“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken

In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman argues that economists and policy makers have deliberately mystified the current economic situation for political reasons and that the solution to our current woes is actually very simple: we need more government spending to boost demand. He plays off the above Mencken epigram, saying “For every simple problem there is an answer that is murky, complex, and wrong.”

It is interesting to compare the kind of economic fear mongering discussed by Krugman with the role of culture in Ebola fear mongering. In a recent interview with medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail she criticizes that “horrible and racist Newsweek” cover story on Ebola for the way it blames the spread of the disease on African “culture.”

Burial practices, wild meat consumption, and local reactions to quarantine and isolation have all been described as “cultural” problems that promote the spread of Ebola. As an anthropologist, I think that journalists should be careful when they use “culture” as a rationale. Culture is not an explanation. It’s something that needs further examination. Culture should not be a cudgel used to blame the victims of Ebola for their own suffering.

What struck me about these two discussions is the fact that, when seen side-by-side in this way, they highlight how willingly journalists (and the public) accept the economy as something which is complex and difficult to understand, but treat culture as a kind of self-evident set of practices and beliefs which, once identified, need no further explanation. As such, public intellectuals in economics (like Krugman) spend a lot of time trying to convince the public that economic problems are easily understandable, while a lot of the work we do as public anthropologists goes into trying to make complex what people believe they already intuitively understand.

Thinking about this led me to make some further disparate observations on complexity and public anthropology/economics which I gave up trying to work into a coherent narrative and instead present to you here in this handy list form:

1. While both the mathematical tools used by economists and the theoretical tools used by anthropologists appear as a foreign language to the untrained eye, there is a certain willingness to accept the necessity of translating human behavior into math while there is a strong negative reaction to the use of anthropological jargon.

2. Economic fear mongering can also take the form of simplistic economic truisms, such as the false analogy between national debt and household debt. But there is a difference between arguing that something is counter-intuitive and arguing that it is complex. I think Krugman does a good job of showing that the truism is wrong without resorting to a complexity argument.

3. Often the complexity that anthropologists want to talk about involves the impact of political-economic factors upon culture. This means that we are often arguing against our own particular claim to expertise (insofar as people see anthropologists as experts on “culture”). I think that one reason for Jared Diamond’s success is that (as Rex so eloquently discusses in his article in The Appendix) this is not a handicap for him since he isn’t really interested in “culture” in the first place.

中文翻譯 Chinese translation

I’m not going to link to a certain New York Times columnist who inspired this post. His piece about how there are no good public intellectuals anymore is a pathetic attempt to troll the academic community. He clearly doesn’t read widely enough to know better. Or he does, but he chooses to pretend otherwise. I do, however, want to say something about anthropologists as public intellectuals. It may be an obvious point, but it is something I think all too often gets overlooked when we have these discussions. The thing is, anthropology is full of public intellectuals. You see anthropologists across all different forms of media, from leading newspapers to blogs, to local talk radio. You see anthropologists working on behalf of communities all around the world as well as working as bridges between communities. And you see anthropologists working daily with the large portion of the public that is in school, training the next generation of public intellectuals.

So, if that’s true, why does the discipline always seem to be in a crisis about the state of our public intellectuals? Why do we feel so marginal to public discourse? Why do we barely even get mentioned in debates like the one that erupted in response to a certain op-ed columnist? I think I have an answer for that. Anthropological expertise is shaped by the ethnographic method. That means that anthropological interventions in the public sphere tend to be grounded in specific ethnographic encounters. The anthropologist who studies religion will offer insights in faith, while the anthropologist who studies nuclear weapons will have insights on national security, and the anthropologist who studies ecology… etc.

This has a number of important consequences. First, it means that the public generally doesn’t see the anthropology behind these interventions. Even if the discipline has accumulated a body of theory shared by many anthropologists, the very nature of how we engage in public often means setting this theory aside. Jargon that fills our journal articles when we are talking to each other is carefully avoided when talking to a wider audience. There is nothing wrong with this, but it means that people rarely see the underlying concepts and ideas which are shared by the many anthropologists who participate in the public sphere.

Secondly, anthropological publics are often different from the imagined community newspaper columnists think of as their public. An anthropologist of Japan might find it more important to publish something in a Japanese paper than an English one, and someone working in a Native American community might find it more useful to speak out at a community meeting than to write an op-ed. Our interventions are often specific and local, which doesn’t make them any less “public.” In fact, they might be more effective for this very reason, but it does make us less visible at the national level.

This brings us to the third point, which is that while in an ideal world anthropological insight would probably be very useful for shaping government policy, the kinds of policies most anthropologists would recommend are unlikely to mesh well with our current political economic climate. That is to say, the facts have a liberal bent so most of our leading institutions don’t want to hear the facts. For instance, certain Times columnists might have to rethink their rescue crusades if they actually read ethnographies of sex workers, and that would put a cramp in their style. Much better to stick to intellectuals whose work can confirm one’s common sense understanding of the world while simultaneously seeming to give empirical proof that this common sense understanding is correct.

So, what should we do? Keep calm and do anthropology.

[Note: The title of this post is taken from something Rex often says when we talk about the blog (and whether it constitutes “public anthropology”). It just perfectly captured what I was trying to say here…]