“Every single time something is done with a purpose in view, something fundamentally different and other occurs” Nietsche.

Anthropology, like most of us has had to go through several personal crises. You know, just like that time in your life when suddenly you discovered things are not quite what we thought they were; the world, society and our immediate surroundings do not quite fit into the perspective they unquestionably once did. For a while we are unable to listen properly, we hesitate, we are paranoid, things fall apart, the center cannot hold. For anthropology that has been happening a lot lately. Suddenly, borders weren’t as defining as they used to be, suddenly societies could no longer be viewed in purist terms, suddenly history could no longer support the categories it once made and suddenly the concept of “culture” came into question. So where is Anthropology supposed to fit in this new world and still try to find justification for the need to study cultures, societies, and systems? I will attempt to demonstrate this with a first hand ethnography of the particular of which I am a part of not just as participant observer but participating within. In doing so, I merely wish to indicate a slight hitch in the categorical department without dwelling too much into the whole explanation/interpretation/representation problems.
A few years ago I was strolling through Wembley, (a predominantly Indian suburb of London) having assumed it would be the most appropriate place to shop for authentic ‘ethnic’ Indian arts and crafts and items for household decoration. Hours later I was humouredly bemused when I realized that everything I came across in the gift shops had none of the ‘ethnic’ qualities I was in search for; instead, everything was rather industrial: cheap wall clocks with plastic gold framing with a Surah verse inscribed within; plastic white perforated mats; or cotton laced seat and table covers; fake crystal paper weights (in the form of some ostentatious automobile); posters of sunsets from some dream island coastline with the words, “God doth shine upon those who pray”. Basically, objects churned out of a factory in Taiwan or China, and imported because they possess only one attribute to them: CHEAP. It is the same sort of junk that you will find on just about every main town street in Kenya and most likely throughout the world.
My own idiosyncrasies on the arty-farty stuff is also all topsy turvy as it would be more in the same frame as the Euro-American appeal to aesthetics. Upon asking where I could find what I was looking for I was advised by a fellow Indian. “Ah, that would be in Camden town where all the hippy shops are.” It is the sort of stuff that appeals to people who have a little bit more to spend. The word ‘oriental’, really is the only term that adequately signifies this category of objects I am trying to refer to: candleholders, incense burners, batiks with abstract images of Hindu deities or architecture; carvings from the pre-European colonial period; cosmological and astrologic signs and symbols, ‘mystical motifs of earthly elements (fire, water, and so forth); i.e. those objects manifested from an ‘exotic’ past of the non-European world. How much of it is imagined and how much recreated by the western world’s creative notions of the rest of the globe, and how much of it actually derives from artifacts of the non-European world, well, who’s to say? There is a particular mutant presence within this interstice. These items are being found more and more in non-EuroAmerican households who have been orientalized but, from within an occidental paradigm. Does that suffice? I am afraid not for we find that not only is there a displacement with the objects and what they signify but also a replacement of category signs (“oriental” “occidental”) giving them a different and deferring meaning depending on the context.
Somewhere in England lives a family in diaspora (shall we say twice removed). The husband and wife were born in East Africa, and moved to England during their later years of education. Both their parents spoke no English, nor made any attempt to (regardless of the fact that they have spent their entire lives in English speaking countries); were conservatively religious (i.e. will only eat a particular type of food, prepared in a particular way, thus will not eat outside in restaurants or in households not of the same class/clan/tribe/caste/race); they are asocial (their only social interaction will take place at the mandir [the Hindu temple], or weddings, a funeral and the annual Diwali trek. Please note there is nothing derogative in this stereotypification project but is merely an exercise to show the difficulties the anthropologist faces in ethnographic practices due to the need for terminology and categorization.
So, they both come from relatively conservative East African Indian backgrounds. Yet, in so many aspects they could not be more anglophile, occidentalized and even orientalized! First, let us take a glance at the game of anglophilization. The two have a chronic case of the ‘Keep up with the Jones’’. Every time they talk about a social event or friends, it’s always their wealth, where they live, how expensive the party must have cost them, and so forth. The husband, I believe is more anglophile than the wife from a genuine point of view, in the sense that he has acquired ‘upper-class’ Anglo-characterisitics which have become very much a part of him, as much as his love of Indian food (Note: home cooked) as well as his devoted esteem for his chosen guru.
That’s the background. Let’s take a step inside the house. The lounge in their pretty little suburban house is a particularly touch-me-not setup. All items have been chosen over a long span of time and carefully picked- i.e. only the best and supposedly characteristic of a particular culture. And it is here we can relate to where we began the journey about ‘ethnic’ stuff, those exotic items symbolic of the occidentals proscribed oriental and exotic flavors. Three items will suffice to demonstrate the nature of symbolic deficiencies in establishing categories and terminology of which gain an inherent value of cultural reference and then fail miserably. Their lounge has been furnished with three of the most typical Kenyan curios which every tourist visiting is bound to purchase: a soapstone chessboard with the pieces all carved out of two Kenyan tribes be it the Nandi vs. the Luo or the Kikuyu vs. the Maasai and all have been carved with the particular cultural attributes of those tribes. The other, is a solitaire board where all the balls are carved out of indigenous Kenyan semi-precious rocks and the third: well, it’s a chair of some sort made of two separate slabs which slot into one another to form what resembles a deck chair. The back rest always has a carving of one of our countries “icons”: either the Maasai warriors or one of the big five animals. Personally, I have never come across any of these items in any Kenyan-Kenyan household.
So these are just a few of the itsybitsy ‘ethnic’ objects that appeal to the orientalist. Camden Market is a plethora of oriental arts and crafts. Even the desired scents and aromas differ. Incense has become the symbol of occidentals with a touch of the east in them- (orientalized?). Sandalwood, Orange, Lemon, cannabis incense have taken the place of fragrance sprays. But in a ‘real’ Indian home, the pungent odor from the incense is one I have only come across in the Hindu mandirs around the world. And if they are of the ‘modern’ type, Haze Air Fresheners will keep the onion waste stink at bay. What more is there to say? It is indeed “a love song to our mongrel selves.”
Once again, I have to stress that as far as Anthropology being a practice of ethnographies of the particular, or participant observation, or just plane old couch potato academic masturbation, things are not the same. W.B Yeats would have it that “Things fall apart, The center cannot hold...” Indeed so, the center cannot hold, and just maybe the relationship between the falcon and the falconer is not the ideal one that we would all assume it to be.
(First Published in Awaaz Magazine)