Anthropology as a Global Chain?
The web changes the way in which we do research and reading. It seems as if its always been this easy to get stuff, but its really only a few years since google and e journals combined became really effective. Its now possible to find almost everything ever written on a topic across disciplines and times, certainly that which was published in the journals now in JSTOR. And this makes new connections and chance discoveries possible, as well as the deliberate searching out of old thinkers. Last week I found a gem of an essay by Mary Douglas called The Hotel Kwilu. A Model of a Model and which had appeared in American Anthropologist in 1989. The essay is a commentary on the lack of connection between anthropology and the world, including the world of other social sciences. Mary Douglas likens this state of isolation to that of the Sheraton style hotel where she had stayed on a revisit to her fieldwork villages in what was then Zaire, a hotel which was perfectly fine but which was not connected to any national infrastructure. There were taps and a bathroom, but no running water. There were light fittings but no electricity. The hotel was in a state of anticipated and optimistic readiness for incorporation into a system from which it was excluded. I am sure all of us have stayed at similar places.
Anthropology has changed a bit since then. So have hotels in rural Africa. But not always in the ways anticipated back in the 1980’s. Connection to international media via satelite television and mobile phone networks is now quite common for even quite local hotels in Tanzania for example. Connection to water less usual. The direction of change is equally unpredictable in anthropology. Anthropology today is more likely to study transnational communities, interstitial social settings and social movements than in the 1980s. We are also looking at bigger issues. From our own singular perspectives. Perhaps where the Sheraton analogy still apt is in this replication of what makes this perspective institutionally possible across much of the world. Despite neoliberalism, cuts in public education and so on, globally, it seems to me that there have never been more anthropology departments in universities and never more anthropologists. What are the implications of this? Are university departments of anthropology part of a global chain? And how diverse are the different institutional products of different countries and regions?
bq. Anthropology today is more likely to study transnational communities, interstitial social settings and social movements than in the 1980s. We are also looking at bigger issues.
I just want to caution against the idea that MIGHT be implicit here, namely that by looking at bigger groups of people, more connected to the rest of the world, we are looking at “bigger issues.” Sometimes true, perhaps, but one of the strengths of anthropology has always been the contention that people everywhere are relevant to wha tit means to be human. Reading the above I was reminded of something said at the memerial service for Valerio Valeri, about the which he found important things to say about humanity as a whole by studying a community of a few hundred people.
Touched by Comet Jo’s comment, I Googled my way to Valerio Valeri’s obituary, where I found the following comment from Marshall Sahlins,
How can we, I wonder, situate what we discover among the handfuls of people whose lives we get to know relatively well in a way that is informed by a more general intellectual significance? Without, that is, returning to the grand narratives of science, progress, salvation or redemption that not only shaped the thinking of our previous generations but continue to shape the thinking of the movers and shakers, policymakers, consumers, tyrants and terrorists whose actions shape the world we inhabit?
A follow-up on Mary Douglas: Besides finding Douglas’ ideas “good to think,” I admire the way in which she pursued the project of finding larger intellectual arenas in which to develop her insights, even reaching out to co-author books with colleagues from other academic disciplines. Thus, from Wikipedia,
Or, from an Amazon reader review by Thomas H. Hall, of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The World of Goods.
AHEM. Yes well Mary Douglas is doubtless well aware of the importance of producing relevant works — now more than ever it seems that what we need to make sense of our globalized world is ANOTHER BOOK ABOUT DEUTORONOMY.
Ok I\’m done now :)
Seriously though, I think the thing that has changed in anthropology (although it has always been true to a certain extent) is that now \’they read what we write\’ and that this removes the social distance between anthropologists and their research subjects that was previously so comfortable.
Rex, are you referring, perhaps, to Leviticus as Literature, which an Amazon.co.uk customer review describes as,
Actually, I was splitting the difference between _Leviticus as Literature_ and _In The Wilderness_, which is on Numbers.
Seriously, if a distinguished anthropologist in her 70s, who has written several books attempting to demonstrate the relevance of social anthropology to thinking about major themes in contemporary culture (the nature of risk and the significance of consumer goods), returns to the materials that first attracted her attention and stimulated the interest in risk, blame and taboo that has shaped all her work….Who are we to be snide. She has done far more than anyone here has or is likely to do to bring anthropology to bear on issues of intellectual significance outside the narrow bounds of our field and, IMHO, deserves our respect for doing so.
Besides, writing about the Bible is likely to do more to bring anthropology to the attention of people who could seriously use its influence than any number of articles and books that are, at the end of the day, addressed to only a tiny handful of humanity, including both the people studied and the scholars at the intersection of particular theoretical and geographical interests.
Plus! If you consider the New Testament and the Qur’an as successful mutations of the Biblical mode of political communication (addressing people who recognize themselves in the text–a massive end-run around both state sovereignty and local identity that ends up generative of both), then Deuteronomy wouldn’t be such a bad entree to thinking about our globalized globe. I don’t know if that’s exactly what Douglas is doing but her dismantling of the category of “scapegoat” [“The Go-Away Goat” in Rolf Rendtorff and Robert Kugler, eds., The Book of Leviticus: Composition and Reception. VTSupp vol. 93 (Leiden: Brill, 2003) 121-41] is wonderful.
Concerning the Bible as jumbo transhistorical interpellation, I’m just finishing trying to argue this at book length (see Sanders, The Invention of Hebrew and the Formation of Ancient Israel, 2007 G*d willing)