The impossibility of reciprocal anthropology

Anthropology in a planetary era

Hassan Choubassi 2005

Video is the perfect tool to document ‘reality’ with ‘fiction’, to

simulate real history out of its context, it has built a mixed
image for both of the cities subject of this documentary (I
mean Amsterdam and Beirut); it is in a way, a tool to turn
inside out the displayed images of those two cities, as it has the
ability to frame reality and to manipulate its transcendences; it
has the power to exclude and fragment, to virtualize. The video
itself is deconstructing the documentary techniques and
dissecting them to use them and then destroy them, it uses the
collapse of the technique to demonstrate the impossibility of
documentary, the impossibility of anthropology.

Baudrillard’s theories of “simulacrum” are questioning the

notion of “reality” which he categorized as a problem of
semiology, a “reality” disguised by appearance, where
“appearances create their illusion of reality”, where “images
invent reality”, in such a way that “the real is not only what can
be reproduced but that which is always being reproduced”: the
“hyper-real”. The world of information and images that
submerges us today is locking us more and more in the
situation of a global entity; we are eventually oriented in the
direction of more gigantesque norms. The reform of the
resistance against this state of being that had been expressed
recently is considered as a symptom of a global ‘taking in
charge’. This global ‘taking in charge’ remains for the time
fragmented or undulant, the new global public space is not born
yet, and there is a feeling of fascinating surprise that takes hold
of the observers of the contemporary world facing an
overwhelming and sudden change in scale, a change in
entourage in a conspicuous way that we cannot yet imagine it’s
effects and consequences on the long term. A change of scale
that is putting us, without being aware, in a period of transition
where our standing ground is not more than a reference or a
starting point.

We find ourselves in a moment of transit where space and time

cross to produce complex figures of differences and identities,
past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.
We find ourselves lost in the ‘au- delà’ as Homi Bhabha likes to
call it, or in the ‘non-place’ for there is a sense of
disorientation, a disturbance of direction. We are living in the
‘beyond’, in the ‘in between’ interval, experiencing an
exploratory, restless movement of discovering this void of
nothingness to establish an anthropological justification for an
analysis of contemporaneity, which in part requires the
rethinking of concepts central to anthropology in the traditional
sense. To begin with, a recent paradigm shift within ethnology
as practiced in France. Rather than focusing on studying
‘remote’ societies, social anthropologists are now setting their
sights closer to home. However, I refute the claim that this
reorientation originates in the increasing difficulty to perform
fieldwork in ‘the distant elsewhere – formerly “colonial”, now “
underdeveloped” – favored in the past by British and French
anthropology’. Rather than being an ‘anthropology by default,’
the anthropology of the near has the potential to be a strong,
methodologically sound area of research. Anthropology is
taking a new direction towards the author himself, a kind of
self-anthropology against the study of the other despite its
raising of a double-sided question. The first concerns the
possibility of an anthropology of the near as being as
conceptually complex as ‘traditional’ anthropology; the second
questions whether ‘the facts, institutions, modes of assembly …
[and] circulation specific to the contemporary world’ are valid
objects for anthropological analysis given the difficulty we
experience in isolating aspects as individual objects of study.
In the first case, European ethnology has already established
that it can be as rigorous as when analyzing the objects of
‘traditional’ anthropology, as it proves the importance of such
objects to our own cultures and the existence of a plurality of
cultures within a certain area. In the second case, a concern
stems from the confusion between the object and method of
anthropologies of the near. Even if individual objects of study
are hard to isolate given the complexity of modern society
because of their interconnecting aspects (such as work, leisure,
commerce, and so forth), we must still establish some
boundaries within which we will set our sights. However, we
need not worry about ‘representativeness’ within ethnological
research in contemporaneity, because the ‘mythologiques’ or
abstract ‘anthropological objects’ longed for by anthropologists
as general hypotheses from which to work are problematic in
the first place. In addition, such isolated anthropological objects
may not be of relevance or of interest to those within
contemporaneity. If the anthropology of the near
contemporaneity had to be based exclusively on the categories
already registered, if it were not allowed to formulate new
objects, then the act of moving into a new empirical terrain
would not answer a need, merely the researchers idle curiosity.

In that regard I find it important to make an overview of the

European anthropological studies in the Orient or what is called
“Orientalism”.
On a visit to Beirut during the terrible civil war of 1975-1976 a
French journalist wrote regretfully of the gutted downtown area
that “once seemed to belong to… the Orient of Chateaubriand
and Nerval.” He was right about the place, of course, especially
so far as a European was concerned. The Orient was almost a
European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of
romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes,
remarkable experiences. Now it was disappearing; in a sense it
had happened, its time was over. Perhaps it seemed irrelevant
that Orientals themselves had something at stake in the
process, that even in the time of Chateaubriand and Nerval
Orientals had lived there, and that now it was they who were
suffering; the main thing for the European visitor was a
European representation of the Orient and its contemporary
fate, both of which had a privileged communal significance for
the journalist and his French readers.

The Orient is not an inert fact of nature. It is not merely there,

just as the occident itself is not just there either. We must take
seriously Vico’s great observation that men make their own
history. That what they can know is what they have made, and
extend it to geography: as both geographical and cultural
entities - to say nothing of historical entities – such locals,
regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are
man-made. Therefore as much as the West itself, the Orient is
an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery,
and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and
for the West. The two geographical entities thus support and to
an extent reflect each other.

Ideas, cultures, and histories cannot seriously be understood or

studied without including their force, or more precisely their
configuration of power, into the study / analysis. To believe
that the Orient was created –or “Orientalized”- and to believe
that such things happen simply as a necessity of the
imagination, is to be disingenuous. The relationship between
Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of
varying degrees of a complex hegemony. The Orient was
Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental”
in all those ways considered common-place by an average
European, but also because it could be made Oriental.

Orientalism is more a European-American “authority” over the

Orient than it is a valuable document about it. Nevertheless,
what we must respect and try to grasp is the sheer knitted-
together strength of the Orientalsit discourse, its very close ties
to the enabling socio-economic and political institutions, and its
redoubtable durability. Orientalism, therefore, is not an airy
European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of
theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has
been a considerable material investment. Continued investment
made Orientalism, as a system of knowledge about the Orient,
an accepted grid for filtering through the Orient into Western
consciousness, just as that same investment multiplied the
statement proliferating out from Orientalism into the general
culture.

There is an impossibility of “Occidentalism” as opposed to

“Orientalism”, referring to the term “Orientalist” which is:
anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the Orient
-and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist,
sociologist, historian, artist, or philologist- either in its specific
or its general aspects. And this impossibility would also go for
the documentary we just saw: the reciprocal act of researching
Amsterdam by someone from 'the Orient' would be an
“Occidentalist” act. This impossibility is due mainly to the lack
of political and economical interest, the lack of cultural or
political “authority”, in opposition to the “Orientalist” position
where “Orientalism” is more particularly valuable as a sign of
European-Atlantic power over the Orient, a cultural domination
from a repressive and manipulative position, than it is a verdict
discourse about the Orient. So the documentary is taking a new
direction -the one we talked about previously- a direction
towards the near, towards the home city of the maker, a self-
anthropology against the study of the other.
As much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a
history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that
have given it reality and presence in and for the West. The two
geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each
other. Amsterdam was, in this documentary, reflecting Beirut;
it was its mirror image. It is more of a study about Beirut, as
there is an impossibility of studying Amsterdam without
referring back to Beirut.

Under such conditions of non-space one would have the illusion

of wellbeing until some tremendous event breaks the illusion
and reality reveals itself. The 9/11 ‘event’ did exactly that: it
revealed the hidden situation of implosion that had started to
accumulate after the end of the cold war and the rise of the
“empire”. Similar ‘events’, but on a smaller scale, occurred in
Amsterdam with the assassination of Theo Van Gogh and in
Beirut with the assassination of P.M. Rafik Hariri. They
revealed in both cities the problem of coexistence, racism and
sectarianism. And this explains why the linear storyline in the
documentary continuously attempts to build-up and destroy the
facade image of the two cities, while it continuously shows the
collapse of “hyper-reality” and the collapse of the medium of
documentation itself.