"Our" Anthropology of Technoscience?

The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist Sits among Computer Engineers by Gary Downey;
Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots by Robbie Davis-Floyd; Joseph Dumit;
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse. Feminism and
Technoscience by Donna Haraway; Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a
Digital World by Stefan Helmreich
Review by: David Hakken
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), pp. 535-539
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
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BOOK REVIEw ESSAYS 535
more than
that,
he shows us how
everyday practice
in-
volves and entails the distant forces that alter the realities
in terms of which
people
live,
the realities that Mills illus-
trates in her
book,
which is more a
description
of the im-
pact
of the
global
on the local rather than an
analysis
of
global processes.
Hannerz makes
frequent
reference to books that
journal-
ists and others such as officials of the World Bank have
written. A favorite
question
for Ph.D. dissertation defenses
is,
"What have
you
done that is different from what a
jour-
nalist
might
have done?" The value of different answers
depends
on the committee. Hannerz discusses that differ-
ence in his notion of
longer-term relationships among
more distant factors as versus events as
crystallizations
of
those forces at
particular
times and
places.
The
first,
he
tells
us, anthropologists
do;
the second is the
purview
of
journalists.
Mills's work fits this
notion,
as does
Hannerz's
in a different
way.
The
writing
in all of the works suffers from their
being
collections rather than
coherently argued
books. Each is
overly repetitious.
Hannerz's
writing
is sometimes
ponder-
ous if
usually
clear.
Appadurai
has an unfortunate
predilec-
tion for
neologisms-"neologicality"
as he
might
call it-
and
hyperinflated prose.
Mills starts with a clear
narrative,
but all too soon the
chapters
become
repetitive.
References Cited
Durrenberger,
E. Paul
1997 That'll Teach You:
Cognition
and Practice in a Union
Local. Human
Organization 56(4):388-392.
In
press Explorations
of Class and Consciousness in the U.S.
Journal of
Anthropological
Research.
Durrenberger,
E.
Paul,
and Suzan Erem
1999a The
Abstract,
the
Concrete,
the
Political,
and the Aca-
demic:
Anthropology
and a Labor Union in the United States.
Human
Organization 58(3):305-312.
1999b The Weak Suffer What
They
Must: A Natural
Experi-
ment in
Thought
and Structure. American
Anthropologist
101(4):783-793.
Lave,
Jean
1988
Cognition
in Practice.
Cambridge: Cambridge
Univer-
sity
Press.
"Our"
Anthropology
of Technoscience?
DAVID HAKKEN
Institute
of Technology,
State
University of
New York
The Machine in Me: An
Anthropologist
Sits
among
Computer Engineers. Gary Downey.
New York: Rout-
ledge,
1998. 288
pp.
Cyborg
Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots.
Robbie
Davis-Floyd
and
Joseph
Dumit,
eds. New York:
Routledge,
1998. 358
pp.
Modest_Witness@SecondMillennium.
FemaleMan?_
MeetsOncoMouseTM. Feminism and Technoscience.
Donna
Haraway.
New York:
Routledge,
1996. 361
pp.
Silicon Second Nature:
Culturing
Artificial Life in a
Digital
World.
Stefan
Helmreich.
Berkeley: University
of California
Press,
1998. 314
pp.
"We are all
anthropologists
now,"
says
the headline of a
summer Guardian review of the new Clifford Geertz book.
Indeed,
an
impressive range
of intellectuals and academics
do
engage
in activities that
they
call
anthropology
or
ethnog-
raphy.
Yet our
discipline's
concrete "internal"
performances,
our actual textual and
graphic
media,
draw much less atten-
tion than this abstract
anthropology;
one
publisher
told me
bitterly
that even we do not read our books!
Anthropologies
of technoscience are
among
the few
forms of "actual"
anthropology
that do draw broader atten-
tion.
However,
it is not
particularly
remarkable that texts
performing
an abstract
anthropology
of technoscience
largely preceded
and have been influential
longer
than eth-
nographic
studies
by
those trained in
anthropology
or
whose work is informed
by deep dialogue
with those in our
profession.'
The works under review show that the latter
two
groups
do indeed now
exist;2
in
fact, they
are a
sample
of a much
larger group.3
(In
line with these
works,
I use technoscience to refer to
a
contemporary practice
that is
quite global
and of substan-
tial
importance
to
general
social formation
reproduction.4
Its distinctive feature is a
special
kind of
knowledge
net-
working,
a seamless dialectic between
production
of cer-
tain
privileged symbolic representations
of the character of
various "realities"
[science]
and the construction of
special
artifacts
[technology]
used in related
practices/perform-
ances.
Indeed,
one of the chief attributes of the works un-
der review is that
they
make the "seamless dialectic"
point
vividly;
that
is, they
document how the artifacts
[technolo-
gies]
enable the
representations [sciences]
as much as vice
versa-hence the focus on "technoscience."
"Ethnography
of
science," repeats
the Greek mistake of
privileging
sci-
ence over
technology,
while
"ethnography
of science and
technology" underplays
the dialectic's
density.)
What does the existence of this work
suggest
for the
future of our
discipline?
Since much of the debate on our
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536 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
*
VOL. 103, No. 2
*
JUNE 2001
future
turns
on the issue of the role of science in the
study
of
culture,
does this "actual"
anthropology
of technos-
cience have
something special
to contribute to our
internal
as well as the broader debate over
interdisciplinarity?
What
do these works
suggest
about whether
professional
anthro-
pology
has a
special
contribution to make to technoscience
studies,
or is a
discipline
of
anthropology largely
irrelevant
to an
anthropology
of technoscience? After
discussing
the
texts and the technoscience culture that
they portray,
I fo-
cus
specifically
on how these authors
negotiate
the con-
traction between the
particularly strong
form of
"studying
up" dependence,
on the one
hand,
and the
necessarily
more
active ethical
posture
of technoscience
ethnography,
on the
other,
characteristic of the field.
Silicon Second Nature is an
ethnography
of the techno-
scientific
practices
associated with artificial life or "Alife."
While
"Alife" can be constructed
narrowly
as the idea that
computer
simulations of
biological processes may pro-
foundly
influence our
understanding
of
life,
the techno-
scientists who are Helmreich's "natives"
generally
make a
stronger
claim:
computing
can create
entirely
new life
forms. Stefan Helmreich started fieldwork in the mid-
1990s at the Santa Fe
Institute,
the
acknowledged
institu-
tional leader in
Alife,
but his site broadens out.
Serially,
he
addresses Alife as a
geographically
located
practice
at the
Institute,
in the broader technoscience
practices
of com-
puter
science and in the
particular
social relations of active
Alife
researchers, including performances
at
international
Alife conferences. He examines as well the considerable
spiritual
dimensions of Alife and the
implications
of Alife
as a
late-twentieth-century
intellectual
practice.
The Machine in Me is similar to Silicon Second Nature
in that it involves
participant
observation
study
of a
spe-
cific technoscience
practice:
The
graduate
education of
software
engineers
in the use of
Computer-Aided Design
(CAD) systems.
Also like
Helmreich, Gary Downey's
analytic approach
involves
illuminating specific practices
by placing
them in broader cultural context. His central fo-
cus is to
specify
the
ways
in which a nationalist discourse
on CAD
(e.g.,
as the
way
to save the
competitive standing
of the United
States) provides
an
implicit
terrain on which
students construct an
understanding
of what CAD is for
and how it relates to them
(and
vice
versa). Specifically,
as
the title
implies,
he is interested in the
way
that student's
bodies become inscribed in the machines and the machines
in the students' (and others') bodies.
Cyborg
Babies is a collection of diverse
pieces,
each of
which
says something
about the character of human
repro-
duction in the era of technoscience.
Many
of them are writ-
ten
by anthropologists
and are based on
ethnography
or at
least a rich
appropriation
of the
ethnographic gaze.
In a
short review, there is not
space
to address each of the es-
says.
In
keeping
with the
postmodem analysis/aesthetic
to
which
they
are committed, Robbie
Davis-Floyd
and
Joseph
Dumit have not
imposed commonality
of
analytic style
or
approach.
Still, they attempt
to stimulate a common
prob-
lematic
by specifying
four different
appropriations
of the
cyborg concept,
and most of the
papers
use the
cyborg
as
an
analytic figure.
Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium
is
perhaps
best
seen as a
piece
of
"performance anthropology,"
as
argument
by example
for the
situating
of
knowledge
that Donna
Haraway
advocates. Even
though
trained in
biology
and
history, Haraway
has made a deliberate choice to
hang
out
with
us,
both
physically
and
intellectually;
the book takes
the structure of a text in
general linguistics,
for
example.
Haraway's triple title,
like the
paintings
and other
graph-
ics contained in her
book,
indexes the
complexity
of the ar-
gument
she wishes to make. Thus her "modest witness"
draws its name from the scientistic
trope
of Robert
Boyle,
a
transcendent,
"denatured intellect" taken to be the ideal
"Dr. Watson" for scientific
experimentation.
Unlike
Boyle,
Haraway hyperlocates
her witness: in
time,
at the end of
the second
millennium,
and in
(cyber)space,
as an e-mail
address. Her
witnessing
is also
embodied,
framed
by
a
conceptual meeting
between a FemaleMan drawn from
science fiction and
copywrited,
and
OncoMouse,
a trade-
marked
genetically engineered laboratory species. Perhaps
most
importantly, Haraway
locates her
project
within the
intersection of feminism and technoscience.
As often via
cascading
humanistic
figures
as
by "objec-
tive"
discourse,
these authors
generally argue by employ-
ing
recursive sketches of
correspondences among,
for ex-
ample,
Alife forms manifest on the
computer screen,
the
linguistic
and social
practices
of their
creators,
the
preoc-
cupations
and
tropic practices
characteristic of
people
like
them,
and the roots of these
tropes
in the collective
heritage
of
Western,
Judeo-Christian culture. This narrative
ap-
proach-as opposed,
for
example,
to the
language
of
hy-
pothesis testing-is just
one of the
ways
in which these
writers manifest
increasingly general preoccupations
of
contemporary ethnography.
Another
example
is the author's
reflexive
presence
in their
narratives,
as in the
DavisFloyd/
Dumit
volume,
whose writers
intensely
root their own
knowledge,
and that of their
informants,
in
particular
situ-
ations.
Like the other authors under
review,
Helmreich is as
conversant with the rhetorical as well as research conven-
tions of
contemporary ethnography.
His title uses double
meanings
to characterize
key
Alife characteristics. "Silicon
second nature" evokes
Sherny
Turkle's computing ethnog-
raphy,
The Second
Self (1984). This evocation
highlights
Alife's creators' construction of Alife as an alternate form
of nature in the substrate of the silicon
chip.
Alife is also
"second nature" in a more standard sense-that is, that it
reflects
very culturally specific presumptions
that to its
creators are "second nature." With most other U.S. tech-
noscientists, Alifers share a
"pre-conscience collective," as
it were, which follows
largely
from
being privileged,
white, male, and heterosexual. Helmreich's
description
of
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BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 537
"Culturing
Artificial Life" communicates the
multiple
senses of
just
how
highly
cultured Alife's forms are:
They
are both
quite
like
something grown
in a
biology
lab and
are more
generally "culturally constructed,"
as
Science,
Technology,
and
Society (STS)
scholars
generally expect
technoscience
practices
to be.
It is from a more
analytic,
less
descriptive perspective
that
Haraway
addresses her set of issues in technoscience:
reconstituting
the
witness, democracy
and
agency
in scien-
tific
research,
the Human Genome
Project, contemporary
reproductive technology, race, (once again)
the
cyborg,
and
reflexivity.
In each of these
areas,
she demonstrates
critical
pyrotechnics,
an
appreciation
for
existing STS,
lit-
erary, philosophical, historical,
and
ethnographic work,
and an awesome
ability
at
synthesis.
Her work is
clearly
the
single strongest
influence on technoscience
anthropol-
ogy. Perhaps
this is
because,
as a
"convert,"
she
ap-
proaches
the
theorizing
that used to characterize "the eth-
nological
moment" in
anthropology
with less
trepidation.
Like all
ethnographers,
those
studying
technoscience
must
gain
access to the field. A distinctive cast to techno-
science
anthropologists'
entree
problems
follows from our
often
having
less
power
than our informants.
Making
less
money
and
having
less
prestige
than
them,
and
having
fewer levers with which to influence whatever
organiza-
tions, institutions,
and networks we
share,
technoscience
ethnographers generally "study up"
to their informants.
In
addressing
a standard
"studying up" problem-how
to convince
busy, "important"
informants to
give you
the
time of
day-most
technoscience
anthropologists
find it
necessary
to demonstrate a
degree
of
mastery
of the tech-
noscientific
practices
in which
they
wish to
participate.
Downey's approach
is to demonstrate the value of a socio-
cultural awareness to the education of
budding engineers.
During
at least one moment while
"sitting among
com-
puter engineers,"
he
experienced
the
"going
native" seduc-
tive
appeal
of
demonstrating mastery.
He sits with them in
a
strong,
and I would
imagine appealing (to them), way.
Helmreich
navigates
the
paradox
of
demonstrating
tech-
noscience
mastery by maintaining
somewhat
greater
eth-
nographic
distance. On the one
hand,
he
presents
clear ex-
plications
of the
problems
at the heart of Alife research and
the
techniques through
which
they
are
approached.
On the
other, he
presents alternative
constructions of these
prob-
lems drawn from within the Alife
community's
own dis-
courses. His
ethnographic portrait
of how Alife is lived in
the lab
provides
the
dimensionality
for which the best
prac-
titioners of constructivist science education strive.
In his contribution to
Cyborg Babies, Joe Dumit locates
himself in his own
family's reproductive experience;
he
also demonstrates a rich
understanding
of the
internal
is-
sues raised
by
unforeseen
drug consequences.
In contrast,
Robbie
Davis-Floyd
identifies
strongly
with the "natural"
rhetorics of the midwives with whom she collaborates, in
opposition
to the
cyborgic
rhetorics of technoscience
medicine. This
practice effectively
forces her to a
dysto-
pian
use of the
cyborg image. Haraway's
insistence that
she is not a relativist rests
upon
an intellectual commitment
to the
problems
of
technoscience,
an insistence that she be
located within
science,
not outside it. The reader is to take
the
analytics
she
performs
not as a
metacritique
of science
but as a
necessary component
of a reconstructed technos-
cientific
practice.
Natural scientist Paul Gross
argues
that
attempts
to ac-
count
culturally
for the construction of science have met
with mixed success and have
questionable
value. Pace
Gross,
these books
provide
a
good, thorough
case for
taking
up
cultural research on technoscience with some intellec-
tual
urgency. Despite
their wide
array
of
positionings,
all
the works under review demonstrate an
understanding
of
what is at stake to the natives. Rather than
merely celebrating
the wonder of scientific
discovery,
these authors offers sub-
stantive
engagement
with the actual work of technoscience.
Moreover,
a mature
anthropology
of technoscience
would
help contemporary humans/cyborgs
understand
more
fully
how technoscience
practices
are
implicated
in
contemporary
social
change.
This
anthropology's opportu-
nity
to be
perceived
as
significant
derives from the
popular
belief that technoscientific
development
is
driving
social
formation
reproduction
toward some new
dynamic,
for ex-
ample, "cyberspace." Thus,
technoscience
anthropology
offers our
discipline
means to have a substantial
impact
on
social formation
reproduction.
Yet because
potential
new
social formation
dynamic
at most exists
only
in
embryo,
studying
it
inherently implicates
one in its creation. This
imposes
a
special
ethical
duty
on the
ethnographer
of tech-
noscience,
to
supplement
her
explication
of
practices
with
her best
understanding
of what these
practices
should be
like
(Hakken 2000).
These works show how one can
ground
an ethical sensi-
bility
in the
really existing
work of technoscience. Helmreich
stubbornly
deconstructs narratives that distance Alife-
science from the broader social
practices
in which its
pur-
suit is
embedded,
showing
how heterosexism and
political
economy
are
presences
in each simulation. In the final
chapter,
he
surveys
the
place
of Alife research in relation to
broader issues of
contemporary
cultural
concern,
such as
modernity, postmodernity,
and
amodernity.
He also includes
voices
critiquing
his own
perspective:
An Alife researcher
uses academic
language
to
critique
Helmreich's
imposi-
tion of a
political agenda
on his research, choosing
as well
to
critique
Helmreich's
grasp
of
anthropology.
The
passage
illustrates some scientists' cavalier
willingness
to
presume
mastery
of others' crafts, but it also
highlights
a tension in
ethnographic study
of technoscience. Good science eth-
nography
often
provokes
informants' defenses of the
prized
terrain of claims to
knowledge, putting
at risk both access
to the field and the
capacity
to
engage
in technoscience.
Such research can threaten natural scientists, as it evokes
the
possibility
of
alternative claim-making processes.
As
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538 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
*
VOL. 103, No. 2
*
JUNE 2001
the attack of
people
like Gross and the broader
place
of
technoscience
anthropology
in the science wars
indicate,
the
alterity
structured into the
study
of "othered"
peoples
is
largely
unavailable cover for the technoscience
ethnogra-
pher.
If we cannot avoid science
wars,
can we
engage
in a
manner that avoids the male
power
moves so much at their
core? These works offers valuable
suggestions:
Listen
carefully
to what technoscientists have to
say
and
develop
the skill to
explain
their
points cogently
in their terms. En-
gage deeply
with what
they do, including
the
performances
in which
they
reveal their dreams and
hopes.
Next,
develop
a
thorough analysis
of such
performances' implications
for
imagining
the
future,
an inevitable
part
of technoscience
practice. (Demonstrating
the
key
role of the
imagination
in
science is a
salutary accomplishment
of
especially Haraway's
witnessing.) Perhaps
most
importantly,
refuse to remain in
the world of
abstraction,
and tie
practices
to their social in-
frastructures.
In various
ways,
each work under review moves
beyond
critique
to offer alternatives to unreflective
technoscience,
to sketch a vision of technoscience
practice
that is cultur-
ally
informed.
Haraway
does it
by framing
technoscience
problems
in aesthetic as well as technical terms.
Downey
concludes his book with a
chapter describing
a CAD de-
veloped
in
support
of human liberation rather than a na-
tional
pursuit
of
productivity. Many
of
Davis-Floyd
and
Dumit's authors draw attention to activist
groups
that ef-
fectively
stake claims to
spaces
in technoscience innova-
tion and
implementation. Through outlining
an alternative
approach
from within natural science to the connection of
life
process
and
intelligence,
Silicon Second Nature
points
to alternative
practices scoped widely enough
to
engage
all
who have a stake in the future of
life,
however it is con-
structed. As these authors
demonstrate,
skill at such activi-
ties is
perhaps
the
strongest
element of what
training
in an-
thropology
offers technoscience studies.
The
ethically engaged practice
that I see as a
necessary
attribute of technoscience
ethnography emerges strongly
in
these works. It remains
possible
that what
qualifies
for
me,
a
reasonably informed
"scientist" of the
anthropological
variety,
as
mastery
sufficient to be taken
seriously
within
technoscience will not be
sufficiently persuasive
for the
specialist.
I have also drawn attention (Hakken 1999) to the
opposite problem:
Demands for a
high
level of
mastery
might
limit the
practice
of technoscience
ethnography
to
the small
group
of ex- or
apostate scientists, engineers,
or
technologists.
This limitation would have extensive race,
gender,
and class
implications regarding
the
standpoints
from which technoscience could be
interrogated.
Like these authors, I have also
regularly participated
in
the structures and
practices
of the
interdisciplinary
field of
STS. These works draw
upon
the diverse literature and
constructs to which this
scholarly practice
has
exposed me;
I find little, other than in the
centrality
of fieldwork, to
separate
their work from that of the best
practitioners
whose
training
took
place
in, say, sociology
or
history.
There is not evidence here of a
distinctly anthropological
problematic,
in a
disciplinary
rather than
philosophical
sense,
in this
"really existing" anthropology
of techno-
science.
There is at least one
perspective
from which this is
prob-
lematic. Over the
years,
I have met a number of students
who have encountered
difficulty
in
pursuing
technoscience
anthropology
dissertation
projects,
in
part
because of what
their advisors see as an absence of relevant
anthropological
work. Because the
corpus
of which these texts are exem-
plary clearly
achieves intellectual
relevance,
advisors' con-
tinued caution
along
these lines is vulnerable to the
charge
of deliberate
professional pedantry.
One
hopes that,
rein-
forced
by
mechanisms like the AAA's
Forsythe
and Tex-
tor
Prizes,
our
discipline
will learn to cultivate the obvious
student interest in technoscience and build
strongly
on this
most
impressive
work.
Notes
1. An
important early (1979)
text was
sociologists
Bruno La-
tour and Steve
Woolgar's Laboratory Life.
Historian Sharon
Traweek's Beamtimes and
Lifetimes (1988)
moves in a deci-
sively anthropological
direction.
2.
Any listing
of such work is
idiosyncratic.
A
by
no means
exhaustive list of authors would also include
Casper, Dubinskas,
Forsythe, Grey, Edwards, Eglash, Escobar, Fisher, Franklin,
Fujimura, Garsten, Gusterson, Hakken, Heath, Hess, Ito, Lave,
Layne, Marcus, Martin, Nader, Nyce, Perin, Pfaffenberger,
Rabinow, Ragon6, Rapp, Strathern,
Stone, Suchman, Tourney,
and
Wright.
3. The texts selected for review were
produced by ethnogra-
phers
who have been a
professional presence
in both
anthropol-
ogy
and STS
(Science, Technology,
and
Society,
as I
prefer,
or
Science and
Technology
Studies in the
current,
more sanitized
rhetorics of
disciplinarity). The
texts are
important
in their own
right,
not selected to be
representative,
nor should
they
be taken
as "best case"
examples. Rather, they represent
a
quick compro-
mise between editor and writer
preferences.
4.
I
review these works as a cultural
anthropologist teaching
at a
technological
unit of a state
university,
whose research has
focused on technoscience.
My
career has benefited from anthro-
pological
attention to
it, and, despite
occasional criticisms of
particular instances, I have
spent time
legitimating study of tech-
noscience in our
discipline-organizing
and
chairing the Com-
mittee on the
Anthroplogy
of Science, Technology,
and Com-
puting
of the General Section of the American
Anthropological
Association.
References Cited
Hakken, David
1999
Cyborgs@Cyberspace:
An
Ethnographer
Looks to the
Future. New York:
Routledge.
2000 "Ethical Issues in the
Ethnography
of
Cyberspace,"
In
Ethics and
Anthropology: Facing
Future Issues in Human
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BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS 539
Biology,
Globalism,
and Cultural
Property.
Anne-Marie
Cantwell,
Eva
Friedlander,
and Madeleine L. Tramm, eds.
Pp.
170-186. New York: New York
Academy
of Sciences.
Latour, Bruno,
and Steve
Woolgar
1979
Laboratory
Life: The Social Construction of Scientific
Knowledge. Beverly Hills,
CA:
Sage.
Traweek,
Sharon
1988 Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of
High Energy
Physicists. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard
University
Press
Turkle, Sherry
1984 The Second Self:
Computers
and the Human
Spirit.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
Dancing
the Nation
ANYA PETERSON ROYCE
Indiana
University
Paper Tangos.
Julie
Taylor. Durham,
NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press,
1998. 121
pp.
The
Mystery
of Samba:
Popular
Music and National
Identity
in Brazil. Hermano Vianna. John Charles
Chasteen,
ed. and trans.
Chapel
Hill:
University
of North
Carolina
Press,
1999. 147
pp.
Borders and
boundaries,
exile and
appropriation,
iden-
tity, nationalism, artists, intellectuals,
and the articulation
of us and them-these are some of the
defining concepts
of
present-day anthropology,
and
they
are well served in
these two books.
Taylor
and Vianna both choose
forms,
embodied and
wordless,
that are at once the most and the
least resistant to distortion and
misappropriation.
As arts
whose most immediate
presence
lies in
performance,
the
tango
and the samba each
provide
a subtle and multivo-
calic
point
of
entry
to examinations of
identity-in
the
per-
forming itself,
but also accessible in
memory
for more lei-
surely
reflection.
Both the
tango
and the samba have been the
subjects
of
other recent
anthropological
treatments. Marta
Savigliano
(1995)
wrote
Tango
and the Political
Economy of
Passion
as an embodied
analysis
of an embodied
form,
document-
ing
the overseas
wanderings
of the
Argentine tango
and its
return,
altered in the recombination of old
stereotypes
with
new territories. Barbara
Browning (1995)
chose the samba
as a
way
of
articulating
Brazilian
gender relationships,
class
ideologies,
and the
thorny
realities of
mestizaje (race
mixing).
Another dance from Latin
America,
the
rumba,
provides
the
subject
of Yvonne Daniel's
(1995) study
that
documents both its several
forms,
its social
history,
and its
implications
for Cuban identities.
What is it about
performing
arts such as dance and music
that makes them
especially powerful
means of
articulating
identity
whether for an individual or for a
people?
And fol-
lowing
on
that,
in what
ways
has the
explosion
of
perform-
ance-based studies
changed anthropology
and our under-
standings
of the
peoples
who are its focus?
Beginning
with the first
question,
dance and music are
polysemous
as well as multivocalic.
Choreographies
and
musical scores have
multiple meanings
that are communi-
cated
through multiple
channels. These features make
them
radically open
to
interpretation
on the
part
of both the
audiences and
performers. Meaning really
is in the
eye
of
the beholder and in the
body
of the
performer. Taylor
speaks eloquently
to the
polysemous
nature of the
tango,
telling
us what it means to dance it and be danced
by it,
and
telling
us what
shifting meanings
it has had for
Argentina.
In her
work, Savigliano (1995)
told us what
meanings
the
tango acquired
abroad in France and in
Japan,
as well as
telling
us of her own
relationship
with the dance.
Music and
dance,
especially
but not
exclusively
in their
popular forms,
are also democratic in that what limits a
person's performance
is
talent,
rather than access to formal
education,
class
standing, literacy,
and other status mark-
ers. Both the
tango
and the
samba,
in
fact,
had humble be-
ginnings
and are still
performed by people
of all social sta-
tions. Vianna devotes much attention to the
development
of the samba as Brazil's national
popular music, linking
it
to musicians who were lower-class urban blacks or inhabi-
tants
offavelas (slums).
In its
development,
the samba be-
came the favorite music of elites as well. The
important
point
was that
poor
and elite could come
together
on a
common
ground
of musical
accomplishment.
Vianna be-
gins
his book with the
story
of
just
such an encounter in
1926. It took
place
in Rio de Janeiro and
brought together
the educated elites Gilberto
Freyre, Sergio Buarque
de Ho-
landa,
Pedro Dantas Prudente de Moraes
Neto,
Heitor
Villa-Lobos,
and Luciano Galle-all from
"good
white
families"-with black and mixed race sambistas
Patrfcio,
Donga,
and
Pixinguinha. They
went out for an
evening
of
guitar
music and
drinking. Perhaps
it was
experiences
such
as this one that
prompted
elite intellectuals to
engage
in the
"fashionable rehabilitation of
everything
from the music of
Pixinguinha
to traditional rice
pudding
desserts"
(Vianna
p. 65).
The democratic nature of arts such as dance and music
means that a
greater range
of
people
has access to them and
therefore that there are more and different voices delineat-
ing
identities. Sometimes these voices
agree
to
agree upon
a common
identity;
sometimes
they
contest the various
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