Written by Alexandra Dalferro
Produced by Max Seawright

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A collection of Post-it notes found near Ratchaprasong intersection, written by Red Shirt protesters and addressed to the movement’s leaders.

Editor and interviewer: Ben Tausig

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Normalcy
written and produced by Juan Orrantia

Normalcy (moments of imagination and memory) mixes still photography, video and sound as a way of documenting the intimate spaces and moments of life in the aftermath of terror in Colombia. Based in a town along the Caribbean coast where paramilitaries massacred more than 30 men in 2000, I documented moments of the everyday 6 years after the event. Through the banality of life, through the quietness of simple activities and situations many times filtered by my own imagination, I recall the possibilities of remembrance embedded in such moments, especially in places where silence has been a means of survival. The work raises the question of what it means to return to normalcy, to live in a place where the past inhabits the present in unexpected ways.

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History of Conspiracy
By Mue Meut

In the spring of 2010, military force was used to clear anti-government protestors from the streets of Bangkok, Thailand’s capital. During and after the crackdowns, conflicting accounts as to the number of casualties and who was behind them circulated widely. These accounts took shape as rumors, tall tales, news reports, blogs, and official announcements. As is normal in unclear circumstances, people tried to make sense of available information, cobbling together something coherent as best they could from bits of information. In many cases, what eventually took shape was, with justification, a tale of nefarious, sinister intentions. Conspiracy theories were, and continue to be, the currency of the day.

One way to think about the widespread resort to conspiracy theory as an explanation for recent events is that it is an aberration traceable to the political uncertainty and anxiety that the looming death of the current king inspires. Thailand, however, is not the only society in which conspiracy theories abound. America has its fair share, from the one about the current president being a foreign-born Muslim (and therefore un-American) to the ones about the moon landing and 9/11 being hoaxes perpetrated by the government. One writer in the New York Times recently noted: “It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock – to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief” (Neal Gabler, “The Elusive Big Idea,” New York Times, 13 August 2011).

Conspiracy theory can be seen as part of a broad regression into the epistemological abyss, as the Times piece indicates, as a pathology, a weapon of the weak, the refuge of the marginalized, a style of politics, as a critical part of what governments do, or as a means of control and a strategy of power. There is some truth in all these views, but to dismiss it outright as a remnant of the mystified past means we have failed to engage the phenomenon critically, as a reflection of the radical skepticism that prevails in Thai society.

That conspiracy theory is a relic of the past is true so far as the elements that make it possible can be traced historically, to real events, real situations, to the years following the Second World War, when the police, the army, and other nodes of the Thai un-state began to exert violent force on political, social, and cultural life in the kingdom. It is no coincidence that ‘third hands’ (mue thi sam), ‘dark hands’ (mue muet), and unnamed ‘people with influence’ (phu mi ithiphon) emerged in the 1950s to become key agents of Thai history, driving events, criminal or otherwise. And it is not by chance that during this period, people have become caught up in a game of constant detection and interpretation, or as Robert Wilson calls it, a state of ‘guerilla ontology,’ to determine what is real and what is fabricated in daily life.

What this piece is about, then, is ultimately to get people to think about how the forms of representation employed are imbued with politics, resulting sometimes in situations we can’t anticipate.

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Knowing Citizens
Written by Sarah E. Igo

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community…

The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire…

—W. H. Auden, “The Unknown Citizen,” 1940

At the center of “The Unknown Citizen,” one of the first poems written by W. H. Auden after his migration to the United States in 1939, is an individual identified only through bureaucratic enumeration. This anonymous citizen is known in purely external and calculable terms, a product of official government agencies—a fictional “Bureau of Statistics”—and an object of corporate, social scientific, marketing, eugenic, and polling scrutiny. The closing lines of the poem point simultaneously to the hubris and limits of statistical knowledge about citizens: “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.”[1]

Written in the form of a state epitaph for an “unknown” but all too knowable citizen, Auden’s poem is an apt starting point for thinking about the implications of making the unseen seen. I want here to consider the visibility permitted by quantification, a form of social description with far-reaching, if unpredictable, consequences. The history of statistical representations concerns precisely the ways previously unenumerated entities are imagined, visualized, and assimilated. In my own work, “typical citizens,” “majority opinion,” “normal sexuality,” and “the American public” itself all became newly palpable concepts in the mid-twentieth century, in part because of the persuasive force of mass surveys and aggregate statistics.

Recently, sociologists Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens have called for treating numbers as speech acts: numbers “do” things as well as “say” things and bring about change as an effect of “saying something.” [2] As they point out, public understandings of crime and health, poverty and gross domestic product, intelligence and educational quality—just to name a few foundational social concepts—are not just undergirded by but absolutely constituted by quantitative measurement. Alain Desrosieres puts it this way: “The aim of statistical work is to make a priori separate things hold together, thus lending reality and consistency to larger, more complex objects.” [3] In this rather potent conjuring act, the invisible and unstable become permanent and actual.

Indeed, recent history suggests that almost nothing in the social world that is presumed to “count” can resist visibility in the form of quantitative measurement. No matter how complex, elusive, and challenging the object, there are those dedicated to coaxing it into coherence and analysis, and in that sense making it “real.” Numbers, of course, can be both reductive and productive. As Alice O’Connor has shown, the capture of poverty by economistic measures in the United States shut down certain ways of thinking about the category (as structural rather than individual, for instance), constraining possible policy options for curbing it. [4] On the other hand, Ian Hacking, who has argued that social classifications play a role in “making up people” (“the pervert” or the “split personality”), slyly suggests that counting and categorizing—in the form of tables of occupations—were unwittingly responsible for class consciousness and perhaps Marxism too. [5]

This 1939 questionnaire from the American Institute of Public Opinion suggests the range of questions put to Americans about public and personal affairs by doorstep pollsters. (Gallup Poll questionnaire, 1939)

Quantitative description is often a technology of apprehension—of objects, its rhetoric insists, that already exist but have been inadequately perceived. But the same processes have the power to render other things invisible. Not the least of these is the technical process by which a certain version of reality is created, thereby complicating efforts to undo it. Successful classification naturalizes its categories, allowing them to retreat from sight. [6] It is precisely this paradox that gives statistical facts their potency: the more that survey technologies, for example, are regarded as unremarkable and matter-of-fact, the more difficult it is to discern their capacity to define entire domains of social life. And this is not even to say anything about “agnotology,” Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger’s neologism for the “study of culturally constructed ignorance” (a close cousin to Steven Colbert’s “truthiness”). Statistics have played a starring role in the “manufactured uncertainty” central to the tobacco industry and climate-change denials, and in “how and why various forms of knowing do not come to be, or have disappeared, or have become invisible.” [7]

The colonization of the social by numbers has a long history, beginning with early tax rolls and censuses. But it took new forms in the twentieth century, when—despite considerable suspicion and controversy—ordinary people’s habits, opinions, and behaviors were all submitted to quantitative measures. This was a distinctly modern project of monitoring the inner life of national populations, their private beliefs and desires. It required new tools, new kinds of coordination, and new ways of thinking, and became a key ambition of policy-makers, corporations, and social scientists alike. Intricate methods of collecting and displaying aggregate information have become ever more intertwined with the public sphere. As such, it is worth asking: How have citizens become known through numbers, and with what effects on subjectivity and social life? Or in slightly different terms, what are the links between new means of perceiving the social and new modes of experiencing it?

One conclusion is clear from my investigation of the rise of new forms of survey knowledge in the last century. Americans, I argue, began to imagine themselves as “statistical citizens,” members of a modern public that saw itself reflected in aggregate data collected from anonymous others. These data lent real substance to the idea of the “mass,” bestowed new cultural weight on the imagined mainstream, and worked to highlight and regulate differences.

Individual responses to this process varied, but they all reveal the thickening bonds between statistical representation and social reality. Many citizens vehemently protested the polls and statistics that purported to describe them in guises as different as the Gallup Poll and the Kinsey Reports, hoping to substitute their own numbers for the experts’. Others worried about the sway of aggregates, including their power to create new norms and behaviors—a version of Espeland and Stevens’ speech acts. Still others, however, happily volunteered and disclosed theretofore private information, in part to make their mark on, and become visible in, the new surveys. Most interesting were those who located themselves in newly accessible statistics, willfully inhabiting the categories of surveyors and communing with strangers known only through tables and charts. [8] In this sense, numbers that persuasively stood in for social reality had significant repercussions. They not only helped consolidate an official public but also shaped individual subjects.

A second conclusion is that quantitative measurement has become central to late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century understandings of privacy. In part because citizens have been made so visible to the “Bureaus of Statistics” (to return to Auden), whether those of the state, private employers, marketers, or polling agencies, some individuals have sought to resist legibility—to evade the elaborate bureaucratic and corporate strategies designed to know them. This kind of privacy is new. And it has had some successes, small interventions (perhaps only temporary) that have managed to halt the flow of information. Most have proliferated since the 1970s: unlisted phone numbers and addresses; “dark routes” to escape CCTV cameras; Census protests; opt-outs from Google street maps. Each of these is a response to visibility and a technique for leaving fewer marks on the official records that have become so ubiquitous in recent decades.

What is clear is that enumeration is once again creating visions of the social—and visions of the self—if in distinctly novel, and perhaps not yet obvious ways. One recent commentator, for instance, writes that “our physical bodies are being shadowed by an increasingly comprehensive ‘data body,’” a body of data, moreover, that “does not just follow but precedes the individual being measured and classified.” [9] Grégoire Chamayou has speculated that such “techniques of traceability” have generated novel aspects of individuality through the concept of personal data, which he provocatively calls a “numerical avatar” and a “schematic and centralized double of ourselves.” [10] What is still clearer is that an aspired-for invisibility is rooted, at least in part, in the conviction that society’s accountants know too much about us, that there can no longer be an “unknown citizen.” In this way, quantitative measurement has been at once a tool for elucidating social life and a trigger for rethinking social values. If privacy of this new sort has become a key aspect of modern citizens’ sense of self, it is in part thanks to those entities that have sought so relentlessly to “sense the unseen.”

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An Anthropological Experiment: From the Cutting Room Floor
Author/Ethnographer: Kathryn Linn Geurts
Photographer: James E. O’Neal

Sensorial anthropology asks that we engage the sensual revolution in scholarship in part by thinking beyond the academic text. This piece experiments with materials that are usually “left on the cutting room floor” as the paradigmatic journal article is written, edited, and produced.

The audio-taped ethnographic interview is a mainstay: it is listened to, transcribed, coded, analyzed, and the content is woven textually into theoretically dense prose. But we seldom glimpse the dynamic interview process; we rarely view the emotional vicissitudes of the exchange. If we are fortunate enough to see a photograph, it is often a posed portrait of the “interviewee.” This piece rescues photos from “the cutting room floor” to display and explore the feeling tone of an ethnographic interview.

For more than 20 years I have been studying sensory-emotional elements of experience and bodily ways of knowing in Ghana. In one of the local languages this is referred to as seselelame: feel-feel-at-flesh-inside or feeling in the body and the skin. Seselelame is a sensibility that is highly valued, trusted, and believed. So while Westerners may say that “seeing is believing,” Africans might say “feeling provides proof.” If Cartesian dualism or mind-body split characterizes a kind of Western way of being-in-the-world, seselelame rivals this as an African style of fusing body to mind.

This slideshow (from fieldwork in 2010) makes evident that ethnography derives from and thrives on relationality. You see the anthropologist interviewing one of Ghana’s leading Deaf activists: Mahama Johnson Numeri. But this is made possible only with the assistance of George Pinto – an interpreter who works with the Ghana National Association of the Deaf. The photographs produced by James O’Neal reveal some things but in turn conceal others, prompting me to invoke seselelame as an analytic tool.

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Sensing the Unseen – Response
Written by David Howes

We have been asked to explore the notion of “sensing the unseen” in relation to our own work, which in my case has to do with the anthropology of the senses. The notion appeals to me for two reasons. First, it decenters vision and thereby opens up a space for the “other” senses to come to the fore and into their own. Not all perceiving has to do with seeing, though one would hardly know it from the way sensing (a whole body, multisensory activity) tends to be assimilated to seeing in common parlance (e.g., going to “see” the doctor, or “seeing” someone) as well as scientific models of perception. Breaking up this hegemony, by setting sight in its place and delving into the life of the non-visual senses, is a salutary opening.

Second, “sensing the unseen” focuses attention on the margins of perception, the “just-out-of-sight,” and thereby extends at the same time as it troubles the bounds of sense, or limits of the sensible. It calls into question the Copernican Revolution, instigated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, which put the “categories of the understanding” first and subordinated the operation of the senses to them. This Kantian position, which gave rise to modern day “cognitive science,” eclipsed the longstanding Aristotelian position, which was more sensible in orientation. According to Aristotle, there is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses. His account of the senses and the intellect is given in De Anima (On the Soul). It holds that all living beings (including plants) have a nutritive soul, animals and humans share a sensitive soul, and humans alone possess a rational soul (the intellect proper). In the Aristotelian tradition, many faculties which we moderns would consider to be cognitive, like memory and imagination, were understood to be sensitive (that is, faculties of the sensitive soul), so that memory and imagination remained forms of sensing rather than thinking. Thinking or ratiocination proper was delayed until after the common sense (sensus communis) had made sense of the deliverances of the five external senses.

There is no mention of the common sense in any contemporary textbook of psychology. This faculty has been lost, just as memory and imagination have been extricated from the sensorium and reclassified as aspects of cognition. This is a result of the general precession of cognition and diminution of sensation in the wake of Kant’s Copernican Revolution. However, the cognitivist (Kantian) position is not a good starting point from which to do cross-cultural research, since in many if not most traditions the understanding is conceived of as a sensuous faculty. For example, in the Buddhist tradition, mind is one of the senses—the sixth sense, in fact. In other words, the intellect is not superior to the senses but on par with them, one of them. In other traditions, the understanding is assimilated to hearing. Even in our own tradition the understanding is often folded into the senses, most notably vision: reason, thought, cogitation are all associated with light and sight. This is what makes it so important to probe the sensorium, instead of skipping it to focus on the supposedly underlying cognitive or neural mechanisms. Rudolf Arnheim was on the right track when he wrote Visual Thinking, only he was mistaken to assume that his visualist account of cognition could hold for all humanity. There are important differences to the ways in which the senses are distinguished and ranked across cultures, and corresponding differences to the ways in which the intellect is beholden to them.

“Sensing the unseen” nicely captures the spirit in which much classical and current research in the anthropology of the senses is being conducted—learning to listen like the Kaluli (Feld 1990) or underwater (Helmreich 2007); trying to sort through the respective contribution of biology and culture (not to mention geography) to the production of the taste of place or terroir (Trubek 2008); apprenticing oneself to a capoeira master or master woodworker so as to acquire the embodied skills of these pursuits firsthand (Downey 2005, Marchand 2010). As these and many other studies attest, participant sensation has taken the place of participant observation as the ethnographic method of choice. “Sensing culture” is the new “writing culture” and there has been a corresponding proliferation in the means of sensation. For example, some ethnographies now come with DVDs (Hahn 2007), or as in Steve Feld’s contribution to this special collection, directly on-line. Of course, they still lack the smell and taste of foreign or familiar places. When will that deficit be corrected?

While “sensing the unseen” thus evokes some of the best practices of contemporary anthropology, it also touches on what is probably the most basic question of anthropology. How do others perceive the world? Franz Boas was fascinated with this question, and so were the members of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait of 1898. They took with them a huge battery of tests —a tintometer, algometer, olfactometer, Politzer’s Hörmesser, Galton’s whistle, various taste solutions, Haken’s E, the Müller-Lyer illusion, etc. — to measure the sensory acuity of the natives. They wanted to find out whether the Islanders, as representatives of “primitive man,” really could see or hear or smell further than Europeans (i.e. sense the unseen), as the reports of missionaries and other travelers concerning “primitives” in different places had suggested. The results of the tests were inconclusive, and the interpretations questionable for all kinds of reasons, such as equipment failure and incommensurability, but above all cultural bias (Howes 2011:437-39). Most seriously, the Cambridge men—Haddon, Rivers and company—never did inquire into native understandings and practices of the senses. Nor did they question the completeness of their list of senses. That would have been unscientific, which is to say not cognizable within the scope of the doctrine of psychophysics which informed both the design of their instrumentation and the sorts of hypotheses they were prepared to entertain.

The idea of the senses of indigenous or “tribal” peoples being more acute than those of Westerners persists today. For example, it cropped up recently as a way of explaining how the indigenous inhabitants (e.g. the Ongee and Sentinelese) of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal were able to escape the giant wave that crashed on their shores the morning of December 26, 2004 by fleeing to higher ground. They did so just in time, as if forewarned. What tipped them off? It was observed that “Some animals have acute sense of hearing and smell that allow them to determine something coming towards them long before humans might know that something is there;” and, just as there were widespread reports of animals anticipating the disaster and fleeing, so it was with the Ongee and Sentinelese: “They can smell the air. They can gauge the depth of the sea with the sound of their oars. They have a sixth sense which we do not possess” according to a local environmentalist (quoted in Howes 2009:13).

The invocation of a sixth sense is both intriguing and problematic. It destabilizes the model of the five-sense sensorium, which is good, but why is it projected onto the other (the animal other, the “primitive” other)? In point of fact, the notion of a sixth sense has a very long (and contested) history in the West as well, with all sorts of different candidates arising at different times to vie for this position—from speech to proprioception, for example, and from Mesmer’s animal magnetism to ESP (see http://sixthsensereader.org; Howes 2009). To study the sixth sense, in whatever form it takes, is to resist the closure which Kant sought to impose on the senses and sense experience through his Copernican Revolution of philosophy. “Sensing the unseen,” by focusing our attention on the historically and culturally shifting margins of perception, opens the way for us to explore and come to understand the sensorium in the expanded field which it actually occupies.

Background photograph: Three Men in Costume, with Ornaments and Weapons In Jungle Clearing, Smithsonian Institution, Haddon Expedition 1891.

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Music on the Table
By Ben Tausig and Peter Doolan
Produced by Elizabeth Watkins

Visitors to Bangkok who happened upon the Red and Yellow Shirt political protests in 2010 and 2011 could be forgiven for mistaking them, much of the time, for concerts or dance parties. The air of the rallies was saturated with songs, both live and recorded. CDs sold almost as quickly as grilled pork, and hundreds of artists created (or recreated) themselves as full-time protest musicians.

Protest music could be, but was not always, whimsical. Indeed, its content, distribution, and subtexts pointed to deep wells of critique of the government and political system, much of which was outspoken and even radical. Listening closely to the music of the protests also gives us a sense of the relationships that flourished at the rallies – between vendors and consumers, protest leaders and crowds, and among protesters themselves. “Music on the Table” addresses itself at once to scholarship on the role of music and media in social movements, to studies of new forms of musical economy enabled by inexpensive technologies of distribution, and to contemporary work on Thai politics, including recent histories of protest and political resistance. See extended scholarly bibliography below.

In this presentation, we guide the reader through the content of two virtual CD tables that display a representative selection of music actually purchased at the rallies in the case of the Red Shirts, and at the offices of right-leaning ASTV media (at Phujatgan headquarters in Bangkok) or audible on the radio in the case of the Yellows.

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This mobile primer on tasting maple syrup is a companion piece to Amy B. Trubek’s Visible Sap.

Created by Amy B. Trubek, design by Louise Ma.

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