Ethnopoetics Project

"Sociology was formed within the culture of imperialism, and embodied an intellectual respones to the colonised world." (9)

How did times affect study of ethnic poetries? How are they discussed?

---- Sent from my 3 mobile

T. S. Eliot, Anthropologist and Primitive
William Harmon
American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Dec., 1976), pp. 797-811
(article consists of 15 pages)
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/675145

A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (Blackwell Companions to Anthropology) (Paperback)
~ Alessandro Duranti (Editor) especially Ch.13 on poetry

Also, database search for Anthropology & Poetry

[Social science's] dominant genres picture the world as it is seen by men, by capitalists,  by the educated and affluent. Most important, they picture the world as seen from the rich capital-exporting countries of Europe and North America -  the global metropole. To ground knowledge of society in other experiences remains a fragile project." (vii)

Paulin Hountondji - data gathering occurs in colonies and is theorised in metropole. (ix)

There is a belief that social science can only have "one, universal, body of concepts and methods." (ix)

“The social sciences took their modern institutional form in the second half of the nineteenth century, at the high tide of European imperialism [...] the colonial connection worked both ways; the metropole too was profoundly affected [...] But twentieth century sociology, rightly rejecting the muddy idea of ‘social evolution,’ also rejected the sense of connection with the colonised world that had underpinned it. With anthropology now the designated intellectual container for primitive societies, the rest of social science formed itself on ethnocentric assumptions that amounted to a gigantic lie – that modernity created itself within the North Atlantic world, independent of the rest of humanity.” (x)

"colonised and peripheral societies produce social thought about the modern world which has as much intellectual power as metropolitan social thought, and more political relevance.” (xii)

Different to postcolonial theory – it is a reconstruction (and construction) of social science. (xii)

What is the relationship between the imperialist project and the incorporation of the 'primitive' into the avant-garde poetry of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century? See Connell, Southern Theory p.x.

One of the main things that has to occur is for alternate (by which I mean
that is not from a global/hegemonic centre) poetries to be extricated from
the project and language of the European avant-garde, as though indigenous
or ancient poetries were an extension of it. For example, I know about the
'primitive' in art from Kandinsky and Dada - they were a source of renewal
of European poetry! Surely they can be known outside of this context, and in
their local situations?

Note: where does ethnopoetics stand in relation? They are themselves a part
of the American modernist program - late modernists, like Olson, Duncan and
Zukofsky, et al.

It is really like the avant-garde interpellates (from Althusser) these
poetries - that is, 'baptises' them.

Click here to download:

The American Uni-Vesre.pdf (3012 KB)

[From The Embattled Lyric: Essays and Conversations in Poetics and Anthropology, Stanford University Press, 2007]

Four field approach:

• Cultural = shared behaviour; transmission/learning; inter-generational; adaptation
• Archaeological = study of artefacts; how humans lived in past
• Linguistic = structural linguistics; historical linguistics; socio-linguistics
• Biological = human evolution; ‘what is uniquely human’; ‘human emergence’; identifying variation in the current species; study of other animal behaviours
  

• Applied anthropology = using cultural knowledge to solve human problems
  

1. Ethnography – single groups (singularity)
2. Ethnology – many groups (universality)
   

• how are humans different from other life-forms?
• Temporal comparison (evolution, pre-historical development of human groups and a ‘baseline’ to study future trajectory of human development)
• cross-cultural comparison of populations
  

WHAT true link is there between this aborigine and ourselves? True they were migrants also, the earliest migrants too, the earliest migrants into the land of nails-in-the-feet: and where did they come from indeed? Old world Asia. Turn, world, turn: the circle will never cease to turn.

There was this carpenter: last Jew / first Christian. I am late in the East, early in the West: this clan is mine. Bringing the white scarf to America, out of the island, carrying East into West: meeting those who had brought the crimson scarf from East to West in our sense, though continuing eastward in theirs - what is this but the wandering assumption of all the priesthoods of the world, gathering them into the body, gathering them into the life, and then taking the life into the poem? The world has voice in us, we are the crust of its imaginations. [...] The river runs back; the clocks return and we are all one man.

[Nathaniel Tarn, 'Toward Any Geography' from The Embattled Lyric p.7]

1. Australia as a part of the periphery and not the centre - this necessarily is bound to its status as colonised continent. Where can I find people dealing with this?

2. Why does Rothenberg focus on 'statelessness' as a feature of ethnopoetics? There are three senses in which I can think of 'statelessness': refugee as stateless - between states?; groups seeking recognition as a state inside a larger state; social (nomadic?) formations that do not have a centralised structure.