Paper short abstract:

Indonesians describe the imitation of foreign cultural forms through the idiom of latah (a syndrome characterised by compulsive imitation following startle). This is leading to new ways of pathologising and experiencing both cultural transformation and neuropsychiatric difference.

Paper long abstract:

Latah is an ostensibly ‘culture-bound’ neuropsychiatric syndrome found across the Malay World. The classic form of latah that has preoccupied researchers to date involves a heightened startle response followed by compulsive imitation and/or a state of high suggestibility. Yet Indonesians also speak of a ‘second type of latah’ hitherto unacknowledged in the literature, in which the startle of novelty leads to the (allegedly) mindless and compulsive imitation of foreign cultural forms. This paper investigates what it is at stake in using the idiom of latah to comment on cultural transformations, and how such usage can influence attempts to mould or safeguard Indonesian futures.

For some Indonesians, the latah idiom grounds globalisation in such an inherently mimetic ethnopsychology that the only way to protect Indonesian culture is to shelter its population from foreign startle. Others use hypnosis to propagate Islamic forms of latah as a prophylactic against the imitation of immoral foreignness. The paper thus shows the navigation, evaluation and affective experience of cultural transformation to be significantly mediated by ethnopsychologies of imitation and the neuropsychiatric ecologies that give rise to them. At the same time, however, the use of the idiom of latah to comment on globalisation is changing attitudes towards ‘classic latah’ sufferers, who are increasingly viewed as themselves ‘following a trend’ and subjected to treatment regimes that seek to interrupt that behavioural pathway. The pathologisation of globalisation is thus leading to new ways of pathologising – and experiencing – neuropsychiatric difference.

Paper short abstract:

Using participant observation, this paper explores Ryousangata as a non-Western modernity. It suggests Ryousangata embraces the absence of authenticity, thus redefining traditional fashion notions. Subsequently, this deepens our insight into the dynamics of cultural identity in a globalized world.

Paper long abstract:

How does the Ryousangata fashion phenomenon in Tokyo challenge the traditional Western grammars of fashion? Existing studies in this area have adopted Western-centric frameworks where authenticity is typically considered a defining element. Moreover, they have used ad hoc methodological techniques with minimum quantitative elements. Accordingly, this paper strives to improve the status quo. First, it draws on the concept of non-Western modernities to guide its analysis and demonstrate how Ryousangata does not align with Western expectation. Second, it implements a comprehensive original survey, informed by qualitative interviews, of young adults in Japan who engage with the Ryousangata fashion phenomenon. Subsequently, the results indicate that the absence of authenticity is a defining characteristic of Ryousangata. As a consequence, Ryousangata represents a shift towards a more fluid and dynamic understanding of style, where reinterpretation, hybridization, and imitation are valued as legitimate forms of creative expression. These results, then, emphasize the relevance of non-Western modernity theory in understanding and interpreting fashion dynamics. Furthermore, they deepen our insight into the complexity of global modernity and contribute to broader conversations about the role of imitation in expressing cultural identity.

Paper short abstract:

The figure of the Indian call centre worker has inspired popular representation as also scholarly work over the last twenty years. This paper examines the mimetic work of the subjects of this economy in these accounts—accent, comportment, desire—as symptoms to read the pathologies of a global world.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last twenty years, the figure of the Indian call centre worker has inspired popular representation as either the poster child of globalization on the one hand, or in Praful Bidwai's term, “cyber-coolie” on the other. At the same time, a substantial body of scholarly work has focused on the experience and specificities of call centre work. In looking back and reviewing this literature, I juxtapose it with popular representations on call centre work in India, in order to ask how the seemingly mimetic work of the subjects of this economy—accent, comportment, desire—may allow us a window into the pathologies inherent to imitation in a globalized world. I examine documentary, popular film, and fiction to ask how one might in hindsight locate the period of the 2000s as a set of symptoms to read the global economy's foray into India as distinctly pathological.

The French historian, literary critic and philosopher, René Girard famously theorized desire as mimetic and contagious. For Girard (1965), the fundamental impasse of human desire is that it is the other’s desire; in other words, he posits the true nature of desire to be a chimera because it functions only through an endless hall of mirrors. In this paper, I locate the work of desire as operationalized and made manifest through imitation in a manner distinguishing it from both Naipaul's tragic mimic man, or Bhabha's unintentionally subversive one, and instead as a symptom of a pathological globalization, nevertheless continuous with the colonial project.

Paper short abstract:

Children must learn how -as well as who- it is appropriate to imitate. I present imitation events amongst children in Helsinki and discuss the emotions and reactions evoked by “inappropriate” imitation. I consider what this indicates about both social learning norms and “pathological” imitation.

Paper long abstract:

Imitation underpins human social learning mechanisms, and from an early age, children are prone to imitating others in their social worlds. Anthropological accounts have highlighted a prestige bias in social learning, indicating that children must learn who to imitate. Less attention has been paid to the fact that children also need to learn how and when to imitate in socially appropriate or normative ways.

Here, I draw on ethnographic data collected amongst children in Helsinki, Finland, to analyse the complex and nuanced responses to “imitation events” occurring during their everyday lives. In several cases, children or adults reacted negatively to being imitated, typically with annoyance or irritation; I consider how such reactions help children to recognise the inappropriateness of imitation in particular contexts. In others, imitation was explicitly used to mock - rather than flatter – a peer or sibling. Here, I focus on these events that involved “inappropriate” imitation, exploring what kinds of emotions and reactions were evoked in the involved parties before, during, and after the event and identifying what aspects of the imitation made it “inappropriate” and how this was communicated.

I argue that studying children as they learn and practice how to imitate makes the social norms and moral-ethical codes that underpin normative imitation practices more explicit. I also discuss how the developmental approach can help us to understand so-called “pathological” imitation in adults, since many of these behaviours may be common – but soon learnt to be socially inappropriate - in young children.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the multiple ways in which young Syrian men engage in processes of mimetic self-alteration in order to explore and inhabit their new worlds in Berlin. It examines how this mimetic semiotic play becomes equal parts empowering and threatening to notions of self and identity.

Paper long abstract:

Ahmed is a Syrian refugee I got to know during my ethnographic research with asylum seekers in Berlin between the years of 2017-2022. He had a reputation among his group of friends for being a little bit eccentric, but it still came as a surprise when he unceremoniously told a group of us that he had converted to Christianity. Since his arrival in Berlin, Ahmed had lived in a church and he explained away his decision as a simple attempt to make the people he lived around more comfortable, insisting he’d just convert back to Islam when he left. Yet the concern remained and shortly after he left one of his friends said simply, “religion is not a haircut!”. I found the phrase compelling because it directly addressed another puzzle. Almost all of the young, male, Syrian refugees I knew had grown out their hair after arriving in Berlin, wearing it in a bun at the back of their heads. None had long hair in Syria. That this surprisingly patterned form of expression seemed to share in a certain kind of Berliner, hipster/male/vegan/upper-class aesthetic identity did not elude me. I wondered - did their hair represent a kind of mimetic improvisation that aimed to ease their entry into Berliner life? What, then, separated religion from a haircut? This paper explores the way refugees navigate the mimetic expectations of their new worlds, exploring when it becomes about semiotic play and when it appears to cut too close to the bone.

Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the use of hypnosis to alleviate cases of ghost possession by Indian Punjabi rationalists, which invites criticism by other rationalists for enacting the pathological imitation of the holy-man phenomenon they otherwise seek to challenge.

Paper long abstract:

The phenomenon of the Indian rationalist activist who employs imitation as a method for rooting out the social pathology of the unbridled exploitation by holy-men of their followers has been well documented. Like hunters who transform their bodies into the image of their prey the better to catch them, activists dress up as holy men all the better to unmask and expose the ‘personality cult’.

This paper reflects on another form of imitative practice engaged in by Punjabi rationalists, whose controversial use of hypnosis invites criticism from rationalists elsewhere for reproducing the exploitative holy-man pathology that they otherwise seek to challenge. This occurs in particular when activists are confronted with cases of ghost possession, when they are accused of imitating holy-men in an attempt to remove the ailment. As one activist explains: ‘Before hypnotizing a person, you have to show her that you are a great personality to help hypnotize and influence’. Of course, in their school visits and street theatre they continue to seek to educate people about the non-existence of spirits, but it is also striking how they are willing in certain situations to suspend the educative project, viz. to dispel belief in ghosts, in order to exorcise ghosts and ameliorate the patient’s mental health in the here and now – a practice that sets these rationalists apart from rationalists elsewhere. Appropriating the affordances of a ‘superstitious’ practice to subvert it, while leaving its ontological premises intact, they prioritise social work over the wider rationalist educational project.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyses the practices and pathologizations of imitation and its contradictions in contemporary social protest movements in Germany and argues for the attempt to entagle the mess without forgetting to acknowledge the authenticity of imitation.

Paper long abstract:

In the current political debate in Germany, opposing groups that differentiate themselves from one another through the dichotomous attributions of being left-wing or right-wing and tend to deny their political opponents their moral and/or intellectual capacity and pathologize them as stupid and/or insane. The mutual accusation of consciously or unconsciously imitating the behaviour of the political opponent plays a decisive role in this debate, resulting in a kaleidoscope of mutual accusations of imitations that are not without a certain irony when right-wing actors adopt traditionally left-wing forms of protest, privileged classes present themselves as marginalized victims or left-wing actors use traditionally right-wing arguments. Based on anthropological fieldwork among protesters for and against the state imposed measures to contain the spread of SARS-CoV-2 during Corona times and the following protests in post-Corona times, this presentation analyses the practices and pathologizations of imitation and its contradictions in contemporary social protest movements in Germany and argues for the attempt to entangle the mess without forgetting to acknowledge the authenticity of imitation.

Paper short abstract:

Litigation before the Indian Supreme Court construes the exalted Jain ritual fast to death as criminal suicide. This paper examines the fast as a socially imitative phenomenon of voluntary death, but also its legal and moral distinctions from pathologies of suicide or the category of social evil.

Paper long abstract:

In Indian judicial rulings on personal law and cases involving legislative attempts to regulate social life, religious ethical discourses have often intersected with state discourses and concerns about what practices are considered constitutionally “protected” versus socially “pathological” for citizens and communities. Since 2015, Jain communities have defended the voluntary ritual fast until death known as sallekhanā, practiced mostly by elderly laywomen, against claims formalized in Public Interest Litigation that voluntarily fasting to death constitutes suicide, even under conditions of terminal illness, and that glorification of the fast as an ideal or exemplary death constitutes its abetment. Suicide and its abetment remain crimes under the Indian Penal Code, though the law has moved away from punitive measures and toward a therapeutic approach with the Indian Mental Healthcare Act of 2017. However, the presumption of social pressure frames the fast as a social evil disproportionately affecting vulnerable women that follows a pattern of contagion, like sati or widow immolation. Jains vehemently deny that sallekhanā is suicide, and the number of sallekhanā fasts has seen a sharp uptick since the case was filed in 2006, from estimates of 200 annually to 500 or more. This paper explores the uses and limitations of Durkheim’s terms, anthropologically examining how sallekhanā has been pathologized as harboring a risk of suicide contagion amid competing reformist logics of the state and psychiatric discourses. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, I further consider how that risk of contagion remains implicitly gendered because of women’s assumed suggestibility.

Paper short abstract:

The rural lower class is increasingly represented in Romanian media as mimicking unsavory Western models of success. Such negative portrayals advance a view of lower class mimesis akin to what used to be perceived as the „savage” mode of imitation, thus contributing to social polarization.

Paper long abstract:

The most popular TV comedy show in post-socialist Romania puts forward grossly mimetic characters. A young man recently returned from Italy, where he’s learnt to comb his hair backwards in the generic Mafioso style, or the tavern keeper wearing a cowboy hat and heavy golden jewelry are designed to perpetuate negative stereotypes of Romanian peasants. These representations of mimesis are thus putting into visual discourse the clear distinction between urban elites and rural lower classes while also providing a postmodernist construction of the post-rural environment as a place of unenlightened imitation of Western success. This paper use a socio-semiotic approach to illustrate that imitation in the show isn’t represented as the typical indigenous mimetic practice, where the essence of Western power is sought and diverted to the local signifying system. Rather, it’s represented as attempts to discard the traditional cultural matrix and replace it with hollow signs of the power of a dominant cultural force. Mimesis is represented as imperfect control of semiotic codes, aping models of success which are also discredited by the educated urban class. Simply put, the characters are shown to imitate the wrong models. Thus, the actual sense of incongruity (Lempert 2014) may come less from the actual representation of aping in the show and more from the creators’ mimetic positioning within what is generally perceived as the „correct” Western subjectivity – one which disregards both the imitating peasants and their models.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines imitation as a cultural pathology in the transnational context of caste. Building on the imitation models of Sanskritisation and Sikhisation of Hinduism and Sikhism, the paper illustrates the ways in which imitation operates as a cultural pathology within these imitational models

Paper long abstract:

Sanskritisation is referred to as the emulation of Brahmin’s way of life by non-Brahmins or lower castes. Similarly, the imitation of higher-caste Sikhs by lower-caste Sikhs is described as “Sikhisation”. However, the two concepts – Sanskritisation and Sikhisation – differ fundamentally, although the basis of their formation is governed by a common element: imitation. Drawing on the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s concept of “imitation”, this paper explores imitation as a cultural pathology. In the case of Sikhisation, for instance, imitation is capable of the formation of an alternative religion by denouncing religious and cultural dominance of the higher-caste Sikhs. Ravidasis, the lower-caste Sikhs, have denounced dominant Sikhism due to its prevalent caste discrimination and social exclusion and adopted new religious lifestyle through the process of Sikhisation. Sanskritisation on the other hand contains the consciousness of its imitators, the lower-caste Hindus, which is potentially subversive of Brahmanical social order. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among Hindu and Sikh migrants in Britain, this paper examines how imitation operates as a cultural pathology in a transnational context of caste. It unravels the myth that imitation of Brahmins (or Sanskritisation) is in the interest of lower-caste Hindus by exploring simultaneously the concept of Sikhisation. Indeed, the paper explores Sikhisation as a means that helps build the lower castes a new religious alternative upon which socio-religious struggles are launched in everyday life.