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Theories of the South: Limits and perspectives of an emergent movement in social sciences

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Theories of the South: Limits and perspectives of an emergent movement in social sciences.

Brazilian sociologist Marcelo Rosa has published an important critique of social theory (download), comparing the approaches of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Jean and John Comaroff and Raewyn Connell. Though he singles out Connell as an approach that allows for alternative southern voices, he concludes from their differing uses of theories an inconsistency in the notion of ‘southern theory’. In reference to the French sociologists Boltanski and Chiapello, he describes this use of south as a ‘circumstantial project’. As such, Rosa is vulnerable to the same critique he has levelled at others in marginalising southern perspectives by contrast to northern theory. Diversity of approaches does not necessarily imply contradictions in the field. They can indicate a dynamic argument that is activating an alternative field of inquiry.

South Ways

Wellington roundtable: Giving art away

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Drawing from Wellington Roundtable

Drawing from Wellington Roundtable

On the morning of Thursday 27 February, 24 people gathered in Wellington to discuss how we can give art away. This roundtable was part of Kete, a biannual craft fair organised by the NZ Academy of the Arts. It was also the first in a series of meeting in South Ways, a project to identify and develop forms of creative practice that have a particular home in the South.

Wellington was an important place to begin this discussion (see background of the key word Bestow). It is the location of Te Papa, a museum whose brief involves the care for precious taonga, Māori treasures deserving special respect for their connection with ancestors and tribal life. It is also the site of vibrant artistic scene, including a community of contemporary jewellers who operate outside the gallery system. The roundtable was a space to stories from both sides about the dynamics involved in gifting art objects. Emerging from this are ideas for platforms that might support this practice.

Artist badge from the Free Time (Sarah Read) toolkit by Jhana Millers, 2012 (Visa Prezzy card, bronze)

Artist badge from the Free Time (Sarah Read) toolkit by Jhana Millers, 2012 (Visa Prezzy card, bronze)

Art that is given carries a meaning that is different to art that is bought and sold. How can we make a space for this while acknowledging our dependence on money to survive in the current world?

Here is a summary of the discussion:

The art of give and take

Gifting is an important means of creating relationships, particularly in Māori culture. The practice of koha cements relationships within iwi and between generations. For koha and other gifting practices, much depends not only the attitude of the giver, but also on the way it is received.

For contemporary jewellers, gifting and exchange has become an important means of sustaining its community of fellow artists. Newly emerging social practitioners are seeking to expand the circle of gifting to include the general public. This offers a counterpoint to the process of commodification that continues to deplete the public domain.

The issue they face is the potential lack of control over the disposition of the public. The danger is that these gifts are seen as ‘freebies’. A challenge is to find frameworks in which objects might circulate into the public domain without too quickly being absorbed into private consumption. It is important to create spaces that involve mutual respect between audience and artist.

Jacqui Chan, Host A Brooch, urban jewellery project, Christchurch 2011, participant's photograph.

Jacqui Chan, Host A Brooch, urban jewellery project, Christchurch 2011, participant's photograph.

Proposal for a Festival

One way of framing the event so that strangers might be open to a gift is to declare a certain number of days when people are encouraged to give and receive gifts. These gifts would be tokens of connection rather than consumer goods. This has potential to enliven a city, making inhabitants more aware of each other. They can also create solidarity for particular causes or groups. This Festival could be supported by a city such as Wellington so that artists would be paid to set up participatory projects in which:

  • members of public would wear items of jewellery walking through the city
  • jewellery that was made from the city
  • jewellery made for the city

Some general points from the roundtable:

Gift

  • A gift can involve extreme honesty. They can be loaded with meaning from the giver and responsibility from the receiver. Sometimes they can even stand in for the person who gave them.
  • Gifts have a ripple effect.

Huhana Smith, Senior Curator Māori Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Associate Curator Joe Horse Capture from Minneapolis Institute of Art. Curators kindly allowed the perspex to be removed from the poutokomanawa. It was an unforgettable experience, because no Māori visual culture scholars to the best of my knowledge then, knew where this taonga had ended up.

Huhana Smith, Senior Curator Māori Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Associate Curator Joe Horse Capture from Minneapolis Institute of Art. Curators kindly allowed the perspex to be removed from the poutokomanawa. It was an unforgettable experience, because no Māori visual culture scholars to the best of my knowledge then, knew where this taonga had ended up.

Taonga

The receiver can have important responsibility. For example, in 1922 the Prince of Wales was given a  Mere Pounamu presented with the blade first as a sign of kaupaki to establish an ongoing relationship.  The idea was that it would be given back, which the Prince failed to appreciate.

There is the money market and Māori market. Less important things are made for money.

Koha Kilohertz "My Te Reo (Maori language)classmates organized a koha for me to make a koha for Hoani, our tutor. I organized a koha for Ewan Duff (local Maori stone carver)who kohad the pounamu to me." Andrew Last

Koha Kilohertz "My Te Reo (Maori language)classmates organized a koha for me to make a koha for Hoani, our tutor. I organized a koha for Ewan Duff (local Maori stone carver)who kohad the pounamu to me." Andrew Last

Koha

  • Māori are very generous.
  • Koha cements relationships. It helps keep the relationship a living one.
  • It isn’t the object, it is the spirit in which it is given.
  • The word koha relates to oha ti, or someone’s last words. This is a message of generosity as part of our very being.
  • Koha is reciprocal.  There’s a message that goes with it, an instruction of some sort
  • It can’t be too small or too big.
  • Gifts are ways of marking a particular moment.
  • They can wait for a long time before reciprocation.
  • Gifts mark connection to this place. It can be important for new-comers to feel at home here.
  • The principles of koha are now taught in New Zealand tertiary institutions, involving a visit to a marae.
Joanna Zellmer 8 portraits from a jeweller’s point of view, From the series “signs in a state of change”, archival satin fine art paper, box framed, each 520 x 390 x 45mm

Joanna Zellmer 8 portraits from a jeweller’s point of view, From the series “signs in a state of change”, archival satin fine art paper, box framed, each 520 x 390 x 45mm

Contemporary jewellery

  • There is a very strong sense of community in New Zealand’s contemporary jewellery scene.
  • But there is a need to challenge this by broadening its audience to include people outside contemporary jewellery.

Social practitioner

  • The social practitioner is an artist who develops connections between people through art works and objects. A number of contemporary jewellers could be seen to be working in this way now too.
  • It involves making art available to everyone. Support for this is gained from both museums and social agencies.
  • It can be informed by Buddhist principle of being effective in the world
  • Sometimes it is important to lend rather than give objects. In that way there is less focus on the object itself and more how it opens up the world around you.
  • Given the lack of saleable product, for some it can involve going to the path of a monastery. This could be living on home-grown vegies in the Coromandels.
  • But there is a danger of an audience that doesn’t respect the art offered as gift. This is sometimes encouraged by the ‘art as fun park’ attitude encouraged by recent biennale culture.

The alternative career path: Coromandel NZ (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Coromandel_Peninsula.jpg)

Other proposals

Existing projects in New Zealand
  • Cuckoo a New Zealand artist collective that organise events in other institutions according to a principle that no money is ever involved
  • Host a Brooch
  • See Here
  • Organisation that brokers spaces for artists to work in vacant shopfronts
Other possible
  • Crowd-funding not so relevant in New Zealand because people aren’t as wealthy as in Australia
  • Cooperative where members would pay an annual fee to borrow works by artists and jewellers

Voices:

Andrew Last; Birgit Moffatt; Carol Mayer; Deborah Donnelly; Elsa Krasniansky; Helen Donnelly; Huhana Smith; Jacqui Chan; Joanna Mere Branthwaite; Johanna Zellmer; Katheryn Yeats; Kevin Murray; Kohai Grace; Laura Porterhouse; Matthew Wilson; Megan Tamati-Quennell; Owen Mapp; Peter Deckers; Richard Reddaway; Sandra Alfoldy; Sarah Read; Tiffany Singh; Vivien Atkinson; Yenji Chen.

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RIP Mbulelo Mzamane (1948 – 2014)

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An inspiring voice of the South has passed on.  Mbulelo Mzamane was described by the late Nelson Mandela as a ‘visionary leader and one of South Africa’s greatest intellectuals. As opening keynote speaker for the South Project Melbourne gathering, his vision helped define the course of its future journey. His legacy lives on in his stirring allegory of reconciliation and his rallying call for a ‘return of the common’.

RIP Mbulelo Mzamane (1948 – 2014) | Books LIVE.

Texts

Is art beyond borders?

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The call to boycott the Sydney Biennale has brought up larger questions about the governance of border control in Australia. The following video by Crossborder Operational Matters argues that Australia is currently a proving ground for techniques of refugee control.  It claims that Australia’s policy of mandatory detention has now been exported to other countries, including China and Israel.

transfield and the sydney biennale from Beyond Borders on Vimeo.

The situation has resonance with latest developments in Southern Theory.

Raewyn Connell’s latest article (with Nour Dados) in Theory and Society  ‘Where in the world does neoliberalism come from?’ pursues her interest in Southern Theory to consider the impact of a perceived Northern ideology of economic rationalism. Rather than passive victim, they argue that the South is an active agent for neoliberalism, responding with a growth in the informal economy that was not part of the original plan. The breakthrough in their article is to identify a need to account for the role of implementation in understanding the effects of global ideologies. Though the Naomi Klein narrative of poorer countries persecuted by the ‘Chicago boys’ seems to champion the interests of the South, it still goes not account for the South’s own role in this, beyond the political elites.

Connell and Dados are critical of the way standard accounts of neoliberalism focus on financialisation rather than trade:

This problem is connected with the habit in analyses of neoliberalism, noted earlier in this article, of separating the theory from the practice, and treating the making of market society on the ground as the (imperfect) enactment of a pre-formed ideological template. This is particularly unfortunate when thinking about neoliberalism in the global South, as it downplays the agency of Southern actors in the formation of the neoliberal order.

Crossborder Operational Matters go further to argue that practices forged in the South can then have an influence in the North. In a similar fashion, the Comaroffs’ Theory from the South argues that the North is now following an African model, entailing corruption and state privatisation.

But is this relevant to art? Sydney Biennale curator Juliana Engberg confesses to a Scandinavian humanism: ‘I’m not a sledgehammer curator. I don’t like didactic much; politics is best encountered through storytelling.’ Yet in studiously avoiding didacticism, Engberg has created a vacuum that other politics will come to fill. Inadvertently, the Biennale has now become a forum for discussion Australia’s role as a pioneer in border protection through exemplary cruelty.

 

References

  • Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2011. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa. Paradigm Publishers.
  • Connell, Raewyn, and Nour Dados. 2014. “Where in the World Does Neoliberalism Come From?” Theory and Society: 1–22.
Conference

AILASA 2014 – Voicing Dissent – AILASA – The University of Sydney

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AILASA 2014 – Voicing Dissent – The University of Sydney 2nd – 4th July, 2014.

In the past few decades, in Iberian and Latin American Studies there has been a growth of academic interest in the challenges posed to the status quo by a plethora of social actors. From committed individual voices in the arts, cinema and literature, to collective forms of urban and rural resistance such as social and indigenous movements, Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula have witnessed an increase in the presence of dissenting voices.

Parallel to this phenomenon, the demands that grew from these forms of resistance, often originating “from below” have become part of significant reforms carried out by nation-states. Some of these top-down reforms have been led by people such as Evo Morales in Bolivia and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina, to mention just two examples, with the effect of unsettling traditional perspectives on identity politics, citizenship, and the relationship between politics and culture.