Course paper by Nina Banerjee
For the course "Contextualizing Context - Explorations in Invertive Anthropology"
Taught by Finn Sivert Nielsen
Institute of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Spring 2002
Theme given for course paper:
Compare the way "context" is used in three of the texts on the course reading list. Explore
the similarities and differences between the three perspectives, and suggest ways in which
they might complement and/or constrain each other…you should take as your point of
departure an empirical, contemporary event (anything from a chance meeting on the street
to a major political event)
It had been a long day at work and I had to travel from the outskirts of Copenhagen to the centre to get home. I was tired and hungry and had stopped for a hotdog. While I was standing in the street eating the hotdog an unknown man approached me. Below is the conversation that took place between us, written down to the best of my memory and translated from Danish to English:
Man: Are you allowed to do that?
Me: Allowed to do…?
Man: I thought you people were not allowed to eat that kind of thing.
Me: That kind of thing…?
Man: Yes, sausages. Pork meat.
Me: Oh…you must be thinking that I am a Muslim…?
Man: Yeah. Maybe you are just trying a sausage since you are young and you are living in
Denmark, after all.
Me: Well, ehmm…I am not a Muslim…
Man: I have been to many of your countries as a sailor. Where are you from?
Me: Well… I was born and brought up in Holbæk(1). My father is from India, though…
Man: India? That's nice, that's a nice country. And very good food. I like Indian food. Do you
like pork?
Me: Well… yes… I do like some kinds of pork meat. But, you see, Hindus, that's beef they
don't eat.
Man: It is good that you are eating it. More of you people should, since you are staying in
Denmark now - Oh, there's my bus. Bye-bye.
Several things could, I believe, be made of this event. Within the context of this brief paper and the given theme (see front page) I will look at just a few, through applying selected texts or lines of arguments from texts. The aspect of context use I will discuss is mainly shifting of figure-ground relationships in different analytics and how this affects what can be said about an event. The idea of figure-ground relationships comes from gestalt-theory as a metaphor for the organisation of perception and denotes that we only perceive parts of reality (the figure) as our momentary object of attention (cf.Tsur 2000). Agreeing with Tsur, that "figure-ground relationship is an important element of the way we organise reality in our awareness" I have found that focusing on what happens to the figure-ground relationships in different analytics brings out both the complexity of social phenomena and of analysing these.
Context 1: The Production of Denmark
In " The Production of Locality" (1995) Appadurai claims that where as much ethnography has taken the locality for granted as the ground for various kinds of rituals and other social actions, the locality can instead be seen as the figure. The rituals and social actions can thereby be re-interpreted as localising practices; they are producing and reproducing localities. Locality is in this discussion understood to be a complex phenomenological quality which is primarily relational and textual. To refer to the actually existing social forms "…in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized" (ibid:204) he uses the term neighbourhood. These neighbourhoods are contexts for social actions, but they also require context - other neighbourhoods or ethnoscapes - and in producing themselves they also produce context. Furthermore, Appadurai also claims that the existence of localising practices shows that societies "assume that localities are ephemeral" (ibid: 206)(2). Then he goes on to show how the context of production of locality is changing through the contemporary processes of globalisation which among other things entail human migration that is a threat to the "…isomorphism of people, territory and legitimate sovereignty that constitutes the normative charter of the modern nation-state" (ibid: 215).
If we, based on the above, take the (re)production of Denmark as a neighbourhood to be the figure in analysing the man's comments on my intake of hotdog, what can be said about it?
As a starting point, the man's comments show that he perceives Denmark as a given entity for people eating pork as opposed to others who do not. Furthermore, he links this to being born in Denmark, maintaining an image of me as being an immigrant, despite (assuming that he heard it) being told that I was born in Holbæk. By telling me to eat pork he is in fact reproducing this understanding of the locality. However, one could also say that facing immigrants this man develops a new localising practice in continuation of his perception of Denmark; as, I assume, a native he takes on the authority to tell of the proper practices for belonging to the neighbourhood.
Context 2: Is Eating the same Everywhere?
In the above conversation the man indirectly acts as an authority on how you should behave when coming to any place; you should behave like he did as a sailor and try the food. Any other meaning of food intake is disallowed. Thereby he treats his perceptions of 'guest-host'-relationships and of eating as universal and not bound to the social practices of a particular neighbourhood. Consequently, he can perceive Muslims' - meaning immigrants' or guests' - refusal to eat pork as ignorance of how to behave. This line of argument is taken from Vitebsky (1993). In discussing development, Vitebsky takes the perception of knowledge as the figure and shows how it is constructed in different localities by different people. In comparison to Appadurai, he thereby treats the localities as ground. By doing so, Vitebsky demonstrates that structures of perceiving knowledge and/or ignorance are by no means universal but local. This conclusion is further used to see development practices as the figure and as a particular construction of power relationships that allows for its own perception of knowledge to be treated as universal and disallows other forms of knowledge.
The point I want to make is not about the universality of eating or lack of this universality but about this effect of knowledge/ignorance perceptions. That by treating me as ignorant, the man has effectively taken away my agency in the conversation, as Vitebsky claims that development workers take away the agency of participants in development projects. One of the ways this is to be seen is that these participants might not be genuinely consulted. Instead, when there should be dialogue they are only allowed to put check marks in pre-constructed questionnaires. The conversation between the man and me does seem to have the structure of such a questionnaire where unforeseen information given by me is filtered out and by assuming that his conceptualisation of me eating counts for all persons and all places and not considering that it could be seen in any other way, the ground of his contextualisation of me becomes so solid that it cannot allow changes in the figure; the power relationship in this conversation is so that I am being produced (See also Appadurai's (1995) discussion of power relationships between context-generating and context-producing neighbourhoods).
Context 3: Figure-ground relationships in conversations
How did the above power relationship come about? I was disturbed by the man's opening question but did not think I was doing anything I was not allowed to do and wanted to assert this. In order to do so, I was desperately trying to work out what action he was referring to that I was not allowed to do and how he could perceive it as he did. Since he was not wearing a uniform and since there were no signs prohibiting standing on that particular street corner I assumed that he was referring to me eating the hotdog. As the conversation shows, that turned out to be correct. Following this I tried guessing the context he might be thinking about. Was he wondering whether I paid for it or not? Was he referring to the fact that a hotdog probably does not have a nutrient composition that will help my gracefully round figure to evolve in the direction of the ideal preached in fashion magazines and government health campaigns? His reference to pork meat was what finally gave me the clue to what he was on about.
Tsur sets the discussion of different kinds of manipulating the figure-ground relationship in the differentiated contexts of music, poetry and visual arts (2000). One of the points he makes is that the artist to a large extent can control the figure-ground relationship and create effects through manipulating it. In doing so, however, the artists "…rely on our habitual figure-ground organisations…" (Tsur 2000). In other words, to be able to manipulate the perceptions of a person one must know how they habitually organise these. Using this conclusion one could say, that since my understanding of how this man structured his world arose only gradually during the conversation I could not rely on it and thereby could not even properly attempt to make him see things from my point of view.
Concluding Remarks: Constraining or Complimentary Contexts?
I understand the above analytics as complimentary. This is based on two lines of reasoning,
one relating to my method of analysis and one relating to the complexity of social
phenomena:
Firstly, I have treated the different ways of analysing and contextualising rather loosely. Or, put differently, I have been very eclectic in choosing not only the texts, but also lines of arguments from these texts, so that they bring out different dimensions of the event, rather than contradicting each other. I have also not integrated them but taken them one by one and not given one priority over the other. Many reasons could be given for why I have chosen this; one is that the conversation has already muddled me and now I rather like to give it some outlines! (Cf. Bateson 1953).
Secondly, I perceive social phenomena or events as highly complex. In this way their internal logic need not be coherent. The power relationship in the conversation can be understood both through looking at the man's perceptions and through looking at my perceptions. This might seem obvious, as it was, after all, some sort of conversation between the two of us. But the man can also in one breath offer me a weird kind of rite de passage to the Danish neighbourhood through pork eating and in the next breath encircle me as not being born in Denmark and forever belonging to a different neighbourhood. Furthermore he can also assume authority both because he sees himself as the native compared to the outsider, thus with implicit reference to the locality of the neighbourhood, and because he considers his perceptions to be universal. I believe more contextualisation done based on this understanding of social phenomena could have brought out more examples of such contradictions of reality.
I will end this paper by saying, that while I was rather stupefied after the conversation, the hotdog vendor went on selling hotdogs unaffected by the event of which his hotdog assumingly had been part.
Bibliography
Abelson, Reed (2001): Absorbing a Blow to the Heart of America's Financial Center, The New York Times, September 12, http://mac18.anthro.ku.dk/fsn/2002-I_Context/9-11-texts.htm
Appadurai, Arjun (1995): "The Production of Locality", in Richard Fardon (ed.): Counterworks. Managing the Diversity of Knowledge, p.204-223, London & New York: Routledge
Bateson, Gregory (1953 [1972]): "Metalogue: Why do things have outlines?", in: Steps to an Ecology of Mind, p.27-32, New York: Ballantine.
Tsur, Reuven (2000): Metaphor and Figure-Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music and the Visual Arts, Psyart, Article Number 000201, http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/articles/psyart2000/tsur03.htm
Vitebsky, Piers (1993): "Is Death the Same Everywhere? Contexts of Knowing and Doubting", in Mark Hobart (ed.): An Anthropological Critique of Development. The Growth of Ignorance, p.100-114, London: Routledge
Notes
1. A Danish town located 60 kilometres outside Copenhagen, which I would say can be assumed to be known to the majority of people living in Denmark.
2. Appadurai makes this point in relation to the small-scale societies studied by e.g. Malinowski. However, as I read his arguments the same can be said about larger scale societies where localising practices are also carried out.