Ha! Just kidding.

The 30 March 2012 issue of the journal Science includes a news piece “Psychology’s Bold Initiative” on a possible moment of introspection for the discipline. Spurred on by some recent high profile academic fraud cases a cohort of scholars are leading a movement aimed at scrutinizing their field.

According to Science, many psychologists now feel that their field has a credibility problem. To my ear this underscores some of the differences between our disciplines and simultaneously calls to mind the critiques of Clifford and Marcus, et al.

The greater concern arises from several recent studies that have broadly critiqued psychological research practices, highlighting lax data collection, analysis, and reporting, and decrying a scientific culture that too heavily favors new and counterintuitive ideas over the confirmation of existing results. Some psychology researchers argue that this has led to too many findings that are striking for their novelty and published in respected journals – but are nonetheless false.

As sociologists and anthropologists are both prone to lament when the mainstream media wants a social scientist they turn to psychology. Even on the topic of human origins it seems the evolutionary psychologists have one up on the human ecologists and bioarchaeologists. Perhaps this envy has contributed to psychology being the punch line in some anthropological circles, but more profound than this are the very different ways the disciplines conduct research and the kinds of knowledge they claim to produce.

Whereas anthropology oft claims the mantle of science with a “but…” psychology appears to have no such hesitation. Rather than deconstruct the authority of science here, I will simply nod in the general direction of France. Psychologists self-identify as scientists. Being that they believe themselves to practice science it follows that one way they may right their vessel is to test the reproducibility of others’ conclusions.

This in and of itself is a radical notion. Reproducibility is one of the core principles of science but the current prestige economy does not reward this sort of work nor does the publication regime offer an outlet for its dissemination. What would be the incentive for expending one’s energies testing reproducibility in an academic culture that gives the highest rewards to new ideas? Just as limiting is the virtually unpublishable status of negative results, which may motivate scientists to identify false positives or structure their research agenda around what is publishable rather than what needs to be known.

A group of 50 psychologists have organized themselves as the Open Science Collaboration with the stated goal of systematically replicating recently published psychological experiments. This is very interesting to me. Instead of worrying about what the limitations of their field might be there’s a group out there setting up an empirical project to test where that limit is.

Jonathan Schooler, author of a study to be tested by the OSC, was quoted in the news story and I found his words to be very revealing.

I think one would want to see a similar effort done in another area before one concluded that low replication rates are unique to psychology. It would really be a shame if a field that was engaging in a careful attempt at evaluating itself were somehow punished for that. It would discourage other fields from doing the same.

Here is the bit that reminded me of Writing Culture. You don’t have to go far in the house of sociology to find scholars who perceive anthropology as having gone off a cliff in the 1980s, a historical moment epitomized by the radical reflexivity of Writing Culture. Even in anthropology its not hard to find old schoolers who think the whole thing has gone to pot and Geertz is the villain. But the kernel of the Writing Culture critique is the same as the OSC movement: its was a call for more empiricism not less.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but reproducibility doesn’t really seem to have a place in contemporary cultural anthropology. On the one hand this makes methodological sense. In ethnography I am my own instrument. The culture I experience is different than the culture you experience even if we’re in the same place at the same time.

But its worth asking again, once more with feeling, how is it that we believe what we read in the journals? I mean, we can disagree about the meaning of an event or whether this idea from Edward Said really goes with that idea from Richard Price. But for the most part if somebody describes Carnival in Trinidad don’t we accept that description and move onto the interpretation?

What the OSC has done is select studies from three high-impact psychology journals published in 2008. “They reasoned that articles published during this time frame are recent enough that most original authors can find and share their materials, yet old enough for the OSC to analyze questions such as whether a study’s reproducibility correlates with how often it has been cited subsequently.” So far the response from study authors has been positive.

What would it look like to refashion this testing of reproducibility on anthropological terms and check up on publications to see if authors really knew what they were talking about? I’m not talking about the rare case of outright fraud, where authors are willfully deceiving readers. But could you pick, say, an essay on Indonesian cross-dressers out of Cultural Anthropology and go to Indonesia and find what they were talking about?

I don’t know, that sounds kind of crazy. Who would pay for it?

“Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn’t remember the theories they had learned in their introductory anthropology course (even, they sheepishly confessed, if I had been their professor for that course). In response, I built a review of general anthropological theory into my classes and developed a theory course for junior and senior anthropology majors.

But re-teaching theory at the advanced level was not enough. I needed a better strategy for teaching theory at the very beginning level of anthropological instruction which, for me now as professor and earlier as graduate student, meant in a large lecture class of anywhere from 100 to 550 students. How could I teach theory so that introductory students could retain and use this knowledge beyond exam day? What new pedagogies would enable students to carry the theoretical messages of Levi-Strauss or Mead or Ortner with them? My strategy was to turn to social media, to teach theory by putting students in dialogue with each other: I created two new course assignments, a student-generated theory wiki and a theory blog.

Inspiration came from online discussions about pedagogy among digital humanists, from folks such as Cathy Davidson at Duke University’s HASTAC collective, Howard Rheingold’s Social Media Classroom project at Berkeley, and here at the University of Colorado, our ASSETT program‘s focus on teaching with technology. In the summer of 2010, grad student Marnie Thomson and I crafted the wiki and blog assignments as complementary and required components of the Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course I taught that fall with an excellent team of graduate student teaching assistants, including Marnie as Head Teaching Assistant (TA).

We had no idea what to expect. Would the students really be able to create a theory wiki as first-year anthropology undergraduates? Would they theoretically engage each other on the theory blog in the ways we hoped for? The answers were ‘sort of’ for the wiki, and ‘yes’ for the blog, where their work went beyond even what we had imagined. Here is what we did:

Food and love. All students wrote two 500-word essays applying two different anthropological theories to a topic of their choice under the rubrics of food and love. Essay due dates were staggered over the semester, with some groups of students writing first about food, then love, or vice versa, and applying the theories they were learning at that particular moment in the course. TAs graded the essays, and selected those to put up on the blog. We posted the essays under gender-neutral pseudonyms, and students were required to submit six “substantive comments” on the blog (three on food essays, three on love essays). Their Theory Blog + Wiki Assignment explained:

What do we mean by substantive blog comments? We are looking to create a truly dialogic space for exchange about anthropology. We ask you to engage with the posted essays—for example, offer your thoughts on the author’s argument, raise questions, make connections to other course topics or cultural phenomenon, in general, participate in such a way that conversation is started, continued, or otherwise enabled.  

All comments were moderated, meaning they were not made public until a TA or myself had read them. Any student who did not want to post under their real name created a pseudonym for their comments. The essays and blog comments were 50% of their recitation grade, which made up 40% of their course grade.

Did it work? Beautifully.

Students had respectful, intellectual conversations not usually possible in a large lecture class. They read, responded to, and benefitted from each other’s writings, rather than just writing for the instructor. Collectively, the students turned the blank blog into a space of intellectual exchange and growth. The TAs and I decided not to participate in the blog but to allow it to be a student space for discussion (except for the time a middle-aged man not in the course commented on the “cougar” essay, and I as professor had to reply; a teaching moment, indeed).

We posted six “food” essays and ten “love” essays (turns out as much as we all love food, we love “love” more). In one essay, a student analyzed the US locavore movement using structural-functionalism and cultural ecology. Another wrote about “bromance” from functionalist and Boasian perspectives. A third student critiqued Facebook profiles using symbolic and feminist anthropology. Following each essay are student comments, which were extensive, thoughtful, and productive. The format was a great success in terms of getting students to think with rather than about theory. Again and again, they asked each other “what would a ______ anthropologist think about this?” and thought through the different theoretical approaches to any one topic.

While the course was in session, students gave positive feedback on the blog, and their understanding of theory was evident in the essays they wrote on their final exams as compared to prior semesters. Students from this 2010 class who have since taken more advanced courses with me are comfortable with theory, clearly retaining knowledge from the earlier class, and thus further marking the pedagogical impact of the blog.

The wiki was not as successful and remains unfinished. Each theory (and a handful of topics) were given a page with four sections: main points, key figures, key texts, and critiques. Some sections are competent, while others are incomplete or even convoluted in places. Designed to accompany the course blog as an introductory theory resource, the wiki covered contemporary and classic theory (rather than just classic theory as some sites do). Course students wrote all entries, and frankly, one semester was not enough time to get to a baseline of content for further refining, editing, and developing. Anyone interested in helping out with it—as part of a course, or on their own—is welcome.

Not all of my Digital Anthropology experiments have been a success (cough, cough, Twitter course feed), but the theory blog was successful beyond my expectations. There is no anthropology without theory, and so teaching it well to our newest students is important, giving them a base on which to build as they go forward. I offer our model and experience in the spirit of sharing and would love to hear what has worked for others, as both instructor and student.

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She regularly teaches theory classes to undergraduate and graduate students, and just debuted a new course this semester on “Reading Ethnography.”

Value, ultimately, refers to the ways in which we choose to represent the importance or meaning of a particular idea, object, action, or place.  Something can be valuable because of its relative standing within a massive global financial system, but it can also be valuable in many other senses as well.  Both David Graeber (in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value) and Julia Elyachar (Markets of Dispossession) explored these different forms of valuation, and made it clear that it’s important to see how the relate with one another.

Another issue that I am looking at is how this question of value relates to geographic space.  This sounds all very abstract and all, but it’s not as abstract as it seems.  The allure, prestige, or value of tourism is fundamentally geographic and spatial in many ways.  As Michael Clancy pointed out in his 2001 book “Exporting Paradise,” exclusive resorts are predicated on the idea of allowing some people in and keeping others out.  These separated or segregated spaces are maintained through a variety of measures, some more explicit than others.  Some resorts have massive walls and guarded entrances, while others are surrounded by miles of barbed wire fences.  Others choose more subtle measures.

So these are a couple of issues that I am looking into during my fieldwork.  Although right now I am just in the beginning of all of this, and there are interesting leads in all directions.  Miles and miles of fences.  Disputes over land.  Completely different ideas about what an ideal tourism destination should look like.  For some, a place is more and more valuable as it gets “developed” with hotels, paved roads, golf courses, and so on.  For others, it is the complete opposite–a place loses its intrinsic, unique value as it becomes a part of a wider, commodifiied tourism network.

Anyway, these are just a few of the starting points, and I thought it might be a good idea to share some of where I am coming from, since I will be writing about little bits and pieces of this over the upcoming year.  Here’s a short selection about value from a working paper that I wrote for the Open Anthropology Cooperative (click here to read the whole thing).  Let me know what you think (for all references and footnotes, check out the paper on the OAC page).  Since I am in the early stages of fieldwork, and looking into these issues about tourism, social conflict, value, space, and so on, I know that things will inevitably lead in some pretty unpredictable directions.  That’s what empirical research is all about.  But it’s good to take account of starting points and see where they end up.  Anyway, enough of the small talk.  Here’s the selection that explores some of my readings of the value question:

SOME NOTES ABOUT VALUE

Before going any further, it makes sense to establish a few foundations. My analysis focuses on the concept of value as it relates to the construction of meaning and place in Baja California Sur. I draw from the work of anthropologists, urban sociologists, and geographers in exploring what is admittedly an unwieldy concept. Theoretical discussions about value—the attribution of import or meaning to ideas, ways of life, goods, and/or actions—have a deep history in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology (see Kluckhohn 1958; Appadurai 1986; Eiss and Pedersen 2002; Graeber 2001, 2011; West 2005; Hart 2011; Elyachar 2005). The term “value” is tremendously loaded and complex. It sounds fairly simple to talk about the value of a place or an idea…but the more you dig into the concept the more difficult things become. That is because, as Graeber argues, while there are plenty of discussions about value, there is no clear theory of value per se. Part of the reason for this is that the term itself refers to a wide array of different—yet interrelated—understandings of what “value” is all about.

As Graeber (2001:1-2) explains, theories of value tend to fall into three overlapping categories: 1) values in the sociological sense (i.e. what is good or desirable for society); 2) the economic sense (how objects/goods are desired and measured according to a particular system of accounting, such as money); and 3) the linguistic sense (which Graeber glosses as “meaningful difference” within a larger structured system). Value in these various, interrelated senses is ultimately about how and why people rank, order, and organize their social worlds according to particular ideals, whether moral, cultural, or political. A truly exhaustive account of value should, as some argue, probably extend at least as far back as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and especially Karl Marx (Hart 2011), whose theories of value focused heavily on the critical importance of labor. Such a project, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. For the sake of conceptual clarity, I am going to limit my use of value to a few lines of thought derived mostly from relatively recent anthropological theories of value (although Marx does play a key role for many of these theorists). I draw primarily on Kluckhohn (1958), Graeber (2001), Elyachar (2005), and Appadurai (1986). Kluckhohn’s comparative project on value is a good place to start.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Clyde Kluckhohn launched an ambitious initiative aiming to make the scientific study of values the key concern of anthropology (Graeber 2001:2). Kluckhohn’s work focused mostly on a sociological sense of value, and attempted to analyze how and why different societies came to develop particular value orientations (Kluckhohn 1958). As Graeber explains, this early effort to analyze and cogently theorize value “ran most definitely aground” (2001:5). But it was not without merit. Foremost was Kluckhohn’s drive to find a way to push anthropology toward a study of social life that paid close attention to moral desires—or what individuals “ought to want” out of their lives (Kluckhohn 1958: 469; Graeber 2001:3). Kluckhohn advocated a study of values that sought to move beyond mechanistic assumptions about human choices and behavior:

We want to live in particular ways and toward selected ends. When the gap between actuality and aspiration is too great, individuals and indeed whole groups choose death rather than survival. For we human beings are not just pushed by our biological needs and psychological drives; we are also pulled by conceptions of the right, the good, the desirable (1958:469).

He argued that since there are patterned “habits of thinking which individuals consciously learn and unconsciously absorb in their daily social experience” (1958:469), an empirically grounded and systematic study of values was possible. He was in search of the “codes which unite individuals in adherence to shared goals that transcend immediate and egocentric interest” (1958:470). Values for Kluckhohn “are cultural and psychological facts of a certain type which can be described as objectively as other types of cultural and psychological facts” (1958: 472). The only problem was that Kluckhohn’s value project was never able to actually achieve these ambitious goals, despite much effort from Kluckhohn and his research team. The key issue, as Graeber (2001:4) points out, was the difficulty of finding a way to relate this comparative project to specific choices, behaviors, and actions within a coherent framework. What was ultimately missing was “an adequate theory of structure” (Graeber 2001:5).

Although Kluckhohn’s project hit a dead end, and has had no intellectual legacy, maybe something worthwhile may be salvaged from his efforts. As Graeber explains, Kluckhohn’s key idea was that cultures differ not simply in what they believe about the world, but also in “what they feel one can justifiably demand from it” (2001:5). This is at heart a moral project. Kluckhohn tried to move beyond studies of belief and perception toward a comparative analysis of morally-based ideals and desires. While most anthropologists may consider Kluckhohn’s project passé or irrelevant today, maybe he was onto something after all. In Graeber’s words: “However primitive the models Kluckhohn actually produced, he did at least open up the possibility of looking at cultures as not just different ways of perceiving the world, but as different ways of imagining what life ought to be like—as moral projects, one might say” (2001:22). This takes us further than many of the approaches to value that followed his.

Kluckhohn provides the first key component, then, of how I want to approach value. Value is not just about market forces, and it is not intrinsically embedded in commodities, places, or other material things. Kluckhohn’s value project went beyond questions of supply, demand, and taste to embrace what people feel is socially and morally just. As one foundation for thinking about value, this requires us to think about how such conceptions are linked to actions and to larger cultural contexts.

David Graeber’s book, Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, offers perhaps the most thorough anthropological investigation of value to date. I want to highlight two key components from Graeber’s discussions of value here. The first is a focus on action. The second is an emphasis on how these actions translate into wider systems of meaning. Graeber seeks to construct a theory of value that moves away from Saussurean structuralism on the one hand and from what he calls “economism” on the other. The problem with the former is that value is reduced to little more than “meaningful difference” (2001:46). With the latter, value is framed as a factor of individual choice and little more. Both frameworks are also hopelessly static; Graeber, following the lead of Nancy Munn, moves toward an understanding of value that is dramatically more dynamic (2001:46).

Munn argues that value emerges in action or through the process of creation itself. Value is not just an intrinsic property of objects, goods, services, or places. It has to be produced—within the context of surrounding cultural systems. This argument, which emphasizes both process and action, comes full circle back to Marx’s theoretical discussions of value (which were, after all, very much about measuring value based upon human action—labor). Money, Graeber explains, is key to Marx’s theory of value: “What money measures and mediates…is ultimately the importance of certain forms of human action (Graeber 2001:66-67). Money, which is an abstract yet ubiquitous representation of value, comes to signify the meaning and importance of human labor or what Graeber sometimes calls “creative energies” (ibid). While Marxists tend to focus on a fairly restricted understanding of human labor, Graeber argues that it might be fruitful to broaden our thinking and consider some other possibilities when it comes to labor and human action.

He writes, “One invests one’s energies in those things one considers most important or most meaningful” (2001:45). Value, he argues, “is the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves” (2001:45). This takes certain socially recognizable forms, whether kula valuables, currency, or credit cards. The important point is that these forms are not the actual source of value—they are just the medium through which value is created and passed around. Human actions produce value….and these actions take on meaning when they are understood within larger social and cultural systems. This brings us to the second point: these human actions and creative energies attain meaning when they are placed within expanded symbolic and social systems.

Graeber argues that value may be understood as how “actions become meaningful” within a larger social system, “real or imagined” (2001:254; see also Elyachar 2006:8)³. In order to understand the importance or meaning of a particular action, there has to be some reference to a surrounding totality. There must be some sort of comparison going on: “Parts take on meaning in relation to each other, and that process always involved references to some sort of whole: whether it be a matter of words in a language, episodes in a story, or ‘goods and services’ on the market” (Graeber 2001:86-87). The “real or imagined” aspect of all this is also important here. Graeber says that the process of creating value requires comparison, which necessitates some kind of audience. This audience may be real (e.g. direct social relationships) or imagined. “Society” is basically an imagined, totalized audience that people use to assess tastes, choices, desires, and values. This is akin to the “imagined communities” that Benedict Anderson (2006) wrote about, which are connected through shared ideals, ideologies, and meanings.

So we have to take account of action in value creation, and we need to pay attention to how those actions are linked to surrounding social, cultural, and political systems of meaning. This is where politics and power come into the equation. Graeber writes, “In any real social situation, there are likely to be any number of such imaginary totalities at play, organized around different conceptions of value” (2001:88). There is not just one system of meaning that people engage with or contest—there are multiple interwoven, contested, overlapping systems. The confluence of these systems leads to what might be called a “politics of value” (Graeber 2001:88; Appadurai 1986). For Graeber, competing or conflicting claims about value are always inherently political in nature (2001:115). Terry Turner, according to him, claims that the struggle to define value is “the ultimate stakes of politics” (2001:88). It would be ideal if value (i.e. what matters, or what is important and how that importance is represented) were determined through democratic, fair, and just decision-making processes. But Graeber and others argue that this is not the case (see also Elyachar 2005). The playing field is not level. This leads to the question of power.

Julia Elyachar writes, “The anthropology of value, which has a strong focus on symbolic meaning, can have politics at its center as well” (2005:7). Elyachar’s monograph, Markets of Dispossession, is a deeply ethnographic work exploring the politics of value through an extended, detailed investigation of workshops in Cairo. She draws from both Munn and Graeber to analyze how workshop masters create what she calls “relational value,” which “expresses the positive value attached to the creation, production, and extension of relationships in communities of Cairo” (2005:7). The power struggles in this case consist of conflicts between these workshop masters, the Egyptian state, international organizations, and NGOs, among others.

Her ethnography outlines a conflict between the intrusion of neoliberal market reforms and ideologies, on the one hand, and the morally-grounded economies of the workshop masters in Cairo on the other. What is being “dispossessed,” she argues, is “the power to decide what matters or, in other words, what is value” (2005:8). Through a focus on neoliberal market reforms, Elyachar shows that “Markets are social and political worlds with their own cosmologies. Each is a cosmos of its own, an intricately functioning field of power” (2005:214). She challenges the utopian notion of neo-classical economists that markets are benign instruments which, if properly unleashed, will serve the interests of “society” at large⁴ (Elyachar 2005:214). Instead, Elyachar argues forcefully that markets are highly political projects that have real—and often dramatically disparate—material effects. What all of this means is that economic expansion and development is anything but a value-neutral or objective process…no matter what many economists and development experts assert. Elyachar makes a solid case for the need to pay close attention to power relations, and more specifically to how different forms of power work, interact, and clash, in the ongoing politics of value.

Arjun Appadurai has explored the politics of value as well, but in a very different way. His approach, which draws a lot on the work of Georg Simmel, is far more economic in its focus. While Graeber seeks to shift the emphasis from a focus on things to an emphasis on actions, Appadurai explores the question of value by paying close attention to the “lives” of commodities. This is because he sees exchange as they key issue in value creation. What matters, ultimately, is how much someone is willing to give up in order to obtain certain goods and services. For Appadurai, value is ultimately based on individual desire (this is a different conception of desire than Kluckhohn sought to address). His analysis of the politics of value focuses on the struggles to control “flows of commodities” themselves, which is a decidedly market-based approach. Appadurai seeks to trace these commodity flows as they pass through different “regimes of value in space and time” (1986:4). He writes, “We have to follow the things themselves, for their meanings are inscribed in their forms, their uses, and their trajectories” (1986:5). Although some aspects of Appadurai’s approach are problematic, I find the idea of “regimes of value in space and time” to be particularly intriguing and useful.

This framework, with commodities passing through different systems of meaning and their value related to this overall process, is yet another foundation for my current work on value creation in Baja California Sur. But it needs reworking a bit, mostly because the commodity in question is not a linen coat or a can of Coke—it’s a place. Land, as Polanyi once argued, is a commodity of a special kind. Logan and Molotch, following him, insist that land is 1) immobile, and 2) not originally produced for sale in a market (1987:23). This means that an analysis of how value is created in particular landscapes or places requires different considerations. Yes, there is an argument to be made that places such as Cabo San Lucas or La Paz are most definitely “produced,” but this is not the same as the production of traditional commodities like coats—or iPods for that matter. The “regimes of value” in this case are the ideas, beliefs, and predilections of people, past and present—and these work to shape and define the meaning and value of particular geographic places. These systems of meaning overlap, clash, coalesce, and break apart. In what follows, I seek to trace the historical trajectories of value embedded in specific places…

I usually get a substantial segment of the class from other disciplines — graduate students who want to do ethnographic work in education, business, sociology, or whatnot and want to see how The Anthros do it. Even though other fields have been doing fieldwork as long or longer than us, we somehow capture the imagination of other disciplines as doing the ‘real’ or ‘most intense’ version of ethnographic work. In fact, often we have a bit of a mystical aura around us since no one can figure out exactly what we do, they just know we do it in some extremely ineffable way. Which, too often, is anthropology’s self-understanding as well.

When we read Marcus-and-Clifford postmodernism in my fieldmethods class, non-anthropology graduate students find their ideas not only uncontroversial, but actually the most scientific of the stuff on the syllabi. While the anthropologists consider postmodern reflexivity to be narcissistic, the non-anthros consider it to be the closest thing our discipline has produced to a ‘methods section’: something in the ethnography that describes what we actually did in the field. While the anthropologists approach collaborative anthropology and the decentering of their epistemological authority with a mixture of erotic longing and dread, the non-anthros consider it to be a sensible attempt to check the validity of research results against the intuitions of research respondents.

I think there’s something deeply ironic — and also very insightful — about this take on anthropology’s now-canonized apostates. But I’m not sure what. That anthropology was so far down the rabbit hole that postmodernism looks like an attempt at answerability? That postmodernism is just common sense about the research process with an -OfTheContemporary suffix attached at the end? Or something else?

Let me know what you figure out.

I.
Kim Fotun began her talk on the production of ethnography in what she termed “Late Industrialism” or the world economic system since 1984. A lasting effect of Writing Culture has been to compel all of us to recognize the conditions in which ethnography is produced and to be aware of how dominant ways of understanding shape what ethnographers see. Today, Fortun said, that must include the media noise of Fox News and the mainstream refusal of scientific explanations – from climate change denial, to the rejection of evolution, and the denigration of experts as elitists.

Projected onto the screen behind her was a cycle of images of factories, corporate advertising, and environmental devastation. Ours is a world where amphibians have become the canary in the coal mine, their rapidly dwindling numbers and sensitivity to grotesque developmental mutations evidence of pervasive and invisible pollution in our air and water. Clearly, Fortun sees her work as addressing how humans experience and understand the environmental effects of industrialization.

Later in the conference she was praised for the juxtaposition of word and image in her presentation. I disagreed, I thought it was lazy. The degree of awareness brought to the text (as is fitting for a conference on Writing Culture) made the lack of engagement with the image especially pronounced.

Fortun’s driving question is this: What makes ethnography an appropriate “technology” for understanding and confronting the contemporary world scene? It is in ethnography, she said, that we find new possibilities to circumvent activism as usual, transformative ways to usher in the future. The audience was implored to design ethnography to be accommodating to open-endedness, the foreign and overlooked, conscious of historical conditions, and always engaged with internal critique.

Ethnography provides us with a powerful and effective way to read historical conditions that resist explanation. Invoking Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies, Fotun offered us a devil’s bargain of sorts. When confronted with “discursive gaps,” events and conditions that defy our ability to think and understand them, we are tempted to accept “discursive risk” by using familiar idioms of thought nonetheless. Cannot ethnography be used to break this cycle? Can the ethnographer say something different?

Ethnography can be used to describe, yes, but also to respond. In confronting the contemporary world system we need new knowledge, but also new knowledge forms. Ethnography’s greatest strength, Fortun said, lies in its ability to sally forth not knowing in advance what this response will sound like. In this sense the production of ethnography can come to resemble performance art. With ethnography we have a method that embraces the ignorance of the researcher. The anthropologist is one who can tolerate truly not knowing where one is headed. You begin a project quite literally not knowing how to end it, allowing it to be transformed in the process of bringing it into being.

Ethnography is not a town hall, but polyvocal. It is not about fairness or turn taking, but collaboration in that sense of laboring together. The job of the ethnographer, she imagined, is to set the stage for an encounter, to create a space for creativity where something new can emerge.

Fortun then went on to elaborate on two projects, one her own and the other a body of work she found exemplary (was it a student of hers or a colleague? I can’t recall): Asthma, the Foucaultian subjtivization of asthma patients, asthma research, air quality and industrialization; And, the US food delivery system, urban planning in the development of retail centers, food retail, and convenience stores – from the convenience store CEOs all the way to the cashiers.

Writing Culture, with its emphasis on the role of discourse in constituting the real, gave us language as a place to play. So run with it. Run with the possibility of fashioning ethnography into something other, whether that be writing a book, compiling an archive, or organizing an event. This is how we will confront, for example, industrial recklessness, or any other problem that won’t settle down. This is how we will address a popular culture that is shrill in its will not to know. Create a space for something new to emerge. Draw people in and set games in motion.

II.
Hugh Raffles took the podium and mumbled shyly into the microphone.

“I can’t hear you,” the elderly woman next to me hollered, “Speak up!”

He adjusted the angle of the mic, “This is just the way I speak.”

“I’m not deaf!”

“There’s still some seats in the front,” he said still friendly. Unfortunately for us she and her obnoxious companion didn’t budge, contenting themselves with a steady stream of complaints.

Then she turned to me, “Has he written a famous book?”

III.
Raffles began with a joke, his first impulse for this conference was to write a manifesto of sorts. One which would document, “everything that drives me nuts” about anthropology. One: we are not interrogators. Two: ethnography should not be like an abusive relationship. Everyone chuckled at his audacity before he slipped into his scholarly report which was, honestly, a bit of a shaggy dog story and something of a letdown compared to Kim Fortun’s righteousness.

Stones. Raffles seemed to be working on some kind of analytic meditation on rocks. He told a brief story about a walk on the beach where he and his companion encountered some unusually beautiful stones and a stray dog. The played fetch with rocks, the humans and the dog, until the game was over. He asked, “What can a stone do?”

Switching gears, Raffles gave us a history lesson on the London Stone, starting with a peasant uprising in the 1400s, tracing connections through Shakespeare to Dickens. Why is the London Stone significant? Is it, as some have declared, merely famous for being famous? Is there a connection to the Romans? To the Druids? The story of the stone became longer and more convoluted as Raffles cast the stone as “a portal to the past, sucking up ideas of the present.”

Some believe the London Stone is the city’s Palladium, that the well being of the city depends on its preservation. He described a number of events which led to the near destruction of the London Stone, most recently this has included urban development. To me the whole thing evoked Benjamin’s Angel of History turning around to face the detritus of history piled up like a regurgitated landfill.

Everyone seems to think the London Stone is significant, but nobody quite knows why. I fully expected this sacred geography to come round with a mystery novel’s twist ending. All that was missing was the occult paranoia of Alan Moore’s Jack the Ripper story. But instead we went to China.

In China the right stone can do a lot. Speaking stones guide scholars and poets in their dreams and self-cultivation is valued as the basis for stone appreciation. Raffles had a number of compelling stories of the gifting of stones to important political figures from the times of feudalism through the Communist Party. These magical objects of desire grew to have such a high demand that their excavation was banned. Raffles spent time in China, interviewing stone aficionados and stone dealers, who told him of the role stones play in their meditation practices. The most special rocks were revered as teachers. “You can travel in a stone like that. You enter it and it enters you.”

The connection of the Chinese example to the previous two stories escaped me. There seemed to be a recurring theme of spirit, of people relating to and finding meaning in their environment. But there was also this problem presented by capitalism threatening sacred geography and the commodification of stones with special cultural value. The presentation reminded me somewhat of my own style of storytelling, which my friends often criticize as being too opaque or rambling. Now on the other side of it I appreciated better what they were trying to tell me. I made a mental note to do a better job of explaining why my stories matter in the future.

By way of conclusion, Raffles broke from his tales of stones to reconsider the possibilities of ethnography. He invoked George Marcus’s essay on “baroque ethnography,” and likened ethnography itself as listening to stones, the contemplation of stillness, searching for a way past an impenetrable surface. Finally, the audience was cautioned against ignoring the potential for finding self-transformation through ethnographic practice.

IV.
“Dreadful,” the woman next me declared, bathing me in her warm peanuty breath, “I hope they didn’t pay him.”

During the Q&A session she would take the microphone and call them both out for failing to produce actual ethnography (because neither one spent an extended period of time studying a single community, natch). Orin Starn picked this line of thinking up and rephrased it more generously as, “What is your investment in calling this ethnography?” A worthwhile question for anyone attempting an experimental writing piece (or performance art, as the case may be).

This panel reminded me of just how open-ended calls for anthropologists to contextualize and situate our studies really are. Context is inexhaustible! How do you know when to stop contextualizing? Or, how do you know which contexts to acknowledge and which ought to be glossed over?

I also truly appreciated Kim Fortun’s call to embrace that uncertainty in her description of ethnography as embracing not-knowingness and keeping comfortable with letting the “not yet” be.

Writing Culture’s Decomposition by Ayla Samli

There was something right about meeting in an old warehouse to discuss Writing Culture at 25. Like the edited volume did to ethnography, the space of the warehouse had been retooled, a repurposed site now used for humanities conferences and colloquia. Like the edited volume, the space showed its age and its possibilities for refurbishment. There weren’t enough seats in Bay 4, the garage where the podium stood, to accommodate all of the listeners so they watched the streaming video close-by on flat screen TV’s.

In her opening remarks, Laurie Patton, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Duke and professor of religion, called Writing Culture a game-changing book and ultimately cast the tensions between scientific representation and literary representation created through the book as canyons. “Canyons are places of biodiversity,” she advised us, “tend to the canyon well.”

Orin Starn, chair of Duke’s anthropology department, then reminisced about the conditions of the 1980s, when Writing Culture was authored; a time of typewriters, new technologies, and Western Empire. A time which echoed the hubris and possibility in the book’s chapters. Now the presenters and audience endeavored to discuss the state of anthropology and its new possibilities under current historical circumstances.

James Clifford gave a talk on what it feels like to feel historic. Importantly globalization was not indexed in Writing Culture and he reflected on how much things have changed, noting that the volume had been a product of changing times. He praised works that make space for marginalized identities, and noted that “displacement is not disappearance.”

What struck me is the feeling of a kind of uncanny return, the way that the anthropologists involved in the WC moment decenterd anthropology to “give voice” to the marginalized and how they (well, we) are now being displaced by global forces, economically, and ontologically. I see how the force of American power coursed through these writings. Only one who has power can “make space” for other voices and perspectives. There is a difference between willfully moving and being pushed aside and something about this conference intonated the profound loss and displacement of that power.

Clifford contrasted globalization with imperialism because globalization can happen from below. “I cringe a little bit when I read it now. We were telling people how to displace themselves. We were confident in our uncertainty.” Clifford interwove the current global crisis with the loss of the haughty superiority of Writing Culture. Things have changed, back to the factory to figure out how to improve our process.

George Marcus delivered his Powerpoint slideshow, “The Legacies of Writing Culture and Alternate Forms Within and Alongside Ethnography,” inclusive of third spaces, para-sites, and ethnocharettes. He discussed the time Clifford arrived at his department with a book bag, a sacred bundle of books, suggesting that this book bag inspired Writing Culture and asked, “What is in the sacred bundle today?”

Marcus then raised an example of the multiple layers with interpretive possibilities on UC Irvine’s web design, discussing the process of selecting and layering images together. The site has a large Russian ship going through Shanghai, fieldnotes (of kinship charts), a silhouette of two suited men in a kind of therapeutic conversation, etc. The image, powerfully iconic, evokes something about a really big ship sailing into an intimate conversation, and the gloss of ethnographic data, all shaded in stormy blues.

He said that the ship “was plowing through urban space.” I think the image attempts to get at the complexity, specters of power, technologies, and shadowy interviews, as part of the process of writing or hypertexting culture today. It says to me that history is undeniable and that our research as anthropologists is bracketed or pushed by other global forces, and yet something remains recognizable about the work.

Marcus talked about the availability of new forms that did not exist during Writing Culture, new possibilities for experimenting with texts, the modes of representation, the possibilities for collaboration, and the temporality of scale. This resonates with how I see anthropology today—it’s not just works and lives, it’s slippery collaborative projects, momentarily brought together by a common quality or interest, then developed into other projects. It’s experts and activists weighing in on events from a different perspective. It’s rich and messy and yet those earlier impulses of representation remain.

Ayla Samli (Rice ’11) is a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focuses on gendered material culture and new subjectivities in Turkey.

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.

It was a familiar drive for me as I zipped west and then cut south into the Old North State. I earned my degree at UNC-Chapel Hill and got to take a number of courses at Duke during my grad career. Being that I live in Virginia now its a pleasure to make a social call when the opportunity arises. The first panel was scheduled to begin at 10:00am and I was looking forward to hearing presentations from two scholars who have for years been heroes of mine: Michael Taussig and Jim Clifford. Many other prominent figures would be there, plus some of my old running buddies and former professors. And real coffee. My current home, Newport News, is not a coffee town by any measure.

Durham was built on tobacco money, even old man Duke made his fortune off the cancer sticks, and its downtown is still distinguished by the red-brick warehouses that used to store the stuff. But tobacco in North Carolina has gone the way of cotton in Texas, the Lucky Strike smokestack has long since puffed its last toke. One long and narrow loading dock with garages lined up against the railroad got snapped up by Duke and the interior has been refurbished into a chic, modernist conference center. The audience sat beneath a raised garage door. A train’s whistle punctuated Hugh Raffles’ slide show on rocks and storytelling. Was that real or part of a soundtrack? The agro-industrial setting made a perfectly intimate venue for the event.

I first encountered Writing Culture as a junior in college. I found the essays intimidating and confusing, nothing at all like Predicament of Culture which I was reading concurrently or Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which I’d finished only the year before. Predicament‘s blend of poetry with history and theory was an inspiration, it was a major event in my intellectual life, the moment when I finally started to “get it.” Writing Culture just made me frustrated and maybe a little afraid that the possibilities of anthropology were more narrow than I’d hoped. By contrast I found Anthropology as Cultural Critique to be much less strident and more useful too.

It wasn’t until the second semester of grad school that I picked up Writing Culture again. This time it came periodized and prepackaged as the catalyst for the postmodern turn in anthropology, a landmark reconsideration of the role played by the individual ethnographer in navigating the process of encountering others and expressing that experience to an audience. It sparked a debate that, for all its blind alleys, leads up to the present. After surviving the hazing ritual that is the first year of grad school I can’t say that I’ve picked up WC since. Today the volume sits on my shelf stupidly wedged between In the Realm of the Diamond Queen and Works and Lives, my underlines and margin notes no doubt becoming more hilarious by the year.

Do you hold on to books you never use? I have hundreds of books warehoused in my attic, collecting dust, warping in the humidity, supporting multiple generations of spiderwebs. Relics of an earlier self waiting to be hollowed out and refurbished with modernist interiors. But then again, maybe I just have a lot of stuff. When I moved my family to the reservation to conduct my dissertation research I even needed to rent one of those self-storage units to house all my belongings. They are kind of ridiculous, these icons of American material culture where people with too many possessions leave the things they never use but can’t bear to part with.

What is Writing Culture to you? Is it something you keep close at hand where it waits anxiously for you to flit nimbly through the pages, deftly landing on your favorite passages? Has it played a crucial role in your training and professional development as you heeded its call for, in the words of Danilyn Rutherford, not less but more empiricism?

Or is it to you just an assignment you completed in grad school? A parlor trick you learned to please your professors: Look at how smart I am, I can read Stephen Tyler and make sense of it! Is this merely another thing you never use, but yet can’t bear to part with?

What do you see as the role of Writing Culture in anthropology’s present?

I, of course, prefer the anthropology of morels.

But that being said, there are in fact a lot of other “Anthropologies of…” which border very closely on anthropology of freedom, and I want to dwell (at too much length) on one of them here: the anthropology of ethics. There is another one going by the label of an “Anthropology of the Will” which will have to wait until whoever has the book checked out returns it to the library, cause there is no way I will pay $55 for it, thank you very much Stanford University Press. There is also the “Anthropology of Happiness” which insofar as freedom is a means rather than an end might be something anthropologists do study. I’m much too pessimistic for that.

But the anthropology of ethics has finally arrived. This year has seen the publication of two books: Ordinary Ethics, (a semi-reasonable $30, $21.99 on Amazon) ed. by Michael Lambeck, and James Faubion’s An Anthropology of Ethics (ditto). The former is a great collection of essays that includes both anthropologists and philosophers (and includes one from Faubion), the latter is likely to appeal to me, Rex, and like 5 other people, which says nothing about how awesome it is, but rather, indicates a perhaps perverse pleasure in being inside James Faubion’s brain. Nonetheless, both of them lay out some problems and concepts for an anthropology of ethics in rigorous and satisfying ways.

It should be said that the “anthropology of ethics” referenced here probably means many things to many people: the parochial problem of our own ethics in anthropology, the newer problem of the bureaucratization of virtue, which we have dwelled on here and which includes the handful of people studying Institutional Review Boards (Rena Lederman, Annelise Riles, Charles Bosk, etc), the rise of an ethics industry, esp. bioethics, and so forth. But Lambek, Faubion and crew sustain an interest in ethics by asking to what extent ethics is a problem for empirical investigation by anthropologists. Is it a “field” of investigation, a method, a universal feature of human life, etc?

Clearly, they are not alone in this, since the 2000s might fairly be characterized as the decade of evolutionary psychology, wherein the
putative discovery of the “moral organ” (which is apparently shaped like a trolley, and is responsible for the rise and fall of reputations of Harvard professors) has occured and led to hundreds if not thousands of studies identifying “morality” as a universal biological feature of animals. And let me just point out that, ipso facto, there is no actual debate here because a) the kinds of actions and effects we call moral or ethical can be biological without being the same everywhere and b) evolutionary psychologists are rarely interested in defining morality or ethics as such, and more interested in looking for effects that might lead to a theory of what those things are. If there is a debate, it is probably at the level of the efficacy of the discursive, i.e. to what extent is the phenomena of an ethical action inextricably a problem of its circulation in discourse? Experimental social scientists will reduce this to a problem of experimental design, interpretive social scientists will not let it go.

But I digress. There have been calls for an anthropology of ethics and/or morality (and I more or less buy the claim made by both Faubion and Lambek, that it is not a good idea to insist that there is a distinction between the two). In a “debate” in Anthropological Theory in 2008, Didier Fassin and Wiktor Stoczkowski briefly addressed the issue. The debate exemplifies the problem of the anthropology of ethics, viz. is it about an anthropology of morals (or ethics) as a particular real object of study in the world, or is it about the morality or ethics (or by implication, objectivity or political commitment) of the anthropologist. The latter reflects what I referred to in a previous post as political anthropology’s distaste for the concept of freedom: it is a normative commitment, not a thing in the world capable of being studied. Anthropologists (should, some say without irony) shy away from normative terms, especially those that seem to be “western” in origin. (I say ‘seem to be’ because that attribution [e.g. "Freedom is a western notion"] entails both an empirical claim which is not necessarily justified, and a morality in which the concept is both original to “us” and therefore either good or bad, depending on who’s talking.)

But both Lambek’s and Faubion’s book are arguing for the former: that ethics is an empirical field, not just a problem of research orientation. Lambek in particular is keen to make ethics a feature of action generally, and not just one of those “anthropologies of…” domains like politics, art, religion etc. One is not ethical only when in church or when helping the poor, one is ethical at least as regularly as one’s mind is in one’s body. Action has an ethical quality. To the extent that we are comfortable with the claim that all people act, we should be comfortable with the claim that all people act in an ethically specific manner (which is different than the colloquially distorted meaning of “he acted ethically” which is an attribution of having done good).

Faubion, perhaps predictably, is eager to elaborate an anthropology of ethics based in Foucault’s work, and especially that of the last years of his life when problems of askesis, parrhesia, and self-fashioning came to dominate his research. For both Faubion and Lambek (and his contributors) there is a relatively sharp distinction drawn between a Kantian form of ethics, and a Foucaultian one (for the record, Lambek has placed his bets on a return to Aristotle’s understanding of ethics, action and judgement, which he elaborates in the first chapter of the volume, whereas Faubion’s unlikely dark horse is Niklas Luhmann).

Ethics in Kant’s sense is (often caricatured as) the setting of a categorical imperative (a law) by which one must act. Thus Kantian ethics reduces ethics to a problem of reason, which in practical terms creates rules that must be followed (obligations) rather than a series of judgements strongly conditioned by or even determined by, circumstances. This “rule-following” ethics allows for a subject who approaches action as driven by (and subordinate to) his/her own priniciple (arrived at by virtue of reason). (And then there is the Weberian elaboration on this, which I won’t go into here). Freedom, therefore, is the ability to act in accordance with these principles.

Ethical practice in Foucault’s sense is much different. It is frequently laid out (as it is in these two texts) as consisting of four components 1) the part of oneself that is the object of an ethics (sex, religion, work etc); 2) the mode of subjection (reason, divine law, natural law, biology); 3) the substance or means of ethical self-fashioning; and 4) the goal or telos of ethical self-fashioning. Considered according to this schema, the Foucaultian definition of ethics allows us to make sense of how individuals submit to things that seem to be the opposite of freedom (Laidlaw’s examples of Jain ascetisism, Mahmood’s pietist cults in Egypt, etc.). Insofar as the choice is available to them to pursue this kind of ethical self-fashioning, they are engaging in what Foucault called “ethics as the practice of freedom.”

So given this sketchy outline, one might ask: is the problems of Freedom a subset of the problem of ethics, or a separate but related one? Can one have an anthropology of ethics without the concept of freedom? And if not, is freedom something to be explored concurrently with ethics, or is it something that requires a more careful separation and analysis. Under the Kantian version, freedom is more or less straightforwardly about non-interference, and in particular, non- interference with the ethical rules arrived at by way of reason–the categorical imperative. Under the Foucaultian version, the question arises of whether freedom is means or end or both. At some level the freedom to self-fashion is separate from an ethical life oriented towards living freely or achieving freedom. Whether there is freedom to self-fashion takes freedom out of the domain of the ethical, but treating it as a telos, leaves it within the domain of ethics.

It is at this point that I think the work done by philosophers to specify the problem of freedom is actually helpful. So consider how
the political philosopher Philp Pettit approaches the problem. In philosophy, the problem of freedom is divided up into separate problems: the individual, psychological problem of free will vs. determinism
(so-called compatibilism debates) and the political problem of liberty. Pettit argues for reintegrating them both because they were origincally integrated as problems from Hobbes through Kant and because a solution to both problems is more compelling than a solution to either one separately (this is implicitly an indictment of philosophy’s previous work of distinguishing them as different kinds of problems, but he doesn’t say that).

Pettit’s reasoning is that there is a compelling solution to both and it comes from the tradition of “civic republicanism” that has seen much revival as of late. One way in which this tradition is useful is that it mediates between the negative and positive versions of liberty. Republican theorists are disatisfied with the notion that non-interference (negative liberty) is sufficient because it leads to the problem of the contented slave (e.g. a slave who is well provided for and whose master does not interfere in anything that s/he wants tod). Clearly the problem of being a slave, even a happy one is intuitively anathema to most any notion of freedom. But republican theorists are also suspicious of any positive freedom that forces people to do what is right (i.e. you must live this way because it enhances your freedom). The solution is what they call non-domination, which is defined as not being subject to arbitrary power. Freedom for republican theorists requires both non-interference and a kind of structural or institutional relationship which is not arbitrary (i.e. always potentially capable of restricting freedom).

I’m not a philosopher (nor apparently am I an anthropologist, but whatever), so I can’t say whether Kant’s version of things can deal with these problems. At the level of the individual, the categorical imperative does seem to be strictly about the assertion of individual powers, and makes no reference to the structural, institutional or background context of that power. But in the Foucaultian case, there are two different kinds of freedom at stake: the first the ability to self-fashion: to engage in practices of self-fashioning (asceticism, for instance; or good samaritanism) guided by a mode of subjection (reason, the divine law, psychadelic experience etc) oriented towards a goal without interference either directly or as a result of some system of domination. The second however is to make freedom (whether as non-interference or non-domination) into a goal, and here it seems to me to matter what kind of freedom one chooses. If one is going to fashion onself as a freedom-fighter, for instance, the goal of freedom as radical non-interference (the libertarian) implies different practices than does the goal of freedom as non-domination (civic republicanism). This of course, implies “the freedom to fight for freedom” or the “freedom to make onself free” which only sounds paradoxical, but is not in fact. And it’s also why, I think, James Faubion’s case for an anthropology of ethics appeals to “auto-poietic”
systems in a Luhmannian sense. But that is neither here nor there. Or it’s way beyond there.

In any case, if there is a point to this post for anyone who hasn’t rightfully given up by now, it is that freedom as a concept that incorporates both the individual problematic of action, and the political problem of domination seems to be to be uniquely related to the kinds of “structure and agency” problems that anthropologists are interested in, but are loath to investigate under this label… for reasons already enumerated. If there is a programmatic aspect to my thinking here, then it is that the exploration of the theoretical variations in he concept of freedom can illuminate and help explain the kinds of actions people undertake not just when they are being ethical, but when they take the possibility of ethical action under consideration as a goal in itself.

Object Domain: Probably the least intellectually satisfying but best choice for your career: delineate and actually-existing object out there and make your discipline the study of it. Rake in big $$$ for large-scale, cross-cultural projects. Give graduate students a clear paradigm and a mode of normal science to do.

For instance: There are things like myths which are self-contained, internally structured, comparable, and cross-cultural. Record five thousand of them to find out what the underlying similarities are. Result: Joseph Campbell! All human beings are plugged into the divine world of transcendence and occasionally it spills out into the mundane world. Do a cross-cultural, historical studies of differential human responses to the same basic phenomenon. Result: Mircea Eliade. People in our colonies are all organized on the basis of real-out there kinship systems whose structure and function can be compared. Result: Radcliffe-Brown.

The interwar period was a time incredible time for the delineation of such object domains in the human sciences, and anthropology was no exception — you could do the anthropology “of law” or “of art” or “of politics” and it all fit together in perfectly. But of course we’ve been doing this for much longer then that — think of earlier Victorian literatures on ‘totemism’ or ‘hysteria’ for instance.

There are two problems with this approach. Ok there are more than that. Any realist epistemology of the human sciences has, historically, been very difficult to advocate if you pay attention to what humans actually do. But really, the two problems are: taking everyday notions and elevating them to analytic status almost always results in you realizing half way through that the notion can’t make sense of the evidence without being stretched so out of shape that it either falls apart (like ‘totemism’) or morphs into something else (as the literature on ‘ritual’ very fruitfully turned into a study of ‘performativity’). The second problem is that most of the time the things that you think of as actually existing don’t actually exist — kinship systems, for instance, are now pretty universally understood not to be ‘out there’ in the sense that Fortes thought they were. So the concept can’t bear the weight, and the phenomena don’t exist. Which can be ok if you are all about the journey, but not if you’re focused on the destination.

I think its pretty clear that Kelty doesn’t seem to be doing this.

Generalizing the concept to broaden the conversation: Another way to approach anthropology ‘of’ something is via a sort of logical positivism manqué. On this approach the goal is to articulate the features of a previously-unarticulated concept (like ‘freedom’) such that it can be incorporated in a broader or more generalized theory of human action. That general theory can then be used to talk to philosophers, or economists, or whatever. This conversation-broadening language can be thought of as a ‘pidgin’ or ‘trading language’ (as Galison does) or else just ‘theory’ in the actual sense of the term.

This is fine if you want to do this, but I don’t think that it’s surprising that anthropologists have, so far, wanted to do this with freedom. Discourses of ‘freedom’ in the United States (where Kelty and I work) are explicitly normative and tied to mainstream discourses. How is this surprising? Anthropology is explicitly opposed to ethnocentrism and was founded at a time when ‘freedom’ meant ‘a state’s right to institute Jim Crow’. Second-generation (read: WASP) anthropologists like Redfield and Linton did think about freedom and progress, etc. but by the time the GI Bill anthropologists institutionalized themselves in the academy, liberalism was the ideology of the bourgeoisie. It’s a sign of the swing to the right of some brands of anthropologists (the kinds who do ‘paraethnography’) that these issues of liberalism come up again. Similar histories could be written for France (where ethnology started socialist) and England (where it began as objective and value free).

Large sections of anthropological theory have focused on emancipation, revolution, equality, and so forth — but they’ve never explicitly taken up the word ‘freedom’. Which doesn’t mean that they weren’t interested in it.

Anthropologists might have a contribution to make towards an understanding of what ‘agency’ is and how macro-orders of determination do or don’t structure action (Paul Kockelman has published on this recently, for instance) and how this relates to moral deliberation. Equally, we could take models from broader theory and try analyzing our ethnographic material with them “the ethics of blogging…. environmentalism as ethical form… etc. etc.”. But most of the work in this area comes from people less squeamish about normativity. Thus while anthropology has Faubion’s anthropological ethics in which Aristotle is inflected with Foucault, in economics they have Capability approaches to development (‘as freedom’) in which Sen and Nussbaum inflect Aristotle with Rawls.

Ethnographic Theorizing: The most promising way to get into an anthropology ‘of’ Freedom is, I think, through particularization not generalization. This means asking: how can we take this concept, understand it as richly as possible, and use this ethnographically specific idea not just as a ‘native’ model but something we can use for our own analysis. This is (I think) the approach described as ‘ethnographic theory’ in the teaser email for the upcoming journal Hau which made the rounds a few months ago. It’s also an approach that I’m familiar with from my own work in the Pacific, where we are trying to encourage a new generation of scholars who are both analysts and Natives (with a capital N) on the one hand and, on the other, experiment with forms of anthropological knowledge which treat indigenous culture as theoretical exegesis. This way, both the people and their ideas get a fair shake.

This direction — more detail, more exploration of variance, ambiguities, historical transformations — is what I feel is too often lacking in ‘anthropologies of’. To a certain extent it’s understandable — taking American discourses of freedom as the subject of a lit review means reading thousands of sermons produced across scores of decades. It means reading books like The Story of American Freedom and Nation of Agents. The other option of studying ‘liberalism’ in Italy and New York and just saying ‘you know, liberalism as a cultural form‘ gives up specifying who, specifically, you are talking to, and what, specifically, you are talking about.

This can be very freeing — cultural studies is blessed by not having to begin every sentence with an ‘among the…’. But ultimately the danger is that discourses of freedom become too free, too untethered from the coordinates from which they were originally beamed up. Soon we begin slipping into liberalism as an object domain, or promise to engage in general theory but never get around to it.

In conclusion, I think that anthropology’s own unique — and by unique I mean ‘weird’ — brand of theorizing might be the best way to do an ‘anthropology of…’. But it would also be a method that would be the most particularizing, not the most generalizing, the one most led by the voices of others rather than extracted out of our preconceptions, the one which sought the most analytic purchase from the most culturally specific forms of thought. Let he who has ears hear.

“The time is now ripe for anthropologists to consider the concept of freedom and the empirical manifestations of freedom in culture. What more significant and urgent task is there for the anthropologist than that of launching a concerted inquiry into the nature of freedom and its place and basis in nature and the cultural process? Such an inquiry would provide in time a charter for belief in those values and principles indispensable to the process of advancing culture and to the ideal of a democratic world order dedicated to the development of human potentialities to their maximum perfection.” (preface to The Concept of Freedom in Anthropology ed. David Bidney, 1963 p. 6)

You and me both, pal.

Thus did David Bidney valiantly launch the investigation into freedom by anthropologists only to immediately then admit: “I realize that hard-headed, realistic anthropologists, including some of the participants in this symposium, would not find themselves in agreement with this anthropologic dream. There is danger, they will protest, that you are reifying Freedom into an absolute entity, just as culture once was. Freedom they will object is a non-scientific, political slogan which betrays its ethnocentric, Western and American origin…”

Freedom, as concept, still evokes this suspicion. That it is “nothing more” than a political slogan; or that it masks the reality of domination, oppression, slavery and power. As well it should given how promiscuously it is exploited.Or, as Edmund Leach so characteristically puts it in his contribution to the same volume: “To prate of Freedom as if it were a separable virtue is the luxurious pursuit of aristocrats and of the more comfortable members of modern affluent society. It has been so since the beginning.” (77)

What Leach expresses here, in part, is the descriptivist bias of anthropology of the time, and specifically of political anthropology: that the goal is comparative analysis without a priori reference to any normative political ideals. This, I think probably resonates with most anthropologists, who would be much less likely to be interested in Freedom as a concept that delimits a certain relationship between action and governance, more more likely to see it as a slogan that has been used as a warrant in colonial, imperial and global economic endeavors; as a tool used to transform existing arrangements in its own name (and secretly in the interests of a global elite). At a first cut this is undeniably so if one simply listens to the way the word is used in the news, and by politicians especially.

Indeed, it is my probably hasty opinion that the whole of “political anthropology” (at least in it’s 1930s-1970s form) shares this bias, despite the fact that it would seem to be this domain to which one would immediately turn for help in understanding the variations in the nature of Freedom. Instead, freedom is excluded from investigation insofar as it contaminates, confuses or otherwise confounds the exploration of objective political structures. Georges Balandier’s account of the development of political anthropology up to the mid 1960s (Political Anthropology) clearly shows how the questions of state formation, legitimacy and domination, kinship and power, status and power and so forth have been investigated. But he never mentions the word freedom. This is not so curious if freedom is understood as an outcome of a normative theory of the state, in favor of a descriptive, comparative science of political systems. Come to think of it, Weber never really talks about freedom either, and for similar reasons: the goal of a scientific sociology is not to articulate the ought of political systems but the is. It does not appear as a subject in Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma, nor in Meyer Fortes and EE Evans-Pritchard’s collection on African Political Systems.

What Bidney was proposing therefore, probably looked far too universalist in its appeal (as if Freedom were inevitably to be found in the struggles of people everywhere) and worse, potentially dangerous (insofar as it imposes a normative vision of freedom on those it seeks to understand). The properly anthropological way to think about “an anthropology of freedom”, therefore, would be to look at it from the perspective of the rest of the world and how it perceives the imposition of “freedom” on it.

There are probably a lot of attempts to do something like this. As I mentioned in a previous post, few of them tag these attempts explicitly with the word ‘freedom’–for whatever reasons. Two in particular that might be explored for this are Paul Reisman’s Freedom Among the Fulani and the great short piece by Caroline Humphrey, “Alternative Freedoms” (thanks again Morpheus!). Neither of these expresses allegiance to or appears similar to what we think of as “political anthropology.” Riesman, interestingly, was a student of Balandier (and the son of David Riesman of The Lonely Crowd fame), but he explicitly avers any deep engagement with political anthropology in his book, which is dedicated instead to Dorothy Lee.

Humphrey’s short piece does more or less does exactly what I was claiming no one in anthropology was doing. In it she outlines three concepts of freedom, starting from the closest linguistic analogues in play, in order to show why it might be that Russians today, hearing a speech of Bush or Blair of Obama crowing triumphantly about freedom, might view such promises with suspicion or fear. At the end of the article she puts it bluntly: “The three ideas of freedom have come to inhabit very different worlds of value. None of them is identical with Western ideas of freedom. But after all, Russians are far from alone in this. Much of the world is culturally different in this regard.” (9) [1]

The first idea is Svoboda, which contains elements of a version of freedom as access to a privileged sphere, a bit like Arendt’s account of the ancient Greeks and their distinction between a sphere of privation and slavery (the household) and a sphere of freedom and publicness, the polis. According to Humphrey, the root is svoi, (self, ours) and so shares some of the meaning of “our way of life” and leads to a particular sense of freedom as “our kind of freedom”–not universalist at all. Thus a hearer in Russian might not hear the word “freedom,” translated as svoboda, as a universal value. The second use is the peculiar Mir (like the spacecraft) which means universe, humanity, the world, but also, ‘peace’ (after the Soviet linguistic reforms). Mir has aspects of a “will of the people” sort–a “universalized community” and Humphrey says of her explanation “I hope this helps explain the deeply non-intuitive fact (to us) that there are Russian villagers today who identify freedom, precisely with Stalinism.” Finally there is Volya, which carries a meaning similar to “will” and expresses that aspect of freedom which is associated with volition and intention.

That there are three words for freedom is nothing new (English boasts Freedom and Liberty), and that the words have a variable semantic range is also unsurprising. Nonetheless, Humphrey is demonstrating how the concept looks different not only linguistically, but in terms of history and political structure. There is an extensive discussion about the tension produced by the transition to capitalism, and the ways in which freedom comes to be associated with lawlessness, banditry and the unconstrained exploitation of Russian resources by a few elites. But this is, in some ways, the same debate about liberty that has occupied political theory since at least the French, if not the English revolution. Liberty is always in tension with some other notion such as stability, tradition, security, etc.

Paul Riesman’s book is a different take on the problem of freedom or liberty. The book is probably better remembered for its experimental character. It is divided into two sections, the first of which cleaves very closely to a classic monographic form detailing aspects of Fulani life; the second is, arguably, one of the earliest experiments in “reflexive” ethnography in which “life as lived” and the encounter of Riesman with Fulani social life is organized through his own experience of coming to an understanding.

Because Riesman is avowedly uninterested in the political structure of Fulani society, the notion of Freedom he is interested in probably ends up looking much more like a question of “agency” (a term he does not use, though Paul Stoller and Lila Abu-Lughod count among his acolytes) than freedom in the political sense. In the first part, he attends at length to the problem of the terms Pulaaku and Semteende–words that circumscribe the experience of custom, obligation, honors, shame and sanction. In this sense, the kind of freedom Riesman is concerned with is in fact the relationship of structure and agency more than anything else. In the second part, Riesman explores more theological notions of freedom (Man’s freedom and Allah’s power) and the notion of freedom as “self-mastery,” which corresponds in a loose way to some of the questions often lumped under “autonomy” (and which has the delightful literal meaning of “He who possesses his own head” [226]). Riesman spends a good deal of the last part talking about how children come to be autonomous or free, a subject that clearly obsessed him, since his second book published posthumously (First find your child a good mother) is concerned with disproving the psychological and psychoanalytic claims that certain kinds of child-rearing practices affect the outcome of adult personhood.

Both Riesman and Humphrey are good examples, I think of the confusion that attends the concept of freedom for more than the simple reason that it is an ideological slogan. As a philosophical concept, the term denotes something that is both political (concerning the structure of governance, rights and the relation of people to each other) and psychological (denoting a relationship to will, autonomy or acting). Both accounts show (but in different ways) how the integration of these two aspects might differ in different settings.

None of this settles the question for me of why Freedom is particularly uninteresting to anthropologists, but it has opened up for me a set of related questions (Another Post! I am Unstoppable!) about two recent attempts to address something related to freedom: the anthropology of the will, and the anthropology of ethics. To be continued…