“How can such abuses ever be eradicated in an institution which is fundamentally about and produced through the valorization of *hierarchy* (a structural logic which makes it nearly impossible not to exploit someone: because the disappearance of the adjunct crisis wouldn’t mean the disappearance of race/gender/color/class discrimination). So what to do? Especially in anthropology.”

Ya, there’s one of the million dollar questions–what can be done? It’s complicated and all that, but honestly I would rather hear more people asking this question rather than talking about branding or marketing and all that. I mean, the whole degree process is based upon the production and maintenance of clear hierarchies, and considering all of the rhetoric coming from many anthros it’s all pretty ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that people buy into these hierarchies and treat people in certain ways based upon credentials, publications, pieces of paper.

“It is always interesting to me how Anthropology’s PR does not match its actual practice.”

Ya, we talk a big game but our rhetoric often does not apply within our own academic houses. Huge problem.

“So everything Sarah Kendzior said above about what anthropology should be is spot-on, but we should be more honest about the extent to which these characteristics are aspirational and ideal–not the daily reality of what anthropology actually is in practice.”

That’s true–but the aspirational/ideal is what hopefully can drive some people to challenge some of what’s going on, to challenge some of these persistent practices that plague the discipline (granted, this isn’t just a problem in anthro).

When I was making these same points about privilege, employment, social (im)mobility, the academy and journalism, in 2007 (yes, before the global financial crisis), I was literally, as is documented in writing, told to “leave your ‘privilege’ critique at home”, viciously bullied, smeared as a violent ghetto criminal with nothing valid to say–including by the department chair who swept white male graduate students bullying me under the table instead of acknowledging the behavior as the Title IX hostile climate violations that they are, with this same professor making a point of putting in writing that she too saw me as a stupid black woman with nothing worthwhile to contribute to anthropology (or the greater world) who only wrote “meaningless” garbage and not valid race/color/gender/class/privilege analysis.

So while I am happy to see Sarah Kendzior praised for talking about these issues of privilege, it is also disturbing to see the continued refusal to acknowledge the dynamics which make it possible for some anthropologists to be taken seriously when they raise these issues, while others will literally be told to shut up, stop “whining about your trillion dollar education”, ignored, dismissed, and literally racially terrorized via shocking forms of sociopathic abuse.

It is always interesting to me how Anthropology’s PR does not match its actual practice.

Additionally, what Sarah Kendzior said above about why people believe lies is worth revisiting, and thinking seriously about, especially in relation to the news last week that Berkeley, along with Dartmouth, USC, and Swarthmore, is being sued for creating a hostile climate, ongoing Title IX violations, and covering up campus sexual assaults. So much for ‘zero tolerance for sexual harassment’; and perhaps all is not well in that department, contrary to Paul Rabinow’s claims here, in 2010, in Chris Kelty’s “DDR or Receivership?” post. It all brings full-circle the comments I made( in Ryan’s “Stop the Silence” post) to David Graeber about his apt description of the ‘habits of fear’ the academy inculcates. Habits certainly being discussed by Ryan and Sarah in the interview above. (And let us not forget that self-censorship of academic projects occurs in very patterned, race-and-gender-specific ways. Cue Elizabeth Chin on nonwhite anthropologists studying people of color while whites get to study everyone.)

I guess unsurprising, then, that my previous question sank like a stone in water.

We don’t all get to ‘speak truth to power’, even if the speaking is motivated by anthropological desire to make anthropology ‘publicly’ useful and relevant.

The Anthropoligies article which quotes anthropologist Elizabeth Chin on who gets to study whom and what in anthropology is certainly relevant here. Because, unfortunately, it is just not true *in actual practice* that: “We are careful when we write about others to put their words and their views before our own.” (Especially not in relation to the kind of bullying, harassment, abuse, exploitation and assault that constitutes hostile climate violations that universities would rather cover up than acknowledge is taking place on their campuses.)

Anthropology’s ‘white public space’ means that some issues of power and inequality, abuse and exploitation, are constantly avoided, ignored, and dismissed–especially when they are raised by those who are seen as both disposable and “meaningless” by virtue of their race/color/gender. There are certainly plenty of instances when anthropologists are more than happy to ‘speak for’ and over others, to tell them to shut up and “leave your ‘privilege’ critique at home”, and to make a point of NOT seeing things from the perspective of those others.

I additionally think anthropologists need to think about the aforementioned Elizabeth Chin quote in relation to Victor Grauer’s insistence on anthropology studying “indigenous people”. What would such a prescription mean for, say, an anthropological study of everyday practices of white supremacy in the US (and who is seen as authorized to conduct such research in the first place)?

And lastly, we can never talk about issues of academic precarity and unemployment without talking about race and racial disparities (colorism and gender included). But interesting that this evacuation managed to happen yet again.

So everything Sarah Kendzior said above about what anthropology should be is spot-on, but we should be more honest about the extent to which these characteristics are aspirational and ideal–not the daily reality of what anthropology actually is in practice.

Also, and especially in light of the most recent Anthropologies issue on confronting racism, it seems to me that you, Sarah Kendzior, and Kate Clancy et al. are all talking about different facets of a co-constituting problem: abuse and/of power in the academy. How can such abuses ever be eradicated in an institution which is fundamentally about and produced through the valorization of *hierarchy* (a structural logic which makes it nearly impossible not to exploit someone: because the disappearance of the adjunct crisis wouldn’t mean the disappearance of race/gender/color/class discrimination). So what to do? Especially in anthropology.

As for the politics issue you raise, I think that good Ethnography and political activism may go together sometimes, but not always. As I wrote above, I think that often ethnography is good for its own sake, i.e. as a way to tell a story. I think also that ethnographers can do a good job using film and the written word, and that this should be encouraged.

As for the focus on the “indigenous” I’m not so sure that this was ever quite as pure as anthropology sometimes seems to claim. After all, ethnography itself is a distinctly academic endeavor which emerges from the modern world. It has done much good in preserving memories of the world before contact with the modern world–but no ethnographer from a modern academic institution has ever talked to anybody who has never had contact with that world. I think that the story of this contact–which is ongoing–is interesting for its own sake, and hope to read many good account on into the future.

Tony

I wouldn’t call this “library research” because it encompasses much more than what is usually implied by that term. Much of this research can be done via the Internet, and there are many possibilities opened up also by media such as film, video, audio recordings, and photos. There are also some very useful databases, ranging from George Murdock’s old Ethnographic Atlas to the recently developed WALS linguistic database to the many databases now being made available by population geneticists, not to mention the flood of exciting publications pouring out of that field in recent years. And I can’t fail to mention the database I was instrumental in developing (under the supervision of Alan Lomax), the Cantometric database of musical performance style. (Lomax also developed a similar database focused on movement style and dance, Choreometrics, though that is currently unavailable as far as I know.)

Most of the fascinating mysteries surrounding the origins and evolution of the many and varied traditions surviving among indigenous peoples are still well worth exploring, especially since so much new information has been pouring in over the last 50 years or so, much of it all but ignored by the mainstream, which no longer seems to see it as relevant.

I realize that for many if not most in this field, political concerns have become of primary importance, and many seem to feel their work to be all but meaningless and irrelevant unless it contributes to the political discourse. As I see it, every citizen has a responsibility to engage with the important political issues of his time and place, whether he be an anthropologist, sociologist, physicist, musicologist, artist, carpenter, plumber, whatever. I’ve certainly been politically active at many points in my career, as both activist and author, and, just for the record, taken some considerable risks in so doing. But as I see it, one’s responsibilities as an activist or politically engaged citizen do not and should not be an excuse to neglect one’s responsibilities as a researcher in one’s chosen field. For me, anthropology was at one time among the most rewarding fields available in the academic world, but today it seems to have lost its way, and become far more routine and predictable, and that’s a shame. The emphasis on field work does in my view have something to do with this decline, and as admirable as field work is, and as rewarding as it can be, I’m afraid the great majority of such projects are no longer particularly relevant, which would explain why the field has been forced on the defensive to such a high degree in recent years.

Where I would disagree is in your assertion that field work is dead, or should be dead. If ethnography is a humanity/art form, shouldn’t there always be room for more development? There are many great ethnographies emerging from unusual locales around the world. As you point out, it is no longer about “indigenous” people, but I’m not sure that that is really the central point of ethnography. I think ethnography as a well-developed form of story-telling which has value for its own sake, as do any number of media. Ethnography is not any more dead than other forms of story-telling found in film, novels, non-fiction, or even country-western music! Rather it takes on new forms.

Tony

What I’m about to say might get things going again as I’m about to say something that will sound totally outrageous to just about everyone reading here. The problem, as I see it, is with the field work paradigm, the idea that anthropology is basically all about field work, or as many now prefer to call it, “participant observation.” When I challenged a group of ethnomusicologists with my reservations concerning field work, I was accused of being crazy. And I have to admit, almost everyone who gets into either anthropology or ethnomusicology does so because either they hanker to travel off to some exotic or at least interesting place or, as in the case of ethno, they want to study some unusual musical instrument or learn to perform in some exotic ensemble (usually a gamelan).

This as I see it, is a far cry from what both of these fields used to be about, which was not some sort of personal fulfillment via going off on some sort of modern day vision quest, but the scientific (or if you prefer humanistic) exploration of what it means to be human, as reflected in the lifestyles of these so-called “primitive” or “indigenour” or “traditional” peoples who appear to be so different from “us.”

When I hear anthropologists remind me that such societies cannot any longer be studied, a part of me understands what they are saying, but another part of me is literally flabbergasted, because what was ever the point of all the many ethnographies produced by all the many hard working anthropologists who did field work among such people in the past, if we insist that the study of such people stops when the field work cannot any longer be done. The great strength of a work such as David Graeber’s “Debt” is also what makes it so different from what most anthropologists are producing these days, as it draws its energies not primarily from field work, but from so much of the excellent ethnography (and archaeology) of his illustrious predecessors.

As I see it, if anthropology is going to be relevant once again, anthropologists must be willing to return to the original point of the whole enterprise, the study of indigenous peoples, but this time, as with Graeber, through careful study of the vast ethnographic literature. If you see yourself as some kind of adventurer, and all you really want to do is what I call “pith helmet” anthropology, then I feel sorry for you, because the opportunities for that sort of thing have become all but nonexistent. But the opportunities for meaningful study of indigenous cultures are just beginning, as so much of the very rich literature on them (not to mention the vast archives of recorded and filmed material) has hardly been touched.

Anyhow, the only real problem I have with anything you’ve written has to do with this very tricky question of what is anthropology. Gertrude Stein once offered the following definition of poetry: “What is poetry? And if not what is poetry then what is prose?” I’m tempted to define anthropology in a similar spirit: “What is anthropology? And if not what is anthropology then what is sociology?”

It seems to me that you see anthropology as a kind of hands-on sociology. And if you are looking for what it is that makes today’s anthropology so much less relevant than that of yesteryear, that, imo, is it. Because when anthropology becomes sociology that is a lot like what happens when poetry becomes prose. And that seems to have happened, yes.

Anthropology was born out of a great shock to the system of what I suppose we can call “Western culture.” A shock produced by the growing realization that there was a whole world of people out there who lived in a very different way than “we” do and thought in a very different manner, and also had very different values, and were different also in a great many other ways. Anthropologists felt an urgent need to investigate these brave new worlds, to engage with them and attempt to understand not only their various cultures and histories, but also to use their research as part of an attempt at both self understanding and self realization, for themselves as well as their society in general. But now, what anthropology seems to be about is, to quote former anthro student, Kurt Vonnegut, how everyone is actually the same as everyone else.

Unfortunately, the original bold, daring and, yes, poetic, project somehow got mixed up with the notion of something called “field work,” and because field work was in fact necessary at first, anthropologists became not only researchers into the workings of “primitive” or “indigenous” or “aboriginal” (as you prefer) societies but also field workers. And as time went on and these very precious societies succumbed, one after the other, to various pressures stemming for the most part from colonialism, then field work among them became increasingly futile, because they had changed irrevocably. And since “field work” per se had become the whole point of the exercise and field work among those fascinating “primitive” peoples had become impossible, anthro had no choice, apparently, but to transform itself into socio. And since socio is prose and anthro was poetry, all the poetry has gone out of the field and it is now boring and irrelevant — as you say.

And I’m wondering if anyone out there can tell us if we are really stuck with that verdict, or whether there might possibly be a way out.