Aftermaths and Recuperations in Anthropology

2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 81103
LECTURES
Aftermaths and recuperations

in anthropology
Jane I. Guyer, Johns Hopkins University
The Frazer Lecture was launched in 1921, with the support of scholars from all over Europe,
explicitly in the context of the meeting on common ground after World War I. In the spirit
of anthropologists examining postdisaster processes of any kind, to meet with scholars
from other disciplines for mutual illumination, and to revisit its own rich intellectual and
empirical archive, my lecture explored processes of recuperation. Recuperation is selective
of elements rather than rescuing whole systems, then followed by creative reconfiguration.
Sources from classics, recent philosophically inspired anthropology, new ethnography of
Africa, and postwar Vietnam are examined as examples that pick up the spirit of the Frazer
Lecture itself.
Keywords: disaster, recuperation, Frazer Lecture
Invitation and introduction

The invitation to deliver the Frazer Lecture, ninety-five years after its inaugura-
tion in 1921, in the aftermath of the Great War, was a true gift from those who
nominated me and endorsed my selection. It provoked me to bring together several
separate threads of thought, starting most prominently from my past reading of the
Frazer Lecture Inauguration for my graduate course at Johns Hopkins University,
on the history of anthropology, entitled Revolutions and Recuperations. All the
signposts for my explorations are instances of the ways in which particular compo-
nents of life and thought can be preserved across thresholds of major change, and
how certain conditions can stimulate their creative reconfiguration and collective
revitalization. This explains my choice of theme: recuperations in our disciplinary
intellectual life, and in the social life of those from whom we learn, in both cases
This is a transcript of the Sir James George Frazer Memorial Lecture given in Cambridge
on October 17, 2016.
his work is licensed under the Creative Commons | Jane I. Guyer.

T
ISSN 2049-1115 (Online). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.011
Jane I. Guyer 82
after changes that threaten, destroy, gravely distort, or replace the legacies from the
past. What remains may have been packed away for no further use of any practical
sort, within the context of a profoundly uncertain future, and yet these remnants
have not been utterly destroyed. For this written version, I retain the spirit of the
lecture, where engagement in discussion and the provocation to further explora-
tions, in conversation with others, rather than the drawing of definitive lines of de-
bate or departure, set the tone and shaped the structure. The writing, delivery, and
revision of the lecture have been an inspiration to me to return to books already on
my shelves, as well as to read newer ones more attentively, and to anticipate further
suggestions, on a very large topic where many voices can contribute and take the
themes in their own directions. Hence my retention of a sense of ongoing collective
engagement, rather than taking a definitive, and final, position as the conclusion.
In the present moment of history, we seem to be entering a phase of general
uncertainty about framing the future, owing to both encompassing apocalyptic
visions and many varied localized disturbances and destructions, as I suggested
in my article on the near future (Guyer 2007). Many dynamics are depicted as
emergent, suggesting indeterminacy: an as-yet unknown creature emerging from
a chrysalis. So our archive of empirical anthropological findings after moments
of crisis, with the recorded experience at the center of analysis and with close at-
tention to the enactment of recuperation in the life of the everyday, became my
central theme. Since I have not carried out close fieldwork directly on this topic,
my reasons to choose it come from connecting classical inspirations from our dis-
ciplinary past to a personal-historical sensibility, and to our shared current concern
about the process by which possible futures are created. What have we found, as a
discipline, how have we interfaced with other disciplines, and what else could be
done? We increasingly engage with new terms: the future depicted as emergent is
not expected to follow predictable stages of development that have already been
traversed by others, as was suggested by social evolutionary theory in our past, and
then development theory.
Recuperation refers to a process, which can include many heterogeneous ele-
ments, chosen by a variety of actors, recorded in different situations by different
scholars, which have been brought forward through time and applied to uncer-
tainty. I differentiate this from recovery, which generally refers to wholeness: the
restitution, or revolutionary replacement, of whole systems. Frazer himself gave
examples of both recovery and recuperation, from the vast library of folklore on
which he drew. His example of great floods, which I address later, is particularly
attentive to the details, which vary from case to case. The current ethnography is
not, or not yet, fully framed to attend to conditions of major encompassing cata-
strophic change, such as another world war, of the kind that marked Frazers own
experience and which returned in full force at the time of his death in May 1941,
at the age of eighty-seven, and informed another Frazer Lecture from around
that time (as I will invoke later). We can draw on some of this past encompass-
ing work, as I do below, and our colleagues who have technical expertise may be
able to craft some specificity into the study of anticipation in advance as well as
into recuperation in the aftermath. Our particular strength as a discipline is deep
attentiveness to the peoples own creative and pragmatic modes, their terms for
depicting their condition even when it seems to be in transition of some kind,

83 Aftermaths and recuperations in anthropology
and our creation of a comparative understanding of the possibilities with which

they work.
We now have a literature on possibilities (Graeber 2007; Guyer 2009) and
impossibilities (Moore 2016), in the anticipation mode, and in varied predictive
temporal modes, some of which I explored in my above-mentioned lecture-turned-
article on temporality (Guyer 2007). Here, however, I follow one of Frazers leads
from 1921, and elsewhere, to attend to the practicalities and imagery of peoples
selective dedicated recuperations in the immediate aftermath of loss and destruc-
tion. We, like him, begin to draw on rich and diverse resources for pushing forward
on both frontiers: to engage with, but not necessarily create anew, single dominant
macrotheories, and to allow the intricate dynamics of life, in the new ethnography
of postdisasters and rising attention to the place of the ordinary in such circum-
stances, to sharpen the question of what is being sifted out of the detritus of disas-
ter, to be rescued for further use, and by whom. We can expect that whatever is
recuperated, whether an idea, a practice, or a material object, will be known to be
a small part, a fragment, considered to be of value. Fragment derives from the
Latin verb frangere, to break off, and we begin to discover that it occurs and recurs
in the history of attention to recuperation, under whatever concept was used at
the time: redemption, reconstruction, renewal, all concepts with the Latinate re
(again) to depict their temporal referent.
Thus can wide-angled, and narrowly focused, works engage with each other. I
pick up particularly on a method and an image from the scholarship of our own
day that can echo an image of Frazers, that we meet on common ground, name-
ly Michael Jacksons Paths towards a clearing (1989), where we meet and deploy
Jacksons radical empiricism (in the subtitle of his book) with respect to our dis-
ciplines methods of learning from a world whose speed and directions of change
are rapidly intensifying, and varying from one case to another. By this, he means
that research is fully interactive: We are continually being changed by as well as
changing the experience of others. ... Radical empiricism seeks to grasp the ways
in which ideas and words are wedded to the world in which we live, how they are
grounded in the mundane events and experience of everyday life (ibid.: 3, 5). In
his own work, some of these ideas and words may be grounded in the mun-
dane, but their referents in practice are to recuperative moments, as I discuss later.
This view can encompass both thought on the ground and thought about it, in the
library, the lecture theatre, and the seminar room, in comparative and concep-
tual mode, and in our resulting return to major works in other disciplines, such
as the philosophy that has animated so much of our new attention to the ordi-
nary, through Stanley Cavell. I would add, also from the history of philosophy,
the apposite title Fragments of redemption (Handelman 1991), on the way in which
Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas approached redemption and repair in the context
of World War II. The library on my topic is broad and brilliant, and still invites,
and deserves, more attention than I can give it here. So this article invites our wider
engagement on a vast and deep topic to which a single time-, and space-, limited
intervention cannot do full justice.
To clarify my exploratory logic, I refer briefly to two previous lectures. In my
Munro Lecture in Edinburgh (Guyer 2013), I termed this kind of thought as work-
ing with epistemologies of surprise: that is, noticing any small originality as it

Jane I. Guyer 84
arises within a thicket of other contextual elements, in a particular instance. We,

and also our informants, work like artists and archeologists as we approach the
clearings for engagement: noticing, digging up, and reconfiguring small elements
of continuing value from yesterday, and recombining them in meaningful ways
with new elements for today and tomorrow. This approach carries forward the
theme of another, but unpublished, lecture I delivered, at Brandeis (Guyer 2010),
where I argued for the central importance for anthropology of the verb to con-
sider: etymologically deriving from the Latin con (together) and sidus (a star),
so perceiving, and/or making constellations of mutually referential elements, as
distinct from geometrical figures with linear derivational logics or just random
collections. And it also infuses the process with the implicit reference of the verb
consider to patience and respect.
The format of the article retains this exploratory spirit, which was explicit in the
imagery of common ground and a clearing in my two central sources, Frazer
himself and Michael Jackson, and which is being taken most recently into particu-
lar interdisciplinary engagements with philosophy by Michael Lambek and Veena
Das. Relevant works from other disciplines, particularly on narrative, are men-
tioned in the article, but remain to be more fully engaged.
Classic inspirations recuperated

In his time, Frazer was attempting to provide, in his own way and for his own moment
in intellectual history, a wide-angle lens on human history and experience, along with
a sharp focus on striking instances. Before turning to our sources on the present, I
return to Frazers own introduction to the inauguration of the lecture, because he
precisely draws our collective attention to postdisaster life, where the varied constitu-
encies can have a focus to share with each other, and can meet on common ground.
I then add inspiration from the same moment in history: Marcel Mauss Essay on the
gift. Mauss himself was a contributor to the foundation of the Frazer Lecture.
The spirit of the foundation in 1921 already included Jacksons concept of a
meeting in a clearing in the forest. We did not yet have the analytical concept of
assemblages of elements, from Deleuze, but the expectation that we would as-
semble in person, from different disciplines and subject matters, around common
challenges to understand complex configurations was explicit in Frazers address to
his public and in the contributions to the lectures endowment. It had been funded
by an international battalion of scholars and public figures from all over Europe,
and across the disciplines. The list of contributors (about 240 altogether) includes
Durkheim (who died in 1917), Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, mile Torday,
Franz Boas, W.H.R. Rivers, several Germans, and British scholars from across the
disciplines, including A.E. Housman, poet-author of A Shropshire Lad, two mem-
bers of the Darwin family, classical scholars, many parsons from local churches
in the vicinity of Cambridge, and public servants. Their participation situates the
lecture series inauguration explicitly in the context of recuperation, and artisanal
scholarly devotion to this process, both together and in personal thought, after a
war that had divided many of the contributors into hostile camps. Here are the
moving terms of the occasions opening speech by Frazer:

It will serve to show to those who come after us that in an age when the
world was torn into hostile camps and exhausted by internecine conflict,
scholars could still meet on common ground, above the clash of arms, in
the serene air and untroubled light where truth is sought by her votaries.
[It] will act as a spur to my industry: it will encourage me to labour yet a
while. (Frazer 1921: unpaginated)
In the spirit of our own interdisciplinary engagement, we can note that Frazers
reference to exhaustion with hostility, and his appreciation of the participation of
his European colleagues in the meeting on common ground in a spirit of re-
cuperation, was a departure from the vision of the war, at that time, that social
psychologist Richard Koenigsberg and historian Roger Griffin1 have referred to as
a collective ritual whose purpose was to sacralize the nation-state. By consuming
soldiers bodies, the body politic came into being: Individuals died so the nation
might live.
The question then becomes, on what themes, in what terms, and by whom,
would the search for truth be undertaken again, then and now, beyond what is
seen by most survivors as a catastrophe? Instead of the French monarchys famous
saying from 1757, Aprs moi, le deluge, we turn it around into Aprs le deluge,
quest-ce qui reste de moi (et de nous, et des autres)? Many echoes resonate. For
example, W.H.R. Rivers was a contributor to the inauguration, and he had been
treating soldiers with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), drawing on wisdom
gained during his experience on the Torres Straits expedition.2
Marcel Mauss was another contributor. He echoes the same theme of reengage-
ment, in recuperative mode, in his Essay on the gift. Working recently on my trans-
lation (Mauss [1925] 2016) to include its context of writing, which was also after
the Great War, I noticed certain parallels of broad inclusiveness, and commitment
to anthropology as a creative source on recuperative themes and variations in cul-
tural life, in relation to the challenges and agonies of the present. In this edition of
LAnne Sociologique, the first issue after the Great War, Mauss paid his respects to
each member of their group whose life had been lost. Several of the young people
had been killed in battle, and it was supposed that Durkheim himself was particu-
larly drained of an already sick life by the death of his only son in a military hospital
in Sarajevo. Mauss imagery for recuperation is almost complementary to that of
Frazer. In the Memorial he writes:
Our group resembles those little woods in devastated regions where,
for a few years, a few old trees, riddled to bursting, try to become green
again. But if just the undergrowth can grow in their shade, the wood will
reestablish itself. ...
Maybe the sap will rise again. Another seed will fall and germinate.
([1925] 2016: 51)
1. https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016/2016-12-07-griffin.
html.
2. See Pat Barkers trilogy based on Rivers work with his patients (Barker 1992, 1994,
1995).

Jane I. Guyer 86
New growth, new interdependence, new futures. His configuration of sources and
explorations of themes and cases in Essay on the gift itself embodies exactly this ef-
fort, as he states explicitly in the conclusion.
Thus the clan, the tribe, and the peoples have learnedas tomorrow, in
our so-called civilized world, classes and nations and individuals too will
have to learnhow to confront one another without massacring each
other, and to give to each other without sacrificing themselves to the
other. Herein lies one of the lasting secrets of their wisdom and their
solidarity. ([1925] 2016: 197)
Essay on the gift, then, in the context of its writing, was a vast effort at recupera-
tion of many specific inspirations from the past, and from a point of departure
[that] lies elsewhere (ibid.: 114), to relaunch a form of cooperativism in European
life (see Hart 2007) that Mauss then lived long enough to see subjected to another
catastrophe. Like Frazer, he seemed to be, at that moment, deeply inspired by the
need to meet on common ground, with many others, beyond strife.
While intellectual history may have resulted in critiques of Frazers and Mauss
big pictures and large theory, I suggest that putting their work back into the context
of their own historical moment would better lead us into their documentation of
the details of life, language, and practice through which other wisdoms can enter
the clearing, on common ground, for consideration. It is these grounded details
to which we can be drawn.
I offer two artistic, rather than intellectual, contributions to the imagery of com-
mon ground, light, and growth, after damage. One is Paul Klees Little tree amid
shrubbery, painted in 1919, composed after the death, in the war, of two of his
close friends. So here is another echo of postwar efforts at picking specific seeds for
regrowth. To deepen one step further our sense of the aesthetic and sensory dimen-
sions of this theme of recuperation, where people retrieve the art as well as the so-
ciality and practicality of life, I add these lines from a poem entitled The end and
the beginning, by Nobel laureate Polish poet Wisawa Szymborska, from 1947, on
postwar triage and selective recuperation, also referring to the dense undergrowth
of life and thought:
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things wont pick
themselves up, after all.
...From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.
(1995: 17879)
In a certain resonance with Szymborska, I had another, already-existing spark of
inspiration for thinking toward recuperationsespecially in the plural, as small
elements from an existing archive, and in the active mode of the verb to recuper-
ate, for daily usethat comes from fieldwork in Nigeria about thirty years ago,
when an elder explained to me the Yoruba word asa, which is generally translated

into English as custom. It refers etymologically to choice, in this context from the
archive of knowledge from the past: that is, finding whatever would be suitable for
the particular occasion at hand, from the treasury of experience, through wisdom
and knowledge. When I asked how it is done, my wise elder explained to me: We
choose whatever will not make everything worse.
This last inspiration emphasized for me the importance of us recuperating
from old disciplinary works, theoretical-philosophical commentary, and the
current ethnography of life experiencesinspirations for meeting on our own
common ground for mutual engagement, to include closer attention to all the
people from whom we learn about selective mobilization after damage: in life, in
ethnographic and perhaps also poetic and artistic modes, where a promising expe-
rience or element can be chosen again, and a rusted argument can be hauled off
to the dump, while another one is searched out and preserved, all in the context of
new experiences of damage and disaster, from wars to floods.
Recuperation as a concept: Narrative and elemental forms

As my Yoruba elder taught me, recuperation is selective: in the storage mode and
in the mobilization mode. It appears that incidents that provoke anguish also pro-
voke a process of valuation and selection for the future. In Frazers case, in Folk-lore
in the Old Testament ([1923] 1988), he places all the detailed versions of such ca-
tastrophes as the Great Floods into comparative juxtaposition. I pay particular
attention to his evidence of the specificity of recuperative actions immediately fol-
lowing survival. While the substance differs markedly in each case, the creation
and application of a narrative to it appears as one way in which the choice is made
of what to recuperate, in order to reinsert a recognizable account of an ongoing life.
Our question then becomes: Which narratives offer the resonating connections to
an indeterminate future, as lived in our current present?
At the time of the lectures foundation, Frazers analysis of Great Floods, world-
wide, was already famous for its expansive inclusiveness, not only of cases across
the world, but of different versions of Noahs Flood in the written biblical tradition,
and their points of similarity to other Middle Eastern narratives. The topic of the
survivors immediate steps toward recuperation after the flood is particularly puz-
zling. These are very small, mainly symbolic elements. Noah sends out the dove,
which brings the surviving olive branch to the still-floating ark: an element that
has remained a symbol of peace-making ever since. But the biblical narrative in-
cludes another, novel element: the first animal sacrifice from man to God, in order
to mend relations. Noah makes an altar and slaughters animals and fowl, without
instructions, although this finds favour with God.3 Indeed, J.H. Hertz ([1936]
3. We can also note that Abels earlier, and successful, offering of an animal to God was
the cause of Cains deep jealousy, but that none of these early humans were reported, in
the Bible, to be acting under direct instructions from God. Those details come much
later, in the wilderness, on the flight from Egypt. The complexities in a cultural archive
can make recuperation an act of skill and imagination, with varied authorities of in-
terpretation, some of them added retrospectively through redaction.

Jane I. Guyer 88
1972), Chief Rabbi of the British Empire while Frazer was writing, makes this com-
mentary on after the flood: that Noah was the pioneer of altars and sacrifices.
However, a subsequent translator of the Hebrew text, Robert Alter (2004), suggests
that this element was recuperated much later, from the Mesopotamian versions
of the story, where the gods always asked for such gifts. Frazers thoughts might
have been similar, as he had compiled many versions, each with its own event of
recuperation and invention, which might also have been borrowed and presented
as pioneering. Among the Iban, in Borneo, a woman observed how the wind pro-
duced friction and warmth by rubbing a creeper against a tree, and she reinvented
fire (ibid.: 85). And in Micronesia, the only survivor, through paddling his own
canoe, was able to find a place to create an altar (ibid.: 91). In his final words on the
Flood, Frazer interprets the gravitas of the story:
Wherever they [many diluvial traditions dispersed throughout the world]
appear to describe vast changes in the physical configuration of the globe
... they probably embody, not the record of contemporary witnesses, but
the speculation of much later thinkers. Compared to the great natural
features of our planet, man is but a thing of yesterday, and his memory a
dream of the night. ([1919] 1988: 14243)
It can be our work, as anthropologists, to archive such memories and their
redeployment.
The moment of posttrauma, in all these poetic and spiritual archives, appears to
be either lived at the time or redacted afterwards to identify recuperation of some
form that can reopen the way to a future. In all these cases, collective continuity su-
persedes individual completion, as in many cultural imaginaries, hence situational
recuperation from a collective archive of knowledge and conceptual imagery, and
as with Noahs Flooda sense that the story itself can continue to be redacted, but
then also applied to diverse situations, each of which may shift the emphasis on ele-
ments while retaining the overall narrative form. When Frazer invoked the Great
War in his lecture inauguration, he repositioned us, implicitly, with Noah and his
rebuilding of a relationship with God and with an almost completely destroyed
earth. In the biblical story, Noah makes a vineyard, hence the story of his artisanal
success, inebriation, eventual clash with his sons, and creation of an ongoing life
in the world that seems to have differed from the one destroyed by the Flood. The
story as a whole supplies a narrative to apply to continuing existence, and a couple
of elementsthe symbol of the dove, and the centrality of recuperation through
ritualto be constantly recontextualized for the situation of the moment. Life goes
on, in artisanal creative mode, with a certain likely, but manageable, fractiousness.
How does it work? Implicitly, Frazer is suggesting that we look closely at narrative
components and ritual elements as key forms for recuperation of an otherwise de-
stroyed past.
Marcel Mauss, in Essay on the gift, makes a similar point about the wisdom of gift
traditions and practices in relation to disasters, as quoted earlier in his comparison
between the past and tomorrow, with respect to competitive opposition through
gift-giving rather than massacring each other. Herein lies one of the lasting se-
crets of their wisdom and their solidarity ([1925] 2016: 197). Lasting secrets,
inspirations from elsewhere, and the means of pooling many such recuperations

after catastrophe are a recurring theme as Mauss compiles his sources and launches
them into a new intellectual and social space. Even in his critical allusions to other
works, he compiles the small elements of enduring value. In his direct reference
to Frazers Folk-lore in the Old Testament, he writes that contrary to the critiques
that freely proclaim these researches out of date, they still retain their freshness and
truth (ibid.: 205).
Essay on the Gift, of course, is a vast effort at recuperation: taking elements from
the past and from elsewhere, saved and treasured by the intellectual equivalent of
an archeological search for remnants, and compiled in order to imagine how to
work forward together, or perhaps compete collaboratively rather than catastrophi-
cally, working away from massacring and sacrificing themselves to the other, in
an inspiring way.
Although I leave economic crises aside for the substance of this article, in my
own work on economic life I have found compelling examples of ideas about the
recuperation of elements from heterogeneous collections in the storehouses of
memory and materiality. In my recent economic anthropology collection of es-
says entitled Legacies, logics, logistics, in order to indicate the archive and then its
new configurations and applications, I use a striking passage from Lord Beveridges
history of food rationing in Britain, also written after the Great War, that deeply
impressed itself on me (as a child of postwar food rationing from World War II,
still owning my own ration book), which provided the title of an article, toiling
ingenuity, and that we could connect further to the reassemblage of the ordinary,
as I move to later.
So many forms and circulars .. . instructions, monuments of toiling
ingenuity, [which should] lie mouldering gently into dust and
oblivionlie buried, please God for ever; little if anything learned
in them can be of use again, save in a civilization bent again on self-
destruction. (Beveridge 1928: 344, cited in Guyer 2016: 256; see also
Guyer 2016: ch. 2, first published as Guyer 1993)
Lord Beveridge invokes the many and varied damages of self-destruction in war
rather than the ideological quality of self-sacrifice, thus giving prominent value to
all the small components of survival. So, how do we understand various different
peoples modes of recuperation of legacies as they emerge out of periods of dis-
turbance, and form them into new assemblages in situational practice? And how
do we, in anthropology, regroup and focus in times of rapid change and loss in the
world, and in revolutions within our discipline? So I take to recuperate to imply
an imaginative extraction of something of value from the past, and its revival and
reconfiguration for the present and future, in whatever way each of these temporal-
ities is understood within familiar processes into which sudden crisis has erupted.
Intellectual recuperations from the history of the Frazer Lecture

In the Frazer Lecture of 1932 (so during the Great Depression, another catastrophe,
and in the new upswing of racial theory), Sir Arthur Keith, physical anthropolo-
gist, writing on the Aryan Theory, praised Frazer as a master marinerwho ...

Jane I. Guyer 90
has sailed his ship on all the linguistic seas of the world. From these living seas
he has dredged a rare harvest of myth, belief, custom and folkloreflotsam and
jetsam which have drifted down to us from the childhood of humanity ([1932]
1967: 304). He is clearly bringing forward the evolutionary implications of Frazers
The golden bough (1922). The negative implication of the last sentence is striking:
that it is not people (whom he refers to as children) but the abstract flows of time
that rescue damaged remainders and float them down to the beaches of the pres-
ent, after storms of destruction. And the term flotsam and jetsam implies that
the damage is serious and the bits and pieces may have little enduring value. This
is hardly in the spirit of Frazers comparative work on the folklore of the Bible or
his appreciation of mythology. Beachcombers in Frazers spirit would not agree
with Keiths imagery. Old wood from skillfully built sunken ships was often recu-
perated and used for new purposes, and sea-glass from broken bottles was turned
to other uses. So Keiths imagery from his own Frazer Lecture can exemplify the
fact that members of our discipline have varied and vacillated in their approaches
to the crafting of what used to be referred to as survivals. Our own approach is
to focus on the skilled preservation, choice, and crafting of specific retrievals, as
recuperations with their own evocations of meaning, and potential for assemblage
with other elements, for the present and the future. The process is not a macrodrift
of vast evolutionary or developmental forces, under their own momentum, but is
composed of many spaces of agency, imagination, and effort.
My other example, tracking through the tragedies of twentieth-century Euro-
pean history and the various links to Frazer, is the Frazer Lecture of 1944 by Morris
Ginsberg on Moral progress. At a historical moment when one can hardly imagine
a more agonizing topic, when he points to the recurrence of periods of barba-
rism and violence (1944: 41), Ginsberg raises the circumstantial argument that
ethical theory is so plastic that it can be adapted at will as circumstances require
(ibid.: 34), and (his closing sentence) we are entitled, despite the cruelties and bar-
barities which abound in this world, to put some trust in human intelligence and
will, and to feel justified in the hope that the energies which are now expended in
mutual destruction may come to be used in the service of ends in which reasonable
men can find fulfilment (ibid.: 45). Thus does he move away from a general theory
of system, steady incremental progress, and abstract rationality to one of situational
recuperations, thought, and determined creativity. And he turns back to the ordi-
nary man (as we do later) who is coming to feel that the action taken by the state
on his behalf in relation to other states concerns him deeply and that he shares in
the responsibility (ibid.: 43) for hoping, being reasonable, and working towards
fulfillment, as he indicates in the final sentence of the lecture, as quoted above.
These statements were written during times of crisis and destruction, when
scholarly communities and their spokespersons were reaching back and digging
down selectively into the human archive, and gradually taking terms like barba-
rism completely out of the evolutionary context, where they were eventually re-
placed by systems defined as civilized. We, too, in what Mauss refers to as our
so-called civilized world, can be barbarous, or become barbaric, as Ginsberg
pointed out and as Isabelle Stengers work develops for the future in her In cata-
strophic times: Resisting the coming barbarism ([2009] 2015). Frazer (1921), too,
argued that current knowledge was temporary and provisional, destined with the

progress of knowledge to be superseded by truer and more comprehensive views in

the future. They all place a question mark over evolutionism and progress, but in
different ways, each for its own time in history, in intellectual framing, and for the
direction of change that it identifies.
Exploring our disciplinary record for yet other moments of crisis, I came across
Ralph Lintons collection of twenty-one chapters by separate authors, from some
different disciplines, entitled The science of man in the world crisis, published in
1945. Like Frazer, he insisted that plans for world reorganization . . . can only
be solved by collaboration, then adds a time-frame: It has been observed that it
usually takes about a generation for the new discoveries and techniques of one sci-
ence to become part of the regular working equipment of other sciences (Linton
1944: vii). Franz Boas published Anthropology and modern life in 1928, with similar
aspirations.
By picking up such concerns, we are meeting our ancestors again, as well as the
people with whom we work, on common ground and with close attention to all
of their recuperative and collaborative modes in times of disturbance, great and
small. I turn now to recent works on the ethnography of recuperations as these are
carried out in the present world, ending with a study of the aftermath of our latest
great flood, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.4
Recent works: The ordinary as archival source, narrative as a guide

for search
The ordinary as source of fragmentary recuperation and aspiration

The recent high profiling of the ordinary as a resourceintellectual and social
is very important, as we move away from past, fully systemic, meanings of endur-
ing structures and patterns, or predictably developing stages of growth, with the
central focus on each structure superseding its precursor. Michael Lambek writes
of ordinary ethics as placing the emphasis on action, not on Kantian reason, thus
avoiding two mutually problematic extremes: decisionism and determinism, with
their polarizations of agency and structure, or choice and compulsion (2010: 15).
Very interestingly to me, the word ordinary itself can thereby come close to my
Yoruba elders meaning for custom: a large and encompassing set of experienced,
or imagined, possibilities, already understood by those who can guide choice and
mobilization. However, such an archive of the ordinary is neither an authoritar-
ian structure imposed from above nor a field for completely open inventive deci-
sions. The implicit index in both cases is to the ordinary people, and to life as
lived by them, and, very importantly, as Lambek puts it, to ethics as a function
of action ... also a function of making (ibid.:14). Ethics result from action, in
our case here, the action of preservation, recuperation, and recrafting for a future,
rather than people simply following rules that have already been laid down, as if
always equally relevant.
4. There are other local studies of climate change and rising waters, most prominent in
my own conversations with the work of my colleague Naveeda Khan in Bangladesh.

Jane I. Guyer 92
In her important and very influential analysis of postviolence situations in

India, Life and words: Violence and the descent into the ordinary (2007), Veena Das
employs several of the terms that I find so useful on our topic of recuperations.
She indicates the importance of the fragment as a way to pick up the pieces and
to live in this very place of devastation (ibid.: 6). Then quoting Achille Mbembe
(2002: 259), she includes this: How can life be redeemed, that is, rescued from
this incessant operation of the negative? (Das 2007: 213). Das treats this as an
ethnographic question, and not primarily an abstract theoretical question, which
endorses one aspect of the position of Frazer at the 1921 Lecture: that we continue
to work at the challenges before us.
In his trailblazing book on the ordinary, Stanley Cavell (1988) uses the word
recovery, with certainperhaps underemphasizedreferents to the systemic
mode. He writes: The ordinary is subject at once to autopsy and to augury, facing
at once its end and its anticipation. The everyday is ordinary because, after all, it
is our habit, or habitat (ibid.: 9). The subject of these sentences is in the singular,
unlike my heterogeneous recuperations, although when Cavell quotes Freud, in
excavational idiom, he moves into the plural: the impulses and wishes which
we dig out so laboriously in adults from their own debris (ibid.: 70); and later
asks: What for us is remains? (ibid.}: 75) Is the life of the world, supposing the
world survives, a big responsibility? Its burden is not its size but its specificness ...
whether nature is breathing (still, again) (ibid.: 101).
In Cavells much later discussion, in Philosophy the day after tomorrow (2005),
the possible tension between large framing and specific elements, across tempo-
ral shiftsin this case, particular words, in their changing situational contextis
made explicit. In the connection of philosophy (as frame) to what is happening
every day, he writes that his own aspiration for philosophy today is to follow all
the following tasks: epistemological or metaphysical or religious or aesthetic or
psychic or political or moral .. . it is precisely all of these, all the time. But that
means to me that every word we utter, or withhold, is an act capable of responsive-
ness within at least these registers. No wonder philosophy lives in fear of the ordi-
nary word (ibid.: 131). The element and the frame are here seen as potentially in
tension, whereas the fragments of redemption may be actively chosen and then
reconfigured into workable assemblages.
Thus can the ordinary escape from being pejoratively depicted as pertain-
ing to the relatively unworthy, from requiring authority from above to make any
coherent sense, and from any cultural implication, which is etymologically incor-
rect (of course), that it is usually disorderly. Rather, it is the outside that introduces
violence and disorder, making the next stage one of recuperating the viable frag-
ments that remain, not necessarily the total system. Stories become important:
not as templates to drop onto unknowable situations, but rather as ways to affirm
the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild (Das
2007: 221). Thus does the ordinary become an archive and a treasure trove for
finding possible elements for ongoing life, and may be the ground on which narra-
tive and elemental assemblage become quite different, or perhaps complementary
or coexisting, alternatives in composing approaches to an emergent, but unknown,
future, in specific times and places. Lambek leads us in this direction when he ar-
gues that the ethical condition has less to do with motivation, freedom or power,

whether to do good or bad, in the abstract, than with situated context. (2015: xix,
original emphasis). The idea of situated context evokes precisely the specificity of
each creative recuperative moment that I am suggesting is anthropologys terrain
for ethnographic attention. In another work, Lambek focuses on our long history
of analysis of ritual, to argue that rituals are frequently culminations of what is past
and anticipations of what will follow (2007: 23). It is possible, then, that the recu-
perated elements and narratives can be crafted to complement each other: the latter
by infusing temporal dynamics into the already apprehended meaningful value of
the former.
Combinatorial processes of narratives and elements: Literary sources and their

questions
This is a brief and simply indicative section of an important breadth given to what
is seen as recuperable (if anything), using narrative analogies, first of all in our cur-
rent literary and philosophical work on apocalypse. (We can note that analogical
thought, as distinct from reason, was what the poet John Keats meant by the cre-
ativity he advocated and termed negative capability.) Yes, disaster is dreadful, but
many of the stories composed and then applied to new situations seem to suggest
that what has been wiped out was itself negative, as, indeed, the Bibles Great Flood
is supposed to exemplify. Maria Manuel Lisboa shows how, in many of the stories
of catastrophe, each ending leads to a new beginning (2011: 15). Hence, the after-
math is not entirely accounted for by destruction and grief. The word catastrophe
itself indicates an unveiling of unseen worlds. Lisboa identifies the sense of a return
to a new equilibrium: to a condition that did not prevail before the cataclysmic
erasure, where what follows must be completely different (ibid.: 15). There may,
in fact, be seen to be a need for radical purge to establish utopia. The myths and
legends can then be applied to emergent situations, to insert their full logics. Noah,
of course, followed instructions about what to recuperate in advance of catastrophe
(all the animals, male and female), and eventually arrived at a totally new place
where he had to deploy one or two of those recuperated beings as ritual sacrifices,
in order to recuperate a relationship with God. During the lecture, I showed Marc
Chagalls remarkable painting of this dramatic moment, painted in 1932. Noah is
dressed as an elder of small-town Jewish life of that period in Europe: the peak
of the Great Depression and the upswing of National Socialism. The matching of
an image of the present moment with a story from the archive from the past can
illustrate Lisboas suggestion about how narrative and element can be recurrently
rematched to each other, especially through the imagination of the creative arts.
What seem to be recuperated are not only elements from an ordinary past, now
devastated, but the possibility of a creative reconfiguration of fragments.
By juxtaposing current deployments of temporalized recuperations with the
narratives and elements of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle Eastern worlds,
we may be alerted to finding very differently nuanced practical philosophies of
recuperation and reassemblage carried forward in time, elsewhere. From other
ethnographic records, the element, or fragment, may assume much greater promi-
nence than the narrative. To research the creative reconfigurations of the moment,
we would need to return again to Michael Jacksons radical empiricism: How is joy,
or some other component, generated, then recuperated and recrafted, with what

Jane I. Guyer 94
other elements, and by which people, in this collective process, into what assem-
blies and assemblages? And, we ask, people work on this in a condition of expe-
riential exposure to what kinds of danger and turbulence? Owing to many recent
turbulent experiences, in several places, all studied closely in ethnographic mode,
we can turn to examples from West African ethnography postwar and postepidem-
ic, Heonik Kwons postwar studies in Vietnam, and eventually an African American
postflood case, to pay close attention to recuperated elements and reconfigured
compositions, both narrative and existential, in the aftermaths of major destruc-
tions, of different kinds. In order to focus on recuperations, I leave for another
conversation the other focus in an ethnography of disaster, namely on peoples ex-
cavation of the causation. Did God, or the gods, ordain this? Did we deserve it?
What is the equation between those who may have deserved the damage and those
who suffered most from it? These topics often remain fractious, owing to variations
in the blame system, but the recuperations I focus on here are small, particular, and
usually inspirational to efforts in the aftermath.
Ethnographic works in Africa

Here is Michael Jackson on story-telling, as bridging the personal and the collec-
tive, the narrative and the element, in recent turbulence in Africa. He particularly
points to the advantage of the capacity of the ordinary to resist a reductively defini-
tive framing in times of crisis, of the kind indicated by Cavell. He suggests that, in
the case he will describe, the terms in narrative lack ontological stability (2013:
273), so are open to the story being a form of restorative praxis, of finding com-
mon ground (ibid.: 23) in the context of crisis. Restorative praxis is a crucial
concept here, in that it can be linked to the thinking on ordinary ethics when it
comes to re-creating life after a flood or whatever kind of destruction is specific
to a particular situation and experience. Clearly, any deep work on recuperations
needs to examine the specificity of the elements, but then also the narratives or
principles of assemblage, when these are applied by whoever assumes the duty or
ambition of considered reconstellation. Who chooses elements, narratives, and
configurational logics to link them? We have examples.
These offer a mix of both the ordinary with its fragments for recuperation and
the encompassing stories with their definitions of transformation, in cases of catas-
trophe. The temporality that is implicit, or explicit, in the accounts of African re-
cuperation is irregular. Here is Jackson again, writing in Life within limits of a text
that preserved the sequencing, interruptions, and distortions of lived time (2011:
132), where disparate things are bound together: Here, as in dreams, the disparate
detail is subject to a perpetual and largely unconscious process of combination and
recombination (ibid.: 133). Dreams again. Of the following case in Sierra Leone,
after war, he writes, in The politics of story-telling, that every story told ... shifts
elusively and continually between idiosyncratic and collective levels of meaning,
and he quotes from Paul Richards on the importance of forgetting the past, the
danger of over-defining the present ... (concisely summarized by the Krio proverb
tok af ief afi.e dont say all you know) (2013: 169). Here, in our ethnographies of
practice and local philosophies of everyday/ordinary life, we may find such livable
wisdom as this, where the legends of major disaster coexistpossibly even uneas-
ily, and promoted by different partieswith recuperative sayings and practices in

the ordinary and the everyday, which have been deployed at successive moments
of dislocation.
Cameroonian philosopher Jean-Godefroy Bidima (2014) proposes that the im-
posed law of European origin needs to be replaced by the long-standing indige-
nous legal processes he refers to, in French, as palabres, through which there can be
what he terms renewal, with the participation of many parties within the African
understanding of the public sphere. He invokes debate with Merleau-Ponty and
iek, and many other European philosophers, but with the aim of recuperating
African modes of retrieving justice and life: Palabre prioritizes conversation, an
element of law that is constitutive (ibid.: xxv); a celebration of speech . . . that
is expressed by rituals (ibid.: xxx, original emphasis). He advocates recuperation
of this tradition, especially after disruption: The important thing is indeed what
happened but particularly its emergence and becoming (ibid.: xxxix). And he also
appreciates the ethnographic approach to life as lived.
A further example is Paul Richards edited collection No peace, no war, which
can offer a comparative view of the temporal indeterminacy of emergence and be-
coming, in some places, between peace and war. He sees it as a continuum, where
organizational demands and the politics of grievance (2005 16) are continually
in existence and in tension, working through intermittent outbursts, while every-
one turns to religion to cope with the scar tissue of the violence. If we could be
present at the ceremonial religious moments, what would we see, and configure, as
recuperations? Or would the reapplication of the master narratives in legendary
and religious history account for most of the recuperative process?
Writing on the local responses to the emergent (heretofore unknown) Ebola
epidemic of 201315 in Sierra Leone, Richards writes of communities mobilizing
experience-based response (2016: 149). Indeed their recuperation in time of cri-
sis was not in what is usually referred to as the cultural domain, but rather in their
capacity to mobilize, judge, and interpret the empirical, in part through a deep
customary knowledge about management of the body, in part through ritual. This
is peoples science, as Richards calls it, and empirical common sense (ibid.: 150),
so an element that resembles epistemology more than it resembles factual or exclu-
sively cultural-value elements. It draws on ritual practices to speak to transitions
and renewals (ibid.: 147), in this case especially the management of burial by the
womens Sande Societies (ibid.: 131). Hence, perhaps, the archive of story-line ex-
perience and particular ritual practices as the source on which people draw in new
situations. The question would then become: Which stories and rituals are stored
and recuperated from the archive, by whom, and at which moments of challenge?
To these profound anthropological works on Sierra Leone after the civil war
and after the Ebola epidemic we can add the moving accounts offered by Sierra
Leonean former child-soldier, now turned writer, Ishmael Beah (2007, 2014). Like
Jackson, Beah gives a central place to the telling of stories as ways in which recu-
peration takes place after tragedy. And it is striking that women figure prominently
in the provocations of his memory, both as story-tellers and as mediators of new
beginnings. In his memoir of the war, he writes of leaving the country after it is
over, and of a moment when he notices a woman telling stories to her children: As
I watched the elaborate movements of her hands, the tide of my thought took me
back to a particular telling of a story I had heard many times as a boy (2007: 217).

Jane I. Guyer 96
Thus do tides move in repetitive rhythm and recuperate a sense of being that his
childhood had laid down. His novel Radiance of tomorrow (2014), about returning
home after exile in war, begins with a quotation that resonates with our disciplin-
ary literature on ends and beginnings. This is the epigraph of the first chapter,
which reappears as the terminus of the last chapter: It is the end, or maybe the
beginning of another story. Every story begins and ends with a woman, a mother, a
grandmother, a girl, a child. Every story is a birth (ibid.: 3). In the last pages, dur-
ing a moment of deprivation, a woman recuperates gestures, stories, and memories
from the past, in a place that Beah describes as where old wisdom and new wis-
dom merge (ibid.: 240).
In these ethnographic examples from our current world, and particularly the
story-telling traditions and the content of common sense in African communi-
ties, I am struck by how story and ritual come up again and again, as major modes
of recuperation. These are modes of choosing and reassembling pieces of the as-
semblages from the past with elements from the present and oriented to the future,
and reinstating the assemblies of collective life and thought. And it is striking that
women play a key role in that they create memories of the past that current situa-
tions can suddenly release, and they mediate the many small steps from now to a
tomorrow imbued with hope, or even Spinozas joy, or radiance (or Arendts
natality). The concept of sacrifice recurs in some of these works about the rocky
temporal and social terrain of political life in the globalizing world, but its contex-
tualization as a ritual element can differ from case to case. What does sacrifice
actually make sacred (its literal etymology) when it consists of a particular being,
subjected to a particular death or transference, by particular others at a particular
moment of historically emergent transition? Exactly how the different actors pro-
voke, or actively mobilize, the archive of knowledge, and how they then configure
action, deserves deeper exploration. From the archive of artistic wisdom, we can
recuperate Wilfred Owens famous poem about death in World War I, recuperating
a line from Latin, written by Horace, which he depicts as the old lie, when it is
told to soldiers marched into terrible battlefields: Dulce et decorum est, Pro patria
mori: Sweet and right it is to die for your country (fatherland).
Moving beyond the West African cases, and English war-time poetry, we have
a great deal to learn from Heonik Kwons work (2006, 2008) on recuperations of
life and spirit in Vietnam after the war, in several places and by people having
undergone different losses. The spirits of those who have died are still there, so
recuperating a respectful relationship with them is crucial for living in the present
and future. The analytical and comparative work that could be done by juxtaposing
all the cases alluded to hereWest Africa, India, Vietnam, and all the new floods
since Frazers classic workis an open and beckoning frontier.
Back to the Flood

As a final example from current ethnography, we can look at Kate Brownes eth-
nographic account of a recent Great Flood: in New Orleans in 2005, as a result
of Hurricane Katrina. Again, ritual life is central in peoples recuperation, and our
critical attention is drawn once more to recovery as a systemic concept, largely
mobilized, in this case, by the bureaucracy, in its own terms. Systemic recovery
does not converge in necessarily very optimistic terms with peoples own efforts

at recuperation. Browne writes of the recovery machine ... that kept [people] in
the dark for three years, unable to help themselves (2015: 157). She sees two big
themes: Two threads weave their way through.... The first thread makes clear
that the parish ... is home to historically important events and culture.... The
second thread concerns the multiple references to the many immigrant groups and
legacies (ibid.: 173).
The people then recuperate small components of life: rituals for death and
burial (including what to wear, to cook, to participate in, with respect to funer-
als), modes of offering comfort to each other, and retrieving a past pace of work
in the face of the new and intensified systemic demands. Browne writes of a par-
ticular funeral: This vivid, two-day rite of passage conveyed the power of culture
to make life good, to hold people up and help them feel comfort in the midst of
suffering (ibid.:188). I do not notice Noahs Flood story being invoked, but then
it is the funeral that is centered in the ethnographic account, not the mythol-
ogy. The narrative may, however, have been there, in some other context. And,
as in the redacted version in the Bible, ritual is crucial to retrieving relationships,
cherished practices, and the sense that the ordinary has not been completely
destroyed. Here, as elsewhere, the place of women is crucial, as sources of knowl-
edge, mediators and actors, even where certain moments of organization may be
led by men.
***
So, in summary, I have pointed to a growing ethnographic literature on peoples
recuperations after disasters and identified a number of themes. People attempt
to bridge a damaged past (judged as deserving or undeserving of such destruc-
tion) and an indeterminate, emergent future within a present that requires effort
and imagination, by drawing on retrievable elements or fragments rather than
(or in addition to) systemic replacement. First, there are the encompassing leg-
ends that different parties may retrieve and apply to situations of deprivation, or
what Browne calls standing in the need, and Marc Sommers, in his books on
postgenocide Rwanda and the youth in other situations, refers to as being stuck
(2012) and outcast (2015). In both of Sommers cases, the people themselves
who are in need, stuck and outcast, craft the elements of possibility rather than
possess the ability to reshape whole systems. They turn to ordinary practices: the
visionary and the everyday, the episodes in the big narratives and the elements
in short proverbs, words and things that can be floated forward independently
of each other but directed by human agency and eventually configured together.
Probably there are several other axes for ethnographic and also philosophical-
theoretical attention. This is not the flotsam and jetsam of Keiths designation;
rather they are retrieved elements, seen as legacies, archived to be recrafted and
recombined.
I feel sure, from all the postdisaster ethnographic work alluded to here, that we
can work much further on the legacy elements that get recuperated, reassembled,
and activated: ritual, narrative, pragmatic practices, and perhaps also simply words
that may be applied to novel situations, or completely redefined as if they could
carry the aura of the past while being skewed in a new direction. The pragmatics
and valuation of the elements of life under these circumstances, the recuperations

Jane I. Guyer 98
involved and aimed for, and the assemblages put together, become a frontier to
address, by drawing on our new literature on ethics and through our meeting on
the kind of common groundof disciplines, places of focus, theories, historical
conditions and different languages of expressionto which Frazer drew our atten-
tion when he launched the lecture after the Great War.
Concluding observations
These cases bring us back, then, to the crucial role of legacies within moments
at the end of disasters, as seen ethnographically and as experienced in the so-
cial-intellectual world of our discipline, which has such impressive resources for
examining life experiences and configurational thinking in moments of chaos,
grief, loss, and determination to move forward (however forward is configured).
Consider here Jacksons paths toward a clearing, Frazers meet[ing] on common
ground, above the clash of arms, in the serene air and untroubled light where
truth is sought by her votaries, or Mauss declaration that where the wood will
reestablish itself . . . the sap will rise again. Frazer was also a daily walker, of-
ten with scholarly friends such as profound Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter,
who famously worked on the huge mounds of scraps of paper from the Cairo
Geniza, another stash of monuments of toiling ingenuity from the past, what
Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole (2011) refer to as sacred trash, now retrieved,
conserved, and studied in detail.
As with Bidima, most of our work shows that large intrusions and total and
systemic replacements are seen as far less creative than peoples own capacity to
recuperate elements and to deploy already understood and meaningful narratives
in the present. Clearly, there is yet more close attention to be paid to the creativity,
social practices. and collaborative dynamics in managing the temporalities and in-
tricacies of storage, choice, recuperation, and recomposition within emergent pro-
cesses after times of crisis and destruction. We certainly bring together philosophy
and ethnography to take the exploration of recuperations further, using Jacksons
radical empiricism and creating conversations on common ground about ele-
ments, narratives, and their implicit temporalities toward a future: the day after
tomorrow or the end times, or any vista in between.
Jacksons paths of radical empiricism and new ethnographic work on the re-
trieval and invention of the ordinary through its fragments have led us into
close attentiveness to worlds that are no longer experienced in the patterned or
progressive modes of previous structural, evolutionary, and developmentalist the-
ory. Much remains to be done, through creative collegiality. The horizons open up,
and we find a growth in the sources by anthropologists, such as Alysse Waterstons
recounting of her fathers memories of war (2013).
Indeed, we can return to the spirit of the Frazer Lectures inaugural moment
through an inspirational essay by Heonik Kwon, where he indicates the recupera-
tive process not only in the worlds we share and study, but within the anthropologi-
cal archive as well. Looking again at Durkheim, Hertz, and Mauss as they wrote on
spiritual life, and their relevance to his own case study, he notes how much greater
is the sense of a temporal creative dynamic in the work of Mauss.

Despite their differences, however, these founders of modern sociology

and anthropology had one common spiritthat the calling of these
disciplines is to enlighten the spirituality of human solidarity. It is in this
spirit that Durkheim saw spirits of society in what people in the past saw
as divine authority. It is due to this spirit that I believe Hertz turned his
attention to the plight of the souls and spirits excluded from the formal
domain of social solidarity and that Mauss saw the power of the gift not
merely in terms of sustaining existing social forms but also in terms of its
capacity to remake and change the horizon of human solidarity. ... Rather
they together help us to grasp the way in which societies struggle with
the progression of modern history, which was unknown to Durkheim.
(Kwon 2014: 130, original emphasis)
In that spirit of finding or creating the common ground toward which we pursue
the paths where we can meet, across times, places and disciplines, I am inspired to
end with a verse by one who contributed to, and possibly attended, the foundation
of the Frazer Lecture: the poet A.E. Housman. Here is a verse from one of his Last
poems (no. IX), first published in 1922, so in the same era of collective life and re-
cuperation from war:
The troubles of our proud and angry dust
Are from eternity, and shall not fail.
Beat them we can, and if we can we must.
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale.
(1965: 108)
In the face of troubles, eternity, and confusions, what do we recuperate? In
Housmans case, the strength and courage to shoulder the sky and the practice of
drinking ale together, or other ritual practices, large and small, and conversations,
in fellowship. I am grateful for the inspiration without which I would not have
taken my own zig-zag pathways through our library of impressive works in our
still-inspiring discipline, and in the world whose own skills we continue to train
ourselves to be attentive to, as the world and the skills change.
I retrieve one further reference about recuperation which echoes Housman and
has inspired me before (Guyer 2009): the very last lines of Lvi-Strauss magnum
opus, Mythologiques. In full awareness of the possibility of nonbeing, man has to
live and struggle, think, believe and above all, preserve his courage (Lvi-Strauss
[1971] 1981: 694).
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for new inspiration from Richard Fardon (and his editing of a col-
lection of Mary Douglas writings on risk [Douglas 2013]) and Giovanni da Col,
whose ethnography and suggestions could not be included here for lack of space,
and to Michael Lambek and the reviewer, for suggestions and editorial work. My
work will continue, through the further conversations that I hope this lecture can
provoke, similar to the theme of intellectual recuperations, taken up by a younger
generation, under the leadership of Bhrigupati Singh (Singh and Guyer 2016).

Jane I. Guyer 100
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Suites et Rappropriation en anthropologie

Rsum : La Frazer Lecture fut lance en 1921, avec le soutien de spcialistes venus
de toute lEurope, dans un contexte dfini explicitement comme une rencontre
autour dintrts communs aprs la Premire Guerre Mondiale. Sinspirant des
anthropologues examinant les suites de dsastres dans le monde, souvrant au dia-
logue avec des chercheurs spcialiss dans dautres disciplines et de nouveaux
clairages, et dans le but de revisiter notre propre archive thorique et empirique,
ma lecture sintresse aux procs de rappropriation. La rappropriation est typi-
quement slective et donne priorit certains lments plutt qu des systmes
complets, donnant lieu des reconfigurations cratives. Des travaux divers - aus-
si bien des classiques que des ouvrages danthropologie inspirs par la philoso-
phie, de nouvelles ethnographies de lAfrique et du Vietnam daprs-guerre - sont

examins en tant quexemples de travaux reprenant lesprit de la Frazer Lecture

elle-mme.
Jane I. Guyer is Professor Emerita at Johns Hopkins University. A graduate of the

London School of Economics (1965) and the University of Rochester (1972), she
undertook field research projects on economic life in Nigeria and Cameroon. She
has held faculty appointments at Harvard, Boston, and Northwestern Universities.
At Northwestern, she was Director of the Program of African Studies (19942001).
Book publications include Family and farm in Southern Cameroon (1984), An Af-
rican niche economy (1997), Marginal gains: Monetary transactions in Atlantic
Africa (2004), Legacies, logics, logistics (2016), and a new translation of Marcel
Mauss, The gift (Expanded Edition, 2016).
Jane I. Guyer
Professor Emerita
Department of Anthropology
Mergenthaler Hall
Homewood Campus
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore MD 21218
USA
jiguyer@jhu.edu

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2017 | Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (1): 81103