Paparazzi Ethnography

6/28: On the heels of the Fulbright Award, I was offered the Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship at UC Berkeley, 2012-2013 (deferred to 2013-2014). While not publicly as well known as the Fulbright, the Ciriacy-Wantrup is unique among academic circles, because of its emphasis on qualitative economic knowledge. I was happy to receive the Fulbright, since there are 2 awards per life time, and my first award came 5 years ago, exactly the hiatus period (5 years) to apply for another award. But I really was taken aback by Ciriacy-Wantrup. Everyone I know who has had the award is a heavy hitter in social sciences and while I consider my work innovative on the planning side, I am never quite sure what it looks like on the operational side. The Fellowship dates conflict with the Fulbright so I requested a deferral for one year.

The project involves completing a manuscript that gathers perspectives on my North American (Canada, Alaska) and European (Russia, Norway) observations of energy development.

On face of things I want to create a typology of experience that contrasts corporeality of expertise (immediacy, inspiration, face-to-face) — to the deliberative, contemplative and isolated activity of reading intermediary reports. I have been thinking already over how the two modes of experience (corporeal and textual) may be contrasted by reference to Peter Sloterdijk’s two types of knowledge, ancient kynicism (corporeal, anecdotal) and modern cynicism (distanced reflection through textual familiarity) but also, by reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s Kantian and anti-Kantian aesthetic, the former tending toward a rejection of representations of the obvious in favor of principles of the esoteric, and the latter, a preference for the sensual, immediate and obvious. The discussion could be linked also to Norbert Elias‘ the civilizing process, what Max Weber called “progressiveness”, and what Georg Simmel referred to as “the blasé attitude”.

For anthropologists like myself, the textual and corporeal is a division marking a threshold of modernity. Literacy, for example, emphasizes abstraction, universalization and depersonalization and thus, makes it possible to dispense with spectacle and demonstration in securing the belief and obedience of others. By contrast, for pre-capitalist modes of obedience, relations of power are made, unmade and remade through personal interactions that rely on visible (conspicuous) expenditures of time and performance of the body. This is necessary to secure symbolic recognition, as shown in example after example, in that wonderful book The Gift, by Marcel Mauss. So, in a sense, corporeality raises the possibility that the legitimacy of expertise in a post-capitalist society is based not solely upon theoretical knowledge but instead, upon pre-capitalist modes of spectacle, charisma and enchantment – what Alfred Whitehead called the “staging of verification” in scientific experiments or Bruno Latour refers to as “inscription”.

There are other areas, but that is the general picture of this particular project.