Cases, in anthropology, are shaped by symbolic processes.
The ‘word,’ language, ideas, or media, provide structure, – textual and semantic – and thus cases are infinitely open-ended. So writing, film and, more recently, digital media give new form to cases in ongoing ways. Previous anthropological cases may or may not inform subsequent creations of cases. So, more particularly, it’s the relationality of words, sentences, images, information technologies and memes, which give structure to the case. Each of the videos here – http://arssynthetica.blip.tv/posts?view=archive&nsfw=dc – creates a case, is a case, and many of these videos characterize explicitly what cases are and how they function, from specific ways of thinking, thus potentially informing subsequent cases. Ethnography, as a modality of anthropological case production, creates specific open-ended forms of cases that I’m particularly interested in.
The larynx has been central to generation of these symbolic processes, in an evolutionary sense, for, without the evolutionary development of the larynx, human language wouldn’t have developed (Deacon, “The Symbolic Species,” 1997). This is important because it relativizes the significance of cases, in anthropology, in an evolutionarily biological context, thus leaving open-ended the generation of new kinds of cases vis-a-vis ethnography, and in new modalities, as symbolic generation processes.
scottmacleod.com
