Reader Letters #1: Post-election edition

Last week we put out a call for letters from our readers. Here’s our first installment. If you’re interested in submitting a letter to Savage Minds, please keep the following guidelines in mind: letters are to be no longer than 250 words and should address issues covered in Savage Minds and relevant to anthropology, broadly construed. Some months we will invite letters on specific themes. As with traditional letters to the editor, all letters must include the writer’s full name and anonymous letters will not be considered. For general guidelines about tone and content refer to our comments policy. Writers of letters selected for publication will be notified before publication. Letters may be subject to minor editing for clarity. For the next installment, please send us your letters by December 15th, 2016. We will publish the next round by December 22nd. If you want to write about Levi Strauss’s take on Father Christmas, or perhaps Panopti-claus, we would not object. Otherwise it’s up to you. –SM Eds.

On the exceptionality of the election

Melissa Harris-Perry’s keynote “What just happened?” at the most recent AAA in Minneapolis was a captivating appeal to stop viewing the U.S. election results as exceptional, shocking, or out-of-order. To her, Donald Trump’s election reaffirms the United States’ century-old hatred towards minorities. Whatever white anthropologists consider extraordinary, posits for many Black Americans and Black Anthropologists the ongoing fight against an everyday reality of discrimination and violence – and she is right. Yet Harris-Perry’s advocacy for denying the exceptionality in this year’s election complicates strategic political protest. Protesters need the semantics of the exceptional to show that Trump breaches a new set of rules that were introduced by Americans electing their first Black (even if male) president. For many on the ground, Obama’s time in office hasn’t changed the world profoundly. Yet it introduced better policies for the disenfranchised, and the poor. This progress is now at risk of being overturned by a nationalist demagogue who clearly articulated his intentions of returning America to its old racist and sexist self. This return needs to be framed as the extraordinary for two reasons. Firstly, referring to the exceptionality of the situation helps advocates to mobilize protest. They use the exceptional to display their disavowal of Trump’s new order. Secondly, however, allowing anthropologists to use the exceptional as a refusal of the status-quo hopefully induces more ethnographically grounded research on the causes and effects of this regrettable political degeneration in the ‘land of the free’.

Melanie Janet Sindelar, Vienna University

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The future is human

My heart was broken by the results, not because I didn’t understand the existing divides in this country, but because I was certain we would not overlook the threats to human rights and democracy so often touted by the now president-elect. As we begin to take stock of our surroundings we must now begin to plan – because never before in our recent history has it been so important to advocate for equality and human rights, especially as anthropologists. I hold that anthropology is essentially humanism at its core – studying our species with tolerance and scientific inquiry requires a respect and understanding that goes beyond politics, culture, and even time. And everything I do as an applied urban anthropologist is to this end – working to create better urban habitats for all people. Jane Jacobs, an urbanist and de facto anthropologist in her own right, gave us a warning about the future in her final book Dark Age Ahead – predicting either the total collapse or coming together of our species in a new “age of human capital”. I will be moving actively in a direction of anthropological advocacy for all of the reasons above. I believe as anthropologists we are uniquely positioned to speak up more publicly and to fight against racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and general hatred. We cannot afford to be silent as humanists if we are to hope for the later outcome and as an anthropologist I cannot give up hope that the future is human, even now.

Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman

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The borders of our political commitments

The views and behaviors that have most disturbed anthropologists during the recent election cycle should actually be familiar to many of us. Indeed, we often witness similar conduct from our interlocutors. At Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, where I work, I know men who treat women’s bodies as objects to be possessed and groped. I also navigate vicious homophobia, offering an alternative perspective without asserting my views too strongly from my position of power. To a degree unprecedented in recent history, this election has transported many of these behaviors and beliefs to our doorsteps. We can no longer leave overt misogyny, xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, or homo/transphobia behind in the field. They have become foundational, highly visible elements of political discourse that we are forced to confront. I advocate vigorous repudiation of the hatefulness and violence emerging around this election. Yet I wonder what signals I might be sending, both to my interlocutors in Kenya and to non-anthropologists here at home. Is it hypocritical to stand in solidarity with the oppressed in America, but accept entrenched patriarchy and discrimination there out of dedication to anthropological acceptance of the Other? Will women and LGBT individuals at Kakuma think I value them less than their American counterparts? We spend time among people with vastly different social and cultural norms from our own, without imposing our own values. However, the 2016 election presents an ethical crisis for anthropologists, and it should spur us to critically reexamine where the borders of our political commitments lie.

Rieti Gengo

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Rethinking the disciplinary obligations of anthropology

If there were a group of people for whom the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States was not a surprise, it surely were anthropologists who saw in this political ritual a final rehearsal of what had been in the making for many years. Accordingly, the consequences of what is to come should also be of little surprise whilst still requiring an attentive eye to the local realisations of contemporary practices. In this moment, I find two crucial relevancies to our discipline. Firstly, an admission that Euro-American anthropology has failed to productively and meaningfully engage its own surroundings. In the first few weeks after the election, it has already become accepted that Americans have little awareness of experiences that shape people’s lives in their own country. The notion of “shock” that traversed the media in describing the election result is an indicator of it. This does not fare well for anthropology, a discipline that aims to understand, show, and justify people’s reasoning and points to its own disciplinary blind-spots. Secondly, now more than ever, we need public anthropology. We cannot limit our responsibility to the gift of thought. In its American form, anthropology was conceived as public practice, and anthropologists have to be proactive in their other social roles, treating their academic status as a means toward the work of creating society. Above all, this moment presents an opportunity to re-think the content of our discipline as an obligation towards people who we imagine as our society.

Andris Suvajevs

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The purpose of publishing on Savage Minds

I have contributed several of my essays to your website, but I still don’t know if that was meaningful in any ways, because I hardly received any feedback from my audience on your site (including you editors). I posted those essays not for some narcissistic reasons, but for productive conversations about the current state of US anthropology. I understand you editors moderate comments to weed out those with abusive tone. But if there are no “viable” comments after the moderating process, do you think that it’s your full time editors’ responsibility to lead some quick discussions about each contributed essay? What is your purpose of publishing those contributed essays? Is it to provide those authors with an online platform to get their work exposed to the public?

Thanks,
Takami Delisle

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist. His current research focuses on coastal conservation, sustainability, and development in the Californias. He also writes about politics, economics, and media. You can reach him at ryan AT savageminds dot org or @anthropologia on twitter.

6 thoughts on “Reader Letters #1: Post-election edition

  1. Hi Takami,

    I will take a stab at answering your questions. First of all, the number of comments we receive compared to the number of people who read (or click on) posts is pretty small. From what I understand this pattern is pretty common. In general a relatively small number of people actually comment on blogs and other online platforms. So, it’s not like we get a ton of comments in the first place. We get some, and every once in a while we have to hold a comment back for violating our policies, but that doesn’t happen too often these days. One other issue is that much of the actual discussion of our posts has shifted to other social media, including Twitter and Facebook. We can track some of this but not all of it. The other factor here is that people often read pieces, don’t comment, don’t share them via social media and perhaps talk about them or think about them in “real life” offline. This last part is really hard to track. All in all what this means is that comments are just the tip of the iceberg, and they don’t actually tell us very much about the actual effects, impacts, and impressions of a given piece.

    All of that said, I think your suggestion–that we editors can help spark discussion–is a great idea. We have to tend to the proverbial garden to get the community to grow, and it would probably help if we did just that a bit more often. This is just my take though…I’d be interested to hear what the other SM editors/authors have to say.

    Ryan

  2. Just for the record, my usual policy is not to comment on the blog, since I’m also the comment moderator and I don’t want to be in the sticky situation of moderating a thread I have direct involvement in.

    That said, the truth is, as Ryan says, that there are almost no comments on our blog now. All the discussion has moved to social media. I moderate about 10 comments a week, and on most weeks all of those go through without being bounced back. So it’s not the case that “there are no “viable” comments after the moderating process”. Rather, people are reading the blog in FaceBook and commenting on it on Twitter, to the extent that they engage at all. To be honest, I am not even sure that that many people read the posts all the way to the end — if they are anything like me, they read the headline, retweet the post, and then move on :S

  3. I guess I had this romantic utopian idea that sites like yours can be a place for vibrant conversations about anthropology….

  4. Takami, I have the same ideal about this site. Check this post: /2015/09/25/95-percent-never-rarely-comment/

    These places can be lively spaces for conversations and debates about anthropology, but we have to actively work to make that happen. One of the issues, as Alex mentions, is that much of the conversation/reaction takes place off site. I’m not sure why this is the case, but some of it may be to avoid comment moderation. Just a guess. Why post on here and wait for your comment to go through moderation when you can post on FB or Twitter with no wait, no mediation?

  5. Speaking, not as an author, but as a frequent commenter, I would add the observation that authors should also take responsibility for fostering conversation. I cannot count the number of times that I have offered a comment and waited for replies that never appeared, or appeared so long after my comment that I had long since moved on to other concerns. Dialogue requires at least two active participants.

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