Student
Work-Reviews
--Anna
Mehta (UC Berkeley)
"Death Of
The Father – an Anthropology of Closure in Political Authority"
is a website located at <http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/DOF>.
In its own words, it sets out to inquire, "Of what significance
is the symbolization of the Father and his dead body for the
form of national authority that follows the collapse of a regime?"
More specifically, it takes as its object six political regimes
here associated with the lives and deaths of six national "fathers."
The regimes considered represent something of a miscellany of
twentieth century dictatorial authority, but can be grouped
crudely around two particular historical moments: the rise and
fall of the great dictatorships of the WWII-era (Mussolini,
Hitler, Stalin, and Hirohito) and the end of Cold War regimes
in the Soviet Union and its satellite states (Stalin (again),
Ceaucescu, and Tito). As the authors of the site put it in their
introductory page, they attempt to "address the end of
an authority crisis that spanned most of this century, and that
crystallized around the regimes of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany,
Imperial Japan, and the State Socialist systems of East Germany,
Yugoslavia, Romania, and the Soviet Union."
Put together
by a team of anthropologists from the United States, Germany,
Norway, France and South Korea, "Death of the Father"
presents itself as more than a political scientist’s reading
of the end of dictatorships. By posing questions about the importance
of "the mode of death, treatment of the corpse, and the
nature of mourning in bringing closure," this project extends
traditionally anthropological concerns with the social and cultural
meanings of death and rebirth to material that is normally the
domain of history and political economy. The site attempts to
build an "anthropology of closure in political authority"
by attending to the symbolic construction of patriarchal authority
and its "end." While this site’s attention to
social symbolism and forms of political identification–and
its attempts to link image, sound and text–constitute contributions
to the field, I argue that these are, at the same time, often
the sources of the site’s structural and interpretive weaknesses.
To give a brief
summary of the site, on arriving at the introductory page, and
before entering further, the visitor is invited to read a brief
statement of the questions concerning the "international
team of anthropologists and artists" in the pages which
follow. By clicking on a blinking "enter" icon, the
visitor is then brought to a page dominated by six equally proportioned
black-and-white portraits, arranged in two rows of three: Mussolini,
Hitler, and Hirohito, followed by Ceaucescu, Stalin and Tito.
Of the six leaders, only Nicolae Ceaucescu is not in military
uniform. Clicking on any of these portraits leads the visitor
to the central resources offered by this site: individually
authored pages concentrating on the six case-studies in this
"anthropology of closure."
Other links
made available at this point draw attention the site’s
scholarly and pedagogical aims. Presented across the top of
the page are textual links to individual historical chronologies
("Composite chronology — coming soon"), maps,
a glossary of key terms and phrases, and links to other internet
resources on each regime or state. Also of interest are links
to similar projects completed by Professor Borneman’s students
in his "Death of the Father" class at Cornell University;
and three separate links to information on "Participants,"
"Media Sources," and "Web Credits." Finally,
two iconographic links at top right lead the visitor, first,
to a synopsis of Borneman’s forthcoming edited collection
of essays on this subject; then to an associated video project
on the "Death of the Father" and the over-arching
theme of the problems of moving "from trauma to democratic
form."
The "front
end" of the site thus appears to promise much: an innovative
but academically responsible and pedagogically useful approach
to the subject-matter. However, moving from this first page
to the central pages on Hitler, Stalin et al, necessitates a
revision in the visitor’s orientation to the material.
The pages are dominated by a series of four-to-six thumbnail
images — this time organized around three sections of textual
narrative and analysis: "Form of Authority," "Death
and Transition(s)," and "Consequences." Should
the visitor click on a thumbnail, she is transported to a larger
version of the same image, complete with a short title and explanatory
caption. At top right, clicking on an icon shaped like an ear
allows the visitor to download and listen to an audio file that
is similarly explained by a gloss at the foot of the page.
The change
in orientation required of the "reader" of the site
relates to this extended use of hyperlinked sounds and images.
The textual analysis supplied by the author(s), while to some
extent guiding the reader’s interpretation of image and
sound, is somewhat fragmentary: long on broad historical narrative,
and short on particular interpretive detail. The reader is very
much left on her own to create an understanding out of her responses
to a discrete image, a discrete sound, their combined articulation,
and the sometimes discontinuous narrative supplied by the analytic
text and textual glosses. The reader soon understands that conventions
of traditional historical or ethnographic scholarship are in
abeyance. These pages are not overloaded with citation and the
symbols of academic authority. Accessible to the general reader,
they present weighty ideas while avoiding similarly weighty
formulations.
Rather than
continuing in general terms, it is perhaps better to argue this
point by example. In the site devoted to Marshall Tito and his
legacy in the former Yugoslavia, the visitor encounters some
of the problems of interpretation she will face in her journey
through this site.
Organized
around a narrative of how Tito’s death in 1981 led to the
death of "brotherhood and unity," eventual civil war,
and the continuing division of the former Communist state along
ethnic lines, the "Tito and Yugoslavia" page, "Consequences"
section, contains a close-up thumbnail image of a man, eyes
cast downwards, having some sort of bottled liquid poured over
him. Clicking on this image brings us to a larger photo which
presents us with a wider view of the scene. We now see two men
in military dress, one doing the pouring as the other holds
the civilian in place (for the camera?). The title reads "ethnic
cleansing" and the caption below reads:
The fracturing
of Yugoslavia along ethnic lines began several years after Tito's
death and has been characterized by particularly vicious hatred,
violence, and a program of ethnic cleansing. Whereas Bosnia
was the site of much of this conflict in the early 1990s, at
the end of the millenium, Kosovo has become the new killing
fields. In this photo, a young Bosnian Muslim man is doused
with water by two Serb police after being thrown out a window.(credit:
by arrangement with Wide World Photos/AP)
The accompanying
audio file contains an excerpt from a Tito speech on the fraternity
and unity of the nationalities of the former Socialist Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia. This file is used earlier in the section
"Form of Authority."
How is this
meant to be read? Taking the image, the sound and the text together,
the visitor is struck by the dissonance between the three media.
The first such example of dissonance is the (obviously intentional)
disjuncture between Tito’s fraternal speech and the image
of ethnic abuse. The juxtaposition of once-powerful socialist
rhetoric with a documentary image from the Bosnian war dramatizes
the "Consequences" of the dictator’s passing.
However, perhaps unintentional tensions creep into the page.
Why choose this image over any of the other pictures from this
much-photographed conflict? Without the aid of the caption,
it would almost be possible to skim the violence of the photo.
The key piece of information seems to be provided by the title
— "ethnic cleansing" — which uses a form
of cursory irony to link the dousing taking place in the photograph
to the "cleansing" of Muslim, Serb and Croatian towns
and villages. While this technique is provocative, and is potentially
a creative way of engaging the reader, the irony of "ethnic
cleansing" is too close to being at the expense of the
victim in the photo. In the absence of any ethnographic analysis
of the events taking place in the photograph, the image risks
being reduced to the status of a rather sick joke.
This vexing
sense of incompleteness also raises questions about other features
and areas of the site. Sometimes, this incompleteness is comparatively
trivial (almost a convention of web-publishing!) — such
as the way in which not all links to the "Glossary"
correspond to an item in that file ("multicultural dissolution"
is one of the more intriguing of these missing links). Perhaps
less forgivable is the way in which distinct concepts which
come up in the text, and are linked to the glossary, go to the
same entry. For example, on the "Stalin and the Soviet
Union" page both "symbolic father" and "primal
father" are linked to the same definition of "father":
"the source of authority and locus of meaning; the leader;
the paternal authority." As a definition of the term "father"
as it is used in this project, this is acceptable; as a way
of elaborating on the different theoretical significances of
the crucial psychoanalytic and/or anthropological concepts
implied by "symbolic" and "primal," this
is clearly inadequate. The glossary is the only form of hypertextual
interactivity that is built into the textual parts of the site.
It is disappointing that these links should frustrate a reader
interested in interrogating the terms of the site.
Equally unsettling
for a critical reader, this incompleteness may also be felt
as the absence of sustained argument. For example, the page
on "Stalin and the Soviet Union" contains the following:
Following Stalin's
death in 1953, he was placed in the tomb alongside Lenin's mummy,
before later being removed to his own grave. The Lenin mausoleum
functioned as a shrine where followers worshipped the symbolic
father. Successive attempts to complete the burial of these
leaders beginning with Khrushchev in 1957 failed, largely because
Soviet authority could not exist without the image of the primal
father.
This is an interesting
and potentially crucial insight into the forms of authority
at work in the Soviet Union between the time of Lenin’s
death and the collapse of the USSR. However, no attempt is made
to argue this point — neither in the images nor
in the text itself. Granting the relevance of the insight that
Soviet political authority depended upon an image of a "primal
father," the reader is still asked to suspend any sense
that other factors played a "large" role in the maintenance
of authority or the end of the regime. In the end, the reader
is simply asked to accept the veracity of this statement
(on what authority?). If she needs convincing, she must attempt
to find substance for this assertion in the surrounding images.
The descriptions
and objections considered in the first pages of this review
can, then, be summarized in the following statement: Having
journeyed through the portal of the first page, complete with
its trappings of scholarly authority; having journeyed further
and re-oriented herself to look for meaning in the creative
juxtaposition of sound, image and text; having done all this,
the visitor to this site finds herself in an ambiguous position
of meaning-making — dissatisfied with the fragments of
scholarly argument and troubled by the implications of some
of the more provocative multimedia ensembles.
Part of
this problem stems from the absence of any accessible theoretical
framework through which to apprehend the material presented.
In a project which appears to be so driven by the theoretical
insights of — at the least — Freud and Lacan, it is
strange that no attempt has been made to guide the inquisitive
visitor to a more complete understanding of the difficult conceptual
vocabulary that is on display. This reader questions the absence
of an ethnographic (or otherwise) investigation of the assumptions
that underpin the authority of the "father." On what
basis can we generalize the key terms of the site without reference
to particular cultural constructions and social practices of
gender, power and the family, for example? Is the "father"
necessarily male? These questions seem particularly pertinent
in relation to the visual and aural evocation of the Ceaucescu
regime. One particularly powerful page displays an image of
Elena Ceaucescu’s bound hands. While the visitor contemplates
this image and notes the gold bracelet that adorns her wrist,
she listens to the sound of the Ceaucescus protesting their
imminent execution. Nicolae Ceaucescu questions the right of
the NSF revolutionaries to usurp his authority, while Elena
Ceaucescu addresses her jailer as "child." When the
visitor comes to interpret this material, what should she assume
about the significance of this potentially gendered difference
in address? How does this relate to the Ceaucescus’ pre-1989
modes of replicating their authority? Should it have any bearing
on our understanding of the death of this particular symbolic
father (and mother)?
Taking a different
critical tack, the "Death of the Father" seems to
avoid a potentially fruitful intersection with theoretical work
that underpins the semiotic and ‘readerly’ nature
of hypertextual publishing. What is the relationship between
the form and the subject of this site? What, if anything, is
the significance of the parallels between the way that the "Death
of the Father" inaugurates an "anthropology of closure"
and, for instance, the way that Roland Barthes’s "Death
of the Author" (1968) inaugurates a ‘readerly’
semiotics that arguably reaches its apotheosis in the World
Wide Web?
This question
leads me to perhaps the most important question raised in this
review: Why is "The Death of the Father" a website?
Given the existence of an advertised video and essay collection,
what is the specific purpose of presenting this material in
this form (other than that it has the potential to be freely
accessible)? More work needs to be done if this is to be a successful
piece of hypertext. The way in which the images are set out
in the main case studies (left-right-left-right-left-right down
the page), although nominally governed by the three-part structure
of the analytical text, is in fact largely chronological —
following the conventional narrative of rise, death, and aftermath.
This linear chronological scheme inadvertently implies that
causality through time is the organizing and motivating force
behind the connections we make between discrete images. What
is particularly unfortunate is that hypertextual publishing
presents unique alternatives to this perhaps unconsciously conventional
way of organizing the page.
In the page
advertising the forthcoming "Death of the Father"
video, the visitor reads:
Rather than
explain the Death of the Father through argument, our video
uses visual symbols and sounds to evoke reaction to affective
force in political authority.
This may be
a clue to the question asked earlier: ‘Why a website?’
I have touched on the ways in which this site attempts to divert
the production of meaning to an axis which includes image and
sound as well as pared-down text. Given the sense of incompleteness
that attends the scholarly substance of the site, and the relative
conventionality of the site’s structure and architecture,
it is the opinion of this reviewer that "Death of the Father"
falls short of its own aims. The fascinating questions raised
on the front page remain unanswered. In addition, if the site
is to achieve its implied aim of successfully eliciting "reaction
to affective force in political authority" it would benefit
from a more complicated architecture, affording more creative
choices for the visitor. A more complete attempt might have
been made to relate the intellectual content of the site to
its modes of interaction and reception -- especially as the
authority of the political "father" might be seen
to relate to (or conflict with) the authority of the scholarly
expert. In the end, "Death of the Father" satisfies
neither the guilty pleasures of readerly play nor the guilty
knowledge of academic authority.
Anna Mehta
May 1999
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