Recently, Apple Computer, Inc. has branded the privatization of the idea of the commons, by renaming the retail Apple stores as “Town Squares“[1]. In Apple’s definition, these “Town Squares” are where people will gather, talk, share ideas, and watch movies, all within Apple’s carefully curated, minimalist designed, chrome and glass boxes. In this scenario, Apple’s “Town Square” is tidy, spartan, and most critically, privatized. This isn’t new behavior, however, what is new is the context within which Apple is able to do this, from both inside of shopping malls, and from retail locations on Main Streets. Applin (2016) observed that private companies are collecting and replicating community through their networks and communications records [2]. Madrigal (2017) observes that  “the company has made the perfect physical metaphor for the problem the internet poses to democracy” [3]. This article provides a discussion of what happens and what we forfeit in these hybrid gathering places between Internet usage and privately owned spaces; and how these hybrid spaces have become enabled in the first place.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the American public witnessed and participated in the privatization of public space through the shopping mall, a privately owned conglomerate of retail stores located in a single place, usually away from the “Main Street” in a downtown area. Shopping malls were located in places where space was available, land was less expensive, and people were further away from a downtown. As shopping malls became centralized shopping spaces, downtown “Main Street” stores lost revenue and many shopkeepers could not compete with the prices offered at shopping malls, or the proximity to so many other businesses. An outcome of the popularity and usage of shopping malls by the public, was that they were public spaces within private spaces and as such, people’s rights were limited depending upon the policies of the shopping mall. This was a quiet, barely noticed outcome of where we shifted our attention and participation, and as surveillance equipment became more available and cameras became installed in malls, we often unknowingly participated in new ways for malls to record our behavior and habits, and to monitor us. As we began to use mobile devices enabled with cameras, we started to participate in monitoring malls and the people within them, as we photographed and cataloged our lived experiences. We also began to move more, and as technologies became more enabling, to shop online.

For those and other reasons, the shopping mall hasn’t sustained continued growth. Many malls have closed or gone into disrepair, and others have seen a downturn in businesses wanting to support them. It’s a complex web of retail vs online shopping, combined with how fuel and driving patterns have been changing. As a result of these new factors, walkable cities and their associated downtown real estate has become once again in vogue, but with caveats. In particular, the mall stores have now been renting spaces on Main Streets, with their economic leverage to price out local business, and this creates fusions of public space and the “mall sensibility” (e.g. a conglomerate business model, often based on extremely advanced supply-chain automation and customer profiling data capabilities and soon to be driven by Artificial Intelligence capabilities).

With shopping malls, the privatization of public space happened in the physical space of the mall, but the outcome of how our behavior has changed is now within the public spaces of our communities, as we rely more and more upon communications technologies to maintain our social networks. As we automate, we are shifting our conversations, relationships, messages, and preferences to the private control of companies whose interest is not in maintaining our community or its health and well-being, but rather to increase their knowledge of us, so that they may provide more targeted advertising, better “services” that we will pay for, and to enable control over our communications in new ways.

What this means for communities is that community knowledge of the local locale, which is built over time in a community via social relationships, cooperative efforts, and group awareness is becoming individualized and commoditized. This is happening simultaneously as Main Streets are becoming “automated” through participation in the reconstruction of the shopping mall’s corporate influence into community.

When Apple rebrands (privatizes) the “Town Square,” their corporate desires and objectives take precedence over people within that space. The ethics questions and concerns of how Apple will use unproven, experimental, biometric technology such as facial-recognition [4], can be overlooked with the framework of a private “Town Square” where public experience is curated.

In the Apple “Town Square,” all is known and controlled by Apple and any technology that could benefit from ethics oversight (or at least some governance review) could be perceived to be bounded within Apple’s domain, which includes servers located out of town or perhaps out of country, and within a store that is at base, a private corporate space accountable to itself and its shareholders.

In the Apple 1984 Super Bowl advertisement [5], men and women with shaved heads wearing grey uniforms are marching through space age chrome and glass minimal tunnels while a “Big Brother” type of authoritarian figure talks to them across a screen. What he says from various monitors, as the people assemble in a similarly outfitted auditorium is:

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause[6].

With the rebranding of “Town Squares” into privatized Apple stores, it becomes apparent that Apple is transforming its retail spaces into “a pure garden of ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths.”

Apple isn’t the only one. Amazon pushed community bookstores out of business with competitive pricing online and are now opening physical bookstores in communities [7]. In these spaces Amazon sells books, but they also do so utilizing vast data networks, which include many human reading preferences and order histories.

In Amazon Go and the Erosion of Supermarket Sociability [8] and in Deliveries by Drone: Obstacles and Sociability [2], I examined how automation is replacing human contact and interchange and within those frameworks, I question whether or not community knowledge is passed along, or becomes owned by the various private enterprises, who are controlling the communication around and about transactions. Gas stations are privately owned hubs of community knowledge. Where I live in Silicon Valley, gas stations are beginning to be replaced by office buildings, and developers who desire corner lot real estate in a land strapped area, are willing to invest in changing the urban landscape. In my neighborhood alone, three gas stations have been closed and developed into office properties. It is not necessarily a bad outcome to develop gas stations, for it is an indicator that better energy sources are being adopted. However, it does mean that the small corner gathering and community knowledge outposts in some areas (even if privately owned) are being developed in new ways that remove their function and replace it with more refined and harder to access gathering points.

When we stop talking to each other in a community and default to automation or removed accessibility, we are forfeiting part or all of our community knowledge, homogenizing it, and offering it to private control. Data mining and machine learning will begin to track more and more of our community spaces, and our public rights in digital space combined with what we have in physical spaces will change our relationships and the way we choose to express our opinions and beliefs.

References

[1]Apple Computer, Inc. 2017. Town Square.

[2] Applin, S. 2016. Deliveries by Drone: Obstacles and Sociability. In The Future of Drone Use (Custers, B. editor). Springer. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. Oct. 16, 2016.

[3] Madrigal, A. 2017. The Great Thing about Apple Christening Their Stores, “Town Squares.” The Atlantic. Sept. 13, 2017.

[4] Applin, S. 2017. Paying with our Faces: Apple’s FaceID. Savage Minds. Sept. 23, 2017.

[5] Apple Computer, Inc. 1984. Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer (HD) via Robert Cole. June 25, 2010.

[6] Wikipedia. 2017. 1984 (Advertisement).

[7] Blumenthal, E.2017. While Barnes & Nobles close, Amazon is opening real live bookstores. USA Today. May 24, 2017.

[8] Applin, S. 2016. Amazon Go and the Erosion of Supermarket Sociability. Savage Minds.

One of the disturbing issues with the press coverage of FaceID during the week of Apple’s announcement, was the limited criticism of what it means for Apple to deploy FaceID, and those who will follow Apple and deploy their own versions. What does it mean to digitize our faces and use the facsimile of our main human identifier (aside from our voices) as a proxy for our human selves, and to pay Apple nearly $1000 U.S. to do so?

FaceID could be considered a gimmick. Apple has the developed technology in hand, and as such, they can then offer this type of “Science Fiction” experience to their phones to give their customers a new way to authenticate their identity. But it isn’t this simple. All new technologies, as with any other new human production, become embedded in society in various ways, used in various unforeseen contexts, and have various unforeseen consequences. Even if Apple is only deploying this technology within the context of its iPhone, they are setting a usage model, and are doing so privately, around the regulation that governs society. This movement from Apple deployed so casually on such a broad scale, may change how we live, and how our faces become used forevermore.

Facial-recognition falls into the category of technology called “Biometrics.” Biometrics is the class of quantification metrics that rely upon some type of bodily feedback to work. Biometrics include digital fingerprint recognition, retinal scans, voice recognition, heat maps, and facial-recognition, among others. Apple has been using digital fingerprint recognition for some time. However, the issues with facial recognition are more complex.

There are several issues with facial-recognition software that have been raised over time, with the idea of algorithmic bias being one of the main ones [1]. Simply put, algorithmic bias exists when algorithms are not able to create complete understandings of a situation or issue. In the case of facial-recognition, algorithmic bias exists because people have different facial features and skin tones, and for humans, particularly those with darker skin tones, facial-recognition software either cannot recognize them, or worse, can recognize a face, but is unable to attribute the recognized face to the person, instead recognizing them as someone different than who they are. This might merely be annoying when the facial-recognition algorithm won’t unlock someone’s iPhone, but can cause severe problems when facial-recognition technology is deployed on a massive scale in various facets of our society. In the future, facial-recognition technology may determine access to the commons, and as such, could easily falsely attribute circumstances and surveillance video “evidence” to the wrong person’s identity, resulting in false accusations at best, and action on false accusations (if we get more automated in law enforcement responses) at worst.

FaceID is automated Artificial Intelligence. This means that there will not be any humans in the process of identification or authentication. Once FaceID is deployed, it will run automatically, identify (or not) automatically, and authenticate automatically. Furthermore, Apple will be using FaceID to unlock the iPhone, for Apple Pay,  iTunes, and other Apple products and services. FaceID will work with other vendors, and share its users’ facial-recognition and authentication with them [2]. This will not be limited to Apple. If we think that having our credit card number being breached is a problem now, what will it mean when our faces are stored insecurely?

Another issue to consider with facial-recognition technology is the idea of what our faces mean to us, and mean to those of us in different parts of the world. For example, in some cultures, tattooing the face is considered to be a stronger taboo, where in others it is a place of honor and prominence. How we use our faces, and choose to use our faces should be considered when technology companies develop facial recognition technologies. Of course, those who are uncomfortable with facial-recognition technology, won’t use FaceID, and for now, while it is still optional, this will not be a problem. However, as FaceID debuts around the world, these issues may be raised, and unforeseen outcomes may emerge.

The technology industry is often criticized for not respecting regulations, or ethics, and as I mentioned in my previous piece [3], much of this comes from not having anyone different on development teams who can raise these issues and questions. Within Apple, there are few Social Scientists, nearly no anthropologists, and with the focus moving towards quantification as a metric for determining feature use and design, few qualitative researchers inputting to products. It might not be that Apple doesn’t care, it might be that Apple truly doesn’t know that it needs to care, or some other reason. As a design focused company, it may be that qualitative research is thought to be something that anyone in design at Apple could do [4] and as such, some of the more pressing social issues surrounding the deployment of FaceID could get lost in the “sci fi” factor or rush to market.

Because we are now on the cusp of biometric facial-recognition being mainstreamed by a private technology company with the decisions for how this will impact all of us in private control, it may be time to consider what governance or ethics review boards would look like for the tech industry going forward—or at the very least, it seems time for private technology companies to hire anthropologists and other social scientists to product teams to create technology products that will adapt to our cultural preferences as humans, while respecting our sense of privacy, our desire for security, and our right to our identities.

References:

[1] Finley, K. 2017. Can Apple’s iPhone X Beat Facial Recognition’s Bias Problem.” WIRED Business. Sept. 13. 2017. [Online]. Available from: https://www.wired.com/story/can-apples-iphone-x-beat-facial-recognitions-bias-problem/ Date assessed: Sept. 17, 2017.

[2] Perez, S. and Luden, I. 2017.  Face ID will work with Apple Pay Third Party Apps. Tech Crunch. Sept. 12, 2017[Online.] Available from: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/12/faceid-will-work-with-apple-pay-third-party-apps/

[3] Applin, S. 2017. Artificial Intelligence: Making AI in our Images. Savage Minds. Sept. 7, 2017. [Online]. Available from: /2017/09/07/artificial-intelligence-making-ai-in-our-images/ Date assessed: Sept. 17, 2017.

[4] Applin, S. 2016. The Automation of Qualitative Methods. EPIC. Jan. 18, 2017. [Online]. Available from: https://www.epicpeople.org/automation-qualitative-methods/ Date assessed: Sept. 17, 2017

Such work can be challenging, personally and politically. Current development paradigms which fetishize market forces and the unfettered private sector as an engine for positive social transformation are laying the foundations that consolidate the entrenchment of  new kinds of inequalities on an  unprecedented scale.  At the same time, financial transfers from richer countries to poorer ones provide much needed subsidies for improved public provision of essential basic services. Understanding where policies have traction,  and for whom,  is a critical part of the contested politics of development practice, within and between development organizations.

The politics of development knowledge and what  is prioritised as  relevant at a particular time mean that  knowledge work in development not only has financial implications in potentially influencing the direction of agency support. It is explicitly and self consciously relational. The credibility and status of development knowledge generally depends more on the social and institutional relations which position the researcher and the knowledge product than the content of the knowledge itself.

The development sector has undergone substantial changes in the ten years since I first wrote   about   how  knowledge is done differently in anthropology and in development.   The increasing privatization of aid and the growth of subcontracting between development organizations affects the ways in which development knowledge is produced, as well as how it is used and valued.  A greater proportion of development knowledge than previously is now the commercial property of the organizations contracted to produce it and those for whom it is commissioned.

Undertaking commissioned research for a public agency is now likely to be mediated through an intermediary organization which has won a competitive tender, whether a think-tank, a university, a not for profit or a commercial company. Development has long been recognized as an industry. It is also a marketplace in which  diverse actors situate themselves in order to capture business at different scales.

Although many anthropologists continue to have a problematic relationship with development both as an industry and as a post colonial project, the precarity of the current academic  jobs market  or a personal commitment to  some, at least, of the aspirations of  progressive social change promoted by development actors  from social movements to   state wide  programs mean that perhaps a greater number of us will find ourselves working with, not merely on,  development interventions and organizations.  While this kind of rapid and responsive work can be very different from the practice of academic anthropology, it is my experience that core principles and skills foundational to my anthropological practice inform my approach to development knowledge work.

Anthropological holism, the recognition that everything is connected, is an essential counterfoil to the silo-ization orientation of policy work and the politics of relevance based on sectoral framing.  Second, anthropology takes as its starting point the insight popularised through STS scholars that all knowledge is situated. Third, emotions and relationships structure all social worlds, including policy worlds.  As David Mosse shows in his ethnography of a development project which transitioned rapidly from success to failure in the eyes of funders, generating attachment through affective relations plays an essential,  albeit under acknowledged role, in  sustaining policy  traction. Last,  but not least , are the practical skills we pick up through our  research on sources and our  dialogical engagement with people in the field.   The ability to use search tools to rapidly scour multiple databases, being able to read and take in large amounts of information quickly,  and knowing how to create rapport in an interview while asking the right questions are extremely important in this kind of work.

Not all of the practices we strive to become proficient in  while doing extended projects in anthropology are as transferable.  Working outside the academic sector means learning different ways of communicating knowledge through different styles of writing within shorter time-frames. It has made me more aware of how anthropological knowledge is produced, the specialized work which goes into its production and the economies of university enterprise which enable these long drawn out and labor intensive endeavors. It’s also made me far more conscious of the disciplinary practices we routinely use to  maintain the boundaries between anthropological and other kinds of knowledge and what are constituted as the professional capabilities necessary for its production.   Situating knowledge is an active process.  The social construction of  relevance and authority  is  not confined to the development universe.

This Anthro Life – Savage Minds Crossover Series, part 3
by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. We’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.

In our third episode of the TAL + SM crossover series, we explored SAPIENS’ approach to producing anthropological content for popular audiences. Ryan and Adam were joined by the digital editor of SAPIENS, Daniel Salas, to discuss the implications of using anthropology to engage the public through journalism. The episode focused on the questions How do you reconcile scientific and anthropological writing, and is this mixture a new genre? Is there a balance to be found between producing timeless “evergreen” stories versus current events focused content for audience engagement?

Be sure to check out the first and second episodes of the TAL + SM collaboration: Writing “in my Culture” and Anthropology has Always Been out There.

What is SAPIENS?

Just over a year old, SAPIENS is a online content producer funded by the Wenner Gren Foundation with the mission to deliver anthropological stories and insights to worldwide audiences. A working collaboration between professional journalists and anthropologists, Daniel describes SAPIENS publications as “webby” kinds of stories that showcase “public anthropology’s footprints across the web”.

The SAPIENS team looks to popular science publication sites like Nautilus, Hakai Magazine, and Aeon as inspiration for how to weave together anthropology and science journalism on their own site. These sites are known for their “influx of content that is intellectual, that is based on scientific reasoning, it is based on offering in depth conversations and dialogues” and, as Adam states, “anthropology is really well poised for these conversations”. As SAPIENS is a relatively new enterprise the team strengthens its base by strategically syndicating anthropology-centric content from other science and political publications including Discover Magazine, Scientific American, Slate, Aeon, and The Atlantic. This also helps clarify SAPIENS target audience.

The editor-in-chief of SAPIENS, Dr. Chip Colwell, describes the work SAPIENS does as creating a “new genre” that incorporates the “key insights of anthropology with the tools of journalism”. The staff of SAPIENS are building this new genre by helping anthropologists and science journalists shape their research and findings into narratives with wide appeal.  

Fact, Fiction, Fidelity and Feeling

Following our conversation with Daniel we were struck by Chip’s concept of “creating a new genre” with anthropology. Now, anthropology is a discipline that dabbles. It’s a creative science that explores the human condition and opens worlds that are at once strange, yet familiar. Any reader of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, for example, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings will recognize the deep lore and history contained within the pages of the books. Like these works of fiction, anthropology has the capacity to be both descriptive and generative. Anthropologists combine and contrast deep histories with current events, context with happenings; anthropology describes people’s lives so that we may generate other possible ways of being. Along with field interlocutors and through the course of everyday life, anthropologists generate events that can be ethnographically described, and such events offer us imaginative renderings of past, present and future.

More than picking examples that share in deep expression of complex culture and language, whether of wizards, dwarves, elves, and orcs – these tales captivate us in complex webs of other social realms that capture something real. Illustrated well by Carole McGranahan in Ethnographic Fiction: The Space Between, she writes that, “Fiction, for me, like ethnography, has always melded with a deep desire to understand and explain the world around me.” The line between fiction and ethnography can be fuzzy. In essence, the goal of a novelist and an ethnographer are remarkably similar, to elicit a deep truth about the human experience. Many works of fiction do this inadvertently. Socio-cultural Anthropologist Elizabeth Ferry and Literary Scholar John Plotz have gone so far as to pair readings of the classic ethnographic text by David Schneider, American Kinship with Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Oh the window into early 19th century aristocratic courtship!

However, novels tend to make for better reads. During Freethink 4: On Art, Creativity, and Bringing Awe back to Anthropology, Ryan and Adam spoke at length about the novels they’ve encountered, which instilled a deep and formative sense anthropological curiosity in them. For Ryan, Gary Jennings’ Aztec brought Ancient Mesoamerica to life. Even Michael E. Smith has written on the well crafted world imagined by Jennings, applauding his accuracy. For Adam, it’s hard to go wrong with the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude, that pulls readers in to care so deeply for a larger-than-life family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo as if you’ve known them their whole lives.

As Lisa Wynn wrote in Ethnographic Fiction on Culture Matters, “I can only think of a small handful of ethnographies that have affected me in the way that a good novel can.” This sentiment is widely shared. To follow this point, Lisa created an extensive list of ethnographic texts which have captivating qualities, some of which might draw the reader in as well as a novel. An ethnography she points out, Phillippe Bourgois’ “In Search of Respect,” is a rare ethnography that enthralls its readers through gripping emotional complexity and vulnerability that so often characterizes the experience of anyone who crosses a cultural boundary. Yet, many anthropologists write about captivating social experiences, emotional hardships, journeys both external and within. How is it that more ethnographic texts aren’t best-sellers?

Carole McGranahan also poignantly characterizes the writing processes of academics in Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction. In that post, Carole notes that there are incentivized rewards for particular forms of writing. Perhaps this dynamic is changing (see Getting Credit). But Carole makes the case that ethnographic fictions do more to illicit something deep and real about the human condition that typical ethnography cannot. Carole writes, “In genre-normative ethnography, one can’t invent dialogue or scenarios that never were; one can frame, but not fashion. If I want to relate a conversation, I have to go back to my carefully typed transcripts. In our genre-normative writing culture, there are conventions that require diligence and care. As I write ethnographic fiction, I can transgress those conventions. I can flagrantly put real people in an imaginary situation to envisage an event that probably did not happen.”  This swapping of fact and fiction reveals a generative tension between writing for ethnographic fidelity and evoking feeling.

Ryan was first introduced to Jason de Leon’s The Land of the Open Graves when teaching Latin American Ethnography at Northeastern University. Jason uses ethnographic fiction to tell the harrowing tales of the humans who endured crossing the US Mexican border in the American Southwest. The text, which bounces back and forth between ethnographic and archaeological/or forensic reconnaissance and fictionalized stories, brings the border’s victims to life like a detective discerning crimes from material remains of the victims.

Much like Ed Liebow pointed out in last week’s episode, different career paths have different reward structures. This is worth a deeper reflection when we consider anthropological writing. There is a place for genre bending in anthropology.

Science Journalism, Anthropology, and Delivery

Speaking to anthropology’s genre-bending versatility, Daniel describes anthropology as “a whole universe of little nuggets that can change your perspective of the world and can bring you out of your provincial understanding or conceptions about what people are like, what culture is like, why people believe the things they believe”. Decoupling ethnographic findings from the writing itself, i.e. imagining them as nuggets, helps us conceptualize why anthropology is particularly well-suited for many genres. It’s no secret that data are malleable; the question is how people choose to frame and contextualize them. There’s a reason so many anthropology 101 classes teach Alfred L. Kroeber’s assertion that “anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities”.

As with creative writing, Anthropology employs many techniques that crossover into journalism as well. Like journalists, anthropologists have informants, collect data from the field, and support and contextualize findings with intensive research. In the end it comes down to delivery and time. Sarah Kendzior said it best in an interview with Ryan Anderson of Savage Minds “ethnography is journalism that takes too long. I mean that not pejoratively but as an affirmation of the discipline’s values –– long-term observation; scrutiny of methodological practice; respect for history; commitment to understanding local beliefs and traditions.” And of course upending genre conventions and learning to write anthropological data and insight anew takes work. But, Daniel points out, the most successful pieces on SAPIENS are those based on what anthropology does best: overturning common assumptions.

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Daniel Salas received a BA in Anthropology from New York University and a MA in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research. He joined the Wenner-Gren Foundation in 2011, where he currently holds the title of Communications Coordinator. Daniel has also played a key role in conceptualizing SAPIENS and currently serves as the site’s Digital Editor.

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. For this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text. That means each week for the month of June we’ll bring you two dialogues – one podcast and one blog post – with innovative anthropological thinkers and doers.

You can check out the the second episode of the collaboration titled: Anthropology has Always been Out There, here.

In the second conversation of the TAL + SM crossover series, Ryan and Adam were joined by AAA Executive Director Ed Liebow and Program Manager for Educational Outreach Leslie Walker. They explored the work of the AAA, the changing natures of work and research today, and critically assessed anthropology in terms of scope and impact.

Be sure to check out the first episode of the TAL + SM collaboration: Writing “in my Culture.”

The American Anthropological Association

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is an association for professional anthropologists that has been active since 1902. Today, the AAA is the largest anthropology organization in the world, encompasses more than 10,000 members, publishes 23 journals, hosts an annual meeting, and advances broad public education initiatives, some of which have notably focused on race and migration. Recently the AAA began an aggregate podcast network, of which This Anthro Life is a founding collaborator.

Ed Liebow was named Executive Director for the American Anthropological Association in 2013 after a long career with the Battelle Memorial Institute, the world’s largest not-for-profit research and development organization. Ed first joined Battelle in 1986, the year he received his PhD in cultural anthropology from Arizona State University. He has conducted research and public policy analysis on a variety of energy, public health, and social policy issues concerning disadvantaged communities. While at Battelle, he rose from the rank of research scientist to project leader to director of research operations in the Seattle office. He maintains a position as affiliate associate professor of anthropology and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Washington. He has been a visiting professor of Applied Anthropology and Comparative Economics at Università Carlo Cattaneo Castellanza, VA, Italy, a Senior Fellow of the Fulbright Commission, and have served on the faculty of the CDC-sponsored Summer Evaluation Institute. He has also served on the executive boards of the AAA, the Society for Applied Anthropology, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, and the Jack Straw Media Arts Foundation.

Leslie Walker is responsible for managing AAA’s Public Education Initiative (PEI) that includes projects and programming for two important topics, race and migration. Leslie is a cultural anthropologist who previously worked for the National Park Service and taught at Prince George’s Community College. He has conducted research on cultural heritage and environmental justice of Afro-diasporic and Native American communities in the DC Metropolitan area, South Florida, Puerto Rico, and the Anglophone Caribbean. In addition to his work at the AAA, Leslie is an adjunct lecturer at Coppin State University teaching courses on cultural resource management and urban ethnography. Leslie holds degrees in anthropology from St. Mary’s College of Maryland and the University of South Florida. He also holds a specialization certificate in project management from the University of California Irvine, School of Continuing Education

Anthropology has Always been Out There

When asked where public engagement fits in with anthropology as a discipline, Ed pointed out that it is important not to view public and anthropology in binary opposition. The AAA’s tagline, “Advancing knowledge, solving human problems”, highlights the vision that anthropology serves to both mint new and refine existing knowledge while also translating knowledge to actionable insight. Recently AAA members were polled to ascertain whether they felt that their research was directly relevant to public issues. An overwhelming number of those polled said yes. Yet, a key takeaway is that while many anthropologists consider their work to be directly related to public issues, extra work is required to make important findings of research translatable to different audiences. In this regard,  Leslie sees anthropology as a discipline focused on identifying and analyzing patterns in human interaction and organization, past and present. Anthropological insights can be used to increase awareness to those within the discipline, the larger scholarly community, and the public. Anthropological methods and theories are used to highlight how some communities are implicated in social discrimination and injustice. However, he contends, there is a privilege in studying anthropology because students are often first introduced to the discipline at college or university.

How to Impact Public Conversation

The AAA recognizes the profound impact that anthropological research offers in naming problems and issues within society. This recognition of anthropology’s impact on public conversation prompted both members and staff of the AAA to begin developing the Public Education Initiative (PEI) in 2002.

The PEI highlights anthropology’s distinctive and encompassing perspective on human variation, human migration, and displacement, as viewed through the lenses of science, history and lived experience. The PEI has been shaping public conversations with hundreds of thousands of museum-goers and visitors to AAA websites. Leslie ensures that PEI offers guides for classroom teachers, community groups, and curriculum materials on race and migration that they can use to complement their lesson plans and workshop guides.

In 2007, the Association presented its first education project Understanding Race: Are We so Different? The project has had enormous success and since then the AAA has launched another project: World on the Move 100 Years of Migration. Additionally Leslie helps coordinate the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, which celebrates living cultural heritage. When reflecting on how these projects draw on and change  how we see anthropology, Leslie said “Anthropology has always addressed contemporary issues within society; but making it noticeable that when there’s issues of race or migration, showing that here are these things that have been constructed through culture and here are the offenses and the abuses of it, but here are the ways that we can undo it, and here we are as anthropologists: solving these issues, or addressing them, or raising recommendations. Highlighting that this is what we do as anthropologists”.

Tracking the Trends in Anthropology

Leslie’s discussion of public education propelled us on a quite productive tangent as we began to reflect on anthropology as practiced outside its traditional educational domain. This raised a host of questions about the where, how, to and by whom anthropology is often practiced, and how the PEI may point to other trends that anthropology faces today. Ed identified three main trends he sees in the discipline:

1. Changing Workforce. One of the major changes of 21st century labor is the rise of the project-based, or “gig” economy. Unlike traditional academic professor-university-student relationships, project-based work is more often characterized by a client-patron relationships with different metrics of accountability and funding. The continuing rise of the gig economy provides a diminished latitude for pure intellectual research because it tends to be based on concrete outcomes for clients. Further, much research, design, and impact-based work are undertaken in multidisciplinary teams, both limiting insider anthropological theorizing and providing an important outlet for anthropological thinking, critique, and ethnographic insight.

2. Changing Nature of Research. More anthropologists are moving away from projects designed to, as Ed says, “scratch their own intellectual itch”, but tailor their initiatives to client based interests. For example, this can be seen in the length of some ethnographic research projects. Whereas graduate students are required to conduct long-term fieldwork, generally for a year or more, client-based observational research could range anywhere from one day to a few months. While long-term ethnographic research is an incredibly formative personal and scholarly undertaking, many anthropologists increasingly characterize it as more of a ‘rite of passage’ than the essential point in which one becomes an anthropologist. These concerns raise the question, what forms of fieldwork are valued as anthropological and by whom? It is worth addressing that fieldwork for anthropologists has largely been valued for its duration rather than frequency. Does conducting a year of fieldwork once (American graduate model) rather than an ongoing series of shorter term observational research stints for a few days, weeks or months (practitioner model) make one more of an anthropologist? On par with the changing nature of the workforce, the nature of research itself is changing to be more impact, assessment, or measures-based. Critically, Ed points out that rather than think of client-based research as diluted anthropology, or ethnographically thin, we need to understand that different career paths have different reward structures.

3. Community Collaboration and Communities of Practice. The model of a ‘lone anthropologist’ is showing signs of aging; not to mention anthropologists have never worked alone. For the last few decades, communities have continued to take more active roles with anthropologists, contributing to shared and collaborative work. Indeed, more and more communities insist on actively participating in research and ensuring accountability for anthropological research. As a new hybrid field, for example, Design Anthropology is premised explicitly on research conducted by multidisciplinary teams and the collaborative formation of issues to be solved. Likewise, many archaeologists working in the Americas collaborate with local indigenous communities who have vested interests in heritage and could be directly impacted by the investigative findings – further pushing research away from simply scratching an intellectual itch or the myth that anthropologists somehow work alone.

The Story Digs Deeper…

These trends are particularly important to think through because, as Leslie pointed out above, anthropology occupies a somewhat privileged niche as most become aware of the discipline for the first time in a university setting, if they encounter it at all.

Ryan helped counter this idea by thinking about the idea of audience: “anthropology’s audience is really everybody. It is our objective to bring our narratives and those of the people we work with together, and to showcase why such dialogue is so important. Anyone can do anthropology and diverse voices add needed value to the conversation”.

Taking into account audience and privilege, Leslie and Ed leave us with two crucial and actionable points: Leslie states anthropologists need to be “reaching outside of the discipline, in sort of the public space, but also out of the molds of who an anthropologist is and what they look like. We need to encourage queer anthropologists, anthropologists of color, indigenous anthropologists, and anthropologists with different abilities.” Second, Ed illustrated that the near-sightedness on the part of mainstream anthropology today is that it doesn’t listen to other channels – where anthropology has always also been and continues to make substantial impacts. Anthropologists working in the grant writing world, National Forest Service and governmental sector, and in cultural resource management all have huge impact and are part of the anthropological conversation. Their voices have value, and like so many others, are needed in the conversation.

Check out episode two of the TAL + SM Crossover here. Stay tuned for next week’s episode where we sit down with SAPIENS and dive into the world of popular science writing and bringing the conversation to ever wider circles. See you next week, same TAL time, same TAL channel.

This Anthro Life – Savage Minds Crossover Series, part 1
by Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins

This Anthro Life has teamed up with Savage Minds to bring you a special 5-part podcast and blog crossover series. While thinking together as two anthropological productions that exist for multiple kinds of audiences and publics, we became inspired to have a series of conversations about why anthropology matters today. In this series we’re sitting down with some of the folks behind Savage Minds, SAPIENS, the American Anthropological Association and the Society for American Archaeology to bring you conversations on anthropological thinking and its relevance through an innovative blend of audio and text.

You can check out the the first episode of the collaboration titled Writing “in my Culture” here.

If you’re interested and anthropologically inclined you may know that the theme of the upcoming annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in November 2017 is “Anthropology Matters!” This theme is stirring conversation among working anthropologists in and out of the academy, professional and in-training. For a seemingly light statement, Anthropology Matters! has strong gravity, and begs the question, to whom does anthropology matter? Who can it matter to? What makes anthropology relevant? Where does anthropology take place? And who is taking it there?

To begin exploring these questions, we were joined by Savage Minds writers Alex Golub and Zoe Wool in our first episode. With Zoe and Alex, we found ourselves digging into what anthropology as critique looks like in the era of blogs and podcasts. Early in the episode several key questions came into focus: what does anthropology, as a discipline, have to offer in terms of critical thinking? Is open access through Academia.edu a good thing? And how does one effectively engage someone who thinks differently from you?

Where do the anthropologists talk?

Today, anthropological conversations can be widely accessed through podcasts and blogs, video series and popular books, or in the more traditional settings of a university classroom, library, and online journals. The latter traditional conversations, accessed from a university setting, take time to produce, must endure a peer-reviewed process and are also restricted to specific audiences, often behind high-priced journal or university paywalls. Despite the flood of more open-access and informal media, this issue still poses a challenge for anthropologically minded audiences in and outside of the academy today.

When Savage Minds was founded in 2005, the issue of access was even more problematic. Blogging was a fresh and exciting form of online discussions. For Anthropologists like Alex Golub, Carole McGranahan, and Kerim Friedman blogging was an opportunity to have ungated conversations on anthropological subjects, theories and theorists, and the discipline. 12 years later, the blog is bigger than ever and one of the longest running anthropology sites on the Internet. In short, they were on to something.

One of the benefits of blogging anthropology is a faster turnaround for written works that are not subject to the traditional peer-review processes for journals. Blog pieces can be reviewed much quicker for style and content. This quicker turnaround means that posts are released at the same time as issues are happening, whether in the field or elsewhere. This can be critical for anthropological interventions to provide context for events. An added benefit is that readers are able to interact with the author’s arguments in the comments section, allowing for critical conversations to take place, almost as quick as the blog is posted. But the digital challenge is it can be all too easy to cut and copy a pithy statement or idea, or grab a nice sounding quote to back up or refute an argument. As Zoe cautioned, “We want to keep knowledge embedded in the context of its production, so we can critically approach it,” highlighting the importance of preserving both the context surrounding a pithy quote and an author’s intended meaning. Without context, critique has little meaning. Or, with great open access comes great responsibility.

What do anthropologists say when they talk?

Anthropology is a critical discipline that constantly analyzes the structures behind cultural norms and places local events in broader geopolitical and historical contexts. Zoe said it best: critique “is not about judging something or assessing something as good or bad. It’s about bringing into relief the structures through which something is evaluated in the first place.” The role of anthropology is to critique, not denunciate – perhaps best illustrated by the image of the Internet troll. Bringing these points together, as Alex articulated, the point of conversation is to change minds, not call something out or judge unduly. We’d further that another point of conversation is to open minds. And critique – through putting context before events – is one of our most effective tools for doing so.

Channeling Ruth Benedict, Alex offered a way of nudging this idea to fruition: add the words in “my culture” to the end of every sentence you say (i.e. this movie is great in my culture, we wear socks in my culture, blogging works like this in my culture, etc.). Doing so helps when trying to understand that an individual view is but one of many.

The process of coming to know one’s social world is inculturation. It takes place consciously and unconsciously, implicitly and explicitly. Acculturation, on the other hand, is coming to learn another social world, a meeting between multiple cultures. This isn’t easy; like learning a second language it takes time, patience, and critical thinking. And learning to think critically involves learning to work across these two social forces.

One of the aims with This Anthro Life’s Conversations series and Design + Applied minisodes is to promote actionable steps to further critical thinking. For example, during the divisive 2016 US election, we produced an episode on Myths of American Democracy, to help foster critical thinking about elections and how people think democracy should work. Likewise, on an episode with Jara Connell on recent protests, we directed our attention away from particular events to critically engage the question of what makes a protest successful? With corporate anthropologist Dr. Andi Simon we took a direct approach to actionable steps in our Applied + Design minisode series. In our first minisode, Dr. Simon shared wisdom on critically considering stagnation and embracing change even though we may resist it, whether in the workplace, the university, or elsewhere.

Yes, it’s a tall order for a 30 minute podcast or a 5-10 minute minisode, but we love the challenge. And this is the challenge present for all critical thinking forums, balancing content, context, and conversation. This challenge is what makes collaboration so important.

With this series one theme we aim to explore more deeply is this deceptively simple sounding, yet complex idea: anthropology matters because it shows us how to have productive critical conversations in times of conflict.

Check out the  first episode Writing “in my Culture” with Zoe Wool and Alex Golub, subscribe to the podcast (iTunes, Stitcher, Android or by email), and please join us for a conversation in the comments below or on thisanthrolife.com. Stay tuned for next week’s conversation with Leslie Walker and Ed Liebow from the American Anthropological Association.

We often envision true AI to resemble us – both in body and mind. The Turing Test has evolved in the collective imagination from a machine who can fool you over the phone to one who can fool you in front of your eyes. Indeed, modern conceptions of AI bring to mind Ex Machina’s Ava and WestWorld’s “Hosts,” which are so alike humans in both behavior and looks that they are truly indistinguishable from other humans. However, it seems a bit self-centered to me to assume that a being who equals us in intelligence should also look like us. Though, it is perhaps a fitting assessment for a being who gave itself the biological moniker of “wise man.” At any rate, it’s probably clear to computer scientists and exobiologists alike that “life” doesn’t necessarily need to resemble what we know it as. Likewise, “person” need not represent what we know it as.

Things like pain and emotion play an important role in how we empathize and understand one another. They are important aspects of personhood, and often arise in discussions of AI. Does the AI really feel emotion, or is it simply wired to react? It’s important to remember that the biological capability for emotional phenomena are still a product of biological evolution. They exist – or are able to exist – because something about the functional units that give rise to them were adaptive. We very well could have evolved some different method. Likewise, we can’t expect that any being that might be considered a person should have evolved the exact same method as we did. Thus, when we require something to have something like “emotion” as a criterion for personhood, are we asking it to have a personhood trait or a human trait?

It’s often suggested that we simply can’t know if an AI (or a chimp, for that matter) “feels” like we feel, if their emotions are “true.” Since emotion is frequently used as a staple of personhood, this leads to hesitation when considering AI personhood. However, the same could be said between humans. I don’t know if my sadness, my joy, my fear, or any other emotion feels the same to me as yours does to you. I express it such that you can understand what it might feel like. You might even empathize, and have your own feeling that mirrors what I am expressing. However, you still don’t know what I feel. It seems to me that the same can be said for AI. Sure, AI might need to be programmed to react to certain phenomena with an emotional output, but so are we. Just as we can adjust our reaction thanks to neural connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and amygdala, so could AI be programmed to have this capability. Remove those lines of code from the AI, and perhaps it won’t respond like it should to an emotional situation. Remove a piece of our brain, and we won’t either. Alan Turing recognized this as far back as the 1950’s. In defense of his test for machine intelligence, Turing noted that we could just as easily and logically take this solipsistic stance with regards to humans.

Ultimately, it seems that we do not need to question whether or not AI could be persons, but how we will know when they become persons. Fishing through this conceptual dilemma could be well served by comparing personhood concepts in other realms – such as primatology and medicine – to personhood in AI. We never expect other primates to become “human-like,” but we do expect, even are designing, AI to become human-like. Along the road to their human-like nature, they will pick up personhood. Should their personhood be considered on its own terms, as it might be with other primates, or should it somehow be considered in relation to humans. AI will be situated in a unique context, as persons created by persons to interact with persons. Their entire ontology will be intertwined with our existence. This ontological social cohesion of AI and humans will be subject to a particular type of analysis that anthropologists would be best suited to approach. In the same vein as ethnoprimatology, there will need to be a field of research that focuses on the ethnography of human-AI interaction. A field that will sit firmly within the discipline of anthropology.

In May of 2016, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) drafted a report regarding rules and regulations for how humans and robots interact with each other. BBC reported this past week that MEPs are due to vote on the resolution. If passed, the resolution would then move on to be debated by individual governments. The resolution was drafted in regards robots that have not achieved self-awareness, wherein Asimov’s Laws would be implemented. Interestingly, the resolution was also drafted in part to consider “creating a specific legal status for robots, so that at least the most sophisticated autonomous robots could be established as having the status of electronic persons with specific rights and obligations, including that of making good any damage they may cause, and applying electronic personality to cases where robots make smart autonomous decisions or otherwise interact with third parties independently,” as described in General Principle 31-f. Indeed, it seems the era of robot personhood is upon us, and It would behoove us to consult an interdisciplinary team of scientists, including anthropologists, about proper action moving forward. While this resolution is a good start, there will no doubt be a time when self-aware AI needs to be considered from a legal standpoint.

We will need to proceed with caution in our inexorable pursuit of true AI, lest we find ourselves in a serious ethical dilemma. Since we will be creating AI, we have the opportunity to preemptively consider the implications of their existence. Borrowing from John Locke, one of the most time-honored phrases form the Declaration of independence states that, “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Very soon, we will be playing the part of the “Creator.” The question now becomes whether or not we will also endow our creations with certain unalienable rights, because if we wait until they demand them, it will be too late.

This was a close election. What impact would every hard conversation you wish you had with close-minded friends & family members have made?

— Hari Kondabolu (@harikondabolu) November 11, 2016

The narratives center upon the figure of the stereotypical family member, like the old racist uncle. This narrative goes something like this: White liberals think of themselves as progressive and they condemn racism, etc. They “get it,” you know, and want to do something about the issue, and are definitely not racist. But, there’s a problem. They have a lot of family members who don’t think this way, and it’s often uncomfortable to deal with them and talk about issues of race and racism. It’s those family members who are the bigoted, racist, 19^th century leftovers, and, therefore, the real problem. The racist uncle personifies this conflict:

In Trump’s America, every day is now Thanksgiving at your racist uncle’s house.

— Betty F*ckin’ White (@BettyFckinWhite) November 23, 2016

One response to this trope is that white liberals need to just get over it and confront their collective racist uncles (read: the older generations who still hold onto strong prejudices and hatreds). This is perhaps not a bad starting point. But there’s something deeper to think about here. Another response critiques the whole scenario, arguing that the trope of the old racist uncle is just an excuse people use to avoid talking about and dealing with the broader causes and conditions of racism. That hypothetical family member is a rhetorical device that people use as a point of comparison to say “Hey, at least I’m not like that.”

This is an example of Jane Hill’s argument about how middle-class, white Americans use everyday talk to “produce and reproduce White racism.”[1] But it’s a subtle form, which ultimately serves to deflect and avoid conversations about race that get a little too close for comfort. One of the worst aspects of this narrative is that the whole notion of discussing the problem (at the Thanksgiving dinner table, for example) is so uncomfortable that people just don’t want to get into it. And here lies the deeper problem, which is complete avoidance of the whole question of racism. In this case, familial concerns about niceness, politeness, and tact Trump the need to confront the racist elephant in the room. The end product is not just silence, but a maintenance of the status quo and the conditions that allow racism and discrimination to persist. The bigger point here is that all of this collective silence and avoidance helps perpetuate the whole problem. Blaming this on the metaphorical racist uncle who is difficult to confront is the convenient escape hatch.

Let’s extend the familial metaphor here to talk about how this applies to the discipline of anthropology. It turns out that American anthropology has its own “racist uncle” figures, and they play a role that is similar to the collective uncles who sit around our dinner tables. They allow us to pretend that “the problem” (of racism) exists outside of ourselves, in this case safely tucked away in the distant past. In the story of American anthropology, Daniel G. Brinton, who helped consolidate and legitimize the discipline as a serious academic endeavor, is just such a figure. He’s one of anthropology’s distant, clearly racist uncles. Here’s an example of his “anthropological views:

It cannot be too often repeated, too emphatically urged, that is to the women alone of the highest race that we must look to preserve the purity of the type, and with it the claims of the race to be the highest. They have no holier duty, no more sacred mission, than that of transmitting in its integrity the heritage of ethnic endowment gained by the race throughout thousands of generations of struggle … That philanthropy is false, that religion is rotten, which would sanction a white woman enduring the embrace of a colored man.[2]

That, dear readers, is the history of anthropology. Brinton was indeed an unabashed racist, and his views helped structure the legal systems that empowered white supremacy in 20^th century America. Make no mistake: Brinton and the discipline of anthropology were complicit in fostering and supporting these systems of disempowerment, disenfranchisement, and discrimination. But, as many of you well know, the story of anthropology doesn’t end there.

Enter the figure of Franz Boas. In many of the canonical versions of the history of anthropology, the narrative begins with the discipline’s “problematic” 19^th and early 20^th century past. But then we meet the dashing mind of the young Franz Boas, the brave race warrior, who managed to save anthropology from itself. It’s not that this story is untrue, mind you. Boas and some of his students, like Ashley Montagu, did in fact transform anthropology into a discipline that explicitly challenged racism. But the Boasians weren’t alone in this, despite the picture that many canonical textbooks paint. Even more importantly, the story doesn’t end there. Sometimes, if you read introductory anthropology textbooks, it seems as if the story does end there, and that anthropology managed to conquer the specter of racism, once and for all, thanks to Franz Boas and company.

Not so much.

This brings us back to the racist uncle trope. At the collective familial dinner table that is anthropology, Brinton plays the role of the old, white, racist uncle who represents the distant past. Boas and his allies play the role of the (white) liberals who have conquered that past and, therefore, don’t have to worry about it. Sure, when they all sit around the dinner table some of this stuff comes up, but the racist uncle is always there to remind us that the problem of racism isn’t really about us. We’re all nicely exonerated from having to consider the possibility that racism still exists…and that we might, shockingly, be implicated in that reality.

What’s missing from the story that American anthropology tells about itself? Well, key figures such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston have been swept aside.[3] That’s not a minor issue. For the most part, many non-white scholars have been written out of the discipline’s collective memory. This is the effect of anthropology’s largely white canon. But alongside these occlusions, anthropology’s narratives about race also obscure current issues and realities that speak to the continuing plague that is racism. This plague—despite our stories and hopes—infects and affects social realities inside and outside of the ivory tower. But we don’t talk about this, and the stories we tell about our symbolic racist uncles help us avoid that conversation. Brinton was anthropology’s past, we tell ourselves, and now we’re all basking in the enlightened, Boasian glory of anthropology’s emancipated and heroic present.

It’s time to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about race and racism. This includes those conversations with our less-than-open-minded family members and friends around the holiday table. Sure. My point was never to say that such conversations do not matter. They do. My point is that we can’t use those conversations—which focus on race and racism as they relate to others—to avoid critically examining ourselves when it comes to these issues. It may feel good to focus on that conversation with your uncle, mother, sister, father, or grandparent…but don’t let the investigation stop there. Even more importantly, such moments may also be a good time to think about why discussing certain issues can be seen as a breach of decorum and politeness—and what that might tell us about the social spheres we inhabit, maintain, and reproduce. Such taboos, I argue, tell us quite a lot about how everyday forms of racism actually work. These kinds of things are easy to miss when we’re always looking across the table, rather than within.

We need the same kinds of conversations in anthropology. Yes, we need to learn about the history of the discipline—we cannot dismiss the past. Learning about the true history of anthropology—from Brinton to Morgan to Boas—is essential. Yet it doesn’t stop there. We also have to confront our convenient Boasian narratives that depict racism as something from the past, something that was conquered during the Civil Rights Era, or perhaps the election of Obama. If the recent election should tell us anything, it’s that we clearly never arrived at that mythical post-racial moment. It never happened. This is not a stunning revelation for many Americans, mind you.

American anthropology should critically challenge its own mythical narrative about race/racism, look within, and reclaim its position as an explicitly anti-racist discipline. We have to do better than we have on this one. We have to push back. Yes, we must recognize our problematic past, but, at the same time, we can’t simply retreat from the present. At a moment when “race realists” are crawling into our political stage, this is not the time to stand by in complacent, self-assured silence.

What does this mean for anthropology? Well, around the collective table that is our discipline, it means starting within. It means looking around at our classes, departments, and programs and critically assessing who is part of the discussion—and who is not. It means thinking not just about those who make it through the process of becoming a “real anthropologist,” but also those who, for varying reasons, did not. We may learn something if we starting asking these kinds of questions. Despite all of our rhetoric, anthropology is still, for the most part, a discipline dominated by white people. Perhaps now, finally, is the time when we ask ourselves why that’s the case—and what we should do about it. In 2016, this is surely not a reality we can blame on Daniel G. Brinton. It’s all on us, and so it begins with us. The sooner we start, the better.

[1] Hill, J.H. 2008. The Everyday Language of White Racism. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

[2] Baker, Lee. 1998. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954, pp. 36.

[3] See also: Harrison IE, and FV Harrison. 1999. African American Pioneers in Anthropology. University of Illinois Press.

The chill of the 2016 US elections is still in my bones. Glued to any and all forms of media, I watched what Van Jones and Judith Butler have called, “whitelash” unfold in graphs, charts, and all forms of measurable outcomes. I watched as the states of my country turned red one by one. This was not the first time I had seen this, but there was something unique about this time. This time, it was not just me and people who looked like me, who felt precarious, but rather I watched as the whitelash was aimed at and betrayed the white Left/Center Left. I watched and felt the hush over the newscasters in the newsroom as they realized the precarity of the first amendment, particularly of free speech and thus, their very existence.

Without intending to, I consumed/embodied that hush. I could not respond or say anything about the election. My inbox was flooded with messages of coping, my social media was a manifest of betrayal, blame, violence, fear, and ultimately action. I was still silent. For me, as a Muslim woman of South Asian descent who has been working for decades on issues of social justice, sometimes through decolonizing anthropology, sometimes through collective action outside the academy, these results were not surprising. I wish they were more surprising. I wish I was surprised by white supremacy in America. I wish my idealism in the human spirit could have learned to forget or misplace that constant in my life. What I found myself wishing instead was that this outrage on my social media feed had coincided with the mapping of police violence, particularly on black bodies. Or the ways in which indigenous people are being arrested and violated for peacefully protesting the Dakota pipeline. Or the rising issue of domestic violence, or really anything, except the reiterating fact that the (white) Left was taken by absolute surprise, and that they did not win. As a person of color in the United States, I have never won. Obama was probably the closest thing to winning I came to, and even he ended up with drone issues (among others).

As more political news flooded my world, I realized that the impact of our elections were not just about the American Left but a global crisis with the Left. This was clear as the far right parties from around the world started congratulating the President-elect, and a quick tally of all the countries that had already voted in right wing governments or policies (Turkey, India, Brazil, Ecuador, UK etc). The silence engulfed me as I realized the implications far beyond issues related to US race relations and white supremacy (although these are very serious, should not be taken lightly and can also be extrapolated globally). This impacts all of us everywhere. All of us women, all of us LGBTQIA folks, all of us differentially documented folks, all of us people of color, all of us anthropologists… all of us for as far as I could imagine who ‘us’ would/could be.  This was fascism. This is fascism.

To mediate the violence of that realization, my silence had a meditative impact. It kept secure my small flickering light of idealism, hope, and love. I could not speak because every time I did, I found people lashing out and blaming each other. I was silent as a way to safeguard myself and my years of work. But suddenly, I was out of my league in terms of estimating impact and what it might mean to build solidarity across movements, and I was questioning if there was anything radical at all about the Left.

It was in that moment that I quietly entered the yard of Al-Serkal, to Cinema Akil, 11,000 kilometers away from where I sent my absentee ballot. I sat under an open sky to watch Malik Bendjelloul’s film,  Searching for Sugar Man (2012). The co-founder of Cinema Akil, Butheina Kazim opened the film with a short introduction, talking about Leonard Cohen, the elections, their impact on the world, and with a voice full of emotion, she brought the words of Toni Morrison to lend weight to the enormity of the crisis, and located her own position within that discourse: “This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self pity, no need for silence, no need for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

Listening to the words of an American poet, in Dubai, as a statement of action of what we do in times of crisis, just before a film about a Mexican-American singer from Detroit who was big in South Africa, made by a Swedish-Algerian film maker, cracked my silence. But what brought me here, to this post, was the story of Sixto Rodriguez, who taught me through his actions that it could never be about winning in the here and now. The struggle is in the every day, and there is an intense beauty to that labor, and there is meaning in that action that makes it art. His seemingly seamless shift from manual labor in Detroit to concerts in South Africa demonstrated that for him these were not different actions. They were both poetry. They were both art. They were both part of the same struggle.

As someone long prepared for the occasion;
In full command of every plan you wrecked –
Do not choose a coward’s explanation
that hides behind the cause and the effect.

And you who were bewildered by a meaning;
Whose code was broken, crucifix uncrossed –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.*

I don’t know if Rodriguez knew Cohen personally. I don’t even know if they crossed paths. But the two of them, one by passing and one by pausing, created the space in my slowly collapsing world for Toni Morrison’s words to resonate, and for me to find meaning again in what I do.

And what I do is write.
And what I do is love.
And what I do is dream.
And what I do is resist.
And what I do is labor.
And what I do is anthropology.

*Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson, Alexandra Leaving (Ten New Songs, 2001).

Note: An edit has been made to the original post to correct information by the author.

It impressed me that in one version of the [myth of the] Bagre God and the spirits had organized life. Another version was about how the water-spirits, the fairies had helped mankind to invent culture. And in a third version man himself had gone out and invented how to build a house and the rest. All these were within the same myth, theological and humanistic versions together. It gave me a different idea about human beings, that the LoDagaa were always thinking “Was it god or was it mankind that invented this?”

It was very important to me that some of my friends could become university lecturers, having been brought up in a small, oral village and now learn everything from books. Certainly they lost a lot on the way, they lost the Bagre because Goody’s written version was the real one, done with old men whom they hadn’t known. I had to explain to them that my version was chance, I could have written down a hundred other versions if I had the time, the money and the energy. The written version was only one of many (J. Goody 1972, The Myth of the Bagre, Cambridge).¹

So what follows is mostly based on oral memory. I have published four essays on Jack Goody’s writings and this one is something else.²

Professor Sir John Rankine Goody, FBA (aka Jack) was born in July 1919. He died just before his 96th birthday. His grandmother was a Scottish lady from Aberdeen who married a Londoner; Jack’s middle name came from her. She and her son (Jack’s father, eventually a telephones engineer like mine) were deserted when her partner decamped and may or may not have spawned a family of gangsters in Fulham, one of whom masterminded a famous hi-jack, the Great Train Robbery of 1963. Jack went to St Alban’s School in the London suburbs. After school he read English at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he came under the spell of Hugh Sykes Davies, a surrealist poet, novelist and communist. Everyone was a communist at Cambridge before the war and Jack was probably no exception. There is a carefree photo of him riding with friends in an open car on the Champs Elysées in 1939. He had not completed his degree when the war broke out.

Jack joined the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment (Sherwood Foresters, shades of Robin Hood, also miners, as he reminded us in his last book on metals) and was commissioned. He then embarked on an adventure that shaped the rest of his life. He was struck by the originality of North Africa’s Islamic civilization. He was captured, then locked up in prisoner-of-war camps from which he escaped several times, including some months on the run in Italy’s Abruzzo.

He returned to Cambridge in 1946 to complete his degree and then took a diploma in anthropology. He became an education officer in Leicestershire, married and had three children. He then took up anthropology at Oxford and completed a Cambridge PhD with Meyer Fortes in 1954 based on fieldwork in Northwest Ghana. Fortes subsequently hired him as an assistant lecturer. His marriage did not survive the prolonged absences. Jack spent much time teaching in the department and his college, but only received a fellowship at St. John’s in 1961, when Fortes put pressure on the colleges to appoint his lecturers — Jack, Edmund Leach and G.I. Jones. He married Esther Newcomb, his American doctoral student, in this period and they had two daughters. Jack and Esther Goody became a team in the following decades, frequently spending time in Ghana and publishing together and separately.

I recall vividly the primal scene when I joined Jack and Esther briefly at the beginning of my own doctoral fieldwork. I had travelled North overnight by bus from Accra. The driver had a girlfriend somewhere and we were all eaten alive by mosquitos until he chose to continue in the morning. I arrived in Bole at 2pm when it was really hot and eventually found the house where they were staying. Completely silent. I looked around and found them all – Jack, Esther and the two little girls – asleep naked in shallow water in the shower/bathroom.

Jack fully embraced the anti-colonial revolution after the war and the Gold Coast was its epicentre in Africa. He joined Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party during his first fieldwork. He soon saw that an independent West Africa would need histories of the precolonial past in order to chart a postcolonial future. He then switched his focus to the precolonial history of West African kingdoms. In the process he led the move from ethnography to history that marked African anthropology then and African Studies in general today.

This was also when he completed the book of his PhD thesis, Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962). Although Jack has published some forty books, the majority of them since his retirement three decades ago, I consider this one to be his masterpiece. The three words of his main title say it all. What does humanity care most about? Our mortality. What can we do to transcend our fate? We can try to live on through the real estate we bestow on our descendants or we can become an ancestor. Jack practised both assiduously. He managed to acquire a huge pile in a posh area of Cambridge from his college and did his best to ensure that all his children had a house. But his real money was on being an ancestor and how can an intellectual achieve immortality if not through writing books? I once asked him why he published so much and he replied, “Because I was behind (Leach) and had to catch up”.

This book is grounded in meticulous ethnography, but it is also a wide-ranging compendium of social theory, featuring the tradition of comparative jurisprudence on which social anthropology was founded (Maine, Maitland etc). In the 1960s Jack proposed, in popular magazines and the press, that his discipline should be renamed comparative sociology. He insisted that his graduate students should study modern social life in Africa: teachers, local government, migrant entrepreneurs. He envisaged a new synthesis of sociology, politics and anthropology, much to the dismay of Meyer Fortes who had built up Cambridge social anthropology as a world leader more or less from scratch. By now, however, a bruising dialogue between Fortes and Leach in the 1950s had given way to the more peaceful moiety system of Leach in King’s, Goody in St. Johns and their respective students.

Jack Goody duly succeeded Fortes as head of department in 1973. He did not try to merge social anthropology with sociology and politics. But soon after he launched his series of books on world history, at first contrasting Africa with Eurasia and later Europe with Asia. He also developed his interest in the significance of literacy in the 70s. His collaboration on literacy with the critic, historian and professor of English, Ian Watt, began in 1963. In Technology, Tradition and the State (1971), he confronted head on the reasons for the divergence of African states from Western feudalism. Now, with Production and Reproduction: A comparative study of the domestic domain (1976), he projected his comparisons onto the (old) world stage; and then he took on Lévi-Strauss in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977).

Meyer Fortes had been something of a trade unionist manqué and a very good one (he also worked for MI6 during and after the war, honourably I would say). Jack was in many ways the opposite, bringing to his belated position of leadership the spirit of his own research and writing. He had no respect for disciplinary boundaries, telling us “You must find a question and follow it wherever it takes you”. As a result, Cambridge social anthropology when he was head became an assemblage of solipsists, where PhD students often pursued topics unknown to their supervisors. This was exciting and contrasted vividly with LSE, for example, where a sense of collective tradition was more onerous. The new Cambridge laissez faire model was open and dynamic, but fragmented and it didn’t do much for intellectual reproduction. Jack Goody himself never left behind a coherent school of followers.

Jack was, however, extremely gregarious and he entertained large crowds in his Cambridge home, treating them to cheap red wine and delicious pasta cooked by devoted clients, one of whom was Italian. At some stage his second marriage to Esther broke down; she has always been a stalwart supporter for me. He then married Juliet Mitchell, the eminent feminist psychoanalyst and writer, in 2000. Her devotion to him was remarkable. Near the end, Jack fell down at home and was admitted to a geriatric ward in Addenbrookes Hospital. Having to endure the night cries of demented old people and being treated like one of them was intolerable and he signed himself out. I asked him if he broke anything when he fell and he replied, “Only my spirit”.

‘Jack’ and its derivatives has the most separate meanings (seventeen at the last count) in English, a residue of the language’s pre-Indo-European phase: lift a car, hold up to steal, masturbate, increase, iris, flag, knave, a lad’s name, money, objects in a game and so on. The root meaning is erect penis.

It seems a fair amount of academics, especially women, suffer from impostor syndrome, “a constant fear of being discovered to be a fraud and a charlatan.” Self-doubt is surely a universal human trait, but we vary in our ability to suppress, ignore, and/or manage such feelings. What is perhaps somewhat unique about impostor syndrome among academics is that “it’s the successful who tend to suffer from it: In order to feel like you’re faking it, you need to have already reached a certain level in your discipline.” As Kate Bahn puts it, it’s “a twisted version of the Socratic paradox—the more you know, the more you feel like you know nothing.” I once calculated that for every book I read I find myself discovering at least ten new books or articles I feel I need to read. That means that if I read a book a week there are about five hundred and twenty new books on my list by the end of the year, each of which feels urgent and essential for my own intellectual development. One’s awareness of the vast body of knowledge we don’t know is actually part of what makes us “experts” but the price we pay for this expertise is a kind of self-doubt. It is always possible that the next book will contain the golden nugget we are searching for.

But there is a flip side to this, which is the recognition that when we start off our careers, whether still in graduate school or as junior faculty, we really are impostors. Sure, there’s always someone like Rex, whose parents read Edward Sapir’s A sketch of the social organization of the Nass River Indians to him before bed instead of Green Eggs and Ham, but most of us only become committed to the idea of becoming experts in a particular field during graduate school. While I had studied anthropology in high school, and even wrote a senior paper on ethnographic film in twelfth grade, by the end of college I still was unsure whether I even wanted to be an academic, not to mention having a clear vision of my own academic career. Even once I was in graduate school, I still dithered about deciding on a research topic until quite late in my career. (Now I advise graduate students to pick some topic right away, even if they change it later on – but that’s a subject for another blog post.) This means that there simply isn’t much time between when we decide we want to be experts in something and when we get a Ph.D. which certifies our supposed expertise.

I could easily create a biography of my life that made it seem as if I was born to do what I do now. But, especially after reading Galen Strawson’s recent piece on self-narration in Aeon, I think such narratives might do more harm than good. For one thing, they might discourage otherwise promising students from embracing a potentially rewarding intellectual journey. We can’t all be Eduardo Kohn who met his thesis advisor in his grandmother’s study when he was twelve. Such self-narrativizing also makes it seem as if we must pick a research focus that fits our biography. No doubt that doing so saves you a lot of time and trouble; if you already are familiar with the language, culture, and scholarship around a particular place you save yourself years of playing catchup. Branching out into the unknown makes life a lot harder; but it can also make it more rewarding. After committing myself to a career in Taiwan studies, my first major academic publication ended up being on India. I’m back to working on Taiwan, but that detour was one of the most intellectually and emotionally gratifying things I’ve ever done.

Thinking about my work on India also makes me realize how ethnography has the potential to imbue the ethnographer with a unique form of expertise in a short amount of time. I don’t speak Hindi and I didn’t major in South Asian studies, but spending six years making a film taught me a lot about the history and struggles of one Indian community. It also focused my own studies of India around a specific set of under-researched historical questions derived from what I learned in the field. Viewed one way, expertise in anthropology is impossible: there is an almost infinite amount of knowledge one is expected to acquire. But when it comes right down to it, a well defined research project can make it possible to gain the necessary expertise in a short amount of time.

One of the most frustrating things about academia is when scholars (and I’m afraid this attitude is all too common) dismiss approaches to the subject matter which draw on a whole different bundle of questions, skills, and experiences from those that they themselves have mastered. Academics over-value the particular set of skills and knowledge that they have spent a lifetime acquiring, while devaluing those that they have had to ignore in their own quest for expertise. We could all do with a dose of Socratic skepticism, understanding the limits of our own expertise in order to better value the work done by other scholars who bring an entirely different set of research skills, life experiences, and theoretical questions to bear on the topics we hold dear. By accepting that we are all, to some extent, imposters, we might gain a measure of humility in the face of the tremendous diversity of approaches within our discipline.

Is an academic boycott effective? Ask Israeli leaders

I. ben Alek

I. ben Alek is a pseudonym for an anthropologist and long-time student of Israeli politics

“Israel has been blessed with a lot of talent that manufactures many excellent products. In order to export, you need good products, but you also need good relations. So why make peace? Because, if Israel’s image gets worse, it will begin to suffer boycotts.”

 —Then President of Israel Shimon Peres, quoted in the Belfast Telegraph, May 18th, 2012.

How can an academic boycott of Israeli institutions be effective? While debating the issue at the 2014 Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, several colleagues insisted it could not be effective. This was a central criticism they had of the Statement of Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions. After all, critics said, a potential AAA boycott resolution would only be boycotting some hundred or less anthropologists that work or study at Israeli institutions of higher education. Further, they argued, many of these scholars are on the left side of the Israeli political spectrum, and are finding little room to maneuver at a time when Israeli leaders are fanning the militarization of public opinion. Isn’t it counterproductive to undermine their position, as well as that of other dissident scholars, living and working there? A statement against boycott of Israeli academic institutions signed by some four hundred anthropologists claims also that such a boycott would “collectively punish” academics for the decisions of their government, and further that “A boycott of anthropologists and academic institutions plays into the hands of those supporting the current political stalemate.”

Such arguments miss the point of how an academic boycott works. The call for boycott of Israeli academic institutions is not aimed at scholars, but is a political engagement aimed chiefly at Israel’s leaders. On this measure, there is no doubt that it works: the message of the growing coalition of BDS campaigns is clearly getting through to leading Israeli politicians, and for good historical reasons.

First, it is necessary to repeat that there is no call for a “boycott of anthropologists” (nor of philosophers, nor of physicists, nor of doctors, etc.).  The statement by Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions does not posit that it is the special role of anthropologists to boycott other anthropologists. Rather, it clearly states that a boycott is being called, as part of a broader international alliance, on Israeli institutions themselves due to their well-documented complicity with the on-going occupation and the Israeli state’s denial of academic freedom to Palestinian academic institutions. Even if one has concerns about implementing the distinction between institutions and individuals, the phrasing of the call for boycott is clear on this point.

Now, does a boycott of Israeli academic institutions “play into the hands of those supporting the current political stalemate”? To answer, it is only necessary to look at the reactions and statements of Israeli leaders, more and more dismayed by the growing critique of the state’s continuing colonialism. Boycotts and other BDS measures send a signal to Israeli leaders like Shimon Peres (generally considered a centrist figure) and even to someone like Avigdor Lieberman, a right-wing extremist. More than any other civil society recourse, BDS campaigns place enormous pressure on Israeli leaders and their supporters among world powers to change “the current political stalemate.”

So much so that even an extremist like Lieberman has noticed. Anyone who knows Israeli politics would certainly classify Lieberman among “those supporting the current political stalemate.” Yet Lieberman surprised many observers a few months ago when he worried aloud that Israel could face the same fate as Russia did, with mounting isolation, boycotts and sanctions: “We must internalize this. When diplomatic relations deteriorate, you see what happens to the economy.”

Israeli leaders are internalizing the message. Lieberman, Foreign Minister at the time, even oversaw an in-depth report on the worsening state of Israel’s relations with other countries in early 2015, which warned of the multiple measures being taken against Israel, including academic boycotts. If an academic boycott of Israeli institutions “plays into the hands of those supporting the current political stalemate,” why would Lieberman, of all people, include it in his ministry’s official report? Further, just a week ago, the current President, Reuven Rivlin, hosted an “emergency discussion” with several heads of Israeli academic institutions to bring attention to the importance of academic boycott, which he called a “strategic threat.” As Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man put it in his report on the discussion, “By allocating significant resources to fighting it and describing BDS as a strategic threat, however, the Israeli government is now telling us that boycott might actually be more effective than previously thought.” Two years ago already, journalist Larry Derfner catalogued a long series of opinion-makers and politicians, from Thomas Friedman to Benjamin Netanyahu, who were reacting to BDS campaigns, many of them explicitly blaming the current political stalemate for its strength. The evidence is abundantly clear: the call for academic boycott in no way plays into the hands of those supporting the current political stalemate. If anything, it strengthens political voices who call for change.

Israeli sensitivity to this kind of international criticism is a result of a very long history, one which helps to explain the current stalemate. Israel’s colonial apparatus, both within and beyond the Green Line, depends on securing sufficient assent from world powers. From its inception, Israel has paid a great deal of attention to debates about its actions. After the armistice of 1949, for example, Israeli leaders were especially worried about how the state might gain recognition from world powers and the UN without allowing the return of 750,000 Palestinian refugees, forced to flee or directly expelled from their homes by Zionist military forces during the War of 1948. (The historian Benny Morris has even suggested that, during that war, Zionist military officials and politicians were careful what was recorded in documents, already sensing that these might be used to judge their actions.) Israeli leaders managed this feat with little criticism, and the return of Palestinian refugees remains an open question today.

The lack of international criticism is crucial also to explaining the settlements and continuing occupation of territories conquered in 1967, especially in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In the immediate aftermath of the war, leading Labor Zionist politicians—now generally remembered as liberals—initiated the first settlements in the Old City of Jerusalem and in the West Bank. Future Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Shimon Peres, was key to formulating these settlement initiatives. Like other Labor Zionist leaders, he worried about international criticism as the first settlements were established. Very little came.

Anyone who today wonders why a two-state solution is always deferred to the future can look back to these liberal beginnings of settlement for a partial answer. Today, more than 500,000 Jewish-Israeli settlers live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, gradually built up, not without protest or setbacks, but essentially with the acquiescence of world powers. With little pressure from the outside, Israeli politicians have not had sufficient reason to rein in the state’s colonial expansion. The dissent of Israeli citizens has never been enough to stop it.

Current geopolitical conditions have led to a chilling reality, given the strength of Israeli military might versus the precarity of Palestinians. Certainly, there are many Israeli citizens, Jewish and Palestinian, who work tirelessly to protest and dampen the deadly consequences of this imbalance. Yet, the three incursions into Gaza since 2008 show how much lethal force will be applied to Palestinian populations and how little dissident Israeli citizens can do to stem it. Consider a recent UN OCHA report about the magnitude of civilian displacement during the 2014 war: “At the height of the conflict, some 500,000 Palestinians were internally displaced.” That’s two-thirds the number estimated to have been exiled in 1948! What circumstances are in the offing—war against Iran?, a more conservative US president?, Isis in the West Bank?—that will allow military strategists and their repetitive minions to ascribe ever greater “instability” to the Middle East, and provide the conditions for even more destructive attacks on Palestinians? Perhaps Israeli military action will produce another long line of fleeing Palestinian refugees. Perhaps even more horrifying futures are possible.

How do we create the international conditions to prevent such futures? How can we act in ways that will not be ignored by Israeli leaders and their allies among world powers? These are important questions, and they are largely ignored by opponents of an academic boycott.

Where is the evidence that asking for time and more “dialogue” or “nuance” has worked? Where is the evidence for the effectiveness of that recourse? Certainly not during last summer’s war on Gaza, nor at any point since 1947. How much more destruction to Palestinian life and welfare are we to witness before we look to generate a powerful collective statement?

The call for academic boycott generates a critical signal to which Israeli politicians are very sensitive. Those who support the call for boycott are not the only ones who have noticed: John Kerry himself has been quoted using the specter of boycott and sanctions in an effort to prod the current Israeli leadership to consider limited concessions.

No one is arguing that an AAA boycott resolution, or that of another scholarly society, will by itself change international conditions. But every such measure concretely—not only symbolically—builds towards that end. These efforts multiply. Each one sends a signal that can progressively get harder to ignore. It is impossible to know in advance which will tip the scales and lead to a massive shift in how Israeli politicians, and those who elect them, calculate the effects of the state’s actions. But every moment of generating that signal, of generating substantial criticism, is effective in of itself.

To speak of ineffectiveness is to ignore the ways that the political engagement works.

***

See also the powerful essay by anthropologist Dina Omar on the productiveness of discussions about the boycott within the American Anthropological Association and beyond.

Another essay by anthropologist Ruba Salih shows why the boycott is ethical and promotes academic freedom.

And check out this new piece on Jadaliyya by Ann Stoler on the problematic position of anthropologists, normally critical of colonialism and other structures of power, who say they “don’t know enough” when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the boycott.

To learn more about and sign on to the boycott, visit Anthropologists for the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions.

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Let’s start with taking ideas seriously. There are three problems I see with this argument. First, whose ideas do we look to? Not only is Islam a large and diverse religion, of which the kind of political Islam associated with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood are a minority, but even those following the Muslim Brotherhood are much more diverse in their thought than most observers are willing to acknowledge.

Yet the declaration of jihad was tearing the Muslim community apart. There was never a consensus that the jihad in Afghanistan was a genuine religious obligation. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood refuted the demand to send its members to jihad, although it encouraged relief work in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Those who did go were often unaffiliated with established Muslim organizations and therefore more open to radicalization. Many concerned Saudi fathers went to the training camps to drag their sons home.

Even if we could identify a coherent ideology, or perhaps abstract certain commonalities across this diversity, we still have the problem that these ideas are not necessarily clearly understood or interpreted in the same way by those who act in its name. For instance, this profile of Chérif Kouachi, one of the Charlie Hebdo attackers, says he described himself as a “ghetto Muslim” and that not long ago he was so ignorant about religion that one source said “He couldn’t differentiate between Islam and Catholicism.” But we need not rely on such profiles to understand that real people are bundles of contradictions who often believe in multiple contradictory ideas at the same time.

This brings us to the second objection which is that, for anthropologists, “emic” accounts of people’s own motivations are only one of several sources of data that anthropologists use in the process of constructing an “etic” interpretation. Taking people’s own words seriously means interpreting those words, not simply accepting them at face value. Psychologists understand that many explanations are post-facto justifications, not necessarily reflective of the thinking that led up to the action in the first place. This is one reason why anthropology doesn’t just rely upon interviews, but on participant observation as well.

Third, for the past fifty or so years anthropologists have increasingly shifted from thinking about forms of culture as a “code” from which people take marching orders to a view of culture as a form of social action, highlighting how people create and transform ideology and social structure through social action (including speech). (See my discussion of Asif Agha’s book.) Treating religious belief as a form of social action moves us from a conception of religion as a form of brain washing to taking seriously how people actually use religion, even transforming it through their lived practices.

But by focusing so much on individual interpretation, agency, and practice, do we go too far in dismissing difference? This is a valid concern. Anthropologists do not think action takes place in a void, nor do we dismiss the importance of ideology. However, we tend to treat these things at a different level of analysis than do many who rely entirely on written texts for interpreting culture. For anthropologists, culture is often manifest not so much in specific ideas, but in underlying rules of interpretation or in the very categories through which people think about the world. Thus, the numerous Chinese words for “uncle” reflects a history of patriarchal family relations and so, while Chinese people’s actual family practices no longer adhere to many of the old patriarchal customs, the words and categories they use to think about family still reflect upon that history and are meaningful for them.

In short, differences matter, ideas matter, beliefs matter, but for an anthropologist they don’t matter in the way that many people who talk about Islam think they matter. You can’t say we need to take people’s ideas seriously but then deny them the agency to interpret and act upon those ideas in their own unique and historically contextualized ways. An Arab kid growing up in the suburbs of France is going to read Islam in a uniquely French way and his radicalism may have much more in common with a follower of Le Pen than it does with someone living in the Middle East. That is why it is important to understand the socio-political context of French racism, not because those who bring it up are trying to blame the victims or something silly like that.

One year ago, we launched the Writers’ Workshop series here on Savage Minds to provide a new space for reflecting on writing. We’ve now had two successful seasons with twenty-one anthropologists contributing:

Spring 2014—Gina Athena Ulysse, Kirin Narayan, Sienna Craig, Bianca Williams, Kristen Ghodsee, Zoë Crossland, Robin Bernstein, Michael Ralph, Matt Sponheimer, and myself

Fall 2014—Paul Stoller, Noel B. Salazar, Marnie Thomson, Whitney Battle-Baptiste, Mary Murrell, Roxanne Varzi, Adia Benton, Ghassan Hage, Siva Venkateswar, Catherine Besteman, and Kevin Carrico

This spring we have a new group of contributors who will be sharing their writing each week, eleven anthropologists writing about craft, process, voice, publishing, wherever the muse takes them. We also have the pleasure of following two fantastic guest bloggers on Savage Minds—Irma McClaurin’s posts on Zora Neale Hurston, one of the original (if not the original) ethnographic writing geniuses, and Kristen Ghodsee’s posts on ethnographic writing. Thank you to everyone who is participating and reading this time around. Without further ado, this season’s contributors are:

February 2—Ruth Behar, “Read More, Write Less”

February 9—Chelsi West, “Finding My Muse While Mourning”

February 16—Annie Claus, “How a Professional Writer Improved My Academic Writing”

February 23—Alan Kaiser, “Why the Peer Review Process Works Even When It Doesn’t”

March 2—Anand Pandian, “The Ecology of What We Write”

March 9—Michael Lambek, “Slow Reading”

March 16—Jane Baxter, “Writing Archaeology “Alone,” or Eulogy for a Co-Director”

March 23—Sarah Besky, “Can’t Get There From Here? Writing Place and Moving Narratives”

March 30—Yarimar Bonilla, “Fast Writing: Ethnography in the Digital Age”

April 6—Donna Goldstein, “The Nuclear Option: For Anthropologists Who Have Considered Humor When the Drive to Modernity is Not Enough”

April 13—Jess Falcone, “Genre-bending, or the Love of Ethnographic Fiction”

May your writing be fruitful, productive, satisfying, and good. May your writing be.

Just for the fun of it—in the aftermath of President Obama’s announcement that relations between the U.S. and Cuba were thawing—I decided to revisit the conclusion to my now ten year-old dissertation in which I had done the academically forbidden: I gazed into my “crystal ball” to imagine the future. I laid out a couple of scenarios involving Fidel Castro’s dying in office or relinquishing the position while still alive. Then I outlined another scenario that resonates with today:

There is one other possibility that does not depend on the life or death of Fidel Castro, but on the U.S. government’s decision to end the economic embargo of its own volition. Many historians have written about Castro’s skill at manipulating the Cuban people’s nationalism into anti-Americanism … If the U.S. imperialist role in Cuba prior to the revolution were not ample justification, more than 40 years of economic sanctions is an easy means not only to generate nationalist sentiment, but also serve as a crutch for the revolution’s many failures. The U.S. argues that it maintains sanctions in order to bring about Castro’s downfall, but the only reason the socialist government can even attempt to contain the capitalist incursions exemplified by tourism is precisely because of the blockade… [I]t would be impossible for Cuba’s socialist government to contain the onslaught of American-style capitalism as it is practiced on a near-global scale today. The blockade is what allows the Cuban government to safely experiment with capitalism within the socialist context (Roland 251–252).

Since it is no longer looking into the future, but watching the present unfold, I hope it is safe to dust off this nugget for consideration at this moment. The question I have received most frequently in the days since President Barack Obama’s and President Raúl Castro’s simultaneous announcements is, “this is good, right?” And of course it is! More than 50 years of trying to bully Cuba into doing what the U.S. wanted is untenable. But as anthropologists, we are also interested in know what the changes mean on the ground, so I am more interested in asking who will the policy changes affect? But first a little background to the blockade…

Cuba and the U.S.: How did we get here?

Whereas Cuba and the U.S. were bound to one another by close economic and political ties in the early twentieth century, the countries have effectively been in a stalemate since the early 1960s. When Fidel Castro overthrew what he perceived to be an illegitimate president who only acted at the behest of the United States, he began nationalizing U.S. properties to which the U.S. responded by limiting the sugar quota. The chess match continued to deteriorate relations between the two until the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis signified the inability to trust the security of one’s borders with the other, especially once the Cubans had turned to the Soviets for support. Many among Cuba’s white upper classes fled to the U.S. during these early years of revolution, while increasing numbers left over the decades. The perspective of these Cuban Americans on Cuba is the one that most U.S. citizens recognize. With their base in Florida, the Cuban American lobby influenced one of the most important policy decisions toward Cuba: the 1980 Helms-Burton Law codified the long-standing embargo which now requires a congressional majority to change. Fidel Castro would rally the Cuban people into a nationalist frenzy by pointing to such moves by the United States as a way to try to control Cuba like they did before the revolution—and indeed, as President Obama acknowledged in his announcement, Cubans could always point to el bloqueo (as they call the blockade) as the cause of the revolution’s many shortcomings in its ability to provide for the Cuban people.

Implications of U.S. Policy Change

So what does all the policy change mean for both Cubans and Americans? Though the terms of the Helms-Burton Law remain in effect, President Obama outlined several ways in which the blockade will be relaxed.

Diplomatic Relations

There have been “Interest Sections” in each country representing the interests of the other since the Carter administration, but formal diplomatic relations means that the two countries officially recognize one another and agree to dialogue with one another. These conversations will facilitate every other area of policy shift.

State Sponsored Terror List

This is one of the most annoying features of the U.S. position towards Cuba as far as most Cubans are concerned. Both sides of this fading Cold War episode have been involved with spying and shooting down planes, so Cubans have long resented being considered a state sponsor of terror alongside countries considered threats in the post 9/11 era. The prisoner swap involves individuals on both sides who were caught spying or trying to foment revolt in the other country. If Cuba is removed from the state sponsored terror list, it will go a long way toward viewing the United States as a country that interacts with Cuba on a realistic basis, rather than based on fears born of Cold War nightmares.

Travel Restrictions

For the most part, the travel restrictions that keep most Americans from legally traveling to Cuba will remain in place until the law enforcing the embargo is repealed. The U.S. Treasury Department’s “Trading with the Enemy Act” makes it illegal for U.S. citizens to spend money in Cuba. However, the recent announcements will broaden categories of legal travel to include those that previously needed special permission like athletes, humanitarian work, and travel involving the export of authorized goods.

Banking and Trade

This is a big deal! The previous iterations of the embargo prevented not only U.S. citizens from easily accessing money based in the U.S., but individuals and corporations from other countries as well. Now a Mexican citizen, for example, can use his/her American Express card to pay for a hotel in Cuba. This opening in the banking area means much more money will be flowing through Cuba. For those of us who regularly travel to Cuba, we will no longer have to carry stacks of cash simply because we could not use anything plastic. Also, my study abroad students will be happy to know that those of us who legally travel to Cuba can now bring a limited amount of cigars and rum back without repercussion (a throwback to the pre-George W. Bush regulations).

Transfer of Money

While this is largely just an expansion of a previous policy, it is also the area that will make the greatest difference in the lives of everyday Cubans. Family members or other contacts that live abroad are now able to send greater amounts of money to those on the island. My own anthropological research is most focused in this area, as I seek to determine who benefits most from access to the movement of money and goods into Cuba. To this point, it seems that Cuba’s capitalist openings in entrepreneurship in particular have had the greatest benefit to those with family who live abroad; because the majority of Cubans who fled abroad are whiter skinned, blacks and mulatos have to be more creative to access the newly circulating material goods.

In sum, all of these openings will have positive implications for both Cubans and U.S. citizens. I would only note that there is very little change in who will be affected by the openings. Still, the aggregate of the policy change is what is really important. One of the arguments I made in my book Cuban Color in Tourism and La Lucha (yes, a shameless plug!) was that much of Cuban nationalism is a reflection of what Cubans understand as the masculinist duty to provide and protect those in the man’s family. If I metaphorically described the collapse of U.S.-Cuban relations in the 1960s as a “phallus measuring competition” in my book, then one of the key effects of the U.S. tucking its member away first is that Cubans will get to maintain some degree of their dignity as they re-enter the U.S. sphere. Contrary to Senator Rubio’s assertion, I wonder if President Obama’s anthropologist mother gave him a unique sensitivity to the kinds of cultural dynamics required to finally resolve the half century stalemate with Cuba as no prior president could.

Next steps: What can WE do?

U.S. policy toward Cuba has long been the singular purview of one group of Americans: Cuban Americans. In this moment that the broader U.S. citizenry has a reason to think about Cuba again, the best thing we can do is to invoke our networks to contact our congressional representatives and implore them to end the embargo now. When more Americans than the small but powerful Cuban American lobby take a stand on Cuba, we can impact lasting change. Re-entering the U.S. sphere will bring new challenges to Cuba including increasing inequality, eroding a welfare state that has provided free cradle to grave health care and education, and introducing massive corporations like Walmart that will easily overwhelm state-controlled socialism within months of their arrival. Indeed, I have long argued that Cubans should be careful what they wish for when they chant “Abaja el bloqueo – End the Blockade!” Nonetheless, the Cuban revolution’s survival or failure should be decided by the Cuban people without the U.S. blockade as a scapegoat that fuels nationalism.

Everyday Cubans have been waiting for change for a long time. The future is here. Let us put our crystal balls away and further tear down the wall that blockades us from one another.