Tag Archives: Theory

Anthropological “isms,” post and otherwise.

Using Social Media to Teach Theory to Undergraduate Students

Savage Minds welcomes guest blogger Carole McGranahan.

“Political economy?” “Symbolic analyses?” Post-whatism?” Semester after semester, my advanced anthropology students told me they couldn’t remember the theories they had learned in their introductory anthropology course (even, they sheepishly confessed, if I had been their professor for that course). In response, I built a review of general anthropological theory into my classes and developed a theory course for junior and senior anthropology majors.

But re-teaching theory at the advanced level was not enough. I needed a better strategy for teaching theory at the very beginning level of anthropological instruction which, for me now as professor and earlier as graduate student, meant in a large lecture class of anywhere from 100 to 550 students. How could I teach theory so that introductory students could retain and use this knowledge beyond exam day? What new pedagogies would enable students to carry the theoretical messages of Levi-Strauss or Mead or Ortner with them? My strategy was to turn to social media, to teach theory by putting students in dialogue with each other: I created two new course assignments, a student-generated theory wiki and a theory blog.

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Value, social conflict, and tourism

One of the underlying questions that I am looking at in my research at is how conflicts in tourism development can be understood by using “value” as a theoretical diving board.  Yes, I mean value in the economic sense.  But I also mean value in the sense that Clyde Kluckhohn sought to explore.  This is value in the moral, political, and/or cultural sense, which is of course somewhat different from the monetary-based understanding of value that might spring to mind when you hear the word.  Value can be about currency, yes, but there’s more to it.

Value, ultimately, refers to the ways in which we choose to represent the importance or meaning of a particular idea, object, action, or place.  Something can be valuable because of its relative standing within a massive global financial system, but it can also be valuable in many other senses as well.  Both David Graeber (in Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value) and Julia Elyachar (Markets of Dispossession) explored these different forms of valuation, and made it clear that it’s important to see how the relate with one another.

Another issue that I am looking at is how this question of value relates to geographic space.  This sounds all very abstract and all, but it’s not as abstract as it seems.  The allure, prestige, or value of tourism is fundamentally geographic and spatial in many ways.  As Michael Clancy pointed out in his 2001 book “Exporting Paradise,” exclusive resorts are predicated on the idea of allowing some people in and keeping others out.  These separated or segregated spaces are maintained through a variety of measures, some more explicit than others.  Some resorts have massive walls and guarded entrances, while others are surrounded by miles of barbed wire fences.  Others choose more subtle measures.

So these are a couple of issues that I am looking into during my fieldwork.  Although right now I am just in the beginning of all of this, and there are interesting leads in all directions.  Miles and miles of fences.  Disputes over land.  Completely different ideas about what an ideal tourism destination should look like.  For some, a place is more and more valuable as it gets “developed” with hotels, paved roads, golf courses, and so on.  For others, it is the complete opposite–a place loses its intrinsic, unique value as it becomes a part of a wider, commodifiied tourism network.

Anyway, these are just a few of the starting points, and I thought it might be a good idea to share some of where I am coming from, since I will be writing about little bits and pieces of this over the upcoming year.  Here’s a short selection about value from a working paper that I wrote for the Open Anthropology Cooperative (click here to read the whole thing).  Let me know what you think (for all references and footnotes, check out the paper on the OAC page).  Since I am in the early stages of fieldwork, and looking into these issues about tourism, social conflict, value, space, and so on, I know that things will inevitably lead in some pretty unpredictable directions.  That’s what empirical research is all about.  But it’s good to take account of starting points and see where they end up.  Anyway, enough of the small talk.  Here’s the selection that explores some of my readings of the value question: Continue reading

Postmodernism as Rigorous Science

My field methods seminar is wrapping up today and something happened in it this semester that has happened in it before.

I usually get a substantial segment of the class from other disciplines — graduate students who want to do ethnographic work in education, business, sociology, or whatnot and want to see how The Anthros do it. Even though other fields have been doing fieldwork as long or longer than us, we somehow capture the imagination of other disciplines as doing the ‘real’ or ‘most intense’ version of ethnographic work. In fact, often we have a bit of a mystical aura around us since no one can figure out exactly what we do, they just know we do it in some extremely ineffable way. Which, too often, is anthropology’s self-understanding as well.

When we read Marcus-and-Clifford postmodernism in my fieldmethods class, non-anthropology graduate students find their ideas not only uncontroversial, but actually the most scientific of the stuff on the syllabi. While the anthropologists consider postmodern reflexivity to be narcissistic, the non-anthros consider it to be the closest thing our discipline has produced to a ‘methods section’: something in the ethnography that describes what we actually did in the field. While the anthropologists approach collaborative anthropology and the decentering of their epistemological authority with a mixture of erotic longing and dread, the non-anthros consider it to be a sensible attempt to check the validity of research results against the intuitions of research respondents.

I think there’s something deeply ironic — and also very insightful — about this take on anthropology’s now-canonized apostates. But I’m not sure what. That anthropology was so far down the rabbit hole that postmodernism looks like an attempt at answerability? That postmodernism is just common sense about the research process with an -OfTheContemporary suffix attached at the end? Or something else?

Let me know what you figure out.

WC25: Ethnography with Hugh Raffles and Kim Fortun

Each of the panels at the conference to honor the 25th anniversary of the publication of Writing Culture were titled with a single, simple word: Ethnography, Fieldwork, Theory; each featuring two presenters and a somewhat passive moderator from the Duke faculty. There was coffee and fruit salad. I greeted my friends and took a seat with Ayla next to a pair of poorly behaved elders who chatted amongst themselves through both presentations as if they were the only people in the room.

I.
Kim Fortun began her talk on the production of ethnography in what she termed “Late Industrialism” or the world economic system since 1984. A lasting effect of Writing Culture has been to compel all of us to recognize the conditions in which ethnography is produced and to be aware of how dominant ways of understanding shape what ethnographers see. Today, Fortun said, that must include the media noise of Fox News and the mainstream refusal of scientific explanations – from climate change denial, to the rejection of evolution, and the denigration of experts as elitists.

Projected onto the screen behind her was a cycle of images of factories, corporate advertising, and environmental devastation. Ours is a world where amphibians have become the canary in the coal mine, their rapidly dwindling numbers and sensitivity to grotesque developmental mutations evidence of pervasive and invisible pollution in our air and water. Clearly, Fortun sees her work as addressing how humans experience and understand the environmental effects of industrialization.

Later in the conference she was praised for the juxtaposition of word and image in her presentation. I disagreed, I thought it was lazy. The degree of awareness brought to the text (as is fitting for a conference on Writing Culture) made the lack of engagement with the image especially pronounced.

Fortun’s driving question is this: What makes ethnography an appropriate “technology” for understanding and confronting the contemporary world scene? It is in ethnography, she said, that we find new possibilities to circumvent activism as usual, transformative ways to usher in the future. The audience was implored to design ethnography to be accommodating to open-endedness, the foreign and overlooked, conscious of historical conditions, and always engaged with internal critique.

Ethnography provides us with a powerful and effective way to read historical conditions that resist explanation. Invoking Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents: Living With High Risk Technologies, Fotun offered us a devil’s bargain of sorts. When confronted with “discursive gaps,” events and conditions that defy our ability to think and understand them, we are tempted to accept “discursive risk” by using familiar idioms of thought nonetheless. Cannot ethnography be used to break this cycle? Can the ethnographer say something different?
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WC25: Clifford and Marcus Reflect

Duke’s conference to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of Writing Culture began a day before I could make time to arrive. This was a great disappointment to me because the first panel of the program (and the only one scheduled for that day) was reserved for the volume’s editors, George Marcus and James Clifford, so that they might share their thoughts on how the book had aged and where they thought anthropology was headed today. I am grateful to Ayla Samli for agreeing to take notes and prepare a blog post for this opening session.

Writing Culture’s Decomposition by Ayla Samli

There was something right about meeting in an old warehouse to discuss Writing Culture at 25. Like the edited volume did to ethnography, the space of the warehouse had been retooled, a repurposed site now used for humanities conferences and colloquia. Like the edited volume, the space showed its age and its possibilities for refurbishment. There weren’t enough seats in Bay 4, the garage where the podium stood, to accommodate all of the listeners so they watched the streaming video close-by on flat screen TV’s.

In her opening remarks, Laurie Patton, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Duke and professor of religion, called Writing Culture a game-changing book and ultimately cast the tensions between scientific representation and literary representation created through the book as canyons. “Canyons are places of biodiversity,” she advised us, “tend to the canyon well.”

Orin Starn, chair of Duke’s anthropology department, then reminisced about the conditions of the 1980s, when Writing Culture was authored; a time of typewriters, new technologies, and Western Empire. A time which echoed the hubris and possibility in the book’s chapters. Now the presenters and audience endeavored to discuss the state of anthropology and its new possibilities under current historical circumstances. Continue reading

On detesting Writing Culture at a young age

I’ll be honest: reading Ken Wissoker’s liveblogging of the Writing Culture conference was the first time I’ve ever understood why anyone bothers to live blog, and I’m looking forwarding to reading more of Matt’s coverage of the conference. It’s exactly the sort of ‘high table’ event that a small amount of anthropologists use to reproduce their elite culture and which is unavailable to most people — unless others ‘cover’ it. In this post, I wanted to encourage conversation about this historical moment by discussing how I learned to detest Writing Culture.

When I was growing up (scholarly speaking) Writing Culture and postmodern anthropology were the enemy. The problems were legion: the navel gazing, the narcissistic obsession with one’s own subjectivity, the reduction of the politics of fieldwork to the writing up of ethnography, the neurotic worrying about one’s one epistemological responsibilities that led the authors to the same sort of straining nervousness that you see in overbred show dogs, a pretension to theoretical sophistication that masked a lack of deeper erudition (especially of the actual ethnographic record), and of course the coup de grace: authors obsessed with prose who were themselves terrible writers.

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Writing Culture at 25

Saturday, October 1, I woke before dawn and drove 180 miles to attend a conference hosted by the Duke University Anthropology Department in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publishing of Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture. Over the next several days I will post notes and observations from the conference and provide you with links to video recordings of each of the papers as soon as they are made available.

It was a familiar drive for me as I zipped west and then cut south into the Old North State. I earned my degree at UNC-Chapel Hill and got to take a number of courses at Duke during my grad career. Being that I live in Virginia now its a pleasure to make a social call when the opportunity arises. The first panel was scheduled to begin at 10:00am and I was looking forward to hearing presentations from two scholars who have for years been heroes of mine: Michael Taussig and Jim Clifford. Many other prominent figures would be there, plus some of my old running buddies and former professors. And real coffee. My current home, Newport News, is not a coffee town by any measure.

Durham was built on tobacco money, even old man Duke made his fortune off the cancer sticks, and its downtown is still distinguished by the red-brick warehouses that used to store the stuff. But tobacco in North Carolina has gone the way of cotton in Texas, the Lucky Strike smokestack has long since puffed its last toke. One long and narrow loading dock with garages lined up against the railroad got snapped up by Duke and the interior has been refurbished into a chic, modernist conference center. The audience sat beneath a raised garage door. A train’s whistle punctuated Hugh Raffles’ slide show on rocks and storytelling. Was that real or part of a soundtrack? The agro-industrial setting made a perfectly intimate venue for the event.

I first encountered Writing Culture as a junior in college. I found the essays intimidating and confusing, nothing at all like Predicament of Culture which I was reading concurrently or Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which I’d finished only the year before. Predicament‘s blend of poetry with history and theory was an inspiration, it was a major event in my intellectual life, the moment when I finally started to “get it.” Writing Culture just made me frustrated and maybe a little afraid that the possibilities of anthropology were more narrow than I’d hoped. By contrast I found Anthropology as Cultural Critique to be much less strident and more useful too.

It wasn’t until the second semester of grad school that I picked up Writing Culture again. This time it came periodized and prepackaged as the catalyst for the postmodern turn in anthropology, a landmark reconsideration of the role played by the individual ethnographer in navigating the process of encountering others and expressing that experience to an audience. It sparked a debate that, for all its blind alleys, leads up to the present. After surviving the hazing ritual that is the first year of grad school I can’t say that I’ve picked up WC since. Today the volume sits on my shelf stupidly wedged between In the Realm of the Diamond Queen and Works and Lives, my underlines and margin notes no doubt becoming more hilarious by the year.

Do you hold on to books you never use? I have hundreds of books warehoused in my attic, collecting dust, warping in the humidity, supporting multiple generations of spiderwebs. Relics of an earlier self waiting to be hollowed out and refurbished with modernist interiors. But then again, maybe I just have a lot of stuff. When I moved my family to the reservation to conduct my dissertation research I even needed to rent one of those self-storage units to house all my belongings. They are kind of ridiculous, these icons of American material culture where people with too many possessions leave the things they never use but can’t bear to part with.

What is Writing Culture to you? Is it something you keep close at hand where it waits anxiously for you to flit nimbly through the pages, deftly landing on your favorite passages? Has it played a crucial role in your training and professional development as you heeded its call for, in the words of Danilyn Rutherford, not less but more empiricism?

Or is it to you just an assignment you completed in grad school? A parlor trick you learned to please your professors: Look at how smart I am, I can read Stephen Tyler and make sense of it! Is this merely another thing you never use, but yet can’t bear to part with?

What do you see as the role of Writing Culture in anthropology’s present?

The Anthropology of Freedom, pt. 4

I Prefer the Anthropology of Morels of course.  (Much more excellent photo of Morels by: Odalaigh at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/odalaigh/2515458601/)
I Prefer the Anthropology of Morels of course. (Much more excellent photo of Morels by: Odalaigh at http://www.flickr.com/photos/odalaigh/2515458601/)
Recent comments on this series have raised a bunch of great issues that I would love to explore. Conveniently, one of them is the question Rex raised about “Anthropologies Of...” I honestly didn’t mean to signal “The Anthropology of Freedom” as a proposal so much as a query. Because anthropology is so relentlessly ecumenical in its topics and approaches, it should be illuminating to think about what anthropology does not study (or does not allow the study of, in some proscriptive sense, like working for the military). There are some things that we are just silent on, and my hunch is that exploring some of these might sometimes be more illuminating than trying to say what it is anthropology does do. The question of an “Anthropology of Freedom” is at least diagnostic in this sense, if not programmatic. And to be clear, I am not in a programmatic mood here.

But that being said, there are in fact a lot of other “Anthropologies of…” which border very closely on anthropology of freedom, and I want to dwell (at too much length) on one of them here: the anthropology of ethics. There is another one going by the label of an “Anthropology of the Will” which will have to wait until whoever has the book checked out returns it to the library, cause there is no way I will pay $55 for it, thank you very much Stanford University Press. There is also the “Anthropology of Happiness” which insofar as freedom is a means rather than an end might be something anthropologists do study. I’m much too pessimistic for that.

But the anthropology of ethics has finally arrived. This year has seen the publication of two books: Ordinary Ethics, (a semi-reasonable $30, $21.99 on Amazon) ed. by Michael Lambeck, and James Faubion’s An Anthropology of Ethics (ditto). The former is a great collection of essays that includes both anthropologists and philosophers (and includes one from Faubion), the latter is likely to appeal to me, Rex, and like 5 other people, which says nothing about how awesome it is, but rather, indicates a perhaps perverse pleasure in being inside James Faubion’s brain. Nonetheless, both of them lay out some problems and concepts for an anthropology of ethics in rigorous and satisfying ways.

It should be said that the “anthropology of ethics” referenced here probably means many things Continue reading

“The Anthropology Of…”

Kelty’s great series of recent posting on The Anthropology Of Freedom has spurred some great comments from a variety of people, and I wanted to add my own two cents here. As an occasional collaborator with Kelty and others of his ilk such as Biella “Mad Dog” Coleman, I’ve encountered these recent projects on ‘liberalism’, ‘freedom’, and other such new-fangled ideas through the lens of my own decidedly old-fangled interests in Melanesia and kinship. I have to admit that I’m a little skeptical about these projects, mostly because of the long previous history of “Anthropologies of…” and so I’d like to obliquely comment on them through a quick discussion of what it might mean to do an anthropology “of” something.

Object Domain: Probably the least intellectually satisfying but best choice for your career: delineate and actually-existing object out there and make your discipline the study of it. Rake in big $$$ for large-scale, cross-cultural projects. Give graduate students a clear paradigm and a mode of normal science to do.

For instance: There are things like myths which are self-contained, internally structured, comparable, and cross-cultural. Record five thousand of them to find out what the underlying similarities are. Result: Joseph Campbell! All human beings are plugged into the divine world of transcendence and occasionally it spills out into the mundane world. Do a cross-cultural, historical studies of differential human responses to the same basic phenomenon. Result: Mircea Eliade. People in our colonies are all organized on the basis of real-out there kinship systems whose structure and function can be compared. Result: Radcliffe-Brown.

The interwar period was a time incredible time for the delineation of such object domains in the human sciences, and anthropology was no exception — you could do the anthropology “of law” or “of art” or “of politics” and it all fit together in perfectly. But of course we’ve been doing this for much longer then that — think of earlier Victorian literatures on ‘totemism’ or ‘hysteria’ for instance.

There are two problems with this approach. Ok there are more than that. Any realist epistemology of the human sciences has, historically, been very difficult to advocate if you pay attention to what humans actually do. But really, the two problems are: taking everyday notions and elevating them to analytic status almost always results in you realizing half way through that the notion can’t make sense of the evidence without being stretched so out of shape that it either falls apart (like ‘totemism’) or morphs into something else (as the literature on ‘ritual’ very fruitfully turned into a study of ‘performativity’). The second problem is that most of the time the things that you think of as actually existing don’t actually exist — kinship systems, for instance, are now pretty universally understood not to be ‘out there’ in the sense that Fortes thought they were. So the concept can’t bear the weight, and the phenomena don’t exist. Which can be ok if you are all about the journey, but not if you’re focused on the destination.

I think its pretty clear that Kelty doesn’t seem to be doing this.

Generalizing the concept to broaden the conversation: Another way to approach anthropology ‘of’ something is via a sort of logical positivism manqué. On this approach the goal is to articulate the features of a previously-unarticulated concept (like ‘freedom’) such that it can be incorporated in a broader or more generalized theory of human action. That general theory can then be used to talk to philosophers, or economists, or whatever. This conversation-broadening language can be thought of as a ‘pidgin’ or ‘trading language’ (as Galison does) or else just ‘theory’ in the actual sense of the term.

This is fine if you want to do this, but I don’t think that it’s surprising that anthropologists have, so far, wanted to do this with freedom. Discourses of ‘freedom’ in the United States (where Kelty and I work) are explicitly normative and tied to mainstream discourses. How is this surprising? Anthropology is explicitly opposed to ethnocentrism and was founded at a time when ‘freedom’ meant ‘a state’s right to institute Jim Crow’. Second-generation (read: WASP) anthropologists like Redfield and Linton did think about freedom and progress, etc. but by the time the GI Bill anthropologists institutionalized themselves in the academy, liberalism was the ideology of the bourgeoisie. It’s a sign of the swing to the right of some brands of anthropologists (the kinds who do ‘paraethnography’) that these issues of liberalism come up again. Similar histories could be written for France (where ethnology started socialist) and England (where it began as objective and value free).

Large sections of anthropological theory have focused on emancipation, revolution, equality, and so forth — but they’ve never explicitly taken up the word ‘freedom’. Which doesn’t mean that they weren’t interested in it.

Anthropologists might have a contribution to make towards an understanding of what ‘agency’ is and how macro-orders of determination do or don’t structure action (Paul Kockelman has published on this recently, for instance) and how this relates to moral deliberation. Equally, we could take models from broader theory and try analyzing our ethnographic material with them “the ethics of blogging…. environmentalism as ethical form… etc. etc.”. But most of the work in this area comes from people less squeamish about normativity. Thus while anthropology has Faubion’s anthropological ethics in which Aristotle is inflected with Foucault, in economics they have Capability approaches to development (‘as freedom’) in which Sen and Nussbaum inflect Aristotle with Rawls.

Ethnographic Theorizing: The most promising way to get into an anthropology ‘of’ Freedom is, I think, through particularization not generalization. This means asking: how can we take this concept, understand it as richly as possible, and use this ethnographically specific idea not just as a ‘native’ model but something we can use for our own analysis. This is (I think) the approach described as ‘ethnographic theory’ in the teaser email for the upcoming journal Hau which made the rounds a few months ago. It’s also an approach that I’m familiar with from my own work in the Pacific, where we are trying to encourage a new generation of scholars who are both analysts and Natives (with a capital N) on the one hand and, on the other, experiment with forms of anthropological knowledge which treat indigenous culture as theoretical exegesis. This way, both the people and their ideas get a fair shake.

This direction — more detail, more exploration of variance, ambiguities, historical transformations — is what I feel is too often lacking in ‘anthropologies of’. To a certain extent it’s understandable — taking American discourses of freedom as the subject of a lit review means reading thousands of sermons produced across scores of decades. It means reading books like The Story of American Freedom and Nation of Agents. The other option of studying ‘liberalism’ in Italy and New York and just saying ‘you know, liberalism as a cultural form‘ gives up specifying who, specifically, you are talking to, and what, specifically, you are talking about.

This can be very freeing — cultural studies is blessed by not having to begin every sentence with an ‘among the…’. But ultimately the danger is that discourses of freedom become too free, too untethered from the coordinates from which they were originally beamed up. Soon we begin slipping into liberalism as an object domain, or promise to engage in general theory but never get around to it.

In conclusion, I think that anthropology’s own unique — and by unique I mean ‘weird’ — brand of theorizing might be the best way to do an ‘anthropology of…’. But it would also be a method that would be the most particularizing, not the most generalizing, the one most led by the voices of others rather than extracted out of our preconceptions, the one which sought the most analytic purchase from the most culturally specific forms of thought. Let he who has ears hear.

 

The Anthropology of Freedom, Part 3

“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)

Freedom Hof-style
You and me both, pal.

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. Continue reading

The Anthropology of Freedom, Part 2

She is Freedom
She is Freedom

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. Continue reading

The Anthropology of Freedom, Part 1

It should come as a surprise that, as James Laidlaw says, “freedom is a concept about which anthropology has had strikingly little to say.” I’ve been thinking about the problem since giving a paper last year at the AAA on “Digital Liberalism” and the problem of Freedom as it relates to liberalism and technology. I’ve decided to break my radio silence at SM and post a series about Freedom, now that the fireworks are over, in part to see what reaction it provokes here, if any.

Freedom
Why does Google think this is the universal image for freedom?

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. Continue reading

Academic Choice Theory

Regular readers might recall that I have an interest in critiques of economics by economists. So I was very happy to learn of “Academic Choice Theory,” a brilliant tongue-in-cheek application of the principles of Rational Choice Theory to the economics profession by Yves Smith, author of ECONned: How Unenlightened Self Interest Undermined Democracy and Corrupted Capitalism. It is written in the form of a letter by a deceased academic to an admiring fan:

Isn’t it offensive to assume that economists, for motives of personal gain, shade their theoretical allegiances in the directions preferred by powerful interest groups?

How could it ever be offensive to assume that a person acts rationally in pursuit of maximizing his or her own utility? I’m afraid I don’t understand this question.

Is there a “behavioral” version of Academic Choice theory, in which the basic premises are enriched by the possibility that economists sometimes act irrationally?

Great question. … Studies have shown that many people do act irrationally, but not economists – to the extent possible, their decision-making conforms to the model of Homo economicus.

[Apologies to whomever first sent me the link on Twitter, I wanted to credit them in the post, but can no longer find the original tweet.]

UPDATE: See this post which uses the movie Inside Job to talk about Academic Choice Theory. [Thanks to @illprofessor for the link!]

Late Capitalist Timepass

This post has two purposes. First of all, I wanted to alert everyone to a wonderful new online Anthropology journal called Anthropology of This Century which “publishes reviews of recent works in anthropology and related disciplines, as well as occasional feature articles.” This is as close as I’ve seen to an anthropology focused New York Review of Books (or perhaps I should say London Review of Books, as AOTC is edited by Charles Stafford at LSE).

Secondly, I specifically wanted to link to two articles in the first issue: On Neoliberalism by Sherry Ortner and Timepass And Boredom In Modern India by Chris Fuller.

Ortner’s article starts with a quote from Marshall Sahlins: “Whatever happened to ‘Late Capitalism’? It became neo-liberalism.” Some of our readers may not remember the phrase “Late Capitalism” which gained popularity after Ernst Mandel’s book of that name came out in the late seventies. David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity owes a lot to Mandel. Ortner doesn’t dispute Sahlins, but suggests that there are some reasons why we might want to use a new word: Continue reading

Collage for NOLA: Ruin

Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism” in Reflections

[Andre Breton] was the first to perceive the revolutionary energies that appear in the “outmoded,” in the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos, the objects that have begun to be extinct, grand pianos, the dresses of five years ago, fashionable restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them.

They bring the immense forces of “atmosphere” concealed in these things to the point of explosion. What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at the decisive moment precisely by the street song last on everyone’s lips?

Suan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing

More generally, throughout [Benjamin’s Arcades Project], the image of the “ruin,” as emblem not only of the transitoriness and fragility of capitalist culture, but also its destructiveness, is pronounced.

Six Flags New Orleans, October 2010. Via.

Kathleen Steward, A Space on the Side of the Road

A rambling rose vine entwined around a crumbling chimney remembers an old family farm, the dramatic fire in which the place was lost, and the utopic potential clinging to the traces of history. Objects that have decayed into fragments and traces draw together a transient past with the very desire to remember. Concrete and embodied absence, they are continued to a context of strict immanence, limited to the representation of ghostly apparitions. Yet they haunt. They become not a symbol of loss but the embodiment of the process of remembering itself; the ruined place itself remembers and grows lonely.

Louis Armstrong Park, November 2010. Via.

Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum

Essential to this montage was the merging of myth with nature that had so appealed to Benjamin in his study of the figure of the storyteller. Here, history as ruin or petrified landscape took center stage, as if the succession of human events we call history had retreated into stiller-than-stiller things entirely evacuated of life – like those monumental things, those great bodies of gravel… millions of cubic yards heaped in the jungle, moved by the hands of slaves and now covered by forest.

Ann Laura Stoler, “Imperial Debris” in Cultural Anthropology, 23(2)

In its common usage, “ruins” are often enchanted, desolate spaces, large-scale monumental structures abandoned and grown over. Ruins provide a quintessential image of what has vanished from the past and has long decayed. What comes most easily to mind is Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, the Acropolis, the Roman Coliseum, icons of romantic loss that inspired the melancholic prose of generations of European poets who devotedly made pilgrimages to them. In thinking about the “ruins of empire” we explicitly work against that melancholic gaze to reposition the present in the wider structures of vulnerability and refusal that imperial formations sustain… to what people are “left with”: to what remains, to the aftershocks of empire, to the material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things. Such effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind. The focus then is not on inert remains but on their vital refiguration. The question is pointed: How do imperial formations persist in their material debris, in ruined landscapes and through the social ruination of people’s lives?