“The time is now ripe for anthropologists to consider the concept of freedom and the empirical manifestations of freedom in culture. What more significant and urgent task is there for the anthropologist than that of launching a concerted inquiry into the nature of freedom and its place and basis in nature and the cultural process? Such an inquiry would provide in time a charter for belief in those values and principles indispensable to the process of advancing culture and to the ideal of a democratic world order dedicated to the development of human potentialities to their maximum perfection.” (preface to The Concept of Freedom in Anthropology ed. David Bidney, 1963 p. 6)

Thus did David Bidney valiantly launch the investigation into freedom by anthropologists only to immediately then admit: “I realize that hard-headed, realistic anthropologists, including some of the participants in this symposium, would not find themselves in agreement with this anthropologic dream. There is danger, they will protest, that you are reifying Freedom into an absolute entity, just as culture once was. Freedom they will object is a non-scientific, political slogan which betrays its ethnocentric, Western and American origin…”

Freedom, as concept, still evokes this suspicion. That it is “nothing more” than a political slogan; or that it masks the reality of domination, oppression, slavery and power. As well it should given how promiscuously it is exploited.Or, as Edmund Leach so characteristically puts it in his contribution to the same volume: “To prate of Freedom as if it were a separable virtue is the luxurious pursuit of aristocrats and of the more comfortable members of modern affluent society. It has been so since the beginning.” (77)

What Leach expresses here, in part, is the descriptivist bias of anthropology of the time, and specifically of political anthropology: that the goal is comparative analysis without a priori reference to any normative political ideals. This, I think probably resonates with most anthropologists, who would be much less likely to be interested in Freedom as a concept that delimits a certain relationship between action and governance, more more likely to see it as a slogan that has been used as a warrant in colonial, imperial and global economic endeavors; as a tool used to transform existing arrangements in its own name (and secretly in the interests of a global elite). At a first cut this is undeniably so if one simply listens to the way the word is used in the news, and by politicians especially.

Indeed, it is my probably hasty opinion that the whole of “political anthropology” (at least in it’s 1930s-1970s form) shares this bias, despite the fact that it would seem to be this domain to which one would immediately turn for help in understanding the variations in the nature of Freedom. Instead, freedom is excluded from investigation insofar as it contaminates, confuses or otherwise confounds the exploration of objective political structures. Georges Balandier’s account of the development of political anthropology up to the mid 1960s (Political Anthropology) clearly shows how the questions of state formation, legitimacy and domination, kinship and power, status and power and so forth have been investigated. But he never mentions the word freedom. This is not so curious if freedom is understood as an outcome of a normative theory of the state, in favor of a descriptive, comparative science of political systems. Come to think of it, Weber never really talks about freedom either, and for similar reasons: the goal of a scientific sociology is not to articulate the ought of political systems but the is. It does not appear as a subject in Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma, nor in Meyer Fortes and EE Evans-Pritchard’s collection on African Political Systems.

What Bidney was proposing therefore, probably looked far too universalist in its appeal (as if Freedom were inevitably to be found in the struggles of people everywhere) and worse, potentially dangerous (insofar as it imposes a normative vision of freedom on those it seeks to understand). The properly anthropological way to think about “an anthropology of freedom”, therefore, would be to look at it from the perspective of the rest of the world and how it perceives the imposition of “freedom” on it.

There are probably a lot of attempts to do something like this. As I mentioned in a previous post, few of them tag these attempts explicitly with the word ‘freedom’–for whatever reasons. Two in particular that might be explored for this are Paul Reisman’s Freedom Among the Fulani and the great short piece by Caroline Humphrey, “Alternative Freedoms” (thanks again Morpheus!). Neither of these expresses allegiance to or appears similar to what we think of as “political anthropology.” Riesman, interestingly, was a student of Balandier (and the son of David Riesman of The Lonely Crowd fame), but he explicitly avers any deep engagement with political anthropology in his book, which is dedicated instead to Dorothy Lee.

Humphrey’s short piece does more or less does exactly what I was claiming no one in anthropology was doing. In it she outlines three concepts of freedom, starting from the closest linguistic analogues in play, in order to show why it might be that Russians today, hearing a speech of Bush or Blair of Obama crowing triumphantly about freedom, might view such promises with suspicion or fear. At the end of the article she puts it bluntly: “The three ideas of freedom have come to inhabit very different worlds of value. None of them is identical with Western ideas of freedom. But after all, Russians are far from alone in this. Much of the world is culturally different in this regard.” (9) [1]

The first idea is Svoboda, which contains elements of a version of freedom as access to a privileged sphere, a bit like Arendt’s account of the ancient Greeks and their distinction between a sphere of privation and slavery (the household) and a sphere of freedom and publicness, the polis. According to Humphrey, the root is svoi, (self, ours) and so shares some of the meaning of “our way of life” and leads to a particular sense of freedom as “our kind of freedom”–not universalist at all. Thus a hearer in Russian might not hear the word “freedom,” translated as svoboda, as a universal value. The second use is the peculiar Mir (like the spacecraft) which means universe, humanity, the world, but also, ‘peace’ (after the Soviet linguistic reforms). Mir has aspects of a “will of the people” sort–a “universalized community” and Humphrey says of her explanation “I hope this helps explain the deeply non-intuitive fact (to us) that there are Russian villagers today who identify freedom, precisely with Stalinism.” Finally there is Volya, which carries a meaning similar to “will” and expresses that aspect of freedom which is associated with volition and intention.

That there are three words for freedom is nothing new (English boasts Freedom and Liberty), and that the words have a variable semantic range is also unsurprising. Nonetheless, Humphrey is demonstrating how the concept looks different not only linguistically, but in terms of history and political structure. There is an extensive discussion about the tension produced by the transition to capitalism, and the ways in which freedom comes to be associated with lawlessness, banditry and the unconstrained exploitation of Russian resources by a few elites. But this is, in some ways, the same debate about liberty that has occupied political theory since at least the French, if not the English revolution. Liberty is always in tension with some other notion such as stability, tradition, security, etc.

Paul Riesman’s book is a different take on the problem of freedom or liberty. The book is probably better remembered for its experimental character. It is divided into two sections, the first of which cleaves very closely to a classic monographic form detailing aspects of Fulani life; the second is, arguably, one of the earliest experiments in “reflexive” ethnography in which “life as lived” and the encounter of Riesman with Fulani social life is organized through his own experience of coming to an understanding.

Because Riesman is avowedly uninterested in the political structure of Fulani society, the notion of Freedom he is interested in probably ends up looking much more like a question of “agency” (a term he does not use, though Paul Stoller and Lila Abu-Lughod count among his acolytes) than freedom in the political sense. In the first part, he attends at length to the problem of the terms Pulaaku and Semteende–words that circumscribe the experience of custom, obligation, honors, shame and sanction. In this sense, the kind of freedom Riesman is concerned with is in fact the relationship of structure and agency more than anything else. In the second part, Riesman explores more theological notions of freedom (Man’s freedom and Allah’s power) and the notion of freedom as “self-mastery,” which corresponds in a loose way to some of the questions often lumped under “autonomy” (and which has the delightful literal meaning of “He who possesses his own head” [226]). Riesman spends a good deal of the last part talking about how children come to be autonomous or free, a subject that clearly obsessed him, since his second book published posthumously (First find your child a good mother) is concerned with disproving the psychological and psychoanalytic claims that certain kinds of child-rearing practices affect the outcome of adult personhood.

Both Riesman and Humphrey are good examples, I think of the confusion that attends the concept of freedom for more than the simple reason that it is an ideological slogan. As a philosophical concept, the term denotes something that is both political (concerning the structure of governance, rights and the relation of people to each other) and psychological (denoting a relationship to will, autonomy or acting). Both accounts show (but in different ways) how the integration of these two aspects might differ in different settings.

None of this settles the question for me of why Freedom is particularly uninteresting to anthropologists, but it has opened up for me a set of related questions (Another Post! I am Unstoppable!) about two recent attempts to address something related to freedom: the anthropology of the will, and the anthropology of ethics. To be continued…

For philosophers, sociologists and historians, freedom is a concept exquisitely defined and heroically distinguished. There are the familiar distinctions like positive and negative liberty (Isaiah Berlin), there is the long tradition of thinking freedom togther with sovereignty, government and arbitrary power (sp. the newly reinvigorated “civic republican” tradition from Machiavelli to Quentin Skinner and Philip Pettit); there is the question of free will and determinism (a core Kantian Antimony that generates both moral philosophy and philosophy of science debates seemingly without end); there is the question of freedom and the mind (the problem of the “contented slave” or the problem Boas raised in arguing that freedom is only subjective); the question of coersion, of autonomy, of equality and of the relationship to liberalism and economic organization. Within each of these domains one can find more and less refined discussions (amongst philosophers and political theorists primarily) oriented towards the refinement of both descriptive and normative presentations of freedom as a concept and as a political ideal. And then there is Sartre.

As I mentioned in the first post, anthropologists have been nearly silent on the problem, while philosophers, political theorists and historians have not. There are shelves and shelves of books in my library with titles like A Theory of Freedom, Dimensions of Freedom, Freedom and Rights, Liberalism and Freedom, Political Freedom, etc. There are readers and edited volumes and special issues of journals to beat the band. In history there is Orlando Patterson and Eric Foner, and a 15 volume series called The Making of Modern Freedom that includes books on Freedom from the medieval era to the present, and includes books on China, Asia, Africa, slavery, migration and fiscal crises (!).

If anthropologists find the concept of freedom distasteful, how then do they organize their concern with things and issues related to what political philosophers or historians approach via freedom? What concepts stand in, challenge or reframe that of freedom? Here is a long list (which could no doubt be longer):

agency, authority, bare life, biopower, biopolitics, citizenship, civil society, colonialism, consent, contract, development, domination, empire, exclusion, governance, governmentality, human rights, humanitarianism, interests, interest theory, in/justice, kingship, neoliberalism, obligation, oppression, precarity, resistance, secularism/secularity, security, social control, sovereignty, suffering, territoriality and violence.

Note that this list concerns terms also familiar to North Atlantic political philosophy, which is to say, this is not a list of “indigenous” or ethnographically derived concepts of/related to freedom. That would constitute yet another distinct question (and a separate post, to follow).

Most of the concepts in that list are closer to the empirical than the theoretical, and I suspect this is why they are preferred to manifestly abstract ideal like freedom. Humanitarianism for instance, has seen a wealth of great work over the last couple of decades for the concrete reason that it is a practice, a domain of law, a set of international economic imperatives as a well as an ideal. Precarity nicely captures a particular economic condition and the effects that has on well-being, etc.

Perhaps most central to the anthropologist’s suspicion around freedom is its inherently individualist bent. The problem of freedom can be construed (though it needn’t be) as one of the free acting, willing or thinking of an individual. It might be safe to suggest that anthropologists, being constitutionally sensitive to the limits of individuals and individuality, see the concept as failing in places where social relations take precedence, and take unfamiliar forms. In this the socialist (perhaps even the anarchist?) traditions of anthropological theory are clear: a tendency at least, if not a commitment to thinking individuality as a feature of social relations rather than the reverse. But even a cursory familiarity with the concept of freedom shows that it is not always about individuality, nor is every philosophical or political theoretical take committed to a version of methodological individualism. A thinker like C.B. MacPherson for instance, very clearly recognizes that there are individual-based theories of liberty, and then there are theories that start from Marxist, socialist or anthropological bases that give primacy to social relations. Dewey ditto. And even in the theory of negative liberty, the problem it identifies is not just that individual liberty is freedom from restraint, but that restraint is the result of the actions of others, and that the fundamental problem of political liberty is that of “harmonizing” interests and actions. This is also why the economic model of freedom is so appealing to so many of our colleagues in the social sciences: freedom is a complex problem of balancing plural social and individual interests, and one that requires sophisticated techniques in order to do so. Insofar as this is about the design of social relations, it concedes the point that freedom is a result of social relations.

Anthropologists might also look to freedom’s opposites, since there are so many more examples of that in the world. Slavery for instance. Curiously, anthropologists seem to have been just as uninterested in slavery as in freedom. Igor Kopytoff noted as much in a 1982 review of anthropology of slavery: “Simply stated, the problem is this: why has modern anthropology, which claims that nothing human is alien to it, consistently ignored so widespread a phenomenon? (207)” Kopytoff suggests that slavery is not a concept, but a name for various phenomena in the world, also a bit of an umbrella term. But the same is not quite true of freedom; which does not pick out any particular arrangements or institutions in quite the way that slavery does. Slavery is something that might exist as an institution or a custom, and yet have an unrecognizable social and moral justification in different societies (and thus shade into the general problem of diverse forms of political institutions; see e.g. Pierre Clastres, Max Gluckman, Edmund Leach, George Balandier, Meyer Fortes and EE Evans-Pritchard). Freedom, however, is a concept that draws together cosmological issues (free will/determinism) with political ones (sovereignty/arbitrary power) with individual action (restraint/autonomy). There is no apriori reason to suspect that other cultures wouldn’t have an equivalent concept, or at least a comparable set. As I say, there are a lot of candidates.

The most well-worn freedom-related concepts in anthropology have got to be those of resistance and domination: the long tradition of “peasant studies”; the figure of the “subaltern,” colonial and post-colonial contexts, peaceful and violent revolution, oppression, the impoverished, the lower status, the exploited etc. Domination is a clear problem of at least some aspects of political freedom; and I think anthropologists rightly start from the assumption that the opposite of domination is not necessarily freedom, which appears ethnocentric at best. Certainly the current mode of thinking about the issue (dominated by the language, if not exactly the concepts, of governmentality) suggests that domination produces culture and that resistance is about remaking it for diverse purposes, few of which are likely to appeal directly to the abstract ideal of freedom. Feminist anthropology also clearly brought attention to questions of domination, resistance, abuse of status, autonomy, and violence, and it would no doubt be insane to suggest that “freedom” or “liberty” were not motivating concerns throughout… nonetheless, it’s hard to find much in terms of explicit engagement in anthropology, compared to, for example, political theory. In most cases, the concept of freedom is either uncritically used as an ultimate human value, or it is ignored or rejected as a narrow, ethnocentric conception of the good. Freedom in this sense is just one value among others, and not a particularly accessible one for most people in the world.

Agency holds a respectable second to domination and resistance, especially in terms of language, linguistic action, speech act theory and so forth, where it serves to link hypotheses about language to social situations were constraint and liberty are at stake. A 2001 review (Ahearn) notes the ways in which this conception of agency overlaps with the concept of resistance, the domain of gender, and the articulatio of “practice theory.” Agency is (or at least should be) directly engaged with the antimonies of free will and determinism that constitute the more ontological philosophical questions about freedom; secondarily, agency is also about autonomy, in the sense of recognizing one’s own control over action and speech. Most often, however, it is used loosely to refer to varieties of effectiveness in the world, or more precisely, those places where that effectiveness is curtailed or repressed. Much of the work in feminist anthropology must (for better or worse) engage the concept of agency and its relationship to politics, to language or media, and to resistance.

Other problems and concepts are more recent; sovereignty, governmentality, biopolitics, bare life, or territoriality are all centrally concerned with problems of long pedigree in political philosophy, but approach them through a series of displacements initiated by Foucault primarily (Foucault on freedom is no doubt a separate post), and taken up in Agamben and crew. Here again, the central problem is not freedom but power. Power remains the central mystery around which these investigations cluster, and even though in Foucault “ethics as a practice of freedom” is central, most work in anthropology places domination in the central position, or sometimes hegemony, or sometimes consensus (as in “neoliberal consensus”), as an effect of power. It might be more accurate to say, however, that power is an effect of freedom, but that, again, will have to wait for another post, or another poster.

Finally, perhaps the work most directly relevant to questions of freedom has been the recent vogue for “anthropology of secularism” which has returned questions about the relationship between freedom and religion to the center of attention (see e.g. Fenella Cannell’s 2010 review of the subject). The work of Talal Asad and his students (esp. Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind) exemplify a certain concern with the triad of religion, freedom and community. Mahmood especially engages critically with political theorists like Charles Taylor in her work (whose mammoth Age of Secularism also remixes political philosophy under this new label). What role “freedom” plays here is less certain than it might seem at first with chapter titles like “The Subject of Freedom.” I certainly don’t think these works are centrally concerned with the problem of freedom; rather it is a kind of environment or background that cannot be ignored–somewhat like Charles Taylor’s notion of a “social imaginary”– concepts and arguments that circulate both in academic language and in popular sentiment and discourse. What this work does do is to point out that things which appear at first sight to be manifest cases of domination or restraint (the veil, pietist movements, severe forms of religious observance) actually satisfy some of the conditions for freedom–or at least, represent a kind of agency in the service of values that we associate with the results of freedom. Again, not the same thing as approaching freedom directly, but an oblique critique nonetheless.

What I think a lot of anthropologists (would like to) believe, however, is that there is a world of “indigenous” or at least diverse, conceptions of freedom in different cultures that it has been our work and duty to explore. It is this that makes Boas’ claim that “primitive peoples” do not have a concept of freedom so puzzling, and if I can sustain this little investigation, the subject of part 3… to be continued.

In fact the number of works that directly address freedom as either an anthropological problem for investigation, or a tool for making sense of ethnographic data, can be held in one hand. There are lots of other concepts that are similar to or related to freedom (enough that I defer to a second post on the subject), but as for the problem of freedom, a term which has more ideological and rhetorical use and abuse today than any other, anthropologists have been largely silent.

Contrast this with the fields of political theory, philosophy and history where one could be buried alive several times over with the number of detailed treatises on the problem of freedom? Why this dearth, this differential unconcern?

It should also come as a surprise that the dean of English language anthropology, that Polish-born fieldworker, scientist of culture and diarist extraordinaire, grandfather Malinowski ended his career, and his time in this world, at work on a book about Freedom, Freedom and Civilization. It is a book almost no one has read or cited (I have found only one or two sustained scholarly assessments of it), and a book that was compiled by his wife and rejected by the first publisher. It’s a book that is heavily influenced by the situation of the War and Stalinism, and barely contains it’s ideological fervor for the rejection of totalitarinism at the same time that it attempts to construct a general science of culture around the concept of freedom. Malinowski was aware that anthropologists had not approached the concept, and rather uncharitably informs us: “As far as I know, however, no anthropological contribution to freedom has yet been made. An article by Professor Franz Boas recently published cannot be considered as in anyway satisfactory.”(vii)

It is true that Boas had written an article about freedom. It appears in one of a (totally awesome) series of books “planned and edited” by Ruth Nanda Anshen, this one called “Freedom: Its Meaning” and including contributions from Croce, Thomas Mann, Whitehead and Russell, Dewey, Einstein, Haldane, Bergson, and Boas, among many others. Boas’ piece is called “Liberty Among Primitive People” and asserts somewhat unsatisfactorily, it is true, that “Freedom is a concept that has meaning only in a subjective sense. A person who is in complete harmony with his culture feels free.” Philosophers would argue, to say nothing of marxists. But Boas is articulating one of the most common conceptions of freedom: freedom from constraint, and in this case constraint means cultural customs. As such, he even goes so far as to say “With all this, the concept of freedom is not found in primitive society.” We can have negative liberty in advanced societies because we recoginize and question cultural custom, but the primitive “in complete harmony” has no use for the concept. To his credit, Boas carves out space for “intellectual” freedom, a project that Paul Radin explored briefly in “Primitive Man as Philosopher” (Chapter 5).

Beyond Boas’ and Malinowski’s contributions, the approaches have been few and sporadic: Raymond Firth briefly mentioned the concept in a Marret lecture on “The Anthropology of Values”; David Bidney organized a conference and publication in the 1950s that led to The Concept of Freedom in Anthropology, a book of essays by the eminient and the unknown, in which Freedom is a starting point for some, rejected as a meaningful concept by most (Edmund Leach most forcefully) and ignored by the rest. Bidney hammered on the subject a bit more in his (1960) textbook, Theoretical Anthropology, where Freedom is offered in Malinowskian spirit, but is largely a re-hash of some philosophical problems and not a presentation of either anthropological work on the concept or indigenous uses of something similar.

In 1959, Dorothy Lee published a collection of her essays called Freedom and Culture which comes about as close as anything to constituting a sustained engagement with freedom and its problems, specifically in Whorfian linguistic terms. The next clear but more oblique attempt came with Paul Riesman’s 1978 Freedom in Fulani Life, which is less about the concept of freedom per se, and more an attempt to pinpoint a difference between French and Fulani liberty. After that, there is a brief review of “anthropology’s engagement with freedom” by Peter Loizos (1995), who points out Eric Wolf’s 1990 essay on the subject; one article by Neil Maclean (1994) on freedom and autonomy in Melanesia and then Laidlaw’s 2001 Malinowski lecture “For an Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom”, which mentions Malinowski’s posthumous magnum opus in roughly the polite way that one refers to beloved relative’s unfortunate, debilitating dementia. Then nothing.

Or at least, nothing that really focuses on the shiny object that is freedom. All this suggests that either anthropologists think the concept irrelevant or unenlightening, or that they substitute other concepts that seem to be more appropriate. Indeed, if one takes freedom not as a coherent concept, but as a kind of umbrella term, then the number of different problems taken up in anthropology appears much more fruitful. As I say, there are lots of other concepts (agency, autonomy, domination, resistance, etc) that have captured anthropologists attention (and in the next post, I’ll lay them out in more detail), but I think it curious that there is direct engagement with what some might say is the central and most important concept in political philosophy. What gives?

One does not need to think of Bohanan’s work among the Tiv of northern Nigeria, or Abner Cohen’s research among Hausa migrants in the southern Nigerian city of Ibadan before one experiences a feeling of nostalgia. There were for instance Nigerians like Angulu Onwujeogwu, Ikenna Nzimora and Victor Uchendu. In Africa at large, efforts were not just expended on doing ‘good’ anthropology and sociology; there were in fact efforts to overcome the Western epistemic assumptions that underpinned much anthropological exercise of the time. I probably don’t need to mention that anthropology was often a tool for colonialists. See, for instance, Bernard Magubane’s criticism of colonial anthropology in this Current Anthropology article. It would also be useful to see Archie Mafeje’s article that is partly a response to Magubane’s article. The point is that there was a lively discussion in anthropology on the continent.

A cursory look at the credentials of many African anthropologists of the 60s and 70s would show that they were largely Western educated, partly because African states, at that point, had a developmental agenda, and that agenda involved awarding scholarships to students to study in Western universities. And when this was not the case, many African got scholarships from Western countries. One could say that even then, with newly independent African states, anthropology was not particularly popular. I think this is linked to the involvement of anthropology in the colonial project. It is arguable that sociology enjoyed a better image than anthropology, especially with its somewhat better image as a discipline that studies ‘more civilised’ societies. That is also probably why there are very few stand-alone anthropology departments in Nigerian universities.

Things became much worse in the 80s when Nigeria’s oil wealth started turning into a curse. Serious balance of payment problems, coupled with a succession of repressive military dictatorships finally encouraged many Nigerian scholars to leave the country, and those who stayed found it increasingly difficult to work. The already unattractive anthropology even became less attractive, and joint anthropology and sociology department started doing much less of anthropology and more of sociology. The fact that many development agencies want statistical data has meant that data provision and generation concentrated in the hands of economists and sociologists. This in turn meant that fewer people got interested in doing graduate degrees in anthropology. I recently visited a Nigerian sociology and anthropology department where there was neither a single lecturer who does anthropological research, nor any graduate student who wanted to do anthropological research.

It is also in this state of the Nigerian economy state that many parents would not be willing to pay for their children to study anthropology in universities. One could also add that a desire to be modern, and therefore to study something modern, is linked to the lack of interest in anthropology, especially as people still seem to associate anthropology with the study of the primitive – in post-colonial studies terms, the Other. There is bound to be a problem for a discipline that studies the Other, when the classical definition of the Other in this context would actually be the self. I know that the experiences of people in African countries are far from uniform, and that there is of course a multiplicity of Others, but those are the fine details that almost always get lost in the quest for modernity. Yes, I throw in that word, because no matter how much we discuss the faults and failings of modernisation as a theory and as a concept, the everyday lives of young Nigerians is modeled after the dream of becoming modern. Of course, I am an anthropologist, and I understood the importance of the kind of knowledge that anthropological methods and methodologies produce, even before I decided to do a Ph.D in anthropology. And of course, there are also other really intelligent anthropologists still in Nigeria. But when one starts framing a discussion in those terms one should realise that one is talking of the exceptions and not the rule.

Some questions of course beg answers. Does Nigeria, and by extension other African countries, have need of the anthropologist’s contribution in its present predicament? Can the problems thrown up in the country be framed in anthropological ways? Are these problems not always being framed in such ways whether or not people realize or admit it, whether or not people study their society, its mental, material and behavioural artefacts, and engage one another, self and other, with the benefit of ethnographic and theoretical training received in university departments of anthropology? At the risk of sounding chauvinistic, I think that it is always anthropology, good or bad—from Huntington to Soyinka.

Any insights from other areas?

Compared with every other country in the world, America does immigration superbly. Do we really want to junk that for the French approach?

The only criticism I’ve seen of Zakaria is that he conflates German guest workers with second or third generation France citizens of foreign descent. (See Moorish Girl for more on “immigrants” vs. “citizens.”) But I think there is a deeper problem here. The reason immigrants tend to do well in America is not because America is a more welcoming society, but because we already have a permanent racial underclass in our African American population! (And, to some extent, Latinos and Native Americans as well.)

America’s recent immigrants serve a useful purpose, deflecting attention away from one of the core conflicts in our society. American immigration policy in recent years has favored middle class Asian immigrants. Their arrival conflates the black/white dichotomy that led to so much social unrest in the 1960s. This can be seen in the area of Affirmative Action policies where it has been widely remarked that those who would benefit most from their termination would not be White Americans, but the children of Asian immigrants!

Popular in Marxist academic circles, the concept of Asian immigrants to the US acting as a “buffer race” has never made it to the mainstream. I would argue that part of the reason for this lies in the intrenched logic of American “multiculturalism.” According to the dominant narrative, America is a “salad” (no longer a “melting pot”) in which each culture adds its own unique flavor to the mix. This narrative hides the very different histories of America’s various ethnic minorities.

In their celebrated essay, “Black students and the burden of ‘acting White.'” (1986, Urban Review 18(3), 176-203) Ogbu and Fordham suggest a tripartite classification for thinking about America’s ethnic minorities:

In order to account for this variability, we have suggtsted that minority groups should be classified into three types: autonomous minorities, who are minorities primarily in a numerical sense; immigrant minorities, who came to America more or less voluntarily with the expectation of improving their economic, political, and social status; and subordinate or castelike minorities, who were involuntarily and permanently incorporated into American society through slavery or conquest. Black Americans are an example par excellence of castelike minorities because they were brought to America as slaves and after’ emancipation were relegated to menial status’ through legal and extralegal devices… American Indians, Mexican Americans, and Native Hawaiians share, to some extent, features of castelike minorities.

What it means to be a “castlike minority” can be understood by looking at our prison population (more here):

Since 1989 and for the first time in national history, African Americans make up a majority of those entering prison each year. Indeed, in four short decades, the ethnic composition of the U.S. inmate population has reversed, turning over from 70 percent white at mid-century to nearly 70 percent black and Latino today, although ethnic patterns of criminal activity have not fundamentally changed during that period.

While South Asian immigrants may never become white in the same way that Jewish and Irish immigrants did (Fareed Zakaria has commented that TV ratings drop whenever he appears on a talk show), I would argue that the reason immigration has “worked so well” in America is that immigrants usefully distract us from the real racial issues in this country, while for many European countries, immigrants are the racial underclass.

The catalyst for this action seems to be Lesley Gill’s recent essay in Transforming Anthropology, “Labor and Humanrights: ‘The Real Thing’ in Colombia” (PDF download). It is worth reading the first few paragraphs in full:

Being a trade unionist in Colombia is one of the most dangerous occupations in the world. The statistics paint a gruesome picture. By 2004, the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores-the country’s largest trade union confederation-had lost four thousand members since it was founded in 1986, including nearly all of its founders. Seventy-eight were murdered in 2003, and twenty-eight were assassinated in the first five months of 2004. During the early years of the twenty-first century, nearly three-quarters of murdered unionists in the world died in Colombia (International Labor Commission 2004). Hundreds of Colombian working people were threatened, displaced, attacked, detained, kidnapped, and forced into exile. Right-wing paramilitary groups affiliated with the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) committed the majority of murders, and they targeted union leaders disproportionately.

The violence of Colombia’s decades-long civil war does not explain the dire situation faced by Colombian unionists. Murdered workers are not the product of indiscriminate, chaotic violence, nor are they the collateral damage of civilians caught between warring groups. They are the victims of a calculated and selective strategy carried out by sectors of the state, allied paramilitaries, and some employers to weaken and eliminate trade unions. It is a strategy that emerges from, and is facilitated by, pervasive impunity. Of the nearly four thousand trade unionists murders since 1986, only five people have been convicted. That represents a rate of impunity of almost 100 percent (International Labor Commission 2004).1 Most of the rights violations are connected to specific labor conflicts, such as strikes, protests, and contract negotiations in which selective assassinations, arbitrary arrests, detentions, unlawful searches, and anonymous threats serve as tools of labor discipline. Targeted and discriminate violence has not only led to the death, exile, and displacement of hundreds of Colombian workers. It has also contributed to a climate of anti-unionism in which trade unions are associated with guerrilla insurgencies and unable to exercise their right to free association.

Multinational firms profit from the reduced effectiveness of trade unions that arises from the intimidation of workers by paramilitaries. Weak unions pose less resistance to job cuts, lowered wages, reduced benefits, and “flexible” contracts that are promoted by multinational corporations and that are emblematic of the new, neoliberal economic order. Yet in some cases multinationals do more than benefit from extra-judicial violence: they actually organize it. Such is the case with the Coca-Cola Company, according to Sinaltrainal (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria de Alimentos), the food and beverage workers’ union that represents Coca-Cola workers in Colombia. On July 21, 2001, Sinaltrainal filed suit against the Coca-Cola Company and two of its Colombian bottlers in U.S. Federal District Court in Miami, charging that they collaborated with paramilitaries to murder and terrorize workers.

This post has been gleaned from those of Robert O’Brien on the AAA-UNITE blog, where he has recently been blogging more actively about issues affecting anthropology and labor. In this post he outlines a number of actions anthropologists (and others) can take to demand changes from Coke.

Coca-Cola responds to the charges here.

The Japanese wanted to prove that they could govern Taiwan more efficiently than the British ruled in India or the Americans in the Philippines. As a result, the Japanese colonial experience in Taiwan was much milder than that in Korea or Mainland China … for the Han Chinese. It is thus possible for many Taiwanese to romanticize this era, as one sees in the rampant Japanese-era nostalgia that is consuming Taiwan. For the Aborigines, however, it was a different story. At the dawn of the twentieth century the mountainous parts of the island where still largely under the control of the Aborigines. The Japanese forcibly took over those areas in a genocidal campaign of violence. There is no record of the number of Aborigine lives lost, but the Japanese recorded 10,000 Japanese dead as a result of what was a largely one-sided battle. Once under Japanese rule, however, schools were set up throughout the region and many Aborigines first gained literacy at schools run by the Japanese police. When missionaries later came into the region (under the KMT), they found it easy to use Japanese language bibles. In the end, Aborigines became some of the most loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor, many even volunteering to serve in the Japanese armed forces during World War II.

All this is the background for a curious political event which took place earlier this year:

On June 13, 2005, Taiwanese independent legislator May Chin, who claims an Atayal identity, arrived in Tokyo with a group of fifty comrades-in-arms representing nine indigenous tribes from Taiwan. Their goal was to protest in front of the controversial Yasukuni Shrine where the spirits of 2.5 million war dead are honored. Among the dead commemorated in the shrine are 28,000 Taiwanese, including approximately 10,000 aboriginal men, who fought for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War. Although the families of Taiwanese soldiers have long demanded compensation from Japan for unpaid pensions, this protest made only one demand: that the names of aboriginal soldiers be removed from the shrine.

I visited Taiwan last summer, arriving just after this event had taken place. I was completely dumbfounded as to what it all meant. Luckily, anthropologist Scott Simon has woven together a lucid account drawn from both historical and ethnographic sources.

Anthropologists John and Jean Comaroff have called for bringing historical understanding into ethnography, saying that, “No ethnography can ever hope to penetrate beyond the surface planes of everyday life, to plumb its invisible forms, unless it is informed by the historical imagination (1992: xi). ” It is important to note, however, that the historical imagination is often also a national imagination; part of contested ideologies that can very well influence the fate of a people. Yet every time historical memory is mobilized in support of contemporary nationalist narratives, conflicting personal memories are silenced. This dynamic is especially visible in Taiwan, a society torn between two conflicting historical imaginations.

I struggled in my own work to combine ethnography and history, discovering that it is no simple task, but Scott’s article makes it look easy. I highly recommend reading the whole thing over at Japan Focus.

While not defending his article, Benny Peiser wrote an e-mail to alert me to a new study which casts doubt on Diamond’s thesis. USA Today reports that “rats and Europeans are likely to blame for the mysterious demise of Easter Island,” not simply deforestation and warfare as suggested by Diamond.

anthropologist Terry Hunt of the University of Hawaii at Manoa first blames the Polynesian rat. The rats probably deforested the 66-square-mile island’s 16 million palm trees. “Palm tree seeds are filet mignon to rats,” Hunt says.

While USA Today focuses on rats, another article describes Hunt’s analysis of the European impact:

While tribal warfare likely reduced the population of Easter Islanders, Hunt suggests that most of the decline probably was resulted from early 18th-century Dutch traders, who brought diseases and took slaves from the island. Research elsewhere indicates that “first contact” diseases — like typhus, influenza and smallpox — carry extremely high mortality rates, often exceeding 90%. The first traders to reach the island likely carried such diseases which would have rapidly spread among the islanders and decimated the population.

My own prejudices lead me to blame rats and Europeans for just about everything, so I’m inclined to trust Hunt’s research, but I’m sure this isn’t over…

It was in the course of searching for some more information about the topic that I came across Vinay Lal’s review of Rai Bahadur M. Pauparao Naidu’s 1915 book: The History of Railway Thieves, with Illustrations and Hints on Detection. Lal’s article discusses the role of colonial anthropology in creating the category of “criminal tribes”, but since I am already well aware of this story, my attention was caught by his tangential account of the origins of fingerprinting in colonial India:

Naidu’s matter-of-fact references to fingerprinting scarcely reveal the manner in which fingerprinting came to be developed and the extraordinary role of the Indian police in enabling its use as the most reliable method for the detection of criminals the world over. It is just shortly after the Rebellion of 1857-58 that William Herschel, Magistrate at Jungipoor on the upper reaches of the Hooghly, realized its uses as a method of identification. … Herschel then left for England, but in India fingerprinting had another proponent, Edward Henry, who in 1891 was appointed Inspector-General of Police for the Lower Provinces, Bengal. Henry first experimented with the anthropometric system, but was not satisfied with the accuracy of the measurements. In a report submitted to the Government of Bengal in 1896, Henry detailed the experiments he had conducted with fingerprints, which he observed were not only inexpensive to obtain, but also a surer means of detecting and confirming the identity of any given person. Henry is then said, with the aid of a team of Indian assistants, to have developed a system of classification under which 1,024 primary positions were identified, which when considered along with secondary and tertiary subdivisions, made fingerprinting a fool-proof form of fixing identity.

Lal goes on to explicate the vital role played by of two of Henry’s subordinates: Azizul Haq and Hem Chandra Bose, as well as to discuss how the Indian origins of fingerprinting came to be suppressed.

If the English police in England had been unable to devise such a system, clearly fingerprinting could be of no great use. This was put bluntly in a letter appearing in an English newspaper, signed by one “disgusted Magistrate”: “Scotland Yard, once known as the world’s finest police organization, will be the laughing stock of Europe if it insisted on trying to trace criminals by odd ridges on their own skins. I, for one, am firmly convinced that no British jury will ever convict a man on ‘evidence’ produced by the half-baked theories some officials happened to pick up in India.”

What redeems this foray into forensic anthropology from being completely tangential is the a comment Lal makes about the lack of any empirical evidence in the prosecution of members of criminal tribes:

Much like the thugs, the criminal tribes were said to be endowed with an innate criminality, and as another official stated apropos the Bawarias, one could easily gain an estimate of the “conditions under which their natural aptitude for thieving has been fostered until the practice of it has become ingrained into their daily life as to assume the features of a hereditary and criminal profession.” Colonial officials had little more to do than to assert this genealogy for the criminal tribes, and as Sanjay Nigam has aptly noted, once the incidence of crime associated with the criminal tribes had been understood “as a species of a well-known, dangerous genus, empirical detail counted for little.” So much for the much-vaunted regime of fact, the dedication to empiricism, on which the English prided themselves.

This is still very much the case. Just today we interviewed a man who was arrested, horribly beaten, and sentenced to ten years in jail just because he was a Chhara. He eventually won his case on appeal and got out of prison after two years. True, he makes his living as a thief, but he was not caught thieving. Moreover, he was charged with “armed robbery,” a much more serious crime, far outside the modus operandi of the Chhara. As he recounted his story, I couldn’t help but think of this famous Bob Marley song.

In one of my first posts on Savage Minds, I argued that there would be a resurgence of “armchair anthropology” as a result of the internet. Central to this argument are what Hossein Derakhshan calls “bridge bloggers.” Such bloggers are able to bridge the same linguistic and cultural barriers that anthropologists seek to overcome. In some cases they may even do it better. I believe that Roxy Gagdekar is one such person.

Beyond the historic injustices Denotified Tribes (DNTs) faced during the British Colonial period, Chharas (and other DNTs) continue to suffer from ethnic discrimination. Stigmatized as thieves, it is difficult for them to get legitimate jobs in mainstream society. As a last resort, they turn to criminal activity. It is a vicious circle from which only a few are able to escape.

But how do people know they are Chhara? They don’t look noticeably different from the rest of the population, and even if they did, they could easily be from a neighboring state. They speak their own language (Bhantu), but they can speak Gujarati as well as anyone else.

The answer, it turns out, couldn’t be simpler: they ask.

As Roxy put it, the third question when you apply for a job, after “What is your name?” and “Where are you from?”, is “What is your caste?” Technically Chharas are outside of the caste system, but that doesn’t help. They have to answer the question. Even if there are laws against discrimination on the basis of caste, there don’t seem to be any laws against asking such questions. Roxy says it would be even worse for a Chhara if they lied and were found out.

Recently, a courier service opened up near Chharanagar. With a recommendation from a high level government official, several Chhara went and applied for the job. They were turned down. The owner of the local franchise said he would rather close shop than hire a Chhara. Not that he’s racist, you understand, but his couriers handle lots of money and precious items. His clients wouldn’t trust him if he employed Chharas…

I regret not having had a chance to see this film. Fortunately, in honor of Peter Jackson’s forthcoming King Kong remake it will be screened on Turner Classic Movies next Tuesday. Here is their description of the film:

Grass’s directors, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, and their patron, Marguerite Harrison, set out to make a film about a nomadic Asian tribe. The only problem was that they knew little about nomadic Asian tribes and even less about where to find one. After a false start and a lengthy journey, they eventually came into contact with the Bakhtiari in what is now known as western Iran. The Bakhtiari proved to be extraordinarily courageous, fascinating people, and the fledgling directors ended up with some of the more remarkable footage in motion picture history.

Each summer, the Bakhtiari would journey, with their livestock in tow, to pasture grounds in the highlands. What this meant was that 50,000 people and 500,000 animals (that’s not a misprint) would trudge across a 12,000-foot mountain range in the snow, ford a river, and climb a sheer mountain face! Their journey was literally a matter of life or death, and it’s all caught on film. Stunning moments abound, but you won’t soon forget thousands of people swimming across a raging river on inflated goat skins, with their livestock tied up and sprawled across makeshift rafts! Grass may be slightly rickety in its construction, and some of the subtitles verge on the inane, but much of what you’ll see is truly beyond belief.

Just what language these letters represent is a matter of some debate, as is archaeologist Ron E. Tappy’s literal use of the Bible, but it seems like a spectacularly important discovery nonetheless.

More links over at Language Log where you can also see a picture.

So I’m proud to announce the release of Acting Like a Thief! A short documentary film I shot and co-produced with Shashwati, who did an amazing job editing it.

The anthropological term the ethnographic present refers to the artificial construction of a time before contact with European culture, and is best illustrated by this Far Side cartoon:

Curtis worked very hard to construct such an ethnographic present in his photographs.

In order to portray traditional customs and dress, Curtis–using techniques accepted by many anthropologists of his day–removed modern clothes and other signs of contemporary life from his pictures. A portrait of a Piegan lodge, for example, originally showed an alarm clock between two seated men. Curtis cut the clock out of the negative and included the retouched image in The North American Indian.

Like contemporary anthropologists, Curtis’s motives were not to deceive, but to show respect for a way of life that was under attack:

Curtis began his photographic project during the height of U.S. government efforts to assimilate the Indian population. Most Indians were restricted to reservations and made dependent on government agents for food, clothing, and other essentials. Tribal governments and native languages were suppressed and religious ceremonies were banned. Indian children were taken away to boarding schools, taught English, and trained to fit into white mainstream society.

But underlying his work was the assumption that native life was doomed, so beautifully captured in his haunting (staged) photograph “The Vanishing Race”:

By depicting them in this romanticized way, Curtis may have done more harm than good,

Other Indian people protested that the pictures are romantic images that stereotype and dehumanize the people in them. A few pointed out that if Curtis had shown the real plight of people on reservations, his images might have led to government reforms that could have helped their ancestors.

In a recent James Faris article, “Navajo and Photography” (in the book Photography’s Other Histories) he shows us two Curtis pictures of the same Navajo model:

Can you guess which one made it into Curtis’ book?

Faris ends his chapter with a discussion of some contemporary Native American photographers, including Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie, whose work is an interesting counterpoint to that of Curtis.

Census Makes a Native Artist, from the series “Creative Native”
1992, © Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie

More Curtis links here.