Session 3a: Insider and Outsider
5th Global Conference
Friday 9th March – Sunday 11th March 2012
Prague, Czech Republic
The Anthropologist and the Ashaninka: Separating the Roots of Culture and Identity from Within the Amazon
Ashley Greenwood
La Trobe University, Melbourne Australia
In the jungle there lies a people who live a stark and contrasting existence which combines both extreme isolation and violent confrontation with the ‘other’ – in the form of colonisers, rebels and multi-national companies. In this place culture, fluid and serpentine, transforms and adjusts with such lingering and lightning as to be imperceptible while identity assembles and articulates in deliberate relationship with that which is different. Among the Asháninka, who live in the Amazon of Central Peru, it is possible to view the kaleidoscope of culture as separate to the monolithic nature of identity and to use this distinction to explore what these concepts mean and how they can be used. The process of ‘othering’ and the associated notions of boundedness, homogeneity, coherence and subordination/resistance have recently become the bane of anthropological practice but represent a misunderstanding about the relationship between culture and identity. This paper explores the ontology and epistemology of culture and identity, the relationship between the two, the processes involved in the construction of these concepts and the differences in how they manifest. As an anthropologist in the jungle the power and frailty of these current debates were laid bare in the manner in which myself and my participants fought to communicate who we were to one another and how, over time, those communications were adjusted. In a world which is increasingly culturally enmeshed, the importance of forceful and definitive identities has intensified and recognition of the difference between the two has become essential.
Thinking Inside the Box: Michael Ondaatje’s Cubist Approach to History
Chris Margrave
Department of English, Texas State University, San Marcos, USA
In The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Michael Ondaatje recreates the historical past of the American West in a fashion similar to a cubist painter, offering several different lenses through which to view the disparate narrative accounts of the Wild West’s most infamous gunslinger. Like a multi-layered Picasso painting, The Collected Works creates a dizzying effect of narrative confusion in which fictional amateur historians speak simultaneously and contradictorily with equal degrees of authority. Using words instead of paint, honoring imagination over facts and poetic musicality over traditional form, Ondaatje’s self-proclaimed cubist approach to history ultimately constructs a democratically generous form of literary epistemology. The Collected Works thus prods us to consider if history is really knowable, and if it is, to ask what would be the best way to represent and experience history in light of the myriad contradictions the actual past contains.
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