At one point in in Kelty’s series of posts entitled “Is An Anthropology of Freedom Possible” (or something like that…) Matt made the remark that it might be more interesting to frame the question of “Anthropology of…” in new terms, of “Anthropology as…” This ingenious idea allows us to imagine our discipline’s potential and values by comparison to… well, pretty much anything. My post on “Anthropology as Velociraptor” will be coming next week but first I want to blog about the idea of anthropology as stand-in and interpreter.
The derives from a paper by Habermas about the plight of philosophy, but I think it offers an appealing way to think about anthropology’s relationship to the people it studies — and particularly its relationship with indigenous people.
Way Back In The 80s, Habermas faced a problem: for centuries philosophy had been the ultimate form of knowledge, grounding and subsuming all others. In this way, it had replaced theology by being the great ‘usher’ (I guess it sounds better in German) and ‘judge’ for all other forms of knowledge: directing them to their seats and arranging in them in order, explaining who they were and where they ought to go. It had, in other words, a great deal of epistemological authority — the same way that anthropologists at one point (we are told) has when it came to the colonized populations they studied. Then it all fell apart. Today it is difficult to find people who feel like their moral judgments and science classes can all be derived from Kant in Hegel — or anyone else for that matter. The story that Habermas tells of the fall of reason is complicated, but the solution that he suggests is more straightforward: that of philosophy as stand-in and interpreter.
The idea of ‘stand-in’ is meant to avoid two untenable positions. First, the idea that the sciences can by themselves create strong, universal claims about, for instance, human nature. This is a bad idea because, as anthropologists well know, a lot of time this just ends up resulting in the scientist discovering their cultural predispositions in the data and dressing them up as a philosophy of everything. Second, it prevents a situation where philosophers dictate a big theory of everything to scientists because they have somehow distilled it from all the big books they’ve read.
A stand-in or placeholder in this situation is a philosopher who uses disciplinarily specific skills of analysis to help create big-picture models of phenomena that technical specialists study. They are ‘placeholders’ for more ambitious and less realistic efforts and big-picture making who work together to clarify directions of research. Thus, for instance, philosophers of science can work together with historians of science to develop a broader and more universal model of how science works than either of them could separately. The same could be said (according to Habermas) of moral philosophy and cognitive science as they try to develop a strongly universal picture of moral psychology.
The notion of interpreter is equally straightforward: in an era of increasing specialization, the world needs generalists who can connect increasingly isolated spheres of research in order to make sure they can talk to one another. Philosophy’s ability to synthesize and generalize about different strands of work enable it, Habermas claims, to help connect the arts and the sciences, literature and biology, logic and experimentalism.
How would anthropology work as stand-in and interpreter? As the most ridiculously generalizing, holistic discipline on the planet, I think its role as interpreter has a lot of potential: anthropology is the discipline that already aspires to connect subfields that many would say have grown too specialized to be housed in the same department. I also find the notion of anthropology as ‘stand-in’ very attractive. Anthropologists have long sought a way to maintain their right and ability to know the human without thereby quashing the knowledge claims of the humans we study. Understanding our work as that of a stand-in or placeholder represents it as a translation of someone else’s point of view, one that allows us to make that viewpoint known to others, without arrogating it to ourselves. As the discipline that says “but not among the…” we are speaking for people who, if they chose and are able, to join our conversations.
Anthropologists have long used tropes of mediation, translation, and interpretation to describe the way we transduce knowledge and meaning across cultural boundaries. One particularly attractive way to imagine anthropologists as stand-in and interpreters is as mediators of anthropological work back not to the academy, but to our research subjects. Rather than telling them who they are, ought to be, or fail to be, I think this account helps us imagine anthropology as a discipline which can work closely with them to help them become whoever they want to be by offering our own account of them.
I’m still at the start of exploring these ideas so I’d be interested to see if these ideas resonate with anyone else.
One particularly attractive way to imagine anthropologists as stand-in and interpreters is as mediators of anthropological work back not to the academy, but to our research subjects. Rather than telling them who they are, ought to be, or fail to be, I think this account helps us imagine anthropology as a discipline which can work closely with them to help them become whoever they want to be by offering our own account of them.
I find myself wondering how this would work with the “peoples” I know best, the Chinese and the Japanese. Let’s just talk about China. What would it mean for me, the anthropologist, to work closely with a quarter of humanity to help them become whoever they want to be? I can imagine myself writing something that might be of interest to Chinese anthropologists. But who else am I helping here? Could it be the numerous Chinese who would like to see China restored to its proper place in world affairs, i.e., the hegemonic center to which all other states are tributary? Or those with the more modest ambition to see China recognized as a great power as well as an economic giant? How about those who would like to see Baidu replace Google as the Net’s preeminent search engine or the RMB replace the US dollar as the currency in which global trade is conducted?
These are, of course, extreme cases. But they do challenge what I read as the implicit assumption in Rex’s thinking that anthropologists work primarily with small groups on the margins of the world system. What about those of us who work with groups big enough that what they want are fifth columnists, or in some less noxious sense, friendly allies—since they don’t need social workers?
You consider _all_ Chinese people to be your research subjects? That would never have occurred to me.
Good stuff and challenging. Habermas is hard to get your head around sometimes. The project for anthropologists (or anyone for that matter) to work closely with people to “become whoever they want to be” is an educative project in the Freirean sense. Knowing the other in a subject-subject dialogical action way could be a role for anthropology because anthropology’s history and resistance in knowing the other without privilege or domination. I think the stand-in and interpreter is much needed in this period of anthropological illiteracy in our society, the sciences, and media.
We cannot seem to escape dominant ideas of the other, and end up in antidialogical (Freire) or disrupted communication (Habermas) relationships in our encounter with the other – this is true of international development work, social work, so called community-based approaches, education, etc. I don’t understand how this works beyond the encounters and relationships at a small scale, say when working with a group, but it could be that anthropologists can pitch in with understanding critical pedagogy efforts? I’ve read strong books/papers by anthropologists who have taken the time to understand and communicate with people – because of this they can deconstruct some of the relationships between say the NGO and community, or company and landowners. However, I don’t believe this is the same as working with people to become whoever they want to be. That is a project of education and social action, with theory from critical social psychology.
An excellent reference if you haven’t read it already is Reading Freire and Habermas: Critical pedagogy and transformative social change by Morrow and Torres.
@David Graeber
David, you put your finger very nicely on the absurdity to which I was pointing. By “subjects” Rex might have meant all and only the particular individuals whose lives he shares and studies. But even then the question of what we can do to help them become who they want to be remains fraught.
In the 1960s in Taiwan I encountered the Daoist healer whose rituals became the topic of my dissertation. Why did he announce to me one day that the Jade Emperor (the supreme deity in the lower Daoist pantheon) had appeared to him in a vision and said that I should become his disciple? I suspect that it had something to do with having another disciple adding to his prestige. That the disciple was American, in a context where the USA was Taiwan’s ally, major trading partner, and a superpower, so that having a relationship with one of its citizens might turn out to be useful some day may also have been a factor. Ditto for having an American scholar as a disciple, in a context where local intellectual elites and government bureaucrats considered what he did for a living rank superstition.
I should note, too, that my Daoist master was no babe in the woods. He had served in the Japanese military police in Manchuria during WWII (Taiwan was still a Japanese colony and Taiwanese were drafted into the Japanese army. Whether he was drafted or volunteered, I do not know). After the war, he and his brothers had set up the wholesale vegetable market in Taichung, the nearest regional city. He had come to Puli, the market town where I and my wife were doing fieldwork, to set up the market there, but wound up the loser in a fight over control of the market, after which he opened the small storefront temple where I met him.
Several years later, after I had moved to Japan and found employment with a large Japanese advertising agency, I visited Taiwan. My master had died, but his oldest son who had taken over the temple and healing practice had me over to dinner. As we talked, I finally broached a question that I had been too shy to ask his father: “What can you make, doing this sort of thing?” The son replied that, putting aside the family’s real estate investments and ownership of a local garage, the temple itself brought in X per month, where, to my surprise, X was on the same scale as my salary as a copywriter in Japan. He himself had inherited the business after traveling to the USA to try to set up a company producing plastic sandals in Taiwan. One of his brothers was the Assistant Principal of the local high school, one worked for an importer of Japanese construction machinery, and a third was in IT, working for Hewlett-Packard.
So lets try the question again at a somewhat less grandiose scale than all Chinese. What, specifically, can I do to help these people become who they want to be? That doesn’t seem at all obvious to me.
@John McCreery
Working with people to be whomever they want to be is easier to imagine or experience (in an educative sense) with small groups in the periphery and in certain contexts. However, I believe there are some possibilities beyond this scale, with globalized or transnational issues. For Habermas, the interpreter cannot be dominant in a subject-object relationship to the people (or issue), but must strive to be a participant in communication, a reflective partner in dialogue. Even with this theory, the interpreter has no special claim to truth, this can only come from the attempt to come to understanding with others and all that entails. This is a concept and role probably very familiar to some anthropologists (at least theoretically).
Critical social psychology, where Habermas and Freire sort of sit, supports the work of anthropologists who are striving to link the universal and local. I believe Morrow and Torres mentioned the work of ABS Preis “Human Rights as Cultural Practice: An Anthropological Critique” who’s approach defends a universal rights, but stresses that human rights practices should have a dialogical relation to local people. This helps us understand a more grounded idea of human rights as cultural practice, not some framework conceptualized in the “center” and dumped on the “periphery”. I also believe the work of James Ferguson in Lesotho and with Africa and a neoliberal world are examples of this sort of work.
@ dafzal
For what it’s worth, I am entirely in sympathy with the philosophical positions of Habermas and Freire as you describe them. At this level, I would like to suggest a third philosophical source, Stanley Cavell’s Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, especially the parts that deal, contra Plato, with Emersonian pedagogy and what Cavell calls “the conversation of justice.” The argument turns on two powerful metaphors. In one, the Platonic version, Truth is conceived as the peak of a mountain that all seekers after Truth must climb. There are many paths but only one Truth, and those higher up the mountain have both the right and the power to instruct those lower down. In the other, the Emersonian version, we see travelers crossing a great plain. The travelers have their own goals and learn different things from their disparate paths. When paths intersect, they may offer their experience as a model for others; but since they meet on the same plane (pun intended), no one occupies a higher position that entitles or empowers them to impose their views on the other.
My concern is the way in which philosophical propositions get argued without taking into account the material conditions that affect their implementation. Thus, in the case of James Ferguson’s work, I admire the intent and the argument. I remain skeptical that reading it would do much for an African farmer in Zimbabwe or an AIDS victim in Johannesburg or, conversely, that it will directly influence audiences with the power and resources to make a substantial difference. I am more impressed by projects like The Rural Women Solar Engineers of Africa.
John,
I have to agree with some of the previous comments — someone may have a problem with scale here, but its not me. Also, a major part of my argument was about decentering ethnographic authority and self confidence, so if you can’t imagine what people want from you… why not try asking them?
@Rex
Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough. I am trying to make two points: (1) The who are we talking about when we say that we want to help them become whoever they want to be is not a simple question and (2) what we can actually do, when push comes to shove, may have little to do with adding to anthropological knowledge.
Why do people cooperate with us? Personally, I have found Frank Cancian’s advice that many if not most people are happy to talk with anyone who takes a serious interest in them and what they are doing works most of the time. They may, of course, have secrets, from mildly embarrassing to outright criminal, to protect. They may also be busy and not like being interrupted. We have to respect both the secrets and wishes of the people whose lives we share.
We may–I am fortunate in this regard–work with smart people who are curious about what our research reveals. What I’m having trouble getting my head around is how we help other people become whoever they want to be, if all we have to put on the table is the sort of knowledge that makes up the bulk of ethnographic reporting and anthropological theorizing.
As I said to dafzal, I am sympathetic to the ideas that you are thinking about. But life has taught me to always ask, how do you implement that? When I start trying to imagine scenarios, the sorts of questions I’ve raised come to mind. Can you tell us a bit more about how what your are suggesting would work?
I do hope that my recent effusions haven’t crashed this conversation. The issues that Rex raises are important ones and my raising the issues (1) how do we do this and (2) for whom are not casual dismissals of the basic ideas. I particularly liked, in fact, his thought that,
As the most ridiculously generalizing, holistic discipline on the planet, [anthropology’s] role as interpreter has a lot of potential: anthropology is the discipline that already aspires to connect subfields that many would say have grown too specialized to be housed in the same department.
It’s the “stand-in” that bothers me. I find myself puzzled in the same way that I was reading Luke Lassiter’s The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. That we should treat our collaborators with respect, as colleagues? Check. That we should show them what we’ve written about them and give them the opportunity to respond to what we have written? Check, again. Both seem to me common courtesy and, given that I work people at the top of their game in the Japanese advertising world, I wouldn’t consider doing anything else.
Then, however, I come to the notion that our collaborators should be co-authors and have the right to control the content of what is written about them. If I were a journalist and treated my sources this way I would, quite properly, be accused of selling out.
Thinking about that issue has led me to be wary of the notion that our role as anthropologists is to stand-in, i.e., replace, the people whose lives we share and study, becoming, in effect, defense lawyers or, worse, PR flacks. That is when the “who are we doing this for?” issue acquires very sharp teeth, indeed.
I imagine myself working, like Lassiter, with Native Americans and trying to follow his advice. Who is it who gets to sign off on my work? Tribal elders? Young turks? Men? Women? Old? Young? The casino promoter? The advocate of return to a traditional way of life?
I am not saying that I know the answer. Plainly, I don’t. I’d welcome some ideas.
FWIW, Lassiter works in a context in which tribal governments have the authority to regulate research within their territories.
@MTBradley
How would you feel about a report of research conducted in China that conformed to the Politburo’s priorities or research on corporations constrained by what the CEOs and PR departments allow? Is legally legitimate authority sufficient reason to limit research topics and censor research findings?
Having no particular reason to assume that tribal government officials are any more saintly than the usual run of politicians and office holders, I predict a decidedly chilling effect on any research that challenges the sacred cows of the current powers-that-be.
I could be wrong, of course. Maybe there are mechanisms in place to prevent what, in other contexts, would be called censorship or labeled selling out. If so, please tell us about them.
This conversation touches on a number of themes I’m currently wrestling with as I engage in discussions with representatives of an indigenous community in South America regarding my proposed fieldwork (my first).
Rex wrote:
“Rather than telling them who they are, ought to be, or fail to be, I think this account helps us imagine anthropology as a discipline which can work closely with them to help them become whoever they want to be by offering our own account of them.”
This sounds like an enlightened approach, but consider the analogous situation of having a conversation with an individual about his or her life, personal struggles, etc. Now, it would be one thing for me to offer this person an account, an interpretation of what I have heard. But it would be quite another thing to publish that account for all the world to see. I like the idea of anthropologists being “mediators of anthropological work back not to the academy, but to our research subjects”, but most of us can’t avoid the fact that we’re also publishing for a wider audience, and this raises all sorts of ethical questions regarding the possible repercussions of what we publish.
A totally frank interpretation of an individual’s situation based on that person divulging personal details would only be appropriate, it seems to me, either in a private context or in a published biography after a person has died. (I’m reminded here of a comment I heard in an interview with John Gaddis about writing biography: he described why, after a certain elderly politician had opened up to him about a range of private matters, Gaddis felt he could only write the biography well after that politician was no longer living.)
The predicament of ethnography is different, but there are similar constraints. In my research context, indigenous representatives seem to be invested in promoting certain representations of themselves, and it appears difficult to gain their trust (and permission to enter their communities) without implicitly (or even explicitly) agreeing to support these representations to some degree. Meanwhile, some more traditionalist representatives disagree with the agenda of the indigenous political leaders, and it would be difficult to publish anything without effectively bolstering the agenda of one side or the other. (Even simply writing about the degree of conflict could undermine the political leaders’ agenda of displaying unity.)
(In the past, this predicament was easier to avoid: one anthropologist who wrote a book in English on the area simply refused to give permission for it to be published in Spanish; but such strategies are no longer tenable or desirable.)
Peter Elass and Kirsten Hastrup wrote an insightful article entitled “Anthropological Advocacy: A Contradiction in Terms?”*, which touches on a number of these themes and also happens to be about the same area I am studying. When Rex wrote, “we are speaking for people who…”, I don’t think he really meant that we speak *for* anyone, but I was reminded of this passage from the Elsass and Hastrup article:
“‘Speaking for’ someone presupposes that one knows who he is. The idea of natives as speaking with one voice, their culture having been reduced to the lowest common denominator, no longer passes for truth in anthropology. Our ‘objects’ are active subjects speaking with as many voices as we. Furthermore, what informants speak is not ‘cultural truths’ but situational responses to the presence of the anthropologist (Clifford 1986:107).” (p. 304)
But ultimately Elsass and Hastrup argue for a position that I think is in line with what Rex is proposing. After explaining why they chose not to get involved in an advocacy project but instead to stick to neutral academic writing, they comment:
“Academic discourse provides a necessarily well-informed point of departure for presenting the reality and the hopes of indigenous peoples both to themselves and to their governments.” (307)
In this sense, we might imagine another facet of the “interpreter” that avoids a third “untenable position” (following the two Rex outlined). That is, the interpreter abstains from the admittedly compelling urge to try to “help” and/or influence a local situation, instead focusing on understanding the situation as deeply as possible and communicating that understanding. I’m not sure whether this actually represents my position, but I wonder to what degree it would dovetail with Rex’s Habermasian project.
*Hastrup, K. & P. Elsass 1990. Anthropological Advocacy: A Contradiction in Terms? Current Anthropology 31(3), 301-311.
I believe you have mentioned previously that your daughter is a Naval Officer. If she has played any role in OIF, OEF, or OOD I suspect that she may have felt more than once that the civilian control of the U.S. Military may from time-to-time be a bit self-serving and is regularly misguided and ill-informed regarding the nature of the institution of which she is a part. If such is the case, is it fair to label her time spent in the employ of the USDOD as selling out? Or to refer to the fact that going on a media campaign to share similar feelings would cost a military professional her or his job as censorship?
Insomuch as Lassiter’s collaborative ethnography is a model for anthropological work within a politicized context in which elected and appointed officials responsive to their own constituencies and looking out for their own individual careers hold a direct veto power over field research and whose power directly and indirectly bears on dissemination of any findings from it, I find it facile as well as ethically problematic. I do not feel altogether differently about the career service member whose response to what he or she knows to be an absolutely wrong-headed course of action is to salute sharply and follow through. But both are the responses of individuals trying to make a living in professions where they don’t get to make the rules. Those making a living outside of those contexts can talk until they are blue in the face and with as much righteous indignation as they choose to project about the shortcomings of tribal sovereignty and civilian control of the military if they so choose. But for those working within either of the two contexts the only choice is how to finesse their way a landscape shaped by larger realities, imperfect though it may be.
@MTBradley
For anthropologists to be deferential to elected and other officials is hardly a new story. I have written elsewhere, if not here, about the curious state of the research done in Taiwan by American anthropologists who worked in Taiwan in the 1960s. I was no exception. I was briefly a member of SDS and carried medical supplies for North Vietnam across Peace Bridge in Buffalo, NY with the Berrigan brothers; but when push came to shove, I signed the loyalty oath required for the NSF fellowship that funded my fieldwork and, like everyone else I knew, took seriously my professors’ advice to stick to safe topics like kinship and marriage, ancestor worship and popular religion and avoid politics as a topic or activity. I went to Taiwan in 1969, and back then people too vocally critical of the Chiang Kai-shek regime sometimes disappeared in the middle of the night.Steering clear of politics was a way of protecting the people whose lives I shared and studied.
Since then I have spent a lot of time thinking about how anthropologists should behave and, perhaps I have been too long in Japan, but I can’t escape what seems to me the fact that it is always case by case. We work with vulnerable people who must be protected, and also with powerful people who demand respect for their wishes as a condition of access to them. How far we can go in applying these sorts of filters to our data before it becomes selling out is never an easy decision. But a Nuremberg defense—we have to do only what elected or duly appointed officials allow us or tell us to do—is never a good place to be.
Four hundred years ago Shakespeare wrote that every subject’s duty is the king’s but every subject’s soul is his own. Plus ça change.