Module III essay: Completeness and incompleteness in collective identities

Default due date: Sep 27, 2024 at 11:59 p.m.

Word count: 1000

In this essay, choose one of the ethnographic cases listed below (or, with the permission of your tutor, another ethnographic case study) that describes a group identity or sense of belonging to a group that people in a community possess. For this ethnographic description of a group identity, make an argument that the group identity is based on either what Nyamnjoh (2023) calls completeness or incompleteness (or sameness versus difference, or mechanical versus organic solidarity).

Along with several other thinkers, we have looked at the ideas of the anthropologist Francis Nyamnjoh to understand the new nationalisms that seem to be emerging in the wake of a dying system of global capitalism. Nyamnjoh (2023) argues for a distinction between, on the one hand, identities, group memberships, or forms of citizenship that are based on the ideal of completeness and, on the other hand, another kind of identity that is based instead on one’s incompleteness (see also Nyamnjoh 2022b, 2022a). He writes:

Incompleteness (in persons, institutions, cultures, civilisations, being human, //Juju//, etc.) must be taken not as an apology, not as something one should be guilty of, but to say, that it is the way of the world, a universal; we are all incomplete, no incompleteness is exactly the same as for another person, but each incompleteness offers an opportunity for interesting encounters and creative outcomes. So, you prop me up with your height, I help you with my shortness. I am in pain, you offer me a shoulder to lean on, with the understanding that one good turn deserves another. (Nyamnjoh 2023, 216)

and, he continues:

To have an approach to citizenship that is informed by incompleteness, is to disabuse ourselves of any pretensions to fullness, purity or superiority, and to point to the violence and violations that delusions around the idea of completeness have caused the world. Ambitions of completeness keep everybody anxious and conflictual. Whereas incompleteness is very reassuring. It encourages one to not necessarily be attracted and seek to reproduce those who are like us, but to be able to get used to people who are not like us. (Nyamnjoh 2023, 217)

These remarks resonate with an important theme connecting several other ideas we have encountered in class.

For instance, at an public event in 2007, the cultual theorist Stuart Hall answered a question from the audience which asked whether what people have in common is more important than what makes them different. He said,

I don’t want other people to be like me. I don’t know why they should be. I don’t think my experience is rich enough to embrace the existence of the rest of the world. I have to find a way of recognising that I cannot be self sufficient in myself. I am, from the moment of birth, from the moment of entry into language and culture, dependent on that which is different from me. Otherwise love is self love, love is narcissism, love is locked in solipsism, never gets out of the confines of the reflection in the mirror. It’s not enough. We are dependent on the other - to feed us, to recognise who we are, to speak a language. Our common humanity, which is what you are speaking about, is the process of reciprocity with that which is not us, which is other than us, which is different. So I hope that when we tear each other apart, we’ll find a little bit of common humanity, just so that we don’t fall into what Hobbes called the war of all against all. But humanism is not any longer quite enough for me. (Hall 2007, 155)

Likewise, in lectures, Ryan introduced the concepts of mechanical and organic solidarity. Emile Durkheim argues that a society is a integrated totality—a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts. The parts of society—its rules and institutions—function to maintain these two different kinds of solidarity, and every society is characterized by areas where it expresses its mechanical solidarity and other areas where it expresses its organic solidarity (Durkheim and Lukes [1893] 2013, 81, 102).

In your essay, use one or more of these ideas as a lens that you can apply to the ethnographic facts of a chosen case to draw a conclusion about the nature of people’s membership in a group and the sense of themselves that they derive from that membership.

Like any other argumentative writing, the most important element of this essay is your claim. A good claim is simple and direct. In any case you choose, there will be many different possible ways to interpret it, and any real-world situation will contain contradictions and paradoxes. So it is entirely possible—indeed, likely—that any case you choose will offer you evidence for both the claim that an identity is based on completeness and that the same identity is based on incompleteness. There is no right answer to this question. Both claims are possible. To make a claim is to go out on a limb, to take a risk. The best possible claim will be one that states simply and directly that what you see is based on either one kind of identity or another, not both. Be bold and make the best possible argument for your view.

Possible ethnographic cases for your essay

For your essay, choose one of these ethnographic cases:

Fisher, Daniel. 2012. “Running Amok or Just Sleeping Rough? Long-Grass Camping and the Politics of Care in Northern Australia.” American Ethnologist 39 (1): 171–86. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01356.x.

Hankins, Joseph. 2016. “Wounded Futures: Pain and the Possibilities of Solidarity.” Anthropological Quarterly 89 (1): 123–50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43955517.

Haynes, Naomi. 2013. “On the Potential and Problems of Pentecostal Exchange.” American Anthropologist 115 (1): 85–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01537.x.

Khabeer, Su’ad Abdul. 2017. “Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the Making of American Muslim Citizenship.” Transforming Anthropology 25 (2): 103–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12098.

Nyamnjoh, Francis, and Michael Rowlands. 1998. “Elite Associations and the Politics of Belonging in Cameroon.” Africa 68 (3): 320–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/1161252.

Silva, Antonio José Bacelar da, and Erika Robb Larkins. 2019. “The Bolsonaro Election, Antiblackness, and Changing Race Relations in Brazil.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 24 (4): 893–913. https://doi.org/10.1111/jlca.12438.

You can also choose to use one of the ethnographic cases in the required and recommended readings for Weeks 7, 8, or 9. With the permission of your tutor, you can also use an ethnographic case study that you find on your own.

References

Durkheim, Emile, and Steven Lukes. (1893) 2013. The Division of Labour in Society. London: Macmillan Education UK. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=4008442.

Hall, Stuart. 2007. “Living with difference: Stuart Hall in conversation with Bill Schwarz.” Soundings 37 (December): 148–59. https://doi.org/10.3898/136266207820465570.

Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 2022a. Incompleteness: Donald Trump, Populism and Citizenship. Oxford: Langaa RPCIG. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/usyd/detail.action?docID=6850417.

———. 2022b. “Citizenship, Incompleteness and Mobility.” Citizenship Studies 26 (4-5): 592–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2022.2091243.

———. 2023. “Citizenship, Incompleteness, and Mobility: Amos Tutuola’s ‘The Complete Gentleman’ and ‘The Bush of Ghosts’.” In Incompleteness Mobility and Conviviality: Ad. E. Jensen Memorial Lectures 2023 Frobenius-Institut Goethe-University, 183–222. African Books Collective.