SOCIAL and CULTURAL PROGRAM 2007/2008

In 2004 the Program in Sociocultural Anthropology began a project of rebuilding and redefinition around a new constellation of interests and expertise. Through this process we sought to blend well-established anthropological perspectives – notably in political economy and critical anthropology – with innovative research agendas to create a distinctive profile for our graduate program. We have conceived of this not as a project yielding a fixed agenda, but rather as one of ongoing critical appraisal of how we can best assimilate new developments in social and cultural anthropology within our teaching and our scholarship.

Social and Cultural Faculty at Binghamton University

Deborah Elliston	Safia Mohsen
Carmen Ferradas	Pamela Smart
Douglas Glick	H. Stephen Straight
Douglas Holmes	Thomas M. Wilson

 

Five new areas of specialization have been developed:
1. Advanced European Integration & Europeanization
2. Material and Visual Culture
3. Nation, Nationalism, and Nationalist Modernity
4. Formations of the Modern Self
5. Semiotics of Culture

What follows is an overview of these areas as we currently conceive of them and the courses we offer and are developing to support these specializations.

Advanced European Integration & Europeanization

Core Courses: European Integration and Europeanization (Wilson), Cultures of Capitalism (Holmes), Cultures of Expertise (Holmes), Political Anthropology (Wilson)

For little more than a decade serious anthropological attention has focused on the institutions of the European Union (EU) and the wider processes of advanced European integration and Europeanization. The institutional project of European integration seeks to integrate more than 27 very different nation-states within an evolving supranational structure encompassing 450 million citizens. By any measure this is a daunting challenge that we believe constitutes the defining issue for the anthropology of Europe. The following interleaved approaches to integration provide an overview of our shared interests:

• The supranational institutions of the EU – notably in Brussels, Strasbourg, and Frankfurt – provide crucial ethnographic settings for investigating the political economy of integration. Within the burgeoning technocratic and political precincts of these EU capitals the issues defining the New Europe are gaining a complex political articulation.

• Integration encompasses manifold transformations of fundamental aspects of economic, social, political, and cultural life that can be acutely observed ethnographically among the inhabitants of Europe's complex borderlands. Indeed, across the border regions of Europe the key imperatives of integration as well as their contradictions are revealed. The people who inhabitant these zones continually negotiate the history of the nation-state and the future-oriented imperatives of a supranational EU.

• Integration has brought into being a vast multiracial and multicultural society that is coalescing most dramatically within the great urban centers of Europe. Cities like London, Paris, and Berlin, the research sites of a number of our faculty, provide settings-immigrant and refugee communities, exuberant youth clubs, and entrenched working class districts-where diverse groups of urbanites participate in the creation of a radically new society.

Finally, we believe that European integration has broad anthropological significance. The supranational operation of the EU reveals how deeply our extant repertoire of analytical concepts, our historical perspectives, even our ethical and moral assumptions are predicated on the nation-state as a social fact. When we seek to examine European integration we must confront phenomena that aggressively challenge all the means and methods by which we produce anthropological knowledge. This theoretical and methodological challenge is precisely what makes the EU – as it continually reinvents itself – such an important object of study for political economy and critical anthropology.

Material and Visual Culture

Core Courses: Topics in the Anthropology of Art and Museums (Smart), Consumption (Ferradas), Collecting (Smart), Transnationalism and Diaspora (staff), Topics in Migration and Transnationalism (staff), Ethnographic Film (Smart), On Value (Smart), The Body (Elliston)

Increasingly, anthropologists have identified consumption – broadly defined as individuals' and communities' engagements with material and visual culture – as a rich and multifaceted arena of inquiry. Once regarded primarily as an alienating social practice arising out of Western processes of commodification, the diverse social dimensions of practices of consumption have now been brought to the fore. Examinations of how objects are circulated, exchanged, and imbued with value illuminate broader dimensions of social power and prestige. Similarly, the ways in which people develop social and linguistic relationships with and through visual media can highlight local instantiations of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity, and nationalism.

Our examination of material and visual culture greatly benefits from theoretical and analytical approaches offered by three subfields of anthropology: archaeology, linguistics, and sociocultural anthropology. Indeed, this discussion of social engagements with material, visual, and aural dimensions of social life incorporates insights from archaeological discussions of material culture, visual anthropology's insights on media, and linguistic anthropology's semiotic approaches.

The following areas outline points of focus within these broader debates.

Consumption, Media, and Language Consumption enables people to enact and signal various types of semiotic and verbal communication. Goods themselves, as well as their use, are part of semiotic systems that can signify social networks and group membership. Goods can also signal identity as people produce themselves as particular kinds of subjects through consumption practices, including the ways in which the body is made a material site of adornment and performative style. Consumption has been described as a language of communication, and the symbolic value of commodities has been shown to be especially instrumental in the construction of style and group membership, key aspects of understanding youth culture and art world elites alike. Consumption can crosscut public and private spheres and offer a more complex understanding of how people negotiate "global flows" of objects and media. Likewise, it can index a wide range of local and transnational influences and practices and highlight the intertextual quality of quotidian life. The linguistic dimensions of material and visual culture add significantly to these debates. The indexical properties of language - i.e., its ability to point to objects in the world other than referentially - allow language use to be multifaceted in its engagement with media worlds. Numerous abiding links mediate between language use and consumption, focusing on media especially. Exploring this dialogic relationship between language practices and consumption practices can offer insight into identity, subjectivity, and social class.

Some areas of investigation include: How goods are imagined, acquired, used, displayed, and talked about can be central to the construction and maintenance of social relationships of friendship, family, and community; the ways in which various individuals and social groups produce, interact with, and create meaning from media; and how consumption practices differentiate generations and social groups while others unite them.

Commodification and Consumer Culture The emergence of consumer culture is often presented as one of the most salient features of western modernity. Individualism, choice and market relations are some of the key elements of western culture that play an integral role in consumption practices.

Anthropology is in a privileged position for examining the historical processes behind the development of a culture of consumption in which commodities play a central role. A cross-cultural examination allows us to identify alternative ways of consumption and cultural reproduction and how these alternative ways have increasingly become transformed and/or suppressed by modernization and, more recently, globalization processes that imposed western modes of consumption.

Both with the political economic and the cultural dimensions of consumption are examined by anthropologists. Political economic approaches emphasize the examination of processes of commodification, the relationship between capitalist crisis and consumption, uneven distribution of consumption and production, the spread of capitalism and market relations and the impact on post-socialist and developing nations, the linkage between development projects and energy consumption, the politics and development of needs, the development of technologies that transformed consumption (transportation, mass production, home appliances), consumption patterns and class formation, inequality and impoverishment, the effects of neoliberalism and the development of resistance movements, and the emergence of alternative modes of production and consumption.

An emphasis on the cultural dimensions of consumption addresses the aestheticization of commodities, the production of desires, the emergence of diverse lifestyles, the overproduction of signs and images, the circulation and changing meaning of symbolic goods. It is also concerned with the role of cultural intermediaries specialized in the production, marketing, and dissemination of cultural goods.

Consumer culture is often associated with the urban experience and the development of modern citizens. Social and cultural analysts are concerned with the study of sites of consumption (shopping malls, themed parks and cities, tourist attractions), the gendered nature of consumption, processes of domestication of consumers through advertising and the media, the emergence of domesticity and disciplinary practices (and associated concepts such as comfort, hygiene, and convenience).

The rise of environmentalism is intimately linked to the rediscovery of consumption in recent decades. Although most of the environmental critique of consumption mobilizes earlier negative moral connotations of the term- consumption as waste, destruction-it often fails to address contemporary everyday practices as the sources of the current crisis. Because most needs are naturalized and unproblematized, dominant forms of environmentalism are not premised on the transformation of contemporary society but rather, attempt to make it more "efficient" such as in policies of ecological modernization and environmental sustainability. Archaeological and social and cultural anthropological research allows us to identify the historical specific politics of needs and the changing relations of men and women with their environment and nature.

Museum Studies Museums are preeminent sites of consumption in which the world is arrayed around one as a spectacle. Over the past couple of decades museums have been the subject of considerable popular and academic critique. Questions have been raised concerning the ways in which they serve the interests of power, through the specific narratives they produce, in their exclusionary character as high cultural institutions, and in the manner in which their audiences are called upon to defer to the authority of expert knowledge. Critiques have also called into question the ethics of museum collecting practices and the politics of who gets to represent whom. At the same time as they face this critical pressure they are also struggling to maintain 'market share' in the context of competing claims on their public's leisure time, and increasingly pressing financial imperatives.

But, strangely, in the face of these mounting pressures, museums are proliferating at an unprecedented rate. How are we to understand this phenomenon? Why do museums continue to be central cultural institutions? How are museums being reimagined in response to their critics? How are they to be understood in relation to other exhibitionary domains through which our understanding of the world and of ourselves in relation to it are established-through, for example, tourism, film, photography, theme parks, and shopping malls?

Anthropology of Art and Artworlds Anthropological interest in art has historically focused on 'primitive' art, analysis of which has been understood to offer a window onto the cultural worlds of its producers. Increasingly, however, attention has been paid to the assimilation of non-western objects into western art markets and to the character of the artworld as a fundamentally transnational, cosmopolitan social formation that at the same time takes on a distinctively local character in its engagements with particular patrons, audiences, and politics.

Ethnographic studies of art worlds might address the complexities of dealing with local contingency in the face of art's claim to constitute 'the new,' 'the contemporary,' globally. They examine processes by which objects are imbued with value-aesthetic, monetary, sentimental-with attention to the institutional and discursive practices that constitute the contemporary art world; and the ways in which art is mobilized variously in the service of projects of cultural critique, of nation-building, personal prestige, and in attempts to produce particular kinds of sensibilities and social relations. The manner in which art objects are called upon, by collectors, artworld professionals, and their audiences, as agents in processes of identification and self-constitution is of central interest.

Nation, Nationalism, and Nationalist Modernity

Core Courses: Nationalism and Women in the 'Third World' (Elliston), Political Anthropology (Wilson), Political Ecology (Ferradas), Latin America Seminar (Ferradas), Kinship, Gender, & Sexuality (Elliston), The Global and the Local (Ferradas), Topics in Migration and Transnationalism (staff), Sexuality Studies Seminar (Elliston), Transnationalism and Diaspora (staff).

Current social theory has approached modernity as a discourse constituted through specific epistemological, metaphysical, and political projects and, in so doing, has critically interrogated modernity's prior meaning as simply an historical epoch (i.e., modes of social organization that emerged in Europe around the 16th century). This major shift in theorizing modernity has founded a wide variety of critical analytical projects, not least of which is the on-going debate about the relationship between modernity and post-modernity. Apart from the distinctiveness of "modern" social institutions and their reinforcing processes (the nation-state, colonialism, capitalism and the commodification of labor, secularization, etc.), key ideological projects and commitments of modernity that have come under challenge are:

• a formulation of history and historical change as the continual unfolding of progress, which has underwritten the ideological contrast of European 'civilization' with Others' "primitivism";

• a formulation of the modern subject/person as a rational human individual with a unified self ("Man"), where autonomous human consciousness was seen as the source of action and meaning (rather than as their product) and which has worked by separating subject from object, thought from reality, self from other;

• a formulation of truth and knowledge that depends on a "metaphysics of presence," i.e., that asserts truth and knowledge are objective and transcendent, existing outside and independent of the social and discoverable through rational, objective thought (in particular, scientific procedure).

A particular understanding of "rationality" has been central to the projects of modernity, underpinning modern claims about and understandings of the subject, history, progress, and truth/ knowledge, along with political projects such as nationalism and the production of social hierarchies. In addition, the production of binaries - civilization/primitivism; colonizer/colonized; self/other; objective/subjective; men/women - and their hierarchical ordering has been central in the Western epistemology constituting modernity.

Each of the modernist formulations distilled above has become a site of critical interrogation owing in part to the emergence of poststructuralist and postmodernist social theory. These have offered alternative approaches for reconstructing contemporary understandings of the subject/individual, history, and truth/knowledge, as well as other 'grand narratives' of modernity. In anthropology, critical engagements with modernity have challenged not only the key modernist formulations described above, but also a wide variety of the social and political projects those modernist formulations have enabled and 'naturalized.'

For example, in recent years anthropologists have developed critical ethnographic approaches to the nation and nationalism, and to their embeddedness in the projects of modernity. Among the interesting questions in this regard are, for example, how nationalism as a modernist undertaking relies on and is produced through inclusions and exclusions (in defining the nation's membership in terms of common language, history, and "culture," for example), and the ways the nation's history is commonly (re)written as a narrative of progress.

In our department, faculty research projects in this specialization include the study of how nationalists describe, imagine (and produce) the nation, that is, how nationalist narratives chart the history of the people and formulate the meanings and terms of the nation's "common culture" and history; the study of state "cultural policies," and the ways they rely upon and reproduce structural inequalities by masking differences within cultural communities and promoting a vision of the nation as a unified, distinctive cultural community vis-à-vis other nations. Other faculty are engaged in cognate studies of how the terms of belonging to the nation are forged, with particular attention to how social differences are harnessed to the project of creating national community; and in projects focusing on the specific social practices through which identifications with the nation are made compelling to many – but never all – people of a given nation, that is, made into something for which people are willing to fight and even die. Still other faculty are researching related questions about the processes through which belonging and identification are produced, but tracking such questions in relation to other forms of community-building such as the forging of transnational and diasporic modes of identification and belonging.

Such belongings demonstrate that neoliberal globalization and transnational processes – the spatial re-arrangements of capital, culture, social movements and migration beyond the boundaries of nation-states – are increasingly challenging the projects of contemporary nation-states. While some analysts predicted that the sovereignty of nation-states would be replaced by the sovereignty of the market and powerful supra-national institutions, current developments show that far from disappearing, nation-states are playing key roles in the restructuring of the world economy, politics, and culture. In this new conjuncture, most nation-states have modified their roles in social welfare and development and now more actively participate in processes of deregulation that facilitate the transnationalization of capital and limit the power of the working classes. These processes have generated impoverishment and insecurity and have widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Moreover, with the unsettling of modernist and universalist agendas, new forms of politics emphasizing particularisms and difference have emerged.

Faculty in our department are concerned with the contradictory and complex processes triggered by neoliberal restructuring and the globalization of culture. Among our faculty, research projects focus on regional and local contestations of the fragmentation and marginalization created by global capital, and on the tensions between national, regional and global projects in such arenas as, for example, international borders, environmental politics in deindustrialized and impoverished nations of the South, processes of privatization and capitalization of nature, the development of nationalist social movements, the emergence of transnational classes such as cosmopolitans, the role of central banks in a globalized economy, and the transformations of modernization and development paradigms.

Formations of the Modern Self

Core Courses: The Body (Elliston), Language & Identity (staff), Kinship, Gender, & Sexuality (Elliston), Collecting (Smart), Sexuality Studies Seminar (Elliston)

The modernist theory of the sovereign subject – as the rational, autonomous, and stable source of meaning and action – has been undermined in part by psychoanalytic accounts of the self as fundamentally built through conflicts and tensions. In addition, scholars from feminist, postcolonial, and other theoretical orientations have revealed that the presumably universal and generic features of the modernist subject turn out to be specific and circumscribed: women, for example, in European societies historically, were held to be irrational, and in ways that categorically banished them from claims to full subjecthood (as well as full citizenship); colonized subjects were also commonly held, by European colonials, to lack key features of sovereign subjectivity, and precisely through such assertions of lack were situated as needful objects of European colonial rule.

In recent years, such challenges to the modernist theory of the subject have been complemented by theories of subjectivity that foreground multiplicity and plurality in characterizing identity and the subject as fluid, unstable, mobile, processual, and even performative – rather than fixed, secure, permanent or essential. Through such theories, and of particular interest to anthropologists, context (in all of its complexity) emerges as vital for the understanding of subjectivity, encouraging ethnographic analyses of identity performances and processes of identification as contingent and situated, bound to and produced within specific social contexts.

Most sociocultural faculty in our department are engaged with questions of subjectivity that foreground critical approaches to the modernist theory of the sovereign subject. Among current faculty research projects, for example, these include research on how the practices of art collection and patronage become media for the subject-collector's self-constitution in relation to ideas about cosmopolitanism and primitivism, class aspirations and structures. Other faculty research projects focus on social differences as sites of and vehicles for identification, interrogating how subjectivity is forged in relation to larger social formations of inequality (of race, sexuality, gender, and class, for example) yet also revealing how the agency of subjects animates such identificatory processes of self-constitution. In these and other faculty research projects, a key part of the ethnographic study of subjectivity involves researching the complex social dynamics through which social differences are made into sites of identification, vehicles of social reproduction, and vehicles of social change.

Semiotics of Culture

Core Courses: Semiotics (Glick), Linguistic Anthropology (Glick), Language and Identity (staff), Language and Materiality (staff), The Body (Elliston)

A growing number of researchers within anthropology and across the social sciences utilize a semiotic approach to the study of cultural phenomena. In the belief that such a development is both interesting and important, we offer and are developing courses that study various socio-cultural and linguistic phenomena from a semiotic perspective. Through focusing on the mediation of cultural meanings through signs, semiotic approaches are productive for quite an array of courses and topics. For example, we presently offer or are in the process of developing courses and encouraging theses in semiotic approaches to the study of mass media, to language and identity, to the production of meaning and to cultural ideology.

As a central and influential institution in many industrialized societies, mass media is understandably a growing area of research for scholars taking a semiotic approach. Similarly, in a mass-media dominated era when identity is a central socio-political construct, semiotics offers us the ability to sort through multiply-layered signs of identity and how they are enacted in social life. Finally, semiotics' most far-reaching contribution emerges in the ways it contributes analyses of the general mechanisms by which cultural life is constructed, maintained, and challenged. Semiotic studies of the production of meaning and cultural ideology are thus central questions of focus.

Roster of Graduate Courses

The Body (Elliston)
Collecting (Smart)
Consumption (Ferradas)
Cultures of Capitalism (Holmes)
Cultures of Expertise (Holmes)
Ethnographic Film (Smart)
European Integration and Europeanization (Wilson)
The Global and the Local (Ferradas)
Kinship, Gender, & Sexuality (Elliston)
Language and Identity (staff)
Language and Materiality (staff)
Latin America Seminar (Ferradas)
Linguistic Anthropology (Glick)
Nationalism and Women in the 'Third World' (Elliston)
On Value (Smart)
Political Anthropology (Wilson)
Political Ecology (Ferradas)
Semiotics (Glick)
Sexuality Studies Seminar (Elliston)
Topics in Migration and Transnationalism (staff)
Topics in the Anthropology of Art and Museums (Smart)
Transnationalism and Diaspora (staff)

 

 

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