LP+Week+10

//** Benson, Peter, and Kevin Lewis O'neill, "Facing Risk: Levinas, Ethnography, and Ethics," Anthropology of Consciousness 18/2 (2007). **//

From Levinas’s standpoint, this means that ethnography is also about an unequal relationship in which a researcher’s self is “marked” through encounters with other people, their diverse experiences, value orientations, political positions, and forms of knowledge. Ethnography thus becomes a deconstructive basis upon which encounters with others dynamically inform the patterns of life and values that define the researcher. 31

The face is not simply an assemblage of features such as eyes, nose, cheeks, and jowl. It is also the singularity of an impression that is absolutely unique, a “trace,” expressive of a person’s vitality and vulnerability. For Levinas, the face reveals absolute otherness, **singularity**, in the other person. 32

Importantly, as Levinas uses the term, the face becomes a kind of metaphor utilized to describe specific temporal and spatial dimensions of the other. The time of the face is that which is without power, destitute and vulnerable, capable of dying, naked no matter how the other might be clothed, powerless no matter how robust the other might be. The spatial location of the face is vertical and proximate. The other “approaches me not from outside but from above,” Levinas says (1969:171). The face is commanding—behind the confident smiles, articulated laughs, and sociable expressions the face is the vital singularity that **guarantees nothing more than “there is**,” the fact that the other person is capable of being killed and that, as someone capable of executing such an event, the self is always already bound by this ethical relationship. 33-34

For Levinas, clear-minded and principles-based moral actions can actually distract people from ethics, which is always more basic than moral principles and even the infinite check on moralities. Levinas’s skepticism about moral action ultimately turns on his idea that **ethics happens in face-to-face encounters** and that **something crucial falls out from the breadth of morality**. Falling out, Levinas argues, is a distinct kind of care in which what matters for the other person always takes precedence over what matters for the self (Kleinman and Benson 2004; Kleinman 1999b). 43

Levinas raises the ethical stakes of ethnography, so to speak, since it puts **impossibility**—the ongoing time of maintaining a critically self-reflective attitude that is predicated upon the marking of other knowledge—at the heart of the project. 44

The consciousness born out of Levinasian ethics—the recognition of one’s responsibility to others and the impossibility of ever exhausting that responsibility—can provoke an empowering turn inward into unending, critical self-reflection aimed at **ensuring that the other’s experience cannot finally be assimilated into the mental and moral models of the self**. 45


 * Moral models, in the end, give way to ethical sensibilities enlivened by an ethics of risk that respects the impossibility of the human ethical condition and takes this impossibility as a starting point for the open enactment of Das’s (1998) “love of anthropology,” not just the concrete opportunity, but also the active maintenance of an affinity to being marked, even irritated, by what the other cares about and experiences. 49**


 * // Peter Benson, " EL CAMPO: Faciality and Structural Violence in Farm Labor Camps," Cultural Anthropology 23/4 (2008):589-629 //**

However, the modes of perception that guide ordinary interactions in empirical life tend to **squash this esoteric principle into hard realities of faciality**, people seeing each other as typified objects and, on that basis, circumscribing suffering as an event that belongs to or was even caused by the sufferer. The other’s suffering dangerously and easily becomes an event in which the self is not complicit (Levinas 1988). 595

This is what is meant by campo—a metaphoric expression used to disparage structural violence and facialize its inhospitable and menacing character. Wages are campo not simply because they are meager, but because they are part of an unremitting **slap in the face** that plasters symbolic denigration into the materiality of such things as a paycheck or a labor camp. 598

The social production of face is here a mechanism of power that does not render people faceless or invisible as much as it **facializes individuals** as having the Face of a culture that is alternately seen as friendly and familial, docile and hard working, threatening and not local, or morally inferior and filthy. 602

If Sean wanted to “educate” parishioners, he started from the premise of a cultural clash between two “groups” that possess unwavering “norms.” 602 [...] It was “evidence of a particular way of seeing” (2002:66), a regime of visibility, a lens that pleasurably examined things from afar with a keen interest in **discerning and reasserting hierarchies** of cultural difference and moral value. The particular spatial sensitivity to aesthetic aspects of human habitation and exchange that defined this colonial gaze was evidence of a more generalized mode of perception and technology of power that, Chakrabarty stresses, underwrites the very grammar of modernity, including visceral sensibilities about public health, a tendency to **equate filth with otherness, and knee-jerk responses to disorder** (2002:65–79). 603 [...] But it is in wanting “my community” to be clean and safe that she excludes forms of life and embodiment that are different from her own, **stops short of being able to understand difference or discomfort** in the context of broadscale conditions and diverging norms, and grounds a narrow image of belonging in stereotypes and misunderstanding. 603-604 [...] People who reside within a geographically defined community can sometimes seem the most out of place owing to practices of exclusion, segregation, and racialized mappings of belonging (Benson 2005). 604

The bathroom, the kitchen, and the bedroom are farcical and condescending gestures of ethically variable livability that resonate for Diego as a “face-object” (Barthes 1972:56), **mean and heavy, somewhat nightmarish even**. The face of structural violence is what Diego recognizes in his meager paycheck and the menacing labor camp, both of which are indicted as muy campo. 610

By parodying the stiff’s gait, walking behind with exaggerated gestures, straightened back and robotic striding arms, the mime achieves an allegorical effect, objectifies the Face of the on-the-go culture of capitalism as the driving force behind (or inside) the seemingly autonomous and self-motivated suit. This release of symbolic energy, unmasking of a secret, defacing of a Face, is what rouses laughter among the crowd, not just the impersonation. [...] Defacement places the Face in a new context, shedding light on webs of power and meaning that underlie its social production. Defacement alters the way a Face looks and looks at observers, linking the semblance of gestures to agencies that might not be immediately visible in the visage. [...] The face here does not signal the radical neediness of the other person, but the worldliness of the face, the fact that the face bears traces of social processes and pressures, not the asocial singularity of an individual. 612

This biopolitics of defecation reproduces a regime of visibility in which individual bodies—those running for the toilet, for example— are visualized as part of a population associated with trash, filth, and transience. A tobacco field’s faciality is profoundly altered when a portable toilet is placed in it. The field looks different, and it looks at one differently. 619

Farm labor advocates realize the power of vision and the face in constituting this system. They utilize faciality in struggles over farmworker rights and social justice—the reproduced images of destitute faces in an Oxfam America report are meant to morally and politically challenge a food system that mystifies labor as faceless beneath the cellophane of product packaging and depersonalizes workers as “machines in the field” (2004; Thompson and Wiggins 2002). 619-620

[poverty porn]

Faciality is ultimately an analytical tool that emphasizes questions of ethics. In directing our attention to how and why people or governments may or may not respond to structural violence, faciality is helpful for organizing political responses that **eschew stereotypes and go beyond narrow framings of blame** to bring social systems into account. 621

//** Todd Ramon Ochoa, "Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography," Cultural Anthropoogy 22/4 (2007):473-500. **//

The repetition of her words produced a singular mode of emphasis. But her authority to speak on the Cuban-Kongo society of affliction known as Palo, and her **authority over me**, rested on much more than this, regardless of how many times she returned to her words, or how poetically she made reference to prior declarations.1 I admit, though, that it was in words first, and only through their repetition, that **she hooked me on the dead**. 473

It was that smile, the one that said she was speaking the most obvious truth, which **said I was a fool if I didn’t understand her. And I didn’t**. What did Isidra mean when she said the dead dragged her out of bed and to her living room to give her answers to conundrums in her healing practice? She gave me hardly a second to ponder this question before she went on. Disquiet and delight marked her. 475

This new language seeks to recreate Isidra’s language in wholly new terms, arrived at by reiterating in my own way Isidra’s articulations and repetitions, which communicated the dead in singular fashion. [...] In our engagements she insisted, through repetition, that I learn her vocabulary of the dead by speaking her words back to her. Our growing rapport depended **on my words being reiterations of her own**, so that before long **I surrendered the terms of my research** and together we spoke about the dead in her words alone. 479-480

I am explicitly not engaging in a translation of Isidra’s language, as this would inevitably lose much of what is powerful in them. Instead, what I seek to do is to create for Palo’s dead a foreign language within our own language, just as her Creole Kikongo, Palo Kikongo I have called it elsewhere, was a foreign language within her own Spanish tongue, so that **Palo’s dead might survive its encounter with my text and continue to resonate, vibrate, with a force of its own**. 480

The **stakes** involved in creating this foreign language for Palo within our own English-language social science are the same as those involved in the primary questions of discourse and power, of the generation (or preservation) of authority in and through representation, which are simultaneously the stakes involved in the profoundly ethical questions regarding the continued existence, or not, of content in its encounter with form, which is to say, of fieldwork in its encounter with the genre (disciplinary) precedents of ethnography. 481

Kalunga**, if it was to be grasped at all, had to be felt first**, as a gentle turn of the stomach. 483

Locating this moment has been difficult enough, involving many of the risks assumed is disregarding dominant codes, and now I want to extend our lingering, to repeat this instant again and again by affirming it serially, by **affirming sense un-certainty again and again in its countless instantiations**—the goose bumps, the butterflies, and vibes that Palo prizes. 488

The method is to affirm each repetition, or version, of the dead, while simultaneously affirming all the others—the goose bumps along with the chills, the wakefulness along with as yet unspecified versions, like ashes, blood, and bones. In one moment the dead is the undefined, pressing mass of Kalunga, the ambient dead, the blue-gray shadows that overtake Isidra in her parlor, and in the same moment the dead are discrete responsive entities such as a deceased parent or an old aunt whispering to Isidra in the middle of the night. 489

The paratactic and that distinguishes the discourse of the dead in Palo, with its characteristic affirmation of versions upon versions of the dead, **excuses itself from the hypotactic subordinations and negations we are so accustomed to in setting up “arguments” and dialectically satisfied “conclusions,” subordinations that little by little build up a depth beneath the feet of the progressively transcendent, vertically organized subject.** 489


 * Amidst these tidal shifts—inchoate, unequal, indifferent, forceful, intimate, and repetitive—it is the repetition of basic sensual forces that emerge as recognizable entities, “objects” and “subjects,” although I am doubtful that these terms are of value to those who would act in Palo. Repetitions of forces that, like the swirling eddies at the edges of a rush, constitute mimetic, contagious feedback loops of becoming, loops that, in complicity with others, subsist. Relatively stable in their repetitions at the fringes of broader currents, these eddies turn in discrete directions, slowly, determining, precipitating, and aggregating forces immanent to the dead into the forms we recognize as static “objects” and static “subjects.” 490**