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Oral Presentation Session
Reviewed by: Society for Visual Anthropology
Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Students
Primary Theme: Persistence
Secondary Theme: Identity and Equity
Performance theorists, anthropologists, and queer studies researchers alike have all confronted and
explored ideas about personhood in enormous depth, questioning how the self is conceived, created,
challenged, and changed. Each of these researchers’ disciplines have asked, in their own manner, if the
self exists at all, how context changes the performed self, and how we conceptualize the individual self
in the context of society. Western academia and, more broadly, Western societies have long clung to a
notion of the self as singular and stable throughout time. This panel challenges such
conceptualizations of the self as a continuous person and instead offers up a new lens with which to
explore ethical life that draws on a synthesis of Lambek’s theory of the forensic and mimetic in concert
with M’Charek’s notion of the folded, or more aptly crumpled, object.
Michael Lambek offers the discipline an analytical framework of the self that takes into consideration
the notion of continuous and discontinuous persons and the role of ethics – in the sense of actors’
susceptibility to evaluation and judgement – in crafting the self. He argues that academia should
refocus our exploration of the self in order to include both continuous and discontinuous, to better
account for the myriad performative acts that point to a discontinuous self. At its core, his framework
is one that challenges the Western idea of a stable person travelling linearly through time, instead
suggesting that personhood is a culmination of performative acts of ethical evaluation solidified into
practices.
At first glance, one might wonder how Amade M’charek’s STS-inspired concept of the crumpled object
resonates with Lambek. We suggest a reading of the two authors’ work as opposite sides of the same
coin. In her article on folded objects, M’Charek addresses the imbued temporality of objects, arguing
that one can never separate the quotidian mess of an object’s historicity from its present temporal
moment. Often, and particularly in the natural sciences, the process of an object’s creation is forgotten,
glossed over, and erased. So it is also with the process of the creation of the continuous self, we attempt
to expunge the discontinuous actions of the past, creating a self that is, in reality, less a whole person
and more a multi-faceted collage.
Inspired by M’Charek’s notion of the collage, we present seemingly disparate, yet simultaneously
synchronous (discontinuous and continuous if you will) empirical examples of the forensic and
mimetic in action in order to explore a modern conceptualization of temporality rooted in an
understanding of the ever-present ethics of quotidian life.
Thomas Malaby
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Thomas Malaby
University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
Laya Liebeseller
Graduate Student
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Laya Liebeseller
Graduate Student
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Josh Rivers
Ph.D. Student
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Josh Rivers
Ph.D. Student
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Todd Ebling
Lecturer
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Michael Lambek
University of Toronto
S. Megan Heller
University of California, Los Angeles