Livelihood, Diaspora, Social Poetics, Actor-Network Theory

Two books I recently assigned to my students-- Ben Orlove's Lines in the Water and Jacqueline Brown's Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail - sparked insights I'd like to incorporate into SS.

Orlove's approach to livelihood and landscape as a "living history" of resilience and adaptation strikes me as applicable to my account of Santa Lucia, although my subjects (unlike Orlove's Puno villagers) are part of a national mainstream, if only ambiguously so.

Brown's book gave me an idea for how I might briefly address or situate my study of localism with respect to the phenomenon of overseas migration and diaspora, for which the Philippines has become so well known. I am taken by Brown's portrait of the city of Manchester itself as a kind of diasporic subject. In what might be thought of as another instance of "living history," the ancestral identifications of Liverpool-born blacks with seafaring and with the black Atlantic seascape makes them particularly open to transnational marriage and migration to the U.S. As Brown says, in this case diasporic longings come first and migration comes later. Similarly, the local identifications that I study in the Philippines emerge out of migration, and I think this may help explain why Filipinos are "available" to diasporal longings and to sojourning on a larger scale. (Brown also has some useful statements on the importance of theorizing localness, although tepic class responses also confirmed my hunch that localness in this sense is a difficult concept for readers to get.)

I have been advising a thesis writer, Megha Majumdar, to read and think more about "social poetics" as a topic and as an ethnographic lens, and this made me realize that I should do so myself. In fact, "social poetics" may be a more useful term than that of "cultural intimacy," which it encompasses as a particular case. Perhaps "social poetics" is also a better description of my approach in SS than is the keyword "narrative," which I have thus far been using? The general concept could serve as a unifying thread throughout the book, while the more specific "cultural intimacy" is perhaps particularly appropriate for Chapter 4, about esoteric national subjects.

Talking to Cameron Warner recently reminded me that I should consider invoking "actor network theory" as a basis for discussing Mt. Banahaw as an actor or subject in its own right, following up on the suggestion of one place theorist (can't remember which) to study the processes by which a locality becomes constituted as an identity-bearing subject in its own right.

Finally, in Chapter 1 or the introduction, I should further explore the links between naming and state territoriality by drawing upon Jim Scott's essay on personal surnames and statecraft.