Larynx: Cases, in anthropology, are shaped by symbolic processes, Vive le Symbole et L'Ordinateur

What is a case in anthropology?


Cases, in anthropology, are shaped by symbolic processes.

The ‘word,’ language, ideas, or media, provide structure, - textual and semantic - and thus cases are infinitely open-ended. So writing, film, musical notations and, more recently, digital media give new form to cases in ongoing ways. Previous anthropological cases may or may not inform subsequent creations of cases. So, more particularly, it’s the relationality of words, sentences, images, information technologies and memes, which give structure to the case. Each of the videos here - http://arssynthetica.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc - creates a case, is a case, and many of these videos characterize explicitly what cases are and how they function, from specific ways of thinking, thus potentially informing subsequent cases. Ethnography, as a modality of anthropological case production, creates specific open-ended forms of cases that I’m particularly interested in.

The larynx (voice box) has been central to generation of these symbolic processes, in an evolutionary sense, for, without the evolutionary development of the larynx, human language wouldn’t have developed (Deacon, “The Symbolic Species,” 1997). This is important because it relativizes the significance of cases, in anthropology, in an evolutionarily biological context, thus leaving open-ended the generation of new kinds of cases vis-a-vis ethnography, and in new modalities, as symbolic generation processes.

scottmacleod.com

(I posted this to http://diogeneslab.wordpress.com/ May 6 2009 at the end of a semester's course, "Ars Synthetic," with UC Berkeley Professor Paul Rabinow, where there are also more thoughts about what a case is. Here's also "Thinking by cases, or: how to put social sciences back the right way up," by Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (eds.), Penser par cas, 2005 espacestemps.net/document1395.html).


Epistemologically, anthropology is hard to reduce.


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Vive le stylo!

et Vive le symbole!

et Vive l'ordinateur ~

It looks like computing and the internet will be with humans forever, like symbols, writing, and language ...