Justin Erik Halldór Smith

The Kelpies

Dear A****,

I'm sorry for disappearing so suddenly a few years back. One day I'm still there on the East Coast busily discharging the duties of my profession, while also, I'm sure you remember, circulating in something pretty close to what you could straight-facedly call a 'demimonde': publishing, blogging, tweeting and getting retweeted like a star. And then, the next day, silence. As you probably detected, it was a challenging time for me at many levels, personal, professional, etc. I've been meaning for a long time to write to fill you in on what's been going on, but I had to feel like I was starting to get back on my feet again before I even dared. 

I've got my own place now, in Sacramento. Not Sacramento exactly, but Carmichael. Which is basically Sacramento. My upstairs neighbors are a couple of skinheads. It's a good thing I'm white, I guess. They mostly keep to themselves, always loading asbestos-removal equipment into and out of their pick-up truck. It's not so bad. I was living with my mom for the first two years or so out in Fair Oaks (also basically Sac), but she eventually pushed me to get a job at Best Buy, drawing on some connections with the middle-manageriate at our local outlet, connections that also seem somehow to involve Timothy, her Vietnamese manicurist who always works with a parrot on his shoulder. I don't know all the behind-the-scenes machinations that went on, but somehow a job was procured for me, and I guess it's around that time that I started feeling like I'm my own person again. Actually that's a bit of an exaggeration: I'm still so steeped in debt I'm not anywhere near being my own person. I can't afford to be a person for anyone but the credit-card companies and their collectors. 

At least I've paid back everything I owed to Best Buy. That's right: for about 9 months I was basically an indentured servant, having ruined a few Bluetooth Cochlears the first week on the job while trying to show some customers how to insert them (I didn't know you had to have a wax-removal certificate from an ENT first). They docked the cost of them from my pay. That was only like half a paycheck, but the real problem started when some of my co-workers (half my age, of course) figured out how to hack the Acer Goggles we had on display in order to get high on the deep-brain-stimulator stuff they were emitting, before the FDA or ATF or whoever handles this sort of thing put a stop to it. 

What a crazy story that was! I couldn't believe it when the scandal broke, and Acer's CEO held a press conference to admit they had come up from behind and beat Google at the enhanced-reality-glasses game by including a little photon beam or whatever that travelled directly to the limbic system and induced a low-grade sense of bliss. My co-workers were a bunch of stoner idiots, but to their credit they were some of the first kids in the country not only to figure out what was going on, and why all of a sudden Acer's profits were going through the roof, but also how to up the photon dosage and stimulate the shit out of the hypothalamus. So picture me: a former philosophy professor, 42 years old, lying on the floor of the Best Buy break room wearing those stupid goggles, acering like a teenager, stoned out of my fucking mind, when the manager bursts in and yanks them off my face. All of a sudden, no more bliss. Damn. And he says to me: "Hey genius, I hope you know it breaks 'em when you unblock the photon dosage. You're gonna be paying that off for a long-ass time, professor."

I'm sure you can recall that I was not always like this. I used to freak out at exactly 2 1/4 glasses of wine, chattering anxiously about how 2 is the maximum doctor-recommended amount, and relating all the dark insomniac thoughts about my battered liver that I already knew would keep me up later that night. Yet here I was blasting my hypothalamus into the raisin state. (You saw that exposé where the kids were talking about their 'raisin brains', didn't you? You know, Alex Jones or one of those other CNN guys going to that glasses-withdrawal ward in Tulsa or some awful place? All those kids? How they wouldn't let them have any wires or straws or anything they could try to insert in order to rub their brains directly? Holy shit!) 

I guess you could say I kind of lost hope for the future. It has something to do with my precipitous loss of status, but it's not just that. It's also that I know what they said was not true, and that that doesn't matter to anyone. The truth doesn't matter! That's enough to make anyone lose hope.

Did you hear what happened? I usually just suppose people found out, what with the way information travels these days. But who knows? To put it succinctly: I was fired from my job for fabricating, so they said, a round-the-world voyage taken by Immanuel Kant. Can you imagine: Immanuel Kant? The philosopher most famous (i) for having a name that kind of sounds like 'cunt', which is the source of endless ribaldry from the Borscht Belt to the frat house; and (ii) as absolutely everyone in the world knows, for never once in his entire life having left his home town of Königsberg? They say I made up a bunch of fake sources to prove that Kant's mature critical philosophy was largely the product of his encounters with native peoples along his route. Well, guess what? Kant really did fucking go to Sumatra. I proved it before, and I'm not in the mood to do it again. I'm over that. 

But in any case the Kant part of it is just the tip of the iceberg, the bit that provides a nice satisfying story with a happy, or at least a poetically just, ending: professor makes stuff up, professor gets fired, professor moves in with mom and gets a job at Best Buy and turns into an Acer junkie. But you have to ask yourself: why would anyone care? Academics make false claims all the time, sometimes billions of dollars hang in the balance, and yet they almost never get punished for it. I made a few claims about some guy's travel plans in the 18th century, and I got fired for it. Don't you think that's a bit strange? Well let me fill you in: there are some people out there who really don't want certain facts to get out, and who have the power to shut you down if you start to let them out. I understand this now: I would never choose to re-fight this battle. It's just not worth it. But I'm telling it to you in private correspondence, only because I trust you and I trust that you understand how important discretion is in this case.

It's not the Sumatra part that gets to them. You might have read, in the original post in that one open-access journal (which was quickly taken down, but of course not until after they'd deposited my $300 publication fee), the part about Kant's sojourn on the Arctic coast of Russia, where he lived among the Tlängit people of the Taimyr Peninsula. This is all documented in Benno Klopp's 1873 book, Die geheime Sumatrareise Immanuel Kants (which has disappeared from nearly all research libraries in the world, for reasons that will become clear). You might also recall the part about the Tlängit concept of nâk, how it means --or at least how Kant thought it meant-- something like 'necessity' or 'fate' or 'weather', and how Kant, d'après Klopp, had taken this concept and placed it at the very heart of one of the antinomies of pure reason in his first Critique. Are you still following? Good, because as I've said I really don't want to have to go over all this stuff again. It's still an open wound for me. 

Anyway it's not just about Kant and the Taimyr Tlängit. This is not some obscure question for Aral-Ultaicists and transcendental idealists. No, it is much, much bigger than that. 

Have you heard of the Kelpius Brotherhood? They are the followers of a certain Johannes Kelpius, a Bavarian mystic from the late 17th century who established a commune in Pennsylvania, which eventually grew into a whole community with its own private university called 'Wissahickon'. Kelpius was out of his gourd, a sort of L. Ron Hubbard of the Baroque. He combined the crudest understanding of Christianized Kabbalism with an eclectic hotch-potch of already outdated alchemy, astrology, and a fervent belief that Pennsylvania was destined, in the coming new age, to be a religious utopia. He is said to have been in possession of the philosopher's stone, as in, that object of the great alchemical quest for deep knowledge of the mysteries of nature and existence and God and stuff. Supposedly he threw it into the Schuylkill somewhere outside of Philly shortly before his death in 1708. Crackpots like Kelpius were a dime a dozen in colonial America, of course, but he managed to make his legacy endure by developing a tight organization, bound together by oral tradition, secret vows, oaths of loyalty. To this very day Wissahickon has something they call  the 'Sub-Brotherhood for the Enforcement of Kelpian Doctrine', also known as the 'Kelpies'.

This gang consists of 200 or so men, mostly local Wissahickon rabble, but also a few recent graduates of Wissahickon's philosophy department who find themselves as unemployable as the day they finished their K-through-12 Kelpian home-schooling and as a result become radicalized in their commitment to the Brotherhood. They have long beards, which is peculiar, since Kelpius himself was beardless and never said anything at all concerning facial hair. But on their understanding the hair 'emanates' from the face in the same way that the world emanates from Ein Sof, which is the Kabbalists' term for the divine. Not every man is expected to have a beard, but only every educated man, whose very face now symbolizes his knowledge of the relationship between God and world. It is for this reason that if a man shows himself to be foolish, or speaks against the officially sanctioned doctrine, the Kelpies will show up with a pair of scissors and exact their punishment.

Now you are about to become one of only two outsiders in the entire world, along with me, who knows this little secret (if you do not wish to be burdened by knowing too much, then stop reading now, my friend): there is a belief, passed down from Kelpius to successive generations of Wissahickon initiates, according to which the Hebrew יהוה‎ is just a ruse, a decoy that distracts the benighted from the true name of God, which is (and you can probably see this coming): נךּ. This is totally insane, of course. Technically the word transliterates as nk, and the suppressed vowel could in principle be an â, but this combination of letters doesn't even look remotely like an acceptable lexeme of ancient Hebrew; the kaph with the dagesh dot in it (indicating a voiceless velar) barely even occurs in the entire Old Testament. But whatever. Kelpius claims to have extracted this bit of knowledge from an esoteric reading of the extremely rare 2nd edition of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth's book, Kabbala denudata, which appeared in Nürnberg in 1686. Now Knorr von Rosenroth was one of the more, shall we say, imaginative of the early modern Christian Hebraists, but he was not sloppy, and he knew not to make stuff up out of thin air. As I'm sure you're beginning to see, the same cannot be said of Herr Kelp.

So anyhow we've got this situation where the Brotherhood takes nâk, or nk, to be the true name of God, where they want to keep this information to themselves, and so really don't want outsiders holding forth with competing interpretations of their cherished little monosyllable. And again, you can probably already see what's coming next. At the time I published my piece, or posted my piece, or whatever, in Knowledge4U (now I remember the name of the online journal!) on Kant's Arctic sojourn and its relevance for Aral-Ultaic linguistics, I was teaching, as you probably recall, at Misericordia University up in Montreal. One night, about a week after the piece went up, Ayelet and I were sitting at home in our apartment on the Plateau, a quiet evening, watching videos on YouTube of animals doing things not usually associated with their species, having a good time. There was a knock on the door; I assumed it was some Canadian humanitarian thing, some campaign for the environment or recycling or something, and I begged her not to answer it. But Ayelet was always a better community member than I was, and she insisted. 

They say that the real art of fiction is knowing how to get your characters in and out of rooms, but this is fact so I'm just going to cut to the chase. The Kelpies pushed into the entryway and immediately started making snipping gestures with their scissors, right in Ayelet's face (as she told me, weeping, later that night).  I heard a tussle and for some reason imagined the notorious Mom Boucher and his band of Quebec Hell's Angels (les Hells, they call them). But these were no Hells. There were five of them, the oldest no more than 22, all with pathetic whiskers hanging in strands from their faces. Three of them had unusually severe acne. All were decked out in what I only know as 'urban wear' or 'street fashion': those oversized baseball caps with the stickers still on them, sweatshirts that say things like 'Zoo York', and other signifiers of utter cultural impoverishment. And yet, somehow, through these markers of entry-level social status, they also gave off the air of deeply religious, indeed fanatically religious, young men. It may have been that they were wearing their urban gear as disguises, that they had gone undercover to move inconspicuously in the big city. Underneath it they looked, mutatis mutandis, like the riff-raff who used to go around the streets of Riyadh calling themselves, as I recall, the 'Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice'. (Do you remember them? Before... Well, you know.) They looked like typical religious enforcer thugs from anywhere in the world, except with a distinctly blue-collar Pennsylvania air about them. In other words: terrifying. 

I had no idea who they were or what was going on. (I would only learn a few days later, when one of the five suffered a crisis of conscience, indeed of identity, and called me to explain the whole thing. It's only thanks to him, to little Gunther, that I was able to piece it all together.) You can imagine my confusion as I came running towards Ayelet and they began shouting, "Where's Bieber!? We're looking for Justin Bieber!" I'm Justin, I said, but this didn't silence them. "Hey Bieber," the one who was evidently their leader intoned, "do you know what 'Justin Bieber' means? It means 'Justin Beaver'." They were, evidently, making fun of my name by riffing on the name of that Canadian pop star. Do you remember him? The one they caught smuggling polar-bear claws for the Chinese mafia after his charity tour of Nunavut? That was weird.

Anyhow the Kelpies seem to have wanted to offend my dignity by associating my name with beavers, which would not in itself have been so bad, but then one of them, the smallest one with the worst acne, with a face that was nothing but pustules, really, started muttering something about how I didn't have a beard, how they had been told I had a beard, how all philosophers have beards. "We came to cut off his beard so he could no longer emanate the cosmos like the Godhead does," little Gunther said (though I did not yet think of him as little Gunther). "Well where's his dang beard, Eberhard?" The Kelpies, it would turn out, did not even know it was possible for a philosopher to not have a beard, so isolated were they at Wissahickon. As Gunther would later tell me, they were even taught there that the hairs of one's beard are a direct corporeal reflection of the ideas in one's mind, so that the longer and thicker one's beard is, the greater one's philosophical attainments are thought to be. The idea of a beardless philosopher, on this understanding, is simply a contradiction in terms. 

But the boys had come to cut something, and in the absence of that thing they were looking for, they cast their eyes around for something else. And this is the part where the story grows dark, and I don't think I have the stomach to retell it: the part where the Kelpies turned from merely rough, to simply evil. Their sights landed on Ayelet's beautiful black curls.

Naturally, in the weeks to follow she and I were hardly in good spirits. She insisted she didn't blame me, but I could tell deep down she would have liked for me to have kicked all five of their asses at once. She mostly stayed in the bedroom and read the Pravda archives online (you might recall she's an old-school Kremlinologist). I slept on the couch and let my hygiene lapse. This made her even more disappointed in me those few times a day we passed each other in the hallway, and out of some bizarre self-defeating stubbornness I can barely understand, her disappointment only exacerbated my neglect. For the first time since my undergrad days, I stopped shaving. To my great surprise, the sparsity that had tinged my twenty-year-old beard experiments with emasculating shame was no longer, at forty, a problem. All the empty spaces were filled, and within a few weeks I had a proper 'ensign of manhood about the face and neck', as someone once said. I could have applied for the job of ayatollah! "Well hello, Mr. Ein Sof," Ayelet hissed as we bumped into each other in the doorway of the bathroom one morning. "Isn't that a nice cosmos emanating out of your fucking face." 

Ayelet's mockery gave me an idea. As long as I was starting to look like a Kelpie, I thought, maybe I should take a little trip down to Wissahickon and see what I can find. In any case I had been placed on unpaid leave, and was being investigated by a disciplinary committee for fabrication of research evidence (the Brotherhood has friends in high places). Ayelet was treating me like a stranger. I figured I had nothing to lose. 

There followed a series of lengthy phone conversations with little Gunther, who explained everything I would need to know in order not to be found out. "Don't walk with your hands in your front pockets," he explained, for example. "Unless you want to have clumps of grass thrown at you by a bunch of guys shouting 'Onan!' 'Onan!'." Also: "If anyone asks you if you want a sip of their Red Bull, which they only drink out of straws, you have to say yes. It's considered impolite to use your own straw, but some people do it anyway." And: "Whenever anyone mentions the name of the great Johannes Kelpius, you have to pause, look toward the Schuylkill, and say, 'Quod erat demonstrandum'." That doesn't make any sense, I interrupted. Saying someone's name doesn't prove anything. "Don't ask," Gunther replied. 

I set out to Wissahickon by Greyhound, passing through Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and many other places that until then had been just names for me. While changing buses in Allentown the teenager at the snack bar handed back my change with a 'Happy travels, grampa', which ordinarily would have infuriated me, but under the circumstances made me feel old and wise. I had a bit of grey showing in my long beard, and I knew I would blend right in once I arrived among the Kelpies.

Wissahickon looked like any private liberal-arts college with a hefty endowment: lots of green space, distinguished red-brick buildings in the Georgian style, a few mistaken modernist complexes inserted here and there. The Kelpius Library was one such mistake, but it was at least, to its credit, unusually large for a campus such as this. The library was by far the largest building at Wissahickon, an irridescent flash-cube tower dwarfing the little brick schoolhouses around it. In front was a sort of cubist statue of Johannes Kelpius himself, holding his own head in his hands, a beaming smile on his face, with some sort of glistening silver garlands coming out of his mouth. 

I was nervous, and naturally worried I'd be turned away at the door, as I lacked a campus ID, indeed any plausible explanation of what I was doing there. But I kept little Gunther's advice in mind: always reply to salutations by simply echoing back the same words. The library was guarded by a beardless man wearing a jumpsuit, who hailed me with a loud, friendly 'Q.E.D.!' as I entered. Now this made no sense at all, as nothing had even been said, but I remembered Gunther's words and answered, 'Q.E.D.!' I passed through the turnstile without incident. 

Do you know how in some restrooms the spaces between the tiles are filled with grout-themed graffiti? Like, little plays on words about 'The Grout Gatsby' or 'The Grout Wall of China'? ('Groutfiti', I think it's called.) Well you can imagine my surprise when, staring at the cracks between the tiles in the bathroom of the Kelpius Library, I noticed that some Wissahickon smart-asses had filled them with nâk jokes, about seeing a red door and wanting it painted nâk, or about how white folks live in fear of a nâk planet. One clever nâk-fitist had even made oblique reference to the band responsable for the 1979 hit, 'My Sharona' (The Knack). 

I didn't make much of all this; bathroom walls are there to be written on, after all. And I had work to do: having formulated a precise reconnaissance mission during my conversations with Gunther, I had determined there were two things in particular I could learn there in the stacks. The first was to finally have a look at Klopp's book on Kant's voyage around Eurasia, which up until then I had only seen mentioned in one other place: Erkki Künnapu's History of the Printing Press in Estonia (Toronto, 2004). The Kelpies had eliminated all circulating copies of the work, but they could not possibly purge all bibliographical references.

They had, sure enough, just as Gunther promised, kept a copy for themselves at Wissahickon, right there with all the other Kant books, under that beautiful B2798 Library-of-Congress number I had come to know so well in grad school. It was everything I'd imagined it would be: an exhaustive, rigorously documented account of Kant's day-to-day doings over the entire five-year period of his voyage: the supplies he bought in Yokohama, the illness he contracted in Ceylon, the Indian he met in Surat who wondered how they get so much foam into beer bottles. It was all there! I photographed all 1200 pages with my iPhone, the whole time beaming with a feeling of elation I suspect only researchers can know. 

My next task was to move to the rare-books room to request to see what I believe is the only extant copy of the 1686 edition of Knorr von Rosenroth's Kabbala denudata. There, too, I met a beardless man in a jumpsuit, who greeted me with a hearty 'Q.E.D.!' And there, again, I answered in the same manner, and was waved in. I was made to deposit all my possessions in a locker, and was given a pair of gloves, but there was no more scrutiny or suspicion here than in any other rare-books collection I've visited anywhere in the world. I even managed to slip my iPhone into my front pocket and to pass into the reading room, with my hidden camera, undetected. 

I spent a good 4 hours with that book, poring through it for the slightest clue that might help to explain the peculiar Kelpian interpretation of the true meaning of nâk. I found nothing. Or, rather, I found almost nothing, yet way too much. Two of the pages of the book were thoroughly stuck together, the way I recall books checked out of the public library being, after some careless disgusting kid before me had eaten his apple sauce or wiped his nose while reading Shel Silverstein, say, and then closed the cover and thoughtlessly returned it. I pried the pages of the Kabbala apart, and to my revulsion I found that they had been sealed together by some unidentifiable gunk, some excretion or waste matter of human or animal, God only knows. And next to the horrible stain, a stain so revolting I could barely stand to look at it, someone, God only knows when or why, had written (you guessed it): NÂK! 

Was this whole thing a huge fucking joke? What the hell do the Kelpies think they're guarding there? Is the stain in the book supposed to be the secret name of God? Or was this just more graffiti? I had no answers, but nor, from the very second I pried those pages apart, did I any longer have a desire for answers. I snapped a quick photo, removed my gloves, and headed as fast as I possibly could back to the Wissahickon bus station. 

Ayelet, whose beauty had easily adapted itself to her new pixie cut, went back to Israel around the time I was slowly slinking home, via Pennsylvania, to California. This was of course before Damascus happened and there was as yet no radiation-zone map you had to check before making travel plans. Last I saw it had moved north pretty much all across Anatolia and up as far as Skopje and Tiranë. (Do you remember in like 1996 at Columbia when we were wondering whether there would be a nuclear attack within our lifetimes? You said yes and I said no. Or maybe it was the other way around. Anyhow one of us was wrong.) Ayelet survived, I know that much. I saw on Donky that she went to Sochi with some guy, whom I of course picture as a beefy mafioso in one of those shiny track suits-- the Russians call them 'sportive costumes'. I noticed on Puckr they had kids (alright, I admit it: I even used an illegal Puckr Portal to get into her private feed). Am I jealous? Yes, but I wish them the best. I hope they didn't turn out like those kids in the orphanage in Oman with the polydactyly and the greenish-blonde hair (did you see them on that PBS infomercial for the new thyroid drug? Again: holy shit!)

I figure there's about a 50% chance by now that you believe all of this, and a 50% chance you're thinking: OMG, my old friend has completely lost it. You could well be thinking I sound like some goddamn birther-truther-Sandy-Hooker-CNN-reptilian type. But I only know what I know. I hate turning into a conspiracy theorist more than anyone. I especially hate that my particular tale involves Kabbalah, the secret name of God, etc., etc. As if I were a fan of that awful serial fiction the community-college kids read-- do you remember, that pulp about the Illuminati that the boys who are always speaking up in their philosophy classes like, the ones who are constantly invoking Schrödinger's Cat and 'quantum effects' even when these plainly have nothing to do with anything? But I'm not a community-college student. I'm a professor. Anyway I used to be a professor back before, well, you know the story. Like I said, it's an open wound. 

The world is a different place now. The uninhabitable part of it grows bigger every day, and the survivors have mostly just retreated behind their goggles to watch meta-porn and hyper-cat loops. I don't know why it should matter anymore who went where in the 18th century, and the truth is I don't even really see why it's so important to know the real name of God, let alone to guard it like some precious secret. To keep it secret only in order to make a big obscene joke out of it with the other secret-keepers: that really is too much. Again, I've kind of lost hope. But it's at least a small consolation to know that there's still such a thing as friendship.

Ever your,

J*****

Carmichael, California

11 March, 2018

--

Note: No rare books were damaged in the making of this story. Everything else, however, is entirely true.

Notes of a Novice Student of India

Any specialist on anything will have had that peculiar experience of coming across some casual comment from a total non-specialist about the very thing to which one has devoted one's life, a comment made as if there were no such thing as specialist knowledge, as if what we know in any domain at all were just so much hearsay and vulgarisation. Lord knows I've seen plenty of people denouncing Descartes, for example, or praising Spinoza (seldom the reverse), who know nothing, but nothing, about Descartes or Spinoza. This is easy and costless to do (and we all do it, including those of us who pride ourselves on being specialists and who really care about getting things right in our special domains), so long as one doesn't mingle with the specialists in the domain about which one holds forth.

I've been thinking about how this works, about this seldom-discussed aspect of the sociology of knowledge, quite a bit recently, as I go deeper in my mid-career shift to what used to be called 'Indology' (more on this telling term soon). I am still a near-absolute beginner, yet I am now reaching the point where I can no longer say whatever I want to say on the grounds that I don't know anything anyway, and that the people with whom I'm speaking don't know anything either. I am now interacting with people who do not find it at all peculiar to care about Pāṇinian syntax theory, or about the rules of proper inference in Navya-Nyāya logic. The days are over when I could make sweeping claims about civilizational differences (the sort of sweeping claims my colleagues in philosophy often make) as regards rationality, for example. So in short I'm learning to be careful about what I say, which is really nothing other than entering a community of specialists. I expect anything I say now will appear naive to me when I look back on it in a few years, which is only to say that I will have entered more fully into that community. But one has to start somewhere. 

What used to be called 'Indology' is now referred to more obliquely by phrases such as 'South Asian Studies', 'Religions- und Kulturgeschichte Südasiens', and so on. To some extent this shift can be explained as part of the broader changes that turned geology into 'earth science', and so on. Here, it's just a matter of rebranding, and has nothing to do with respecting the sensibilities of the subjects themselves that are being studied (rocks and sediment don't have sensibilities). In addition, there is the broad impact of Saïd's critique of Orientalism, and the bizarre presumption that if we redescribe ourselves as doing 'studies' of something rather than the '-logy' of it, then we are somehow immune to that critique. But unlike the transformation of Sinology into East-Asian Studies (it's gone translinguistic now, too: in Montreal you can major in 'Études est-asiatiques'), Indology is weighted down by other historical legacies than just the one Saïd picked out, since the gaze upon India has often been one that did not treat it as exotically other, but also, for often less than liberal reasons, treated it as fundamentally, autochthonously, the same. Thus there were several generations of European Indology that used the archaeological, linguistic, and philological evidence of a common Indo-European history for simply sinister, and distinctly European, political ends.

One thing I am quickly learning is that it is best, in South Asian Studies today, to simply leave that particularly charged aspect of Indology's past alone. It is the stuff of cranks. Recently, I was castigated for observing that the shooter at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin would have done well to have learned that, according to the Nazi ideology he claimed to value, Sikhs are themselves Aryans, and worthy of respect from nativist white Americans. I noted that Aryanism is bullshit and suitable only for cranks, no matter who is deemed a member of that class, but still, I said, one ought to start out with the likes of Wade M. Page using principles to which he would be sure to assent. I argued that if he were to learn this much, he might well conclude that the world is more complicated than he had thought, and maybe he should just pause a while and reconsider his prejudices. No sooner did I finish writing this than I got news of some white yokel in Texas who was using his belief in 'Vedism' to claim that he had a first-amendment right to not have his groceries handled by an African-American supermarket clerk. Oh Jesus, I thought, I guess I was wrong. Here is a textbook case of someone who is clearly made worse by the tiny bit of knowledge he manages to come by. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, as Brian Leiter likes to say. I suspect that this clown found his way to Vedism via some fringe white-supremacist nonsense, some pamphlet or blog of collected half-truths. Perhaps we would have seen similar results with Page (but then again, one might also point out that the idiot in Texas isn't shooting anyone, he's just being an awful, awful person). 

With a fringe like that, one can well understand why the mainstream defines the range of legitimate interests as cautiously as it does. But while I'm speaking as a newcomer, it seems to me that there must have been quite a traumatic rift in the Euro-American study of India at the moment when the hippies --that is, if we should attempt to pigeon-hole them, the people who looked to India as the place that is precisely not Europe, and therefore worth learning from-- moved in to replace the older generation of Indologists-- that is, again to pigeon-hole, the people who looked to India primarily in view of its Indo-Europeanness. Wendy Doniger describes herself as a 'recovering Indologist', and I imagine there what she means is that she has spent her career, as someone who came up in the sixties, seeking to overcome the limitations of the generation that trained her. Of course, she has also had to position herself, like many Euro-American post-Indologists, in opposition to Indian popular opinion. And here we have an additional complicating factor in the strange play of forces that has given us today's 'South Asian Studies': there is a tension between what Indian religious and political conservatives like to hear about Indian history and civilization, on the one hand, and on the other what the Euro-American post-Indologists, however much they may have been influenced by an early hope for total inter-civilizational harmony, have to say about India.

Hindu conservatives, old-fashioned European Indologists, and sixties-era harmony-seeking South Asianists all seem to have left their mark on this peculiar field, and for better or worse to be benefitting from each other's work while also doing their best to avoid direct confrontation as to the deep reasons that motivate their respective interests in the field. Again, I'm speaking as a newcomer, and am particularly sensitive to the ways in which I might come across as not knwoing what I'm talking about, but I do think it's safe to say that the different possible ways one might come to study Sanskrit are rather more various and complex than the motivations that might bring one to the study of, say, Swahili. There, one could predict with a fairly high degree accuracy what the Swahili student's general take on the value, the sources, and the 'actuality' of East African culture and history are. Not so with those who are looking to Sanskrit as a portal of entry into Indian culture and history.

I add that this tumultuous history seems fairly sub rosa among the youngest generation of Euro-American students of South Asia. A generation or so after (I imagine) students such as Doniger had to confront the ancien régime of Mircea Eliade et al., students of South Asia today can approach it with an insouciant and innocent 'interest in other cultures', or in learning about the place their parents came from. I suppose this is progress, though part of me thinks that the contested nature of the discipline of Indology ought itself to be considered an integral part of South Asian studies today.

One division that does seem meaningful among the new generation of South Asianists is that between, on the one hand, the students who care first and foremost about India the place, who think one must go there, who care about Bollywood, food, the big fat Indian weddings of college roommates, and so on, and on the other hand the ones who don't, who take India as a place that happens to have produced some great ideas and innovations, but that one need visit no more urgently than, say, a Plato scholar need make a trip to Athens. I am probably closer to the latter camp, though I am certainly as interested in the everyday world of contemporary India, in all its phenomenal richness, as I am in anything else. I expect I'll make it to India at some point, but it will be nothing like a pilgrimage. I will think of it as work, I expect.

I started working on classical Indian philosophy principally as a result of a very significant encounter, perhaps six years ago, with some of the work of G. E. R. Lloyd (which I've known longer than six years, but which took a while to hit me the right way). Lloyd does not work on India, but rather on ancient Chinese and Greek medicine, but nonetheless it was his work that seemed to provide to me a methodological model for the sort of research I would like to do. As time goes on I'm finding myself more and more hung up on questions of methodology and, one might say, of metaphilosophy, wondering how to put two belief systems into comparison without simply resorting to impressionistic observations of the sort, 'This sounds like that', and without favoring one of the systems over the other in the comparison. Lloyd focuses on medicine, which perhaps lends itself more easily to comparison than philosophy as a whole, a field so nebulous, with a denotation so unstable, that one must always wonder whether one is talking about the same thing from one century to the next, let alone from one civilization to the next.

So I'm finding myself unable to really get started on the comparative project I'd set out on, yet I'm also finding myself happier and happier with the passage of time at my decision to start working on this stuff. I'm more convinced than ever that to the extent that academic philosophers stay in the village of European ideas, they are really only, to paraphrase Nietzsche, offering up a catalog of their own prejudices in the guise of philosophical arguments. There are big questions that interest me --such as the idea that grammar is for the Indian tradition what mathematics is for the Greek-- but again I'm getting sufficiently socialized into the world of real scholars in this field that I am now sensitive to the difficulty of addressing this sort of question head on.

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It's Time to Stop Saying 'Caucasian'

I don't know why all these racists are worried about Caucasians being reduced to a minority in Georgia as a result of demographic shifts. In fact it's logically certain that Caucasians will always be the majority in Georgia: if one is Georgian, ipso facto one is Caucasian.

Oh wait. I thought we were talking about that other Georgia. Because when I say 'Caucasian', I intend it as an adjective that refers to the land and peoples between the Black and Caspian Seas.

The origins of the use of this adjective as an umbrella term for so-called white people are rooted, it seems, in the Ottoman slave trade. Thus in 1684 François Bernier reports having been to a slave market in Constantinople. He is spellbound by the ivory beauty of a Circassian (presumably Georgian) slave girl. He notes that women from the Caucasus region have been praised since antiquity as the palest and most beautiful slave girls in all the world, and he regrets not having enough money to buy her.

Phenotypically, the girl Bernier desired was most likely very similar to, say, the Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov: blonde-haired, blue-eyed, yet for all that something altogether different from what, say, an Atlanta Republican maven has in mind when she imagines of herself that she is a 'Caucasian'.

A century later, Christoph Meiners would attempt to transform the designation into a natural kind: now Caucasians constituted, alongside 'Mongolians' and 'Negroes', one of the basic subtypes of humanity. The mountain region and its peoples came to stand in metonymically for a third or so of humanity. Who makes the cut has been a matter of much dispute over the centuries. For Blumenbach, Slavs were Mongolian, while Tatars (presumably because of their long presence in the extensive Caucasus region) were included as Caucasians.

The designation long served, as one of its principal raisons d'être, to ensure that Jews remained excluded from the fold, and any self-described member of the Caucasian race, if projected from the early 20th century to the early 21st and shown, say, an online dating profile that reads 'Race: Caucasian; Religion: Jewish', would take this as a straightforward contradiction. They would have been dead wrong, but that does not make us dead right. The sad fact is that the term, to the extent that it refers to anything other than the noble people of Georgia, Chechnya, and so on, functions simply as a way of dividing us off from them. For now, the us includes Slavs and Ashkenazi Jews but not, generally, Arabs and (most) Latin Americans. It is, in other words, as racist as the day it was coined. Though it excludes different groups in different eras, it exists for the sole purpose of exclusion.

Most Americans who describe themselves as Caucasians would likely be reluctant to include Kadyrov as one of their own, even if they were to learn that, on strictly technical grounds, he must count as Caucasian if anyone does. He is a Muslim, after all; he is bearded, wears a fez-like hat, is usually seen draped in ammunition, and would appear entirely out of place at your local Bed, Bath, & Beyond. But the original association of whiteness with the Caucasus appears to have been a sort of pre-racial Orientalism, which valued the beauty of the Caucasian slave girl in view of its exoticness. In other words, its object was a white person, but it was objectifying in exactly the same way the later fascination with, e.g., the Hottentot Venus would be.

So when the know-nothing North Carolina State Senator's wife, Jodie Brunstetter, says that gay marriage should be prohibited as a measure against the eventual elimination of the 'Caucasian' race, she should not just be condemned for homophobia, for the logical fallaciousness of supposing that if they weren't getting married gay people would be reproducing, and for the retrograde idea that races in themselves are anything worth conserving, as one might conserve Sumatran rhinoceroses. She should also be condemned for supposing that there is such a thing as the Caucasian race. There is not, and never has been.

Yet the reaction from progressive circles is to denounce Brunstetter for her homophobia and her sentimental attachment to the white race, while letting pass without notice, and even with explicit support, her identification of whiteness with Caucasianness. Or, alternatively, we find what appears to be utter confusion about the meaning of the latter term. Thus Erin Gloria Ryan asks in a post in Jezebel: "Does Jodie Brunstetter know that 'Caucasian' isn't synonymous with 'white people'?" And thus far I found myself thinking: yes! But then came the disappointment of reading on: "Caucasians," Ryan writes, "live in India, on the horn of Africa, the Middle East, and in South America. They're brown and white and black. What Mrs. Brunstetter means is 'Aryan'. You know, like what Hitler meant, but in America."

Here I confess I just don't know what Ryan means by 'Caucasian' (a complaint that cannot be made, at least, about what Brunstetter means). I suppose there might be some scattered Chechens and the like in the Horn of Africa, and they might show a variety of complexions. But if the term is not taken to refer to someone from that mountain region, then I really don't know what it could be referring to except to that folk-category often described, alternatively, as 'white people'.

Invoking that other sinister and so-flexible-as-to-be-meaningless category of 'Aryans' only confuses matters; it too was once a non-racial category, referring to a certain caste in a certain region that we don't think of today as having much to do with whiteness, which became racialized principally in Germany as a result of certain rather ungrounded philological and linguistic speculations (by contrast with the physical-anthropological speculations of Blumenbach et al. in which the parallel notion of 'Caucasians' developed).

Neither 'Aryan' (except in the case of ancient North India) nor 'Caucasian' (except in the case of the southern Urals) ever had any serious application to human biological or social reality, yet Ryan happily goes along with Brunstetter in speaking as if there really are such things. It's time to scrap this bit of 18th-century racial mythology.

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Cultural Lycanthropy

I've been rethinking n+1's 2010 intervention, "What Was the Hipster?", which I continue to take as some of the best amateur sociology of recent decades. It alludes explicitly to Anatole Broyard's 1947 "Anatomy of a Hipster," but the real antecedents are works like William Foote Whyte's 1943 Street Corner Society. It is a serious analysis of phenomena that don't exactly make their own case for being taken seriously.

One thing that did not strike me on my first reading of it a year or so ago was the description of a shift, circa 2003, I think, from a sort of Phase 1, which was entirely based upon appropriation of symbols of American whiteness, to a Phase 2 that might be called 'lycanthropic' (in the broad sense in which we understand 'clinical lycanthropy' today, to include not just werewolfism, but any human adoption of the physical or behavioral traits of an animal, cf. T. A. Fahy, "Lycanthropy: A Review,"  J R Soc Med 82, 1 (January, 1989): 37–9). This involved both a new animal-centered totemism that was somewhat continuous with the old irony (the howling-wolf-before-the-full-moon t-shirt might be seen as straddling both Phases), as well as a more literal becoming-animal (to speak with Deleuze, which I try not to do) that involved the growing of thick beards, a sort of coming-out as hirsute beings.

Not since the Sexual Revolution has so much hair been left to grow, laissé pousser, as they say. Even if this time around the additional hair does not provoke conservative outcries about the decline of civilization (perhaps there are too many other symptoms of that for the old and hairless to notice), and instead is immediately taken up into the system of commerce and advertising --thick beards suddenly appearing on the models in the vitrines of FCUK and Stüssy, mere frozen photographs, yet somehow blowing like weathervanes--, even if things are different this time around, I say, to the extent that capitalism has developed quite a bit since 1968 in its ability to swallow whatever comes along, still, this new hair must be seen as pointing beyond itself, as significant.

I don't want to get into what that might be. I suspect that it has something to do with the rise of ecology as a rallying point for the post-political youth in search of something to be earnest about. It also, perhaps, and perhaps relatedly, has something to do with a historical shift in the way we think about our community with animals.

But here is what I did want to get to: those who have been around me for the last month or so have noticed that I am having trouble shutting up about bears. I wrote a review for the Chronicle of Higher Education of a book about the history of the bear as a symbol in medieval Europe. It was an excellent book, and it fit nicely with my current broad interest, both scholarly and belle-lettristic, in the importance of animals in the constitution of human social reality.

Puzzlingly, when I arrived in Brooklyn a month ago, I quickly noticed that everyone around me was on about bears as well: the lad at the café would have one tattooed on his forearm; at least one restaurant would feature a bearskin rug, as if this were some hunting lodge; the names of bands I'd never heard of would bespeak the resurgence of the sort of ursine cult that the Church was supposed to have stamped out by the 11th century.

But here too, perhaps, the cult was waning: the kids had already started regretting their tattooing priorities of 2008; the bands with the ursine names were in close-out bins (bins full of recordings made in the last days of the history of the recording as a material object); and so on. And here I was, a middle-aged man arriving from the far provinces, just getting on to this bear thing!

And the question this has caused me to ask is one that is more Bourdieuian than Deleuzian: is everything, in the end, trickle-down, or do I actually care about bears? Am I like some mom on Facebook trying to use teen lingo? Or is my own 'animal turn', which expresses itself in books and essays and reviews (and blog posts too), rather than in tattoos and t-shirts and new directions in facial hair, something that has arisen quite independently?

In the end it doesn't matter; I'll write about them one way or another. And in a way it is heartening to see such intimate confirmation of what I have long suspected: that there is, so to speak, a regnum in regno, a kingdom within a kingdom --not grace within nature, but ideas within culture-- and intellectual trends might very well track those of fashion, without for that reason being any the less worth pursuing.

In a subsequent post I will attempt to say more about what I take to be the deeper causes of this cultural lycanthropy, and perhaps to make some sense of why I have become swept up in it.

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The Hipsters' Obituarist

I am going to break out of my usual habit of writing for the Internet as if the rest of the Internet did not exist to mention that 'over at' New York Magazine (am I doing that right?) Mark Greif has released some of his much awaited sociological investigation of the hipster phenomenon. (I've realized, by the way, that my constant insistence that I am not a blogger in fact eerily parallels that most infamous trait of the hipsters: denial of group membership as a way of signalling utmost insider status.)

This is some fairly serious cultural criticism from Greif, if likely not as epoch-defining as Anatole Boyard's 1947 Paris Review essay, 'Portrait of a Hipster'. As with Boyard's piece (which was a living portrait, and not a post-mortem), one can easily see that 60 years from now the entire thing will be entirely incomprehensible to all but perhaps a few late-21st-century descendents of what are now called 'American studies' profesors. How many people today even know that there were earlier chapters in the history of hipsters? And by 'people' I don't mean people in their twenties who themselves deserve this moniker, and to the extent that they deserve it believe that whatever it is they do or wear or say or think is unprecedented in human history; but people for whom Greif is writing, who are old enough to remember trucker hats at Reagan-era punk shows and have therefore accrued some historical depth and earned the right to scoff at the presentist youth.

I imagine Greif must have anticipated the obvious criticism his piece was bound to draw: that writing the hipsters' epitaph could easily be perceived as itself the ultimate asshole-hipster move, simultaneously regaling the reader with a fan-tail display of insider knowledge, even as he pretends he's not one of them, and speaks from a position of external --in fact, transcendent-- authority.

I, anyway, am aware that I risk appearing to wish to one-up our era's own Boyard when I note that my own hipster credibility is highly dubious. Now when I say this, I mean it at face value. It doesn't mean the opposite of what it says, but the very thing it says. I came up in the pre-hipster (or inter-hipster) fin de siècle, and for many years sought to associate myself to some group or other of kids who had perfected the deadpan look they knew had to accompany their insistence that they really, truly liked Conway Twitty, say, or Sansa-Belt pants. But I always did something wrong; I always gave myself away. And so I retreated, and pursued certain other things --such as school-- with a sort of earnestness: things that did not need to be accompanied by a trained deadpan, because they were not funny to begin with. For years, then, I have been an interested observer of the phenomenon in question, but one who has never quite got over the feeling of having been spurned, of having been deemed --to use some other mid-century lingo that enjoys even wider currency-- uncool.

If I dwell on myself, here, it is only because --though I reject corollary theses in postcolonial theory, for example, which say that only subalterns can write about subalterns in a way that does not perpetuate domination, etc.-- it seems to me obvious that the results of any attempted sociology of hipsters are going to be heavily influenced by the purchase this complicated affiliation has on the social identity of the sociologist. This is not, or not just, Gananath Obeyesekere's point about who can claim to write the history (or ethnography, or sociology) of a group, for Sri Lankans and native Hawai'ians (to cite his examples) lack a certain complicating feature that hipsters definitely have: they don't, that is, habitually deny that they are Sri Lankans or Hawai'ians.

The sociologist of the hipsters is going to have to face up to the fact that he is dealing with a special sort of esoteric group --so esoteric that even a secret handshake between two members is far too risky: it would give them away to one another--, and accordingly he is going to have to violate the group's principle piety by stating honestly what his relationship to it is, perhaps even avowing that he likes the culture, just like mods have the right to their (entirely groundless) mod pride, and punks can affirm in messages inscribed into their very garb that the music and culture that give their lives meaning is 'not dead'. Otherwise, any pretense of outside critique will continue to look like so much more in-group rule-following. The announcement that the culture is dead, moreover, is not safe from this danger, but in fact is supremely susceptible to it.

Still, Greif is doing important work: we need serious people making serious attempts at explaining what people, and even kids, are up to. Greif's place on the American-studies syllabi of 2073 has surely been secured, for he has spoken lucidly on a social phenomenon that until now has triggered only dissimulation and denial: as he notes, the most common avoidance strategy has been to simply deny that the term 'hipster' has any real denotation. I particularly appreciate Greif's surveillance of the uncertain boundary between subculture and ethnie. It's often seemed to me in Germany, in fact, that street punks constitute a genuine ethnic group, capable of reproducing itself and transmitting its ways from one generation to the next; what these 'ways' are is largely the same as in other countries, but extraneous factors bring it about that they become more engrained early in life, and harder to shake off once one reaches a typical reproductive age. Might the hipsters someday constitute their own haplogroup, with its own set of birth-defect risks?

If Greif is correct, it won't have to come to that. It is certainly not damaging to the project of sizing the hipsters up, and even perhaps of putting them to rest, to write more in the vein of Obeyesekere in his native village, than of, say, William Foote Whyte's entirely external perspective in his Street Corner Society of 1943. But it is particularly important in this case, for the reasons I hope I've made clear, to make one's background motivation known.

A Double Standard in Judgments about the Past

When my mind wanders, as it often does, and I begin to imagine, say, the raids conducted by the Mongol Horde, the psychopathic methods of torture they devised, and the incalculable amount of raping and pillaging that must have gone on, unrecorded, across the Eurasian land mass since the domestication of the horse and the invention of metallurgy, I admit that sometimes I think to myself: Alright! Good show! I am impressed with all this cruelty, not indignant about it, and I suspect you are too. The standards I bring to my assessment of the killers who filled the mass grave at Srebrenica, a little over a decade ago, are completely different. I am still trying to figure out why this is so.  

There is a similar double standard that comes into play in my reading of the history of philosophy. Consider the claim that 'only love does not have to be. God loves without being'. Now it seems to me that if I came across this sort of thing in Gregory of Nyssa or in Nāgārjuna I would think to myself: There is much wisdom here. But when I see this claim in a book written in the 1990s (which is where I in fact saw it), my reaction is very different. What are the author's grounds for claiming such a thing, I want to know. How can he justify this claim?  

Now in both cases it cannot just be that we hold more recent figures to different standards (of morality or of rationality) than past figures as a result of the availability in our age of rules of acting or thinking that were not available then. After all, I spend much of my time insisting on the relative superficiality of the innovations that we think of as distinctly modern. The historical record shows that there were a lot of people being nice to one another long before Kant or Peter Singer or the UN Declaration of Human Rights; and there were a lot of people saying things that were rational and well-founded, by our standards, long before Francis Bacon or A. J. Ayer attempted to spell out for us exactly what such things are like. There is indeed nothing more empirically grounded and practically rational than the 'concrete sciences', like botanical taxonomy, characteristic of la pensée sauvage.  

Given that the distant past featured people who were good and rational in our sense, why not take them as the standard-bearers for their own era, rather than employing different standards for different eras? I think the answer is in part that, with respect to the present, expediency requires something like an ethical suspension of the anthropological: the consequences of actions or beliefs in the distant past are already known. Nothing hangs on my condemnation of Genghis Khan, and so I am freed up to simply observe him and contemplate him as a larger-than-life manifestation of a certain sort of human potential. To disapprove of Genghis Khan would be scarcely different from disapproving of humanity itself (even as, curiously, failing to disapprove of Adolf Hitler is also to disapprove of humanity), for Genghis provides us a useful and vivid demonstration of the vast range of what it is human beings are capable of doing. He is a singular illustration of Clyde Kluckhohn's intriguing but untestable thesis: "During the long course of human history individual men and women have probably thought, felt and done almost everything that was within the range permitted by anatomy, physiology, and the limits of external nature."   

I am freed up by Genghis's historical distance to let him feed my imagination. And it's my imagination, too, that is fed by Gregory of Nyssa: what I want from him is to gain a sense of the range of possible thoughts human beings can have. If I'm looking for the truth here, it's a different order of truth than anything that can be found in the content of his claims. It's a truth about the range of possible beliefs, rather than a particular true belief, that I'm after.  

In the present age by contrast I expect everyone to be straight and narrow, to tell it like it in fact is and to be moderate and sober in their actions. I don't want any new demonstrations of the extremes of human potential or of the range of exotic beliefs people collectively come up with in order to get through their lives. If my wishes are respected, people will be nice and reasonable, rather than mean and unreasonable, with one another, and surely that is good. An unfortunate corollary of this however is that it transforms the past into a sort of age of heroes, and shows our very decency to be a symptom of decline. The present age starts to look like what Goethe feared would be the ultimate result of Enlightenment: a worldwide hospital, where 'everyone is everyone else's humane nurse'.  

I don't want to decide here as between a torture chamber and a hospital, but I do want simply to pause to note the correlation, and possible connection, between the two sorts of double standard. The expectation that our fellow human beings tell it like it is arises together in history with the expectation that they be nice to one another. The chronological upper limit of the exemption that I, and I expect others, allow for saying delirious things about God and angels and spirits and the prophetic power of dreams is roughly the same as the one for raping and pillaging and bludgeoning. If I had to be precise, I would say the boundary lies somewhere around the end of the 15th century (with a good deal of regional variation, and with the non-European world only coming to fall on this side of the historical boundary at the same rate as it is assimilated into the Euro-American global system), and that it is Christopher Columbus who stands as a sort of pioneer of the modern way of being wrong.  

Of course the pillaging and unreason go on as before, not just in spite of the Euro-American global system, but just as often in support of it. Modernity then is not really that period when people begin to think and to act differently--i.e., rationally and morally-- but only that period when disapproval of the default way of human thinking and acting --irrationally and brutally-- begins to make sense.   

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Imaginary Tribes #7

The Taimyr Tlängit 

Ken Vonderwelt had spent most of his career in the department of anthropology at Oahu University of Cambridge, Indiana. They claim it was named after an Indian tribe that used to inhabit Southwestern Indiana, but no one Ken knew could ever say concretely who the Oahu Indians really were. Ken had long suspected that the name was the result an ill-advised attempt to entice Midwestern high-school kids with fantasies of palm-lined beaches. How embarrassing. Ken spent his whole career avoiding the question of institutional affiliation whenever he went to conferences. Forty years later, he still trembled with shame and ressentiment whenever he recalled his single meeting with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, upon hearing the phrase 'Oahu University of Indiana', took no time at all to produce his comeback: "What is then next? The Tahiti University of Paris?"  

 Barb greeted Ken as he entered the department office. As usual, she had a grocery-bag-sized McDonald's bag on the floor next to her desk. Over the course of the day, like every day, she would work her way through its contents: various combinations of corn and soy by-products, prefixed with 'Mc', some purporting to be breakfast items, some lunch. Ken had always thought of this as 'Barb's feedbag', though of course he would never say such a thing. Barb, Ken thought to himself. Barb, you Midwestern madonna. Where is this secret sorority of secretaries and dental hygienists that teaches you to be how you are? Where does it meet? The sweaters with the teddy-bear motif and the socks with the geese with the ribbons round their necks. The Lite FM with Kool & the Gang, Phil Collins, the Pointer Sisters, Chicago, at an audible yet work-friendly volume. The desk plaque depicting a cat hanging from a branch with the censored words 'Oh Sh...!'. The photos of Midwestern kids dressed up to play softball. This could have been my life too, Ken thought for a nanosecond.

"You got a call from Montreal today," Barb said, interrupting his reverie. "It was some blogger or professor or something. He says he's a philosopher there. But he also has a blog. I couldn't figure it out." 

"A professor of philosophy in Montreal? From the good university?"

"No," Barb said. "The other one. The Catholic-sounding one."

"Oh. What does he want?"

"Here, I wrote it down. He said his name was Jason. Or maybe it was Josh or Jared, I don't remember. It was like a student name, not a professor name. He says he called because you never answer your e-mail, and he has something very important to tell you. It's something about the meaning of nak, you know, that thing you talk about at conferences? That thing that doesn't actually mean anything?"

"Yes, nâk."

"Right, well he says he found a book about this one famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant. Is that it? Do you say it like kohnt or like can't? Anyway he says the book explains this whole nak thing."

"That doesn't make any sense. What does Immanuel Kant have to do with nâk?"

"He sent me all the information about the book when I promised I'd give it to you. I printed out the important part."

Barb handed Ken the bibliographical reference.

 

Klopp, Benno. Die geheime Sumatrareise des Immanuel Kant, Dorpat, 1873.

 

"He's trying to tell me that someone named Benno Klopp published a book in 1873 about Immanuel Kant's secret journey to Sumatra? Something doesn't seem right here."

"I don't know," Barb replied, reaching into the sack for her twelve-o'clock hash browns. "I'm just telling you what he told me."

Ken did not remember much from his undergraduate philosophy course at Michigan in the early '60s, but one thing that had stuck in his mind was that Kant had spent his entire life within the city limits of Königsberg, at the time a major Prussian port city on the Baltic Sea. How many middling philosophy professors had by now attempted to contrast the provincialism of Kant's actual life with the cosmopolitan pretenses of his philosophy? Even Ken remembered this bit of trivia, though he had no recollection of the professor who taught the intro philosophy course at Michigan. But how could anyone claim that Kant left the city, not just to visit Berlin, say, or Riga, but to sail all the way to Sumatra? Something doesn't add up.

 Vonderwelt did what everyone does these days in moments of uncertainty: he repaired straightaway to Google. He found nothing on 'Benno Klopp' or on 'Klopp Kant' or 'Kant Klopp', nothing of interest on 'Sumatra Kant', 'Asia Kant', or 'Indonesia Kant'. He tried 'Dorpat', the book's place of publication, and discovered that this was in fact the archaic German name for Tartu, Estonia's second largest city and the home of its most distinguished university. This gave him an idea. Ken's linguistic skills had improved dramatically since the invention of Wikipedia, and he often found himself reading entries in languages he had never studied: Català, Polski, Nynorsk. Why not Eesti, too?

His instinct served him well: the Estonian entry on Kant featured an illustration purporting to show the itinerary of the philosopher's journey eastward along the northern coast of Siberia, then down to Japan (where he apparently spent a year, though nothing is known of this period), then, on a different ship, from Japan to Sumatra. 

 However much Ken hated professors with student names, his curiosity was piqued and he simply could not resist the temptation to contact this Jason or Josh or Jared. In a giddy phone conversation, the professor/blogger from Montreal told Ken of his exciting discovery of a rare edition of Klopp's forgotten work in the library of the University of Tartu. Jared was so impressed by Klopp's work that it convinced him to abandon his entire research program (something having to do with Hempel's raft, whatever that is), in order to vindicate Klopp's claim that the famous 'critical turn' in Kant's philosophy came not as a result of reading David Hume, but from an altogether different and hidden source. This Jeff was a likeable enough if slightly unbalanced man, Ken found, who was for some reason exceedingly eager to convince him, Ken Vonderwelt, of the importance of Klopp's work. Within seconds of getting off the phone, Ken received by e-mail a scanned pdf file of the Geheime Sumatrareise.

According to Klopp, Kant's ship, while travelling to Sumatra, suffered heavy damages in a storm in the South China Sea, and was permitted to stay in harbor by the gracious Sultan of Aceh for a period of several months. While the captain and his crew saw to the ship's repair, the on-board philosopher was permitted to travel inland and to learn a bit about local customs. "Just make sure you don't stay in the sun too long," the deckhands told him as he set off. "You'll come back a-jumping and a-quaking with lâtah, you will."

Klopp maintains that it was the natives of the Sumatran highlands, in 1777, who explained to the great German philosopher that the highest aim of lajbâh, or contemplation, is not to seek after truth in the study of the bûjnah (or the natural world), but rather to investigate the bâjnyat (a priori categories) of the gajbyuh (understanding), which determine the boundaries and the character of our luhteh (experience). The Critique of Pure Reason, claims Klopp, first published in Riga in 1781, is not a work of transcendental philosophy at all, but rather a compilation of ethnographic field notes. Kant understood that to reveal the trues source of his 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy would be to undermine his own claim to authority, and so he pretended that he had spent his legendary silent years holed up in Königsberg, coming to terms with the skeptical aporiae of the philosophy of David Hume, when in fact he had departed from Rotterdam on a ship bound for Kamchatka, via the famous Northeast passage, in May of 1773.

 By the time of the Critique of Judgment of 1790, Kant is much less careful to conceal the riches of his circumnavigation of Eurasia. Thus he relates a joke that he heard in an inn in Surat (§53, 5: 333); he describes the tattoos on the faces of Maori sailors (§16, 5: 230); and he recalls with disdain the rudimentary social organization of the 'New Hollanders', a generic name used to describe both the Australian aborigenes as well as those we would today call 'New Guinean' (§67, 5: 378). Significantly, when Kant mentions the Iroquois, whom he would not have met on this voyage, he draws on Rousseau as the authority, yet when speaking of various Asian, Polynesian, and Melanesian peoples, he feels no such need to rely on other authors. Why is this? According to Klopp, it is remarkable, given all of this first-hand reportage, that the Third Critique is not read as a straightforward travelogue. 

 But what does Klopp's account of Kant's voyage to Southeast Asia have to do with nâk? After all, Ken thought, I'm an Aral-Ultaicist, not an Austronesianist. Well, Klopp explains that en route to Kamchatka, the ship on which Kant sailed also made a six-month stop at the Taimyr Peninsula of Arctic Russia (this stop also comes up in the Third Critique, where Kant reveals his deep familiarity with Samoyed reindeer-herding practices (§ 63, 5:369)). The purpose of the stop, imperial documents show, was to collect samples of "plants pressed in books, animals stuffed with straw, transcriptions of the 'Our Father' in each of the local languages encountered, and, if possible, for each of the languages, a sample of the chin hairs of the people who speak them." Unfortunately, by the time the ship arrived in Taimyr, the frigid winter weather had already set in. Snow and ice had long since hidden all of the plants from view, and even the ocean waters were predicted to freeze over within the next few weeks.

The second chapter of Klopp's work is entitled "Kants Tajmyraufenthalt in seinem Zusammenhang mit der Entstehung der Antinomie der reinen Vernunft," or, "Kant's sejour on the Taimyr Peninsula in connection with the development of the antinomy of pure reason." Klopp writes that Kant spent the long and harsh winter of 1773-74, waiting with captain and crew for the ice along the Northeast passage to melt, among the Taimyr Tlängit. The Tlängit had been a small group of Paleo-Siberian reindeer herders who, according to Russian imperial sources, were completely exterminated by their Funno-Igric neighbors, the Samoyed, by sometime in the mid-19th century. Today, the Samoyed are called by the ethnonym 'Nenets', meaning 'the people', since their preferred self-description, 'Saamid', had been corrupted into Russian as 'Samoyed', and  'Samoyed', by some awful coincidence, just happens to mean, in Russian, 'self-eater'.

But unlike their Samoyed neighbors, the Tlängit really did eat themselves. In fact, prior to their obliteration, the Tlängit provided some of the best documented instances of autocannibalism in the ethnographic record. In every conceivable way, the Tlängit seemed absolutely determined to do everything that the European traveller of the Enlightenment could not help but associate with brutishness: the consumption of raw meat, the drinking of reindeer blood, the use of the bare feet and toes for grasping and throwing small objects (and even for popping pellets of reindeer dung into one's mouth for a little mid-day snack), incest, infanticide up to the age of seven, domestic violence (even the marriage ceremony starts off with a ritual beating of the bride), recreational murder, chronic nakedness, ignorance of the very existence of cutlery, and, of course, the bread and butter of the savage habitus: anthropophagy.

 Why eat yourself, though, when there are so many other creatures out there, both human and ungulate? According to Ya. K. Tolstykh's report, issuing from Nicholas I's 1833 survey of the empire, the Tlängit elders explained that, in times of bounty, their principal source of nutrition comes from a mixture of reindeer milk and blood, swirled together into a pure pink juice. But in difficult times it is far from easy to find a nursing doe with milk to spare, and in very hard times one cannot even find a reindeer healthy enough to part with a cupful of its blood. But the Tlängit crave it desperately, and often attempt to use their own blood as a replacement. In the early contact period, Tolstykh reports, shamans are said to have survived their entire adult lives consuming nothing but their own blood. When the famous explorer Stepan Krasheninnikov noticed this remarkable phenomenon during his visit to Taimyr in 1733, he wrote in his journal: "Yea, I have found that machine of perpetual motion, that true perpetuum mobile, whose possibility even the great Leibnitz denied! The savage priest lives only upon himself, without need for fuel from outside of him."

 Kant left no notes from the Taimyr period, but according to Klopp, Vyacheslav Korg, the ship's botanist, kept extensive records of his conversations with the great Prussian philosopher. Korg noted that within days of their arrival in the Tlängit settlement, to which harsh winter weather would confine them for the next several months, Kant had begun to inquire into the most fundamental elements of the Tlängit belief system.

In mid-January, 1774, the ship's crew was ordered to begin sleeping on shore so that the vessel could undergo structural repairs to the hull. They were placed in makeshift reindeer-hide tents just next to the Tlängit's winter settlement, and Kant and Korg were ordered to share. In early February, Korg notes in his journal, Kant returned of an evening, after a day spent with the Tlängit, and announced that he had 'the most remarkable antinomy' to relate to his new tent-mate. Now decades earlier Korg had studied the chemical arts in the circle of Yakov Brius, and at first he thought that the philosopher was trying to tell him that he had discovered antimony, which, given the fact that they were separated from all of the earth's elements by several feet of ice, the botanist doubted greatly.

"How, Immanuel, could you have come across antimony in your idle conversations with the savages?", Korg asked. "Do they gnaw upon it for an afternoon collation, perhaps? Do they use molten antimony as a soup base?"

"Not antimony, Slava. Antinomy. Antimony is a silvery fusible metal. Antinomy is where you've got two things that have to be true, but that can't both be true together. I've happened upon a new antinomy. Do you want to hear it?"

Korg had no idea what Kant was talking about, but didn't have anything else to talk about either. "Sure," he said. "Go ahead."

Thesis: No body can remain forever different in its internal character from the bodies that surround it.

Antithesis: I've been freezing my hindquarters off for the past two months, yet here I am, calorifacient as ever

 

"That's a good one," Korg laughed. "I like these antimonies."

"Antinomies," Kant said. "Here's another."

Thesis: Every living body is nourished by sundry things, all of which are themselves obtained from living nature.

Antithesis: I've been eating nothing but dethawed cod ever since we arrived in this frozen wasteland.

Korg let go a full belly laugh at that one. "But what about the Tlängit," he asked, rubbing tears from his eyes. "Did you learn any antimonies from them?"

"Antinomies," Kant corrected him again. "As a matter of fact I did. Are you ready?"

"Nu davai," Korg said in Russian, the language of his childhood, to which he reverted when he was happy. "Go ahead."

 

Thesis: There are in the world causes through turguk.

Antithesis: There is no turguk, but all is näk.

What the hell does that mean?, Ken wondered. He flipped to Klopp's endnotes and found a brief explanation of this pair of terms. 'Turguk', according to Klopp, was the Tlängit word for human agency, while 'näk' meant for them something like 'nature', or perhaps 'fate' or, in certain contexts, 'weather'. This antinomy, then, was nothing less than the Tlängit version of the belief that human freedom is strictly incompatible with the determinism of nature. Klopp writes that, according to Korg's account in his journal, the Tlängit would spend cold winter nights around the fire, as the elders debated the respective reasons for holding one or the other of these opposing views, and the young men listened and learned while the women pretended not to understand. Klopp speculates that it was in listening to these freewheeling fireside disputationes --which always ended with a ritualistic declaration by the eldest shaman of the words "Who cares?!", after which the entire community took part in a massive, all-night wife-swap-- that Kant first saw a glimpse of a possible critical overcoming of the dogmatic dead-ends of the philosophical tradition.

But why the umlauts and not the circumflex? Jason or whatever his name is explained on the phone that this was probably just a different spelling, more typical of the way 19th-century German scholars sought to render the pronunciation of foreign words. He added that to this day, in Naryan-Mar, the Arctic capital of Russian Nenetsia, the Nenets inhabitants often use the Tlängit word 'няк' [nyak] in response to a wide variety of misfortunes. When the weather takes a turn for the worse, they say, "Well, isn't that just the няк?" Or when a hapless husband accidentally chops off his thumb or dies of cirrhosis, his wife will mutter to her friends: "That's няк for you."

Could this няк be the same as my nâk?, Vonderwelt wondered. He sprang up from his desk and walked excitedly towards the secretary's office. "Barb," he called out as he approached her door, "call Kiki at the travel agency. Tell her I need a ticket to Naryan-Mar."

"Do you really think Kiki's gonna know where that is? That's not really like Cancun or Orlando or something, is it?"

Barb was right. Kiki didn't know a goddamned thing about the world. Travel agent my ass,
 Ken thought. I'll have to make my own way to Nenetsia. Why not? Joan is dead and gone. She's the one who wanted the cardboard coffin. There's nothing left of her by now. I could pass through Moscow and see Tanya one last time. I've got nothing here. Barb's got her feedbag. Maybe Klopp was onto something.There's only one way to find out...

Imaginary Tribes #6

The Middle Managers

It's the 105th annual meeting of the American Society for Anthropology. Dr. Ken Vonderwelt is late to his own talk. He is rushing from door to door in the massive foyer of the Minneapolis Sheraton, looking for the appointed venue, from the Lake Superior Banquet Hall to the Madison Ballroom to the 10,000 Lakes Business Solutions Headquarters. He can't find a soul he knows, not even in the Twins Sports Bar.

Vonderwelt spots an employee and asks him where the anthropologists are. The employee's nametag says 'Jimmy'. Jimmy asks him if he means the convention. He   says there was a convention on the mezzanine level, but that the mezzanine conventioneers were all carrying tote bags advertising some new hip-replacement device.

"I think they're like doctors," Jimmy says. "Are you a doctor?"

"Not really," Vonderwelt replies.
"Maybe your group is meeting in the basement rooms. They're along the hall next to the fitness center. They're named after cities from around here. You know like Brainerd and Duluth."

Vonderwelt takes the elevator down two flights below the ground floor. In the Bemidji Room there's a man wearing a turquoise bolo tie. He has a long grey goatee and is talking to an audience of a dozen people or so about a recent summer spent arrowhead collecting with his wife. "We took the camper out near Flagstaff," he recounts. "Great arrowhead country out there. Mitzi and I were in heaven." Alas, Vonderwelt says to himself, I'm with my people.

But this is not quite the group he's looking for so he moves on, further down the hall. In the St. Cloud Room there are two men, one of them Native American, sitting in front of microphones and unopened bottles of water. The latter is wearing a flanel shirt and a cap that says 'Buffalo Bills' on it. The man next to him is talking about resource conservation in the Finger Lakes area. "Otherwise," he says, concluding some line of reasoning Vonderwelt had missed, "pretty soon the bass fishing won't be so good for the region's original inhabitants." He turns to his neighbor and says: "You wouldn't like that, would you Jerry?" Jerry grunts 'no', and the dozen or so people in the audience emit a borderline-laugh of condescending agreement.

Vonderwelt goes out and opens the next door along the hallway, entering the Mankato Room. It's a younger crowd, and a larger one. A young woman, her face cluttered with eyebrow rings and horn-rimmed glasses, is talking about the teenaged 'cosplayers' of Harajuku. She maintains that Lolita goths need to be seen as a separate species from, rather than a variety of, the vampire goths. Vonderwelt hears the word 'intermediality' and quickly makes his exit. What the hell kind of profession is this? he wonders. What do any of these people have to do with one another?

Next to the fitness-room door he spots a flyer with one of those copyright-free bits of clip-art, those silhouettes with the protruding noses and question marks over their heads, those inane little icons that announce: here an instance of bottom-of-the-barrel scholarship is about to take place; here an event has been scheduled for people associated with universities, but which bears only the most distant ancestral relation to science natural or human: a brown-bag lunch for faculty and/or staff on smoking cessation or stress management ("Blood pressure soaring? Try walking to work!"), a workshop on learning styles and multiple intelligences sponsored by the Office of Teaching Support, a lecture by Dr. Ken Vonderwelt. Or the clip-art homunculus might be found frozen in a stomping motion, surrounded by exclamation points and asterisks, and for this bad behavior will have been crossed through with a red slash. "No hitting, swearing, threatening, or other violent gestures of any kind will be tolerated in this office," the sign will warn, perhaps concluding with that golden oldie of public-institutional morality: "It's About Respect!" Nay indeed, wherever that clip-art man is found, you will know that the university has lost its way.  

Wait a minute! says Vonderwelt. That's me! That's my name on a flyer with that fucking clip-art. I have striven to be a paragon of seriousness throughout my career.  Why are they doing this to me?

"Looking for Dr. Ken Vonderwelt's talk on 'The Sociocosmic Context of the Nak Concept among Ural-Altaic Reindeer Herders'?" the flyer reads, as the homunculus scratches his head.  "It's been moved to the Minnetonka Annex!" The little man appears again, now featured in a running motion, running, we may presume, towards the Minnetonka Annex, his question mark transformed into an exclamation point, bending backwards from the sheer speed of his dash. 

Dammit! Vonderwelt thinks. Why do they always write 'Ural-Altaic' when it's supposed to be 'Aral-Ultaic'?! And where is that damned circumflex accent over nâk? Nak doesn't even mean anything! Come to think of it, nâk doesn't mean anything either. I thought it did when I did my thesis. I made up this whole big structuralist structure that made it mean something. That went out of fashion, the profession crumbled into a thousand little camps --dear old arrowhead collector here, indigenous advocate there, grating culture-studies clones all around-- and I was left with my meaningless nâk: just a sound, really, just a meaningless sound the fates had conspired to make the center of my career. Nâk means employee benefits is what nâk means. Nâk means braces for the girls. Nâk meant braces for the girls anyway. Now it's just this last meaningless talk of an undistinguished career, advertised with clip-art, to be given in the Minnetonka Annex of the Minneapolis Sheraton.

"Miss," Vonderwelt says, showing his unconcealable age, to a girl pushing a cart bearing multiple 24-packs of bottled water. "Where's the Minnetonka Annex?"
"Oh that's like out on the lake," the girl says. "That's where we host company retreats. You know like the kind where people who work together go out to the woods and they have to fall backwards so their co-workers can catch them? To build trust and stuff?"
Vonderwelt nods his head.
"Well they do that there."

Nâk means last talk before I move to half-time teaching and the faculty takes away my conference-travel stipend. Last talk of my career and they've moved it out to a business retreat out of town without telling me. Nâk means lichen and nâk means life-force-- Vonderwelt was by now mumbling in a mocking tone. Nâk means whatever you want it to mean. Louise, the older girl, used to make up new meanings for words she shouldn't even have known yet. She took the names of illnesses and extended them far beyond the human body.  A potato with too many eyes or too much mold was said to have 'tuberculosis'; upon entering an odd-smelling room she would deem it to be suffering from 'roomatism'.

How many Sanskrit scholars have milked a steady paycheck and employee benefits out of om?  What does om mean, anyway? Vonderwelt wonders.  Something like the onomatopoeia of the cosmos; the sound the human voice makes to sound like nothing in particular, just life itself. But they have texts and tradition. I had reindeer herders.

Self-pitying Vonderwelt makes his way to the annex shuttle in the front parking lot. There he finds Jimmy, buck-toothed and acne-ridden, yet, it now seems, a disarmingly eager employee of this great hotel franchise. "Hi doctor," he says, "you going to the annex?"
"I told you I'm not a doctor. And yes, to the Minnetonka Annex."
"This way sir, watch your fingers. It's a slide door."

In the van, Vonderwelt pulls from his bag his decades-old copy of the translation of A. P. Okladnikov's Yakutia Before Its Incorporation into the Russian State. It describes the archeological work carried out under the author's leadership along the Lena River in 1939-40, under the auspices of the Yakut Institute of Language, Literature, and History and the N. Ya. Marr Institute for the History of Material Culture, which was then attached to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. To think that any science got done at all, in those years! More than today, that's for sure.

Tanya's father had been on that expedition. She says the archaeologists had been ordered by the Yakut Institute, transmitting a direct command from Moscow, to be on the look-out for signs of living woolly mammoths in the region of the mouth of the Khatanga and in the vicinity of Cape Chelyushkin. She says that in 1938 General N. V. Vatutin, inspired by his recent taste of dethawed mammoth meat from Karelia, had developed a plan, codenamed 'Hannibal', to create a sort of cavalry of woolly mammoths that would drive the German army out of Finland. Vatutin regaled Stalin with images of the Arctic elephants' mighty tusks, and assured him of the 'near-certainty' that they were still out there roaming, somewhere, in the great North. Stalin became fixated. The archaeologists were given tranquilizer guns, and strict orders to 'harness' and 'tame' at least a half-dozen of the beasts by the end of their year-long expedition.

"Who knows if Tanya was telling the truth?," Vonderwelt thinks. "Maybe I should tell the story when I get to the annex, just to keep the legend alive."

"Last stop, Minnetonka Annex," bellows Jimmy, awakening Vonderwelt from his private Sibériade, as he slams on the brakes in the nearly empty parking lot of a bleak, futurist little complex of glass cubes tucked among the pines on the edge of the lake.

In the entryway to the large, central cube, Vonderwelt finds a letterboard announcing an event hosted by a certain Dr. Glenn Bacca, Ph.D.: "Building Trust, Building Sales: It's Your Move!" On a fold out table to the side there is a cardboard box filled with glossy pamphlets describing Dr. Bacca's many accomplishments. "Dr. Glenn Bacca, Ph.D., is one of the most sought-after motivational speakers in the country," the pamphlet announced. "Known to earn up to $20,000 for a single engagement, Dr. Bacca has made a name for himself wowing crowds and boosting sales from Palm Beach to Palm Springs."

There is no sign of Vonderwelt's talk, not on the letterboard, not in any pamphlets in the cardboard box on the fold-out table. Vonderwelt turns toward Jimmy, who had followed him in from the shuttle. "Are you sure this is the Minnetonka Annex?"
"Positive," Jimmy says.
"So you're sure this is where I'm supposed to be?"
"This is definitely where you're supposed to be," smiles Jimmy.
Vonderwelt seems to understand. He nods to Jimmy, thanking him for his help, letting him know he could bring the shuttle back to the hotel. This was the final engagement.

Vonderwelt hears the din of audience participation from a meeting room down the hall, and makes his way towards it. He can already hear Bacca's voice, the voice of a man-child, a honey voice honed through an adolescence spent in community-theater productions of Cats and Grease. When Vonderwelt enters the meeting room the motivational speaking comes to a halt, and twenty or so middle-aged, Midwestern middle managers, a thoroughly middling tribe, stand gaping towards the door, waiting for Bacca to give them some kind of sign.

"I'm Ken Vonderwelt," the interloper volunteers. "I'm, uh, here for the seminar on boosting sales."
"Well I don't know if you can call it a seminahhh," Bacca replies, feigning an English accent for that unfamiliar word, "but we're definitely about boosting sales."

The middle managers all laugh heartily, gesturing for Vonderwelt to come join the fray. Bacca instructs them to go around the room and say a little bit about themselves. There is Doug from Cedar Rapids who is just trying to stay focused on his vision, and Harlan from Peoria who won't let any negativity kill his deals. There is Steve whose dreams didn't burst when the housing bubble did, and Barb who, to the great delight of her peers, is on her way to outselling her ex for the third year in a row.

Once everyone in the room has been introduced, Bacca announces a new plan: "You know what I think we're going to do? I'm going to have you partner with Tammy here, and what you and Tammy are going to do is what we call a trust-building exercise. Because why?"
"Because there's no sales without trust," three or four of the participants mutter.
"You think that's something you want to do?"
Vonderwelt nods his head.
"Good," Bacca says. "Now you know what? I think we're going to do one of the oldies-but-goodies here. Now I know you're all going to be like, 'that's so cliché, that's so cliché'. You're going to say you remember seeing it on Eight is Enough way back in the Stone Age. But you know what? It's been around for so long because it works. Techniques that work in the motivational business are techniques that last. So Ken what I'm going to have you do is to get ready to put your trust into Tammy here. And I mean your complete trust. You're going to have to trust Tammy to catch you when you fall back into her arms. If Tammy doesn't come through for you, then you know what? Your skull's going straight for the tiles. Sound good?"

Vonderwelt nods his skull, and he begins to prepare himself to fall. He tries to imagine what might come next. Would he be stripped naked and painted black with soot, taking on the form of some god of the underworld? The god of no-sales, who would then be ritualistically cast out and plunged into Lake Minnetonka? Would they scarify him with motivational hortations, or adorn him with a bluetooth headset and a penile sheath bearing slogans that promise 'solutions'?  And is this fate, Vonderwelt thinks as he waits to fall, not the fate of anthropology itself? Could anyone else offer a more incisive farewell performance than I, here, building trust, falling backwards into the arms of some homely sales team leader from some branch office in Grand Rapids?

The team forms a circle around them, and begins to chant 'trust, trust, trust' in the same tone and rhythm that Vonderwelt imagines college kids in that same region must, at that same moment, be encouraging their peers to 'chug'. Bacca enters the circle and lurks over Vonderwelt and his partner. The motivational speaker has become the high priest of trust, and trust has become --by some hidden chain of cosmic associations that would have been entirely obscure just minutes earlier-- that force that sustained sales, just as blood once brought the rain that made the corn grow. The high priest leans in closer and commands:
"Now Ken, on the count of three, I want you to trust, and I want you to fall. Tammy here's got your back, you remember that."
Vonderwelt nods.
"No you know what? I'm going to do something different this time. Instead of just one-two-three, like that, I'm going to count 'one, two, three... trust!' And when I say trust!, just like that, that's when you fall."
Vonderwelt nods his head again.

This new variation on the countdown is carried out to great enthusiasm, and Vonderwelt begins his descent. And as he falls the din of the encircling mob fades into the distance, and Bacca's theatrics occupy just the narrowest corner of Vonderwelt's eye, and Tammy's saving hands seem still hours away (if they are to materialize at all, and all this talk of trust is to succeed in summoning its deity after all). And the sensation of the wind, and the blur of the bodies, and the sound of their chant all blend together in Vonderwelt's falling brain --in his now semi-retired, entirely spent little brain-- into a single word.

Is that word trust? God no, Vonderwelt is no heathen. Is it om? It isn't that either. Om echoes with pure harmonious being, but Vonderwelt's word comes riddled with provisos, stipulations, conditionality, and backtracking. Is it, then, that notoriously plurivocal nâk? How desperately he would have wanted it to be just that! It is almost that, but --oh, what a career!-- the circumflex is missing. He hears it with a long a as in marsh, not the a is in land that Aral-Ultaicists associate so strongly with that two-sloped diacritical mark.

"Damn where's the circumflex!?" Vonderwelt thinks, plummeting, just as Tammy's cell, programmed to ring to the tune of the Eagles' 1976 hit, "Life in the Fast Lane," begins to peel out for attention. And the heart of the sales team leader from Grand Rapids, who never really gave a damn about sales, but only turned her attention to them in proportion as her nubility waned, races with hope as she recalls the personal ad she has placed in the Grand Rapids free weekly (which, too, referenced life in the fast lane), and causes her, cursed be the gods, to reach for her classic-rock phone. 

Imaginary Tribes #5

The Vendyak

Justin E. H. Smith

In his 1957 structuralist masterpiece, Le croustillant et le gluant, the French anthropologist Jean-Robert Klein argued that the fundamental binary distinction through which the savage mind filters the world is that between the crispy and the chewy. The first and primary domain of application of these concepts is of course the alimentary one, but in primitive cultures, he argued, the crispy and the chewy are often projected from there into the cosmos as a whole. In his own fieldwork among the Yanomamo of Brazil, he showed in more than a few elaborate diagrams that, for them, men, rubber trees, the color green, the East, vipers, and butterflies are held to be ‘crispy’, while women, black, jaguars, the North, the stars, and ground foliage are in turn ‘chewy’.

Beginning in the late 1970s, Klein’s former student, Françoise Pombo, argued in a series of influential publications that her mentor had failed to notice something of great importance. What he was actually in the process of discovering, she claimed, was a tripartite schema, in which the crunchy [le croquant] was to be sharply distinguished from both the crispy and the chewy. The crunchy stands as the ‘in-between’ class, what cannot be subsumed, what remains forever outside of Aristotelian dualistic logic. It is neither crispy (which is to say, brittle throughout) nor chewy (soft throughout), but manifests something of both of these opposites. (To the criticism that, in everyday speech, what is crunchy is not at all chewy, Pombo responded that these are technical terms we are dealing with, and we should not try too hard to make them match up with our quotidian usages.) The crunchy, she maintained in a Hegelian vein, is nothing less than the Aufhebung or sublation of the crispy and the chewy: a category that simultaneously overcomes and preserves these lower-order concepts.

Imaginary Tribes #4

The Qyzyk Nomads

J. E. H. Smith

It was not much in the way of pillow talk, but after a night like the one we'd just spent, nothing could surprise me.  "Do you want to hear a folk tale?" Tanya asked. "I  heard it when I was running a polyclinic in Nebit-Dag a few years ago."  "Tell it to me," I said.

"Once there was a camel on his way to the capital, to praise Turkmenbashi, the Father of all Turkmen," Tanya began.  "He came across a dog, who asked: "camel, camel, where are you going?'  'To the capital, to praise Turkmenbashi, the father of all Turkmen,' replied the camel.  'Take me with you,' said the dog.  'Come along, dog,' said the camel.  They walked and walked and along the road they met a goat.  'Camel, camel, dog, dog, where are you going?' 'To the capital, to praise Turkmenbashi, the Father of all Turkmen.'  'Take me with you.' 'Come along, goat,' they replied.  And they walked and walked and they met a mouse. 'Camel, camel, dog, dog, goat, goat, where are you going?' "To the capital, to praise Turkmenbashi, the Father of all Turkmen.'  'Take me with you.'  'Come along, little guy!' 

"So they walked and walked until they came to a giant pit in the road.  'I am the biggest and strongest of all,' said the camel, 'I will jump across.'  And he jumped, but made it only halfway, and fell into the pit. 'I am stronger than the camel,' said the dog, and he jumped and fell into the pit.  The goat and the mouse jumped in after them.