EXTREME MASCULINITIES (1) Special Issue
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EXTREME MASCULINITIES (1) Special Issue Journal of Extreme Anthropology ISSN: 1 2535-3241 Extreme Masculinities (1): Special Issue Vol. 1, No. 3, December 2017 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ Cover image: Henry Moncrieff Zabaleta Cover design: Tereza Kuldova Journal of Extreme Anthropology Special Issue, Vol.1, No. 3, December 2017, ISSN: 2535-3241 FRITT journal, University of Oslo. Produced with support of the University of Oslo. Based on an international conference Extreme Masculinities, organized at the University of Vienna, 29th Sep. - 1st Oct. 2017, with support of Zukunftsfonds der Republik Österreich and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. 2 EDITORIAL Tereza Kuldova Extreme Masculinities 1 is a special issue that emerged out of the international conference Extreme Masculinities, which I have organized on behalf of the Extreme Anthropology Research Network (www.extreme-anthropology.com) at the University of Vienna between 28th September and 1st October 2017. This is the first of two special issues of JEA devoted to the topic. In this issue, you will find a range of articles on exciting and thought-provoking topics. Henrik H. Mikkelsen explores the dynamics of headhunting among the Bugkalot in the Philippines, showing how empathy can paradoxically allow violence to achieve its transformative power. Graham Roberts draws us into the Russian fashion world and the politics of style. Lisa Nike Bühring thinks through aging of men under neoliberalism and The Expendables. Marco Pedroni explores the lives of gamblers in Italy through the notion of excess. Jukka Jouhki offers us an analysis of online poker ads and the hyperreal. Adina R. Sverdlin draws us into the impoverished neighborhoods in Western Mexico City, and traces the life trajectories of the members of bandas, under the city’s neoliberal transformations over the last decades. Fabian Hartwell explores the convergence of masculinity, terrorism, and the Indian state, through the case of the Kashmiri separatist Burhan Wani. Udith Dematagoda offers us an insightful review essay of the recent book on the alt-right, Kill All Normies by Angela Nagel. I contribute a book review of The Rise of the Right by Steve Hall, Simon Winlow, and James Treadwell, a brilliant book analyzing the English Defence League within the political and socio- economic context of the transformation of the last decades. Finally, Henry Moncrieff closes this issue with a photo essay on cockfighting in Venezuela. We hope you enjoy reading this issue! 3 CONTENTS Articles Facehunting Empathy, Masculinity and Violence Among the Bugkalot Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen (5-17) Angels with Dirty Faces Gosha Rubchinskiy and the Politics of Style Graham H. Roberts (18-40) Men Refusing to Be Marginalised Aged Tough Guys in The Expendables and The Expendables 2 Lisa-Nike Bühring (41-60) Extreme Losers On Excess and Profitless Expenditure of Male Gamblers Marco Pedroni (61-82) The Hyperreal Gambler On the Visual Construction of Men in Online Poker Ads Jukka Jouhki (83-101) Bandas beyond their ‘Ethnographic Present’ Neoliberalism and the Possibility of Meaning in Mexico City Adina Radosh Sverdlin (102-124) Burhan Wani and the Masculinities of the Indian State Fabian Hartwell (125-138) Review Essay Revenge of the Nerds Recidivist Masculinity, Identity Politics and the Online ‘Culture Wars’ Udith Dematagoda (139-148) Book Review What Drives the Rise of the Right? Tereza Kuldova (149-154) Photo Essay Cockfighting in Venezuela Capitalist Paroxysm within a State Controlled Economy Henry Moncrieff (155-165) 4 Article Facehunting Empathy, Masculinity and Violence Among the Bugkalot Henrik Hvenegaard Mikkelsen University of Copenhagen Abstract This article discusses how anthropological explorations of empathy can be enriched through a focus on transgression. Empathy is commonly understood as a human capacity that allows a person to share the feelings of others through some form of mental engagement. Thereby, it is believed, empathy establishes compassionate relationships between people and prevents violence from breaking out. In this article, I suggest the opposite may be the case: in fact, empathy may be the very foundation for acts of radical violence and killings. The ethnographic basis of my inquiry is research conducted among the Bugkalot (Ilongot) of northern Philippines on the practice of headhunting. I propose that empathy is what allows violence to achieve its transformative capacity. Furthermore, I seek to show how understanding headhunting as ‘murder’ may disclose how this particular act is tied to masculine ideals of autonomy. Headhunting, I argue, targets not the head but the ‘face,’ that is, it strikes at the very fulcrum of the ethical relation and the foundation of empathy. Keywords Bugkalot, Ilongot, headhunting, empathy, transgression, violence This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists me in her face, is her face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’ Levinas, Totality and Infinity ‘It is not easy! It is a hard task!’ … In 2010, I was having a discussion with Tó’paw, a 60- year-old Bugkalot man, about the practice ritual headhunting, ngayó, which involved cutting off the head of the victim. He was irritated that this form of killing, which was largely abandoned as a common practice in the Sierra Madre Mountains of northern Philippines in the 1970s, was today talked about among the youth as if it was merely some type a ‘game.’ It seemed vital to him that I understood that ngayó had deep and at times devastating effects on the dima mamotog— ‘the ones who cut.’ ‘I once had the experience that I could not hold on to my bolo,’ he continued. ‘I had to hold it with both of my hands. This was not just because of fear. To kill a human this way is hard. It’s a big thing for the young man who succeeds in this endeavour. It is supposed to be demanding.’ In this article, I examine a form of masculinity that manifests itself through transgression. In this sense, not only is it ‘demanding’ to kill another person—it is, within the context of headhunting, supposed to be demanding. Ngayó refers to the type of DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jea.4877 Journal of Extreme Anthropology, Vol.1, No. 3.: 5-17, ISSN: 2535-3241 5 headhunting that made the Bugkalot1 rise to scholarly fame through the works of Michelle Rosaldo (1980, 1983, 1984) and Renato Rosaldo (1980, 2004). It is a collective event that circles around the intentional beheading of a human person. And the treatment of the victim’s body during ngayó seems surprisingly brutal: after the victim had been ambushed and shot, his or her head was cut off at the neck, preferably in one determined strike with the headhunting knife, the tek-yaden, and was subsequently tossed to the ground with all the force that the killer could muster in a final deed known as balabag. This treatment of the head (or rather, the face) was part of a transformative act that ultimately aimed to render the man autonomous as he was no longer dominated by chaotic emotions of shame, and anger. This situation requires us to reconsider key questions concerning the role of empathy in relation to violence, especially in the way empathy tends to be considered as being antithetical to violence. Empathy, in this conventional view, is based on the pre-reflexive experience of the affective and experiential world of others as analogous to our own. This phenomenological engagement in the world is implicit in our recognition of others as members of our moral community. Empathy, then, involves a moral commitment to others, a certain proximity, which commands us not to kill. This idea is present in Zygmund Bauman’s book, Modernity and the Holocaust, in which he reveals a Levinasian inspiration in his thinking. He argues that our sense of responsibility for other people is dependent upon proximity. Thus, morality ‘looms large and thick close to the eye. With the growth of distance, responsibility for the other shrivels, moral dimensions of the object blur, till both reach the vanishing point and disappear from view’ (Bauman 1989, 192). Writing about the famous experiment conducted by the psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University, Bauman argues that ‘it is difficult to harm a person we touch. It is somewhat easier to afflict pain upon a person we only see at a distance’ (Bauman 1989, 155). Rather than holding that Bauman is incorrect, I will argue that a form of violence exists that is nourished by exertion. This type of violence is transgressive through and through and would and in fact does only exist due to being difficult to carry out. This article contributes to current attempts to expand the category of empathy and to explore the ways in which empathy may be culturally patterned (Throop 2010, 771). The task would be, as Nils Bubandt and Rane Willerslev recently phrased it, to move beyond ‘the implicit idea that empathy is always a moral virtue and instead embrace a broader approach that also encompass its darker, but no less social side’ (Bubandt and Willerslev 2015, 6). They argue that empathetic engagement with others may, in certain situations, not have intersubjective compassion and mutual understanding as its goal, and likewise the end-result may not always be a stronger social cohesion. In fact, the opposite may be the case. Empathy can be used for deceptive and ultimately violent purposes: the capacity for imagining the vantage point and emotional life of another person may also provide a way to manipulate, abuse, and dehumanize that person. 1 For reasons that go beyond the scope of this article, the Bugkalot gradually changed their name during the 1970s. They began to be known as the E’gongot, meaning ‘from the forest/mountain,’ by the lowlanders and subsequently became widely known as the Ilongot within the anthropological literature through the ethnographic works of Renato Rosaldo (e.g., 1980, 2004) and Michelle Rosaldo (e.g., 1980, 1983).