The massacre in Orlando was just two days before we sat together around a seminar table in an idyllic New England college town. A massacre of forty-nine people out dancing, celebrating life in a gay nightclub called Pulse. They were mostly young, queer, and Latinx. Gone. Already stories had turned to focus on the killer’s motivations. Was this primarily homophobic homegrown terrorism or the machinations of the Islamic State? We were meeting at Wesleyan University in Connecticut to discuss the creation of the Public Anthropology Institute (PAI) and contemplate ways to use our scholarly knowledge of cultural difference for greater service globally. Given the disheartening public debate in this moment reminiscent of Dickens’ best and worst of times, we were convinced that this work is necessary in the face of such violence and hate.

For too long anthropologists have retreated into the minutia of arcane disciplinary debate even when our knowledge can make a difference. It can be intellectually stimulating and important to turn inward, but conversations among ourselves cannot be the only ones we have. We also need to create work with a larger impact and a longer reach. As scholars who have studied across the global south and thought deeply about geopolitics, poverty, social and economic inequality, racism, homophobia, sexism and climate change, we believe it is time to reconnect with the obligation to produce knowledge that makes the world a better place. As the stakes get higher, anthropological perspectives can make critical, unexpected connections and offer direction beyond the logic of dominant assumptions.

The litany of ills threatening to unravel the fabric of contemporary social life is well known. For example, climate change promises the inexorable spread of disease and super-resistant bacteria, yet many public officials deny its incontrovertible presence. Climate scientists predict drastic coastal and river flooding that will result in major social dislocations. Social and economic relations in the world are deteriorating, with deepening disparities in power, wealth, health, life expectancy and both the ability and inclination to exercise violence. Fears and anxieties over our uncertain futures are producing conflicting and contradictory responses in both progressive and conservative movements world-wide. In the United States, #BlackLivesMatter seeks redress from the injustices of state-sanctioned violence by disrupting narratives and practices that normalize law-and-order profiling of Black and racially Othered youth and young adults of all genders. Simultaneously, there is a palpable uptick in collective expressions of overtly racist, misogynist and xenophobic speech and behavior. In response to a refugee crisis and increased immigration, similar toxic trends are spreading across Europe. Brexit won. Questions concerning definitions of citizenship abound. Each day brings reminders of the global presence of prejudice and terrorism, both homegrown and external. On these concerns and so many more, our insights have both explanatory and enrichment value.

The Public Anthropology Institute at Wesleyan University is being established to prepare more anthropologists to engage multiple audiences on urgent contemporary problems. PAI will hold its inaugural four-day summer institute in June 2017, with faculty members from different universities who each practice some form of public anthropology. Participants will be exposed to techniques for accessible and compelling storytelling. They will be guided in the craft of writing for different kinds of outlets, including op-eds, mainstream media, social media and blogs. Although writing will be the main emphasis, the institute will also address other key media and platforms, including filmmaking, spoken word and dramatic performance. Because risk, vulnerability and ethical challenges are endemic to all public scholarship, ongoing attention to these topics will be woven into the institute’s training approach.

There exists a long tradition of anthropologists who have made their work relevant and accessible to a broader public, but we are also mindful of professional criticisms of this work. Censorious, half-envious tags such as “popularizer” were once high on the dread list for anthropologists who shared their ideas more widely. Now we are somewhat freer to honor the better-self impulse that leads to exchanging knowledge that truly matters.  Still, joining the fray can feel like an exercise in vulnerability, especially when one can lob scornful critiques of the monolithic “media” and its coverage of vital events from the safety of the sidelines. We think the risk is well worth it. With the possession of new crafting tools and up-to-date, substantive information about how media platforms work, anthropologists certainly can and should do better.

We believe in the power of storytelling. Now, more than ever, we need voices that disrupt stereotypes, reductive forms of analysis and fear to see what lies beyond our old, worn out stories about differences that divide us. The cultivation of reoriented voices is necessary to communicate our ways of being in the world and to respond with urgency to the “now.” Hence, we view this project as essential to the decolonization of anthropology. By supporting anthropologists in their efforts to differently distribute and convey our insights, we aim to face our publics and extend the yearning for a politically committed scholarship towards social justice, which is at the core of the volume Decolonizing Anthropology.

The worst of times call for the best responses. We hope to do our part in training scholars to meet the public challenge of engaging in the ongoing debates of these times as we advance our collective awareness and pedagogies. This is anthropology for the 21st century: rich, rigorous and responsive.

The Public Anthropology Institute was convened by Gina Athena Ulysse and facilitated by Melissa Rosario at Wesleyan University. Faye V. Harrison, Carole McGranahan, Paul Stoller, Melissa Rosario, Gina Athena Ulysse and Maria Vesperi are the founding faculty members, and Matilda Ostow is the PAI Program Student Assistant.

For inquiries about the Public Anthropology Institute, please contact Gina Athena Ulysse (gulysse@wesleyan.edu) and/or Melissa Rosario (melissa.rosario@gmail.com).

News that Karen McCarthy Brown passed away after years of deteriorating illness reached me earlier this month. I kept it to myself. When more official announcement from Drew University–where she was Professor Emerita of anthropology and sociology of religion—showed up on my Facebook feed this past Sunday, I shared it with the following comment:

Reading Karen’s Mama Lola kept me in grad school. Vodou got a human face from her. A tremendous loss, indeed.

When the first email arrived from UCSB’s Claudine Michel who penned the preface to the third edition of Brown’s award-winning ethnography in 2010, I had a flashback to nearly two decades ago.

I was sitting across from the department chair. We were in his office on the first floor of the LS&A building on S. State Street. I wanted out of the anthropology Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan. In our long conversation, I disclosed more vulnerabilities then I ever would again professionally. Tormented, I grappled with the racist history of a discipline in which I would always be a subject. I did not belong in this white institution and was exhausted from feeling I was desegregating the department all over again. Hang in there, he said. Minority retention at the doctoral level is a huge problem all over this country. It may not get easier but at least it will become more manageable. You can do it. Just don’t give up you will be a pioneer. I broke into sobs. I can’t be a pioneer, it’s not the 1950s. Was there anyone whose work really interested me? Well, there was this book, Mama Lola, about a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn. Did I know the author? No I did not. The subject was close to home. We had inherited responsibilities that have been overstretched by migration. It’s not something that we talk about. Maybe after your dissertation on Jamaica, you’ll write another book on your family’s story. In the meantime was there enough interest in this work to bring her to campus? Mere thoughts of that someday became inspiration enough to help me keep my eyes on the prize.

Karen McCarthy Brown did come to give a talk at UM on Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Between the mainstreaming feminism project led by a group of senior graduate students and supporting faculty, the event occurred a year or so later. Since I don’t do revisionist history—full disclosure—I remember sketchy details of this and my first encounter with Karen.

Mama Lola was published by the University of California Press in 1991. Based on extensive fieldwork conducted over a decade, Brown became an initiate of her subject, as a condition to deeper research and writing her life history. The resulting ethnography with its radical crossings blurred methodological and scriptive lines. Brown took creative liberties fictionalizing various strands of Lola’s familial and spiritual genealogies. The cover illustration of the first edition featured a doll from Lola’s altar representing the spirit Ezili Danto.

The book was hailed as a “new postmodern ethnography,” or “new feminist ethnography” (2001:ix) exemplary of this new genre of ethnographic writing that simultaneously weaved narrative analysis, the autobiographical and critical insights. Brown actually eschewed this connection. As she noted in the book’s second edition, which had a photograph of Lola herself on the cover, “I cannot claim to have self-consciously positioned my book in those niches” (2001:x). To the end, she re-asserted that she considered the work “primarily an exercise in interpretation” as she had done a decade before (2001:x). Brown would become a renowned religion expert and one of the founding members of KOSANBA—The Congress of Santa Barbara, a scholarly association for the study of Haitian Vodou.

A highly recognized work, Mama Lola was awarded the best first book in the History of Religions of the American Academy of Religion (1991) and the Victor Turner Prize of the American Anthropological Association (1992). But it was not without its critics. Chief among them was premier Haitian anthropologist, the late Michel-Rolph Trouillot who rightfully asked a most fundamental question: how much fiction is ethnography? Moreover, he questioned various tensions between Brown’s ethnographic authority and totalizing narrative. To that end, he wrote, “those unfamiliar with Haiti will lack the means by which to evaluate the global assertions of the transcendental narrator” (1994:653). I had not read Trouillot’s review in American Ethnologist until years later after a conversation with him at the AAAs.

Indeed, in many ways, Mama Lola was something of an insider ethnography. In retrospect, I formed an attachment to it precisely because I had some knowledge to discern fact from fiction, to fill in the silences and to decipher practices layered in an opacity that was part of a historically damaging trope. Simultaneously, it expanded my lexicon as I learned so much about religious practices in my birth country that to this day remain trapped in obscurity, familial and otherwise. In that sense, the book had done for me what anthropology is supposed to do, make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It also sensitized me to the restrictions of genres, fieldwork dynamics and negotiations among so many other things. I knew there would never be an ethnography of my family’s story. Performance, maybe?. Memoir, definitely. Some stories are not mine to tell.

Since I began teaching years ago, I routinely used Mama Lola in my staple Haiti course. Despite my own feminist critiques, it’s an excellent project with which to debunk stereotypes, explore conflicts between researcher and subject and point to other disciplinary shortcomings. What I appreciated then and still do despite its limits is that this book, which kept me in grad school, actually managed to accomplish something that had been quite elusive until its publication. By (re)/constructing the So-Called Life of Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Margaux Kowalski, Karen gave Vodou a human face, at least in anthropology and one step beyond. Considering the long history of demonization and stigmatization that marred the religion, this is a Herculean achievement indeed, for which Karen McCarthy Brown should be recognized. Chapo ba!!!!!!!

Karen McCarthy Brown 2001 [1991] Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot. 1994. Review of Mama Lola. American Ethnologist 21(3):653-654.

And she gave us this gem: “Decades ago, I realized that I am not a linear writer, but more of a quilt maker. I am content when I produce chunks. I have also learned to not berate myself if I can’t come up with anything. There are works by certain poets and art books near my desk (or in the moveable studio bag), which I need and reach for when words are not whirling out of my head as I face the screen.  As long as I am present in the space and in conversation with artists or even in silence, I now consider myself writing.” 

Thank you, Gina.

Everyone has a different writing process, a different style, a different voice. And we each might have different processes, styles, and voices across our own varied writing projects. Recognize these, come to know them, learn when to work with and when to push against where you are. This is Week 2 of 10, a good time to take stock of where you are as a writer in addition to taking stock of your writing for this week. Take some time to reflect on it now and then revisit the same questions again at the end of our ten weeks; work toward generating both writing and a fresh sense of your own writing strengths and limits..

For now, let’s all check-in in the comments section below with how our writing went in Week 2. I’m looking forward to hearing about your weeks, and be sure to tune in on Monday for the insights, the generosity, and the guidance of our next guest author, the fabulous cultural anthropologist and multi-genre author Kirin Narayan.