Vasilina Orlova

9/28/2017

(Interactive) lecture to the undergraduate course Culture and Communication at UT-Austin

Anthropology and Poetry: Different Languages (Or Not)

The theme of the today’s lecture is Anthropology and Poetry: Different Languages (Or Not). Why
“or not?” What does it mean, “or not”? “Or not” means that at this point we know little about what is
language, what is anthropology, what is poetry, and what is the language of anthropology and poetry. But
I think we might agree that anthropology has its own language, and poetry has its own language. You
know what you’re doing some discipline, you have to learn the language of this discipline, and speak it. It
is quite a parallel process to speaking the jargon of the discipline. You know how you’re being asked do
not frame your inquiries in a jargony way, but make them as clear and transparent to scientists working
in other branches of our universal inquiry.

How different or close the languages are? It might be unexpected. Languages, I think we might
suggest, in all their differences, still describe the same reality. The Whorf and Sapir’s hypothesis suggests
that differently structured languages end up portraying reality differently, or even portray different types
of reality. It is explained sometimes not through what languages say, but what they do not; or through
what the structure of sentence, the words themselves, oblige you to disclose. For example, in the majority
of the European languages you could not say “I met my neighbor today” without disclosing the gender of
the said neighbor. Either in articles or in the ending of the word you will disclose, inadvertently, whether
you met she-neighbor or he-neighbor today.

And so let’s suggest that anthropology and poetry are both languages, the types of languages, the
regimes of expression and self-expression that allow us to operate and know the world, to change the
social reality, to study it, and to understand it, to work through it. I do believe that the intersections of
anthropology and poetry, which are many, remain the unthrodden field, with few pioneers venturing into.
Why indeed there is a department of enthnomusicology and no department of “ethnopoetry,” as the
linguist Anthony Webster suggested once in our conversation there could be? I told him that I would
object to the “ethno” part, and this is my qualms against ethnomusicology too: is it so much about ethnos
as it is about gender, or class, or style of music?

Nonetheless, why study “the rock-n-roll scene in Austin,” why is this a legitimate inquiry, and not
poetic scene in Austin, which is also incredibly rich, why is this not a scientific inquiry, not an inquiry of
anthropology today?1 Poetry today is in a lot of ways a performative art, but in addition to being

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There are pieces making different connections of anthropology and poetry. Maynard, Kent, and Melisa
Cahnmann-Taylor in "Anthropology at the edge of words: Where poetry and ethnography meet." Anthropology
and Humanism 35.1 (2010): 2-19 study the connection of ethnographic practices and poetry. Poets themselves,
they speak of “ethnographic poetry.” A short piece by Ryan, S. C. "Anthropology and Poetry." Current
Anthropology 51.6 (2010): 729-729, is about Gary Snyder, whom he calls “ethnopoet,” a writer combining both

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performative, it is also networked art, the art conducted with mediation of social media (tautology
intended).

Additionally, American discoursive regimes of poetry afford for prose to be read as poetry without
calling the words "poetry" or "prose" into question. As examples such poets might serve like Bukowski,
Ginsberg, Kerouac, and so on. There is a tradition of “documental” poetry, allowing for poems which are
almost read like newspaper articles in a newspaper of one person.

And on the other side, prose can be inherently poetic. For about two years now, I collect “poems
of famous anthropologists they were unaware they wrote.” It’s a violation of text—you meet a poetic
fragment in one of these treatises that anthropologists produce in great numbers, and break it into lines.
I did this violence to almost all fathers of modern anthropology: Malinowski, Boas, Geertz, et cetera
(https://vasilinaorlova.wordpress.com/2016/01/21/poems-by-famous-anthropologists-they-were-
unaware-they-wrote/). Consider example:

Bronislav Malinowski, I Watched Them

I watched them a long time

through binoculars

and waved my handkerchief–

I felt

I was taking leave of civilization.

I was fairly depressed, afraid

I might not feel equal to the task before me.

After lunch

I went out on deck.

anthropological training and literary aspirations in his word. (And in my opinion we may treat Kerouac as an
anthropologist of the American roads and space, Bukowski as an avid auto-ethnographer, and so on—depending
on which tools we would want to use. There’s also something to be said about Descola’s observation in The Spears
of Twilight about many anthropologists ending up becoming anthropologists while initially aspiring to be writers.
Dell Hymes in short commentary "Anthropology and poetry." Dialectical anthropology 11.2 (1986): 407-410;
among the examples of poetic texts that become a part of ethnography the author recalls recorded by Boas (and
very curiously translated) the unforgettable Kwakuitl song. Finally as early as 1984 there had been made a gesture
towards proclaiming a poetic turn in anthropology (Tyler, Stephen A. "The poetic turn in postmodern
anthropology: the poetry of Paul Friedrich." American Anthropologist 86.2 (1984): 328-336.), but if this turn is a
turn, something remains to be seen by way of the results, in changing of methodologies, methods of inquiries, and
subsequently findings. The postmodernism is already dead but poetry, contradictory to the expectations, is not,
and so seems to be anthropology.

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 (For those who already took an introductory course in cultural anthropology: Where is this from?)

These anthropologists are read splendidly in poetic form, imposed on them without their
permission or knowledge. It is an experiment that allows me to reread the texts of these anthropologists
from a new angle, searching not only for hidden meanings, but also for what is making the text worth
reading and rereading. And I start to suspect that what makes a good anthropological text from a bad, is
its literary mastery, its rhythm, and the beauty of style. And it might be one more step towards realization
that the anthropological text, an ethnography, is a genre, with its own laws, and it is inasmuch a literary
genre, as it is scientific. It took a long time for anthropologists and their readers to realize that we deal
with literature, and that the anthropologist is the author (Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The
Anthropologist as Author, 1988). Nonfiction is also a literature. Literature is not a bad word, it does not in
itself mean that we are not dealing in the very same text with philosophy, anthropology, sociology,
cultural geography, ethnomusicology, poetry, and so on.

There are anthropologists today, moreover, who use poetry among their methods. Professor
Shanya Cordis has graduated from our anthropology department this year, wrote a cycle of poems as a
part of her dissertation, titled “(Un)Settling Dispossession: Neoliberal Development, Gender Violence, and
Indigenous Struggles for Land in Guyana”; as she explained during her defense, for her poetry is a way to
work through bodily experiences received in the field. Therefore poetry might not only be a subject of
anthropological inquiry, as we saw in the beautiful book we read by Lila Abu-Lughod Veiled Sentiments:
Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, but it can also be, as Shanya Cordis attests, an anthropological
method. I contacted Dr Cordis before this lecture and she said, over the email, that in this part of her work
she works on “my conceptualization of the relationship between poetry, embodied praxis, subjectivity,
and rethinking the methodological toolkit we are presented with in our anthropological training.” (email
9/27/2017).

“Language is fossil poetry,” how many of you have heard this expression before?

Whom does it belong to?

That’s right, it belongs to the poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), and the context of this
statement is as follows: “Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite
masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their
secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.”

When, on the last lecture, the professor Keating gave you examples of many metaphors we’re
using in our everyday, mundane, ordinary life, she was precisely speaking of language as fossil poetry.
When we say “there is a chemistry between them,” or “there was no chemistry,” “there was no spark,”
we are not only using metaphors, but we are using poetic metaphors—the metaphors which are incredibly
charged, and have a special affective impact. We are surprised to read the Abu-Lughod account of the
Bedouin community where people start reciting poetry in social situation and it helps them to navigate
kinship structures, upholds and questions hierarchies, influences personal relationships and helps people
to make decisions, or explains their hidden motives, but if we had an alien among us, or an anthropologist,
they could have sketched in their evening journal, after the day of conversing with people: “The natives

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spontaneously recite enigmatic poetry, which is half lost in translation, thus, they say: there is a spark
between those two human beings. What does it mean? We must employ the works of our poets and
philologists to fully recognize their social structures, springing from that interesting use of the language.”
This is the work that the anthropology does: it makes the strange familiar, and familiar, strange.
Remember the Laura Bohannan’s piece “Shakespeare in the bush,” it’s a perfect illustration to this kind of
universality working through us, that is nonetheless dressed in a lot of very special particularities.

All these metaphors that we’re using do in fact have authors—these metaphors became clichés
precisely because they were so novel at some point; they spread wide because they happen to
encapsulate for us complex things within singular, highly economic, concise forms.

Poetry is deeply contextual. It relies on language and on performance-and poetry can be said to
be the highest form of speech act or language expression, since it employs all the registers of language
and requires knowledge of decoding the message, that is to say, poetry happens between the speakers of
the language, in shared spheres of meaning. In a way, poetry is like joke: you either get it or not, depending
on a way you speak the language, for there are multiple ways to speak the same language.

We will consider several ways of doing poetry accepted concurrently in the modern American
public sphere in several minutes, but first let’s refresh our knowledge of the Bedouin society’s use of
poetry. For a little bit of the context from the life of the author of the inquiry, Lila Abu-Lughod (and here’s
a picture of her) is a feminist scholar taking a pronounced political stance; one of her famous works is the
book Do Muslim Women Need Saving? arguing against the Western feminist and anti-feminist stances
alike. What can you say about the question “Do Muslim women need saving?”, would the answer that the
author supposes to spring to this question, be the a “yes” or “no”?

Here is a quote from Do Muslim Women Need Saving?:

“These words have haunting resonances for anyone who has studied colonial history, Many who
have worked on British colonialism in South Asia have noted the use of the woman question in colonial
policies where intervention into sati (the practice of widows immolating themselves on their husbands'
funeral pyres), child marriage, and other practices was used to justify rule, As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(1988) has cynically put it: white men saving brown women from brown men, The historical record is full
of similar cases, including in the Middle East, In Turn of the Century Egypt, what Leila Ahmed (1992) has
called "colonial feminism" was hard at work, This was a selective concern about the plight of Egyptian
women that focused on the veil as a sign of oppression but gave no support to women's education and
was professed loudly by the same Englishman, Lord Cromer, who opposed women's suffrage back home.”

The book Veiled Sentiments was first published in 1986. It is in print steadily, running multiple
editions. In it, Abu-Lughod revealed the affective function of poetry characteristic for the Awlad ‘Ali, the
feature that we might call unaccountability of whoever is engaged with poetic form. As long as the form
is poetic, as it is ghinnāwas that people express their feelings in, they are curiously exonerated from the
backlash they were bound to receive if they spoke about this in their everyday communications. The
speaker is not being held accountable for that they package in ghinnāwas.

When it comes to interpretation of poetry, when Abu-Lughod asked her interlocutors about
meaning of the poem, what did she hear in response? “When I asked what a poem meant, they either
simply repeated the words or described the type of situation that might elicit this poem.” (P. 27)

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 We learn that in Bedouin society, poetry is “a form of discourse well integrated into Bedouin social
life rather than an obscure art” (28); poems are spontaneously recited in different social situations; the
performance of poetry is gendered; men and women express different sentiments at different
appropriate situations; the sentiments expressed in poetry and nonpoetic utterances are vastly different;
the difference strikes her as something requiring explanation.

Why should we care, and why do we care, if there is a difference between what is said ordinarily
and in poetic form? Why is that something we find ourselves wondering about? “What is it about poetry
that allows it to be used to express sentiments contrary to those appropriate to the ideals of honor
without jeopardizing the reputation of those who recite it?” (35); She sees that these practices are deeply
embedded in the ideological structures of feeling in the society she observes, that there are “honor” and
“modesty” at play, and it is about “the politics of the discourses of sentiment” (35).

“How is the fact that individuals express such utterly different sentiments in poetic and in
nonpoetic discourse to be understood?” – Lila Abu-Lughod asks. “Why the Bedouins can express through
poetry the sentiments of weakness that violate the code of honor, why listeners apply a different set of
standards regarding conformity to the societal ideals to presentations in this medium, and what the
significance of having two contradictory discourses is?” (207)

Now the question would be, why is this surprising for a Western researcher? What is the attitude
to the speaker in the Western community, broadly understood? Do we expect the speaker to mean what
they say? Do we spring from the assumption that the author wanted to say something, and the author’s
meaning is finite, detectable, and knowable?

Remember Malinowski, who is a saint patron of this lecture, a guest ghost lecturer, as it were,
standing here next to me, invisibly? He lived in 1884-1942.

Whom did Bronislaw Malonowski studied and where? Remember?

(The Kula on the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia.)

In The Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the book written in 1922, he wrote: “Perhaps as we read
the account of these remote customs there may emerge a feeling of solidarity with the endeavours and
ambitions of these natives. Perhaps man's mentality will be revealed to us, and brought near, along some
lines which we never have followed before. Perhaps through realising human nature in a shape very
distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own. In this, and in this case only, we shall
be justified in feeling that it has been worth our while to understand these natives, their institutions and
customs, and that we have gathered some profit from the Kula.” (42)

The profit from the Kula. They are only interested to us because they can provide some insights
into how we function. This is a birth trauma of anthropology that we’re still not over. There is always “us”
studying “them,” but we try to question it, overcome it, queer it, we try to be native anthropologists, be
feminist anthropologists, to work on decolonizing our mind and soul and to stop othering practices, but
this trauma remains, it is not easily overcome. There are they and there are us.

So why do we care, if we do, and I hope we do, I mean I do, why do we read with interest about
the Bedouin use of poetry? Because the way you frame the question is no less interesting and telling than
the possible answer. Let me refresh in your memory my previous questions:

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 Now the question would be, why is this surprising for a Western researcher? What is the attitude
to the speaker in the Western community, broadly understood? Do we expect the speaker to mean what
they say? Do we spring from the assumption that the author wanted to say something, and the author’s
meaning is finite, detectable, and knowable?

You are in perfect positions, as insiders of this culture, to answer these questions. We do expect
the author to say what they mean and then to mean what they say, and we do expect her to be held
accountable for what they say. Do we expect consistency between what people say in their poetry and
what they say in everyday life? Apparently we do, or Abu-Lughod would not have her research question.

Note that Abu-Lughod concentrates on “performative poetry”; she makes a comparison with
American blues; some of the examples of performative poetry in the West merge music and spoken word
come to mind; rap artists; academic writers, like Billy Collins.

What do you think is performance? (Let’s give a definition and someone record it.)

3 poets: Billy Collins, Melissa Broder, Rupi Kaur

Billy Collins, Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. Video:
https://youtu.be/Vgnec1r9YuU

Melissa Broder: 531K followers on Twitter. Ok so trigger warning, people. Video:

Rupi Kaur: 1.6 million followers on Instagram. Trigger warning. A picture with a menstrual blood
stain.

The selection I made I made because they demonstrate the different ways of contemporary
writers engaging with different media; they broaden the definition of performance and performativity
(maybe); because the USA is obsessed with celebrities; and so am I.

Performativity: what is performativity?

John L. Austin’s term; How to Do Things With Words (book). Performative utterance is neither
false, nor true, because it changes the social reality as it is being uttered. Example: “I do” to the question
“Do you take this man for your husband?” during the marriage ceremony. The context of the utterance,
the settings, the rituals, make words into a social contract. Another example: "I name this ship the Queen
Elizabeth,” and so on.

Judith Butler in Gender Trouble and her other works used “performance” as a construction
module of her theory of gender, working against biological predetermination: "gender proves to be
performance—that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be. In this sense, gender is always a doing,
though not a doing by a subject who might be said to pre-exist the deed.” The gender might be said to be
performative, according to Butler.

To return to the “intended meaning” that the author packaged in the poem, do you recall, who
was the author of “the death of the author” concept?

In 1960s, Roland Barthes in his essay, written in 1967, “The Death of the Author,” spoke against
the idea that text has a “singe theological meaning (the “message” of the Author-God)”; and in 1969 in

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his lecture, “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault imagined a culture where "All discourses, whatever
their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop
in the anonymity of a murmur." (Foucault, 1984, 119). Rather than asking “who is author?” one should
ask questions like “whom does this discourse benefit?” etc.

Abu-Lughod studies the society of “impersonal” authorship, there is never a question who wrote
this or that poem, some of them belong to the existing tradition, and many are composed by those who
recite these poems. However, even in a recited poem, the meaning is appropriated and is supposed to
speak for the speaker, expressing the speaker’s sentiment. This allows the researcher to talk about the
vulnerability in poetry, as there are greater degrees of vulnerability afforded the speaker in poetry than
in everyday life. Still, there is a distance on a number of occasions. “When I asked at one point if a
particular poem was about herself, she laughed and said it was just a song.” (217)

“Ghinnāwas seem to have been the medium in which she could voice responses not culturally
appropriate for a young Bedouin woman.” (221)

(more quotes in my notebook if I need them)

Why indeed it happens, why this discrepancy exist, and why we want to reconcile those
discrepancies, explain, or even explain them away?

“One key to the puzzle of why individuals can express certain sentiments in one medium and not
in another is the social context in which the two discourses came into play.” (234).

It is important to whom things are cited. Women cite poems to women, and men to men, but not
to every woman or man, it is all regulated within kinship practice. We may say poetry is something like a
therapy in this situation. For individuals not to be trapped in their own feelings in the society where there
is upholding “deemphasis of, and even disdain for, emotional closeness between husband and wife” (223),
for instance, and a code requires individuals to demonstrate nonchalance, there is a legitimate way to
express oneself in poetry, spoken word, spontaneous domestic performance.

Now, is not this exactly how the performance functions in our culture as well?

Let us return to our definition of performance and see what linguists Bauman and Briggs have to
say about performance, what is it about? The following quote is from their article “Poetics and
Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life” (Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol.
19 (1990), pp. 59-88); they were advocating for performance studies to become a field contributing to
understanding how speech acts work:

“As many authors have stressed, performances are not simply artful uses of language that stand
apart both from day-to-day life and from larger questions of meaning, as a Kantian aesthetics would
suggest. Performance rather provides a frame that invites critical reflection on communicative processes.
A given performance is tied to a number of speech events that precede and succeed it (past performances,
readings of texts, negotiations, rehearsals, gossip, reports, critiques, challenges, subsequent
performances, and the like)” (61-62).

“Bauman (26) and Hymes (142) have suggested that audience evaluation of the communicative
competence of performers forms a crucial dimension of performance. Particularly in ritual and political

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discourse, this concern with form and function is often extended to assessments of how (and even if)
formal patterning becomes imbued with functional significance.” (66)

Thus performance works also only in certain contexts, with speakers making assessments as to
whether the performer is a confident, fitting speaker; there are multiple unspoken rules who can perform
what and where and how; those who do not understand or transgress these rules are punished; there is
even a space for transgression—for example, you cannot appear in the Emmys award wearing shorts, but
you still can do it by way of transgression, only it should be a special performance, special shorts and ways
of wearing them and so on (I fantasize here, I have no idea what you can wear to the Emmys or what you
can’t); what is allowed during the funeral is not appropriate at the wedding and vice versa; performance
is a special space and time and a number of movements which is not something that can happen during
the everyday life—I’ve been to performances and I am sure you to, of the kind where if the performer
would perform the very same thing in the ordinary life, they would end up in a madhouse. Performance,
let me repeat the Bauman and Briggs’ formula one more time, “rather provides a frame that invites critical
reflection on communicative processes.”