Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

A Shared Anthropology in the Study of Migration: Other, Self, and beyond “Entre centre et absence”1 Displacement is an embodied experience. Spatial rupture induces double estrangement – stressing both proximity and otherness of so called Other as well as experiencing Self as someone else. A particular sort of displacement – migration is under our scope here. It is illustrated by the case of temporary migration of Chukchi and Eskimo students in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The inevitable transformation of spatial (De Certeau 1984) and bodily practices in the new social and cultural realm triggers “the shift of the centre” in the individual migrant, conceiving one’s own body as ambiguously present and/or absent. Such oscillation between the actual centeredness and experiential absence of the migrant’s living body (corps vivant, Merleau-Ponty 1945) unfolds within the contact with Other and appears to be a condition of a situated (and of re-situating) Self. Accordingly, Clifford’s definition of displacement is relevant in this study: “pervasive condition of offcenteredness in a world of distinct meaning systems, a state of being in culture while looking at culture, a form of personal and collective self-fashioning” 2. Some shifts in understanding of this term, however, are present in this paper. Firstly, world of distinct meanings is a rather instantaneous

state; migrant,

perhaps more than anyone else, witnesses a world as collage of entangled “braids of meanings” (Barthes), identities, and experience. Secondly, decenteredness as used referring to Merleau-Ponty is a pre-reflexive category whereas Clifford’s offcenteredness points out reflexivity in the process of self-fashioning; in migrant’s life such reflexivity becomes pervasive (occupying whole spectrum of everyday life) and discourse-stimulating (“self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence” 3 ), and significant as far as modus vivendi is concerned. In the migratory 1

Inspired by Henri Michaux. Clifford J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University. P. 9. 3 Ibidem. P.14.

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Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

experience both, decenteredness and off-centeredness, are present. As our study shows, migration can be indeed conceived as a shift from decentralized “I”, or rather “non-I” towards a reflexive, off-centered yet integrated, Self. Considering the peculiarity of a migratory experience, it is argued that if we are to account for the statement and re-adjustment of subjectivity in the context of displacement (such as migration) then affectionate knowledge and conditions of sharing need to be the place of the study. Both of these aspects intertwine in the filmic approach in anthropological research. It does not seem plausible to suggest that visuality is the only site within which the above mentioned issue can be studied. Yet, according to our findings, it is visuality that has capacity of disclosing new methodological schema in the studies of migration. The following paragraphs are to precise and demonstrate this statement.

Displaced Body – Eskimo dance in Saint Petersburg

The fact of displacement initiates the distinction between the body in its totality, a flesh, and subject – object differentiation. Decenteredness relates to this pre-reflective flesh, sensible for itself. It is not “I” who sees, who smells, who touches, it is one who sees, smells, touches in me (Merleau-Ponty 1945). In the case of Chukchi and Eskimo students in Saint Petersburg it is the metropolitan space which encloses them in a world of senses radically different from their home; first contact with the city is perceived rather as an assault to the senses: gaudy, jumbled, vulgar surfaces (Chaney 1994) contrasting at the same time with “tasteless food”, “stuffy air”, “limited mobility”. The capacity of one’s body in such situation is indeed to appropriate certain objects in the environment in the extent that these objects cease to be objects and become “incorporated” – become part of the living body (Merleau-Ponty 19454). The world, so impulsively taken at first, is gradually taken as own; latterly even new landscapes of (self-) expression can be tested.

4

Moran, D., Staehler, T. (2004) Phenomenology : Themes and Issues. Vo.2. London: Routledge. P.145.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

How such a transformation in a migrant’s perspective is possible? What exactly attends the shift from decenteredness to off-centeredness? The answer appears to lie in the contact with Other, in the possibility of transcendental perspective. It challenges the experience of displacement in several ways. Our desire for reciprocity of a special sort, namely the intent to see ourselves as Other sees us motivates in us the development of reflective awareness. Identification with Other (and yet not identity) is the condition for the capacity of sharing. On the pre-reflective level one might experience the Other as someone like me (but not exactly me), that is someone who is experiencing the same world but from over there. Such reversibility is a necessity for Self of a migrant to be situated in a new social, cultural realm. “Mineness” experienced through “Otherness” implies double perspective – the one of seeing (voyant) and the one of being seen (visible). The only position that is hidden to me is the one of seeing, observing me, myself, from the position of Other. Such anonymity of the perceiving body does not restrict but rather structures the continuity of seeing – being seen. Such continuity, however, has been long time denied by anthropology, rendering subject – object relationship dominating. For ethnography and film, both children of Modernity, “being seen” in a form of observation or gaze seemed to be of the foremost importance. As Chaney writes, “Ways of seeing are also necessarily ways of being seen – an inescapability of observation that is unsurprisingly centre to the fantasies of modernity” 5 . Such strategy evokes Bill Nichols’s term “ethnotopia”: an ideal of limitless observation inspired by our fascination for Other as well as our desire to conquer, possess it epistemologically 6 . As Russell points out, Jean Rouch’s concept of anthropologie partagée, aiming to blur the barriers between Self and Other in the fantasy of displacement is “an ethnotopian form of filmmaking that freely deployed narrative and dramatic techniques, in conjunction with (scientific) anthropological material to offset the apparatus […] of epistemological

5 6

Chaney, D. (1996) Lifestyles. London, New York: Routledge. P.103.

Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. P. 218.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

possession”7. In its extreme it brings to an end transcendental perspective and along with it also subjectivity itself. Likewise Rouch’s effort to render the camera invisible by adopting it as a part of his own anatomy (as an extra limb) is an utopian quest. The camera does not cease to be there and it is indeed held by someone coming from different cultural background. Such positioning of the camera might enhance the subjectivity of the person with a camera but denying the subjectivity (and the possibility of an extra limb) of Other. The act of laying aside the instrument of epistemological possession does not make the mean itself less related to the fascination for exotic Other. This study is to suggest, however, that Rouch’s work is influential by quite another perspective it proposes; it is not sharing as an act of breaking down the subject – object barriers but rather as a participatory, intersubjective experience that shall be able to inspire our inquiry of displacement. If body can serve as a metaphor of social relationships, including Self – Other relationship, then body choreography can reveal the subjective stance and the dynamics between Self and Other. It is not coincidental, that Rouch’s films portray foremost trance, dance, and hunting practices. In our research of displacement the experience of dance occupies a dominant place. It is in the traditional Eskimo dance performed, constructed, and reconstructed in the foreign, metropolitan space of Saint Petersburg where the affectionate, bodily, and spatial experience induced by migration is encapsulated. Most migrants perform traditional dance exclusively in the city; it is the only place where such endeavour can be meaningful for them. “Who would dance at home where everybody dances?” is often a response. Hence in the Self – Other relations the identity is based upon the rhetoric of exceptionality. The stigma of “primitive”, “exotic”, or “uncivilized” is elaborated into a notion of being “unique”, “rare”. Beside self-confirmation through exceptional, culturally one-of-a-kind practice, dance also provides a synecdoche for what it is to be an Eskimo in Saint Petersburg. The latter perspective enable us to see how the subjectivity, displaced, decentered, is experiencing Self as someone else and through dance reintegrates itself taking an off-centered, reflexive stance. 7

Russell, C. (1999) Experimental Ethnography. The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, London: Duke University Press. P. 77-78.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

Dance itself is a metaphor of displacement. As Straus writes: “A shift of the ego in relation to the body schema corresponds to the dominance or the movement of the torso. While in the waking, active human being the ego is localized in the region of the bridge of the nose between the eyes, it descends in dancing into the torso”. 8 Similarly, dance conveys the richness of local sensibilities; when done in the intimate sphere it enables the migrant to eliminate frustration and evoke home, when performed in the dance group it provides channels for Self – Other interrogation. Authenticity politics managed in the folk dance group by its leaders yet negotiated with other members outlines the borders within which Eskimo Self shall be identified. It is not, however, only a particular “traditional” dance that is to be adjusted, revised, or tuned, so to say stylized; Self is also to be fashioned. Choices are to be made: dance in the city shall be fleshy, impressive, dance at home – “genuine”9; costume made of regular cotton instead of fur it is acceptable, dancer with braces alas not. In the context of migration into the city such microcosm of the dance studio resembles mini Chukotka. Such “scape”, partially escape and partially a site for self-fashioning, constructs a specific kind of locality.

Autoethnography

Let us consider a snapshot of an Eskimo boy in Saint Petersburg. Image depicting a subject who is looking directly into the camera is one of the most powerful visual source of a dialogue: encounter of a portrayed subject with someone who is looking at him in physical reality – the photographer (process of filming) or in screening reality – the spectator, or possibly neither of the two when his gaze is pointed to an anonymous background. Such gaze, as MacDougall wrote, “evokes one of the primal experiences of daily life – of look returned by look – through which we signal mutual recognition and affirm the shared experience of the moment. […] In a Lacanian

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Straus Erwin. Die Formen des Räumlichen. Ihre Bedeutung für die Motorik un die Wahrnehming. In: Phenomenological Psychology. Basic Books 1966. 9 Sapir, 1949. P. 326; King, 2005. P. 4.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

sense, the self is reaffirmed and mirrored in these comparatively rare direct glances from the screen”10. If “being seen” is experienced the same as “being seen” in the presence of Other than it shall be feasible to come closer to an understanding of subjectivity through a selfobservation taking a stand similar (yet not identical) to Other. Selfhood is manageable through the means of body.11 The actual play with body practices implies degree of selfirony. In this sense, snapshots of Chukchi and Eskimo in front of their “ancestors” preserved, literally “canned”, in the glass boxes in the ethnographic museum “Kunstkamera” seem to evoke the hidden satire. Its ambivalence (even though perhaps not fully conscious) is apparent. On one hand, Chukchi and Eskimo are aware of the ethnographic stocks knowledge as well as of the notion of “primitive”. In fact, it is this non-indigenous epistemological heritage, studied at the universities in the city, which becomes oftentimes a primary source of information related to indigenous traditional culture. It is in the condition of imminent confrontation with Other (such as in migratory situation) when “archeology” of specific nature comes at hand: Indigenous man digs out from ethnological strata the virgin indigenous man who was supposed to be there “before ethnology” and who then was conceived, preserved, and repeatedly reinvented as such in ethnographic writing. Baudrillard, with a sense of irony, calls it a triumph of ethnology, “science which seemed dedicated to their [Indians] destruction” was actually able “to reincarnate itself, in the “brute” reality of those Indians it has entirely reinvented savages who are indebted to ethnology for still being Savage”12. Acting out the prescribed role of a “primitive” with a degree of exaggeration sets the dialogue between Self and Other on a qualitatively different level. Similar ironic dispute with a set of different authoritative discourses – the one of own ethnic elite and the one of white society, is clear-cut in the comments made by Chukchi students while 10

MacDougall, D. (1998) Transcultural Cinema. Ed. Taylor, L. Princeton: Princeton University Press. P.100. 11 Chaney, D (1996). Lifestyles. Routledge: London, N.Y. P.117. 12 Baudrillard, J. (1984) The Precession of Simulacra. In: Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. by Brian Wallis. New York: MOMA. Pp. 253-281.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

watching TV show in which their teachers and friends from Folk dance group participated13: • TV presenter (after a short piece of throat singing presented by teacher 2 in the studio): It is so… it is impossible to learn it…Where does it come from? • Teacher 1: It is a very ancient tradition… • Teacher 2: Throat singing, Chukchi, paleoasian, Chukchi, Evenk, Koryak, and let’s say, tradition of Kamchatka. […] If it is considered as singing, it appears to be a rhythmic breathing, but it is not a throat but deeply underneath that one hears. It is hard for me to explain it… • Teacher 1: [...] It was studied, Volodya Sayan was telling me, and yet nobody understood it, it is something that goes way back, it is genetic, in-born, ancestral. One student starts throat singing, the other students in the dorm room laugh. Although described in the context of presentation and performance, the above mentioned examples of Self-presentation imply also “more intimate structure of culture”14. Subjectivity and selfhood are still negotiated within Self – Other encounters, this time, however, the notion of Self-integrity gains its significance. “Decentered mineness” becomes an “off-centered Self”: the imminent self-reflexivity of a particular migrant regarding his/her authenticity is equally important as general systems of thoughts, rules, and practices behind it. What actually lies between the centre and absence? Having claimed the high potential of visuality to explore the territories yet to be mapped by anthropology, it is also plausible to suggest that visuality renders non-visible visible. In a given context, visuality (be it film, photography or something else) envisions displacement as effort of Self to “dwell” in the experience and at the same time to interpret the latter as if it was life of someone else (be it Other).

Such immediacy of displacement reminds of hunger.

Describing the process of instinct regulation Freud states that a child learns to control his feeling of hunger by the means of visual representation. By creating an image of food in 13

Local channel TV 3, Saint Petersburg, February 2005. Sapir, E. (1934) The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures In: Mandelbaum., 1949/1984.

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Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

his mind, child postpones his actual hunger15. What would social world be like if all our eager for the meaning, whether sought in our selves or elsewhere, was satisfied by mere consumption of visual images.

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Sigmund Freud In: Yalom (1980) Existential Psychotherapy.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

“Я ведь тоже из Калифорнии”. (“I am yet also from California” says the caption on the rear side of the photograph of a young Chukchi boy in Ethnographic Museum “Kunstkamera” in Saint Petersburg).

Neither this eskimo woman, visiting her fellow villagers, did not miss the exhibition on Eskimos at the Arctic department of “Kunstkamera”.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

Literature Barthes, R. (1981) Camera Lucida. New York: Hill and Wang. Baudrillard,

J. (1984) The Precession of Simulacra. In: Art after Modernism:

Rethinking Representation. Ed. by Brian Wallis. New York: MOMA. Pp. 253-281. Chaney, D. (1996) Lifestyles. London, New York: Routledge. Clifford J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge: Harvard University. King, A. D. (2005) Genuine and spurious dance forms in Kamchatka, Russia. Working Paper No.79, MPI for Social Anthropology. 19p. MacDougall, D. (1998) Transcultural Cinema. Ed. Taylor, L. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 318p. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/1962/2002) Phenomenology of perception. London: Routledge. Moran, D., Staehler, T. (2004) Phenomenology : Themes and Issues. Vo.2. London: Routledge. Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Our Totemic Ancestors and Crazed Masters. Ed. P. Hockings Paul, Omori Yasuhiro. In: Senri Ethnological Studies, Series №24. National Museum of Ethnology: Osaka, 1988. Pp. 225-238. Russell, C. (1999) Experimental Ethnography. The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Durham, London: Duke University Press. Sapir,E. (1934, 1949/85). The Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures

In: Selected Writings in Language, Culture, and Personality. Edited by

Mandelbaum, D.G.. Berkely: University of California Press. Straus Erwin. Die Formen des Räumlichen. Ihre Bedeutung für die Motorik un die Wahrnehming. In: Psychologie der menschlichen Welt. Berlin: Springer, 1960/ reprinted as The Forms of Spatiality. In: Phenomenological Psychology. Basic Books 1966. Yalom, I.D. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy. ISBN 0-465-021476.

Jaroslava Bagdasarova Max Plack Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany [email protected]

Author’s filmography on the related topic: 2005 The Seagull flying against the Wind. FAMU. 15 min. 2008 faux pas . fopíčko FAMU/Université Paris VIII, Saint Denis. 22 min.