Deborah Bird Rosethe ancestral providers. Double death puts her in double jeopardy.
The rivers are rapidly deteriorating from erosion and, even more se-
verely at this time, from the invasion of noxious weeds. It is probable
that in the near future riverine ecologies will collapse, and with that
collapse the possibility for living people to go fishing and feed their
families will be radically impaired, if not completely obliterated. For
Jessie, then, there is a doubling up: first her own death as a living per-
son, and subsequently, her obliteration as a nurturer within a flour-
ishing country.
I can imagine that there could be yet another form of obliteration—
a triple death, perhaps, with anthropology as a contributor. As schol-
ars, we are vulnerable to being colonized by reductionisms and to re-
inscribing their legitimacy by refusing to name and challenge their
power. Our boundaries around what is sayable, and our elisions that
treat as real only that which can be subject to constricted modes of
social analysis, have the potential either to excise a great range of ex-
perience and knowledge, or to drag it back into the familiar, thus de-
priving it of its own real power.
The concept of multiple death requires us to think about what is
happening in the world. Death is overpowering life, and some of our
practices may facilitate this violent thrust of entropy. Normative mo-
dernity’s progressive emptying of the human capacity to imagine non-
human life in subjectively vibrant forms of self-realization, self-repair,
and self-organization is matched by practices outside and beyond an-
thropology that progressively are emptying the living world of its sub-
jectively vibrant life forms. Social and ecological entropy go hand in
hand. Anthropology’s silences have the potential to reduce or obliter-
ate much of what people have to say about the process and to excise
from the record much of the human evidence concerning violence. Fa-
bian ( 1991 ) demonstrates that anthropology has consistently allowed
itself to be deflected from the challenges of epistemology and enabled
itself to find a zone of security.
In contrast to security, Fabian contends that ethnographic knowl-
edge is an open process. His passionate and perhaps risky protest in
favor of a processually engaged anthropology returns me to a basic
question: who or what was I addressing when I called out to Jessie