As I am not teaching this year my engagement with ideas is coming largely through the things I am reading , rather than through dialogue with students. Its actually the need to understand something in order to explain it to another person which provides me with a good starting point for an ongoing engagement with a topic or theme, an engagement which generally goes way beyond whatever the original class topic was about. My tendency to drift along avenues of interest now runs relatively unchecked without the discipline of having to refocus on the core issues which I would have to address in a course. There are losses from this, a certain fragmentation in reading and thinking which may seem to jeopardize the likelihood of having any coherent thoughts about anything. But there have been enormous gains in the sense of freedom from the constraints of normative connections which one usually makes, enmeshed within the silos of what have come to count as discrete topics and issues in anthropology which have become entrapped within particular discursive frameworks and literatures.

I have written here before about the problem of witchcraft, the way in which anthropology has construed this as primarily an intellectual problem, as a problem of interpretation. Partially escaping the closed circuits of anthropological approaches to the phenomenon is enabling me to embark on some different thinking in relation to witchcraft, different at least in terms of my own approaches to it. I gave a paper last week looking at witchcraft as an instance of moral re-categorization- so far so usual. But by comparing the social effects of this reordering of obligations and households with social policies in nineteenth century Britain and France a clear parallel emerges in relation to transformations in the kinds and content of social relations which go into making up, literally, modern economies. So witchcraft appears (or is made to appear) not so much as a critique of capitalist reordering, as a modality for its achievement.

My freedom to think outside the box comes by making my boxes bigger, and situating them in different stacks of other kinds of boxes. Interestingly, this expansionary capacity is what anthropology seemed to have once effected for other disciplines, particularly, and perhaps paradoxically, at the very time when anthropology was at its most insular and when its representation of the Other was most totalising. Perhaps this was because it seemed to offer such solid alternative propositions of different cultural worlds. In the current context of course these multiple worlds are invoked within and outside anthropology. Given the increasing singularity of anthropology today it may be that its only outside of it that we can get different takes on how these may be perceived and apprehended.

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Well, I went to the European Anthropology conference and it was really good. Smallish, with perhaps five hundred delegates- with plenary sessions and workshops, the latter being a kind of succession of panel , often with a continuity of themes participants, creating a different and more coherent experience than at the AAAs. And I kind of got the answer to the question I raised the other week, about the rationale for a specifically Europe focused association. The stated aim was for a professional association across the expanded Europe. Another aim, officially unstated but one mentioned in conversation by some delegates, was as an explicit alternative to the apparent American hegemony of the AAA. This was not unexpected. It was however intriguing, especially in relation to some of the topics which came up at the conference, which included conspiracy theories and our current favourite, neo-liberalism.

A presentation by Kathleen Reedy on popular conspiracy theories in Syria got me thinking. It emerged from the discussion that in many ways conspiracy theories are like social theory. They do the same things. And whether or not we categorize something as conspiracy theory or not is a matter of the politics of to what we are willing to accord credibility. This insight brings me back to neo-liberalism, or rather, to anthropological takes on it. We are very keen to accord neo-liberallism conspiratorial power to wholly re-form multiple world orders in its own image; indeed, the opening speech at the conference made this explicit claim.

The conference itself was partly informed brought into being in response to an American conspiracy. Strangely, this self conscious rejection of such hegemonic ordering does not seem to lead to radically divergent anthropologies.. The preoccupations of papers seem on a par with the range of offerings at a triple A meeting. Is this a victory for hegemony and evidence of the neo-liberal reach, creating, as Hardt and Negri might have it, the possibility for the replication globally of the same few core institutional forms? Or is it simply the reality that we comprise the same scholarly community within and outside Europe, that the boundary is not so much between European anthropology and the US axis but elsewhere, perhaps imposed by the de facto alliance of European and North American influenced anthropological forms? Which leads to another question: whether the apparent uniformity of the product and preoccupations of anthropology now are an indication of a crisis of the anthropological imagination, on both sides of the Atlantic?

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Reading Rex’’s comments on the challenges of creating on line communities made me feel guilty. I have been a slothful poster of blogs, and hence something of a peripheral member of the minds community. But it also made me think about the work and time involved in building communities in general, the labour of making relationships and making relationships work (something Latour makes much of in Reassembling the Social). As anthropologists and as academics we have to do this in several ways simultaneously; through interpersonal contacts and conversation, as when we teach or engage in person to person debate and fieldwork; and through our relations with texts, in the form of books, posts and articles, and increasingly through the on line exchanges with their authors which may follow. And then there are the formal events at which we are supposed to achieve a presence which is both personal and textual as in the conference presentation season which is fast coming upon us.

This week, after my holiday reading, I am struggling to make a presentation for a workshop session at the European Association of Social Anthropologists Conference to be held in Bristol in the UK next week. This is a new event for me. Although not a mega conferencer, I have tended to go to the AAA meetings. AAA, whatever its shortfalls, is inclusive and open to all anthropologists, whatever and wherever their fields. I was somewhat disconcerted to see that the EASA states that it exists for anthropologists working on or trained in Europe. Why the limitation? Is there anything unique about being trained in Europe? Is there a European tradition of anthropology which renders the inclusion of others trained elsewhere inappropriate? What is included in `Europe’? Does Euro America count? Other places influenced by Europe? Or rather where are boundaries drawn between kinds of relations which are categorised as somehow pertaining to Europe?

I wonder how systematically these boundaries are policed and enforced. I also wonder what the purpose is, especially since the logic of a place based anthropology community has been largely trascended by the combination of cheap air travel and the internet. Personally, I would like to see more inclusive and open organisations which confront and discourage boundaries , whether these are regional, disciplinary or whatever. I think we see the kind of synergy and innovation that results from this kind of openness in the ways that anthropology is changing and in the kinds of things which we now study. As a person qualified in Europe, I will go to the conference and presumably find out more about their regionally exclusive rationale. I will do my presentation and make my limited contribution to face to face community building. After that I hope to have more time to get on with the virtual sort.

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If anybody fancies some heavy but rewarding reading try Bruno Latour’s recently published book on Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor Network Theory. I took it on holiday, along with a pile of other books , including Friction and Global Shadows. In the event, or lack of it, I only managed to struggle through the Latour. And once I had read it the other books didn’t seem as inviting, although they are probably a more engaging read. Latour’s book seems to be directed not at the experience of reading so much as the consequence of having read. It takes the reader on a mental journey over difficult terrain, the terrain metaphor resurfacing throughout the book via a play on the acronym ANT and the notion that ants are somehow grounded and hence capable of dealing thoroughly with whatever minutiae are blocking their paths
to unspecified destinations.

Reassembling the Social is one of those books written against in order to work out what it is for. In this instance, its directed against sociologists, whom Latour divides into two types: sociologists of the social and those who claim to practice critical sociology. Latour argues that both kinds of sociology and their practitioners do not conform to what might be the expectations of scientific approaches to the study of society. This is because they rely on pre-existing notions of what the social is and does to account for what people do and why they do it. The idea of society in such accounts fails to explain the very thing which is the object of study. As a consequence the motivations of social actors are always silenced and ignored. The silenncing of social actors is paradoxical for what claims to be a science of the social which ought to be able to demonstrate how things happen or rather how happenings are made. The making is the social process which is both material and symbolic. There is then no break between material culture and cultural material. The object of study includes objects, the subject object divide is collapsed and the sociology of the social superseded by a sociology of association, that is the relations through which actors achieve agency to effect happening.

Latour says much more than this of course in this complicated text, some of which reiterates previous insights and ideas. He makes pertinent points about the sociology of the social’s preoccupation with context and place, hence the eternal return conceptually to the analytical split level of the global and the local. I will try and think more about this when I get around to reading Friction as an `ethnography of global connections’. But in the meantime I think that Latour’s arguments about place are worth exploring for the way they jog ones’ perspective and decentre comfort zones about where we are and what we are claiming to describe when we set out to describe other places. Latour proposes that there is nothing intrinsically contextual about place, that place is simply a staging or framing for traces and associations, near and distant, past and present. Context as such does not exist as a factor which explains or accounts for a place. Placeness is brought to a situation through framing, and only part of this situation is localised.

There is some truth in this way of thinking. As write this I am in what I had on first contact thought of as a post Augean non place, not Manchester although I am sure that others consider it so, but a holiday island in the Mediterranean, the kind of island so subjected to the onslaughts of package tourism and the internationalization of consumption that it seems to no longer have any real identity or sense of location. Among the Irish pubs, the West African street traders selling carved elephants, the Mexican, Chinese and Indian themed restaurants , the International Herald Tribune on the newsstands and the televisions broadcasting UK news and sport, you have to actively look for faint signs of some other more original identity. Latour’s account makes me reconsider my position. If place is frame rather than context then what I am witnessing is a framing of wider traces, some place.

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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?

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The recent debate around FGC on Savage Minds raised some important questions about the political implications of how we choose to perceive social practice. It also raised the issue of agency in our selection of the analytic positions through which we situate practices relationally, and hence within particular political frames of argument. The key point here is not what the issue is, so much as with what other issues is it represented as being articulated in various ways. This articulation may be represented either within a particular social context, as in for example the relation between forms of practice and social outcomes, for which in the recent example read gender. Or, adopting the kind of argument put forward by Marilyn Strathern in her Partial Connections, it may be about how the issue is related through ethnography to what are represented as equivalent examples of social practice across social contexts, that is within anthropological theory or social theory more generally.

The ways in which issues become relationally articulated within anthropology is fundamental to establishing the legitimacy of what become accepted, or acceptable, responses to social phenomena within the discipline, some of which, despite anthropology’s claims to reflexivity and to the consistent examination of constructivist positions, seem remarkably persistent. The disciplinary representation of witchcraft is a case in point. Not only is witchcraft represented persistently as a problem of knowledge, rather than a problem of power, terror, inequality and violence manifested differently at different times and places. It is commonly represented as related to Zande practices of the late 1920’s as somehow paradigmatic, if not in terms modalities of divination then in terms of the essential logic and systematicity of Zande witchcraft cosmology.

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic provides an account of the place of witchcraft in Zande society and the interrelationship between the persistence of witchcraft beliefs and oracular authority as mediated by princely rulers themselves subjected to Anglo- Egyptian colonial power. This book, a classic of functionalist ethnography and one which posits as its centre the question of the rationality of belief, continues to be a staple of anthropology reading lists, certainly in the UK. It also remains widely cited within the anthropology of religion, science studies and philosophy. This strikes me as somewhat surprising. What Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic actually describes is not so much the rationality of belief in witchcraft, as a political system in which the powerless are liable to be accused of involuntary murder and then forced to pay compensation for the deaths of alleged victims. To suggest that the comparative value of Evans Pritchard’s text lies in the power play of witchcraft as a weapon of violence working in conjunction with regimes of power is not to underplay the salience of ideas and world views in effecting social practice, merely to question why certain interpretations become established. Some of this has to do with what they are brought into relation to. Can disestablishment follow on then from new juxtapositions and new relations?

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My time is up. My fortnight as a guest blogger is ended. Its been a great experience. First, feeling connected to a critical, engaged and international anthropological community. Second, for me at any rate, experimenting with a different kind of writing within and about anthropology. This is only just starting. I wonder whether we will see a new kind of hybrid anthropological arguing emerging which combines the blog process of iterative thinking in response to critical commentary and academic styling. I hope that new collaborative authorships will emerge as a result of connections made in the blogosphere. For this to happen more of us have to make the shift from reading to writing in this kind of space, and hence to a different kind of more immediate relationship between reading and writing than we are used to in anthropology at present.

When we consider the culture of anthropological presentations and knowledge dissemination through writing these don’t seem to have changed much since the birth of the discipline, at least here in the UK. Take seminars for example, the weekly fora which anthropology departments have for the sharing and presentation of knowledge and which typically involve one person reading aloud for an hour a paper which they have produced for production in an academic journal. The audience interacts after the reading, via commentaries and questions which may or may not be taken up later by the author.

The aim is to confront the author’s interpretation: discussion never really moves off the points made in the paper. So if the seminar is a springboard to knowledge its focused on the presenter’s paper, not on taking forward issues which might arise more generally. Of course this happens for individuals who have heard the paper, listening as a proxy experience of reading, but if this occurs it occurs inside their heads. Are we back to the social production of the individualism which I suggested characterised contemporary social anthropology? To what extent would changing our institutions and practices change our knowledge? How can we explain this conservatism of forms?

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I returned from London with two things, a bad cold and a copy of the Borofsky book on Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy. It was a good combination, because having the cold gave me the opportunity to stay home and read it. And I read it pretty much in one go. I get the sense from the general aheadness of Minds Readers that many of you have already read it, so I won’t go into the details of what the book is about. In any case, the main positions set out in the book were in the public domain long before it was published.

Aside from the controversy with which it explicitly deals, the book offers fascinating insights into the organisation of anthropology today, indeed it could be taken as a contribution to something one of its own contributors calls for, an anthropology of anthropology. The book is structured around three successive `roundtables’ in which individuals with expertise in Yanomami politics and anthropology give their perspectives via written submissions on the main issues in the controversy. This format serves the book’s purpose effectively, providing clearly contrasting positions which enable the reader to weigh different sides of the debate. But it also sheds light on the individualistic culture of professional anthropology.

Contributors to the round tables write not so much as against one position or another implicated in the Darkness book, but , certainly by round table three, as against each other. Some of this doubtless stems from the way in which the round table format was set up. However, I think it provides an interesting snapshot of anthropology as a discipline concerned with the primacy of individual interpretations over the possibilities for collaborative working or consensus. This normative position is so strong that even in a book which highlights the limitations of single researcher perspectives and fieldwork, the possibilities of collaborative research or teamwork are not considered, although revisits to the same field site by successive generations of individual researchers are proposed.

What anthropologies of anthropology can others recommend? Laboratory Life is a good starting point for academia in general, part ethnography, part career manual for grant attracting scientists. Have we yet subjected ourselves to what we advocate for other sciences?

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My post on anthropology as identity or practice has generated some great responses. Most of those who have commented have touched on questions that recur in what we might reframe as the engaged anthropology (as opposed to applied) anthropology debate. This debate highlights ethical and political dilemmas pertaining to the issue of engagement. Do anthropologists as doers of anthropology (see my previous post) have an obligation to engage in public processes as advocates of the communities with whom they have worked, or is the obligation to engage the broader more amorphous responsibility of an empirical social science which seeks not only to understand the world, but to contribute to how it is perceived and acted upon by policy makers and others?

Conversely, is there an obligation only to Knowledge, to the academic project and to a perception of public obligation as limited to making this knowledge publicly available. These are difficult questions and I do not have answers to them. But they bring me to the theme of this post which examines the relation between different kinds of knowing and engagement in policy processes.

Recent graduates and young job seekers in Tanzania have often expressed to me their frustration with trying to obtain employment in the development sector. `Its know who they are after, not know how’ they comment, remarking how they have sent numerous applications for a range of positions with no success whatsoever. `What you know does not matter in this instance’ , I was repeatedly told. It’s a question of who.

This may of may or may not be an accurate representation of employment practices in Tanzania at the moment. I think that, in reality, the sector is less nepotistic than they imply. Its just that like in academia there are too many highly qualified candidates chasing too few vacancies. In this situation, those who have some experience within the kinds of employing agencies (and hence know who) seem a safer bet to employers than those who have qualifications alone without personal experience of the sector.

I thought of know who and know how earlier this month, while attending a two day meeting of policy makers and representatives of the international community on children affected by HIV and AIDS. I was not attending the meeting as an anthropologist or as someone who does anthropology. Indeed, I do not have anthropological expertise based on fieldwork and ethnographic research on that particular topic, although I do have expertise on rural Tanzania. I was there because I had contributed to some of the background policy analysis which informed one of the meeting themes. Although there were a couple of other anthropologists attending the meeting, they too were there because of their situation within institutions engaged in policy processes around children and AIDS, and not necessarily because they had conducted anthropological research on the meeting themes.

For the anthropologists at the meeting, participation was not determined primarily by disciplinary knowledge, but through knowledge of a different kind: the social relations and institutional nexus of policy and research on children and AIDS. Embedding in social relations brought anthropologists, and indeed other experts to the meeting. In this context, know who mattered more than know how or, perhaps more accurately, know what.

This situation confronts the common sense suppositions about the relationship between knowledge and engagement which is often represented in abstract terms, as if knowledge or research or findings simply filter through and inform policy and public action. They don’t. Whether they do or not depends on the mediation of a host of social and institutional relationships, and on whether individuals engaged in these select or otherwise particular bits of research to make political arguments. Engagement is as much an institutional as an intellectual project. Getting knowledge out and into public processes, whichever side you are on, depends on social relations. Know what, know how, know who.

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Last week I presented a paper at an anthropology department in another university in the UK. It was a department where many of the staff had either worked in development, or were working on development as the subject of their inquiry. This was good, because my paper was about development and about the participation of anthropologists in development policy making. Based on recent experience of working as policy maker within the UK government’s aid agency, I argued that anthropologists rarely got involved in policy making as anthropologists, although people who had been anthropologists quite often ended up working as policy makers. Why was this?

I suggested that anthropology and policy making rely on similar conceptual and writing practices, in particular the use of categorical representations. Indeed, both anthropology and policy making are in important ways modes of social ordering, presenting the social representationally. But there are also fundamental differences between them which mean that they can also be seen as the opposite of one another. Whereas anthropology dissembles social ordering through deconstruction, policy making reconstitutes, reconstructs and reorders with a view to bringing into being modified social realities. This has implications for the extent that the practices of anthropology and policy making are compatible. Indeed, when working in the policy field I have experienced what I was doing as practically and conceptually quite distinct from what I have done as an anthropologist.

Engaging in policy making as an anthropologist is difficult. One has to move beyond critique into the kind of reordering which anthropology is more comfortable describing than engaging in. This discomfort, and the general theoretical unease around government across the social sciences more widely, I suggested, accounts for at least some of the anthropological distance from policy processes and from government. As a discipline, certainly in the UK, we have been happier to unpack, critique, comment, translate, explain and witness than to involve ourselves in making policy and in re-envisioning the social.

For an audience committed to understanding anthropology as essentially an identity my suggestion that anthropology was a particular kind of practice was untenable. To maintain that anthropology could be reconsidered as practice, rather than an identity, seemed to imply that one somehow lost one’s anthropological being or status when one engaged in other kinds of practices. The debate then turned to questions of definition and categorisation: who could say that someone was or was not an anthropologist? Were there certain kinds of practices which were not anthropological?

Obviously, to some extent practices and identities go together and what one feels about being an anthropologist as opposed to doing anthropology is highly subjective. Moreover, our identities as anthropologists, whether honed in factory or studio, are deeply felt . Its what makes this a community of Minds and Minds readers. But, having had some seven days to consider the distinction I rashly proposed, I can see some value in maintaining the separation, at least analytically.

Separating out what we do as anthropologists, the special kinds of anthropological practices around ethnography and interpretation (apologies to other fields ) which are largely determined by the institutional contexts which create anthropology as a discipline and profession, from our identity as people who have received this kind of training enables us to perceive more clearly the terms on which we are well placed to engage with the world beyond the University, that is to address what other commentators have called the problem of engagement.

I think some of the problems in dealing with the world outside stem from our adherence to rather narrow anthropological ways of representing knowledge and modes of disciplinary practice , what I have called doing anthropology, which are central to the constitution of the discipline we have built (and which are really interesting and fun and complicated and all the things we as anthropologists love about anthropology). But they are also the same things which make anthropology inaccessible for outsiders and difficult to apply to the kinds of processes in which we claim we would like to be engaged. If we choose to view anthropology as an identity maybe we are less constrained. Anthropology as an identity which encompasses competence in anthropological practices should not preclude our gaining competence in other practices more suited to the engagement we seek. There is much to learn from the outside.

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Hi! My name is Maia Green , a UK based anthropologist and, for the next two weeks, a temporary mind. I’d like to thank the Savage Minds team for responding so generously and so quickly to my impromptu offer to join them.

I have never blogged before, although I have often thought about it. When I first began exploring anthropology blogs a couple of years ago there did not seem to be any sites which offered the opportunity for the kind of informed engagement that Savage Minds offers today. Some sites were listlike aggregations of material thought to appeal to anthropologists; others were interesting but very general. If they made use of anthropology they used it to provide a perspective on the worlds they wrote about. They did not apply the same kind of critical reflexivity to anthropology.

My interest in blogging derives not so much from an interest in technology or the new communication possibilities of the web, although these are important. It seems to me that the blog format and blog community of ongoing interactive engagement provides a unique space in which people with an interest in anthropology can engage in debates about issues which are not only problematic for ourselves as members of a discipline, but which are rarely discussed in the public domains of our publications or on our webpages. Different propositions can be explored as moments in a web conversation or thought process than can be articulated in formal submissions to academic journals or associated correspondence.

I think we see the benefits of this new disciplinary freedom in the kinds of debates ongoing within the Savage Minds community; the concerns with issues of engagement, matters of ethics and the public role of anthropology within and outside a rapidly changing academia. As an anthropologist within a university who is also engaged in worlds outside it these are very much my concerns. I welcome the opportunity to share these concerns with others. Please bear with me while I get used to the technology of inputting. Watch this space.

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