means “self-making”), refers to dynamics
through which “realities” come into existence “only through interactive processes
determined solely by the organism’s own organization” (Hayles 1999: 138). In my
terms, the phenomenon organizes (to varying degrees) the phenomenon. If autopoietic relationships become fully systemic, the system self-reproduces: “it produces
the components that produce it” (Bailey 1997: 86). In terms of ritual, one may argue—again, always in degrees—that a ritual produces the persons that will produce
the ritual as that ritual that produces them (see Hayles 1999: 139). Thus, social autopoiesis or self-organization generates degrees of autonomy of the social phenomenon
from its social surround (Mingers 2002: 294). As such, the integrity of the phenomenon—the practices that hold it together—derives degrees from within itself and less
from its social surround. In relation to social phenomena, I emphasize the subjunctive character of this condition. Nonetheless, some social phenomena, some rituals,
likely approach this tightly knit condition of becoming. A very tight fit between selfproduction and the transformed self is exemplified by Piroska Nagy’s (2005) conception of intimate ritual within medieval religious weepers, which I will discuss further
on. Bruce Kapferer’s (1997) analysis of the Sinhalese Suniyama exorcism as a virtuality
is an instance of a high degree of self-integrity and self-organization in ritual.
Self-reference entails making a distinction (Kauffman 1987: 53), in the simplest
yet critical instance for this discussion, a distinction that the self-referential phenomenon makes between itself, through the very practice of self-referencing, and what I
am calling its environment or social surround. Niklas Luhmann (1997) argues that
self-referential distinctions, such as those the phenomenon makes between itself and
its social surround, are reintroduced within the phenomenon itself, as integral to its
self-organizing properties (see also King and Thornhill 2003).5 Then the social phenomenon may be said to “look” inward in order to “look” outward, and to re-enter its
surround from within itself. In another terminology, the social phenomenon includes
the other or otherness within itself—both differentiating itself from and relating to
this. Again, this is a matter of degree, shifting between the possibilities of the other as
representation and the other as the emerging grounds for the transformation of being
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
| 69
within ritual. This is what enables some rituals (which I will call more complex in
their organization) to act on their social surround: in the very practice of separating
itself from its social surround, the ritual contains the surround, thereby acting on the
surround through what is done within the ritual. Kapferer’s conception of virtuality,
for example, through which the creation of cosmos from within itself emerges during
the Sinhalese Suniyama exorcism, speaks directly to these issues (Kapferer 1997).
I suggest, then, that within ritual forms, autopoietic qualities of self-organization
and qualities of complexity go hand in hand. Perhaps the greater the degree of interior complexity within a ritual, the greater will be its tendency to self-organize. And,
so, the greater the tendency for self-organizing, the greater the capacity of the ritual
for temporary autonomy from its sociocultural surround. Then, one step further, the
greater this relative autonomy, the greater the capacity of the ritual to interiorize the
distinction between itself and its surround and so to act on the latter from within
itself, through the dynamics of the ritual design. Numerous case studies (see, for example, Handelman and Lindquist 2004) demonstrate that many rituals have within
themselves the intentionality to change one or more of their participants through the
very practice of ritual designs.
Topology (in a loose, nonmathematical sense) is relevant here because of its concern with form as self-connectivity (McNeil 2004). The topological movement from
lesser to greater self-organization can be likened to that from a straight line to that
of a curve, though in social terms it may be more advantageous to speak entirely of
degrees of curvature. The less the tendency of a ritual to self-organization, the more
its interior operation is akin to a straight line, a “line,” moreover, that continues
from and is continuous with its sociocultural surround, its existence dependent on
representing the latter. Such ritual derives directly from its surround, hence its linear
relationship to the latter and, too, the lesser complexity of its interior organization.6
Here “map” is close to, almost isomorphic with, “territory.” By contrast, the more
the tendency of a ritual toward self-organization, the more its interior organization
is akin to curving that arcs away from the immediate embrace of its sociocultural
surround and moves toward self-enclosing and increasing self-integrity.
The self-referencing existence of cultural forms, their degree of self-organizing and
self-integrity, is intimately related to issues of recursion. Bateson gives a simple physical example of recursion: a smoke ring, a torus, turning in upon itself, giving itself a
separable existence. “It is, after all,” writes Bateson (1977: 246), “made up of nothing
but air marked with a little smoke. It is of the same substance with its ‘environment.’
But it has duration and location and a certain degree of separation by virtue of its
own in-turned motion.” This torus is an in-curving form containing the beginning of
elementary self-referencing, the hallmark of integrity, and so of self-organizing, itself
existing through recursion (on the movements that characterize the mathematical
form known as the torus, see McNeil 2004: 19–25).
The social torus is constituted through a double movement: curving inwards,
torqueing outwards, through form recognizing itself within itself, and on the basis of
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70 | moebius anthropology
this self-integrity moving outwards, driving into broader cosmic and social worlds.7
This double movement, inwards and outwards, is crucial to the existence of any social
form containing within itself the potential for self-organizing, the propensity for the
forming of difference within itself and for exfoliating this, twisting it back into the
broader sociocultural surround.8 The double movement—simultaneously curving toward closure and twisting toward openness—baldly describes ritual in its own right,
separable yet inseparable from its surround. As separable, ritual can be examined as
such. As inseparable, ritual twists back into relations with the broader worlds within
which it is embedded and from which it takes form.9
Through their self-curvature, social forms, enclosing themselves within themselves as vectors of action, give themselves intentionality, organization, depth, and
direction—in other words, shape.10 Recursivity in a sense gives to itself a push, a
phusis (Castoriades 1997: 331), toward completing what has been set in movement—
these are the pulling qualities of propensity embedded in self-organization. No social
form has the autonomous existence of absolute difference, yet without minimal selfpropelling difference, no social form exists as it does, for whatever duration, under
whatever conditions. This propensity to self-organization is present in the most mundane of everyday behavior and interaction. Studying face-to-face interaction, I was
struck by how, whenever two or more persons began to interact, the double movement of curving toward closure and twisting toward openness came into existence,
taking phenomenal shape. I coined the adage that in social interaction between two
persons, one plus one never equaled two. Persons interacting were never the sum of
their parts, since their interacting was mediated by the emergence of ephemeral, organizing forms whose duration was that of the interaction itself and whose emergent
structures influenced the character of interaction as it emerged. Reshaping Erving
Goffman’s (1961) concept, I called these transient, yet continually present, emergent
forms “encounters” (Handelman 1973, 1977; see the Epilogue to this volume for
further discussion of the encounter).11
Important again is the double movement—of an everyday encounter emerging
into phenomenal form, curving toward self-closure, toward some degree of selforganization, however momentary, however transient, separating itself temporarily
from the social field, existing in its own right, then ending, twisting back, torqueing
into broader social fields, dissipating, its character influencing encounters to come.
Interpersonal encounters have self-organizing propensities. In mundane life these
properties are often emergent phenomena of interaction as it is occurring. Though
these properties differ vastly in their degrees of complexity, they curve recursively as
they emerge, shaping the ongoing interaction. Self-organizing phenomenal forms
have variable capacities to generate new aspects of themselves, during their activity.
Even in highly rule-governed contexts, social interaction contains the potential to
generate creativity, which may (or may not) become part of the curve toward phenomenal self-closure.12 Social form is always in movement within itself. Luhmann
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
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(1999: 19) writes that “form is the simultaneity of sequentiality,” the compression
of its dynamics. Form exists through its dynamics of self-forming and dissipation.
Forming form—phenomenal form emerging through practice—does not necessitate any principled distinction between mundane living and ritual (Handelman
1979). Both domains exist through the forming through practice of temporary, interactive social units—of whatever duration, space, and significance—that rejoin the
sociocultural fields from which they emerge. The signal difference between mundane
encounters and ritual may be more in how they self-organize and less in any meta-definition of sameness and difference from which all else follows—a position that
still dominates attempts in anthropology to define ritual.
The phrasing of this chapter addresses ritual as a curving toward self-closure and
self-organization, and as whatever depth and innerness this enclosing opens. Witness the insistence of so many rituals that they go elsewhere, elsewhen, within and
through themselves. The movement from the line to the curve is that of conditions
of self-organization. Curving, the line becomes self-referential, opening space, acquiring depth. In relating to itself, the curve organizes itself in terms of itself, thereby
enabling its existential and phenomenal self-organization as different from whatever
exists outside the curve, while including this distinction within its own self-referentiality. As Bateson (1977: 242) implies, phenomenal forms “survive through time
only if they are recursive. They ‘survive’—i.e., literally live upon themselves—and some
survive longer than others.” In these terms, sociocultural phenomena differ in the
resources they have to live on, within themselves. When self-organization becomes
highly complex, a ritual has more to live on, or rather, to live through, and we may
speak, rightly so, of a separate world of causation and action, one in which, perhaps,
all tenses exist simultaneously within self-same space.13
These thoughts on phenomena as inwardly curving self-enclosures resonate with
Deleuze’s interpretation of Leibniz’s “fold.” The fold may be conceptualized as the
forming of a pocket of social action, as a folding in of movements of living, articulating persons within these curving self-enclosures in certain ways, not in others. As
it curves, the fold or pocket opens the depths of time/space when/where no opening
had existed a moment before. The opening itself is a curving of time/space, since
the movement of living is neither stopped nor blocked, but shifted into itself, enfolded, reorganized, and thereby made different—minimally, partially, utterly—from
the movements of whose courses the opening is but a moment. The fold or pocket
inflects and involutes (Deleuze 1993: 14–26), entailing variable and varying degrees
of self-organization, the autopoietic propensity that follows from the self-closing that
is the curve. Yet the pocket is partial because the fold twists back, torqueing into
the movements of living, refolding again in similar and dissimilar ways. The fold
curves recursively because its forming is anti-Cartesian, turning over and upending
the monothetic, and so resonating with many of the traditional and tribal rituals for
which we have substantive ethnographic evidence.
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72 | moebius anthropology
This is no small matter, since numerous indigenous claims and exegeses insist that
ritual does something—often transformative, temporarily, permanently—to cosmos,
to participants. The doing of transformation through ritual requires curvature, the
opening of time/space within which cause and effect can be joined self-referentially,
such that each embeds knowledge of its relation to the other, thereby together influencing one another recursively in predictive, controlled ways. Cause and effect
find one another through self-referentiality. To do controlled transformation, a ritual
form must “know” it is doing this, in order to recognize change as both property and
product of its operation. Curvature creates the existential knowledge of what it is
that is curving, as distinct from whatever realities the curve emerges from and returns
into. Moreover, curvature creates the existential knowledge of how what it is that is
curving is changing as it is curving; so that, for example, more interiorly complex
ritual is continuously becoming other to its-self as it is practiced, since it necessarily is
changing in relation to its-self.
Folding, curvature, recursivity, self-referentiality, all are elemental to the idea
that some forms of ritual must be separated from the sociocultural orders that create
them, and thereby that these ritual forms temporarily are made autonomous of these
surrounds. This was an implicit insight of Van Gennep and Victor Turner on rites
de passage as the organization of social and self-transformation. Liminality is a time/
space of curvature, of renewal, rebirth, resurgence, reshaping, remaking, and so forth.
But liminality also is the folding of time/space into itself, such that whatever enters, wherever, is made to relate to itself differently, coming out elsewhere, otherwise.
Nonetheless, as noted, we should never forget that the relationship of lineality~curvature always is relative; thus degrees of curvature, degrees of lineality, are ratios of
self-knowledge and self-organization of and within ritual forms.
Claims coming from anthropology often weigh in from extremes: arguing on the
one hand that if ritual does something, then either this is done through representations within ritual of the broader sociocultural order, enabling ritual to reflect or
radiate how values, ideals, and relationships should be shaped and resolved, symbolically, functionally; or, on the other, that ritual is organized to act directly, causally,
on sociocultural order. Both positions are valid, since each is related to the kinds and
degrees of self-closure of a given ritual. From this perspective, ritual becomes the
self-organizing of kinds and degrees of closure and their consequences. Therefore,
variation in parameters of self-organizing should be sought and explored within any
given ritual. These parameters also become one guideline for a comparative study of
ritual that focuses on ritual form and its doings.
The above points to the error in thinking that a singular conceptualization or definition of ritual can encompass, let alone index, all “ritual” phenomena. Though all social phenomena are interactive and so have some degree of curving self-closure, varying
from the nearly flat to the near autopoietic, their variations in self-organization relate,
as Bateson commented, to the degrees of self-sustainability of sociocultural forms in
their surrounds. I relate these variations in self-organization to the capacity of rituals
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
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to make difference or change occur through their own operations. Put simply, the
more a ritual curves into the foldedness of self-closure, the greater its self-organizing
and self-sustaining capacity. And, so, the greater is the ritual’s capacity to effect difference or change through its operations. Then, the more distinctive is the ritual’s
torqueing back into social order.
This discussion points to an experimental moment in the study of ritual, one that
asks what, if anything, can be discovered about the operation of ritual in relation to
itself, rather than worrying immediately about the truth-value of this exercise. The
truth-value of this experimental moment is never complete without the second part
of the movement, ritual’s twisting back, torqueing into sociocultural order. Nonetheless, scholars who insist that canons of scientific validity and its truth-claims are
always at the forefront of brainstorming are unlikely to respond with any enthusiasm
to this exercise. Ritual in its own right is not an end in itself but rather a perspective,
a way of inquiring into ritual forms, into how rituals are put together, into whether,
how, and to what degree such in-turning compositions have self-integrity. Rather
than, “anything goes,” as Feyerabend (1978: 28) put it, one can say that what goes
around, if it comes around, does so with difference. What comes around, then, is
more toroidal than spheroidal.
Beginning with ritual in its own right turns the canonical study of ritual on its
head, since it obviates representation. That is, the gambit of ritual in its own right
does away with the entire thrust of models of and models for, including the reign of
the symbolic as symbolic of, and the functional as functional for. The gambit nullifying representation also does away with this as an inherent (and oft-thought sufficient)
condition for the existence of ritual phenomena (see, e.g., Bloch 1992; Geertz 1980).
This obviation of the necessity of representation includes the idea that ritual should
be cultural self-narration (Geertz 1973) or that it must be a working out of social
relations (Gluckman 1962). Instead, I am arguing that a radical way through which
to learn of the relationship of ritual to social order is to examine first and foremost
what, if anything, can be gleaned about a given ritual in relation to itself. The initial
intention is to explain ritual more as phenomenon, as form, and less so as social order.
Therefore, my premise is one of the a-representativity of ritual phenomena, a position
neither pro- nor anti-representation.
The degree to which the interior organization (and therefore dynamics) of particular ritual forms are dependent on their representation of sociocultural order
becomes an issue for study. From the perspective of particular ritual forms, it is
social order that may be perceived as radically other rather than as continuous with
these rites (de Coppet 1990). Or, from Kapferer’s perspective, the virtual has the potential to generate all possibilities that a ritual is capable of actualizing in particular
conditions of practice, including its generation of the sociocultural surround.14 So,
too, the way opens to considering whether a particular ritual form has self-organizing
qualities. If a particular ritual form has only minimal self-organizing properties,
then in such instances the definitiveness of the distinction between ritual and
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not-ritual may turn out to be irrelevant (de Coppet 1992: 2–3), or at least much
less definitive.
Thinking on Ritual in Its Own Right
To amplify the above discussion, I discuss three ethnographic instances, adding practice to my argument for the theoretical value of learning about ritual through ritual.
Each instance is discussed in terms of the two dynamics raised earlier: the degree
of self-closure in the rite, and its twisting back and torqueing into social order. In
my understanding, the first instance discussed has hardly any self-closure or tendency toward self-organization, and so has little or no twisting back; the second has
self-closure coming into existence, but this is not sustainable, and one cannot quite
speak of its twisting back; the third has complex curvature, the highest degree of selfclosure and tendency toward self-organization, and undoubtedly twists back, powerfully torqueing into social order. These two dynamics correspond to the two methodological steps outlined previously: first, separating the ethnography of the ritual from
its social surround in order to discuss it in its own right, and, second, re-embedding
the ritual in social order.
Minimal Self-Closure: Maria Antonia Crosses the Rhine
The first instance, from eighteenth-century Europe, is that of Maria Antonia, the
fourteen-year-old daughter of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa, on her way to France
to wed the Dauphin, the future king, Louis XVI. Stopping at the Rhine, she was
turned from an Austrian princess into a French one. This exchange of one identity for
another had been preceded by intensive pedagogy at the Austrian court: instruction
to perfect her French; lessons in deportment and appearance suitable to Versailles;
changes in hairstyle; learning the latest minuets and fashionable card games; practicing the variety of bows and curtseys required by court etiquette; discussing matters
of state and polity, and so on. A series of rituals had been practiced, including the
French ambassador’s state entry into Vienna, Maria Antonia’s renunciation of all her
hereditary rights, and her marriage by proxy to the French Dauphin (Haslip 1987:
4–8).
Her exchange of identity took place in a pavilion on an uninhabited island in
the Rhine. The pavilion had five rooms, two facing east (toward Austria), two facing
west (toward France), and in the middle a large hall where she was to be given over
to France. Prior to this, Maria Antonia shed her Austrian garments and was redressed
in the embroidered shifts and petticoats of her French trousseau, the silk
stockings from Lyons, the diamond-buckled shoes from the court shoemaker of Versailles. Her Austrian attendants, many of whom she had
known from childhood, came forward to bid her a last tearful goodbye. . .
As formally as in a minuet, in which every gesture had been carefully
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
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rehearsed, Marie Antoinette was now handed over to her new country.
Prince Starhemberg led her up to a raised dais in the central hall, in front
of which was a long table representing the symbolic frontier between
France and Germany. Here waiting for her were the French envoys with
the official documents. (Haslip 1987: 9–10)
In France, Marie Antoinette was married again, and entered into a series of rituals
in which she was continually on display, in accordance with the etiquette of Versailles.
Architectonically, Versailles embodied the king, and Marin (referring to Louis XIV)
describes the topography as a “perfect simulacrum” of his portrait (1991: 180–81).
In a sense, then, these rituals were practiced within the encompassing body of the
king, the simulacrum fully continuous and perhaps isomorphic with its surround.
The rituals of display were continuous with their surround. These rituals included the
royal card game, the wedding banquet (held in a new theatre), and the levee—Marie
Antoinette’s daily rising from bed through acts of dressing in which every piece of
clothing proffered her indexed the (changing) status and prestige of the performer.
The levee of the king was even more complicated in the number and variety of categories of person who had roles to play in his getting up from and going to bed.
These and other royal rituals of etiquette were the stuff of court life, ongoing arenas
for competition over status in which the slightest fluctuation in value was registered
immediately by the participants (Elias 1983: 78–116).
The interior organization of the fold in mid-Rhine leads not more deeply into
itself but immediately outside, toward the courts organizing this formal exchange.
There is no double movement of curving interiorly and torqueing anteriorly in this
rite of exchanging the archduchess for the dauphine. One act leads additively to the
next, then to the next, and so on. The curvature of this pocket is nearly flat, its trajectory shallow, barely recursive, forging forward into the next ritual display, and then
the one after, and the one after that. The princess is entirely a vehicle of the symbolic,
exchanging one set of representations for another. The persona of an Austrian princess is exchanged for that of a French one.
Despite the intricacy of protocol, the demeanor of personae, the multivocal symbolism of dress, and the political maneuvering, the ritual in mid-Rhine has no selforganizing properties. The ritual lacks complexity in relation to itself. In its entirety,
this ritual (and all the others of the series, perhaps with the exception of the marriage
rite) is lineally continuous with royal social order on each side of the river and reflects
this in its transfer of representations from one authority to another. The significance
of this ritual is wholly in its representations, as symbolic of the social orders that gave
it shape: a model of courtly form, a model for courtly form. This is clear when the rite
is reinserted analytically within social order.
The ritual in mid-Rhine was isomorphic with the organization of court life outside the rite. The ritual was another piece of the broader social matrix and was not
divisible from this. The action within the ritual was entirely a manifestation of the
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patterning of court life. Here, ritual in its own right tells us that Maria Antonia’s
change of persona did not exist in its own right. There likely was no experiencing
from the world within the rite of the world without as radically different (Foucault
1993: 59)—as I would expect to be the case in rituals with more powerful properties of self-organization. In this instance, the distinction itself between ritual and
not-ritual may be irrelevant, since both domains were organized according to the
same principles of formal demeanor and deference, and to the centrality of public,
privileged gaze.
Curving toward Self-Closure: The Dancing Regiment
The second instance provides a sense of how a curvature of social autopoiesis can
come into existence, since the instance—one of dance—practices curving selfclosure metonymically, through its own movement. The dance is that of a regiment
in eighteenth-century Geneva, observed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Members of a
local regiment, on completing their exercises, ate together as companies. Most then
gathered in a nearby square “and started dancing all together, officers and soldiers,
around the fountain [in the square], to the basin of which the drummers, the fifers,
and the torch bearers had mounted . . . the harmony of five or six hundred men in
uniform, holding one another by the hand and forming a long ribbon which wound
around, serpent-like, in cadence and without confusion, with countless turns and
returns, countless sorts of figured evolutions . . . the sound of the drums, the glare
of the torches . . . all of this created a very lively sensation” (Rousseau 1982: 135). It
was late, the women had retired. Yet soon the windows filled with female spectators,
and then women came out, the wives to their husbands, the servants with wine,
the children half-clothed, running between their parents. The dance was suspended
and, instead, embraces, laughs, well-wishes, caresses—a mood of “universal gaiety”—
prevailed. Rousseau’s father, trembling with feeling, embraced him, saying, “JeanJacques, love your country. Do you see these good Genevans? They are all friends,
they are all brothers; joy and concord reign in their midst.” Rousseau commented
that he himself still felt this trembling feeling, continuing, “They wanted to pick up
the dance again, but it was impossible; they did not know what they were doing any
more; all heads were spinning with a drunkenness sweeter than that of wine. [Later]
they had to part, each withdrawing peaceably with his family” (ibid.: 135–36).
Ritual in its own right notes that in this instance the opening of time/space immediately curves, the serpentine line of dancers, officers and men together, holding
hands, stepping in unison, winding round, through countless turns and returns, to
the beat of drums, the puff of fifes. The ritual curves further and further into selfclosure, into self-reference, organizing itself over and again through its practice. The
more the ritual curves, the deeper its self-enfolding. The self-organization of this
pocket taking shape through movement is more complex than it appears on its mobile surface. This little world exists through rhythm, and rhythm depends on tempo.
Tempo organizes the dancers, enabling them to exist together through rhythm (You
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1994: 362). The aesthetic recurrence of rhythmicity and its movement generate their
own time/space. Effectively, the dancers and musicians momentarily existed in their
own ritual reality, quite autonomous of the immediate surround.
By contrast, the transfer of Maria Antonia according to protocol, from one phase
to the next, is more lineally additive than transformative. However, the organizing
tempo and rhythm of the regimental dance contain within their forming the propensity to fold. The curvature curves recursively through itself, forming the fold that is
the curve enfolding its curvature. Time/space becomes more that of the fold, rather
than a representation of the wider world. The winding shaping of this enfolding
takes form in relation to the habitat of the square, the positioning of its fountain and
that of the musicians.15 Without leaving the interior of this rite, we can say that the
dancers, though in uniform, likely were in more of an egalitarian relationship to one
another than they were in the regiment outside of the dance. The men were doing
what McNeill (1995: 2) calls “muscular bonding”—“the euphoric fellow feeling that
prolonged and rhythmic muscular movement arouses among nearly all participants
in such exercises”—though to discuss this further requires more information than the
rite in itself supplies.
I underscore that in Rousseau’s description of this rite, the double movement of
curving self-closure and torqueing into exteriority was present to a degree. However,
the dance roused unanticipated, emergent action from its social surround. The womenfolk, initially spectators, rushed from their homes to embrace their menfolk. The
self-sustaining fold of the dance did not withstand the social surround torqueing into
the dancers: the uni-form regiment turned into a multitude of family groups, a microcosm of a family-based order, and the harmonics of the euphoric bonding of the
fighting men passed into the family groups (witness also the responses of Rousseau
and his father).16
Given Rousseau’s description, this is about as far as one can go in discussing the
dancing of the regiment as a ritual in its own right. Here, the movement of social life
suddenly (perhaps spontaneously) forms into a powerful self-enclosing curve, a fold
self-organizing and augmenting the rhythm and harmonics of muscular bonding.
The second step, re-embedding the ritual into the broader surround, implicates other
aspects of this event, though without radically altering the rudimentary analysis I
have offered of the ritual in relation to itself.
In keeping with this second step, Rousseau wrote that, previous to the dance, the
soldiers had done their exercises and then had supped together in companies. The
sequencing is significant, since the dance may have been the emergent property of
the men drilling and eating together. By the sixteenth century in Europe, drilling
organized soldiers in systems, and the maneuver, called the “countermarch” by the
Dutch, turned a body of men with firearms into “a unit of continuous production”
(Feld 1975: 424–25), one that folded and self-organized into a group that fired continuously—one that, in its own way, danced continuously to the rhythm of serried
ranks in movement from front to back, to the tempo of firearms discharging.
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78 | moebius anthropology
The men who danced as a regiment knew the steps, the music, and how to synchronize these, but the dancing at that time and place has the sense of a spontaneous
celebration and self-organization of the feelings aroused by drilling and eating together, sustainable for a time through its own propensity to fold recursively (just as
drilling instilled). McNeill (1995: 8) argues that drilling together produces boundary
loss in the individual and a collective feeling of oneness. Eating together undoubtedly
enhances such collective feelings, harmonizing people’s interiors in concert. Sliding
into dance changed the geometries, the topologies of movement of the preceding
practices. The dancers joined to one another through the folding, flowing currents of
rhythmic movement, synchronization, direction, entering further into the relationship between exterior and interior of individual and collectivity opened by drilling
and eating together. The fragmenting of the dance by kin torqued the dancers back
into the broader surround, into their families, into another topology through which
the military practiced exteriority against the enemy in order to protect the interiority
of family units, the core of societal reproduction.
Self-Closure and Complexity: Slovene Pig-Sticking (Furez)
The third instance, pig-sticking on Slovene farmsteads, demonstrates that greater curvature increases the self-organizing complexity of ritual and, furthermore, radically
alters what ritual can do, in its own right. I use Robert Minnich’s rich ethnography
to discuss further ritual in relation to itself and then re-embedding ritual in its sociocultural surround.
The rite of pig-sticking (Furez) is the day on the Slovene farmstead when pigs are
killed and made into sausage and other pork products. The head of the household
(gospodar) invites a “head butcher” and others who will participate in the killing and
prepare the meat. Arriving in early morning, the “guest” butchers assemble around
the kitchen table together with the gospodar. The head butcher takes the gospodar’s
seat at the head of the table, also giving the gospodar’s wife, the gospodinja, any special
instructions he may have. The mood during the small breakfast is quiet, subdued, solemn, as it is among the women in the kitchen. The head butcher says a prayer, crosses
himself, and takes out his dagger-like “sticking knife,” kept separate from his other
blades and used only for killing pigs. The knife is thought to have its own powers
and to do the killing, rather than the one who wields it (Minnich 1979: 187, 190).
The head butcher takes the pig out of the sty, and the others pin it down. The
women retreat into the house. Uttering, “with God’s help,” the head butcher thrusts
the knife into the pig’s jugular vein, stabbing the heart. The head butcher may then
etch a cross in blood below the neck (ibid.: 111). Until the pig is dead, there is tense
silence among the butchers. Before the butchering begins, or before the carcass is
taken into the house, it is blessed, sprinkled with holy water at the threshold of the
house, or sprinkled with blessed salt by the gospodinja. The body then is convertible for human consumption (ibid.: 114). Usually, both skinning and butchering are
done outside, and once these tasks are completed, the body parts are taken inside,
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where the butchers take over space, though not in the kitchen. Many of the particular
cuts of meat and the cured products from the Furez are designated especially for particular meals, ritual and other, throughout the calendar year of the household. These
Slovenes say: “Each limb [of the pig] has its own nameday” (ibid.: 107).
With the body parts inside the home, the mood of the participants changes acutely,
from withdrawn solemnity to sociability, joking, fun. After a jovial midday meal, the
butchers make sausages: raw sausage for smoking, blood sausage, and klobasa, the meat
sausage. They shape the first klobasa as a gigantic phallus, or as a double-segment circular sausage with a third segment attached and protruding through the circle, a pointed
sign of sexual intercourse (ibid.: 117). Either a butcher brings the phallus into the
kitchen or the gospodinja comes to take it. In their separate work areas, the men and
women continue their ribald joking about this sausage, which remains unnamed.
As night falls, with the sausage-making and cooking completed, people arrive
for the Furez supper. The guests include neighbors, kin, and the wives and children
of the butchers. The table is decked in white, the best service is used, and seats of
honor are given to the eldest present. The gospodar returns to prominence through
his speechmaking. The meal itself is huge and lengthy, with many different sausages,
cuts of pork, other dishes, and wine and brandy. Afterwards, the participants dance
and sing, even until dawn.
The Rite in Its Own Right
These are the bare bones of the event. Most evident is the event’s lineal sequencing. If
we go by activity and mood, there are three segments. In the first, solemnity and religiosity prevail before and during the killing, and during the skinning and slicing up
of the carcass, throughout all of which the head butcher displaces the gospodar. The
second consists of bringing the body parts inside the home, with the subsequent sausage-making by the men and cooking by the women. This segment is characterized
by fun, ribaldry, sexual joking, degrees of embarrassment, and greater sociability. The
third is the festive meal—lengthy, convivial, replete with speeches by the reinstated
gospodar and talk, stories, music, and song—embracing many guests.
The segments must take place in the lineal order they do. The pig cannot be killed
before the guest butchers arrive and make their preparations. The body parts must
not be taken inside the house before being blessed. Joking should not occur before
sausage-making begins. The festive meal cannot be held until all of the pork products
are ready and additional guests arrive. Each segment corresponds to periods of the
day—morning, afternoon, evening.17 Each segment has its own high point: in the
first, the killing of the pig; in the second, the phallus-like klobasa made of the pig’s intestine; in the third, the high conviviality of numerous people, many from outside the
farmstead, joining together. The high degree of curving self-closure is immediately
evident. The pig returns, but different, consecrated, sexualized. The butchers return,
but different, their solemnity transformed into jovial ribaldry. The women return;
the home returns. The second segment is a recurving of the first, and so forth. Each
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80 | moebius anthropology
recursion increases the propensity of folding the rite deeper and more fully into itself,
making it more complex, more a ritual existing phenomenally in relation to itself.18
In sequence, the three segments also have a sense of climax embedded within their
movement. A high degree of recursion enables transformation. The movement may
be glossed as that of death into procreation, procreation into an extended familial
order, the fruits of procreation feasting on the death that promises life for the living.
The segments are not modular (as those involving Maria Antonia were, to a high
degree), in that their order cannot be switched about without utterly altering the integrity of the occasion’s recursive folding. On the basis of what we know so far, there
is an internal logic to the propensity of the temporal sequencing, one that appears
lineal (segment moving to segment) yet that is self-closing. The movement of the sequencing is a widening gyre, taking off from the death of the pig and flowing around
the farmstead, momentarily changing its interior and its relationship to its exterior.
The farmstead is folded into itself but comes out somewhere else.
This is evident in analyzing movement through space, especially that between the
interior and exterior of the farmstead. The household invites outsiders inside. The
guest butchers enter farmstead and home, eating breakfast together, the head butcher
displacing the gospodar, who, as Minnich comments, becomes a guest in his own
home. The border—the distinction between interior and environment, in Luhmann’s
terms—between the farmstead and its exterior is stretched into the inside, into the
home, especially by the head butcher, who is an analogue of the exterior plane of this
border. Exterior becomes interior, a fold opening and containing this different order
of things as its dynamics. Furthermore, the head butcher, the exterior made interior,
moves toward the pig and its destruction. Yet on the basis of ritual in its own right, we
cannot say anything directly about the pig and its possible relationship to bordering,
since this information is lodged in the sociocultural surround of the ritual.
Nonetheless, we can say that the killing of the pig is marked by bordering signs.
With a brief invocation, the killer crosses himself, separating himself from the pig he
will kill. His pig-sticking knife has killing power of its own, separating it from the
killer who wields it. The skinned corpse is sprinkled with blessed salt, separating it
from what it was in life, enabling it to cross the home threshold, from outside to inside. All this suggests that there is something in the pig, perhaps related to its coming
death, involving its separation from human beings. Perhaps because pig and human
are somehow related, even intimately? When the pig, apparently associated with outside, comes inside, it does so in pieces. An analogue of the exterior, the pig has been
taken apart, and it is the interiors of this analogue—especially intestines, stomach,
blood—that come inside. Inside, the interiors of the pig are used to alter mood and
relationships of the interior of the home.
The butchers coming back inside the home with the insides of the pig are not the
same butchers who went outside to kill that pig. Their demeanor is different, and
deep within the home they begin the intimate work of turning the pig’s interiors
into sustenance. The pig’s insides, intestines and stomach, become the container,
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another recursive pocket within the complex fold, to be filled with the man-made
mix of minced pork. Inside the home, the interior of the pig is made into the exterior
of the sausage, shaped by the men into signs of sexuality and procreation, cooked
by the women and later taken into the interiors of the people who will feast on it.
One analogue of exteriority, the butchers, destroys and transforms another, the pig.
One sign of the transformed pig, the transformed exterior (sexuality, procreation), is
consumed and made interior by the participants, in the course of which they, too, are
transformed. The self-organizing properties of Furez operate through this propensity
of folding and enfolding the fold that continues to be folded recursively, thereby destroying exteriorities that function in the everyday. Folding within folding generates
deep interiority. Thus, this ritual fold generates itself as more autonomous of the
everyday, becoming in its own right a specialized context for change that will twist
back, torqueing into the everyday, effecting this.
Inside the home, both butchers and women are preparing pork as food. This complementarity in work between “outside” men and “inside” women is one ground
through which they relate to one another. The pig gives its interior to be made into
a male sexual organ extruding from the outside male within the home of the inside
female. Coming to the women, the penis is cooked, domesticated, perhaps with intimations of fertilization and procreation, perhaps with connotations of the “birth”
of something else, something that will be the “offspring” of exterior within interior.
If so, then this entire process depends upon making the domains of outside and inside, exterior and interior, bend and curve recursively into one another, segment into
segment. Beginning with the coming of the guest butchers, the distinction between
exterior and interior is enfolded, thereby self-enclosing the fold of the Furez.
What might this birthing be? We know from the ritual that the corpse of the pig
is being made into sustenance, and that during its preparation and later as food this
corpse is the basis for commensality, sociality, intimacy. We know that later on the
festive supper opens the farmstead even further to outsiders, expanding in duration
and number. Perhaps this social expansion is the birth of something else?
Everything said so far is accessible through analyzing the ritual in its own right
and yet, more significantly, is integral to that ritual, in and of itself—all this without
deriving the ritual form and dynamics from the broader order of things, the usual
sequence of thinking in anthropological analysis. We see that this ritual has its own
integrity of recursive self-organization, and, as such, this ritual form may have the
propensity (indeed the interior capacity) to accomplish something that the farmstead
cannot do on its own. To discuss this further, I take the second step of re-embedding
the ritual within the broader order of things, as its recursion twists back, torqueing
into the wider society.
The Rite Re-embedded
The Slovene peasant-farmers of this region place great value on the social and economic autonomy of their farmsteads and nuclear families. Autonomy is a bastion
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82 | moebius anthropology
of their identity. Farmsteads (not family lines) signify to these peasant-farmers “the
continuity and stability of a local social and economic universe” (Minnich 1979: 64).
The all-important standing of the gospodar is identified with a place, the farmstead,
his “home ground,” and not with a family line. On the front stage (though not the
backstage) of the farmstead, the gospodar appears as the sovereign of his immediate
family. The relationship between gospodars is that of equals, while a gospodar entering
the domain of another usually becomes “guest” in relation to “host,” accepting the
hospitality and authority of the latter.
These peasant-farmers say that Furez is a special occasion practiced annually, preferably close to but before Christmas. The Furez supper is the household’s most festive
and richest annual meal. The pig is the only animal raised here for slaughter. Its
killing is given the special name of pig-sticking, while the infrequent killing of other
farm animals is referred to as slaughtering. The pig has an unusual status among these
peasant-farmers. More than any other farm animal, the pig is involved in the daily
routines of its keepers (ibid.: 134). Swine food commonly is prepared on the kitchen
hearth, and there is some sharing of kinds of food among people and swine—cabbage
and potatoes, and, in the past, millet and corn. Pigs and farm people, writes Minnich
(1979: 143), are close associates. Yet unlike other farm animals, pigs are not given
names, are not personalized. Moreover, pigs proffer the most prolific referents for
local obscenities and sexual joking, while the most powerful rhetorical abuse refers to
pigs and their inhuman qualities: “swine lap up and wallow in their own excrement,”
and “sows devour their young” (ibid.: 138). On the one hand, the pig exists only to
give its life, but on the other, only for the pig is an annual Furez held.
As a farmstead animal, the pig has a special status—close to people, distanced
from people, the nonhuman refracting the human, its death ritualized, its flayed and
dismembered corpse intimating sexuality, procreation, commensality. On the human
side, the autonomous gospodar abdicates front-stage authority to the head butcher, a
“stranger” to the ideologically independent farmstead. The gospodar thereby distances
himself from the killing within his domain. In turn, the head butcher is distanced
from the killing by the belief that his special dagger has the power to do the deed
and kill. Nothing human, no one belonging to the farmstead, kills the pig. It is not
an immaculate death, yet, moving in that direction—a death with qualities of an
ordeal (witness the change of mood from prior to and then after the killing) in which
the killer takes distance and the corpse is sanctified. Yet what is being killed? And by
whom? As I asked earlier, what is being birthed?
On the basis of ritual in its own right, I argued that the butchers are analogues of
the border between exterior and interior, the border thereby stretched into the farmstead, into the pigsty, into the pig, into the corpse, into the home, turning outside
into inside, emerging through the pig’s interior as the power of sexuality and procreation, penetrating the kitchen, the women’s domain, there cooked into sustenance
that sustains human beings and social relationships. Ritual in its own right identifies
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
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ing itself with profound consequences for the farmstead. Yet if the butchers are the
analogues of a moveable border, what is the pig, given the additional ethnography
from the sociocultural surround?
The moveable border that is the butchers meets the pig. Given its cultural attributes, the pig also has qualities of a living border. The pig is something like the
stranger, yet positioned deep within the farmstead rather than outside it, perhaps a
border between the human and the un-human, the human and itself, an un-human
other living in close proximity to humans, the distinction between un-human and
human, between selfness and otherness within the farmstead. Yet it is a border to be
effaced, if the pig is to die for humans so that they can become more fully human
as social and sociable beings. As the head butcher kills the pig, one stranger destroys
another, one (exterior) border destroys another (interior) one, opening the farmstead
simultaneously from its outside and its inside, enabling numerous guests to move
from the exterior to the deeply interior, toward the festive supper, and the pig to
move toward becoming food for that repast. The cut-up pieces of this interior border
(the pig), made into sausage, become the sustenance for a generative, procreative
sociality of labor between strange men and household women, extending later in the
day to the greater collectivity of the festive supper.
It is this opening of the farmstead— blossoming within the self-organizing time/
space of the fold, its participants interacting through the night into the new day
through joy, fun, good spirits, and fellowship—that is being birthed. Minnich (1979:
138–40) comments that the killing of the pig, of a close associate, is consecrated to a
degree and has qualities of sacrifice (ibid.: 191), though there are difficulties in stating
this baldly. Sacrifice destroys boundaries in order to create new ones, new forms. Killing the pig—destroying the implicit border, deeply interior within the farmstead, and
domesticating this deep interiority that signifies otherness, the unnamed, obscenity,
unbridled sexuality, and yet a kind of intimacy—is done by the head butcher, the exterior plane of that other, more explicit border separating the autonomous farmstead
from social others. The exterior border destroys the interior border, changing both
in the process, so that during the remainder of the fold’s time/space, neither border
exists. As I commented, the butchers re-entering the home are not the same ones who
went out to kill the pig. Now they are more the intimates of the home, their own
sexuality and procreative drive more open, especially brought home through ribaldry;
and to a degree, the women respond in kind. Butchers and women cooperate in shaping sustenance from the sacrifice.
The corpse of the pig also is changed—blessed before its body parts move into the
home. One border destroys the other, destroying itself in the process. Furthermore,
this nullifying of borders enables whatever they excluded to flow together and to fill
out into fruitful union. The gospodar—who, in his rightful standing as the head of
the farmstead, would block these movements—stands down, stands aside, and is
implicated neither in the killing nor in the changes in relationships within the household. The sustenance formed from the sacrifice has qualities of a sacrament, eaten
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84 | moebius anthropology
in various forms during the festive meal by the solidary, though more amorphous,
collectivity of kin, neighbors, friends.
This re-embedded analysis may also illuminate why Furez should be practiced
before and close to the Catholic Christmas. If the pig is a sacrifice eaten as sacrament
by the autonomous farmstead, itself “reborn” as a broad, solidary community without clear-cut borders and with little internal hierarchy, then in cosmic terms Furez
resonates with Christmas as a preparation for the birth of the savior, whose sacrificial
death is transformed into sacrament. I am not saying that Furez is an analogue of the
birth and death of Christ, but I am saying that through the self-organizing closure of
the Furez fold, one is made to resonate with the other. Prior to Christmas, the farmstead takes itself apart from within itself so that it is remade and delimited again, yet
differently, by its exteriors turned into interiors.19
These interiors become recursive pockets in the curving fold of Furez. That is,
Furez itself is a filling—and fillings within fillings—of the time/space opened through
self-organization. The farmstead is filled with strangers (the butchers); the pig is filled
with itself (the pork mix stuffed into its intestines); the home is filled with people
(the guests); the people are filled with pork. The time/space of Furez is filled entirely
with its own special mix. These fillings within fillings likely would not occur without
the erasure of boundaries, enabling different substances with different values to enter
one another. This also is a kind of filling of the world, a bringing of the world into
fullness; perhaps this echoes practices of All Hallows, All Souls, and All Saints, in the
Christian universe, filling the cosmos with an entirety of its presence, awaiting the
coming presence of Christ.20
Complexity and Self-Organization
The three instances discussed here begin to show how “rituals,” when treated analytically in their own right, demonstrate varying degrees of interior self-organization
and complexity. Degrees of self-organization support the contention that the most
complex kind of agency a ritual can have built into its design is that of making radical change through its own interior dynamics. The least complex is for a ritual to be
quite continuous with the sociocultural surround, lineally reflecting and representing
it in manifold ways of show and tell—telling it stories about itself; showing it to itself
from various aspects; magnifying, miniaturizing, upending, celebrating, mourning,
and so forth. In the latter instance, the connectivity between ritual and its surround
passes through a border that hardly distinguishes, hardly differentiates, between one
and the other, since the mandate of such ritual is more that of highlighting, embellishing, enhancing, and condensing than of creating difference and making change.
Yet more complex agency depends upon greater curvature; curvature leads inevitably
to self-reference and reification as a relatively autonomous phenomenon or event;
and relative autonomy leads to self-organization that activates controlled causality
to make change. In practice, the causality of curvature is circular (Haken 1993),
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
| 85
through which distinctions such as those of “structure” and “process” are indivisible;
through which structure as process bends through causality into itself, coming out elsewhere, differently, re-formed. Within the complexities of increasing self-organization,
causality is not linear.
In the instance of Maria Antonia at the Rhine, her crossing as Marie Antoinette
was one of a lineally continuous series of events, each event a module, such that the
addition together of the modules constituted the entire passage. One may surmise
that though integral to a culture of royal display and elaboration, many of these modules could have been done away with, should geopolitical and other conditions have
required this.21 The basic movement from Vienna to Versailles, from Maria Antonia
to Marie Antoinette, would not have been effected, even if the status and esteem of
the royal houses suffered. In the instance of the regiment, moving into dance embodied an explicit dynamic, away from the lineal into curving. The movement into dance
immediately shaped some degree of more complex self-organization that sustained
itself as distinct from its surround, if only for a short while. Of the three cases, Furez
demonstrates that when a program for radical change is integral to ritual design, the
ritual will be self-organizing to a high degree and relatively autonomous from its
surround. These three instances suggest that studying ritual in its own right may be a
useful strategy for thinking on ritual, one quite distinct from those usually encountered in anthropology and cognate disciplines, and in these terms opening toward a
more comparative study of the phenomenality of ritual that is committed neither to
the pursuit of universal definitions of ritual nor to cultural relativism.
Must Ritual Be Social?
Understandably, one would think, the social is the heartland of ritual studies. What
is ritual, if not the Durkheimian effervescence of the social? Yet the premises of ritual
in its own right try to free us from the so deeply embedded anthropological stricture
that ritual is social because it must be attached to, relate to, or service some group.
Ritual is created by groups and expressive of groups, otherwise it is insignificant.
This complicity of ritual and groupness implicitly demands that rite have meaning
or function for the social, the raison d’être of ritual’s existence. Thus, the structures,
dynamics, and processes of ritual are immediately oriented to the social. Rarely considered is that taking this tack eliminates other potentialities in which thinking on
ritual ignores the borders of the social.
Nonetheless, if ritual is (though I am less than certain of this) the great generating
ground of the human phantasmagoric, as I think Bruce Kapferer argues, then insisting that this ground must be utterly social denies (again) the essential phenomenality
of ritual phenomena. I argued earlier that the constitution of phenomenon qua phenomenon should have a central place in ritual studies. Protecting the phenomenality
of ritual insists, as I tried to show, that it should be possible to avoid committing the
analysis of a particular ritual to meaning/function even before one grasps just what
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86 | moebius anthropology
its shape implicates. Yet this requires that we begin analysis with the phenomenality
of the phenomenon itself, and not with its surround. If form is to exist in and of itself, to whatever degree, minimally, maximally, with whatever qualities, it must have
integrity—completeness or wholeness, as its Latin root intimates. The degrees and
qualities of completeness of the ritual phenomenon constitute its phenomenality,
giving to it textures and rhythms of phenomenal reality.
The emphasis that I put on the form and forming of phenomenality is an attempt
to avoid prejudging what any given ritual is about (indeed if it is about anything that
may be specified). Yet this also is to refrain deliberately from defining the term “ritual,” since monothetic definition insists on exact distinctions of the either/or variety
(see Chapter Four, this volume). Speaking of degrees of self-closure and integrity is
a way of trying to avoid the over-reification of ritual phenomena while nonetheless
insisting on their phenomenality.
Now, it is easy for me to write of degrees and qualities of curvature as indices of the
complexity of self-organization that a given ritual develops or evolves, while claiming
that complexity effects what participants are able to do through that ritual form,
and, too, what ritual form is able to do through its own dynamics—yet, so what? In
terms of their potential application, these ideas are vague, loose, seemingly bearing
little relevance to the practice of ritual. Nonetheless, these ideas are terms of reference, a way of thinking that is distinct from those usually used to conceptualize and
think about ritual. Whether this way of thinking makes any difference to the study
of ritual is not for me to say. However, this perspective does tell anthropologists and
others that unless they put aside the conventional tool kits of the ritual trade, they
will continue to reproduce rituals as qualities of the known, and these may well be
very distant from the potentialities generated by conceptualizing ritual as the creative
grounds of the phantasmagoric.
If this is so then ritual becomes the imagining of the social, yet through ritual,
not through the social. Thus a ritual imaginary comes to the fore—the capacities of
rite to imagine otherness, other-where, other-when, through its own self-organizing
media and their originary grounds. Ritual self-forming and the self-organizing of rite
are done always through a ritual imaginary. Ritual in its own right recognizes that
the comprehensiveness and usage of the imaginary vary with the integrity of selforganization that particular rites enable and accomplish. Simplistically (yet recognizing this), the greater this integrity, the greater the autopoietic autonomy of the rite
from its social surround. It is these self-organizing qualities of phenomena that give
them relative freedom toward the social. In turn, these qualities enable studies of
ritual in its own right to border the social.
Yet how social must a ritual be in order to be ritual? Given that the grounds for a
particular ritual will be social in some way, must its form be directly accountable to
the social? I will venture that whether a given ritual form is accountable directly to
the social is contingent upon its practice and whether this practice will have meaning
and function for the social. Meaning/function, then, is not a given that follows diThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
| 87
rectly from the fact that the ritual is practiced. Questioning whether particular ritual
forms must be social in their phenomenality pushes the discussion of ritual beyond
the usually acceptable.
The medievalist, Piroska Nagy, offers us a case in point through that which she
calls “intimate ritual,” that of religious weeping during the European High Middle
Ages. During the High Medieval period religious weeping was called the “gift of
tears.” This was said to be given by God, indicating His presence within the weeper,
the tears washing away the sins of the latter. Weeping affected the homo interior, the
“inner person” of the weeper. In this way the soul of the weeper was cleansed and
transformed. Some medieval authors drew a parallel between the baptism, the purification by exterior water, and weeping as the interior “water of tears,” an internal
“baptism of tears” that complemented and completed the exterior purification (Nagy
2004: 125).
Nagy emphasizes that the intimate ritual of weeping occurred entirely within the
being of the weeper, such that the weeping could remain invisible, entirely within
the interior of the weeper. Understood within its historical environment, this was
not a solipsistic rite, simply between the person and herself. Instead, she opened her
within-ness to the potentialities of cosmos, to God’s penetration that reorganized
her from within herself. The person embodied her ritual, taking it within her wherever she went, her body becoming the interface between ritual and social surround.
Weepers took both sides of the distinction between self and the social into themselves, making the social subordinate to the self, thereby opening the way to personal
mysticism.
For some three centuries, these persons limited the presence of the social within
their intimate ritual or, perhaps more accurately, shut in the social within themselves. For people around her, the ritual dynamics within such a person were no less
mysterious than are those of many other initiation rites. As such this ritual neither
was formalized nor was under the control of church and social order. The efficacy of
weeping “lay in the [very] act of weeping itself ” (Nagy 2004: 128), the act induced
by God through his hidden relationship with the individual, a relational dynamic
that continued throughout the life course of the weeper. The occurrence of this ritual was directed neither by sociality nor by the formal theology of the church. Indeed through weeping the individual circumvented the social controls of church and
community. Nonetheless, at its height the ritual was not perceived as anti-social, for
weeping indexed God’s presence within the weeper.22 Nagy rightly writes of weeping
as a lifelong intimate ritual of initiation into the mysteries of salvation of the soul.
Her think-piece is a provocative challenge to the insistence of canonical anthropology
that ritual be grounded in shared meaning and its social function.
Nagy’s work intimates a problematic that in my view can hardly be solved through
beginning the analysis of ritual with its social and cultural surround. At issue here
is how ritual works when the participants do not share common understandings of
cultural symbols, and when those who are being healed have at best only a sketchy
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88 | moebius anthropology
sense of and limited feel for the cosmological premises that inform the existence of
the ritual. I foundered on this problem some fifty years ago, and the halting explanation I offered then (Handelman 1967) really limped, to say the least. At issue for me
was the latest healing ritual of the Washo shaman, Henry Rupert (see Chapter One
and the Epilogue to this volume). Henry had transformed his healing so that its form,
technics, and thematics were utterly foreign to everyone I knew or heard of whom he
had treated in the recent past. Nonetheless, patients of great social and cultural diversity continued to come for treatment, and his reputation only gained in stature. One
could not really speak of cultural meaning or of social function. He was a recluse,
issues of power were irrelevant to him, and he resisted representation when anthropologists and others thrust this upon him (Handelman 1993). In anthropological
terms my perception today of his transformed healing is as opaque as it was then. I
can say that he represented nothing—nothing, that is, other than the actualization of
potentiality, of an emerging strand of the phantasmagoric.
Ritual in more traditional social orders likely is a most prominent venue of phenomena privileged with cultural creation through the potentiation of the possible. In
this sense, much traditional ritual is a vortex of the virtual, in the way Kapferer (2004)
uses the virtual—as a vortex through which cosmoses are made, but no less explored
in their making.23 Yet traditional rituals as venues of creativity have hardly been explored as such, nor will they so long as there persist the obsessions with Durkheimian
functionalism, with Geertzian stories that people tell themselves about themselves,
with the Gluckmanian conception of ritual as social relations (Gluckman 1962), and
with ritual reduced to arenas of politics and power (Bell 1992). All of these perspectives ironically deny the virtual capacities of ritual, closing the phenomenality of rite
to the creative potentialities of the imaginary, of potentiality itself.
Ritual in its own right plainly says to take the very phenomenality of ritual seriously if you are interested in the phenomenon of ritual. Then study ritual through
ritual, and see where this leads, especially as to whether these directions are worthwhile. Surprisingly (is it?), no existing avenues are shut by this approach—though
they become more contingent and, thus, more open. And, after all, Calvin, the ritual
expert, can always retort: “If you can’t control your peanut butter, you can’t expect to
control your life.”
Notes
First published in 2004 as “Introduction: Why Ritual in Its Own Right? How So?,” Social Analysis
48: 1–32. Reprinted with permission.
1. Frits Staal (1996: 131–32) argues that ritual exists “for its own sake,” constituting “its own aim
or goal.” Therefore, ritual does not have meaning within itself, for its own sake, since meaning
indexes representation. My perspectives coincide to an extent, though I reject his speaking for
“ritual” as a generic category, and so, too, his use of any specific ritual, in particular the Vedic
agnicayana, as paradigmatic of all ritual. See Malamoud (2002: 25) on systemic aspects of the
agnicayana.
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why ritual in its own right? how so?
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2. The phrasing “ritual in its own right” was used by de Boeck and Devisch (1994) to develop a
critique of studies of divinatory ritual in Central Africa, particularly those of Victor Turner,
in which the dynamics of ritual transformation are reduced, in their words, to a script or text
located in social order and not in the ritual moment.
3. The overall perspective resonates to a degree with the call by Castoriadis (1997: 339) to comprehend social and psychological forms and patterns from within themselves, from the perspective
of their “self-constitution.”
4. By shifting from the usual discussion of levels of macro/micro-organization to domains of organization, I am assuming that the existence of micro-domains, however they are organized, is not
predicated on the existence of macro-systems. By beginning analysis with the micro-domain
of ritual, I enable the relationship between ritual and its (more macro) surround to be guided
by the ways in which the ritual is organized, without assuming that this is subordinated to or
directly derived from the macro.
5. The reasoning likely depends on Spencer Brown’s (1969) logical injunction that once a distinction is made, both sides of the distinction must be included in what follows.
6. Just how embedded lineality is in Western taken-for-granted perceiving and thinking is brilliantly discussed by Lee (1959).
7. On torsion, see Bunn (1981: 16–17) who argues that in torsion, or torque, as I use it, there is
discontinuity rather than absolute fit in the joining of difference—here, the torqueing of ritual
into social order.
8. On propensity in form, see Jullien (1995: 75–89).
9. Here I sidestep my own position (which I continue to hold) that the idea of ritual is utterly otiose (see Handelman 1998, 2006). On the development in Western thought of the phenomenal
category of “ritual,” see Boudewijnse (1995) and Asad (1993).
10. On the significance of “depth” for recursivity, see Rosen (2004).
11. Erving Goffman (1981: 63) wrote of his belief that “the way to study something is to start by
taking a shot at treating the matter as a system in its own right . . . it is [this] bias which led me
to try to treat face-to-face interaction as a domain in its own right . . . and to try to rescue the
term ‘interaction’ from the place where the great social psychologists and their avowed followers
seemed prepared to leave it.”
12. The position for creativity in ritual action during ritual performance is argued by Csordas
(1997: 250–65).
13. Deleuze’s (1991: 58–59, 118) reading of Bergson moves in this direction. The curve may be
said to create past and future simultaneously, folding them into one another, creating short cuts
between them.
14. Thus, the greater the self-organizing and self-sustaining capacities of a ritual, the greater the degree of discontinuity in its torqueing back into social order. However, if ritual self-organization
creates itself as the replacement of social order, so that the ritual is the simulacrum of the basic
premises of social order, then there is no discontinuity between the two. The outcome of the
ritual returns to its surround as that surround. Here there is no longer any distinction between
the ideal and the real, between map and territory.
15. Unlike the lineal movement of Maria Antonia, the trajectory of the dancers likely moved
through a recursive multistability of perspective, of dancers holding onto dancers moving past
dancers holding onto dancers who were moving past them. Multistability refers to a fluidity of
perception, a multiplicity of perspectives, opening pathways of possibility that nonetheless keep
proportional relationships and ratios, thereby exploring variations of propensity within form
and sense (see Friedson 1996: 139–44; Ihde 1983).
16. Rousseau’s remembering may be called imagistic and episodic (Whitehouse 2000: 9–11, 92–
93). The event likely was more a singular than a repetitive episode, though one with powerful,
particularistic reverberations for the participants.
17. In the not distant past, Furez was held on three consecutive days, each day given over to one of
the three segments.
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90 | moebius anthropology
18. There is the question, beyond the scope of this work, of whether the folding of a rite deeper and
deeper into itself might not generate fractal-like qualities within the phenomenon. Today, this
would be my understanding of my reanalysis (Handelman 1979) of Bateson’s analysis of naven
behavior among the Sepik River Iatmul—the fractal-like relationship between a single utterance
that is fully naven behavior, on the one hand, and a complex performance that is fully naven behavior, on the other. Its fractal-like qualities would self-enclose the phenomenon within its own
variations, expansions, contractions. See my comments on naven behavior in Chapter Seven of
this volume.
19. This part of the re-embedded analysis may be understood as a modification of Zempleni’s
(1990: 208) argument that “what disintegrates the group periodically on the inside is converted
in a force which delimits it continuously from the outside.”
20. Might not these “fillings” be thought of, in relation to one another, as having fractal-like
qualities?
21. On modularity in ritual organization, see Handelman 2004.
22. The sinologist, Kristofer Schipper, himself a Taoist priest, once told me that the Taoist priest
could do, step by step, an entire ritual within his mind, and that the efficacy of the self-same
rite would be the equivalent of its performance in the temple before an audience. The ritual
was performed before an audience when it was paid for (personal communication, Netherlands
Institute for Advanced Study, spring 1988). In the first instance the ritual was cosmological, yet
was it social?
23. Here I emphasize traditional ritual as a venue of creativity, since I do not think that rituals
associated with modern state orders have much of this capacity. See Handelman 2004.
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Chapter 4
Bureaucratic
Logic
Author’s Note
I began to think more formally about the logic of much bureaucratic endeavor some
years after fieldwork in Newfoundland on welfare bureaucracy. I was dissatisfied with
Weber’s paradigm of bureaucracy as institution which was and continues to be dominant in the social sciences. In my view, missing from this paradigm is what I would
call today the logic of the forming of form that bureaucracy creates. In 1981 I coedited (with Jeff Collmann) a special issue of Social Analysis entitled “Administrative
Frameworks and Clients.” In thinking about the special issue, Michel Foucault’s The
Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, was a blessing. Foucault understood profoundly how the creation of taxonomies and their organization was critical
to the emergence of modernity in Europe and elsewhere.
I understood that the metier of bureaucracy could be understood in these terms;
and I tried out an initial formulation of the idea in the Introduction (Handelman
1981). I suggested that bureaucracy produces and systemically organizes social categories that shape their contents, human and otherwise. Later on, in Models and
Mirrors (1990: 77–78), I suggested that,
The paradigmatic form of organization of the modern state is that of bureaucracy. The most elementary feature of bureaucracy is that it is a device
for the ongoing generation of taxonomies—of ways of classifying aspects
of the world, and of relating to these categories. The ideal practice of bureaucracy is that of orthopraxy . . . the metier of bureaucratic organization
is the making of controlled change through the creation and manipulation
of taxonomy . . . bureaucracy does all of this in the most mundane and
routine of ways.
Chapter Four refines and expands these ideas. The chapter comes from my book,
Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events (2004). The upshot of my perspective is that the invention and application of systemically organized
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94 | moebius anthropology
taxonomies is the most powerful device for making routine change (destructive and
creative) ever invented by Human Being. Indeed, this may be approaching an apex as
the digital age gains momentum and systemic depth and strength.
R
The forming of form through bureaucratic logic is discussed in depth in this chapter. The chapter proposes one trace through which this logic may have developed in
Europe during the past few hundred years and follows one route through which the
logic reached pre-state Palestine via socialists from Russia, where it was put to work
in the building of the Zionist state-in-the-making.
Before continuing, let me remind about the kind of classification that bureaucratic logic generates. This classification is linear, with two intersecting axes, vertical
and horizontal. The vertical axis is composed of levels of classification in a hierarchy
of levels in which each higher level subsumes the lower, and is itself subsumed by
the level above. The horizontal axis—a given level of classification—is composed
of n number of categories, each of which contrasts with and excludes all others on
the same level. All the categories on a given level of abstraction are the equivalents
of one another. This logic does not produce dichotomous distinctions. A scheme of
classification can have n number of levels of abstraction, and n number of categories
on any given level. The classification does insist, however, that a given item be placed
in one and only one of the existing categories on a given level of classification, and
therefore that it be excluded from all the rest on that level. This is a highly prevalent
mode of ordering, of sorting contents into categories, and of relating these categories
and their levels to one another. This is a way of organizing a classification of individuals, groups, or things, grasped for purposes of classification as nuclear entities. The
taxonomies produced may interface, interlock, and compete with one another, yet
they discourage overlap and permeability among themselves. Bureaucratic logic is not
a democratic dynamic, nor an egalitarian one.1
The development of bureaucratic logic comes fully into being when two conditions are satisfied: one condition is metaphysical, referring to the emergence of the
conscious, systematic, classification of information that is made autonomous from
the natural, God-given order of things. Through time the doing of classification gains
conscious control over the means of classifying. Thus, second, a pragmatic science of
classification comes fully into existence; and, this science of classification comes to be
organized as a system in the self-correcting sense.
The Monothetic Forming of Form
Bowker and Star (1999: 10) define classification as, “a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world.” They add that a classification system is “a
set of boxes (metaphorical or literal) into which things can be put to then do some
kind of work—bureaucratic or knowledge production.” This kind of lineal classifiThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
https://doi.org/10.3167/9781789208542. Not for resale.
bureaucratic logic
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cation scheme is called monothetic and has been traced to Aristotle’s Organon and
to his Metaphysics (see Ellen 1979). Sokal (1974: 1116), writing of classification in
science, emphasizes “the ordering or arrangement of objects into groups or sets on
the basis of their relationships.” If, in science, classification is intended to bring forth
relationships that do exist in the natural world, but that may not be easy to grasp and
delineate, in social life we are referring to invented schemas of categorization (though
their invention may be ancient, their arbitrariness hidden in mythistory). Reified,
these schemes are put to work to classify and act on phenomena. In monothetic or
Aristotelian classification, precision always is preferred to no precision (Bowker and
Star 1999: 103), regardless of the validity of the precise distinctions among categories
at a given level of abstraction, or between levels of abstraction. This suggests that
often it is more important to classify with preciseness for the sake of creating a world
of precision, than it is to worry about how accurately this classification reflects the
world it is made to act upon.
Invented schemes of lineal classification are intended to create facts; and C. Wright
Mills (1959) commented long ago that to the bureaucrat the world is a (self-obvious)
world of facts, to be treated according to firm rules. Undoubtedly there are frequent
clashes of classifications invented at different times by different agencies for different
purposes. Yet ideally these problems are intended to be resolved through monothetic
distinctions. Bureaucratic logic is a procrustean practice—it cuts, shapes, and changes
phenomena more with regard to its own hermeneutic of closure than in terms of how
these phenomena otherwise exist in their worlds.2 Though conflicts over particular
classifications are continually generated, there is little argumentation over whether
this kind of classifying is indeed the way to organize many aspects of public life, including the interface between public and private. Instead this kind of classifying is a
self-obvious practicality in a world of facts (e.g., Haines 1990).
Monothetic classification builds closure into its own scheme since it is designed
to enclose totally the world it describes, thereby exhausting the possibilities of that
world in terms of the scheme. The scheme of classification folds into itself its own
contingencies (cultural, social, legal) that are unfolded under various conditions.
Both the folding and unfolding are symmetrical. Bureaucratic logic values symmetry
in classification, in both its vertical and horizontal dimensions. Symmetry signifies
boundedness, formality, order (Weyl 1952: 16). Exhausting a world of its contents
through monothetic classification is the exercising of symmetrical order. Symmetry
invokes the locating of every thing in its proper place, thereby enabling a monothetic
taxonomy to be a simultaneity of all its categories.
Yet the practice of classification is necessarily a sequence of action, and therefore temporal. A form or scheme of classification is then also “the simultaneity of
sequentiality” (Luhmann 1999: 19). By totalizing itself in these ways, a scheme of
classification may be accorded relative autonomy from its social environment. This
is especially so for law courts deciding on how to classify in matters of falsehood and
truth, guilt and innocence; but it is also so for the multitudes of administrative deThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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96 | moebius anthropology
cisions about classification, for examinations in education, and for a host of athletic
contests and games, all of which are concerned with the classifying and re-classifying
of candidates and competitors (Handelman 1998: xxxvii–xli; Hoskin 1996; Hoskin
and Macve 1995).3
Monothetic classification is associated closely with counting in its simplest sense
of adding and subtracting so that one number is not another, with making these
kinds of counts in which an item goes into one category and not another nor in both.
Stone (1988: 128) points to the act of this counting as categorizing, as a decision
about what to include and exclude. Moreover, to categorize requires boundaries that
inform whether something belongs or not. Such numbers, she argues, are like metaphors—they are “about how to count as . . . [so that] to categorize in counting or to
analogize in metaphors is to select one feature of something, assert a likeness on the
basis of that feature, and ignore all other features. To count is to form a category . . .”
by emphasizing a feature of inclusion and excluding all else (ibid.: 129). Therefore
monothetic classification has analogical qualities that can be rendered as inclusion,
exclusion, the making of hierarchies. These qualities are symbolized with every act
of counting of this kind. Every monothetic taxonomy not only totalizes itself but
practices and symbolizes that very totalization in every act of its classifying. These
properties are deeply embedded in bureaucratic logic.
Something of the same is so for the performance of an event of presentation. The
performance comes into existence through the taxonomies that are integral to that
event. The taxonomies contribute to shaping the performance. The logic of form that
shaped the taxonomies shapes the performance.4
Tracing Bureaucratic Logic through Classification
Logics of the forming of form that are more linear and relatively autonomous from
natural cosmos are ancient (e.g., Handelman 1995; Luhmann 1999: 22), and I will
not try to account for their histories. However, in Europe there is one historical vector of the forming of linear classification that contributes to this discussion in two
ways. It gives a sense of a bureaucratic logic coming to the fore and shows the broad
spectrum of its influence. Through its European peregrination from the German
principalities to Russia, this vector later left its traces in the early history of Zionist
presence in pre-state Palestine, and the beginnings there of a highly centralized, bureaucratic proto-state, the precursor of the present State. This vector gathers strength
and momentum during the period, roughly of the sixteenth through the eighteenth
century, when the formation and practice of lineal taxonomic classification was understood to be under the conscious control and implementation of human agency,
and was used deliberately to shape, discipline, and change social order. I break these
developments into two overlapping segments: the first discusses changes in the cosmology of classification from which the monothetic emerged dominant; while the
second takes up how the monothetic contributed to a sense of proto-bureaucratic
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community in central Europe. Toward the close of this discussion I bring out the
resonances between bureaucratic logic and that which Deleuze and Guattari call the
state-form. In my reading, the state-form is a logic of the forming of form, one that
converges in modernity with bureaucratic logic, in a torsion of these logics that enseams together the dynamic of monothetic classification with those that Deleuze and
Guattari call capture, containment, striation, smoothing.
The first segment of the historical vector traces the consequences of classifying
knowledge of the world totally and quite monothetically. In The Order of Things
(1973) Foucault provides an insightful, historicized perspective on the crystallization
of monothetic classification in Europe.5 He tells us that the sciences of the seventeenth century were informed by ways of seeing the world that can be glossed as “rationalism.” Through these perceptions, “comparison became a function of order . . .
progressing naturally from the simple to the complex . . . . The activity of the
mind . . . will therefore no longer consist in drawing things together [through similarities] . . . but, on the contrary, in discriminating” (1973: 54). Rationalism used the
idea of taxonomy to make monothetic order: to distinguish, to divide, to locate, to
name, and to connect things living and dead according to their natural characteristics, in order to make these things clearly visible. The phenomenal world surrendered
and made explicit what was thought to be its essences. Foucault (1973: 131–32, my
emphasis) comments that:
What came surreptitiously into being between the age of the theatre [the
Renaissance] and that of the catalogue [the seventeenth century] was not
the desire for knowledge, but a new way of connecting things both to the
eye and to discourse . . . . The ever more complete preservation of what
was written, the establishment of archives, then of filing systems for them,
the reorganization of libraries, the drawing up of catalogues, indexes, and
inventories, all these things represent . . . an order of the same type as that
which was being established between living creatures.
Linnaeus began his new way of connecting things taxonomically by modifying
but hardly rejecting the Great Chain of Being, the cosmos of God the Creator (Tillyard n.d.), which he enhanced through the precision of monothetic classification. Yet
scientific taxonomies helped to shift classification further from the God-given toward
the humanly constructed (Weinstock 1985; Frangsmyr 1994; Gould 1987). As an
idea of science, the forming of monothetic taxonomy shaped perceptions of the physical world by opening time/space to the capture and containment of all things, living
and inert, through their naming, itemization, placement. All things were classified
exclusively and inclusively on vertical axes and horizontal planes in concordance with
explicit rules that enabled the classified to enter the discourse of the classifier.
To construct a taxonomic scheme there had to be explicit rules for the delineation of categories, and for the inclusion of items within them; for the aggregation of
categories at higher and lower planes, and for the resolution of anomalies when an
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98 | moebius anthropology
item fit more than one category on the same plane of abstraction. Therefore there
had to be rules also for the creation of new categories, through division and addition.
The decision-rules of scientific, monothetic taxonomies were understood as conscious
and secular constructions, without divine inspiration, yet mirroring its precision. This
conception of classification resembled that of a static, monothetic form, rule-governed
yet empty of content. More accurately, this dynamic of the forming of form moved
relatively slowly, though with definitiveness and the need to assimilate new items
uncovered in faraway places in this age of discovery. This slow dynamic was closer
to movement in the divinely created and regulated natural cosmos. Yet, to the extent that the decision-rules of a taxonomic scheme did their work of comparison,
contrast, attribution, and distribution, one could also speak of the “rationality” and
“efficiency” of the taxonomy.
This idea of taxonomy as a totality of information was hardly restricted to science.
Mapping and placing, naming and classifying, became pervasive to the practices of
the period. Yet because the taxonomy was a slow-moving dynamic, to render social
life visibly taxonomic required the application of considerable force. Force often took
the form of power through presentation. In one of Foucault’s striking examples, instructions to control an outbreak of plague in seventeenth-century France, the taxonomic map is the territory.
In response to the tendrils of infection, of disorder, death, chaos, the town is
sealed. Within, it is divided into sections and streets, each under the authority of an
official. Dwellers are locked within their homes, bread and wine reach their doorsteps
via small wooden canals that branch out from more central ones. The only people
to move between houses are the higher officials and the non-persons who carry the
corpses and the sick from place to place, from category to category. The boundaries of
this “frozen space” (Foucault 1979: 195) are controlled by officials, themselves fixed
in place. Surveillance within the town is pervasive. Every day each of the inhabitants
of a house appears before his allocated window, to answer the roll call of officials:
name, age, sex, death, illness, irregularity, all are inscribed and recorded. In this way
the totalization of information is emended. “The relation of each individual to his
disease and to his death passes through representatives of power, the registration they
make of it, the decisions they take on it” (ibid.: 197).
The application of such social taxonomies is proto-bureaucratic. The minute, visible, forceful application of classification is living presentational evidence of its validity: the town has become “[t]his enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point,
in which individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements
are supervised, in which events are recorded . . .” (ibid.: 197). The vision is that of the
perfectly governed polity in which: “power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere
present and visible . . . it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions; it constructs for a
time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society . . .” (Foucault 1979: 205;
Eliav-Feldon 1982: 45). The perfectly governed society is one in which every person
is classified and catalogued, and, therefore, in principle is regulated.
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The age of the theater and that of the catalogue collided and intersected in numerous public venues, as the following instance from Bologna indicates. There, for
one hundred and fifty years during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, taxonomizing science was linked intimately to events of presentation. During this period
a public anatomy course—the dissection of an entire human body with accompanying scholarly exegesis and learned debate—was held annually for ten to fifteen
days during the carnival period (Ferrari 1987). The dissection was an exercise in
monothetic precision and rigor in the naming and classifying of body parts, their
functioning and function—a disciplined exercise of taking apart an individual whole,
but under the total control of science. The public dissection was a spectacle infused
with the scientific (and proto-bureaucratic) de-forming of form.
Of especial fascination here is how this monothetic de-formation emerges from
the discourse of science and takes the form of spectacle, of a presentation of parts
held up for inspection, one by one. And, that the anatomy course was held during
carnival, and was attended also by anonymous masked revelers. Carnival de-formed
the monothetic by raucously playing with the body, exposing hidden social innards,
upending and jumbling social order, blurring boundaries among distinct categories
and torqueing them into one another. As this occurred, the dissection and presentation of body parts simultaneously began to make monothetic order in this world
of carnival, an order that formed scientific classification out of the de-formation of a
human whole that concealed most of its body parts within itself. Here science took
the aesthetic form of a proto-bureaucratic spectacle that laid out for didactic inspection that which was usually hidden within the body.
During the eighteenth century, Western perceptions turned the interior integration of the scientific taxonomy—the archive, the table, the catalogue—into one of
organic relationships. Foucault (1973: 218) puts this shift in the following way: “the
general area of knowledge is no longer that of identities and differences . . . of a general taxonomia . . . but an area made up of organic structures, that is, of internal relations between elements whose totality performs a function . . . the link between one
organic structure and another . . . can no longer be the identity [in and of itself ] of
one or several elements, but must be the identity of the relation between the elements
and of the function they perform . . . .” Rendered as components in organic relationships, classified items practiced functions for entire classifications. This more complex
division of labor within and among monothetic taxonomies began to shift into that
which we recognize as a functional system: a hierarchic assemblage of levels and categories, that are thought to belong more together than apart; each of which contribute
specialized functions to the existence of the whole assemblage. The entire assemblage
is dependent on the functions of each of its parts, as they are on one another.
Relationships of interdependence informed the taxonomy with a quicker dynamic
of purpose and direction, and so provided social life with more proficient fulcrums
of power: the ratio of force to social control changed, so that less force could achieve
more powerful effects. The premises of monothetic classification were not disposed
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100 | moebius anthropology
of; instead its forming was in-formed by a more “systemic”‘ organization. Systemic
taxonomizing enabled one to influence in monothetic, totalistic ways whatever was
reorganized. Should a part (and its specialized function) be altered, the repercussions
would be felt throughout the entire system. As a depiction of organization, the table
of contents was to be replaced by the flow chart, while the theorizing of Spencer and
Maine, Tönnies and Durkheim, waited at the threshold.
The forming logic that shaped scientific and other taxonomies valued the visual
above all other senses. The scientific gaze can be called “attestive,” following Ezrahi
(1990: 72–87), the gaze of knowledge that dispassionately uncovers, dissects, classifies, and displays the facts of phenomena. The attestive eye is no less integral to the
bureaucratic ethos. Science and bureaucracy produce, preserve, and use texts without
number. Classification commonly depends on the eye. Therefore, bureaucratic work
is also hermeneutical; its practices and explanations follow from its own premises.
Bureaucratic logic moves toward the self-exegetical and the contemplative. Nonetheless this hermeneutic continually implicates the gaze (Jay 1992).
The synthesis of the visual, the taxonomic, and the systemic was exemplified by
innovative topological designs like that of Jeremy Bentham’s late–eighteenth-century
Panopticon, intended as a site for punishment and work. The Panopticon was a design of taxonomy as spectacle, made systemic. The name reflects Greek roots, meaning “all-seeing.” The panopticon: a circular, tiered building composed of individual
cells whose inmates cannot see one another, but all of whom are visible to supervisors
in a central tower who, in turn, are hidden from the inmates. The supervisors themselves are visible to the director, who is hidden from everyone. Exterminated from the
panoptic sort is sociality, the interconnectedness and interchange of human beings,
their seeing and feeling one another as subjects. Present are the “clients” of the organization, each individual reduced to a body controlled by abstraction, by the geometric:
separated, numbered, supervised, put to productive tasks, each within the isolation of
his cell—and on continuous display. Who exercises power and why is of no immediate relevance: whoever occupies the tower, the center, the office, the apex of hierarchy,
operates the classifying gaze of perfect taxonomy and its systemic control. Indeed, the
Panopticon has been called a “materialized classification” (Jacques-Alain Miller, cited
in Bozovic 1995: 24). The Panopticon is the dynamic of the bureaucratic forming
of form gazing at the forming of its product, the client, who is enacting the ways in
which he has come to be taxonomized. Here this forming logic gives shape and life to
a living taxonomy that is in the ongoing performance of presentation.6
In the Panopticon, Bentham intended to create a perfectly symmetric cosmology
of scopic supervision, its hierarchy analogous to that of God, angels, and humans; yet
a secular microcosmos, one consciously invented, synthesizing surveillance, control,
and the changing of individuals. In the entry of the prisoner into the Panopticon,
Bentham joined bureaucratic logic to an event of presentation, to a show decidedly
didactic in content, one to be staged by the “manager of a theatre” (Bentham 1995:
101). In this entry (Bentham called it a “masquerade.”) the prisoner performed and
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bureaucratic logic
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attested to his own guilt and sentencing in order to persuade others not to transgress
(Bozovic 1995: 5). The prisoner performed himself as a confession through which his
hidden feelings were exteriorized, so that both his interior and exterior fit perfectly
within the taxonomizing form he was in the process of becoming. This was similar
to the anatomy dissection, except that in the Panopticon the corpse came alive. In
performing himself, the prisoner embodied his guilt.7 As the prisoner performed his
entry, he formed himself into a spectacle pervaded by bureaucratic logic; then to be
moved deeper into the prison, into his isolated cubicle, to live entirely by this logic
of the forming of form, as an ongoing spectacle controlled by bureaucratic logic.8
The Panopticon entry contrasts decisively with the behavior of the prisoner in
earlier times before his public execution. In Royal France the prisoner performed
his own guilt in a great public spectacle of self-fragmentation that reflected and celebrated the holistic power of the King, embodied in the identity of his person and his
kingdom (Foucault 1979; Ezrahi 1990: 72–74); while, within the panoptic forming
of form, the prisoner performed in seclusion, before a committee of his sorters (including a theater manager), those who executed his shaping. Rather than his own
dismemberment through execution, the panoptic prisoner was individuated, torn
from his social integument of relationship and exchange, and put to work in a world
itself detached, anonymous, autonomous. The panoptic vision brings together the
taxonomic and a more modern sense of the systemic, so that the exercise of power
could become “lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a
society to come” (Foucault 1979: 209). Such a design would require little fiscal expenditure; would be labor intensive; would be politically discreet; would be relatively
invisible; would arouse little resistance; and would raise the effects of social power to
maximum intensity and specificity.9
In the twentieth century, Weber’s conception of rational-legal authority became
the cornerstone of much modern thinking on bureaucracy. My concern here is not
with the concept’s current status, but with how this concept further developed the
dynamics of the bureaucratic forming of form. Weber’s understanding of bureaucracy
implicitly depended on the premise of classification. The rational-legal bureaucratic
type (Weber 1964: 329–40) has the following characteristics. It requires a classification of “offices.” Offices are defined by “rules” (“a consistent system of abstract rules,
intentionally established”). All offices are regulated by a “continuous organization” of
rules that inform the overall scheme of classification. Thus the organization of offices
can be understood as a taxonomy of categories of office, regulated by general principles of classification. The contents of a category of office are defined by the boundary
rules of the taxonomy in relation to the particular category in question. (Such contents concern spheres of authority, competence, technical knowledge, procedures for
making decisions, and so forth). Offices as categories are situated within a hierarchy
of levels of superordination and subordination. The entire schema is understood as
a secular construction, one whose practice is intended to exhaust the phenomenal
domain to which it is applied. “Monothetic rationality” is embedded in this idea of
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102 | moebius anthropology
bureaucracy; in its abstract, intentional principles of hierarchical organization and integration, and in its clean-cut definitions of categories (i.e., offices) that are exclusive
and inclusive. Weber’s conception of modern bureaucracy, which he termed “a power
instrument of the first order—for the one who controls the bureaucratic apparatus”
(Gerth and Mills 1958: 228), depends on premises both of taxonomy and of the
systemic.10
The Weberian paradigm of bureaucracy bears a strong semblance to the organization of taxonomies, social and scientific, of the seventeenth century, yet now
informed by systemic premises. The raison d’être of the bureaucratic form is systemic
taxonomic practice. In the modern age, the shaping of form is purposive, directed,
directional. The organization is shaped to intentionally accomplish some goal; and
to accomplish this the relationship between means and ends is made explicit and
rationalist. The functions of offices are specialized and specific in their complex interdependence. The entire system is infused with a social power whose focused intensity
is evident on any of its levels, in any of its parts.
As a generalized system of processing information, this schema is in principle
devoid of content, just as it is devoid of ethics. The bureaucratic schema can be filled
with any content, to be processed in accordance with instructions. This is why it
frightened Weber, though he was a German nationalist. This is why Bauman (1989:
106) argues that bureaucracy “is intrinsically capable of genocidal action,” since its
operators can target, select out, and seal off a social category from a multitude of
others. Wyschogrod (1985: 39) contends that this may be done through a “sorting
myth,” a cosmogonic method of dividing off, excluding, and even destroying certain
social categories, so as to remake others as organic, as essence, as foundational, as a
purified people, as a united family. The monothetic bureaucratic logic that organizes
this exclusion and seclusion of the selected category may become the only frame of
reference for its victims, the members of the category (Bauman 1989: 123), and
therefore their hope and death of hope.11
Underscored here over and again are the qualities of modern social organization
and of the modern state that use bureaucratic logic to invent and modify taxonomies
in the most commonsense and routine of ways. These classifications, often systemic,
proliferate and flourish in the present as never before, dividing any and all social
units—group, community, family, relationship—and fragmenting, classifying, and
reshaping the humanity of human beings . . . but also destroying this. The inner vision of bureaucratic logic is that of a hermeneutical gaze of “viewpoints unaffected by
standpoints” (Illich 1995: 52). The bureaucratic forming of form is capable of consciously and deliberately creating virtually any reality and of processing its contents.12
The development of the Science of Police had profound consequences for moral
and social order in the emerging societies of Central and Eastern Europe, and eventually on the proto-bureaucratic state-in-the-making of the socialist Zionists in Palestine. The Science of Police depended on bureaucratic logic but moved this shaping
more explicitly and firmly toward the political, toward the dynamics of organizing
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and administering community. I turn to discussing bureaucratic logic in the Science
of Police.13
Bureaucratic Logic in the Science of Police
In Central Europe the religious conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) were
ended by the peace of Westphalia (1648). This began the end of the dominance of
the Holy Roman Empire. In Foucault’s (2007: 348) terms, that which then came
into being was “a new rationality by . . . carving out the domain of the state in the
great cosmo-theological world of medieval and Renaissance thought.” The empire
was characterized by a multitude of smaller and larger states and principalities whose
existence was legitimated by the peace of Westphalia that emerged from “the strong
conviction at the time in the virtues of a centralized and unified political authority as
a guarantor of virtuous government” (Harding and Harding 2006: 411). Westphalia
formally recognized the territorial integrity of the multitude of German-speaking
principalities (which for a century many had been exercising in practice). Foucault
(2007: 317) comments on these principalities, “We can think of these German states,
which were constituted, reorganized, and sometimes even fabricated at the time of
the treaty of Westphalia . . . as veritable small, micro-state laboratories that could
serve both as models and sites of experiment.”
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries these principalities practiced
ways of ordering the state through a forming of form that has been called “Police,”
“the well-ordered police state,” or “the science of police” (Raeff 1983; see also Oestreich 1982: 155–65). The science of police emerged fully from the domain of the
political in the German micro-states. Coming out of the feudal structure of the Holy
Roman Empire, these states had no tradition of specialized administrative personnel, though administrative specialization began to be developed and taught in the
German universities. Foucault (2007: 318) calls this specialization “something with
practically no equivalent in Europe . . . , an absolutely German specialty that spreads
throughout Europe and exerts a crucial influence.” With the shattering of the occidental Christian cosmos and empire and the rejection of ecclesiastical institutions, it
was the secular authorities, the secular political domain, that stepped in with ordinances of the science of police (Raeff 1983: 56).
The science of police was neither the police nor the police state in today’s sense of
these terms. The practices of the science of police deliberately planned and administered the shape and substance of Gemeinschaft (community), such that people would
behave as they should for the common good (res publica), the good that encompassed
and included them all and that in this case specifically included the “set of means that
serve the splendor of the entire state and the happiness of all its citizens” (Foucault
2007: 313–14), that is, the desirability of their living fruitful, productive, satisfying
lives. This was to be accomplished by “establishing a closer connection between the
moral realm and the life-style of the population . . . [the] acceptance of the duties of
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104 | moebius anthropology
earthly existence for its own sake. It was imperative that the same norms and values
inform every activity of the individual and group” (Raeff 1983: 88, my emphasis). In
this the beliefs and teachings of the churches had a vital role; yet the churches were
under the protection of the state, and in the Protestant states the ordinances of police
regulated the proper performance of all aspects of church life, and amongst these, first
and foremost, ritual (ibid.: 59).
To practice, and so to create the good of all—the state and its citizens—required
the deliberate, rational, standardization and exactness in specifying similarity and
difference in order to introduce uniform classifications; thereby to compare and to
control persons in the most specific of ways (Kharkhordin 2001: 227). So, statistical
information was collected, bearing on the capacities and resources of populations and
their territories (rates of birth and death appeared; covert denunciation of neighbors
was commended). New taxonomies based on age, sex, occupation, and health were
invented, intended to increase wealth and population, but also to enable intervention
in and to alleviate a wide variety of social problems. People would be enabled to live
happier lives, as individuals and as groups, within the nexus of concerned regulation.
Through correct practices, people were naturalized, one could say, into perceiving
these ways of living as best for the well-being of one and all. These practices of togetherness effected the group-centered character of social order, the sense that good ways
of living were integral to social relationships. Though the beginnings of the science
of police had powerful qualities of imposition and coercion, with time these ways
of living, and living together, came to be felt as naturally right for the interiority of
collectivity, perhaps even as sprouting from values of Gemeinschaft and likely undergirded by values of holism.
Through what I call bureaucratic logic, the science of police was practiced by
promulgating and applying standardized administrative ordinances and rules for behavior within very broad domains of intervention, yet in highly specific detail. So,
in various places the science of police set rules for the use of the personal pronoun
between parents and children, for the dimensions of saddles, for the enumeration
of what should be drunk and consumed during wedding feasts, for the number of
people permitted to attend a christening, and so forth. A rational science of endless,
detailed listings of classification in the interests of the “good order of public matters”
(Pasquino 1991: 111) in the interests of the forming and shaping of collectivity as a
community of hardworking, industrious people for the good of the state (Raeff 1983:
87–88). Police regulations tried to organize everything that went unregulated, that
lacked clear form in a society of the three estates—this was “a great effort of formation of the social body,” one that demanded degrees of order that reached beyond law
and encroached on domains new to becoming occupied by public ordering (Pasquino
1991: 111).14 In terms of its institutions, the science of police in the German principalities was more proto-bureaucratic than bureaucratic, yet it established a “gridwork
of order” (Gordon 1991: 20) that paid close, regulating attention to the itemization,
movement, and flow of persons and goods.
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Above all, the patterning of this gridwork of order and its taxonomies was symmetrical in its control of variance, variation, idiosyncrasy. Simmel ([1896] 1968:
72–73) argues that the “tendency to organize all of society symmetrically . . . according to general principles is shared by all despotic forms of social organization . . . .
Symmetrical organizations facilitate the ruling of many from a single point. Norms
can be imposed from above with less resistance and greater effectiveness in a symmetrical organization than in a system whose inner structure is irregular and fluctuating.”
This was so for the science of police, and more generally is so for all social forms
shaped through bureaucratic logic. Bureaucratic logic generates the symmetries of
monothetic taxonomizing. The science of police totalized the control of sameness
and difference through taking responsibility for society and sociality (Foucault 2007:
326). Central to the ethos of living that was to be more than just living was the linking of the state’s strength to the felicity of the individual, such that men’s happiness
was turned into the utility of the state, indeed into the very strength of the state
(Foucault 2007: 327).
The same kind of link held for communities. Raeff points out that through compartmentalization (like the number of people permitted to attend a christening) the
family was made more private, separated more from extended kin and social networks. The person was individualized (and expected to become a more productive
and efficient worker) and individuated (and, so, accentuated as a unit of counting
and governance). Yet together with this the community became solidary through
its self-managing and self-policing, all for the common good; and persons felt the
significance of the organizing community in their lives, as individuals and as group
members. Thus the public sphere penetrated deeply within the private, so that the
emergence of the private sphere (the family, the individual) incorporated powerful
visions of the public good as a collective endeavor, one that contributed to making
the private domain reliant on that of the public and its governance. Governance had
opened points of entry into the private sphere, and the private sphere was imbued with
values of the public.15 Individuation in my usage refers to the categorical separation of
person from person, making each into an individuate through administrative forces
external to the person. Bureaucratic logic individuates when it generates taxonomies
within which the person is made a member of an aggregate in a particular social category and is isolated in this way for administrative purposes. Individualization refers to
the person perceived as a unique being in terms of psychologistic qualities. As Lemke
(2001: 191) puts it, “Foucault endeavors to show how the modern sovereign state
and the modern autonomous individual co-determine each other’s emergence.” The
modern state shaped individual agency to fit the spread of pastoral power through
bureaucratic institutions (Foucault 1982: 783–85). These institutions individuated
the person and tended to the person so individuated. The individual exercised agency
within the range of possibilities extended by individuating bureaucracies.
The powerful sense of solidary, organic groupness that came into existence in the
German principalities emerged together with the power of this groupness to shape
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106 | moebius anthropology
and discipline the person as an individual, yet as the exercise of power integral to the
happiness of both community and individual. In Foucault’s terms, the pastoral care
of the state was joined to the care of selfhood. Thus in Foucault’s view, individual
agency is a modern, bureaucratic conception of that which I am calling both the individualization and the individuation of the person, in terms of which the individual
participates in his or her own self-formation (Foucault 1980; Rose 1998).16 Articulated together were the welfare of the group and the well-being of the individual
who was managed in the first instance from outside himself, leading him to value
his membership in and feelings for groupness and community, and his creative independence within groupness. Most intriguing, the enabling of both division (through
classification) and unification eventually came to grow from the deeply organic sense
of groupness, bottom-up, as it were—out of the well-being and happiness of community and not simply from the coercion of authority. The German sociologist, Ferdinand Tönnies, called this adhesion to the holism of Gemeinschaft, the “spontaneous
will” (Naturwille), in our terms the utter naturalization of the individual into the
social whole. Therefore this enablement did not alienate levels of social order from one
another, for culturally they came to grow out of one another—their relationship was
continuous with one another, with the individual and individualism firmly embedded
within and integral to community. By the beginning of the nineteenth century the
German philosopher, Johan Gottleib Fichte, could say that the goal of social order was
“the complete unity and unanimity of all its members” (quoted in Hartman 1997:
123). In the Prussian state, which unified Germany politically in the nineteenth century, the top-down formation of absolutist statehood met the more bottom-up values
of holistic community, the long-term effects of the Science of Police.17
The tsars of Russia, beginning with Peter I, brought ideas of the well-ordered
police state into the very different grounds of eighteenth-century Russia. Unlike the
more interior forming of community in the German principalities, Peter imposed
the science of police top-down on Russian social and moral order. His project was
to wrench into existence an abstract conception of the state, one that conceived of
its policy in terms of rational efficiency in ordering and changing society through
didactics, regulation, and prescription (Raeff 1983: 205). Instead of an incompact
empire governed loosely from its center but with high degrees of local autonomy, he
introduced centralized and centralizing administration, and built a new capital, Saint
Petersburg, as the exemplar of rectilinear hierarchy and functional planning (Scott
1998: 194). The bureaucratic forming of form took shape through top-down coercion and compulsion, discipline, and regimentation (Raeff 1983: 237; Stites 1989:
19–24). Peter introduced bureaucratic institutions that formally separated government from other domains of life, that required written records, and that paid attention to the minutiae of office (inkwells, furniture, office hours) (Raeff 1983: 203).
The terminology of the state, as an apparatus of government independent of ruler and
ruled, appeared in Russian in the eighteenth century. The state—the bureaucracy and
legal apparatus—was brought into existence in between ruler and ruled in the name
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bureaucratic logic
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of the common good but imposed from above as coercive form (Kharkhordin 2001).
Catherine the Great made the administrative system introduced by Peter more efficient, in trying to shape a society that would reflect the practices of the well-ordered
police state, and that would help rather than hinder the modernizing efforts of the
state. Her reforms rationalized administration on lower levels of state organization,
and effected ways of life on local levels. Nonetheless, Russian statutes continued to
stress the repressive and punitive dimensions of police law (Raeff 1983: 224–54).
The science of police worked well in the closely-knit German principalities because the logic of its forming of form had resonated deeply and harmonically among
groups, individuals, and moral order. By contrast, the Russian version of police continued to be imposed from above to hold together the vastness, heterogeneity, and
locality of Russia as empire and as frontier state. One could argue that the top-down
imposition of order in Russia continued to be a major force for societal control until
the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989. Unlike the German case, the Russian case has
continuously generated profound discontinuities and a lack of organic integration
between different levels of social order.
The socialist Zionist leaders who rose to prominence in Palestine came there from
Russia after 1905 and then again after the October Revolution. They were well inculcated in top-down social and moral order, but they were also deeply concerned that
this turn into a powerful sense of organic community, one that would be felt to grow
from the bottom up. They brought with them the shaping force and power of Russian (and then Soviet) bureaucratic organization, but also the more distant resonance
of German organic groupness with its interior force of shaping moral and social order
categorically, yet nonetheless felt to grow from within itself.18
The science of police is close to what Foucault (1991: 103) calls governmentality.
The sensibilities of governmentality are important here because they relate directly to
forms that constitute the state, and to public events that reflect what is felt to be significant in this state of being. Governmentality should be read as govern-mentality, or
simply as government—the perceptions that the State should intervene systemically,
however loosely articulated the systems, in the lives, relationships, networks, and enterprises of its own citizens, for its own good and for their well-being. Therefore governmentality can be understood as forms of activity that shape, guide, and affect the
conduct of persons (Gordon 1991: 2). Paralleling my claim that bureaucratic logic is
a logic of practice, the practice of forming in certain ways and not in others, Foucault
(1991: 97) argues that governmentality is the practice of forming acts of governing—
the reality of governmentality is its doing. Thus the shift into the Jewish nation-in-arms
through national public events is a practice of governmentality through which distinctions between state and nation are erased, the heads of state become the heads of the
nation, and the symmetrics of inclusion and exclusion are practiced to a high degree.19
Governmentality in Foucault’s usage is much more than the formal apparatus of
state administration—it is closer to a composite reality put together by institutions,
procedures, myths, analyses, reflections, strategies, and tactics that enable the shapThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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108 | moebius anthropology
ing, effecting and affecting of populations (Foucault 1991: 102–3). The practices of
governmentality may be totalistic, top-down, and all-embracing, or, as Rose (1996b:
57, 61) argues for advanced liberal democracies, these practices may exist at the “molecular level” of social orders, in relation to “micro-moral domains.” Trouillot (2001:
130), echoing Foucault, points out that, “statelike processes and practices also obtain
increasingly in nongovernmental sites such as NGOs or trans-state institutions such
as the World Bank. These practices, in turn, produce effects as powerful as those of
national governments.”20 Their effects are state-like. Public events of presentation in
the modern state are no less the products of this governmental ensemble of the state
and the state-like.
Yet much of the complexity in coordinating the mentalities of a governing ensemble depends on the use of the flexibility of bureaucratic logic in inventing and
altering linear classification. Bureaucratic logic enables the tailoring of classification
to the sorting and organizing of micro- and macro-levels, and to a wide variety of
social units of heterogeneous composition. Bureaucratic logic gives to strategies of
governmentality a tremendous range of adaptation in the face of complex, rapidly
shifting social, political, and economic conditions.21
Bureaucratic Logic and the State-Form
Logics of the forming of form address the imagining and formation of phenomenal
worlds. The forming of phenomenal worlds is ongoing, never-ending. In the case of
bureaucratic logic, the métier of the forms of organization that this logic informs is
that of change, acting on and altering phenomenal worlds continuously, by adding,
subtracting, dividing, and re-dividing levels and categories of classification through
which these worlds are put together and taken apart. Yet bureaucratic logic is hardly
the sole logic of the forming of form we can identify. Most likely there is a vast field
of logics of the forming of form—not universals for the shaping of particular social
forms, but a fuzzy reservoir of human imaginaries, of potentials of logics of forming.
My reading of Deleuze and Guattari (1988) suggests that their concept of the
state-form is a logic of forming. The logic of the state-form complements bureaucratic logic, and this relationship is discussed here. Deleuze and Guattari ask us to
imagine how logics of form inevitably emerge from one another, changing themselves
as they do. This is especially significant here because the forming logic of the stateform opens toward the state. Bureaucratic logic and the state-form share dynamics
that enable them to interact synergistically, to provide together certain crucial attributes of the state in modernity.
The forming logic of the state-form is arboreal and spatial: the shaping is tree-like,
deeply rooted, in-place, a fundament of origins and ancestry reaching unbroken from
the distant past into the far future, centered stably around an axis mundi that opens in
all directions and planes, unmoving, vertical, tall, hierarchical, protective under the
cover of its shading; branching and reproducing clearly, exactly. This logic of forming
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bureaucratic logic
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expands by capture, by taking space, by reproducing its form in additional spaces, by
making over these spaces into places. The state-form extends itself lineally, a design
for quantitative growth of space and population (Patton 2000). The state-form gives
especial attention to shaping and controlling its own interiority, as distinct from exteriority. Deleuze and Guattari (1986: 15) write that: “the law of the State is . . . that of
interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over what
it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally.” Space is striated~smooth. The
state-form striates the space it contains (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 385). Striated
space “closes a surface, divides it up at determinate intervals, establishes breaks . . .”
(ibid.: 481). This is the lineal forming of measurable spaces, and of standardized measures to determine all similarities and differences within these spaces.
Deleuze and Guattari relate the state-form to (in my terms) the logic of forming
that they call the rhizome. Each of these logics is interior to the other, such that in
particular social, historical conditions, each generates the other, each emerging from
the other; just as, under other conditions, each meets the other through the interface
of exteriors that clash. The rhizome grows open-ended networks of indeterminate
nexuses that are shifting, incompact, without centers, without hierarchy, so that any
point of a rhizome can connect to any other without going through another. The
rhizome is a multiplicity of dimensions, not of bounded linear categories. The lines of
the rhizome are flat (not vertical) because these lines continually fill all of their dimensionality. Rhizomes that are broken, shattered, scattered, activate one or another line
of movement and growth. The rhizomic has no deep structure, no foundational axis,
nor the capacity to grow anything except itself, yet without knowing precisely what it
is. So the rhizomic cannot trace itself: it has no capacity for self-organization through
memory; no capacity to account, to locate, to specify, to count; and therefore no capacity to capture (even itself ) (ibid.: 7–20). The rhizome is smooth space, the space of
a patchwork of continuous variation without unity of direction (ibid.: 481). Yet where
the rhizome shows nodes of massification, the logic of the state-form is emerging.
The Israeli state, Israeli-Jewish nationalism, the project of shaping Jews as national
in their citizenship, have always been at war with the rhizomic logic of forming.
From the perspective of governmentality, any felt fragmentation (ideological, ethnic,
religious) among Israeli Jews is the subversive appearance of the rhizomic. In these
terms, Palestinian citizens of Israel, perceived as the enemy from the founding of the
state, should be excluded from the arboreal unity that characterizes the community
of Israeli Jews. Jews should relate organically toward one another within their community-state; whereas, Palestinians are perceived by so many Jews as threatening, as
a fifth-column.
Deleuze and Guattari take for granted that the state-form generates its own apparatus of self-regulation. Yet I am arguing that bureaucratic logic exists in its own
right, and that it shapes without necessary reference to whatever forms of organization emerge from shaping by the state-form. Like the state-form, bureaucratic logic
shapes and controls the social surfaces of its expanding space through the capture of
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110 | moebius anthropology
new territory for the deployment of power. A classification creates space that simultaneously is captured, bounded, contained. Yet whatever lies beyond the boundary of
this captured space becomes the basis for further extension. New classifications create
their own raison d’être for expansion and self-totalization.22
The classifications invented through bureaucratic logic also open space within
their containment by making new divisions within existing ones. Complementing
the arboreal logic of the state-form, bureaucratic logic enables bureaucratic form to
expand through a kind of cellular division of difference yet sameness—the adding of
more units of organization to itself (a new title, a new office, a new subcommittee).
Bureaucratic logic enables bureaucratic form to attend to finer and ever-increasing
details (Lefort 1986: 95). Thus, Lefort (1986: 108) comments that, “it is essential to
grasp the movement by which bureaucracy creates its order. The more that activities
are fragmented, departments are diversified, specialized, and compartmentalized . . .
the more instances of coordination and supervision proliferate, by virtue of this very
dispersion, and the more bureaucracy flourishes . . . . Bureaucracy loves bureaucrats,
just as much as bureaucrats love bureaucracy.”
Given the powerful affinity between bureaucratic logic and monothetic classification, the former is continually implicated in the kind of counting that, as noted, is
symbolic of inclusion, exclusion, hierarchy. Stone (1988: 128) points out that this
language of counting sounds highly political. Inclusion and exclusion are terms that
suggest community, boundaries, allies, enemies; selection implicates privilege and
discrimination (and social triage and genocide); while the characteristics that define a
class of categories or the category itself connote value judgement and hierarchy. Both
bureaucratic logic and the state-form symbolize acts of counting and the arbitrary
fragmentation or augmentation of numbers into yet other numbers. Every act of
counting practices and regenerates this logic.
The dynamic of capture, containment, and taxonomic division within classification has the formidable impetus and coercion of law in modern society. King (1993:
223) argues that,
in the legal system social events derive their meaning through the law’s
unique binary code of lawful/unlawful, legal/illegal. An event in the social
environment cannot be interpreted simultaneously as lawful and unlawful
or as falling both within and outside the scope of the law. These categories
are mutually exclusive . . . . Any act or utterance that codes social acts according to this binary code of lawful unlawful may be regarded as part of
the legal system, no matter where it was made and no matter who made it.
King is saying that in modern social orders the implementation of division and contrast in terms of absolute categories of inclusion and exclusion has something of the
feel, force, and aesthetic qualities of legal mandate (see also Gray 1978: 141). In
my terms, the phenomenal forms generated by bureaucratic logic have imbedded in
them the feeling of the force impact, and aesthetics of the symmetries of law. These
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bureaucratic logic
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distinctions need not be binary, in the sense of a choice between two and only two
possibilities. The crucial point is the maintenance of the logic of form, the symmetrical distinction between inclusion and exclusion. In monothetic terms, truth is
necessarily a singularity, not a multiplicity.
Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the relationship between the state-form and
the rhizome is not dialectical, given that each of these imaginaries exists within the
other. Their relationship to one another is that of the continual emergence of each
within the other, while this process exteriorizes them into near-absolute distinctiveness only under extraordinary conditions. Bureaucratic logic, however, drives toward
a perfect fit between the borders of categories, smoothing the interface between a
subject to be counted and a category of classification, so that the category wholly
contains the subject. This meeting is procrustean, territorializing the subject as a
space of subjection, yet also smoothing, shaping the subject to the category, while
smoothing each category to others of the taxonomy. As it striates form, bureaucratic
logic simultaneously smooths form.
Bureaucratic logic de-territorializes, in the terms of Deleuze and Guattari, since
its formings have the capacity to amputate any and all social relationships (whether
of family, kin, community, friendship), thereby severing and separating persons from
one another, from their locations in space (thus, imprisonment, transfer, ethnic
cleansing, exile), from their usual trajectories of living, and even from their pasts
(thus, social erasure and lobotomy) (Bogard 2000: 270). The social surface of the
individual can be separated from any organic conception of the “person,” amputating
the social from the personal, making the social surfaces of individuals placed within
the same category homogeneous with one another.
In Israel, this smoothing of social surfaces operates in the bringing together of
nationality, ethnicity, and minority. The classification of nationality contributes to
the taxonomy of Jewish ethnicity and Palestinian minority, a taxonomy organized so
that minority is made inferior to ethnicity. In terms of this taxonomy, superior Jewish
ethnicity should show the value of national feeling on its social surface, while this is
forbidden to the Palestinian minority.
Through bureaucratic logic, taxonomized space is the smooth depending from
the striated, the striated depending from the smooth. The space within taxonomy is
made smooth, standardized, homogeneous, every category symmetrically comparable
to and relating neatly to every other on the same level of abstraction, and between
levels. Simultaneously, the very creation of the entire scheme of social classification
depends on its internal borders between exclusive categories. Bureaucratic classification is striating; it is simultaneously smoothing. Bureaucratic classification is smoothing; it is simultaneously striating. The interface between categories in a classification
schema is smoothed, so that their “edges” fit together; while the fitting together of
categories is itself striating.
Bureaucratic logic re-territorializes, in that it generates taxonomies of containment, so that within a taxonomy each category is put into its proper place. BureauThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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112 | moebius anthropology
cratic logic joins smoothing to classifying, enabling and enhancing the fit among
surfaces. Yet in its capacity to generate form as de-territorialized, as striated and lineal, bureaucratic logic is itself highly mobile without the need for deep roots of the
arboreal state-form. Thus, bureaucratic logic can be practiced as its own metaphysics.
Unlike the state-form, bureaucratic logic easily shifts its coordinates to shape containment in any terrain. No less, this logic is infinitely expandable, unless ordered to stop.
Bureaucratic logic is a near-perfect “machine” of capture, forming interiority that
is always exterior to itself, preparing always to capture exteriorly and to interiorize
whatever it grasps and contains. Given its lack of essentialism in forming classification, bureaucratic logic opens time-space for new phenomena, like hybrids, that
combine or transgress categories. The hybrid is simply another phenomenon, one
that in accordance with this logic requires classification, as hybrid, or as appendage
to a taxonomy.23
Two examples from the early years of the Israeli state will give a sense of the arbitrary power of the directed use of bureaucratic logic, and of the flexibility of this
apparatus of capture and containment. (This reasoning is ongoing, has not changed
to this day, and is perhaps the most potent weapon in the ongoing confiscation of
Palestinian lands in the occupied territories). The Absentee Property Law placed
property abandoned by Palestinians during the 1948 War under the control of the
Custodian of Absentee Property. Yet some thirty thousand Palestinians had fled from
one place to another within Israel, and so had not left and were not refugees. Government bureaucracy applied the Absentee Property Law. To wit, any person who may
have traveled to Beirut, Bethlehem, or elsewhere, even for a one-day visit, but outside
borders that had not existed during the British Mandate, was classified as a “present
absentee.” Such a person, one who was absent in his very presence, a non-person
in terms of his property rights, indeed had his property confiscated (Peretz 1991).
Through this and other legislation, the State gained a goodly portion of agricultural
land that had belonged to Palestinians who became Israeli citizens.
Under emergency regulations promulgated by the British Mandate, the military
governor could declare any area closed for national security reasons. After the 1948
War the population of twelve Arab villages were not permitted to return to areas
that had been closed, though they had not left the country. Under an ordinance of
the Ministry of Agriculture, the land was classified as uncultivated. The owners were
notified that if they did not immediately cultivate these lands, the areas would be
confiscated. However, the villagers could not enter these lands because the area was
closed by military order. So the lands were expropriated and leased to Jewish farmers;
and the villagers were left homeless (Rouhana 1997: 61; see also, Drury and Winn
1992; Benvenisti 1990).24
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari are steadfast in their ahistoricism,
resolute in their commitment to imagining and exploring dynamics of space, the
skins of the imaginary. Yet, no less, the shaping of time—its smoothing and striating—is most relevant for the forms of the modern state, and for its public events of
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nationhood and nationalism. Many scholars have commented on the importance for
governmentality of controlling a people’s sense of time, of shaping or of adopting
shapes of time within which people know themselves and others as historical beings
(or as people without history, in Eric Wolf ’s phrasing) through national imaginings
of duration and periodization (Gross 1985; Verdery 1996: 39–57).
In my terms, the smoothing of time refers to metaphysics of the temporal, within
which time is made to flow continuously, such that any markers of time embedded in
the flow do not impede its movement, but are integral to its continuity.25 Smoothing
does not mean that time is necessarily lineal, in the sense of having a flat temporal trajectory. Jewish time imparts its significance through rhythmic pulsation, as I argue in
Part II of the Epilogue. The smoothing and planning of time, indeed the very capture
of time, enables the modern state to have a national history—either an unbroken past
through time or a past that strives through national activity in the present to mend
hiatus and to reshape gaps of discontinuity. The senses of national pastness, upon
which so-called “collective memory” often depends, themselves depend from some
shaping of national history or mythistory. A paramount device for the smoothing of
time in the modern state is the event of presentation, since such events show themselves as fact, without questions, without conundra. These qualities of presentation
show the joining and smoothing of present to past as unbroken duration (without
showing the joints of their joining).
Yet events of presentation (see, for example, Chapter Five), even as they smooth,
also striate time. Most simply the striation of time is its division, especially its classification into intervals in a taxonomy of time, so that any phenomenon within this
containment is locatable exactly in its time. Conversely, any group or individual is
divisible into its own history as a sequence of time-parts, synchronized temporally
yet detachable from one another, like the slices of a salami. State and person are composed of time-parts, whereby any of their durations—often reckoned in years—can
be sliced off the salami for purposes of classification. Clock time striates however it
is counted, as do schedules, timetables, and the like. So, too, their synchronizations
with one another are themselves classifications whose function is to enable surfaces of
categories to juxtapose smoothly with one another through time. Just as mythistorical time is smoothed, so, too, this time must be striated—divided, dated, made lineal
and sequential—since our understanding of history requires its mapping, its capture
and containment, made interior as national history (see Gell 1992). Generally, the
smoothing of national time, national history, also generates its striation, its markings
of prominent times; for these, like body markings and incisions of initiation, make a
difference in the perception of national and biographical selves.
The Bureaucratization of Politics in Jewish Palestine
The dominant ideological narratives in pre-state Jewish society in Palestine and later
in Israel have given primacy to one or another idealistic vision of a Jewish collectivity,
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114 | moebius anthropology
equating individualism with the breakdown of their dreams (Ezrahi 1997: 81–89).
All have diminished the individual as a person with agency. Zionist socialism, the
dominant organizing force in Jewish Palestine, held a utopian vision of Jewish autonomy and Jewish statehood, to be attained through social engineering. As noted, virtually all of the founders of socialist Zionism in Palestine came from Russia between
1905 and 1926, the last group experiencing the first years of Soviet rule. They perceived themselves as socialists and nationalists, and where they came from influenced
how they built Zionist presence in Palestine (Shapiro 1993: 66). Unlike western Europeans’ concerns with liberal democracy and civil rights, the founders of Zionist
socialism stressed the relationship between nation and nationalism, placing issues of
rights squarely within the purview of the collectivity (Shapiro 1993: 79; Yanai 1996).
The vision of the Russian state as an administrative utopia lasted well into the
nineteenth century. The few who held power arranged the lives of the others, to
organize them for production, combat, or detention, through hierarchy, discipline,
regimentation, rational planning, welfare planning, and a geometrical environment
(Stites 1989: 19). Yet even as ideas of utopia declined, “the dream of state power
refashioning the land and the people was too alluring to die, and it appealed even to
the most radical social dreamers who hated the tsarist state and whose ultimate vision
was a stateless society” (ibid.: 23). The October Revolution augmented obsessions
with top-down reform and control, with increasing efficiency and machine-like systemic visions of social and economic production, with Taylorism and Fordism (ibid.:
146–49)—in other words, with the forming of form through capture, containment,
striation. It is from this milieu of planned, administrative, systemic collectivism, with
its Russian echoes of Police and the totalistic encompassment of the individual by the
social order, that the founders of socialist Zionism arrived in Palestine.
So much attention has been given to the ideological dreams of these leaders, and
so much less to the elementary fact that first and foremost they were attending to
the building of bureaucratic infrastructure as the bedrock for their political and economic vision of a future state. Erecting bureaucracy was basic to their efforts, and this
shaping had immense impact on their political and economic organization during
the period of the Yishuv, the Zionist settler “community” of pre-state Palestine (YuvalDavis1987: 77), and then on forms of organization after statehood. These people
were imbued with Russian political culture—tsarist absolutism and government intervention in all spheres of living, dominated by a collectivist orientation (Shapiro
1976: 2). The Histadrut (General Federation of Labor) umbrella trade-union organization, was established in 1920, and by 1925, David Ben-Gurion, the leader of
the major political party of the Yishuv, Akhdut Ha’avodah (and later the first prime
minister of the State), claimed that, “The Histadrut has been built like a quasi-state
with self-rule for the working class . . .” (Shapiro 1993: 70; see also Yanai 1996:
139; Shalev 1992). This quasi-state included trade unions, labor exchanges, workers’
kitchens, schools, public works bureaus, settlement departments, and so forth.
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The nascent bureaucracy was taken over by the dominant political party, using
methods reflecting how the Communist Party in the Soviet Union had gained control of the state by establishing party cells in all important centers of power, leading
to control by a powerful, centralized party machine. In Palestine the socialist Zionist
leadership built a strong party machine with cells in all Histadrut organizations, and
by 1927 their party received an absolute majority in Histadrut elections. The founders of the party became the heads of the Histadrut, while the members of the inner
council of the party were mostly bureaucrats in the Histadrut. In the Soviet Union
the political leadership that created the bureaucracy became the product of “an apotheosis of bureaucratic institutions, an ultra-bureaucracy” (Pintner and Rowney
1980: 11). Bruno Rizzi (1985) called this “bureaucratic collectivism,” “the ascent of
a new, bureaucratic ruling class and the conversion of the means of production into a
new form of property, owned through the state in a nationalized . . . form” (Westoby
1985: 2). Something similar occurred in Palestine.
Ben-Gurion’s desire to shape his political forces as a disciplined, obedient “army
of labor” (a version of the nation-in-arms, modeled perhaps on Trotsky’s idea of labor
armies) was rejected by his party. Yet there was no disagreement that the issue was
how to build a total organization, materially and spiritually, one that included party
and Histadrut (Shapiro 1976: 60). One major Zionist figure called the Histadrut an
“administrative democracy” (ibid.: 67)—a bureaucracy manned by politicians who
used political practices to run organizations and bureaucratic practices to organize
politics. Huntington and Brzezinski (cited in Shapiro 1976) called these leaders in
Soviet Russia “bureaucratic-politicians,” in that only those who were prepared to
head the bureaucracy could hold onto political leadership. The Soviet bureaucrat
first had to demonstrate his mastery over the operation of systems of bureaucratic
classification, thereby passing “tests” of his expertise, before he moved into the role of
politician. These features of the bureaucrat-politician seem to have been the case also
in the Yishuv (and later in the State). Bureaucratic-political practices in Palestine, argues Shapiro, were closer to the bureaucratic politics of Soviet Russia than they were
to the electoral politics of democratic states.
The dominant party, becoming Mapai in 1930 (and then the Labor Party in
1969), set out to persuade the other Zionist parties of the Yishuv to reorganize themselves as copies of itself. Mapai supplied these parties with resources—financial, material, territorial—in exchange for coalition support; and also encouraged them to
develop their own bureaucratic infrastructures, which led to close ties between these
apparatuses across party lines (Shapiro 1993: 74). Major private enterprises accommodated their practices to Zionist socialist and nationalist rhetoric, arguing that industry, too, was integral to the armature of Jewish nation-building (Frenkel, Shenhav,
and Herzog 1997). The success of the Jewish national in Palestine depended to a high
degree on the development of bureaucratic infrastructures. Though limited and embryonic in their resources, these infrastructures did their utmost to organize, control,
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116 | moebius anthropology
plan, and totalize numerous spheres of living (including that of public events, largely
planned and organized by committee). Though the scale of these activities (like the
population) was relatively small, the solution to problems demanded greater centralization of activists, officials, and offices. As activities expanded and the structuring of
living became more complex, new taxonomies and standards of classification had to
be invented continually.26
There also were the distant resonances of Police, with its powerful stress on the
embrace of collectivity by the community, in that whatever was demanded by its
regulations should resonate deeply with the desires of its members. Ben-Eliezer
(1998b) contends that even as their elders in the Yishuv were intent on shaping a
societal infrastructure through bureaucratization, among the younger native-born
generation of socialist-Zionists the distinction between coercion and consent often
blurred, and the will of the collectivity (of its leaders) was intended to be identical
with the desire of individual members. He quotes a youth movement speaker: “We
have no state, we are a Yishuv and a movement that counts on volunteering, and we
have no regime . . . [but] the movement can declare a regime of volunteering, with
anyone who does not volunteer being removed from the group. Today this council should declare that we are a movement of collective volunteering” (Ben-Eliezer
1998b: 378). Ben-Eliezer maintains that these people were creating a system of
domination through the practice of certain kinds of organization over a broad range
of interpersonal relations.
On the other hand, the Jewish proto-state was thoroughly pervaded by bureaucratic logic, which organized numerous domains of living, connecting officials and
clients through rules, regulations, their bending and breaking. Every act that applied
a regulation, that categorized a person, population, or thing, and that argued over
proper classification, necessarily practiced and regenerated the bureaucratic logic of
the forming of form.
Nonetheless, in the Yishuv, persons had degrees of choice as to national affiliation,
as to whether to join a political party, as to what sources of aid to turn to, as to which
friends to associate with (especially across the Jewish/Arab interface). This proto-state
still was closer to a “civil society,” in the sense of a “free association, not under the
tutelage of state power” (Taylor 1990: 98). During much of that period it was easier
for individual Jews and Arabs to develop social relationships with one another.27 After
statehood, choices were narrowed, even pinched off. Bureaucratic logic was related
indelibly to the laws of the land and to regulating its infrastructure.28 This was a
country in which ideas of liberal democracy, espousing the rights of the individual
and of “minorities” against encroachment by the state, did not have and have not
had much success. More and more strongly present is the use of the Holocaust as the
foundational catastrophe that empowers nationalism and the nation-under-arms.29
The ways in which these presences are formed depend to a high degree on bureaucratic logic.
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bureaucratic logic
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Notes
First published in 2004 as “Bureaucratic Logic,” in Don Handelman, Nationalism and The Israeli
State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events, Oxford: Berg Press. Reprinted with permission from Berg
Press.
1. That bureaucratic logic is used endlessly in social orders that are to organize social life raises
questions about the influence of the logic on democratic setups.
2. Bowker and Star (1999: 98) write of how the virus is dealt with through biological classification: “there has been a deliberate effort to create something that looks and feels like other biological classifications, even though the virus itself transgresses basic categories (it jumps across
hosts of different kinds, steals from its host, mutates rapidly, and so forth) . . . . Even in this
most phenomenologically difficult of cases, the world must still be cut up into recognizable
temporal and spatial units.” The virus of course is unaffected by scientific classifications.
3. Fuzzier forms of classification are also integral to the routine grounds of everyday living. These
include polythetic classification (Sokal 1974; Needham 1975), Wittgenstein’s (1953) idea of
“family resemblance,” and Kosko’s (1993) notion of multivalence. In these fuzzy classifications,
items are brought together through that which psychologists have called “complexive classes,”
or “chain complexes” (Vygotsky 1962). That is, members of a class of items are connected to
one another by attributes not shared by all members of that class. Vygotsky described a child
beginning with a small yellow triangle, then adding a red triangle, then a red circle, and so forth.
When children used this kind of associative classification in school—classing a chair with a pencil because both are yellow, the pencil with a pointer because both are long and thin, and then
regarding all three objects as constituting a class of objects, they were corrected by the teacher,
who insisted on the recognition of a feature common to all members of the class: thus, pencil
was classified with pen (as writing instruments), and so forth. In a series of pioneering experiments, Rosch (1975; Rosch et al. 1976) argued that family resemblances, a form of complexive
groupings, are integral to how adults compose more abstract levels of classification, so that, for
example, the class or level of “furniture” is arrived at by using complexive groupings of attributes. Note the close association between monothetic classification, racism, and eugenics, in
official thinking, and the likely association between fuzzy classification, multiculturalism, and
ideas of hybrid and cyborg. In anthropology, attention should be drawn to Strathern’s (1988)
studies of gender in Melanesia, and to gender’s fluid character, such that female is an accentuated version of male, male of female, and which is which may quite depend on context. See also
Roy Wagner’s recent formulation of a holographic worldview; Handelman and Shulman (1997:
194–97) on the Hindu deity, Siva, as a holographic god; and Handelman (1995b). Yet note
Atran’s (1996) argument that all biological taxonomies of living kinds seem to have universal
properties that accord more or less with monothetic classification.
4. Yet, too, those who put a classification to work also feed their own values into the scheme, and
this needs to be taken into account in how classification impacts on that which it classifies. So,
the bureaucratic innocence in census-taking can be turned easily to horrendous purpose. The
Nazis used the Dutch comprehensive population registration system, set up to enable more
accurate social science research, to identify Jews and Gypsies in The Netherlands (Seltzer and
Anderson 2001). In 1988 the Iraqi war against the Kurds used the 1987 national census to
define the target group of Kurds against whom to practice extermination (Salih 1996).
5. I use Foucault here, despite critiques of his historicism (e.g., Patey 1984: 266–69), given that
his formulations offer a useful point of start for tracing this vector of bureaucratic logic.
6. The panopticon is a distant modification of the earlier Kunstkammer, the form of museum that
in the interests of science brought together greatly disparate objects, natural and artifactual,
ahistorical and historical, encouraging the playful forging of metaphoric relationships between
unlike objects. Connectivity through metaphor illuminated the ongoing creation and creative
potential of the world (Bredekamp 1995: 69ff.). Unlike the Panopticon world, the holism
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118 | moebius anthropology
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
of the Kunstkammer world was predicated on degrees of asymmetry. Utilitarian thought later
broke down the playful asymmetries of the Kunstkammer world into units that were combinable
through monothetic logic, valuing the resulting symmetries in classification, whether in science
or bureaucracy. On symmetries in modern science see Wechsler (1988) and McAllister (1996:
39–44).
In Kafka’s short story, “In the penal colony,” the prisoner learns of his guilt and punishment
as they are inscribed on (and in) his body by a writing machine, thereby forming him into a
bureaucratic text—the human being as the embodied, sensuous spectacle of bureaucratic order,
not unlike the tattooed arm number invented for prisoners in Auschwitz, one that soon developed its own taxonomic distinctions (numbers for women on the inside of the forearm, for men
on the outside).
Through the monothetic forming of form, surveillance of the individual comes decisively to the
fore through total access to his isolation and display. A century earlier, Leibniz, in his, “An Odd
Thought Concerning a New Sort of Exhibition (or rather, an Academy of Sciences),” written
in September 1675, had proposed a series of “academies” for the public exhibition of scientific
inventions, as well as “academies” of games and pleasures. Surveillance was important to the
covert functioning of the latter, yet here the scopic still was hidden: “These [. . .] [academies
of pleasure] would be built in such a way that the director of the house could hear and see
everything said and done without any one perceiving him, by means of mirrors and openings,
something that would be very important for the state [. . .].” (The translation of this passage is
in Wiener 1957: 465.)
Such renditions are the visionary forerunners of the organizational forms we know today as
total institutions, service organizations, people-processing organizations, and so forth. Such administrative frameworks use techniques of social, psychologistic, educational, and bureaucratic
intervention in the lives of persons defined as their “clients” (see, among others, Scott 1969;
Dandekar 1990; Rose 1998; Bogard 1996; Handelman 1976, 1978).
Weber, however, never used the metaphor of the “iron cage,” but rather the “shell as hard
as steel,” which has quite different connotations; nor did he metaphorize bureaucracy as this
“shell” (Baehr 2001).
Bourdieu (1998: 52) maintains that through its “molding power” the modern state “wields a
genuinely creative quasi-divine power” (see also Calhoun 1997: 76). Yet the logic of this creativity is that of the bureaucratic, the quasi-divine power emanating from the capacity of this logic
to change social worlds by altering their classifications.
For example, though the powerful connections during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
among science, statistics, eugenics, and racism are well documented, ideas like that of bureaucratic logic, as the forming of form, are rarely if ever referred to. Thus Evans (1997: 295), writing on the Department of Native Affairs in mid-twentieth-century South Africa, clearly joins
together science and racism to that which I am calling bureaucratic logic, but his approach goes
no deeper than the study of institutions as such.
The forming of bureaucratic logic received impetus from other developments: from European
colonialism and colonial administration (Arendt 1958), from the science of statistics, literally,
the science of the state (Desrosieres 1998; Gigerenzer et al. 1989), from the embracing of numeration (Cohen 1982), and from individualism and its freedoms inherent in ideas of social
contract, but also from the revolutionary reorganization of the military, and from shifts of
education toward more universal criteria.
Foucault (2007: 338) thus likens police to a “permanent coup d’Etat,” one that “is exercised and
functions in the name of and in terms of the principles of its own rationality, without having
to mold or model itself on the otherwise given rules of justice.” In this formulation, Foucault
comes close to those of Carl Schmitt, and then Agamben in “the state of exception.” Yet, in
certain ways, Foucault’s formulation is the more profound because he is referring to a state of
permanent exception concerned with endless self-regulation and, so, continuously renewing
itself.
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15. Rose (1998: 99–115) argues that in liberal, democratic societies the intention of governmentality is to produce, shape, and regulate the moral order within the psychological individual, rather
than to suppress individuality, as is the case under totalitarian regimes.
16. This self-formation may take the shape of the “individual as enterprise,” the management of
personal identity through which one is employed in this enterprise of living throughout one’s
lifetime (Gordon 1991: 44). This perspective on self-identity dovetails well with the individual
internalization of bureaucratic logic, and with the current emphasis on the importance of psychologies of self-actualization, self-autonomy, and the performance of self, raising the issue of
how these psychologies contribute to the grounding of bureaucratic logic within the individual.
See also Rieff (1966).
17. Here I do not follow developments in Prussia and the shaping of the bureaucratic-military
absolutist state, this attempt to construct “a huge human automaton” (Rosenberg 1958: 38).
To no small degree, the model here for bureaucratic absolutism was military (Anderson 1996:
243–46). According to Oestreich (1982: 258–72), in Germany the formation of the absolutist
state, of top-down bureaucratic and military order met the more localized, more bottom-up
“science of police” in what became their common goal of shaping and disciplining social and
moral order. The developments in the principalities likely have had very long-term effects
through German idealism, linking, for example, with the ethnographic insight that German
individualism develops best within organic groups (Norman 1991).
18. That group formation not only be imposed top-down but also, quite mysteriously, emerge from
within the group has been an ongoing concern of Israeli Jews. In Hebrew this process is often
called “crystallization” (gibush), and a group of people brought or thrown together does not
have groupness, this sense of belonging together naturally, until they feel this crystallization of
sentiment (see Katriel 1991a). I emphasize “feel,” for there are no conscious, objective, social
indices of how and when this sense of groupness comes into existence. People just feel when it
has. In the Israeli case this crystallization is related to the coming into being of the nation-inarms and the family-in-arms, and its existence has powerful commonsensical aesthetic qualities
for many Israeli Jews.
19. The nation-in-arms is invoked with every declaration that Israel is “a Jewish and democratic
state”—a sequence that privileges and empowers Jewish over democratic (see Kimmerling
2002). So, too, with the declaration that the character of Israeli society, and the future of the
state, will be decided on only by Israeli Jews—a pronouncement of inclusion and exclusion,
evoking an embattled people who must stand alone, together, otherwise they will lose their
knowledge of who they are. Every such declaration is also a commemoration and a celebration
of every other occasion when this was the case, or when it will be so.
20. Walby (1999) argues that the European Union is a new kind of state, a “regulatory state.” A state
in which the law, a most powerful generator and applier of linear classification, plays a central
role. She argues that it is “the ability to deploy power through a regulatory framework, rather
than through the monopolization of violence or the provision of welfare, which is the key to the
distinctive nature of the regulatory state” (1999: 123).
21. Laumann and Knoke (1987: 382), in a large-scale study of American government bureaucracies, understand the state as “a complex entity spanning multiple policy domains, comprising
both government organizations and those core private sector participants whose interests must
be taken into account.” They found that many of the classifications generated by government
bureaucracies, which have major effects on the worlds beyond these organizations, are intended
first and foremost for the internal purposes of these bureaucracies, in particular to conserve their
own existence.
22. So, a Californian without a driver’s license would not be able to use a credit card or cash a check.
Such persons are issued with “non-driver” driving licenses (Herzfeld 1992: 46), thereby capturing them within the taxonomy through whose practice they are enabled to live like others.
23. Ironically, bureaucratic logic also reflects aspects of the rhizomic. For all their linearity, the
trajectories of bureaucratic logic are often tangential, without set direction or set sequence of
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120 | moebius anthropology
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
movement in capturing, containing, and de-territorializing space and time. Because bureaucratic logic is arbitrary in its construction and motion, it moves easily, in any direction, through
any vectors, in making over space/time as its own.
Since 1948, Israeli governments and the IDF have nurtured (in career terms) generations of
military colonial bureaucrats. Military bureaucrats ruled Palestinian citizens of Israel from 1950
until 1966 in areas of concentrated Arab population (see Lustick 1980; Shammas 1991); and
they rule, from 1967 through the present, all or part of the occupied territories. Military rule
is by administrative order, and judicial proceedings are autarchic and often draconian. Human
rights are irrelevant to making order through containment and classification. Estimates are that
since 1967 (as of 7 April 2002) the military bureaucracy in the West Bank has issued 1500
administrative orders (as of 7 April 2002), each with the binding force of law, and together
embracing virtually all domains of living and livelihood. The orders set in place a complex system of permits, through which permissions are required in order to carry out a very long list of
activities. The granting and withholding of permits function to reward and punish applicants.
Military government is the extreme shaping of form through bureaucratic logic. On the ambivalence of the Israeli Supreme Court toward the military government and its rulings in the
occupied territories, see Kretzmer (2002), who argues strongly that the Court consistently finds
in favor of the authorities because, in part, Israel is defined as the State of the Jewish People,
and therefore that any action perceived as contrary to the interests of this national collectivity is
regarded as a threat to the security of the state (Kretzmer 2002: 193).
However prevalent, this is but one metaphysics of temporal movement. See, for example, Briggs
(1992) on Inuit, and Rosaldo (1980) on Ilongot.
Arguments over whether the people who did these tasks were “bureaucrats,” or whether they
were “functionaries” who behaved as bureaucrats (Carmi and Rosenfeld 1991), seem misplaced.
First and foremost, they were people who invented and applied a wide range of taxonomies of
classification, and who used bureaucratic logic to do so. After 1948 they moved without difficulty into new and renamed offices and positions within the state infrastructures.
Thus, an “Oriental” identity, one that sought common cause between Jews and Palestinians,
may have been viable in the pre-state period, at least among some intellectuals (see Eyal 1996;
Cordoba 1980). After 1948, governmental taxonomies and their practices made such alliances
difficult and costly.
Carmi and Rosenfeld (1989) argue that there were limited parallels between the socialist organization of the Yishuv and the state bureaucracy after 1948; so that the State’s total bureaucratization of the Arab national and refugee problems constituted a radical transformation in the
organization of the social order. Though the scale of things changed drastically with statehood,
bureaucratic logic clearly antedates formal statehood.
The first Israeli astronaut, who died in the disintegration of the space shuttle, Columbia, took
with him into space a small Torah scroll that had survived the Holocaust and a drawing of the
earth as seen from the moon, made by a small boy in Theresienstadt (Ha’aretz, 2 February 2003,
English Edition). Echoing the author, Ka-tzetnik (Yehiel De-Nur), the Holocaust was becoming another planet.
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Chapter 5
Bureaucratic
Logic,
Bureaucratic
Aesthetics
The Opening Event of
Holocaust Martyrs and
Heroes Remembrance Day
in Israel
Author’s Note
This chapter was prepared first in 2001 for a workshop on Performance Genres and
Comparative Aesthetics, organized by Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer. It is offered here as a case study of how bureaucratic logic organizes a major public event in
Israel, one that annually commemorates the Holocaust dead. Though in more recent
years technology has been put to good effect in this event, its logic of organization
has not changed. Throughout the emphasis is on representation through the presentation, one after another, of linearly and precisely defined social categories. The
murderous events that constituted the core of the Holocaust were dynamic in the
extreme, killing upon killing upon killing . . . Yet its commemoration here abuts on
the static. In this there are lessons for the kind of aesthetics that bureaucratic logic
enables and promotes. I return to bureaucratic aesthetics in Chapter Eleven.
R
My concern here is with logics and aesthetics that organize rituals. I will argue that
the logics of ritual organization are intimately related to practice, informing practice
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
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with its shaping of goals, action, movement, direction. So, too, are aesthetics crucial
to practice; for that matter, perhaps practice works best, if I can put it like this, when
given its senses by aesthetics. Aesthetics are crucial to practice; while logics of organization hardly exist without practice. Logics, in the terms used here, are the ways
that inform how the practices of connecting, of fitting together—people, things,
worlds—are done. Aesthetics, on the other hand, enable the very connecting, the
fitting together, to be done in practice. Aesthetics are informed, obviously, by cultural logics. The logic of ritual organization and the aesthetics of practice form a set
without which there is no such phenomenon that might be called ritual. However,
I do not intend that there be any clean-cut conceptual distinction between “logic”
and “aesthetics.” Perhaps because through practice, logic and aesthetics mesh together
epistemology and the sensuous, their relationship is vague. In my view, the relationship between logic and aesthetics is teleological rather than lineal—if logic is present
so are aesthetics. Perhaps logic generates its own aesthetic as it is practiced into being
by that aesthetic.
I want to argue more generally that aesthetics are crucial to all practice—to the
very practice of practice—in the regularities of mundane living; and that in this sense
the aesthetics of ritual practice may not be radically distinct from those of everyday
practice. To make these arguments relatively straightforward, I will discuss aspects of
the state ritual that officially opens Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day
in Israel (Yom HaShoah v’HaGvura), a day popularly if facetiously known as Holocaust
Day. Officially, the ritual is called a Memorial Gathering (atzeret zikaron). The logic of
organization of this event I will call bureaucratic logic, and its aesthetics, bureaucratic
aesthetics. I will argue that this ritual, despite its empathic and emotive sacralization
in Israeli society, is an extension of the logic and aesthetics of mundane bureaucratic
order. The military logic of organization is continuous with the logic that organizes the
performance of the Holocaust Memorial Gathering. Here the logic and aesthetics of
ritual are organized as a continuation of mundane, bureaucratic practice.
Underlying my argument is the claim that in the history of modern Western
thought, the conceptualization and treatment of “aesthetics,” as a higher-order condition of value and knowledge, took a terribly wrong turn, in its thorough and unrelenting identification with beauty, art, truth, reflection, and so forth. To save the
significance and the inestimable value of aesthetics in the mundane, and in the ritual
living of lives, aesthetics should not be severed and parted from the grounding of
social and personal practice.
The Aesthetic “Feel” of Practice
My understanding of the aesthetic in mundane living is quite rough and ready—for
that matter, murky—and again is not given to any neat definition. My sense of the
aesthetic is something like the “feel” that one has for that which one is doing; the
feel for that which can only be called the “rightness” of how one is doing what one
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128 | moebius anthropology
is doing, or how this is done in concert. The aesthetic in mundane living is related
to Bergson’s idea of “habit memory,” which is a way of attending kinesthetically to
one’s own body, monitoring that which one is doing. As Sheets-Johnstone (2000:
360) points out for the individual, “this is memory etched in movement,” providing
unconscious ways of behaving that “engender a felt sense of rightness in doing what
one does . . . we feel at home in our bodies . . . because we resonate with a familiar
dynamics, a tactile-kinesthetic dynamics that we have come to establish as our own
way of doing something, whether brushing our teeth, throwing a ball, playing the
violin, or walking” (Sheets-Johnstone 2000: 360–61, my emphasis). This sense of
rightness or “fitness” (Hardin 1993: 12)—kinesthetic, sensuous, interpersonal—indexes the aesthetics of living unselfconsciously, in the main. No less, this sense of
rightness is one of feeling—unselfconsciously, one monitors affectively. This is a sense
of rightness not in moral terms but in the sense of how one does that which one is doing.1 The aesthetics of mundane living are forms of autopoiesis, of self-organization,
that produce and conserve personal and intercorporeal awareness through feeling the
rightness of action, of practice, inside oneself, outside oneself, and between oneself
and others (see also Inglis and Hughson 2000: 289). To put this otherwise, the everyday aesthetics of practice are feelings of rightness-in-doing, of feeling that which feels
right in doing that which we are doing. In Michael Polanyi’s (1966: 17–23) terms,
one could say that mundane aesthetics are a kind of “indwelling” of tacit knowing, a
knowing that, as he puts it, always relates to or includes more than we can tell, were
we able to relate this knowingly. Paraphrasing Polanyi, Jack Katz (1999: 314) argues
that “effective action requires that we disattend our body as we act, focusing away
from the point at which our body intersects with the world.” In my view, tacit knowing is the feeling of disattending/attending that enables the exterior world of practice
and the interior world of experience to be united as the exterior world of experience
and the interior world of practice (see also Dufrenne 1973: 446). Mikel Dufrenne
(1973: 377) argues that to feel is to transcend. The aesthetics of practice transcend
practice by enabling practice to communicate “more than we can tell,” while feeling
the rightness of not needing to, or not being able to, tell this. The aesthetics of practice integrate us with that which we do, in ways that self-produce and self-organize
this integration as more than we can tell and as feeling the rightness of this.
This positioning, as Katz (1999: 314) points out, “leads quickly to an appreciation
of the essential place of aesthetics in all behaviors, however mundane or esoteric.”
In mundane living, it is the aesthetics of practice, in my terms, that enable people
and social orders to naturalize their own arbitrariness, to know their worlds tacitly
as “natural,” as “taken for granted” (see Bourdieu 1977: 164; Garfinkel 1967; Geertz
1983: 86–91). Without the aesthetics of practice/experience there is no feel of rightness in practice, no feel that this is how doing is doing, how doing is done, how done
continues on into doing.
Aesthetics, then, are crucial to the naturalness of the feel of mundane practice
as more than we can tell, indeed, as more than we can know, self-consciously, selfThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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reflexively. Practice is inevitably the fitting together of person and world, person and
person, person and action, action and action—their fitting into, yet through one
another. Aesthetics—the synesthetic, sensuous feel of things fitting together (and
not fitting together)—is that which enables us to proceed coherently, perspectively,
and prospectively in the hereness of nowness, as it were. Simmel (1994a: 10) wrote
that “the human being is . . . the bordering creature who has no border.” I would add
that the bordering creature in kinesthetic movement is always on the edge of coming into being, and so is always creating borders in order to cross them, in order to
move. The aesthetics of practice have something intimate to do with the creation and
crossing of borders, and how these are done. It is by creating and crossing borders,
the sites at which exosmosis and endosmosis (Simmel 1994b: 11) of the fluidity of
selfness and otherness occur, that fitting together is accomplished. To put this yet
more emphatically, without the mundane aesthetics of practice, there likely would
not be self-integrating individuals nor, for that matter, social life. The aesthetics of
practice not only enable practice—they are the persuasive grounds, the grounds that
persuade us that practice is in the process of being done as the kind of practice it is
(or is becoming). Perhaps this could be called the persuasive self-embodiment of the
truth-claims of practice. Aesthetics may be more like an ongoing gestalt, in the sense
of a “coherent entity” (Polanyi 1966), or an entity whose coherence is continuously
coming into being, fitting itself together self-persuasively, even as that which it fits
together ruptures and breaks.
Since we must know ourselves indirectly, through interaction, through others and
their mediation, through what might be called the “practice of betweenness,” there
is always a break (perhaps an ongoing break) in any aesthetics of mundane practice.
The very feel or sense of rightness also constitutes a temporal lag, however small; a
lack of synchronization with oneself and with others. As Katz (1999: 315) puts it, “I
see, hear, feel, and express myself through actions that in part always remain behind
myself, always just beyond the reach of my self-awareness.” In this regard, we are
always trying to catch up with ourselves and with others. This is integral to the sense
of mundane aesthetics as more than one can tell. But this is also the break between a
ritual and mundane social order—the possible shift from an aesthetics of mundane
practice to something else; the world catching up with its rituals and their visions
(and dynamics) of order; the break that may open toward radical shifts in aesthetics
of performance or that may continue to hone its aesthetics, but in different venues.2
Here, my concern is with the latter, as it organizes the opening ritual of Holocaust
Remembrance Day.
Bureaucratic Logic and the Event of Presentation
Earlier I said that cultural logics inform us as to how practice fits together people,
things, and worlds. Bureaucratic logic indexes how certain kinds of cultural taxonomies are organized and practiced. Recent studies of modern bureaucracy and its
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origins recognize clearly that it is constructed of premises about how worlds are put
together, how they work, and how this knowledge may be known (Brown 1978: 373;
Morgan 1986; Astley 1985; Melossi and Pavarini 1981). Nonetheless, not recognized
is the premise that the epistemology of bureaucratic logic is to intimately engage in
the invention and practice of taxonomy that is lineal, exclusivist, and hierarchical
in character. Bureaucratic logic is a mentality of the modern world that consciously
invents and deploys lineal taxonomy to create, to control, and to change order. The
conscious control over processes of classification is a most powerful means through
which to shape social order (Handelman 1995; Shamgar-Handelman and Handelman 1991: 308).
The use of bureaucratic logic encourages the invention of forms of classification
that are hierarchical and exclusivist. In true Linnean fashion, the boundaries of categories of classification on the same level of abstraction are mutually exclusive and are
organized in hierarchies of subsumation and exclusion. This lineal logic of classification—of membership that is permitted, exclusively, in one and only one category on
the same level of abstraction within a given taxonomic scheme—is powerfully implicated in the making of “difference” in modern life. That is, it is implicated in our
mechanistic capacities to make infinitesimal and infinite distinctions of difference
that mutually exclude whatever they fragment, while insisting on the significance
of these divisions. (On this logic, see Wyschogrod 1985.) In hierarchical terms, we
perceive levels of difference as nesting quite neatly and naturally within one another,
thereby encompassing difference within yet more subsuming difference.
Bureaucratic logic informs institutions as to how to continually invent and implement new taxonomies by reimagining and reorganizing the social categories of
everyday life. This logic consciously informs how to consciously create social categories that can be made to divide, to fragment, to reclassify, and to reshape members of
any social unit—group, community, family, relationship. This logic informs how to
perceive that the making of division through the creation of a boundary is also the demarcation of differences that are naturalized on either side of this border. Therefore,
bureaucratic logic foregrounds the significance of boundaries that separate mutually
exclusive categories from one another.
No less than any other mode of informing the organization of realities, bureaucratic logic is enabled by its own aesthetics of practice that give to its use the feel of
rightness. In keeping with the significance of ocular centrism and the gaze in the
modern epoch (Foucault 1973, 1979; Jay 1992a), these, one may say, are the aesthetics of anatomization—of laying out, defining, classifying, specifying, inspecting, and
enumerating all of the parts that constitute some totality. In modern bureaucratic
society, in the modern bureaucratic state, these aesthetics of bureaucratic logic are
performed in public most explicitly in rituals that I call events of presentation (Handelman 1998). The organization of performance in the public event of presentation
often (but not necessarily always) is pervaded by aesthetics of bureaucratic logic.
Again, I am arguing that it is aesthetics that enable us to sense the rightness of orgaThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
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nization and practice; and so, too, of performance (which, as noted, I understand as
the heightened consciousness, and perhaps the morphogenesis, of practice). In other
words, the logic and aesthetics of events of presentation are strongly continuous with
the logic and aesthetics that organize so many domains of mundane life. There is no
radical shift in logic and aesthetic from the mundane to this kind of ritual.3
The event of presentation often shapes, puts into place, and demonstratively shows
social taxonomies. To a high degree, taxonomies are put on view, their categories
filled, and members of these categories are used to perform a repertoire of symbolic
actions. Perhaps there are here taxonomies in motion, a spectacle of bureaucratic
logic whose aesthetic feel of rightness enables their performance. Events of presentation may be societal icons, fully open to the inspection of the public gaze. These rituals rarely conceal any mysteries, nor is their atmosphere particularly mysterious. Their
purpose may be to assert the determinacy of the significance that they enclose within
themselves. Such rituals are ocular-centric, their symbolism arranged often in the
form of a relatively static tableau, or a tableau in motion. The actions of performers
(like the categories they embody) rarely overlap and are carefully allocated, measured,
and often synchronized. Order is continually seen to be practiced during the event.
The opening ceremony of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day is
held in Jerusalem at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Authority, which is the
national site of Holocaust memorialism in Israel. The ceremony, televised in its entirety, is a major ritual occasion of the state, the first of the three major “ritual days”
legislated after Israel’s declaration of independence.
I have chosen this Holocaust occasion to press my arguments on bureaucratic logic
and bureaucratic aesthetics in statist public events especially because the Holocaust is
a highly emotional and volatile subject (and increasingly so) in Jewish-Israeli everyday life (Friedlander and Seligman 1994; Young 1990; Handelman and ShamgarHandelman 1996; Handelman 2004: 171–99; Feldman 2000; Kidron 2000). In
Israeli discourse, popular and academic alike, the ritualization of the Holocaust is
attended to primarily (and often solely) in terms of moral, philosophical, theological,
historical, and political valences and their consequences, as if the logic and aesthetics
of ritualism and commemoration are irrelevant to how these valences are expressed
and conveyed. Yet it is the logic of ritual organization that in no small measure is
shaping the significance of the Holocaust in Israeli society.4 And in no small measure
it is the practiced aesthetics of this logic that enable such events to take, naturalistically, the presentational, taxonomic form that they do, and to be appreciated as such.
The Military Envelopment of the Memorial Gathering
Like all Israeli state events, the Memorial Gathering is enclosed by a cocoon shaped
by military classification. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has a major presence in
this opening event, described in the next section. Yet the explicit participation of the
IDF is but the tip of the military presence—the Gathering exists as it does by being
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enveloped by the military. The presence of the military envelope serves a practical
and functional purpose—to ensure monothetic order in keeping with the forming
capacities of bureaucratic logic and the state-form. The differences between military
and bureaucratic logic are more matters of content and direction than of premises of
classification. Therefore my discussion is of the military as the exercise of bureaucratic
logic. Both the Gathering and the IDF are metonymic with bureaucratic logic. In
terms of a logic and aesthetics of classification and its practice, the military instructions to protect the occasion cannot be separated from the performance itself of that
occasion. I turn now to these instructions and their monothetic logic.
The overall responsibility for planning and enacting the event lies with Yad
Vashem. Nonetheless the Army’s instructions to secure and to protect the site of the
Gathering envelop and ultimately control Yad Vashem’s roles. Though Yad Vashem
appears in official control of the Gathering, there are points at which this institution
is dependent upon or subordinate to the IDF. At times there is a struggle between the
overt and hidden enactments—one example will suffice here. The Army’s concern is
to secure the Gathering against terrorist attacks. The President and Prime Minister
of the State attend, as do official representatives of foreign states. Yad Vashem wants
the event enacted according to its script. Both Yad Vashem and the IDF are deeply
committed to the vision of the State and nation-in-arms as the protective bastions
against any future Holocaust. The final rehearsal takes place in the late afternoon,
before the Gathering begins. Some hours before, the IDF seals off Yad Vashem as a
closed military area, under the Emergency Regulations. The Army controls all access
and movement within this area.
In 1988 the Gathering took place some months after the outbreak of the first Intifada, and the local IDF Commander decided to seal off the site (itself distant from
any actual clashes) earlier than usual, in what Yad Vashem personnel described as a fit
of “security hysteria.” Consequently the announcers and members of the choir and
orchestra were either unable to enter the site or to rehearse properly there. This could
have affected the performance adversely, and led to discussions between Yad Vashem
administrators and Army officers. A compromise was hammered out, but the Army’s
ultimate control of the site was uncontested.
Both sides in this dispute are organized through bureaucratic logic. At issue is not
only a division of labor and spheres of authority, but the very forming and application of taxonomic categories—the relentless creation and invocation of arbitrary,
categorical difference. Yad Vashem orders the presentation of the Holocaust in monothetic terms, and the Army does the same to Yad Vashem. Yad Vashem, open to the
public six days a week, and receiving in the neighborhood of a million visitors a year,
is redefined categorically by the IDF, and on this basis is turned into a fortress, into
another order of ordering.
The significance of the IDF’s act of closure may be lost on the parties concerned,
yet it must be stressed. The official Holocaust memorial is itself remade—ghettoized—
within the national landscape intended ideologically to be open. The fortress is besieged
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
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within itself, granted the status of a protected species, and placed apart. As the participants commemorate the Holocaust, they themselves are set apart as the potential victims of another Holocaust (thereby encouraging their self-classification as such). This
irony is foreign to the bureaucratic logic used. At issue is whose taxonomic ordering
of reality will prevail. The Army has the advantage, since it envelops Yad Vashem in
its timescape. The military vision of order puts in place and territorializes a taxonomy
of control and discipline hidden in the main from the Gathering’s participants, yet
intended to embed them all within its surveillance. The classified territory becomes
the mirror image peering within itself in a panopticon-like way. The Army creates
an event within which order is made yet is not to be seen, complementing the order
made to be seen in the Gathering itself. The Army relentlessly and symmetrically
divides and classifies time, space, people, and function. There is no ambiguity in classification. Everyone and everything connected with the Gathering is placed in one or
another category. The focus here is on Army planning for a Gathering in the 1990s.
After this I discuss relevant aspects of the Gathering enacted at that time.
Time was sliced cleanly into two consecutive phases. The first phase spanned four
days, from the 7th to the 10th of April, during which preparations and rehearsals
were done. The second stage began at 15:00 hours on the 10th of April, when military forces secured the area, and lasted until the end of the Gathering at approximately 21:00 hours. The list of Army goals was lengthy and exhaustive: to control all
approaches to the ceremonial plaza where the Gathering would be held; to secure the
entire area of Yad Vashem and its roads and byways, using foot patrols on the near
and distant peripheries, motorized patrols on the roads, as well as positioning bomb
disposal personnel; to establish observation points at controlling locations; to use
military police to secure the parking lots; to use civil defense reservists and soldiers of
the Women’s Corps to search the bags (and where necessary, the person) of all entering the ceremonial area; to use bomb disposal personnel to check all vehicles entering
the area; to have in readiness Medical Corps personnel to treat and evacuate, according to need; and to coordinate with bodyguards of the Security Services (Sherutei
Bitakhon, aka Shabak) who safeguard the seating of Israeli dignitaries. Safeguarding
the ceremonial plaza itself was also the responsibility of the Security Services from the
moment the dignitaries entered.
To implement these goals, the IDF used several hundred military personnel belonging to the regular army, the Military Police, the Border Police, the sappers, the
Medical Corps, the Women’s Corps, and the Civil Defense Guard. Military personnel were divided into eleven units: these included a regional command center with
communication specialists; forces to secure and to safeguard the approaches to Yad
Vashem; a preventive force on a rooftop overlooking the plaza; an assault force for
more incisive intervention; and patrols on axes triangulating the entire area of the
memorial complex.
This relentless classifying shapes discrete, modular, monothetic categories. Taken
together, these categories are organized vertically (those ranked higher control those
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134 | moebius anthropology
ranked lower) and horizontally (categories on the same level do not overlap in their
contents and functions). The dimensions of each category are measured: the kind
and number of personnel, the kind and number of weapons and other artifacts. Together, these categories totalize space and time—they suck in, subsume, and make
order among all the phenomena toward which their taxonomy is aimed. Nothing, no
one, is left outside the monothetic classifying of space, time, people. The taxonomy
includes itself, and so is self-sealing. All are under control and discipline, whether
they know this or not. Since the categories are modular, they can be altered, shifted,
redesigned, added to or subtracted from the taxonomy without changing the operational efficiency of the classifications.
The effect of having all the categories of the military taxonomy in position on the
ground, enveloping and surveilling everyone and everything within the Holocaust
memorial, is something like a public event in its own right. An event of presentation,
but organized as a concealed scopic system controlling itself and aimed at the Memorial Gathering. This systemic apparatus is hidden from outsiders who do not hold
the code to the military taxonomy. Nonetheless the hidden military classification is
present and piercingly scopic, in place and space, reshaping the landscape into vectors of force, moving according to preset instructions, holding everything within its
gaze. An event that itself is the gaze of control, a symmetric, systemic, covert tableau,
the embodiment of bureaucratic logic and aesthetics in systemic motion—a lookout
precisely here, a roadblock directly there, a patrol moving through a specified axis, an
assault force held in instant readiness.
The military event is an analogue of the state-form, capturing and containing
through the forming enabled by bureaucratic logic and aesthetics. The covert military event surveils the entire site of the Memorial complex, enveloping this and the
Gathering performed there. The military apparatus cocoons the memorial site in
its taxonomic closure, gazing at the displayed tableau of the past, at the practice of
Holocaust memorialism. The hidden present (the military) disciplines and orders the
visible past (the Holocaust event) that is made to appear as if it controls the visible
present. The tableau of the Memorial Gathering is immobile and static, in contrast to
that of the military, mobile, flexible, systemic.
The Memorial Gathering
My concern here is to show how the Memorial Gathering is performed as a taxonomic
tableau of categories, one that embodies in its organization ideas of bureaucratic logic
and aesthetics, as discussed earlier. I do not closely interpret the symbolism of this
event (as I have done elsewhere for the opening ceremonies of Israeli Remembrance
Day for the War Dead and Independence Day; see Handelman 1998: 191–233).
The gathering lasts approximately one hour. The setting is the Warsaw Ghetto
Plaza (dedicated to the revolt staged in the ghetto) at Yad Vashem, dominated on
one side by a high brick wall (called the Wall of Remembrance; hereafter, the Wall),
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
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within which are embedded reproductions of Nathan Rapoport’s original sculpture
and bas-relief that stand on the site of the razed Warsaw Ghetto (see Young 1989).
The sculpture and bas-relief effectively divide the Wall into sections, two categories;
and during the ceremony itself attention is shifted from one to the other (from right
to left, facing the Wall, the direction in which Hebrew and Yiddish are written).
The Taxonomy of the Wall of Remembrance
The large bronze bas-relief of the Last March is embedded within the right side of
the Wall. The bas-relief depends through a horizontal, longitudinal axis that depicts
Jews—all older men, women, and children who look like they are from a ghetto or
shtetl—clustered together, eyes averted from the viewer, bent beneath the burdens
they carry, appearing to walk into a strong wind, sorrowfully marching to some unknown destination. Whatever this destination, it leads to their annihilation. To the
left of the bas-relief is a sculpture of the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, one
that emphasizes verticality and height. Recessed within the Wall, these fighters, most
of whom are young, stand tall and strong at the ready, grasping rifles and grenades,
facing the viewer and looking straight ahead at a distant horizon. In the Warsaw
original, the bas-relief is placed on the reverse side of the ghetto uprising sculpture,
so that bas-relief and sculpture cannot be seen together. At Yad Vashem, the basrelief and the sculpture are placed in a lineal relationship of two scenes. The bas-relief
(given this genre of art) has less depth of figuration and more sketchiness than does
the more fully formed sculpture.
These two scenes constitute a taxonomy of the sequencing of narrative history, one
that more cleanly divides Jewish perceptions of history into a before and an after, into
categories of destruction and ascension, and that shifts one into the other. As I noted
above, at Yad Vashem these two scenes should be looked at from right to left—from
the driven despair of the breaking edges of generations of Jews, of the very young and
the old on the bas-relief, to the fierce determination of the ghetto fighters, the maturing of embattled but powerful strength. The scenes move from the horizontal stretch
of the bas-relief, an even plane of suffering that extends indefinitely without relief, to
the unbending verticality of the sculpture, which stops movement through posture,
gesture, and positioning (even bending the lineality of the Wall), communicating a
message of this-far-and-no-further. These are all themes of the dominant narrative of
the Holocaust in present-day Zionist Israel, and, so too, of Yad Vashem. It is this narrative framing that dominates the taxonomic shift from catastrophe to regeneration
that is enacted within the ritual gathering. I first discuss the visual placement of social
categories along the Wall, and then their performative sequencing during the ritual.
Since its inception, the plaza has been used as the venue for the ritual gathering.
The Wall itself is made to frame the performance. The major social categories of
the performance are laid out, in lineal fashion, along the breadth of the Wall. The
vertical, recessed sculpture of the ghetto fighters is used to break this tableau into
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two segments. To the right (facing the Wall) of the vertical sculpture, the area of the
bas-relief, the catastrophe and sorrow of the Holocaust dominate the performance
tableau. To the left, the fighting response dominates.
For the ritual, a central memorial beacon is placed between the bas-relief and the
ghetto fighters sculpture—but more to the right side, identified with the Holocaust
catastrophe. In 1991, the gas flame of this beacon reached to the very top of the Wall.
The flame emerged from a cone set atop a squared base, rising high through a spiral
of barbed wire, searing and transcending the barbs that tore the flesh, heart, and
the very life of the Jewish people. To the right of this central beacon are two podia
that are used by the announcers of the ceremony (who also perform the memorial
readings) and by those who deliver speeches and prayers. Still further to the right are
situated the choir and orchestra. The right side, then, is identified more with what
could be called civil/religious (as opposed to military) order, as well as with Holocaust
suffering.
By contrast, the categories of the left side are identified primarily with military order. Immediately to the left of the central beacon stands the Honor Guard of the IDF,
with naked bayonets fixed to automatic weapons. Further left, atop a lower extension
of the Wall, are placed six memorial beacons in memory of the six million Jews who
perished in the Holocaust. During the ritual the beacons are lit ceremoniously by
persons chosen by the Yad Vashem administration. The beacon lighters are assisted
by Gadna paramilitary youth in uniform who hand them the lit torches with which
they kindle the beacons. Framing the entire tableau at its extreme left is the flag of
the state. Thus, the fighting response to the Holocaust—the IDF Honor Guard, the
beacon lighters, the paramilitary youth—is itself framed, enclosed on its right by the
ghetto fighters sculpture and on its left by the state flag. The sequencing of the ritual
shifts from stateless Holocaust victims driven fatedly, to Jews standing their ground,
focused for battle, intergenerational, national.
Thus, during the performance, the narrative—or, more accurately, the visual sequence of taxonomy, of bas-relief and sculpture—is extended from World War II
into the present. This sequencing of categories shifts the Jews from that of uprising
(signified by the sculpture) to that of the State of Israel (signified by the national flag).
The fighting response extends into the present, within the state. During the ritual, the
entire Zionist version of recent history is taxonomized as a classification of historical
events laid bare and explicated before the gaze of the audience.5 The audience sits
facing the Wall, dignitaries and speakers in the first row.6
In terms of the sequencing of the ritual, the initial focus of activity tends to cluster
around the bas-relief, with its figures bent beneath tribulation—the unredeemable
tragic side of the Holocaust tableau. However, with the lighting of the six beacons,
the focus of activity is shifted to the fighting response. The beacon lighters are often
living heroes and heroines of the Holocaust—the living embodiments of the Warsaw
Ghetto sculpture—who stand above the level of the audience, on the low wall of
beacons, to the very left of the tableau. By contrast, the Jews depicted in the bas-relief
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
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no longer exist in this version of history—either they have been turned into survivors
and perhaps fighters (who live in Israel), or they are dead “martyrs,” in the language
of this day of remembrance. In any case, there is no mimetic embodiment of the
category of martyr within the performance of the ritual—only the ghostly outlines
of figures long past, frozen in the bronze of the bas-relief. When all the taxonomic
categories are added together, category by category, they constitute a version of history that connects the annihilation of the Holocaust to the fighting response in the
face of oppression, and connects the fighting response to the active, armed protection
offered to Jews by the State of Israel (which is embodied by the Honor Guard and
paramilitary youth, who protect the beacon-lighter survivors, all of them grasped
within the protective envelope of the IDF, which safeguards the entire site).
Taxonomy and the Three Generations
The section of the performative tableau that I am calling “the fighting response” is
embodied in three distinct categories that are no less metaphysical and historical in
their temporal linkage. These categories are those of three generations of fighters,
which can be likened to the grandparental, the parental, and their offspring. The beacon lighters are analogous to the grandparental generation who, born in Europe, survived the Holocaust (often heroically), and made the decision to “ascend” to Israel,
thereby making this their future, through which they aligned themselves with the
generation of founders and pioneers.7 They light the beacons of remembrance, which
are also flames of destruction and sacrifice, rising and transcending, as it were, their
own pasts. The Honor Guard of the IDF, standing near the beacon lighters, fixed
bayonets at the ready, is composed of young soldiers who are doing their compulsory
military service. They are analogous to the generation of children of the survivors,
who have grown to maturity within Israel. They serve the state directly, in its uniform
modality, honoring and protecting the generation of Holocaust survivors who themselves pioneered the Jewish fighting response in Europe and who later joined their
efforts to those of the pioneers in Israel. The beacon lighters are handed their torches
by the uniformed (but unarmed) paramilitary youth. The youth are analogous to the
generation of Israeli Jewish grandchildren to whom belongs the more distant future.
As they hand over the lit torches, the paramilitary youth (the still-unformed future)
enable the beacon lighters (the past) to remember and to commemorate, all the while
protected by the Honor Guard (the fighting present).
The narrative structures and the three-generational paradigm of remembrance are
at the heart of the symbolism of the gathering; and they are encoded through the aesthetics of temporal rhythmicity, of low to high. I emphasize the aesthetics of temporality because, in terms of my earlier argument, it is aesthetics that enable the natural
feel of the rightness of practice. The experiencing of the organization of categories in
sequence as temporal—in a relationship of low to high—feels right in a fully natural
sense in monotheistic cosmologies.
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Neither the rhythmicity of Jewish time nor the paradigm of three generations
is explicitly recognized in the ritual. The bureaucratic logic for the composition of
symbolic meaning seems to require the specification and description of discrete taxonomic elements and categories. But beyond this, bureaucratic logic should enable the
arbitrary combining or joining of categories to one another, in somewhat arithmetical ways, by bringing them into conjunction—added to, subtracted from, or mixed
together. Yet, aesthetically, these taxonomic elements and categories are enabled to be
practiced, felt, and experienced as moral rhythmics of time. And, though in practice
we recognize the rightness of these rhythms of temporality, they are also “more than
we can know,” and therefore they encompass us aesthetically in ways that in their
fullness of becoming are beyond our ken.
Bureaucratic Logic and the Planning of the Ritual
The presence of bureaucratic logic is plainly evident in the comments of a planner and organizer of the early opening ceremonies of remembrance at Yad Vashem,
which first used the Wall of Remembrance. He stated that the arrangement of taxonomic categories, in my terms, along the length of the Wall was primarily a matter
of practicality, of a somewhat arbitrary positioning according to available space.
Thus, one listed the elements needing to be included, without particular attention
to the consequences of their particular positioning in relation to one another. So,
once the decision was taken to use the Wall and the taxonomic categories I have
mentioned, the only space sufficient for the six beacons was on the left side. Therefore, since the national Honor Guard defended/celebrated the beacon lighters, it
too went to the left side. The national flag, then, also went to the left side, as did,
of course, the paramilitary youth whose task it was to hand a lit torch to the beacon
lighters. But then, all space on the left side was taken up, and the choir had to go
to the right side, and so, too, did the orchestra. This disposition, said the organizer,
“has no meaning.”8
The distribution along the Wall of categories of participation was done, approximately, according to the following thinking: first, decide which elements should be
included in the ritual; second, arrange them in relation to one another so that they
all fit into the available space/time. In this there is the arbitrary character of bureaucratic logic, yet also the tacit aesthetic perception (which accords with this logic)
that like goes together with like. Once the beacons were positioned arbitrarily, the
beacon lighters, Honor Guard, paramilitary youth, and flag also joined the beacons.
All these elements fit together naturally; they belong together without much thought.
Once they were brought into conjunction, their positioning in relation to one another—their symbolic interaction—immediately began to make emergent, perhaps
even unintended, meaning (see Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1993). One
result of this interactive making of meaning was the structuring of the doubled visual
narrative; another was that which I am calling the paradigm of the three generations,
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
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clustered about the flames of sacrifice, remembrance, and freedom. Relatively unrelated symbols brought serendipitously near to one another within contexts officially
defined as symbolic are likely to be felt symbolically related to one another—they are
felt, aesthetically, to fit together even if this remains implicit.
The organizers of the first Holocaust memorial ceremonies decided that a proper
ritual of remembrance should include at least three discrete, taxonomic categories
of symbolic activities, without specifying their relationship to one another. These
categories were the following: (1) a category of actions mandatory for a religious
memorial (the reciting of the mourner’s prayer [kaddish], and of “God full of mercy”
[El maleh rahamim]); (2) an “artistic” category (consisting of appropriate music and
song); and (3) a category of speeches and readings. Music and songs, readings and
speeches, were then mixed together and synchronized through alternation: a song
followed a speech or reading, and so forth; while the religious practices were clustered
toward the end of the ritual. In keeping with bureaucratic logic, these three categories
were defined arbitrarily, yet their conjunction produced an aesthetically clean-cut
alternation between words and song that felt right—perhaps in that it maintained
the discreteness of speech and music, even as it brought them into conjunction. Furthermore, these secular practices were kept together in a broader category, separated
from the category of religious practices, most of which were used to close the ritual.
Bureaucratic Aesthetics: Exactitude, Itemization, Modularity
Bureaucratic aesthetics insist on the exactitude of definitions of categories, their borders cleanly demarcated in relation to one another, demonstrating their differences.
In keeping with the aesthetics of exactness in division, the sequence of ritual action
was divided into segments of measured time, to produce as perfect a synchronization
as possible between these parts within ritual space. This aesthetics of exact division
and combination, of parts fitting together as if in a machine, are what, above all, enabled the performers to be in the right place at the right time. In a way, this exactness
of synchronization was the primary integrating force in this ritual, holding together
pieces that otherwise might have little or no sense of connectivity with one another.
Much of the logic of integration of this ritual is in the construction of time and space
as formats, without which many of the parts marshaled for the ritual might well fly
off symbolically in all directions, or trip over one another.
Crucial to this construction of integration is the role of the announcer. In the
performance itself, one of the tasks of the announcers is to report the condition of
synchronization in the ritual, by telling the audience which segment will perform
next. This fully expresses the bureaucratic logic that informs the event, since the announcing of each segment is simultaneously an enunciation of the demarcation of its
bounded modularity. The announcer does coordinate the ritual from within its own
enactment—but, since the ritual is not organized systemically, the announcer (unlike
the commander of the military envelope) has no capacity to modify its course. The
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announcer may be more a representation of integration within the ritual, than a generating force that produces integration.
In this kind of event it is the extreme modularity of the contents or parts of the ritual that enables its construction and integration as a whole; and, so too, the capacity
of its organizers to add and subtract modules almost at will. This is true, of course, for
the arbitrariness of much of the practice of everyday life in social orders organized by
bureaucratic logic, aesthetics, and apparatuses. There are, then, powerful continuities
and similarities between the organization of the gathering and the organization of
the everyday.
The 1991 Memorial Gathering: Sequencing
In the 1991 gathering, there were twenty discrete segments. Their sequencing (and
the time of each in minutes) was as follows:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
entry of the Honor Guard (five minutes before the start of the ritual)
entry of the president of the state (2:00)
lowering the state flag to half-mast (2:30)
lighting the central memorial beacon by the president (3:00)
song by choir (2:00)
speech by the chairman of the Yad Vashem directorate (2:00)
song by choir (2:00)
speech by the director of Yad Vashem (2:00)
song by cantor, “God, God, why did you forsake us?” accompanied by the
choir (3:00)
speech by the representative of partisans’ organizations (3:00)
speech by the prime minister (5:00)
reading of poem by an announcer (2:30)
song by choir (2:00)
lighting the six beacons (8:00, including the introductions of the announcer
and accompanying music)
reading by an announcer of a text of the “live witnessing” (edut haia) of the
massacre of Jews in the area of Pinsk, during World War II (3:00)
readings of psalms by the Sephardic chief rabbi of the state (2:00)
recitation of Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer for the dead (2:00)
song by cantor, Yizkor, the prayer of remembrance (6:00)
songs by choir (2:00)
singing of the national anthem, Ha-Tikvah (The Hope) (2:00)9
The total time formally allocated to the ritual is one hour and thirty seconds.
Like the tableau placed through space along the Wall, the sequence of acts through
time is categorical, segmentary, and modular. Parts or segments can be inserted or
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
| 141
extracted with ease. The logic of connectivity among these modules and the sense of
rightness of their performance apparently must be external to the ritual itself. That is,
the ritual has no internal dynamics that are organic to it. Most segments have been
rehearsed, and it is through this that participants learn about their roles in connection to other segments; but they have no mandate, say, for ad hoc improvisation if
something should go wrong with the organization of time/space in performance. The
bureaucratic logic and aesthetics of performance seems to require that, in their entirety, segments be externally administered by a director or organizer—in a functional
sense, by bureaucrats who ensure that the performers of every category be in the right
place at the right time for the correct duration.
Especially notable in the tableau of categories of persons and segments of practice
is just how little kinesic movement there is by the performers and when there is motion, just how contained and restricted it is. Some categories of persons are glued in
place throughout the event (Honor Guard, choir, orchestra). Others move very short
distances (from the front row of the audience) to take fixed positions temporarily on
the podia and behind the beacons. The contents of the taxonomic categories take up
their assigned positions and remain rigidly in place. At all times the entire tableau
is overt and visible to the gaze of the audience—and, of course, to the television
camera that need hardly shift position in order to telecast the performance.10 The
performer is the (near) perfect embodiment of his category of membership in the
performance—he neither expands nor restricts this, nor plays with this. Instead he
always contributes to the vision of overall perfected taxonomic ordering. All of this
speaks to a regime of discipline in aesthetic presentation that is beyond the nationalist
and the statist but is closest to the bureaucratic ordering of people and things.
Framing
Despite the segmented character of performance modules, there is some framing of
sequence at the beginning and the end of the ritual. Yet this framing, too, is highly
categorical and modular. As the representation of the protective might of the state,
the IDF Honor Guard takes up position first, to await the entry of the president and
prime minister, the ranking citizens of the state. Within the ritual, the Honor Guard,
the military, anticipates the arrival of the civil state. The state flag is lowered to halfmast, signifying the entry of state and citizenry into mourning. The central memorial
beacon is lit, signifying the entry of the people into remembrance. Though none of
these symbolic acts are essential to such an event, their sequencing demonstrates the
logic of the state’s protective encompassment of the performance.
Thus, the people do not enter into remembrance until the state first enters into
mourning. In these terms, the state controls, coordinates, and synchronizes the remembrance of the Holocaust. State control is practiced through the presentation, in
sequence, of a taxonomy of categories of power (the Honor Guard), of authority (the
president and prime minister), and of peoplehood (the central beacon). So, too, the
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142 | moebius anthropology
end of the event is practiced by the collective singing (by performers and audience
members) of the national anthem—the ritual does not end until the state grants it
closure. Though this framing signifies the control and power of the state throughout
the ritual, the logic of categorization and connection in presentation is that of the
bureaucratic. In other words, it is the way in which the bureaucratic mindset organizes the event as it does that enables the ritual to signify the control and power of
the state as it does.
In these aesthetics of presentation the taxonomic categories are displayed and activated, one by one—each is a segment, discrete and quite self-contained, lacking dynamics of design that generate any organic momentum of performance. Just as each
category of controlled and constrained formulaic action is added to the next, so, too,
can the event be deconstructed into these segments without doing much violence to
the event as a whole. Despite the variety of physical postures of the different categories of performers—standing on guard, sitting and holding musical instruments,
standing and lighting a beacon, standing and orating, standing and singing—the
very immobility and functionality of their embodiments, their movements, suggest
that like proper functionaries they could all be seated behind a desk or stood behind
a wicket. This ceremonial montage points to the resonance generated by bureaucratic
logic in modern social orders like that of Israel with the ordering of society beyond
the ritual site, almost without needing any inflection, let alone transformation.
Lighting the Memorial Beacons
The taxonomics of bureaucratic logic and aesthetics organize the lengthiest segment
of the ritual, its dramatic highlight, the lighting of the six memorial beacons. Each
year a Yad Vashem committee chooses one or more themes to commemorate in the
Memorial Gathering, the categories of persons who will represent this theme, and
the actual persons who will embody these categories by igniting the beacons in the
name of the theme. In 1991 the theme chosen was the fiftieth anniversary of the
destruction of the Jewries of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bukovina. In its deliberations, the committee emphasized that the Holocaust lives of those chosen had
to be unique and striking, so as to attract the media. In the 1991 ritual, the beacon
lighters numbered eleven (three beacons were each lit by two persons in unison, and
another by three in unison). They had been military heroes, partisans, survivors of
ghettos and escapees from concentration camps, children during the Holocaust (one,
now a Supreme Court justice, hidden by a “peasant savior of souls”), the mother of
a young child slaughtered at Babi Yar whose own mother had been murdered there,
and a “righteous gentile” who made his home in Israel.11 Each of these represented
a particular segment of the destroyed Jewries of the themes, and each segment was
declared as such by the announcers.
Despite the qualifications of heroism and suffering of the beacon lighters, and despite the death and pain they commemorated, this was enunciated in the announcers’
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
| 143
texts as the enumeration of a precise anatomy of horror and as a trait list of its attributes and locations.12 Thus, the first beacon lighter was introduced by the following
text (given here in part):
A full fifty years after the extermination of the Jews in the Soviet territories
conquered by the Nazis, in memory of the Jews of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Byelorussia who were murdered . . . the murder of Ponar—near
Vilna, the nine in Kovno, Rumbala—near Riga, Maly Trostinets—near
Minsk, and many other places, ascending first to light the beacon is a
new immigrant from the Soviet Union who was in a prisoner camp in the
Minsk Ghetto, escaped and joined the partisans in the forests, one of the
survivors of the concentration camp, Skarzysko.
This trait listing, together with those of other texts, seems to practice the premise
that an enumeration of details at the microlevel of Nazi actions will produce a comprehensive vision of the multitude of catastrophes that today we call the Holocaust.
(In this regard, see the critical comment by Jay [1992b: 103].) This kind of listing
by categories that are cross-indexed, as it were, with other categories, is precisely
one of the attitudes of bureaucratic logic, enabled by a bureaucratic aesthetic, which
equates the addition and enumeration of mass with a holistic totality. This logic and
its aesthetic of every detail in its proper place are commonplace in the organization
of our lifeworlds.
Conclusion
If events like the Memorial Gathering are organized through bureaucratic logic and
the aesthetics of practice, then this makes a difference in the kinds of messages that
the event can communicate. From the perspectives of the state, the organizers, and
the audience, the Memorial Gathering is a moral project of the state, carried out
in the name of the Jewish people. Given that the state is a Jewish one, the moral
duty of its representatives is to remember the evils of the past—evils that fragmented
and threatened the Jewish people—and to protect these fragments, as a whole, from
threats in the present. This whole is, of course, more than the sum of its values. Crucial to this moral project is the practice of remembering the past. Here, remembering
is cast as an itemization, an accounting of the past, occurrence by occurrence, point
by point—perhaps an aesthetic double-entry bookkeeping of remembrance. Nonetheless, holism in turn requires ways of communicating its totalistic and comprehensive visions, ones that encompass the discrete itemizations of remembering.
I have argued throughout this chapter (and elsewhere) that bureaucratic logic is
pervasive in the modern world and that it dominates what I call events of presentation. The practice of bureaucratic logic is enabled by the bureaucratic aesthetics of
lineal organization, arithmetic modularity, exclusivist classification, and exactitude in
itemization; and, for that matter, the invention of all these modalities. Thus, these
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144 | moebius anthropology
logical and aesthetic qualities of taxonomization dominate public events that are organized in ways similar to the Memorial Gathering. In the case of the gathering, the
power of taxonomizing is brought home more clearly by the ways in which the military envelops the event through its own taxonomies. But the premises of taxonomy
used by the military are no different from those used to organize the gathering, and,
for that matter, both are quite similar to ones that are powerful, if more camouflaged,
in the practice of daily life in social orders with prominent bureaucratic infrastructures. To no small degree, in keeping with taxonomic logic and aesthetics, the relationships between the practices of the ritual and the practices of daily life are fractal.
The elements used in the gathering are without a doubt highly symbolic—nevertheless, the practice of this kind of event depends on connections within and among
taxonomies rather than on relationships that are organic, dynamic, and transforming. The bureaucratic message is made explicit in the visible tableau of the gathering. This message stresses the practice of exclusivist classification, fragmentation, and
itemization, at the expense of the holism of the vision of remembrance. The state’s
holistic, moral project is shaped, modified, and fragmented by its passage through the
organizing media of bureaucratic logic and aesthetics. The vision and feeling of the
Holocaust stand rigidly at attention, open to minute inspection, petrified in place.
The vision shifts toward the totalitarian in its presentation.
Ironically, bureaucratic logic and aesthetics contribute to separating the Jewish
Holocaust from all other atrocities and to classifying it as the unique, historical occurrence of the planned extermination of an entire people—a category with a single
member (indeed, a category that paradoxically is a member of itself and is therefore
self-sealing and quite resistant to surrendering its self-referentiality, which augments
its power exponentially). This exclusivist patterning, with all its inherent dangers
(see, for example, Ophir 1987) resonates with the taxonomic treatment of profound
tragedy that characterizes the Memorial Gathering. In this instance, bureaucratic
logic and aesthetics support (indeed, nourish) the exclusivist state, nationalism, and
remembrance that recursively gather themselves within themselves, an in-gathering
that separates the Holocaust from too many other instances of human catastrophe.
In Israel, many persons both identify with and feel alienated from these state
rituals. Part of our identification (even as this may repel us) is because we ourselves
often are both the practitioners and the targets of bureaucratic logic and aesthetics in
everyday life. The kinds of classification used, and the practice of their enabling, are
common-sensically obvious to us in the way we live much of our lives. We are not
reflexive about our practice of this logic nor about its aesthetic enablement—about
our practice of practice. Another reason for our lack of reflexivity is the way in which
scholars, in particular, philosophers and art historians, have framed off, classified, and
separated aesthetics from its role in the practice of everyday life. It is this separation
of aesthetics as a realm apart, one dominated by values of beauty and truth, by genres
of art, literature, music, and so forth, that has focused scholarly and elitist reflexivity
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bureaucratic logic, bureaucratic aesthetics
| 145
almost exclusively on aesthetics per se, as a discrete domain of culture. In so doing,
the intimate enabling of virtually all practice that aesthetics does, is lost.
The final point I will make points to intimations of lawfulness in the use of bureaucratic logic and aesthetics. One scholar, Michael King, has argued that in Western legal systems, law depends for its ontology on a binary code of lawful/unlawful,
legal/illegal, and the like. To carry this a step further, law is a prime way of classifying
everyday acts within exclusivist taxonomies, with great authority, and with powerful
social and personal consequences. Legal systems operate to generate decisions that
clarify conditions of vagueness, overlapping rights, allocations of responsibility, and
so forth; and legal systems underwrite these decisions with lineal, ontological sanctification. King (1993: 223) suggests further that “any act or utterance that codes social
acts according to this binary code of lawful/unlawful may be regarded as part of the
legal system.” In other words, this logic of the legal system is much more embracing
and totalizing than the formal system as such. Yet even more than this, the binary
meets the criteria of exclusivist taxonomic classification. Therefore, this kind of taxonomic classification, which has a much broader range than the binary as such, can
be substituted for the latter. Now, I have argued that the operation of such exclusivist
logic points to the presence of bureaucratic logic. In my terms, then, the operation of
bureaucratic logic in Western societies continually implicates the presence of lawfulness. Indeed, bureaucratic logic is itself authorized ontologically to a degree by a sense
or feeling of lawfulness in producing and practicing the kind of lineal, taxonomic
classification that it does. There is then an aesthetics, itself imbued with a sense of
lawfulness, indeed, of rightness, that enables the practice of bureaucratic logic in
everyday life. This is one modern version of aesthetics that enables practice—and
one, I think, that helps to explain why the bureaucratic logic of classification used in
the Memorial Gathering and in everyday life works on so many of us aesthetically.
However, it might also explain why we may be so ambivalent to the practice of such
classification, yet without knowing exactly and precisely why.
Notes
First published in 2005 as “Bureaucratic Logic, Bureaucratic Aesthetics: The Opening Event of Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day in Israel,” in Aesthetics in Performance: Formations of
Symbolic Construction and Experience, ed. Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer, 196–215. New York:
Berghahn Books. Reprinted with permission.
1. In other words, it is done like this because it is done like this—this is how it is felt to be done
when one does it.
2. For my purposes here the difference between mundane practice and performance is that the
latter is that of practice writ large, consciously and self-reflexively. Therefore, mundane practice
slips in and out of performance, apart from the conscious shift into ritual, in which performance becomes the mundane.
3. This is so despite claims for the sacralizing qualities of all manners of ritual, including, for
example, “secular ritual” (Moore and Myerhoff 1977). Not a few of the studies in that volume,
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146 | moebius anthropology
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
with their focus on “ritual,” would have benefited from being analyzed in terms of bureaucratic
logic.
The ethos of bureaucratic framing conditions all statist rituals in Israel. For an example of the
collision between bureaucratic logic and popular sentiment, see the discussion of the funeral of
the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin, in Bilu and Levy (1993).
In later years, a second state flag has been placed atop the Wall, above the bas-relief, as a symbol
of the statist, national encompassment and transcendence of the sorrow symbolized by the
suffering Jews, beneath.
In later years, a large video screen has been hung on the Wall, above the Honor Guard, and
is used for audiovisual contextualizations, for example, to personalize the introductions of
the beacon lighters through autobiographical narratives of these persons, which were taped
beforehand.
The Hebrew term for Jewish immigration to Israel is aliyah, literally, ascent.
Binyamin Arnon, interviewed at Yad Vashem by Noemi Lerner, 24 July 1991.
By 1995, some of the speeches by functionaries had been taken out of the program.
One may argue that the stronger sense of movement, of dynamics—archetypal, historicist—is
located in the poetics of rhetoric, song, and prayer, which I do not discuss here. Nonetheless,
the speeches are stilted; the songs, often old favorites; and the psalms and prayers, generic insertions into ritual.
The honor of “righteous gentile” is bestowed by Yad Vashem (in the name of the state) on nonJews who endangered their own lives by rescuing Jews during World War II.
In this respect, the form of these introductions resembled the Yizkor prayer of remembrance
that can be expanded to include a limitless listing of attributes to be remembered.
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Part III
Cosmological
Trajectories
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Chapter 6
Passages to Play
Paradox and Process
Author’s Note
I hadn’t given any attention to play and the playful prior to 1969. Unsurprisingly,
my interest in play was triggered by surprise. In 1969 I was observing interaction
among aged workers in workshops in Jerusalem. This eventually turned into the
study of encounters discussed in the Epilogue to this volume. While I was there
something extraordinary, at least for me, occurred in one of the workshops which
employed both women and men. Without prologue or comment the men stealthily
began to hang the untwisted metal from a hangar onto the backs of the trousers of
one another. When the “butt” discovered his “tail” the other men in the shop would
call out loudly, “Donkey! Donkey!,” accompanied by the laughter of both men and
women. This developed into turn-taking among the men, and only among the men.
This activity went on throughout working hours, day after day for about a month. I
emphasize that all of this was done without any comments or discussions about who
had the right to participate, about how to behave on the parts of men and women,
about what the rules were, and so forth. This activity ended as it had begun—silently,
without comment—and was not resurrected while I was there. I realized during the
period of this activity that I myself could not comment or ask questions about it since
it moved almost as if it didn’t exist, and I feared drawing attention to this fragility.
Yet, when I did so after its disappearance no one remembered any of the details, as if
it had been utterly inconsequential, indeed had not existed. And, had I not seen it in
practice, it indeed would not have existed anywhere. My abductive understanding of
this organized activity is available in Chapter Four of Models and Mirrors, and I won’t
go into it here. Suffice to say that during that month I had encountered spontaneous
play that emerged into a game; and, moreover, that this was fraught with significance
for any understanding of local life within the shop. An alternative reality that again
and again slipped through the social crevices of the shop and that momentarily overturned the dominant daily reality of the workplace.
The dynamic, flexible, and reflexive qualities of play have been on my horizons
ever since I read Gregory Bateson’s brilliant essays on play, its framing, and the paraThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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152 | moebius anthropology
doxical passage between serious reality and that of play (“The Message, ‘This Is Play,’”
and “A Theory of Play and Fantasy”). Bateson’s ideas were critical in developing my
thoughts. His thinking enabled me to bring the framing of play into conjunction
with those of ritual, bureaucracy, and charisma (Handelman 1977, 1981). In 1991 I
gave the Distinguished Lecture of The Anthropological Association for the Study of
Play (TAASP, which later became TASP, The Association for the Study of Play). Here
I brought together thinking on play and cosmology, recognizing that there are cosmoses that embed play at a high level of abstraction. In these cosmos qualities of play
are integral to the very organization of cosmos. Here play is a top-down idea. And
here the qualities of play lend fluid dynamism to the organization of cosmos, resonating throughout its entirety. For a closer look at this thesis, see Handelman and Shulman’s God Inside Out: Siva’s Game of Dice (1997). By contrast, in cosmoses in which
play is not embedded at a high level of organization its qualities tend to erupt from
below, bottom-up. Then play is perceived as momentary, unserious, ephemeral, yet
subversive. The lecture was published in 1992 in the TAASP journal, Play and Culture. The journal died after that year, though I take no responsibility for its demise.
R
If you’re going to study play you’ve got to carry in the forefront of your
mind what sort of logical type this class is. What is the level of classification,
what does it enclose, what are the messages that label it, if any, and so on?
—Gregory Bateson, “Play and Paradigm”
The concept of cosmos refers to the order of a cultural universe in its broadest, most
comprehensive sense (Long 1987). Whether ideas of play can be related substantially to conceptions of cosmos is one major test of the power of play, of its forceful
influence on the organization of the human imagination that we call culture. Are
there grounds to support the view that ideas of play may influence the ways traditional cosmologies are put together, the ways they work? If so, what does this say
about the structuring of cosmologies in which ideas of play have little or no role?
The implications of these questions are far reaching, and there is more than a little
hubris in raising them in such an unadorned fashion, without numerous scholarly
qualifications and emendations. Nonetheless, I believe that such questions go to the
heart of play in the human universe, whether play is our invention or whether it is
a biological disposition. Therefore, these questions should be addressed even though
our efforts, indeed my efforts, fumble, stumble, and trip over only a tiny outcrop of
these cosmic puzzles.
I haven’t any clear-cut answers. The route I would like to take you through is circuitous and, at the outset, seems to have little direct relevance to the questions posed.
But, as scholars of play, I hope you agree that the shortest distance is often roundabout.
The route I’ve planned goes through a passage to a way station. This passage is
from what may be called, rather awkwardly, not-play (or non-play), to play. My
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premise is that play, and ideas that can be understood to resonate with play, are given
some autonomous recognition in virtually all cultures; therefore, cultures make some
ideational distinction between not-play and play. Given that these are distinct ideational domains, they are related by the passage from one to the other. So, too, this
passage occurs through what may be called, heuristically, a boundary or a frame—the
nexus where messages of not-play and play interact. This meeting place is strange, for
it is constituted from paradox. Yet paradox contains qualities that help us to understand the power of play in human cosmology.
The way station I mentioned is inside the boundary itself, the boundary in between not-play and play, the boundary composed of paradox. By peering within this
boundary, we may find qualities of play that help to explain its effect on boundaries
and its potential influence on the organization of cosmos.
On the basis of these arguments, I will suggest the following relationship between
play and cosmos and will reformulate this further on. If qualities of play found within
the boundary between not-play and play are present in a particular cosmos, then
where these qualities of play are located in that cosmic scheme will influence the ways
that cosmos is conceived to exist and to operate. To put this more straightforwardly,
a cosmic scheme that is influenced by premises of play seems to operate quite differently from one that is less so.
I will apply this approach in a rudimentary manner by taking up a few aspects of
Hindu cosmology, within which an idea of play seems to be embedded at a high level
of abstraction. In this respect, mythic and religious cosmologies are more amenable
to these preliminary formulations because metaphysical conceptions are often made
more forthright. In closing, I will touch on questions of comparison by distinguishing between what I call top-down play and bottom-up play.
Passages to Play: Extending Bateson’s Problem of Play as Paradox
In his seminal essay “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” first published in 1955, Bateson
(1972) made three basic points. First, the invocation of play creates a boundary in between not-play and play. Second, this boundary is paradoxical. Third, this same invocation of play also overcomes the paradox it creates, enabling passage into the reality
of play. For my purposes, it is important to understand how his analysis proceeded.
Bateson problematized the relationship of not-play to play by using Whitehead and
Russell’s (1927) theory of logical types. This enabled Bateson to posit play as an abstraction different from that of not-play. The logic of play, he seemed to argue, frames
it differently from that of not-play.
Let me emphasize at the outset that Bateson’s problem was epistemological—that
is, his concern was the character of the relationship of not-play to play, as a puzzle
in adaptive communication. In his view, this relationship privileged neither not-play
nor play. Neither was inferior to the other. Not-play and play were organized according to premises that were different. But more than this, their respective premises radThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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154 | moebius anthropology
ically contradicted one another to create what Hofstadter (1980) has called a tangled
hierarchy. At issue was not the contents of these domains (e.g., whether one was real
and serious and the other, illusory and pretend). Instead, the problem of their difference was located in the very nexus of their interaction, in the logic of the frame (in
the logic of what I call the boundary) in between not-play and play.
Bateson recognized that this kind of frame has a peculiar, paradoxical character.
He wrote, “it is our hypothesis that the message ‘This is play’ establishes a paradoxical
frame comparable to Epimenides’s paradox” (Bateson 1972: 184). As I noted, this
invocation or metamessage of play—which Bateson called “This is play”—does three
things simultaneously: it creates the frame; it creates the paradox of the frame; and it
overrides this paradox, opening the way into play. The paradox referred to is of the
self-referential variety. So, Epimenides, the Cretan, stated that all Cretans were liars.
A more compact version of this kind of paradox would simply say “This statement
is false.” If the statement is true, then it is false; but if the statement is false, then it
falsifies itself. Playfully, we could replace the period that ends this sentence with the
sign for infinity, at least for a time.
Among the examples that Bateson used to illustrate this paradox is one closer
in substance to the issue of play—the example of the bite and the playful nip. The
playful nip looks like a bite, but it signifies something quite different. It is a bite, and
it is not a bite, at one and the same time. It is a different bite, perhaps an imaginary
bite, a bite that does not exist, yet does, for it is consequential as a bite that wasn’t
(Handelman 1990: 69). Or, one may say that the playful nip is a bite on its way to
becoming what it isn’t. Simultaneously, the playful nip is not only a bite and a nonbite, not only one thing and another, but also a bite in process, in transformation to
something else. Something looks like what it isn’t (Napier 1986: 1), and indeed it is
that. This kind of formulation has significant implications for the boundary between
not-play and play, and I will get to this shortly.
In his 1955 essay, Bateson addressed the logic of self-referential paradox as structure and process (and therefore also as temporal). Bateson depicted a self-referential
paradox in terms of a rectangular frame within which was written, “All statements
within this frame are untrue,” followed by two alternatives within the rectangle, “I
love you” and “I hate you.” This rectangular frame may be misleading if one thinks
that it models a paradoxical reality that one enters into, on the other side of the
boundary. Quite the contrary, this depiction models the interior logic of the frame
itself. In other words, it models the boundary, or the threshold between realities.
Likewise, the depiction models the paradoxical interior of the boundary in between
not-play and play.1 Let me emphasize that the realities of play are not necessarily
paradoxical in relation to themselves, but play is paradoxical in relation to not-play.
Bateson barely addressed the interior features of play worlds themselves—of how
these realities are put together and experienced, subjects that have been the focus
of so much thought and research. However, he did demonstrate imaginatively and
incisively the problematic character of the paradoxical passage from not-play to play.
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Nevertheless, he speedily disregarded the significance of this paradoxical passage for
an epistemology of play by invoking the metamessage “This is play.” This metamessage enables us, with speed and ease, to override the paradox of passage from one
kind of abstraction, one kind of reality, to another, on a routine and mundane basis,
without paying heed to the magnitude of our accomplishment.
This is where Bateson stopped. Having found the way out of paradox, Bateson
didn’t look into paradox, yet there he would have found hints of how play works and
what play can do. Instead, with the solution for the passage to play in hand, Bateson
pursued no further that which paradox, and paradox as boundary, intimate about
play and about the effects of play on boundaries. Nonetheless, my reading of Bateson
is of an implicit invitation to peer into the paradoxical composition of this kind of
boundary in order to consider the relevance of paradox for play. I would like to turn
to this now.
Peering into Boundaries
Most boundaries with which we are familiar in daily life either are traversed routinely
or close off special domains of experience. Both are commonly marked by thresholds,
whether these are thresholds of space (physical and visible), of time (counted and
felt), or of sociality (known and normative). For my purposes, the presence of all such
boundaries can be summarized as shifts in social definition, from some segment of
continuity to its discontinuity, where this discontinuity is the location of boundary.
Here the sides of the boundary are adjacent to and contiguous with one another.
Regardless of how forceful these boundaries are, whether because of their pervasiveness or because of the hegemonies of power they signify, there is nothing inherently
problematic about them. They separate alternatives in an either/or fashion. These
boundaries are constructs that retain their shape through either consensus or imposition. They are always subject to redefinition and change. These boundaries are not
relevant to the themes pursued here.
Boundaries that are made out of self-referential paradox are quite distinct and
are especially significant for my purposes. More generally, such boundaries probably
symbolize locations of potential crossing between different realities. In this regard,
the passage to play is analogous to the classic problem of paradoxical movement
between contrasting levels or domains of cosmos, from one reality to another, movement that Eliade (1964: 483–86) called paradoxical passage (e.g., the necessity to
go where night and day meet, to find a gate in a blank wall, or to pass between two
boulders that constantly clash together). In other words, it is to simultaneously do
one thing and its contrary, to do the impossible.
Such points of passage are made out of paradox. The interior of the boundary in
between not-play and play is constituted as a severely restricted and highly redundant
world, one that is formed through self-reference, contradiction, and infinite regress
and that encloses itself within itself (Hughes and Brecht 1984: 1). This tiny world of
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156 | moebius anthropology
paradox is itself a simulation of the passage between realities. In its most rudimentary
form, this miniscule world consists of two alternatives (I love you / I hate you; this
is not-play / this is play; and so on). These alternatives are governed by self-contradiction such that each leads to and negates the other, which leads to and negates the
other, and so forth. According to Bateson (1980: 130), “Norbert Weiner used to
point out that if you present the Epimenides paradox to a computer, the answer will
come out yes . . . no . . . yes . . . no . . . until the computer runs out of ink or energy.”
Paradox is generated because each alternative exists on the same level of abstraction, where each is given the same value as the other and is without the capacity to
dominate or to cancel the other. The paradox seems like an impassable trap. On the
other hand, the very conjunction and interaction of these contradictory alternatives
makes this kind of paradox a nexus of potential crossing between levels of abstraction
or between alternative realities.
In her fascinating book, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox, Colie (1966) pointed to several premises of self-referential paradox that are especially relevant to the interior of the paradoxical boundary of neither/nor. She noted,
first, the closed structure of this sort of paradox. “The perfect self-contradiction,” she
wrote, “is a perfect equivocation” (Colie 1966: 6). She continued, “It tells the truth
and it doesn’t . . . its negative and positive meanings are so balanced that one meaning
can never outweigh the other, though weighed to eternity.” Indeed, such paradox has
no formal ending (ibid.: 21).
Not only is this sort of paradox totalistic, but inside itself it breaks down and resynthesizes the contradictions that are the basis for its very existence. Thus, not only
does such paradox deal with itself both as form and as content, as subject and object,
but it also collapses these distinctions. Subject turns into object, object into subject.
So too, the means of paradox are always its ends as it turns endlessly in and upon itself (ibid.: 518). Phrased otherwise, this kind of paradox transforms itself continually
and continuously; its structure is also its process, its process its very structure. The
stability of paradox is change. The internal collapse of categories and their resynthesis
are evidence for Colie that paradox ultimately insists upon a unity of being. Paradox,
she commented, folds “all its parts into one unbroken [whole] . . . paradox is selfregarding, self-contained, and self-confirming; it attempts to give the appearance of
ontological wholeness” (ibid.: 518). Given its powerful momentum toward wholeness and totality, toward seamlessness and self-separation, this kind of paradox creates
a powerful demarcation, a forceful boundary.
Yet inside this special boundary, there is another aspect of importance. Colie
(1966: 7) wrote that the self-referential paradox is “profoundly self-critical,” for
within its narrow strictures it is continually calling itself into question, making itself
problematic. She commented that it operates at the “limits of discourse” (ibid.: 10),
calling into question those categories that are thought out in order to express human
thought. Playing on the Latin term for mirror, speculum, she added that the selfreferential paradox is “literally, speculative, its meanings infinitely mirrored, infinitely
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passages to play
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reflected, in each other” (ibid.: 6). Infinite regress, but it is also an imaginative search
for the parameters of the in-between condition of boundariness—that is, of being
in-between. Reflecting further, Colie insisted that, “like a tight spring, the implications of any particular paradox impel that paradox beyond its own limitation to defy
its own categories” (ibid.: 11). Self-limited, it denies limitation. Here she intimated
that just as paradox bounds itself off and closes itself in, so, too, does it have the
potential to open itself, to become a nexus of passage, of crossing through the impassable. Paradox may function as a gateway (Yusa 1987: 191).
These premises of self-referential paradox compose the boundary between notplay and play. In turn, the paradox generates qualities that are of direct relevance to
ideas of play and to how play can act on other boundaries.
Thus, paradox is not only full of movement but is constituted wholly and only
through movement. Once set into operation, it seems to go on forever, nearing a
metaphor of perpetual motion. It is a fiercely dynamic medium, one that is highly
processual (cf. Slaate 1968). Its being is always a becoming, to paraphrase Gadamer
(1988: 110), and it is conducive to spherical thinking rather than to lineal thought
(Yusa 1987: 194). Just as it contains and collapses distinctions—between ends and
means, structure and function—so it actualizes the perfect praxis of idea and action.2
There seems to be no such phenomenon as a static paradox, or one that is stable
without being continually unstable. Indeed, the paradox of self-reference is highly
systemic in its self-reproduction through self-transformation.
The only way out of this sort of paradox (aside from waiting for entropy to degenerate the structure) is to make a choice. The passage through paradox is a matter
of agency. In this, the self-criticism of paradox is significant because it spells out
alternatives even as it attributes equal values to these alternatives. Self-doubt evokes
a reflexive stance that may break the dynamic deadlock of the paradoxical boundary.
Choice requires a hierarchy of value, the preference of one alternative to others.
This preference is an index of change in value, one that breaks the dynamic deadlock. Passage through this kind of boundary is always a discourse on change in values. Phrased differently, there is no movement between realities without a change in
values. The capacity to change values is a prerequisite of moving between levels of
abstraction, whether this is seemingly as simple as an act of imagination, as in the case
of play, or as complex as training in self-transcendence. The passage through paradox
demands this capacity. This is the significance of Bateson’s metamessage, “This is
play.” It is a message of passage through paradox because it makes a choice—it puts
the value of play above that of not-play. One cannot play without changing values,
without changing the value of reality, without changing realities.
These qualities of paradox have strong affinities to qualities of play. The paradoxical boundary, the passage from not-play to play through neither/nor, cryptically
prefigures many of the qualities of play realities. Especially important is the powerful
thrust of processuality. The passage to play makes a structural difference, but one that
is related intimately to processuality. Processuality speaks to the flexibility and malleThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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158 | moebius anthropology
ability, the fluidity and changeability, that pervade so many contexts of play.3 At the
same time, the paradoxical passage from not-play to play creates self-transformation
through two degrees of abstraction. One is the level of the paradox itself, the level of
neither/nor, where not-play and play interact, lead to, and turn into the other. The
second is the movement between levels or realities, through the metamessage that
enables choice, and so enables exit from the paradox and entry into play.
Let me reformulate the relationship between play and cosmos that I put forward
at the beginning of this lecture. Every invocation of play demonstrates the immediate
presence of the impassable yet fluid boundary that is passed through. Every invocation of play demonstrates the immediate presence of premises of self-transformation.
Every invocation of play puts things in motion. Every invocation of play demonstrates the immediate presence of qualities that enable passage through this boundary—and once more I especially emphasize qualities of movement and change.4
This formulation suggests the following kind of correspondence: the higher, the
more abstract, the level of cosmos at which these qualities of play are embedded and
legitimated, the greater the influence of these qualities on the organization of that
cosmos. Therefore, where the invocation of play is embedded in cosmos at a high
level of abstraction, its fluid, transformational qualities reappear also at lower levels
of abstraction, permeating their influence there. The boundaries throughout such a
cosmos are more malleable, and the entire cosmos may approximate more closely a
system of self-transformation.
Play and Self-Transforming Cosmology: Lila and Maya
I return now to the question of relationships between play and cosmos. I’d like to
address (with great brevity) two ideas that have been prominent in Indian cosmologies. One is called lila,5 and the other, maya.6 Like their more recent counterparts, the
ancient cosmologies within which these ideas were invented and flourished made the
continuing existence of cosmos contingent on perpetual change. Cosmos continually
transformed itself continuously, reproducing itself as phenomenal form.7
In the ancient Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda, the cosmic Self (Brahman) is the undifferentiated, unreflective unity that “breathes or pulsates by itself, though without
breath” (Miller 1985: 53). At some moment it began the directional process of differentiating itself, thereby creating the level of gods, who in turn gave shape to human
agency. One may argue that a paradox of self-reference is embedded in that initial
moment of differentiation when the cosmic Self became to itself simultaneously one
thing and another, Self and Other. I will return to this shortly.
Following the first movement of the cosmic Self, evolution continued ceaselessly
through extremely lengthy durations. Yet all evolution was entropic. Eventually the
process would reverse itself, destroying the phenomenal cosmos and returning to
the sentient but undifferentiated and unreflective cosmic Self, then to begin another
cosmic cycle.
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The order of this world was never at rest, never static—it was one of an ongoing
“becoming.” The fundamental rhythms of these cosmic processes were analogous
to those of expansion and contraction, construction and destruction, or, in the language of the Rig Veda, weave forth, weave back (Miller 1985: 58). Expansion and
construction connote descent and devolution through the creation of a hierarchy
of increasingly material levels of phenomenal reality. Contraction and destruction
refer to contrary processes that ascend to a condition of cosmic holism, one without
difference. In this cosmos, “everything is in constant motion . . . but this constancy
of movement is itself the stability of cosmic order” (ibid.: 289).
Ideas of play were given cosmic significance, especially in relation to the puzzle of
why the cosmic Self, utterly without desire or need, bothered to create the phenomenal cosmos. The concept of lila answered this. Lila is a Sanskrit noun that means play
or sport—in the sense of diversion, amusement, fun. It also connotes effortless, rapid
movement (Huizinga 1970: 51). The highly influential text, the Vedanta Sutra of the
third century CE, states that the creative activity of the Divine is mere lila, “such as
we see in ordinary life” (Thibault 1962, pt. 1, bk. 2, sect. 1, verse 33). The great religious teacher, Shankara (ninth century CE), commented on this passage:
The process of inhalation and exhalation is going on without reference
to any extraneous purpose, merely following the law of its own nature.
Analogously, the activity of the Lord also may be supposed to be mere
sport, proceeding from his own nature, without reference to any purpose.
(Thibault 1962: 356–57)
Lila is the motive that is without motive: spontaneous action wholly for its own sake
(cf. O’Flaherty 1984: 230). The Divine makes and regulates the cosmos out of neither need nor necessity, “but by a free and joyous creativity that is integral to his own
nature. He acts in a state of rapt absorption comparable to that of an artist possessed
by his creative vision” (Hein 1987: 550). In lila, in play, the Divine takes spontaneous
delight in his own self-transformation and, therefore, in that of the cosmos with
which he is homologous (Zimmer 1984: 24). By providing the motive, as it were, for
the ongoing creation of the phenomenal cosmos, lila embeds the metamessage “This
is play” at a high, abstract level of cosmic organization.
Earlier, I said that a paradox of self-reference was embedded in the initial movement, the first moment of differentiation within the cosmic Self. Through that movement, the cosmic Self became to itself simultaneously one thing and another, self and
other, through lila. Let me emphasize that in this cosmos, this paradox was integral
to the beginning of self-definition, to the very creation of Self through the division
between Self and Other. Moreover, this also was the creation of self-alienation, of
estrangement from Self, of knowing oneself otherwise, because this was inherent in
the creation of Other from Self, Self from Other.8
Therefore, this paradox of self-reference also constituted the very first boundary,
that between Self and Other. This boundary also was created in lila—that is, by the
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160 | moebius anthropology
equivalent of the metamessage “This is play.” Indeed, this is the boundary in between
not-play (the undifferentiated cosmic Self ) and play (the creation of the Other, and
the definition of the Self through the Other). Likewise, lila signified the first passage
through this boundary, just as this passage signified the creation of cosmos. In this
cosmology, lila (play) is implicated in many rudiments of the creation of being and
cosmos—of Self and Other, of the boundary in between them, and of self-alienation.
In the terms I have outlined, the metamessage “This is play” imputes to the comprehensive organization of this cosmos all of the qualities of play that are embedded
in the paradoxical passage from not-play to play. These are the qualities of malleability and fluidity, movement and change. As I noted, in the cosmology under discussion, the paradoxical passage from not-play to play is embedded in the very first
movement of the cosmic Self as it began the creation of the phenomenal cosmos.
Movement, one may say, is the mysterious choice of the cosmic Self. It is the passage
from inaction to action, from immobility to mobility. Processuality is encoded in this
paradoxical passage, and cosmic action and movement are identified with play. These
qualities of play are attached to all differences among levels, to all boundaries, putting
them in play in the cosmic system.
In all Indian cosmologies, cosmic process is cosmic regulation. Divine play (lila)
was identified not only with creation but also with its ongoing processuality. For
example, in numerous classical myths, the god Shiva and his wife play dice. The dice
are named after the great eons of time in Hinduism. One scholar (Hiltebeitel 1987:
473) has commented that “The dice play of the divine couple thus represents the
continuity of the universe and their absorption with and within it.”
The character of play (lila) was also embedded within certain great deities of later
Hinduism. Here lila is related to their capacity to manifest themselves within the
human world. Their shifts among levels, and their abrupt appearances among humankind, are the embodied effects of cosmic processes in the world. Their appearances are paradoxical. Prominent among these puzzles is the paradox of the infinite
god who is “embedded in finite form,” at the human level of cosmos (Dimock 1989:
164). This paradox plays on the simultaneous difference yet non-difference between
god and humankind and on their simultaneous separation and non-separation from
one another. Therefore, to humankind, deity is at one and the same time transcendent and immanent, unknowable and knowable (bheda/abheda) (Dimock 1989: 162;
Handelman 1987a).
For example, the god Krishna is a human form (avatara) of the god Vishnu.
Krishna contains the entire cosmos within himself. He is a child, full of spontaneous,
mischievous fun, playing with his own shadow, stealing butter, and eating dirt. He is
a beautiful youth who plays the flute, frolics, and seduces the village girls (see Hawley
1981; Kinsley 1975). He is the misshapen, monstrous, primeval, Jagganath. One
Indologist (Dimock 1989: 165) commented that all of these Krishnas are real, and
all are really Krishna—each form is the infinite, essential godhead (Dimock 1976:
113). These forms are his play, his lilas, because “the full deity [who is the cosmos] is
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in constant motion and therefore of everchanging form” (Dimock 1989: 164; Handelman 1987a).9
As I discussed in relation to the cosmic Self, the motion of lila intimates motive
in the creation of the phenomenal universe. Moreover, the appearance of lila is that
of the Divine, the manifestation of cosmic process on different levels of the universe.
In both instances, this presence of play is also the presence of boundaries. In the first
instance—that of creation—lila points to the making of boundaries, that is, the making of those differences among phenomena that define and constitute the world.10 In
the second—the transformative manifestation of deity—lila demonstrates passage
through boundaries. Embedded at a high level of cosmic organization, the idea of
play influences the fluidity and permeability of boundaries. Barriers to passage are
transmuted more into waystations or signposts; the continual, playful movement
of cosmic forces among levels relates directly to the transformative character of the
entire cosmos.11
A few remarks now on maya, a crucial idea in Indian cosmologies. Although it
has no linguistic link to play, the qualities of maya complement to a high degree
those of lila. Lila and maya have a good deal of functional resonance with one
another in their implications for the organization of cosmos. The authoritative, etymological study of maya (Burrow 1980: 319) stated that the word, by itself, meant
craft or skill, but when the word was used in connection with deities, it connoted
their mysterious “management or manipulation of the forces of nature” and, less
frequently, their acts of creation.12 Metaphors of maya often emphasize its elusive
force for continuing change (Lannoy 1971: 290).13 Later it acquired the meaning of
the power of illusion.
A most enigmatic concept, maya is full of the powers that move the phenomenal
cosmos and keep it in motion, in accordance with its own nature (Miller 1985: 114);
that nature is of “something constantly being made” (O’Flaherty 1984: 119). Maya,
one may say, is the management of motion. So, for example, in the following verse
from the Rig Veda (10.85.18–19a, cited in Johnson 1980: 92), maya refers to the
power that moves sun and moon and, by implication, the cosmos in its entirety:
One after another the two turn, by maya,
Two children playing, going round a sacrifice.
One, regards all creatures,
The other, establishing the seasons, is born again.
Ever anew and anew being born, he comes [repeatedly]
into existence.
Possessed in differing degrees by deities, demons, and humans, maya is the faculty by
which they weave changes into the continually shifting fabric of the phenomenal cosmos. Maya alters the cosmic warp and weft, transmuting its balances and imbalances
such that the entire cosmic system continues to operate according to its own nature.
In this regard, maya is something like the miraculous means for the manipulation of
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162 | moebius anthropology
cosmic order, by which the cosmic system produces the phenomenal effects of and
for its own continuing existence (cf. Shastri 1911: 31).
These sidelong glances into Indian cosmology can do no more than give a rhetorical thrust to the claim that this cosmos is organized according to premises of
self-transformation. Yet this argument is significant for an appreciation of the powers
of play in different cosmologies. In using the phrasing of self-transformation, I want
to stress the following. This cosmos is in a condition of continual and continuous
change. Less obvious, perhaps, is that this change is total. The parts, as it were, of this
cosmic system have no inherent shape, no integral stability, in their own right. Everything, everyone, is in process, undergoing change all the time. At issue, then, is not
the changing of relationships among the stable parts of this system, but instead how
everything is thought to change within itself through its relations to everything else.14
Indian cosmologies totalize change through various theories of creation and destruction, from the smallest to the grandest of scales, and through brief periods and
extremely lengthy temporal cycles. These are cosmologies in which the cosmos totally
absorbs its own changes within itself just as it makes all these changes within its own
totality. From top to bottom, these cosmic hierarchies resonate with those qualities of
play that exemplify fluidity and malleability, movement and change.
Homeostasis is not especially desirable in these cosmologies because this signifies
a balanced state that slows down or ends the processes of transformation, the natural condition of the cosmos. When there are tendencies toward homeostasis in this
kind of cosmos, it responds by teetering and slipping—indeed, by imbalancing itself
toward continuing processuality. This is like saying that the self-transforming system
subverts itself in order to function.
I’d like to illustrate this point with an incident from perhaps the greatest of Indian
epics, the Mahabharata. The power implicated in this story is that of maya, not lila,
but it is maya resonating with the powers of play. The Mahabharata is extremely long
and convoluted, and the incident I have in mind is considered quite minor, as more
of an embellishment to the weighty ideas and strenuous action of the epic. But I
think of this little incident in terms of what chaos theory calls the “butterfly effect”—
the idea, for example, that “a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform
storm systems next month in New York,” to quote Gleick (1988: 8).
The Mahabharata is set in the seam between two great eons of time as the universe
moves into the lowest, the most entropic of these (the Kaliyuga), with its increased
strife and disintegration of the cosmic weave (Hiltebeitel 1987: 473). The stories of
the epic tell of the struggles between two great families of cousins, the five Pandava
brothers and their rivals, the Kauravas. The eldest of the five brothers, Yudhisthira,
is to be consecrated as a great monarch, the height of majesty, the upholder of moral
boundaries, laws, and duties (dharmaraja). He is to be the perfect ruler, the perfect
regulator of the natural order of the kingdom.
He decides to build a magnificent palace, worthy of his title, and commissions
the most eminent of architects to do this.15 The architect is greatly indebted to the
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passages to play
| 163
Pandava brothers. Previously, they had saved his life, and he strives to the utmost
to carry out the commission. Indeed, he succeeds. The palace is perfection and
rivals those of the lesser gods. For that matter, the palace is a model, a microcosm
of the cosmos over which the king rules. There is only one little flaw. The architect
is a demon (asura), and demons, like deities, are heavy with the powers of maya.
Although doing his very best for the Pandavas, the demon nonetheless is true to his
own transformative nature, and so he cannot help but build a few illusions into the
structure of the palace.
The king invites his cousins, the Kauravas to visit the palace. All wonder in admiration at its beauty. But one Kaurava, Duryodhana, keeps tripping over the little
glitches in this perfection. Where there is a pool, he sees solid floor and falls into the
water. Where he sees an entryway, there is only solid surface on which he cracks his
head. At each mishap he is mocked, the butt of laughter. His anger grows; his hatred
festers. He goes home, schemes revenge, and comes up with a plan to invite the
king to play dice. The king loses everything in this game, including himself. The five
brothers are forced into lengthy exile. And entropy, the fragmentation and destruction of social and cosmic order, gathers direction and momentum to end eventually
in utter holocaust and the annihilation of all. A minor error of perspective, seemingly
no more than a prop, contributes to gigantic effects. But whose is the error?
During this era of increasing entropy, the consecration of the perfect ruler is an
act of stability, perhaps a striving for homeostasis. It runs counter to, perhaps even
blocks, the progressive degeneration of the cosmos during this phase of its devolution. The demon builds illusion into the palace, into this microcosm of the kingdom.
For that matter, he builds change into this stable perfection. Things are not as they
seem. Illusion is something that looks like one thing yet is another.
Perhaps it is one thing that not only masks something else but is on its way to
becoming that other thing. Illusion is something in process, undergoing change. Illusion is transforming. The architect, true to his own nature and to that of the cosmos,
builds imbalance within homeostasis and transforms this seeming stability, tipping
it over, setting it into movement that cannot be reversed. Maya, the power of cosmic
management and therefore of change, resonating with the messages of play, of lila,
keeps the cosmos true to itself, perpetually self-transforming.
Play and Cosmos: Top-Down or Bottom-Up?
I have argued that the locations of play, of where play is perceived to be embedded in
the cosmic order of things, effects its influence. This focus on the locations of play in
conceptions of cosmos also opens the way to comparison. Therefore I will conclude
by contrasting, in a most preliminary way, play that is top-down and play that is
bottom-up.
In Indian cosmology, play is a top-down idea. Passages to play and their premises
are embedded at a high level of abstraction and generality. The qualities of play resThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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164 | moebius anthropology
onate and resound throughout the whole. But more than this, qualities of play are
integral to the very operation of the cosmos. In this regard, to be in play, to partake of
the qualities of play, is to be attuned to cosmic processes and their ideals of self-transformation. To be in play is to reproduce time and again the very premises that inform
the existence of this kind of cosmos.16
Cosmologies are related to cultural ideologies. So too, the processual qualities of
play that I have emphasized—fluidity and malleability, movement and change—are
deeply embedded in Indian cultural ideologies under a variety of rubrics. As one
commentator has noted, “The most striking aspect of play activity in India . . . is its
tendency to set in motion, to propel the society forwards by an incessant circulation”
(Lannoy 1971: 195).17
Now, in cosmologies where premises of play are not embedded at a high level, and
are not integral to the organization of cosmos, the phenomena of play seem to erupt
more from the bottom. By bottom-up play I mean that play often is phrased in opposition to, or as a negation of, the order of things. This is the perception of play as
unserious, illusory, and ephemeral, but it is also the perception of play as subversive
and as resisting the order of things.
To my mind, these descriptions apply to the roles of play in, for example, mainstream monotheistic cosmologies. There, relationships between God and humankind
are organized generally in terms of rupture, of absolute difference and hardened
boundaries, and of opposites. Frye (1980: 11) once commented that the encounter
of the God of creation and man as a creative being “seems to be rather like what some
of the great poets of nuclear physics have described as the encounter of matter with
anti-matter: each annihilates the other.” There the premises of play have a role neither
in cosmogony nor in the organization of cosmos. Historically, play has survived and
at times flourished in these contexts—but almost always from the bottom up.
Bottom-up play has deep roots in monotheistic cosmologies. It has dominated
play phenomena even in periods and places, like those of medieval and Renaissance
Europe, that scholars hold out as exemplars of the near-cosmic presence of play. For
example, the medieval grotesque discussed by Gurevich (1988: 176–210), the Feast
of Fools (Gilhus 1990), and carnival and the carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1968; Burke
1978: 178–205; Camporesi 1988: 47, 51, 208–20; Handelman 1990; Le Roy Ladurie 1979) were all perceived to combine qualities of the unserious and the comic, and
of confrontation and resistance. Undoubtedly, these instances qualify as bottom-up
play, and numerous other examples from these and other periods can be adduced.18
In this regard, the subsequent influences of the Reformation, and the emergence
of pronounced contrasts between work and play, were not a radical break with the
Western past but construed its heritages of play in other rhetorics, other forms.19 So
it is in the present: theologians of play at the postmodern edge must know that if they
desire a dominant metaphysic to emerge from Western heritages of play then they
will have to invent it.20 In the historical developments of monotheistic frameworks,
the thrusts of play are strongly from the bottom up.
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passages to play
| 165
The bottom-up entry of play into routine living is often a battle for presence, a
struggle over space and time devoted to other practices, and a confrontation over legitimacy, apart from special occasions and places that indeed are set apart. So play is
often perceived to lurk within the interstices and to spill over from the margins. The
effortless, quicksilver qualities of play are always the same, but the epistemological
status of these qualities differs radically between cosmologies that embed such qualities at the top of cosmic hierarchy and cosmologies that locate such qualities nearer
the bottom.21
Top-down or bottom-up? I am arguing that there are essential qualities of play that
make it different from not-play and that these qualities are encoded within passages
to play and are reproduced continually with each crossing. Nonetheless, I am insisting that those aspects of play closer to cultural sensibilities are contextual. Thus, the
interpretations of play, the meanings of play, the significance of play, and the powers
of play are contextual, reflecting the valuations others and ourselves put on essential
qualities of play. Play seems rarely to be a neutral idea, as Mechling (1989: 308–10)
has reminded us. Top-down or bottom-up? The vision is crude, yet the implications
may be telling. Top-down or bottom-up? Find the passages to play.
Notes
First published in 1992 as “Passages to Play: Paradox and Process,” Play & Culture 5: 1–19. Reprinted with permission.
1. Some scholars make paradoxical boundaries, like that in between not-play and play, unproblematical. Three examples will suffice. Goffman (1974: 40–46) supposedly built on Bateson’s
idea of the play frame in order to analyze the shift from not-play to play. Goffman grotesquely
turned this into a problem of mechanics: strips of play, made to mimic strips of not-play, were
laid like lumber, strip on strip, through simple alterations in social conventions. Buckley (1983:
389) conflated the contents of play realities with the paradox of the play frame and thereby
argued that Bateson considered the realities of play to be paradoxical from within. Goffman and
Buckley reduced play to forms of not-play, making each continuous with the other. Schechner
(1988: 16) argued that the “Batesonian play frame is a rationalist attempt to stabilize and localize playing, to contain it safely within definable borders.” Schechner complemented Buckley by
conflating Bateson’s argument on passages to play with the substance of play within play frames.
All three ignored the logic of passages to play.
2. Here paradox is similar to Csikzentmihalyi’s (1974) notion of flow. On the perfect praxis of idea
and action, see Handelman (1991).
3. Elsewhere (Handelman 1990: 63–72) I point to the affinities between play and uncertainty.
In this regard, uncertainty is a mode of processuality. Thus the presence of play within ritual
signifies changes that the ritual is undergoing, often as part of its structure of intentionality.
4. Relationships between play and boundary are discussed in Handelman (1981; 1990: 236–65).
5. Diacritical marks of transliterated Sanskrit terms are omitted in order to ease printing. So too,
only the first use of each term is italicized.
6. Schechner (1988) addressed lila and maya in his own fashion, in a previous address to The
Association for the Study of Play.
7. Ancient Indo-European cosmologies (including those of ancient India) made change integral
to their operation. Lincoln (1986) discussed two complementary Indo-European visions of
cosmic creation. In one, the body of a primordial being became the raw material from which
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166 | moebius anthropology
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
cosmos was made. In the other, the elements that composed the phenomenal cosmos became
the material from which the body of the first man was made. Lincoln (1986: 33) argued that
each vision was a phase in an encompassing process whereby “whenever the cosmos is created,
the body is destroyed, and . . . whenever the body is created, the cosmos is destroyed.” Cosmos
and body, macrocosm and microcosm were alternative forms of one another, each broken down
and transformed into the other (ibid.: 40). In this kind of cosmos, the only constancy was that
of change. Cosmos operated by transforming itself and even by absorbing itself. It constituted
a cultural milieu within which ideas of play as a cosmic process gained prominence.
Thus, play is integral to the dynamic relationship between integration and fragmentation that
is characteristic of many Indian cosmologies.
Just so, the god Shiva simultaneously is higher and lower, transcendent and immanent in his
play, his lilas (see Dessigane, Pattabiramin, and Filliozat 1960). Thus, “All the time that Shiva
made love with Sati [his wife], it was just his divine play, for he was entirely self-controlled
and without emotional excitement the whole time [. . .] when Sati died, Shiva, the great Yogi,
wept like a lover in agony, but this is just his divine play, to act like a lover, for in fact he is
unconquered and without emotional excitement” (Shiva Purana, quoted in O’Flaherty 1973:
147).
Finding the correct balance in the character of boundaries was an important feature of ancient
Indian cosmogonies. There was an emphasis on fluidity and change in the necessity to make adjustments in the quality of boundaries because their creator was imperfect in his creations. Thus
the parts of the cosmos might be insufficiently differentiated from one another and, therefore,
too similar to one another ( jami). These boundaries were overly soft and shapeless, so the parts
they bounded became joined indiscriminately, losing their distinctiveness and producing cosmic chaos. Or, the parts might be excessively differentiated from one another, thereby lacking
all connectivity, and therefore separated and dispersed, without any cohesion ( prthak). These
boundaries were overly rigid, preventing all interaction between parts and producing cosmic
chaos. See Smith (1989: 50–69) for an extensive exposition of these ideas.
Just as deities descend through levels and boundaries of cosmos, transforming their shapes and
their relevance to cosmic process, so in theory can humans transform themselves into lesser
deities in their own right (cf. Parry 1985).
The Sanskrit term maya derives from the same Indo-European root as the Greek term metis
(Burrow 1980). These terms have much resonance. Metis refers to cunning intelligence. In
versions of cosmology, Metis was a primordial female deity. Among the connotations of metis
are fast or incessant movement, swiftness, mobility, shimmering sheen, the power of metamorphosis, and multiplicity. Gods and humans endowed with metis were able to dominate (perhaps
manage?) uncertain, fluid, rapidly changing situations (see Detienne and Vernant 1978: 5–23).
In varieties of Hinduism (for example, Shaivism), maya is understood as female.
More so than lila, maya enables the existence of the paradoxical relationships between the
transcendent and the immanent deity, who is simultaneously one thing and another. Thus, a
Sanskrit text (Brhadaranyaka Upanisad, 2.1.20) metaphorizes creation as the spider who weaves
the world out of and around itself. Shulman (1985: 167) commented, “the god is both the
source and the victim of the creative process of weaving a world, maya, in all its beauty and its
entangling danger.”
The Durkheimian legacy has left two powerful analogies of systemic functioning: the machine
and the living organism. Both are misleading if used in conjunction with the concept of the
self-transforming system. Machine and organism both depend on functional relationships between parts or organs that exist as permanently defined, autonomous entities. The variability
of relationships among parts or organs constitutes the dynamism of these systems. Needham
(1965: 540) compared the Hindu universe to a perpetual-motion machine. The analogy
is partial. Despite the prominence of the body as a microcosm in Indian thought, the selftransforming system must break itself down in order to reconstitute and endure. The equiva-
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passages to play
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
| 167
lent, in terms of machine and organism, would be of one part turning into another—something
like a wheel turning into a lever, a heart into a stomach.
The architect’s name is transliterated as Maya, meaning maker. This is not related etymologically
to the transformative power that is transliterated as maya.
In this kind of self-transformative cosmic framework, experiential contrasts between ritual and
play begin to break down. In varieties of Hinduism, ritual as the repair of the world may be
infused with playful moments or may be framed playfully. In abstract terms, these playful
moments signify more the operation of cosmic processes and less their subversion. I would
add these emendations to my own contrasting of play and ritual (Handelman 1977; 1987b);
and I would emend Henricks (1980) in a similar vein, arguing that his position has more
validity in relation to Western perspectives but requires modification in relation to play in selftransforming cosmologies.
During the past two decades, an increasing number of scholars have pointed to the significance
of ideas of processuality in Indian life. Thus, stasis is undesirable (Das 1985; Kapferer 1983
[on Sri Lanka]; Ostor 1980); personhood, relationships, and matter itself are all perceived as
fluid, shifting, and mutable (Daniels 1984; Marriott 1989: 17–18) while relationships between
humans and gods are more continuous (Parry 1985). Even Dumont’s (1970) seemingly rigid
structuralism is relevant here, given his great insight that a hierarchical system based on difference (he discussed caste) is extremely flexible, elastic, and internally expandable, so long as hierarchical relationships are maintained continuously throughout the system. None of these studies
conceptualize processuality as play, yet qualities of play are very close to an ethos of processuality
that informs much of the recent scholarship on India. Process as play, and play as process, are
embedded deeply not only in cosmology but also more indirectly in Indian cultural ideologies.
Even within the carnivalesque world created by Rabelais, the most playfully subversive is more
a bottom-up phenomenon. Thus, although both Gargantua and his son Pantagruel are bottom-up characters, the circumstances of their respective births point to the production of the
playfully subversive as more bottom-up. Gargantua cannot exit naturally through his mother’s
birth canal and must find another aperture. Forced higher (against his will, one might say), he
emerges through her left ear (Putnam 1955: 69)—in other words, through her head. For all his
excesses, he becomes a scholar and subsidizer of a utopian, humanistic community. Covered in
fur, Pantagruel is born from his mother’s belly, killing her in childbirth (Putnam 1955: 237).
Pantagruel is even more subversive than his father. Within the entirety of this carnivalesque
world, the playful is graduated in increasing degrees of subversion, from top to bottom—in
keeping therefore with Western monotheisms. I am indebted to John McClelland for pointing
me to these births.
I take issue with the view that the development of Protestantism was a necessary condition for
the emergence of play as subversion and resistance in Western cosmologies (cf. Norbeck 1971;
Turner 1974). Though this was a significant contributing factor, such conceptions of play are
associated more with cosmologies that are not self-transformative and that include Western
monotheisms, as these developed long before the Reformation.
See Miller (1970). This is no less so for scholars of performance who endow play with universal
meanings of seduction (see Schechner 1988).
In discussion, Beverly Stoeltje raised the question of whether top-down and bottom-up play
could be related to the gender of cosmic principles or deities. Though the issue is important, I
can only offer some brief thoughts. I associated top-down play with self-transformative cosmic
systems, which are approximated by varieties of Hinduism. Hinduism has highly elaborated
goddess traditions in which the female may be understood as ultimate reality. In the post-Vedic
Markandeya Purana (fifth to sixth centuries CE), the male deity is described on occasion as an
emanation of the female (Coburn 1985: 80). More radically, the goddess is described as encompassing her own female principle (Coburn 1985: 137, 147) and, one may add, as being complete in herself. This suggests that there may be greater interchangeability of male and female
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168 | moebius anthropology
in self-transformative cosmic systems (this seems to be so in varieties of classical Hinduism; cf.
Zimmer 1972: 123). If play is integral to such systems, this will be activated as easily by female
principles as by male, and top-down cosmic play need not be gender specific.
Compare this to the ruptures in Western monotheisms between creativity and cosmogenesis
(the preserve of male deity) on the one hand, and procreativity and reproduction (a female
preserve) on the other (Weigle 1989: 60–61). This division of labor is hierarchical (high/low,
spiritual/earthy), and there is little interchangeability of deity in terms of gender. One should
ask whether there is any tendency to identify bottom-up play with female figures (or with inversions of the male). Consider, too, the thirteenth-century Gugliemites who envisioned salvation
through the female—with female cardinals under a female pope, the vicaress of a female Holy
Spirit, incarnated in order to establish a new Church. The sect was exterminated by the inquisition (Wessley 1978).
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Chapter 7
Framing
Hierarchically,
Framing
Moebiusly
Author’s Note
A preliminary version of this chapter was prepared as a response to the presentations
of a panel on “Reframing Naven” at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of
Religion in 2009. This was an opportunity to rethink lineal framing. Lineal framing,
to which we are so accustomed in the most mundane of ways, separates absolutely
and definitively between one side of the frame or boundary and the other, for example, between outside and inside. Whereas in Chapter Six, I argued for examining the
interior of the frame itself in order to find clues to passage through the boundary, in
this chapter I suggest that in certain, perhaps in many instances, the idea of lineal
framing and its making of neat order should be put aside entirely. I was invigorated
by the thinking of Steven Rosen (a polymath in his own right) in his Science, Paradox,
and the Moebius Principle (1994) which gave me the impetus to think moebiusly on
framing. To think with what Rosen (2006) calls post-mathematical topology. Thus
I understood that if a frame is constituted through self-entering moebius movement
then one can do away with the ideas (that deeply informed Bateson’s thinking) that a
frame must be lineal; that passage through a frame must require metacommunication
and meta-organization; and, so, that the organization of framing must be hierarchical. This opens to framing that is interactive, and, as such, to more fuzziness and
indeed messiness in how framing relates to realities.
More than twenty years earlier I used a more structural approach to understanding
what the appearance of sacred clowns within ritual accomplished. I suggested then
that the paradoxical interior of the sacred clown resonated with the interior of the
boundary, foretelling the argument that is Chapter Six of this volume. In the earlier
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172 | moebius anthropology
study I understood that sacred clowns were intimately involved in moving ritual
within itself through itself, thereby shifting ritual from one phase into another by
themselves revolving within themselves through their own contradictory and oppositional attributes (Handelman 1981). However, thinking moebiusly, I later concluded
(Handelman 2009) that rather than the interior of the sacred clown being composed of structural oppositions this self-same interior of the clown was more fluid
and dynamic. Thus it was this fluidity that was homologous with the fluidity of the
moebius-like boundaries within the ritual. And, so, it was this homology of fluidness
that enabled the sacred clowns to pull one phase after another into and out of the
ritual. In Chapter Seven I extend this thinking to the interior organization of cosmos,
contrasting cosmos that is intra-grated within itself more through fluid moebius-like
movement and interior transformation to cosmos that is more inter-grated by monothetic hierarchies whose ultimate ordering is actually outside cosmos itself. I expand
on this argument in Chapter Eight of this volume.
Prelude
I am taking a roundabout way in thinking about Gregory Bateson’s theory of framing. This enables me to foreground certain of my own positions. Bateson’s approach
to framing had great personal impact on me in the late 1960s. Doing my PhD thesis in anthropology on face-to-face interaction in small work groups, I discovered
that emerging realities of play and game were crucial to comprehending the daily
goings-on in these settings. Bateson’s idea of metacommunication gave me insight
into how realities like play and ritual could be entered because they were constituted
sometimes as radically different within everyday realities, Bateson gave to the idea of
framing a complexity that had not existed beforehand and that (apart from Erving
Goffman [1974]) has hardly existed since, yet who could have expected Bateson to
be simply commonsensical and matter-of-fact? In anthropology at the time, framing
was hardly mentioned analytically.
I eventually realized that Bateson’s play frame, and his framing as this could be applied to ritual, is itself composed of logical paradox. Indeed, the paradox is the frame
(see Chapter Six), and without the paradox there is no such frame. Or, we can say
that the metacommunication of paradox is itself the frame. For Bateson, metacommunication is critical to the organization of framing, and the metalevel necessarily
operates hierarchically and more abstractly. This is clear in the theory of schizophrenia he developed with Jackson, Haley, and Weakland (Bateson 1972: 203–78). The
lack of a hierarchical metamessage develops in the victim a kind of terminal chaos
within which communication is all “noise,” all self-disrupting, all self-negating. The
celebrated idea of the double bind results from oscillation between opposing values
that are destructive because they are not organized hierarchically and that therefore
are self-negating (I love you / I hate you). If this oscillation were hierarchized, then
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framing hierarchically, framing moebiusly
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one of these values would become the metamessage, subordinating the other, and, so,
the system of self-other communication could stabilize.
In Bateson’s (1972: 184) diagram of the play frame, the metacommunication “All
statements within this frame are untrue,” should not be (as he places it) inside the
rectangular frame. More accurately, “All statements within this frame, etc.” should be
written as the frame itself, because it is this (truth) claim that invokes the paradox
that is the framing. “This is play” is a further direction in which the frame may be
taken, given the paradox of crossing into this kind of reality. Perhaps there are others.
If the metacommunication itself is the frame, then the frame must be in hierarchical
relationship to its “sides,” to what it frames on the one hand and to what it leaves
outside on the other. Logical paradox—the higher level in this instance—acts as a
block to passage through itself (Colie 1966). The paradox both creates and separates
realities. The solution to passage is to change values (perceptions, emotions) that
belong to one side to those that are regnant on the other side. With this shift, the
paradox-as-block disappears and/or one finds oneself on the other side (though I’m
not so certain of this).
In Bateson’s pathbreaking cybernetic analysis of naven behavior in the epilogue
to the 1958 edition of Naven, his use of feedback to analyze social setups gave me a
tool to think on rituals that do radical change within and through their own interior
organization, and to separate these out from events that could be discussed straightforwardly as presentations and representations of sociocultural orderings. In turn this
made me realize that basically collecting together all “ritual” events under the rubric
of RITUAL, even when they had little or nothing in common, is not just pointless
but indeed detrimental to comprehending these occasions (Handelman 2006a). This
was the impetus for writing Models and Mirrors (Handelman [1990] 1998), which
argued that there will be no progress toward a general theory of ritual until the term
“ritual” itself is thrown out and other ways of thinking are encouraged. I mention this
here because at the time that I took to the idea of metacommunication as a universal
property of framing and interactivity, basic to analyzing play and ritual, I began to
think on South Indian Hindu cosmologies with my colleague, the Indologist David
Shulman, and to do fieldwork in South India on goddess rituals. Then my perspective
changed little by little.
For one thing, the status of logical paradox of the Epimenides variety came into
question as did, together with this, the premises of linear framing. Logical paradox
abounds in India, yet mostly as something perhaps to be noted as curiosity and largely
disregarded. My own understanding of logical paradox as blocking passage, as acting
as a trap for mind and perception (Colie 1966), seems to have little or no cachet in
India. While such paradox blocks Westerners from moving through to elsewhere, for
Indians paradox itself is a forming or shaping of potential reality to be played with
and perhaps appreciated (O’Flaherty 1984). Through India the idea of metacommunication also came into question, sometimes. David Shulman is fond of saying that in
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174 | moebius anthropology
India the elephant does not precede the footprint that it leaves behind. Rather, first
the footprint appears, followed by the elephant, coming into being and presence—in
Western terms, the effect appears before the cause. To put this another way, cause and
effect exist simultaneously, and entireties appear entirely, together, so that distinguishing between signifier and signified, and thereby addressing their relationship (which
is at the heart of the idea of symbol, of representation and of symbolic analysis), just
doesn’t play. Of course this relationship can be forced to cooperate, but this is indeed
just that, forced, and somehow not true to the rituals I observed and had a hand in
discussing, in which the symbolic as representation loses its authenticity (Handelman
2014). So, too, in the cosmic logics which historically influenced these and other
rituals (i.e., Handelman and Shulman 1997, 2004). This is not simply to relativize
these matters but rather to insist that great variabilities and uncertainties open up,
that I doubt can be addressed deeply and profoundly in terms of existing theories of
ritual, so long as the habit of, the convenience of, and the investment in this rubric of
RITUAL, with its great biases (especially those of representation), hold sway.
I also began to doubt the universality of metacommunication that, as I understand it in terms of Bateson, must be in a hierarchical relationship to the “content”
of frames like those of play and ritual. My critique of Batesonian framing recognizes
that levels are related recursively, reciprocally, though I may do this too implicitly.
After all, Bateson thought with systems that were constituted through levels, through
the reflexivity of second-order thinking, and so forth, and there is no Batesonian
system without recursiveness and reciprocity among levels. Yet these are levels of
increasing abstraction, and I had doubts about the neat hierarchical nesting of these
levels of communication within one another in Batesonian formulations.
For Bateson, recursive cybernetic-like feedback loops (positive and negative) were
critical to understanding how systemic or systemic-like properties organize cosmic
and social orderings. In these terms, a feedback loop cannot describe itself, that is,
it cannot be reflexive toward what it is and what it is doing, and therefore requires
a higher-order feedback loop (above, and, so, external to the first loop) to do this,
thereby correcting the activity of the lower loop, which communicates this to the
higher loop. I will return to this in a moment. I also began to question the universalizing proposition that our understanding of reflexivity requires a perspective of externality or otherness which itself tends toward a clear-cut distinction between inside/
outside, self/other. This claim, I venture to say, is basic to understanding reflexivity
through the academic disciplines. In human setups and systems, reflexivity is critical,
because on it depends the capacity to self-correct, to alter direction, to return and
repeat, and so forth. Therefore reflexivity is central to Batesonian framing. Norbert
Wiley (in Harries-Jones 1995: 250) puts reflexive organization in the following way
(which Bateson himself accepted): “A reflexive hierarchy is an inter-relation between
communicators and the same interrelation looked back at itself from an ‘outside’ vantage point. The notion of reflexivity always entails an ability of an intelligent being,
or group, to ‘get out’ of itself in order to attend to itself.”
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framing hierarchically, framing moebiusly
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At issue for me became whether there are alternative ways of conceiving framing
that do not require the premise of meta-organization and its hierarchical, linear order, and that alter the relationship of framing to reflexivity.1 It was in this spirit that
I suggested moebius framing as a stimulus to thought, one that would not simply
make order neatly between realities by separating them cleanly and meta-organizing
the inside of the frame.2 Rather, one that would open the way for mess and fuzziness
in organization. This in the spirit of Bateson’s first metalogue (“Why Do Things Get
in a Muddle?”) in Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972: 3–8), appreciating “noise” in the
setup that Bateson understood as desirable (unlike the cyberneticians), as “playful and
creative”—as novelty that could lead to the creation of new patterns (Harries-Jones
1995: 113–14). Alternative dynamics of framing should bring forth the flexibility of
organization and not simply its capacity to make linear order.
Moebius qualities helped me to understand just how taken-for-granted in Western thinking is lineal hierarchy and the role of the meta in this logic of organizing;
and, so, just how significant logical paradox could be in such setups. Let me illustrate
this in the following manner, which, in my view, has cosmic implications. Say we begin with a feedback loop. A feedback loop is relational. Common to Russell’s Theory
of Logical Types (if this is used as the basis for a cybernetic system) and to Batesonian
thinking is that such a loop does what it does yet cannot describe itself or what it
does. It is not self-reflexive. So, needed is a higher-order loop which encompasses the
lower and describes what the latter does. This more abstract loop is necessarily both
relational and reflexive about the setup. It is a relationship about a relationship. Yet,
though the second loop does what it does, it cannot describe itself and what it does.
Therefore a still higher loop is needed, and this third encompasses and describes
reflexively what the two lower ones do, but it cannot describe itself. Even if we drop
the transitive character of Russell’s levels (as Jens Kreinath [2012] argues) and accept
that the levels in Bateson’s hierarchy are intransitive, interactive, and reciprocal (Harries-Jones 1995: 248), this emerging “system” contains the following problem: will
it become self-limiting, as metalevels are piled atop one another? Moreover, will it
become self-limiting yet not fully self-knowing (which would enable it to consciously
change itself in systemic ways)? One way of self-closing and self-limiting is to create
a metalevel as logical paradox. As such, the paradox itself becomes an impassable
boundary that closes and turns the entire system back on itself.
Then it struck me that, looking from the opposite direction, top down, this is
the elementary logic of organization of the surviving monotheistic cosmoses. The
ancient Hebrew cosmos, the first of the surviving monotheisms, during a lengthy
period came to postulate an absolute rupture, an utter discontinuity between God
the creator and human beings, creating a binary of absolute difference yet similarity
(God first created man in his image and then changed this similitude). God, the cosmic encompassment, is outside His cosmos, holding the entirety of cosmos together
from outside itself. Human beings cannot penetrate the paradox that separates him/
her from God. Within itself, cosmos is held together through integration, the relaThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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176 | moebius anthropology
tionships between its parts. The other surviving monotheisms modified this paradigm
but basically remained within it. But the important point is that the monotheisms
shattered the logic of cosmic organization that was (and still is in many respects)
prominent among traditional and tribal peoples.
The late Galina Lindquist and I argue that so many of these tribal and traditional cosmoses are held together from within themselves, through the dense, intense, multiple, and overlapping connectivities of their interiorities. These cosmoses
are held together through what I call intra-gration; they are quite continuous within
themselves (absolutist binary distinctions are rare), organizing through multiple domains or planes rather than more discrete, clearly hierarchical levels. Indeed they
may have no closure at all, no external boundaries, since they are held together from
within themselves; and in these cosmoses logical paradox does not play the roles it has
in the surviving monotheistic cosmoses. The creation and operation of these tribal
and traditional cosmoses are more akin to autopoiesis (i.e., self-creation) and selforganization than they are to the metalevels of encompassment and disjunction of
the surviving monotheisms.3 (These arguments are developed in Handelman and
Lindquist 2011.) Yet these traditional and tribal cosmoses are no less reflexive than
are the surviving monotheistic ones, but the former are continuously self-entering,
and their reflexivity derives from this, from their ongoing entering within their own
interiorities. Self-entering moebius movement can be understood to fold into itself,
to self-connect through itself, thereby describing itself self-referentially, yet without
creating levels or binary distinctions between inside and outside. This actually relates
to the potentiality for fractal organization in such cosmoses, but fractals that entangle
or braid with one another rather than nesting neatly within one another on different
scales.
An intra-grated cosmos invokes a holism quite different from a cosmos that is integrated through encompassment, one which continues to have binary distinction at
its core, metaphysically and historically. Altogether, however, binary structure ( pace
Levi-Strauss) may be a limited case of organization through recursiveness. In the
surviving monotheisms, binaries are foundational, and logical paradox that derives
from binary organization has powerful stopping power when it becomes a hard-andfast boundary that in the first instance is impenetrable to human being’s attempts to
interact directly with God (though of course there are both historical and present-day
modifications to this). Yet, as I pointed out, in India what looks like a logical paradox
and may be recognized as such is more a curiosity than a block to movement. There,
in cosmoses and in many areas of ritual, binaries are irrelevant and symbolism as
representation makes no sense.
This description of a cosmos that is intra-grated through the density and intensity of its self-entering recursivities and infra-connectivities, has moebius-like qualities, but this moebiusness goes deep, way inside and through and through. Unlike
Yair Neuman (2003), I do not see that the self-entering self-enfolding dynamics of
moebiusness, which may characterize setups that are held together by themselves,
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framing hierarchically, framing moebiusly
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through themselves, are paradoxical. If we keep in mind that moebius dynamics are
neither hierarchical nor structural, then they are not characterized by movement
that . . . starts . . . stops . . . starts. . . . There is no “make a distinction” that creates
sides, that creates a binary (the first step in G. Spencer Brown’s [1969] influential
treatise on a logic of emerging space), and that enabled, for example, Hegel’s theory
of the dialectic, and Louis Dumont’s (1970, 1986) theory of holism as encompassment. Take away the binary and moebius movement that has one side that turns or
twists into itself, and so that has two sides that are never two, becomes illuminating. More generally, the use of chaos theory by anthropologists (Mosko and Damon
2005) and other social scientists needs to recognize that the stop . . . start . . . stop . . .
mentality of analysis which continues to distinguish between “structure” and “process” (and other similar distinctions) simply retards recognition of the dynamics that
are the social and the cultural (Handelman 2007). The interior potentiality of moebiusness is relevant as well to how certain rituals may be framed, and to how deeply
this framing goes. Linear framing may be shallow by comparison, lending itself more
to distinctions between a frame and its content. The potentially deep framing of
moebiusness may plumb interiority to depths that emerge elsewhere and differently,
and in this sense their raison d’être may be metaphysical, as is that of numerous rituals
that are intended to do transformation within and through themselves.
Moebius Qualities of Ritual Framing:
Or Is Moebius Necessarily Paradoxical?
Jens Kreinath (2012) has done an exhaustive and stimulating rethinking of naven,
arguing that Bateson’s conception of framing is compatible with that of moebius
framing, and adding the idea of fractal dynamics to discuss framing in the Iatmul
naven “ritual.” Kreinath opts for a universal logic of the phenomenon of boundary
(as apparently did Bateson) and for the mathematical reasoning that enables this.
Just about all discussions of “boundary” agree that it has two sides, one outside and
one inside (see for example, Zerubavel 1991). In Bateson’s terms the movement from
outside to inside requires a higher, hierarchical level of abstraction, an encompassing metalevel, to accomplish passage. Recursively, the metalevel informs and is informed by the lower level. Kreinath agrees with Yair Neuman that the boundary (in
Bateson’s evocative phrasing) is a difference that makes a difference, “a paradoxical
event.” Bateson’s thinking on the frame, “This is play,” implies the paradoxicalness
and dynamism of boundaries more generally.
Neuman introduces moebius-as-boundary in order to highlight the self-referencing paradoxical nature of the boundary generating difference. The moebius surface
is paradoxical because mathematical logic demands this, and the phenomenological
acquiesces: topologically the surface has one side; phenomenally it is a binary, an outside and an in-side. “Out” and “in” relate to one another such that phenomenally
they are separate and distinct yet topologically they are one another. Here logical
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178 | moebius anthropology
paradox generates dynamism in every crossing of the boundary which also reproduces
the boundary as paradox.
Does the moebius surface necessarily have the qualities that Neuman and Kreinath ascribe to it? Must the moebius surface be a paradoxical form? For Neuman the
phenomenological is cultural, and the topological, mathematical. Yet whose phenomenological culture axiomatically established the ever-presentness of a binary distinction resulting from the postulation of a linear boundary, and, so, its two sides
(after all, Spencer Brown was a mathematician and a logician)? Is the phenomenological culturally subordinate to the topological, given that the latter claims the truth of
its universalism, which the former cannot do (despite Merleau-Ponty)? I do not think
that the moebius form must be paradoxical in relation to itself, despite mathematically being both one-sided and two-sided, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. If
one looks at the surface from the outside, it curves into itself. Yet if one moves along
the moebius surface from its inside, it appears flat and never seems to curve selfreferentially, even as it goes elsewhere. Moving on this surface, one doesn’t know if
one is outside or inside since the surface is continuous within itself. We can say of the
moebius surface that what goes around comes around . . . only differently.4 One can
argue that the moebius surface is relatively autonomous of its environment precisely
because it is continuously self-entering, self-referencing, self-reflexive, self-processing.
Yet it is because of these qualities that this surface is not paradoxical in relation to
itself. The loops of the moebius surface are not hierarchical, higher abstractions of
one another.5 So they may be described as braiding with one another, thereby making
their relationships both stronger and more complex, since they all hold together from
within, through one another. Therefore moebius framing likely is more resilient in its
self-integration than is lineal framing.
Moebius framing comes closer to opening into forms within ritual that entangle
and braid with one another (Handelman 2006c). Consider the sequencing of phases
within ritual. Is an act or event coming before or after another a matter of norm, program, and script, as such positioning is commonly described in ritual studies? Or is it
the very practice of an act that brings into phenomenal presence an act that “comes
after,” as it were, yet that is already present (perhaps as potential) in the former as
it emerges? An act shaping that which will come after itself even as it shapes itself
into practice? An act that “hooks” itself into a future that becomes possible because
the former is phenomenally actualizing itself? Those self-entering reflexive moebius
qualities that enable passage into ritual—going around and coming around . . . but
differently—may be no less the properties that enable the ritual to move into itself
and through itself, shaping itself into its future so that what is “coming around” is no
less present in what is “going around.” The boundary between one phase and another
within a ritual may be no less moebius in its dynamics than the boundary between
the environment and the ritual. One can envisage some rituals as braids of moebius
surfaces that self-enter and emerge further along or deeper into the braid. This kind
of movement of the ritual through itself—this deeply interior quality of dynamism—
generates the ritual and abjures the shift of one ritual phase into another as something
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like stop . . . start . . . stop. This entangling and braiding of ritual within and through
itself is closer to what I called (in the previous section) intra-gration rather than integration, to ritual creating and holding itself together from within itself through its
own emerging phenomenal integrity, the very quality that makes a particular ritual
the kind of phenomenon that it is. This is the significance of thinking of ritual as selforganizing. The idea of braiding, if it is ever developed, may well offer a very different
take on classification through ritual, one closer to the polythetic and to Wittgenstein’s
(1953; see especially Saler 2008) idea of “family resemblance” and Vygotsky’s (1962)
of “chain complexes.”
Kreinath (and Neuman) argue that there is a universal logic of framing that will
be based in mathematical logic, itself a universal method of reasoning. I am of mixed
mind though more doubtful than not. Moebius framing and lineal framing seem
to be radical extremes, yet in a field of framings we hardly have begun to think on.
Jadran Mimica (1988), who studies the Iqwaye people of Papua New Guinea, once
said during discussion (in 1999 at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies) that
among them ritual is something like a “swelling” of aspects of everyday life, hardly
an occasion on the other side of a binary set apart in order to act on social life, yet
also not an event with the recursive complexities of moebius framing. Perhaps among
the Iqwaye, ritual does what social life does, only more intensely (and densely) so?
So perhaps the boundary of ritual among the Iqwaye is neither a linear frame nor
a moebius one, but one located elsewhere in the field of framings? Bruce Kapferer
argues in The Feast of the Sorcerer (1997) that the Sinhalese Suniyama exorcism creates
the cosmos entirely out of itself since it contains the basic premises and the dynamics
of the cultural order, which created the ritual, which creates the cultural order and its
cosmos. A ritual intensely recursive, hardly lineal, possibly moebius in its framing, yet
perhaps not, again located elsewhere in the field of framings.
Today I would think twice and more about turning play and ritual into a binary
whose two sides complement one another, with play metacommunicating makebelieve and ritual, truth. In Batesonian terms, as Engler and Gardiner (2012) point
out, the binary would be organized hierarchically, with that of truth subordinating
make-believe, which in turn subverts the former, especially when play (which I understand more abstractly as indeterminacy) is located within ritual. The binary of
play and ritual has an explanatory capacity, but it also is too overburdened. In the
1970s an ongoing issue in thinking on play was its relevance to sociocultural orders;
and, for a few, the relevance of play to ritual phenomena. As it turned out, two major
books (Spariosu 1989; Sutton-Smith 1997) marked the apex of play studies, which
since then has turned primarily to Internet play (Danet 2001) and video games.6
The Fractal Wau in Naven
My understanding of naven behavior changes accordingly in the wake of Roy Wagner’s (2001) discussion of the fractal person in Melanesia and Jens Kreinath’s (2012)
discussion of fractals. Previously I had argued that the wau (the classificatory mother’s
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180 | moebius anthropology
brother) playfully inverted himself in relation to his laua (the classificatory sister’s
son) and through this rebalanced this relationship which had been thrown out of
kilter by the increase in status of the laua in relationship to his wau, because of the
achievements of the laua. A neat solution through play to the instantaneous destabilizing of a crucial Iatmul social relationship. Today I would try to argue something
like the following: faced with the accomplishment of his laua, the wau goes into
himself and finds a fractal part of his distributed personhood which is entangled
and shared with female kin, and in the full-blown dramatization of naven the wau
acts out to others this aspect of his fractal being. This fractal part is him and it is also
others. He does not turn himself inside-out or upside-down (both standard forms of
inversion), but rather interiorly finds a part or part of others that is also part of his
selfness and that is directly relevant to the naven context. In this sense, naven opens
interiorly to others and this may be a movement that is more moebius-like yet closer
to Melanesia. What looks like a binary inversion on the part of the wau is more like a
non-linear re-assemblage of his person in relation to that of the laua and others. This
could be understood through play as make-believe, yet this is no longer necessary
since the wau is not pretending to be other than he fractally is.7
Though he alludes to this, Kreinath (2012) does not mention a fascinating fractal-like aspect of naven behavior—the way its forms condense and expand one another. This is the feature of naven behavior that persuaded me in the first instance
that the fractal is relevant here. The most compact form of naven behavior is a single
sentence—“Husband thou indeed” —which the wau utters (on hearing of the laua’s
accomplishment) in the absence of the latter, yet which condenses the core significance of what the wau is doing in naven. If the laua is present then the wau says the
sentence, throws lime powder on his laua, and recites a list of his own descent group’s
genealogical names. I note here that these two forms are the least social in terms of
the number of participants and in the spread of relationships that are affected by
naven behavior, and this may be why Kreinath does not dwell on them, given his
insistence that ritual must be social.8 The third form is the fully fledged, with the
wau constituted in evident detail through both male and female attributes, with the
participation of multiple others (Bateson 1958: 84–85, 109, 111, 119, 259, 288).
Bateson wrote that he did not really understand the first two forms until he had
witnessed the full-blown one. The fractal-like nesting of scale here is hard to ignore,
yet with the following proviso—the social fractal is two-way, it both condenses and
expands into and out of itself. In this regard these fractal forms also may be thought
of as entangled with one another, their choice dependent on social and contextual
forms.
It is worth noting here that Wagner’s conception of the fractal person in Melanesia
is paralleled in another radical rethinking of cultural personhood, that of McKim
Marriott’s (1989: 1–39; Babb 1990) ethnosociology of India. Marriott thinks of the
interior entirety of the person as continually reformed, reorganized, and nuanced
through what I call intra-action with many others—persons, the earth he/she was
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framing hierarchically, framing moebiusly
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born on, one’s home, the constellations, and so forth. The substances of person, of all
persons, move from the interior of one to the interior of another without necessarily
becoming exterior (see, for example, Bar-On Cohen 2009 for a temporary setup of
this sort). All of these beings (they are all alive) continually exchange elementary
substances, thereby continuously altering their being in relation to one another (see
Daniels 1984). They are deeply in-tangled with one another. Entireties here are first
and foremost intra-grated rather than integrated, and the entirety of the person is, in
a sense, cosmic, without going outside of itself. Though the fractal wau is unlike Marriott’s understanding of Indian personhood, the former may be just as intra-active as
interactive in naven behavior.
Kreinath (in press) uses the mathematical idea of random fractal dynamics to
conceptualize the emergence of indeterminate factors emanating from unpredictable decisions of individual participants, which introduces uncertainty and contingency into naven interaction. The problem of emergence in social life is crucial to
understanding the appearance of change in any social setup and is the key to one
of Bateson’s originary and brilliant concepts, schismogenesis, through which similarities, indeed identities in interaction, generate the emergence of difference, and
differences in interaction generate similarity. Potentially, schismogenetic dynamics
are open-ended and so do not surrender to the academic temptation and comfort to
slip into a Hegelian dialectical mode whose processes generate the very parameters
which self-constrain and limit the dynamics of emergence. Yet, apart from the value
in thinking experimentally with such ideas, do we need random fractal dynamics to
think about the indeterminacy of and the appearance in social life of emergent and
unexpected properties? All interaction generates “noise” in Batesonian terms. Novel
elements (regardless of how tiny) continuously appear, even as the great majority are
disregarded and discarded, while a few are focused on and elaborated (Handelman
1977, 2006b; see too the Epilogue to this volume). Indeterminacy and the potential for change are always present. This brings us back to “ritual” and the making of
change.
Naven as Social Ritual
Let’s say for the sake of argument that all rituals are social, and so are relational. For
example, for the anthropologist, Michael Houseman (and, I surmise, for Kreinath),
ritual must be social, put together through the sociocultural and producing and altering social arrangements and social relationships. I think there is basic agreement on
this among anthropologists.9 Houseman’s (2005) illuminating experimental ritual,
“The Red and the Black,” is very convincing in this respect. Houseman built into
the design of his invented ritual the kinds of social changes he wanted it to produce
among his students, and the design persuaded the students and did just this. Does
Houseman’s ritual do trans-formation, that is, the changing of one form of being into
another, or does it more directly move that being from one category to another within
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182 | moebius anthropology
a setup of classification? Changing a person from ill-health to improved health, or reviving an entropic cosmos, may not be only a matter of persuasion and performance,
but of metaphysical alterations. The Jewish bar-mitzvah is a social ritual which confirms shifting a thirteen-year-old male from the social category of a child to that of an
adult who is competent to fully participate in religious ritual. The change in category,
in status, is profound, yet the ritual is a performance that only confirms what is already known; it does not directly trans-form the inner being of the youngster. On the
other hand, the circumcision ritual—the cut that binds—done to a tiny male infant
is trans-formative, since through a blood sacrifice (of a perfect form) the tiny male
is de-formed by the cutting of the foreskin, de-created from God’s image in which
he was created, and re-formed in his de-creation as one forever bound as fully and
only human to the Almighty, as one of His chosen people, a status he can never be
fully rid of. The infant is related to socially as a Jew, yet elemental qualities in his selfconstitution are understood to change unalterably through the ritual. He is potentiated for the future in a radically different way. The act of sacrifice is one of transformation, with the infant perhaps aware of this as shock and pain.
Naven behavior is social ritual first and foremost, and perhaps entirely so. It is
ritual behavior that is wholly continuous with social life (perhaps as something like
a “swelling,” an accentuation and intensification of the social, as Mimica mentioned
for the Iqwaye people).10 This is emphasized even more if we accept that naven in
its different forms is constituted at least in part through social fractals. The fractal is
powerfully recursive and reproductive in its self-similarity, yet it is not trans-formative. Naven does rearrangement and recalibration of social relationships, but I do not
consider these transformations since in them there is no radical change of one being
or form into another. The fractal character of naven points to the continuousness of
the wau with and among the fractal parts of his person. Random fractal dynamics
may open ways to indeterminate change and perhaps to unplanned trans-forms, yet
this is strongly discouraged in rituals whose phenomenal integrity depends on their
interior design (nonetheless, see Kreinath n.d.). However, here is one example of
what may be a random fractal dynamic in an unusual setting in which fractal-like
forms seem to be prominent, taken from Sundar Kaali (2006).
In the region of Tanjavur in South India there are ritual enactments of the story
of the demon-king, Hiranya, and his slaying at the claws of Visnu’s avatara, the manlion Narasimha. In one village these performances have taken an unusual turn in
that all of the characters in the performance arena, with the exception of Narasimha/
Vishnu, are doubled. There may be one cosmos in this performance or two, or perhaps a second is coming into existence; yet in any case something new has or is developing and the doubles seem to be fractals of one another, even as Narasimha/Vishnu
holds all cosmos together from inside himself/itself. Because of a special boon, the
demon-king cannot be killed under ordinary circumstances and he threatens the integrity of Vishnu’s cosmos. Nonetheless the man-lion triumphs and cosmic entropy
is reversed.
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framing hierarchically, framing moebiusly
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Especially interesting here is what did indeed happen during one performance.
The defeat of the demon-king is usually demonstrated in performance by removing
his crown and giving it to the man-lion. On this occasion, as Kaali notes, a performer
of high status who was enacting Narasimha removed the man-lion’s mask—his face,
his being—at the climactic moment and brought it to the demon-king (apparently
without knowing consciously why he did so), thereby announcing (but also in a
way, generating) the victory of the demon-king over the god. This ending should
never have happened, and it was corrected ritually; nonetheless the ending seemed
a possible outcome, emotionally and logically, and one that, within the ritual enactment, had of course profound cosmic implications. In this ritual performance, within
which a (perhaps random) fractal-like organization had developed, a random fractal
suddenly emerged that threatened to entirely upset the logic of the cosmos being
enacted ritually.
Framing and Depth
One of these issues is the depth of the frame. If for Bateson the metamessage constitutes the frame, then the depth of the frame is “thin” (as it especially would be in using set theory to discuss this). However, if the frame has moebius, braiding, or fractal
qualities, the issue of depth becomes complex. For example, if a frame is constituted
through self-entering moebius qualities, where do these “end” as it were? They may
enter deeper into the ritual, connecting to, braiding with, boundaries and thematics
within. There may be no clear-cut distinction between a metacommunicational feedback loop and information that is keyed to this, especially if the self-entering qualities
of moebius also begin to self-organize. Thus it is worth considering the topology of
homotopy.
Homotopy refers to two paths (or lines) that have the same points of start and
the same endpoints but different ways of going from one to the other. The homotope
contains different forms that coalesce between these points of start and the endpoints. Then there is smooth passage among these forms even though they are quite
different in form and purpose. Put otherwise, two forms are homotopic if the deformation from one to the other is continuous (Armstrong 1979). A common example is the cup with a round handle that can morph into a doughnut, a torus, and back
or likely elsewhere. These forms are quite different even though their smooth passages
into and out of one another are related to their sharing only one hole in each, as do
all the forms “in between,” as it were.11
If one thinks that this idea is simply distant from anthropology and social organization, consider the pioneering study of Edmund Leach, Political Systems of Highland
Burma (1954: 8–9). Leach argues that the Kachin peoples have two contradictory
political modes of organization. One is the shan form, which is something like feudal
hierarchy. The other is the gumlao form which is anarchistic and egalitarian. Most
Kachin communities are neither one or the other, but rather that which Leach calls
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184 | moebius anthropology
the gumsa form. Gumsa communities are unstable in their political organization: with
favorable economic circumstances they shift toward the Shan form; with unfavorable
ones, toward the gumlao. Despite the profound differences between shan and gumlao,
Leach understands each Kachin community as a variant turning within itself toward
one or the other; in homotopic terms, as paths or planes that have the same starting
points and endpoints but that move on different lines between the two.12
Cleaning Up Bateson’s Framing
In an enlightening essay, Steven Engler and Mark Gardiner (2012) are owed a debt
for disentangling Bateson’s framing from Russell’s set theory; for emphasizing that
the frame need not be paradoxical in Russell’s sense; for explicating that there is
no necessary hierarchy of frame that distinguishes “outside” from “inside”; and for
arguing that “something” framed differently (i.e., play) should be considered in its
own right and not as a “not-something,” which reduces its truth value and makes
it hierarchically subordinate to whatever that “something” is. As I see it now, that
Batesonian frames can be confused with Russellian sets is a good reason to rethink
framing. Their introduction of Frege and denotation in place of Russell and hierarchical Logical Types enables the nuancing of framings and their graduated entering
into one another, or indeed their entanglements with one another. Undoubtedly,
we can think of social life as constituted through numerous framings with persons
moving through these frames in the courses of living. This was Goffman’s (1974)
later understanding of social life, in which experience of the interpersonal became
laminated into its framings.
Engler and Gardiner’s critique of the centrality that Bateson gives to Korzybski’s
map-territory distinction is important since again for Bateson this is the relationship
between representation that lacks truth and reality that is truth. A character in the
noir thriller, Blindside (Bayer 1990), says, “Photographs lie; diagrams tell the truth.”
Diagrams make no claims to truth, as photos (in the pre-digital photo age) often do.
Diagrams can neither be real nor unreal since they purport to be nothing other than
that which they are, selective abstractions that have no significance outside themselves (i.e., the diagram of the London Underground cannot be used to move around
London outside of the Underground). Lewis Carroll (1893: 169) showed the absurdity in confuting the map-as-representation with the territory-as-real (the idea later
was adopted by Borges). In Bruno and Sylvie Concluded, the interlocutor converses
with Mein Herr on the value of maps. The interlocutor tells Mein Herr that the largest map considered useful is on the scale of six inches to the mile. Mein Herr responds
with amazement, telling how in his country people tried a scale of six yards to the
mile, then a hundred yards to the mile, and “then came the grandest idea of all! We
actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile! ” Asked whether
this map has been used much, Mein Herr responds: “It has never been spread out
yet . . . . the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut
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framing hierarchically, framing moebiusly
| 185
out the sunlight! So now we use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you
it does nearly as well.” The absurdity is one of trying to do the representation (the
map) of a normal territory which will be no different than the territory, yet which
will be the not-territory because it is a representation which is intended to replace the
territory but cannot because it is not the territory, but a representation of this. When
the territory is used within itself as a guide to itself it does quite well, even if it is not
an abstraction of itself.
Engler and Gardiner argue that if Batesonian framing is treated in Fregian terms
as a denotative guide, then relationships within the frame are sense-making, relativistically, but not, or not necessarily so, outside the frame. In this regard, ritual as
itself does not necessarily denote truth outside itself but makes sense within itself to
itself—thus the Catholic priest, the wafer, and the body of Christ come together. This
may be another way of arguing (though from very different premises than mine) that
ritual is worth studying in its own right, in and of itself—that ritual should make
sense to itself (see Chapter Three, this volume).13 The denotative, guiding function
of the frame is metacommunicative, but this too is relativistic—more or less distinctive, more or less explicit, more or less powerful, and so forth. In this regard, ritual
need not be set apart from the everyday in a hard-and-fast way, but may be similar,
for example, to what Mimica called “swelling.” For that matter, “swelling” may well
describe all the forms of naven, understood fractally.
For Engler and Gardiner, framing-as-map denotes where ritual is positioned in the
world. They do not relate to the interiors of frames, of rituals. If I understood them
correctly, they would argue that frames within ritual also are marked and guided by
further denotative shifts into context. Yet missing from their formulations is any
attention to practice, apart from the semantic (implying that rituals are contextsensitive grammars?). Perhaps too much reliance has been placed on the cognitive
(and semantic) constitution of framing? Which in a way is “thin” framing, unlike the
“thick” framing of moebius qualities of self-entering, which is that which rituals of
trans-formation do? And that not enough reliance has been given to practices that
bring a ritual into being and shape its self-forming and self-organization that may
separate it from the everyday?
Conclusion
Bateson’s holistic vision was cosmic and all-embracing. He proposed a universal logic
of framing that was consonant with his understanding of the systemic organization
of cosmos in its fullest sense. If we accept that cosmoses differed in their organization (and likely continue to do so, to various degrees) then it is not that Bateson’s
universalism fails in the face of relativism, but that human beings have created great
variability in the metaphysics of their cosmoses, and of their rituals. There is no
universal frame for “ritual.” Generally speaking, there is not even a single more advantageous theoretical perspective to take on the framing of ritual. While this reflects
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186 | moebius anthropology
the weaknesses of the category of “ritual,” it nonetheless highlights the need to think
empirically, abductively (in C. S. Peirce’s sense; see Chapter Two), through a case-bycase approach to ritual framing. At present this is the intuitive way to go, since it is
more likely to open to fruitful ideas for analyses of framing.
Utterly evident is that the understanding of framing as first and foremost cognitive is wrong-headed. Sensuousness and aesthetics (in the sense of practice, not
beauty, [see Chapter Five, this volume]) are integral to ritual framing. To complicate
this, if one takes a framing approach to ritual (and this is not self-evident or given),
should one relate only to the frame as it relates ritual to the world around it? Or
should one ask whether framing is no less important within a given ritual, whether it
is constituted through phases, whether these, too, should be considered framed, and
how it is that the ritual moves through them, frame after frame, frame within frame,
frame entangled with frame? If so, we would have to ask whether the same kind of
frame is consonant throughout the ritual.
Issues of framing within ritual come to the fore when rituals that do trans-formation within and through themselves are distinguished from rituals that are continuous
throughout themselves. In the former, trans-formation may be predicated on making
a kind of being or condition of being discontinuous while using cultural dynamics to
create this form or condition differently, indeed perhaps as another form or condition
of being. In the latter, rituals that are wholly social tend to rearrange, conform, and
confirm social relations through representation rather than transformation. In Models
and Mirrors (Handelman 1998: 47–48) I suggested a simple rule of thumb to check
the distinction in ritual between trans-formation and representation: run the ritual
backward (hypothetically, of course). In a ritual that does representation, running it
backward may well produce a different cultural narrative, yet one that is viable. In a
ritual that does trans-formation, say one of healing, running it backward is likely to
produce the unviable, perhaps the deleterious, perhaps sorcery in place of healing. If
framing is to be of increased value in studying “ritual,” then we need to expand our
sense of the multiplicity of framings that shape ritual phenomena from without and
from within.
Notes
First published in 2012 as “Postlude: Framing Hierarchically, Framing Moebiusly,” Journal of Ritual
Studies 26: 65–77. Reprinted with permission of co-editors of Journal of Ritual Studies, Professor
Pamela J. Stewart and Professor Andrew Strathern.
1. Making framing looser and more flexible is not a new issue. Framing in art is a case in point.
The sixteenth-century portrait painter, Jan Gossaert, painted subjects with an empty picture
frame behind them. He took them out of the picture frame and painted them more realistically, perhaps more true-to-life, warts and all. See his A Young Princess (Dorothea of Denmark?),
c. 1530. (The National Gallery, London), and his The Children of Christian II of Denmark, c.
1526. (The Royal Collection). Metaframing does not work for Picasso’s cubist Portrait of Jaime
Sabartes as a Spanish Nobleman, 1939. The portrait is usually understood as bringing together
multiple external perspectives of vision as a simultaneity of the same face. I think that in this
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framing hierarchically, framing moebiusly
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
| 187
work (and in many others) Picasso paints the face as it is in mundane motion, showing the
dynamism of expressive movement that is within itself as face.
The moebius strip is a mathematical construct, yet its form and (perhaps its dynamic) are
found in nature, for example in the circulation of the earth’s warmer and cooler ocean currents.
On the nano-scale, the moebius form has been created at Arizona State University (“DNA
art imitates life: Construction of a nanoscale Mobius strip”) using a variant of origami DNA,
measuring less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair, and thought to have a variety of applications (Science Daily, accessed 16 August 2020 <https://www.sciencedaily.com/
releases/2010/10/101004101530.htm>). At the opposite extreme of scale, astrophysicists using
the Herschel telescope have identified a twisted ring of gas and dust at the center of the Milky
Way galaxy, measuring something like six-hundred light years across. Called a twisted ellipse by
the scientists, the ring includes some of the most active areas of star formation in the galaxy. At
the center of the ellipse is a massive black hole. And, who knows, perhaps this gigantic twisted
ellipse will turn out to have moebius properties (“Herschel telescope discovered twisted ring
of gas and dust at the centre of our galaxy,” World Socialist Web Site, accessed 16 July 2020
<https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2011/08/ring-a05.html>).
Niklas Luhmann postulates that social autopoiesis refers to systems that differentiate themselves
from their environments through their recursive operations, through their self-organization.
Phillip Guddemi (2007: 914) dubs as “sympoietic” those recursive systems that do not bound
themselves from their environment. In the case of cosmos, which is self-creating, intensely
recursive, yet without boundaries, sympoietic organization might be relevant. In the case of
rituals of transformation that do enclose themselves recursively, the autopoietic self-organizing
sense is more relevant.
David Lynch uses this quality in his films, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive (see Chapter
Ten).
Perhaps it is because Kreinath takes Bateson’s universal framing to be paradoxical and hierarchical that he does not understand why I did not so much abandon this formulation as look for
alternatives that related with greater congruence to a variety of the empirical materials.
In this book, Sutton-Smith introduced the idea of “playfulness” with the intention of modifying
emphasis on the abrupt discontinuity between “play” and the serious. In this respect, Engler and
Gardiner are close to his position.
Gil Daryn’s (2006) ethnographic analysis of a community of Nepalese Brahmins is one of the
few detailed works in anthropology that actively uses the idea of the fractal.
Elsewhere I address the issue of “how social must ritual be?” (Handelman 2005b; and Chapter
Three, this volume).
Houseman’s approach to ritual has strong resonances with that of the social anthropologists of
the Manchester School (founded by Max Gluckman) during the 1950s and 1960s (see Evens
and Handelman 2006). The Manchester School utterly eschewed metaphysics in the understanding of ritual, concentrating entirely on social arrangements and relationships. One need
only compare Gluckman’s essay, Les rites de passage (1962) with his student, Victor Turner’s
discussion of rites of passage in his The Ritual Process (1969), after he broke with the Manchester
insistence that all ritual was solely social.
Communication to the colloquium of the Research Group, “Narratives of Ritual,” The Israel
Institute for Advanced Studies, May 1999.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/homotopy. Accessed 14 August 2020.
It is worth noting that Leach (1961: 7) was an early proponent in anthropology of thinking
topologically.
The eighteenth-century empiricist philosopher, Bishop George Berkeley, felt fully the complete
identity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost within the Mass and simultaneously the
absence of this identity, indeed the distinctiveness of each from the others. Outside the Mass, as
philosopher rather than believer, he concluded that the simultaneous presence of identity and
non-identity was impossible.
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188 | moebius anthropology
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Vygotsky, Lev S. 1962. Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Chapter 8
Inter-gration
and
Intra-gration
in Cosmology
Author’s Note
This chapter was prepared initially for a discussion on contemporary cosmologies at
University College London in 2011. This discussion was an opportunity to expand
further on the idea of an intra-grated cosmos, one that is held together more from
within itself through itself, and that of an inter-grated cosmos that is held together
from outside itself. I associate the first kind of cosmos more with tribal and traditional cultural orderings and the second more with monotheistic social orderings.
I argue counterintuitively that in cosmoses of the more open kind—held together within themselves, through themselves—there is less emphasis on the external
boundaries of cosmos. On the other hand, monotheistic cosmoses are of the more
closed kind, since they are held together from outside themselves by their creator
God, all-knowing and surviving any destruction of the world He created. Here great
attention is given to how cosmos is closed, separating human beings from the creator God who in large measure dictates rules for living a moral existence (perhaps
especially so in Judaism). I go into some detail of a goddess cosmos in South India
that is intra-grated (and analyzed in greater detail in Chapter Four of Handelman
2014). Moreover, I argue that cosmos should not be reduced to the social, and that
this should be at the heart of cosmology and metaphysics, in a sense, to cosmology in
its own right. This approach is largely abandoned by anthropologies which perceive,
wrongly in my view, that by definition cosmos is closed and therefore out of sync
especially with the movements of modernization and globalization.
R
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192 | moebius anthropology
Introduction
At the roots of what we call “religion” are values of holism (Handelman and Lindquist 2011). The late Galina Lindquist and I contended that such values were never
extinguished during very lengthy periods in ancient and traditional worlds in which
holism related first and foremost to cosmos, indeed to cosmos that hold itself together from within itself, through itself—as intra-gration.1 This kind of cosmos was
shattered primarily by the historical emergence of the monotheisms that shaped cosmoses that were “encompassed”—that were held together from outside themselves.
These developments are associated with a lengthy period that Karl Jaspers called the
Axial Age (See Bellah and Joas 2012; Robbins 2009; Thomassen 2010). Lindquist
and I call this shattering of cosmos, in areas of the ancient world, the First Great
Rupture of Cosmos.
Nonetheless, values of holism continued through modern Western worlds, as
these values were lodged in what came to be called “religion,” and still later in peoplehood, nationhood, statism, ethnicity, and not least in the individual (culminating in
Foucault’s idea of the care of the self ).2 In Part I, I explore relationships among holism
and cosmos, stopping with the First Great Rupture. Following this, in Part II, I outline, through its rituals, a goddess cosmos in South India that, in emerging from itself
as an ongoing dynamic, holds itself together from its interior. This exemplifies the
idea of cosmos intra-grating holistically. I close with a discussion of this cosmic logic.
Part I: Holism and Cosmos
Louis Dumont understands holism (and individualism) as value through which the
social is organized. Dumont (1986: 279) gives the following succinct definition of
holism: “We call holist [holistic] an ideology [which he understands as “value”] that
valorizes the social whole and neglects or subordinates [the value of ] the human
individual.”
I modify Dumont’s formulation as follows: holism entails the integrity of the entirety, where the “entirety” may be any kind of human unit, and where these units are
not necessarily bounded clearly (in the sense of being contained from their boundaries inward). The emphasis within an entirety is on integrity, which there are many
different ways of accomplishing. I use integrity here in the sense of entireness, completeness, soundness. Integrity is related to integration. Integration refers more to
parts added together to constitute a whole—so that in the first instance the connection between parts is additive—thus, an inter-gration through connections of
betweenness. By contrast, my intention for integrity refers more to the synergistic relationships within and through the parts of a whole—thus, the connections between
parts must be intra-relational, held together through their entirety. My interest is in
how worlds are holding together through the metaphysics of the human, through
the imaginaries of the human, where “world” may vary from the cosmic to the indiThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology
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vidual, even as, say, in modernity, religion becomes civil, political, national, secular,
individualized, yet forming and re-forming around the globe, carrying their seeds of
holism (Handelman and Lindquist 2011: 42–45). Cosmos here refers to the entirety
of the phenomenal lived-space of all entities—human and other-than-human—the
entirety of a world of all dimensions of existence.
Beginnings—Holistic Cosmos Held Together from within Itself
As noted, cosmoses may be distinguished broadly if crudely in terms of their logics of
organization, between (1) those held together largely from within themselves and (2)
those held together largely from their boundaries, from outside themselves. Cosmos
held together from within and through itself applies primarily to a wide variety of
archaic, traditional, and tribal cosmoses. Cosmos held together from outside itself is
pertinent particularly to the surviving monotheisms.
In the English language there is no word I can find to describe how something
is intra-grated from within itself through the self-integrity of its interiority, rather
than from outside itself—an excellent monotheistic understanding of integration. In
English (translated from the French) the word made prominent by Louis Dumont
(1981) to describe how something—social, cultural—is held together from outside
itself is “encompassment.” My dictionary defines “encompass” (and “incompass”) as,
“to surround, to encircle, to include, to contain, to get in one’s power.” This kind of
being-held-together is crucial to monotheistic cosmoses.
Yet consider the following dynamics of an ancient holistic cosmos of Mahayana
Buddhism, that of the cosmos of the Chinese Hua-yen school of Buddhism from the
seventh century CE (Cook 1972: 2):
Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful
net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that
it stretches out infinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each
“eye” of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimensions, the jewels
are infinite in number. There hang the jewels glittering like stars of the first
magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of
these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its
polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite
in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel
is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting
process occurring . . . . This is a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos.
This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous . . . mutual inter-causality (which
I read as mutually relational or indeed intra-relational).
Every jewel is the sole cause for the infinity of jewels, but simultaneously the infinite whole of jewels is the cause for every single jewel. In terms of beings,
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194 | moebius anthropology
each . . . is at once the cause for the whole and is caused by the whole, and
what is called existence is a vast body made up of an infinity of [beings] all
sustaining each other and defining each other. The cosmos is, in short, a
self-creating, self-maintaining, and self-defining organism . . . what affects
one item in the vast inventory of the cosmos affects every other individual
therein. (Cook 1972: 3–4)
The Hua-yen cosmos has no center, or, if there is a center, “it is everywhere. Man certainly is not the center, nor is some god” (ibid.: 4). Note that the Hua-yen cosmos has
no external boundaries, unlike the absolute, virtually impassable boundary between
God and human beings to which the surviving monotheisms have accustomed us to
as natural and commonsensical. The Hua-yen cosmos is not enclosed from outside
itself, in contrast to our understanding of the kind of holism suggested by Dumont’s
idea of “encompassment.”
The absence of boundaries in the Hua-yen cosmos is attested to by the emphasis on the infinity of intra-relationships that in a strong sense are this cosmos. This
cosmos holds itself together through its intra-relationalities, the very densities and
textures of these connections creating a thick mesh of intensities of mutual being.
This kind of cosmos lives wholly through itself—within which human being and
other-than-human are thought to be alive and interactive.
The Hua-yen cosmos is continuous within itself. Continuousness here is graduated between levels and among domains without necessarily abrupt shifts or ruptures
between human beings and other-than-human. Cosmos is hierarchical yet flowing,
with an utter abhorrence of stasis. I contend that a continuousness of cosmos is generally immanent, not transcendent, since continuousness is primarily self-referential,
referring to nothing outside itself (See Jacobsen [1976] on ancient Mesopotamia),
without implying in the least that cosmic continuousness indexes harmony and an
absence of fragmentation (though it may index ongoing self-creation—autopoiesis
and self-repair from within itself ).
Analogous descriptions of organic cosmos with the qualities I ascribe to this
abound for a host of tribal cosmologies. Without romanticizing this, tribal cosmologies had integrity: these were and are cosmoses that were true to themselves within
themselves, held together from within themselves through the densities, intensities,
and textures of the fullness of intra-acting connectivities with deep resonances between deities, human beings, other beings, and the continuousness of their shared
cosmos. In my terms, in such cosmologies holism is only sometimes dependent on cosmic
closure. Indeed, much of the historical and ethnographic evidence points to holistic
cosmologies that are open.
With regard to the eventual emergence of Western cosmology, two great ruptures of holistic cosmoses developed historically. The first emerged during what is
often called the Axial Age; while the second, the separation of politics from religion, sometimes referred to as the Great Separation (Lilia 2007), formed through the
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inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology
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deep rupture in Western European Christian culture provoked, in particular, by the
Protestant Reformation, beginning in the sixteenth century. Monotheistic cosmos,
forming through the first rupture, contained the beginnings of a foundational break
with itself, within itself.
The First Great Rupture: The Axial Age
The cultural loci of these radical ruptures in cosmic organization are usually given
as Greece (of the philosophers), Palestine (of the Hebrew prophets), Iran (of Zoroaster), China (of Lao-tse), and India (of the Buddha). The most persuasive instances
are those of ancient Israel and Greece (but only of the philosophes). The rupture of
cosmic holism severed the graduated continuousness of cosmos, such that the otherthan-human separated from the human. This separation enabled that which scholars
call “transcendence” to emerge within cosmos. On the other side of the rupture,
Deity became unknowable to human being, positioned way beyond the capability,
capacity, and knowability of the latter. How were human beings able to relate to the
now transcendent divine?
The rupture created the other-worldly transcendence of the gods. God and gods
were no longer of this world, even of this cosmos. God and gods become the absolute
creators of cosmos rather than living within and integral to it, no longer sharing with
human beings the substances from which cosmos was constituted. This is where the
idea of encompassment comes in.
My Axial Age concern here is with what the historian of religion Jan Assman
(2008: 75) calls the “revolutionary monotheism” of ancient Israel, and how this
indelibly changed the logics through which cosmos was held together. The emergence of monotheism eventually came to posit the absolute separation of God the
transcendent Creator from humankind. God crossed this chasm at will; yet, human
beings might cross it only through prayer and sacrifice. Frankfort and Frankfort
(1963: 241–44) argue that, “The God of the Hebrews is pure being, unqualified,
ineffable. He is holy. That means he is sui generis . . . . It means that all values are ultimately attributes of God alone . . . . Only a God who transcends every phenomenon . . . can be the one and only ground of all existence.” Herewith and underlined
is the contrast between a cosmos that holds together from within itself through
itself, and the emerging monotheistic cosmos of the Hebrew God who is boundless, infinite, unnameable, unfathomable, creating His finite cosmos as one ruptured
from himself.
Given the absolute boundary between God and the human, the ancient Hebrew
cosmos became held together from its exterior by the transcendent God whose eternal existence did not depend on that of his finite cosmos. The integration of this
cosmos depended on its being encompassed by God, by his moral injunctions. As
noted, cosmos acquires exteriority through the cosmic rupture, and so the capacity to
be encompassed by transcendent deity. The rupture of the intra-grated holistic cosmos led to the creation of another kind of holism, that of the monotheistic, in which
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196 | moebius anthropology
God holds his cosmos together from its boundaries, while his primary positioning
is outside his creation. Basically, he is independent of the cosmos of his creation
whose parts are inter-grated. The monotheistic cosmos turned the perfection of the
human being into the divine purpose of the universe, while setting before human
being the goal of organizing the world into one that was truly, exclusively, and solely
human. For as various scholars (e.g., Bruno Latour) have commented, in the worlds
that eventually derived from monotheism, most living beings who were other-thanhuman were either killed off, reduced in their communicative capacities with humans, or, treated as inert, were no longer perceived as living.
So far, I have referred in the abstract to cosmos that holds itself together through
the densities and intensities of its own interiority. Now I turn to a goddess cosmos in
South India to introduce one variety of how such a holistic cosmos might work. I do
this in brief using ritual events through which the goddess—Paiditalli, the Golden
Lady—forms and re-forms as she changes herself and her cosmos.3
Part II: The Fluid Cosmic Logic of the Goddess Paiditalli
The venue of the following discussion is the small city and former kingdom of Vizianagaram in northeastern Andhra Pradesh. Culturally, Vizianagaram is in the region
called Kalinga, and Vizianagaram shared cultural themes with other previously extant
little kingdoms (e.g., neighboring Bobilli), some of whose kingship-related rituals
have been studied by anthropologists in Puri (Apffel-Marglin 1981, 2008) and Jeypore in Orissa (Schnepel 1996, 2002), and Bastar in Madhya Pradesh (Gell 1997).
With all the hubris entailed, I will attempt here to take something of the perspective
of the goddess.
Paiditalli’s story and her relationship to the kingdom of Vizianagaram begins in
the eighteenth century. In January 1757, Vijaya Rama Raju, the Raja of Vizianagaram, aided by French irregulars led by the adventurer Charles de Bussy (who held a
farman from the Padshah in Delhi to collect taxes in the Kalinga region), set out to
war with Bobilli.4 In the foundational myth of Paiditalli, the younger sister of the
Raja, Paidimamba, pleaded with him not to go to battle, saying nothing good would
come of it. Vizianagaram was victorious, Bobilli destroyed, and yet that very night
the Raja was killed in his tent by the greatest hero of Bobilli. Hearing of his death,
overcome with grief, Paidimamba hurled herself into a lake close to Vizianagaram
and drowned. Before entering the waters, she said she would return, and her death
was self-sacrificial. Later she appeared to fishermen and told them to dive and find
her image. She emerged from the depths as the goddess, Paiditalli, onto the hard,
flat surfaces of the land. Her shrine, called the Wilderness Temple, was erected close
to the lake. Later, a second shrine, called the Square Temple (echoing the square
mandala according to which the old city was built), was located in the vicinity of the
palace-fort of the Raja. Paiditalli had returned with the explicit aim of protecting and
aiding kingdom and kingship. She resides roughly half the year in the Wilderness
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Temple and half in the Square Temple. The climax of her yearly return is a great Jatra
(festival; literally, movement)—the Sirimanu—through which a people’s version of
kingship is renewed.
The cosmos of Paiditalli is radically different in its logics of organization from
those of most other South Indian deities as they are discussed in the literature. This
goddess cosmos is characterized by dynamism, by interiority, by depth, by fluidity,
and by hardness, yet by a somewhat different sense of hierarchy than that which one
might expect in India.
Paidimamba, the Raja’s sister, left the brittle flatness of the land and went into
depths of water. The fluid is replete with itself, extremely dense, leaving no interior emptiness, no holes, without boundaries in itself, and in continuous movement
within itself. The sister rose from the depths of fluidity as the goddess, Paiditalli,
emerged onto the surface that she had left. The land of the surface is dry and thin,
its features fixed in form and perhaps in place, organized by the linearity of rule, of
law, rectilinear (its spaces cultivated and ordered in different ways), and constituted
in terms of temporal distinctions and movement that are formed through starts and
stops, often through counted durations. Yet surface must have the fluid (water) to
survive. This hardened surface is that of the animate and human world which of
course is integral to Paiditalli’s cosmos. Yet this world is that of the surface of Paiditalli’s interior fluidity. Surface, then, exists because it is the flattened, hardened, rigid,
encrusted portions of Paiditalli’s cosmos. And these rigid portions are fragile (Handelman and Shulman 2004). When fluid rises on this surface, the latter becomes
softer, more malleable, and more tensile, amenable to being shaped to awaken fertility and growth upon which humankind depends.
Though Paiditalli desires to help humankind in its struggle on the inhospitable
surface of her cosmos (though humanity can exist nowhere else) this is not the location where she is most at home to herself, most fully herself. Her fluidity, her deep
interiority, is self–intra-grating through its never-ceasing dynamic movement which
continuously permeates itself. Deep within herself is where she is most true to herself
as herself. Thus, as she approaches the surface of her cosmos, one can say that her
transition is severe (though likely not abrupt—her cosmos is continuous, as is she
within herself ). And it is here, on her hardened, fixed surface of selfness (so unlike her
true selfness) that human beings use ritual to affect and effect this transition as gently
as they can, to bring her once more to perceive human needs, to re-awaken her desire
to aid the people of Vizianagaram, their kingship and king.
The highest degree of intra-gration in Paiditalli’s cosmos is deep within herself,
within her infinite depths (which have no center) where she is most fully herself,
uninterrupted, undivided, wholly dynamic. The lowest degree of intra-gration is near
or on the surface of her cosmos, in the animate world. Here rituals aid or enable the
presence of the goddess to become form, phase by phase. In doing so she quickens
life in the encrustation, infusing this with the dynamism of reviving growth. Rituals
are the primary if indirect source of thinking on Paiditalli’s cosmos.5
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198 | moebius anthropology
I turn briefly to the ritual phases through which Paiditalli annually emerges into
form, moving from formlessness within her own deep interiority into her own shallows, from which she wades ashore to where the human dwells, and where shaping
and self-shaping through ritual begins and continues, until and then after its climax.
Devara Pandaga Ritual: The Birth of the Goddess on Her Cosmic Surface
This ritual cycle begins near the end of the hot season (usually in May), broken by
the coming of the monsoon. The hot season is blazing and extremely dry. In the past
this was the primary period of disease and epidemic, and goddesses in South India are
often the bringers both of the extreme heating of disease and its healing, its blessed
cooling. The devara pandaga ritual takes place on the shore of the lake where in 1757
the king’s sister drowned herself and emerged as Paiditalli. In the stillness of the deep
night, her priest and his two helpers enter the waters. On shore, in clusters here and
there, are gathered devotees of the goddess. The priest and his helpers address the
goddess, pleading with her to come, cajoling her, yet also as time passes cursing and
insulting Paiditalli in efforts to arouse her from her depths. Sometimes this is a difficult birth, taking hours; yet sometimes it is easier and quicker. Nonetheless Paiditalli
often resists coming, and then when she does appear it is with force, in anger at being
disturbed deep within her fluid depths.
All await a sign of fire in the dark sky. Eventually a spark appears, perhaps heat
lightning, which is seen as falling into the water. The priest and his helpers grasp
handfuls of mud from the lake bottom even as they fall unconscious with the force
of the anger of the goddess’s coming, and they immediately are dragged ashore, their
fists clenched around oozing mud. The priest sees in the mud the two colors that are
the essence of the Goddess (and of the female in general). One is gold, the color of
turmeric ( pasuppu), and the other, vermilion, the redness of kunkum. In her coming, Paiditalli joins together the basic elements of cosmos: fire (the lightning), air
(through which she passes), water (the lake from which she emerges), and earth (the
mud within which her essence rests). She comes as an infant re-born. Women on the
shore immediately feed her and ritually protect her in her openness and helplessness
in the animate world. I call the goddess in this form, Mud-Paiditalli; within the
mud she is relatively labile, fluid, amorphous, perhaps still closer to her own depths.
Nonetheless the initial shaping and hardening into form is occurring, and her fluidity
lessens as she takes on form. Simultaneously, Paiditalli brings the depth and density
of cosmic interiority and fluidity to the hardness, dryness, and brittleness of the human world, softening this, making this more malleable to reshaping, and, so, more
suitable for the deeper potential of fertility and growth, as the monsoon rains come.
Mud-Paiditalli is placed in a jangidi, a winnowing basket. The basket’s concave
inner surface has been rubbed intensively with golden-colored turmeric. In the center
of the basket is a largish circular bed of vermilion kunkum surrounded by white flowers. On the bed of kunkum is a circular lamp filled with camphor, in which is a lit,
long wick and a raw mango. The whole basket is formed as female. The winnowing
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basket is rubbed with turmeric as is the face of an auspicious married woman after
her morning bath. This intensifies her femaleness and gives this greater depth, greater
density and self-resonance. The basket is marked with a dot of vermilion kunkum, as
is the female forehead—intended to ward off any untoward forces in the vicinity. In
Andhra the winnowing basket is strongly associated with the womb and female fertility (Handelman 2014), and the mango with the vagina and the birth of goddesses.
Thus: face within the womb, vagina within the face, a lit lamp on the forehead,
a mark of respect and worship. The newborn amorphous infant is placed simultaneously deep within the female form (the jangidi) yet also on its intensified (and
therefore deeper) surface, from which she will continue to emerge and mature in the
human world. The female turns into and through herself, interior becoming more
exterior, exterior becoming more interior. Autopoietically, the goddess gives birth
to herself, first in the lake and then on shore, at the water’s edge, in the winnowing
basket. Coming from deep within herself, she is placed deep within herself on the
shore of the hardness of the human world, into an exterior womb on the surface of
the human world, an exterior womb that is no less a cradle, one designed for the human forming of the female—which is how the winnowing basket has been prepared
here. The goddess gives birth to herself without ever leaving herself, which speaks to
the depth and density of her cosmos. In this sense she is permitting human beings to
shape her for their need to create depth and life within the flatness of civilization. She
is quiet now, a slumbering infant.
Dawn breaks, and the winnowing basket is carried in procession from the lake
into the city, to the Square Temple some hundreds of meters from the palace-fort of
the Raja. In the climactic ritual of this renewal of kingship, the goddess will move
between her Square Temple and the palace-fort.
The Goddess Becomes Womb
Within the inner sanctum ( garbha griha) of the Square Temple, Mud-Paiditalli is
divided into clumps which rejuvenate metal pots of the goddess that have been taken
out of storage. Fifteen days later the dried mud is carefully put back into the lake,
and two, new, spheroidal pots (made from lake-bottom clay) are placed in the inner
sanctum where for the next months (through August) they absorb the energies and
female qualities (turmeric and kunkum) of the infant from her permanent metal pots.
Her amorphousness is curved, the energies are curving, the curvature enclosing itself with her energies within this: Paiditalli enclosing herself within herself. The two
clay pots are a virginal womb for and of the goddess, her own form within which
she matures and evolves. Mud-Paiditalli turns herself into Pot-Paiditalli. She herself
is described as “innocent,” as prepubescent. In effect, the goddess is moving from
womb to womb, from the lake of her origins to infancy in the wicker basket to her
own pre-existing metal pots to her own clay pots shaped especially for her on this
occasion. Each womb is a locus of depth on the superficial surface of the human
world. Even as her form acquires a measure of solid presence, she continues flowing
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200 | moebius anthropology
within herself. She is the Golden Goddess and in South India gold is the solid that is
the closest to the fluid.
Just as Paiditalli’s movement from womb to womb opens depth and softness in
the hard, shallow surface of the human world, so, too, does the growing of rice, the
food staple. The maturing of the goddess within the Square Temple parallels the
growing of rice in the rural fields outside the city. Farmers perceive powerful parallels
between the growth of the rice plant and female pregnancy. The paddy is planted in a
rice-plot (aku-madi), a corner of the larger field. Around the end of July, the sprouts
are removed and transplanted into the larger field. Around this time, Paiditalli transplants herself from the mud into the metal pots. Inside the plant the pannicle buds
begin forming, shaping what is called the “little stomach,” akin to the first signs of
pregnancy. By late August, as the rice stomach grows very visibly, the two, empty, clay
pots that are Pot-Paiditalli, daily begin leaving the Square Temple, going into the Old
City of Vizianagaram. While the rice-plant flowers, its female and male reproductive
organs are pollinated together by the wind. The flower turns into seed and develops
a quasi-protective hull that fills with liquid (starch and protein). As the flower falls
away, this milky fluid is visible. Farmers say that “the flower becomes pregnant with
milk,” proof that the soft, green seed is a viable offspring. The plant is successfully
pregnant within itself as the seeds develop and is heavy with rice as it bends back and
down, ready for harvesting.
The annual rice cycle in the region of Vizianagaram is related intimately to the
opening of space and depth—in seeding, in the extrusion of shoots, in the ploughing
of furrows and filling them with water, in the transplanting, in the protrusion of
the stomach in the extruding plant, in the forming of the milk-pregnancy, and in
the birth of the mature turmeric-colored rice. The dynamics are those of interiority
exteriorizing itself and emerging onto the softened, now receptive, indeed welcoming, surface that is the human world. The dynamics of exteriorization are primarily
female, generating new life from within life. This is Paiditalli’s purpose on the surface
of her cosmos.
Pot-Paiditalli Furrows and Sows
During the period that stomach, flower, and milk pregnancy appear in the rice plant,
the clay pots of Pot-Paiditalli leave the Square Temple most evenings during August
and September and go through Old Vizianagaram, street by street, alley by alley. This
is the first phase of Paiditalli’s evolution that is marked less by her interiorization
within womb-like structures and more by her bringing her fertility, her womb, to
human beings. Now she is actively moving into the thin hardness of a kingdom in
need of softening, depth, fertilization, and healing. As she goes from home to home,
Pot-Paiditalli is met by family members, especially women, who place their offerings
in the pots and ask for the goddess’s blessing. This worship, night after night, street
after street, is akin to furrowing the surfaces of the city, opening space for the depth
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of presence of the goddess within home after home. So, too, one can think of these
movements of the goddess as sowing the coming of kingship in every corner of the
furrowed mandala of the Old City. The climactic harvesting will occur during the
Sirimanu, as the king is brought anew to his palace-fort, renewing this intra-grative
core of the kingdom.
The Tevadam Rite: Paiditalli Sprouts from the Earth
As the sowing of the city nears completion during the second half of September,
Paiditalli reappears, now growing in a Tamarind tree (cinta cettu) some 40–45 feet
high, in the midst of paddy fields.6 At the beginning of October, Tree-Paiditalli is
carefully, ritually, taken out of the earth, and on to the city where she rests quietly
in a street close to her priest’s home until the Sirimanu Jatra some ten days later.
In contrast to Mud-Paiditalli, Tree-Paiditalli demands to enter the human plane of
her cosmos, to sacrifice herself once more (being cut, severed, injured). This is her
most prominent exteriorization of herself within her cosmos as she forms herself
as thoroughly solid and lineal in shape, with powerful linear directionality (unlike
the recursiveness of the pot). She is the goddess evolving further, her cosmos preparing to harvest and deliver kingship within the Old City, energized and prepared
by Pot-Paiditalli. Unlike her precursors, she is her own shrine, independent of any
fixed location. Utterly self-aware, she extrudes and protrudes into the human world
within herself.
From her top, four slender pieces are sliced away, with one given a crude visage.
Three are the head-body of Paiditalli and her arms, yet no less the head-body of her
younger brother, Potu Raju (the Buffalo King). The fourth is also Paiditalli. In the
priest’s yard the vehicles for the Jatra are being assembled. Foremost is the Sirimanu
carriage (ratham) itself which will carry Tree-Paiditalli, enabling her to swivel up and
down or to rotate. To her top will be slotted, and in this way fixed there, a seat and
footrest. As the Jatra nears, Tree-Paiditalli is intensified and self-intensifies through
offerings and sacrifices, her tree-body rubbed with turmeric, red rings of vermilion
traced round her girth, camphor lamps placed along her entire length which is caressed over and over.
In other rituals the night before the Jatra, the Potu Raju qualities of Paiditalli (the
three-piece) are nurtured (indeed treated as an infant) even as she becomes more
she~he, her~him. Potu Raju is the generic younger brother of the goddess in South
India. Where the Goddess is present, his presence is ubiquitous (Biardeau 2004),
considered her guardian and protector. Yet now the goddess, her cosmos, contains
him, and he emerges from, is cut from her so that their relationship and presence is
fuzzy-minded (and likely felt fuzzily in ways that people cannot articulate), and they
infra-lap (rather than overlap) even as they separate. Both are one and the one is the
goddess within herself. In effect, Paiditalli gives birth to her younger brother as she
does to the entirety of the cosmos.
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The Surimanu Jatra: Tree-Paiditalli Carries the King Home
A small city bursting with visitors: perhaps three to four hundred thousand persons have come to Vizianagaram to see the Sirimanu. Tree-Paiditalli’s length is again
rubbed with turmeric and she is taken by ox cart to the Square Temple and there
mounted on her carriage. Her priest wears the white, silken finery of a raja (and given
to him by the son of the last Raja of Vizianagaram), the raja’s turban on his head. He
is garlanded and receives turmeric and vermilion. Tied with new saris into the seat,
with one hand he holds tightly onto the fourth sliver cut from her head even as she
carries him throughout the journey. In his lap, wrapped in a silk cloth, is the threepiece, the other three slivers cut from her head, who are Paiditalli—Potu Raju, the
goddess, and her younger brother.
With a great cry, a wave-like sigh from the assembled, Tree-Paiditalli lifts her priest
high in the air at a 45-degree angle and swings him in an arc of 180 degrees. This
great raising and heightening of space is the opening of the depth of the kingdom by
Tree-Paiditalli, harvesting its capacities for creativity and growth sowed and rejuvenated by the goddess. King and kingship sprout from Tree-Paiditalli into her priest, the
receptacle formed to receive them within the human world. Tree-Paiditalli and her entourage make three journeys from the Square Temple to the palace-fort and back. The
first is climactic, carried high on the surging waves of the crowd’s emotions. During
each successive round there is less overt excitement, the waves subsiding, becoming
gentler, gentler. Yet there is no lessening of enthusiasm and more a sense of increasing
fullness, repletion, and quietude as a difficult, lengthy journey nears its completion. As
the sun sets with the third return of Tree-Paiditalli to the Temple, the Sirimanu ends.
From the human perspective the priest is possessed by Paiditalli. From Paiditalli’s
perspective—if I may be allowed the hubris of this extrapolation—she absorbs him
fully into her interiority so that he becomes part of her greater depths. The new saris
are her, tying him into her, dressing him, enclosing him so that he is held next to her
as a mother would carry an infant in front of her. From this perspective the world of
Vizianagaram is an exteriorization from within the cosmos during this period when
Paiditalli comes closest to exteriorizing herself in this way. And it is within herself
that the king sprouts into the priest becoming the raja, the priest who is the raja, just
as the raja is no less the slain brother of the younger sister who drowned herself and
became a goddess and who has a younger brother who emerges from her. The priestturned-king sprouts from within the interior of the goddess as she brings him to his
palace-fort, the sovereign center of the kingdom. In this sense the autopoietic goddess
brings the king out of herself into her own exterior, into an extension of herself that
is still herself and, within this, into the kingdom of Vizianagaram that she has sown
and grown with her blessings. In a profound sense, within herself she gives birth to
the king, her brother—or to her brother, the king. Put otherwise, the king slips out
from the goddess just as Potu Raju emerges from his sister. Now older sisters both,
younger brothers both.
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The Uyyala Kambulu Ritual: Paiditalli Swings Away to the Wilderness Temple
All post-Sirimanu rituals are intended to quiet, soothe, and please Paiditalli, to make
her softly sleepy. The two weeks after the Sirimanu are felt as a spooky period of betwixt and between, a post-harvest lull, perhaps a time of cosmic dissipation. A swing
is erected outside the Square Temple. Some parts are from an old Sirimanu carriage.
In effect the swing is another vehicle (ratham) for Paiditalli, yet a fluid, modulating
version of the Sirimanu carriage. After these two weeks, aspects of the goddess are
placed on the swing which is referred to as a cradle. From the apex of her maturity
in the human world during the Sirimanu, Paiditalli again moves toward infanthood,
moving deeper into herself, involuting, withdrawing from the encrusted, superficial,
human part of her cosmos into her fruitful depths. Her priest speaks of Paiditalli now
as a young girl, and of the swinging as a lullaby. In the past the swinging away was
more explicitly a pavalimpu seva ritual, one of putting the goddess to bed as is done
every evening in her temples. Now she is swung away to her Wilderness Temple next
to the lake, there going deeper into herself, into her intra-grated cosmos where she
is said to sleep, to rest—into the fluid, dense, continuous, flowing depths of herself,
where she remains from mid-October to mid-May, far from the thin, brittle, divided,
and bounded world of humans, the world of kingdom and kingship.
Conclusion: Reflections on a South Indian Cosmic Logic
I suggested in Part I that, in an intra-grated cosmos, holism is only sometimes dependent on cosmic closure. Instead, these holistic cosmoses are open, rather than
enclosed from their exteriors. So, how does Paiditalli’s cosmos hold together—sort of
topologically (and unrelated to the mathematics of topology)? This is something like
trying to visualize the first nano-moments of the Big Bang before anything existed
externally to whatever expands from, as it were, its inside.
Paiditalli’s cosmos emerges from deep within herself, from fluid bottomless
depths, from her autopoietic beginnings in the lake. Visualized, this is something
like an inverted conus without a cap, which rises through itself to protrude above
itself without leaving itself. The dynamic is from an inside without end toward a
non-existent outside, without ever fully surfacing outside because everything continues to be inside, and then moving from the direction of a non-existent outside
into inside, the cone-without-cap going into itself without end—while the actual
shaping of these movements is done through ritual. Were I to look for boundedness to this intra-grated cosmos, where would I look? The liquid depths of innerness
have no bottom. Neither does the cosmos have an exterior, an outside. Instead, in
moving further outward from the deep innerness of great densities and intensities of
ever-flowing fluidity, there is a hardening, a rigidifying, through which depth turns
into encrustation. This may be called a surface, yet it is inside cosmos. This dynamic
is cosmic process—the less deep slows and in slowing becomes encrusted with itself.
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204 | moebius anthropology
Thus cosmos is held together by shifts in concentrations of gravity from deep-within
to less deep-within. As the intensity of deeper fluidity rises outward, the positioning
of densities, of qualities of energy and fruitfulness, shift, softening the less-deep encrustations of the fluid that are the animate world of human beings. This dynamic
reaches the apex of its own interiority in a concentration of gravity in the least deepwithin during the Sirimanu in the merging of Potu Raju, king, and brother within
the goddess at the very top of Tree-Paiditalli.
In Paiditalli’s cosmos the encrustations of the fluid are entropic, a senescence of
cosmos: these are the regions in which fluidity slows, encounters obstacles, dries out,
losing the energy of the fertile and the fruitful, and, so, withers and dies. The rituals
I have discussed drive this melting of crusted fluids of the as-if surface, the less-deep.
Understood in this way, there are no boundaries to this cosmos, and even their formation toward outer-ness, into encrustation which is decay, cries out for their softening and dissolution.
This cosmos is fluid yet without boundedness, without encompassment, seemingly
an impossibility, yet not so since existence-as-fluid is what there is, and this existence
discovers its own currents within itself, the goddess within herself, the human within
the goddess. Nonetheless this cosmos is not a closed system since it is unbounded,
yet neither is it open since it includes everything there is. Similarly, calling this a
porous system merely begs the question. One can say of course that this is merely a
cosmos constructed through ritual and therefore illusory, and, so, minimally related
to the realities of daily existence of human being. This leads into fruitless discussion
on religion and social order (see Handelman and Lindquist 2011), and in the case
of Vizianagaram also denies the profoundly fluid, involutional, cultural currents that
emerged in the kingdom of Vizianagaram during the nineteenth century.7
The cosmos discussed here has powerful resonances with a medieval South Indian
cosmos of Siva (Handelman and Shulman 2004). I briefly draw attention to this
cosmos, thereby stipulating that it is worth thinking again on other South Indian
cosmoses through time.
Siva, the great god, the creator of cosmos and its interior depths, is told that in the
Forest of Pines there are sages who have forgotten him and instead seek enlightenment through severe ascetic practices. Siva goes to the faraway Forest where the sages
practice their asceticism, accompanied by Visnu in his female form as Mohini. While
naked ash-strewn Siva seduces the sages’ chaste wives, ravishing Mohini arouses the
sages from their asceticism with her sexual allure. When the sages become aware of
what has befallen them and their wives, they curse Siva (whom they do not recognize)
as a wicked, lascivious magician and plan to kill him. From their great sacrificial fire
appear weapons one by one to attack Siva, yet he catches and tames each one and
makes it part of himself (tiger, axe, elephant, deer, snakes, two-headed drum, the
bleached skull of Brahma, etc.). Defeated, the sages recognize him as the great god
and worship him once more. Then in the Forest he dances (as Nataraja, Lord of the
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Dance) for the first time, desisting only as the cosmos, nearing collapse, terrifies all
the assembled.
Siva is the all-knowing cosmos of his creation and he is affected by what transpires
within it. He does not encompass his cosmos—this has no boundary—but he is
anywhere and everywhere within it. He is the life principle of cosmos. His cosmos,
though not liquid, nonetheless flows continually just as he does. The alternative—
entropy, stasis—is the destruction of cosmos, of himself. Evident at the outset is
that his quality of knowing has deteriorated, for he is unaware that the sages deny
his existence and have become autonomous of him. In effect, part of his cosmos has
congealed, hardened, fragmented, leaving cosmos, himself, diminished, less whole.
After Siva and Mohini destroy the self-contemplation of the sages, the latter practice
sorcery against Siva. Through this he discovers that he had lost significant attributes
of his being, for the weapons they send against him are aspects of himself that fragmented from him as did the Forest—and he takes them back, completing himself
again, softening the Forest back into himself, into cosmos as the sages worship him.
Fully himself once more, he dances, and the dynamic is both that of destruction
and creation, for the two are inseparable. Implicit in this is that Siva, like Paiditalli,
must continually conserve his cosmos from its interior, finding those loci that are
losing dynamism, freeing them from senescence that is entropy, so that again they are
intra-related, held together from within. In both Vizianagaram and the Pine Forest
there are powerful continuities though separated by hundreds of years, and in both
instances cosmic work is directed to reviving human beings and their surround.
Paiditalli’s cosmos (and that of the medieval Siva) are flowing, full of currents
and shifting volumes of density, without boundedness. These cosmoses are highly
systemic. Yet how can fluidity without boundaries be systemic? Would the question itself arise without one or another perspective that insisted on intra-gration
rather than inte(r)gration, or without a perspective that eschews cosmos as container,8 instead seeking dynamics? One interesting idea that emerges from thinking
on “primitive” cosmos as intra-grating is that, without external containment (in the
monotheistic sense), cosmos is not necessarily self-limiting but potentially can go
on and on. If cosmos is characterized by fluid dynamics (which to my knowledge
no monotheistic cosmos is) then the problematic of holding itself together is even
more acute. However, if cosmos is less exteriorizing than it is interiorizing, plumbing depths rather than expanding through space (as, for example, encompassment
and other ideas of hierarchical meta-organization stress), then holding together may
be a problem of movement through other dimensions of which we are unaware or
do not recognize. Consider that which transpires at the top of Tree-Paiditalli during
the Sirimanu Jatra as the balance of fluid densities shifts toward lesser depth and
sister, brother, king, and goddess all come together through the priest, or, more
accurately, all go through one another so that they cannot be distinguished from
one another.
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So, perhaps, Paiditalli’s fluid cosmos is held together through recursiveness, and
this recursiveness is activated primarily by ritual. Paiditalli’s essential being is fluid
depth without end. Her natural condition of being is going deep into her own depths,
becoming denser as she goes, distant from the congelation in her lesser depths. Left
to her own nature, she would stay in her own depths and her human world would
dry, harden, fragment. Ritual activates the recursiveness to shift the intensities of
her densities toward the human world. Recursivity braids cosmos together through
movement, though not through structure, unless one argues that structure itself is
movement (i.e., Prigogine and Stengers [1984] on every thing existing through the
movement of its own time because this is basic to its interior existence—and time,
of whatever variety, is movement). Yet saying that recursiveness braids together a
fluid cosmos through the very movement of recursiveness is nonetheless arguing that
cosmos intra-grates itself from within since the entirety, fluidity, is recursive through
and through.
In anthropology, studies like that of Paiditalli’s cosmos demand rethinking movement, be it called process or dynamics. Victor Turner (1977) called for this long ago.
There are attempts, for example, Daryn’s (2006) use of fractals to discuss in stimulating ways a Nepalese Brahmin world, Roy Wagner’s (2001) maddeningly creative
use of the holographic worldview, and the worthy attempts to apply chaos theory
in the chapters of Mosko and Damon (2005).9 The latter volume would have been
more potent had the contributors rethought “structure” as varieties of the temporal—perhaps “structure” as slow or very slow temporal processes—thereby avoiding
the division of “structure” and “process” that inevitably demands “stops” (“structure”)
and “starts” (“process”) which subvert the very dynamics proposed by chaos theory
(Handelman 2007). Temporality (though less so linear time) may accomplish unification in a way that space (and structure) are less capable of, given that the latter tend
to segregate and separate (Rosen 1994: 203–4).10
I said at the outset of Part II that my intention regarding the cosmos of Paiditalli
is metaphysical. In sociocultural anthropology the usual approach to cosmology is
to begin with the social, the cultural, and construct cosmos on these bases. What
happens then is that the limning of cosmos tends strongly to reflect the social, the
cultural, and rarely goes beyond this. Otherwise, fears of theology take over, and
Western philosophies of the ontological, especially phenomenology, may be invoked
to sidestep these worries. In his late, great work, The Elementary Forms of Religious
Life, Durkheim came to the idea of effervescence to recognize that something critical
to human existence is shaped by people together that cannot be reduced to the social
(or the cultural), just as the social cannot be reduced to the individual. In my view,
this kind of recognition is at the heart of the study of cosmology and its metaphysics.
One can enter into cosmos in its own right and fruitfully discover different kinds of
entirety.11
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inter-gration and intra-gration in cosmology
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Notes
First published in 2014 as “Inter-gration and intra-gration in Cosmology,” in Framing Cosmologies:
The Anthropology of Worlds, ed. Allen Abramson and Martin Holbraad, 95–115. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Reprinted with permission.
1. A neologism is necessary since the conception that informs it is foreign to standard English
language usage.
2. In the perspective offered here, values of individualism are not antithetical to values of holism.
Rather, more at issue are differences and shifts in scale that reorganize values of holism, rather
than radical changes in value. In the Western individual (yet obviously not only) there continues the sense of an entity that holds together rather than fragments. My response to postmodern
claims for the fragmentation of a unified self is that it has always been preferable, analytically,
to speak of qualities of selfness rather than of the self (Handelman 2002).
3. For the fuller ethnography, see Handelman, Krishnayya, and Shulman (2014).
4. Narratives of this war are discussed in Narayana Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam (2001:
24–92).
5. The surface is not uniformly hard. Lakes, springs, caves in the mountains, are all softer areas
within the hardness. The human beings in these locales—fishers, hunters—resonate more naturally with the fluidity of the goddess. So, too, healers in their healing soften the rigidity of the
surface.
6. The tamarind can grow beyond sixty feet. Its wood is hard and dense; its heartwood colored
dark red, its sapwood yellowish.
7. After the 1757 debacle at Bobilli, Vizianagaram ceased being an expansionist kingdom and
turned inward. In the nineteenth century this social involution produced a cultural florescence
in the Telugu country. Under royal patronage, Vizianagaram became the most vibrant cultural
center between Calcutta and Madras through creativities that engaged intensive introspection
in language, tantric yoga, ayurvedic healing, and more. The cosmos of Paiditalli and the ritual
cycle that activated this in the human world may have been another post-1757 shaping of this
involution through popular ritual rather than through royal rites of renewal.
8. Leading to the oft misguided notion of linear framing and content within the frame (Handelman 2012; see also Chapter Seven).
9. My interpretation of McKim Marriott’s (e.g., 1989) perspective on the exchange of substances
in India among what I could call sentient cosmic particles (human and other) which continuously alter each other’s interiority, influences the idea of intra-gration in everyday life. For
example, the inter-action among persons in the West is understood—through phenomenology,
self-theory, symbolic interactionism and the like—as an utterance or action that comes from
one’s interior self, moving to one’s (often facial) exterior and is absorbed through alter’s (often
facial) exterior, entering alter’s interior self, back and forth. What is related to goes outside of
one and enters into another from the exterior, and so forth. With Marriott’s general perspective
on the exchange of substances in India, a quite different constellation emerges. Persons, the
earth, one’s home, are related through depths of movement (Daniels 1984), such that, rather
than moving from depth (of self ) to surface and over to another surface and into depth (of
the self of another), the exchange of substances in India moves from the depths of the person
directly to the depths of another, yet not only between persons but between person and house,
between person and natal earth, and so forth (see Bar-On Cohen [2009] on accomplishing a related condition of being in karate). Extrapolating further, all of these cosmic particles are somehow related to one another through their insides, their depths, and the changing densities and
intensities of these intra-relationships. Indeed, this is an intra-gration of cosmos in the everyday.
As Babb (1990: 202) writes on Marriott’s theory, “This is surely a possible world. Whether it (or
something like it) is an actual world, a world conceptually and perceptually dwelt in by Hindus,
is one of the most interesting questions yet raised in the anthropology of India.”
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208 | moebius anthropology
10. Interestingly, as Allen Abramson notes, this connects to the late-modern physics of quantum
theory (see Rosen 1994: 203–4, and, among quantum physicists, especially Bohm 1981).
Abramson comments (personal communication) that the quantum cosmos goes on and on
without closure and perhaps without reversing itself. In the case of a human cosmos like that of
Paiditalli, recursive braiding (rather than closure) is accomplished through made ritual.
11. Or as the late Roy Wagner (2001) might have said, be discovered by cosmos in its own right.
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Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 1984. Order Out of Chaos. New York: Bantam Books.
Robbins, Joel. 2009. “Is the Trans- in Transnational the Trans- in Transcendent?” In Transnational
Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, ed. Thomas J. Csordas, 55–72. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Rosen, Steven M. 1994. Science, Paradox, and the Moebius Principle: The Evolution of a “Transcultural” Approach to Wholeness. Albany: SUNY Press.
Schnepel, Burkhard. 1996. “The Hindu King’s Authority Reconsidered: Durga-Puja and Dasara
in a South Orissan Jungle Kingdom.” In Political Ritual, ed. Asa Boholm,126–57. Goteberg:
Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology.
———. 2002. The Jungle Kings: Ethnohistorical Aspects of Politics and Ritual in Orissa. New Delhi:
Manohar.
Thomassen, Bjorn. 2010. “Anthropology, Multiple Modernities and the Axial Age Debate.” Anthropological Theory 10: 321–42.
Turner, Victor. 1977. “Process, System, and Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis.” Daedalus
106: 61–80.
Wagner, Roy. 2001. An Anthropology of the Subject. Berkeley: University of California Press.
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Part IV
Deleuzian
Conjunctions
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Chapter 9
Self-Exploders,
Self-Sacrifice,
and the Rhizomic
Organization
of Terrorism
Author’s Note
In January 1996 the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and Bruce Kapferer
brought together a small group of anthropologists of whom I was one to critique
his manuscript of The Feast of the Sorcerer so that Bruce could make final alterations
if he so wished before the final manuscript was sent to press. To my knowledge,
through this magnificent book Bruce was the first anthropologist to introduce Deleuzian thinking to an anthropological readership. This, too, was my introduction to
Deleuze, especially to his and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, a primer, perhaps the
primer, for counterintuitive thinking. For me, Deleuze and Guattari were a blessing
of the imagination. I am not a Deleuzian, for wedding myself to a particular conceptual perspective has always felt wrongheaded, while imagining potentialities certainly
was the fun in what I did. When I was younger the science fiction of Cordwainer
Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula LeGuin, Frank Herbert, Philip K. Dick, Joanna
Russ, Samuel Delaney, and others, gave me that opportunity. Meeting the writings
of Deleuze (and, of course, Guattari) so much later restored to me something of the
enthusiasm for wakeful dreaming, hence they were a blessing to my imagination,
indeed blessing mine own imagination.
I wrote “Self-Exploders . . .” for a lecture series at Stockholm University in 2005
organized by Galina Lindquist. The literature on terrorism was replete with discussions of terrorist networks, yet I didn’t find a single mention of the Deleuze and
Guattari idea of the rhizome. In explaining the tremendous adaptive potential of
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214 | moebius anthropology
today’s terrorism, using the rhizome was so much more powerful than that of the
network, and showed me the value of practicing Deleuzian thinking.
R
The human bombs of today’s terrorism are self-exploders. I do not refer to self-exploder lightly. Exploding the self is the self-destruction of one’s intimate interior being, one’s own journeys of becoming, the existential being-ness through which each
of us (in manifoldly different cultural ways) experiences and knows worlds, inside
one’s self, outside one’s self. Since self comes into existence and is formed and forming
through relating to otherness, the self is a social being. To self-explode self is then a
social act, a social practice, one intended to act on the world through one’s own selfdestruction. As social practice, self-explosion radiates outwards, into sociality, into its
fragmentation, disruption, dismemberment. As social practice, self-exploding leads
directly to the potentiality of self-sacrifice in today’s world. Self-sacrifice indexes the
voluntary giving of one’s life for otherness—protecting this, saving this, bringing this
into existence through self-destruction. The giving of one’s self to otherness no less
indexes altruism (Gambetta 2005b: 259), the gift of devotion—to a cause, to a belief,
to others, and on. Therefore, and I emphasize this connectivity, the social giving of
one’s self to otherness as self-sacrifice often has cosmic implications when selfness and
otherness in relation to one another are comprehended as integral to world-making.
The creation of worlds through the destruction of worlds. This is the linkage I want
to explore through the practice of self-exploding in and from the Middle East by
considering, toward the end of this chapter, the self-exploder as a double sacrifice—of
the enemy other and of the (purified and consecrated) self, and the implications of
this for cosmic destruction and creation.
Self-exploding and the organization of today’s terrorism both have qualities of
a nomadic, rhizomic dynamic, in the terms created by Deleuze and Guattari. The
rhizomic dynamic of movement has qualities of asymmetry, speed, intensity, laterality, and penetration (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 1986, 1988). As far as I can tell,
self-exploder terrorism adopted these qualities for practical reasons, for putting together (again in Deleuzian terms) assemblages that worked, especially within globalizing, transnational, and urban ecologies. To a high degree, these dynamic, rhizomic
qualities potentiate and enable the organization of terrorism to culminate eventfully
in self-explosion. Though the rhizomic organization of terrorism and self-explosion
have not been brought to conjoin one another in any deliberate, conscious way, they
evolved together through practice, coming powerfully to complement one another.
The rhizomic organization of terrorism foregrounds self-explosion as sacrifice, and
the rhizomic is discussed here prior to addressing the latter.
Following this brief introduction, the chapter continues with the section “Terrorism in Modernity,” considering thinking on terrorism that situates human bombs as
a more “civilian” (though not noncombatant) response to perceived, felt, grievance.
I then take up “The Rhizome and the Self-Organization of Terrorism,” afterwards
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self-exploders, self-sacrifice
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turning to that which I am calling self-exploding, its sacrificial qualities, and its implications for cosmic order. I close by thinking on the attacks of 9/11 as ritual sacrifice
and cosmic (re)origination. The logic of my argument moves from the phenomenon
of terrorism more generally, to the organization of terrorism, to the terrorist act (that
itself has rhizomic qualities). I do not discuss any psychology of self-exploders—so far
this has been discussed primarily and often only in universal terms of suiciding and
suicide. This I regard as of little or no aid in comprehending much of the significance
of self-exploders in today’s world.1
Self-exploders appeared in the Near East in 1983, during the civil war in Lebanon, when attacks by the Shi’a movement Hezbollah against American and French
military peacekeeping forces and against Israeli military targets caused major casualties. The departure of the peacekeepers from Lebanon was linked to these attacks.
Major training grounds at the time were in the Sudan, and in Afghanistan during the
occupation by and battles against the Soviet armies there. That war in Afghanistan
attracted and exported Muslim fighters from and to a broad swath of North Africa,
the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Near East, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. The success
of Hezbollah with self-exploders in Lebanon may have influenced their use by the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) beginning in the late 1980s (see Roberts
n.d., 2005a, 2005b) and likely had an effect on al-Qaida (Gunaratna 2002: 147).
Human bombs appeared in Israel/Palestine during the 1990s, when Hamas and
Palestinian Islamic Jihad (and later, during the Second Intifada, Fatah) adopted the
Hezbollah initiative. The first Hamas self-exploders blew themselves up following
the massacre in the Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, where according to Jewish and Muslim traditions Abraham/Ibrahim is buried (Beinin 2003:
15). On Purim, 25 February 1994, an annual holiday unusual in Judaism in that
it is given over to inversion, license, and the blurring of boundaries between good
and bad, a physician and settler, Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque in his army
reserve fatigues and shot well over a hundred and fifty Muslim worshipers, of whom
twenty-nine died. He was torn to pieces by the survivors. Goldstein the terrorist
undoubtedly perceived himself as a self-sacrifice for the greater Jewish good in the
biblical Land of Israel. His remains were buried in Rabbi Meir Kahane Park, and his
tomb has become a pilgrimage site for West Bank settlers and their sympathizers.
The inscription on his tomb reads: “Here lies the saint, Dr. Baruch Kappel Goldstein, blessed be the memory of the righteous and holy man, may the Lord avenge his
blood, who devoted his soul to the Jews, Jewish religion and Jewish land. His hands
are innocent and his heart is pure. He was killed as a martyr of G-d.” (my emphases)
Attackers have detonated themselves or their bombs in numerous locations in
the Middle East and Asia and, more recently in European capitals (Madrid, London). Their greatest success has been, of course, 9/11, the 2001 attacks on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon, in which the brilliance of a rhizomic attack and the catastrophe of its aftermath were magnified for all to see, as were the severity of the
American bureaucratic responses through law, classification, and regulation.2 SelfThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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216 | moebius anthropology
exploding terrorism appears as an apparently new means of mass violence (but see,
too, Dale 1988; Andriolo 2002), joining in the savagery of the twentieth and now
the twenty-first centuries, on the edge of the uncomfortably incomprehensible in the
religiousness of its self-destructiveness, in its indiscriminate massacring, and in its
seemingly tenuous and diffuse social organization.
Responses to terrorism by intellectuals and university academics are commonly
moralistic, outraged at the butchering of innocent noncombatants; at the destruction
of peaceful, law-abiding civilian sectors; and at the transnational influx into Western
states of archaics or primitives in a globalizing world. Scholarly and political thinking
join in perceiving terrorism in grandiose terms—a war of civilizations, a war among
the so-called universal Abrahamic religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, a
theophany of Gog and Magog. With few exceptions, there is consensus that suicide
bombers are terrorists, though there is no agreement as to what entails terror nor
how to define this. Obviously, terror can be defined categorically, legalistically, normatively—but whether this can be a substantive rendition of the phenomenal in its
social, existential, and eschatological dimensions is quite another matter, one hardly
addressed. This affects how liberal scholarship is relating to terrorist phenomena.
The following premises infuse much scholarly thinking about these human precision bombs (as Michael Roberts calls them), about the contexts that shape them,
and about the ways in which they organize. First, the perpetrators are suiciders, often mentally unstable or impressionable, trapped in the unstable flux of modernity,
unable to find their footings, alienated and frustrated human detritus (e.g., Moghaddam 2005). In Durkheimian terms, their lives are underintegrated, insufficiently
moored in a societal matrix, and they drift into what he called egoistical suicide,
killing themselves for their own sake. Or, their lives are overintegrated within an
authoritarian religious matrix, and so they are driven to give their lives to the cause
in acts that Durkheim called altruistic suicide (Durkheim 1952: 152–240).3 I return
to this theme, briefly, further on.
Second, commonsensical and scholarly thinking concur that there is a clear-cut
ethical and functional distinction between the civilian and the combatant—combatants are borderers, protecting civilians who live within borders and who are not
complicit in the oppressions that are perpetrated by their states, officials, and armies.
Therefore attacks on civilians violate this categorical distinction: these attacks treat
noncombatants as fully complicit in the oppression and devastation carried through
by states of which they are members. Whatever else it is, terrorism is understood as
deviant violence against innocent civilians.4 Today’s terrorism, with its colonial and
neocolonial legacies, puts this to the question.
Terrorism in Modernity
During the twentieth century, warfare between states turned from battles primarily between armies to violence aimed deliberately at civilian populations. No less,
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self-exploders, self-sacrifice
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states attacked their own subject populations (the Armenian genocide, the Herero
genocide [e.g., Hull 2005: 7–90], the Holocaust of European Jewry). The bulk of
casualties during World War I were those of combatants. Poison gas was used by
military against military. In World War II this completely turned about: Auschwitz,
Einsatzgruppen, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden and London, and on and on.5
States deliberately attacking one another’s civilian populations and their own, making
them prime targets for mass slaughter. Western states terrorizing Western noncombatants, thereby making them no longer quite that, no longer innocent noncombatants
but integral to strategizing the weakening of enemy capacities and capabilities, if
not the very extermination of that enemy. If in the more distant past, “The law of
nations held that war was a contest between states, waged by official, uniformed,
armed forces,” in more recent times, “as entire economies and societies have been
conscripted to the war effort and military and nonmilitary work have converged,
[there has been] a gradual loosening of what constitutes a legitimate military target”
(Smith 2002: 361). Civilian targets that also contribute to war use increasingly are
treated as unambiguous military targets. “The vogue today is the ‘Strategic Ring Theory’ of striking critical nodes of infrastructure in order to induce ‘strategic paralysis’
in one’s enemy” (Smith 2002: 362).
The massacring, killing, and brutalizing of subject populations that had flourished
during centuries of colonial rule surfaced within the motherlands and fatherlands,
internally and in relation to one another. Despite numerous international treaties
against the manufacture and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, against
war crimes, and so forth, during the twentieth century it became more and more
acceptable to attack civilians and civilian targets. In Edith Wyschogrod’s (1985) momentous phrasing, the logic of manmade mass death became fully formed during the
twentieth century.
Sociologist of law Donald Black argues that “terrorism in its purest form is selfhelp by organized civilians who covertly inflict mass violence on other civilians”
(2004: 16, my emphasis).6 Terrorism, he argues, is highly moralistic, often utopian,
and intended to exert social control by responding to grievance with aggression, especially when there is no other redress, or when redress does not work.7 Religious
international terrorists may well resemble millenarian mystical Christian movements
of medieval Europe (Black 2004: 18) whose utopian orientation, wrote Karl Mannheim (1936: 220), “tends at every moment to turn into hostility towards the world,
its culture, and all its works and earthly achievements” (see also Cohn [1970]).
Black (2004: 15) contends, “Violence occurs when a conflict structure is violent . . . . Every form of violence,” he writes, “has its own structure. . . . Structures kill
and maim, not individuals or collectivities.” The conflict structure of “pure terrorism”
(Black uses this as a Weberian ideal type), like some of its organization and strategies,
resembles that of the Deleuzian rhizome in relation to the state. Pure terrorism whose
aim is the mass killing and maiming of civilians by civilians takes shape on behalf
of one collectivity against another that is perceived as culturally and socially foreign,
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218 | moebius anthropology
and as superior in military, political, and economic power. Hence the Madrid rushhour commuter train bombings in 2004, and the London Underground bombings in
2005. Two decades ago, Rapoport (1984: 675) could (perhaps) argue that terrorists
tend “to choose methods that minimize the terrorist’s risks; the targets, accordingly,
are increasingly defenseless victims who have less and less value as symbols and less
responsibility for any condition that the terrorists say they want to alter.” If this
was ever the case, it ceased to be so in the age of the self-exploder, when boundaries
between the military and the civilian, between combatant and noncombatant, are
blurred and even effaced, and when terrorism extends self-exploding and other opportunities to civilians, both male and female (Gambetta 2005b: 283).
In 2003 there were ninety-eight self-exploder attacks around the world (Atran
2004a). Not only are most of the targets of these attacks civilian, but civilians are
perceived to be complicit in the oppressive enterprises of the offending states because
they do not oppose these states. Of no less significance, implicit in the complicit
is the intentional. Complicity is a declaration of intentionality—civilians thereby
are intentional accomplices of the oppressive states they are members in and shelter
within. The deeper implication is that the distinction between the officially designated armed forces of the state and its civilian citizens no longer holds. Civilians are
held responsible for their government and its practices. Civilians, then, should take
responsibility for their governments just as Islamist terrorists take responsibility for
the well-being of Islam. There are no longer any innocents, only perpetrators and the
complicit. This has more than a little prominence in America, for example, in the
bombing of the federal office building in Oklahoma City, yet no less in the Columbine high school massacre and in similar mass murders.8 I will discuss intentionality
further, in relation to sacrifice.
However, the brutal converse of all this is that in the name of national security,
indeed security even more broadly conceived as Total (and Totalizing) Security, there
are no longer civilian innocents in the eyes of the State either (see Bajc 2007).9 All are
at least under suspicion unless cleared for the moment. Thus every stop at a security
portal where ID is demanded, every passage through a metal detector, is a form of
interrogation into whether passage will be permitted, an interrogation into that which
is not evident on the surface of being, an interrogation that can be highly condensed
in time and act, even left entirely to machines, or stretched out to include questioning, body search, and even incarceration. CCTV systems in civic spaces, and the
monitoring of private phone conversations and email no less attest to the fact that all
are under suspicion until shown not to be. So too does the current official enthusiasm
for simplistic behavior profiling in public spaces: “The authorities at about a dozen
US airports now monitor passengers’ involuntary actions in hopes of nabbing potential terrorists, and Miami officials are so impressed with such behavior recognition
techniques that they plan to have janitors, coffee-shop workers and skycaps trained
to detect dangerous fliers.”10 A hostile environment for the unwary traveler who is
unaware of his own subtle behavioral habits.
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The practice of terrorism is a phenomenon of late modernity, of the last century
and this one, as technology has enabled transnational strike trajectories across lengthy
distances, separating, for example, a colonial power from those whom it oppresses
or oppressed (Atran 2004b). Violent civilians fighting back, attacking the oppressive state through its civilians who are perceived as complicit, rejecting the distinct
classification of civilian and military (e.g., Asad 2007: 17, 22).11 Violent civilians or
quasi-civilians (those with limited martial training) in small groups are systematic
wild cards, mutating, developing, emerging in their own ways with less of or quite
without the external strictures imposed by bureaucratic states, as was the case with
terrorism during the Cold War (Ackerman 2006). But the ways in which this is coming to be done, if al-Qaida is any example, are through rhizomic transformations of
state organization.
The Rhizome and the Self-Organization of Terrorism
Much of (pure) terrorism is organized through forms of organization that are antithetical to the modern state. The infrastructure of the modern Western state is highly
bureaucratic, its institutions organized around clearly defined offices and tasks, a
clear-cut division of labor, hierarchies of officials, and chains of command. This holds
no less for the armed forces, the intelligence agencies, and the secret police. The
modern state is deeply rooted in clearly bounded territories whose borders are inviolate and within which its sovereignty is supreme. State systems work best when
pitted against other states with the same logic of organization or under conditions
of colonization when conquering or grabbing territory and economic resources, or
controlling these, are often primary goals. So, too, during the Cold War the Soviet
Union and the United States sponsored and used terrorist activities as arms of state
to further national goals, but also kept the scope and intensity of these activities tempered (Raufer 2003: 392).
The organization of transnational terrorism that has blossomed during the past two
decades is different. Consider the following scenario recently posed by a researcher:
Now, imagine a company, or agency, with global markets, or an international mission, say IBM or the CIA. If their offices have been raided
worldwide, or bombarded, tens of millions of dollars confiscated from
them, all their known bank accounts blocked, their computers seized,
their electronic communication systems destroyed, thousands of their
employees and part of their leadership arrested—even killed sometimes—
could these organizations still function? No, of course not. (Ibid.: 395)
He is referring to al-Qaida, though whether there is a unified organization (like a
corporation, say IBM, or a bureaucracy, say the CIA) that can be called “al-Qaida”
is unlikely. If not this, then what manner of entity is working here? No one seems to
know the overall state of affairs—al-Qaida, and probably other terrorist entities, like
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220 | moebius anthropology
the anarchists of the late nineteenth century, constitute an “inscrutable case” (Gambetta 2005a), one about which there is no stable truth to find out. This is so not
only because terrorist formation may be quite loosely held together, but also because
it is in ongoing change. So the forming of terrorist entities varies within a field of
potentialities, enabling (indeed, potentiating) the simultaneous emergence of more
hierarchical formations, more network-like formations, and more rhizome-like formations, perhaps shifting through these different modalities. I will turn to the rhizome shortly.
In the case of al-Qaida, the best documented of these organizations, these forms
mutate, radically changing their formations. In its early years in Afghanistan, al-Qaida
was a highly structured, more guerilla-like hierarchical formation run from the top by
Osama bin Laden and dedicated to fighting the Soviet occupation there. Bin Laden
was reputed to own or control eighty companies around the world (Hoffman 2003:
434). In the Sudan alone he owned construction, manufacturing, currency trading,
import-export, and agricultural businesses (Bergen 2001: 47–49), and he had established a set of valuable Islamic charities in Saudi Arabia with international sections.
Following the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, bin Laden turned al-Qaida toward
more transnational terror operations (while continuing more of a conventional war
against the Northern Alliance). Bin Laden in part reoriented the organization toward
more network-like formations that enabled making decisions and carrying out operations to be done locally, without referring to an apex or center. This was the case with
the first World Trade Center bombing in 1992; with Ramzi Ahmed Yousef ’s plan,
developed in the Philippines in 1994–95, to simultaneously bomb twelve American
commercial airliners in midflight over the Pacific (Hoffman 2003: 436); and with the
plan to assassinate the Pope in Manila in 1995, using an assassin dressed as a priest
who was to explode himself while kissing the papal ring (Hassan 2001; Gunaratna
2002: 175).
More network-like formations strongly contributed to the planning and putting
together of the cells for the 9/11 attacks. The terrorists trained in al-Qaida facilities
in Afghanistan, and later received logistical support from sleeper cells in Europe and
Southeast Asia in order to enter the United States (Mishal and Rosenthal 2005: 279).
The attackers themselves were divided into a number of cells that were unknown
to one another, except through operators or cut-outs (in Cold War espionage language)—the pilots met the other attackers only on the morning of 9/11. Moreover,
it is likely that not all members of the same cell knew one another. Meetings were
held to synchronize distant segments or cells of the network and to discuss progress,
but then these ties went dormant.12 The 9/11 attacks are estimated to have cost under
500,000 USD (Basile 2004: 172).13
An important attribute of this shift in organization is that terrorism becomes more
of a bottom-up phenomenon, with local initiatives and local cells whose destruction
have limited effects on the viability of larger transnational terrorist networks. Bottomup formation is highly emergent, spawning a multitude of directions, but also reThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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self-exploders, self-sacrifice
| 221
cursiveness and numerous loci of leadership.14 These are indeed qualities of rhizomic
formation. Following the American invasion of Afghanistan and the destruction
of al-Qaida infrastructure—its bases of operation and training camps—al-Qaida
ceased holding to two tenets of conventional organizations: first, attachment to territory—apart from the religious-political imaginary of the first Islamic State shaped by
Muhammad after he was driven from Mecca to Medina—and, second, permanent
institutional presence (Mishal and Rosenthal 2005: 279).15
Thus the networks and cells of al-Qaida decentralized further, becoming weakly
coupled in their connections to one another, though tightly coupled within themselves. Weak coupling allows greater agency, enabling cells to adapt less abstractly
and more directly and immediately to their environments, while setting their own
agendas. Maksim Tsvetovat and Kathleen Farley (2003) who modeled covert (terrorist) networks found that attacking them as one would a hierarchical organization, for example by targeted assassinations of network or cell leaders (a major Israeli
weapon)—thereby “beheading” and fragmenting such entities—was not effective.
Cells are highly adaptive and heal themselves, either by finding ways to reconnect
to the network, by operating on their own, or by becoming dormant and waiting.
Al-Qaida’s cells have been likened to clusters of grapes, such that a grape plucked
does not affect the viability of others of the bunch (Gunaratna 2002: 97). Since cells
tend toward the autopoietic in interaction with local ecologies, they also tend not to
replicate one another in their organization (Knorr Cetina 2005: 230).
Tight coupling within cells gives them esprit de corps and a sense of fictive kinship.16 Entities that come into existence in bottom-up ways generate more complex
behavior and action than is produced by top-down, deliberate planning according
to a hierarchical chain of command (Marion and Uhl-Bien 2003: 70). Bottom-up
forming encourages experimentation and learning from experience. Marion and
Uhl-Bien (2003: 71) contend that “al-Qaida leadership provided models of creativity, dropped seeds of innovation, encouraged innovative initiatives, stimulated the
growth of supporting resources and largely stayed out of the way of spontaneous
growth and innovation.” So, al-Qaida can create or help to create ad hoc cells to
carry out local missions of their own choice, specifications, and modes of operation.
The March 2004 attack on commuter trains in Madrid is an example. The attack
was coordinated by a Tunisian who created an ad hoc cell by connecting to a local
group of immigrants called the Moroccan Islamic Combat Group, without direct
links to al-Qaida (Mishal and Rosenthal 2005: 288). The elimination of the Madrid
attackers did little or no damage to the nets of al-Qaida, which probably proceeded
to set up other local ad hoc cells elsewhere. The cell that carried out the 2005 London Underground bombings was autopoietic, obtaining most if not all of its bombmaking information from the Internet. Many of these cells “are not durable units
but changing implementations of short-term projects sequentially replaced by new
projects—they are units that their creators plan from the outset to abolish, abandon
and recreate as non-identical units at a different location” (Knorr Cetina 2005: 229).
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222 | moebius anthropology
A further adaptive or mutating form, emerging from nets of loosely coupled terrorist
cells, is what is called swarming—terrorists from different groups come together from
scattered locations to hone in on multiple targets and then disperse, perhaps to form
other swarms (Atran 2004a).17
The economics of al-Qaida are especially instructive in relation to the emergent
bottom-up forming of cells and nets. Though American bureaucracies have shut
down many channels of al-Qaida monies in the United States, its devolving character
makes it extremely difficult to track money sources globally. Al-Qaida seems not to
benefit from state funding. Monies raised by Islamic charities, in Saudi Arabia, for
example, may be moved through Islamic banks (governed by Shari’a law) that are
subjected to little bureaucratic regulation and oversight, and through hawala (“transfer,” “exchange,” “change”) networks, long institutionalized in South Asia and the
Middle East. In hawala, there are no transfers between money traders; instead, one
hawaldar will fax or phone another, telling him to give a sum of cash to a particular
recipient. Particular transactions are not recorded; instead hawaldara keep track of
the balance of their accounts with one another, the outstanding balance eventually
to be settled in various ways (cf. Berkowitz, Woodward, and Woodward 2005). AlQaida separates monies for its operational cells from its sources of funding. Until now, every successful operation sponsored by al-Qaida has used different money
sources, the funds for any given operation arriving through multiple routes. According to al-Qaida’s training manual, the commander of a cell is to divide finances into
monies to be invested and monies to be saved for operations (Basile 2004: 171–76).
Cells are intended to be as financially self-sufficient as possible, in keeping with their
loose coupling and agency in choosing targets and organizing attacks.
Transnational terrorism has emerged from the mass killing of civilians characterizing much bloodletting among and within states especially from World War II
on, becoming matter-of-course. These terrorist networks and groupings often are
more civilian-terrorists, or at most quasi-military, than they are military. They are,
in the main, civilians taking up or turning themselves into weapons against civilians,
directly reaching civilian populations whom they hold complicit in the perduring
existence of regimes that have or that are oppressing them. Attacks by civilians upon
civilians are not only strategic decisions to damage easier “soft” targets—these attacks
in their own ways are uprisings that go directly to those held most responsible; those
sheltering behind the violent bureaucracies that are the military.
Discussing the history of warfare, Lind et al. (1989) suggest that a fourth generation of forms of war is emerging, and that terrorism is integral to this: terrorism
“attempts to bypass the enemy’s military entirely and strike directly at his homeland
at civilian targets. Ideally, the enemy’s military is simply irrelevant to the terrorist.”
Military culture remains a culture of order even as the battlefields are ones of disorder.
Military culture, they point out, “has become contradictory to the battlefield” (but
see endnote 18). Both the forming of cells and the trajectories of attack are becoming more rhizomic. The International Institute for Strategic Studies states that the
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Iraq War is generating “an already decentralized and evasive transnational terrorist
network to become more ‘virtual’ and protean and, therefore, harder to identify and
neutralize” (2003). Knorr Cetina (2005: 214) maintains that today’s terrorism is not
only global but constitutes “the emergence of global microstructures; of forms of
connectivity and coordination that combine global reach with microstructural mechanisms that instantiate self-organizing principles and patterns.”
Little by little, terrorist attackers, their cells and nets, are becoming more deterritorialized, more mobile, more nomadic in a transnational, globalizing world—they
are becoming rhizomic in their forming. In a topological sense, terrorist attackers are
their movement, and the dynamic of this movement is rhizomic. Deleuze and Guattari (1988) distinguish the rhizomic from the state form, that form of organizing that
captures, incorporates, and stabilizes whatever it takes in within its boundaries. Yet
as Deleuze and Guattari intend, the state form and the rhizome are metamorphs of
one another. Every subversion, uprising, insurrection within the state is a node of the
rhizomic, of an unpredictable dynamic that undermines the verticality of the deeply
rooted, the beginnings of a line of flight, a trajectory that will destroy distinctions between interior and exterior, erasing borders. No less, every swelling within a rhizome,
every shift toward hierarchical self-organization is a node of a potential state form in
the making, of the emergence of boundaries, of distinctions between interior and exterior, of verticality, of the deeply rooted. Many transnational terrorists are migrants
moving from one state to another, settling in new places yet becoming nomadic, fluid
cysts within the weightiness of statist territorial positioning.
What is rhizomic forming, according to Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of this vegetal dynamic? The rhizome is not a root, but rather a tuber or bulb that ramifies
growth in all directions, on, over, and under the ground, a multiplicity of diversities without clear boundaries, or perhaps whose boundaries are densities of connectedness, with shallow tendrils without any natural points of closure, with multiple
entrances and ongoing, spreading movement. Within this dynamic maze of movement any point can be connected to any other, and this making of connection never
ceases. Rhizomic organization has no fixed points in its lines of flight (as Deleuze
and Guattari call its movements), and therefore has only potentialities to emerge
vertically, to grow hierarchy and stratification with differences in status, authority,
gatekeepers, and specialized guardians of order sign-posted by the uniform—in other
words, to becoming top-down organization, the bureaucratic state in miniature. “A
rhizome,” they write, “can be cracked and broken at any point; it starts off again following one or another of its lines, or even other lines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983:
17–18). A crucial dynamic of the rhizomic is speed. The bureaucratic state form exists
through the stability of its territorialism, the portentousness of its deep-rootedness,
the weightiness of its regulations, the density of its institutions. The rhizome turns a
point—the potential node of swelling into verticality—into an intense line of flight
through the speed with which it moves. Speed vanishes the boundary, its blockage
and stoppage disappearing with it.18
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Deleuze and Guattari (1983: 49) write: “In opposition to centered systems (even
multi-centered), with hierarchical communication and pre-established connections,
the rhizome is an a-centered system, non-hierarchical and nonsignifying, without a
General, without an organizing memory or central autonomy.” The rhizome cannot
answer to a structural or generative model, for there is no grammar through which
to generate a rhizome. Therefore the rhizome makes and morphs itself as it moves.19
Here, in a strange yet powerful way, rhizome and self-exploder join in the same line
of flight. In the emergence of its manifold evolution, al-Qaida has developed qualities
of the rhizomic—loosely organized, decentralized, flexible in practice (Gunaratna
2002: 11, 57–58, 95), penetrating fluidly from multiple directions, while encouraging if only by example, the sprouting of autonomous rhizomes, terror cells with
potentially these sorts of capacities.20 Moreover, speed and intensity are the dynamic
of the self-exploder, as they are of the rhizome. A founder of Palestinian Islamic Jihad
wrote in 1988 on the importance of penetrating the territory of the enemy, in making
the case for what he called “exceptional martyrdom,” aimed at countering objections
by Islamic religious figures to suicide bombing. “We cannot achieve the goal of these
operations if our mujahid [holy warrior] is not able to create an explosion within
seconds and is unable to prevent the enemy from blocking the operation. All these
results can be achieved through the explosion” (Hassan 2001). A leader of Hamas
commented to Nasra Hassan (2001): “The main thing is to guarantee that a large
number of the enemy will be affected. With an explosive belt or bag, the bomber
has control over vision, location, and timing.” And al-Zawahiri of al-Qaida, in his
post-9/11 book, wrote on “the need to concentrate on the method of martyrdom
operations as the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and
the least costly to the mujahidin in terms of casualties” (Gunaratna 2002: 224).
It is crucial to recognize here that the individual self-exploder is himself/herself a
tiny rhizome in its asymmetric movement and speed, intensity and depth of penetration, a tiny rhizome that is a small piece or segment of a larger rhizome, a cell in
self-organization and line of flight, itself perhaps part of a larger rhizomic agglomerate. A recent case in point of the above was the self-exploder Abdullah al-Asiri, who
flew from Yemen to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia with half a kilo of explosive secreted in
“a bodily orifice” (perhaps in his rectum, since he refrained from eating or drinking
for forty hours), and who then succeeded in getting into close proximity to the Saudi
interior minister, whereupon the explosives were detonated by a call from his controllers to a cell phone.21
Just as some terrorist cells are rhizomic in their dynamics, putting down no permanent roots, deterritorializing their networks, weapons, and finances, combining
local conditions and religious-mythic abstraction into practice, so, too, they accomplish the complete synthesis of idea and action, of perfect praxis, through the act of
self-explosion. Moving in emerging lines of horizontal flight, shifting direction, communicating through cyberspace, cells connect to other cells or to members of these.
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And so the emerging phenomenon of swarming for a particular operation, gathering
together a multiplicity and diversity of persons and resources into what Deleuze and
Guattari (1988) call an “assemblage,” here a transient proliferation of the dimensions
of the phenomenon that also changes its nature. So, too, just as the ruptured rhizome
starts up again, cells show adaptability in self-healing after parts of cells or networks
are destroyed. And, the cell or cells act at speed, refusing to accentuate any point
of potential stability, sometimes choosing the objective at the last moment, often
angularly penetrating to the target, controlling the line of flight, of access, to a high
degree. It is the rhizomic qualities of the terrorist cell and network, the rhizomic
qualities of the individual self-exploder, that make them so effective against weighty
structures, solidified ponderously in place in the bureaucratic state, making it so difficult for the state to trace the activities of the rhizomic. The terrorist rhizome may
become a perduring threat to the promise of the state that total security is the right of
civilians and the belief of the latter (who are no less True Believers) in this promise.22
I return to the response of the state in the conclusion.23
Rhizomic terrorism is also complemented powerfully by the character of Islam that
is emerging through the jihad declared by al-Qaida and other Islamist agglomerates.
The usual analyses done on the Islamic roots of jihad and their influence on al-Qaida
and others is to classify and pigeonhole according to traditional social movements—
Salafi, Wahabi, and so forth (e.g., Sageman 2004)—such that these movements are
made to exist historically and currently as the neatly compartmentalized progenitors
of today’s jihad and as the ideological motivators of Islamic self-exploders. In a much
more penetrating analysis, Faisal Devji (2005: 50) argues that, for al-Qaida and associates, “Islamic history and authority has been completely disaggregated and is no
longer clustered within more or less distinct lineages of doctrine or ideology that
can be identified with particular groups.” Devji (2005: 51) contends: “In effect all
traditional forms of intellectual and political grouping or identification have been
fragmented, their elements scattered like debris for the picking, to be recycled in ever
more temporary constructions.” One result of this is what he calls the “democratization of authority in the Muslim world” (ibid.: 51), and so the “radical individuation
of Islam” through which many Muslims become related much more tenuously to
traditional modes of collective solidarity “based on some common history of needs,
interests or ideas” (Devji 2005: 31; see also Brown 2001: 110). This perspective of
global dynamics enables understanding of how today’s Muslim self-exploders and
other terrorists constitute such heterogeneous agglomerations, and, so, too, the flexibility, mobility, and tensile strength of their rhizomic self-organization (putting to
the question, for example, studies that evaluate the enabling of extremism in jihad in
terms of the selective inaccuracy with which bin Laden and other terrorist leaders and
ideologues use the Qur’an and Hadith (e.g., Gwynne 2006). The individuation of the
self-exploder, and the self-exploder as a rhizomic segment or piece of a rhizome, are
directly relevant to self-exploding sacrifice.
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226 | moebius anthropology
Self-Exploding Sacrifice
The rhizome is a metamorph, transforming itself through its own dynamics of ongoing movement, through its assemblages and lines of flight. In this respect the
rhizomic form of terrorism and self-exploder is complemented by the very act of
self-explosion and the preparation leading to this, once we understand that the act is
one of self-sacrifice, and that sacrifice is a practice of transformation. To get at this,
the interior logic of sacrifice needs discussion.
In the most influential work on suicide written in the modern era, Emile
Durkheim (1951: 152–240) distinguished between egoistic suicide, the intention to
kill oneself for oneself, and altruistic suicide, the preparedness to kill oneself for others, as in warfare. In either instance, Durkheim abhorred the taking of one’s own life.
This is the canonical attitude of all three monotheistic universal religions—God gives
life and only God has the right to take life. The modern state claims a monopoly on
doing violence, primarily through its violent bureaucracies (within which I include
military, judiciary, and police). Suicide transgresses both the monotheisms and the
states that developed from them.
Though no general theory of sacrifice will satisfy all the phenomena that anthropologists and historians of religion call sacrifice, a few general points are relevant here.
Whatever else it is, sacrifice is an act of violence—a violence done to natural form,
natural in the sense of form existing in the integrity of its created shape in the cosmos.
Kapferer (1997: 189) argues that sacrifice is “a primordial act . . . a total act [. . . in
which] the force of sacrifice [is] constitutive both of the being of the person at the
center of sacrifice and of the person as himself or herself [as] a being who constitutes. . . . The violence of sacrifice underlines sacrifice as the total act: an act that can
have immanent within its process the entire potential and process of human being.”
He (1997: 190) continues:
Violence is quintessentially the form of totalizing action, the explosion of
possibility and of possibility exploded. . . . The act of killing in sacrifice is
a conjunction of the force of life with death, and of the separation of life
from death. This conjunctive/disjunctive energy is the vital force of sacrifice. The motion towards killing is the conjunction . . . of death with life.
The moment of killing, the peak of the death-life conjunction, is also the
radical separation, the disjunction of life from death.
In sacrifice, natural form is taken apart—cut, rent, torn, split, burnt—so that something else can come into existence.24 The violence of sacrifice is originary (Kapferer
1997: 190). Put differently, the violence done to form through sacrifice is violence
that is done to the boundary, perhaps to the origination of boundary and being that
no less is that of cosmos. The violence done to the sacrifice alters, opens, momentarily destroys the boundary between levels, domains, or realms of cosmos. Thus sacrifice, as Kapferer argues, is an act of primordial transformation, of radical change.
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Through this something unseen will take shape or have consequential effects in the
world.
Sacrifice is a foundational practice in the three monotheisms (in Judaism, the
aqedah—Abraham’s preparedness to sacrifice Isaac, and God’s acceptance of an animal substitution; in Islam, Ishmael’s willingness to be sacrificed by Ibrahim for Allah,
the willingness that nears, that perhaps is, self-sacrifice; in Christianity, the selfsacrifice of Christ). In Islam, self-sacrifice must be death in the service of God’s plan
but is first and foremost active struggle with correct intention in the service of God’s
plan (Lewinstein 2001: 78–81). Self-sacrifice may differ from sacrifice in the degree
of its closure and in the totalization of its intensity and dynamic of movement. Its
explosion is no less its implosion. The sacrificer is no less the sacrificed—as one dies
for an exterior goal or cause, one’s self or soul is transformed interiorly, perhaps the
purification or release of an authentic self (Verkaaik 2005: 141), perhaps the instantaneous transference of the soul to paradise (Hassan 2001). A Hamas self-exploder
whose bomb failed to explode described to Nasra Hassan (2001) how he felt when
chosen for martyrdom: “It’s as if a very high impenetrable wall separated you from
Paradise or Hell. . . . Allah has promised one or the other to his creatures. So, by
pressing the detonator, you can immediately open the door to Paradise—it is the
shortest path to Heaven.” Another described the immediacy of paradise as: “It is very,
very near—right in front of our eyes. It lies beneath the thumb. On the other side of
the detonator.”
If the victim is made holy or sacred in the act of sacrifice (Hubert and Mauss
1964: 9)—a sacrificium—this is because the violence of its destruction momentarily
destroys the boundary between cosmic levels, this destruction becoming an originary
locus of the reconstitution of cosmos. In Israel/Palestine in the name of jihad, the
Islamist self-exploder simultaneously kills himself as a self-sacrifice that transports
him to paradise and kills enemies, others, thereby offering them as a sacrifice to Allah
to open the way to the creation of the Palestinian nation-state, as part of the ummah,
the universal Islamic religious polity (Strenski 2003: 4; Hage 2003: 69) that in its
making is perforce fragmentary and transnational.25 I return in a moment to this
theme. In the warfare of the modern state, the ethos of heroic death in battle acquires
the status of self-sacrifice (Greenhouse 1989; Marvin and Ingle 1999; Handelman
2004; Zerubavel 1995).
Sacrifice is originary; suicide is abhorred. Suicide is a sin, self-sacrifice is not. Sacrifice is transformative; suicide is merely self-destructive. Under what conditions in
monotheistic traditions and in modern states does self-destruction become transformative, and so is turned into sacrifice?26 The question lies at the heart of the emerging
conundra of self-exploders. The matter of intentionality is crucial here.27 Intentionality establishes a conscious relationship of consequence between sacrificer and sacrificed, between destroyer and offering (see Kapferer 1997: 192–98). In the case of
the self-exploder, much of this relationship is within the self, thereby fusing and
totalizing commitment and outcome. Closed into itself—into selfness—the locus
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of sacrifice becomes absolute. Commitment predicated on the direction of dying,
of transformation, exploding exteriorly, transforming interiorly. The idea of “exceptional martyrdom,” mentioned above, depends on this embodiment of intentionality.
So, too, a Muslim cleric making the case for martyrdom argues, “while both suicide
and acts of martyrdom require the express act of will of the perpetrator, what matters
is not the act, but the intention [niyya] of the martyr” (Israeli 2002: 35).28
Shaping the Ritual Sacrifice
Sacrifice is the perfect praxis—the perfect synthesis—of idea, intention, action. The
inner logic of self-exploders—in Israel/Palestine and those of 9/11—configures how
this praxis of self-sacrifice is accomplished through the ritual shaping of self. Central
to this is an agency different from that of individualism made free for itself, the individual for himself. Devji’s argument on the spreading of individuation in today’s
Islam, mentioned earlier, is especially relevant here. Devji (2005: 34) contends that
today’s jihad largely rejects “the classical doctrine of holy war as a collective or political obligation [ farzkifaya].” Instead, holy war becomes “an individual and ethical
obligation [ farz ayn] like prayer. . . . [Holy war] becomes spiritualized and finally
puts the jihad beyond the pragmatism of political life. . . . So, whereas liberals as
well as fundamentalist Muslims tried to instrumentalize Islam by attributing social,
political or economic functions to its beliefs or practices, the jihad does just the opposite—its task is to de-instrumentalize Islam and make it part of everyday ethics”
(2005: 34; see also Gwynne 2006: 14, 16; Brown 2001: 110–11). Today’s jihad, like
previous movements, develops in the peripheries of the Muslim world, with practices
that braid together the charismatic, the heretical, the experiential, the mystical—the
Muslim content of which “draws upon the flotsam and jetsam of received wisdoms
and remembered histories [. . . denying] the existence of distinct orders or genealogies of Islamic authority” (Devji 2005: 41–42). Instead, personal faith, repentance,
and the quest for salvation rise to the fore together with the democratization of authority in which prophecy, dream, and messianism are prominent, rather than the
traditional, even canonical knowledge of texts (ibid.: 42, 48). If this jihad emerged
out of oppression of Muslim populations, it has become a metaphysical war, “an
effort to define the terms of global social relations outside the language of state and
citizenship” (ibid.: 76)—and it is through this that self-explosion and self-sacrifice
become sacred practice intended to transform cosmos through individual intentionality and action.29
Relevant thinking on individual agency, self-discipline, and ethics in present-day
Islam comes, appositely, from a study of putting on the veil by Muslim women. Saba
Mahmood discusses how women in Egypt take on veiling through docility, though
this is not the docility of the passive abandoning of agency—rather, it refers literally
to the malleability needed to be taught particular skills, and this demands “struggle,
effort, exertion, and achievement” (Mahmood 2001: 210). This is an internal strugThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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gle within and against one’s self, one not distant from the struggle demanded by jihad
(see Euben 2002: 12). Putting on the veil is the preparedness to respond positively
to shaping oneself, in relation to self and others, as one is being shaped. Thus, “while
wearing the veil at first serves as a means to tutor oneself in the attributes of shyness,
it is also simultaneously integral to the practice of shyness. . . . One veils,” argue these
women, “not to express [my emphasis] an identity but as a necessary, if insufficient
condition for attaining the goal internal to that practice—namely, the creation of a
shy and modest self. The veil in this sense is the means of both being and becoming
a certain kind of person” (Mahmood 2001: 214–15, emphasis in original). Putting
on the veil is a bi-directional self-declaring practice of ascetic intent—interior and
exterior.
Taking on the veil is an exterior practice that develops interior qualities that, in
turn, “comes to regulate and govern one’s behavior without conscious deliberation”
(Mahmood 2001: 216). The practice of shyness, modesty, and patience become inseparable from one’s interior intentionality and desire, as both are inseparable from
the significance of the theology and eschatology that inspire these. The veil becomes
integral to the face, not as covering but as an embodiment of synthesizing interiority and exteriority, of showing one’s authentic interior selfness on one’s exterior.
One’s holism, within and without. The distance from face to veil is, at it were, the
absence of distance between re-formed self and the practice of self-transcendence,
between an ethics of self-accountability and an ethics of self-responsibility, embodied
by the veil-face. So, too, when the bomber puts the bomb on himself and becomes a
self-exploder, the distance between self and self-transcendence diminishes and then
disappears if he self-explodes successfully. Both in the instances of women veiling
and in jihad there is the dynamic of making Islam universal. Devji (2005: 94) puts it
this way for the forming of the self-exploder: “the forging of a generic Muslim, one
who loses all cultural and historical particularity by his or her destruction in an act
of martyrdom.”
There are three hand-written copies of a four-page document in Arabic that the
9/11 self-exploders left behind. The document can be called a spiritual manual (Kippenberg 2005).30 If we accept it as a guide to the preparation of the self-exploders (we
have no way of knowing whether they followed this), then it gives an inkling of how
the self-exploders ritualized and shaped themselves in spirit and body (Mneimneh
and Makiya 2002) before attacking and transforming themselves through the total
and totalizing act of martyring self-sacrifice.
In Arabic, to be martyred, to have one’s martyrdom seen and witnessed, to witness one’s own martyrdom, are all highly complementary through the term shahadat—“Witnessing means martyrdom. . . . There is a close link between seeing and
dying in the etymology of martyrdom” (Devji 2005: 94).31 But the significance of
shahadat is much greater than that of the individual martyr’s self-experiencing—the
term resonates powerfully with medieval and modern understandings of enduring
habitus (Nederman 1989; Bourdieu 1977) and too with the Deleuze and Guattari
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230 | moebius anthropology
(1988) understanding of dynamic assemblage constituted to momentarily reshape
and act on realities. Devji (2005: 94–95) comments that:
Shahadat involves not only the person whose life is voluntarily sacrificed
for the cause of God, but everyone [my emphasis] annihilated in this cause
whether willingly or not. Not only people, but animals, buildings and
other inanimate objects as well may participate in the rite, including even
those who witness the martyrdom of others without themselves being
killed. . . . Shahadat is a fundamentally social and therefore inclusive act,
the pity and compassion it excites among witnesses forming part of its
classical as much as contemporary definition . . . perpetrators, victims,
bystanders, other animate and inanimate witnesses, near or far, all of
whom constitute by their very seeing the landscape of the jihad as a site
of sociability.
The total act of self-exploding brings into one another habitus in its more enduring reality and assemblage in its more immediate configuration, through where and
when the self explodes. Self-sacrifice in these terms is always an act of cosmogenesis
that ultimately is social, while the scale and grandeur of the self-sacrifice expands its
sociability.
The transitory assemblage that enables the explosion totalizes habitus through the
sacrifice, a total act that is intended to be one of cosmic (re)creation. The sacrifice and
martyrdom are shaped as their own proof, utterly self-contained (Devji 2005: 102,
104), supremely interior even as they effect the exteriority of habitus. Implicitly or
explicitly, this shaping of the 9/11 sacrifice likely speaks to its ritual forming through
preparation, even though this aspect of the totality of the act has been quite ignored
by scholars and other interpreters.32
In the spiritual manual, the attack is called a raid (ghazwa) for the sake of God,
one whose intention is voluntary and whose preparation is ascetic—in classical Arabic literature, like all wars against infidels, “a kind of worship” (Kippenberg 2005:
36). The term “raid” also referred to each of the groups or cells that came together
on the morning of 9/11 to do the attack. The manual orientates the conditions of
being of the attackers, toward one another and individually. It opens with “a mutual
pledge (bai’a) to die and the renewal of intent (niyya)” (Kippenberg 2005: 37).33
Intention and action must braid together, both in worship and in battle and in battle
as worship. Intention must be such that the attacker is purified of all personal emotion, such as a desire for personal vengeance, so that the sacrifice is selfless. Selfless,
yet self-responsible and the outcome of free choice, the (self-)sacrificial total and
totalizing act is turned into the practice of ethics, argues Devji (2005: 102, 120).
Only when the action is for the sake of God alone, can violence be turned into sacred
act (Kippenberg 2005: 39). In my terms, the sacrificer prepares himself as a vehicle of self-transformation through violence, the pure gift (Kapferer 1997), the selfsacrifice of the selfless self, the sacrifice of other. Through their pledge of mutuality,
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the self-sacrificers form or re-form themselves as a community. As a microcosm, the
entire (male) religious polity goes to a battle of self-sacrifice for the sake of God.34
The manual divides the raid into a three-part sequence: the first part, the night
before, during which the attacker struggles with his own soul; the second part, the
following morning at the airport, when the attacker struggles with the satanic forces
all about him, all of the unbelievers and their institutions; and the third part, the battle against the unbelievers inside the airplane. The sequencing of these three parts is
significant. First, the purification of deepest interiority within the person, as he takes
into himself and embodies the ascetic state of being of the sacrificer for God (Euben
2002: 19). Second, the exteriorization of this condition of being, as the intentionality
of the sacrificer’s line of flight moves into the world, meeting the first ranks of the
enemy face-to-face, yet needing to elude these in order to penetrate the target and
close with his victims. Third, the violence of sacrifice.
The manual prescribes fifteen exercises for the night before the attack. These include recitals, prayers, meditations, and purifications.35 Cook (2002: 25) contends
that “during the period of time covered by ‘The Last Night’ the attackers would consider themselves to be dead.” Kippenberg (2005: 39) comments that the Arabic word
for “recital” (dhikr) means “remembering” in a broad sense; and that the manual
chooses Suras 8 and 9 from the Qur’an, both originating when Muhammad the persecuted prophet had turned into the warrior and had begun establishing the Islamic
State in Medina, breaking off all contact with non-Muslims except that of attack, kill,
or convert. Following the recital of the Suras, the manual prescribes Sufi practices of
self-forming. The carnal self wants to live, not die. Yet the ascetic, denying the world,
must persuade, tame, awaken, and drive the self to action through self-purification.
Not unlike the woman who puts on the veil, the self-sacrificer must become patient
and modest, with honed will and dedication. Thus Mohamed Atta, thought to be the
leader of the four cells, left instructions long before the 9/11 attack that whosoever
washed his corpse should wear gloves so that his genitals would not be touched; and
asked that pregnant women and unclean persons not be allowed to see his body,
attend his funeral, or go to his grave (Gole 2002). There follow instructions on sharpening the sacrificial knife and the wearing of proper clothing for the attack. In the
morning, prayers, a ritual washing, the shaving of excess hair from the body and the
application of perfume (Mneimneh and Makiya 2002). Cook argues that the attention to preparation of their bodies by the attackers is related to the preparation of a
corpse for burial. Thus, “One should note that in Islam, although normally corpses
are prepared after death [sic], the body of a shahid is deemed to have been purified by
the act of martyrdom, and the body is buried in the state in which the person died”
(Cook 2002: 25). With all of these purifying acts—spiritual, physical—the first part
of the manual ends.
Mneimneh and Makiya (2002) argue that the attackers enter a great sacred drama
and the heroic deeds of the Companions of the Prophet of the Seventh Century.
Probably so, yet the attackers are preparing themselves both as sacrifices and as sacriThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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232 | moebius anthropology
ficed. For this they ritualize themselves as warriors, re-forming self and body through
inner discipline and purification, so that these will awaken with agency, as one. So,
too, they prepare themselves as the perfect sacrifice to God, selfless, honed, aimed,
totally committed, their intentionality utterly willed and joined to their task. They
re-create themselves as the very capacity to deliver both other (the infidel) and self
(the true believer) as the totalizing of sacrificial violence, the entirety of cosmos in the
process of transformation.36
In the second part of this ritual, the warrior ventures forth from within himself on
the way to the airport, advancing his being into a world ruled by satanic powers, yet
protected from them, undetected by them. So long as he is in a condition of worship,
of living truth, reminding himself repeatedly of God, he can deceive those who live in
a world of lies as to his identity (Kippenberg 2005: 42–43). At each point in the journey he silently invokes God’s blessing. He wears his purified intentional interiority on
his exterior, and this mask or shield cannot be pierced by his enemies, by “Western
Civilization,” as the manual says, with all its technological might.
In the third part of the ritual, quietly reciting Qur’an and prayers, the attacker
enters the plane, and self-sacrifice, martyrdom, dominates, yet as always, this can
only be granted by God, by His divinely authorized plan, to which martyrdom is
submission (Euben 2002: 26). The manual tells the attackers to “Clench your teeth
as did [your] predecessors . . . before engaging in battle. Hit as would heroes who
desire not to return to the World” (Mneimneh and Makiya 2002; Kippenberg 2005:
45). If there is resistance to the hijacking, those persons should be killed as a “ritual
slaughter” (dhabaha, rather than qatala, to kill), as an act of grace conferred by God
and an offering made to God, through filial devotion on behalf of the attacker’s parents. According to Mneimneh and Makiya, dictionaries of classical Arabic give the
meaning of dhabaha as “to cleave, slit, or rip something open. This is the word used
for slitting the two external jugular veins in the throat of an animal. It is quick, direct,
and always physically intimate: one does not slaughter with a gun, or a bomb, from
afar. . . . Dhabaha is also that which Abraham was prepared to do to his son on God’s
instructions.” And, as the sacrificer enters his own death, the manual says, “When the
moment of truth comes near, and zero hour is upon you, open your chest welcoming
death on the path of God” (Kippenberg 2005: 46). “Opening his chest,” his interior, the sacrificer is himself the perfect sacrifice, selflessly welcoming self-death, selfsacrifice. Devji (2005: 120) argues that this moment of martyrdom is “the purest and
therefore the most ethical of acts, because in destroying himself its soldier becomes
fully human by assuming complete responsibility for his fate beyond the reach of any
need, interest or idea.”37
I have suggested that the logic of this moment is one of transformation, the totalizing of a microcosmos constituted of self and other in which self dedicates the
sacrifice of other and, simultaneously, dedicates his own death by sacrifice, all by
the grace of God, in the name of martyrdom and the generation of the transcendent Islamic polity. The entire sequence—which I understand as a ritual sequence
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self-exploders, self-sacrifice
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(Handelman 2005)—shapes a line of flight through which the self of the sacrificer is
first made malleable within itself and shaped through purification and dedication of
intent. This self is a self among fellow selves, filiated selves, a band of warrior brothers
who selflessly are no longer other to one another among themselves. Self-dedicated,
they know one another intimately, indeed a condition of communitas. This interior
self (and selves) then emerges from within itself, thrusting rhizomically with speed
and intensity deep within the world of the alien enemy other, until it penetrates the
interior of the selfness of this other (within the aircraft, outside the aircraft). The
interior self of the sacrificer kills that of the other, thereby destroying its existence in
this microcosmos. The sacrificer, self-witnessing, self-sacrifices, and this microcosmos
with its presence of the alien enemy other utterly ceases to exist. In its own way, this is
a primordial act of transformation at the very heart of creation; perhaps, as Agamben
(1998: 105) puts it, this is the “survival of the state of nature at the very heart of the
state.”
Sacrifice, as we understand this in traditional moral orders, is an economy of violence, of violence calibrated to accomplish transformations necessary for dynamics
of survival of person, group, social order, in a self-creating cosmos.38 The “state of
nature” at the very heart of moral order was calibrated to destroy in ongoing relationship to that which would be created within social orders. The manmade mass
death of the twentieth century has exploded through the massive deaths of trench
warfare, through the military killings of civilians in World War II, and now through
mutations of civilians massacring civilians augmented by rhizomic terrorism. The
economy of sacrificial violence inflated in modernity and blew up, as sacrifice already joined to military death and the military slaughter of civilians became joined
to civilians slaughtering civilians, and to terrorism. Sacrifice itself becomes rhizomic,
braided into speed, penetration, and small-scale acts amplified into massive uncertainty by state and global responses. Terrorism and self-sacrificial terrorism target the
very complexities upon which modern infrastructures depend, demonstrating the
fragility of their jointing, of their coordination and synchronization. Potential targets
move toward the infinite in number (Simon and Benjamin 2001–02: 14), certainly
a lesson of today’s Iraq, and the state mobilizes “to wage infinite war on an indefinite
enemy” (Dillon 2002: 77).
The outcome of these amplifications may be what Beck (2002: 41) calls the world
risk society, “a world of uncontrollable risk” in which rhizomic terrorism and selfexploders join together with vectors of ecological deterioration, disease, starvation,
population movement, mass slaughter, financial crises, all of which overflow the borders of particular states, fill interstices in fuzzy areas among and amidst fuzzy states
(Mbembe 2000), and are transnational in differing configurations of presence and
effect, amplifying threat, fear, and its administration (e.g., Virilio 2007: 17–18).
State response to rhizomic terrorism is to reify borders; to exact the marking and
identification of persons; to slow down, stop, and freeze movement (e.g., Bajc 2007);
to increase surveillance in public spaces and private lives—to shape an increasingly
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234 | moebius anthropology
gated, exclusionary state. In general to adopt what Virilio (2007: 43) calls the myth
of “a precautionary principle,” which seems to promise absolute security to everyone
selected for inclusion within state bastions manned by fear against exterior threat, demanding what Beck (2002: 41) calls the feigning of control over the uncontrollable.
Without a doubt, the terrorism I am discussing and state initiatives are intimately
complicit and powerfully self-fulfilling (Zulaika 2003). To a serious degree, states
contribute to the shaping of terror for their own purposes (American support for
al-Qaida in Afghanistan against the Soviets; Israeli support for the early Hamas as a
counterweight to Fatah).
Yet this relationship between terrorism and state cannot be reduced to the methodological rationalism of economistic calculations of the political. Metaphysics stirs
just beneath the surface in its world-breaking and world-making capacities. Through
rhizomic violence, Muslim self-exploders seek an end to violence in the creation of
the goodness of a transcendent polity, even as the destruction they do engenders
further violence that denies the realization of this or any other utopia. Americans
dote on the badness of rhizomic violence within their borders and elsewhere, even as
they erect more and higher walls of the good to imprison this—always failing, always
convinced of the utopic righteousness of their cause (see Duclos 1998). Responding
to the rhizomic through its trans-form, the state form, in order to destroy the former,
just augments and accelerates the rhizome-state form dynamic. Yet in the present
day the forming and destroying dynamic of rhizome and state form, each within the
other, each growing the other, are increasingly amplified by technological means of
control and destruction, threatening life more than any “war of civilizations.”
Notes
First published in 2011 as “Self-Exploders, Self-Sacrifice, and the Rhizomic Organization of Terrorism,” in Religion, Politics and Globalization: Anthropological Approaches, ed. Galina Lindquist
and Don Handelman, 231–62. New York: Berghahn Books. Reprinted with permission. Though
not deliberately, this work emerged contrapuntally to my Nationalism and the Israeli State: Bureaucratic Logic in Public Events (2004). That book focuses on the forming power of the bureaucratic
logic of the state. This chapter was given in seminars at the University of Bergen, the University of
Capetown, and Stockholm University. My thanks to the participants for their responses. For their
comments I am indebted especially to Smadar Lavie, the late Galina Lindquist, Limor Samimian
Darash, and Liora Sion.
1. The term suicide bomber is an oxymoron. The intention of this bomber is, first and foremost,
purposefully to kill other people. (The point is made by Israeli [2002] and others, though I
reached this position independently). The formative dynamic of the act is that the bomber
dies in killing others; and this conjoining of self and other may index the logic of sacrifice permeating many of these acts. Nasra Hassan (2001) reports that Hamas self-exploders are called
“sacred exploders.”
2. One should not forget that a terrorist cell on 9/11 also intended the hijacking of a flight from
Heathrow to Manchester in order to crash the aircraft into the British Houses of Parliament. By
the time the cell members reached Heathrow, the attacks in America already had occurred and
the airport was closed to flight traffic (Gunaratna 2002: 119).
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self-exploders, self-sacrifice
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3. Durkheim himself was offended by suicide. This may have reflected the deeply rooted monotheism of the modern Western state, and the value given to the individual as an autonomous social unit in France and elsewhere. If the individual is understood as an autonomous microunit,
then it is a holistic entirety, even if in a limited sense. Then self-killing makes the microunit
extinct, the death of no value to social order. However, for the individual to die for group bonds
and values is to create death as sacrifice, death that is of value to social order.
4. Thus most scholars and theologians of Islam whom we hear of distinguish between canonical
religion that eschews suicide, whatever the cause and intention, and sects that deviate from the
canon.
5. See W. G. Sebald’s (2004) discussions of the allied bombing of Hamburg, and John Hersey’s
([1946] 1989) all but forgotten classic description of Hiroshima nuclearized, as told by survivors.
6. Contrast this with the definition of terrorism given by the US State Department in 1983:
“Terrorism is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatant
targets by sub-national groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience”
(Kippenberg 2005: 55).
7. Philosophers differ, in their own terms, as to whether terror is a moral act. Compare with Primoratz’s (1997) contention that terrorism is morally impermissible, and Held’s (1991) claim
that terrorism is justified in terms of human rights and distributive justice. See also Devji’s
(2005: 120) argument that martyrdom entails an ethical act.
8. Pure terrorism seems to be quite absent from conflicts within relatively homogeneous social
orders; there, riots, assassinations, and guerrilla warfare will be more prominent (Black 2004:
20).
9. Neocleous (2006: 374–76) charts how, in the United States, the idea of “national security”
developed from that of “social security.” Social security policies, designed in the main to protect
the citizenry against rapacious capitalism, also spawned the idea of national security after World
War II. Neocleous (2006: 378–80) argues that the “national security state” was intended first
and foremost not for military purposes as such, but to further economic security, in other words
to make the world safe for capital expansion and accumulation.
10. International Herald Tribune, 9–10 September 2006. See also, “Judging Evil Intent: It’s All in
the Body Language—A New Squad at Dulles Airport Is Scrutinizing Travelers for Behavioral
Signs of Bad Intentions,” International Herald Tribune, 18 August 2006.
11. This schematic portrait is much more complex than I have space for here. As Mbembe (2003:
31–33) notes, military operations and the right to killing practices are no longer the monopoly
of states—thus mercenaries, child soldiers, citizen soldiers, and privateers abound in different
combinations in Africa, in spaces that are “a patchwork of overlapping and incomplete rights to
rule . . . inextricably superimposed and tangled, in which different de facto juridical instances
are geographically interwoven and plural allegiances, asymmetrical suzerainties, and enclaves
abound” (Mbembe 2003: 31).
12. Krebs, http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue7_/krebs/.
13. Before 9/11, al-Qaida operatives returned over 20,000 USD in unused funds to leaders in the
Middle East (Basile 2004: 172). Hassan (2001) reports that the cost of organizing an armed
self-exploder to enter Israel was about 150 USD. The ingredients are of the order of nails, gunpowder, a light switch and cable, mercury, acetone. The most expensive item is transportation.
For that matter, the bombs exploded in London in 2005 cost only a few hundred pounds sterling (Observer, 9 April 2006).
14. Researchers of organizations sometimes speak of “autocatalysis”—“a tendency of recursive systems to self-generate catalysts that speed up or enable the emergence and evolution of forms”
(Marion and Uhl-Bien 2003: 61).
15. These qualities are why some analysts compare al-Qaida to a modern corporation whose existence is primarily through the flow of capital, investment, and production, rather than through
any permanent physical presence in particular places.
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236 | moebius anthropology
16. According to Scott Atran (2003), al-Qaida, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah
use small cells of three to eight members who are brought to feel the cell as a family of fictive
kin “for whom they are as willing to die as a mother for her child or a soldier for his buddies.”
http://www.interdisciplines.org/terrorism/papers/1. See also Sageman (2004). A rich source of
information on self-exploders in Gaza, especially during the First Intifada, is Oliver and Steinberg (2005).
17. Thus Iraq’s Ansar al-Islam and Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammed may be coordinating operations, following al-Qaida’s example and swarming through their own impetus
(Atran 2004b). Swarming in warfare is said to have powerful historical antecedents (Edwards
2005: 13–52), and the language and ideas of swarming are used by strategic planners to describe
future warfare built through highly mobile and flexible units that join together for particular
operations and then disperse, no longer using fixed weapons platforms as bases from which to
launch operations, adapting to continuously changing battlescapes that are related to as ecosystems (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2000; Dillon 2002: 72). Such imaginaries seem to be rejected
by American military brass. See also Dillon (2002: 74). Nonetheless, there is evidence that the
initial (and successful) American attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq used swarming tactics. Some
Israeli military strategists in low-intensity urban warfare on the West Bank explicitly adapt
the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari to develop strategies of “infestation” in attack (Weizman
2006a) and “necrotactics” (Weizman 2006b). From a military perspective, necrotactics reverse
traditional goals of warfare by temporarily entering strategic ground solely in order to kill enemies (Weizman 2006b: 81). The last Israeli army offensive into Gaza, called Operation Cast
Lead, used necrotactics. Asaf Hazani (personal communication) tells me that Israeli Army “infestation strategies” were taken from those used by the French paras in the battle for the Casbah
of Algiers. Especially interesting are the rhizomic parallels in movement between self-exploders
and some military units. Likely they learn from one another. In response to the Israeli Army’s
practice of low-density urban warfare, its ethicist, a professor of analytic philosophy, is defining
neat moral distinctions (similar to those formulated to cover “ticking bombs”) between “preventive killing” and assassination. In other words, as to when murder is moral (see Kasher and
Yadlin 2005a, 2005b).
18. Implicit within, though especially germane to the Deleuze and Guattari argument is that the
deeply rooted state-form is especially vulnerable where its lines of movement slow down, becoming densely constricted with limited lines of flight. For the self-exploder, such concentrations, approaching stasis in the restricted movement within them, are excellent targets. Perhaps
for al-Qaida the Twin Towers were a lure hard to resist, a gigantic trap of limited, clumsy,
machinic, vertical movement, existing (like all skyscrapers) ethereally, seemingly unconnected
to their own grounding in the world of human beings, with no ethical responsibility to the
earthy struggling “ants” way below. Exploded, the Twin Towers were revealed as ponderous trees
deeply rooted in earth masquerading as sky.
19. Consider the implications of the rhizomic dynamic when it is propelled by a universal religion.
20. In differing degrees, Hezbollah (in Lebanon) and now Hamas (in Gaza) are evolving in counterpoint to al-Qaida, from more rhizomic to more centralized, deeply rooted organizations.
The point is that these are various potentialities actualizing; and so far, these organizations have
shown high capacities for altering their self-organization in relation to changing circumstance
and ecology.
21. Ha’aretz (English edition), 13 September 2009.
22. Despite the relevance of rhizomic dynamics to understanding terrorist cells and networks in
relation to state structures, I found no such connections in the literature I read, apart from one
essay by a historian (Griffin 2003). He, however, uses rhizome as an ideal type, while Deleuze
and Guattari understand the dynamic as entirely relational.
23. Rhizome should be differentiated from network. The rhizome is its own dynamic, obviating
distinctions of the order of “structure” and “process” or “structure” and “content.” The rhizomic
point is itself dynamic, swelling into verticality, receding into the snaking lateral movement of
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self-exploders, self-sacrifice
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
| 237
another rhizome in the making. The conception of network, as this usually is understood, including its application to terrorism (Knorr Cetina 2005; Sageman 2004), depends on relatively
fixed points (the individuals in the net) whose relatedness to one another is analyzed through
how the structural properties of these points connect these individuals to one another. Network,
then, is first and foremost a structure to which the content of relatedness between points is
imputed. This relatedness (through structural properties of points, and through the content of
relatedness that connects these points) is confounded with dynamics. On the other hand, network could also be understood as an emergent property of the rhizomic dynamic, one driving
toward structuration and verticality.
Violence can be done equally well to vegetal form as to animal or human. The ancient Greeks
called the “dismemberment” of form sparagmos, and the term was used extensively by Victor
Turner to denote social order taken apart ritually.
From its outset Islam was a political religion, aimed at the creation of an Islamic State, the
intention of the Prophet during the last decade of his life, after he left Mecca for Medina.
Muhammad can also be cast, in the present era, “as the chief example of both self-sacrificial
death and self-sacrifice (tad’hia’ ) that is linked essentially with jihad” (Strenski 2003: 14). Such
positions are criticized by Ahmad (2009: 148) who argues that, “it is [only] during the early
twentieth century that a fully developed political theory of the Islamic state emerged in the
discourse of Islamism.”
Israeli (2002: 25–26) traces the Hezbollah innovation of what he calls “islamikaze” to the Shi’a
reversal of the tragic mourning of the suffering and martyrdom of Imam Hussein at Karbala
into the celebratory attacking martyrdom of the bombers, in which Hussein becomes not someone to be mourned but a heroic model of the battling warrior. Israeli’s neologism is based on the
similarities he perceives between Islamic human bombers and the Japanese kamikaze of World
War II. On kamikaze see Ohnuki-Tierney (2002).
As Friedman (2002: 108) comments, intellectuals tend to take intentionality away from the
bombers, turning them into representations or embodiments of social problems. Intellectuals
thereby miss the workings of praxis that they so often extol.
The ultimate decision as to the intentionality of the self-exploder is that of heaven, of Allah.
If the appellation of suicide bomber is accepted without critique, as Asad (2007) does, this
obviates the transformative dynamic of self-sacrifice. Indeed, this is a signal weakness in Asad’s
analysis. Thus, “Suicide [in the Abrahamic religions] is a sin because it is a unique act of freedom, a right that neither the religious authorities nor the nation-state allows” (Asad 2007: 67).
Yet, the self-sacrificer in Islam cannot know beforehand how God will judge his intentionality
and whether God will accept his self-sacrifice.
Kippenberg (2005: 56–57) notes that The 9/11 Commission Report (2004) reconstructs the
sequence of events leading to the attack yet utterly ignores the manual. The American “concept
of a war against evil portrays the attackers as devoid of religious faith.” The faithless cannot have
morality in a state that, after all, is one of Christian believers.
Lewinstein (2001: 79) comments on early Islam that shahid likely acquired its sense as “martyr”
as “a reflex of late antique Christian usage.”
Neria et al. (2005: 7–8) argue that this document presents an “as if ” reality, in effect, ritual-as-pretense of ritual that enabled the attackers to dissociate themselves from the real, violent
consequences of their action. In my view this demonstrates a complete lack of comprehension
of the relationship between sacrifice, violence, and transformation. To date, psychologists have
contributed little to comprehending self-exploders (for example, Guss, Tuason, and Teixeira
2007).
For Hasan al-Bana, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, “death is the very goal of jihad,
and willingness to die is the key to its success” (Brown 2001: 113).
I am not concerned with whether or not such formations accord with “canonical” Islamic traditions. My premise is that in all moral and social orders, religious life, like all other domains
of living, goes through innovation and emergence, most of which is disregarded and discarded,
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238 | moebius anthropology
35.
36.
37.
38.
though each has its own history, were we able to trace this. This has been a prominent theme of
my thinking for the past four decades. As I have discussed this here, the entire phenomenon of
terrorism as we are experiencing this is innovative, as is, to a degree, the rhizomic forming this
takes, in movement, changing shapes. Must religious forming accord always with Durkheimian
genealogical foundationalism? My position here accords in more general substantial terms with
that of Faisal Devji (2005).
When the practices of the manual are referred to, too often this offers “rational” explanation of
the order of: “prayer is ritual designed to block thought, to prevent the spontaneous upsurge
of disobedient impulses and inclinations. Prayer is anesthesia” (Holmes 2005: 151–52). For a
psychologistic rationalization of the manual, see Neria et al. (2005).
Hassan (2001) quotes Palestinian bombers (whose explosives failed to detonate) as saying, “We
were in a constant state of worship. . . . Those were the happiest days of my life,” and “We were
floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity.”
This argument gives us an idea of just why it is so important on the part of Western media,
scholars, publicists, and politicians to demean and denigrate the terrorist self-sacrificer by labeling him or her mentally ill, mentally retarded, lost in despair and hopelessness, brainwashed,
and, not least, without true religious belief. Devji (2005: 120) writes that “the Islam of the
suicide bomber is an absolutely personal quality, as distant from the group identity of the traditional cleric as it is from the state ideology of the fundamentalist.”
This is lost sight of too often by scholars of the logic of “sacrificial violence” in modernity, in
which violence and sacrifice are nearly equated. As Martel (2006: 819) puts it, “if everything is
sacrifice, then nothing is sacrifice.”
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Chapter 10
Thinking
Moebiusly
Can We Learn about
Ritual from Cinema with
Mulholland Drive?
Author’s Note
In 2001 I saw David Lynch’s extraordinary film Mulholland Drive in Stockholm.
The next evening I returned with Galina Lindquist, and she was equally enthusiastic.
We discussed the film over and again, imagining its implications beyond representation. I perceived MD as a moebius movie, as a moebius surface in action. Not as
evident a moebius movie as Lynch’s Lost Highway, yet so much more complex in its
turning-into-itself-coming-out-elsewhere in order to return to itself, differently. In
2005 I participated in a discussion on “The Interface Between Ritual, Theatre and
Film,” in Ascona, Switzerland. Out of this came a draft of this chapter. I had never
formally studied film as a medium, though in the late 1970s and early 1980s I had
co-taught a course with Elihu Katz on public events and media events, which also
was beneficial for the creation of Models and Mirrors. Elihu is a founder of the sociology of communication, and the course rehearsed many of the televised media occasions that formulated the argument of Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History
(1992), that he coauthored with the semiotician of communication, Daniel Dayan.
So I was not completely unfamiliar with thinking on screen images, sequences, and
their narratives.
In perceiving MD as a cosmos in difficulty, I was influenced by Deleuze’s brilliant
thinking on cinema. Interestingly, his ideas moved extremely well through the moebius movement of Mulholland Drive.
R
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thinking moebiusly
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Regularity is easier to represent than chaos.
If one were to say: I want to represent chaos
using a handful of mud, it’s quite hard to show
the viewer that it’s mud. Such things only work
when they’re still recognizable.
—M. C. Escher
There are new things coming up every second . . . but
the present is the most elusive, because it’s going real fast.
—David Lynch in Lynch on Lynch
Prolapse
Recently the following happens to me, or, more moebiusly, happens to me as I am
happening to me: before me the light of the television screen implodes, a whiteness
spiraling inward within the screen, swallowing itself. I am elsewhere, perhaps in another room; perhaps I go through the screen, imploding. Startled, I am facing myself,
self to self. The I facing I, a quizzical smile on his tight lips, holds up his hands in
loose fists and waggles them toward me. Whatever else is happening here, I am opening space—perhaps within my self—that has not existed, and this space is interactive,
open-ended, emergent, reflexive. However it is that I and I arrive together within this
opened space (as the TV screen seems to enter within itself ), the movement is not
linear. Perhaps in a moebius-like dynamic I curve into my self and divide, so that I
both repeat myself and produce myself as different, permutating my self through its
transmutations. Though I am the I that I am, I have no doubt that the I facing I is I.
Yet two. Yet different. I in-flect myself into re-flection that enables the two-ness to be
recognized as different from the one-ness, and so to relate to this in an embryonically
nonlinear way (I am startled; I smile and waggle fists toward my surprise; I stare at my
waggling fists). A generative dynamic, a creative process, in which I, momentarily a
micro-world unto myself, become a site of cosmogenesis, somewhere within-through
the interval opening between one-ness and two-ness, sliding into and out of myself,
involuting, evoluting. Moebius movement, one-ness curving through its own space,
through its own time, repeating its own space~time yet creating this as different, as
two-ness, as two-ness that then is both inside and outside itself, yet where/when inside is no less outside, and outside no less inside.
Borges (1994: 15), in his brief meditation, Borges and I, opens with the inflecting
line, “It is to my other self, to Borges, that things happen,” and closes with, “I cannot tell which one of us is writing this page,” Borges relating moebiusly to Borges,
curving through one another. The inflection opens a site of cosmogenesis, an interval for a two-ness of Borges through which Borges is taking over Borges until they
merge, becoming one but different, each inside~outside the other.1 In my experience
and in Borges’s imaginary, mimesis, the creation of difference from sameness, is no
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244 | moebius anthropology
less moebius, a dynamic that permutes our singularities, such that the permutations
transmute sites of cosmogenesis without destroying their elasticity.
Moebius Dynamics
The moebius dynamic is a self-entering form (Neuman 2003: 143, 145) such that
each re-entry, each curving through itself, is no less a folding in the Deleuzian sense
(Deleuze 1993: 8) than it is an opening of interiority, recursively opening space/time
where, again, none had existed.2 As it exits itself it re-enters itself; in re-entering itself
it re-exits itself. It has no stable exteriority or interiority, no ground on which to rest,
only changing perspectives through movement. This kind of self-organization is pivotal to the film, Mulholland Drive, which I discuss in detail below, and which I use to
ask whether the study of rituals of transformation can learn from cinema.
As I will stress throughout this chapter, moebius dynamics bring disparate levels
or domains into conjunction, yet relate to them as existing on a single plane of continuous movement. In this regard, the moebius dynamic is implicated in rituals that transform within and through themselves (see Chapter Three; Handelman 1998; Kapferer
1997) by generating, operating, and moving through multiple actualities, enabling
them to turn into one another. Too, this dynamic is implicated in films that bring
multiple actualities into existence, blurring their boundaries and traversing them. I
discuss actuality (and virtuality) further on.
Moebius dynamics, curving, folding recursively, and, no less, virtuality and actuality, are all entangled in my question of, can we learn about ritual from cinema? In
these dynamics of curving and folding there is something that speaks to many rituals
that in their self-organizing propensities have the capacities to do transformation
within and through themselves. Rituals that do trans-formation seem to have properties of self-organization, of forming themselves through themselves within themselves, in ways that enable complex changes to be done through them. Thus, shaped
into their plan, their design, is the future to be actualized.3 Furthermore, these rituals
are reflexive, such that in being cognizant of themselves as they are practiced, they
include themselves within themselves. In this regard, no less than the doer practicing the doing of ritual, the ritual that is being done becomes aware of the doer (see
Baudrillard 2000: 76), incorporating the doer within itself, thereby further effecting
what is being done. Can we learn about ritual from cinema? If so, then thinking on
their respective movements within and through themselves may well be the axis of
their relatedness.
These nonlinear dynamics—from the point of inflection, through more complex
folding and moebius movement, to degrees of self-organization—often are submerged in ritual forms. These dynamics sometimes are intertwined and overlaid with
masses of detail and elaboration, sometimes coded so that only ritual specialists enter
these hidden or disguised space~times of ritual, sometimes highly schematized so
that what is present to the senses is powerfully minimalist yet enclosing (as may be
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thinking moebiusly
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the case with the activity of ritual texts within rite). More simply, ritual worlds commonly interpolate, interpenetrate, and fold together the visible and not-visible, the
unseen and seen as the um-felt of the umwelt, and this conjoining of here-not-here often is understood by natives (whoever they are) as locus or nexus of trans-formation.
Film is hyper-real because it is hyper-visual, magnifying, reducing, changing
proportions, altering angles of perception, giving shape to the seemingly shapeless,
speeding up, slowing down, superimposing, fading and zooming, reversing time, inverting space, through shot, cut, and montage, and, for that matter, hyper-moving,
for even if stilled, its images are coiled into and tense with motion. Paraphrasing
Claude Levi-Strauss, film is good to imagine with.4 It is our crooking medium, a
misshaping medium for imagining the visual—for enabling visuality to fill and overflow the imaginary, visuality as the great enlightenment sensory adventure (see Jay
1993, Levin 1993). And, so, also a medium for imagining how trans-formings might
look-like-they-are-happening-even-though-we-cannot-know-they-are-happening.5
I have tried elsewhere to identify how dynamics of trans-formation are done
through ritual, approaching this problematic from various perspectives (Handelman
1998, 2005, 2006), and regarding all of these attempts as failures, albeit, perhaps,
interesting ones. I fully expect to fail over and again—dynamics of transformation in
themselves are indeed elusive within rituals that make change happen through themselves, and these dynamics slip away from discourse that cannot address their very
fullness of existence in multiple planes, dimensions, vectors, circumferences, that
Deleuze calls virtuality—regardless of whether such discourse is symbolic, semiotic,
structuralist, hermeneutic, phenomenological, and perhaps systemic. Transformation
is elusive because it is dynamic rather than a ritual recipe; shapeless, fluid, trajecting,
vectoring, rather than moving between static points of start . . . stop . . . start. And I
am neither a Renaissance alchemist nor a modern scientist.
Thinking on Ritual through Filmic Dynamics
I thought to attempt here to learn something about visualizing ritual transformation
through film, trying to open an interval between them,6 a space~time for reflection,
from which to move in the direction of both without denying either.7 I do not mean
documentary film on ritual, which, like the anthropologist strives for realism and
authenticity in reporting and representation, nor film that uses “ritual” as such in its
plot or narration; rather, I mean film that permutes its own inflections, its moebiusmovements and their shapings. Film that in a filmic sense may have qualities of selforganization built into its forming; film that perhaps can be seen and through this
felt to do trans-formation through its self-organizing qualities. Film that imagines
all of this and that tries to give visual shape to its imaginings, encouraging trajectories of desire for the just-out-of-sight.8 Thereby (wittingly or not) trying to make
these dynamics visible. I will try to see some of these thoughts through Mulholland
Drive.
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246 | moebius anthropology
Consider the following, in which Larisa Kingston-Mann has a filmic response to
actuality, one that permutes another potential actuality by imagining this through
the virtual film medium which plays with time/space in the creation of actualities:
While reading my economic history, I came across this information: that
the engineers at Ford and Co. had gotten some of their ideas about an
assembly line from seeing the Chicago slaughterhouses, the way the carcasses swung down a line on chains, being disassembled piece by piece.
And I thought: such a rich image, and whose idea was it to reverse
that image, so that it was one of assembly, of adding-together, instead of
taking-apart? Such a filmic response, is it not, to run the slaughterhouse
in reverse [my emphasis]? It’s happening at the same time as the rise of
the movies: the early “teens” [of the Twentieth Century], and I can’t help
thinking there’s something so timely about it, the way early films were
constantly playing with the ability to thread it backwards and have people
miraculously un-eat food, buildings spring to life and be kissed by the
wrecking ball, the hero unsticks from the ground and flies up to the top of
the tall building. And here is someone who runs the slaughterhouse backwards, building cows. And from that takes inspiration, that you can have
a moving line which accumulates parts until voila, a finished product,
an automobile, a model T-for-time-runs-backwards. I love synchronicity.9
A model T-for-time-runs-backwards, a dynamic that imagines one mode of production, one actuality, into another, so that cars emerge from cows, one form of movement turning into another, permuting the same dynamic of motion.10 To look at a
film in this way pushes to discard baggage from anthropology that imposes formal
strictures on ideas of ritual, and, no less, baggage from film studies that take their
theoretical impetus from varieties of textual criticism and cultural critique. The sorts
of constraints that anthropologists commonly impose on “ritual” as a global integument, giving to it hardness, rigidity, and inflexibility, for example, between its exterior and interior, a framing that makes digital the relatedness of ritual to not-ritual,
an either/or distinctiveness that accords with the classic Durkheimian separation of
sacred and profane realities. Then, formal properties posited for ritual naturalistically
mimic this framing, giving to ritual qualities of repetition, stylized behavior, order
(Moore and Myerhoff 1977: 7), and Rappaport’s (1999: 24) influential definition
of ritual as: “The performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and
utterances not entirely encoded by the performers.” Such formal qualities, argues
Rappaport (1999: 53), establish the bedrock messages of ritual as canonical.
Much thinking on ritual in anthropology reduces transformation done through
ritual to narrative, to, in Geertz’s phrasing, stories that people tell themselves about
themselves, thereby recuperating values, identity, group boundaries, and so forth—
another version of Durkheimian group solidarity without effervescence. Transformation is reduced to narrative and plot, and how change occurs through ritual contexts
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becomes a matter of how narrative is put together and performed. Analysis of cinema,
following on approaches of cultural studies and literary criticism, so often understand
films as narrative, as dramatic psychologies of personae, as representations of social
order, as surrealistic and parodic reflections of all of these—as metacommentaries on
social life.
Given that so many rituals are organized to act on and to trans-form aspects of
social orders, we must consider dynamics that are interior to such rituals as their
own worlds of self-organization, put together to do transformation. Worlds unto
themselves, such rituals contain the dynamics of permutating themselves within
themselves, thereby transforming whatever is within them, the intention of their
attention. Such rituals enfold and permutate actualities of cosmos, health, maturity,
life-passage, and so forth. Rituals that do transformation produce “the shock of the
real immanence of the metaphysical” (Murphie 2002: 192). Film in its own right is
an assemblage that includes the imagination, with the capacity to play with showing
the actualization of potentials of the metaphysical, the metaphysical understood as
existence forming and re-forming through potentialities becoming actualities. Film
can show how actualities intersect and collide, changing and effecting one another.
Film paradoxically is a flat medium that peers into depths and their interior workings (Stephenson and Debrix 1970: 55). Nonetheless, in order to try to think on
ritual through film, the usual baggage of plot, narrative and representation needs to
be put aside as much as possible, thereby highlighting dynamics that enable certain
films to have the strange processes and coherences that they do, dynamics that should
not be reduced to technology and filming techniques. Ideas of Deleuze—singularity,
actuality, virtuality, crystallization—resonate with and hone my desire to focus on
moebius-like dynamics, and I will make intensive use of them in discussing the film,
following the synopsis, below.
Mulholland Drive
Moments lost in time,
like tears in rain.
—Blade Runner
Mulholland Drive, (henceforth MD) written and directed by David Lynch, attracts
scholars of cinema. Their studies treat the film as a whole, as a unity, and so as
one that contains mystery, and puzzles to unravel. Most cut to the perspective that
Sinnerbrink (2005: 3) calls “reductive” rationalism—“the tendency to treat films as
illustrations of theoretical concepts or ideological perspectives that can be properly
deciphered only once submitted to conceptual analysis or subsumed within a philosophical metalanguage.”11 These studies agree that MD has no conventional linear
narrative, but do find linear logic by arguing that MD combines dream (the first fourfifths of the film) together with hallucination and flashback, all of which are explained
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248 | moebius anthropology
by the final one-fifth that is the reality, the authentic, exposing the dream character
of the first four-fifths, thereby straightening and stiffening the former (Hayles and
Gessler 2004; Sinnerbrink 2005; Nochimson 2002).12
MD is unsettling not because it divides into dream positioned before reality, but
because the film is constructed as an entirety within itself, never leaving itself, providing an entirely interior optic on/in itself without any exterior perspective whatsoever
for the viewer who is drawn within, disoriented, unable to take an Archimedean
standpoint, confused by the multiple actualities that Borges (1998) summarized as
the garden of forking paths.13 A film that swallows itself, a form re-entering itself
moebiusly, aligning the strange relations among its actualities on the same plane,
transforming itself from within itself, without positing to itself any exterior perspective—in this sense a world without exteriority. Thus, the autopoiesis of a world permutating itself into worlds, and, perhaps in this aiding another look at ritual, though
the film on its face has no relation to ritual. This is what I will want to scratch at a bit
in the concluding section.
Despite the above Disclaimers, a Practical Need
for a (Somewhat Skewed) Synopsis of the Plot
The opening shot is of young couples jitterbugging without background except for
the shadows they cast, then overlaid dreamily through a rising mist by the happy
face of a young blonde woman, and then by a grandparental-looking couple, one on
either side of her.
A beautiful young brunette with hair to her shoulders, wearing a black dress, is
being driven at night in a dark-colored car up winding, wooded, dark Mulholland
Drive in Hollywood. Above and out of sight, two cars full of raucous youngsters are
drag-racing downhill. The dark car suddenly stops, the brunette is alarmed, the driver
(another man sitting next to him, both in dark suit and tie) turns, a silenced pistol
aimed at the brunette. At that moment the drag-racers crash into the parked car. The
brunette alone staggers away from the accident, through the woods, downhill, falling
asleep under bushes next to an apartment complex, the Havenhurst. She awakens to
a middle-aged woman directing a taxi-driver to load her bags; the brunette then slips
inside the woman’s well-to-do apartment before the latter locks the door.
[I]14 Two men are sitting in Winkies diner during daytime. One tells the other of
a dream he’s had for the second time—it is half-night, he is sitting in Winkies, and he
is terrified. His friend is standing by the counter, next to the cash register, and he too
is frightened. The sitting man sees through the wall of the diner, sees a horrific face
outside, at the back of the diner. He tells his friend, in the present, “He’s doing it.”
And wants to know whether that man is outside now. His friend goes to the counter
to pay, standing exactly where he did in the dream. They go outside, around to the
back of Winkies. As they near the backyard area, a face slides out from behind the
wall of the diner—a face blackened with dirt, perhaps with fungus, with long, dark,
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thinking moebiusly
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matted hair, a derelict’s face with gleaming eyes and teeth. The dreamer clutches his
heart, collapsing. The Derelict’s face slides back, out of sight.
A young woman arrives in Hollywood, (apparently) accompanied by a warm
older couple, Irene and her partner, who address the young woman as Betty, treating her gently, gravely, and tenderly, then leaving in a limousine, [II] grinning and
laughing together with glee, somewhat unpleasantly. Both are most pleased. Betty
takes a taxi to the Havenhurst apartment complex, where she will stay while her
aunt Ruth is traveling. She meets Coco, the manager who gives her the key. Inside
she finds the brunette who says she’s been in a car accident and has lost her memory.
Asked her name, she takes that of Rita, from a movie poster of Rita Hayworth in
the bathroom.
Cut to a depth-shot of a room painted red (the Red Room) [III], lengthened beyond ordinary proportions, a foreshortened microphone hanging on the wall. Deep
within the narrow room sits a small man in a wheelchair, Mr. Roque, who hears
reports through the microphone and issues orders by implication. He says that the
girl is still missing.
Betty tells Rita to look in her purse for ID. A close-up of the black purse, the loud
sound of the zipper opening. Inside are bundles of cash and a large, triangular blue
key. [IV] At that moment Rita remembers she had been going to Mulholland Drive.
Betty wants to investigate the accident. Betty and Rita are sitting in Winkies Diner,
checking the newspaper for information about the accident. Rita sees the name Diane on the wall (the name of the waitress on duty), and Rita remembers the name,
Diane Selwyn, and wonders if its hers. Outside Winkies, Betty calls Diane Selwyn’s
number. Though the voice on the answering machine is not Rita’s, Betty knows the
voice.
Adam Kesher is casting the female lead for his film, The Sylvia North Story. At a
boardroom meeting, Kesher, the director, is told bluntly by two mafia types to hire
Camilla Rhodes by saying while Camilla is auditioning, “This is the one.” They show
him the photo of a young blonde with upswept hair and pouty lips. Kesher refuses.
One of the mafia types yells, “This is the girl. It is no longer your film. This is the
girl.” Cut to the Red Room. [V] Mr. Roque is listening to the boardroom discussion
through the microphone. The film producer comes from the meeting to report to Mr.
Roque, who implies that the entire production should be shut down.
Kesher’s credit cards are canceled; his bank account emptied. He receives a message
to go to a corral at the very top of Beechwood Canyon, there to meet the Cowboy.
That night he drives to the wilderness at the road’s end, going through the crude gateway, a steer skull at its apex together with a light flashing red as he enters, emitting a
droning sound. [VI] The corral is empty, but Kesher turns and there is the Cowboy,
a medium-sized trim figure, with a kerchief around his neck and a white six-gallon
hat on his head. The Cowboy warns Kesher about his attitude, telling him to take
Camilla Rhodes during the auditions, saying “This is the girl.” He adds, “You will see
me one more time if you do good; you will see me two more times if you do bad.”
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Betty goes to her own audition for a lead role while Rita stays in the apartment.
The director, Bob Brooker, tells Betty and the actor with whom she is playing the
scene, “Don’t play it for real until it gets real.” The audition goes extremely well, and
Betty is taken to the casting audition for the The Sylvia North Story, where Kesher
says, “This is the girl” when blonde Camilla Rhodes (the woman in the photo) is
auditioning. Betty and Adam exchange looks of longing, but Betty runs off to help
Rita find her identity.
The two women go to the address they found for the name, Diane Selwyn. A
female neighbor who knows Diane Selwyn does not recognize Rita, so she is not
Diane. There is no response to the knocking on Diane’s door. Betty finds a smallish
window that opens and enters. The front door opens from within, Betty reappears,
one hand over her mouth and nose. Going through the dark apartment the women
enter the bedroom. On the bed, lying on its side away from the doorway, knees
bent, is a decomposing woman’s corpse. A close up of her distorted face, but she is
unrecognizable, perhaps with dark blonde hair. Both women flee in panic. A close up
of their faces—they are terrified—rippling in-and-out of phase, here-and-not-here,
shattering. [VII]
Back in the apartment, Betty cuts Rita’s hair, disguising her with a shortish blonde
wig. Standing side-by-side before a full-length mirror, both blonde, they shift toward
one another, though their features are strikingly different. Sleeping together in the
same large bed, they make love, Betty saying she is in love with Rita. Betty’s profile
(she is on her back) and Rita’s full face (she is on her side, facing Betty’s profile) seem
to have a common integument. Later, Rita mutters in her sleep, “Silencio, silencio,
no hay banda [there is no band], no orchestra, silencio, silencio . . .” Rita opens her
eyes, saying, “It’s not okay.” She’s terrified. Yet now she knows where to go (apparently to find her lost identity). Though it is 2 a.m., she asks Betty to accompany
her—to the Club Silencio, at the dead end of a broad, deserted alley.
Inside is a small auditorium with plush seats but few occupants. A few box seats
overlook the stage, only one of which is occupied, by a stately, gowned women, her
blue hair piled atop her head. Onstage is a magician, saying, “This is all a tape recording. There is no band, yet we hear the music . . . It’s all recorded . . . It is an illusion . . . .” “Listen,” he intones, raising his arms as violent thunder echoes throughout the Club, suffused in blue light. [VIII] Betty, terrified, shudders uncontrollably
and Rita holds her. Onstage, the magician disappears in a cloud of smoke. An MC
in a red suit presents the singer, Rebekah Del Rio.15 With close-ups of her heavily
made-up face, she sings Roy Orbison’s country-and-western song, “Crying,” in Spanish with great pathos. Rita and Betty weep together. Del Rio collapses onstage and is
dragged off. Her voice continues the song. Betty opens her purse and finds a square
blue box with a small triangular opening. The lovers look at each other with dread;
they rush to the apartment.
Rita goes to the bedroom closet for her purse, the cash and triangular key inside.
Suddenly she realizes Betty is gone. She opens the blue box with the blue key and
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peers inside. A closeup of indigo darkness fills vision totally, the box heard falling
with a thud to the carpet. [IX] The doorway to the bedroom looms, the dark corridor
beyond. Aunt Ruth appears in the doorway, looks into the room, but it is empty, no
purse, no box, no clothes on the bed. She looks puzzled, as if she heard something
and had come to check, shrugs and leaves.
The doorway looms and the dark hallway within, rippling and shuddering in-andout-of-phase moving into still greater darkness, opening into a dark room, a figure
lying on her side on the bed, face hidden, knees bent. The sound of a door opening—standing in the doorway the Cowboy says, “Hey pretty girl, time to wake up.”
Darkness. [X] Again the woman on her side, the Cowboy in the doorway closing the
door carefully, and again the girl on her side. Darkness again.16 The sound of knocking, the woman turning over, awakening, putting on a worn robe. Its Betty, though
looking slovenly, disheveled, dull. The apartment resembles the one in which Betty
and Rita found the rotting corpse.
At the door is the female neighbor who addresses Betty as Diane, asking where
she’s been. An ordinary blue key lies at the edge of the coffee table. She says, leaving,
“Oh, by the way, those two detectives came by again looking for you.” Cut to Diane
at the kitchen sink, looking through the window. She turns suddenly and there is
Rita, though Diane calls her Camilla. Then Diane is shivering, scared. Cut to Diane
in the bare kitchen, making coffee. She takes her cup toward the sofa. Camilla is
lying there, bare-breasted as Diane, also bare-breasted, climbs over the back of the
sofa onto Camilla, and they caress. There is no blue key on the coffee table. Camilla
pushes Diane away, saying “We shouldn’t do this anymore.” (Here [wherever this
is] Camilla Rhodes is the lead in Adam Kesher’s film, The Sylvia North Story, and is
having an affair with Kesher). Raging, Diane throws out Camilla. Diane in shorts
sits on the sofa, crying with fury, masturbating, as the phone rings in the bedroom.
Answering the phone, Diane is wearing a black dress. Camilla is calling—the car is
waiting to take Diane to an address on Mulholland Drive.
A dark car driving through the night up winding Mulholland Drive, stopping
unexpectedly. Diane is alarmed; but Camilla appears, taking her by the hand up
through the woods to Adam Kesher’s home where a party is underway. Here Coco
(the Havenhurst manager) is Kesher’s mother. Diane tells that she won a jitterbug
contest; her aunt died, leaving her some money, so she came to Hollywood, meeting
Camilla on the movie set of The Sylvia North Story, where Camilla was the star. Diane hoped for the part, but the director, Bob Brooker was not impressed with her.
A blonde woman whispers in Camilla’s ear at the dinner table. They kiss intimately.
Camilla is “This is the girl,” the Camilla Rhodes whom the mafia men were adamant
would receive the lead in the film. Camilla/Rita enjoys Diane’s pain and discomfort.
The Cowboy passes in the far background, going elsewhere. Kesher, laughing, is announcing to everyone his and Camilla’s . . . the sound of a crash . . . .
Cut to Winkies and a fallen tray. Diane is hiring a killer to murder Camilla. The
waitress is named Betty. Diane pays cash, pushing a photo of Camilla across the taThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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ble, saying “This is the girl.” The killer gives her an ordinary blue key, saying “When
it’s finished, you’ll find this where I told you.” At this moment, standing at the cash
register is the man who accompanied the dreamer who saw the Derelict through the
wall, behind Winkies.
Night. Alongside a dumpster behind Winkies the Derelict sits next to a small fire,
turning the blue box in his hands. He puts the box into a paper bag and drops it to
the ground. A close up of the open bag, an edge of the box visible. Two tiny figures,
Irene and her partner, emerge screeching maniacally with laughter, their arms outstretched, reaching. [XI]
Cut to a close-up of the ordinary blue key on the coffee table, Diane sitting in her
tawdry robe on the sofa, staring at it. A loud rapping on the door, the tiny figures of
Irene and her partner crawling under it into the apartment. Diane hears the laughter,
the knocking continues, the laughter wild and screechy and the old couple, now fullsized, arms outstretched reaching for Diane are upon her, as she turns and runs into
the bedroom, flinging herself onto the bed, scrabbling in a drawer, frantically pulling
out a pistol, shooting herself in the mouth, lying on her side, knees bent.
Heavy mist forms in the bedroom, entirely obscuring the scene. The mysterious
visage of the Derelict, full-face, appears in the mist. Then the dreamy face of Betty/
Diane, happy and vital as she is as Betty, and next to her the face of Rita/Camilla, but
blonde and warm as she is as Rita.
Cut to the empty stage of Club Silencio, and to the regal woman in the box seat
who quietly but sibilantly declares, “Silencio.”
Transformative Moments
Analysis lives by and largely through map-making (and its cartesian, geometric origins), and the map, as John Vernon (1973: 10) comments, “Relates the whole to
its parts as an addition of discrete entities rather than as a fluid unity of transformations.” Map-like, MD becomes a container with at least one neat compartmentalization: most of the film is fantasy, the last minutes, reality. Fantasy contrasted to
reality—the former unreal, inauthentic, subjective; the latter, real, authentic, objective. Ultimately, any ruler-edged contrast between fantasy and reality recuperates a
linear logic of progression in which reality is the benchmark, the touchstone, the
foundation, whose stability (indeed, its reality-testing) gives the lie to fantasy. Anyone
who embraces fantasy rather than reality verges on the psychotic or disappears within
this miasma, in keeping with the map-like dualism between sanity and insanity (Vernon 1973). In keeping with these analyses, most of MD is the interior vision of a
sick mind.
From this perspective the logic of MD is not that different from, say, the film, The
Night of the Following Day (1968), a straightforwardly chilling tale of kidnapping,
torture, and murder, in which only the very last minutes reveal the entire film until
then to have been a dream whose horrific reality is only just beginning in earnest
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thinking moebiusly
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as the film closes. . . In keeping with the fantasy/reality dualism, MD’s numerous
strange-looking and strange-sounding characters and scenes are intended as entertaining curlicues, making a fairly mundane plot very mysterious. Is this it? A film
cluttered with red herrings harboring clues in a fantasy re-arranging reality, enabling
the dreamer to momentarily escape her lonely, miserable existence and its furies? As
I commented, MD is good to imagine with for students of transformation, once
we put aside the dualism of fantasy/reality and try to avoid using the film either as
representation or as an illustration of theory. Then we can ask how this film imagines
transformation, and whether this is helpful in opening space for imagining dynamics
of transformation in ritual.
The Opening and Closing of Mulholland Drive
Before turning to the moments I indicated in the synopsis, orientating toward and
preparing for transformation and then actualizing this, I discuss briefly the opening
and closing of MD, for together these demonstrate the powerfully recursive selforganizing in the film. The opening shot is of acrobatic jitterbugging couples, against a
bluish background that has no dimensionality or orientation apart from that given by
the dancing figures and the shadows they cast. The figures dancing in space, without
flooring, without ceiling, without horizon. Some are dancing higher than others, some
are huge, others quite small, while some are indistinct, parts here and there, disappearing into one another. On closer look, there are only a few couples, their foregrounding
and size changing, overlapping—dancers permutating. Moreover the dancing is without beginning or ending—it is happening; it is a present—its only temporality that of
the tempo and rhythm of the music and the movement of the dancers. But a present
full of potentiality, a Deleuzian virtuality, complete, full, real, within itself.
Whitish mist billows, partly obscuring the dancers, and the dreamy, upraised, exalted face of Betty appears in the mist, joyous, exhilarated, then joined on either side
by that of Irene and her partner. As long as it lasts (for over one minute) the dancing
scene is self-reproducing. It is Klee’s site of cosmogenesis, his nondimensional point,
“an event that awaits an event,” as Deleuze (1993: 15) puts it, an event that awaits
in-flection, curvature, the folding of reality into itself—the formation of complexity.
Cosmic form begins to take shape quickly—the mist obscuring the frenetic dancers
as the faces of Betty and the old couple appear, a meta-presence that is launching this
filmic micro-universe in which Betty is a major protagonist and the old couple have a
significant role in her fate. Yet these faces are, like the dancers, still a nondimensional
point, though in-flection has begun. Unlike the dancers, the faces clearly have identity, albeit virtual. Shortly, this virtuality of the filmic micro-cosmos will generate actuality—horizons of being and becoming, dimensionality, character, and trajectories
of action becoming vectors of consequence.
MD closes immediately following Diane’s suicide. Mist forms in the bedroom,
swirling, gathering, entirely obscuring space. From within the mist the dark, mysThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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254 | moebius anthropology
terious visage of the Derelict appears, full-face. Then Betty/Diane’s visage appears
in silhouette, a happy, sparkling Betty, followed by the faces, side by side, of Betty/
Diane and Rita/Camilla, both as blondes, intimately warming one another. Cut to
the empty stage of Club Silencio and the blue-haired regal woman in the box seat, almost whispering, “Silencio.” The close is just that, a closure, not an ending as such.17
The closure of actualities, the return to cosmic nondimensionality, to de-flection,
awaiting an event, awaiting an actuality.
The opening and closing mirror one another, a doubling of a sort, the near largest
circuit or envelope of the film, in Deleuzian terms. The mists of space/time fold into
the mists of space/time, though differently, for Betty is Betty/Diane, joined by Rita/
Camilla, their potentialities of being multiplied, expanded, amplified. Their microcosmos is changed, for it has per-mutated, literally going through itself and altering,
though not ending. Both the Old Couple who appear with Betty in the opening
and the Derelict who appears just prior to the two women in the closing have crucial purposes, as I discuss below, in the forming of actualities between opening and
closing. And beyond this fold, another yet more encompassing circuit, the opening
of swerving, swooping, arcing, exuberant jitterbug dancing and music utterly stilled
and folded into the unmoving, upright woman in the box seat at Club Silencio,
with her emphatic whisper, “Silencio.” The microcosmos re-entering itself moebiusly,
quietening, stilling, awaiting . . . not ending.18 Within these two great recursivities of
“encompassing space” (Deleuze 1992: 218) is the entirety of the film’s existence, of
its presents and pasts, but no less the potentialities of its futures, yet unscreened (or
screening interactively within viewers).19 In this regard the film is ritual-like, a site
of cosmogenesis, in-flection, closure . . . poised to begin the dynamic once again, yet
responding to conditions that will generate other actualities.
The Accident
The drag-racers crashing into the car in which the brunette is a moment from being murdered is an accident in the fullest sense—an unexpected happening in an
unpredictable world that destroys an intended action, the murder. The accident is a
Deleuzian singularity, a point or event from which divergences begin to occur as ordinaries are disrupted and re-form differently. An event resonating with the in-flected
point of cosmogenesis. This is still the same world, yet altering itself within itself, as
Deleuze (1993: 60) comments, “because a singular point is only the coincidence of
two ordinary points from different vectors.” One vector, the dragsters, collides with
another, the-murder-in-process, and a new inflection appears as the brunette staggers
away from the crash. Singularities, argues Deleuze (1990: 52), “are turning points . . .
bottlenecks, knots . . . points of fusion and boiling.” But the singularity “is quite
indifferent to the individual and the collective, the personal and the impersonal . . .
singularity is neutral,” in the sense that it happens because it happens, yet it makes
sense as such in the cosmos of its occurrence (De Landa 2002: 15, 35).
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The trajectory the brunette develops is neutral—wandering downhill, perhaps
because of the city lights below, perhaps downhill is easier going—but its accumulations are not. For her this singularity is also her re-birth from certain death. Her
trajectory into life is creating another actuality. The singularity is a great rupture in
the ordinaries of cosmic continuity, its effects akin to the damage wreaked by terrible
illness or a natural disaster, a tiny yet cosmic occurrence.
Without her memory, the brunette is out-of-place in this actuality. She experiences her sensual reality, its immediacy, yet there only is this immediacy, for she has
lost actuality, the present-ness of tense, the very relationality that moves her within
present-past-future, the potentialities of relationality that are virtuality. Looking at
herself in the bathroom mirror in the Havenhurst apartment, in the mirror of her potential knowledge of self, she begins recreating herself, forming and entering another
actuality, another present that cannot pass into past because this is so foreshortened as
to hardly exist as yet. As the brunette’s virtuality re-forms, the actuality that emerges
into being does so moebiusly, reorganizing her through an attractor itself coming
into existence through the singularity of the accident—the powerful feelings she and
Betty have for one another, the solidity of this second actuality.
Deleuze (1989: 81), following Bergson, argues that, “the past is constituted not
after the present that it was but at the same time, time has to split itself in two at
each moment as present and past . . . it has to split the present in two heterogeneous directions, one of which is launched toward the future while the other falls
into the past.” Time is this split, Borges’s garden of forking paths. The singularity of
the accident blocks this dynamic of time splitting simultaneously in its actuality. In
the singularity’s wake, strange characters and weird forces appear, with moebius-like
transformative effects on actuality.
For the brunette the singularity blocks the past, her virtuality, so that time in a
sense is post-singular, time in which she has such an emotional effect on Betty who
was on quite a different life-trajectory. As time re-forms again for the brunette, now
Rita, the second actuality is forming, relating moebiusly to the one before as the
women search for the brunette. So, too, do strange and menacing characters for
whom the existence of “the girl” (still missing; this is the girl) is troubling. Something
in the forming of this second actuality is aberrant, perhaps related to the continuing
existence of the brunette, and to her becoming an attractor for Betty.
Deleuze (1989: 79) contends that “the image has to be present and past, still
present and already past, at once and at the same time. The past does not follow the
present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual
image and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.” The
image in the mirror, the ideal image, perfect in that it is the very idea of the image,
is past, yet changing in its present, its actuality which comes into existence because
of the potentiality of its virtuality, the idea of image.20 The virtual and the actual,
coupled together in what Deleuze refers to as the tightest of circuits, the tightest of
recursivities, are what he calls an image-crystal, an image of present-ness continually
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256 | moebius anthropology
grounding itself in its own past-ness, its own tense-ness, of form moebiusly re-entering
itself, the image of form re-entering the idea of form, the idea of form re-entering the
image of form.
Every actuality is simultaneously and partially within its own virtuality, as the
qualities of each pass into the other, refracting one another so that actuality and
virtuality become indistinguishable within the image-crystal. The image-crystal that
in my terms is form re-entering the image of form (witness Da Vinci, note 20) and
emerging from this, is prominent in cinema and in certain rituals (Bruce Kapferer
[1997, 2013] has argued these points, in his own way, for the virtuality~actuality
of the Sinhalese Suniyama exorcism rite). The image-crystal, I add, is itself a focus
of trans-formation, since potentiality enters actuality through virtuality; potentiality
shaped to become actual (as we know is the case in ritual). Nonetheless, the dynamic
of movement within the image-crystal is then moebius-like, a dynamic of connecting
and relating planes of existing (and imagining) that, even if they are in conjunction
(and they may well not be), are not continuous with one another. The first actuality
(of which there is only a bare hint) turns into the second through a moebius-like dynamic in which terror turns into desire tinged with fear (Rita’s emotions do bleed into
the second actuality from the first). The great image-crystals of MD are the two that
relate opening and closing: the opening dancers and the closing lady of Club Silencio,
and the opening Betty and Old Couple and the closing Derelict, Betty and Rita.
Yet the brunette is memoryless, without past, with bare virtuality, without grounds
from which to speak of her very existence (apart from her name, Rita, from a film
poster of Rita Hayworth).21 Her search for her memory, her identity, driven by Betty,
is no less a search for the actuality she has lost. No less, menacing characters of whom
she is unaware also want her back in that actuality within which she dies. These two
trajectories, or “lines of the universe” (Deleuze 1992: 218), moebiusly join together
moments that prepare the way for and do transformation, from one actuality to another. This is transformation that emerges from cosmic design, from the virtuality of
the cosmos of the film (regardless of how limited this is), rather than from the shocks
of singularity itself.
Moments Preparing for Transformation
The first moment of preparation takes place at Winkies diner [I]. The diner reveals
itself as moebius-space, an interiority full of curvature through which memory is
refracted from one actuality to another. Here the dreamer recounts his vision of the
horrific face he saw through the diner wall, the wall itself becoming mirror-like,
another curve through which the dreamer faces a still deeper space, one that shortly
will change his life. In the dumpster zone of detritus, the face slides out from behind
the wall as the dreamer approaches, and the dreamer is struck down by the face as its
power (his memory of his dream) enters him. The Derelict is interstitial, a homeless
nomad, an urban forager curving to and fro, a creature of the interval which suddenly
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opens for the dreamer. Like other creatures of the interval, he is a figure of great
power, a shamanic shifter who moebiusly relates and changes the planes of actuality.22
The dreamer enters a curve as he goes out the front door of the diner and around
the side toward the back, the Derelict sliding out, conjoining the dreamer’s gaze,
completing the curvature, both suddenly on the same plane, both curving together
despite the great disparity in their trajectories.
Like the first, the second moment introduces figures of power. As the Old Couple accompanying Betty sit in the back seat of the vehicle taking them away, they
are grinning with glee, the sweetness they showed Betty becoming something else,
perhaps malevolent [II]. They seem to know something she does not. Their very presence bodes apprehension. They too are shaping this actuality in which Betty shortly
will meet Rita.
The third moment is the presence of the enigmatic, omnipotent Mr. Roque within
the distorted dimensions of the Red Room [III], wherein he receives and coordinates
reports about the missing girl—yet where is she missing from? Just missing from
the accident scene? Missing from the actuality within which the accident happened
and where she will be murdered? Missing from her own memory, thereby further
rupturing plans for her elimination in the actuality of the accident? Beginning an actuality in which Rita-without-virtuality will meet Betty? An actuality in which Rita’s
presence will destroy Betty, yet perhaps will save herself elsewhere? If Rita recovers
her memory, her past-ness, indeed her virtual selfness, will this resituate her in the
actuality from which she has gone missing, or will she go elsewhere?
The fourth moment of preparation reminds that all the locations mentioned so
far—the diner dumpster zone, the back of a car, the Red Room—are intervals, all
in their own way the opening of space/time that had not existed a moment before,
treacherous passages into interiorities, where things happen that are threatening to
the ordinaries of mundane lives. The fourth is simply the close-up of Rita’s black
purse and the magnified sound as she unzips it, looking for her identity. Riiip—an
interval opening. Inside she finds cash (which never makes sense in the actuality she
now is helping to create) and the triangular blue key [IV], the key of virtuality which
will open a perilous passage into the transformation of actuality. The key that already
is forming another actuality within this second one. The very presence of the key
suggests that some sort of cosmic correction to the effects of the singularity is being
put in position.
The fifth moment is again in the Red Room, demonstrating Mr. Roque’s power
as the producer of The Sylvia North Story stands fearfully at the room’s threshold [V],
receiving indirect instructions to shut the film down, to pressure Adam Kesher into
hiring Camilla Rhodes for the lead. In this actuality these forces will not permit Rita
to become a star, and they are acting to drive her into the actuality of her death. The
sixth moment is Kesher’s meeting with the threatening Cowboy [VI], after he traverses the menacing archway into the metaspace of the corral. Like Mr. Roque, the
Cowboy, a shamanic shifter, is shaping actuality to effect Rita.
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Betty enters Diane Selwyn’s apartment through a narrow aperture, a perilous passage into a dark interior of space/time that suddenly opens, of death and bodily
corruption [VII]. Betty unknowingly sees her own rotting corpse. Or does she? Her
corpse in this actuality? This is the only point where I have to go outside the interiority
of the film to note that the actress who plays Betty does not play this corpse. Roche
(2004: 46) comments insightfully that
the decomposition of Rita’s and Betty’s image occurs after they have been
confronted with an image-crystal that functions as a bridge between the
Betty/Rita part of the movie and the Diane/Camilla part, both parts reflecting each other without defining which is the reflected and which is
the reflection . . . the image-crystal contains two films . . . the second image is almost identical to the first, so that one can’t tell Diane apart from
her reflection.
The transformation of actuality is almost done here; the women see and smell another potential actuality in virtuality, one not yet formed and determined in their
own actuality (though on its way); and this shakes the stability of their own. As the
women flee, their actuality begins to disintegrate—a closeup of their faces as they run
forward shows them in terror, rippling and shuddering in-and-out-of-focus, hereand-not-here, shattering. An aperture seems to be opening around them even as they
flee, sucking them in. Two films, in filmic terms, or the dynamic of one actuality
transforming into another?
The two women twin, almost becoming one: Betty cuts Rita’s hair, fitting her with
a blonde wig—they look like one another, make love, fitting into one another. Made
two, the two permutate toward becoming one as the solidity of actuality disintegrates
around them, their love the powerful bond holding the second actuality together,
protecting Rita from the destruction prevented by the singularity of the accident.
Rita dreaming, mutters in her sleep—there is no band, there is no orchestra, it’s not
okay. She awakens distraught, but now knows exactly where to go to trace her lost
identity—the Club Silencio. As memory returns and her virtuality deepens, she is
being driven from this second actuality, as it is collapsing around her.
Club Silencio is an interval within which this actuality is deliberately made to disintegrate [A].23 Perhaps another singularity is opening within actuality, yet this one is
designed deliberately to take actuality apart in particular ways. I call this a planned,
cosmic singularity because though the singularity is intended, no one is able to predict what manner of attractors will influence trajectories emerging from this maelstrom of inflection. Onstage, the magician, the MC in the red suit, and Rebekah Del
Rio, all drive actuality to implode, losing its self-referents, a chasm opening between
idea and action, signifier and signified, indeed between Actuality and Virtuality—
there is no orchestra but there is music; there is thunder but no storm; the voice of
Del Rio continues its pathos after she collapses. All sound is now a recording but once
it was real. Actuality is detached from virtuality within this interval suddenly openThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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thinking moebiusly
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ing in space/time, the continuousness of its moebius relation to virtuality rupturing.
Just as Rita lost her memory and so her virtuality, creating a new actuality, now this
entire actuality is losing its virtuality, its metaphysical grounding in what Deleuze
calls grains of time, imploding within the inflecting singularity of Club Silencio. The
visible, the actual, has no past nor future. And Betty in the depth of her purse finds
the Blue Box, the aperture again of a moebius dynamic that will permutate actualities
(perhaps as an infinite series) transforming this one into another. With the appearance of the Blue Box the second actuality stands forth as a circuit of key (its outset)
and box (its close), an image crystal of actuality (the key) entering virtuality (the box),
emerging moebiusly as actuality re-aligned and transmuted.
The collapse of actuality continues back in the apartment. Betty disappears, winking out behind Rita’s back, and Rita herself and the remainder of this actuality implode within the Blue Box [B]. Vision enters the doorway, traveling a dark hallway
rippling and shuddering, becoming still darker, opening into a darkened bedroom,
a figure lying on her side on the bed, knees bent. This actuality is activated by the
Cowboy [C] in the doorway, telling the woman it’s time to wake up—in this actuality. Club Silencio, the Blue Box, the bedroom, the Cowboy, all are aligned moebiusly
on the same plane, and one actuality crystallizes from within another, through the
virtuality of the Blue Box.
Some of the characters in this third actuality are the same as they were in the second, while others are present but are other persons. This third actuality seems stable,
every character has its memory and so its virtual potentiality. The cosmic attempts
to stop Rita, now Camilla Rhodes, from becoming a star have failed, yet she will be
destroyed, as will her destroyer, Betty, who is now Diane. That is, there is a greater
dynamic driving the third actuality into virtual relations with the other two, a grand
time-crystal of permutative actualities forming virtually through one another, moving toward the outer envelope that moebiusly joins together the opening and closing
of the film, folding them into one another.
Thus, though the fate of Rita/Camilla may have been sealed in the first actuality, her moebius-like passage to the second and then the third, created an anomaly,
the survival of “Rita,” which this micro-cosmos eliminates. And, just as Diane and
Camilla become so similar to and synchronized with one another in the second actuality, so they share the same fate in the third. The second actuality makes of them
women twinned in love;24 the third separates them agonistically, so that they destroy
one another. The third erases all traces of the contamination created by the anomaly
of the survival of “Rita” in the first actuality and the strengthening of this anomaly
in the second.
The closing phase of the transformation of actuality [D] gathers together a great
concentration of forces to destroy the permutating anomaly created by “Rita’s” survival and, as a consequence, her life-giving relationship with Betty—this destruction
includes the self-killing of the latter as Diane, after she has killed Rita. Coming together are the Cowboy activating the third actuality; the Derelict in the interval-space
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260 | moebius anthropology
behind Winkies; the Blue Box, aligning actualities on the same plane; the Old Couple, emerging from the Blue Box at the Derelict’s feet, who attack Betty/Diane, driving her to self-death. In its own way, MD is a highly self-organizing micro-cosmos;
and, again in its own way, mirrored through the refractions of modernity and cinematics, MD is a simple filmic form of a “primitive” cosmic logic of organization.
On the “surface” of the film none of this is evident, and hence the recourse among
scholars and others to the cartesian dichotomy of fantasy/reality and the like. In my
moebius-like visualizing of Mulholland Drive, I see the film creating a micro-cosmos
within which there are dynamic permutations of actuality, in which the absence of
virtuality is shown to be consequential for actuality, and in which modes of transformation are crucial to keeping this cosmos stable through permutations of actuality.
Interval
The man who can’t visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.
—Andre Breton
Sergei Eisenstein’s pioneer thinking on montage is apposite here. Eisenstein (1975:
4) wrote that “while playing with pieces of film, they [the ‘leftists of montage’] discovered a certain property in the toy . . . two film pieces of any kind, placed together,
inevitably combine into a new concept, a new quality, arising out of that juxtaposition.”25 He (1975: 7; see also Eisenstein 1949: 254) continued, “The juxtaposition of
two separate shots by splicing them together resemble not so much a simple sum of
one shot plus another shot—as it does a creation . . . in every such juxtaposition the
result is qualitatively distinguishable from each component element viewed separately.”
The interval is a break that may expand into a gap, an intermediate space, a zone
of difference, through which the film necessarily passes, and which may be used to alter it, ordinarily as sequence, but also radically, in its dynamic composition. Deleuze
(1989: 276–79) discusses the interval in terms of rational and irrational cuts. The
rational cut respects the integrity of images and sequences of image such that “the
limit as interval is included as the end of the one [sequence of images] or as the beginning of the other [the next sequence]” (ibid.: 277). The intervals that are rational
cuts construct a continuous world of images in which the interval itself serves the
continuousness of the series. The irrational cut on the other hand slices through, divides, and thereby fragments images, image from sound, continuousness. “Euclidean
coordinates” are lost (ibid.: 278).26
The irrational cut, however, sets the interval free, since it no longer has an integral
relationship to the image by setting its limit, by maintaining the integrity of the unity
of image and sound. In a way the interval exists in its own right, with its own permutative effects. The irrational cut enables the expansion, elaboration, and involution
of the interval. The interval may become its own self-entering and self-exiting form,
evolving its own virtuality~actuality.
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thinking moebiusly
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Mulholland Drive shows just how powerful such intervals can be, figuring in its
transformations, dissolving one actuality, ramifying another. In MD the intervals are
the moments when virtual preparations are made for transforming actuality—often
through characters I have called shamanic shifters—and in locations where transformation is done, in the Club Silencio and immediately after in the Havenhurst apartment, and in the third actuality, behind Winkie’s. The interval freed by the irrational
cut is chiasmic, in Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) terms—a zone of cross-over through which
one actuality transmutes or torques into another, perhaps bringing the latter into
existence. This speaks to, perhaps even visualizes aspects of rituals of transformation,
highlighting just how crucial the interval may be in such rites.
It is its irrational cuts (though I prefer a-rational) and its recursive involution and
elaboration of the interval that make MD a film with an entirely interior view—so
that any exterior Archimedean perspective is always subverted by moebius movement. The experience may be akin to being inside one’s own body, entirely in-bodied
sensuously, trying to make sense of a myriad of pulsating, throbbing, dripping, evacuating shapes and contours of flesh, connected by conduits of all sorts transporting
fluids in many dimensions and directions, all composed of tiny en-walled bits with
their own lives, utterly dynamic, impossible to comprehend, indubitably real.
This may also be the condition of participants in numerous rituals of transformation and in their intervals that are re-entering self-entering forms. From within
the interval set free, without exteriority, there may be loss of balance, uncertainty,
sometimes apprehension, as actuality forms but is not neatly accessible to literal description, or to enumeration of a series of acts, musical scores, utterances, commands,
sacrifices, symbols . . . symbols. The interval of transformation can be itemized, yet
I wonder whether it can be fully grasped as an entirety within itself—moebiusly, it
is swallowing itself and whoever enters it. The interiority of much ritual dynamics is
less amenable to academic meta-level discourse because it is so profoundly an infraprocessual dynamic. A film like MD may give us some sense of how this might be
visualized. It is a film that plays with in-between-ness, in-between the infinite seedbed of virtuality and potential actualities coming into existence, a film that visualizes
liminality from within itself. A film whose interior dynamics are never exhausted,
never ending, perhaps only abating, slowing, curving moebiusly into themselves; and
so, in Deleuzian terms, always “starting again in the middle rather than moving from
a beginning to an end” (Rajchman 2000: 58). Transformative ritual, too, never ends
despite its linear cause-and-effect appearance. Such ritual enters abeyance or abatement, existing in its virtual cosmos as an ever-present on-going dynamic of cosmic
self-organization even when not activated; so that, once activated again, it begins “in
the middle” of its own ongoing relationship to cosmic process.
I said earlier that Victor Turner’s theory of transformative ritual—the single most
influential theory of ritual in modern anthropology—is one of the interval. In his
theory, transformation depends on the freeing of the interval.27 The liminal phase in
rites de passage is an interval that, in Deleuze’s filmic terms, has been freed by irratioThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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262 | moebius anthropology
nal cut from the serial character of the mundane—the liminal phase is not sacred,
rather it is a-serial, independent, a self-entering form of virtual space/time, moebiusly
recursive as it generates actualities. Transformative ritual then can be understood as
an assemblage for the generation of permutating actualities emerging from virtuality,
within intervals. It is within intervals that powers meet humans. And I would not
be surprised if, in cosmic terms, the interval in ritual which may look like a crack,
a narrow aperture, opens interiorly, within itself, to swallow the compass of cosmos
from within itself; as happens in the transformative moments of Mulholland Drive.
Yet this would be a cosmos that throws up singularities. Not a legalistic, bureaucratic
cosmos that turns singularities into exceptions—in which the accident, the illness,
the earthquake, the desire, are exceptional in that they should never happen, and
so they are to be dealt with and effaced through normative rules and regulations as
exceptions to the rule, rather than as singularities. However, the cosmos that throws
up singularities is often a traditional one, in which the singularity is unexpected but
not unusual or exceptional; and, so, the cosmos which generates singularity is always
in its own middle, as are the rituals resonating with this cosmos that are also in their
own middle, even as they begin.
An interval theory of rituals of transformation would try to address the virtual~actual conundrum (as Kapferer 1997, 2013 has begun to do). I would think on
the following. Rituals that do transformation through their own operations emerge
through an irrational or a-rational cut that is elaborated into an interval. Whether
this is predicated on dualisms of the order of sacred-profane or canonical-indexical
(Rappaport 1999) is of less significance than that it is done. The interval is a virtuality, utterly real in its cosmic potentialities that generate and permutate actualities, and
that themselves become the outcomes of ritual. Thus Kapferer (1997) argues for the
Sinhalese Suniyama exorcism that, through the virtual~actual relationship, actuality
can be slowed, acted upon, mended, changed.
Within the interval, actuality is formed through recursiveness, through curvature
and folding. Folding invokes the moebius movement of self-entering and self-exiting
form, that of a highly interior perspective on ritual. Folding perhaps also crumples
time, in Michel Serres’s (1995: 81–122; Ma 2000) terms, and I think space as well,
so that any time, any space, can touch and torque into any other. The crumpling of
time/space injects reflexivity into the interiority of ritual; reflexivity of the kind that
I sometimes describe as the eye seeing itself seeing—again, not a metaperspective on
interiority but rather an infra-sensuousness through which senses are utterly attuned
to themselves.28 Within this virtuality of ritual, actuality is formed, formed so as to
permutate itself once the moebius dynamic self-exits, the folding turning inside-out,
the new actuality returned to or torqueing into the social surround of the ritual.
A brief example reported by Sundar Kaali (2006) shows the value of thinking
through cinema about ritual. The ritual play, Hiranya Natakam is performed widely
in South India. The play enacts the story of the demon king, Hiranya, whose son
Prahlada was a great devotee of the god, Vishnu, and for this was persecuted by his
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thinking moebiusly
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father who belittled Vishnu and challenged the deity to appear. In the climax to the
play the avatara of Vishnu, Narasimha the man-lion, appears from within a solid
pillar and disembowels Hiranya. In a number of villages that are geographically contiguous in the Tanjavur region the performance is varied in the following way: almost
all of the characters are doubled in the performance area, each a mimetic of the other.
Narasimha himself, the cosmic encompassment who, one may argue, contains all the
other characters, is not doubled. For whatever the reasons that the characters appear
in twos, this doubling seems to be a historically emergent property of the enactment
of this ritual play in this locale. An emergent property that is an a-rational cut, opening an interval within each character.
Though this apparently cannot be seen, I believe that the doubles are expansions of
one another, opening space/time that had not existed before—not so unlike the Handelmans and Borgeses with whom I opened this excursus. Within the performance
zone the doubles may be bringing something else into being beyond the mimetic
production of their similarity. The doubles create an interval between them, a singular interval of virtuality within the performance area itself. Moebiusly, the doubles
interact amongst themselves through this interval with all its potentiality, moving
the action inside and outside, permutating toward diverging performances, diverging
outcomes. Put otherwise, within the performance area there are two, overlapping,
ritual plays going on simultaneously, both articulated especially by the encompassing
Narasimha. Yet, within the emerging embryonic space between them, these parallel
mimetic performances are on their way to throwing up a variant of Hiranya Natakam in which each play, each set of actors, may diverge substantially from the other,
thereby potentially creating a new storyline. Whatever the local conditions, the virtuality of the Hiranya Natakam cosmos is generating an actuality significantly different
from the usual, an actuality taking shape through its own virtuality; an actuality
generating further divergence through the interaction of its own doubling forms.
Especially interesting here is what did indeed happen during one performance.
The defeat of the demon-king is usually marked by removing his crown and giving
it to Narasimha. On this occasion, as Sundar Kaali notes, a performer of high status removed Narasimha’s mask at the climactic moment and brought it to Hiranya
(apparently without knowing consciously why he did so), thereby marking the victory of the demon-king over the god. Though this ending was corrected by doing
the ritual-play over again (ridding the enactment of its unexpected singularity), the
singularity itself was a potential outcome formed from virtuality, one with its own
emotional and logical satisfactions. Moreover, given Narasimha’s encompassment of
the cosmos, this was an outcome with profound implications.
Can we learn from cinema about ritual? This may depend, for instance, on our
theorizing the interval toward a theory of virtuality in ritual. The kinds of dynamics I
have pointed to in discussing Mulholland Drive are not prominent in anthropological
studies of ritual whose primary concern is the relationship between ritual and social
order, with primacy in explaining the former accorded to the latter. Little attention
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264 | moebius anthropology
is given to how, as I put it in Chapter Three, ritual works in its own right through
dynamics that belong to ritual, rather than those that are exterior to and apart from
this. In its own ways, Mulholland Drive shows how the ritual imaginary may benefit
from thinking with a theory of rite that draws together singularity and actuality
within virtuality, and their alignment within interval through a self-entering selfexiting dynamic like that of moebius.
Notes
My thanks to Ruth HaCohen, Lydia Ginzburg, Bruce Kapferer, and Galina Lindquist for their
critical comments.
1. The phrasing, site of cosmogenesis, or “between dimensions,” is that of Deleuze (1993: 15),
following Paul Klee, referring to the world itself, its beginning between Idea and inflection, an
elastic point, becoming what it is but different, a permutative dynamic of the ways the elastic
can be stretched, shaped in space, through time, through itself, as Klee demonstrates over and
again. The Kleeian point is a particular event, a singularity in Deleuzian terms, attracting elements to itself, just as the canvas, the lines, the brush and hand, are attracted to and from that
point, creating an image unlike any other yet entirely in the world of others, related genetically
to them.
2. The moebius surface is traversed from one of its sides to the other without crossing an edge or
border. Rosen (1994: 9) comments that, “points on opposite sides are intimately connected—
they can be thought of as ‘twisting’ or ‘dissolving’ into each other, as being bound together internally.” So, “in the moebius transformation, reflexive self-reference and reference to the other
are thoroughly blended . . . the moebius aspect turns back upon itself and, at the same time,
upholds what is different” (ibid.: 14).
3. See this argument in Helm (2005: 78–79).
4. The influence of film on scholarly imaginations has hardly been broached. Algazi (2004) argues
that Norbert Elias in 1935 thought in filmic terms while conceptualizing historical change.
Zischler (2003) traces the films Franz Kafka (an inveterate filmgoer) went to see, and quotes
Theodor Adorno to wit, “Kafka’s novels are not prompt books for the experimental theater . . . .
Rather, they are the last, disappearing textual links to silent film (which, not coincidently, disappeared nearly simultaneously with Kafka’s death)” (Zischler 2003: 58).
5. Egginton argues that theatre, as distinct from ritual, came into existence in its own right in
fifteenth-century Spain with the invention of the stage, separating audience from actors. This
created “the experience of fiction,” an alternative, viable imaginary reality that had not existed
before, since during the Middle Ages the performance of a story was ontologically part of the
entirety of the world, the only world in existence (Egginton 1996: 402; see also Egginton
2003). “Once the screen is in place, following Lacan, the gaze is never merely a position to be
taken up, but rather an object to be desired” (Egginton 1996: 404). What the spectator cannot
see, then, becomes the trajectory of desire. There, somehow, yet invisible; there, somehow, perhaps traceable through its traces. This brings us back to dynamics of transformation in ritual:
whatever the goal of transformation, this is the desired—yet unseen, invisible, out of sight,
distant, just around the corner, in front of our noses—toward which the trajectory of intentionality soars and burrows. Not the invisibility of separate worlds, distinct realities, but rather
one cosmos, perhaps curving, folding, twisting, through whose virtualities one moves to reach
or create other actualities.
6. The interval, to which I return in the closing section, is crucial to transformation through ritual.
7. Elsewhere, I argue adamantly that there is no over-arching idea, rubric, or phenomenon that
can be called “ritual” around the world (Handelman 1998, 2006). Not because “ritual” is a
Christian cultural formation (Asad 1993) not applicable elsewhere, but because there are pervaThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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thinking moebiusly
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
| 265
sive differences in self-organization between events or rituals that trans-form and those that do
representation (Handelman 1998, 2004).
Andrey Tarkovsky (1989: 116), the singular director, writes that, “a self-organising structure
takes shape during editing because of the distinctive properties given the material during
shooting.” The logic of self-organization comes together when the “distinctive properties” of
a rhythm of time, the “time-thrust within the frames” (ibid.: 119), comes through and then
the entire film comes together through its rhythm of time. Tarkovsky (1989: 117) insists that,
“time courses through the picture despite editing rather than because of it.” The film, then, is
reaching beyond itself toward that which is out of sight, beyond the frame, beyond itself. See
also, Frampton (2006) on the idea that (logics of ) film think into existence their composition,
movement, and characters. When watching a film we are embraced by a process of thinking
embedded within the picture.
From an email sent by Larisa Kingston-Mann to her mother, Esther Kingston-Mann (13 October 1998). Used with the permission of Larissa Mann, given in an email, 17 August 2005.
Beller (2003: 95) shifts this kind of imaginary into a Marxist mode by arguing that the “cut”
of assembly line work later shifts to the work of cinema spectators following the “cuts” through
which film is constituted. “Cinema,” he argues, “took the formal properties of the assembly line
and introjected them as consciousness.”
Thus Zizek’s (2000) Lacanian analysis of a previous Lynch film, Lost Highway (1997); and a
study of Lynch’s TV series, Twin Peaks, as media poetry that re-mediates the mythic character of
American middle-class social order (O’Connor 2004).
Hayles and Gessler (2004) argue that their solution to MD meets the ten clues that Lynch
provided to enable viewers to make sense of the film. For Lynch’s ten clues, see <www.mulhol
land-drive.net>, and for his attitude to them, see Rodley (2005: 289). Gessler, <www.sscnet
.ucla.edu/geoeg/gessler/topics/mulholland-drive>, provides a minute summary of the chronology of MD. Buckland (2003) tells the production history of MD and its multiple threads.
In this regard, the viewer becomes part of the systemic organization of the film, yet of its
second-order systemics. The viewer then is organized by the reflexive self-organization of the
film, and has difficulty seeing whether the film is purposive and goal-directed (see Glanville
2004: 1384). One consequence seems to be that a system of this kind “will always expand
beyond the frames of reference adopted by observers . . . ,” and therefore is in principle unpredictable (Scott 2004: 1370). This is my understanding of MD—to some degree the film is
unpredictable to itself, and struggles with its own uncertainty, sucking the viewer into this.
Square brackets indicate the points in the film that are loci in which different dimensions are
aligned on the same plane, junctures of potential transformation—of one dimension entering
into and effecting another.
Del Rio is a female vocalist in present-day Los Angeles, playing herself in the film. She has a
website.
By this point close to two hours of the film have elapsed. The remainder takes some twenty-five
minutes.
Claude Lanzmann, who directed the epic nine-hour film, Shoah, asked: “When does the Holocaust really end?” replying: “When I really had to conclude [the film] [. . .] I decided that the
last image of the film would be [. . .] an endlessly rolling [. . .] train” (quoted in Felman 1992:
242). An actuality train rolling back into the potentiality of its virtuality.
Thain (2004: 3, 7), in a Deleuzian analysis, notes how the close of Lost Highway curves, in my
terms, into its opening. Buckland comments that the narrative of Lost Highway “is literally
organized like a moebius strip.” (Posting to Film-Philosophy Salon <film-philosophy@jismail
.ac.uk>, 8 January 2006).
On interactivity between viewer and (TV) screen, see Handelman (2000, 2003).
Da Vinci (2002: 79) caught this Deleuzian understanding of virtuality/actuality in the fifteenth
century: “To see whether your painting as a whole corresponds to the thing represented, take
a mirror and set it so that it reflects the model [which the painting represents], and compare
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266 | moebius anthropology
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
this reflection with your picture, and carefully examine the whole surface to see whether the
two images of the object are similar . . . . And since the mirror can create the illusion of relief
by means of lines and of light and shadow, you, who have among your colors more powerful
shadows and lights than those of the mirror, if you know how to combine them as you should,
will also be able to make your work seem like the reality seen in a great mirror.”
Rita Hayworth suffered from Alzheimer’s and likely lost her memory and virtual existence
within herself; so the poster itself is a perfect node for the brunette to search for her own identity, the two Ritas in themselves an image-crystal.
See Rodley (2005: 277) for the origins of Winkies and the Derelict.
Transformative moments are shown by capital letters.
Lynch (Rodley 2005: 289) calls Mulholland Drive “a love story.”
Without knowing Eisenstein’s writings, I argued this for ritual (Handelman 2004: 112), and
more generally for the positioning in close proximity to one another of unrelated symbols that,
as it were, magnetize a relationship between them and give to this the potentiality of significance, if not meaning (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1993).
More recently I have begun to wonder how Deleuze’s distinction between irrational and rational
cuts can be brought into planar conjunction with Andrey Tarkovsky’s adamantine sense that
frame and film are filled with “time-thrust” (1989: 119) that pulsates and moves the entirety
of the film from outset to closure. The task of editing a film is discovering the time-thrusts of
frames and allowing these to come together, indeed to “link together” (1989: 117). Tarkovsky
continues, “The distinctive time running through the shots makes the rhythm of the picture;
and rhythm is determined not by the length of edited pieces, but by the pressure of the time that
runs through them. Editing cannot determine rhythm [. . .] time courses through the picture
despite editing rather than because of it [. . .] The course of time, recorded in the frame, is what
the director has to catch in the pieces laid out on the editing table” (1989: 117).
Turner’s predecessor, Arnold Van Gennep, likely was influenced by the nineteenth-century interest in the limen, the threshold of perception, which also so effected impressionist painting,
especially that of Seurat and other pointillists (Prendeville 1999: 377).
Picasso depicts this wonderfully in some of his cubist faces—one eye looking outward, the other
trying to look at the face doing the looking, yet from within that face—a self-other perspective
that is interior to a single figure. I’m thinking, for example, of Der gelbe pullover (1939) and Der
maler und sein modell (1971), both in the Berggruen Museum in Berlin.
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Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Baudrillard, Jean. 2000. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press.
Beller, Jonathan. 2003. “The Cinematic Mode of Production: Towards a Political Economy of the
Postmodern.” Culture, Theory and Critique 44: 91–106.
Borges, Jorge Luis. 1994. “Borges and I.” Antaeus 73/74: 5.
———. 1998. “The Garden of Forking Paths.” In Collected Fictions, 119–28. London: Allen Lane.
Buckland, Warren. 2003. “‘A Sad, Bad Traffic Accident’: The Televisual Prehistory of David Lynch’s
Film Mulholland Drive.’” New Review of Film and Television Studies 1: 131–47.
Da Vinci, Leonardo. 2002. Leonardo on Art and the Artist. Mineola: Dover.
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Chapter 11
Folding and
Enfolding Walls
Statist Imperatives and
Bureaucratic Aesthetics
in Divided Jerusalem
Author’s Note
Deleuze’s proposition for inquiry in the epigraph to this chapter jump-started my
thinking on how to make significant connections between the seemingly unlike, yet
connections that would be dynamic rather than simply structural. In this chapter
on the cityscape of today’s Jerusalem I connect places that turn into spaces that relate to one another as a vector of force that contributes to shaping and controlling
the cityscape through bureaucratic aesthetics of the Israeli State. I find the spaces of
this vector through a post-mathematical topology which can only be dynamic in its
movement, thereby jettisoning topography which can only be static, without movement, without dynamic.
R
You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should
look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that
something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other . . .
You don’t have to be learned, to know or be familiar with a particular
area, but to pick up this or that in areas which are very different.
—Gilles Deleuze, Dialogues II
After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the armistice line ran through Jerusalem on a
roughly north-south axis. That line developed into a dilapidated no man’s land, with
ongoing back-and-forth sniper fire. The ancient Old City remained in Jordan, its
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270 | moebius anthropology
western Ottoman walls lying alongside the armistice line. After the 1967 June War,
the Israeli government annexed an area that included Jordanian Jerusalem, together
with a large area of the adjacent West Bank, all of which was made part of a single
municipal territory. The Israeli state declared this new entity to be “United Jerusalem, the Eternal Capital of Israel” (Klein 2005: 55). Ever since, actualizing a single
Jerusalem, united through conquest under Israeli rule (although quite divided in
mundane life), has been a statist imperative. In this state project, architecture has a
prominent role. According to Nitzan-Shiftan (2005: 231), architecture “as a technique of execution . . . is not transparent—it is neither devoid of ideology, nor is it
readily accessible to political dictates, particularly not in sites saturated with national
and religious symbolism. On the contrary, politicians are largely dependent on professionals who have privileged access to the spatial tools of architecture.” Given the
powerful presence of Jerusalem in the symbolism of each of the monotheisms and
in the religious and secular cultures that emerged from these religions—and, no less,
the prominence of Jerusalem in the Arab-Israeli conflict—the making and shaping of
built forms there are often perceived through synecdoche, that is, the parts are seen
as standing for the whole. Often changes in built form are a felt aesthetic presence
that is immediately plumbed, analytically, common-sensically, for its significance in
relation to the city-as-whole.
Since 1967, after seizing the heights surrounding the Palestinian city, Israel has
been building a wide, dense arc of housing for Israeli Jews, without giving building
permits to Palestinians. Residential building has been accompanied by a variety of
physical barriers. The most recent, dubbed officially the “separation fence,” is intended to wall off much of the Palestinian city from its hinterland in the occupied
West Bank, territory that might be given to the Palestinian-state-in-the-making,
should this ever be actualized. Israel controls the Palestinian city with a bureaucratic
and militaristic iron hand, while minimally investing in infrastructure for its Palestinian inhabitants, even as Israeli governance insists that the entire city is a seamless
unity (Benvenisti 1995).
It is in this Israel-controlled cityscape that I discuss one vector of statist-related
physical forms that have qualities of walls. Although here I consider only official and
quasi-official forming of space, my intention is to bring out the dynamic of folding
and enfolding space through the shaping of walls as a transforming vector of control.
The term “vector” comes from the Latin vehere, to carry. The vector as carrier refers
to a line in space that has both the magnitude and direction of a quantity. Since I use
the word “vector” in a loosely topological way, the line of space becomes one of connectivities that need not be linear and may well be recursive. In my usage, the vector
carries value through space, value that is enhanced, augmented, made more powerful
as it moves into and through the enfoldings I discuss. In traversing these enfoldings,
value turns into force, that of the state and its imperatives.
The architectural forms I discuss are new, ostensibly without relation to one another, yet together they create this vector of force, as the cityscape shifts from west to
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folding and enfolding walls
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east. The first is a bridge pylon, while the others I refer to as walls, although only the
last ordinarily would be understood as such. The first of these walls is a new historical
museum of the Holocaust (the “museum-wall”). The second is a massive continuous stretch of new buildings (the “mall-wall”) that crosses the former no man’s land
between Jewish West Jerusalem and the southwestern walls of the Old City. The
third is the “separation barrier” between Palestinian East Jerusalem and its hinterland.
Together, these four constructions are one topological vector shaping the cityscape.
Using the idea of topology in a broad way enables all four constructions to be implicated together in how the city is being shaped and practiced in accordance with statist
imperatives. Crucially, this vector is self-referential. Therefore, what I will call its
“beginning” (the bridge pylon) and its “end” (the separation fence) fold into one another, transforming the force of directionality into the totalizing of recursive energy.
I return to topological thinking in relation to that which Gilles Deleuze referred to
as “folding,” a dynamic especially relevant to discussing the forming of form, in both
social and material terms (Handelman 2005). By describing three of the constructions as walls, I imply that they partake of an aesthetics that I regard as bureaucratic,
a topic that will be addressed in the concluding remarks.
In terms of their aesthetic form, cityscapes are usually analyzed by social scientists in terms of topography—the ways in which forms are situated on surfaces and
through the lines on these surfaces that connect the forms. Topography relates more
to material and social positioning in four-dimensional space. It is less concerned with
the dynamics that actively shape forms and relations among forms through different scales and intensities, through vectors that come into being as forms are being
formed, and that give direction and impetus to these vectorial thrusts. Topography is
passive in that it can be presented as a given of things, natural or human-made. This
sense of passivity easily enables social scientists to use features of topography as containers of representations of social and historical formations. Representation reflects,
presents, reflects—but does nothing through itself. Topographies are representations;
they, too, do nothing through themselves. They reflect forces (political, economic,
ideological, architectural) that originate elsewhere. Thus, sites in the cityscape may
be perceived as dense mappings of meaning, yet these are passive receptacles whose
significance is to be deciphered.1 As Deleuze (1994: 67) comments, “Representation
has only a single centre, a unique and receding perspective, and in consequence a false
depth. It mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing.”2
The dominant use of aesthetics continues to link this to representation. For the
pre-Socratic Greeks, aisthesis, or sense perception, was not separated from logos, and
“physical sensory perception was trusted as knowledge” (Kane 2007: 83). The metaphysical project of the Age of Reason was to separate aisthesis from logos and to tie
aesthetics to representation. I use aesthetics in a somewhat combined way as “sensuous knowledge” (Goldman 2001: 255), as knowledge that is trusted but largely tacit
and taken for granted. My usage of the aesthetic refers to something more like the
“feel” that one has for what one is doing or seeing or moving through kinesthetically
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272 | moebius anthropology
(or perceiving through other of the senses)—the feel for the “rightness” of how one is
doing what one is doing, or how this is done in concert, the feel of the senses forming
form through practice. The aesthetic in mundane living is related to Bergson’s notion
of “habit memory,” of attending kinesthetically to one’s own body, monitoring what
one is doing; but, I add, attending kinesthetically no less to the surround, including
of course the built environment. In this regard, movement itself is a sense, as the body
continuously changes position, revising the information it takes in from the environment, as do other of the senses in their own ways. Therefore, this is also a haptic aesthetics of practicing formed and forming space, of “memory etched in movement,”
of the body, of the surround.3
These mundane aesthetics are an indwelling of largely tacit knowledge that always
seems to include more than we can tell, were we able to relate this knowingly (Polanyi
1962: 314; idem 1966: 17–23). Tacit knowing is the feeling of disattending to ourselves, which moves us beyond ourselves, enabling the exterior world of practice and
the interior world of experience to be unified as the exterior world of experience and
the interior world of practice (see Dufrenne 1973: 446; Katz 1999: 314). Indeed, the
aesthetics of practice lead us to “an appreciation of the essential place of aesthetics in
all behaviors, however mundane or esoteric” (Katz 1999: 314). No less, the aesthetics
of practice lead us to all surrounds and, I emphasize, to vectors of force that connect
through these surrounds in and during multiple dimensions.
In trying to consider how an aesthetics of statist practice forms the constructions
to be addressed in this chapter, I will perhaps escape to a degree from the passive receptacles of representational symbolism, away from topographical thinking and more
toward the topological, toward a dynamic of the relational among forms. Each of the
four new constructions is, in its own right, a separate venue of statist imperatives for
Jerusalem. Nonetheless, each is a variation of the dynamic of folding, and the vector
of these variations intensifies its wall-ish qualities as it thrusts from west to east.
The Beginning—the Calatrava Pylon-Parabola
Driving up to Jerusalem (to a height of some 800 meters) from the coast in the west,
the highway enters the lip of the city at a busy intersection and continues into the
west-east axis that begins the major thoroughfare, Jaffa Road, which runs through the
city all the way to the Ottoman-period walls of the Old City, the border of the Palestinian city. Traversing the intersection, roughly from north to south, is a cable-stayed
bridge, some 360 meters in length, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava
(see Fig. 11.1). When it became fully operational in 2011, the bridge was also adjusted to carry light-rail lines above the intersection. Part of the support system of the
bridge is a slender steel pylon, some 118 meters in height, inclining toward the east.
From either side of the pylon, steel cables in the shape of a parabola hold the bridge
in place.4 The parabolic imparts a sense of three-dimensionality to the pylon and its
steel cables. Inaugurated in June 2008, the pylon is considered by Israeli authorities
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folding and enfolding walls
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Figure 11.1. The Calatrava pylon-parabola at the western entrance to Jerusalem. Photograph
by the author.
to be the major visual landmark at the entry to the Jewish city. The pylon-parabola
quickly acquired a biblical referent, the harp of King David (the mythical founder of
the Israelite city) and is referred to as the Chords Bridge or the Bridge of (musical)
Strings—a giant harp embedded in the city’s western entrance.
Since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 with Jerusalem as the capital, the
Jewish city has welcomed Jews to its precincts from the westerly direction with its
dense concentration of finance, business, and industry on the coastal plain. The most
striking feature of this pylon positioned at the edge of the mountain is its openness
in multiple dimensions. It is quite transparent, concealing nothing, as it were, yet
with quite extensive presence, visible from numerous points on the ridges around
the city. The pylon leans into the city, opening the way, beginning an enfoldment. It
soars into the heaven from different perspectives, sometimes shaping a great bird with
outstretched wings, sometimes a feathery embracing cloak, sometimes the mythical
harp of the love poetry and psalms of the ancient David.
The parabolic form of the pylon imparts a complexity to the open air, to open
space through which it moves. In his discussion of Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze
takes in the fold, the folding of space-time that is the opening of a different forming, a
forming of difference that had not existed before in that space and time. Folding may
be conceptualized as the forming of a pocket (of space, of time, of social action, and
of their intersections)—a folding in of structures, of movements of living, articulating persons within these curving self-enclosures in certain ways and not in others. As
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274 | moebius anthropology
it curves, the fold or pocket opens the depths of space-time where/when no opening
had existed a moment before. The opening itself is a curving of space-time, since the
movement of living is neither stopped nor blocked, but shifted into itself, enfolded,
reorganized, and thereby made different, minimally, partially, utterly, from the movements in whose courses the opening is but a moment (Handelman 2005: 14). The
fold or pocket inflects and involutes (Deleuze 1993: 14–26), entailing variable degrees of the emergence of autopoietic propensities for self-organization that follow
from the self-closing that is the curve. The fold curves recursively because its forming
in itself is anti-lineal, anti-Cartesian, turning over, upending. Of especial interest here
is that Deleuze (ibid.: 16) cites Paul Klee as calling a point—the (pure) event that is a
point of inflection—“‘a site of cosmogenesis’ . . . ‘between dimensions.’”5
Consider the parabolic pylon. It begins a curve, soaring as its curve leans and
swerves into the city. This curvature has an axis, the pylon, yet it does not have a center that is centering itself, since its movement is upward, outward, reaching beyond
the physical extension of the cables themselves. It is a folding dynamic, but one just
beginning, the folding reaching toward, into the city even as it soars into the heavens,
gently, openly, enfolding both together. The point of inflection, the beginning, is
the point of cosmogenesis for the vector (continuously emerging into being, here,
elsewhere) that I am beginning to discuss—a point of cosmogenesis whose parabolic extension seems to modulate space harmonically (resonating with the metaphor
of David’s harp), imparting a rhythm to the ether.6 Looked at this way, the pylonparabola begins to take on the forming of a net, one that is in movement, leaning
transparently, benignly, into its catchment area.
A net, not yet a wall. I problematize this beginning by shifting to the new Holocaust History Museum at the national Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem (which
means “A Place and a Name”). As I noted at the outset, the relationality of spaces that
I am connecting is more topological, less topographical. So, although Yad Vashem is
not quite on the west-east trajectory that begins here with the pylon-parabola, it is
undoubtedly on that trajectory once temporality is added to the vector.
The Museum-Wall—Folding History into the State
Today the Israeli state is sieved through the Holocaust. During the state’s early years, its
representatives rarely raised the likelihood that its foundation emerged from the Holocaust or that the United Nations vote in 1947 in favor of this founding was a response
to genocide. Israel’s political leadership presented the establishment of the state as its
own accomplishment. Nonetheless, statist imperative demanded commemoration of
the Holocaust. Yet the end of European Jewry and the beginning of the new Jews of
Palestine and then Israel were presented as two separate narrative trajectories—one
buried into near extinction as the other was rising into prominence. In these narratives
the fate of European Jewry was the inevitable dead-ended outcome of Diaspora living.
Only as an independent nation-state could Jews have a future in a world of states.
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In the present-day political realities of Israel, which have powerfully revived the
presence of the religious Judaic as the cultural grounds for the existence of the Jewish
people inside and outside the state, these two historical narratives have merged to
the point that the state is now the direct consequence of the Holocaust. This causal
relationship must be honored and sanctified continuously with respect and vigilance,
since the conditions of the Holocaust are everywhere anew.7 Most immediately, the
Israeli people and state are threatened by the enmity of Palestinians and, more generally, of Muslims (perceived independently of Israeli occupation and settlement of the
territories). It is in these senses that the trajectory of beginning (the open, although
directional, folding of the pylon-parabola) has on its existential horizon the historical
museum of Yad Vashem, through which it must pass.
The old Holocaust museum was located in a squarish, nondescript building, one
of the cluster that makes up the core of the Yad Vashem memorial complex (see Fig.
11.2, the building in the left background). All of the buildings in this complex offer a
blank exterior visage, the horrific realities of the genocide being hidden from external
view (Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1997). Despite being concealed deep
inside and far away, those horrors are immediately here and now. The exhibition
in the old museum, which had been in place for about thirty years, was designed
by historians and resembled a musty illustrated book of Holocaust history. Over
the years since it opened, the Israeli political leadership had begun to emphasize
Israel’s role as the natural leader in Holocaust commemoration. The new Holocaust
History Museum is a response to the tremendous rise in Holocaust commemoration
among world Jewry, especially in the United States, culminating in the political success of placing the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the National Mall
Figure 11.2. The Yad Vashem memorial complex with the old Holocaust museum in the
background and the new Holocaust museum in the foreground. Photograph by the author.
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276 | moebius anthropology
in Washington, DC, in the heart of American national symbolism. The new commemorative sites use innovative designs and aesthetics that had left Yad Vashem in
their wake. The new Holocaust museum is intended to rectify this—or so its leaders
imagine.
My focus here is only on the exterior of this building and its positioning within
the national Holocaust memorial. The Yad Vashem complex is built along the top of a
ridge, with most of the buildings fronting along its southern exposure. The outermost
walkway along the circumference of the ridge is named the Avenue of the Righteous
Among the Nations. On either side of the long walkway are carob trees dedicated to
particular Gentiles who, at risk to their own lives, saved Jews during the Holocaust
(see Fig. 11.3). These trees, these dedications, are an outer bulwark, protective of
the memories of elsewhen, elsewhere that are lodged within the complex. The three
largest free-standing monuments of the complex are dedicated to the resistance and
heroism of Jews during World War II. Open to the elements, they thrust abruptly
upward from the land, dominating the perspective. The symmetric triangulation of
these three monuments corresponds to the shape of the ridge and forms another bulwark within that of the Avenue of the Righteous. Within these two bulwarks are the
major memorial buildings, protected by righteous Gentiles and by Jewish resistance
and heroism (see Handelman and Shamgar-Handelman 1997: 101–10).
The positioning of the new museum reverses this patterning. The shape of the
building is a long triangle, some 200 meters in length, positioned to intersect at a
right angle with the Avenue of the Righteous. There are two openings set into the
sloping wall of the building, facing outward toward the beginning of the complex.
Figure 11.3. The Avenue of the Righteous passing through the new Holocaust museum. Photograph by the author.
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folding and enfolding walls
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One is the entrance to the museum. The other opening is a larger rectangle the width
of the Avenue of the Righteous, continuing this walkway through the wall of the
museum into the larger territory of the complex beyond. There are no windows or
other apertures in the sloping side of the museum. But where the two sloping walls
meet at their apex, there is a triangular skylight, a prism that runs the length of the
building. On the northerly side of the Avenue, the museum triangle plunges into
the mountain ridge of the complex, with the skylight above ground. At its northerly
end the museum triangle emerges from the ridge, its sloping sides folding back and
cantilevered to open into the space of large windows that frame an expansive view of
the city below.
The exhibits of the museum’s interior roughly correspond to the tripartition of
the exterior walls. The first section of the exterior walls, including the entrance, corresponds to the first portion of the standard Israeli narrative of the Holocaust—the
prologue, the rise to power of the Nazis, the setting of the trap, the condition of no
exit. The second section of the exterior walls, buried in the earth of the ridge, corresponds to the second portion of the narrative—the extermination of European Jewry
in concentration and death camps. Often these deaths are understood in religious
terms as self-sacrifice, as dying in the name of God (al Kiddush HaShem). The third
section of the exterior walls, emerging (“exploding,” in the words of the architect
[Safdie 2006: 94]) from their burial, opening into the light toward the vista of the
living city below, corresponds to the narrative’s third part—the liberation from the
camps and emigration to the Israeli state-in-the-making, the pinnacle of freedom
achieved through war and sacrifice (Handelman 2004: 171–99). Along the entire
length of the museum its triangular skylight prism remains above ground, a honed,
cutting-edge slicing-open of the earth that exposes the sacrifices of the Holocaust
beneath the ground to the redemption that illuminates this history with the light of
the heavens over the State of Israel. One perceptive interpreter comments that “the
architect’s act of violence in slitting open the ground is felt viscerally, expressing itself
as an archeological scar symbolically healed by the landscape itself ” (Ockman 2006a:
21; see also Bennett 2005: 35).
The vector that begins with the ethereal innocence of the pylon-parabola breaks
(explodes) out of the historical museum as a topos of enfolded force that has been
transformed through sacrifice into the violence and redemption of war and destruction.8 The motto “never forget” is no less that of “always remember,” and nowadays
the force of national remembering drives primarily eastward, striving to incorporate
whatever it penetrates.
Astride the Avenue of the Righteous, the new historical museum becomes an integral part of the protective bulwarks around the other buildings and sites of the
memorial complex. As noted previously, the old museum, huddled amid and deep
within the configuration of Holocaust remembrance buildings, was enfolded by the
protective bulwarks around it. The new museum comes forth, directly confronting
the visitor, in his or her face, as it were. Its forming is a wall, severe in its absolutism
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of controlling passage. The building’s exterior walls repel the climbing gaze, except
through the permitted apertures. The architect of the new museum writes: “I was
determined to cast the entire museum monolithically, jointless, unadorned—without
any exterior waterproofing or cladding . . . I wanted just the basic structure” (Safdie
2006: 98). Elsewhere he says, “I wanted something so primeval and archeological that
you don’t think about the architecture” (Dean 2005: 113). Yet the new museum is no
less a fold. All buildings of course are folded materials and spaces that are enclosed
and closed to varying degrees. Used banally in relation to material constructions, this
could reduce Deleuzian folding to a non sequitur. Nonetheless, the Deleuzian fold is
always a dynamic, constituted through other dynamics—the ways in which folding
is done, the interactivity of exteriors and interiors, how folds are lived, the degrees
of self-organizing within the fold, the contents that are shaped and shape. All these
enable distinguishing among many varieties of folds and folds within folds (Deleuze
1999: 97). Moreover, from this perspective even folds in solids may become more
textured rather than given as is, once and for all.
This site is a museum engulfed by a wall, a museum within a wall, a museum embedded in a wall, a museum-wall, a front-line enfolding of horrific history folded into
itself, unlike the old museum, where the horrific was enfolded away anonymously,
its vulnerability protected amid a cluster of memorial buildings. The new museum
enfolds horrific memory on its very front line, thrusting it in the face of mundane
life. This folding itself is powerful, since the fold in its forming regenerates the historical narrative of that which it enfolds. Thus, the standard Holocaust narrative of
Israel is now on the front line (facing eastward toward the most immediate enemy) as
it buttresses Holocaust memorialism. Simultaneously interiorizing/introverting and
exteriorizing/extroverting, the museum-wall practices itself into existence from its
outside and its inside—the self-fortifying wall of memory that unfolds history and
memory within itself, even as it zealously guards yet opens the way to the parceling
out of this history and memory through other buildings and sites in the memorial
complex. No less, the museum-wall is dedicated to consumption—the consuming of
history and memory.
The museum-wall is a fold in time-space of the topological variety that scientists
refer to as “rubber sheet geometry” (Asad 1999: 41)—a fold through which any point
in time-space may touch any other. The folding of the pylon-parabola touches the
museum-wall—the embryonic openness of the parabola folding closes itself into the
unyielding history of Holocaust that today enfolds and interiorizes so much memory
work in Jewish Israel. In present-day Jewish Jerusalem, many journeys that meander
eastward will touch Holocaust time, will pass into Holocaust time, into the time of
the great sacrifice, becoming locked into the self-fortification of memory that the
Holocaust has become, thereby emerging transformed, more self-protective, more
defensive, more aggressive, more warlike. Today, this front line moves eastward. In
the culture of the Jewish nation-state, in which memory and history are always on
the way and always in the way, there is little choice but to go through memory and
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folding and enfolding walls
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history and take them on the way, take them along, as our vector develops, involutes,
expands, armoring itself with walls that are no less spears as it gathers force. This vector acquires the pointed desire to spear consumption as it moves eastward.
The Mall-Wall—Vector Becomes Vortex
Jaffa Road, with the pylon-parabola at its western end, runs eastward until it meets
the Ottoman walls of the Old City and then runs alongside these in a southwesterly
direction, along the 1949 armistice lines. After the 1967 war, much thought and
argument went into planning how to relate architectonically to captured East Jerusalem and just what to build in this former no man’s land between the Israeli and the
Palestinian cities (Nitzan-Shiftan 2005).9 It was unthinkable for the Jewish-Israeli
politicians, the army, and the general Jewish public to leave this as a (memory) scar
running through the middle of the now joined city. Forty-three years later, the most
dominant presence in this interstitial zone is almost complete, ramming across the
former no man’s land to the Old City. This project (designed by the architect who
also did the new Holocaust history museum) stretches for about a quarter of a kilometer (likely longer) along the length of the slope of a hill, meeting Jaffa Road and
the Old City walls at the Jaffa Gate, the only entry point into the Old City along the
entirety of its southwesterly walls.
Perhaps the most striking feature of this project is that its entire length is uninterrupted, building abutting building, one after another (indeed reminiscent of the new
Holocaust history museum). No less striking, the entire length of this built presence
is bisected by a broad walkway with shops and restaurants on both sides,10 intended
for solidly upscale shoppers. Many stores are chain outlets, selling trendy brand-name
clothes and shoes that fill shopping malls. Others sell jewelry a cut above the average,
and one is a pipe and tobacco shop, a rarity in a country in which the imagery of the
pipe harks back to a time perceived as more thoughtful, more intellectual. This mall,
encased all the way to the Jaffa Gate, is almost entirely without perspectives to the
outside environment.
At its Jewish city western end, this project is bulkier, with apartment buildings and
a hotel reaching eight stories on both sides of the walkway. Farther east, the buildings
are lower but still utterly obscure any view from the walkway of the nearby Old City
walls (see Fig. 11.4), unless one climbs out of the walkway on its northerly side onto
an open promenade that runs alongside the walls.11 Yet there is only one set of stairs
on that side along the walkway’s entire length. Along the other, southerly side of the
walkway, there are nine flights of stairs that go downslope to the street below (called
Valley [HaEmek] Road), where the entrances to the parking garages are located. At
this lower level, these entrances run almost the full length of the project. Walking the
mall toward the Jaffa Gate, the horizon of ancient city walls is constricted to a single
image, that of the Tower of David next to the Jaffa Gate, since the nineteenth century
a popular icon of Jerusalem for Jews. The rest of the vista is completely effaced. So,
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280 | moebius anthropology
Figure 11.4. The mall-wall from the Old City wall, looking toward West Jerusalem. Photograph by the author.
too, as one approaches the end of this shopping street, the elegant presence of the
Jaffa Gate itself is blocked from view until one climbs the steep thirty or so steps to
surface above the mall’s encasing.
From the western end of the project, looking down Valley Road toward the Old
City walls, the entrance to this street itself looks like a huge gateway. To one’s left
there are the buildings of the mall, and to one’s right is a bulky, relatively new hotel, David’s Citadel. With massive pillars supporting its entranceway (an example of
what I call “Third Temple” architecture), it is a near parody of the modest symmetric
proportions of the Ottoman period Jaffa Gate all the way at the far Old City end.
When walking on Valley Road along the base of the mall-wall toward the Jaffa Gate,
to one’s left the Old City’s southwesterly walls are completely obscured from view by
the massive wall of continuous construction, with the linearity and instrumentality
of its buying deeply embedded within.12
What does the mall-wall signify in terms of this discussion? This Jewish wall, a
massive presence, blocks from view a section of the uninterrupted perspective of the
Old City walls, which are integral to the grand presence of this ancient city and its
history. Indeed, the mall-wall substitutes itself, a modern Jewish wall, one devoted
to consumption, for a portion of the Old City Ottoman wall. Today, this is the only
length of the Old City walls whose vista is obscured. Moreover, this meeting of the
Jewish mall-wall and the largely Palestinian Old City is now the only location along
the walls where the Jewish city threatens to penetrate the latter. Thus, I see the mallwall driving toward the Old City, a bulwark of Jewish West Jerusalem that is no less
a spear, or, more aptly, a battering ram, aimed at the Arab Jaffa Gate.
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folding and enfolding walls
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The mall-wall as a line of mass, as a projectile of the might of the Jewish state, propels itself at the ancient, deeply textured Old City walls and beyond.13 No less, this
projectile is the accelerating mass of consumer consumption and Israeli economic
domination; indeed, the entirety of this line of force is justified in terms of, and
is dedicated to, consumption. The mall-wall enfolds the capacity to consume—the
long line of stores on either side, their windows full of separate items, the passers-by
caught in the seductive gaze of objects-for-sale, one by one, all available to the desires
of the buyer. The eye passes from item to item, from shop window to shop window,
each of which has the potential to offer shoppers whatever they wish in order to stimulate their fantasies. These exchanges are embedded within the wall-mall, enclosed
into itself without external perspectives—a closed single-purpose vessel with tunnel
vision en route to the Old City. Within itself the mall-wall turns the vector into
a vortical funnel, a vortex generated by and for desires of consumption, funnelled
through the recursive self-enclosure. Within this, the desire to acquire, to own, to
consume, is reified, accentuated, expanded, whirling through itself, augmenting itself
as it is aimed at the Old City, which the state acquires, owns, and desires to consume
over and over, altering its particular goals and strategies from time to time, yet never
altering its need to make it its own. In this vector, the violence of sacrifice is whirled
into another variety of absolutist violence—that of the commodity fetishism of ownership, certainly a prominent form of nationalist consumption.
The Impenetrable Block—the End Folding Back, into the Beginning
Beyond the Old City, on the eastern edges of Jerusalem, is the yet unfinished security
barrier that Israel calls the separation fence, but which is intended to practice absolute
division, domination, and sovereignty (Ben-Eliezer and Feinstein 2008). Planned
during the Second Intifada, the entire length of the separation barrier, if completed,
will span some 800 kilometers. Constituted in the main by networks of fences and
trenches, with watchtowers, roadblocks, and gates distributed along its length, the
barrier is legitimized in the name of “security needs” (see Sorkin 2005; Weizman
2007: 161–82).14 In the Jerusalem area, the barrier (see Fig. 11.5) snakes up and
down its ridges for some 170 kilometers, cutting off much of East Jerusalem from
its Palestinian hinterlands. In neighborhoods of densely built housing, the fences
become a wall of concrete slabs some 8 meters in height, splitting streets, chopping
apart houses and social relations, separating farmers from their agricultural lands. The
path of the fence/wall is quite arbitrary, based on army evaluations of security, but no
less routed by the military, bureaucratic, and political establishments to include much
additional land for settlements that will then be on the Israeli side of the barrier.15
Tens of thousands of Palestinians, official residents of “united” Jerusalem, now
find themselves on the other side of the barrier, unable to enter the city by any direct route, their neighborhoods receiving no municipal services (health, education,
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282 | moebius anthropology
Figure 11.5. The security wall chopping through Palestinian Abu Dis. Photograph by the
author.
welfare, garbage collection, ambulance service, repairs to the water and electricity
systems, etc.). The effect of the security barrier will be to destroy Palestinian metropolitan Jerusalem “and control it without annexing it” (Klein 2005: 71). In the
words of Ehud Barak, a former Israeli prime minister and the current minister of
defense, “They are over there, and we are over here.” Stark concrete of brute force,
slicing and slamming Zionist statist imperatives through Palestine, the wall is utterly
without adornment, without subtlety, containing nothing but its own impetus to do
the violence of absolute difference. This is a Jewish wall reserved for Palestinians; for
that matter, it is hardly intended for civilian Jewish eyes. At a distance from the Jewish city, the wall even appears abstract and pastoral as it meanders and curves up and
down ridges. Up close, it is a row of huge blunt teeth sunk into the earth, their bite
savage and unyielding. Horizons of living are blocked, perspective severely foreshortened. One cannot look over, under, or around. For many Israeli Jews, the civilized
world ends here. Were we speaking of a cartography of Israeli Jewish consciousness,
the eastern side of the security wall might well be inscribed by the Israeli state with
the warning “terra incognita” or “here there be monsters.”
The security barrier may seem the termination of the vector I have laid out, but
it is not. As it blocks movement, the barrier enfolds movement that may have been.
By blocking movement, the barrier becomes different from the very block that it is.
Put differently, in blocking movement the barrier does not repeat itself as just that
which it was: it becomes different in itself even as it is identical to itself. Deleuze
(1994: 57) argues provocatively, “It is always differences which resemble one another,
which are analogous, opposed or identical: difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing. Each difference passes through all the others; it must
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folding and enfolding walls
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‘will’ itself or find itself through all the others.” As the barrier blocks movement, it
is itself movement, a variation of itself. Sameness is a function of difference; without
difference there is no sameness. Thus, sameness emerges through the circulation of
difference—this is its repetition, its repetition through itself, its “willing” of itself that
enables it to be that which it is and therefore other than it is. To wit, Deleuze (ibid.)
quotes the American poet Benjamin Paul Blood: “[T]he same returns not, save to
bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of
a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant
true—ever not quite.”16
Thus, the separation barrier enfolds whatever, whomever it blocks as it blocks.
And as it blocks, the barrier curves back, enfolding, in the direction of the pylonparabola from where we began and which I called the beginning of this vector. Reaching its apparent limits, its outside, the vector bends back, the outside becoming inside, the vector enfolding itself, its interaction with itself augmented, becoming more
complex, its power emerging further, effecting itself. The vector is a great folding, an
ongoing folding and re-folding, forming a spheroid of forces and sites that, enfolded,
interact. At this juncture, I can say that the sites themselves are not crucial in these
dynamics; it is the dynamics of their vectorization that are crucial, their Zeitgeist
diffusing through the spaces they organize as they do. In more topological terms,
“the most distant point becomes interior, by being converted into the nearest: life
within the folds” (Deleuze 1999: 101). It is in this sense that the separation barrier is
the transmogrification of the pylon-parabola. The bridge is inviting, poetic, soaring,
graceful, opening into the Jewish city, encouraging horizons, a site of cosmogenesis,
the beginning of an enfolding, while the barrier is forbidding, massive in its squatting, brutal in its starkness, an altar of sacrificial violence blocking the horizon from
earth to sky, a site of cosmic closure, a folding back through itself to constrain, own,
and sacrifice the Palestinian city in its containing.
Aesthetics, Fold, Vector
To appreciate the role of an aesthetics of power and control in urban form, it is insufficient to consider particular or singular forms or even their comparisons based primarily on symbolic and architectural criteria. The most powerful aesthetics are those
that are lived mundanely. Without the aesthetic experiencing of power as practice,
there is no feel that this is how doing is doing, how doing is done, how done continues as doing. But I also can invert this to say that this is how surrounds naturalize us
into the practices of power. Aesthetics—the synesthetic, sensuous feel of things fitting
together (and not fitting together)—enable us to proceed formatively, coherently,
perspectively, and prospectively in the nowness of here. The aesthetics of practice are
the persuasive grounds of practice, persuading that practice is in the process of being
done as the kind of practice it is (and is becoming). In this sense, aesthetics may be
more of a gestalt, a “coherent entity” (Polanyi 1966), or an entity whose coherence
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284 | moebius anthropology
is continuously coming into being, emerging, fitting itself together self-persuasively,
even as that which it fits together erodes, ruptures, breaks. This is no less the aesthetics of the vector I have discussed. An aesthetics of power is distributed, circulated,
transformed, and practiced throughout the vector rather than through connections
between sites. In my terms, the aesthetics of control are those of an aesthetics continually practiced and augmented as a common-sense given.
More than five decades after the capture of Palestinian Jerusalem and the other
Occupied Territories, despite two intifadas and numerous acts of resistance and protest, the conquest is fully naturalized in the most quotidian way for Israeli Jews. This
is practiced into existence on a daily basis in ways far too numerous to enter into
here—and likewise for the vector I have discussed. Beginning with the harmonic
pylon-parabola as the entry to the historic and holy capital, gathering sacrificial empowerment through the museum-wall, its velocity becoming more directional, the
vector accelerates through the mall-wall, gathering the power to own and fetishize,
pinning Palestinians-as-objects against the security barrier with Holocaust history,
squeezing, flattening, and sacrificing them with the power to consume against its
unyielding, brute form. This form folds back toward the pylon-parabola, creating a
multi-dimensional spheroid of forces to contain and imprison Palestinians’ hopes and
aspirations. Integral to this practice of power are the aesthetics that I call bureaucratic.
I argued at the outset that aesthetics enable the fitting together of people, things,
places, worlds through practice. Aesthetics are crucial to all practice in mundane
living. Historically, bureaucratic aesthetics are tied closely to the emergence of the
modern state. This state-form (after Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 385), tree-like, is
deeply rooted, centered stably around an axis mundi that opens in all directions and
planes, vertical, tall, hierarchical, protective under the cover of its shading. Branching
and reproducing clearly, exactly, this logic of forming expands by capture, by taking
space, by reproducing its form in additional spaces, by making over these spaces into
places. The state-form extends itself lineally, a design for quantitative growth of space
and population (Patton 2000), giving especial regard to shaping and controlling its
own interiority. Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 397) write: “The law of the State is . . .
that of interior and exterior. The State is sovereignty. But sovereignty only reigns over
what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally.” The aesthetics of doing
this are in large measure the bureaucratic.
The bureaucratic aesthetics of what the state-form does are related to closing up
space, dividing it into determinate intervals, establishing clear-cut breaks and absolutist boundaries. An integral component of this is monothetic classification (Bowker
and Star 1999). This system demands that every classified item be put into a category
with exact boundaries and explicit distinctions that set it apart from all other categories on the same level of classification, without fuzziness, overlap, confusion. This
is the kind of classification that Foucault (1973) traced historically in Europe. This
is how Western bureaucracy has desired to be practiced. This feels right aesthetically
in the practice of bureaucracy, in its common-sensical self-persuasions. Everything is
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folding and enfolding walls
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in its proper place, with concomitant consequences in the actualization of power. In
practicing the imperatives of the state-form, bureaucratic aesthetics shape and control
the social and spatial surfaces of expanding space by capturing new territory for the
deployment of power. The aesthetics of bureaucratic classification enable the creation
of space that simultaneously is captured, contained, and accounted for. Moreover,
new classifications create their own raison d’être for expansion and self-totalization.
Bureaucratic aesthetics enable the bureaucratic state to expand through a kind of
cellular division of difference yet sameness.
In the modern state, the bureaucratic aesthetics of capture, containment, and taxonomic division are given the formidable impetus and coercion of law. Analyzing the
mutual exclusiveness in law of categories such as lawful/unlawful and legal/illegal,
King (1993: 223) argues that, through such social codes, wherever absolute categorical distinctions are made, they will be regarded as part of the legal system—and I
emphasize that they will be felt aesthetically as part of the legal system. In my terms,
phenomenal forms created through or enabled by an aesthetic of monothetic classification will have embedded in them something of the feel and force of legal mandate
that stems from inclusion and exclusion. Through bureaucratic aesthetics, truth is a
singular, not a multiple.17
Bureaucratic aesthetics are those of the making of walls, the walls of capture and
containment, of lawfulness, the walls of an absolutist classification that strives to banish overlap, fuzziness, fluctuation, uncertainty—the walls discussed in this work. The
wall that folds and enfolds (unlike so many other potentialities of folding) resonates
with the lawful feel of bureaucratic aesthetics. The wall that folds and enfolds encloses
by constraining access, perspective, exit, by striving to totalize everything it contains
to make all of this homogeneous—in this way, whatever is within is self-fortifying and
protected within itself. This is the vector that I have discussed, itself one of bureaucratic
aesthetics. A vector connecting walls otherwise distant in topographical space from
one another, in part through connectivities that resonate with bureaucratic aesthetics.
A vector within which these folding and enfolding walls give through themselves a
push, a phusis (Castoriades 1997: 331), toward the completion of the self-fortification
of the city that they (and numerous other vectors) have helped set in motion.
Notes
First published in 2010 as “Folding and Enfolding Walls: Statist Imperatives and Bureaucratic Aesthetics in Divided Jerusalem,” Social Analysis 54: 60–79. Reprinted with permission.
1. A classic modern exposition that reflects this perspective on the meaning of buildings is that of
Goodman (1985).
2. Deleuze has influenced theorists of architecture in developing computer models of what they
call “folding architecture,” characterized by “a more fluid logic of connectivity” that integrates
“unrelated elements within a new continuous mixture” (Greg Lynn, cited in Harris 2005: 37).
3. The term “haptic,” according to Alois Riegl, refers to a kind of vision distinct from the optical,
one in which the eye behaves as does the sense of touch (Deleuze 2003: 189). The haptic gaze
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286 | moebius anthropology
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
is tactile, reaching out, touching, even shaping the textures of another surface and penetrating
the contours of its depth (Handelman 2006: 66). See also Gandelman (1991: 5).
This is what we are told. In fact, the bridge stands on its own; the pylon and cables are decoration. Since the bridge is not weight-bearing, this vector begins with an illusion. My thanks to
Allen Weiss for this observation.
This is in relation to Deleuze’s arguments regarding singularity coming-into-being from virtuality; virtuality creating, but the creation not quite yet created.
In Deleuzian terms, this point of cosmogenesis, a singularity, can also be understood as a point
of catastrophe, with the consequences of the oscillation of its waves yet to be known fully.
In addition to high school students sent in droves to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau and other extermination camps (see Feldman 2008), during the past few years the Israeli Army has developed
its “Witnesses in Uniform” program, which sends thousands of officers and soldiers annually to
visit death camps.
In The Feast of the Sorcerer, Kapferer (1997) explicates this logic of sacrifice.
According to Meron Benvenisti, deputy mayor of Jerusalem at that time, “these plans were de
facto a political tool, equal to government policy, in the light of the scarcity of symbolic land”
(Nitzan-Shiftan 2005: 231).
This walkway, Alrov Mamilla Avenue, is named after the company developing the project, Alrov
Properties and Lodgings, which is owned by the Israeli billionaire Alfred Akirov.
A recent advertisement aimed at foreign tourists describes the “shopping avenue” as overlooking
the Old City—a “stretch of beautiful architecture, which connects the old and new city” (International Herald Tribune, 20 November 2008; emphasis added).
There is one angled turn in the mall walkway, about halfway along. It is here that the only steps
leading up to the promenade alongside the Old City walls are located.
If we enter the Old City through the Jaffa Gate and continue straight on, downslope through
markets and neighborhoods, we reach the ancient Israelite wall, the Western Wall, the last remnant of the outer walls of the Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE. This is part of the
wall that surrounds the Haram al-Sharif mosque complex, enclosing the Dome of the Rock and
the al-Aqsa Mosque. After the 1967 war, the state religion officially turned the Western Wall,
long a traditional place of Jewish worship, into the holiest place in Judaism, but also into the
ur-wall, iconic of Israeli control of all of Jerusalem from its Judaic religious center.
The phrase “security needs” is stock-in-trade discourse for the military and security establishments and often should be understood as justification for undisguised statist and military interests. Apart from the Occupied Territories, Israel’s military, defense, and security establishments
have been estimated to control over half of the territory of the state (Oren 2008).
The original route of the barrier would have confiscated more than 20 percent of the occupied
West Bank, but court-ordered alterations have reduced this to about 10 percent (Ben-Eliezer
and Feinstein 2008: 178–79).
In this vein, Deleuze (1994: 57) argues: “The world is neither finite nor infinite as representation would have it: it is completed and unlimited. Eternal return is the unlimited of the finished
itself . . . . Repetition is the formless being of all differences, the formless power of the ground
which carries every object to that extreme ‘form’ in which its representation comes undone.”
The above is discussed in Handelman (2004: 19–42) and elsewhere.
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Lambert, 36–60. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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of Philosophy 11: 83–100.
Kapferer, Bruce. 1997. The Feast of the Sorcerer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Katz, Jack. 1999. How Emotions Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
King, Michael. 1993. “The ‘Truth’ about Autopoiesis.” Journal of Law and Society 20: 218–36.
Klein, Menachem. 2005. “Old and New Walls in Jerusalem.” Political Geography 24: 53–76.
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The Architecture of Memory, ed. Joan Ockman, 19–26. Baden: Lars Muller Verlag.
———, ed. 2006b. Yad Vashem: Moshe Safdie—The Architecture of Memory. Baden: Lars Muller
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Patton, Paul. 2000. Deleuze and the Political. London: Routledge.
Polanyi, Michael. 1962. Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. New York: Harper
Torchbooks.
———. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Epilogue
Forming Form,
Folding Time
(Toward Dynamics
through an
Anthropology
of Form)
Listen O Lord of the Meeting Rivers
Things standing shall fall
But the moving ever shall stay.
—Basavanna, twelfth-century CE Indian philosopher and poet
Part I: Forming Form
Thinking through my own anthropology of the past half-century I recognize an intermittent though abiding curiosity in the workings of phenomenal forms, formings
of the social, some of which are more recognizable and identifiable by the people
who shape and inhabit them for varying periods (for example, numerous “rituals”
that I have discussed in detail elsewhere) while others, though less so, are discernible
through analysis. In either instance and in their intermingling, phenomenal forms,
social forms, are, paraphrasing Deleuze (1997: 91), those that show themselves in
and through themselves. They show themselves in and through themselves as more or
less distinct entities through their practice and through perceptions of their practice,
though again these often cannot be distinguished and need not be. Clarity and fuzziness in worlds of practice coexist and often enable the existence of one another.
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290 | moebius anthropology
Nonetheless this is hardly sufficient to even begin theorizing about phenomenal
forms. In the ways in which the thinking of anthropology is constituted, in order
to theorize—social form, cultural form—the form in question is given a name that
enters it into some regime of cultural contextualization, social relationships, rulegiving of some sort, ontological standing of some kind, and the like. Yet this kind of
thinking says little about the form itself, the logics of form qua form, and issues of
the order of, how does a form hold together as a form? Mainly from within itself, or
mainly from outside itself? Is there something in, say, a particular form that in itself
enables that form to continue for a while as it does, without turning for explanation
in the first instance to some sort of stabilizing grounding that is external to this
form—in my day this was grounding in culture, in tradition, values, norms, and now
to multiple ontologies and to ethics? Such questions are hardly ever asked.
Yet it is questions like these that made me curious about whether something of a
response might be found in the interiors of forms: in the ways these are put together,
and in how these effect what it is that forms potentially can do within themselves and
in relation to their external worlds—in other words, to search within their “own-ness.”
In thinking about such questions I found little aid in various anthropologies (nor in
other of the social sciences). Anthropologists do not conceptualize social phenomena
through such ideas as “form” and “forming.” They still tend to move in the general
directions of individual agency, social relationships, power, and collective activities
and representations. The very idea that social forms may have degrees of autonomy
from their social surrounds, and that this autonomy is related to how they come to
be put together within themselves, is near to anathema within anthropologies where
continuous connectedness and interdependencies are the rule, while their antinomies
are perceived as destructive. This is even more so in the era of globalization, glocalization, and cosmopolitanism, producing anthropologies that emphasize expansiveness
and the inter-relational rather than social interiority and the intra-relational.
Despite alterations of perspective in anthropology like the ontological turn that
produces multiple ontologies, like actor-network theory (ANT), and others that produce multiple epistemologies, the foci and units used to discuss the social and the
cultural remain more continuous than not with prior approaches. Claims to radical
difference so often turn out to be academic exercises in hair-splitting that, following
Freud and Lacan, can be called the narcissism of the minor difference. Put directly,
intellectually I found myself quite alone in my attempts to discuss and theorize form,
and have remained so.
From time to time I return to this problem that I am calling the interior organization of social or phenomenal forms. My intention in this Epilogue is to discuss
how this recursiveness in my thinking developed, from the 1970s into the 2000s,
beginning with my first monograph, Work and Play Among the Aged (1977), then
turning to Models and Mirrors (1st ed. 1990, 2nd ed. 1998), followed by the introduction to Ritual in Its Own Right (Handelman and Lindquist 2005). I will give the
most space to Work and Play for two reasons: it is the least known of my thoughts on
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epilogue
| 291
form, and much of what I wrote in the other two works mentioned here was already
embryonic in Work and Play. In looking through these materials, one major lacuna
became evident: in my endeavors to discuss the interiority of social forms there is
hardly any mention of time. For all of my fascination with movement within the
forming of form I did not see the relevance of time as such. Previewing my current
thinking on time, I will argue that time may be a dynamic, perhaps a dynamic in its
own right. All forms, animate and inanimate, are time-full and, as time-full, they are
full of movement, given that their interiors always are in motion within themselves
even as their exteriors are no less moving with time; and, given that there often
are differences of temporal movement between these time-full interior and exterior
movements. Whatever else they are, these time-full movements are a given, even as
this given is a multiplicity that varies greatly among forms. In other words, time
should always be on the agenda of the study of the social-cultural and not necessarily
shoved into the category of dimensionality that greatly restricts the multiplicity of the
fullness of time’s motion.
Whether time-as-incessant-movement qualifies time as dynamic is indeed an issue, and one not easily answered if at all. Time perhaps might be understood as an
“enabler” of the movement of time-full forms, interiorly and exteriorly. In the second
part of this Epilogue I will pursue this line of thinking, at least to raise the issue of
time and the forming of form into view. To wit: if the movement of time is continuous (yet changing) then is time critical to the enabling of form? If all “solidities”
in conceptions of social ordering (like “structure,” “institution,” “community,” and
the like) are time-full then is not their appearance of solidity due to the very movement of their interior times at different speeds and intensities, rather than to other
qualities that position the appearance of solidness as chronological, yet outside of
time-as-dynamic?
Before turning into my own work let me point to one kind of relatedness between
form and time. All social, phenomenal forms have interiority. Have depth to differing degrees. Form without depth denies the very sociality of the social. Flatness of
form speaks to the superficiality of the social. Degrees of depth, degrees of interiority,
are critical to how forms come to be formed within themselves, and to how these
formings relate to their external environments. Yet the opening and shaping of depth
within the interiority of form should not be taken for granted. The phenomenologist,
Merleau-Ponty, argued that Descartes understood space as an open, flat presence
of measurable external relations, as a third dimension without depth. By contrast,
Merleau-Ponty characterized depth as “both natal space and matrix of every other existing space,” indeed, as the “first” dimension that is the very source of the Cartesian
dimensions, yet that is “self-containing” (Rosen 2015: 263, my emphasis, to which
I will return). Thus for Merleau-Ponty (1962: 298) depth became the originating
and most “existential” of all dimensions (see Johnson 1993: 86). Existence emerges
from the natality of depth. This is “where relationships between objects [and, I add,
between persons] as differential processes are formed.” (Somers-Hall 2009: 214).
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292 | moebius anthropology
Deleuze (in Cinema Two: The Time-Image) adds a significant moment of bridging
to this opening of voluminosity, suggesting that Merleau-Ponty’s idea of depth is not
a spatial notion at all but is rather a temporal one—depth is a notion of duration
that is not reducible to dimensions of space (Wambacq 2011: 327; see also Mazis
2010: 127–28). Time is depth so long as one does not reduce temporality to the
shallow flatness of its linear, metric variant. Time and depth are inseparable. What
could make more sense than this? If time were not depth-full then time would exist
only as a metric of (chronological) passage; indeed time in its existential fullness
would not exist (pace Julian Barbour [cf. Barbour 2009: 85–90]). In other words,
existence is tightly braided into depth, time, and duration, and this is no less so
for the existence of social forms in their own right. The existence of a social form is
grounded intimately within its own depth(s) and duration, and duration-as-time is
of course always moving, never fixed. Forms, time-full, are indeed time-forms: their
own durations differ from one another, and these durations need not necessarily be
linear. And depth, to whichever degree, is always created by the forming of form that
itself becomes time~space folded into itself to varying degrees. As noted above, I will
return to temporality and form in the second part of this Epilogue. For the moment
it is sufficient to state this relationship so that the reader is aware of the tenor of that
which is to come.
Evolving Thoughts on Emergence and the Forming of Form
Work and Play Among the Aged grew from intensive observations of interaction during
a lengthy period in a number of workshops that employed the aged. As prosaic as
this research sounds, it gave me insight into how human inter-action only sometimes
could be reduced to individuals interacting through individual agency. Face-to-face
interaction took the form of a sequence between beginning and ending. A simple
point yet one with a powerful intimation: to wit, that I could treat an “interaction
strip” (as Goffman sometimes called such sequences) as a unitary event in itself, however tiny this forming might be. Following Goffman (1961) I called such an occasion
an “encounter.” Encounters came and went. Given their speed and their short duration they frequently were momentary compared to the ongoing lengthy durations
of the workshops within which they occurred. Nonetheless I called the encounter
an ephemeral yet natural form (rather than an analytical kind) of social organization
since, regardless of the substance of an encounter, all encounters took a sequential
form between discontinuity (onset) and discontinuity (closure) (see also Goffman
1983: 6).
Furthermore, the form that an encounter developed was emergent, in that how an
encounter developed could hardly be predicted from its onset—there was no straightforward linear, causal relationship in the interaction sequence. I recognized that the
encounter could be studied “in terms of its own emergent sequential form” (Handelman 1977: 95)—the subtitle of the book is Interaction, Replication and Emergence in
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a Jerusalem Setting. In doing so I found that “the sequential unfolding of a particular
encounter is very much a function of the organizational form which that encounter [itself ] develops” (Handelman 1977: 95; see also Handelman 1973).1 In other
words, however an encounter developed, its properties, and so, too, its forming, were
emergent. Moreover, these emerging properties were continually becoming part of
the encounter, affecting the forming of its emergence in ongoing ways. As I wrote
many years later, “Encounters are formed through the interaction of their creators,
but they also shape this interaction as it is occurring. Therefore encounters are not
reducible to the contributions—the particular life conditions, decisions, strategies,
moves, emotions—of the participants. The forming of interaction cannot be reduced
to versions of methodological individualism . . . interaction [that is] understood as
the addition of discrete, individual acts, each with its own individual intention—
without destroying the idea of the encounter,” as a naturally existing, phenomenal,
social form (Handelman 2006b).2
More than forty years ago I had not heard of complexity theory, yet influenced
by Gregory Bateson’s thinking at the Josiah Macy Jr. conferences, and by his brilliant
Epilogue to the second edition of his monograph, Naven (1958), I called this interactional recursivity “feedback” (yet, strangely, not fully recognizing the implications
of the curving movement of feedback). The quietening of methodological individualism in processes of emergence has its parallel in the subduing of the transcendent
subjectivism of much of phenomenology, as Holland (2012: 21) puts this. In my
terms, the “active self ” as the ground, touchstone, and impetus for the shaping of the
phenomenal becomes sucked or folded within the curving shaping of form to which
self and selves contribute but that comes to form them, momentarily, lengthily. In
extreme instances (for which many ritual forms qualify) the very forming of selves
may become part of the form itself (see, for example, Harrison 1993).3
There was a powerful autopoietic moment here that I missed, and I was unable to
name what it was that I was after in studying the social life of phenomenal forms. Not
a systemics of the social (of which some two decades later Niklas Luhmann produced
the most sophisticated version). Neither was I taken by systems theory as such, but
rather by something that in cosmoses of multiplicity (to use Deleuze’s fertile term)
potentially could move in the direction of systemics yet so, too, toward many other
alternatives. That something, in a Deleuzian vein, was the generation of variation.
Not the occasional generation of variation, but rather its ongoing generation in social
life. That is, the continuous generation of immanent potentiation that generated
variation. I felt early on that anthropologists did not give enough attention to the
epistemologies of how variation and change were generated (perhaps continuously)
from within a social setup, given that the primary anthropological focus was on impetuses for change coming from some sort of contact with the external.4
Today the idea of emergence is a buzzword of complexity theory and the nonlinear (cf. Deacon 2006).5 This was hardly so when I used the term in my own way
decades ago. As Holland (2012: 18) notes, emergence refers to, “the spontaneous
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294 | moebius anthropology
self-ordering of physical as well as social systems. Order emerges from chaos, without
that order being imposed from above or pre-determined from before.” The neatest
description of emergence that I know of comes from the physicist, Murray GellMann (Horgan 1998: 214), a Nobel laureate. Gell-Mann said that emergence occurs
when, “We don’t need something else in order to get something else.” In the practice
of the encounter when “something” else emerges into (phenomenal) existence the
encounter re-organizes, in other words re-adapts (or doesn’t) to enable itself to continue.6 This is not order out of chaos but rather the ongoing generation of usually
minor variation that has the potential to become difference. Generally speaking, interaction emerged from within itself and brought self-variations to the fore. This, in
a simple sense, is self-organization.7
Variation often emerged during the interaction within an encounter. Exact repetition in the very practice of the everyday was rare, even though this might be summarized as sameness by participants. As Michael Fisch (2013: 336) puts this in his
brilliant study of how the mechanics of the Tokyo underground were turned into a
self-organizing, technological system (one perceived by the Japanese computer engineers to have organic properties of internal self-adaptation to changing conditions),
“irregularity is regular.” And the occurrence of “irregularity” is of course unpredictable. Moreover, the enabling of the self-organization of emergent properties seems to
work most reliably and comprehensively when the “unit” producing these properties
has relative autonomy (that can be termed “distributed autonomy” [Fisch 2013]). My
guess is, and I will return to this when discussing “time,” that this relative autonomy
also involved a multiplicity of time; that is, a multiplicity of local incidents on the
underground that had their own temporal existences yet that potentially effected
one another. With regard to the encounters that I observed in Work and Play, some
had this resiliency, while others did not; yet in so many of them the irregular, that is,
variation, was quite common. Most likely one should understand the generation of
variation as elemental to human social life (as it is to biological life more generally)
and, so, to consider regularity in human existence as exceptional and as an ongoing
struggle to attain some sort of steadiness (for an earlier statement relating social life
to a premise of indeterminacy see Moore 1975: 221, 233).
Though interaction during encounters generated variation, this was not yet the
emergence of difference. Emergence was immanent, though the great bulk of variation was ignored by workshop members and only some variants, a few, were disentangled, elaborated and made into the reality of difference. Gregory Bateson’s maxim
that a difference to be a difference has to make a difference was most relevant. In
discussing encounters I realized that they varied in their capacities to sustain focused
interaction, and that these capacities were no less emergent properties of encounters
even as these themselves were emerging. This pointed toward ways of thinking that
were within me though not yet with me, not for some years. To wit: that emergent
forms of social existence differed in their capacity to sustain certain kinds of life and
living within their forming; that this was related to the kinds of complexity that
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emergent forms developed within themselves; and that the more complex formings
were greater than the sum of their parts and could not be reduced to these. In other
words, encounters that developed more complex interiors were more sustainable in
part because the interaction of participants was shaped by the emergent encounter.
One could say that the encounter as it formed began to enfold the participants within
itself, rather than their fully directing the encounter through individual choices and
decisions.8 Yet this too did not give me understanding of the ongoing formation of
variation.
One of the few anthropologists at the time who for me exemplified a concern with
questions of emergence and movement in social ordering was Victor Turner (another
was Bruce Kapferer [see especially Kapferer 1972]). Yet Turner also exemplified difficulties that I had even with an anthropology that conceptualized movement yet that
did not let go of points of rest and stability that often were (and are) called “structure” and the like. Doing a social structural kind of analysis amounts to a start . . .
stop . . . start . . . stop anthropology. Stop: and set up the hard contrasts. Start: and
activate the hard contrasts in relation to one another, calling processual that which
moves softly amongst them. Stop: . . . and so forth. This kind of setup implies that
the continual movement of the social within itself has to be frozen, has to be stilled
in certain of its aspects so that the movement of other aspects can be attended to, an
“all other things being equal” rendition of social ordering (that never exists in social
life; see also Handelman 2007a). Simply put, the entirety is too complex and has to
be simplified so that particular aspects can be isolated for analysis. Call this “methodological reductionism.”9 This entails a theorizing that rationalizes points or levels
of rest as “structure,” even as other points become vectors of “process.” Turner, whom
I cherished personally and professionally, was not radical enough in conceptualizing
the very movement itself of emergence in dynamic terms, though at the time I did
not phrase my reservations in this way. I should point out that what I am calling
points of rest/structure are critical to our academic understandings of that which
we call, in these and other terms, continuity and change, in which continuity is the
expected and, even today, change is out of the ordinary if not necessarily problematic.
However the critical positioning likely is that the generation of variation is continuous while the problematic is discovering how variation turns into change.
The quantum physicist and feminist, Karen Barad (2010: 249, see also 2007), asks:
“How much of our understanding of the nature of change has been and continues
to be caught up in the notion of continuity?” such that there is a “presumed radical
disjuncture between continuity and discontinuity,” a division that parallels that of the
“stop-start” of movement between structure and process that I indicated above. This
kind of distinction over-reifies both continuity and discontinuity, another phrasing of
rapid change. From encounters, though so micro-scale, I began to understand a little
that it is indeed the potential for change through the ongoing emergence of variation
that is continuous, and that a good deal of this potential is generated within forms
that emerge rather than from external impetuses. This pointed me toward emergence
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296 | moebius anthropology
as continuous and to the within-ness of the emergence of form. This understanding
of emergence differed from its general usage in complexity theory and the sciences as
the appearance of an entirely new phenomenon that reorganizes any configuration
that it appears within. That usage of emergence is closer to a singularity, as this is used
in Chapter Three, this volume.
In 1977 Turner published a pathbreaking essay entitled, “Process, System, and
Symbol: A New Anthropological Synthesis.” There he argued that “culture has to be
seen as processual because it emerges in interaction and imposes meaning on the . . .
systems (also dynamic) with which it interacts” (Turner 1977: 63). Turner understood culture as processual because “it” entailed “an endless series of negotiations
among actors about the assignment of meaning . . . ,” and because these negotiations
never were completed (ibid.). He added that, “social interaction generates an emergent social reality distinct from and external to that of the individuals who produce
it” (ibid.). Turner’s position here was not distant from that which I have outlined
in earlier paragraphs. Yet he refused to part from “structure,” arguing that, “process
is intimately bound up with structure and that an adequate analysis of social life
necessitates a rigorous consideration of the relation between them” (Turner 1977:
65). When discussing time I will suggest that this sense of “structure” is in itself the
equivalent of the movement of slow time while “process” in itself is the equivalent of
the movement of time faster. To put this more directly: “structure” is a constellation
of slow-time movement, and “process” a constellation of fast-time movement, but all
move all the time, though at different speeds through variable intensities, while speed
and intensity of course also shift and change.10 This is consequential for how long (if
ever) we may have firm footing, as it were, through which to stand.
An emphasis on emergence in the forming of encounters raises the issue of
whether this movement tends toward the linear or the nonlinear. One can question
whether this issue is at all relevant to the organization of the social, belonging more
to mathematics and to the physical sciences from whence it was taken. I think it is
relevant. The historian, Alan Beyerchen (1992/93: 62) comments that: “Nonlinear
phenomena are . . . usually regarded as recalcitrant misfits in our catalogue of norms,
although they are actually more prevalent than phenomena that conform to the rules
of linearity. This can seriously distort perceptions of what is central and what is marginal . . . .” Linear progression applies most when the reality of social ordering is
ultimately (and only ultimately) stable (is there such a state of being?). The drive or
pull to linearity (though rarely its full actualization) is evident wherever bureaucratic
logic (see Chapter Four, this volume) is in use. Thus Michael King (1993) points to
the strong physis,11 the internal drive, in western (and other) legal systems to achieve
juridical finality that is rendered as definitive, categorical decisions of “guilt” or “innocence” (rather than one of guilt and innocence, as may be the case in a variety of
“nonwestern” judicial setups).12 Yet in most everyday realities the irregular is regular,
as the Japanese cybernetic engineers put this;13 even though in American (and Israeli)
social orderings (and elsewhere) Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) “etc. clause” bridges the
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| 297
bottomless pit of interpretations of reality, enabling tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1958)
to glide over many of the immanent, interpretive pitfalls of everyday life.
In the workshops, encounters that broke up quickly over some disagreement, over
the expression of emotions that were painful, or over a history of rawness between
the participants were closer to linearity in their emergent organization and progression. That is, these encounters lacked any self-correction as they proceeded. Ideas like
self-correction again come from systems theory though here I am not referring to
systems but rather to trajectories of emergence through which encounters embraced
the participants within their emergent forms. Without any sort of self-correction the
trajectory tended strongly toward the linear with a distinct lack of complexity as to
how the encounter moved forward and crashed. When there was feedback, or, more
accurately, degrees of curvature, complexity might have emerged and the encounter
ramified, tending toward the nonlinear in the growth of its potential to sustain itself
and to move in a multiplicity of trajectories.
In other terms, the contrast here between linear and nonlinear is that of the difference between a straight line (with minimal volume) and a curve (that is voluminous),
as I put this in the introduction to Ritual in Its Own Right. Curvature and volume are
critical to the interior growth of complexity and to its relative sustainability. Feedback
curves back into the very trajectory of emergence through which it comes forth even
as that trajectory moves forward.14 Within the voluminosity of curving, the forming
of form turns toward itself from within itself, opening time-space for activity that
had not existed before the encounter began. This becomes even more salient if we
recognize that as curving creates volume within itself this volume creates (or rather,
is) depth, and depth is time-full. Within this depth forming may curl within itself
opening to a form potentially developing its own time within itself—to wit, a local
time, and indeed a local time that may be out of sync with time outside this particular
folding (local time will be discussed in Part Two of this chapter).
Consider the following encounter in which the jazz vocalist, Nina Simone, meets
her guitarist-to-be, Al Schackman, as Simone (1992) describes this in her memoir,
I Put a Spell on You: “I called the title of the first song, ‘Little Girl Blue.’ What happened next was one of the most amazing moments in my entire life. Al was right there
with me from the first moment, as if we had been playing together all our lives. It
was more than that even; it was as if we were one instrument split in two. We played
Bach-type tunes for hours, and all the way through we hardly dared look at each other
for fear that the whole thing would come tumbling down and we wouldn’t be able to
pick it up again.” The two interact, and Simone says this was as if one instrument split
in two; though the emergent property of the encounter is that of two instruments
becoming one, splitting into two related through synecdoche, without the mediation
of symbol, indeed a relatedness that may be called unmediated immediateness.15
Playing improv the two are enfolded by their encounter as it is emerging; and the
encounter curves them into itself, opening volume, opening depth. And what happens to time? The two enter into what Alfred Schutz called “concert time” (Schutz
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298 | moebius anthropology
1962–66), within which time becomes different without going away. Or, more accurately, linear, metric time turns into the “local time” of the Simone-Schackman
encounter, perhaps through changing rhythms and intensities. Thus their local time
became nonlinear, unpredictable, without border or direction, enabling the two artists to continue their playful improv “for hours.” What comes first here, time or
sociality? Is this a problem of the chicken and the egg? Without the change in the
quality of time the encounter could not have emerged as it did. Without the budding
sociality between the musicians, time would not have changed. The two cannot be
separated, yet in my thinking the quality of time is at the very least an enabler here of
the sociality that emerged.
In recasting my doctoral thesis on the workshops into Work and Play the significance of the confluence of curving, volume, depth, and (local) time in the emergence
of form eluded me. Obviously, the encounter proceeded until it ceased to do so.
Yet how did the emergent form hold itself together, to the extent that it did, while
it existed? The usual understanding of this question was to phrase it in terms of a
negotiated or constructed social order, of give-and-take, of exchange or transaction,
interpreted by and managed by the participants mainly as individuals with agency,
and/or as members of networks, and/or as representations of a cultural category or social unit. One way or another the phenomenological intentionality of social persons
was at the forefront. By framing epistemological understanding of the question in
this way the idea that form qua form, unless referenced in terms of highly embedded
and repetitive forms such as “ritual” and the like, could have formative strength very
rarely came to the fore.16 In more or less accepting this I did not really catch the consequences of the potential in-turning of the emergence of form, and in not doing so
I missed the critical consequences of this in-turning. In Models and Mirrors I started
to address this problematic.
Models and Mirrors and Ritual in Its Own Right:
The Nuances of Folding
Models and Mirrors was conceived as a critique of the elementary idea in the social
sciences and in religious studies that a multitude of social and cultural forms, temporary though often recurring, are all placed theoretically under the same roof called
“ritual,” when in terms of the logics of their interior organization they are constituted
in radically different ways that effect and affect what these events do and how they do
this (Chapter One; see also Handelman 2006a). By grouping this multitude of forms
under the same conceptual rubric and assuming that every social-cultural order has
occasions that should be called “ritual,” and that all these occasions across all societies
have attributes in common that make these occasions “ritual,” scholars continue to
commit Whitehead’s fallacy of misplaced concreteness. They concretize the functions
these events are assumed to have for social orders, thereby a priori establishing the
relationships these events have to the ordering of the social-cultural.
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Instead, I suggested concretizing the phenomenal-ness—or, to use a more accurate neologism, the phenomenality—of the forms of such occasions, analyzing their
interior workings in order to understand their relationships to the social orders in
which they are found. In other words, I suggested reversing the usual anthropological
presumption that the interiors of all “ritual” occasions reflected and represented the
social-cultural orders within which they are found. Instead of this, I argued, begin
with the phenomenal form of the event and, within this, discover its relationship
to social-cultural ordering (and, so, too, the Peircean logic of abduction might be
awakened). I have been accused of an implicit functionalism in these formulations,
yet I find the premises regarding “ritual” mentioned above to be far more functionalist, and explicitly so, than those premises I used to study public events and other
phenomenal forms.
In Chapter Two of Models and Mirrors I argued how logics of organization differ
among “rituals,” with profound consequences for the relationships between these
events and the social orders that enable their existence. By beginning analysis with the
phenomenal form I showed that certain forms do intentional transformation (i.e.,
make radical change) within themselves through the organization of their interior
processes. These phenomenal forms may have degrees of self-correction shaped into
their forms that enable them to adhere quite closely to the purposes for which they
were activated. However other forms do little more than mirror or represent selected
thematics of their socio-cultural surrounds. These latter forms are put together often
using what I later called bureaucratic logic (this volume, Chapter Four), and usually
have little or nothing in common with “ritual” events that do radical change within
and through themselves.
In Models and Mirrors I did not use the conceptual language of emergence since
most of the phenomenal forms I reanalyzed were based on the ethnography of others,
and these studies were primarily synchronic. Nonetheless, in beginning with the interiors of forms, and thinking of how cultural and social forms may be held together
from within themselves, I was able to argue in greater detail that forms with more
complex interior organization are relatively more self-sustainable than are simpler
forms. Moreover, I proposed that greater interior complexity goes together with degrees of separation from the social surround. By this I meant that interior complexity
of phenomenal forms goes together with relatively greater autonomy from their social
surrounds. Interior complexity endows these forms with greater resilience against
external pressures. This idea of (always) temporary, relative autonomy from the social surround was heretical in anthropology (and I think still is) yet it enabled me
to propose a different understanding of rituals that are organized intentionally and
interiorly to directly accomplish particular outcomes within and through their own
workings.17 The capacity of such forms to activate controlled trajectories that may be
causal is due in no small measure to their relative autonomy from their social surrounds. In archaic and tribal social orderings acts to influence cosmic ordering were
largely limited to events precariously organized to control causality.18
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300 | moebius anthropology
The introduction to Ritual in Its Own Right was conceived when I was influenced
by Deleuze’s (1993) thinking on the fold in The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Folding, as Deleuze (1995: 156–57) pointed out, is everywhere:
Straight lines are all alike, but folds vary, and all folding proceeds by differentiation. No two things are folded in the same way . . . . Folds are in
this sense everywhere, without the fold being universal. It’s a “differentiator,” a “differential” . . . . The concept of fold is always something singular,
and can only get anywhere by varying, branching out, taking new forms.
You’ve only . . . to see and touch mountains as formed by their folding,
for them to lose their solidity, and for millennia to turn back into what
they are, not something permanent but time in its pure state, pliability.
There’s nothing more unsettling than the continual movement of something that seems fixed. (My emphases, echoed at numerous junctures by
Michel Serres; e.g., Serres 1998: 107–8)
I modified Deleuze’s conception of the fold for my purposes by reflecting on forming
form as the distance between the straight line and the curve.19 As I wrote then, “The
movement from the line to the curve is that of conditions of self-organization. Curving, the line becomes self-referential, opening space, acquiring depth. In relating to
itself, the curve organizes itself in terms of itself, thereby enabling its existential and
phenomenal self-organization as different from whatever exists outside the curve,
while including this distinction within its self-referentiality” (Handelman 2005a:
14). Without the recursiveness of curvature, in other words of self-referentiality, phenomenal social forms cannot survive, as Bateson (1977: 242) implied.20
Through folding I furthered the argument on phenomenal form by expressly addressing what I called the forming of form, focusing now on the practice of form
taking shape, folding in particular situations, and on the emergence of complexity
within the folding itself. Interestingly, social form—as in the little encounter—is
initiated by individual agency, yet if the form emerges complexly then the shaping it
acquires contains to different degrees its own Castoriadian physis (Castoriades 1997:
331, see note 8), its own impetus toward a kind of completion (though this is not
necessarily complete in any hermetic or hermeneutic sense). I suggested that while
no social form “has the autonomous existence of absolute difference . . . without
minimal self-propelling difference, no social form exists as it does . . . . This propensity
to self-organization is present in the most mundane of everyday behavior and interaction” (Handelman 2005a: 13). One can say that the forming of form-in-itself, as I
noted earlier, speaks to the degrees to which the form may hold itself together from
within itself, and to the form’s interior sustainability and so to its precarity; while as
this form is activated within itself, doing whatever it does, it becomes form-for-itself,
an active force within the world. Thus I am saying indirectly that some phenomenal
forms may be endowed by their creators with their own intentionality; and if these
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epilogue
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forms are organized interiorly to accomplish this purposiveness then it may be more
problematic for their practitioners to disrupt them.
In Work and Play I had thought that complexity developed through feedback,
Norbert Weiner’s cybernetic term. Later I recognized that feedback has the shallow
thinness and flatness of a line turning back on its own linearity. Needed was a much
fuller sense of form as volume potentially filling and fulfilling itself within itself.
The idea of the “fold” supplied this sense of form curving into itself, folding into
and enfolding itself as it emerges into fullness. Form curving into itself makes form
self-referencing, self-reflexive. The self-referentiality of folding is critical to enabling
the fold to contain itself, and so, too, to enabling the fold to open into volume within
itself, and therefore critical to volume opening into depth within the fold. As noted,
this depth is time. Put otherwise, the self-intersection of the fold demands duration.
Folding can only occur through time, indeed as time, as time opens within the depth
of the fold.21
Folding offered another improvement on “feedback.” Through folding I could
think in terms of degrees of curving, degrees of interiority, such that a fold can be understood in terms of degrees of closure, from the relatively open (and perhaps shallower)
to the more fully self-intersecting, self-enclosing fold. By contrast, feedback requires
the full return of a feedback loop into itself. Either there is feedback or there isn’t.
Although I did not go in this direction, folding better delineates the range of events
and their interior complexities that I put forward in Models and Mirrors (Chapter
Two). So, too, with regard to the resemblance of the interior of a fold to its social
surround. In the instance of a more fully self-intersecting fold, the interior organization of the fold need have only a limited resemblance to the exterior environment
(even as it folds elements or configurations of its surround into itself in order to affect
these [Handelman 2005a: 11]). This is critical to my argument that certain events
can be shaped as relatively autonomous from their exterior social surround, and that
this self-enclosure enables these events to act on their exteriors in ways that are not
simply representations of these surrounds. In other words, the interior of such a fold
need not be reducible to the macro-order outside the fold. On the one hand the more
fully self-intersecting a fold potentially is, the more relatively discontinuous is the fold
from its social surround even as it acts on and through this, while on the other its selfreferentiality as a more autonomous unit, one with greater own-ness, is heightened.
Dynamics of Form—Banana Time
I turn here to an instance of forming form through folding and self-organization that
heads this discussion toward the movement of form that is time-full and dynamic.
The ethnographic setting is a small industrial workshop within an American factory
during the 1950s.22 Three middle-aged men, George, Ike, and Sammy, worked in a
room on separate machines that punched-out material used elsewhere in the factory.
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302 | moebius anthropology
In terms of the process of production there was no necessary contact amongst them,
and they could have become social isolates without this interfering with their work.
One can characterize this as three linear trajectories of activity that did not necessarily intersect. Nonetheless there was interaction and a good deal of this amongst the
three. What is interesting is the form that emerged from their interaction and how
this was put together.
George and Ike came to work before Sammy and the two shared a pot of coffee made on George’s hotplate. The ethnographer, Donald Roy, called this occasion
“coffee time.” After Sammy arrived, he declared “peach time,” took out two peaches
from his bag and divided the two among the three workers (note the difficulty here
of dividing two peaches into three equal portions). Sammy daily brought a banana
to work. Following the sharing of peach time, Ike stole the banana, yelled, “banana
time,” and gulped down the fruit. Sammy remonstrated with Ike, as did George.
As Sammy continued to dress down Ike, the latter retaliated by opening wide the
window facing Sammy’s machine, letting in the cold air. Sammy bitterly complained
that he would “catch a cold,” and closed the window. Yet now George encouraged
Ike against Sammy. The ethnographer termed this incident, “window time.” George’s
alarm clock kept the work schedule and the alarm rang when lunchtime came. Ike
stealthily turned the clock ahead by some minutes so that the three would break
for lunch earlier. George of course discovered this and remonstrated with Ike. The
ethnographer called this incident, “lunch time.” Every afternoon a worker came to
collect the output done by the three during that day. They told him of that day’s
adventures and all three quarreled with one another. The ethnographer called this
“pick-up time.” Later in the afternoon George and Ike ate pickled fish together, provided by Ike. This was “fish time.” The series of times ended in the late afternoon
when the three took turns going to the Coca-Cola machine in another section of the
factory to buy drinks for himself and the others. This was “coke time.”
All of the “times” described by the ethnographer emerged from the practice of daily
life—none were called for by the process of production in the workshop. Moreover,
while the process of production was linear the emergent “times” were not. Through
these “times” the workers curved the morning into the afternoon such that the curve
enclosed them almost fully during the working day. Both ends of the curve—the
early morning and late afternoon—were made of “times” that resonated amongst
themselves. All were occasions of the sharing of sustenance, of drink and food—in
the early morning coffee time and peach time; in the late afternoon fish time and
coke time. The morning times of sharing were created to first include George and Ike
who came to work earlier, and then to include all three when Sammy entered, so that
the three cooperated in food-sharing with one another. At the close of the curve this
was done in reverse. With fish-time George and Ike first shared food and then with
coke time all three shared buying Coca-Colas for one another.
Parallel to the straight, linear trajectories of production the workers created a
curve that intersected with itself and that enclosed the workers through the working
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epilogue
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day. As far as we know there was no reference to any factor in the social environment
outside of this production space that would help explain the curvature that emerged
within it. The curve opened volume within itself, one given to sociality. This volume
was deep, containing eight distinct times that were repeated during every working
day. And, so, this depth was organized through duration: the times were arranged
temporally in a particular order of occurrence. With the depth of its interior volume
this curve became a fold that enwrapped the three workers, opening a recursive timespace, that of sociality and the relational, that did not exist beforehand. It is no less
important to emphasize that this phenomenon—the forming of form—emerged out
of their practice and enfolded them reflexively within its emergent form. Reflexivity
imbues whatever is enfolded with identity; in this instance reflexivity endowed the
three workers with intense sociality toward one another.
The curving of this folding generated complexity in its organization. Inside the
depth of this fold of sharing, solidarity, and strong relationships the three workers
were in disharmony with one another. Within the curve of coffee time, peach time,
fish time, and coke time the three shared sustenance and sociability; but the three
argued and fought with one another during banana time, window time, lunch time,
and pickup time. Daily recurring times of conflict were folded inside daily recurring
times of sharing and solidarity—the increasing complexity of a fold within a fold.
Thus the solidarity of the fold (that of times of sharing and reciprocity) contained
the disharmony of the yet more interior fold (that of times of conflict).23 One may
argue that the very control of conflict encourages the generation of conflict that is
controlled. Perhaps the fold acquires teleonomic properties as the fold regenerates
itself over and again. In effect the three workers reflexively tested their relationships
with one another over and over through the duration of times that curled into their
sequencing and out again—times of sharing that curved into times of conflict that
curled outward again into times of sharing.24
We have something of a test of that which I am arguing because of what happened
when the folding of times frayed, and its curvature straightened wholly into parallel
lines of production. Sammy went on vacation (the triad became a dyad) and the relationship between George and Ike collapsed after Ike accidentally insulted George.
For the next two weeks George and Ike operated their machines with hardly a word
passing between them. Then Sammy returned to work and the straight lines recurved
and self-intersected, resurrecting the fold through the following order of events: One
afternoon George and Ike ate George’s pickled fish together. Later that same afternoon Ike and Sammy began to kid one another, and Ike began to sing. In the following days the times of disharmony returned, folded into those of shared sustenance
and cooperation. The resurrected fold took the recursive form of its predecessor, returning as another version of itself since its times somewhat differed. In particular an
entirely new “time” emerged, one that clearly indexed Ike’s error that had led to the
collapse of the fold. Donald Roy describes this new time as follows: “Ike broke wind
[farted], and put his head in his hands on the [work] block as Sammy grabbed a rod
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304 | moebius anthropology
and made a mock rush to open the window. He beat Ike on the head, and George
threw some water on him [Ike], playfully.”
What happened here? The folding curvedness of the working day broke down;
the curve straightening, becoming nonreflexive. This difference indeed made a difference. Without reflexivity sociality disappeared. Then Sammy returned and some
sort of reorganization occurred. Yet I would speak of this as a still existing residue of
self-organizing qualities in the workshop. Why self-organization? Because the original fold was highly self-reflexive for the three participants—they belonged together,
had a togetherness of identity, and were aware of their joint mutuality. So that when,
after the rupture, they were together again their reflexiveness of themselves as a unit
of some kind again came to the fore. Through the three the patterning of the fold
self-organized anew. Self-organization followed a change in form, as it often seems
to do. The reflexiveness of the refolding curve comes through clearly in the addition
of the new “time” to the self-organization of times—the new time undoubtedly selfreferences the breakdown of the folding curve (Ike farts, committing a faux pas) and
includes its own self-correction (the chastising of Ike by George and Sammy, accompanied by Ike’s apologetic demeanor).
During this case, linearity turns into nonlinearity turns into linearity turns into
nonlinearity . . . and each of these shifts is of great significance for the forming of
form that holds the three participants together (and doesn’t) in their sociality and
social relationships. Just because we as anthropologists are unaccustomed to thinking
in such terms certainly (with all of the qualifications that indeed attend to certainty)
suggests that we must not exclude them if they demonstrate just how dynamic is the
human (always). In discussing time further on I will point to how important nonlinearity is to the human and that it enables movement that is so human.
There is a very delicate trajectory here during the forming of form that follows
where agency is situated and how it is redistributed. It is a near given in Western social science (including anthropology) that agency is first and foremost located in the
consciousness of the individual, and that it is active individuals who make choices and
decisions. In this regard what I am calling the forming of form would be understood as
the outcome of the choices and decisions of individuals. So, too, a near-standard social
critique of self-organization in complexity theory is that it does not relate to human
consciousness and, so, not to human agency. Thus, as Forbes-Pitt (2013: 107) comments on the “self ” in self-organization, “‘self ’ makes no reference to individual system
elements, or to any kind of consciousness, it refers to the system under investigation”
and to the dynamics of the interiority of the system—this is its self-organization. This
in contrast to the “self ” as it is used in social science—the embodied self of phenomenology and culture, the “self ” whose human qualities emerge through that which
Sheets-Johnstone (1999) calls “the primacy of movement.” These and other perspectives position the location of “self ” within the embodied individual, a self expressed
through interaction amongst individuals. Even as anthropologists have modified this
to refer to “cultural selves,” to how selves in a certain cultural milieu are constituted
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with different ontologies and qualities thereof than those in other milieus, nonetheless
the location of qualities of “self ” are entirely located in the acting individual. It is first
and foremost the individual who has and who is responsible for agency.
In order to propose a modification of agency as the always primary prerogative
of the individual self during the forming of form I make a brief detour here. Bialecki and Daswani (2015: 274) point to the importance of questioning “the Western
assumptions of the bounded, singular, individual self, as the main form of [culturally] imagining the person.” Then, are there other ways in the world of inhabiting
embodiment in relation to other embodiments that are unlike (or overlap with) the
dominant Western assumption of the self-person? McKim Marriott’s shaping of the
“dividual” in South India was foundational in this respect (see Marriott 1989 for an
overview of thinking on this and related subjects).25 No less significant was Valentine
Daniels’s (1984) research in Tamil Nadu, demonstrating just how much of Marriott’s
argument on the exchange of elements and qualities of life among persons, among
persons and their natal earth, among persons and their homes, and so forth, occurs
through the relatedness of interiorities that in my terms are intra-connected rather
than interconnected. All domains in which life inheres—including the human, the
deities, the apparently inanimate (soft matter, hard matter), and the moving (flora,
water, wind)—exchange the elements and qualities through which life is constituted.
This is that which enables the living cosmos.
In the logic of the Western conception of one self per individual interaction between individuals leaves from the interior of one individual to his exterior, passes over
to the exterior of the other, enters the interior of this other where it is interpreted
and responded to in the reverse order of its arrival. These inter-actional passages between the interiors and exteriors of persons are somewhat alien to South Indian selfpersonhood. The implications potentially are profound: for example, the elementary
flows of life-substances and qualities in South India are in the first instance inherently
social—cosmos must be social in its very existence, and any blockage of these (social)
flows is fundamentally anti-social, indeed the extermination of the social in its worst,
destructive sense. The South Indian social is not socially constructed, is not a social
contract like the Western Hobbesian separation of individual and social order in
order to put the latter together through the former; nor is it likely learned through
childhood in quite the way suggested by the process philosophy of G. H. Mead and
others, in terms of the development of self through taking the role of the other and
seeing oneself through the eyes of the other, and so forth.26 Given its intense intraactions and intra-changes the South Indian cosmos is, one can say, naturally social.
To take an example of the blockage of flow mentioned above, South Indian sorcery results not merely from possession that shuts in and cuts off the individual from
the sociality of her or his fellow human beings, resulting in extreme isolation. Rather,
South Indian sorcery blocks the elementary intra-actional flows of living among persons and among all aspects of their total environments, and these flows like the cosmos they enliven are inherently social. The result is utterly destructive stasis for the
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306 | moebius anthropology
ensorcelled selfness yet, more than this, the damage of stasis for all those who were in
continuous intra-actional flow with the afflicted. (For an outline of this argument see
Handelman and Shulman 2004: 210–14.)
Where is agency, or more to the point when is agency, as the curve straightens and
the fold implodes in the workshop? The three did not consciously design and plan
the curve, the order of its contents, nor the symmetry and significance of its selfreferential intersection. One can say that as the curve emerged through practice the
three endowed direction, impetus, and intensities to its folding. Their curve of sociality had direction, moving into self-intersection near the end of the working day.
Folding, their curve opened time-space that had not existed beforehand. Within its
enfolding each daily “time” or event of the curve indexed its impetus toward the
next. Curving moved through moments of rising and lessening intensity of activity
that gave to it an unnamed yet definite self-identity. Thus once a logic of curving and
folding emerged in the shop, the way through which folding shaped the activities
within it, the impulses and pulsations it gave to these activities, continued without
the always active and ongoing need for human agency.
I surmise that in some way and to some degree the moving, folding curve existed
in its own right as a fragile form, a transient phenomenon. One should not forget
that form is force. That form is a line or trajectory of force, of forcefulness. And that,
though neither concretized nor materialized in any common-sense way, when the
force of form is absent after it has been present this absence is felt. This is to say that
in the workshop the folding of form had some kind of agency—though only local
agency—that self-organized the lives of the three workers in the workshop who were
enfolded within it; and, moreover, that the force of the form could not be obtained
by totaling together the various activities of the three. Put simply, the three created a
social form that was vaster and deeper than themselves and their social relationships
with one another in the shop. Form-in-itself, form existing, became form-for-itself,
form-as-force in action through duration.
Yet what is concreteness? Anthropology has consistently concretized the physically
invisible in order to presume the existence of the social and of cultural beliefs, ideas,
norms, values, social relationships, community, social network, exchange, cosmologies, and on and on. It is these concretizations that largely enable social-cultural
anthropology to exist as the kind of academic discipline that it is. Moreover, once
concretized all of the above are assumed to exist even as particular concretizations are
critiqued, and some fall out of favor as others rise in fashion. Concretizations have
solidity, positions of rest, points of anchorage. They may even be felt as material.
However, the sense of forming form that I am suggesting is anything but a point of
rest or an anchorage. The forms I wrote of in Work and Play, in portions of Models
and Mirrors, and in the introduction to Ritual in Its Own Right, are emergent and
self-organizing movements, and often ones of force and duration.
Thus consider the following three examples of forming and folding in relation to
concreteness. Diana Espirito Santo (2015) offers an alternative to the usual emphasis
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epilogue
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on concreteness in anthropology in her discussion of “knowledge” among practitioners of Cuban espiritismo. Knowledge is fluid ( fluido), independent of cognition,
existing outside of persons, including practitioners of espiritismo. Perhaps knowledge
is ontogenic potentiality. Using words, practitioners give thingness to fluido, to latent
knowledge. Interacting with this flow of potentiality through words, mediums instigate “the self-organization and emergence of knowledge as new cosmology comes
to the fore” (2015: 588). Fluido emerges as form that self-organizes as knowledge.
Moreover, knowledge-form is substantive and is seen by the medium but not as a
representation of knowledge nor as a metaphor; but rather, that “knowledge [itself ]
is . . . a moving, mutable, and emergent form of seeing itself ” (2015: 589).
Bar-On Cohen (2009) writes of the kibadachi (rider’s stance) exercise in Japanese
Shotokan karate. To enter the rider’s stance the participants stand in a circle, bend
and flex their knees as a rider would atop a horse, and hold this position without
moving. After no more than a few minutes the stance becomes grueling, torturous
and painful. Yet the experienced participants hold the rider position for even ninety
minutes. This strongly implies that some sort of forming of form emerges within
the bodies of the participants and that this forming nonverbally intra-connects and
relates together all the bodies in the participatory circle, enabling them to withstand
the agony of the exercise. Yet this forming is not set, is not a “structure,” for it seems
to continuously circulate through the participants. In a sense this forming is that of
a loop whose moving through the participants is ongoing and recursive. One can say
that this emergent forming enables the bodies of the participants to become folded
into one another, or perhaps even folded through one another; and that this is their
intra-connectedness, their intimate, simultaneous sharing of painful interior exertion
that gives them the steadiness and steadfastness to endure as more than particular
individuals and as more than a group of individuals. Yet by saying that these persons
are folded into one another I am insisting that this process is one of a joining through
involution and not one of encompassment.27
Deborah Bird Rose discusses dance in ritual among the Aboriginal peoples of the
Victoria River District in Australia. Bird Rose (2000: 292–93) writes,
Thus I learned that the body connects earth and air when you dance. The
call comes from deep within and is propelled by the impact of your feet on
the ground. It comes to feel as if the ground itself propels your voice into
the night sky. That call starts somewhere below your feet and ends somewhere out in the world. The call is a motion, a sound wave of connection.
You are dancing the earth, and the earth is dancing you, and so perhaps
you are motion . . . a wave of connection . . . who is the dancer and who is
the dance? . . . I find that [recursively] both are the dancer and the danced.
In my terms, the dancer’s feet are folding into the ground, the ground folding into
the feet, perhaps folding through each other, perhaps becoming a single folding moving with oneness, perhaps in Barad’s terms entangling, creating greater complexity, as
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308 | moebius anthropology
does the forming of intra-folding among participants during kibadachi, and through
the self-organizing of fluid knowledge-forming in Cuban espiritismo. All are concrete,
all are not. The distinction is a red herring. The cleavage between objective and subjective loses its presumed distinctiveness once we recognize that motion and movement
are continuously folding and shaping human beings, while points of rest and anchorage are kinds of motion in themselves and, so, related to duration and, so, to time.
An additional word on the workshop. After the fall the three workers re-created
their enfolding self-intersecting sociality with its emotional rhythmic pulsation
of rising and falling intensities and dense moments (of Times and time). This reformed fold bore a strong resemblance to the previous one. One could ascribe this to
memory, habit, micro-culture and the like, yet all of these are merely summarizing
thoughts and weak explanations. Something more actively creative had happened. I
am tempted to call this a moment of self-creation, of autopoiesis, of the unspoken
synchronization of acts that index the emergence of form, now the three recreating
the folding logic of their initial creation while using different materials for a similar
forming. Here the three have a sense of selfness together, one of (unspoken) selfreferentiality, of identity.28
Within the workshop, production time continued as before, linear, shallow, even
in tone, moving from the beginning of the working day to its end. Yet, within the
forming of the fold, time shifted from the linear toward the recursive, the working
day beginning and ending in the spirit of reflexive reciprocity and good fellowship.
The usual way of dealing with this kind of shift in anthropology would be to say that
the structuring of interaction in the workshop changed; that the workers positioned
“times” throughout the workday, and that this gave to the time and the timing of
“times” a subjective, experiential circularity even as objective, linear time dominated
the length and substance of the workday.
However my sense is that the change is not structural, not a matter of the fixing
of positions, of “times,” but one of changing movement, of a different kind of temporal motion that enables dynamically the arrangement of “times”; temporal motion
that is recursive and, so, is self-reflexive. I entertain the likelihood that time curved
around the workers as they began to practice sociality and its reciprocalness, a folding
opened the depth of time~space for the “times” that the workers created, endowing
recursive time within the folding with rhythmic pulsation through the intensities of
the “times.” If so, then it is time as such that makes or enables the folding of local
motion, thereby playing a significant role in the forming of local phenomenal forms.
Thus one can argue for the multiplicity of local phenomenal forms through the
multiplicity of temporal movements without necessarily beginning from the premise
that different cultures are likely to have different interpretations and understandings
of time as a single dimension. Both the relativism of Nancy Munn’s (1992) review
of the cultural anthropology of time and Alfred Gell’s (1992) use of the A-Series and
B-Series time of analytic philosophy are premised on the one foundational movement
of time, indeed on time as a dimension, varied in terms of interpretations of time in
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epilogue
| 309
different cultures and distinguished by objective and subjective perceptions of time.
However if we take seriously at least some of the claims put forward by scholars of
multiple ontologies then these may apply as well to time. In other words, instead
of assuming (indeed, being able to assume) that there is always a single foundational movement of time, whether that of time measured metrically or time that is
culturally perceived and subjectively felt, we should entertain the potentiality of a
multiplicity of time movements that become more dominant or fade toward latency
depending upon what manner of time movement enables certain kinds of actions
and endeavors to become active. My guess is that the multiplicity of temporal movements will enable or will produce a multiplicity of phenomenal forms.
All of this requires discussion of temporality in the forming and folding of form.
And this raises the question once more of whether time is a passive passage or a
dynamic force, and what this says about the understanding of dynamics as time,
through time. I think a beginning can be sought in the physical sciences, and I emphasize once more that I am not concerned with the science and its validity as such
but rather with how the way its logics can give us an inkling into the relationship
between time and organic life, including the human.
Part II: Folding Time
If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond
where they are valid, [then] where they are valid there
is a singularity.
—Graffiti on a bus stop sign, Mivtza Kadesh Street, Jerusalem,
29 July 2015
The Physical Time of the Universe Is Linear and Irreversible
Here the perspective on time of Ilya Prigogine—a Nobel laureate for his research
on non-equilibrium thermodynamics and conditions far from equilibrium—is illuminating. Prigogine’s theorizing is especially persuasive to me because he links the
evolution of the physical universe to the emergence of organic life, aligning the time
of the organic with the time of the physical universe. I will suggest that it is with the
existence of organic life and its dynamics of reproduction that the folding of temporal
movement within phenomenal forms becomes especially salient. Furthermore, with
the emergence of the social as the primary human form of organization the dynamics
of social reproduction are tied intimately to generational, biological reproduction.
Folding is integral both to biological time and to social time, especially as the movements of the biological and the social—perhaps most prominently through different
sorts of reproduction—diverge from that of physical time. This difference is critical
to an understanding of social ordering as always out of sync with itself even as it tries
to reproduce itself, an ongoing breach within social ordering that may be irreparable.
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310 | moebius anthropology
Prigogine argues that “time precedes the universe” (Grana 2016: 231), and thus
precedes any and all matter, inorganic and organic. In his theory there was no singularity like the Big Bang that created the universe. Instead there was a primordial,
empty (quantum), unstable universe in which time was latent yet irreversible. In a
sense this was a virtual universe that contained, or perhaps was, pure potentiality, the
potential existence of matter, yet without matter. This unstable void broke down and
substance, matter, came into existence, and with matter, so, too, did entropy. Matter
moved within itself and within the universe as the bearer of entropy (Magnani 2016:
250). Time actualized with the entropic movement of matter and time moved like
an arrow, linearly and irreversibly (Prigogine and Stengers 1984). As Magnani (ibid.)
comments: “The meaning of irreversibility [in physics] undergoes a radical change,
since irreversibility should no longer be linked to an evolution that leads inexorably
toward an inert state of the universe (thermic death), but to its birth, or perhaps to
an eternal succession of universes that are born everywhere and that head toward the
infinite.” In other words, rather than moving temporally toward increasing disorder
and thermal death the universe moves toward increasing complexity and its concomitant issues of organization.
For our purposes here it is sufficient to emphasize that it is precisely the irreversibility of the arrow of time that makes futurity open-ended, indeterminable, unknown. Irreversible time gives to the universe a changing, historical existence. As the
sociologist, Barbara Adam (1998: 214) states succinctly, Prigogine established this
conception of time “as a law of nature; and with it he changed the very meaning of
the nature of a scientific law . . . laws themselves come to be understood as developing; and reversibility, far from being the most fundamental aspect of nature, comes to
be recognized as a product of the consciousness of the human observer.”
The evolving, entropic complexity of the universe through lengthy durations produces that which Prigogine terms conditions-far-from-equilibrium. Through these
conditions the universe is in continuous emergence, the dynamics of which amplify
fluctuations while ordering their disordering. Through these fluctuations time no
less may develop different trajectories though continuing linearly. Nonetheless, the
existence of temporal fluctuations can be considered as potential multiplicities of the
movement of time. It is important to emphasize that with Prigogine’s arrow of time
the multiplicities that emerge from the indeterminacy of conditions-far-from-equilibrium are not undone or corrected. Were time subjective then, hypothetically, time
could be shaped as circular; and so could correct or eliminate unstable complexities
that are integral to the dynamics of emergence. Instead, developments must work out
the consequences of their emergence that in turn contribute to increasing complexity.
Prigogine (1997: 27) stated this as follows: “Irreversible processes [associated with the
arrow of time] are as real as reversible processes described by the fundamental laws of
physics; they do not correspond to approximations added to the basic laws. Irreversible processes play a fundamental constructive role in nature.”29
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epilogue
| 311
In Prigogine’s thinking, organic life emerged in conditions-far-from-equilibrium.
As he put this (Prigogine 1997: 26–27): “Life is possible only in a nonequilibrium
universe.” To look ahead for a moment, organic life is always a fluctuation since it
must reproduce and repeat itself in order to continue to exist. That is, organic life
fluctuates through time that is far-from-equilibrium. Prigogine’s theorizing aligns
the time of the evolving universe with the time through which the organic evolves.
In my understanding this implies that all forms in the universe are time-full, yet indeterministic. Nothing exists outside of or beyond time. There is no point in saying
that the social and the biological are entirely removed from the physical because they
are alive and not inert matter. As noted, not only does everything inorganic and organic move through time but time no less moves through everything. Yet, in “moving
through” different forms of the organization of substance, time is shaped by their interiors even as forms move through time together. This implies that forms inorganic
and organic have their own interior time trajectories that are, or that are synchronized
with the interior movement of these forms.
In my terms, Prigogine’s theorizing posits time as an ontological movement of the
universe, and I emphasize here the status of the ontological. The point being that if
time is ontological rather than dimensional then the status of time is likely not to
change when this is considered in the world of organic life, including the human. If
Prigogine’s arguments have value we then can ask whether the universe would exist
without time. Does the existence of the universe depend in some way on the existence of time? Or is time a passive passage? Passive in the sense that we move through
time, though that which we are as human beings is not made or shaped by time as
such; in other words not by time of itself. If time is merely a passive passage then we
and everything else are shaped by other forces and configurations—biological, social,
cultural—and we use time simply as a measure to evaluate these forces and their
changes. Time then indeed is a passive, pliant medium through which interaction
occurs, yet time is not accountable for interaction that itself depends on forces understood as independent of time. The physicist, Lee Smolin (2007: 256–57), in calling
for physics to return to the study of time, states that physics treated time as a frozen,
measurable dimension of space.
The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1999a: 3) calls such time a “neutral medium” in
which matter and life are framed, rather than time as a dynamic force in their framing.
As a neutral medium time again is cast as a dimension that is a measure of movement rather than a mover of movement. Or, is time perhaps a dynamic movement,
indeed a mover of movement that is more than or different from thinking of time as
a dimension? As the fourth dimension? Grosz (1999a: 3) points out that thinkers as
disparate as Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze all understood time as a force of
chance, randomness, open-ended-ness, becoming; and that each “conceives of time as
difference.”30 These emphases fit well with the fluctuations of time that emerge through
conditions-far-from-equilibrium, the conditions through which organic life exists.
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312 | moebius anthropology
Newton’s and Einstein’s conception of time as the fourth dimension continues to
dominate anthropological thinking on time. This is present in such common-sense
phrasings as “the flow of time” and “time unfolding,” both of which are associated
with that which is called “processual anthropology” in which “process” is critical to
the (historical) temporality of anthropological analysis (Hodges 2014). Anthropologists in their research seem to accept that time is the fourth dimension; and therefore
that this kind of time is an absolute baseline with which to compare and contrast
cultural conceptions of time among other peoples with Western objective knowledge
about time. In other words, that ideas of time among other peoples, while they may
have powerful effects, are culturally subjective knowledge when compared with the
objective knowledge gained by Western science. Yet as the historian, H. W. Brands
(1992: 506), commented: Einstein did not say that space-time “really had four dimensions. What he said was that it was for human beings to think of space and time
as being a four-dimensional continuum. The universe does not have four dimensions,
or three dimensions, or eleven dimensions . . . . The dimensions are simply scaffolding erected by humans trying to measure the universe.”31
So, too, it is practical for anthropologists to assume (and likely believe) that time
as the fourth dimension is no less the objective undergirding of other cultures, while
they, like ourselves, may well have different, subjective, experiential realities of time.
In this sense the anthropological understanding of the living of time in other cultures
often is categorized as belonging to the subjective realities of those moral and social
orderings rather than to the scientific, objective reality of time as a linear medium of
passive passage. So, say, an event to renew the cosmos, one intimately related to the
movement of time, may well have culturally meaningful experiences for the people
involved, yet does this objectively re-energize cosmos?
The philosopher, Jean Gebser (quoted in Simeonov 2015: 271–72), argued that
time “is not a ‘di-mension,’ i.e., a dividing measure, but an a-mension, i.e., an element free from division and measurement . . . a basic phenomenon without spatial
character. It is a quality, whereas the measurability of the spatial dimensions lets them
appear as quantities.”32 As commented on in note 4, following this line of thinking
the Greek preposition “a-” can liberate us from slipping over and again into incipient
dualisms like that of the linear/nonlinear (see Gebser 1984: 2). Perhaps “local times”
should be referred to as a-linear, enabling time potentially to move into a variety
of relationships with space within different social and cultural forms. This fits with
Bergson’s use of the mathematician G. B. Riemann’s distinction between “quantitative,” or discrete, and “qualitative,” or continuous, multiplicities. “Quantitative multiplicities are numerical in nature, and take the form of the one and the many: their
differences are homogeneous differences of degree, and such multiplicities therefore
can be divided without occasioning a difference in kind. By contrast, qualitative multiplicities on division create heterogenous differences” (Hodges 2008: 409). Hodges
here quotes Deleuze (1991: 38) to wit that qualitative multiplicities are “of differences
in kind . . . that cannot be reduced to numbers.”33
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epilogue
| 313
Duration and the Curving of Organic Time
Prigogine’s understanding of cosmic time fits well with an important proposition
of Henri Bergson. After Einstein’s utter disparagement of Bergson’s thinking during
their so-called debate of 1922 (see Canales 2015) the philosopher’s theorizing was
ignored until quite recently. Bergson (1992: 93) argued that: “Time is something.
Therefore it acts. Time is what hinders everything from being given at once. It retards,
or rather it is retardation. It must, therefore, be elaboration. Would it not then be a
vehicle of creation and of choice? Would not the existence of time prove that there
is indetermination in things? Would not time be that indetermination itself?” [my
emphasis]. To paraphrase: Time exists to stop everything from happening at once. By
banishing simultaneity Bergson banished all relations, all forms, from existing outside of time. So, too, from this perspective time enables the separate existence of every
“thing.” Existing through time, all relations, all forms, have duration, and, moreover,
their durations differ. The social anthropologist, Max Gluckman, argued something
like this fifty years ago with regard to social life, and I will turn to this further on.
Duration too in the first instance is a qualitative multiplicity. This is saying that
forms—biological, social, cultural—have their own durations, their own interior
times, their own “local times.” Further on I will argue that this is critical to understanding how time is folded within form yet no less shapes form from within its
depths, recalling Deleuze’s comment on Merleau-Ponty in Part One that depth is
time.
If Prigogine posits time as an ontological movement of the universe then this
is complemented by Merleau-Ponty’s radical shift from the acceptance of Husserl’s
theory of a phenomenology of time—one that depends upon structures of human
consciousness, upon our perception of time-consciousness that depends from and is
experienced by ourselves as subject—to his apparent rejection of this. In MerleauPonty’s final but unfinished work, The Visible and the Invisible (1968) he
expressly rejects his [own] Phenomenology of Perception for having retained
the Husserlian philosophy of consciousness . . . . To say that he moves
from phenomenology to ontology is to say that he rejects any privileging
of the subject or consciousness as constituting time either as a perceptual object or through a lived experience . . . . Time now is characterized
as an ontologically independent entity and not a construct disclosed by
consciousness . . . this time is no longer an archetype of the self ’s nonobjectivating self-awareness.” (Kelly 2015).
Thus Merleau-Ponty (1968) stated bluntly, “The subject is time.” Now in his thinking it is time that constitutes the subject, rather than the other way round. Time no
longer provides any neat division between the human consciousness of the subject
and the time of organism, or of any nonhuman living creature or, for that matter,
the time of the object. Human Being did not invent time. The character of time as
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314 | moebius anthropology
weaving together being, the organic, and the inanimate through its movement is
rendered profoundly by Borges (1964: 205) in his celebrated philosophical essay,
“A New Refutation of Time.” After arguing, relentlessly so, that time does not exist,
Borges concludes: “And yet, and yet . . . Time is the substance I am made of. Time is
a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but
I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world unfortunately is real; I unfortunately, am Borges.”
Nonetheless there are critical differences between multiplicities of physical time
and the multiplicities of time of living organisms, and this is related to that which
Bergson called duration. Grosz (2005: 10) comments that for Bergson duration is a
force, “the force of temporality.” When Bergson banished simultaneity and insisted
that every thing existed only through time he gave to duration the force to open time,
in a sense to “stretch” time, and, so, to drive that which I called in Part One ongoing
emergence, and the ongoing emergence of difference. Organic life of any kind in its
existence and behavior is never in equilibrium and is always entropic through both
physical time and biological time. Yet the life of biological time seeks negentropy,
the reduction of entropy, the “turn” into itself, as it were, in order to accomplish
the renewal of itself, keeping itself alive as a species of organism. In turning inward
to accomplish negentropy, the organism or organisms (depending on the particular
dynamic of reproduction) seek to reproduce and to repeat themselves.
In his Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues intensively that repetition generates difference.34 Discussing Deleuze on repetition, Bar-On Cohen (2014: 532)
writes: “For Deleuze, a philosopher of difference, repetition is opposed to identity:
identity is a tyrant who imposes external categories as a measurement of difference,
but ‘difference’ as a concept emanating from repetition is not lodged between two
distinctive states but rather occurs from within itself to become a condition of the
emergent new” [my emphasis]. In my view, one signal impetus for the emergence
of difference depends from duration. With Merleau-Ponty’s recanting of the timeconsciousness of the subject as the foundation of human time, duration comes to the
fore as ever-present in the interior and exterior movements of organic life.
Thus duration disrupts the possibility of exact repetition and makes this indeterminate. The ongoing physical time of duration moves a repetition toward a future
time. Everything is with-time-through-time and there is always a duration between
repetition and repetition regardless of whether this is the briefest of moments or the
expectation of a repetition far into the future. Duration ruptures the continuousness
or even the continuity of repetition. Once said, this is obvious. Yet apparently it
first must be said. Thus no organism can close itself fully and entirely into itself, not
externally, not internally. That the organism exists with-time-through-time makes it
interactional and vulnerable to the entry of factors, internal, external, that potentially
may alter its life and modify the next round of repetition throughout its lifetime.
Therefore time in its moving enables, and perhaps is critical to, the emergence of
difference; and, so, difference is inherent in repetition. In Part One, I wrote that the
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epilogue
| 315
forming of encounters in the workshop continually generated variations, yet that very
few of these were taken up and elaborated by the workers. Whatever these elements,
they entered the durational gap between one encounter and the next, and met their
fate there. Repetitive human actions, repetitive human events, are all time-forms that
will produce difference within themselves through the very actions of their mundane
existence; and some of these, in Bateson’s phrasing, will make a difference.
My sense is that human beings strive to live through the present continuous,
holding to the continuity of their existence (see Handelman 2013). Yet our wellbeing depends on there being gaps in the continuousness of living consciously awake.
We must sleep and sleep ruptures the linearity of the present continuous. So we live
through the gaps in linear duration. We escape consciousness to experience the fluctuations of time through our own personal conditions-far-from-equilibrium away
from the durations we experience consciously. We turn within our own “local” times
folded within us when we sleep and when we daydream and, during these periods,
these times organize our experience. Through these a-linear fluctuations of our “local”
times we also avoid the precarity of tending to seek the shortest distances between
two points, thereby avoiding losing the potentially valuable cognitive and emotional
information of the scenic routes along the way (Bateson 1972).
The poet, Raymond McDaniel, offers himself as a case in point of what may
happen if one cannot rupture the continuousness of the time of the organic, if one
cannot escape fully for a period from the incessant movement of physical time. McDaniel is always aware and conscious. McDaniel sleeps normally and dreams and,
simultaneously, is aware. Always aware, he knows what his sleeping-self dreams but
the latter, asleep, is not aware of the former’s awareness. As he says (2013: 211), “No,
I am not sleepy. Were I failing to sleep I would be dead. I sleep perfectly well. What I
cannot do is cease being aware, and so what I am is tired.” McDaniel’s awareness lives
fully in the present continuous, through duration without rupture, which is saying
he is aware (almost?) without duration. Thus,
the concept of a long time no longer makes any personal sense, for all its
prior conceptual validity. In some immeasurable [qualitative] way, I am
having one day. Not the same day repeatedly, not a day of exceptional
duration, because nothing ever truly repeats and a day is only as long as
whatever not-day allows . . . [yet] I no longer feel if any sliver of time is
any longer than any other . . . it isn’t as if I don’t know how long it has
been since I have seen a friend . . . it’s just that I register ten minutes and
ten years as having the same aspect, which is that of having occurred today. I would rather not dwell on that . . . . If there’s an afterlife I am going
to be very, very upset. (Ibid.)
McDaniel lives in his own “local” time that is folded within him, and that in various
ways affects how he experiences his life and how he synchronizes himself with durational time outside of himself.
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316 | moebius anthropology
In my own knowing, and somewhat apposite to McDaniel’s, there was a brief period
when I became out of sync with time external to myself. A conundrum emerged that
for me became one of, not “where was I” but rather “when was I?” It happened like this.
In the late spring of 1994 I brought my slowly dying wife, Lea, to the United States
for a second cycle of stereotactic radiosurgery. While there I picked up a book by N. E.
Thing Enterprises entitled, Magic Eye: A New Way of Looking at the World (1993). The
book consisted of two-dimensional illustrations that, when looked at in certain ways,
suddenly acquired depth, becoming three-dimensional. Back in Jerusalem, curious, I
learned to shift perspective from the two-dimensional to the deeper three-dimensional
and back again. And then I slid deliberately into trying to shift from one perspective
to the other as quickly as possible. The duration of a shift from two-dimensionality to
three was about a second, and I repeated this shifting many, many times.
Then, abruptly, out of this activity something weird emerged. I suddenly was out
of sync with moving time outside of myself. No matter where, I was perhaps a second
more or less behind time in the temporal surround. And I could not catch up, could
not erase this disjunction. I should add that I felt this disjunction primarily when my
eyes were open. This may sound absurd, but with this teeny durational gap I immediately became disorientated, discombobulated. Disconcertingly, the very when-ness
of my presence became an issue for me. I did not feel that I was behind nor that I
was late in relation to the surround. I was in the same space inhabited by others yet
not quite simultaneously present together with them and with everything else in the
surround. In other words, I was not fully “there,” or perhaps I should say, “here.” And
I was not fully myself since this depended on my relationships with the world that
immediately were integral to my self-embodiment.
What may have happened here? Perhaps an extremely concentrated in-turning
that excluded all other external stimuli and that created depth for this repetitive
in-curving. This repetition shaped a local time within myself that differed from external linear time; and this, even though I wanted to emerge from within myself and
synchronize with time external to myself. I was caught within a personal, local time
of my own making and could not escape. This local time apparently emerged from
the concentrated shifting between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional
through repetitive durations of approximately one second that obsessively reversed
themselves. In manipulating my vision with the Magic Eye illustrations I was playing
with the chiasm, the (partial) crossover of the optic nerve. In mammals the optic
chiasm enables stimuli to reach each eye simultaneously. This simultaneity enables
stereoscopic, three-dimensional vision. Perhaps I was turning this on and off until
this repetition of one-second durations somehow became autonomous and I became
disjointed with external time. By the way, this went on for about three weeks. I then
went to my friend, Su Schachter who practices a technique called “reflex balance.” Su
re-balanced me and suddenly I was back in sync with the movement of time outside
of myself. I never fiddled again with Magic Eye though at this moment the book is in
front of me (and is speedily going back into its cupboard).
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epilogue
| 317
For all the complexities involved, the prime difference between the inorganic and
the organic is that the organic must reproduce in order to continue to exist. The organic is not only intra-entropic through time but in some way all organisms are aware
of this. Entropy excites organic life to seek its own renewal. And, reproduction would
not occur without one general movement—I will call this again a kind of in-turning,
the organism or organisms recursively turning within, into itself or themselves and to
others of its kind, the organism into its own-ness. In order to reproduce an organism
relates to itself. This often is referred to as the organism referencing itself. That is, the
organism is reflexive. Reflexivity too has duration. One can say that this in-turning is
the curving of time—the organism referencing its own local time. Reflexivity curves
time. If I phrase this as the organism going back into itself, relating to its own-ness,
then I am implying that the organism seeks through reproduction to return itself to
an earlier moment of reduced entropy, even as the organism moves forward with the
movement of physical, linear time.35 Organic life accomplishes the repetition of itself
with whatever alterations that accrue between one reproductive round and the next.
In the simplest sense an organism is constituted so as to reconstitute itself and adapt
itself internally and externally.
Yet in-turning requires duration and, in doing so, organic life curves away from
the movement of physical, linear time, indeed from its own ongoing, inevitable, forward movement through time. A conundrum results. On the one hand, organic time
curves into itself to accomplish the negentropy of reproduction and renewal; while
on the other, entropic, linear movement through time never ceases.36 Thus, under
conditions that are far-from-equilibrium, the time of the organism both separates
from yet remains in physical time; and in-turning organic time lags behind the movement of the organism through physical time. Moreover, this is no less so for efforts by
human beings to search for negentropy to renew and revitalize their social orderings
through ritual and numerous other sociocultural formings. As I will argue, given the
durations required, the regenerative time of negentropy sought by human beings in
concert through participation in cultural and social formings never catches up with
itself. The durational movement of negentropy lags behind the entropic movement of
physical time through which the efforts of renewal occur. This endemic lag signifies,
for example, why the full (social) regeneration of a sociocultural ordering through,
say, ritual, is virtually impossible.37 In simpler terms, why ritual never can be fully
effective. Yet more than this, since in my terms all sustained interaction generates degrees of emergent folding (see Part One), the time-lag is always present. One can say
that persons are (almost?) always out-of-sync with themselves as well as with others.
Max Gluckman’s Idea of Structural Duration
In anthropology ideas are few concerning the significance of duration in social life
that potentially could open into the perspective I am thinking here. One such instance is that of Max Gluckman’s thoughts on what he called “structural duration.”
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318 | moebius anthropology
In 1966, Gluckman, the founder of the Manchester School of social anthropology
(Evens and Handelman 2006) was invited to give a plenary address to the American Anthropological Association. Then fifty-five years of age, this was a highlight
of his illustrious career. Gluckman and the Manchester School anthropologists had
pioneered ideas of the analysis of social situations and the extended case method,
both of which contributed substantially to the understanding of social ordering as
ongoing, processual movement. A second plenary lecture was delivered by the social
anthropologist, Fredrik Barth, then thirty-eight years of age, and the founder of the
Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen. For over a decade
Barth had dazzled anthropology with his sophisticated joining together and modeling of social organization, transactionalism, and individual agency. Barth lectured
on the study of social change as the outgrowth of the cumulative, strategic choices
persons made vis a vis one another. Gluckman too lectured on the study of social
change, relating this to what he called “the utility of the equilibrium model” in the
study of institutions undergoing change. Gluckman’s lecture received polite applause.
Barth’s lecture was treated to a standing ovation. “Transaction” and “individual
agency” turned on the middle-class audience; while “equilibrium” and “institution”
turned them off. The audience’s reaction demonstrated that Barth was at the cutting
edge of anthropology, addressing agency in decision-making and everyday life; while
Gluckman was a passé structural-functionalist, a brontosaurus of an intellectual who
insisted on holding onto outmoded theoretical ideas of systemic equilibrium. Gluckman returned to Manchester in deep gloom and, as far as I know, never referred again
in print to the idea of structural duration.38
Gluckman’s use of “equilibrium model” emphasized the modeling of reality and
not reality as such, as a way of gauging the disruption of social order through conflict and its return to some sort of ordering. This was a strongly processual approach
that in his perspective required the modeling of process since movement was continual. Yet beyond Gluckman’s defense of the equilibrium model as a heuristic device
with which to compare and contrast change through time there is a fascinating idea
embedded in his lecture that he called the “structural duration” of institutions. An
idea quite ignored and forgotten, tangled up with the equilibrium model and caught
in the web of misidentification of Gluckman with structural-functionalism. Google
Gluckman and “structural duration” and you will come up with a bare handful of
references, most of them derogating his “static” anthropology, which could hardly be
further from his actual labors (for a striking exception, see Crawford 2007).
What is the idea of “structural duration”? I prefer to drop the language of “institution” and continue to use that of form and phenomenon, or of assemblages that
seem to hold together during time with varying degrees of self-integrity. Gluckman
(1968: 220) wrote that, “The problem of time is critical for all studies of social and
cultural systems.” He (not so unlike Bergson) was saying that no phenomenon exists outside of time. Furthermore, that every phenomenon existing in the human
world (and, I add, in the organic, more generally) “has its own time-scale built into
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it” (ibid.). Moreover, that “we cannot understand [a phenomenon, an organization]
unless we do so in that [very] scale.” The particular time-scale of a social form is its
structural duration. The duration is the period through which the phenomenon lives
fully, so that one can perceive this or, if its duration is lengthy, one can project the
entirety of its existence forward through time. No form, no phenomenon or assemblage, whether tiny or huge, exists in such a simple manner that one can perceive its
existence in the temporal flatness of the immediate present. Yet neither can we assign
arbitrarily a period of time which we will declare as “sufficient time” to know the
form through time.
In my terms one must discover through itself the “structural duration” during
which a form may be said to exist fully. Then one can think with acumen on the
in-turning of the form and how it is assembled as itself, as its own integrity that
enables its phenomenal existence. How can one know, or project, the length and
complexity of a structural duration, and whether this may be cyclical, oscillatory, periodic, or indeed open-ended? In the best of ethnographic worlds we do this by living
and following what seems to be the phenomenal folding or assemblage of foldings,
thereby learning what happens in what seems to be the nature of the organization.
In fact one cannot know a structural duration without following what seems to be,
is assumed to be, a folding of form, yet without knowing whether this is indeed the
case. And without comprehending its structural duration one will not know in the
fuller sense the nature of the phenomenon and how it changes (and as I have argued,
changes during the duration of the very reproduction of itself ). In discussing his idea
of structural duration, Gluckman was not referring to historical time in the usual
sense, but rather to time that is integral to a phenomenon, to that which I am calling
a folding of form; the time within its folding that enables the form to be or to become
fully its own; the time to go through the phases, alterations or changes that make the
phenomenon as it is and/or how it will be. Structural duration indexes form through
the temporalities of its own interior dynamics that are activated by the movement of
time.39 This enables us to comprehend how phenomena are constituted through their
own temporalities—their own rhythms, tempos, disturbances, and chaotics.
There is no shortage of examples of structural duration in the anthropological
literature. A few of small scale come to mind. In her study of family, community,
and industry in an American town, June Nash (1989: 265) concluded that the researcher needs to account for four generations of family in order “to see the biological
processes of mating, reproduction, maturity, and death worked out in a complete
cycle.” In his, Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way, Valentine Daniels (1984)
discovered unexpectedly that in participating in his third pilgrimage to the same
shrine of a particular deity he actually was completing a full cycle of pilgrimage, and
that this cycle is the critical mass of devotion of the devotee of this deity. Had he not
gone on his third pilgrimage he may well not have acquired this knowledge. In her
Inuit Morality Play, Jean Briggs (1998) watched numerous episodes of adults trying
to play with three year-old Chubby Matta in ways that Jean came to think of as failed
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320 | moebius anthropology
game-playing, only to discover that this Inuit play actually ended just when we would
expect it to begin; so Jean was thinking entirely in the wrong direction through a
mistaken duration.
Gluckman (1968: 223) understood “all social life as a process in time” [my emphasis], yet less as a dynamic that operated through time in a double sense—as moving
only with time and as being moved by time moving. He argued for abstracting the
structuring of the duration of an institution so that duration became the period
through which the institution would show itself more fully; that perhaps in a sense,
would tend to reproduce itself (including whatever alterations had accrued during
this period). Yet in this he did not consider time as a force of movement in itself, one
that is folded into a “structural duration” in certain ways and not in others; and so
that helps organize the very movement of the duration from within itself. Gluckman’s
idea of duration acquires greater value when its “structuring” is understood as the
forming of form that never loses its potential for emergence even as it is predisposed
to in-turn and to fold in particular ways. Rather than duration becoming more of a
skeleton of time (as it does in Gluckman’s schema) time instead opens into that which
I have called “prospective history” (Handelman 2005b). Prospective history begins
with presentness always moving through future. Prospective history is a history of
becoming, of the potential of duration to open into emergence. Even as time-moving
is shaped by the durational forming of form so, too, moving-time enables social life
to actualize its formings and foldings.
Reflexivity, Negentropy, and the Recursive In-Turning of Organic Time
For human beings, reflexivity is key in attempting to accomplish negentropy. However this kind of reflexivity is more basic and much broader in scope than that initiated by the “reflexive turn” in anthropology during the 1980s (see Handelman 1994,
for a critique of that reflexive turn). Like phenomenology in general, the reflexive
turn in anthropology focused on individual experience and referred to the relating of
self to other as they mutually influence one another’s perceptions and actions. So, this
sort of reflexivity is the act of referencing oneself to oneself through the mediation
of an external perspective on oneself, a perspective whose location may be through
other persons or through other sources of stimuli. This version of reflexivity often is
applied to the anthropologist as fieldworker in relation to a native other through a
variety of media, producing, enhancing, and doubting perception, thought, feeling,
and knowledge-making (Handelman 2016).
Here I depend from a different perspective on reflexivity. Evens, Handelman, and
Roberts (2016: 1–20) argue that reflexivity-as-action is critical to the very becoming
and being of the human condition.40 To this I add that reflexivity is a movement
that turns back on itself, a movement that is durational but not linear. Yet even as
a time-trajectory curves into itself, re-entering itself with the experience and knowledge accumulated as it moves forward indeterminately, it re-enters later than when it
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began its curving. Put otherwise, curving time re-enters its own physical, time past.
The self-intersection of reflexivity in its manifold planes is critical to consciousness
in human beings. The self-awareness of consciousness does not exist without the
reflexive curve. The self-awareness of consciousness depends on curving, in-turning
duration.41
I suggested earlier that organic life is temporally out-of-sync with itself. Thus there
is almost no way for life in general and human beings in particular to accomplish
the full negation of the effects of entropy, either personally or in terms of the social.
Nonetheless, the striving for this goal continues, today especially through the biology
of gene editing, cloning, and the transplantation of organs. An historical example of
such striving is that of (the rare instances of ) self-mummification (sokushimbutsu) in
Japan and elsewhere in Buddhist Asia. Pure Buddhist practice would concentrate on
the perfection of the self as a way to Nirvana. Yet according to one Japanese Buddhist
sect, a believer, through the practice of especially severe austerities, could perfect the
self and become a Buddha in his own body (Hori 1962: 234). These austerities would
produce a being of emptiness unaffected by the passage of time, escaping the entropic
deterioration of selfness and biological death and attaining a kind of negentropy of
the living soul.
In the process of self-mummification dietary restrictions were prominent: abstention from meat, the cereals, salt, and cooked foods. The ascetic did tree-eating
(mokujiki), substituting only on parts of the tree. The ascetic dedicated to becoming a self-mummified Buddha in his own body would take a vow to perform the
tree-eating austerities for periods of one thousand days, two thousand days and even
lengthier periods. Blacker (1975: 88) comments that: “During the first part of the
discipline their diet consisted of nuts, bark, fruit, berries, grass, and sometimes soy
in fair abundance. The quantity of these things was then reduced, until by the end
of their allotted period they had undergone a total fast of many days. Ideally . . . the
man should die from starvation, upright in the lotus posture . . . . His body should
have been reduced to skin and bone, all flesh and visceral contents having long disappeared.” The body then was placed in a wooden coffin inside a stone sarcophagus,
buried for three years, and then exhumed. By then the body should have mummified. Blacker adds that (1975: 89), “It was alleged . . . that such people did not suffer
death. What appeared to be death is in fact the state of suspended animation known
as nyujo, in which condition the soul may await the coming, millions of years hence,
of the future Buddha Maitreya.” In recognition of the tremendous powers acquired
through the terrible suffering of self-mummification, each mummified Buddha was
dressed in the robes of a Buddhist abbot and placed in the position usually kept for
the Buddha image in a local temple. The self-mummified Buddha would then be
supplicated and prayed to, as one would have done before the usual Buddha image.
Self-mummification is an instance of extreme in-turning, of folding and selfreflexivity that completely enclosed the individual deeply within himself in order to
seek self-perfection that was perceived as suspended animation; that is, a condition
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322 | moebius anthropology
of time whose movement is extremely slow or non-existent. To accomplish this, time
within the individual folded into himself, becoming entirely local, separated from
temporal movement outside the fold. Through his austerities the seeker comes to
separate his own organic, temporal movement from those of the physical and sociocultural worlds beyond his self-folding. Within his self-folding the seeker becomes
profoundly, actively, and continuously self-reflexive. He cannot be separated from this
engrossing reflexivity. This self-folding is profoundly deep, with the practitioner discovering in this depth (in Deleuze’s terms) how to alter the movement of time. In my
terms the seeker creates a different time within the fold, and through this synchronizes
his interior, organic time with this local time. The seeker within his self-folding moves
time in two ways. Initially, through self-starvation he speeds up time to reach his early
death in an emaciated condition. Then, once his body is mummified, the movement
of organic time becomes minimal, extremely slow, perhaps eliminated, as his now
selfless soul awaits Maitreya in the far distant future. If a kind of negentropy then is attained within the fold this enables the now minimalistic organic time to move through
physical time without being (or hardly being) effected by the latter. Here, what is left
of the selfless organic is not out-of-sync with itself as it moves through physical time.
I emphasize that both Raymond McDaniel and the self-mummifiers (at their outset)
are and were enfolded within their own local times, each out-of-sync with time outside
their foldings. Without these changes in the movement of time, and, so, of the durations of time, neither would become what they are and were.
What are these folded durations that I am calling local times? How do they relate
to the distinction that I drew between physical time and organic time? To the question of whether time is a force in itself or whether its movement can be relegated
comfortably to the passive passage of the fourth dimension? And, so, whether anthropologists can continue to rely safely on different movements of time as the products of varying cultural interpretations of the same dimensionality that at least since
Newton has provided the scientific foundation for theories of time. The existence of
time apparently is not provable except through measuring its movement; yet this, in
turn, locks time into dimensionality and avoids what the bio-mathematician, Plamen
Simeonov (2015: 271), calls the true nature of time that is ineffable, eluding science
and mathematics. And, as I noted earlier, no less eluding for anthropologists as they
accept the dimensionality of time as basic to ontological premises regarding the constitution of the very movement of everything within itself and in relation to everything else. The ways in which time moves seem to be critical to questions of ontology.
Cultural orderings have different, though sometimes overlapping basic premises
that permeate living through their worlds, their cosmologies. These are premises that
are not deterministic, yet they enable certain formations of existence rather than
others. The patternings of these premises are ontological for the peoples who live
them and epistemological for their practice. To my knowledge there are no human
ontologies whose premises are static, without the movement of time. Premises of
time-as-movement likely are embedded in some way in all human ontologies. If there
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epilogue
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are different human ontologies, then are there different human realities? Most likely
there are. Moreover, different realities may not be predicated on a distinction between subjective perception and experience and objective knowledge. If there are
thoroughly different realities then do these realities have their own qualities of time
(see, for example, Rosaldo 1980)? We know that a myriad of groupings live time, feel
time, think time, and organize time differently from one another, thereby inducing
the variable experiencing of time among their members.
If there is a multiplicity of cultural ontologies then perhaps time too is not a singular medium of passive passage that is always the same, though interpreted differently?
Perhaps time is a multiplicity? Not a multiplicity of distinctions between objective,
scientific time and subjective, native time, but as temporalities that work differently
through the realities of cultural ontologies that themselves are no less real than is our
unquestioned reliance on time as the fourth dimension. In my view, how ontological
temporalities work differently to endow the reality of the movement of time may be
one of the most difficult questions that an anthropology of time can take up; and,
moreover, one to which there may well be no answers. Nonetheless this question
should be asked and pondered.
Henry Rupert and the Dynamic Force of Time
I wish to address the above questions through fieldwork I did over fifty years ago with
a Native American shaman in Nevada (see Chapter One). When I met the Washo
shaman, Henry Moses Rupert, he was just about the same age as I am now. The ways
in which Henry came to organize his healing practices may tell us something about
how time and reality are irreducibly interwoven and perhaps suggest that the issue of
the potential existence of ontological multiplicities of time is indubitably real.
The Washo people lived in the Great Basin, an arid plateau with relatively few
natural foodstuffs. The traditional Washo cosmos was of a world continually in movement, in flux. This continuous movement was that of “power” (wegeleyu) which filled
cosmos (perhaps one could say that this power was the very existence of cosmos) and
had an intimate affinity to life-energy. Life-energy energized a vast array of beings.
Cosmos was fluid within itself. The fluidity of the Washo cosmos was associated
movingly with water, while power, life-energy, was intrinsically attracted to water
and flowed along waterways (though also along trails) (Miller 1983). This was a
living cosmos that can be characterized as organic, with all its elements and beings
intimately interrelated and interactive. The ontology of such a cosmos has hardly an
opening for an Archimedean perspective, one that is external to cosmos, a perspective
that considers itself all-seeing and objective, since any move toward perceiving the
exterior of cosmos disrupts its interior relatedness. Without an Archimedean point of
observation this sort of cosmos is comprehended from within itself.
Over a period of years Henry had formulated for himself an ethic of living that
he called the Law of Nature. This ethic was composed of three primary ways of reThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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324 | moebius anthropology
lating to the cosmos of which he was a part. These were: be honest; be discreet; do
no harm (Handelman 1967, 1972). Henry’s ethic of existence was a way of entering
and fitting directly into the interacting forms of the organic cosmos. In Henry’s Law
of Nature all beings, all flora and fauna, require water in order to continue to exist.
Water flows with life, life flows with water. Water is the duration of life. To which I
add the following: water is time. If the duration of water is disrupted, then life falls ill.
Duration is disrupted when life is dried out and life-energy fails before the conclusion
of its natural life span, its natural range of time. This usually occurs when a person
inadvertently fails to provide water to the life-force of another organic entity, whether
human or not, one for which he or she is responsible. In response the dried-out entity
seeks and takes the water it needs from the person responsible, desiccating this person
who then falls ill. To put this a little differently, life falters when its own time, its
water, is taken from it. Henry’s healing solution often was to ensure that water (and,
so, time) would return to both of the afflicted.
Henry worked with entropy. This is to say that he healed with time. The reduction
of water in an organic being increased its entropy and reduced the duration of its
internal time. Thus the interior time of an organic being, its local time, was disrupted
and faltered. Without the ongoing progression of time the condition of the afflicted
became increasingly indeterminate. Healing involved restoring the life-force of the
person by replenishing her or his water, that is, his or her internal time. In order to
heal these conditions Henry had to make the ill person self-reflexive about her or his
responsibility for the condition of illness. Here self-reflexivity again was a turning
into oneself, a returning to a time when the person actually was making the error of
desiccating another being, thereby triggering the loss of life-energy and time. Selfreflexivity had the potential to become an act of renewal just as the reflexive in-turning
of the organism through reproduction is an act of renewal.
To call this in-turning “memory” is to obfuscate the necessity in self-reflexivity of
re-experiencing what one has done. Let me reemphasize that which I have argued: it
is more productive to say that in an indeterminate world of multiplicities (organic)
self-reflexivity curves back through time even as physical time moves forward. The
two are never fully synced, and the time of the organic never catches up with the
movement of physical time.42 Organic reproduction is the movement of time that
is negentropic, in-turning, moving into dynamics that will re-energize and re-create
the organism. Yet during this movement toward repetition the organism continues
to move forward through time as a physical, linear progression. This suggests that
there always is a time-gap, however tiny this may be, between the progression of
physical time and the regeneration that is organic time. Yet I also am saying that the
in-turning’s reflexive regeneration of organic time is a hallmark of social ordering, an
ordering that continually seeks to repeat and reproduce itself even as this movement
makes this reproduction out-of-sync with its own movement through physical time,
opening ordering to continuing potential ongoing impetuses for change.
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I have suggested that in Henry Rupert’s healing the replenishment of life-energy
and the replenishment of time were one and the same. Yet, was time simply malleable,
simply passive, thus to be manipulated by the healer? Or was time dynamic, enabling
or even making something happen in the healing process? Let me note at this point
that the first spirit helper whom Henry acquired was that of water itself. In Henry’s
healing he would pray for water for the well-being of the patient, asking that the
aggrieved being, dried-out and disintegrating, agree to stop dehydrating the patient
in return for receiving water from the patient. In other words, the time that is water
acted to help replenish the time-duration of the patient’s life. Here time is hardly a
passive passage that healer and patient pass through. Time is life-giving, indeed time
in itself is a force (as it may be in the reproducing and re-energizing of the organic).
Initially Henry Rupert did what was understood as traditional Washo healing. A
healing ritual required the shaman to work for three consecutive nights from dusk
until midnight, and a fourth night from dusk until dawn. The same ritual acts were
repeated during each night. Night after night the ritual had a rhythmic pulsation
of repetition with each lengthy repetition augmenting, magnifying, and deepening
the ritual folding and its intentionality and intensity; and then into the dawn of the
fourth day when the shaman would have a better idea of whether difference had been
accomplished—whether or not the victim agreed to stop dehydrating the patient.
Later on Henry acquired a second spirit helper, a young Hindu whose skeleton
stood in the local high school. Henry continued doing the traditional healing ritual;
though during healing he now saw himself as a skeleton wearing a turban, moving
quickly around the patient’s body. His own being during the ritual had changed.
Though Henry continued practicing the repetitive, pulsating velocity of four nights
of healing, he had introduced into his practice the potential of speedier time. His
own interior velocity became faster with the augmenting life-energy that the Hindu
brought him.
Many years later, when Henry was seventy years old, he healed a Hawaiian curer
who lived in California. In return the Hawaiian gifted Henry with some of his own
power in the form of a Hawaiian spirit helper named George who lived in a volcano
on one of the islands, but whose power was at its maximum in the vicinity of Henry’s
home. George brought Henry new healing techniques together with the maxims
that, “everything comes quick and goes away quick” and “we help nature and nature does the rest.” For ailments easier to cure Henry now dispensed with visions of
diagnosis and prognosis, with chants, and with many other of the elements of the
four-night healing rituals. The healing ritual now took between approximately ten
minutes to four hours, and involved Henry praying to George and the placing of
hands on the patient to remove pain from the body.
With the Hawaiian spirit helper the healing ritual changed radically. The rhythm
of repetition and pulsation was omitted in many instances, while the speed and velocity of the ritual increased greatly, now perhaps matching the speed of Henry’s interior
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326 | moebius anthropology
after he acquired the Hindu spirit helper. Washo cosmology and Henry’s development of the energy of time-as-water were largely excised. Moreover in these instances
the patient was depersonalized since there was no need to establish causation through
errors of omission and commission on the part of the patient. Through the emphasis
on speed and velocity, time came more fully to the forefront as the dynamic that
enabled “Hawaiian” healing. Yet, too, it was the sense and feel of the organic that
Henry sought to heal. Today I think of Henry’s healing as experimenting, albeit not
deliberately, with the potentialities of time within his ritual (although he did not
mention them as such). Nonetheless he was drawn to the dynamic potentiality of the
movement of time as he folded this within his ritual. Initially, in his healing practice,
time was contextualized through the movement of water as life-energy. Time in his
healing ritual was repetitive, pulsating and, at the end of the fourth night at dawn,
often climactic. Eventually, through the Hawaiian healing of George, contextualization disappeared and non-pulsating time—closer perhaps to the pure movement of
time—came to the fore.
Interestingly, this change resonates to no small degree with how Deleuze, borrowing from the Stoic philosophers, understood the shift from pulsed time (Chronos)
to non-pulsed time (Aion). Deleuze argued first that pulsed time is territorialized
time, time marking territory. Second, that “pulsed time marks the temporality of
a form in development.” And third, that pulsed time “marks, or measures, or scans
the formation of a subject”; thus education and the German idea of bildung, of character-formation, occur through pulsed time. Yet if de-territorialization occurs then
non-pulsed time appears. So, too, if time moves primarily through speed and slowness then non-pulsed time is present. Furthermore, through non-pulsed time there is
no formation of a subject.43
When Henry took on George’s epistemology of intensity—the movement of
speedier time—then time was de-territorialized, and non-pulsating time became the
dynamic of movement. Furthermore, in this way of healing Henry gave little or no
regard as to whom the patient-as-subject was. Henry was disinterested in the cause
of pain, the errors made by the patient, and so forth. In Henry’s world time was not
a passive passage but an active force. The message seems to be clear: Change time,
change the dynamic of time; thus, without changing time there is no change in the
dynamic of time.
After Henry and I began talking about his shamanism he told me flatly, “What is
real for me is not real for you.” I was unsurprised yet nonetheless nonplussed. What
was the significance of his statement? It did not single out one of our realities as
objective and true and the other as subjective and, if not untrue, then misguided or
deluded. Indeed he never did so. He seemed to be telling me that we lived in different
worlds, and that different worlds existed and moved through themselves differently.
He understood multiplicity much more comprehensively than did I. But then he
practiced this as I did not. Well, so what? Couldn’t I learn about his world and come
to understand it without embracing it? Probably not. Not without living a world
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epilogue
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through premises of existence and movement distinctly different from my own, even
though sometimes these premises seemed, and I emphasize this, to overlap one another. We lived through different ontologies, different cosmologies. I lived time more
as the fourth dimension, time more as a passive passage. This too is what I had studied in anthropology. He frequently lived time as Gebser’s a-dimensional time, time
as a force for dynamic movement. My thought through the present moment is that
without ontologies of time there may well be no ontology at all, and no epistemological difference that makes a difference. And this should be a sobering thought.
A Cosmic Macro-Folding: Jewish Cultural Time
I said earlier that how temporal ontologies move differently to endow the realities of
the movement of time may be one of the most difficult questions that an anthropology of time can take up. In closing I would like to take up aspects of one ontology
of cultural time that effected and affected those who lived with and through it and
that continues to do so. My discussion here is necessarily sketchy.44 Though here construed loosely and schematically, this ontology is basic to moving time in the Jewish
religio-cultural cosmos. This time-moving is rhythmic, a moving-ness that thereby
folds in on itself.
Writing of the Jewish week, Zerubavel (1985: 115) comments that this unit of
duration is characterized by a peak day, the Sabbath, that imparts a “beat” to the
week. He continues, “The experience of beat is essentially a sensation of a throbbing
pulsation.” The Jewish week is a unit of cultural time pulsating in accordance with a
certain beat, or impulsion. This a deceptively simple yet profound observation, for
this rhythm of temporal pulsing is critical to the forming of numerous units or durations of time in Jewish culture. This pulsing may be described as an impulsing from
lower to higher, from ordinary to extraordinary. The rhythm is climactic, yet more
so, for this impulsing implies movement from the less valued to the highly valued.
For reasons not dwelt on here, this selfsame impulsing also may be found within the
dynamic moving from fragmenting to integrating, to unity and holism. Time moving
with Jewish culture is, generally, speaking, that of directional emerging and that of
collective becoming. In the distant past this climactic impulsing of time was divorced
in part from rhythms of nature, and therefore from ideas of the eternal character of
dynamics of “becoming.” As Zerubavel (1985: 11) notes of the Jewish week, it had to
be based on an “entirely artificial mathematical rhythm.”
Within this macro-folding of time, time-moving was imbued with the moral valuation of the human condition (Kauffman 1972: 73). Moving time that is a cultural becoming is then in the first instance (and in the last) a moral problem. Time
is necessarily the moral ordering of existence. Put more emphatically, the dynamic
movement of impulsing and pulsating time enables the coming into existence of Jewish moral ordering, through different durations. Should one need reminding, in the
biblical myth of cosmogenesis the creation of time, the separation of light from darkThis open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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328 | moebius anthropology
ness, day from night (Genesis 1: 3–5), is almost isomorphic with the onset of cosmic
creation, while the entire creating movement is marked by consecutively numbered
days, climaxing on the seventh, which God blessed and made holy. As the medieval
philosopher Maimonides (1956: 171) commented, “Even time itself is among the
things created.” Whereupon he added (albeit for purposes of his own argument) that
the “true and essential condition” of time “is not to remain in the same state for two
consecutive moments.” In other words, time is moving continuously, always.
That time has a special status in Jewish thought is not in question. Heschel (1951:
8) writes that, “Judaism is a religion of time. The main themes of faith lie in the realm
of time.” The nineteenth-century Orthodox thinker Hirsch (1985: 41) stated that,
“The catechism of the Jew consists of his calendar.” Once time is created, everything
else (with the exception of the Creator) happens within and during continuous time.
Heschel (1951: 100) argues that, “it is within time that we are able to sense the
unity of all beings.” One can say that moving time holds everything together in the
Jewish phenomenal world. During (rather than in) the Judaic cosmos time never
falters, never loses its continuous coherence, integrity, unity, even as Jewish human
beings are falling, threatened, fragmenting.45 Impulsing and pulsing time lifts them
toward the potentiality of reintegration. Time never loses its rhythmic, impulsing
and pulsating movement from low to high. The existence of the cultural logic that
is this impulsing~pulsating rhythm enables moving time to become the template,
as it were, for the moral ordering of becoming, of progressing, one that enables the
forming of strivings for utopian perfection and for the unifying of people and place.
The eschatological visions of traditional Judaism (that are growing steadily in Jewish
Israel during the past fifty years, since the 1967 war and the occupation of Palestine),
of God intervening in time to end time, and so to begin an eternity of perfection,
point precisely to the essential integrity of the dynamic of moving time.
The rhythmic pulsing of time enables the forming of form that is climactic. It
does not index the content of this forming; for example, it does not refer to the ways
in which a messianic thrust takes form, nor to how the present-day forming of religious-political-territorial messianism in Israel compares with previous thrusts of the
messianic potential of Judaism. To understand such phenomena one need do analyses
of the social, the political, the economic, and so forth. Yet, in this respect, one can
say that in the above perspective time ends when it is no longer necessary—when its
dynamic of Becoming is completed and the impregnable boundary between God and
the Jewish human being is dissolved.46
The rhythm of pulsation—from low to high, from morally inferior to morally
superior —is evident through different durations of Jewish time, from the short to
the lengthy. The Jewish cosmos folds moving time within its own depths, shaping a
particular rhythmic relationship between different durational, calendrical units of
time moving. As noted below, these durations differ in scale, yet these durations are
self-similar to one another in the pulsing rhythm that organizes their moving times.
Thus the relationship between these different durations of time-moving appears to
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be fractal-like. Fractal form was conceptualized mathematically by Benoit Mandelbrot, yet has a multiplicity of parallels and resonances in the organizing of form in
the natural world.47 Fractal organization refers to recurring patterns of similarity and
difference on different planes or levels of scale (see Kreinath 2019, 2012). That is, regardless of their scale of organization, certain patterns maintain the same proportions
in their internal constitution.48
The fractal is holographic. All the information of the three-dimensional hologram is contained and is present in any of its (arbitrarily selected) parts. Cut any
piece arbitrarily from a visual hologram and this part contains the entire hologram.
So, too, with fractal organization. As in the hologram, information in the fractal is
distributed non-locally—the whole is in every part. A fractal contains all its information on any scale on which it is organizing or organized. Put otherwise, as in the
hologram, “information is embedded . . . so densely and recursively that everything
is connected simultaneously to everything else. Moreover, this information is actually
embedded within embedments (that are embedded within other embedments, and
so on)” (Handelman and Shulman 1997: 194; see Bohm 1981: 143–47). The fractal,
like the holograph, is characterized by ongoing self-similarity (Grossing 1993: 80).
In this regard consider moving time within the following durations of Jewish time.
Thus, the pulsing of the Jewish twenty-four hour “day”: in the phrasing of Genesis (I:
5), “And the evening and the morning were the first day.” The moving time of the Jewish day begins in darkness and emerges into light. Light rather than darkness implies
the value of morality. In a simple yet ever-ongoing way this night-day, as Hirsch (1985:
42) calls it, is no less the recapitulation of cosmogonic and existential movement.
Consider the pulsing of the Jewish week. It moves through six ordinary days to
peak at the extraordinary seventh, that Heschel calls “the climax of living,” and that
has its own superior character (Zerubavel 1985: 113). In the biblical text, at least,
“the Sabbath commemorates the creation” (Kaufmann 1972: 117); and, so, one may
surmise, again implicates that elementary momentum.
Consider the yearly pulsing of holidays like Purim, Passover, and Hannukah. Purim is preceded by a fast day that commemorates the period of trepidation and repentance when the lives of the Jews of Persia were under dire threat. On the eve of
the holiday the story of their salvation is read. The following day is one of celebration
and jubilation. Passover is preceded by a fast day that commemorates the time of
trial when God slew the firstborn of the Egyptians, whilst those of the Israelites
were spared. On the eve of the holiday the story of the exodus from Egypt is read.
Hannukah, too, is a sequence of trial and triumph. The pulsing of all the holidays
moves through the low of tribulation to the high of triumph. But the peak of these
occasions, like that of the Sabbath, is always celebrated during their eves, in darkness.
Again, in these instances darkness is eclipsed, turning into the heights of light and the
moral, collective good of the Jewish people.
Consider rhythms pulsing through longer durations. Every Sabbath service includes a reading from the Torah (the Pentateuch) that concludes with a reading called
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330 | moebius anthropology
haftarah (literally, “Conclusion”), usually from the books of the Prophets. Exegeses
tend to link the meanings of these sets of readings. Consider the rhythmic pulsing of
these Sabbath readings in Ashkenazic tradition, for six Sabbaths that fall in sequence
between the end of the Hebrew month of Shevat (February–March) and Passover
(March–April) plus one additional haftarah reading on the last day of Passover.49
Here this implicit rhythm is discussed in brief (texts and commentaries are available easily in Hertz 1938). The first of these Sabbaths is called Shekalim. The Torah
reading tells of the obligation of every Israelite to contribute a half-shekel toward
the upkeep of the Temple. This has been interpreted as an annual renewal of collective membership (Hirsch 1985: 323; Vainstein 1953: 139). The associated haftarah
tells of revolt against foreign idolaters, of the enemy within, and of their destruction
(Hertz 1938: 954). The second, called Zakhor (“remember”), precedes the holiday of
Purim. The Torah reading recalls the unprovoked and vicious attack of Amalek on the
Israelites, following the exodus from Egypt. The haftarah tells of Saul’s extermination
of the Amalekites. Both readings relate to the destruction of the enemy without.
Haman, the arch-enemy of the Jews of Persia who is destroyed at Purim, commonly
is assimilated as a descendant of Amalek.
The third of these Sabbaths is called Para (“heifer”). Its readings are on themes of
purification, bodily and moral, and of renewal of the nation from within, as preparation for the fruition of the desolate land (Hertz 1938: 961). The fourth is Hahodesh
(“the month”). Its Torah reading describes preparations for Passover, the holiday of
the exodus. The haftarah is part of a prophecy of the New Jerusalem, to arise when
exile is ended. The fifth, Shabbat Hagadol (The Great Sabbath), is the Sabbath prior
to Passover. The haftarah concludes with a vision of the coming of the Prophet Elijah,
in religious tradition the herald of redemption who would appear at Passover-time
(Hertz 1938: 967). The sixth of these Sabbaths occurs during Passover itself. Its
haftarah is Ezekiel’s great vision of the dry bones returning to life, of resurrection and
redemption: “I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves,
and bring you into the land of Israel” (Ezekiel 37: 12). The seventh reading is not on
the following Sabbath but on the last day of Passover, and continues the upward impulsing of time moving. This haftarah from Isaiah (Isaiah 11) contains the vision of
a perfected cosmos, one in which wolf and lamb, leopard and kid, and so forth, will
dwell together in harmony—a vision of peaceful, cosmic holism. This last haftarah
is also read during the special prayer service of Israeli Independence Day (Vainstein
1953: 159), and I will return to this detail.
Time-moving carries the sequence of these Sabbath texts plus one toward crescendo, one that includes the peaks of Purim and Passover. This sequence of impulsing begins with the corruption within, the expulsion of interior corruption, and
the renewal of collective identity. The impulsing continues through the collective
response to evil from without, and then through themes of purification and cleansing
from within. Time-moving then raises visions of the end of fragmentation and exile,
into the onset of reunification and perfection, climaxing during Passover, that itself
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is forming the primordial coalescence of the Israelites into a rudimentary collectivity
emerging through their collective deliverance from oppression.
Consider the duration of fifty days (seven weeks of seven days plus one; in other
words, the whole completion of this duration) called “Counting the Omer” (Sefirat
Ha’omer). This begins on Passover and moves until the holiday of Shavu’ot (Weeks),
identified with first fruits and often with the giving of the Torah by God to Moses on
Mount Sinai. During this period, time moves from Passover, the struggling for collective freedom, to Shavu’ot, the contractual surrendering to God and God’s laws by
the Israelite collectivity. Again through this duration time is moving toward climactic
impulsion. Consider the lengthiest of durations of Jewish time, the eschatological.
Whether conceived of as progressive (moving slowly toward completion, toward endtime redemption) or as apocalyptic (God intervening abruptly in human life to end
time) moving time is pulsating toward the climactic and utopic, toward the moral
unifying and perfecting of the Jewish cosmos.
So, what happened when Israeli Jews were given a choice as to what manner of
time-moving to adopt as their moving time? The founding of the State of Israel in
1948 is the case in point. Consider that the first Israeli government—orientated
toward socialism, secularism, and nationalism—chose to adopt officially the Hebrew
calendar with its significant holy days and holidays. In other words, Israel adopted the
religious calendar with its fractal-like impulsing of time outlined above. Even though
most of the populace organized their daily life in terms of the Gregorian calendar,
the durations of cosmic Jewish time, with its rhythm of time folded within, surfaced
continuously. The secular antidote to this (beginning even earlier, during the British
Mandate) was to secularize the contents of holiday observances and celebrations, yet
nonetheless to observe their occurrence on the dates of the religious calendar (Shavit
and Sitton 2004). This was done as if it were the now secular contents themselves of
time-moving that had the power to move persons rather than the pulsating rhythms
of time folded into the religious calendar.
Consider that the State also invented three new days of state commemoration
and celebration: Independence Day, Remembrance Day for the fallen soldiers, and
Holocaust Remembrance Day. These three Days were scheduled soon after the end
of Passover and were quickly arranged in the sequence of Holocaust Remembrance
Day, Remembrance Day, and Independence Day. These Days move from the lowest
depths of destruction that is the Holocaust, to the upward-moving fight for national
independence and freedom commemorated by Remembrance Day for the fallen, to
the heights of celebrating the founding and ongoing existence of the Jewish State,
that is Independence Day. The sequencing of the three Days immediately picked up
the impulsing, recursive, pulsating rhythm of cosmic Jewish time: moving from low
to high, from darkness into light (see Handelman and Katz 1998).
Consider that in 1948 the State organized a competition to choose the design
for the national emblem of Israel. A variety of designs were submitted, both secular
and traditional in their shaping and thematics. The winning design was that of the
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332 | moebius anthropology
seven-branched lampstand, the menorah, sculpted in relief and frozen for posterity
in 81 CE on the triumphal Arch of the Emperor Titus in Rome. The menorah was
one of the ritual implements that had stood in the Temple in Jerusalem, destroyed
by the Roman armies in 70 CE, and that was carted off to Rome. The choice was
understood to recuperate the ancient loss of Jewish sovereignty, returning the ancient symbol of independence to the newly founded Jewish state (Handelman and
Shamgar-Handelman 1990, 1993). Again that pulsating rhythm of time from low to
high that dominates the Jewish cosmic folding.
Consider that the two great all-out wars that Israel has fought since the 1948 War
were the war of 1967 and that of 1973. That of 1967 speedily came to be called the
Six-Day War, even though it had lasted seven days, and that of 1973 was termed
the Yom Kippur War since it began on the Jewish Day of Atonement (according to
the religious calendar). The Six-Day War immediately bore connotations of God’s
creation of cosmos: he labored for six days to create cosmos and rested on the holy
seventh. So, too, the Israeli Army fought three Arab states for six days and rested victoriously on the seventh, having also recaptured the Old City of Jerusalem and, most
significantly, the Western Wall, that sole remnant of the ancient Temple destroyed by
the armies of Titus; the remainder that quite quickly became the most holy relic of
the State (and of much of its Jewish population), tying together that ancient time of
fragmentation and the present-day of unifying victory (and all Jewish historical moments in-between). In messianic terms the ownership of the Wall brought the State
and Judaism, its official state religion, to the very verge of the Temple Mount (the
Muslim Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary) where the Temple destroyed by Titus’s armies had stood. That which is ensuing at that site since 1967 is a story in itself.
During the 1973 War, Israel sustained severe losses of life and armament in desperate battles before regaining the upper hand against the Egyptian and Syrian armies.
Not a few responses in Israel attributed Israel’s trials in this war to the overweening
pride of its leaders since the Six-Day War, and of their neglect of the ongoing training
of the armed forces and the upkeep of their equipment. In other words, Israel had to
struggle mightily to overcome its own weaknesses and the strengths of its enemies in
order to move from the darkness of near defeat into the light of victory and salvation.
These wars (and other actions) easily assimilate into the Jewish rhythmic pulsating
of time.
Consider that two months after the Six-Day War a new social movement arose,
called the Greater Land of Israel. Its founding signatories, primarily secular and primarily from the center-left of the political spectrum, were among the most senior
and respected Jewish intelligentsia in the country. They included the revered poet
and guru, Natan Alterman, and the author, S. Y. Agnon, who had been awarded the
Nobel Prize for literature. It is worth quoting here from the document (in Hebrew)
that they signed: “The Land of Israel is now in the hands of the Jewish people. Just
as we are not permitted to relinquish the State of Israel, so we are commanded to
maintain what we have received from its hands: the Land of Israel. We are hereby
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loyally committed to the wholeness of our land, with respect both to the people’s past
and to its future, and no government in Israel is entitled to relinquish this wholeness”
[my emphases].50
I am not saying that the simple temporal, fractal-like pulsating rhythm I am describing is causal. Not at all. Or, more accurately, I don’t know. I am not relating to
the “contents” of cultural classifications and social actions, nor to their contextual
meanings, nor to their consequences grounded in the social, the geopolitical, and so
forth. Nor am I saying that there is some distinction here between “ritual time” and
mundane time, as Bloch (1974) argued long ago in criticizing Geertz’s conception
of Balinese time as cyclical. Please forgive my repetition. I must emphasize this: I
am saying that within the macro-folding that is Jewish creation and its existing that
is ongoing, time-moving often is organized through a pulsating rhythm that moves
from low to high, from darkness to light; that this is integral to Jewish cosmology;
that this is a common-sensical understanding within Jewish culture; that this organizes numerous occurrences of social existence; and that this naturalness is used both
without and with intention.
Time here is dynamic because at the very least it enables movement, because
it was shaped to move as it does, and because it has fractal-like qualities of selfsimilarity of scale on a host of planes and levels, micro and macro. Zionism carried
this macro-folding of Jewish time to Palestine, first within the state-in-the-making
during the British Mandate and then within the Jewish state, despite claims of secularization, socialism, liberalism, modernization, and, too, of course, of the creation
of the post-Holocaust new Jewish person, heroic, strong, and unbending. The rhythmic impulsing and pulsating of Jewish time with its fractal-like self-similarity moves
powerfully within and through the messianic wave that has been building in Israel
at least since the 1967 War, a wave whose future heights and duration no one can
predict, nor can one know what will be left after it breaks. The State of Israel is caught
(perhaps trapped) within Jewish cosmic time. Can it break free of this?
Notes
1. However “unfolding” was used there more in a micro-historical sense, of occurrences following
one another.
2. For a powerful critique of methodological individualism, see Evens (1977).
3. In what I call events of modeling (Handelman 1990) or rituals of transformation we can say
something like, the ritual creates the persons who will produce the ritual as that ritual that
created them during n number of generations.
4. A path-breaking yet quite ignored exception was John M. (Jack) Roberts’s (1951) monograph
on cultural variation in three closely-related Navaho households. Roberts (1951: 3) argued
that anthropologists had neglected the study of small groups “as discrete cultural entities lying
between the individual and the larger groups . . .” While small groups were not neglected, they
nonetheless “have been treated as parts of larger entities and their cultures as segments or divisions of larger group-ordered cultures” (1951: 4). Roberts’s radical hypothesis was that “every
small group, like groups of other sizes, defines an independent and unique culture” (1951:
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334 | moebius anthropology
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
3). Thus, small groups “sometimes constitute entities which cannot be fully encompassed by
some larger group-ordered culture . . .” (1951: 5). Moreover, in a later essay Roberts (1964)
recognized the small-group culture as a medium of information-processing, one with greater
capacity to do this than the small-group as such. Tom McFeat (1974) took up and developed
Roberts’s ideas in an intriguing and creative book that in turn anthropologists ignored. See also
Handelman (1989).
The neologism of a-linear gives to movement a very different potentiality than does the nonlinear. Nonlinearity has linearity as its ground. The nonlinear is not-linear yet includes the referent
of the linear. The nonlinear departs from the linear. However the Greek prefix /a-/ liberates
movement from linearity. A-linearity locates movement (and time) away from and unconnected
to linearity and nonlinearity, without any referent to the linear and without any commitment to
an either-or arrangement of linearity or nonlinearity. See Gebser (1984: 2) for the significance
of using the Greek prefix /a-/.
This also opens to the logic of abduction of C. S. Peirce through which surprise generates questioning and analysis, rather than the prediction of induction or the reductionism of deduction.
The logic of abduction in fact is critical in anthropological fieldwork though hardly recognized
by anthropologists even as they use it in common-sensical ways.
The sociologist, Keith Sawyer (2005: 104) argues that ideas of emergence were widespread in
French nineteenth-century intellectual life. Durkheim made “emergence” central to his theorizing on the “social emergence” of social facts and collective representations from the interaction
of individuals, and that: “social structure then becomes autonomous and external to individuals
and exerts causal power over those individuals.” In other words, society emerges from individuals in concert but then becomes sui generis. Sawyer suggests that Durkheim’s place as a primary
theoretician of social emergence was obscured by the emphasis he placed on the reproduction of
society rather than on further social change. Though one should note that Durkheim’s concern
with social reproduction was likely related to his pondering on how the France of that period
could be held together through the creation of social solidarity.
Interestingly, the idea of the autopoietic moment is joined to the sui generis when linearity
(suddenly?) begins to curl into itself, toward folding and the beginning of self-organizing. It
is then, during emergence, that the interaction of individuals is becoming the intra-action of
folding.
Compare what I have said on my early thinking on the encounter in the preceding pages with
the following passage (Di Paolo 2009: 58), separated by some three decades from the latter:
“Even though normal social encounters, for instance conversations, may only last a few minutes, our point is that during that period they may organize themselves [as follows] . . . the
agents sustain the encounter, and the encounter itself influences the agents and invests them
with the role of interactors. The interaction process emerges as an entity when social encounters
acquire this operationally closed precarious organization. It constitutes a level of analysis not
reducible to individual behaviors.” The tenor of resemblance to that which I argued a generation
before is remarkable.
This is one reason why in anthropology the journal article has become more prevalent in citation recording and evaluation. Much less can be accomplished through the article when compared with the monograph. The latter tries much harder to embody the complexity and richness
of time, space, and person (see Handelman 2009). The length and character of the journal
article in practice almost automatically invokes and legitimates the premise of “all other things
being equal.”
The historian of science Michel Serres (2015) argues for example, that “solidity” is slow speed.
The philosopher, Cornelius Castoriades, influenced by Francisco Varela’s use of autopoiesis in
cell biology, re-introduced and radicalized Aristotle’s concept of physis (or phusis) as purposively
“pushing-toward-giving-itself-a-form.” See Adams (2008: 390; 2014).
For critiques of and support for the usefulness of autopoiesis in law see, for example, Zolo 1992;
Bankowski 1994; Paterson 1995.
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epilogue
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13. Fully supported by the Inuit households that the late Jean Briggs studied in the 1960s and
1970s. See Briggs (1970, 1998).
14. That might be worth thinking about, for example, in relation to Mircea Eliade’s (1964) myth of
the eternal return.
15. This thought builds on the philosopher Helmuth Plessner’s conception of “mediated immediateness,” in which the immediacy of human experience becomes mediated perception in order
to shape the world (Lerch 2014: 208). Also cited in Soeffner (1997).
16. So neither Peter Blau (1964), the most prominent proponent of exchange theory at the time,
nor Fredrik Barth (1981: 14–76), the innovator of transaction theory, related to the profound
formative confluence of the conjunction of curving, volume, depth, and time. This kind of
thinking was foreign to them, as it continues to be in anthropology and sociology. I am not discussing Gestalt Theory here though it is relevant to the stability of visual forms and, according
to Gandelman (1982), to Husserl’s phenomenology. However Gestalt Theory seems to say little
about the problematic of time in social forms.
17. Here is one example of responses at the time to these ideas. In 2004 I lectured on ritual in its
own right at the Institute for Indian Studies at the University of Heidelberg. When I began to
discuss the step of taking a “ritual” out of context in order to study the phenomenality of its
interior form the senior anthropologist at the Institute half stood up and loudly called out to
me, “You can’t do that!” My response was, “I’m doing it.”
18. Present-day state and other official orderings largely downgrade “ritual” to mirroring and representing social orders. Yet oft forgotten in relation to “ritual” is that these orderings use the most
powerful organ of making controlled change ever invented by human beings—bureaucratic
logic and the ongoing, routine, making and changing of taxonomic bureaucratic classification
(Handelman 1998: xxiv–xliii; this volume, Chapter Four). So it is not surprising that official
“rituals” are often as lacking in interior dynamics as they are. In thinking like this I can be
accused (once more) of implicit functionalism through lengthy durations. Yet to me this way
of thinking is more akin to that of Michel Serres’s use of the logic of “crumpled time,” of times
that—chronologically, linearly—are distant from one another yet that bring together, even join
together, a logic in each that is akin to the other (See Serres’s thinking on turbulence in Lucretius and in modern physics). In its crumpling, time is nonlinear or, more accurately, a-linear,
such that there is no linear baseline to time, as the nonlinear (the “not-linear”) implies. Then,
why necessarily separate points of time chronologically distant from one another when the logic
of what happens during each of these points in time is akin to that of the other? To what extent
is such separation a product of an ontology that demands linearity in thinking, planning, and
intellectualizing in order to conceal recursivity?
19. For example, look at the dynamism of curving and folding in paintings (Elasticity [1922], The
Dynamism of a Football Player [1913], and The Dynamism of a Cyclist) by the Italian futurist,
Umberto Boccioni.
20. Among those who have responded to the idea that it is worthwhile studying ritual in its own
right are Clark-Deces (2007: 11–12), Espirito Santo (2016), and Shapiro (2015).
21. The mathematician, George Spencer Brown (1969), called this self-intersection, re-entry. His
calculus shows how logical form emerges from the making of distinctions—how space comes
into existence from nothing (Robertson 1999). In doing so he discovered that, contrary to his
original intention to have space emerge only from space, his calculus could not continue indefinitely to develop space synchronically. In a sense the calculus demanded that form exit itself
and re-enter itself in order to enable the calculus to make its creation of form just that—whole.
Form, in order to become form, had to become self-referential. This is what the re-entry of
form did in re-entering itself and thereby necessarily referring to itself. Yet, what is especially
interesting here is that to have form make itself self-referential Spencer Brown had to introduce
what he called “time” in order to deal with re-entry—of going outside in order to return inside.
This operation could not be performed without duration, that is, time. As Schiltz (2007: 27)
put this: “The reader must realize that time has thus been created as a consequence of a type of
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336 | moebius anthropology
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
space, namely space in which form can relate to itself [through self-intersection], and, as such,
change . . . .” But here in my terms something no less intriguing occurred. By making time critical to the creation of form Spencer Brown had to take into account just what it is that time does.
Time moves. As form durationally re-enters itself time continues to move forward, and therefore form, creating itself through its re-entering, can never catch up with itself, and is always out
of sync with itself (see Schiltz 2007: 22). Form therefore can never be whole; holism is always just
out of reach. Furthermore, again in my terms, if the re-entry of form into itself is understand
as the repetition of form in a Deleuzian sense then repetition necessarily generates difference.
Form therefore is ontogenetic (i.e., morphogenetic) rather than ontological (see Schiltz and
Verschraegen 2002). For a similar argument on why holistic theories in physics—theories of
everything (theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory)—ultimately fail, see Rosen
2008.
The ethnographer was Donald Roy, an industrial sociologist whose orientation derived from
the Chicago School of Sociology (see Roy 1959–60). In Models and Mirrors (Handelman 1998:
104–12) I offered an earlier interpretation, one related to dialectics, though I am more satisfied
with my present-day understanding.
One might argue that the idea of framing is no less effective than that of folding and that
framing has been an accepted term for many years. Yet note that “frame” is a linear idea that
promotes the spatial and its interior shallowness, while “fold” accentuates depth, the temporal,
and interior complexity.
This is similar to phenomena that Max Gluckman (1963) called “rituals of rebellion,” in which
recurrent, ritualized opposition to the social order is contained by that order, thereby demonstrated the strength and resilience of that order that then encourages further “rituals” of opposition to the social order. Myron Aronoff (2015) used Gluckman’s idea to analyze the operations
of the Central Committee of the Mapai (Labor) party in Israel during the 1970s.
Marilyn Strathern (1988) took the “dividual” to Melanesia, arguing that Melanesian persons are
themselves composites of the substances and qualities of other persons so that in a sense each
person contains a multiplicity of persons and is able to shift through aspects of these others as
parts of oneself. The Melanesian person, she argues, is partible. In this regard, see the distinction
drawn by Busby (1997) between partible and permeable personhood.
So, too, with regard to certain aspects of gender in South India. In Western perception categories of gender are monothetic, and as a new gender is “officially” recognized it is added to the
string of others, each an encapsulated difference, hence the string of LGBTQ that is actually
L+G+B+T+Q. South Indian gender may be more similar to a continuum or, more accurately, to
the skins of an onion that overlap with one another more and more in deeper and deeper depth
(see Handelman 2014: 109–10).
I must emphasize that the idea of folding is not the recourse to a more abstract metalevel understanding of the forming of form. Folding is not encompassment. Encompassment refers to
a holding together from their exteriors of all the elements that hold together. The logics of this
kind of assemblage are those of some kinds of forcefulness that tries to prevent the elements of
the assemblage from falling apart or escaping. Encompassment is a top-down idea that dictates
the organization of motion and movement. Folding is closer to a bottom-up idea, describing
the emergence and self-organization of assemblages through their own motion and movement.
Folding resonates in some ways with a qualitative use of the construct of the Klein Bottle with
its self-intersecting involution that, according to Steven Rose in one of his works, is time as the
fourth dimension; in other words, is the duration that necessarily enables movement through,
within, and outside the Bottle. Of course the distinction between encompassment and folding
may well be fuzzy, perhaps with shifts back-and-forth, in and out. This does not obviate the significance of the distinction; indeed folding and encompassment may grow out of one another,
and then the conditions for the formation of each become critical.
What I deny is the simplistic ease with which we reach for higher-order metalevel concepts
and arguments in order to enable order that then, again too easily, becomes the baseline for
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epilogue
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
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thinking on stability and change. I am in full agreement with the philosopher of science,
Isabelle Stengers (2008: 107), when she argues about the problematic way “in which we accept the domination of abstractions; that is, the way in which we consent to forget or neglect
what we are aware of when it cannot be formulated in a clear, self-contained way.” The macro
does not necessarily encompass and organize the micro. Phenomenal forms on their ways to
folding self-intersection (to whatever degrees) have their own lives that thread through the
lives of their participants. In order to perceive this we must avoid the condition of explanation in which, as the historian Siegfried Kracauer (1969: 126) commented, events (and social
phenomena) arrive at macro altitudes in a “damaged state.” Kracauer (1969: 130) accurately
and wisely summarizes the problem of metalevel explanation in noting that, “The belief that
the widening of the range of intelligibility involves an increase of significance is one of the
basic tenets of Western thought. Throughout the history of philosophy it has been held that
the highest principle, the highest abstractions, not only define all the principles they formally
encompass but also contain the essences of all that exists in the lower depths. They are imagined as the ‘highest things’ in terms of both generality and substance” [italics in original]. As I
(Handelman 2006b: 112) commented elsewhere, “The history of field-research anthropology
in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century may be understood as an unresolved struggle
with this premise [of Kracauer’s].”
Another example of an autopoietic moment is what in Jewish Israel is called “crystallization”
(gibush), the sudden formation of group-ness, of folded-ness, within a collection of loosely
connected or disparate individuals (see Handelman 2007b: 132–34). See also the invention of
an (unspoken) game, the Donkey Game, in one of the workshops I studied (Handelman 1990:
86–101).
Physics had long discounted time as a dynamic in the workings of the cosmos. As Stengers
(1977: 40.1) states: “to affirm that time is nothing else than the geometrical parameter [i.e., a
fourth dimension] that allows calculation from the exterior, and as such, negates the becoming
of all natural beings, has been almost a constant of the tradition of physics for the last three
centuries . . . . In our time it is Einstein who embodies with the greatest force the ambition of
eliminating time,” that was powerfully in evidence in his 1922 debate with Bergson during
which Einstein dismissed the “[subjective] time of philosophers” as “incompetent” (ibid.). Yet
according to Canales (2015: 346) later in life Einstein “admitted that he did not think that the
division between the subjective and objective could be established once and for all, or even that
between physics and metaphysics.”
Interestingly, the historian, Kofi Campbell, in a blog post in 2008, wrote, “I was rereading
some of the writings of Albert Einstein, and one sentence in particular struck me again: ‘The
only reason for time is so everything doesn’t happen at once.’” This phrasing, here attributed
to Einstein, is simply a paraphrase of Bergson’s, “Time is what hinders everything from being
given at once” (Bergson 1992: 93). Regrettably, Campbell does not give a reference for his
reading, and apparently the other historian contributing to the blog did not ask him for one. I
emailed Campbell at the University of Waterloo (4 April 2018) asking if perhaps he still had the
reference even though a decade had passed but received no reply. Campbell’s post was cited in
Eileen Joy, “Signaling to Each Other From Inscrutable Depths: A Response to Gabrielle Spiegel’s ‘“Getting Medieval”: History and the Torture Memos’” (http://www.inthemedievalmiddle
.com/2009/03/signaling-to-each-other-from.html; accessed 5 February 2017).
Thus Grosz (1999a: 4): “each [of these thinkers] in his own way affirms time as an open-ended
and fundamentally active force—a materializing if not material—force whose movements and
operations have an inherent element of surprise, unpredictability, or newness . . . and chance . . .
is of the essence of a time that is not regulated by causality and determination but unfolds with
its own rhythms and logic, its own enigmas and impetus.” See also Grosz (1999b: 28).
Later on, Einstein was convinced the universe had four dimensions, and still later on he wondered about this. See note 29.
See note 4 in Simeonov 2015 for the translation.
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338 | moebius anthropology
33. Michel Serres’s (1998: 81–122) exposition of “the birth of time” gives to time something of
the qualities of the a-linear. Serres suggests that, in relation to space, time can shift to become
less spatial (and closer to pure time in its own right) or more spatial, enabling a multiplicity of
relationships between forms and time.
34. Bateson (1972) argued this through his theory of schismogenesis. See the modifications of
Simonse (n.d.) and Thomassen (2010).
35. By using the neologism, own-ness, I do not have to assume the existence of self in relation to reflexivity. I assume instead that an organism of any variety has its own “own-ness,” whatever this is
that holds the organism together as a unit or units, without assuming that it necessarily has a self.
36. Organic matter, even at the molecular level (see Schweber 2016: 130–31; Torday 2018: 5) may
be said to possess memory and hence to process information. This suggests that in-turning is
no less the organic referencing itself through information-processing. In evolutionary terms, according to the cell biologist, J. S. Torday, such memory is genetic and, importantly, epigenetic,
the cellular organism learning through time from its changing environments and passing this
information from generation to generation. See also the discussions on the Neuroskeptic Blog
(“Slug Life: About that Injectable Memory Study,” <http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neu
roskeptic/2018/05/18/epic-snail-about-that-injectable-memory-study/#more-9517> accessed
4 June 2018) regarding experiments to transfer a component of memory from one sea slug
to another. As Landecker and Panofsky (2013: 339) say, “With epigenetics, the formerly immutable genome is acquiring a life span.” In my terms, life span is durational and the organism
is a time-form contending with reproduction and change through the organism’s in-turning,
into itself. For a wise, cautionary note on epigenetics, society, and culture, see Lock (2015).
37. Once the movement of time is factored in, even the potentialities of Deleuzian virtuality (see
Handelman 2013) cannot enable organic time to catch up with physical time.
38. I saw this first-hand and up close. At the time I was in Manchester and Gluckman was my PhD
supervisor.
39. As Crawford (2007: 11) points out, “Gluckman’s material example of structural duration was
a chair, in which the molecules are always moving but the structure . . . remains the same. This
is perhaps more telling than Gluckman realized. The significant distinction is not between
‘the’ structure of the chair and the constant movement of the many particles within it, but the
multiple structures involved in a chair and their corresponding multiple timeframes . . . . Max
Gluckman’s chair contains a radical plurality of temporalities . . . The chair-in-itself is a sort of
membrane, or what some have termed a ‘moment,’ where (when!?) a set of temporal processes
of very different periodicities come together.”
40. Thus the process philosopher, G. H. Mead, used a version of this kind of reflexivity to discuss
the emergence and functioning of selfhood through taking the role of the other.
41. Without speaking of selfhood, self-identity may be embedded in a variety of organic forms.
Some, like the body and flesh more generally, are clearly sentient in their own, active ways that
are undoubtedly sensually cognitive. For example, the reactions of immune responses to the
presence of foreign bodies that are felt as threatening to the organism, and the mistakes of immune responses in recognizing the surface disguises that some of these foreign bodies may take
on, all depend on recognizing difference from the common identity that characterizes cellular
membership in the organism (cf. Tauber 1997, Wilce 2003, Napier 2003).
42. Perhaps time, in opening to the potentiality of multiplicity, moves toward what Michel Serres
called “crumpled time,” a heterogeneous, polymorphic sense of time through which moments
separated chronologically in linear time come into contact with one another because both use
the same logic of thought and affect. Therefore these moments or events should not be thought
of as separated by the duration between present and past, however distant. (For that matter,
these moments could be thought of as existing on parallel time-lines in an indeterminate universe). Serres’s most well-known example is the resonance (one can say the time-resonance)
between the thinking on turbulence of the Roman, Epicurean poet, Lucretius (in his De Rerum
Natura) and the twentieth-century thinking of physicists).
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| 339
43. See Gilles Deleuze speaking with Richard Pinhas, “On Music,” 03/05/1977, translated by Timothy S. Murphy, in Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze <www.webdeleuze.com>.
44. Much of this discussion is taken from Handelman and Katz (1998), though my understanding
of this ontology today is radically different in certain respects from that previous version.
45. By contrast, space is alienated (by expulsion), and fragmented (by destruction); while desired
space is often at best the promise of time: elsewhen, and attainable only through the coherent
continuity and integrity of time.
46. Elsewhere (Handelman and Lindquist 2011) I have argued that the Jewish God holds together
the cosmos of His creation from its outside rather than from its inside. The existence of God
does not depend upon the survival of His cosmos (unlike, for example the South Indian cosmos of the deity, Shiva, whose very survival depends upon his cosmos holding itself together
from its inside [Handelman and Shulman 2004]). One can say that the existence of His cosmos depends upon the capacity of Jews to perfect themselves morally in accordance with God’s
instructions through actions whose primary rhythm and pulsation is that of time moving from
low to high; and that every striving for such moral perfection throughout Jewish history has
failed, yet the rhythm of striving for moral perfection begins all over again. At times I think
that the Jewish God placed his standards at such a height that Jews could only fail in their
strivings to reach them, thereby ensuring that the rhythm and pulsation would begin over
again.
47. Mandelbrot’s geometry of the fractal refers to structures that in terms of classical mathematics
of Euclid and Newton were perceived as pathological: “By definition, fractal objects have fractal
dimension. According to Mandelbrot, they are broken, irregular, fragmented, grainy, ramified,
strange, tangled, wrinkled. These wrinkled structures may extend over space, over time, or over
both: fractal space-time patterns” (Abraham 1993: 53). Time, as discussed in this chapter, is
neither objective nor subjective. Nor is time a structure that extends over time. Rather, time is
moving and folding within form, enabling or aiding form to move through time within itself
and through time exterior to itself. Thus I am saying that the organizing of Jewish cosmic time,
its self-similar pulsation on different scales, is fractal-like in this respect.
48. The idea of the fractal was introduced into anthropology by Roy Wagner in the first instance to
discuss Marilyn Strathern’s “concept of the person who is neither singular nor plural” (Wagner
1991: 162), though Wagner demonstrates the relevance of its organization to a number of New
Guinea cultural orderings.
49. The first four Sabbaths of this sequence are explicitly accorded a special status in traditional
Judaism. Their temporal rhythm is accentuated if one adds to this sequencing the readings from
Prophets of the two subsequent Sabbaths.
50. Meron Rapaport, “One Day, Two Declarations,” Haaretz (English edition), 7 June 2007.
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Index
abduction, logic of, 40–58, 299, 334n6.
See also mindful feeling
aesthetics: aesthetic feel of practice, 127–
129, 271–272, 283–285; of the event of
presentation, 129–131; of experience,
128; of mundane living, 127–129,
145n2, 272, 283; of performance, 130–
131, 141, 145n2; of power, 283–285.
See also bureaucratic aesthetics
autopoiesis (self-making), 68–69, 128,
187n3, 308, 334n11, 337n28
Axial Age. See First Great Rupture of
Cosmos
banana time, 301–304. See also
curving; folding; forming of form;
self-organization
Bar-On Cohen, Einat, 307, 314
Barth, Fredrik, 318, 335n16
Bateson, Gregory, 44, 58n2, 69, 71, 90n18,
151–168, 172–187; schismogenesis,
58n2, 18; “A Theory of Play and
Fantasy” (publication), 153. See also play,
and fantasy theory; recursiveness
Beck, Ulrich, 233–234
Bentham, Jeremy. See Panopticon
Bergson, Henri, 128, 272, 312, 313–314
Black, Donald, 217
border, between interior and environment,
41, 80, 82–84, 111–112. See also
Luhmann, Niklas
Borges, Jorge Luis, Borges and I
(publication), 243–244, 314. See also
curving
boundary: between humans and the divine,
10, 48, 194–195; between inside and
outside, 171, 177–179 (see also framing,
theory of; Kreinath, Jens); between play
and not-play, 151–158, 160 (see also play,
theory of; Bateson, Gregory). See also
border
bureaucratic aesthetics: of the Israeli State,
126–146, 269–272, 283–285; of legal
system, 110, 145, 285 (see also King,
Michael); of power, 283–285; of ritual,
126–146; of temporality, 137–138
bureaucratic logic, 9, 40–58, 93–120,
126–146; of the Israeli State, 9, 49–52,
54–58, 110–116, 119nn18–19, 120n24,
126–146; of legal system (system of
capture), 110, 145; of power, 101–103,
118n11, 142 (see also Panopticon); of
ritual, 53–58, 126–146; of temporality,
138. See also lineal classification; Weber,
Max
Calatrava Pylon-Parabola, 272–279. See also
Impenetrable Block; Mall-Wall
Calvin and Hobbes, 64–65
Cartesian divide, 12
chaos theory, 177
complexity (interior), theory of, 64–70,
84–86, 293–301, 303–304, 310. See also
self-organization
cosmology (also cosmos): ancient IndoEuropean, 165–166; filmic microcosmos of Mulholland Drive, 253–254,
259–260 (see also Mulholland Drive);
intra-grated (see intra-gration); of
Henry Rupert, 47–48, 53; of Hua-yen
buddhism, 193–194; Jewish, 327–333,
339n46; monotheistic (also monothetic),
10, 175–176; of play, 152–153, 158–165;
South Indian, 4–5, 158–163, 196–206,
305–306; Washo, 1, 29–30, 323–324;
Zionist, 9, 333
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index
curving (dynamic), 69–88, 89n13, 243,
244, 256–257, 262, 273–274, 297–298,
300–306, 316–317, 320–321. See also
Borges, Jorge Luis; Deleuze, Gilles;
dynamics, moebius; folding
Dancing Regiment, The, 76–78. See also
autopoiesis; curving; rite
Daniels, Valentine, 305, 319. See also fluidity
Deleuze, Gilles, 10, 44, 253–256, 260–
262, 292; cosmogenesis, 253–254, 264,
286n6 (see also Klee, Paul); fold, 71,
300 (see also folding); rhizome, 213–214,
223–225 (see also Guattari, Felix; rhizome
[dynamic]); state-form, 97, 108–113,
131–134, 223, 234, 236n18, 283–285
(see also bureaucratic logic; forming of
form; topology); territorialization (i.e.,
making place from space), 111–112,
326; Thousand Plateaus, A, 213–214
Devji, Faisal, 225, 228–232, 238n37
Dumont, Louis, 167n17, 192–194. See also
holism
Durkheim, Emile, 166n14; altruistic
suicide, egoistic suicide, 216, 226, 234
(see also self-exploding; self-sacrifice);
effervescence, 85, 208; emergence,
334n7 (see also emergence)
dynamics: as cosmic process, 203–206 (see
also Turner, Victor); filmic dynamics,
245–247; of folding place and space,
270–272, 278 (see also folding); interior
dynamics of ritual, 55, 66, 68, 74, 84–85
(see also ritual); interval, 260–264 (see
also liminality); moebius as alternative
dynamics of framing, 175–179 (see also
framing; moebius); moebius dynamics of
the forming of form, 244–245 (see also
forming of form); of rhizomic forming
and movement, 223–228 (see also
Deleuze, Gilles); theory of social, 2, 5,
8–11; time-full dynamics of movement
and form, 289–337 (see also time)
Eisenstein, Sergei, 260
emergence, 3–5, 181, 293–300, 309–310,
320, 334n7; of bureaucratic logic, 42,
| 347
94, 105, 111 (see also bureaucratic logic;
Foucault, Michel); of difference, 314;
of monotheisms, 192, 194–195 (see also
First Great Rupture of Cosmos); of play,
164, 167n19; of boundaries, 223–224
(see also boundary); of self-organization,
274, 307–308 (see also autopoiesis). See
also Durkheim, Emile
Engler, Steven, 179, 184–185. See also
Gardiner, Mark
entropy, 163, 310; as destruction of
cosmos, 205 (see also cosmology, South
Indian); and negentropy, 314, 317,
320–323
ethnography, 4, 43–44
First Great Rupture of Cosmos, 192,
194–195. See also Lindquist, Galina
fluidity, in South Indian cosmology, 4–5,
160–162, 166n10, 196–200, 203–206
folding, 10–11; fold, 71, 300–301 (see also
Deleuze, Gilles); folding and enfolding
as vector of control, 269–286; moebius
dynamics as, 244–245, 253–254, 262;
in monothetic classification, 95 (see also
lineal classification); in ritual, 72–73,
77–84 (see also Turner, Victor); as selforganization, 301–309, 336n27 (see also
self-organizing); of temporal movement,
309–320, 322, 326, 327, 331–333 (see
also time)
forming of form: bureaucratic aesthetics of,
126–146 (see also aesthetics; framing);
through bureaucratic logic, 93–120 (see
also lineal classification; state-form);
interior and exterior forming of cosmos,
191–208 (see also cosmology, South
Indian; First Great Rupture of Cosmos);
logic of the, 1–13; moebius qualities and
dynamics of, 171–187, 243–266 (see
also Bateson, Gregory; moebius; ritual);
through play, paradox of, 151–168
(see also Bateson, Gregory; boundary
between play and not-play; play, theory
of ); through ritual, 63–90 (see also
curving; folding); through self-exploding,
213–238 (see also rhizomic organization;
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348 | index
terrorism); through the state, 269–286
(see also aesthetics; folding; vector)
Foucault, Michel, 93, 97–101, 103–108;
The Order of Things, 93, 97. See also
bureaucratic logic; lineal classification
fractal (dynamics), 329, 339nn47–48; in
naven ritual, 177, 179–181, 182–183
(see also naven). See also Wagner, Roy
framing: paradox of framing play, 154–160
(see also play, and fantasy theory); theory
of, 9, 141–142, 151–152, 171–187, 311,
336n22. See also Bateson, Gregory
Furez, 78–85. See also recursiveness; border;
folding, fold; rite
Gardiner, Mark, 179, 184–185. See also
Engler, Steven
Geertz, Clifford, 64–65
Gemeinschaft (community), 103–106. See
also holism
gestalt (coherent entity), 129, 283–284.
See also Polanyi, Michael
Gluckman, Max: on ritual as social
relations, 88, 187n9, 336n24; on
structural duration, 317–320
Goffman, Erving, on encounter, 50, 70,
89n11, 165n1, 184, 292
Guattari, Felix, Thousand Plateaus, A,
213–214. See also Deleuze, Gilles
Handelman, Don, 1–13, 47–58;
“Administrative Frameworks and Clients”
(special issue of Social Analysis, with Jeff
Collmann), 93; God Inside Out, 152
(see also Shulman, David); Models and
Mirrors, 63–64, 93, 173, 186, 298–301;
Nationalism and the Israeli State, 93;
Ritual in Its Own Right (publication),
300 (see also Lindquist, Galina); Work
and Play Among the Aged, 290–294,
298–301
holism, 177, 192–203, 207n2. See also
Dumont, Louis
Holocaust, 116, 136–137, 141–143,
274–279; Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes
Remembrance Day (Israel), 9, 126–146,
331; memorial authority (see Yad
Vashem). See also time
hologram, 329. See also fractal
Horwitz, Jonathan (shaman), 1, 17–18
Houseman, Michael, 181–182, 187n9
Impenetrable Block, 281–283. See also
Calatrava Pylon-Parabola; Mall-Wall
inter-gration (i.e., exterior organization of
cosmos), 192–208
interval, 246, 260–264
intra-gration (i.e., interior organization of
cosmos), 9–10, 176–177, 192–208
Islam (also Muslim world), individuation
of, 218, 225–227, 228–229, 238n37.
See also Devji, Faisal; Mahmood, Saba;
rhizome
Israel (also Palestine), bureaucratic logic in:
the forming of pre-state Palestine, 93–94,
107, 109, 111–116; the memorialization
of the Holocaust, 119nn18–19,
126–146; mundane life, 9, 42, 49–58;
the topology of Jerusalem, 269–286. See
also aesthetics; bureaucratic aesthetics;
cosmology, Zionist; Deleuze, Gilles;
folding; forming of form; Holocaust;
Jerusalem; lineal classification; social
ordering; state-form
Kapferer, Bruce, 54, 88; Feast of the Sorcerer,
The, 179, 213; on Sinhalese Suniyama
exorcism, 68–69, 179, 226–227, 262.
See also emergence
Katz, Jack, 128–129
King, Michael, 56–57, 110–111, 145, 285,
296
Klee, Paul, 253, 264n1, 274. See also
Deleuze, Gilles
Kreinath, Jens, 177–181, 187n5
Leach, Edmund, 183–184
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 65
lila and maya, 158–163. See also boundary;
cosmology, South Indian; play, and
self-transformation; play, and top-down
cosmos
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index
liminality, as a time/space of curvature, 72,
261–262. See also curving; Turner, Victor
Lindquist, Galina, 13, 17, 176, 192, 242;
Ritual in Its Own Right (publication),
300 (see also Handelman, Don)
lineal classification (also linear classification,
lineal logic of classification, lineal
taxonomy, taxonomic classification),
9, 42, 52–58, 130; bureaucratic
classification, 53–56; military
classification, 131–134; monothetic
classification, 94–103, 110–111, 117n3.
See also forming of form
Luhmann, Niklas, 68, 70–71, 187n3. See
also border
Lynch, David. See Mulholland Drive
Mahmood, Saba, 228–229
Mall-Wall, 279–281. See also Calatrava
Pylon-Parabola; Impenetrable Block
Marie Antoinette (Maria Antonia) crossing
the Rhine, 74–76. See also curving; rite
Marriott, McKim, 180–181, 207n9, 305
Maturana, Humberto. See autopoiesis
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 291–292,
313–314
mindful feeling (also feeling-thinking), 5,
41, 43, 46, 50, 57; knowing and feeling,
paradox of, 1–2, 5–7, 11–12, 43; “Know
through your feelings, but know!,” 1, 12,
18 (see also Rupert, Henry Moses)
moebius: framing, 175, 177–179 (see
also framing); paradoxical surface of,
6–7, 178; rhizomic movement of, 10;
as self-entering form, 171, 176–177,
243–245, 262, 264n2 (see also folding;
recursiveness; self-organization)
Mulholland Drive, 242–266
myth, 65. See also Levi-Strauss, Claude;
Paiditalli
naven (Iatmul ritual), 90n18, 173, 177,
179–183; fractal wau in, 179–181;
Naven (book), 173. 293. See also
Bateson, Gregory
Neuman, Yair. See moebius, framing
| 349
ontology, 290, 322–323; temporal
ontologies (also time as ontological
movement), 311, 313, 327. See also time;
Prigogine, Ilya
organization, exterior logics of (also
hierarchical organization, symmetrical
organization, systemic organization). See
bureaucratic logic; lineal classification
organization, interior logics of (also selforganization), 63–64, 187n3, 304–305;
complexity and self-organization,
84–85, 89n14; as emergence, 294; as
folding, 298–301, 307–308, 336n27
(see also folding, fold); through moebius
dynamics, 244 (see also dynamics,
moebius); self-organization as ritual,
55, 58n7, 67–73, 74–84; of terrorism,
214–215, 219–225 (see also rhizome).
See also autopoiesis; curving; forming of
form; recursiveness
Paiditalli (the Golden Lady), 4–5, 196–
206. See also autopoiesis; cosmology,
South Indian; Durkheim, effervescence;
entropy; fluidity; intra-gration;
recursiveness; ritual
Panopticon, 100–101, 117–118n6
Peirce, C. S. See abduction, logic of
phenomena, 66–68; formation of
phenomenal worlds, 108; phenomenal
cosmos, 158–165 (see also play);
phenomenality of phenomena, 85–88;
phenomenology of time, 313, 318–319
(see also Prigogine, Ilya); phenomenon as
boundary, 177–179 (see also boundary;
moebius); self-organizing phenomenal
form, 70–73, 289–298, 299–301. See
also forming of form; ritual
physis (phusis, the internal drive), 70, 285,
296, 300, 334n11
play: and bottom-up cosmos, 163–165
(see also cosmology, monotheistic;
self-ordering); boundary between play
and not-play, paradox of, 153–160 (see
also boundary); and fantasy theory, 9,
152–153 (see also Bateson, Gregory); and
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350 | index
Indian cosmologies (see lila and maya);
and self-transformation, 158–163,
166n14, 167n16, 167n19, 167–168n21;
theory of, 151–168; and top-down
cosmos, 163–164
poetism, 40, 58
presentation, the event of, 129–131
Prigogine, Ilya: linear physical time
(contrast with curving organic time),
309–311, 313; “time as arrow,” 11
process: culture as processual, 296 (see also
Turner, Victor); play as, 151–168 (see
also Bateson, Gregory); social ordering as
processual, 318 (see also Barth, Fredrik;
Gluckman, Max). See also dynamics;
emergence; play, theory of
recursiveness (also recursivity), 42–44,
58n2, 206; in framing cosmos, 176,
187n3; in framing ritual, 70–72, 74–84,
174, 177–179; in the moebius dynamic,
244, 253–255 (see also dynamics,
moebius); phenomenal form (i.e.,
recursiveness of curvature), 300; recursive
time-space, 303, 307–308, 320. See also
Bateson, Gregory; Deleuze, Gilles
rhizome (dynamic), 10, 109; lines of flight
(i.e., rhizomic movement), 223–225;
rhizomic organization of terrorism,
213–215, 219–225, 233–234, 236n17,
237n23. See also Deleuze, Giles;
singularity
rite: rites de passage, 72 (see also liminality;
Turner, Victor; Van Gennep, Arnold);
self-closure of, 74–88, 90n18 (see also
folding; self-organization); study of, 65
(see also Black, Max)
ritual: and bureaucratic logic, 53–58,
126–146 (see also lineal classification);
and cosmic logic, 191–208; through
filmic dynamics, 245–248; and folding,
298–301; forms that form forms, 8;
framing ritual, 171–187 (see also selfclosure); in its own right, 8–9, 63–90,
335n17; moebius dynamics of, 244–245;
play-within-ritual, 51, 165n3, 167n16;
ritual plays, 262–264; and sacrifice,
228–233; as self-organization, 67–74, 81,
84–85, 86, 89n14; transformative ritual,
261–262 (see also process; Turner, Victor)
Rupert, Henry Moses (shaman), 1–2,
11–12, 17–38, 44–45, 47–48, 52–54,
88, 323–327. See also abduction, logic
of; mindful feeling
Russell, Bertrand: set theory, 184; theory of
logical types, 153, 175 (see also Bateson,
Gregory)
self-exploding (i.e., destruction of one’s
interior existential being-ness), 10,
213–238; as social act, 214 (see also selfsacrifice). See also rhizome (dynamic);
self-organization; terrorism
self-sacrifice (i.e., self-exploding as
altruistic), 214–215, 226–228; altruistic
suicide and egoistic suicide, 226 (see also
Durkheim, Emile); shaping the ritual
of, 228–234 (see also forming of form;
rhizomic organization)
shaman: ethic of healing, 26–35; spirit
helper, 23–27, 32–35, 36, 325–326;
Washo, 1–2, 17–38, 45, 88, 323–327
(see also Rupert, Henry Moses)
Shamgar-Handelman, Lea (also Lea
Shamgar), 13, 54, 57, 58n6, 316
Shulman, David, 18, 54, 166n13, 173;
God Inside Out, 152 (see also Handelman,
Don). See also cosmology, South Indian
Simmel, Georg, 129; on “social forms,” 7,
105
singularity, 254–256, 257–259, 262–264.
See also Deleuze, Gilles; rhizome
Siva, 117n3 152, 204–205. See also
cosmology, South Indian; Handelman
and Shulman, God Inside Out; hologram;
Wagner, Roy
social ordering, 41–44, 55–58, 63–66,
294–299, 305, 309, 317–318, 335n18.
See also folding; ritual organization
surprise, 40–48, 334n6. See also abduction,
logic of
terrorism, 10, 213–238; rhizomic
organization of (also rhizomic terrorism),
This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
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index
223–225, 233–234; terrorism in
modernity, 219. See also Black, Donald
time: bureaucratic aesthetics of, 133–134,
139–141; bureaucratic logic of, 113;
Jewish cultural time, 327–333; moebius
movement of, 257–259, 262–263;
perception of time as dimension, 11,
291–292, 295–298, 301–333; the
splitting of time, 255 (see also Deleuze,
Gilles). See also folding, fold; recursiveness
topology, 6, 69, 100; topological vector,
269–285 (see also folding; Israel; stateform); topology of homotopy, 183.
See also forming of form; moebius,
paradoxical surface of
Turner, Victor, 72, 187n9, 261, 295–296.
See also emergence; ritual, transformative
| 351
Van Gennep, Arnold, 72. See also ritual
Vishnu (also Krishna), 160–161, 182,
262–263
Wagner, Roy, 339n48. See also fractal
Washo (people), 18–19; healing ritual, 25,
37n3, 325–327. See also ritual
Weber, Max, 93, 101–102, 118n10. See also
bureaucratic logic
Wyschogrod, Edith, 102, 217
Yad Vashem, (Holocaust Memorial
Authority), 131–136, 138, 142, 146n11,
274–276
Zionist narrative, 9, 49, 107, 114–116. See
also cosmology, Zionist
This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
https://doi.org/10.3167/9781789208542. Not for resale.