Category Archives: Blog post

My Interest in Things

Thanks Kerim!

Like Kerim wrote in the post introducing me, my ongoing dissertation is on the trade in second-hand clothing. I am trying to tease out the relations that surround the trade as it moves from the United Kingdom to Nigeria through Benin, and I am trying to deal with the pieces of clothing as what they are wherever they are. This in effect means dealing with what are at some point described as gifts (at least that is how the ‘donors’ of second-hand clothes describe what they drop in clothes banks) at other points as commodities, fundraising tool, a source of livelihood etc. Of course, Appadurai’s Social Life of Things, and Kopytoff’s cultural Biography of Things lend themselves as a framework for approaching things of this nature. The Social Life of Things was a groundbreaking work. Read what James Ferguson wrote about it in a review article:

But following the last decade’s preoccupation in anthropology with production […] on the one hand, and consumption […] on the other, Appadurai’s approach to commodities as “objects in motion” has the feel of a new departure, even while appearing at the same time as a kind of homecoming.

In short, what it did was to put culture back in the analyses of things. Ferguson writes further:

The key claim here is not that things are “social” but that they have lives; the suggestion is that the social dimension of things can be narratively approached through the conventions not only of traditional historical exposition, but through that venerable anthropological device, “life history”.

That was really groundbreaking in so many ways, and thinking about it as I am writing this, I don’t see any reason why that should not be enough for studying the trade in second-hand clothing. Save for the fact that, as a friend noted, writing a doctoral dissertation is as if one were producing an affirmation of ones existence – an affirmation that needs to be underscored by the discovery of something original. In this case, I suppose that it is not as much a desire to discover something original as it is a desire to do as much theoretical exploration as possible (although I know that I would not live up to this expection). There, of course, have to be some more recent anthropological theorising on commodities in particular and things in general so why settle for a framework from 1986?

The product of that question is what I will be blogging about during my period as a Savage Minds guest blogger. I am currently digging into the literature on commodities and things, since I see commodities as a form of things (see Keith Hart’s explication of Marx’s conceptualisation of commodities as resulting from a historical dialectic). I will be sharing and discussing some of the stuffs I read. It is an ongoing process so I welcome suggestions on where to look and what to look at.

Jared Diamond is diluting my brand

I was recently interviewed by a journalist working on a piece on The Daniel Wemp affair for an article in Science that will appear in the next couple of weeks, apparently, and that interview got me thinking about the ‘Is Jared Diamond An Anthropologist’ issue. This topic has come up on the blog from time to time, and after some reflection it seems to me that there are more and less interesting ways to answer this question.

One uninteresting question to me is the issue of institutional license. There is clearly a sliding scale of institutional license from paradigmatic anthropologists (Ph.D.s in anthropology in tenured positions of anthropology training more Ph.D.s in anthropology, conducting anthropological work and publishing in scholarly anthropological journals) to people who ‘think anthropologically’ but might not have a degree in anthropology. I suppose some people would take issue with Diamond’s representation of himself (or more accurately, the press’s representation of him) as an anthropologist because he lack the appropriate institutional licensing.

But what truly bothers me about the fact that Diamond’s ‘vengeance’ piece ran under the banner ‘annals of anthropology’ is not that Diamond doesn’t have Official Certification in our field. Rather, what bothers me is that this piece and the affair it provoked sends an off-brand message to our audience.

I think of anthropology as a discipline in the broadest sense of the word — a way of thinking about the world, a disposition about how to study it, a certain set of texts which provide a genealogy and another which provide a taken-for-granted reservoir of examples about how different societies have organized themselves. This discipline is clearly connected to academic anthropology, but at the same time it also attaches to a variety of other institutional sites that include, yes, even the History Channel.

I don’t mind when people without degrees do anthropology — the more the merrier, in fact. But I do mind when our consumers get the wrong message about our brand.

For instance, I think consumers learn from Diamond’s work that anthropologists study ancient/primitive people. As a result, I have had people ask me if I, as an anthropologist, get upset when non-anthropologists study Papua New Guinea (presumably because it is ‘primitive’). What’s more, I have had other anthropologists chastise me, a Melanesianist, for perpetuating this message. It puts me in a double bind.

In contrast, I want to send non-anthropologists the message that anthropologists study culture and the power if has in shaping human social life. Saying that anthropologists are only allowed to study ‘primitives’ is like saying linguists are only allowed to study French, biologists are only allowed to study mammals, and chemists are only allowed to study tungsten. It is to mistake the topic for an approach. The fact that Diamond prefers biological and geographical explanations almost to the exclusion of cultural explanations doesn’t help.

Consumers learn from the Wemp affair that anthropologists are unethical and lousy at getting the facts right. In contrast, I want to send them the message that anthropologists are responsible stewards of the information that people share with us, and that we get the facts right.

Consumers learn from the Wemp affair that anthropologists like Diamond can be unethical and inaccurate because they are powerful white people who study powerless brown people. This imagination of the anthropological field situation leads to the assumption that anthropologists either help powerless brown people or harm them, and each of these options can be negatively or positively morally charged: help them (positive: collaboration and empowerment, negative: colonial paternalism), hurt them (positive: exterminate/educate the brutes in the name of civilization, negative: colonial predation).

In contrast, I want people to recognize that there is no necessary connection between race and power in anthropological fieldwork: powerful brown people could be studying helpless white people, powerless brown people could be studying powerful white people, etc. (you can make a chart to get all the permutations if you want and I bet I can find examples of every combination in the ethnographic record, even if some are much rarer than others). Just as anthropologist study all sorts of people, the dynamics of that study in the field are also varied.

Of course, not everyone may agree with me in my sense of what the discipline of anthropology is and some may have thicker or thinner senses of how exhaustive our disciplinary commitments will be. There may be different standards for different sorts of scholarly and nonscholarly genres, and of course I’m sure there are some anthropologists who behave so badly that they have done a much more effective job of trashing our brand than Diamond. But this is just to say that good work is good work, bad work is bad work, and people will always quibble about the details.

Beyond issue of institutional licensing or theological disputes about what what, theoretically, counts as ‘anthropology’ what worries me about coverage of the Daniel Wemp affair is what our audience will think of us. When I got off the plane in Papua New Guinea later this month, will people be unwilling to talk to me because they’ve heard about the Jared Diamond affair? Will they spend their time explaining to me that they are not ‘primitive’? While scholarly and legal issues will be raised in the course of the Wemp affair, I think it also behooves anthropologists to think about the fallout this event will have for how we are perceived, and the sort of messages we want to send about ourselves to our audience. Using the idiom of brand, as I have somewhat jokingly used it here, helps us realize that an important part of this debate is associations and experiences that people have of us.

Engaged Anthropology and Academic Freedom

“Is it not amazing that in this day and age, serious scholars get death threats?” asks Notre Dame anthropologist Cynthia Mahmood in a shocking, graphic, account of how she “was assaulted, beaten and raped by a gang of hired thugs or rogue police in a north central Indian state during fieldwork in 1992.” I’ve heard many stories of death threats from academics in India who study the “wrong” topics, but this is the first account I’ve read of actual violence. Mahmood mentions some other scholars who have been threatened:

Wendy Doniger, Paul Courtright and David White have also been among those academics who have been targeted by the Hindu right because of their intellectual work on the religion. Doniger, a senior scholar of the Hindu tradition, regularly receives death threats; a letter-writing campaign tried to prevent another young scholar’s tenure at Rice University.

Certainly India needs to do more to preserve academic freedom, including ensuring that “that other actors [besides the state and the university], including the media, political parties and the citizenry do not by their actions undermine academic freedom.” And, as the example from Rice University shows, this issue is not confined to India. The US needs to protect academics from coordinated attacks of the sort William I. Robinson is facing from the ADL.

On the convergence of virtual and actual

I was thinking about Tom Boellstorff’s claim that “culture has always been virtual” when this story arrived, of a man who learned about birth from watching YouTube videos about how to deliver a baby, and then immediately delivered his wife’s baby. There is something about the convergence of virtual worlds and actual ones here in the ability to try out birth (from a few more and less graphic angles) before going through it “for real” which is, I think a nice demonstration of the relationship between virtual and actual. The baby is healthy and the Guardian’s version of the story notes that the man also learned to play guitar and solve a rubik’s cube by watching youtube videos, while the BBC version credits his navy training (another kind of virtual world. It gives me hope for all those level 80 healers out there…

Kuwimb’s Letter to the New Yorker

This got mentioned in Rhonda Shearer’s comments on Rex’s post, but I felt it warranted its own post: Mako John Kuwimb, a lecturer in law and a PhD candidate at Australia’s James Cook University, who is one of the people responsible for the lawsuit against The New Yorker and Jared Diamond, wrote a long letter attacking Diamond’s article paragraph by paragraph. It is a fascinating document and worth reading in full. I’ve posted it to Google Docs and you can read it here. UPDATE: Use the Scribd link instead.

Pandemic Anthropology

For those looking for a place to read more about the politics surrounding the swine flu pre-pandemic, Carlo Caduff, Lyle Fearnley, Andrew Lakoff, Stephen Collier and others at “Vital Systems Security” are madly, and intelligently, covering the unfolding events. Several posts in the last few days have addressed the issue of vaccine creation, the WHO and New York City public health surveillance of the disease. I also recommend Nick Shapiro’s posts on Bio-Agent Sentinels and Animal Biosecurity, which preceded the outbreak. All good stuff.

Et tu Mark Taylor?

Some days all I have time for is “the most emailed” section of the NY Times. Today, #1 is an op-ed by Mark C. Taylor, distinguished professor and chair of Religion at Columbia, formerly of Williams college, and author of many fascinating books ranging from deeply penetrating to faddishly impenetrable. I personally like some of Taylor’s work, but this op-ed sucks. It proposes to abolish the university as we know it, and it reads like a plank out of the dying republican party’s tattered playbook. I’m no defender of the university, and certainly not of the current publishing and reward structure, but this op ed won’t help me. It’s more like dynamite stashed somewhere for the adolescent delight of administrators who think that blowing up the institutions we’ve spent centuries building is the best way to build new ones.

Among its unfortunately pedantic suggestions are: get rid of tenure (okay, but do you really want academics chasing after bonuses like Wall Street does?), abolish departments (sounds good, let’s abolish what little pedagogy we have as well), use distance education instead of teaching people directly (oh, come on, have we not been through this before?), and give grad students training for other careers besides research and teaching (fries with that?).

Look, I really want to agree with Taylor. I just took a very good job in exactly the kind of entity Taylor is suggesting we develop to replace departments and transform academia (The Center for Society and Genetics at UCLA), and I think it is the bees’ knees. I absolutely agree that Continue reading →

Anthropological Ancestors

Clicking through the links on a recent NeuroAnthropology post about the open access archives of the Cambridge anthropology department, I found Alan Macfarlane’s Anthropological Ancestors website.

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

The full list of interviews can be found here.

Stumped by AnthroSource

Here is a blog post I was reading:

Rebecca Bird and I recently wrote a brief essay in which we bemoaned this perspective, noting particularly in the case of indigenous peoples, the diagnosis of irrationality is the ticket to paternalism, allowing “marginalized people to be further marginalized and fail to reap the benefits of even well-intentioned [development] projects.”  In many traditional social contexts, pecuniary rewards may trade-off with social prestige.  People could be hyper-rational in their optimization of social capital and fail utterly to meet the bar for narrow-sense economic rationality.

But when I click on the link, a DOI pointing at AnthroSoruce, I see this:

Anthrosource - Abstract Details
I tried everything. I deleted my cookies, then logged in before clicking the link. I tried different web browsers, etc. but I can’t get to the article. And this isn’t a new problem either. I wrote to the AAA about this back in January, nearly a month after the new AnthroSource came out and made CKelty cry. I’ve been able to get around this problem in the past by doing a search for the article title, but I don’t seem able to do that here. And sometimes one can find the article directly on JSTOR, but I don’t see Anthropology News listed there. So how am I supposed to read this? Is it just me, or do you have trouble as well? And why isn’t Anthropology News free anyway? Do they really think people pay their AAA fee just to get it?

The new AAA blog

First, the American Anthropological Association knew nothing of blogs. Then, in a fit of change, they started like, a dozen of them. Now all those blogs have been consolidated into “a single AAA blog”:http://blog.aaanet.org/. They have been doing a pretty good job of posting regularly over the past couple of days. It would be great if this blog grew and became a regular part of the anthropological noosphere so… check it out.

Jacques Lacaniki

Most days, the INTERNET depresses me. But sometimes I see things which give me hope. Today, No Subject, the Jacques Lacan Wiki, did that for me. It is remarkably detailed. Of course, I haven’t thought about Lacan for over a decade, so it may actually suck, but if it did it would still be amazing. Enjoy your symptom.

Vengeance is Hers: Rhonda Shearer on Jared Diamond’s ‘Factual Collapse’

Rhonda Shearer, a cofounder of the Arts Science Research Lab and widow of Stephen Jay Gould recently released a long report on ASRL’s website “Stinky Journalism.org”:http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/aboutus.php entitled “Jared Diamond’s Factual Collapse: New Yorker Mag’s Papua New Guinea Revenge Tale Untrue… Tribal Members Angry, Want Justice”:http://www.stinkyjournalism.org/latest-journalism-news-updates-149.php. I have more than a passing interest in this case because I served as a fact-checker for the New Yorker on the piece, have written “my own response to the piece”:http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&url=%2F2008%2F05%2F04%2Fvengeance-is-his-jared-diamond-in-the-new-yorker%2F&ei=1EvvSemiGZb8swPs8LHhAQ&usg=AFQjCNEd0-gDpTtootHXezSPeCtHJ7EMUw, and have been in contact with Shearer as she has been working on her response. But this story is far more that just something I am personally interested in — it has already been reported on by the “Huffington Post”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/22/new-guinea-tribe-sues-the_n_189841.html and “Forbes”:http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/21/new-yorker-jared-diamond-business-media-new-yorker.html?feed=rss_business_media shows. Most news coverage will focus on the more spectacular aspects of the case: Diamond publishes a piece in the New Yorker depicting a tribal fight in Papua New Guinea, Shearer produces documentation that his accounts are untrue, and the Papua New Guineans involve sue Diamond for US$10 million.

What I think is truly important about this case – beyond the obvious fact that Wemp deserves justice – is that it represents the fundamental ethical issue that anthropologists will have to face for decades to come. Anthropological collaboration with the army may directly impact more human lives, but collaboration is an old problem that we have talked about for a long time. The great ethical debate prior to HTS was the ‘Yanomami Scandal’ stirred up by Patrick Tierney, a debate that centered on anthropologists (and others) behaving badly in the field, and not being held to account by the powers that be in the metropole. Some people like Rob Borofsky want to fetishize this debate as the issue in anthropological ethics, since it involves what they imagine must be the paradigmatic anthropological situation: powerful white outsiders, (relatively) supine brown people.

I admit that L’affaire Shearer does have a whiff of that dynamic. But overall it is about a relatively new issue which will I think will become increasingly central to anthropological ethics in the future: the radical answerability that researchers increasingly have to the people they depict. While this should always have been important to us, it is a topic we can no longer ignore in a world where their ‘informants’ are more connected than ever before to the flows of media and communication in which ‘we’ depict ‘them’. If the Yanomami controversy was about anthropologists suddenly being held responsible in the metropole for what they did in the field, the Jared Diamond case is about an author suddenly being held responsible in the field for what they did in the metropole.

Shearer’s report is long and detailed and I will not attempt to do more than summarize it here. Basically, Jared Diamond wrote an article in the New Yorker in which he told the story of Daniel Wemp, a man he met in Papua New Guinea who described a tribal fight he had been in which allegedly involved killing dozens of people and paralyzing his enemy in a quest to seek revenge for the death of his uncle. What did Diamond do wrong, according to Shearer? We can summarize as follows:

Poor research and inaccurate facts
Shearer conducted punishingly scrupulous research on Diamond’s story, which included contacting Wemp and having researchers in Papua New Guinea investigate Diamond’s story. It looks like the New Yorker article is a hodge-podge of Diamond’s recollections of the stories Wemp told Diamond when Wemp drove him around the Southern Highlands. The actual history of fighting in the area Wemp describes is quite different — for instance, the man that Diamond says was paralyzed in a wheelchair is photographed standing and walking in Shearer’s piece. Diamond presents what appear to be verbatim quotations from Wemp which are probably Diamond’s reconstruction of the conversation, and so forth. So both the facts and their presentation are problematic.

Poor ethical standards
Separate from the fact that Diamond appears to have gotten the story wrong is the fact that he followed few of the ethical standards which anthropologists (and journalists, apparently) follow in writing about their research subjects. Calling someone a murderer in a venue like the New Yorker is a serious claim indeed. Add to this the fact that Diamond used Wemp’s real name in the story, and that Wemp had no idea that his stories would ever be published, and you have serious ethical problems. There was, in other words, no informed consent and no attempt to provide anonymity for informants.

Shearer’s points here are largely factual and perhaps in the future there will be more delving into the minutiae of this case — as someone who lived in the province just north of Southern Highland and who has visited this area I am extremely impressed with the quality of her research, the experts she has contacted, and her collaboration with Papua New Guinean journalists. But for non specialists the issues of what did or did not happen in 1992 will probably be less important than some of the wider issues raised by this piece:

Let’s hope this doesn’t turn into The Great Counterattack
Many anthropologists dislike Jared Diamond because he has done what they fantasize of doing — writing readable nonfiction for a general audience. One possible outcome of this case is that it turns into The Great Counterattack in which every possible error in Diamond’s reporting is used to trash him by people who care less about Papua New Guinea, geography, steel, collapse, etc. and more about getting the taste of sour grapes out of their mouths. To the extent this becomes a witchhunt, it will get more and more boring and, of course, more and more cruel.

Questions about scholarly competency and institutional licensing
Diamond is like some sort of great Victorian polymath — geographer, ornithologist, anthropologist, historian… in his books it appears there is nothing he can’t do, and to experts in each of these fields it appears that he can’t do any of them. While popular audiences love Diamond’s work, the scholarly consensus on it has been pretty firmly established: much of what the public thinks is Diamond’s original ideas are cribbed from other authors, often with the bare minimum of acknowledgments performed in footnotes to stave off accusations of plagiarism. Overall, what Diamond gets right, he gets from others. What he gets wrong tends to be the stuff he has made up himself.

It is one thing to have Diamond’s book show up on the shelves of airport bookstores, but quite another for it to be described as ‘anthropology’ in the subheading of a story in the New Yorker. Now that Diamond has tried his hand at some ethnographic ‘research’ in a public forum, I think we are beginning to see the differences between avocational anthropology and the real thing. So what is an anthropologist? Is it someone who follows the best practices of our discipline, or do we really feel there must be some sort of institutional licensing in the form of a departmental appointment of degree in order for someone to take up this mantle? Its an interesting question that Diamond’s piece raises.

Could anyone sustain this level of scrutiny?
Shearer takes Diamond to task for not meeting anthropological (and journalistic) standards of evidence, methodology, and ethics. Yet I have to wonder if Diamond is the only person who would be snared in a net as tightly woven as Shearers. After all, anthropologists have a long history of failing to meet their own evidentiary standards. Those of us who work in PNG can think of several authors whose work is not widely taught because we ‘all know’ about the quality of their fieldwork. It is important to hold Diamond to professional standards if he is going to act like a professional. At the same time, we must recognize that he is taking his place in a field where those who have come before him have often failed to distinguish themselves.

Shearer is not reporting the story, Shearer is the story
Anthropologists understand that social life is a constant process of narration and renarration — and I’ve always felt this is particularly true of highlands PNG, somehow. I am not Melanesian (obviously) but looking at this case through a Melanesian lens it seems to me that there is something complex and fascinating about the way Shearer’s report has elicited a whole series of responses from people in PNG and is yet another step in the ongoing reentextualization of events that happened a decade ago in Southern Highlands as it twists and turns into various forms of compensation/litigation.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the central and most important point of this debate is that it is about what we write at ‘home’ circulating back to the ‘field’. But this is just another way of saying that the line between these two is increasingly porous (as Gupta and Ferguson noted some time ago). Diamond’s case is a cautionary tale for all anthropologists who write in the comfort of their homes imagining their fieldsite is far away. It is answerability that is at stake here — Diamond’s and our own. Answerability is something that journalists have been struggling with longer than anthropologists and I think what they have to teach Diamond offers lessons we ourselves will have to learn in the future (if we haven’t already): get your facts straight, report them fairly, and let people know that you are doing so. It is not only the right thing to do, but in a world where ‘they read what we right’, your audience is also your informants.