Beyond the Dead and the Living: Towards an Anthropology of the Third
A moment of silence and suspension in the air, before the author retrieves the result of her visa application for travel to the study site in Europe. Consulate of France in New York. December 6th, 2016. Photo by Tram Luong.
What is special about an image? Those of us trained in the craft of photography often come across this question in its multiple variations. The technological advancement of our time has transformed photography, an art form emerged as early as 1839, into a relatively effortless act of recording the imponderabilia of life (Gasser 1992; Newhall 1982). Despite the development of mechanical reproduction technologies, however, a photograph remains two things. It is at once a representation of truth and non-truth. Photographic techniques allow for the capture of a moment in time into a two-dimensional plane of existence, a representation of reality with supposed objectivity and accuracy. At the same time, the photograph is an illusion, a state of total stillness that has no equivalent in real life. As such, beyond its immediate form and content, the photograph embodies a complex universe of relations between the photographer and the photographed, between time and its representation, between space and the imagination of space.
On a larger scale, this paradox bears witness to the contradicting nature of images in their myriad forms – photographic, filmic, and even mental. As Foucault (1993, 36) maintains, the image is “a language which expresses without formulating, an utterance less transparent for meaning than the word itself.” The satisfaction of human desire through images takes on a “primitively imaginative character” enabled by the surreal modes of fantasy. Roland Barthes (1977) discusses this resistance to the formulation of meanings in images, calling it the “third” or the obtuse meaning of an image. The third meaning is something that holds us despite our attempt to decode the image’s symbolism. In the semiotics tradition of Charles Peirce (1955), this “third meaning” can be understood in terms of a general “thirdness,” something that comes in between the formulation of meaning and interpretation as such. In the Peircean categorization of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, the third symbolizes the multiple possibilities of interpreting an object (the second) through its sign (the first).
Building on this idea, Kockelman (2007; 2015) theorizes the third as a path to get from an origin (the first) to a destination (the second). As the essence of a path is “arguably all the ways it may go awry,” Kockelman posits that the third represents all possibilities of interpretation going astray. The functioning of such thirdness rests in all its possibilities to “fail,” to interrupt, and to malfunction (Kockelman 2015, 184). With consideration for the ethnographic enterprise, this paper mines into this notion of thirdness as it surfaces in the works of Lisa Stevenson, Anna Tsing, Kathryn Dudley and Audra Simpson. Through the metaphors of the raven, the mushroom, the Geppetto’s dream and the politics of refusal, the paper follows the traces of thirdness in the different monographs in question. Thinking with the third means observing the contour of various anthropological subjects as they live on despite the forces of global capitalism and imperial governance. It also means an effort to locate anthropological insights in what disrupts, rather than facilitate, the compulsion to arrival at total knowledge, a process that traps the complexity of relations between living organisms into “dead” records and publications. Indeed, the conventional approach to anthropological subjects as potential data for scientific generalization has often resulted in a kind of ethnographic atrophy, or a reduction of the rhizomatic nature of living human and non-human ecologies into lifeless parcels for ready consumption. Against the grain of this paradigm, the following pages will attempt to delineate a theory of ethnographic thirdness, or an anthropology that pivots on uncertainty, precarity, arrests, and refusal.
Life Beside Itself by Lisa Stevenson provides a dynamic point of entry for such anthropology. Life Beside Itself is an exploration on the vernacular and bureaucratic forms of care that condition Canadian attitudes toward Inuit people during two historic periods – the tuberculosis epidemic of the 1940s-60s and the ongoing suicide epidemic. Stevenson characterizes the responses of the Canadian state to both events as evident of a “biopolitical” care regime, a form of governance that is concerned merely with maintaining the life of the whole population (Stevenson 2014, 3). Biopolitics is imbricated in the logic of undifferentiated treatments that, though touted by the state as benevolence and goodwill, has yielded murderous effects on the Inuit community. Indeed, the colonial efforts to curb tuberculosis among indigenous people led to massive displacement of Inuit population into healthcare institutions far from their home. Pivoting on the serialization of sick bodies without proper identity attribution, this anonymous care system denied Inuit families crucial information on the condition and whereabouts of their relatives. Furthermore, a practice of burying deceased Inuit in unmarked graves around Canada also left grave impacts on the social fabric of the Inuit.
In a care regime that stages living as the ultimate social good, all other forms of social imagining become irrelevant. Inuit meet the challenge of constantly negotiating their identity and citizenship in a system that cares only that they live and not who they are. To be a Canadian citizen means to cooperate with a regime of life, whose goal remains to mold native populations into hygienic, orderly, dutiful colonial subjects. Yet, the reduction of physical deaths only resulted in another fatal, psychic death that continues to haunt Inuits to this day. As the rate of Inuit suicide skyrockets, Stevenson reminds us of the Inuit’s fundamentally different approach to human relations. The “dead Eskimo” of postwar Canadian policy can be folded back into daily life in a way such that the community maintains a sustained relationship with the deceased (Stevenson 2014, 104). The practice of “atiq,” or the transfer of someone’s life to a newborn baby bearing the same name, testifies to the myriad ways Inuit ontology challenges our common conceptions of life and death. The survival of this “name-soul” in Inuit society points to what Stevenson calls a “mournful life,” the continuation of life stories as the dead are always “still there” (Stevenson 2014, 157). With regards to the suicide epidemic, Stevenson contends that the Inuit understand suicide in terms of a disjuncture between two temporalities. Perhaps Inuit suicide is not so much a question of life versus death, but an answer to the desynchronization between the Inuit sense of time and the bureaucratic clock that keeps on ticking against them. Suicide, perhaps a mode of imagining (Foucault 1993, 69), is a manifestation of the desire to belong differently to the world.
Through the metaphor of the raven, an enigmatic figure that might or might not represent the soul of a deceased Inuit man, Stevenson underlines the important of this longing to relate differently. The raven, she argues, is the reappearance ofsomething that once was, something that stubbornly remains in life and defies our sense of reason. In the Inuit conceptualization of death and life, the raven embodies the “vital presence of an absence,” something that points to another invisible entity in such a way that it erases the divide between present or absent, alive or dead (Stevenson 2014, 40). With a quality of thirdness, the image of the raven threatens to unsettle our world. The force of such image lies in the fact that it registers experience of the therenessof the bird rather than confirming a prediction of what it really is. This kind of images continues to resonate, to animate for a lifetime without necessarily having any value, like a haunting that happens to us without our permission (Gordon 2008). As such, they continue to have an affective hold on the ethnographer and her informant (cf. Barthes 1977), as well as the readers of the text.
Thinking of the raven as a third helps relay ethnography towards another direction – that of a productive and hopeful uncertainty. In this sense, fieldwork is a mutual project of reflecting on the “impenetrable residues of daily life,” the things that persist in their uncertainty like the raven (Stevenson 2014, 17). This ethnography calls for a mode of listening that tolerates hesitation. In such paradigm, fieldwork means to look not for facts but for the moments the facts falter. These are the moments of qualm that suspend the professional detachment between the ethnographer and her subjects. Like the hold of an image, there exists something about the enigmatic presence of a statement, an entity, or a phenomenon that holds significance meanings yet cannot be cataloged by the intellect. This image-based methodology constitutes a novel kind of anthropology, one that does not derive truth from the repetition of everyday actions. Compared to discursive modes of knowing, the imagistic equivalent allows for a range of contradictory experiences otherwise omitted from anthropological analysis. This anthropology looks for truth in the possible, the negated, and the absent. In its extreme form, anthropology becomes an act of self-displacement, of gravitating away from one’s customary dispositions to realize that contrasting modes of imagining life and death exist, and that we are left to create new ways of caring for others and ourselves as imaginative beings.
Beyond arrest and disruption, the third is something that operates both within and without the paradigm in question. It thwarts the passage from the first to the second, yet does not reject the system entirely. In the highly effective multi-species ethnography titled The Mushroom at the End of the World, Anna Tsing uses the image of mushrooms in the forest after the rain as a metaphor for the precarity of “third nature,” or what Tsing terms “what manages to live despite capitalism” (Tsing 2015, 10). Tsing argues that the history of capitalist concentration of wealth has relied largely on reducing both humans and nonhumans (“first nature”) into resources for investment (“second nature”). In this history, people and things become alienated commodities divorced from their real-time entanglements with one another. The simplification of “first nature” for alienation produces ruins, or spaces of abandonment for asset production. Yet, it is in the ruins that a “third nature” flourishes. “Third nature” emerges within a spatial and temporal polyphony, which allows us to see natural entities beyond their utilitarian terms in a landscape of lost promises and damaged livelihoods.
“Third nature” takes the form of the Matsutake mushroom in Tsing’s account. The uncontrollable life of mushrooms, through without the promise of stability, become a valuable guide forward when the world we took for granted has failed. Once we open ourselves to their fungal attractions, matsutake mushroom, the protagonist of the book, can catapult us into “collaborative survival in precarious times” (Tsing 2015, 22). Indeed, Matsutake, a highly valued type of mushroom in Japan, are wild mushrooms that live in human-disturbed forests. Thriving in the aftermath of human disruption, Matsutake guides us towards the possibility of coexistence in environmental tumult. The mushroom exists simultaneously inside and outside the global political economy in its various forms – as a trophy of valor, a global commodity, and an esteemed gift. The mushroom is foraged across the northern hemisphere, often by displaced and disenfranchised cultural minorities in North America, Europe and elsewhere, who lead a form of precarious livelihood. Despite the uncertainties associated with this form of work, foragers consider the mushroom as trophies of their freedom in their respective locality. Upon entering the supply chain, however, the mushroom is transformed into a commodity. Tsing explains the transnational conduit of matsutake trade in terms of a “salvage accumulation,” or the process through which “lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions of commodity production.” Sites for salvage are precapitalist, simultaneously inside and outside the framework of capitalism (Tsing 2015, 97). As such, Matsutake foraged and sold in precapitalist performances become capitalist inventory en route their way to Japan.
What is at stake here is the acts of translation across varied social and political spaces which Tsing calls “patches” (Tsing 2015, 96). As important features of capitalism, translations across sites of difference make different life-ways commensurable for capitalist investment. In Japan, the main market for Matsutake mushroom, these commodities turn into tokens of gift as dealers match the mushroom packages almost instantly to clients upon their arrival. This act of translation must be reckoned in light of the anthropological concept of the gift (Tsing 2015, 185). The relationship-building capacity of Matsutake enables them to enter a gift economy informed by Japanese cultural specificities. As a whole, the supply chain resembles a collage of incredible cultural and political variations, “a mosaic of open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life (Tsing 2015, 25). Only through the appreciation of this patchiness can we start to understand the precarious condition of our world.
With considerations for the ethnographic enterprise, Tsing highlights the importance of a new art of noticing, or the art of directing one’s attention to the here and now of encounter, in all its contingencies and surprises. The mushrooms embody the quality of unpredictability in their characteristic fungal growth. Thinking with mushroom, one realizes that some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminacy than previously thought. Tsing argues that the key forward when the world we know has failed, is through contaminated diversity. Staying alive, for every species, requires livable collaborations, the working across differences that inevitably leads to contamination. Coming to terms with the contamination of the world means to reconcile with histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction. Through this lens, history cannot be parceled into self-contained units and computed with costs and benefits. Ethnography should emerge from similar encounters of “contamination,” which Tsing argues is the proper units of analysis. Like fungal bodies extending themselves in mineral soils before producing a single mushroom, fieldwork thrives from hidden collaborations (Tsing 2015, 11). This approach requires one to let go of the dogged assumption of anthropology as a solo performance and embrace a mode of always-in-process collaboration.
The point of ethnography is to learn how to think together with one’s informants, to develop research categories with the research and not before it. As such, Tsing’s work traverses disciplinary borders to arrive at the places of entangled histories, ecologies, and cultural traditions. Against the surveillance techniques of intellectual privatization (Tsing 2015, 399), she maintains that intellectual life should resemble the peasant woodland, where useful products emerged by unintended designs. Thinking with mushroom and its thirdness quality as something that evades concrete prediction, one comes to appreciate the woodland in its patchiness and unexpected possibilities. As an intellectual manifestation, ethnographic storytelling should make stories that lead to further stories. In the intellectual woodlands that Tsing imagines, adventures lead to more adventures, and the treasures are indefinite. The ethnographic thirdness in this context is a mode of thinking and writing without end.
The point of ethnography is to learn how to think together with one’s informants, to develop research categories with the research and not before it.
The disruptive third resurfaces in Guitar Makers by Kathryn Dudley, a story of the peregrinations of the author into the animated world of lutherie in North America. Tracing the history of artisanal guitar building practices, Dudley conceptualizes the act of guitar making as a field of encounter between human and nonhuman agents. This aesthetic encounter is marked by the guitar’s tonal presence – its creation and effects on us as well as our responses to it. The tone in this sense is the “dialectic of objective and subjective feeling” that occurs when we apprehend things aesthetically. A stringed instrument’s tone is not simply created or heard. It is a structure of feeling that organizes the encounter and invests it with an intensity that defies immediate articulation (Dudley 2014, 8). Tonality is a kind of affect, a traveling in-betweenness that leaves its trace on our bodies, minds, and understanding of the world. As guitar makers perform their craft repertoire and evaluate the quality of the craft object by attending to the sentiments in the tone of things that which allows us to relate differently to the project of social belonging, and which disturbs the common story of resources appropriation in the global marketplace.
Indeed, Dudley argues that the central tenet of guitar making rests on a conception of animacy that predisposes the luthier to a mode of interaction with physical objects beyond the limits of human rationality (Dudley 2014, 9). The desire for an object is hereby triggered not by its possession per se, but the tonal experience of interacting with it and its maker. The luthiers, in transgressing the common perceptions of the relationship between human and non-human subjects, approach their craft with the underlined recognition of the animacy of material entities. This refusal to treat wood as dead materials implies a political potential, that of an alternative social project that comes up against the capitalist forms of life and labor. Like a Pinocchio coming to life, the wood of the luthiers is understood to have the potentiality of a “voice” even before it turns into a guitar. This awareness reveals the capacity of nonhuman agents to act upon us, and lead us to value material objects in terms other than their market price.
The survival of guitar craftsmanship in North America depends on this politics of animacy, exemplified by Geppetto’s dream of awakening Pinocchio. Like the perilous travels of Pinocchio through the social landscape of an industrial society, luthiers and their beloved objects have to navigate the operation of craftsmanship within a world of commodities. Similar to the story of the Matsutake mushroom, one encounters here another tale of something that falls both inside and outside the capitalist cycle. By and large, careers in lutherie lacked public recognition and institutionalized markers, rendering the luthiers vulnerable to the vagaries of capitalism, making their “addiction” to guitar making a case of perceived “social” suicide. As the instrument enters the register of luxurious commodities, the original craft object acquired an inflated monetary value far greater than the income it generated for the maker. Yet, as Pinocchio escapes and looks back on his own former body at the end of Geppetto’s tale, the commodity state needs not be permanent. The Geppetto’s dream realizes itself when the artisan’s work leaves the marketplaces. At that moment, the handmade guitar becomes an “inalienable possession,” with an absolute value that overrides its market value. They are similar to the seashells in a Kula ring of the Trobrianders, handcrafted objects that are tied to a myth larger than themselves.
Despite this optimism, Dudley reminds us of the prototype of guitar today as relics of the Renaissance five-course guitars, a historic instrument created by the reach of European sovereigns to sites of exotic materials (ebony, pearl, tortoiseshell, tusk, etc). In the post-9/11 age, North American luthiers find themselves “haunted by empire,” as they negotiate zones of commerce where colonialism left its tangible legacy (Dudley 2014, 242). Unsurprisingly, the globalized regime of customs control and interdiction, exemplified by the Lacey’s Act, poses a major challenge to guitar makers and jeopardize the future of the craft. These sorts of legislation promote the “consolidation of power in a governmental apparatus that legitimates differential modes of social belonging in the name of national security” (Dudley 2014, 282). The control of international trade and travel is a neoliberal act amplified by surveillance technologies to protect the economic interests of nation-states. By and large, this apparatus consigns a whole class of people and objects into the liminal status of unauthorized citizens and commodities. In the face of challenges from this policy regime, some luthiers have argued for a consideration of guitar making as a cultural tradition to be exempted from declaration requirements. This line of argument occupies a different social temporality that portrays craftsmanship as a form of national belonging. Yet, it inevitably evokes the tales of luthiers as guitar heroes, one that obscures the existence of gender disparity within the lutherie world and the ideal of masculinity that continues to haunt guitar making to this day (Dudley 2014, 237).
Nevertheless, the story of communication through tonality provides a different way of locating thirdness in the ethnographic project. Perhaps what contributes most significantly to Dudley’s ethnographic success is the triangulation that underpins the project. The text emerges from a triangulating process, a form of creative collaboration between several agents that produces a unique tone of experience. Unlike the one-way conduit of knowledge extraction that characterizes most of anthropology’s history, the encounters in Guitar Makers take the form of an artistic collaboration. Knowledge is hereby produced in the moment of interaction between the guitar maker who brings life into the natural materials, the musician who enacts the tonality each time he/she plays, and the anthropologist who illustrates the cultural and political implications of artisanal lutherie with such depth and captivation. Allows for equal footings between the ethnographer and her interlocutors, this three-fold structure makes space for creative understanding and unexpected intersubjective comprehension.
The desire for an object is hereby triggered not by its possession per se, but the tonal experience of interacting with it and its maker.
Confronting the same kind of anthropology that privileges absolute answers, Audra Simpson is perhaps the most adamant author to embrace the idea of thirdness. Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus is indeed a direct confrontation with anthropology’s drive to hem people into the fixed grids. Concerning the politics of refusal and the politics of recognition, Simpson examines the Mohawks of Kahnawà:ke’s struggle for political sovereignty through centuries of settler colonialism. At the heart of Simpson’s analysis rests the distinction between the politics of recognition and the politics of refusal. Recognition of indigenous status, she argues, is the least corporeally violent way of managing differences (Simpson 2014, 20). It offers a multicultural solution to settler colonialism and imperial realities that produced decades of war and displacement. The desires and practices of colonialism get rerouted in the liberal argument for democratic inclusion, in the name of toleration, recognition, and post-conquest magnanimity (Wolfe 2016, 32). However, this sort of inclusion is possible only where alterity does not threaten the norms of settler society. The dialogue of cultural difference, despite its virtuosity, remains a rhetorical device of the state. Mohawk reservations as grounded fields of belonging and recognition are nevertheless imbricated in the larger system of state power and its ethical-jurisdictional control. Committed to an Aristotelian approach to governance and order, the bureaucratized state is bent on the mission of producing visibility and invisibility, articulating affiliation and distance vis-à-vis its Iroquois other. In this paradigm, the state realizes its monopoly to the national sense of belonging through the granting of citizenship, the legal preconditions for intimacy and affection towards one’s nation.
At this junction in time, however, the age-old recipe of “printed” relatedness (cf. Anderson’s 1991 discussion of mass printing as the device for national imagination) is complicated by the advent of telecommunications and social networking, making the state’s claim to national imagination as contentious as possible. As oppose to indigeneity, a paradigm embedded in the language of settler colonialism, the idea of the Mohawk nation expresses another form of collectivity with desire for sovereignty and justice. This collective identity hinges upon uprooting the state governance of dispossession and disavowal. The Mohawk’s ideas of citizenship are grounded in the presence of intra-community recognition, affection and care, everything that challenges the logics of colonial and imperial reasoning. Yet, like a third that is both inside and outside the system, this validation of Mohawk nationality comes from an assertion of the very benchmarks of Western sovereignty. Mohawk re-appropriate the language of the settler colonizers themselves to stake claim on their nationhood as contemporary and unvanquished. Such assertion interrupts the mono-cultural aspiration of nation-state rooted in Indigenous dispossession. The Mohawks contest systems of legitimacy and acknowledgment to assert actual histories and interpretive alternative to official legislation. This refusal to be imbricated in the nation-state project is a political strategy that brings unequal relationships into purview, recognizes the terms of bondage, and leverages the same language to assert a greater principle of autonomy.
However, the historical loss of territory and jurisdictional authority constituted an anxiety that complicated much of the inner debate on Mohawk membership. The territorial question maps itself onto the discourses on inclusion and exclusion within the Mohawk communities. United over only the rejection of Canadian and US citizenship, there exist frictions within the community itself about who is qualified as a Mohawk and who is not, depending on the definition of identity as “culture” or as “genealogical” (Simpson 2014, 45). When resources were breached and Mohawks became “Indians,” race and sex became useful categories to determine membership in the consciousness of the Kahnawa’kehró:non. The resulting legislative bills and acts also had jarring effects on the social fabric of Kahnawà:ke, disenfranchising a substantial number of its women who transgressed the perceived social boundary (as they got married to outsiders). In that sense, the Mohawk laws on membership are complex responses to the changing world that compels Mohawks to look into social memories for guidance to live in the presence of empire.
An examination of the very concepts of “indigeneity” and “culture” reveals the complicity of anthropology in the imperial project that marginalized the Mohawk and other indigenous communities around the world. What is being coded as culture in the corpus of canonical texts on Mohawk society is, in fact, a “theory of jurisdictional authority and legitimacy,” predicated on the creation of memorizable forms and prescribed procedures for their subjugation (Simpson 2014, 92). Inspired by the trope of culture-as-vanishing that persisted well into the 1970s, canonical works in Iroquois studies brush over the fundamental relationship between Iroquois and white, what Simpson calls the “underlying business of relations” (Simpson 2014, 38). Conceiving the interlocutor merely as an instructive instance of pre-contact history, anthropologists were able to salvage their claim to scientific objectivity and maintain their distant and different markers. Furthermore, anthropological values are hereby selected by virtue of their distance and difference under the optics of the settler colonial state (Simpson 2014, 86–87). Historical writings on the Iroquois for example depict Kahnawà:ke particularly as an “out-of-the-way” locality absent of the “pure” Indian culture. These deeply simplified and atrophied representations reduce the complexity of the Iroquoian society into a spurious tale of exoticism and timelessness. This in turn acts to justify the foretold cultural and political death of this community, one that appears entirely out of sync with the logic of settler colonialism and capitalism development.
As Simpson points out, nothing could be further from the truth. Kahnawake before the emergence of anthropological representations did not exist in a social and historical vacuum, independent of the surroundings or the workings of state politics. The Kahnawa’kehró:non were integrated into the larger market community throughout the early modern period – as fur traders, soldiers, craft people and river expedition guides (Simpson 2014, 50). Furthermore, along with the development of material resources, the integration of the Kahnawa’kehró:non with Whites and other indigenous groups precipitated an influx of ideas and practices in8i8888to the community. Nevertheless, as these classic renditions continue to resurface in modern bibliography in Iroquois studies, the simplistic representations of Mohawk people continue to gain purchase. Acting as references for the settler colonial nation-states to adjudicate legal matters and land claims, this troubled corpus has actual resonance on the future of many First Nation people.
Against the grain of this canonical paradigm, Simpson advocates for alternative techniques of representations that move away from difference and ethnological fetishism. When difference is no longer the unit of analysis, the idea of culture encompasses a variety of narratives rather than one comprehensive story. In this context, distancing the self from the other becomes a moot point. Ethnographic voice goes together with personal sovereignty – as the people speak for themselves, their sovereignty interrupts the ethnographic authority of the researcher and refutes the anthropological portraiture of timelessness. Like Tsing, Simpson instructs us to move gingerly into the domain of the ruins – what remains despite the scenes of apprehension in the history anthropology, despite what has been produced by the processes of articulating differences. Drawing from the politics of refusal that characterizes life in the reservation, Simpson argues for an ethnographic refusal that disrupts, like a third, the ethnohistorical conventions.
Ethnographic refusal hence is a particular form of writing and representing that does not genuflect to the terms of traditional anthropology. To think and write about the sovereignty of others means to seriously re-evaluate the rubrics of disclosure in ethnography – what the audience wants to know does not necessarily line up with what the ethnographer decides to show. Underpinning this new paradigm is a recognition of ethnographic writing as a complex instantiation of jurisdiction and authority (Simpson 2014, 105). Ethnographic refusal demands the ethnographer to reclaim his or her sovereign authority over the presentation of ethnographic data for concerns of the communities. Like the Mohawk’s politics of refusal, an anthropology that refuses to succumb under the duress of scientism acknowledges the asymmetrical power relations that enable fieldwork on native lives and politics. Ethnographic refusal ultimately moves away from the discursive containment that informed most of the anthropological works on Iroquois and other supposed others elsewhere.
The “third meaning” that takes over oneself without one’s permission, like a case of haunting, is a condition of being that suspends reason.
To close this discussion on the possibility of ethnographic thirdness, or the tactic of thinking and writing ethnography that looks for meanings in disruption, it seems worthwhile to revisit the initial idea of the hold of the image. An image – let it be photographic, sonic, or mental – is a rupture in time. As a temporal intervention, the hold of the image transcends our understanding of stillness and movement. The “third meaning” that takes over oneself without one’s permission, like a case of haunting, is a condition of being that suspends reason. An anthropology of thirdness therefore is an anthropology of interruption rooted in the collapse of time-space. It is an anthropology without ends, at times irrelevant to the project of streamlining culture for academic consumption, and yet it operates both within and without the lingo of what has come before it. This anthropology is predicated on the triangulation of meanings between different actors, one that creates space for unpredictable interfaces and intersubjectivities. In this new paradigm, the notion of the past, the present, and the future take on radically different meanings. In a post-modern age when narrating the past and the future become ways of having the present, phenomena as diverse as Inuit suicide or mushroom hunting may appear irrational or outright senseless. Yet, in light of a future devoid of surprise, these phenomena become diverse forms of attuning to the pain of the “now.” Like the hold of an image, this pain has a constitutive absence that eludes our immediate grab. The pain of living in the shadow of future’s rubble prompts the acts of physical and social “suicide,” actions that challenge the norms of what it means to feel dead or alive, actions such as ending one’s life or taking on an economically vulnerable form of livelihood. And yet, as Simpson argues, suicide is also a leap into another way of being in time, one that questions “whether there is always a brighter future around the corner” (Stevenson, 147). Ethnographic thirdness in this sense embodies a different mode of social imagining. Confronted by the jarring question of “What if the future cannot redeem the present?” the anthropology of the third goes humbly –
“Then, let’s put the present on hold.”
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