The descent into incivility?

-William M. Smith

Participant Observation at the Barricades

There have been numerous responses to the “new” situation we find ourselves in (one all too familiar to scholars of color, women and gender-non-conforming academics, and others): We need to speed up in response to the crisis, paving the way for rapid response ethnography. We need more public scholarship, opening the gates of knowledge in a face of swelling anti-intellectualism. We need to research this shift to the right with ethnographies of the disenchanted white working class and the monied capitalists that voted for Trump. There is another way that anthropologists can respond to our contemporary politics: participate.

We can and should hone in on the participant aspect of participant-observation and join those struggling against ascendant fascism on the frontlines. Anyone who has tried to outmaneuver the police knows this requires thinking quickly; anyone involved in consensus-based decision-making knows it is a methodical process. Direct action is often public, but it requires quiet, secure organizing not necessarily conducive to your typical published article. Ethnographies of Trump supporters can shed light on much – so can a renewed anthropology of social movements. By dedicating ourselves to the movements doing the work, anthropologists can put their bodies at the barricades, experience the intricacies of consciousness-raising and direct action, and engage with a world outside of academia, all while contributing to the anthropology of activism. The concerns of activists may not lend themselves to a traditional ethnography, but through praxis we can encounter theories of action and live the solidarity with communities that many ethnographies propound.

-Scott Ross

The master’s rhetoric will never dismantle the master’s Executive Orders

In late January, President Trump signed three Executive Orders concerning immigration. The “Muslim Ban” galvanized attention, from protests and Op-Eds to legislative action. Given the patently unconstitutional practices sanctioned by that Order, the maneuvers promised by the other two—including increased agency powers to profile and criminalize immigrants, mass raids, detentions, and deportations—possibly appeared less immediately pressing.

Academics’ responses hint at a more worrying reality. An open letter to the President signed by 43,000+ scholars, including prominent anthropologists, concludes:

The unethical and discriminatory treatment of law-abiding, hard-working, and well-integrated immigrants fundamentally contravenes the founding principles of the United States.

The qualifiers are deeply alarming. Racialized groups of people have been systematically criminalized, exploited for their labor, and marginalized in the United States since its founding. Terms like “law-abiding,” “hard-working,” and “well-integrated,” are furthermore malleable to pernicious ends, and frequently deployed by right-wing voices.

As scholars, teachers, and activists, we must refute, not echo, the “good” vs. “bad” immigrant rhetoric of this (and earlier) administrations. As anthropologists, we must reflect critically on governmental categorizations of people, not take them for granted. We must expose the xenophobic constructions at the heart of each policy statement. As Trump makes good on his promises, we must advocate for all immigrants—regardless of taxes paid, skill sets, or ascribed work ethics; regardless of faith, language, or family ties; regardless of records, status, or papers. Lines drawn in the sand around state-approved “deserving” immigrants will only fortify the foundations of future border walls.

-Siobhán McGuirk, Georgetown University

On alternative factualities

In the debris left by “alternative facts,” one is tempted by nostalgia for singular truths. After all, “alternative facts” code lies. March for Science advocates tend to reaffirm science as a value-neutral, objective pursuit tied to teleological histories of Western progress. Critics problematize the march as further politicizing science. In these accounts, to go forward is to go back.

I am haunted by an uncanny resonance between alternative facts and the construction of truth. In some ways, the resemblance is superficial: asserting facts and scientific knowledge are constructed points to material, historical, and discursive conditions and effects, not free floating signifiers.

But I still wonder: did Trump take an anthropology course and miss the point? What about Weston’s reminder that climate change skepticism is not inherently anti-science, but deeply sympathetic with Enlightenment ways of knowing, of transforming sensory phenomena into facts?

Is there space for feminist, Indigenous, and anti-racist methodologies, for knowledge as necessarily partial, positioned, and political? In some (radically different) sense, anthropologists deal precisely in alternative facts: disrupting epistemological and ontological securities, attending to silences in totalizing knowledges. Our bread and butter is that which remains uncounted (and uncountable) in dominant ways of constructing facts and accounts.

Alternative factualities seed worlds otherwise, however morally ambiguous. They are vital and dangerous, but there is no going back. As my colleague, Binte-Farid, said: there are multiple truths, but also lies. We might push to fold rigorous accountability for the construction of facts and politics of scientific practice into our organizing.

-Lee Bloch

Please keep the following guidelines: letters should be no longer than 250 words and should address issues covered in Savage Minds and relevant to anthropology, broadly construed. As with traditional letters to the editor, all letters must include the writer’s full name; anonymous letters will not be considered. For general guidelines refer to our comments policy. Writers of letters selected for publication will be notified before publication. Letters may be subject to minor editing for clarity.

Send your letter in the body of an email (not an attachment) to ryananderson@uky.edu. You can also send me a DM via twitter: @anthropologia. Deadline for submission is February 20 and we plan to publish by March 1, 2017.

For this second installment of Reader Letters we invite you to send us your thoughts about the Savage Minds name change, the impending end of the semester, or the upcoming winter break. If you want to write about Levi Strauss’s take on Father Christmas, or perhaps Panopti-claus, we would not object. Otherwise it’s up to you. Write about anthropology and what’s on your mind, and send it to us. No stamp necessary.

Send your letter in the body of an email (not an attachment) to ryananderson@uky.edu. Deadline for submission is December 20 and we plan to publish between December 25 and January 1, 2017.

On the exceptionality of the election

Melissa Harris-Perry’s keynote “What just happened?” at the most recent AAA in Minneapolis was a captivating appeal to stop viewing the U.S. election results as exceptional, shocking, or out-of-order. To her, Donald Trump’s election reaffirms the United States’ century-old hatred towards minorities. Whatever white anthropologists consider extraordinary, posits for many Black Americans and Black Anthropologists the ongoing fight against an everyday reality of discrimination and violence – and she is right. Yet Harris-Perry’s advocacy for denying the exceptionality in this year’s election complicates strategic political protest. Protesters need the semantics of the exceptional to show that Trump breaches a new set of rules that were introduced by Americans electing their first Black (even if male) president. For many on the ground, Obama’s time in office hasn’t changed the world profoundly. Yet it introduced better policies for the disenfranchised, and the poor. This progress is now at risk of being overturned by a nationalist demagogue who clearly articulated his intentions of returning America to its old racist and sexist self. This return needs to be framed as the extraordinary for two reasons. Firstly, referring to the exceptionality of the situation helps advocates to mobilize protest. They use the exceptional to display their disavowal of Trump’s new order. Secondly, however, allowing anthropologists to use the exceptional as a refusal of the status-quo hopefully induces more ethnographically grounded research on the causes and effects of this regrettable political degeneration in the ‘land of the free’.

Melanie Janet Sindelar, Vienna University

***

The future is human

My heart was broken by the results, not because I didn’t understand the existing divides in this country, but because I was certain we would not overlook the threats to human rights and democracy so often touted by the now president-elect. As we begin to take stock of our surroundings we must now begin to plan – because never before in our recent history has it been so important to advocate for equality and human rights, especially as anthropologists. I hold that anthropology is essentially humanism at its core – studying our species with tolerance and scientific inquiry requires a respect and understanding that goes beyond politics, culture, and even time. And everything I do as an applied urban anthropologist is to this end – working to create better urban habitats for all people. Jane Jacobs, an urbanist and de facto anthropologist in her own right, gave us a warning about the future in her final book Dark Age Ahead – predicting either the total collapse or coming together of our species in a new “age of human capital”. I will be moving actively in a direction of anthropological advocacy for all of the reasons above. I believe as anthropologists we are uniquely positioned to speak up more publicly and to fight against racism, homophobia, misogyny, xenophobia, and general hatred. We cannot afford to be silent as humanists if we are to hope for the later outcome and as an anthropologist I cannot give up hope that the future is human, even now.

Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman

***

The borders of our political commitments

The views and behaviors that have most disturbed anthropologists during the recent election cycle should actually be familiar to many of us. Indeed, we often witness similar conduct from our interlocutors. At Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, where I work, I know men who treat women’s bodies as objects to be possessed and groped. I also navigate vicious homophobia, offering an alternative perspective without asserting my views too strongly from my position of power. To a degree unprecedented in recent history, this election has transported many of these behaviors and beliefs to our doorsteps. We can no longer leave overt misogyny, xenophobia, racism, ethnocentrism, or homo/transphobia behind in the field. They have become foundational, highly visible elements of political discourse that we are forced to confront. I advocate vigorous repudiation of the hatefulness and violence emerging around this election. Yet I wonder what signals I might be sending, both to my interlocutors in Kenya and to non-anthropologists here at home. Is it hypocritical to stand in solidarity with the oppressed in America, but accept entrenched patriarchy and discrimination there out of dedication to anthropological acceptance of the Other? Will women and LGBT individuals at Kakuma think I value them less than their American counterparts? We spend time among people with vastly different social and cultural norms from our own, without imposing our own values. However, the 2016 election presents an ethical crisis for anthropologists, and it should spur us to critically reexamine where the borders of our political commitments lie.

Rieti Gengo

***

Rethinking the disciplinary obligations of anthropology

If there were a group of people for whom the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States was not a surprise, it surely were anthropologists who saw in this political ritual a final rehearsal of what had been in the making for many years. Accordingly, the consequences of what is to come should also be of little surprise whilst still requiring an attentive eye to the local realisations of contemporary practices. In this moment, I find two crucial relevancies to our discipline. Firstly, an admission that Euro-American anthropology has failed to productively and meaningfully engage its own surroundings. In the first few weeks after the election, it has already become accepted that Americans have little awareness of experiences that shape people’s lives in their own country. The notion of “shock” that traversed the media in describing the election result is an indicator of it. This does not fare well for anthropology, a discipline that aims to understand, show, and justify people’s reasoning and points to its own disciplinary blind-spots. Secondly, now more than ever, we need public anthropology. We cannot limit our responsibility to the gift of thought. In its American form, anthropology was conceived as public practice, and anthropologists have to be proactive in their other social roles, treating their academic status as a means toward the work of creating society. Above all, this moment presents an opportunity to re-think the content of our discipline as an obligation towards people who we imagine as our society.

Andris Suvajevs

***

The purpose of publishing on Savage Minds

I have contributed several of my essays to your website, but I still don’t know if that was meaningful in any ways, because I hardly received any feedback from my audience on your site (including you editors). I posted those essays not for some narcissistic reasons, but for productive conversations about the current state of US anthropology. I understand you editors moderate comments to weed out those with abusive tone. But if there are no “viable” comments after the moderating process, do you think that it’s your full time editors’ responsibility to lead some quick discussions about each contributed essay? What is your purpose of publishing those contributed essays? Is it to provide those authors with an online platform to get their work exposed to the public?

Thanks,
Takami Delisle

For our first installment of Reader Letters we invite you to send us your thoughts about the U.S. election. Send your letter in the body of an email (not an attachment) to ryananderson@uky.edu. Deadline for submission is Nov 23 and we plan to publish Nov 30.