Melancholia and anthropology

Abstract

Relationships forged during ethnographic fieldwork are often ambivalent, if only because of the tension between “being there” and departure. Following Freud's argument that ambivalence in relationships lies at the heart of melancholia, I argue that ethnographic ambivalence can result in disciplinary melancholia, as seen in calls for a more ethical anthropology and in the pleasure of these appeals. I reach this conclusion by continuing a narrative I began in this journal in 2009, in which I describe my “entanglement” in familial relationships in my field site in southern Laos. Here I focus on the central ambivalence of Lao familial relationships (between nurturance and abandonment), especially in terms of how it informs understandings of death, ghostly agency, and Buddhism. I contend that the central ambivalence of anthropology (between being there and departure) likewise informs disciplinary debates about the ethics of fieldwork, collective culpability, and moral positioning.

Ambivalent Attachment — Melancholia and Political Activism in Contemporary Palestine

“…Loss has been well studied in anthropology, and its conventional tools go some of the way in helping us to understand the ramifications of Palestine as the lost ideal. Anthropologists primarily explore loss and bereavement through its public rituals, cultural schemes, and practices (Bloch and Parry ; Boret ; Brison and Leavitt ; Briggs ; High ; Robben [2004]; Saint Cassia ). This emphasis is unsurprising, since anthropology is preoccupied with observable forms of human behavior—the visible and audible expressions of loss, say, in the form of lament (Briggs ; High ).…”

“…Anthropologists primarily explore loss and bereavement through its public rituals, cultural schemes, and practices (Bloch and Parry ; Boret ; Brison and Leavitt ; Briggs ; High ; Robben [2004]; Saint Cassia ). This emphasis is unsurprising, since anthropology is preoccupied with observable forms of human behavior—the visible and audible expressions of loss, say, in the form of lament (Briggs ; High ). Making the case for an anthropology of bereavement, Jason Throop argues for the importance of investigating anthropologically those areas of human experience that Western epistemology tends to categorize as interior.…”

The Dragon and the River: Poetic Parallelism in Hazardous Research

“…This article moves through a parallelism of its own in that it lies at the nexus of anthropological debates regarding the ethnography of violence (see, for example, Nordstrom ; Daniel ) and the hazards latent in ethnographic intimacy (see High ). My analysis engages these discipline‐level discussions while being rooted in my ethnography of contemporary Laos.…”

Humanity Lost: Alterity and the Politics of a Melancholic Anthropology

“… See High () and Garcia () for different, complementary discussions of the significance of melancholia in anthropology. While High focuses on the implications of anthropologists’ simultaneous “being there” and departure for understandings of the ethics of fieldwork, culpability, and moral positioning, and Garcia on the melancholic subject in the context of addiction, I focus on how the demand of the specificity of affective relation to the other challenges the very notion of collective, including humanity itself, and thus of a politics based on community, belonging, or the human.…”