~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Toward Living with (not Under) Anthropology

by Takami Delisle

Looking back on those years when I was perpetually in fear of disappointing my professors, I realize that’s when I began to question the whole point of anthropology. I wasn’t alone; there have been many discussions out there about what anthropology can teach us, what we can do with it, and what anthropological knowledge means (e.g., Anthropologies, Issue 1, and Ryan’s open thread on who owns anthropology). Among them I encountered a handful of anthropologists questioning the validity of academic anthropology. I felt vindicated – I too am in disbelief of academic anthropology, because what it seems to be doing is producing its own kind of species of “anthropologists,” claiming that they are the only real, true, and legitimate anthropologists. If the goal of anthropology is to better understand humankind and help make the world an equitable place, now would be a good time for these academic anthropologists to take a good look in their own backyard. Those who are leading the next generations of anthropologists have to learn not to take themselves too seriously, not to be arrogant. They owe mentorship and respect to their students, the future generations of anthropologists, before claiming how righteous, intellectual, and special they are.

For this, I argue here that academic anthropologists are in dire need of critical evaluation. They must not become or practice what they critique. They must not fall into the delusion of believing that anthropology is a post-racist/sexist discipline. They can’t keep claiming to not be racists or sexists without taking the time to understand their own privileges. As Faye Harrison firmly asserts in her AAA report “Racism in Academy” (2012), academic anthropologists must confront anthropology’s exceptionalism, which is “the common claim that anthropologists make that the discipline is intrinsically multicultural and nonracist because of its cross-cultural orientation and its Boasian tradition of intellectual racism” (17). In reality, as Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson astutely highlight in their report “Anthropology as White Public Space?” (2011), academic anthropologists “have not done well when it comes to decolonizing their own practices around race … the racial division of academic labor and race-avoidant workplace discourses are key constituents of anthropology departments as white public space” (545).

One of the strikingly familiar results in the report is how often anthropology students and faculty of minority become responsible for “diversity duty.” Not surprisingly, one of the few minority faculty in my second graduate program represented the department in the university-wide “diversity” committee, which was supposedly to promote diversity in the whole university community. What would be the benefit of having such a committee, if a representative from every department is a minority and a bunch of nonwhites get together discussing diversity? Aren’t minorities more than well aware of the importance of diversity, and aren’t the white folks the ones who need to be included in these discussions?

In the end, “students and faculty of color are often hyper-visible as tokens of institutional political correctness but invisible as scholars in their work settings” (Brodkin et al 2011:551). Race-avoidant discourses were prevalent in my second anthropology department. I lost my personal “affirmative action” battle to my white advisor. The department gave no guidance and support to nonwhite graduate students in teaching the topic of racial issues to the mostly white students, who often frustratingly threw dagger-like angry stares at me – some of them even called me “anti-white.” The department gave me no place to express my experiences as a racial minority. I once voiced my concern about why I – as a racial minority – felt forced to suppress my thoughts on racism in our seminars. All the white faces swiftly turned to me with acrimonious glares. The white professor simply carried on, and it was the cue for my classmates to move on as well, without responding to my concern. Just like white professors, white students didn’t want to get involved in conversations about racial issues within our department. Yet they were all eager to discuss race as a theoretical, distant, anthropological topic.

The authoritative academic anthropologists who run departments can become the panopticon, transforming their community into a microcosmic biopolitical society. They do this, ironically, while using these concepts as tools for social analysis and critique. Graduate students in my second department practically had no say in departmental policies, even collectively in the name of our graduate student association. As such, the notes taken by a student representative during the faculty meetings were severely censored by the faculty. Students spent so much time trying to figure out many unwritten, intangible rules; they were constantly riding an emotional roller coaster of panic, thrill, distress, ecstasy, and despair. But they took those rules as they were, even those seemingly unreasonable ones, while quietly complaining among themselves. And they worked hard to follow the rules, often policed each other, and competed with each other under the rules. Some of them even took a great deal of pride in fulfilling the rules, as any positive comments from the professors made students totally high. If anyone challenged the rules, hostility flared up within the students, who were divided by the not-so-subtle color line. After all, students simply did what they were told to do. Just like Michel Foucault described “biopolitical” societies, authoritative power is conditioned into the consciousness and bodies of the population (graduate students). Those rules are a form of power (or “biopower”) that “regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, and rearticulating it … every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her accord,” as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt put it in their book “Empire” (2000:23-24). The beauty of anthropological inquiry and knowledge gets lost in this.

I am not getting into every detail of my experience in the department here, but towards the end of my career there, I just felt so bullied. I could feel that the program was destroying me – it depressed me, controlled my life, and emotionally tortured me. The only good thing I had in the department was my good friend there, who happened to be another minority student and shared many struggles with me. My husband wanted me to pull the plug way before I realized I should have. But the big turning point was a meeting with my advisor to discuss my leave of absence. “You’ve already asked for delaying your progress three times,” she declared in the beginning of the meeting. I felt so angry that I could feel my heartbeat in my face. Yes, the “three times” part was absolutely correct, but no, the “you’ve asked for it” part was unequivocally wrong. The first time was when one of my dissertation committee members left for another institution, as I was nearing the time for my proposal defense. She loved my project. She was the only one who patiently helped me go through the writing process. But some of the materials in my project were outside of the expertise of her replacement, who of course pushed my project into her direction.

Soon enough, I was rewriting my entire proposal. The second “delay” was when another committee member just quit, out of the blue, with no clear explanation, just a few weeks before my qualifying exam. Her replacement wanted me to add more materials on my exam bibliographies, almost a dozen books, which made it impossible to prepare for the exam within such a short amount of time. The third time was when Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami happened. I had to go home abruptly, knowing that the whole disaster devastated my sister-in-law’s family in Fukushima and my mom’s relatives up in the north. So, let me ask again. Did I ask for delaying my progress under these circumstances? Are they all my fault? I dare anyone say yes.

And I eventually did leave the program with full of guilt, self-blame, and shame. My therapist once asked me, “Do you really want to go back to the burning airplane? It injured you so badly, but just because you spent so much time, energy, and money to get on it, you’d want to get back on that burning airplane, knowing you will get injured more?” “It’s not that simple,” I bluntly responded. “I know, but I want you to think about it,” he shot back. The metaphor turned out to be quite effective. One day I said to myself that it was the time for me to learn to be gentle and merciful to myself. So the recovery process began, and oddly enough, anthropological knowledge has helped me through all of this.

Some people may say that my passion for anthropology wasn’t strong enough to put my personal difficulties aside and still pursue the degree. Others may say that I wasn’t intelligent enough to complete the program after all. And still others may tell me to stop being so much of an idealist and accept the reality: everyone is a hypocrite, teaching something while practicing the opposite. But at least I am not engulfed in the biopolitical, institutionalized world of anthropology. I didn’t let it take over me. I am getting myself back. I get to be me again. I would rather live my life with anthropology in my pocket than live my life trying not to drown in the middle of a massive ocean of anthropology.

To those who are out there thinking about going to graduate school for an anthropology degree – Be wise and selective about the culture of the anthropology department you want to be a part of, especially if you’re a minority student. You need to know about your prospective advisor, talk to current and former students, and figure out how/whether the department as a whole is engaged in communications about its own gender and racial issues. Doing all this is that important because it will determine the course of your life for the following 7 to 10 years. And if you make it to the end, stay humble and worldly, be true to anthropology.

To those who are happily doing their graduate studies in anthropology: Remember, complacency with the status quo can be your worst enemy. Keep in mind that people with more power are less aware of the power relationship than people with less power are. And,

…. practice what [you] preach … to do the same with those [you] see as a part of [your] own culture (department) – particularly if they may see themselves as part of ‘the Other’ themselves. To not do so is hypocrisy. To do so creates real understanding, acceptance, and diversity in a department (Brodkin et al 2011:546).

To those who had limited choices of graduate programs and are finding yourself burned out in academic anthropology because of your department’s oppressive power structure – If you’re looking for advice, I’m afraid I cannot offer any, except that it’s worthwhile identifying and communicating with faculty and fellow graduate students with willing ears. But I’m not the one who stuck around to finish the PhD. All I can say is that I still love anthropology, and I still call myself an anthropologist, whether some of the academic anthropologists like it or not. I don’t think I have ever lost my appreciation for anthropology, even in the midst of the craziness at my second graduate program. I simply couldn’t take the authoritative academic anthropology, and I didn’t want to use it as a vehicle to do anthropology any more. If I had stayed there longer, I could have started to dislike anthropology. In retrospect, I left academic anthropology to preserve my passion for anthropology, and I think it worked for me. But I cannot tell others like myself to do the same.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Toward Living with (not Under) Anthropology

by Takami Delisle

I have spent most of my American life doing anthropology. I think about and with anthropology when I observe the world around me, whether watching the news or listening to friends’ conversations. It’s not that someone is forcing me to do so with a knife right at my jugular, but it’s that anthropology has been one of the biggest passions I have ever had in my entire life. Coming home after my very first cultural anthropology class, I felt as if I had just been awakened by something magical. I still remember the sense of thrill when I declared my major as anthropology at my first U.S. university. I sat in the very front row in every single cultural anthropology class like a little kid watching a cartoon right in front of the TV.

What drew me into anthropology is that it opened a door to a wide-open space where I was encouraged to ask questions that I had never felt allowed to voice – like Japan’s appalling gender inequalities, Japanese corporations’ socioeconomic exploitations overseas, and the central government’s ill treatments of Okinawa. Anthropology gave me opportunities to critically and objectively reevaluate the country where I was born and raised, the place I often took for granted. It’s not that anthropology gave me answers to all of my questions, but it did bring me closer to the answers.

My first anthropology graduate program did not betray my expectations of anthropology. The seminar “Poverty, Power, and Privilege” was the most instrumental for strengthening my passion for anthropology. It provided me with theoretical and analytical tools to trace social injustices back through history – to see where they came from and how they changed over time. This seminar taught me to look at the bigger picture when it comes to inequality, and to pay close attention to issues of power. Everything about the seminar blew my mind.

I also learned what it means to be a good anthropologist from this graduate program, which had incredible, worldly-minded teachers who were also good mentors. For instance, after I submitted the final draft of my master’s thesis to my faculty committee members, one of them, who was also the department chair, e-mailed me his comment, which started with, “I want to thank you for teaching me about this important community” – his humbleness taught me to be humble, as I also thanked many of my own students for teaching me things I didn’t know. Another professor, who didn’t believe in the value of testing and grading his graduate students, asked us in his seminar to write what each of us found the most intriguing about the seminar, instead of giving us a final exam – his consistent practice of the principle against the standardized education taught me to be loyal to my principles. When a white student in one of my discussion sections complained about the class materials on racial issues and accused me of being a racist toward whites, the professor whom I was a TA for asked me to let him directly speak with the student to defend me, instead of telling me to ignore the incident – his courage to pursue justice taught me to stand up to injustice. When I brought the dilemmas and difficulties that I had encountered during my research fieldwork to my advisor, instead of telling me to figure them out on my own, she patiently listened, worked out strategies with me, and suggested to incorporate these encounters into my research data and thesis – her mentorship taught me to stay motivated, to keep pushing forward. I was entirely impressed, when another professor, who was often quite harsh on me, stood in front of the whole seminar at the first meeting of the semester and publicly admitted that she was wrong for her vehement disagreement with my argument in another seminar during the previous semester. Her honesty and integrity as an anthropologist taught me to be committed to anthropological inquiries. All these professors helped solidify my deeper understanding of what anthropology should be as a discipline.

My confidence in academic anthropology began to crumble when I joined another anthropology graduate program later on. It was drastically different from my previous program, particularly the relationships between the professors and the graduate students. Some of the professors were obsessed with exerting their authority; this hierarchical pressure permeated throughout the entire department, instilling a cold, sometimes hostile air among the graduate student body. Because of this, anthropology started to take over me, to preoccupy my essence. It consumed every minute of my everyday life, constantly making me question whether I grasped what I was expected to in the course materials, whether I was writing the right things in the weekly reflective essays, and whether I was intelligent enough to be an anthropologist. I had no time to do anything else. I never felt I was doing anything right.

I got so paranoid about falling behind. There were days when I didn’t even see my husband because I sat behind books and the computer in our back room for hours on end. I worked hard, very very hard. But the way I spent my life doing anthropology changed. I was no longer doing anthropology because I was passionate about it—I was doing it out of fear. And out of my fear, I lost interest in everything else. Not only did I have few real friends in the department, but also I had no time, energy, and motivation to make friends outside the department. The result was that I turned into this statue-like apathetic thinking machine with “Anthropology” written big on my forehead.

What was it about the fear that was colonizing my life with anthropology? The truth is that anthropology is not a pure knowledge genre, but it is an institutionalized discipline. When knowledge gets institutionalized, the ways in which the knowledge is practiced and disseminated fall into the hands of the people who run the institution. The materialization of the knowledge depends heavily on how these people carry themselves under the authoritative titles. In other words, the remarkable potential of anthropological knowledge gets filtered through authoritative anthropologists. What is truly detrimental to anthropology is, then, that if they can’t embody the ingenious knowledge to their students and colleagues in everyday life, they also turn anthropology into hypocrisy. This is what was rampant in my second anthropology graduate program. The fear, which consumed my life in anthropology, was of getting disapprovals from those authoritative anthropologists. They scared the hell out of me.

Ryan Anderson: All of this has me wondering how this is happening in US anthropology. As a discipline, we have this sort of pride that comes with our Boasian legacy of anti-racism. But your work seems to indicate that something is terribly amiss. Despite all of our rhetoric about anti-racism, it turns out we have some serious internal problems when it comes to race and diversity. In your view, how has this happened and why do we tell ourselves such a different story?

Karen Brodkin: In its institutional profile, anthropology is not much different from other white-majority institutions, and like them, we also think we’re doing better than especially non-white anthropologists think we are. I’ve used “white public space” to highlight the different views that white and racialized minority anthropologists have about anthropology’s racial climate. But knowing that only raises two more questions. What are the specific practices and narratives that have led anthropologists of color give the discipline’s racial climate low marks over some 40 years? And, what are the positive changes anthropologists have been making within their departments and scholarly networks? Both these efforts and conversations about them need a bigger public profile within the discipline.

I think that the story about our Boasian anti-racist legacy is one of the (many) things we need to change. As you indicate, it’s part of what makes many of us think we’re doing well. It is also part of what attracts scholars of color to anthropology, even if they subsequently may become disappointed.

The story I learned eons ago, and that I also taught made Boas an exemplar of anthropology’s anti-racist potential, either as PR for the discipline or as encouragement to engage in social justice scholarship, depending on the teller. It was a story of Boas and his students as activists and scholars who challenged prevailing ideas that races were unequal and that white social supremacy was a natural and inevitable outcome of superior biology. Key points were that race, language and culture varied independently; that biology was changeable; that Africa had great kingdoms; and that there was no inherent or inevitable inferiority of black Americans or any other racialized group.

All that was true and good, but, as Lee Baker has shown, Boas had some serious limitations in his own era, and they loom even larger in today’s context. In their own time Boasians ignored the political economy of race and the sociocultural organization of African American communities. Political and economic oppression of black Americans was the “self-evident” confirmation of white supremacy. With 20-20 hindsight it’s easy to see how big that omission was. Nevertheless, the political economy of American racism was very much part of the analysis of progressive scholarship in Boas’ time. W.E.B. DuBois, whom Boas knew and worked with, and anthropologists like Alison Davis, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, contemporaries of Boas’ students, were publishing politically and economically-informed analyses of Black America and of African American cultural communities.

Nevertheless, these scholars and the kind of socially critical analysis they generated about race/ism weren’t in the anthropological canon I learned, and I’m guessing they still aren’t. By ignoring this work, Boasians arguably established a pattern of marginalizing the study of race and racism—that it’s somehow not real anthropology–that persists today. That their view of culture in general didn’t include political economy is also a weakness. Marginalizing the study of rac/ism in the U.S. was in part a casualty of a larger exclusion of political economy. Anthropology ceded such things to sociology. Still, British social anthropology, and later, even Marx, made happy homes in U.S. anthropology. Less so the study of race and racism.

Racism is a shape shifter, and while Boasian anti-racism countered the white racist narratives of its time, today’s racism isn’t the racism of pre-civil rights eras. We’ve inherited three weaknesses from genuflecting to Boasians as anti-racist ancestors instead of analyzing their contributions in historical perspective.

First, as Lee Baker shows in “The Color-Blind Bind,” the political right wing has embraced anthropology’s signature contribution that race is not a biological concept to argue for erasing race from the civic vocabulary; if there are no races, there can be no racism. How do we as anthropologists counter that logic?

Second, there’s a hole in our traditional Boasian story. DuBois, St.Clair Drake, Cayton, and Alison Davis gave birth to a powerful stream of anti-racist social science scholarship, but I don’t think it’s widely embraced as part of our canon. Seldom are these scholars included as apical ancestors, even though we make disciplinary exceptions for Durkheim, Weber and more recently Marx.

Third, both Boasian and British colonial anthropology have left an exoticist legacy, which disparaged studying “us.” Boasians tended to treat Native Americans as cultural and ahistorical “others,” and African Americans as a biological race but otherwise culturally the same as whites. Happily dying, such traditions lived on well in the 1980s and ‘90s, and I suspect are alive still among some of us old folks. If anthropology’s reason for being is to understand society & culture, how trustworthy are we at understanding either in places we know not so well, if we assume incompetence at reflective analysis of our home places?

So what’s the point of this long meditation on Boas? I think that it’s just one (very small) example of the kinds of critical reflections we need to make on our disciplinary taken-for-granted cultural practices and narratives. We also need to move from reflection to changing the Boasian narrative and expanding the anthropological canon to include DuBois, Drake, Davis and Cayton as theoretical pioneers. Doing so would be one step in placing the study of race squarely inside the anthropological mainstream.

It’s all people could talk about at school. “When do you think they’ll announce it?” The conversation even veered into “Ferguson” in my seminar on reproductive health issues. It gave us a chance to talk about how #BlackLivesMatter is a reproductive rights issue, something I had hoped to discuss for the last several weeks.

Hours later, I was back home watching the local news on my television, @AnonCopWatch on my laptop, and listening to the STL Police Scanner. McCulloch’s speech, calculated from the beginning, was chilling, especially in the context of his background. No one was surprised. President Obama’s speech was a disappointment, as if he was running for re-election. The police moved in with smoke and then tear gas and we all know the rest of the story.

The Grand Jury decision has come on the heels of the murder of 12 year old Tamir Rice by a Cleveland police officer for carrying an Airsoft handgun without the orange tip, and I had just spent about a day fruitlessly arguing with people on Facebook about whether or not this was a “race issue.” Because I’m a sucker for being drawn into these things, I gave up yet another day of valuable time trying to convince a brick wall to bend.

The most astonishing part about the discussions that I’ve had is that half of the people with whom I sparred are trained in anthropology (and the other half, closet racist relatives; but you almost have to expect that). I apparently believed – naively so – that we (anthropologists) are on the same page, especially about things like structural violence (or vulnerability), governmentality, state-sanctioned violence, privilege, méconnaissance, social reproduction and so forth; I assumed that we could all discuss things abstractly in order to flesh out a conceptual framework of why the sudden rash of “justifiable homicides.” Nope. I shouldn’t have been surprised, and here’s why.

“Race is a biological myth.” The AAA should tattoo it on our faces when we buy lifetime memberships. We say it all the time and don’t pretend that you don’t get some satisfaction from the look of shock when your students hear this for the first time. The problem is, it lacks a very crucial corollary: “[But] race is a social reality.”

Another friend – a non-anthropologist woman of color – messaged me privately. “Why don’t your friends get it? Why do they insist on telling me that my experience as a black woman is wrong?” I told her: They are (or were) anthropology students. We are taught that “race is a myth,” and therefore it follows that race cannot be implicated in the issues that they were happy to identify as “structural” or “systemic.” They just weren’t willing to take the next step and see that even if the whole system is flawed, it affects people of color much differently than it affects white people; that parents of black children worry differently than parents of white children. Additionally, I told her, students of anthropology are implicitly taught that anthropology is done outside of the United States and sociology is done inside the United States, and so were aren’t exactly receptive to the idea of viewing “justifiable homicide” through an anthropological lens, and I’ll be damned if we even know what a sociological lens looks like. I suggested that some of my friends read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” and one friend replied that they didn’t need to read to learn about “the real world.” I assume “the real world” in this case means “America,” because as an anthropologist this person had no trouble reading literature related to their research.

Professors of anthropology, you need to sit down with your students and hash this out. I don’t need to tell you that if we deny the social reality of race, we will continue to reproduce this lacuna of empathy in the next generation of anthropologists. The “race card” can be a powerful tool for us. Don’t let anthropology persist in being a white public space.