The NGOs and Nonprofits Special Interest Group held its second biennial conference before the AAAs last week. It’s designed to give anthropologists and practitioners working in and with NGOs a chance to engage with each other in a more intimate, focused way before diving into the chaos of the AAAs. Entitled “NGOgraphies,” this year’s conference explored the dual meaning of the term, coined by Steven Sampson and Julie Hemment in 2001, which refers both to critical ethnography of NGOs in general and to analysis of the human geography of NGOs in particular. The conference attracted 112 attendees from 13 countries, and session organizers were encouraged to use alternate formats to engage participants, ranging from workshops to roundtables. Rather than a general report on the conference, this post is a reflection on some of the specific conversations and lines of thought the conference generated for me.

When I circulated the call for papers for my roundtable panel “What Is This ‘Local Knowledge’ that Development Organizations Fetishize?” to the NGOs and Nonprofits Interest Group listserv in May, I got the following email in reply:

Dear All,

I might have been interested in participating, but will likely be traveling overseas for humanitarian work at the time. I have worked for international NGOs and aid agencies for 30 years, as I do now. However, I must say that the title of the session troubles me. As a long-time member and leader of such organizations, I have never known our community to “fetishize” local knowledge. I think the term is disrespectful to my colleagues and their work and insights. This seems like some sort of construct or perception of research-based academics.

Others replied, agreeing that the term “fetishize” had judgmental connotations and suggesting that the phrase “local knowledge” is a neutral, technical term that refers to practically-oriented understandings of phenomena prevalent at the community level: “Nothing more. No denigrating overtones. No ‘elevation’ of the local understandings. Just plain knowledge from a likely different, local point of view.” Dozens of people applied to join the panel and some just as quickly withdrew, saying that they “weren’t prepared” for those kinds of conversations.

With the panel already touched by controversy, I was excited to see if the conversation this last Tuesday would bring fireworks. While the discussion was animated, it was ultimately made up of solely academic voices, and the participants shared the viewpoint that “fetishization” can be a legitimate, non-accusatory term for the ways that organizations handle their relationship to their host communities.

The speakers addressed questions of ontology (what is the nature of this object, “local knowledge”? or knowledge of what?), epistemology (how do we know what we know? Or whose knowledge?), and positionality (who can know “local knowledge”?).

The discussion ranged across a variety of examples from public health projects and gender-based violence organizations to economic empowerment projects that showed that the fetishization and devaluation of the local can be two sides of the same coin. Some of the points established were relatively obvious but worth reinforcing: the local is not homogenous. Representatives may not be so “representative.” According to Laura Jung, in international health clinics in Honduras, any Honduran and even second-generation immigrants were considered to possess knowledge of the local, even if they had never visited the particular area where the project was taking place.

Another theme that emerged was that “the local” can be temporal rather than merely spatial. Ivana Topalovic reported that post-conflict Bosnia experienced a record-breaking surge in NGO activity that has since subsided, and the post-NGO period has left residual NGO models of development in place with “local knowledge” as the default operating system. The trauma experienced by Bosnian communities has divided NGOs between those with legitimacy based in the experience of violence and those that arrived on the scene after the fact.

Several speakers in my roundtable, most particularly Kristina Baines and Kevin Ritt, pointed to the ways in which anthropologists become entangled with NGO practice. Many anthropologists who may not (initially) be focused on the anthropological study of NGOs themselves use NGOs for access to the communities they serve and work with NGOs to gather information and evaluate their programs. The similar spaces of knowledge production that ethnographers and organizational practitioners occupy can lead to conflicts, which was apparent as several speakers mentioned moments of tension or conflict as their critiques were sought but not welcomed or their input was ignored.

My personal brush with scandal in the naming of my roundtable brought home one of the main points discussed throughout the conference as a whole: that anthropologists have a complicated relationship with NGO practitioners. Work with NGOs seems to intensify the already fraught and messy task of navigating a path through fieldwork and publishing. The conversation also brought home the importance of setting the boundaries of engagement, defining limits, and setting realistic expectations for collaborations on the part of both researchers and organizations. Some researchers suggested using a formal contract to establish terms, citing the potential for a disjuncture between what we want to know and how NGOs would use us. NGOs have agendas that may not align with our agendas as researchers.

Engagement with NGOs may entail “entanglement” (with states, consultants, donors, markets, competing NGOs, social movements, civil society, and other anthropologists). Several participants noted concerns about becoming too deeply engaged with institutions, which may provide richer data but also increases the possibility of conflict and push-back from informants. Where researchers may see themselves as helpfully providing general critique to practitioners, beyond evaluation or assessment of projects, practitioners can interpret such commentary as criticism. Working with NGOs means considering the real likelihood that our research subjects will read and publicly respond to our publications. As anthropologists, we write differently for different publics, contextualizing information and providing rich nuance for other scholars and breaking down concepts and providing concrete conclusions for NGOS and the public. Presenting the same data to different audiences can force scholars to add nuance or consider our work from new angles. According to some researchers who had consulted with NGOS, the perfect report would be concise, snappy, and tell the story they want told, but anthropologists can’t always in good conscience produce the “perfect report.” Speakers questioned whether anthropologists can effectively critique NGOs that hosted them and provided them with access. They discussed their inclinations to censor themselves rather than damage relationships with NGO workers, who might also be censoring themselves in their commentary on their organizations. Anthropologists clearly need to be reflexive about our engagement with NGOs and our roles in relation to them.

The particular anxieties about NGO research arise from the overlap between our roles. As knowledge producers, anthropologists and NGOs compete for discursive space. It occurs to me that Pierre Bourdieu’s (1993) notion of the “field of cultural production,” the social space in which agents struggle for the power to give meaning and value to cultural products, may be helpful in understanding how this plays out. Bourdieu theorized that objects gain social and economic value in a “field of cultural production,” in which agents struggle for the power to decide which material and symbolic products are legitimate. Agents and institutions constitute the shape of the field by staking claims to the cultural capital to create and interpret meaning. As agents of cultural production, NGOs and anthropologists are similarly concerned with creating relationships with communities and undertake agendas of “doing good.” While engaged anthropologists may seek to “do good,” at a certain point it may be imperative to upset NGOs’ received moral categories, questioning who defines what it means to “do good.” Judgements about the success of organizational or anthropological projects are tied up in moral economies. Rather than feeling betrayed, we need to ask what values are being expressed when the people we work with accept or reject our conclusions, just as we hope they approach our publications with an open mind rather than a spirit of defensiveness. The response to my use of the term “fetishize” showed me my own naïveté in assuming that anthropologists’ idiosyncratic understandings of terms and tendency to auto-criticism are universal, and taking for granted my own position of authority as a knowledge generator and word herder.

My thanks go out to everyone who participated in the email conversation, roundtable, and conference. If you didn’t get a chance to participate in this year’s conference, keep a lookout for information on the next conference in 2017!

Last year I got together with Dr. Paul Farmer for a talk. In part two of our conversation, I ask Farmer about the limits of “applied” social science; the reasons for his apparent optimism; and whether, after all these years, he at all considers himself an anthropologist.

In terms of attending to the practical needs of the poor, there are few who doubt that Paul Farmer practices what he preaches. In 1987, while still a young anthropology student at Harvard, he co-founded Partners in Health with his fellow student Jim Yong Kim (today president of the World Bank) among others. Since his ethnographic fieldwork in Haiti in the late 1980s, a whole host of “Paul Farmers” seem to have sprung up: Doctor, Harvard professor, author, infectious-disease specialist, UN special envoi to Haiti, globetrotting Robin Hood.

But when I ask whether he also still considers himself an anthropologist, after all his travels outside the confines of the discipline, he looks surprised.

PF: Yes, I do. I mean you don’t have to, but I do, and I always will. I didn’t know that being an anthropologist meant that you had to be, as we say in the US, a card carrying anthropologist.

[…] Here is how I feel: It doesn’t matter if my ideas are not that influential in academic circles. If someone doesn’t like a paper I wrote in an anthropology journal, that’s OK. You know, I’ll try some other time, or maybe try a new idea, right? I am not inside a single institution; I am not inside a single hospital at Harvard, or in Haiti. I admire people who can do that – enclose themselves – but I can’t.

And I am not offended when people don’t like a paper I wrote. I used to be when I was a graduate student, but I was cured of that by being a physician and working in places like Haiti.

The uses of the ivory tower

SW: I get a sense from what you are saying here that social science has been too concerned these last few decades with deconstruction, or destructive critique.

PF: Well, I feel that academia can contribute very constructively through critique and understanding, and partly does so already. For example, a lot of people in NGOs, aid and development work are unable to do social analysis. And that is hurtful to them; because they are not aware of what they are doing can hurt beneficiaries, or doesn’t help them. So I think there is a big role for the weaving together practical policy and social analysis. It has to be an accurate analysis though. Let’s say you write a book about an institution and you don’t do ethnographic work – you wouldn’t do that as an anthropologist.

But I think it comes down to a division of labor. And if there is enough division of labor, people who do critical academic work can perform a valuable service to people living in poverty. But the answer to the question of “what is to be done” is not always to write a new book.

The people living in poverty are my core constituency. And I have never, in 30 years of engagement, had a patient ask me to write another book. But I write them anyway, so that I can think more clearly. I can’t think clearly without reading a lot of other people’s work and writing. Some people I am told can do that, and I believe it, but not me. But no-one’s ever said to me, “Dr. Paul, we really wish you would stop seeing us as patients and building hospitals, and work more on a book about social theory.” That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it, if I had more time. I think I would actually enjoy writing a whole book about a concept like structural violence. But I can’t do that, because I don’t have enough time. But if other people do that, and enjoy it, and I’m cheering them on.

SW: There seems to be a core of optimism in your writing, which seems rare to find among scholars working in deprived locations. Where does that come from?

PF: “Pessimism of the intellect is appropriate but optimism of the spirit is necessary.” I don’t remember who coined that phrase, but I’ve always liked it.

But part of my optimism comes from working collectively. A lot of academics don’t get to do that. They work by themselves. If you put your energy in a collective movement, say, labor rights in Norway, or racial equality in the 1960s, or fighting against unjust wars – and if you stick with it long enough, and you believe that the arc of history is fundamentally bending towards justice – then it doesn’t seem to be optimism to the point of not understanding realistic and sound analysis.

So, there are several sources of optimism. Getting out there with others is important. That’s what doctors do, not so much academics.

SW: Getting out of the ivory tower.

PF: Yes, and think of all the ways in which we have ivory towers! Gated communities, monasteries, those are good places to think and write. And at times it is useful to lock yourself in, to think that your ideas are the most important thing on earth, to cut off the rest the world. It is by creating a bubble that you can get deep thinking and writing done.

But I’ve seen a lot of people become in love with their own ideas at the end of that process. And then spend their careers repeating their ideas, and feeling in the end that their ideas are products not to be molded, and shaped and improved but to be maintained. And I don’t that recommend that to my students because it’s a trap. And luckily, ethnographers can get out of that by just going out to a new place.

Anthropology as a discipline and ethnography as a set of practices enjoyed a period of heightened popularity in the world of market research in the U.S. from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s.  During that time, anthropology was seen as the “next big thing,” a new, improved way of understanding the behaviors and motivations of consumers.  Stories about the special insights that ethnography could bring offer abounded in the popular press, trade journals, and even on NPR’s Motley Fool radio show.  Advertising firms and makers of consumer goods touted ethnography’s ability to offer a more authentic and deeper view of consumer attitudes and practices.  These enhanced understandings, it was promised, would enable ad agencies and product manufacturers to target new markets, develop new products, transform their brand image, and, ultimately, sell more snacks and widgets.  My entry into this landscape was a function of chance; I earned my PhD in cultural anthropology in 2002, during anthropology’s hottest corporate moment. Newly credentialed, on the academic job market, and broke, I was more than a little interested when an anthropologist friend in similar (actually, identical) circumstances told me about a small consumer research firm that was hiring anthropologists to “do ethnographies” on consumer habits. For the next three years on and off,  I worked for this small outfit and, with teams of other anthropologists and videographers, helped produce ethnographic videos and reports on products ranging from snack and convenience foods to appliances to phamaceuticals.  This snapshot of that work is not meant as expose, but rather an account of what ethnography signified and looked like in that context.  It not an entirely negative story. To be sure, much substance can be lost when knowledge is produced under such instrumentalizing constraints and conditions.  But to my surprise, this interlude furnished gains beyond the adjunct-salary-shaming paycheck. I’m still not sure that what my colleagues and I produced were ethnographies per se, but the experience, as I’ll explain, has expanded how I imagine the possibilities of ethnographic research and intellectual collaboration.

Before proceeding, though, I should clarify two points: 1) while the period I speak of was a particularly fertile one for consumer ethnography, the relationship between anthropology and advertising has a long history; and 2) I’m no expert on the field of consumer research.  Indeed, the fact that neither my anthropologist colleagues nor I at the consumer research firm had extensive training or experience in that area is a function of the “boom” moment during which firms expanded their staffs beyond consumer research experts to hire graduates students and newly-minted PhDs. For an account of the character of this moment in the context of the relationship between ethnography and consumer research, Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny’s 2007 volume Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research is an essential resource that expertly spans theory and practice.  In chronicling the history of anthropology in marketing and the corporate sector in general, the authors point out that the relationship between advertising and social science is nothing new.  It is, they assert, at least as old as Madison Avenue’s love affair with Freudian depth psychology. Sunderland and Denny also indicate what ethnographic consumer research can aspire to in the long haul, pointing out that while the ethnography boom in advertising and marketing may have passed, blue chip Madison Avenue firms have retained in-house anthropologists, and, in some cases, entire ethnographic research departments, well-versed in cultural analysis.

That said, what did ethnography look like in the corner of consumer research I inhabited in the boomlet years of the early 2000s? The outfit I worked for (which, incidentally, no longer exists) was small but led by an experienced and well-connected marketing professional who was able to secure contracts with major corporate clients. The clients would hire the firm to design and carry out research (“ethnographies”) meant to give information (“insights”) into consumer’s thoughts, feelings and practices related to a particular type of product.  Once hired by the corporate client, the firm paired anthropologists with videographers to go into the homes of  pre-screened consumers and interview, observe, and film them going about aspects of their daily lives relevant to the product or topic the client wished to investigate. Sometimes the themes came from our own observation; more often, they were determined by the client (or at least were the result of negotiation with the client).  On average, the duration of our stay in the home was about 4-5 hours and was divided between interviews and activities, e.g., washing dishes; throwing together a quick meal; or exercising through the pain that the client’s newly-patented pharmaceutical could alleviate.  After each encounter in the field, the anthropologist would write up fieldnotes, review the raw footage of interviews and activities, and code both according to theme.  These themes then acted as templates for the short quasi-documentaries and Powerpoint presentations (the deliverables) we produced for the client.   The term “ethnography” was somewhat slippery and ill-defined in this context, but the use of the term “video ethnography” was consistently used to denote the mini-documentaries we produced along with the videographers (also contract workers) and the in-house video editor.  The time span for each project was often as short a couple of weeks and rarely longer than a month from start to finish, meaning there were many 10-hour days either in the field or in front of a video monitor selecting and organizing snippets of footage.

This intense foray into market anthropology was fairly short-lived for me (less than a few years), and problematic on several fronts. First, while my anthropology PhD got me the job, this work was not at all what I had envisioned for myself.  The fact that I could earn as much in four days of market ethnography as I could in four months of adjuncting (which I was also doing at this time) only problematized things further.  Second, I wasn’t so sure I felt great about some of the products we were helping to sell (mostly the pills, but also some of the snacks).  Perhaps the biggest conflict of all, as I somewhat guiltily admitted when asked about my “corporate gigs,” was that I actually really liked the work itself. The satisfaction I derived from it came largely from the fact that it was everything that writing up a dissertation was not: quick, collaborative, and relatively lucrative.  Working with the videographer and film editors to make the video ethnographies was fun and creative in a completely different way than conducting my own research. In comparison to the inherently isolating process of writing a dissertation, working with the other anthropologists to compile and analyze our findings offered an experience of collaborative knowledge production that was incredibly refreshing. As I said, it’s arguable whether or not what we produced were ethnographies. I think by many definitions they weren’t, although they did employ a version of ethnographic methods and benefitted from anthropological ways of thinking about patterns of behavior and how groups of people make and see meaning in their daily lives. Nonetheless, these experiences generated new skills and modes of working, not to mention an insider’s look into a range of corporate modes of thinking and operating. For example, approaching the field with an eye to creating video documentation has made me more attuned of the visual and aural aspects of fieldwork. And the process of working as part of a team with a clearly-defined, shared goal is a situation I’d like to recreate in future work. Ultimately, though, I think of this interlude in terms of how I might bring the knoweldge and skills gained there into my “own” work, which for me still means original research and teaching. In keeping with the theme of precarity and ethnographic production, then, I wonder how skills and ways of thinking gained or honed in a less-than-ideal setting may get translated and used in others in ways that ultimately enrich our practice and production of ethnography.

Laurel George is an adjunct assistant professor in New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences and Gallatin Division, as well as a humanities scholar with The Paul Taylor Dance Company. She received her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Rice University in 2002.