6 Domestication

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Reaching again into the tool box of anthropology, I would like to bring up a notion that has had broad application in this field: the idea of “domestication.” Victor Turner (1969, 42) turned to “domestication” to describe the use of symbols during rituals to render safe what were formerly dangerous emotions among the Ndembu; while Susan Sontag (1966) noted that modernity seems to verge between two impulses: surrender to the exotic, and the domestication of the unknown, of the exotic, mostly by science.

Marcus and Fischer's (1986) comments on anthropology as cultural critique bring up an inverse notion: that of defamiliarization, of making exotic what had previously or elsewhere been domesticated. In his 1987 article on cricket in contemporary India, Arjun Appadurai commented on how cricket, one of the “hardest” of British cultural forms, has been domesticated within India. And we cannot overlook the literature on gender and the domestication of women.

In other fields, Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 13) accuse the Oedipal impulse (at the service of society) of domesticating our very desires. Finally, Zygmont Bauman (1990) warns us that the domestication of space by the nation replaces the means that individuals and local communities formerly domesticated their own neighborhoods--making us incapable of telling friend from enemy--and thus ultimately failing as a mode of domestication.

The national space, Bauman notes, is too large a place to be familiar, and so we all live in unfamiliar surroundings that resist our attempts at local appropriation. No longer given the authority to domesticate our own locales, we are now subject to larger (in space and time) processes of market-state domestication. We are, ourselves, domesticated along with the places where we stroll and eat, work and play.

Robert Sack brings a related term “homogenization” to his discussion of national memorial spaces:

“The multifunctional character of some memorials makes them less than sacred. Even among nationally recognized memorials, there is no hierarchy of importance, as there would normally be among sacred places in an organized religion. And what power are these places supposed to possess? Certainly not the power of miracles or even of eliciting the truth (which was attributed to even minor Chinese city temples as late as the nineteenth century). This does not mean that such memorials do not work. They do evince shared and often strong sentiments in the form of common memories. But mostly they work by thinning out the meaning of the events and the place so that they can be shared quickly by a modern, heterogeneous society. People visit them not only to remember but to quickly and vicariously experience adventures of the past. In this sense, national memorials are more like generic tourist attractions and theme parks than they are like shrines and sacred places.

Eviscerating the power of the sacred is part of the general modern tendency to thin out culture and homogenize modern places. This tendency is supported by several modern conditions. One is that the use of the public, objective, geometrical meaning of space makes it difficult to convey the specific and emotional contents of place and thus tends naturally to emphasize their generic qualities. The same holds true of the scientific perspective. Another modern condition is the trend toward a global economy and culture, which seems to require that places all over the world contain similar or functionally related activities and that geographical differences or variations that interfere with these interactions be reduced. After all, if we live in a global village, then we must feel at home anywhere, and the simplest way of making us comfortable is to remove the strange and the unexpected. The thinning out and homogenizing of culture can be expected as a consequence of yet another important condition—modern mass communication, especially television. (Sack 1992, 95-96)”

This removal of “the strange and the unexpected” has another consequence: a coding of those things that are removed from the bourgeois public sphere as things that are irredeemably strange and unexpectable. The criminalization of recreational drug use is a widespread example of this, as are the various modes of homophobia.

I will use the term “domestication” in two main senses: the first is the hegemonic reading: a domesticated space is a place under paternalist control. A place that services its owners. The second meaning is that of “familiarity”-- the other space now joins the household, losing any exotic or dangerous meanings by this joining.

Domestication, in the two senses I use here—the creation of spaces both of the familial and the familiar—is a notion of some real value for anthropologists working in East Asia. It helps us see through the simulation of unity, and of history, to grasp the hybridity of places of local cultural production.

The domestication of Japanese history during Meiji hoped to cut the island off from its mainland cultural heritage, and the domestication of the West is today positioning the island somewhere off the coast of Europe. What we have to do, in our ethnographies, is to carefully avoid reifying the process of domestication, and work toward a better theoretical purchase on this process as it is found in various locales on the Pacific Rim.

The state and the market, often in concert, but increasingly with oblique goals, offer up cultural desires that share a common power aspect: they are beyond the control of the residents of the city, who are all treated like tourists, welcome to watch and spend, but not to act on their own. A domesticated national cultural place cannot be appropriated by local residents, it has already been reduced to a single meaning, and is closed to dialogic intervention.

So, it is not only the foreign, exotic space that is subject to domestication by the marketplace. Domestication also describes a process that produces places of the state from a former landscape of local spaces. The nation-state domesticates local histories (which are dangerous to national “unity”) into a single national history. But why do we tend to allow the state this process as a feature of its own production? And what are the tactics (in de Certeau's sense) that can re-hybridize a domesticated locale? This is a central problematic for my research.

Domesticated bodies

The other result of practices of domestication are domesticated bodies, bodies that are trained to act within the norms for self control. The presence of domesticated bodies in a space is vital to the ongoing domestication of the space. When all others in a space are behaving “appropriately,” the undomesticated body becomes marked and available to the attention of institutions that maintain surveillance (the police, local merchants, neighbors).

“ If some of the crowd's actions can be seen as countertheatre, this is by no means true of all. For a third characteristic of popular action was the crowd's capacity for swift direct action. To be one of a crowd, or a mob, was another way of being anonymous, whereas to be a member of a continuing organization was bound to expose one to detection and victimization. The eighteenth-century crowd well understood its capacities for action, and its own art of the Possible. Its successes must be immediate, or not at all. It must destroy these machines, intimidate these employers or dealers, damage that mill, enforce from their masters a subsidy of bread, untile that house, before troops came on the scene”
(Thompson 1993, 69).

When enough people find personal reasons to disattend to the “rules” of bodily domestication, then the tables turn, and it is the domesticated individual who becomes marked. The sudden turn that transforms a “crowd” into a “mob” is often mistakenly given as an example of this. But this transformation is more often a counter tactic with a direct, collective purpose in mind...and not well suited as an example of un-domestication. Undomestication, which occurs in festivals, is linked to an individual distancing from domestication, and is not liable to the “mass” effects that result in a mob.

So too, Buford’s (1992) accounts of riotous football (soccer) fans showed that they used their numbers to confound the usual police response to individual crimes, rushing en masse into convenience stores and stealing absolutely everything, then using the empty racks to break the windows before rushing back out again onto the street. Like a flock of small birds distracting the hawk, the crowd enables lawlessness by submerging the individual into its mass.

Undomestication

I will take a better example from a work experience I had. In a large organization in which I was working as a writer there was a once a year “retreat” for all of the executives. This day-long event sent virtually all of the bosses off to a local resort for a day of pep-talks, strategizing, and conversation (later I became one of these and joined in this event). But that day was also a day when the remainder of the workers—the people who actually did most of the work in the office—were left unsupervised. Within an hour the entire space had been reinvented. Impromptu games (a football was tossed around until it broke a lamp) were assembled. People from different departments began to talk with one another, using the director’s office (with its plush furniture) as a base for gripes about the general office situation. Orders went out for pizza to be delivered. Dresses and sports coats were exchanged for jeans and t-shirts. There were two people who did not find entré into this transformation. The telephone receptionist was required to answer the phones, but between calls she signalled her desire to belong to the games. The director’s secretary tried in the first hour to assert her authority and maintain office “decorum.” She was unable to do so, and thereafter was “marked” as a possible snitch. While she stayed in her own office most of the day, when she wandered about, her presence provoked an irritated hush among those in close proximity.

The domesticated space and bodies of office workers is linked to the authority of superiors, and to the economic consequences of actions in their presence. This means it is weak form of domestication, or even a mere show of this. There are more durable forms. The domestication of public space, particularly in a democratic society where authority is legitimated in an inverse relation to its exercise (shooting into a crowd becomes illegitimate as soon as it happens, although the police have this authority), must be enforced through “voluntary” compliance.

This compliance is accomplished by a discipline, the desired outcome of which is a repertoire of proper behaviors, and an orthopostural (SEE: orthoposture) attitude toward these behaviors. Domestication of the body (and the resulting decorum) is acquired as an aspect of individual identity through body schooling. What results is the Public Body.