The time is gone when anthropologists could find solace in the claim that our main civic duty–and the justification for our public support–was the constant reaffirmation that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us.” Every single term of that phrase is now publicly contested terrain, caught between the politics of identity and the turbulence of global flows. Too many of the Bongobongo are now living next door, and a few of them may even be anthropologists presenting their own vision of their home societies, or studying their North Atlantic neighbors. The North Atlantic natives who reject them do so with a passion. Those who do accept them do not need anthropologists in the welcoming committee.
–Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations (2003:137)

Trouillot is then outlining a vision of anthropological duties and risks, include making native voices more full interlocutors, identifying the ultimate targets of anthropological discourse, and publicizing the stakes of anthropological exchange.

To what degree do Open Access efforts–specifically Hau–move us in that direction?

Allow me to first state that I am very encouraged by Hau and its potential. I also do not want to take away from the many interesting comments. However, from that discussion, I am left wondering:

1. As Rex identified in his initial post, “I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all.” David Graeber challenged this, but Rex challenged back–and so it seems the question is still on the table: To what degree might open access also be a place where indigenous anthropologists, native voices, and internal others have a chance to become more full interlocutors in anthropological conversations?

2. Are we “identifying clearly the ultimate listeners,” those Trouillot called “the Sepulvedas of our times” (2003:136)? Hau admirably aims to make “anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders” (2011:viii) and is specifically launched against insularity and triviality. At the same time, the observation of “parochial irrelevance” is followed by lamenting that the Deleuzians, Speculative Realists, Lacanians, and Foucauldians are not taking classic anthropology into account, “a colossal failure of nerve” (2011:x). But are these the Sepulvedas of our times?

3. Trouillot was not talking about Open Access, but he did discuss accessibility: “Media claims notwithstanding, the influence of academic research that could be labeled politically ‘progressive’ has decreased–if only because these works are increasingly inaccessible to lay readers” (2003:137). And so I here wonder–even if every article in American Anthropologist were declared Open Access today–to what degree would it make a difference for the Bongobongo and the Sepulvedas of our times? I do not mean to be too harsh–Trouillot recognized the need for “a technical vocabulary to which research contributes and without which it cannot be sustained” (2003:137, and of course Trouillot’s Global Transformations is rather out-of-reach for many lay readers)–but it is worth thinking about how Open Acess and accessibility could and should interact.

This also seems related to Rex’s analogy to Academia as Music Industry. “Platinum hits” may be rarer, but the irrepentant Sepulvedas of our times keep churning out multi-nationally financed blockbusters.

[I realize the irony of prominently citing American Anthropologist during the Open Access debates--I do end with a call to support Rex's proposal to read and talk about HAU]

–Andre Gingrich, Transitions: Notes on Sociocultural Anthropology’s Present and Its Transnational Potential, December 2010:555

–Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen and Janis Hutchinson, Anthropology as White Public Space?, December 2011:545

I am hoping in these guest posts to examine episodes of how anthropology gets taken–starting with a follow-up to Kerim’s archive on Jared Diamond, and then tackling the Anthropologie Store, the TV series Community, and other instances where anthropology either gives stuff away or gets hijacked. But I’d also like to write about taking anthropology back, in alliance with what Rex proposes around Hau or Matt suggests about the AAA.

As an introduction, I would like to use the two articles above, from the December 2010 and December 2011 issues of American Anthropologist, to assess anthropology’s current position, to evaluate resources and risks.

Andre Gingrich’s article hit the press just as the AAA science and mission statement issue really earned anthropology some great NY Times coverage. If anyone is working on a “careful and balanced history” of the autocritique, please let me know–in the wake of old wounds and new emotions about science, such accountings became nearly impossible. Bad feelings and suspicion persist, and for those in adjacent disciplines, anthropology can now always be dismissed with some lines about how it is “at war with itself” and “got rid of science.” This only exacerbated the way the autocritique had been misused, as Giovanni Da Col and David Graeber argue in the inaugural issue of HAU:

The anthropological auto-critique of the 1980s was made to serve a purpose for which it was never intended. In fact, anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today. For outsiders, though, it provided a convenient set of simplified tag lines through which it was possible to simply dismiss all anthropological knowledge as inherently Eurocentric and racist, and therefore, as not real knowledge at all. (2011:xi)

This debate also proved how much the tag line postmodernism still serves as a convenient device to lump all opponents. Such lumping ignores how accusations of postmodernism tend to conceal more than they reveal about actual positions, and that there were legitimate critiques of normative science from Marxism and feminism long before–and that did not depend upon–this so-called postmodern critique.

Andre Gingrich could also have hardly known of all the other minor and major assaults in the works for anthropology in 2011, including the backlash from the “F— You Republicans” e-mail as a minor ambush and then the Florida Governor’s declaration of a no-anthropology-needed zone, which together with the heightened threats to educational funding and continued use of “economic crisis” to discipline and informalize academic labor, amounted to a major assault. However, Gingrich did have pertinent and rather prophetic words of advice for navigating these episodes:

Opponents will not remain inactive. In times of crisis, it is not difficult to predict that some forces will emerge that will argue either for an intensification of anthropology’s applied subordination and instrumentalization at the service of other needs and fields or for anthropology’s radical downsizing–or for both, as one step toward its dissolution. (2010:558-559)

Nevertheless, as of December 2011 there were good reasons to be hopeful. In contrast to the December 2010 science-in-anthropology incident, the AAA swiftly responded to Florida Governor Scott; anthropology bloggers like Daniel Lende and students like Charlotte Noble provided round-the-clock coverage and response, coalescing in what seemed to be anthropology’s first-ever rapid action team.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement dramatically re-framed issues of plutocracy, wealth, and power, with anthropologist David Graeber playing a critical role. As a record number of attendees headed to the AAA annual meetings in Montreal, there were certainly reasons for optimism.

It is in this context that the December 2011 article “Anthropology as White Public Space?” was a particularly painful reminder of incongruities and what anthropology has been unable to accomplish. Anthropology as an academic discipline has generally been more willing to engage in autocritique and to take this further than other disciplines even begin to ponder. Anthropology also claims an anti-racist heritage and position. But though the authors found “some improvement” the overall tenor is that “many of the same exclusionary ideological and structural elements that the Committee on Minorities and Anthropology encountered [in 1973] are still prevalent in many anthropology departments” (2011:546).

This is a must-read article for anthropology. As the 2012 U.S. election season unfolds, vitriol and vicious denials of any kind of bias or structuring along lines of race, class, and gender will undoubtedly intensify. This is no time for anthropology to turn away from these issues.

Can a beleagured discipline simultaneously go through a transition to transnationalism and at the same time “take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others” (Brodkin et al. 2011:555)? I believe these issues can and must be linked and tackled together. But it requires awareness and political will.

Of most immediate relevance, and since I have the honor and privilege of blogging on the most distinguished of anthropology blogs, is how those of us who write and read anthropology blogs might contribute to this realignment. Anthropology blogs could potentially be a transnational hub and a place to embrace anthropologists of color, but I don’t think we are there yet.

Rex’s proposal to read and talk about HAU has real potential to address the kinds of “minimum consensus about transnational quality standards” Andre Gingrich discusses: “I would have great difficulties envisioning future postdocs in anthropology who have never done any fieldwork whatsoever, who speak no other language than their own, and who have never heard or read anything about Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, or Marcel Mauss” (2010:557). HAU precisely asks us to consider ethnographic insights, prominently includes translated works, and brings classic authors and basic texts to our attention.

At the same time, I want to highlight the insights from Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson:

The heart of our conclusion is embarrassingly obvious. It is this: the defamiliarizing insights and analyses generated from vantage points developed by anthropologists of color are better tools for diversifying departmental organization and culture (among other things) than hegemonic ones, and anthropology departments should embrace them instead of marginalizing them. Alternatively put, anthropology has made its mark on understanding cultures by taking seriously the points of view of those it studies. We suggest it needs to take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others to better understand and diversify itself as well as enhance its theoretical robustness. (2011:555)

When I was growing up (scholarly speaking) Writing Culture and postmodern anthropology were the enemy. The problems were legion: the navel gazing, the narcissistic obsession with one’s own subjectivity, the reduction of the politics of fieldwork to the writing up of ethnography, the neurotic worrying about one’s one epistemological responsibilities that led the authors to the same sort of straining nervousness that you see in overbred show dogs, a pretension to theoretical sophistication that masked a lack of deeper erudition (especially of the actual ethnographic record), and of course the coup de grace: authors obsessed with prose who were themselves terrible writers.

All of this led to a deep and authentic detesting of Writing Culture. We all knew the world was complicated, the writing was a craft, and that the fieldwork encounter was fraught. Writing Culture somehow took this basic insight into the human condition of our discipline and tried to convince others that it was some sort of enormous problem.

The reaction was particularly severe from the anthropologists who actually had moral confidence: the Marxists. In many ways, they were the ones who introduced theoretical sophistication into post-war anthropology. The Hegel and Kant that were taken for granted by Boas and Kroeber reappeared in the work of authors like Bob Scholte. After a decade of genuine political action, the conservative retrenchment of the 1980s marked the resurgence of the right in a way that threatened the gains of previous years. Scholte’s review of Writing Culture (and Tyler’s response to him) in Critique of Anthropology summarized the problem in nutshell: the next generation of anthropology had responded to Reagan-era neoconservatism with a retreat into aesthetics, as if the response to the revanchist policies of the Republican party was the anthropological equivalent of Twin Peaks or a quirky David Byrne performance piece.

It took me a long time to consider taking Writing Culture seriously, but I did eventually. Mostly because I met people who I respected who cut their teeth on Writing Culture seemingly without being posioned by it: people like Chris ‘No Truth Anywhere’ Kelty and Melissa ‘Screw The Ethnographic Details’ Cefkin. When I started teaching anthropological theory I got around to rereading the work from 1986, and when I started an ethnographic project on elites I started keeping up with what had been done since then. I think that is when my sense of Writing Culture began changing.

The first thing to say about Writing Culture — or the ‘Rice Circle’ as I think they might now be calling themselves — is that the work is smart and deserves to be read for what it actually says. Amazingly, a quarter century after 1986, some people’s emotions are still to raw to do this. Nevertheless, it’s important to note that the works of 1986 ask questions — often carefully. It’s worth reading what they actually say rather than immediately reaching for the nearest stick to hit the snake with.

The second thing that amazes me about Writing Culture is that the authors actually had students. Students who they nurtured and supported. Jim Clifford played a key part in creating Native Pacific Cultural Studies through his support of upcoming Pacific scholars. Although they are not often read, the Late Editions volumes provided an incredible forum for upcoming scholars. Marcus and Clifford regularly cite Ph.D. students they advise in their own work, helping bring attention to well-deserving projects and scholars. This is simply something that not everyone does. Of course, to some this might look like an imperialistic attempt to take over a discipline by overproducing Ph.D.s, throwing whole passles of them on the wall, and seeing what sticks. Except oh wait — that’s my alma mater’s strategy isn’t it…

Finally, as my mention of Late Editions points out, Writing Culture had a program — even if it was not programmatic. People working with and under its authors had a sense of where the discipline was going or at least what exploration space they should be moving around in. I think in this sense the Writing Culture crowd was very successful in creating a sense of direction and space for their students without forcing them into a narrow and ultimately unproductive ‘program’ of research.

There is still a lot that bothers me about the people involved in Writing Culture. Many of them still can’t write. Recent work on ‘paraethnography’ seems like a tortuously overthought attempt to do things in fieldwork that many of us who work in ‘Malinowskian’ locations have been doing in years. I worry about the lack of concern for the political implications of  ’collaborating’ with powerful elites. I appreciate the avant-gardist desire to probe the limits of what anthropology can be, but wonder why we think anyone other than us (read: funders) should care about this sort of work.

In the end I am glad that Writing Culture happened, and I think the network of researchers that resulted have made anthropology a much better place. Appreciating their contribution to the discipline is difficult because of how hyperbolic both the negative and positive evaluations are. Overall, though, I think people like me who grew up hating Writing Culture at an early age should take a step back and both understand and appreciate what came out of it — not only because of how hegemonic it’s successors have become in our discipline, but because of the genuine intellectual contributions its made.

In a recent essay called “Anthropologists and the Economists Without History,” Jason Antrosio wrote:

Many anthropologists receive a caricature of economics. This caricature has been promoted by neo-classical economists, who sought dominance and the erasure of heterogeneous approaches. Restoring a fuller history can help to promote a rapprochement between anthropology and economics.

I agree that anthropologists often have a limited picture of what economics is all about, and that we sometimes lump any and all economists in with the neo-classical folks.  I, for one, am guilty of that, and I realize that I need to put some time in to learning more about what economists actually do if I want to move beyond arguments and understandings that are based upon mere caricatures.   Not all economists think alike–and that’s a pretty important point to keep in mind.

Jason also argues that a renewed focus on the history of economic thought might be a good way to bridge anthropology and economics.  Interestingly, Loomnie recently posted something about a project that Bruce Caldwell–from Duke University–is heading, which focuses on putting discussions about methodology and the history of economic thought back into graduate training.  Caldwell states that an emphasis on the history of economic thought has been absent from many economics graduate programs around the country for some time.  Duke, apparently, is one place where this kind of training has survived.  Check out the video and Caldwell’s explanation of his Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke.  Interesting, no?

I would really like to see how this history of economic thought is taught, and what (if any) overlap there is with anthropology (and economic anthropology more specifically).  What kinds of readings are on the table, and does this open up a space for talking about human behavior and economics that moves beyond the standard neo-classical framework?  Some day, actually, would like to spend some time learning how economics grad courses are taught–I really have no idea what they do, how they set up seminars, and why anthropology and economics ends up in such different places when it comes to ideas about human motivations, etc.  I think it would be pretty fascinating, for instance, to sit in on some graduate seminars in economics–but that’s just me.  Dialog–or even debates–require some sort of mutual understanding to actually be interesting (and effective).

When was the last time that anthropologists and economists had a sustained conversation about their overlapping interests in human behavior? Was it waaaaaaay back in 1941 when Knight and Herskovitz had their little fireside chat?  Was it during the infamous debate between the formalists and the substantivists?  What would a renewed conversation–or even debate–between anthropologists and economists look like?  Do we need some kind of collaboration or dialog between anthropologists and economists? What would we all hope to achieve with this? Is there room for dialog, or are the disciplines so theoretically, methodologically, and politically different that there is no possibility for productive engagement?

In their recent book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write about one of their main goals:  “We hope to persuade economists with real world concerns to take an interest in what anthropologists have discovered about the human economy, and in the kinds of theories we have advanced to understand it” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  However, they also make this point quite clear: “There is not much hope for dialogue with those who define economics exclusively as the application of an individualistic logic of utility maximization to all domains of social life” (Hann and Hart 2011:9).  Ultimately, they say, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists” (Hann and Hart 2011:162).

David Graeber, in his seminal book Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, argues: “In fact, the effort to reconcile the two disciplines is in many ways inherently contradictory. This is because economics and anthropology were created with almost entirely opposite purposes in mind” (Graeber 2001:7).**  Anthropologists and economists do approach the study of human behavior and society in some radically different ways.  However, it’s pretty safe to say that not all economists think alike–and the same can of course be said of anthropologists.  So maybe, indeed, there is room for some sort of productive engagement.

One thing that does seem pretty clear to me is that anthropologists talk about economists much more than the reverse.  When was the last time you saw an economist refer to an anthropologist in any way?  Anthropologists, especially those with an economic bent, talk about economists and their BIG IDEAS all the time.  The only problem?  I am not sure there’s really anyone on the other end of the metaphorical phone, if you know what I mean (they aren’t necessarily all that concerned with the BIG IDEAS from anthropology).  I could be wrong, but for the most part I do not think that economists spend much time, if any, reading about what anthropologists have to say about economic issues.

What does this mean?  Well, considering the spate of economic “events” that have taken place since 2008, I think it’s probably high time for anthropologists–who have more than their fair share of experience studying human behavior–to get themselves back into larger debates and discussions about economics.  It’s definitely time for some rethinking about the relationships between individuals, the market, and society, that’s for sure.  And if people aren’t listening, we’ll have to find ways to make our thoughts on these economic matters known.  Sitting around waiting for the Adam Smith’s invisible hand to get this engagement started isn’t doing us any good.  Where should this all start?  Well, as Jason Antrosio argues, a revamped exploration of history would probably be a good place place to begin.

*Here are a few of my favorite posts from Maxine Udall:

Economics: Art or Science?

Amartya Sen: The Uses and Abuses of Adam Smith

Faith-Based Economics

The (Crippled) Invisible Hand

**Graeber’s book, which I just reread this summer, is a fantastic read.  Highly recommended.  Now I just need to get my hands his new book on debt, which also sounds really good.

Since I haven’t yet read any of the linked works, I won’t comment on what the list tells us about the state of our discipline, but I imagine a thorough investigation of the listed works might be able to tell us something – especially if we were able to compare it with a similar list from a decade ago. I did notice that about half of the listed ethnographies are available on Amazon Kindle for about $15 which encourages me to think that I might actually read some of them!

Without further ado, here is the list.

It is easy to see why. Being an activist requires two main ingredients: 1) moral certainty (that something in the world is wrong) and 2) empirical confidence (of the changes necessary to make things better). Postmodernism (to a first approximation) is characterized by 1) a suspicion of foundational moral thinking and 2) not a very robust theory of causation. Postmodernism, in brief, is inimical to intervention.

Intervention in the world by anthropologists — whether it be ‘critical’ or ‘applied’ — is typically grounded by a firm belief that you know what is going on. Indeed, the most famous cases of overreaching political planning (think Robespierre) were a result of _too much_ faith in Science. While Real Scientists can have some sort of beef with ‘critical’ anthropologists, it will have to be a complicated and well-thought out beef about the relationship between scientific knowledge, civic participation, fair dealings with research communities, and ‘broader impacts’ (to use the language of the NSF) over research. But it cannot be a simple one that anthropology ‘ought not get involved’, at least not if one wants to avoid taking the untenable position that urban planners are deeply unethical when they embrace the value judgment that local communities deserve functioning traffic lights and graded roads. Neither can it be an epistemological one that critical anthropologists have no theory of truth, causation, and so forth, since in fact such a theory is necessary (to a first approximation) for any attempt at intervention.

In short, a commitment to positive knowledge unites critical anthropologists and Real Scientists against postmodernism, not the other way around.

A good example of this can be seen in the exchange between Bob Scholte and Steven Tylor in the pages of Critique of Anthropology (volume seven issue one if you want to look it up) in 1987. Scholte is a bit of a forgotten figure in anthropology, a leftist and philosophically-inclined anthropologist who was poised to become a major figure in the field until he passed away unexpectedly at a young age. His review of Writing Culture — a key postmodernist text in anthropology — was thus fairly influential in its time, and was a summary of white the older generation of Marxist scholars who came up in the sixties thought about the newer postmodern trends of the eighties.

For Scholte, postmodernism is not a fellow fighter against Truth and Objectivity, but rather a threat to it. A postmodern approach to the poetics of a text is insufficient to normatively ground anthropological critique. Scholte finds

an exclusive appeal to aesthetics and poetry politically inadequate. On the one hand, there is no guarantee that the ’Mephistophelian urge to power’ cannot also infect the poet. On the other hand, there is no guarantee that poetry by definition generates positive or desirable political consequences.

This is, in fact, not a problem of postmodernism but of the Geertzian interpretive anthropology out of which it grew:

spinning textual tapestries inspired by native designs does not, of course, guarantee a moral center. In fact, the latter threatens to disappear from anthropological praxis altogether. And there is the rub. Politics may become merely academic – literally so. Specifically, the politics of interpretation in the academy threatens to draw a ’cordon sanitaire’ (p. 257) around the interpretation of politics in society. That, I would argue, is the greatest danger of symbolic anthropology and – by implication – its literary turn.

Thus Scholte, like some of the Real Scientists involved in #AAAfail, finds the politics of political correctness and academic posturing — the “politics of interpretation in the academy” — totally unappetizing.

While Scholte’s review — like much of his writing — tends to ramble, Tylor’s response does a much better job of summarizing Scholte’s charge against him than Scholte himself. Scholte, he writes, “faults the book for avoiding politics and praxis, for failing to confront the political realities that make the context of its own Mandarin concerns with literary effect” and being, in essence, “a cowardly retreat into a feckless literary aestheticism”.

Tylor was in 1987 nothing if not a poster boy for the more caricatureable branch of postmodernism, and his response to Scholte does not disappoint. “Where Bob finds these essays unpolitical, or evasive in their politics, or unmindful of political contexts,” he writes, “they strike me as being excessively political, too trapped in the discourse of RAYT – of power, politics, reason, epistemology, praxis, critique, and normative import.”

Tylor continues to use the term RAYT — get it?!? — throughout the review, taking Writing Culture to task because the chapters in it “still spin their tales cocooned by the security of representational discourse. Still unmetamorphased, they do not burgeon into light, nor challenge the dark hegemony of politics and epistemology, but presuppose it even in the ironies that enshroud their purposes.” As a result they “preserves the myth of a privileged discourse that founds or grounds all the others.”

In contrast, “post-modernism grants no priority to any discourse. It aims to deconstruct the divisions that give the illusion of separate, hierarchically ordered discourses… It is a way of using these discourses against themselves neither in order to re-hierarchize them nor even to overcome them, but to realize that parodic potential which is their fullest implication.”

This is clearly not a brief for intervention. In fact, Tylor seems to find the idea of intervention in the world ludicrous: “Who now believes that politics or science works any positive transformation? Anthropology, modem science, and history have all conspired to teach us to disavow this hubris of the modem age,” he writes. Even worse, critical anthropology leads to “boredom” since “those complementary modes of demystification called symbolic anthropology and critical anthropology” leads to a “dialectic that mystifies the past and projects an unreachable future that always escapes final totalization in the clash of conflicting interests – until – by this prattling parabasis lulled into slumber, succumbed to the rhythm of their rupture and continuity we are succussed into some new succession RAYTING still.”

It is not clear what Tylor’s solution is — except perhaps that he is beyond looking for one. It is useful, I think, to be reminded that ‘postmodernism’ can be something more than a term of abuse. And as this exchange makes clear, it is not automatically aligned with ‘critical anthropology’ in the fight against ‘Real Science’. After all, one of the ideas behind many brands of Marxism is that it is ‘science’. Too often we assume that we remember what the alignment of forces were in a debate, or we simply don’t learn the specifics of a debate at all because ‘we all know what someone said’. I think it is important that there is some precision and history is necessary in debates about our discipline.

A two-prong impulse to apperceive and cenceive at once empirically and holistically. We constitute one of the smaller learned professions, but we aim to take in perhaps more phenomenal territory than any other discipline Our coverage must of necessity be somewhat thin. Yet it is rarely either vague or abstruse — we start with concrete facts which we sense to carry an interest, and we stick with them. Perhaps our coverage can fairly be called spotty; though without the implication of being random, irrelevant, disconnected. If a whole is steadily envisaged, the relation of its fragments can be significant, provided the parts are specifically known and are specifically located within the totality. So the holistic urge is perhaps what is most characterlistic of us.

This taproot we share with the humanities. And we also tend strongly here toward the natural history approach. Sociologists have called us “nature lovers” and “-bird watchers,” Steve Hart says; and from their angle, the epithets stick. There are anthropological museums of tangible objects, but no sociological ones. We are strong on photographs, films, and tapes that reproduce sights and sounds. We write chapters on art in ethnographies and and sometimes offer courses on primitive art. How many sociologists would venture that, or even wish to venture it?…. We insist on field workd as an opportunity, a privelege, and a profesional cachet. We want the face-to-face experience with our sbjects. The anonymity of the sociological questionnare seems to us bloodless.

Since personalities are initially determined by their ancestry, it is highly relevant that anthropology was not a social science at all originally. Its father was natural science; its mother, aesthetically tinged humanities. Both parents want to attain reasoned and general conclusions; but they both also want to reach them by way of their senses… anthropology settled down to starting directly from experienced phenomena, with a bare minimum of ready-made abstraction and theory, but with a glowing conviction that it was entering new territory and making discovery. The visions was wide, charged,and stirring.. It may perhaps fairly be called romantic: certainly,it emerged historically about at the point when aesthetic romanticism was intellecturalizing. The pursuit of anthropology must have seemed strange to many people; but no one has ever called it an arid or a dismal science.

Now, maturity has stolen upon us… The times, and utilitarianism, have caught up with us, and we find ourselvres classified and assigned to the social sciences. It is a dimmer atmosphere, with the smog of Jargon sometimes hanging heavy. Generalizations no longer suffice; we are taught to worship Abstraction; sharp sensory outlines have melted into vagueoness.  As our daily bread, we invent hypotheses in order to test them, as we are told is the constant practice of the high tribe of physicists. If at times some of you, like myself, feel ill at ease in the house of social science, do not wonder; we are changelings therein; our true paternity lies elsewhere.

Around the beginning of this century Durkheim demonstrated the social factors controlling thought.  He demonstrated it for one portion of humanity only, those tribes whose members were united by mechanical solidarity.  Somehow he managed to be satisfied that his critique did not apply to modern industrial man or to the findings of science.  One may ask why his insights were never fully exploited in philosophical circles… If Durkheim did not push his thoughts on the social determination of knowledge to their full and radical conclusion, the barrier that inhibited him may well have been the same that has stopped others from carrying his programme through.  It seems that he cherished two unquestioned assumptions that blocked him.  One was that he really believed that primitives were utterly different from us.  A week’s fieldwork would have brought correction…[snip] His other assumption allowed him to reserve part of our knowledge from his own sociological theory. This was his belief in objective scientific truth, itself the product of our own kind of society, with its scope for individual diversity of thought. His concern to protect his own cognitive commitment from his own scrutiny prevented him from developing his sociology of knowledge… [snip]

For Durkheim, sacred and profane are the two poles of the religious life on which the relation between individual and society is worked out. The sacred is that which the individual recognises as having ultimate authority, as being other than himself and greater than himself. The dichotomy profane and sacred is not isomorphic with that between individual and society. It is not correct to interpret the indivudal as profane and society as sacred, for each individual recognises in himself something of the sacred. Sacredness inheres in the moral law erected by consensus to which each individual himself subscribes. The sacred is constructed by the efforts of individuals to live together in society and to bind themselves to their agreed rules.  It is characterised by dangers alleged to follow upon breach of rules.  Belief in these dangers acts as a deterrent… Because of the dangers attributed to breach of the rules, the sacred is treated as if it were contagious and can be recognised by the insulating behaviour of its devotees…

The first essential character by which the sacred is recognisable is its dangerousness… The second essential characer of the sacred is that its boundaries are inexplicable, since the reasons for any particular way of defining the sacred are embedded in the social consensus which it protects.  The ultimate explanation of the sacred is that this is how the universe is constituted; it is dangerous because this what reality is like.  The only person who holds nothing sacred is the one who has not internalised the norms of any community… The definition quickly identifies the sacred which in Durkheim’s universe is not to be profaned:  it is scientific truth… It is entirely understandable he should have internalised unquestioningly the categories of nineteenth-century scientific debate since he strove to have an honourable place in that very community from which the standards of conduct emanated.  His blind spot, for all the theoretical weakness it brought him, at least vindicates once and for all the value of his central theory of the sacred.  At that time science itself was unselfconscious about how its edicts were formulated and followed. But science has now diversified. It has moved from the primitive mythological state of a small isolated community to an international body of highly specialised individuals among whom consensus is hard to achieve.  According to his theory, such a new kind of scientific community would be hard put to identify anything we could have recognised as sacred fifty years ago.  So he is vindicated again by the passage of time which has made ‘correspondence-to-reality’ a fuzzier concept than it used to be…

[snip... Foucault... Quine... Hume... Wittgenstein... Bloor...]

When {Durkheim} entered the great debate {on social determinants of knowledge}, he muffed his cue. He could have have thrown upon the screen x-ray pictures just a disturbing as {Marx and Freud}. He could have been telling us that our colonisation of each other’s minds is the price we pay for thought.  He could have been warning us that our home is bugged; that though we try to build our Jerusalem, others must tear up our bridges and run roads through our temple, the paths we use will lead in directions we have not chosen. Woe! he should have cried, to those who never read the small print, who listen only to the spoken word and naively believe its promises. Bane to those who claim that their sacred mysteries are true and that other people’s sacred is false; bane to those who claim that it is within the nature of humans to be free of each other.  Begging us to turn round and listen urgently to ourselves, his speech would have disturbed the complacency of Europe as deeply as the other two.  But instead of showing us the social structuring of our minds, he showed us the minds of feathered Indians and painted aborigines. With unforgivable optimism he declared that his discoveries applied to them only. He taught that we have a more genial destiny. For this mistake our knowledge of ourselves has been delayed by half a century.  Time has passed.  Marx and Freud have been heard. Wittgenstein has had his say.  Surely now it is an anachronism to believe that our world is more securely founded in knowledge than one that is driven by pangolin power.

Rex recently asked for “anthropology creeds” but for the life of me I can’t write one. So instead I’ll write about why I think the task is impossible. An anti-creed if you like.

In short, I think that anthropology, like Christmas, or the island on Lost, is whatever you want it to be. Every discipline in academia also exists as a mirror-self within anthropology: economics, semiotics, medicine, political-science, genetics, religion, history…etc., all have their counterparts in anthropology. And not just one counterpart either. Just looking at economic anthropology, one can take a myriad of different approaches to the subject all of which are called anthropology. Just about the only approach not called anthropology would be that used by economists… and even there I’m sure you can find some anthropologists whose work isn’t too different from what you would find in an economics journal.

Some scholars have tried to do an end-run around the question by defining anthropology in terms of its method rather than its subject matter. This is what the AAA tries to do in defining sociocultural anthropology.  But that runs into two problems: First of all, anthropologists don’t own “ethnography.” Lots of other disciplines now use ethnography as a standard methodological tool. Secondly, not all anthropologists do ethnography. There are historical anthropologists and those in Foucauldian governmentality studies whose research might sometimes include ethnography but is often much more concerend with textual analysis. Then there are archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and linguists who also frequently do work which is not ethnographic (although, again, many do include ethnography). I would even add that a lot of traditional, supposedly ethnographic, cultural anthropology often uses ethnography in a very superficial way. All too often, journal articles invoke ethnography to confer legitimacy on a text which isn’t really ethnographic at all. I don’t say this as a criticism, I personally think anthropologists should be wary of fetishizing methodology. Ethnography is a big part of who we are, but I don’t think we should be defined by it.

Instead of trying to define the discipline as a whole, we are better off thinking of ourselves as social scientists, writ large. To the extent that we function within anthropology departments, publish in anthropology journals, and hang out with 6,000 anthropologists at the annual meetings, we are anthropologists. But within that there are multiple “anthropologies” which function more-or-less independently of the whole. We can (and often do) choose to wear multiple hats, defined by our training (“Temple Anthropologist”), specialty (“Linguistic Anthropologist”), politics (“Marxist Anthropologist”) etc. Sometimes all three (or more!) at the same time – including all the contradictions which come with that.

The real problem, I think, is the way institutions are increasingly forcing us to narrowly define our area of expertise. This is particularly bad in Taiwan where academic evaluations can be down-graded for lacking focus, even when the scholar in question has only two or three areas of interest. I recently read a talk by James Clifford which addressed this issue. He called for “creating a multiplex, adaptive, hyphenating/connecting knowledge space that is…fundamentally interpretive, realist, historical, and ethico-political.” I think this is what anthropology needs to be as well. We shouldn’t settle for anything less.

Addendum: If one were to seriously try to define anthropology, I would probably adopt a prototype semantics approach, defining key features which may or may not be present in the work of any individual anthropologist. Umberto Eco famously did this in his definition of Fascism [PDF]. Perhaps another time…

UPDATE: Proper link to James Clifford’s talk.

You can get the full version here. It is a totally non-interactive .png file — sorry, Adam beats me on the interactivity front.

Timelines are interesting in the same way that kinship diagrams are: they are analyses of materials pretending to be merely lists of facts. This one was constructed basically off the top of my head based on what I’ve been teaching in anthropological theory courses, and which Wikipedia pages linked to which. Choosing which dates to put up is basically to create a useable genealogy for yourself. Its a fun exercise — among other things, it really made me realize how much of what I thought of as ’80s theory’ was really published in the 70s (77 seems to really be the watershed year here). Any feedback?

In 1990 [1900], the renowned mathematician David Hilbert laid down a challenge to future generations: 23 hand-picked mathematical problems, all difficult, all important, and all unsolved. Since then, countless mathematicians around the world have struggled to solve the 23 ‘Hilbert Problems’ (ten have been resolved; eleven are partly solved or simply cannot be solved; and two remain at large). Most important, the pursuit of the solutions had a profound and fundamental influence on the roadmap for 20th century mathematics, testament to Hilbert’s foresight.

So begins an announcement about a Harvard symposium aimed at identifying a similar list of problems for the social sciences. I thought it might be interesting to poll our readers about their own ideas for a list of “hard problems in anthropology.” Does it make sense to compile such a list? What would you put on the list? What would it mean for cultural anthropologists to “solve” a problem.Are there any such problems from a previous era that we’ve already solved?

Off the top of my head, I can think of two typical anthropological “problems.” Each posing different challenges to a Hilbertesque approach to defining a list of such problems.

The first might be phrased as “What’s the matter with Kansas?” That is, why do people seem to act contrary to their own class interests? But even asking the problem causes problems. Larry Bartels famously asked: What’s the Matter With ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’, which undermined many of the premises of Frank’s book. The difficulties of defining “class interests” in the first place makes this question so much messier than a mathematical problem.

The second is more typical of contemporary anthropology and could be stated thus: “What are the cultural logics that make X actions thinkable, practicable, and desirable?” (Paraphrased from the introduction to Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship.) Having observed some phenomenon, anthropologists then collect the stories people tell about that problem and interpret them in light of our own understanding of how institutional and cultural practices shape such stories. Here the problem isn’t so much the question, but identifying under what conditions we might consider the problem “solved”? One can’t jump in the same river twice and so each anthropologist who asks such a question will very likely come up with different answers.

So what do our readers think? Does it make sense to compile such a list? If so, what would you put on it? And how would you define a problem as being “solved”? If not, might there be a better way to focus the efforts of cultural anthropology on a set of common problems?

(Hat tip to Ennis for the link.)

First off, the title is somewhat misleading. Ingold’s purpose is not to distinguish anthropology from ethnography, but to criticize the “the idea of a one-way progression from ethnography to anthropology” in which methodological rigor precedes theoretical generalization. The title really should read: “Anthropological reasoning is not inductive, but dialectical.” He wants to challenge the dichotomy which places ethnographic description on the one side and anthropological theorizing on the other.

We can still recognise today the figure of the ‘social theorist’, sunk in his armchair or more likely peering from behind his computer screen, who presumes to be qualified, by virtue of his standing as an intellectual, to pronounce upon the ways of a world with which he involves himself as little as possible, preferring to interrogate the works of others of his kind. At the other extreme is the lowly ‘ethnographic researcher’, tasked with undertaking structured and semi-structured interviews with a selected sample of informants and analysing their contents with an appropriate software package, who is convinced that the data he collects are ethnographic simply because they are qualitative. These figures are the fossils of an outmoded distinction between empirical data collection and abstract theoretical speculation, and I hope we can all agree that there is no room for either in anthropology.

Against this he juxtaposes a view of anthropology as a craft (a view which Rex has elaborated in a series of posts on this blog).

For it is characteristic of craft that both the practitioner’s knowledge of things, and what he does to them, are grounded in intensive, respectful and intimate relations with the tools and materials of his trade. Indeed, anthropologists have long liked to see themselves as craftsmen among social scientists, priding themselves on the quality of their handiwork by contrast to the mass-produced goods of industrial data-processing turned out by sociologists and others.

As I understand it, the emphasis on craftsmanship is an effort to shift the focus from the tools of the trade — qualitative data collection techniques — to the ethnographer herself. The ethnographer is a researcher who has cultivated in herself an “anthropological attitude”:

The endeavour is essentially comparative, but what it compares are not bounded objects or entities but ways of being. It is the constant awareness of alternative ways of being, and of the ever-present possibility of ‘flipping’ from one to another, that defines the anthropological attitude. It lies in what I would call the ‘sideways glance’.

He defines this “sideways glance” as “a practice of observation grounded in participatory dialog.” Through the course of this dialog anthropologists swing back and forth like a pendulum between anthropological theorizing and ethnographic description.

But I have started this discussion at the conclusion, and Ingold’s own process of getting there is as important as where he ends up. Much of the essay is, in fact, a dialog with Radcliffe-Brown, and the kind of anthropology he proposed. It both seeks to defend R-B from his critics, as well as to correct some of his contradictions and excesses. I am not particularly concerned about defending or attacking R-B’s place in the anthropological cannon, but I do find the shifting framework of Ingold’s discussion to be quite fascinating. He starts with Kroeber’s critique of R-B’s approach as a form of ahistorical classification, to which Kroeber opposed a form of “descriptive integration.” Just as the artist does not see a landscape as a “multitude of particulars” so too does Kroeber’s anthropologist seek to render the particulars into a coherent whole rather than viewing them as an incoherent jigsaw puzzle of unconnected parts.

This integrative approach leads to an interesting question: “the anthropologist describes the social world as the artist paints a landscape, then what becomes of time?”

Kroeber came to the conclusion that time, in the chronological sense, is inessential to history. Presented as a kind of ‘descriptive cross-section’ or as the characterisation of a moment,a historical account can just as well be synchronic as diachronic.

E. E. Evans-Pritchard was to take up Kroeber’s view of time, juxtaposing it to that of R-B “for whom history was nothing more than ‘a record of a succession of unique events’ and social anthropology nothing less than ‘a set of general propositions.’”

It was left to Edmund Leach to defend R-B, although his defense was at best a backhanded one. Leach complained that his colleagues had “given up in the attempt to make comparative generalizations” for “butterfly collecting” (by which he meant “impeccably detailed historical ethnographies of particular peoples”). However, he felt that R-B’s approach to comparative generalization overemphasized the “generalization” part rather than the “comparison” part which Leach felt was more important.

A generalisation, then, would take the form not of a typological specification that would enable us to distinguish societies of one kind from those of another, but of a statement of the relationships between variables that may operate in societies of any kind.

It is here that Ingold leaps to R-B’s defense, arguing that R-B did not see social life as a collection of static, ahistorical taxonomic specimens, but rather as “a process.” Ingold argues that Leach’s criticism could much better be applied to his beloved Levi-Strauss than R-B. But Ingold is nonetheless critical of R-B’s view of “social life” as being dichotomous with the internal (psychological) life of the mind. Such an approach “implies the closure and completion of a system of relations that has been fully joined up” as opposed to a processual view of social life as “open ended and never complete.” It is here that Ingolds discussion of R-B and his view of anthropology as a craft dovetail, for:

It follows that any endeavour of so-called descriptive integration, if it is to do justice to the implicate order of social life, can be neither descriptive nor theoretical in the specific senses constituted by their opposition. It must rather do away with the opposition itself.

If social life is a process, then our method for investigating it must itself eschew the opposition between lived experience and theoretical generalization, and must emphasize instead the shared experience of the anthropologist and her subjects with whom knowledge is collaboratively generated through dialog.

Having concluded my summary of Ingold’s argument, I have some questions:

• Does our epistemology necessarily need to reflect our ontology? I’m not convinced it does… In any case, it seems that the case for this needs to be made rather than simply assumed.
• How much of this is boundary maintenance? Real anthropologists are those who have an undefinable savoir faire, as opposed to those pesky applied folks, or ethnographers in other disciplines, who have only learned our methodological tools.
• What is left, after this discussion, of generalizing theory? I’m not really clear. My sense is that Ingold ends up collapsing theory into ethnography, undermining his own argument. But I’m not sure about that. I have the feeling I need to read Ingold’s other work to get a better grip on where he is coming from.
• I think one of the things I like most here is the critique of the postmodern “assemblage” view which revels in complexity. It seems that Ingold is staking out a middle ground, but again, I’m left a little uncertain where this might be?

I look forward to hearing what our readers have to say!

One does not need to think of Bohanan’s work among the Tiv of northern Nigeria, or Abner Cohen’s research among Hausa migrants in the southern Nigerian city of Ibadan before one experiences a feeling of nostalgia. There were for instance Nigerians like Angulu Onwujeogwu, Ikenna Nzimora and Victor Uchendu. In Africa at large, efforts were not just expended on doing ‘good’ anthropology and sociology; there were in fact efforts to overcome the Western epistemic assumptions that underpinned much anthropological exercise of the time. I probably don’t need to mention that anthropology was often a tool for colonialists. See, for instance, Bernard Magubane’s criticism of colonial anthropology in this Current Anthropology article. It would also be useful to see Archie Mafeje’s article that is partly a response to Magubane’s article. The point is that there was a lively discussion in anthropology on the continent.

A cursory look at the credentials of many African anthropologists of the 60s and 70s would show that they were largely Western educated, partly because African states, at that point, had a developmental agenda, and that agenda involved awarding scholarships to students to study in Western universities. And when this was not the case, many African got scholarships from Western countries. One could say that even then, with newly independent African states, anthropology was not particularly popular. I think this is linked to the involvement of anthropology in the colonial project. It is arguable that sociology enjoyed a better image than anthropology, especially with its somewhat better image as a discipline that studies ‘more civilised’ societies. That is also probably why there are very few stand-alone anthropology departments in Nigerian universities.

Things became much worse in the 80s when Nigeria’s oil wealth started turning into a curse. Serious balance of payment problems, coupled with a succession of repressive military dictatorships finally encouraged many Nigerian scholars to leave the country, and those who stayed found it increasingly difficult to work. The already unattractive anthropology even became less attractive, and joint anthropology and sociology department started doing much less of anthropology and more of sociology. The fact that many development agencies want statistical data has meant that data provision and generation concentrated in the hands of economists and sociologists. This in turn meant that fewer people got interested in doing graduate degrees in anthropology. I recently visited a Nigerian sociology and anthropology department where there was neither a single lecturer who does anthropological research, nor any graduate student who wanted to do anthropological research.

It is also in this state of the Nigerian economy state that many parents would not be willing to pay for their children to study anthropology in universities. One could also add that a desire to be modern, and therefore to study something modern, is linked to the lack of interest in anthropology, especially as people still seem to associate anthropology with the study of the primitive – in post-colonial studies terms, the Other. There is bound to be a problem for a discipline that studies the Other, when the classical definition of the Other in this context would actually be the self. I know that the experiences of people in African countries are far from uniform, and that there is of course a multiplicity of Others, but those are the fine details that almost always get lost in the quest for modernity. Yes, I throw in that word, because no matter how much we discuss the faults and failings of modernisation as a theory and as a concept, the everyday lives of young Nigerians is modeled after the dream of becoming modern. Of course, I am an anthropologist, and I understood the importance of the kind of knowledge that anthropological methods and methodologies produce, even before I decided to do a Ph.D in anthropology. And of course, there are also other really intelligent anthropologists still in Nigeria. But when one starts framing a discussion in those terms one should realise that one is talking of the exceptions and not the rule.

Some questions of course beg answers. Does Nigeria, and by extension other African countries, have need of the anthropologist’s contribution in its present predicament? Can the problems thrown up in the country be framed in anthropological ways? Are these problems not always being framed in such ways whether or not people realize or admit it, whether or not people study their society, its mental, material and behavioural artefacts, and engage one another, self and other, with the benefit of ethnographic and theoretical training received in university departments of anthropology? At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I think that it is always anthropology, good or bad—from Huntington to Soyinka.

Any insights from other areas?

The interviews were started by Jack Goody in 1982. He arranged for the filming of seminars by Audrey Richards, Meyer Fortes and M.N.Srinivas. Since then, with the help of others, and particularly Sarah Harrison, I have filmed and edited over ninety archival interviews. Having started with leading anthropologists, my subjects have broadened to include other social scientists and, recently, biological and physical scientists.

The full list of interviews can be found here.