The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology 0415583950, 9780415583954

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THE ROUtLEDGE COMPANION tO CONtEMPOrArY ANtHrOPOLOGY

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is an invaluable guide and major reference source for students and scholars alike, introducing its readers to key contemporary perspectives and approaches within the field. Written by an experienced international team of contributors, with an interdisciplinary range of essays, this collection provides a powerful overview of the transformations currently affecting anthropology. The volume both addresses the concerns of the discipline and comments on its construction through texts, classroom interactions, engagements with various publics, and changing relations with other academic subjects. Persuasively demonstrating that a number of key contemporary issues can be usefully analyzed through an anthropological lens, the contributors cover important topics such as globalization, law and politics, collaborative archaeology, economics, religion, citizenship and community, health, and the environment. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is a fascinating examination of this lively and constantly evolving discipline. Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He has previously been editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and is currently co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research. He works on Pentecostalism, pilgrimage, hospital chaplaincies, and cathedrals, and has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria. Previous general works on anthropology have included Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology (2006, ed. with Peter Collins) and Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (2011, ed. with Pauline von Hellermann). Susan B. Hyatt is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University–Purdue University ­Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Chair of the Anthropology Department. She is also founder of the department’s MA program in Applied Anthropology. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts in 1996. With Boone Shear and Susan Wright, she co-edited a recent volume entitled, Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education (2015). She is committed to involving her students in collaborative fieldwork with neighborhoods in Indianapolis, and in 2010, the Indiana Campus Compact awarded her with the Brian Hiltunen Award for the Outstanding Scholarship of Civic Engagement, and in 2012 she received the Chancellor’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Civic Engagement.

Ann Kingsolver is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her work as a cultural anthropologist, in ethnographic fieldwork in the United States, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, has been focused on variously situated interpretations of, and responses to, all that gets glossed as capitalist globalization. Her books include NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States (2001) and Tobacco Town Futures: Global Encounters in Rural Kentucky (2011), and edited collections More than Class: Studying Power in U.S. Workplaces (1998) and, with Nandini Gunewardena, The Gender of Globalization: Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities (2007).

THE ROUtLEDGE COMPANION tO CONtEMPOrArY ANtHrOPOLOGY

Edited by Simon Coleman, Susan B. Hyatt and Ann Kingsolver

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 S. Coleman, S. B. Hyatt and A. Kingsolver The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-415-58395-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74395-0 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

CONtENtS

Figures ix Contributors xi PART I

Introduction 1 1 Introduction to an engaging discipline: The challenge of creating a companion to contemporary anthropology Simon Coleman, Susan B. Hyatt and Ann Kingsolver

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PART II

Conceptualizing the field in/of anthropology 25 2 Engaging theory in the new millennium 27 Faye V. Harrison 3 Participating, observing, witnessing 57 Deborah Reed-Danahay 4 Beyond sites and methods: The field, history and global capitalism 72 Patrick Neveling 5 Anthropology and the internet 92 Anna Stewart 6 Hand in hand: Homelessness, heritage and collaborative approaches to the material past 107 Rachael Kiddey v

Contents

7 Communicating anthropology: Writing, screening, and exhibiting culture 124 Paul Basu 8 Teaching anthropological theory in neoliberal times 144 Elizabeth Chin PART III

Transforming disciplinary conversations 159 9 Doing and being: Process, essence, and hierarchy in making kin 161 Susan McKinnon 10 “Religion” after religion, “ritual” after ritual 183 Jon Bialecki 11 Language, gender, and desire in performance Peter C. Haney

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12 Selves and codified bodies Subhadra Channa

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13 Law and politics: An anthropological history, and research and practice among vulnerable populations 234 Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban 14 Objectifying economies: Contemporary themes in the anthropology of economic knowledge and practice Daromir Rudnyckyj

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15 Research, representation, redemption, and repatriation: Archaeology and community relationships in 21st-century America 264 Joe Watkins 16 Critical biocultural anthropology: A model for anthropological integration Thomas Leatherman and Morgan Hoke

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PART IV

Anthropology in conversation with other fields 303 17 Anthropology and science Jonathan Marks

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Contents

18 Joined at the head: Anthropology, geography and the environment 323 Michael J.Watts 19 Entangled subjects and art objects 359 Shelly Errington 20 Psychological anthropology: An awkward hybrid? 382 Andrew Beatty 21 Whither anthropology in public policy?: Reflections from India 400 Soumendra Mohan Patnaik 22 Health and anthropology in the era of anthropogenic climatic and environmental change Merrill Singer

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23 Immersive politics and the ethnographic encounter: Anthropology and political science Joseph MacKay and Jamie Levin

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24 Social movements as process Marianne Maeckelbergh

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25 Ethnography as aprendizaje: Growing and using collaborative knowledge with the People’s Produce Project in San Diego A. L. Anderson-Lazo

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26 Interdisciplinary approaches to cultural citizenship and migration 495 Mattia Fumanti Index 513

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FIGUrES

6.1 Kiddey records Punk Paul talking about Temple Church, Bristol (UK) in situ (photo: John Schofield) 113 6.2 Dan and Mark bagging finds at ‘The Pavilion’, York (UK) (photo: Rachael Kiddey) 113 19.1 Caduveo woman with painted face (left). Facial design reproduced by a Caduveo woman on a sheet of paper (right) 363

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CONtrIBUtOrS

A.L. Anderson-Lazo, PhD, works today in the United States with grassroots food, farm, and farmworker justice organizations developing participatory research, assessment, and evaluation tools that focus on the stories and knowledges of land-based, agriculturalist, and indigenous peoples, and the movements shaped by urban and rural people of color communities articulating self-defined food sovereignty. Her ethnography explores practical and policy applications for a decolonized anthropology that forges collaboration and long-term commitments through shared struggles for justice and equity in the United States, Central America, and beyond. Paul Basu is Professor of Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, ­University of London. His research interests are focused around issues of cultural heritage, memory and material culture. In recent years his work has been concentrated in West Africa. He has a long-standing engagement with museums and exhibition practice. He has led various research collaborations with the Sierra Leone National Museum and recently curated the exhibition Sowei Mask: Spirit of Sierra Leone at the British Museum. His books include Highland ­Homecomings (Routledge 2007), Exhibition Experiments (Blackwell 2007, coedited with Sharon Macdonald), Museums, Heritage and International Development (Routledge 2015, coedited with Wayne Modest), and The Inbetweenness of Things (Bloomsbury 2016). Andrew Beatty has carried out long-term fieldwork in Indonesia, with a sideline in Mexico. He is the author of Society and Exchange in Nias (Oxford, 1992), Varieties of Javanese Religion (Cambridge, 1999) and Anthropology and Emotion (Cambridge, forthcoming). Two recent works, A Shadow Falls: in the Heart of Java (Faber, 2009) and After the Ancestors: an Anthropologist’s Tale (Cambridge, 2015), draw on narrative techniques to convey the human dimensions of motive, feeling, and character that tend to elude conventional ethnography. At Brunel University ­London he established the first Masters in Psychological Anthropology outside the United States. Jon Bialecki was a Lecturer, and is now a Fellow, in Anthropology at the University of ­Edinburgh. His academic interests include the anthropology of religion, anthropology of the subject, ontology and temporality, religious language ideology, American charismatic evangelicalism, and religious transhumanism. His in-press book, A Diagram for Fire: American Charismatic Religion and the Contemporary Miraculous, focuses on the miraculous and modes of differentiation at the individual and xi

Contributors

institutional level in the Vineyard church-planting movement, with an emphasis on how this process is expressed in ethics, politics, language, and in economic practices. His work has been published in several edited volumes and academic journals, such as the South Atlantic Quarterly, American Ethno­ logist, Anthropological Theory, and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; he was also recently a co-editor of a special issue of Anthropological Quarterly that focused on christian language ideology. Subhadra Mitra Channa is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delhi. Her areas of interest are marginalization and identity, gender, religion and cosmology, ecology and landscapes. She has received several prestigious international awards and fellowships; Charles Wallace Fellow to UK (Queen’s University 2000), Visiting Professor to MSH, Paris (2002), Fulbright visiting lecturer to USA (2003) andVisiting Professor in 2008-9 to USC, USA. She is the author or editor of nine books and has about fifty scholarly published papers. She was President of the Indian Anthropological Association, editor of the journal Indian Anthropologist, Chair of the Commission on the Anthropology of Women (IUAES) and is presently Vice President of IUAES. Her important publications include, Gender in South Asia (Cambridge University Press), The Inner and Outer Selves (Oxford University press), Life as a Dalit (Sage Publications), and Gender Livelihood and Environment (Orient Blackswan). Elizabeth Chin has work that spans a variety of topics—race, consumption, Barbie—but nearly always engages marginalized youth in collaboratively taking on the complexities of the world around them. She has current projects in Los Angeles, Uganda, and Haiti and has engaged partners including the Los Angeles Police Department, numerous public schools, Jovenes Inc. in Boyle Heights, and Lekòl Kominotè Matènwa in Haiti. A specialist in Haitian Folkloric dance, she has performed professionally and still occasionally teaches. Taking writing very, very seriously, her work increasingly investigates the ethnographic voice with an eye toward decolonizing anthropological knowledge as it appears on the page. Simon Coleman is Chancellor Jackman Professor at the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He has previously been editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and is currently co-editor of the journal Religion and Society: Advances in Research. He works on Pentecostalism, pilgrimage, hospital chaplaincies, and cathedrals, and has carried out fieldwork in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Nigeria. Previous general works on anthropology have included Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology (2006, ed. with Peter Collins) and Multi-sited Ethnography: Problems and Possibilities in the Translocation of Research Methods (2011, ed. with Pauline von Hellermann). Sherry Errington is Professor Emerita at the Department of Anthropology, UC Santa Cruz, cultural anthropologist. Her previous work focused on politics, gender, and meaningful cultural aesthetic forms. Her studies in the last two decades or so have focused on visible and audible aspects of culture—the arts, especially non-Western; visual culture; museums and their narratives; photography; ethnographic film and digital anthropology. Sherry is currently completing a book on art and artists from the Fourth World in the twenty-first century, exploring the changing narratives in Anthropology, Art History, and Museology that seek to understand them. Her publications include Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asia Realm (1989) and The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (1998). Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, PhD, is Professor Emerita of Anthropology and a member of the graduate faculty of Education at Rhode Island College, and Adjunct Professor of African Studies at the US Naval War College. From 1970 to the present, she spent six years living and conducting xii

Contributors

research in the Sudan, Egypt, and Tunisia. Her writings on ethics, cultural relativism, comparative legal studies, gender, and human rights are embedded in this substantial field experience. She pioneered the application of informed consent in anthropology. She is the author or editor of twelve books, including several on ethics: Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for a New Era (1990 ed.); Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice (2003 ed.); and most recently a textbook Ethics and Anthropology, Ideas and Practice (2013). She has authored a number of works on Islamic law and a textbook on race and gender, Race and Racism, an Introduction (2006), and Female Well-Being,Toward a Global Theory of Social Change (2003, co-edited). Mattia Fumanti is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He has conducted anthropological research in Namibia, Ghana, and the Ghanaian Diaspora. Mattia has a research interest in political anthropology, the formation of elites, and postcolonial transitions; youth and intergenerational relations; masculinity and sexuality; migration, citizenship and multiculturalism; religion, morality, and the public sphere. Mattia has published articles in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. He has two co-edited volumes, Beer in Africa with Steven van Wolputte, and Imagining the Future, a short story illustrated by Namibian artist Tuli-Mekondjo. His monograph, The Politics of Distinction, has been recently published with Sean Kingston Publishing. He is currently working on a collaborative ethnographic film. Peter C. Haney is an independent scholar living in Madison, Wisconsin. His research has appeared in The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, The Journal of American Folklore, Pragmatics, ­Language and Communication,Text Practice Performance, and several edited volumes. He served as a consultant for the museum exhibit “Las Carpas: Mexican American Tent Shows,” which opened in 1998 at San Antonio’s Herzberg Circus Museum and remained until the museum’s closure in 2001. He also served as a consultant for the Galán Productions documentary Visiones: Latino Arts and Culture, which aired on most PBS stations in 2004. Faye V. Harrison is currently Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology as well as a Faculty Affiliate with the Program in Women and Gender in Global Perspectives at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her scholarly interests are the politics and political economy of social inequalities; intersections of race, gender, class, and (trans)national belonging; gender-­ conscious anti-racisms as foci for the social and political life of human rights; the history and politics of anthropology and African Diaspora studies; and Africana feminisms. Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age, Resisting Racism and Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Human Rights, African-American Pioneers in Anthropology and Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation are among her publications. Her professional service includes the Presidency of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (2013–2018). Morgan Hoke is a Mellon ACLS Fellow currently completing her PhD in Anthropology and her Masters of Public Health at Northwestern University. Her research interests include biocultural anthropology, public health, political economy, the biosocial determinants of health, early growth and infant health, infant feeding, and nutritional transitions. She has undertaken anthropological fieldwork in the Andes since 2005. She recently completed her dissertation research in the southern highlands of Peru, employing both ethnographic and biological methods to examine the cultural, social, and biological factors influencing early child growth and health. Susan B. Hyatt is Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University–Purdue University ­Indianapolis (IUPUI) and Chair of the Anthropology Department. She is also founder of the xiii

Contributors

department’s MA program in Applied Anthropology. She received her PhD from the University of Massachusetts in 1996. With Boone Shear and Susan Wright, she co-edited a recent volume entitled, Learning Under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education (2015). She is committed to involving her students in collaborative fieldwork with neighborhoods in Indianapolis, and in 2010, the Indiana Campus Compact awarded her with the Brian Hiltunen Award for the Outstanding Scholarship of Civic Engagement, and in 2012 she received the Chancellor’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Civic Engagement. Rachael Kiddey is Editorial Assistant at the Independent Social Research Foundation where, among her responsibilities, is the production of the interdisciplinary Bulletin (http://www.isrf. org/bulletin). Kiddey worked as a radio and television documentary producer (BBC Radio 4 and Channel 4 television) for several years before returning to academia. She received her PhD from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York in 2014. The chapter produced for this volume is based on her doctoral research which involved developing methodologies for working archaeologically with homeless people and documenting how heritage can function in socially useful ways. Her PhD research was shortlisted for the Times Higher Education Award for Widening Participation Initiative of the Year 2012. She is currently completing a monograph on her ‘Homeless Heritage’ work for Oxford University Press. Ann Kingsolver is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Kentucky. Her work as a cultural anthropologist, in ethnographic fieldwork in the United States, Mexico, and Sri Lanka, has been focused on variously situated interpretations of, and responses to, all that gets glossed as capitalist globalization. Her books include NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States (2001) and Tobacco Town Futures: Global Encounters in Rural Kentucky (2011), and edited collections More than Class: Studying Power in U.S.Workplaces (1998) and, with Nandini Gunewardena, The Gender of Globalization:Women Navigating Cultural and Economic Marginalities (2007). Thomas Leatherman is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts,­Amherst. He is a biocultural anthropologist whose work addresses social change, inequalities, and health in Latin America and the United States.Work in the Yucatan of Mexico focused on the “coca-­colonization” of diets within a tourism-based economy. Long-term research in the southern Peruvian Andes focused on the co-constitutive nature of poverty, nutrition, and illness as part of the structural and political violence manifested in a 20-year civil war (1980–2000). Recent work examines shifts in national and regional economies, food security and health in post-conflict Andean Peru. Jamie Levin (PhD Toronto) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harry S.Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and an MSc from the London School of Economics. His graduate work focuses on the role of weapons in the resolution of civil wars. Jamie’s work has been published in the Journal of Peace Conflict and Development, International Politics, International Peacekeeping, International Studies Review, and The Palestine Israel Journal. Joseph MacKay is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harriman Institute of Columbia University. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto. His current research projects concern the varied historical means by which empires claim legitimate authority over their possessions, and processes of policy learning in counterinsurgent warfare. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Review of International Studies, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Social Science History, and Central Asian Survey, and with co-authors in International Peacekeeping, International Studies Review, Terrorism and Political Violence, and International Politics. xiv

Contributors

Marianne Maeckelbergh is Associate Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Leiden University, Netherlands. She has been participating in (and later researching) social movements since the mid-1990s. Her research explores the contrasts between emerging forms of self-­determination and classic notions of democracy. She is the author of The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement Is Changing the Face of Democracy (Pluto Press, 2009) and co-producer of the http://www.globaluprisings.org film series. From 2014 to 2016 she is a Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at University of California, Berkeley. Jonathan Marks is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His primary training is in biological anthropology and genetics, but his interests are broad. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In the last few years he has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the ESRC Genomics Forum in Edinburgh, at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, and a Templeton Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Notre Dame. His most recent book is Tales of the ex-Apes: How We Think about Human Evolution. Susan McKinnon is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. Her research and publications primarily focus on kinship and marriage, gender, hierarchy, the history of anthropology, and science studies. Her books include From a Shattered Sun: Hierarchy, Gender, and Alliance in the Tanimbar Islands (1991) and Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology (2005), as well as the co-edited volumes, Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (with Sarah Franklin, 2001), Complexities: Beyond Nature and Nurture (with Sydel Silverman, 2005), and Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship (with Fenella Cannell, 2013). Patrick Neveling is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University. He has lead-edited special issues for Sociologus, Etnográfica, Contributions to Indian Sociology, and co-edited a book on Tradition Within and Beyond the Framework of Invention (Halle University Press). Patrick’s work addresses the historical political economy of capitalism, with a special focus on the global spread of export-processing zones/special economic zones and on the small-­island state Mauritius, and he is currently finishing a book on a global histo­ rical anthropology of special economic zones. Soumendra Mohan Patnaik is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Delhi. He has done fieldwork among indigenous tribes of northeast and central India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. His research publications focus on development policy and practice, displacement and resettlement of marginalized communities, and the anthropology of globalization and tourism. He was a Fulbright Nehru Visiting Fellow to the Institute of Policy and Governance at Virginia Tech University, in 2011–2012. Currently he is President of the Indian Anthropological Association, a member of the Organizing Committee of the World Council of Anthropological Associations, and Chair of the IUAES scientific commission on Anthropology, Public Policy, and Governance. His most recent book is Culture, Identity and Development: An Account of Team Ethnography among the Bhils of Jhabua. Deborah Reed-Danahay is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for E ­ uropean Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). Her books include Education and Identity in Rural France:The Politics of Schooling; Auto/Ethnography: Rewriting the Self and the Social; Locating Bourdieu; and (with C.B. Brettell) Citizenship, Political Engagement and Belonging: Immigrants in Europe and the United States and Civic Engagements:The Citizenship Practices of Vietnamese and Indian Immigrants. xv

Contributors

Daromir Rudnyckyj is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research addresses globalization, religion, development, Islam, and the state in Southeast Asia, focusing on Indonesia and Malaysia. His current research examines the globalization of Islamic finance and analyzes efforts to make Kuala Lumpur the “New York of the Muslim World” by transforming it into the central node in a transnational Islamic financial system. His book, Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development (Cornell University Press, 2010), was awarded a Sharon Stephens Prize by the American Ethno­logical Society. Merrill Singer, PhD, a medical and cultural anthropologist, is a Professor in the departments of Anthropology and Community Medicine, at the University of Connecticut. The central issues in his work are the social determinants of health inequality, the critical biosocial nature of health, and environmental health, including infectious diseases. Over his career, his research and writing have addressed HIV/AIDS in highly vulnerable and disadvantaged populations, the nature of syndemics, illicit drug use and drinking behavior, community and structural violence, and the political ecology of health including the health consequences of climate change. His current research focuses community health impacts of climate change and infectious disease. Singer has published over 275 articles and book chapters and has authored or edited 29 books. He is a recipient of the Rudolph Virchow Professional Prize, the George Foster Memorial Award for Practicing Anthropology, the AIDS and Anthropology Paper Prize, the Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Critical Study of North America, the Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association and the AIDS and Anthropology Research Group’s Distinguished Service Award. Anna Stewart is an anthropologist whose research focuses on media and gender in conser­ vative Christianity. For her doctoral research she carried out multi-sited ethnographic work in evangelical and charismatic churches in Brighton, United Kingdom, considering in this research and her subsequent published work the manner in which believers use the internet as they locate themselves in relation to their local congregation, the global community of believers, and a fallen world. She has taught introductions to anthropology, research methods, and the study of religion at the University of Sussex and the University of Kent. Joe Watkins, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, became the Supervisory Anthropologist and the Chief of the Tribal Relations and American Cultures Program of the National Park Service in Washington, DC, in 2013. He was the Director of the Native American Studies Program at the University of Oklahoma from 2007 to 2013, and an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico from 2003 to 2007. Watkins’ study interests concern the ethical practice of anthropology and the study of anthropology’s relationships with descendant communities and populations, including American Indians, Australian Aboriginals, New Zealand Maori, and the Japanese Ainu. Michael J. Watts is Class of ‘63 Professor of Geography, and co-Director of Development Studies at the University of California, Berkeley where he has taught for thirty-seven years. He served as the Director of the Institute of International Studies at Berkeley from 1994 to 2004. His recent research has focused on the political ecology of oil in West Africa and on the relations between oil— understood materially, biophysically, socially and symbolically—and the field of conflict in Nigeria in particular. He was educated at University College London and the University of ­Michigan. He was formerly Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Social Science Research Council.

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PART I

Introduction

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1 INtrODUctION tO AN ENGAGING DIScIPLINE The challenge of creating a companion to contemporary anthropology Simon Coleman, Susan B. Hyatt and Ann Kingsolver Anthropology has always been a heterogeneous discipline, engaged in a constant process of debate, self-examination and reinvention. As the study of human connections to, or disconnections from, one another, in myriad environments, it is an eclectic way of thinking by an eclectic group of global practitioners. No single volume should dare to claim that it is providing a comprehensive compendium of everything going on in anthropology today, and this book is no exception. In putting together this collection for readers who may or may not be anthropologists and who learn and work in academic or other contexts, our goal was to compile a range of articles that would speak both to the diversity of the discipline and also to its common threads— and of course to lay out what we see as the significance of its role in the contemporary world. The term “anthropology” is now often modified by such adjectives as “engaged,” “public” and “collaborative” and these emphases are reflected in the contributions to this collection. As US archaeologist Paul Mullins (2011: 235) noted, The question of whether or not engaged scholarship has won over anthropology has apparently been settled, with every corner of the discipline concretely confronting the politics of anthropological insight. What Mullins describes as “the politics of anthropological insight” now shape work across all of anthropology’s sub-disciplines that, in the United States in particular, comprise departments conforming to the scholar Franz Boas’s early 20th-century vision of a “four-field anthropology” (archaeology and linguistic, biological and cultural anthropology). In this Companion, our goal was not to provide encyclopedic coverage of work in all of the various spheres of anthropological research; rather, we wanted to pull together a collection of articles that would illustrate the ways in which these current emphases on public, collaborative and engaged anthropology are playing out across a range of approaches and field sites. In that sense, we do not consider and do not intend for any one chapter to stand in as representative of any one particular subfield or site; rather, our goal was to show how shared interests in commitment and collaboration stretch across the discipline, manifesting themselves through a selection of contemporary work, by scholars located in different institutions and at different stages of their own careers. Engaged, or committed, anthropology is one feature of contemporary work that contrasts strongly with the discipline’s historical entanglements with aspirational “objectivity” and 3

Simon Coleman, et al.

assumed distance between the (colonial) observer and (colonized) observed. The majority of current anthropologists’ commitments are to finding paths to social justice in contrast to much of colonial anthropology’s witting or unwitting justification of oppressive regimes. Another groundbreaking contemporary dimension of the discipline is that those who identify themselves as anthropologists hail from every nation. As Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (2014: 165) points out, “thousands of anthropologists… over the course of more than a century, have woven global webs of influence.” Through individual journeys for training, research, collaboration, employment and publication in a field already focused on global diversity, anthropologists are constantly shaping a world conversation in anthropology that cannot be parsed necessarily by national tradition–although there are very different histories of anthropological programs and practice, as depicted by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Arturo Escobar and their colleagues in the critical collection World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power (2006). Thanks to the World Anthropology Network, the World Council of Anthropological Associations, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and many other transregional anthropological organizations, there is more comparison than ever of approaches and topics and perspectives in the discipline. Shinji Yamashita (2015: 377) encourages all anthropologists “to go beyond the dichotomy between the West and non-West, center and periphery, and native and nonnative and go toward a global anthropology balanced on equal footing.” This has been a challenge, given that, as Mwenda Ntarangwi (2010: 133) observes, “What we have are traditions born out of interactions and exchanges occurring at various levels between anthropologies and anthropologists, especially following such processes as imperialism and globalization.” Contributors to Faye Harrison’s important edited volume, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation (1991), first published over 25 years ago, argued for practical steps toward addressing the inequities in power and voice among anthropologists as part of colonial legacies, including more equitable access to conference and publication venues. Our own book is shaped by the vagaries of personal and professional networks, primarily English speaking, and does not, once again, pretend to be comprehensive through translation or geographic representation. But as editors we share in the commitment to decolonize anthropology and encourage all readers to situate the examples in this volume—drawn from several, but not all, world regions—within the global anthropological conversation that is increasingly accessible and affordable through online, open-source journals and Skype exchanges, and through taking advantage of the international milieu within which most of us now live and work. In keeping with our commitment to seeing anthropology as an integrated—if often ­cacophonous—set of discussions of ideas about understanding the world around us, we have not followed what has been a convention in collections like this one to have separate chapters on such topics as racialization, economic inequalities, gender, sexuality and globalization. Instead, our intention has been for these topics to be woven throughout the text, to form the bedrock for the kinds of inquiries that are integral to the critical power of the discipline in all of its contemporary manifestations. Furthermore, we draw on Mwenda Ntarangui’s (2010: 126) fundamental question, “What is the future of anthropology in a world that is becoming increasingly connected by new forms of globalization that hinge on a neoliberal economic model?” An important dimension of anthropological thought since the 1960s has been its propensity to understand the significance of interconnectedness, while wrestling with the gross inequalities that now appear to have become almost a taken-for-granted aspect of the global landscape. The “global” has, itself, become another fundamental anchor of contemporary anthropology and that global perspective is another thread that weaves itself through many, if not all, of the chapters in this book. Our emphasis on “interconnectedness” as a theme not just of the book, but of the 4

Introduction to an engaging discipline

world itself, harkens back to an insight articulated by Eric Wolf (1982: 6) in the introduction to his key anthropological text of the 20th century, Europe and the People Without History: By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls. Extending that insight, we have also sought not to treat concepts such as race, gender and class like billiard balls bouncing off one another, but as characteristics that overlap and are inextricably linked, and that intersect in the ways that they create and sustain systems of inequality; we have solicited and organized the chapters that make up this volume in such a way that those themes extend through the book as a whole. Similarly, we have tried not to treat anthropology as though it were a self-contained “billiard ball,” bouncing off other disciplines. We recognize that contemporary anthropology’s conversations outside the traditional “membranes” of the discipline constitute some of the most interesting and intellectually challenging spaces for debate and discussion. In many respects, anthropology has long played a role as a “connector,” as a way of thinking about the world that speaks to, draws from, and contributes to larger visions of the way the world is, and of what could be. We do not intend this book to be read as a definitive conclusion about the state of the discipline. Rather, it is intended as one opening to a larger series of debates about how we might deploy the ideas, concepts and insights that emerge from our conversations with one another and with other scholars in other disciplines. These conversations take place in a multiplicity of places, both institutionalized and less formal; they not only reach toward better understandings and analyses of the complexities, contradictions and subjugations inherent in the politics and economics of the contemporary world, but they also have the potential to signpost the way toward political and activist responses work to denaturalize and therefore disrupt these difficult realities. In the following, we provide you with a summary of the chapters of the Companion as they appear in each section, even as we try to keep in mind our overall aim of presenting anthropology as a means of opening up ways of understanding the world precisely through juxtaposing different forms of knowledge and experience—forms that may themselves interrelate in complex ways.We hope, then, that the image of a Companion might imply more than a mere (though rather bulky) edited volume, for we see anthropology itself as a useful accompaniment to all areas of life, helping us to negotiate institutions and social situations including but also going far beyond those of the academy.

Conceptualizing the field in/of anthropology The title of this section of our book may sound rather cerebral—conceptualizing the field—but in practice anthropologists’ understandings and conceptions of their “field” imply much more than intellectual debate or reflection. The active construction and framing of the field are central to the very constitution of the discipline. Perhaps the most obvious depiction of the field in anthropology is as the place where we do fieldwork, the site (or sites) where we gather data, usually through participant-observation. However, the term may also refer to the discipline as a whole—overlapping with but also partially distinct from other related activities such as sociology, psychology, geography and so on. In other words, anthropological labor involves a much wider array of activities than just interacting with informants. Indeed, many of the titles of the chapters of this section contain such action verbs as “engaging,” “witnessing” and “teaching,” 5

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that indicate the range of our work. In his contribution, Paul Basu notes that most practising anthropologists spend much of their time simply communicating through different media, and his comment indicates the interesting ambiguity of the word “ethnography”—an activity normally seen as central to much of what anthropologists do (though see Ingold 2008): ethnography, after all, implies both the gathering of data about people and the writing up and dissemination of such work. These ambiguities about what is meant by “the field”—as a place of cultural encounter, or as a broader set of disciplinary practices—remind us that anthropology does not float about in abstract space but is rooted in specific institutional forms: the university, the museum, perhaps the nongovernmental organization, but also in the wider political economy of the production of “knowledge” in and about the world. Anthropology is certainly a product of human institutions (inflected by class, gender, ethnicity and so on), but at the same time it attempts to reflect on such institutions—comparatively, contextually and critically. Faye Harrison’s opening chapter on anthropological theory insists that we become aware of the multiplication of sites and networks where theorizing is currently taking place. She argues that one of the most exciting dimensions of the present moment is growth in recognition of the diversity of contexts out of which theorizing can emerge—a development that can unsettle “the megastructure of the academy.” She draws on the work of Arturo Escobar (e.g., 2008), already mentioned above, a US-based Colombian academic and thus—like many anthropologists—someone used to inhabiting more than one “home” as well as multiple “fields.” At the same time, Harrison highlights the complicated politics of representing a “world anthropology” perspective from the privileged vantage point of a North Atlantic institution. As you read Harrison’s chapter and other chapters in this section—and in fact the book as a whole—you might be struck by how often writers draw on spatial metaphors in their descriptions and analyses: look out in this section for terms such as “locating,” “mapping,” people working in “zones” or “landscapes,” or thinking about how “Northern epistemologies” relate to those from the South and so on. Anthropology is a discipline that is decidedly “grounded,” and the metaphors and materiality of the field represent important contexts through which it actively constitutes itself in and through space and place, despite the common assumption that globalization means a kind of liberation from the constraints of locality. Such grounding is an important part of the role anthropology can play as a discipline involving different forms of social and political engagement. As you will see throughout this section, but especially in Deborah Reed-Danahay’s chapter, there is some debate as to how “neutral” anthropologists can or should be as they participate in and observe their field sites. Her contribution contains the implied question: Must we adopt a “liminal” or threshold position (another spatial metaphor) in relation to institutions of power, and how consciously activist or partial can we permit our perspective to be while still retaining our claims to academic rigor? Reading Danahay’s piece, we might ask further whether her idea of ethnographer as witness provides a means to both mediate between and challenge conventional notions of the anthropologist as participant-observer in relation to cultural and social fields. What are, in fact, the limits to participation and how passive in reality is that activity we call “observation”? However we choose to respond to such questions, we must bear in mind that fieldwork is an activity rife with moral implications, and one that suggests ethical orientations that form a bridge between the field as place of data gathering and the wider discipline. In a powerfully argued paper called “Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities,” Michael Carrithers poses a difficult but vital question that again refers to questions of engagement, neutrality and positionality: “In a world of continued and expanding empire, does sociocultural anthropology in itself offer grounds for moral and social criticism?” (2005: 433). He asks this question in the specific context of 6

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considering how anthropologists might reflect on the Iraq war that began in 2003. Carrithers’s answer is nuanced but also passionate—an awkward but characteristically anthropological stance—and he sees anthropology as possessing a “moral aesthetic” that emerges “out of our collective experience of engaging with and writing about others in very different moral climes from our own” (ibid.: 434). In his view, the conditions of anthropological production suggest a moral dimension of ethnographic practice that challenges the potential moral paralysis implied in cultural relativism by embodying forms of mutual forbearance, and implying the possibility that the relations involved in fieldwork “give sociocultural anthropologists support, based in the moral logic of the discipline itself and in its understanding of the complexity of possibilities surrounding any moral judgment, for skeptical and therapeutic criticism of rhetoric exercised in pursuit of empire” (ibid.: 433). Carrithers emphasizes the point that the exercise of disciplinary practice has moral and ethical dimensions that are strikingly parallel to the disciplinary and collegial relations described by Rachael Kiddey in her remarkable chapter on the exercise of an apparent oxymoron: “contemporary archaeology.” The two projects she describes were based in the United Kingdom but do not involve conventional locations such as Stonehenge or a Roman villa. Rather, they work to uncover another kind of past, that of present-day homeless people’s lives, as biographical experiences—previously concealed by official discourses—are now rendered visible on the map of urban space. Homeless people actively collaborate with archaeologists in the process of uncovering and analyzing the material culture of those without conventional homes. In the best tradition of ethnographic work, Kiddey learns much from the unexpected dimensions of her practice. For instance, she comes to realize that her homeless colleagues prefer to communicate orally rather than through writing or drawing.The material processes of knowledge production, and not just the end product, become revealing, and possess their own politics (as Basu also reveals in his chapter). Furthermore, in her use of collaborative methods that are more conventionally associated with socio-cultural anthropology than with archaeology, Kiddey engages in a further, creative, disciplinary politics that involves unsettling intellectual boundaries between cultural anthropology and archaeology. The moral and political critique explored by Carrithers suggests one public role for anthropology, as do the varied forms of disciplinary communication (written, filmed, displayed) explored by Basu and Reed-Danahay, and the collaborations discussed by Kiddey. As Elizabeth Chin points out in her contribution to the section, however, it is a mistake to overlook another kind of public—that is, students of anthropology. Chin reminds us once more of the nature of the institution in which many of us work: colleges and universities, both public and private, are increasingly run as businesses in keeping with neoliberal economic imperatives, emphasizing such values as competition, consumerism and “value for money.” Of course, teaching often results in its own form of disciplinary reproduction, as some students ultimately become faculty, themselves; but Chin points to a far wider medium for the deployment of an anthropological sensibility: that of the lives of students “as they move through the world, building anthropology into their daily lives and experiences.” Anthropology here becomes an orientation toward life and, as such, it goes far beyond the need to be written in a monograph. As is the case in Kiddey’s chapter on the archaeology of homelessness, we see here a partial loss of academic control of the means and media of production of an anthropologized world. The results, written in and through biographies, become unpredictable but not negligible. It is not just the field, then, but also the media in and through which anthropology is constituted that we must consider in assessing the ways in which anthropology is being reconceptualized. In a discipline as grounded as anthropology, the medium and the message are intimately connected. Anna Stewart’s chapter on the relationship between anthropology and “the internet” 7

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illustrates this point beautifully. She traces the rapid process through which use of the web has become an everyday practice for many of the people whom anthropologists study. This reality poses new challenges that call upon the discipline to develop methods and analytical stances to keep up with a technology that both challenges and expands anthropological fields. Stewart indicates how anthropology invokes and reconsiders spatial metaphors as it reflects on the virtual constitution of territory and space—not only in the lives of our informants, but also in our professional practices. Such developments have implications for anthropology as a discipline that is committed to making a difference in the world. In an argument that complements Basu’s discussion of communication, Stewart refers to the possibilities of anthropology deploying the internet to contribute to civil society online while dislodging the authority once claimed by academic authors, as anthropologists and their informants engage in a process of mutual surveillance enabled by the democratization of access to academic research. Thus Stewart asks: Who is peering over whose shoulder? This question illustrates the complexity of trying to maintain an academic stance whereby we write about the world while acknowledging the multiple ways in which we are enmeshed within it. Stewart notes that anthropologists were rather slow to respond to the ethical and methodological challenges raised by the democratic nature of the internet. One disciplinary worry may have been over the status of “co-presence”—the latter a concept (and again a spatial metaphor) discussed by Reed-Danahay that reveals anthropology’s frequent privileging of face-to-face relations. Indeed, even as anthropology is often a discipline that likes to position itself as radical in its analysis of societies from a liminal (and sometimes obscure) vantage point, it may also have conservative leanings in some of its orientations and effects. The history of the discipline reflects the constant dilemma of how to represent, analyze and take an ethical stance toward change in the lives of the peoples studied, who—in earlier eras—have often been regarded as somehow living in a time zone removed from the contemporary world of the scholar (Fabian 1983; see also Reed-Danahay). In his chapter, Patrick Neveling takes up the question of how we represent informants who are caught up in political, economic and social transformations that must be analyzed at different temporal and spatial scales. Neveling starts with a conventional anthropological evocation of place and particularity: we are introduced to the economic and political situation in Mauritius in 2003 and 2004, and to a significant crisis in the island’s textile industry. Neveling then takes us beyond the specifics of this site and time, providing a critique of other anthropological forms of analysis that explain social conflict and upheaval as the inevitable product of “ethnic” differences, which are often portrayed as static. In contrast to that approach, Neveling explores the links between Mauritian culture—including its ritual forms—and the inequalities of the “world-system” (Wallerstein 1990) embedded in colonial relations.The political rhetoric of Mauritian sovereignty is juxtaposed with an awareness of the workings of global capital. Neveling produces an incipient historical anthropology of a single place; yet much of his essay is actually a much wider problematizing of anthropological depictions of globalization, which have used the language of ethnic diversity and cultural “flows” to mask deeper questions of structural inequality and colonial exploitation. In our discussion of the chapters in this section, we have not kept to the order in which they appear. As a reader you may also choose to mix and match chapters in ways that we as editors cannot predict. However, a significant thread that connects the pieces is the notion that even while anthropology (at least in some nations) primarily inhabits the institutional frame of the academy, it must also strive to go beyond this boundary. Another thread is that the discipline is, itself, subject to constant change. Despite the century-old trope within the discipline that we are defined by our distinctive and intensive style of fieldwork, the character, direction, medium and audience for such work have always been shifting and fragmenting in new directions. Nonetheless, over time 8

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the discipline has consistently wrestled with the balance between relative intellectual obscurity on the one hand, and the desire for public engagement on the other. This is a dilemma that revolves around the extent to which anthropologists should remain “neutral,” “disinterested” or “liminal,” and it is one that may itself have different implications and applications in different part of the world. As these chapters remind us, not only new fields, but also new publics and forms of participation, and thus new modes of engagement, surely lie in wait in the future.

Transforming disciplinary conversations New modes of engagement have concomitantly posed new political imperatives and challenges for the discipline. Over 100 years ago, for example, Franz Boas mounted a challenge to the doctrine of “scientific racism,” which dominated the discipline during the late 19th and earlier 20th century in the United States and which had helped to sustain and perpetuate that era’s systems of inequality based on racial hierarchies. In the context of a dynamic discipline that has regularly undergone shifts in its own understanding of itself, the chapters in this section of the volume capture the emergence of new cycles of critique, reflexivity and re-imagination. In considering the contemporary salience of these articles, we might look back at a couple of significant turning points that took place during the second half of the 20th century. In 1969, linguistic anthropologist Dell Hymes brought together many of the key critical thinkers of that time to address anthropology’s engagement with questions of power, reflection and representation. Contributors to that collection, Reinventing Anthropology (1969), wrestled with the impacts generated by the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement, the legacy of colonialism and the emergence of postcolonial liberation movements. In the volume, we were exhorted to “study up,” to use Laura Nader’s aphoristic phrase, which remains relevant today: that is, to look ethnographically at the actions of the powerful, rather than at the situation of the powerless. Several contributors—in addition to Nader—urged anthropologists to train our scholarly sights not only on disclosing the plight of the poor and marginalized, but also on revealing the ways in which their marginality was not “natural” but rather was produced by particular policies enacted by people in institutionalized positions of power and influence. Reinventing Anthropology was likely most influential within the United States; nonetheless, the ferment unleashed by the seismic shifts in the post–World War II era affected universities all over the world. In England in 1972, anthropologist Talal Asad convened a conference at the University of Hull, which brought together an illustrious roster of British anthropologists to inaugurate a transformative conversation interrogating the influence of British colonialism on anthropology’s methods and theories. A year later, those conference participants published a volume, edited by Asad, entitled Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), in which they wrestled with the meaning of that legacy. Despite their critiques of the ways colonial relations of inequality had shaped anthropological practices, the contributors to Hymes’s and Asad’s collections reaffirmed the belief that there was still an important role for the discipline to play in a rapidly changing world. As Asad (1973:1) wrote: I believe it is a mistake to view anthropology in the colonial era as primarily an aid to colonial administration or as the simple reflection of colonial ideology. I say this not because I subscribe to the anthropological establishment’s comfortable view of itself, but because bourgeois consciousness, of which social anthropology is merely one fragment, has always contained within itself profound contradictions and ambiguities— and therefore the potentialities for transcending itself. 9

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Through these moments of self-examination, anthropology continued to renew its relevance, to rethink its fundamental assumptions about the world, and to engage in interdisciplinary conversations. Another disciplinary watershed came in 1986 with the publication of the collection Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, co-edited by James Clifford and George Marcus. Reinventing Anthropology and Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter had been largely shaped by political-economic considerations, by the need to account for anthropology’s standing in relation to postcolonial social movements and peasant wars of liberation, and in a global context where neoliberal economic regimes, embodying the values of competition, privatization and consumerism, were generating new relationships of inequality. However, Writing Culture emerged from an ostensibly different lineage: it found its footing in a consideration of the assumptions underlying the literary conventions of ethnographic writing. Many of the contributors to this volume—almost all of them white men in contrast to the more diverse constituencies represented in the Hymes and Asad volumes—argued persuasively that there was a politics inherent in the deployment of particular literary devices, such as the use of the omniscient narrator characteristic of much “traditional” ethnographic writing. Nonetheless, the collection undermined its own claims that it was destabilizing the relationship between the anthropologist and the non-Western and exoticized “other,” by excluding women (except for one who was not an anthropologist) and people of color. The book transpired as a result of an advanced seminar held at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the contributors to the volume—all scholars employed in elite institutions—initially gathered. In his introduction, Clifford (1986: 20) issued one of many opening salvos in a long decade of debate unleashed by the publication of the book when he wrote, “Feminism had not contributed much to the theoretical analysis of ethnographies as texts.”This allegation, like others, had the effect of reaffirming the very same privilege of the contributors that the editors asserted they wished to dislodge, as they argued in favor of the legitimacy of exactly the kind of experimental writing that had long been the refuge of women and other scholars marginalized from the academic mainstream. Even so, the after-effects of Writing Culture were significant, as anthropologists reflected on the epistemological assumptions that underlay that relationship between “self ” and “other” in ethnographic accounts of fieldwork (see, for example, Mascia-Lees et al. 1989; James et al. 1997). A few years after Writing Culture was published, the volume Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon 1995) offered a robust feminist and multicultural riposte to many of the contributors to the earlier volume’s assertions. Two other key moments of re-invention have led national anthropology communities to be more in conversation globally: the scholarly collaborations that led to the publication of Decolonizing Anthropology and World Anthropologies (their shortened titles). In 1991 in the United States, the Association of Black Anthropologists and the American Anthropological Association published the collection, Decolonizing Anthropology. Edited by Faye Harrison (see also her contribution in this volume), the first edition quickly sold out and demands for additional copies resulted in the production of a second edition in 1998, and a third in 2011. Building on earlier critiques of the relationship between anthropology and colonialism, this collection went beyond the consideration of how colonial agendas had shaped the discipline’s past, and argued that in order to create a genuine “anthropology for liberation” for the present and future, the theoretical contributions of Third World scholars had to be moved from a position too often on the periphery of the discipline (enforced through financial and linguistic access to its constitutive conversations) to its very center. In her introduction, Harrison (1997:1) asked the prescient question: “Can an authentic anthropology emerge from the critical intellectual traditions and counter-hegemonic struggles of Third World peoples?” 10

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The International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences had been established over 65 years before the publication of Decolonizing Anthropology and the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences has been an active organization since 1948. Only in this millennium, though, have anthropologists in the United States and the United Kingdom been much more active participants in the already-vibrant world anthropological conversation. The principal anthropological journal in the United States, American Anthropologist, has added a World Anthropologies section recently, which many would say was long overdue. The relative abundance of conference and publication venues in English prolonged the isolation of the United States, particularly, but also the United Kingdom (the two contexts associated historically with the formation of the discipline), in addition to France, from more fluid and equal interactions with global colleagues (beyond traditional relationships with transnational research assistants and students). At least in part in response to the challenge posited in Decolonizing Anthropology, a network of scholars emerged as the World Anthropologies Network (WAN) through a 2003 Wenner-Gren conference. In the European journal Social Anthropology, the World Anthropologies Network announced its intent to “contribute to a plural landscape of world anthropologies less shaped by metropolitan hegemonies and opened to the heteroglossic potential of unfolding globalisation processes” (WAN 2003: 256). The formalization of WAN was evidence that a meaningful reckoning with anthropological scholarship that was produced outside of a handful of Western nations was long overdue. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar’s 2006 collection, World Anthropologies, came out of the 2003 Wenner-Gren conference and was foundational in considering the many different ways in which the discipline developed epistemologically, and has been practiced, in postcolonial national contexts in Africa, East and South Asia, Australia, Europe, and Latin America. As the editors noted (Lins Ribeiro and Escobar 2006: 24): “The concept of world anthropologies provides a space of opportunities for all those who understand that difference goes well beyond inequality and that diversity is an asset to be cherished on epistemological, cultural, social, and ecological grounds.” Many of the critiques and reconsiderations in this section of the volume go to the heart of how the teaching of anthropology might be rethought alongside the development of new research agendas in this particular historical moment. The contributors to this section of this volume speak to the ways in which these debates critiques and moments of reconfiguration and reinvigoration have resulted in a discipline that shows itself to be enduringly present and relevant for the 21st century. Historically, anthropology departments have divided their cultural course offerings into such topics as “Economic Anthropology,” “Anthropology of Religion” and “Gender in Cross-­ Cultural Perspective.” In the United States, many departments historically embraced the “four field approach” mentioned above, featuring courses in cultural (or social) anthropology, linguistic anthropology, biological/physical anthropology and both prehistoric and historic archaeology (though usually not classical archaeology). Currently, many departments no longer (if, indeed, they ever did) offer courses in all four subfields and over the years, each area has tended to split apart into its own separate associations and professional meetings. There is, however, still space for important integrative conversations sparked by new discoveries. One such example is the case of the unearthing of the African Burial Ground in Manhattan. Found by chance during the construction of a new federal building in central New York City in the mid-1990s (though a careful study of old maps of the area would have indicated the possible presence of such a site), contractors uncovered a cache of human remains which, upon further investigation, turned out to be the bodies of people of African origin dating back to the 1700s. Interpreting the human and material remains at the site, arranging for their respectful reburial, and designing an appropriate memorial on the site brought together biological, cultural and linguistic anthropologists, 11

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along with historic archaeologists and museum specialists resulting in multi-disciplinary conversations around the history and meanings of race in the United States. (For a more detailed account of this discovery and its implications, see La Roche and Blakey 1997.) Rethinking how anthropology is taught also means re-evaluating the ways in which particular subjects that have traditionally constituted the anthropological corpus are addressed. One such area has been the study of kinship. While few would argue against the proposition that familial relationships constitute a fundamental element of human social organization, the tendency of anthropologists prior to the 1970s was to treat the social ties of kinship as commensurate and necessarily equivalent to relationships founded on biology or “blood.” In her chapter, Susan McKinnon points to another important turning point in 20th century anthropology, which was the publication of David Schneider’s (1972, 1984) critiques of the biological assumptions underlying kinship studies. Like the other salvos addressed earlier in this section of the introduction, Schneider’s reappraisal was extraordinarily generative as well as prescient, emerging as it did at just the moment when many societies were questioning the patriarchal, heterosexist and biologically based assumptions that had implicitly undergirded the study of “kinship.” In the 21st century, as McKinnon points out, we are faced with a host of different kinds of relatedness that may or may not involve “blood,” ranging from families of choice in the gay-lesbian community; transnational and transracial adoption; and children resulting from a host of new reproductive technologies. Relatedness is also expressed and mobilized through time and space through the use of such modes of communication as email, Facebook and Skype. The decoupling of relatedness from biology has resulted in an anthropology of kinship that acknowledges and honors, as McKinnon puts it, the multiple ways in which communities, families and households make and remake themselves, particularly in the context of the shadows cast by “war, political turmoil, and economic impoverishment [that] force dislocations and migrations that shatter communities and require a kind of fluidity and flexibility in the creation of new lines of relation that may or may not be positively valued.” Thinking about relatedness is one side of the coin; the other side is the challenge of coming to terms with finding new ways to understand the axes of difference, conflict and division at the forefront of national discussions all over the world. At a time when various forms of what are characterized as “religious fundamentalisms” appear to be resurgent, Bialecki, in his chapter, challenges readers to move forward in our thinking by “revisit[ing] the vast wealth of thought on religion…from the standpoint that sees them as numerous directions, as different ‘lines of flight,’ as various discussions of particular manifestations of religious imaginaries.” In other words, “religion” becomes just one approach that is a part of a larger repertoire of ways in which humans make sense of the world. Bialecki decouples “religion” from “ritual” in ways that help us undo religion as a firm category in favor of “the proliferation of the religious.” As in the case of “kinship,” “religion” has also become something to write “against” rather than “about,” for it is in writing about religion that we reaffirm, rather than challenging, the fissures that then come to seem “natural” rather than constructed. (See also Abu-Lughod 1991 on “writing against culture.”) Bialecki suggests that such foundational concepts as “religion” and “ritual” are not so much examples of cultural traits or particular behaviors as much as they are instances of “­culture-in-process;” that is, flashpoints rather than stable entities and, as such, they are creations that simultaneously appear both lasting and ephemeral in their expression. This insight troubles persistent notions of “religion” as lodged in “tradition” and perforce antithetical to “modernity.” The chapter by Joe Watkins returns to questions of representation, but he examines this issue in the context of archaeological work rather than ethnography. His contribution also illustrates an emphasis on engaged, public and collaborative research (thus complementing Kiddey’s 12

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contribution, already discussed). He traces out how an act of the US Congress known as NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), enacted in 1990, which mandated that archaeologists repatriate “unclaimed human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony” to their descendent communities, forced archaeologists into new sets of relationships with indigenous peoples. Watkins writes: Archaeology, as a sub-discipline of anthropology, has continued moving beyond the closed halls of the academy in more recent years as it has participated in an internal review of its complicity in the colonial enterprise.This “reflexivity” has pushed archaeologists toward critical evaluations of the archaeological enterprise, the questioning of the role of archaeology in nationalist agendas, and the concern over the ways that archaeology as a social science can be used in the contemporary world. Watkins shows how the reflexive nature of anthropology is equally relevant to archaeology as it is to ethnography in the 21st century, as the politics of cataloguing, naming, analyzing and repatriating artifacts is freighted with the complexities of how such discoveries play into material strategies for legitimizing or contesting claims for native and national identities. Fluid and fluctuating concepts of identity are also at the heart of Peter Haney’s chapter on language, gender and sexuality. Through his analysis of a performance by a queer-identified Mexican-American male performer named Beto, Haney illustrates the ways in which the performer toyed with the expectations and anxieties of his largely straight audience. Beto’s show enacted a feminized masculinity on the stage while hinting at his off-stage presumed sexual relationships with other men. Haney uses the particulars of this performance to address a debate in linguistic anthropology questioning the linkages between language and sexual identity. As he explains, a pivotal critique originally put forth by linguistic anthropologist Don Kulick (2000) called upon anthropologists to drop an “unhappy fixation on identity” in favor of considering the shifting ways that desire and repression are expressed through language. This critique occasioned a number of responses, including a counter-argument advanced by Bucholtz and Hall (2004a, 2004b), who emphasized the fact that notions of identity need not imply a state of stasis but that they could also incorporate a consideration of fluctuation and dynamism inherent in analyses of situational expression. Because Beto, whose act is at the heart of Haney’s analysis, is performing in front of a largely straight audience, Haney suggests another way to expand upon Bucholtz and Hall’s intervention: he introduces the terms “linking” and “circumspection.” By linking, Haney means the ways in which a performance suggests activities outside of the formal framework of the present; and by “circumspection,” Haney sees performers carrying out the opposite operation, that is, as striving to isolate their stage performances from any reference to other behaviors outside of that frame. Haney illustrates the importance of understanding that the connections between lived identities and language are inextricable from the specifics of the contexts in which such presentations occur, even as they are also simultaneously embedded in contexts outside of the particulars of the acts in which such linguistic patterns are invoked and understood. Another foundational concept in anthropological teaching and scholarship is the ways in which bodies are inscribed with various attributes, including gender, race, ethnicity, caste and class. In her chapter, Suhbadra Channa encourages the reader to think about the ways in which bodies are, themselves, both the objects of external marking and the oppositional expression of selves who are responding to a range of oppressive and hierarchical situations. Channa echoes the language of “others” and “selves” that became emblematic of the “writing culture” moment, yet in this context, in contrast to other approaches, neither self nor other is taken for granted as 13

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two oppositional (and hierarchical) stances; rather, the relationship between others and selves is a shifting dyad, constantly being challenged and reshaped by relationships of power and resistance. For example, in her comparison between the Hindu term “dalit,” most often translated as “untouchable,” the lowest caste in Indian society, and “indigenous,” Channa notes that both of these terms “encapsulate the emerging power of the displaced and marginalized.” Such identities and the bodies they inhabit are rendered up for grabs in shifting political circumstances. As she continues: “Thus, when people gain the power to reinvent their own names and redefine who they are, we see the beginnings of a transformative social and political order.” New expectations in the ways in which we carry out our fieldwork, adhering to values of collaboration and partnership, have necessitated a reconsideration of the ethics of anthropological fieldwork. In recent years in the United States and elsewhere, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs), stung by serious scandals in medical research whereby, for example, doctors and scientists operating clinical trials turned out to have financial interests in the very procedures and devices they were purporting to test, have recommended a much stricter set of regulations on all research, including in the social sciences.Yet, this presumed “protection of subjects” does not fully address the ethical complexities that can arise in the course of ethnographic, archaeological and linguistic research, when we are often “embedded” in complex networks of interpersonal social relationships whose intricacies may not be fully visible to the researcher. In her chapter, Fluehr-Lobban discusses another realm of activity outside of the domain of formal research, and one in which anthropologists are increasingly involved; that is, serving as expert witnesses in cases where people from groups with whom anthropologists have often worked are seeking political asylum and refugee status in other countries. Such cases call upon anthropologists to re-examine the limits of cultural relativism and demand engagement in ongoing debates about the divergences between commitments to both promoting values of cultural relativism and shaping institutional understandings of universal human rights. In his chapter on economy, Daromir Rudnyckyj perceptively teases apart “the reflexivity between economic knowledge and practice.” He shows how in contemporary anthropological work, “economics” represents what British sociologist Anthony Giddens described as “the double hermeneutic,” that is, the ways in which concepts from social science circulate not only in academic circles, but also shape the understandings of laypeople in a kind of perpetual Mobius strip of understanding. Giddens (1990:15–16) writes: Sociological knowledge spirals in and out of the universe of social life, reconstructing both itself and that universe as an integral part of that process. What we know cannot therefore be separated from how we know it and from the material manifestations of what we know that we call “reality.” Building on the contributions of both Foucault and Weber, Rudnyckyj argues that what we believe we know about economics becomes constitutive not just of our own comprehension of this domain but also of the ways in which the economy operates as a sphere of activity embedded in human practice, action and agency. As Rudnyckyj notes, drawing on the work of Michel Callon, “economic knowledge does not simply model existing reality, but rather is instrumental in constituting that reality.” Rudnyckyj draws on several recent ethnographies that document how specific actors— such as shareholders, investment bankers, and government economists—bring into being the very phenomena they then purport to analyze. He writes: “[A]nthropologists have sought to address critical contemporary economic problems by avoiding abstractions and instead analyzing the empirical formation of economic knowledge and its exercise in practice.” Rudnyckyj’s 14

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contribution to this volume also includes a discussion, rooted in his own ethnographic fieldwork, of Islamic banking. He states of his informants that: “Rather than interpreting Islam to make it conducive to capitalism, they seek to reconfigure capitalist action to conform to Islamic requirements.” Thus Rudnyckyj challenges us to expose the underlying logics of economic regimes—whether they be described as socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism or something else— and to question the ways in which they lay claim to their apparent universality and “naturalness.” In doing so, he illustrates well the power of an engaged, intellectually astute anthropology to strike at the heart of what seems most unchanging or commonsensical in human institutions. As noted earlier, the relationship among the four sub-disciplines of anthropology has increasingly become somewhat fraught. Leatherman and Hoke, however, provide an alternative vision of how some anthropologists and anthropology departments are mobilizing new models for cross-disciplinary collaboration. It is indisputable that in some institutions there have been irrevocable splits between intellectual factions—one that sees anthropology as a “science,” the other advocating for anthropology as primarily an interpretive and symbolic enterprise. These splits have sometimes divided sociocultural anthropologists into two or even more camps; in other cases, they have resulted in divisions between archaeology and biological or physical anthropology on one side, with cultural anthropology and sometimes linguistics on the other. In this volume, Leatherman and Hoke emphasize the need for “the sort of anthropology that blurs divisions among the sub-fields, that occupies hybrid spaces at the margins of normative approaches, that bleed into and demand input from other perspectives within and out of anthropology, and that allow for and even privilege the anthropological promise of integration of natural and social sciences and humanities.” They speak to many anthropologists’ efforts to genuinely integrate biological and cultural approaches to understanding human behavior without attributing a dominant determinism to either of these. Such strategies gained momentum in 1998 when Goodman and Leatherman published the work, Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-­Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. This book was a significant contribution to a growing body of literature that increasingly argued that biology and culture could not be divorced from one another in our explanations of the material manifestations of growing ­inequality and that our understanding of both sets of phenomena needed to be carefully embedded in a firm understanding of shifting local and global historical circumstances. Drawing on their own case study, part of a long-standing research project with communities located in the Peruvian Andes, Leatherman and Hoke demonstrate how health disparities are shaped and exacerbated by a range of social conditions, including but not limited to such factors as access to nutritious food and healthcare. They show how the legacy of colonialism contributed to a breakdown in social relationships, which intensified poor health outcomes. Overall, Leatherman and Hoke argue that “Anthropology is one of the few disciplines explicitly prepared to make the connections between environments, cultures, inequalities, biology and health.” In many respects, the transformation of disciplinary conversations that all of the contributors address in this section urge readers to see the institutions of social, cultural and biological life as intellectual constructs that have been shaped and re-shaped over time by cycles of critique and reflection.These chapters speak to the ways in which new cohorts of scholars emerge onto the scene, bringing with them new sets of questions and new answers that continue to revitalize and reshape the discipline of anthropology, renewing its relevance and importance for understanding and countering many of the serious conflicts and divisions that challenge the future of everyone in the world, as we move fitfully toward the end of the second decade of the 21st century. 15

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Anthropology in conversation with other fields Anthropology combines interdisciplinarity with what often seems like an impossibly broad focus on human experience across space and time. Individual scholars, academic departments, journals and communities of practice focus in nationally inflected ways on areas of the world, human languages, cultures, physical bodies, environments and historic and prehistoric pasts. Because of these different areas of concentration, anthropologists have long been in deep conversation with other disciplines as well as with communities beyond academia. Linguistic anthropologists may as easily be housed in language or linguistics departments as anthropology departments, for example. In some nations, including the United Kingdom, archaeology is considered a separate discipline. Anthropologists are accustomed to not having reductionist explanations of human differences, beliefs and behaviors; therefore, anthropology could easily be called the science of the messy bits, that messiness including whether to call it a science at all. In the political lives of universities, paralleling the clustering and dividing of anthropology departments, waves of concentrating interdisciplinarity into new centers or departments, or even closing them as downsizing measures, have been elements of austerity regimes carried out in publicly financed institutions. Sources of funding for positions are often cobbled together from different budget streams, imposing joint responsibilities on such faculty members including burdening them with the responsibility of attending two or more sets of academic program meetings, advising and teaching students in different fields and publishing according to the sometimes confusing or confounding conventions of multiple fields. (One “academic home” might prioritize articles and another a book, for example, or one might emphasize community engagement and another basic research.) In smaller institutions, anthropology might be in a single unit combined with other social sciences and humanities disciplines, e.g., history, geography and sociology. Anthropologists are highly likely to wear multiple hats in academic positions, wherever they may be teaching, and it is not unusual to find that faculty members in an anthropology department have joint appointments in other areas including environmental studies, gender studies, regional studies programs, science and technology studies and so on. This situation has necessitated participation by those trained as anthropologists in professional conversations with many other fields as well as requiring that considerable attention be paid to the discipline’s epistemological boundaries in relation to, and sometimes in the creation of, other fields. Interdisciplinary programs, at least in their first several intellectual generations, tend to be anchored by faculty with Ph.D.s in more traditional disciplines, anthropology among them.This situation leads to conflicting but also productive debates about how to organize training and what constitutes “appropriate” knowledge production in those spaces in which disciplines are not just comfortably reproducing themselves. Since anthropologists have long held the discipline itself to account for the power relations embedded in its methods, there is audible dismay among anthropologists at the borrowing of anthropological methods (e.g., ethnography) without concomitant attention to the harm that might be caused in the name of social science. One example is ethical review processes to ensure that a research design does not include, to give some blatant examples, the forced interviewing of prisoners or schoolchildren or publication of identifiable information about individuals who might be living in a country without legal status. Different disciplines have different notions of accountability—anthropologists to those studied, journalists to a larger public, for example— and conversations at the edges of disciplines or beyond disciplines entirely (as members of a blogosphere might generate visual ethnographies, for example) bring those into focus. Lange (2013: 52) notes that one reason for anthropological knowledge practices finding their way into other contexts is that they have been developed “to engage with questions and 16

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methods from outside” themselves, always necessarily bringing epistemologies into conversation as part of the practice, so that anthropological methods and theories can easily travel across the borders of fields. Susan Carol Rogers (2000: 141), however, cautions that “it is easy to assume that terminology shared across disciplinary boundaries marks common ground” and suggests close inquiry into what is actually meant by concepts and methods of the same name. Marilyn Strathern (2006), who has studied interdisciplinary knowledge production as an anthropologist, reminds readers that the role of disagreement, or asking critical questions, is a vital part of what anthropology brings to the table in such conversations. Anthropologists in inter-field conversations tend to bring up questions about the effects of constituting collaborations in particular ways; about the meaning of silences; and about gender, racialization and class. As Ntarangwi (2010) and Harrison (2008) point out, these lenses need to be applied to anthropology itself, and participation in broader conversations disrupting and critiquing narrative stances, as whiteness studies has done, can be very useful. Anthropologists have written for a century about whether the discipline would outlive its necessity as a field, or melt into another discipline, and more recently about its role in interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, pluridisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity and adisciplinarity (Nissani 1997: 203; Lange 2013: 51). John Comaroff (2010: 525) muses that “perhaps intermittent iterations of the End of Anthropology do not portend oblivion so much as prevent it.” He argues that it is the discipline’s “critical in/discipline” that makes it relevant to current inquiry, “vexing the social sciences at large about the production of knowledge, about pedagogy, about the human predicament—and how best to make sense of it in the perplexing history of the present” (Comaroff 2010: 533). Some have worried about the discipline’s toolkit “getting away,” but Torezani (2010: 5)—noting that while anthropology course enrollments are going down at her university, the demand for training in ethnography in other disciplines is ­increasing—urges anthropologists to use their disciplinary skills to understand how ethnography is seen as useful to other fields of inquiry rather than feel threatened. Journals’ editorial boards would be the presumed patrolling communities of disciplinary knowledge, but the vast array of current possibilities for sharing knowledge and the small proportion of anthropologists (and others) employed in tenure-track jobs or in the academy at all reduces the policing power of publications. Granting agencies have both disciplined the borders of fields and reflected the broader global economic emphasis on flexibility and communication, increasingly requiring the involvement of multiple fields in research projects. The current generation, unimpressed by the possibilities of career devotion, is tending to draw usefully from a more kaleidoscopic approach to disciplinary lenses (and to academic training) in contexts that include many different kinds of praxis. There can be, then, some intergenerational bafflement in the use of terms like “anthropology” and “ethnography,” even though there tends to be a general understanding that an anthropological worldview is not troubled by acknowledging multiple, conflicting, simultaneous explanations of social life and indeed is drawn to those edge zones. “Anthropology” is as much shaped by its interlocutors inside and outside the academy as by a distinct body of disciplinary practices, and who does it has changed quite a bit from its original colonizer/colonized, researcher/subject configuration, with practitioners all over the world as or more likely to be organized into collaborative knowledge commons as in the medieval master guild model of the academy. In this final section of the volume, we do not pretend to present a “representative sample” of interdisciplinary conversations, and of course it makes a difference whether the author writing about anthropology in conversation with other fields has been trained and is working as an anthropologist or is active in an/other field(s). The chapters provide insight into the ways that anthropology has long been intertwined with other disciplines with some differences in 17

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emphasis, and into how it has been involved in the production of new fields of inquiry. In his chapter, for example, Michael Watts addresses anthropology and geography’s roles in the creation of political ecology. Some of the authors take up what terms like art, mind and power mean to anthropologists and those in other disciplines, how anthropologists work in broader collaborations, and how anthropological inquiry has been shaped by postcolonial contexts. And most of these chapters focus on interdisciplinary conversations about contemporary issues of concern to many (not only academic) publics, including climate change, health, well-being, food justice, social movements, political conflicts and transnational migration. Jonathan Marks, in his chapter “Anthropology and science,” establishes the point that anthropology is intrinsically interdisciplinary anyway, so interdisciplinary collaborations make sense. He discusses accountability in knowledge production, what we cannot know through science, and how not to fall into dualistic battle lines between different ways of knowing (e.g., evolution and creationism), or belittle others’ beliefs using the mantle of science. He usefully parses “existential, epistemological, ethnographic, and ethnological questions about anthropology and science,” illustrating what Strathern (2006) and many others have said about using anthropology’s tools to understand intellectual borderlands and their possibilities. If we drop the whose-disciplinary-lens-is-better competition and look at what each collaborator contributes through the way s/he sees (like the eye on the cover of this book) to making sense of human life, what can be learned? Wendy Harcourt (historian) and Arturo Escobar (anthropologist) have modeled excellent interdisciplinary collaboration in their book Women and the Politics of Place (2005), and there are myriad other examples. Politically, within universities, we might think about a confederation of emphases. Sociology is not represented in this section, but it is a discipline often combined with anthropology in departments, as mentioned earlier, and over time the disciplinary boundaries have blurred. The distinction emphasized in the late 19th century would have been between sociology’s focus on urban, industrialized social contexts (Victorian “selves”) and anthropology’s focus on rural, nonindustrialized settings (Victorian “others”), but as Lins Ribeiro and Escobar (2006) point out, postcolonial nations often have traditions of sociology and no anthropology departments because of that very association of anthropology with colonial rule. Now there are rural sociologists and urban anthropologists, and scholars in both disciplines do research in any imaginable social context, including virtual ones. Watts explores the historical conversation between anthropology and another of its very close disciplinary siblings, geography, in the chapter fittingly titled “Joined at the head: ­anthropology, geography, and the environment.” As someone viewing anthropology from another field, he ­provides the critical point that anthropology—while very engaged in interdisciplinarity—tends to be insular in its own citation practices.Various authors in this section provide notable exceptions; Joseph MacKay and Jamie Levin, for example, note the importance of political scientist James Scott’s strong influence on how anthropologists conceptualize power. This is an area in which anthropologists have drawn on scholars from many disciplines, including also the philosopher Michel Foucault. Students in anthropology programs, however, are often mentored to be sure to include anthropological citations, being asked questions about their graduate research projects like, “How is this anthropological?” Watts traces the spatial turn in the social sciences over the past three decades, with anthropology using more of a cultural lens and geography using a more environmental one, but creating together political ecology with a lens of its own. Shelly Errington’s wide-ranging chapter “Entangled subjects and art objects” encourages us to understand shifting historical contexts for how objects and experiences are promoted and understood as “art.” By bringing what are sometimes differently classified traditions into the same frame, she shows how Western means of viewing art are deeply entangled with particular, 18

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culturally located dispositions, including understandings of space, representation, and dimension. At the same time, she explores how a focus on non-Western forms of art reveals rather different ways of seeing and exercising the imagination. One of the provocative claims that Errington asks us to consider is the following: “In the process of making, we make things, but we also make subjects: we make ourselves.” In “Psychological anthropology: An awkward hybrid?” Andrew Beatty looks at an interdisciplinary area in which psychology’s traditional emphasis on the individual and anthropology’s emphasis on the cultural are in conversation—and not always an easy one as the title suggests. Tensions arise especially in relation to discussions of testing and categorization of the mind, given the clinical and legal requirements on psychology for measurement and the tendency of anthropology to always question systems of classification. Another area of conflict has to do with seeing individuals as experimental subjects, with anthropologists often producing queries about the design of experiments rather than accepting their findings. As emerges throughout this section and in larger discussions of anthropology in conversation with other disciplines, the role of anthropology as raising annoying questions about the construction of knowledge, assumptions and exclusions seems clear, and some would argue a valuable one. In psychological anthropology, Beatty notes, questioning the applicability of categories across cultural contexts and documenting against the grain of such universal claims is a major activity that necessitates familiarity with several disciplinary languages. One contribution of the interdisciplinary subfield is a confirmation of the need for talking about spectra rather than definite boxes when discussing the mind and the relationship between the brain and environment in cognition.This point brings up, also, the difference in emphasis on qualitative and quantitative methods both within the discipline of anthropology itself and across fields. The emphasis varies over time, as well. Currently in the United States, for example, sociology tends to be more quantitative in methodological emphasis and cultural anthropology more qualitative. There is some interesting work at the borders of methodologies, just as there is at the fertile edges of fields. Soumendra Patnaik writes about interdisciplinary conversations in development work in his chapter “Whither anthropology in public policy? Examples from India.” He discusses the uneasy relationship between anthropology and governance, and the tendency of government to privilege quantitative and macro approaches, which has meant that anthropology’s mixing of qualitative and quantitative approaches and movement between the micro and macro in analyses has necessarily marginalized the discipline from participation in the formation of policy. The current tendency is far from the discipline’s position in relation to governance during the colonial period, and Patnaik points out that this is another strong reason why the Indian government avoids engagement with anthropology. On the other side of that relationship, Patnaik says, anthropologists distance themselves from work with the government because of widespread corruption (which has sparked a national and global social movement against such perceived dishonesty). The result of this distance, from both sides, is the lack of anthropological influence on policy, which Patnaik argues can help with making governance more inclusive of traditionally marginalized voices, though he cautions that indigenous and policymaking perspectives should not be viewed as mutually exclusive. He provides examples of the need for critical attention to the use of the term “participatory” in development policy, and advocates policy as a site of anthropological study itself. This is a growing global area of inquiry. Merrill Singer also advocates a stronger role for anthropologists in policy debates in his ­chapter “Health and anthropology in the era of anthropogenic climatic and environmental change.” He points out that precisely because anthropologists work in communities all over the world (most often marginalized ones), and in interdisciplinary teams, they are well-positioned to compare notes and consider the lived effects of climate change. Through environmental justice 19

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frameworks, anthropologists and those in many other disciplines are able to document the ways in which effects of climate changes are experienced very unequally. This chapter provides an example of the political ecology approach Watts’ chapter discusses. Drawing on multiple disciplines, it may be possible to convey the human effects on the environment in ways that are compelling to humans to motivate social change. Anthropological approaches to documenting the messy and simultaneous are useful when it is necessary to comprehend how for some people, as Singer notes, climate change does not exist, while for others it is a matter of life and death; he documents that over 100,000 people per year are dying as a result of climate change through flooding and drought-related food insecurity and illnesses as well as direct deaths. He points out that the health effects of capitalism are increasing and intensifying, and it is vital to bring whatever disciplinary lenses are useful to examine the cultural logics that perpetuate environmental degradation and valorize human/environmental relations differently in order to address the outcomes of those logics. Scale is a key topic in interdisciplinary conversations, and their very interdisciplinarity facilitates movement between scales to address topics that seem so outside the realm of individual action, such as climate change. The political scientists MacKay and Levin, contributors of the chapter “Immersive politics and the ethnographic encounter: Anthropology and political ­science,” can be put into conversation with Patnaik’s points about scale, anthropology, and ­governmentality. They write that within political science globally, attention to the micro-level, the qualitative, and to ethnographic methods is actually growing. They see this “immersive” approach, newly referred to as “political ethnography” within the discipline of political science, as particularly useful in studying international relations. As they point out, the questions at the center of international relations are large-scale inquiries about war or trade policies, for example, and it can be difficult to have access to the micro-level in a war zone, or when negotiations are carried out behind closed doors. Because political science has taken its methodology largely from the field of economics, they argue, qualitative approaches are marginalized in relation to quantitative ones, but they find a lot of promise for political ethnography in comparative political science, by using multi-sited and collaborative approaches to better comprehend global political issues through local understandings. Marianne Maeckelbergh, an anthropologist but also an activist in the alterglobalization movement, in her chapter “Social movements as process,” addresses the problem of access to the political processes that MacKay and Levin also discuss, but in relation to social movements—which are diverse and contradictory, always in motion. She has studied social movements through participating in them, which allows kinds of learning that might not otherwise be possible, as in her example of participating in training sessions as part of a social movement in which goals and strategies are articulated. Maeckelbergh views a movement as “a site of political meaning-­ making,” and draws on anthropological methods to study these ever-shifting contexts. She notes that since anthropologists do not tend to view “politics” as having a fixed, unitary meaning anyway, ethnographic methods are a good fit with studying social movements as fluid processes. A.L. Anderson-Lazo’s chapter “Ethnography as aprendizaje: Growing and using collaborative knowledge with the People’s Produce Project in San Diego” further illustrates learning through participation in social movements. Unlike most other authors in this collection, who are employed as academics, she writes as a community activist who was trained as an anthropologist and who brings that toolkit—particularly ethnographic listening—to her work in the food justice movement in San Diego. She developed her “ethnography as apprenticeship” perspective through learning with social justice activists working for the inclusion of Garifuna communities in the new “multicultural” constitution in Guatemala during her doctoral fieldwork. She apprenticed in political storytelling in her ethnographic work with a social movement 20

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and  has  drawn on that in her participation in food justice organization in California. Those engaged in the People’s Produce Project have rejected characterization of their neighborhood as a “food desert” and have been creating and mapping food stories to construct alternatives to the deficit narratives of racialized poverty that are used in many dominant representations in government and academic contexts of southeastern San Diego, California. Anderson-Lazo conveys the complexity and possibilities of negotiating epistemological parity in long-term collaborations, and of participants in projects like the one she describes—whether anthropologists or not—having to parse the meanings and strategic uses of terms including race, class, well-being, disparities, community, trauma and abandonment in a context in which there are different levels of commitment to and knowledge of everyday life. Mattia Fumanti addresses different levels of commitment and knowledge as well in his chapter “Interdisciplinary approaches to cultural citizenship and migration.” He summarizes and adds to conceptualization of citizenship and multiculturalism, which he sees as dialogical and performative. While he discusses earlier theorization of cultural and graduated citizenship, Fumanti focuses on “intimate” and “virtuous” citizenship as a way to think about how new immigrants use family relations and religious communities to mediate state alienation and power and to construct and perform belonging. He uses the example of new immigrants from Ghana to the United Kingdom who craft their conceptualizations of virtuous citizenship through participation in the Methodist Church. Fumanti’s chapter is the endnote for this Companion to Contemporary Anthropology because of the broad public conversation, as we assemble the volume in 2015, on how political and economic refugees are being welcomed or rejected by nation-states, by communities, and by households. Pope Francis has stated that Syrian families would be “adopted” by congregations within the Vatican City, modeling the practice for the European Union even as Denmark, for example, closed train lines to Germany to prevent that means of trans-border travel by refugees. Anthropological and allied critical lenses are useful for asking questions about the differential use of the terms migrant, immigrant and refugee; about how individuals are portrayed in the press as “worthy” or “unworthy” immigrants; about variously situated interpretations of the terms “adopting” or “incorporating”; about the implications of the valorization of some groups as “worth incorporating” while others are seen as somehow less skilled or trustworthy; about the meaning of nation; and about the larger connections between capitalist logic and practice, political violence and migration.What has emerged throughout the chapters in this final section is that anthropology’s constant questioning of the frame is itself a contribution to the conversation. Both the frame and the critical questions need to keep expanding, however, to include in whatever persists as anthropological dialogue such issues as the unemployment crisis and the rapid reconfiguration of education, livelihoods, nation-states, environments and publics.

Concluding thoughts It would be impossible to end this introduction without acknowledging the perilous state of the universities within which anthropology is often institutionalized. Too many anthropology instructors are now on temporary or short-term contracts; too many are working as adjuncts, trying to scrape by teaching a course here and a course there in two, three, four institutions. Students in many countries, including the United States as well as elsewhere, are overburdened by debt as states cut back on their funding for higher education. Public institutions are particularly affected by this development. Universities, both public and private, are increasingly run and presided over by people who come out of the business sector, and who see the university as a profit-­ and-loss-making center. In this kind of calculus, the humanities and social sciences are on the 21

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losing end when departments are cut back. And quite alarmingly, in nations such as the United States in which intolerance seems to accompany corporate control of the academy, anthropology’s diverse voices and foci—with strong potential contributions to resolving entrenched and dangerous misunderstandings and conflicts—have been either recruited for military purposes or targeted for silencing (see the authors collected by Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira in their 2014 volume, The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent). Anthropology has nonetheless managed to sustain a role for itself, not just in the university but in settings outside the academy. Given that the discipline’s methodology is attuned to following kaleidoscopic human interactions, it can be a very useful approach in situations of crisis and momentous change—a natural or political disaster, for example. There are people working in all kinds of settings whose worldview has been shaped by their training in anthropology, even as their many perspectives have contributed to the discipline. In this collection, our hope is to demonstrate and illustrate an anthropological perspective not only as an intellectual stance but also as a strategy for dealing with, for example, the inequalities perpetuated by the dominance of global capitalism in its current neoliberal forms. We have tried to present anthropology not so much as a self-contained disciplinary container filled with its own unique knowledge, but as a nexus of insights and questions that are constantly being reformed and reconstituted by its internal debates and conversations as well as through its interactions with other disciplines. We leave it to you the reader to use the chapters as part of your own processes of questioning, challenging, rejecting, rediscovering and reinventing anthropology.The “contemporary” is ephemeral, but we hope that this book will be useful to “think with” as anthropology continues to move in multiple unexpected, engaging and engaged directions.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila (1991) “Writing against culture,” in Fox, Richard G., ed., Recapturing Anthropology:Working in the Present. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 138–162. Asad, Talal, ed. (1973) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. New York: Humanities Press. Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. (1995) Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall (2004a) “Language and identity,” in Duranti, Alessandro, ed., A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 268–294. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall (2004b) “Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research,” Language in Society 33(4): 469–515. Carrithers, Michael (2005) “Anthropology as a moral science of possibilities,” Current Anthropology 46(3): 433–456. Chatterjee, Piya, and Sunaina Maira, eds. (2014) The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clifford, James (1986) “Introduction: Partial truths,” in James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture:The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1–26. Comaroff, John (2010) “The end of anthropology, again: On the future of an in/discipline,” American Anthropologist 112(4): 524–538. Escobar, Arturo (2008) Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Goodman, Alan, and Thomas Leatherman, eds. (1998) Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Harcourt, Wendy, and Arturo Escobar, eds. (2005) Women and the Politics of Place. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press. Harrison, Faye (2008) Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

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Introduction to an engaging discipline Harrison, Faye V., ed. (1997) Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation, 2nd ed. Washington: American Anthropological Association. Harrison, Faye V. (1991) “Anthropology as an agent of transformation: Introductory comments and queries,” in Faye Harrison, ed., Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation, Washington: Association of Black Anthropologists/American Anthropological Association, pp. 1–14. Hymes, Dell, ed. (1969) Reinventing Anthropology. New York:Vintage Books. Ingold, Tim (2008) “Anthropology is not ethnography,” Proceedings of the British Academy 154: 69–92. James, Allison, Jennifer Lorna Hockey, and Andrew H. Dawson (1997) After Writing Culture: Epistemology and Praxis in Contemporary Anthropology. Association of Social Anthropologists, London and New York: Routledge. Kulick, Don (2000) “Gay and lesbian language,” Annual Review of Anthropology 29: 243–295. Lange, Michael (2013) “The particular place of anthropology in an interdisciplinary curriculum,” Teaching Anthropology 3(1): 43–54. La Roche, Cheryl, and Michael L. Blakey (1997) “Seizing intellectual power:The dialogue at the New York African Burial Ground,” Historical Archaeology 31(3): 84–106. Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo (2014) Brazilian anthropology away from home. World Anthropology section. American Anthropologist 116(1): 165–169. Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo, and Arturo Escobar, eds. (2006) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. Oxford: Berg. Mascia-Lees, Frances, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen (1989) “The post-modern turn in anthropology: Cautions from a feminist perspective,” Signs 15(1): 7–33. Nissani, Moti (1997) “Ten cheers for interdisciplinarity: The case for interdisciplinary knowledge and research,” Social Science Journal 34(2): 201–216. Ntarangwi, Mwenda (2010) Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology. Urbana-­ Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Rogers, Susan Carol (2000) “History and anthropology: Reflections on visits across borders,” City and Society 12: 139–144. Schneider, David M. (1972) “What is kinship all about?” in Priscilla Reining, ed., Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year, Washington: Anthropological Society of Washington, pp. 32–63. Schneider, David M. (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Strathern, Marilyn (2006) “A community of critics? Thoughts on new knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12(1): 191–209. Torezani, Silvia (2010) “Ethnography across disciplinary borders: A strategic response to increasing demand and decreasing resources,” Anthropology News September: 5, 8. Wallerstein, Immanuel (1990) “Culture is the world-system: A reply to Boyne,” Theory, Culture and Society, 7(2): 63–65. Wolf, Eric (1982) “Introduction,” in Europe and the People Without History, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–23. World Anthropologies Network (2003) “A conversation about a World Anthropologies Network,” Social Anthropology 11(2): 265–269. Yamashita, Shinji (2015) “East Asian anthropology: A Japanese perspective.” Comment,World Anthropology section. American Anthropologist 117(2): 376–377.

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PART II

Conceptualizing the field in/of anthropology

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2 ENGAGING THEOrY IN tHE NEW MILLENNIUM Faye V. Harrison

Giorgio Agamben, Benedict Anderson, Hannah Arendt, Mikhail Bakhtin, Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Manuel Castells, Michel de Certeau, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Patricia Hill Collins, Manuel de Landa, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Anthony Giddens, Antonio Gramsci, Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Donna Haraway, David Harvey, Martin Heidegger, bell hooks, Bruno Latour, Archille Mbembe, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Valentin Mudimbe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edward Said, Saskia Sassen, James Scott, Amartya Sen, Guyatri Spivak, Sylvia Wynter, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are among the transdisciplinary social theorists whose names and ideas have been invoked in relatively recent anthropological writings, particularly within sociocultural anthropology.1 Evidence of current trends, emergent shifts, and critical reworkings in anthropologists’ theoretical engagements, particularly those considered most authoritative, can be found in the writings of such anthropologists as Arjun Appadurai, Philippe Bourgois, Karen Brodkin, Jean and John Comaroff, Veena Das, Marisol de la Cadena, Virginia Dominguez, Arturo Escobar, Paul Farmer, James Ferguson, John Gledhill, Akhil Gupta, Charles Hale, John Jackson Jr., Setha Low, Henrietta Moore, Mwenda Ntarangwi, Francis Nyanmjoh, Aihwa Ong, Sherry Ortner, Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Nina Glick Schiller, David Scott, Ann Laura Stoler, Deborah Thomas, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Anna Tsing, Gina Ulysse, Mary Weismantel, Patricia Zavella … A brief sampling of anthropologists (some of whom are more visible and widely read than others) across a variety of specialty areas can give us a glimpse of the various ways theory is constructed, appropriated, critiqued, applied, and reworked in social inquiry that ranges from studies of neoliberalism, globalization, transnationalism, diasporas, development, and multiple modernities to those of gender and sexuality, racial identities, violence and social suffering, state restructuring, and plural dimensions of citizenship.

Contextualizing and setting the stage for the current “theoretical moment” Of course, lists are as problematic as they are informative. They never exhaust the relevant information, in this case, thinkers who have produced theoretically significant work, whether within realms of social theory outside of anthropology or within the disciplinary domain of ethnographic analysis and other modalities of anthropological writing.2 It is certainly not my intention to suggest that the individuals I include on these two lists are the only intellectuals or scholars deserving mention as “theorists” or, in the case of anthropologists, theoretically nuanced 27

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ethnographers (or ethnographically nuanced theorists). One of the main arguments I will make in this chapter is that especially at what US-based Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar (2008: 285) characterizes as the present theoretical moment, there is an expansion of the space and, thereby, a multiplication of the sites (along with the networks in between them), where various modes and forms of theorizing take place and are being claimed and acknowledged as such.3 As Escobar describes it, this new trend, with its more “complex conversations” (285), is “unsettling the megastructure of the academy” and flattening the “landscape of knowledge production” (306). This is leading toward the creation of more decentralized and decolonized conditions for reworking, reorienting, and, when possible, formulating new social theory. This process, he argues, can potentially contribute to the production of “other knowledges and knowledge otherwise” (306). Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2007), a visionary thinker affiliated with the world social forum and based in universities in both Portugal and the United States, describes this project as one predicated on the conviction that “another knowledge is possible beyond northern epistemologies.” According to these social scientists, the transformation of knowledge and, as I claim, its constituent theory-making processes has the potential to engender new understandings of reality that, ultimately, prepare us “to contribute to the creation of different worlds” (Escobar 2008:285). Because of my interest in how dominant traditions of theorizing, including the most mainstreamed critical traditions, are being called to undergo transformation and decentering so that a broader array of thinkers and texts can inhabit the spaces of multi-centric or “ex-centric” (Bhabha 1994:6) zones of theory, my focus will not be on most of the individuals I have mentioned thus far. In the context of this chapter, I am more concerned with the multivocal and intercultural strategies of theorizing and thinking about theory in which certain current anthropological analyses are bringing, for example, Wittgenstein into conversation with Das (1998, 2006), Foucault and Agamben with Mbembe (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2011), Mbembe with Caribbean theorists (Thomas 2011), and, as we shall see, Foucault and other prestigious academic scholars with vernacular philosophers on the frontlines of war and shadow economies in the Global South (Nordstrom 2011 [2009]). Intercultural conversations such as these are among the trends that contribute to the current theoretical moment.

Shifting from metropolitan centers to ex-centric sites This is an exciting time to think about the “theory-work” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011:48) anthropologists perform, its sources of inspiration, the domestic and international divisions of intellectual labor it relies on and implicates, and the diverse sites where it is undertaken. Over the past four decades, the expansion and refinement of feminist scholarship has led to important interventions in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences (e.g., Harding 2006). Cultural studies, critical race theory, critical race feminism, critical ethnic studies and accompanying minoritized and transnational perspectives, postcolonial discourse, global studies, and, reverberating across all of these, the turn toward varieties of postmodernism and poststructuralism (and their skepticism about or rejection of totalizing grand theories) have had significant disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and, in some instances, antidisciplinary impacts.4 In turn, these impacts have affected the criteria for, expectations of, and demands on the critical, creative and embodied practices that engender theory. Confluences such as these set the stage for the dialogues and exchanges that inspired important paradigm-shifting publications such as Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Smith 1999 [2012]), Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings (Lemert 1999), Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (The Latina Feminist Group 2001), Southern Theory:The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science (Connell 2007), 28

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and Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies (Santos 2007). Among many other things, these volumes, originating in different parts of the world, have brought greater visibility to thinkers and texts that would otherwise remain on the margins of, if not altogether erased from, the established social science canon, were it not for recent trajectories in critical social theory along with realignments in the wider material world. Roughly parallel trends in anthropology have been inscribed in Culture and Truth:The Remaking of Social Analysis (Rosaldo 1989), Recapturing Anthropology:Working in the Present (Fox 1991), Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology of Liberation (Harrison 2010 [1991]), Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining Native (Medicine 2001), Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (McClaurin 2001), World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006), and Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendant Cultural Politics (Hale and Stephens 2014). In these books the “coloniality” (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006:15), Eurocentrism and phallocentrism of much of anthropological knowledge are problematized, and epistemic diversity, in its varied domestic and international permutations, is embraced as a matter of both principle and intellectual imperative. The potentially promising disciplinary outcomes of “mov[ing] the project of theory-making to an ‘ex-centric site’” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011:3, quoting the postcolonial literary critic Homi Bhabha 1994:6) are being considered in a number of intellectual communities. Among them are feminist and minoritized scholars often working as “outsiders within” (Collins 1990; Harrison 2008) dominant North Atlantic traditions of anthropology as well as proponents of world anthropologies perspectives, most notably those articulated within the World Anthropologies Network (WAN). The consolidation of this latter approach over the past decade (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006) has challenged much of the conventional wisdom ultimately grounded in the dominance of Northern metropolitan anthropologies, particularly US anthropology.The anthropologies of the North have come to have the lion’s share of authority and institutional clout in determining the contents and contours of core, canonical knowledge.5 The critiques and alternative approaches of WAN’s proponents are situated within the larger context of “knowledge divides” that shape and constrain the social sciences on a world scale (ISSC/UNESCO 2010). Epistemological and structural disparities in the production of knowledge (e.g., in research capacity and access to publications and publishing pipelines) are recognized as an obstacle to “the accumulation, transmission and use of knowledge in different societies” (ISSR/UNESCO 2010:2).The implications of these international and also domestic divisions for anthropology are being elucidated by critical anthropologists situated in both the North and the South (Harrison 2008, 2012a). Clearly, the asymmetrical and unequal developments documented in the International Social Science Council’s 2010 world report are also manifest in the production, validation, and mobility or circulation of theory. Arjun Appardurai (1986), preeminent scholar of modernity and globalization, identified this problem quite a while ago, when he wrote about prestige and peripheral zones of theory. Prestige zones are, largely, constituted within the spheres of northern metropolitan universities, research institutes, research philanthropies, and publishing outlets.This does not mean, however, that theory is not produced elsewhere. For the most part, however, the theoretical contributions made in the peripheries have been absent from “the metropolitan gaze” (Appadurai 1986:360) or devalued via a skewed process of Western-mediated validation (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006:11). In the latter case, Southern scholarship is rendered as “local knowledge” or, at best, “area studies.” As a consequence, unintended or not, much of this scholarship is typically read more for its descriptive evidence of “parochial wisdom … [and] reservoirs of raw fact” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011:1) than for its value as a source of theory, particularly theory that can travel across cosmopolitan terrain and oceanic scapes. 29

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There is, nonetheless, an increasingly visible minority of Southern scholars (also labeled “postcolonial” and “subaltern” in other contexts) who have achieved considerable status and mobility within the circuits of transnational academia. Some are based at the most prestigious universities in the South (the North within the South, so to speak), but most Southern scholars with ample transnational cultural and social capital have become part of a postcolonial, new-­ immigrant elite incorporated into Northern universities, not uncommonly the most prestigious. There they enjoy advantages that the majority of their counterparts in the South do not. (In fact, the majority of non-immigrant academics in Northern higher education are much less privileged as well.) This hyperprivileged, deterritorialized elite (Dominguez 1994) is an important source of contemporary theory, especially in studies of globalization, transnationalism, multiple modernities, development, and public culture. They bring non-Western and Western theories into conversation, problematizing the inclination of some orientations to essentialize differences and harden boundaries.6

What is theory? What, then, do we mean by theory? Who does it, why, and for what audiences? How is it perceived, recognized, represented, and defined? How do critics of the hegemonic norms for theory construction conceptualize and enact alternative forms of it? Or do they unwittingly replicate those hegemonic forms? These are questions that need to be addressed if what we understand as theory is to be demystified, brought down to earth and recast along more democratic (i.e., non-elitist) and decolonizing lines. Much too often, theory is associated with the most abstruse, dense, and jargon-laden writing that is way above the heads of the typical reader. Does theory exist otherwise? Can conversations about it and about the world through its prism be expanded and leveled so that they include more voices speaking from the vantage of their variously “situated knowledges” (Haraway 1988)? The Kenyan writer and theorist of decolonizing the mind, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1986, 2012), certainly thinks so. In his notion of poor theory, informed by his experience in a former colony and current underdeveloped country, he emphasizes the creative, “maximizing… possibilities inherent in [the necessity of making the most, riches, out of ] the minimum” (2). This process draws on the analogy of many poor people’s creative strategies of survival in the face of abject structural poverty. He points out that “[p]oor theory may simply remind us that density of words is not the same thing as complexity [and clarity] of thought” (3). A similar line of thought is reflected in Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s (2007:206–207) perspective on producing theory, particularly the dirty theory that is grounded, without being trapped, in the specific landscapes “on which the theorist’s boots are planted” (206). This is a different starting point for developing the different levels of generalization with which social theory is built. Sherry Ortner has played a major role in thinking through and clarifying the assumptions and implications of social theory in anthropology, particularly as they relate to questions of practice and agency, gender and class, and culture’s relationship to power and history (Ortner 1984, 2006; Dirks, Eley, and Ortner 1994). According to her, theory comprises “a range of… thoughtframes—narratives, maps, categories, perspectives, positionalities—that operate as the conditions for allowing us to see and talk about social and cultural phenomena” (2006:90). It encompasses “concepts, metaphors, models, and accounts offering interpretive frames for making sense of evidence” (Harrison 2000:62, paraphrasing Ortner). She goes on to say that theory provides the “competing bigger pictures of how things are ‘really’ put together (regardless of what the natives say) and why” (Ortner 1998:436).7 As a locus of shared conversations and debates, it also allows 30

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us to “map the world in a way that [we] can understand the relationship” among different kinds of knowledge claims and ways of knowing (Ortner 1998:436). Zooming in on the usefulness of one specific kind of thought-frame, Ann Kingsolver views theory as “the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of life and to determine where we are as we navigate social space” (2001:4, emphasis mine). The various stories anthropologists tell to make sense of the world can operate at nomothetic and ideographic levels of interpretation and explanation. Although they still contend for recognition and authority (e.g., contemporary paradigms in scientific anthropology, including Darwinist theory [Logan and Qirko 1990; Logan and Ousley 2001], etc.), grand narratives (Lyotard 1979) are less en vogue today than in the past when totalizing, universalizing frameworks and paradigm-building pursuits were the dominant strategy for building the discipline’s track record as a science capable of answering “big questions,” such as those about human progress and evolution or about the deep structural logic or grammar of human cognition and behavior. Throughout anthropology’s history, grand theories (evolutionism, neo-evolutionism, structuralism, orthodox Marxism, modernization theory) have been in conversation with ideographic perspectives (historical particularism, transactionalism, ethnoscience, interpretivism, poststructuralism), sometimes in the form of polarizing debates. Anthropological thought has developed over the past century through a dialectical dialogue between these competing frames whose tensions have generated new questions and innovative strategies for expanding and reintegrating knowledge. While ideographic theory making in US anthropology dates back to historical particularism and, more recently, the interpretive anthropology of the 1960s and 1970s, the current predilection for “ethnography of the particular” (Abu-Lughod 2008 [1993]) and medium-level frameworks stem in good part from the “postmodern turn” (Lyotard 1979; Clifford and Marcus 1986), the impact of poststructuralism (e.g., Bourdieu 1977; Foucault 1980; Butler 2006), and the persuasiveness of other perspectives, including current versions of “culture and political economy” (di Leonardo 1991). Together these influences have given rise to an interest in grounding theory in: the historically contextualized, problem-driven effort to account for the production of social and cultural “facts” in the world by recourse to an imaginative methodological counterpoint between the inductive and the deductive, the concrete and the concept; also in a different register, between the epic and the everyday, the meaningful and the material—and, here in particular, between capitalism and modernity, the fitful dialectic at the core of our present concerns. In short, our predilection is for theory that neither is an all-embracing meta-narrative nor is microcosmically, myopically local, but tacks on the awkward scale between the two, seeking to explain phenomena with reference both to their larger determinations and their contingent, proximate conditions—by plumbing the complex, often counter-intuitive points of articulation among them. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011:48) In their Theory from the South, Jean and John Comaroff (2011) argue for approaching theory as “a praxis … whose object is to arrive at a principled sense of the connection between what it is that constitutes the lived world and how that world is affectively and cognitively experienced, acted upon, inhabited by sentient human subjects” (48–49).

Situating theory in gender, race, and other differences An important dimension of theorizing that is usually unrecognized or, if implicitly recognized, left unstated is that theory-making practices are situated in a matrix of interlocking hierarchies 31

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of difference and inequality.This has important ramifications both in academia and in the world at large. Catherine Lutz (1995) has insightfully illuminated the process of “theory gendering” and acknowledges that “[w]hen theory is gendered … it is simultaneously raced and classed” (1995:251); this is consistent with Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000 [1990]) idea of a matrix of domination with its overlapping hierarchies of difference, inequality, and power. In light of my mapping of theory across the terrain of world anthropologies and transnational mobility, I would also add (trans)national positionality as a salient social distinction and axis. Lutz (1995:253) argues that writing that is conventionally recognizable as theoretical, in anthropology and beyond, tends to be culturally encoded as masculine. She points out that in our culture “[w]omen’s discourse equals description (or complaint); male discourse equals theory, the covering law. The words of women do not have the same weight as the words of men, and theoretical words are especially heavy” (259). At best, female academics as well as male and female scholars of color have come to be associated with a theoretical middle ground, “a space for the … middlebrow between the white male theorist and the uneducated masses who are his students” (261). “Proper” theoretical writing, located comfortably within white male scholars’ purview: “describes a wider variety of instances rather than a single case”; consists of “more rather than less abstract statements” of wide relevance, “denuded of their origin in a writer and his or her experience or stripped of …reference to a concrete phenomenal world of specific contexts and history”; requires “more … substantial intellectual ‘gifts’ to compose” and, from readers’ vantage, to digest; is assumed to be serious, substantial, consequential, and profound; and has “traditionally allowed for the erasure of the subject—both the subject who writes and the human subjects who are written about” (Lutz 1995:259). An alternative to an ideology or philosophy of social science that assumes that theory is disembodied—and must be for the sake of objectivity—is the view that the neo-Marxist/postmodernist feminist philosopher Donna Haraway (1988) advances. The implication of her analysis is that theory is informed by partial perspectives which contribute to the production of situated knowledges. Situated knowledges are embodied and grounded in shared conversations mediated by webbed connections. These connections and potential coalitions of knowledge politics set the stage for the decoding, critique, analytical refinement, and synthesis that make collective vision and more comprehensive understanding possible. This view of theory goes against the grain of what the postmodern/socialist feminist philosopher Haraway portrays as the disembodied, omniscient, and abstract-universalist truth claims associated with the androcentric “god trick” (586). At this moment in anthropology’s history, there is growing awareness that a wider array of voices, practices, and texts matter in making and remaking theory as an integral dimension of situated knowledges. More than ever before, theorizing practices are bringing more diverse voices into dialogue and debate. Some of these voices would ordinarily be considered unexpected candidates for the (co)production of theory. Conventionally, voices such as these, subaltern in positionality, have been assigned the informant role, serving as a source of raw data for anthropologists to mine and convert into refined forms of explanation and knowledge. A move away from the traditional self/other, subject/object, and ethnographer/informant dichotomies allows anthropologists to practice an ethic and politics of social inquiry that engender less vertical and hierarchical relations of knowledge production along with the processes of theory formulation integral to them. There is greater appreciation now for the fact that our research subjects or interrogators talk back to anthropology and in some cases contribute to it in ways that bring significant insights to bear on the analytical and theoretical work that formally trained anthropologists do. There is also greater appreciation for what formally educated subalterns, anthropologists as well as other intellectuals, bring to the discipline.There is a regrettable history 32

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of their being exploited as glorified informants and field assistants rather than treated respectfully as professional peers (Jones 1970; Mafeje 1998; Obbo 1990; Harrison 2008, 2012a). Some anthropologists are attempting to redress the disciplinary coloniality that has long naturalized that asymmetry of power.

Storytelling and counter-storytelling about lived, embodied theory Carolyn Nordstrom (2011 [2009]) writes that through her creative nonfiction style of ethno­ graphy she plays the part of a bard recounting “philosophical stories” that translate the life-­ threatening experiences of war orphans, farmers, and others struggling to sustain themselves on the front lines of life and death. She is an engaged ethnographic witness to the “shadowy worlds” of war, war profiteering, and illegal drug, arms, and diamond smuggling in Africa and Asia (Notre Dame News nd). She claims that the stories she writes about the raw experiences of war orphans trouble the gatekeepers of “academic apartheid” (44). This is so because, in some of her writing (e.g., Nordstrom 2011), she has resisted performing the ritual of “genuflection by citation” (Brodkin 2011:21), a convention in mainstream academic publications. Rather than organizing her ethnographic evocation and analysis around established academic theory and theorists, she prefers to trace the genealogy of the ideas she elaborates to the people she encounters in life-threatening war zones. They, she insists, embody theory by “[living] Foucault in resistance to abusive violence” (37); and their “theories of life are as vibrant as any scholar’s” (35). In fact, she goes so far as to claim that their lived theories are even more vibrant, because too often scholarly theory is “bloodless” and, like a dead body, “missing its lifeforce” (40). Her strategy, therefore, is to bring academic social theory into meaningful dialogue with the vernacular philosophies lived and expressed on the frontlines of life and war (Harrison 2012b). Nordstrom claims to learn theories of life from kids (35) and other war survivors, who express them in everyday conversations. She gives interesting examples of how her research participants/consultants talk back to Foucault, Agamben, and others after she translates the scholars’ concepts of power, bare life, and sovereignty into intelligible terms that permit her local interlocutors to talk back and even explain to her what “western epistemologies lack” (40). She writes that: It is fascinating to me that when I take the jargon out of academic theory and explain it to people who may never had seen the inside of a classroom, they can engage with me on a level as deep as any of my university colleagues. I’ve discussed Foucault’s ideas about power with farmers in Sri Lanka. (“Foucault basically has it right, but needs to factor in humans’ ability to react to power on at least five simultaneous planes: a non-thoughtful submission to oppressive power, the thoughtful spark of creative resistance to this, the tools of history, the potential of the [creative] unknown, and the grounding of individual as social will”). African peasant women have patiently explained to me that western epistemologies of knowledge lack an understanding of the fact that perception is never a mere linear process; that even asking the question of whether sense, perception or raw knowing precedes knowledge misses the point (“Knowledge can be embedded in raw perception, knowing is sense, and in battles the survivors have learned perception-is-action-knowing-is-perception”). (2011:40–41) Mainstream gatekeepers of academic standards tend not to accept the philosophical storytelling and translation that Nordstrom’s writings perform as “real theory.” Citing field notes and transcribed or paraphrased conversations with war orphans and dislocated peasants rather than 33

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renowned European or Euro-descended “geniuses” is not the typical way to secure footing in academia, in light of the Realpolitik of the ivory tower as a prestige zone of theory. But what legitimacy do the echelons of higher learning, especially their most conservative sectors, have in the eyes and experiences of ordinary people who, in the United States as an example, are forced to navigate the vicissitudes of structural unemployment, welfare-to-workfare reform, an expanding prison-industrial complex (in spite of declining rates of property and violent crime, [Holleman et al. 2009:7]), the subprime mortgage crisis, and the still-unresolved problem of post-Katrina internal displacement (Gunewardena and Schuller 2008)? As I have already pointed out, there is an increasingly visible minority of academics like Nordstrom, who embrace forms of social inquiry and counter-storytelling that are publicly engaged, participatory, and collaborative (e.g., Hale and Stephen 2014; Reiter and Oslender 2015). In this context, theory is not for theory’s sake or primarily for an expert-specialty audience. It is a tool for making a difference in people’s lives. A similar view is powerfully expressed in the late literary/cultural critic Barbara Christian’s remarks that many feminists and scholars of color “seek knowledge, write, teach, and theorize to save our own lives” (Harrison 2008: 79, paraphrasing Christian 1987). This approach to theory-work goes against the grain of dominant social scientific accounts and the conventional audiences that consume them. Ferreting out the theorizing that ordinary and, in some cases, extraordinary people perform to make sense of their lives and to devise strategies for rehumanizing themselves, especially when under threat, is what some anthropologists are interested in doing (e.g., Ulysse 2007). Mark P. Whitaker’s Learning Politics from Sivaram (2007), an intellectual biography of the Sri Lankan Tamil journalist, Sivaram Dharmeratnam, is an exemplary account of a revolutionary freedom fighter and learned intellectual who lived his embattled praxis, theory, and practice inextricably intertwined. The unfortunate victim of a political assassination in 2005, his life was sacrificed in the civil war between the Tamil minority and Sinhalese majority. But his legacy lives on in manifold ways, including in Whitaker’s intellectual biography, which reveals the logic and context of a politics and a theory informed by a cosmopolitan literacy. As both Nordstrom and Whitaker’s writings reveal, ethnographic subjects are diverse in terms of their positionality, knowledge, and the forms their theorizing assumes. Ethnographically elicited theory can range from vernacular orature to the oral and textual narrations of formally educated interlocutors. Across such diverse contexts, anthropological accounts of “how things are ‘really’ put together” (Ortner 1998:436) do not necessarily trump “what the natives say,” contrary to what Ortner seems to imply.

Indigenous theory situated beyond the boundaries of local knowledge Another provocative ethnographer who has taken the meaning, value, and implications of lived, embodied theory quite seriously is Latin Americanist Mary Weismantel (1995). She has studied how the Indios of Zumbagua theorize kinship and family formation; she demonstrates the relevance of Zumbagua theory well beyond the local field site(s) where she did her research. Like Nordstrom, Weismantel uses theory she learned from her research subjects who were not formally trained as intellectuals or theorists. They were ordinary Indios and Indias who turned out to be much more than the typical “informants” from whom data are elicited and later interpreted largely through the lens of external and distant sources of theory. Zumbagua views of kinship do not rely on notions that assume biological or biologized reckoning of family relationships, with adoption serving as a compensatory device when consanguineal kinship fails to fulfill its “natural” roles and responsibilities. Among Zumbagua residents, adoptions occur frequently among blood relatives, who build with their rearranged connections 34

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dense kin ties that provide overlapping networks of support for “[surviving] the vicissitudes of life on the economic periphery” (Weismantel 1995:689). Weismantel offers a cogent argument that Zumbagua perspectives on making kin through ongoing interactions such as feeding and caring for adopted children constitute the elements of a materialist social theory. She makes its assumptions, concepts, and propositions explicit and formalized for the purpose of her analysis. Her explanatory account of the Zumbagua world gives her a deeper understanding of the issues at stake in the workings of gender, adoption, and family dynamics not only in the village and farmsteads where she did fieldwork in Ecuador. She also finds that the materialist theory of Zimbagua’s indígena offers significant insights into the dilemmas and expectations of kinship in the United States. Hegemonic notions of what constitutes a family (traditionally assumed to be a heteronormative nuclear unit), who belongs to it, and who is legally recognizable as a parent with custody over a child (complicated in the age of surrogacy and same-sex marriage) are being challenged by significant cultural change, shifts in legal norms, and contentious litigation in US society. Weismantel’s distillation and elaboration of indigenous materialist theory shows that it is more than what is conventionally characterized as emic or “native/insider” data. It is at once local and extra-local in its relevance for making sense of family-making processes cross-culturally, at least in the two sites Weismantel links in this instance. She makes no universalist claims and belies those undergirding the functionalism and biodeterminism she and other feminist anthropologists, notably Collier and Yanagisako (1987), problematize. Indigenous theory is not limited to ethnographic sources such as in Nordstrom’s and Weismantel’s cases. There are also indigenous scholars with formal training in anthropology and related social sciences who engage and construct theory, often embedded in ethnographic and ethnohistorical analysis. The late American Indian anthropologist Beatrice Medicine (2001, 2007) is one example of an ethnographer committed to developing an indigenous model for explaining and preventing abuse among American Indians, particularly the Lakota Sioux, the nation of people to whom she herself belonged. Her theorization and model building were grounded in applied work geared toward the betterment of indigenous people’s lives. Native American Studies scholar Jack D. Forbes (1993), whose training was in both history and anthropology, made important interventions that challenged conventional racial constructs, especially the historically contingent, shifting boundaries between “Indian” and “Black” in a context in which centuries of contact, interaction, and intermarriage occurred in the Americas. Beyond indigenous intellectuals in the United States but on the same wavelength with them, Maori/Pacific scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999 [2006]; Denzin, Lincoln, and Smith 2008) has had a major impact on rethinking the contours of methodology, which links theory with the most appropriate strategies for research design and practice. Her approach to decolonizing methodologies is participatory and very much grounded in the epistemology, social ontology, and urgent public policy interests of indigenous peoples and other subjugated communities. Debate on “native” anthropologies in the global south, not necessarily “indigenous” in the same “fourth-world” sense as I have used it thus far, can also be dated back to Hussein Fahim’s (1982) Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries, the proceedings of a 1978 ­Wenner-Gren–sponsored Burg Wartenstein symposium (also see Fahim and Helmer 1980). “Native anthropology” is also a label claimed by various anthropologists native to the communities or imagined communities that they investigate (e.g.,Thomas-Houston 2005). In this sense, minoritized anthropologists studying racially and ethnically subordinated communities as well as white anthropologists working in Anglo-North America (historically also a peripheral zone of analysis and theory in US anthropology) are also native anthropologists in a discipline whose foundations were built on Europeans and Euro-Americans studying down the racial, class, and 35

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national ladder—that is, studying geopolitically and culturally distant ethnographic Others. Delmos Jones (1970) was one of the earliest anthropologists to invoke a concept of native anthropology. He addressed the prospects and disciplinary benefits of the subaltern production of counter-narratives among US minority and “third world” anthropologists—both of whom are native to and have been “nativized” with respect to traditionally “anthropologized” cultures.

Southern, ex-centric sites of theory-making War zones, peasant villages, and indigenous families and communities may be within the spectrum of peripheral sites where theorizing can occur, but universities and other socially recognized settings associated with intellectual activities (museums, research institutes, publishing media, nongovernmental organizations [NGOs]) are the official venues where the “usual suspects” are based in both the North and South. The ISSR/UNESCO (2010) report on world social science focused on the local, regional, and global conditions that have created major gaps and inequalities in intellectual production and circulation, and learned ignorance in Northern universities’ social science programs about the remarkable traditions of social theory in other parts of the world, particularly outside of the North West Atlantic world. Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell (2007) takes the laudable and ambitious initiative to introduce her readers to the multi-sited South’s silenced intellectual pasts and neglected trajectories of social theory. After summarizing the history of Northern theory, situating it in the context of Empire, the Enlightenment, and later modern and late-modern developments (notably globalization and how it is imagined), she turns her attention to the diverse Souths and the particular themes, foci, and problems social theorists have engaged in their respective milieus: Australia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Islamic world (principally Iran or Persia), Latin America, and India. She ends with a chapter on “social science on a world scale,” in which she raises questions about the relations among knowledges, their production and circulation, and the relevance of social knowledge for democracy and democratic movements, which, she claims, are confronting the assaults on truth under the regime of neoliberal power (230). A good portion of Connell’s chapter on Indian/South Asian social theory focuses on feminist theorizations of gender and violence. She devotes an entire section to the anthropologist/ sociologist Veena Das, who spent the first three decades of her distinguished career at the University of Delhi before moving to the United States to assume positions at the New School of Social Research and Johns Hopkins.8 Connell focuses her discussion on Das’ Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (1995), a major contribution to postcolonial anthropological theory that challenges the “monopoly [on] intellectual framing” that “metropolitan social theorists” have held in the study of India (Connell, 177). The book “demonstrates, among other things, that powerful theorizing about gender violence is generated from the Indian experience” (Ibid.). Questioning the assumptions of classic ethnography, Das examines the life-world (Husserl 1970 [1936], Habermas 1987) of contemporary communities as political actors within the nation-state. She explains the emergence of “new formations of community and culture,” which have become the loci of major contemporary conflicts (Connell 2001: 177–178, quoting Das 1995:12). Das examines a series of the conflicts and episodes of painful social suffering that have transpired over the past two generations of Indian modernity: “violence against women in the 1947 Partition,” divorced Muslim women’s legal claims for alimony, the social outcomes of death by sati, the rise of separatist Sikh militancy, and the devastating 1984 industrial ­chemical disaster at Bhopal (Connell, 178). In most of these cases, women suffered gendered violence—“mass rape, abduction … mutilation…and [honor] killings” (179)—and structural 36

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and discursive violence from the State and medical profession, which redefined reality by mobilizing a rhetoric of suffering survivors to advance institutional power rather than the interests of “the people [they] claimed to represent” (179). Those people’s voices were silenced and their agency erased from official interpretations of the events. Das provides a keen analysis of the intricacies of discourse, “gender relations and state power” (179, 180). Her analysis punctuates theoretical nuances lacking in sociological and anthropological traditions. For example, she departs from the Durkheimian emphasis on equilibrium and social integration as well as complicates Levi-Straussian assumptions about women being “signs in matrimonial exchanges among men” (179). She argues instead that “[i]n situations of crisis, women become signs in a monstruous exchange of pollution and hatred between groups of men and women’s bodies become the men’s battleground” (179). The “moments of [pain and] terror” she scrutinizes were shaped well outside of the sociocultural logic of reproducing social relations, the emphasis within structural-functionalism. A theory of chaos, she argues, is more illuminating than “the time-honored tradition in sociology [and anthropology] to look for meaning in the face of suffering” (181). In more recent work, specifically her Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (2006), Das revisits two of the critical events she examines in her earlier book: violence against women during the 1947 Partition of India to create Pakistan and, the other side of Sikh militant separatism, the violence targeting Sikhs in the aftermath of the 1984 assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.This time, however, her interrogation proceeds with the help of a different theoretical/philosophical prism. Toward this end, she draws on philosopher Stanley Cavell’s (e.g., 1989) interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s works, especially the latter’s posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953), considered by some leading critics to be one of the most important works of the 20th century. In this work in which a philosophy of culture was foreshadowed, Wittgenstein explores language and language games, whose unfixed life and meaning, he argued, lie in the multiplicity and diversity of ways language is used. This activity-oriented approach marked a major shift from “the philosopher’s craving for generality” and from locating meaning in formal representation or objective external space (Biletzi and Matar 2009). Wittgenstein rejects the search for general explanations in favor of seeking “family resemblance” by “traveling” with a word’s uses through “a complicated network of similarities, overlapping and criss-crossing” (Wittgenstein 1953:66). Wittgenstein situates language games in the context of “a form of life,” in which the interpretation and application of rules is laden with skepticism and paradox. Using Cavell as a guide in her Life and Words, Das “[articulates] a deep reading of Wittgenstein with the interpellation of ancient and contemporary Sanskrit, Hindi, Gujerati, Bengali and Urdu philosophies” (DiFruscia 2010:136). As a result, she develops a unique intercultural framework to interrogate the relationship between ordinary life (which is not uncommonly violent, as in the case of domestic violence) and extraordinary violence, implicating panic rumors and other public discourses in the process. Das stated the following in an interview about her theoretical objectives: I see everyday life as a kind of achievement, not just as part of habit…the kind of work that needs to be done to maintain the everyday, and the ways in which the ordinary and the extraordinary are braided together in our ordinary lives are theoretically much more difficult to understand. Throughout very extraordinary moments, all kinds of ordinary things have to continue to be done. And it seems to me that very often it is at this junction that we lose interest in what is at stake. By underlining that resistance can be romanticized, I do not mean that the notion of resistance is never to be appreciated, 37

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or that it never plays any role. But I want to think of moments of resistance as also integrated and carried forward into ordinary life. (DiFruscia 2010: 137) Das’ social analysis and theoretical intervention are intended to “[witness] the descent into the everyday through which victims and survivors affirm the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild—leading words home, so to speak” (Guggenheim 2009). As she sees it, her task has been to explicate “the everyday as a site on which [to] see the closeness of both the ordinary and its violation… to track the traces of each in the other.” Besides the profound influence of Wittgenstein and Cavell, she credits Arthur Kleinman, Talal Asad, and Arjun Appadurai as being other important influences on her scholarship, which has been a major force in anthropological theorizations of gender, violence, social suffering, and the State. In terms of the public and moral role that anthropological analysis and theory can play, she says that anthropology offers “evidence that contests the official amnesia and systematic acts of making evidence disappear” (Guggenheim 2009). This is consistent with the conviction she expressed in Critical Events in which she argued that anthropological analysis: should resist complicity with all attempts at establishing monopolies of truth, whether those of the modern state, or those of the ‘communities’ claiming space in politics, or those of professional communities … It is a matter of urgency to challenge these meta-narratives, to allow other narratives to come forth, and to relate different narratives to each other. This … allows alliance (even more, ‘consubstantiation’) with the truth of the victims, the truth incarnate in the victim. This allows new possibilities for pursuing justice, ‘and an anthropology which can be seen a forming one body with the victim.’ (Connell 2007:181, citing Das 1995:23, 209)

Other formulations of theory from the South Connell’s approach to Southern theory privileges intellectuals who were and are, for the most part, (Sub-Saharan/Black) African, Asian, and Latin American. But she also maps Australian sociology and anthropology in her cartography of the South. Although a settler colony in origin and legacy, Australia has produced hybrid social research and theory traditions that while developing in tandem with metropolitan (UK and US) variants, has “recognized a wider spectrum of possibilities inherent in the geopolitical situation of a rich peripheral country and the history of settler colonialism… For the first time … it is possible to move beyond the traditional link with the metropole to link with the intellectual projects of other regions of the periphery” (2007:86). A factor contributing to this new direction is Australian social scientists’, especially anthropologists’, realization of the significance of issues of land, land rights, displacement, dispossession, and their implications for Aboriginal and settler-descended Australians, especially at a juncture when indigenous movements are taking their claims to court. Taking the social and political life of historical memory, litigation, and indigenous rights seriously has implications for the construction of “grounded theory” (206) or “dirty theory (207), that is, theorizing that is removed from the generation of “pure general theory” in the abstract and grounded in the soil, the land, of specific concrete situations, “drawing into the analysis and explanation” a “wealth of materials,” multiplying the local sources and insights that are worked with in making theory (209). 38

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South Africa is another former settler colony that, in many respects, bridges the North and South and is in the midst of the struggle to produce a postcolonial and post-apartheid anthropology that reflects its interstitial or intermediate position, complicating the conventional mapping of North and South, of European and African. In their Theory from the South or How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa (2011), Jean and John Comaroff present the distillation of their thinking of over the past several years on theorizing modernity from locations other than Western Europe and Euro-America. The intellectual history of dominant social theory is firmly based in North Atlantic metropolitan contexts, the rest of the world being assigned the labor of yielding “parochial wisdom” and “reservoirs of raw fact” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2011:1) to Northern “data mining” (Connell 2007:81). That this division of labor is shifting is demonstrated in the Comaroffs’ approach, which recognizes the salience of ex-centricity in contemporary social analysis, especially in places like South Africa and other parts of the Global South, where trends in predatory governance, economic development (both official and illicit), crime, corruption, public health disparities and pandemics (HIV/AIDS), xenophobia, and other aspects and effects of neoliberal capitalism’s structural violence (18) appear to be shifting northward or reflected in “the north going south” (17).They argue that, hitherto, social theorists have failed to “recognize in Africa, Asia, and Latin America the traces of things about to happen” in the North, which, as in the case of the United States, “has been in decline since the 1970s.” The Comaroffs claim that we are now witnessing a parodic counter-evolution that reverses the expected outcomes predicted in the now discredited grand narratives of Euro-modernity, once presumed to be the universal ideal and yardstick for the underdeveloped or developing world. We can anticipate the future of the North by observing what is happening in the South. Accordingly, they posit that “it is the global south that affords privileged insights into the workings of the world at large” and, therefore, it is from there that theory-work should spring forth (1).Their book is most provocative and compelling in its effort to “subvert the epistemic scaffolding” on which established social theory is built and the world is interpreted. Toward this end, “‘Africa’ perform[s] a radically new kind of work in theory—a work radically different in its nature and scope from the one ‘Africa’ has always been historically assigned to perform” (Mbembe 2012). Africa provides a heuristic window on the workings and potential futures of global capitalism. Theorizing from the South, as the Comaroffs claim to do, is based on their life-long careers as Africanists doing fieldwork mainly in South Africa (among the Tswana). Their theoretical project is also informed and motivated by the fact that they themselves are South Africans who have spent much of their lives there while having the University of Chicago as the principal base of their professional work, their theory-work in particular.They are ensconced in the prestige zone of theory in the United States and travel, packed with abundant academic capital, back and forth across the transnational field linking Chicago and now Harvard, where they are currently based, to the University of Cape Town (where they hold honorary professorships) and other South African institutions.The topography of the South that they inhabit, as members of a transnational intelligentsia, is stratified, and fractured, quite an uneven playing field.That unevenness is reflected in how the Comaroffs go about scripting their performance and performing their script of theory from the South. Without a doubt, Theory from the South clearly demonstrates its authors’ remarkable intellectual breadth, their command of an extensive transdisciplinary history of ideas and sociology of knowledge situated across expansive hemispheric and other relevant borders. Their engagement of scholarship and theory emanating from both the North and South far surpasses the conventional academic practice. It is refreshing and quite a challenge to witness the invocation of W.E.B. Du Bois (1933 [1903]), Frantz Fanon (1967), Mahmood Mamdani (e.g., 1996), Friedrich Nietzsche (1957), and many others in the same text. Nonetheless, the theory—or, as Mbembe (2012) suggests, the cacophony of things that “theory” glosses—that is most explicitly engaged and 39

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reworked is that of the “usual suspects”—Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2005) on bare life in the sovereign state of exception, Hannah Arendt (1958) on the condition of human life, David Harvey (1989, 2005) on postmodernity and neoliberalism, Friedrich Nietzsche (1957) on historical memory, Walter Benjamin (2009) on memory’s subversion of reigning narrative authority, Carl Schmitt (1996 [1927]) on the political in the modern world, Michel Foucault (e.g., 1980, 1991, 1997 [1980], 2008) on a number of matters related to his far-ranging oeuvre, and so on. Of course, the relevance and significance of these thinkers, some representing recent trends, others resurrected from earlier periods (e.g., Arendt, Benjamin, Nietzche, Schmitt), are undisputed, but the question arises whether there are less visible non-European scholars, particularly African scholars, whose theorizing of relevant matters would warrant a higher profile in this book.9 A wide range of potential candidates is cited, but even Mbembe (2001), often touted as the most brilliant postcolonial theorist contemporary Africa has produced, receives only a few passing mentions rather than the detailed dialogue one might expect, especially in light of the significance of the “postcolony” concept in the Comaroffs’ writings (e.g., 1998, 2006). Their Cameroonian colleague coined this concept (Mbembe 1992a, 1992b). The sort of exposure to African theorists one might have expected Theory from the South to offer may be accomplished, in part, through the extensive critical discussion the book has gene­rated subsequent to its publication. For instance, Mbembe was invited to participate in an American Anthropological Association forum on the book that the journal Cultural Anthropology published online (February 2012). His excellent remarks and friendly critique show that he has a great deal to say about the role that Africa and its uneven incorporation into global capitalism should play in contemporary theory. Postcolonial literary scholar Srinivas Aravamudan’s comments in the same forum raise significant questions about the Comaroffs’ project, noting that it “is much less from the South than it is about the South” (Aravamudan 2012). It is certainly a product of its authors’ relationship to and mobility between both the North and South. ­Aravamudan is quite forthright in asking whether it is appropriate to characterize the project as one of speaking for the South, and …speaking on behalf of that which theorizes itself mutedly, but that particular muted situation needs the Comaroffs to provide the academic megaphone that makes that theorizing audible.Then we are more on the classic terrain of “they cannot represent themselves—they must be represented,” and this is not so much about the Northern expropriation of Southern value as it is about the academic recognition, explanation, and advocacy of anthropological life-worlds. In which case, the grandstanding claim by the Comaroffs that their theory is from the South is more window-dressing than it is a new version of epistemological continentalism.

More on theorizing African experiences Beyond the Comaroffs’ project, a number of interesting trends have emerged in which anthropologists are self-consciously attempting to move away from the Euro- and andro-centric underpinnings of earlier treatments and renderings of Africa, which has historically represented a site of radical alterity (Otherness, difference) in Western regimes of representation and know­ ledge. This makes studies of late-modern sociocultural landscapes in Africa a useful window on anthropological theory-work, given the discipline’s traditional bias toward making ethnographic sense of the Other.The ethnographic record for Africa now includes some exemplary depictions that diverge from the preoccupations with the dystopic landscapes to which Mbembe (2012) alludes in his response to Theory from the South. The theory-work that “Africa” can perform in rethinking modernity, development, state sovereignty and governmentality is significant. 40

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Brenda Chalfin’s (2010) ethnography of Ghana’s neoliberal experience, Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa, focuses on the restructuring of state sovereignty as evidenced at multiple sites of the customs service. She portrays Ghana as an innovative trend-setter on the African continent as well as on the global stage, presaging a model of rational bureaucratic reorganization whose best practices are worthy of being followed by other states. This case study contrasts with the rampant representations of predatory and rogue states, of “things fall[ing] apart,” if I may play with Chinua Achebe’s (1959) book title. Chalfin views her analysis of the workings of late-modern sovereignty in West Africa as a project in formulating theory on “neoliberal state formation from an African vantage point” (4).Toward that end, she makes use of an extensive repertoire of conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools, a toolkit that enables her to illuminate: the lives and outlooks of those who inhabit the polity. Customs officials, at once enmeshed with the public—to which they themselves belong—play a central role in negotiating the forces of sovereign transformation. Far from being a static and faceless bureaucratic corps, Customs officers’ implementation of changing codes of governance involves a concomitant reworking of ways of being and knowing, of self, sociality, and morality to alter the ontology of sovereign power.” (242–243) Chalfin’s theoretically nuanced ethnography of Ghanaian Customs provides a refreshing view of neoliberalization that does not homogenize it as inevitably nefarious. She shows that, in spite of the constraints, there is space in which state officials and state subjects maneuver, yielding outcomes that are relatively innovative and resourceful. Going back quite a few years, we can revisit Gracia Clark’s Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women (1995), a magisterial ethnography of Kumasi market women’s navigation of the Ghanaian economy and their shrewd negotiations with the State when the country was under the throes of structural adjustment policies. Clark offers an insightful, ethnographically rich picture of the State’s attacks on the local market (over “goods allocation, price controls, and other issues”) (372) and Kumasi market women’s resilience in ensuring the marketplace system’s survival and, thereby, that of their families and communities under increasingly inauspicious circumstances imposed by the entrenchment of a neoliberal regime. The aspect of Clark’s ethnographic analysis that I wish to place in the foreground is her use and reworking of Black feminist theory as an integral component of her analysis as a British-trained economic anthropologist and as a Euro-American who began her junior faculty years in a joint appointment with anthropology and African/African Americana studies.This means that she participated in ongoing conversations framed around the intellectual interests and priorities within Africana studies, an inter- or trans-discipline in which Africans and African-descended scholars are vying for respect and legitimacy in Euro-American dominated academia. As she reveals in the preface, another formative experience that had a tremendous impact on her thinking was her involvement in the feminist community in Washington, DC, where she encountered “the presence of active, articulate Black feminists [who] had an unmistakable influence on theory and practice” (xiii).This activist experience and her later professional alignment with Africana studies prepared her for the challenges she eventually faced as an ethnographer in Kumasi. Mulling over which “theoretical windows” would be most appropriate for making coherent sense of her ethnographic materials concerning Ghanaian market women’s capacity for social action, Clark writes the following: I needed a theoretical framework that could integrate the full range of resources and strategies they integrated, identifying their most significant aspects and suggesting 41

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how they fit together without necessarily privileging one or another in an absolute way. The specific relations that Kumasi women traders drew upon to accumulate or to survive included family and ethnic relations, international and regional relations, national politics, as well as marketplace relations, I wanted to talk about these relations together without suppressing the distinctive historical experience of each and without implying that I was leaving the women behind as women by talking about concerns of theirs not simply defined by gender. Their multiple identities as women, Africans, traders, Ghanaians, Asantefo, Kumasifo, etc. did not just have effects on each other, but each was only experienced in a form that incorporated the others. This mutual construction process involved as much contradiction as reinforcement, and traders themselves constantly used one identity as leverage upon another. Each identity group was deeply differentiated by the same processes of mutual implication that generated them and empowered them for effective social action and eventual historical transformation. (26) She decides that the theoretical framework “most hospitable to this multi-faceted analysis” is embedded in the scholarship and political manifestos of Black American feminists, among them the Combahee River Collective (2009 [1978]) and Patricia Hill Collins (1990). Karen Brodkin Sacks (1989, now Karen Brodkin) and Leith Mullings (1996) have been leaders among feminist anthropologists who have adopted and reworked elements from this body of theory as well as from perspectives that other ethno-racially minoritized and working-class women, have produced (Clark 1995: 27). The theoretical model in question was constructed to explain multiple forms of oppressions and interlocking axes of domination, what Collins (1990) calls a matrix of domination. This model and variations of it (e.g., Crenshaw 1991) usually interrogate the interaction or “intersection(ality)” among “the holy trinity”—race, gender, and class—but, as Clark points out, the model can “easily be expanded [or adapted] to accommodate additional [or other] axes, such as ethnicity” and, I would add in light of more recent research and worldly struggles, sexuality and religious affiliation. Clark’s reworking of an intersectional strategy for theorizing a historically contingent case of Ghanaian women’s agency in overlapping kinship, economic, and political arenas represents an instantiation of the usefulness of Black feminist theory beyond the national borders of its origins. Clark facilitates the substantiation and transnational mobility of a thought-frame originally crafted largely in the margins of US civil society and academia, as a periphery of two peripheries, the male-dominated black freedom struggle and the women’s movement. It is important to point out that Black feminist theorists from the United States have participated in international conversations with counterparts from other parts of the world, including feminists from other parts of the African diaspora and the African continent (Zerai 2014). A number of key Caribbean and African feminists have played an important part in building the international women’s movement (Antrobus 2004; Pala 1995). The practice of situating gender within a wider analysis that implicates the workings of class disparities, the political ecology of rural-urban spatialization, development, and imperialism is integral to African(a) (i.e.,African and African diasporic) feminisms. Nonetheless, most of these articulations have enjoyed much less international visibility than US-based Black feminism, which since the 1970s has made inroads into academia and, as a consequence, undergone greater formalization and circulation through transnational circuits and outlets dominated by the English language. Although US-­centeredness and Anglophone bias are problems, the usefulness of African-American feminist scholarship, with its explicit intersectional framework and rejection of a race-evasive, homogenized sisterhood, has been acknowledged (Barriteau 2006). 42

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Clark’s contribution to the study of multiple identities/oppressions is not an appropriation without proper acknowledgment of Black feminist “author-ity” in theory-work. Problems of appropriation and erasure are, however, common. With respect to these concerns, A. Lynn Bolles (1995), drawing on Decolonizing Anthropology (Harrison 2010 [1991]), has addressed the need to decolonize feminist anthropology. Clark is obviously in accord with this view, as are Irma McClaurin and the contributors to Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (2001). One of the contributors to the latter book, Carolyn Martin Shaw, is an Africanist who has conducted ethnographic research in Kenya among the Kikuyu, particularly Kikuyu women. Her thought-provoking book, Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex and Class in Kenya (1995), is worth revisiting, because it addresses questions of theory in a clear, accessible way. Identifying herself as a postmodernist, she explains: her reading of the variegated theoretical literature in anthropology, from structural-functionalist accounts to poststructural and postcolonial engagements; her critique of the turn away from theory that resulted from the preoccupation with ethnographic representation; her own “personal synthesis” of the several elements key to her understanding of postmodernism as a potentially affirmative, liberatory tool (see endnote # 4); and the basis for her “serious quarrels with Foucauldian discourse” (that is, as it existed before the availability of Foucault’s later writings, which appear to reevaluate subjectivity [Paras 2006]). Her critique “[has] to do with the disappearance of the individual as agent in shaping his or her own reality, the reification of abstract concepts and cumulative processes, and the postulation of the major overarching linkages as coming from the episteme” (21–22). Her thoughtful constructive criticism of Foucault along with her deep understanding of Kenya’s historically constituted interculturality makes it possible for her to delineate a sophisticated, theoretically nuanced strategy for analyzing “the borderland between European and African knowledge and experience” (1).The lens she crafts for her examination is developed for a close reading of writings (including ethnographies, memoirs, novels) by Kenyans, black and white, and other representations, including commercial films and other repositories of images. Shaw’s discourse analysis of the several forms of cultural and knowledge production that contributed to Kenya’s intercultural landscape is clearly enhanced by her ethnographically informed reading of the relevant texts. In this way, she diverges from the typical work in cultural studies that is long on text-based theory but short on empirical evidence. Shaw’s critical reworking of Foucauldian techniques for analyzing discourse is part of a larger body of anthropological analysis, and within it feminist work, that draws heavily on Foucault’s conceptualization of discourse and power (e.g., Wilson 1995) and, more recently, specifically on governmentality and biopolitics.

African gazes and voices speaking for themselves The late South African anthropologist Archie Mafeje (1998) wrote critically and compellingly about the tendency of European and Euro-American Africanists to relegate Black African anthropologists and other intellectuals to key informant and data mining roles rather than acknowledging them as peers and co-producers in making anthropology. His experience was so negative that he argued for a post-anthropological mode of inquiry and analysis. Despite African anthropologists’ awareness of and dissatisfaction with their relative marginality, along with the material constraints that sustain the present status quo, a number of them are playing an important part in remaking anthropology. They are working toward creating conditions for Africans on the continent and in diaspora to participate more visibly and audibly in developing theory from the South. 43

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Kwesi Kwaa Prah (2008), a Dutch-trained Ghanaian anthropologist based in South Africa, articulates a fairly optimistic perspective on anthropology’s future on the continent, provided that it “sheds its colonial baggage” (53) and eliminates “otherness” (96). Rather than echo the call for a post-anthropological moment, Prah is of the view that anthropology cannot really exist without Africans “as either subjects or objects” (95). He agrees, in a sense, with the Comaroffs about the imperative of Africa becoming a center of gravity in the production of knowledge and theory. Envisioning for anthropology a “universalism of all voices … not a universalism under restrictive hegemony,” he urges that “the ‘otherness’ … which the history of Western anthropology has imposed on Africa [be] removed” (Prah 2008:96). He goes on to say that “we must all, North and South, learn to look at ourselves, hear others about ourselves and themselves, and above all allow others to speak for themselves” (96, emphasis mine). Claiming the space within the discipline to speak for themselves is exactly what is increasingly happening. Nigerian anthropologist Ifi Amadiume (1987), for example, has talked back to feminist anthropologists about their conceptualization of gender in her ethnography of Igbo male daughters and female husbands. Her thinking, along with that of Oyēwumi (1997) based on Yoruba material, has generated a great deal of debate among Western and African scholars (e.g., Bakari-Yusuf 2004). Cameroonian anthropologist Francis B. Nyamnjoh (2011), now in South Africa after many years at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), based in Senegal, has written about African anthropology and its relationship to other media and genres for writing about culture and power, especially fiction informed by ethnographic data. Nyamnjoh is both an accomplished ethnographer and a prolific writer of novels (e.g., 2009) and other creative works (poetry and plays). (Interestingly, Amadiume is also a literary artist [a poet] as well as an ethnographer.) Rather than treating his creative writing as merely a hobby or avocation, he “consciously [navigates] between fiction and anthropology,” despite the fact that a serious dialogic and cross-fertile relationship between them has “yet to gain legitimacy and popularity” (2011:702). In the case of Nyamnjoh and many other African intellectuals who write not only for a largely Western academic audience but also for African readers who are directly affected by the issues that ethnographers address, Nyamnjoh explains his need to discuss [his] research in a much more complex and nuanced manner than is usually possible in disciplinary writing. More importantly, [he has] been driven by a desire to take the discussion of research beyond the ivory tower, to the very people whose daily predicaments are at the heart of scholarly work. (702) For African anthropologists like him to reach the audience that is part of the raison d’être for their scholarship, they bring ethnography and fiction into productive conversations.This is especially necessary given anthropology’s intense lack of popularity and credibility in Africa and in other parts of the world as well. Anthropology, even its most liberal versions, is perceived to be more interested in talking at, on, and about Africans than in talking with them, which entails listening to what African voices have to say (702). He points out that in an effort to dissociate from anthropology’s emphasis on radical alterity, “[e]thnographic research by Africans has been channeled through the outlets of other, purportedly less tainted disciplines. Fiction is one of the most common vehicles used by African intellectuals to document and share ‘insider’ accounts of their societies.” In some instances, creative, literary writing has become required reading in university curricula—but not in anthropology. As an example, Nyamnjoh refers to an epic poem that has reached that level of popularity: 44

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[O]ne of the best “anthropological” representations of Africans’ simultaneous disenchantment and fascination with colonial education and Western lifestyles is Song of Lawino, an epic poem by the late Okot p’Bitek (1989). Initially trained as an anthropologist, on his return to Uganda from the United Kingdom, p’Bitek used fiction to question the misrepresentations induced by colonial education in Africa. His is a very popular text in universities across Africa, read by students of African literature, who are reluctant to embrace anthropology. But it is not a popular reading in anthropology because of its label as fiction. (2011:702) One of the ways to discern the form and content of theory in the anthropology that Africans (re)make is to explore the conversations between ethnography and fiction. According to Joan Vincent (1991:47), ethnography is “the one vehicle above all others through which anthropologists represent and transform theory.” In light of Nyamnjoh’s argument about anthropology in Africa, a revision of this statement is in order. Earlier I pointed out that “[f]iction encodes truth claims—and alternative modes of theorizing” (Harrison 2008:121). However, they are also embedded in the conversations and intertextual relation between fiction and ethnography. Discerning readers of both genres can glean theoretical insights from this hybrid textual field, especially in the context of African anthropological thinking, which is just as likely to be found in novels and poetry as it is in formal ethnographies and journal articles. Nyamnjoh uses the bushfalling metaphor to (re)interpret the flexible navigations of ­Cameroonian and other African transmigrants venturing beyond their natal villages and cities to seek opportunities abroad so that they can return home and negotiate their renewed or redefined identities and sense of belonging. Through their back and forth mobility, bushfallers mediate social margins, navigate terrain betwixt and between disparate realities, and practice the logic of “being married but available.” Nyamnjoh claims that “their determination to cross and subvert heavily policed borders is indicative of their discomfort with cultural essentialism” (711). He goes on to illuminate the relevance for anthropology itself: Attempts by bushfallers to re-create home away from home while longing for home and to invest in home “back home” even when away from it is a useful metaphor for the relationship I envisage between anthropology and Africa, fiction and ethnography. Anthropology in Africa could renew itself through the sort of disciplinary flexibility captured in the metaphors of being “married but available” and “bushfalling.”Through such flexibility, anthropology could be enriched by systematic documentation and reinterpretation of African fiction. (2011:711) One final example of African anthropologists speaking for themselves in innovative ways is US-based Kenyan anthropologist Mwenda Ntarangwi (2010), whose Reversed Gaze: An African Ethnography of American Anthropology resists the division of labor that Archie Mafeje (1998) and Christine Obbo (1990) critique. Obbo recounts experiences in Uganda and in the United States in which European and Euro-American anthropologists have, respectively, attempted to expropriate her field notes for their own use and have strongly disapproved of her desire to study middle-class white Americans. Supposedly, only they should enjoy the prerogative of traveling across national/cultural boundaries to study an ethnographic Other. Well, the Empire strikes back!10 Ntarangwi reverses the ethnographic gaze to US anthropology and anthropologists, from graduate studies to postdoctoral experiences back home and in national and international conferences. Drawing on a number of recent critical trends (interpretive, symbolic, reflexive, situated knowledges, critical race studies, etc.), he situates his analysis of differential “anthropological 45

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citizenship” (16) in the context of world anthropologies discourse. He also ties it to perspectives on “the politics of race and racialized knowledge production” (17) he encountered in the work of African and African American scholars such as Archie Mafeje (1998), St. Clair Drake (1980, 1978), and Faye Harrison (2008). Moreover, his approach to race and transnational positioning are clearly intersectional, for he is also cognizant of the salience of gender within anthropology and in the many situations anthropologists investigate.

Other key trends and issues While my focus has been largely on “ex-centric” and “Southern” vantage points for anthropological theorizing, I do not at all mean to upstage the role or depreciate the value of more (or less) conventional sites for theory construction in the North. It is important to recognize that there are centric and ex-centric sites in US anthropology, which should never be homogenized. Efforts to “flatten” Northern landscapes of knowledge production have led to a more heterogeneous group of scholars acknowledged for theoretically significant work in their various areas of expertise. Among these anthropologists are those who specialize in the study of US society in settings that have not been on the canonical radar until fairly recently. Conceptually and theoretically sophisticated studies of the social and political life of race (Baker 2010, 2011; Brodkin 1989, 1999; Buck 2001; Dávila 2008; Hartigan 2005; Jackson 2005; Smedley and Smedley 2011), generation (e.g., senior citizens in the work of Sanjek 2009 and Vesperi 1986), gender (Kingfisher 1996; Waterston 1999; Craven and Davis 2013), sexuality (Lewis 2009), and class (Sacks 1989; Ortner 2003) are burgeoning. Studies of the workings and effects of transnationalism (Basch et al.1994; Glick Schiller and Fouron 2002), neoliberalism (Collins, di Leonardo, and Williams 2008; Dávila 2012; Kingfisher and Goldsmith 2001; Craven and Davis 2013), and globalization (Kingsolver 2011) in North American contexts are complementing the more abundant work done in other parts of the world (e.g., “Futures of Neoliberalism” compilation in Cultural Anthropology, February 2012; Glick Schiller 2004; Gunewardena and Kingsolver 2007; Gledhill 2004; Gregory 2004; Ong 1999; Trouillot 2003). This combined body of knowledge illuminates the wide range of contexts within which the forces and processes of late modernity are played out, experienced, and navigated. The analyses elucidate the ambiguities, complexities, and contradictions of human agency, which is exercised along lines of socioeconomic inequality and also those of gendered and sexual difference (e.g., Boellstorff 2008; Kulick 1998; Murray 2002). Problems of cultural commodification are also implicated in analyses of neoliberal modalities of development in which heritage and other aspects of culture (e.g., ethnic identity) are marketed in tourism, a major sphere of growth in the global economy (Babb 2010; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). Another cluster of issues related to studies of transnationalism and transmigration are those related to the formation and dynamics of diasporas (Clifford 1994; Carter 2010;Yelvington 2006; Pierre 2012). A major concern within anthropological global studies is with the restructuring of the state and its sovereignty in accord with the values and practices of marketization, privatization, and related NGO-ization (Harvey 2005; Schuller 2012; Trouillot 2003). The effects of these processes even permeate the organizational and intersubjective spheres of social justice and human rights advocates and activists, who may unwittingly manifest consumer subjectivities (Craven 2013) or self-regulatory elements of “capillary” governmentality (Foucault 1991; Uzwiak 2013). Another important concern in the study of neoliberalization and the interrelated neoliberalized globalization is on structural violence (Farmer 2004; Simmons 2010; Harrison 1997) along with the violence continuum (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 2004). These forms of violence 46

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are commonly exacerbated by the historically contingent forces of neoliberalized political-­ economic and sociocultural change. These shifts may be expressed in and contributors to the severe constraints of “biopolitics,” “bare life,” and the “state of exception” (Agamben 1998 [1995], 2005; Foucault 1997 [1980]). Neoliberally restructured sovereign power, however, is contested by the discourses and practices of insurgent citizenship and other embodied forms of national, transnational, or postnational belonging from below (Carnegie 2002; Holston 2009; Sheller 2012; Thomas 2011). Integral to these mobilizations and their accompanying cultural politics are the dynamic formation of identities and culturally inflected expressions of personhood (Escobar 2004; Hall 1996; Hale 1997).

Does theory have life beyond the ivory tower? Beyond the work it does cognitively or cerebrally, Jamaican anthropologist Don Robotham asserts that theory potentially has or should have practical effects in the world. Rather than rationalize or reinforce the status quo, which commonly happens by default, theory, ideally, “should propose an alternative to established politico-economic configurations, and that alternative should inspire people to mobilize (Robotham,April 24, 2000, discussant remarks at NYAS lecture, paraphrased in ­Harrison 2000). For theory to have this change-inspiring outcome, it needs to be situated in or aligned with solidarities that translate and mobilize ideas into meaningful and sustainable social action. In the case of the struggles for progressive change as it is envisioned and propelled forward by new social movements in Latin America, the Afro-Colombian struggle for economically and environmentally just forms of development in the Pacific coastal region is a significant case for examining the kinds of solidarities Robotham describes. Escobar, who has studied this movement as an activist scholar, illuminates how the movement and the solidarities it negotiates operate as self-organizing assemblages characterized by meshworks, which are nonhierarchical networks (2008:274). Within this context, theory is constructed through the cooperative or, under optimal circumstances, collaborative relationships cultivated in the interests of more sustainable forms of biodiversity, development, peace, and community life, as social movement agents envision them. These men and women have contributed to the co-production of new theory informed by their distinct ontological commitments and epistemological stance, which diverge from those underpinning dominant academic-based theory (285). Escobar claims that an ontological turn is affecting the revamping of critical theory. This means that the way we understand the nature of the world, social reality, and being is changed. Social ­theory’s ontological turn (or shift toward alternative [i.e., non-Western] understandings of being and social reality) is especially evident in the context of the situated knowledges grounded in indigenous and tribal peoples’ movements for self-determination, territorial rights, and sustainable development. The black communities in Colombia are also an exemplary context within which new theory arises from the crucible of alternative ontologies and their confrontation with imperial globality. This exemplar, along with others, demonstrates that, contrary to traditional thinking especially prevalent in positivist science, theory has a symbiotic rather than a dichotomous relationship to practice.This is an important tenet especially in publicly engaged trends in anthropology and kindred social sciences.

Final reflections This examination of theorizing among contemporary sociocultural anthropologists is a partial perspective on only some of the recent trends within the discipline. I have emphasized an array of theory-making strategies and practices, the multivocal and dialogic character of theory-work, 47

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and projects that seek to converse in more leveled ways across lines of salient difference— be they theoretical or methodological (e.g., political economy and postmodernism; biological anthropology and poststructuralism [Goodman and Leatherman 1999]), cultural, national, or hemispheric. This can potentially engender varying degrees of cross-pollination, synthesis, and reconciliation (Harrison 2010 [1991]: 10) that may lead to building, if not a shared vision, then a common grounding for coordinating and framing varying kinds of contact among different anthropologies and anthropologists. This vision for anthropology in the 21st century is perhaps much like what Haraway (1988) envisions for the webbed connections articulating situated knowledges and also Harding’s (2006) view of the possibilities for science if feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural scientists seriously converse. Facilitating dialogues and exchanges across our various differences may make it possible to develop a greater mutual awareness of the different trajectories of thought that comprise anthropology and the extent to which the discipline’s differences—at least some of them—are commensurable, complementary, mutually intelligible or not. Some may think the various forms of storytelling, counter-storytelling, critique, and interpretation I have described in this chapter are more of a problematic cacophony (cf. Mbembe 2012) than anything else. My view is that we must learn to listen in new ways so that we can identify those voices that could potentially harmonize or, in the absence of harmony, like avantgarde jazz, create music based on different compositional principles. Perhaps an even better analogy than cacophony is antiphony, call and response. Can we learn to discern meaningful antiphonies out of what may initially sound like a discordant, chaotic clash of voices? Even discordance might, unexpectedly and indirectly, play a constructive role. Let me end by reiterating Ntarangwi’s thoughtful caveat that we resist overstating the differences among national and hemispheric anthropologies, and by implication the theoretical underpinnings associated with them (personal communication, 2008). As I have written elsewhere, Under the intensified time-space compression … of globalization, ideas, cultures, societies and nations are not and, in fact, have never been separated by impermeable boundaries. … Acknowledging salient differences should not preclude recognizing and building epistemological alliances [and other relationships] based on what is shared in common [or on what may be complementary but different concerns]. (Harrison 2012a:97–98) Overlapping and intersecting interests in the kinds of problems that anthropological inquiry addresses should make us aware of the potentially productive outcomes of various sorts of transborder dialogues that might be among the conditions for stimulating the making of ex-centric theory.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Crystal Felima, a University of Florida doctoral student who served as my research assistant in 2011–12. Her preliminary survey of anthropological journal literature helped me compile what she called the “who’s hot” list of theorists. I also appreciate input from several colleagues and students whose suggested or shared readings, conversations, email correspondence, or invitations to visit their graduate seminars helped to stimulate my thinking on the matters I address in this chapter. Among them are Pem Davidson Buck, Scott Catey, Brenda Chalfin, Amanda Concha-Holmes, Justin Hosbey, Christa Craven, Deidre Crumbley, 48

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Dána-Ain Davis, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, Edward Gonzalez-Tennant, Giles Harrison-Conwill, Ann Kingsolver, Alejandro Lugo, Camee Maddox, Martin Manalansan, Mwenda Ntarangwi, Francis Nyamnjoh, Keisha-Khan Perry, Jemima Pierre, Fiona Ross, Peter Schmidt, Mark Schuller, David Simmons, and Gina Athena Ulysse.

Notes 1 Archaeology and critical biological anthropology also draw on many of the same social theorists engaged with in sociocultural anthropology (e.g., Schmidt 2009, Goodman and Leatherman 1998). Some of the theorists mentioned here are more popular than others. Bourdieu and Foucault, for instance, are staples, while Wittgenstein’s influence is evident mainly in the writings of Veena Das (1995, 1998, 2006), who herself has emerged as a preeminent presence in US anthropology (critical medical anthropology and the anthropology of social suffering and violence) as well as in Indian social anthropology and sociology. Mbembe’s (2001) theorization of the postcolony has been influential especially among Africanists (e.g., Comaroffs), anthropologists interrogating postcolonial and/or neoliberal states (e.g., Thomas 2011), and scholars investigating law and disorder (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 2006). 2 Ethnography is the dominant genre in which sociocultural anthropologists write their social analysis. But anthropological writing is not restricted to conventional notions of ethnography. (Meta)theoretical essays, review essays, book reviews, creative nonfiction, memoirs, theatrical scripts, poetry and fiction also figure prominently in the literatures to which anthropologists contribute. The boundaries among these genres are often blurred. See Behar and Gordon (1995), Waterston and Vesperi (2011), Nyamnjoh (2011), and Harrison (2008, 2012b) for insights into these issues and their implications for public engagement. 3 The diversity of sites for theorization is not a new phenomenon. This has always been the case if we subscribe to a broadly conceived, non-elitist understanding of what constitutes theory and the theoretical, and how they are expressed. Conventionally, the theory-making landscape has been quite restricted, consistent with the logic of epistemological apartheid (Harrison 2012a:90, Mafeje 1998). At this juncture, there is greater recognition of a multiplicity of sites beyond northern academia’s mainstream. 4 I have written elsewhere that “[p]ostmodernism is a general epistemological orientation influenced by poststructuralism, hermeneutics, and neo-Marxism…Although [its] critique of positivism and realist writing is …a significant contribution, [some of] its other features are seriously problematic” (Harrison 2010 [1991]:5). Its “epistemic skepticism, extreme relativism, explanatory nihilism, theoretical agnosticism and sense of political impotence present troubling problems” (Harrison 1993:406–407), having the effect of circumscribing or undermining the legitimacy of the counter-hegemonic claims associated with the rise of female and global South scholars contesting the universality of Western androcentric views. Carolyn Martin Shaw (1995) presents a more complimentary view of postmodernism in her theorization of the colonial and anti-colonial discourses in Kenya (including Jomo Kenyatta’s [1938 (1968)] ethnography’s place in the struggle for national sovereignty). She emphasizes postmodernism’s heterogeneity, acknowledging its skeptical and affirmative varieties. Based on her own “personal synthesis,” she delineates the several dimensions or attributes most meaningful to her approach to theory. In one of the most useful and insightful characterizations of postmodernism, she (1995:17) writes: When I use postmodernism, I mean (1) a historical epoch encompassing late capitalism; (2) a post-Marxist political philosophy that incorporates interest groups, social movements, and identity politics with class relations to discern the power of ideology and culture in the production, maintenance, and transformation of relations of dominance and subordination; (3) a poststructuralist concern with the creation of the subject through discourse and the creation of discourse through alterity—­ engagement with an other; (4) the imbrication of power and knowledge such that power is implicated in all scholarship; (5) the collapse of unilinear time, creating disjunctures between the past and the present; (6) a reflexive political aesthetic that questions the place of the author, the form, and the content of the text and the levels of meanings of the work; and (7) a potentially liberating politics open to renewal through struggle and resistance, destabilization and re-creation. Closely related to postmodernism, poststructuralism is the rubric used to refer to a heterogeneous body of work also emanating largely from France in the 1960s and 1970s. Anthropologist Paul A. Erickson (1998:180) writes that when the adjective “poststructural” is invoked it refers to “disenchantment with static, mechanistic, and controlling models of society and culture and a consequent interest in social process and agency.” The deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan,

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Faye V. Harrison sociologist-ethnographer Pierre Bourdieu, and philosopher-historian Michel Foucault are considered leaders in this trend (see Barnard 2000:140-144). In the United States, the influential work of philosopher Judith Butler has brought poststructuralist theory into feminist and queer theory. She has had a major influence in anthropology. 5 The north(ern) designation is not solely geographical or a synonym for the formerly salient first-world category. Metaphorically, the north signals a relation of power and structural privilege, much like center as a spatial metaphor (Harrison 2012a:99). From this, one can extrapolate my understanding of “south/ ern” and the interrelated spatial metaphors of center/periphery. 6 In other writings I have discussed the multi-tiered nature of this elite, with some being more or less read principally through the lens of area studies. This appears to be reflected in the academic reception to a number of African anthropologists as compared to the situation for other expatriate intellectuals. (See Harrison 2011 and 2012a; Mafeje 1998). 7 Ortner seems to assume that the stories natives tell are raw data rather than also containing theoretical insight, which is what the anthropologist brings to the data analysis. An alternative reading is that the theory that may be embedded in natives’ stories is a lower-order explanation vis à vis the anthropologist’s explanation. Other anthropologists, as I demonstrate in this chapter, claim to discern theoretical import in some of the data they elicit from ethnographic subjects. This suggests that evidence gathered during fieldwork is multilayered and multidimensional, representing different kinds of stories, different categories of knowledge. 8 In India and parts of Africa as well, the boundary between sociology and anthropology is nebulous or artificial, especially given the influence of British social anthropology, which is sometimes defined as the sociology of non-Western societies. In parts of the postcolonial world, anthropology has such a negative connotation because of its close association with colonial intelligence that anthropologists are often tempted to “pass” for sociologists. 9 As I indicate, the book cites a much wider array of African scholars than has been the modus operandi within African studies and Africanist anthropology. See Archie Mafeje (1998) for a critique of European and Euro-American Africanists’ marginalization of African intellectuals. I have also addressed this issue (Harrison 2008, 2012a). The Comaroffs’ bibliography, which is more extensive than the references that are actually cited in the book, is a better indication of the extent to which African scholars have been productive contributors to knowledge production. However, probably for the multiple reasons alluded to in this chapter, few have achieved the cachet of the most renowned metropolitan or ­metropolitan-based scholars. 10 This phrase was popularized in the Star Wars series of novels and films, but it is also the title of a co-edited book, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, published by the Centre for Contemporary Studies (1982) at the University of Birmingham, UK.The contents focus mainly on the struggles over citizenship and national belonging that immigrants from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia faced during the crisis in the 1970s just before the rise of Thatcherism, about which Stuart Hall (1988), who directed the center from 1968 to 1979, theorized.

Further reading Allen, Jefari Sinclaire and Ryan Cecil Jobson. 2016. The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties. Current Anthropology 57(2): 129–148. Davis, Dána-Ain and Christa Craven. 2016. Feminist Ethnography:Thinking through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities. Lanham, MD, and London: Rowman and Littlefield.

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Faye V. Harrison Shaw, Carolyn Martin. 1995. Colonial Inscriptions: Race, Sex, and Class in Kenya. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sheller, Mimi. 2012. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Durham: Duke University Press. Simmons, David. 2010. Structural Violence as Social Practice: Haitian Agricultural Workers, Anti-­Hatianism, and Health in the Dominican Republic. Human Organization 69(1): 10–18. Smedley, Audrey and Brian D. Smedley. 2011 [1994]. Fourth edition. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. The Latina Feminist Group. 2001. Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios. Durham: Duke University Press. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa. 1986. Decolonizing the Mind:The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey. ———. 2012. Globalectics:Theory and the Politics of Knowing. New York: Columbia University Press. Thomas, Deborah. 2011. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Thomas-Houston, Marilyn M. 2005. “Stony the Road” to Change: Black Mississippians and the Culture of Social Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Ulysse, Gina Athena. 2007. Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist, and Self-Making in Jamaica. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Uzwiak, Beth A. 2013. Fracturing Feminism: Activist Research and Ethics in a Women’s Human Rights NGO. In Feminist Activist Ethnography:Counterpoints to Neoliberalism in North America. Christa Craven and Dána-Ain Davis, eds. Pp. 119–136. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Vesperi, Maria 1986. City of Green Benches: Growing Old in a New Downtown. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Vincent, Joan 1991. Engaging Historicism. In Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Richard G. Fox, ed. Pp. 45–58. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press [now School for Advanced Research Press]. Waterston, Alisse. 1999. Love, Sorrow, and Rage: Destitute Women in a Manhattan Residence. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Waterston, Alisse and Maria D. Vesperi, eds. 2011 [2009]. Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing. Malden and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Weismantel, Mary. 1995. Making Kin: Kinship Theory and Zumbagua Adoptions. American Ethnologist 22(4): 685–709. Whitaker, Mark P. 2007. Learning Politics from Sivaram:The Life and Death of a Revolutionary Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka. London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press. Wilson, Lynn B. 1995. Speaking to Power: Gender and Politics in the Western Pacific. New York: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Yelvington, Kevin A. 2006, ed. Afro-Atlantic Dialogues: Anthropology in the Diaspora. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press. Zerai, Assata. 2014. Hypermasculinity, State Violence, and Family Well-Being in Zimbabwe: An Africana Feminist Analysis of Maternal and Child Health. Trenton: Africa World Press..

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3 PArtIcIPAtING, OBSErVING, WItNESSING Deborah Reed-Danahay

This chapter is about the framing of the anthropologist’s role in ethnographic fieldwork and in writing based on such fieldwork. The history of anthropology can be located in both natural science approaches and in travel, with the idea of going to some place to study some people being a very general foundation for what it means to do ethnography. The idea of participant observation, moreover, involves encounters with those people and some degree of personal experience in their way of life. And when we “get back home,” we write about those people and those encounters in ways that are meant to speak to and be read by a broad audience—which can include not only other anthropologists and other academics, but also the general public, policy makers, and the people we wrote about. Increasingly, anthropologists are conscious of the changing nature of what it means to participate and to observe in a contemporary world of globalization and migration, of virtual worlds and other new technologies, and of violence and human suffering. Questions have arisen about what we should be observing and how we should be participating under these circumstances. This chapter will focus on tropes of distance and involvement that have historically surrounded discussions of participant observation. After some historical reflections regarding these themes, I will turn to the growing use of a vocabulary associated with “witnessing” in discussions of fieldwork and some variations it can take. I will end with a consideration of the ways in which witnessing can entail a dual sense of the observer and the participant and thereby does not resolve the ongoing subjective versus objective dichotomy that characterizes anthropological discourse, and which is discussed further below.

Participant observation: some historical reflections The dominant genealogical narrative of ethnographic fieldwork is that it involves a combination of participating and observing (“participant-observation”) that can be traced to Bronislaw Malinowski’s (1922) research on the Trobriand Islands. References to Malinowski in discussions of the history of participant-observation in anthropology are standard, even though he did not use this term himself. In her obituary of Malinowski published in the journal Man, Audrey Richards (1943: 2) noted that “he spent what was then an unusually long period of time in a single community, and quickly began to abandon the fixed interview and the native interpreter for the participant observation that is more common nowadays.” Hortense Powdermaker, who 57

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studied with Malinowski and later did fieldwork in Africa and in the United States, argued that anthropology was a “humanistic science” (1966: 306). The anthropologist’s stance, for her, was a blend of “involvement and detachment” (ibid.: 295), and this was expressed in the title of her book Stranger and Friend:The Way of an Anthropologist. Powdermaker (ibid.: 285) summed up the history of participant observation by writing that it “was forged in the study of small homogeneous societies, in which the anthropologist lived for an extended period of time, participated in them, learned the language, interviewed, and constantly observed.” Among her various research projects was one in Hollywood. This work presented the greatest challenges to participant observation research, Powdermaker laments, “because no physical community existed” (ibid.: 288). We can see her struggling in her reflections on this experience to deal with issues much more common in contemporary anthropological fieldwork and, in a sense, to let go of the ideal-type ethnography in which she was invested. There were also issues of maintaining emotional distance for her during this fieldwork. The assumption that people live in stable physical communities and that this is the best unit for anthropological research is one that is increasingly difficult to maintain.The notion of intensive fieldwork associated with Malinowski was one that came to privilege ideas of one group of people living in one place, even though his own research detailed much travel, trade, and communication across the islands in the Trobriands that he studied. Ideas of participating and observing arose within a framework assuming a demarcated social sphere which a lone anthropologist could somehow experience first-hand while also observing, in order to bring back these observations to be shared with others “at home.” In an overview of British anthropology, the well-known Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth notes (2005: 14–16) that Seligman, Rivers, and the Torres Straits Expedition set the stage for the type of “intensive” ethnographic research more fully realized by Malinowski. According to Barth (ibid.: 18), “Malinowski became the formulator, epitome and propaganda for the new kind of ethnographic data” that was based on field practice of “participation.” There were, however, other currents of anthropology that supported the development of participant observation. In France, for example, Marcel Mauss was an advocate for ethnographic fieldwork and trained many ethnographers who conducted intensive research in French colonies—notably Marcel Griaule, Léopold Sabatier, and Maurice Leenhardt (see Parkin 2005; Parkin and de Sales 2010; James and Allen 1998). Parkin and de Sales note (2010: 5–6) that as French anthropology became institutionalized, it initially wanted to distance itself from empirical methods used by folklore, so that fieldwork by professional anthropologists became common later in French than in British or American traditions. The emphasis on theory in French anthropology reached its apex with structuralism. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book Tristes Tropiques (1955) is a compelling travelogue and reflection upon both the “modern” world and those it may leave behind, but it is not an account of participant observation research (see Reed-Danahay 2004 and 2005), and privileges “the view from afar.” An important turning point away from this emphasis on the objective observer in French anthropology was the publication of Jeanne Favret-Saada’s book Deadly Words: Witchcraft in the Bocage (1980 [1977]), in which she characterizes her position as being “caught” in local witchcraft practices and writes that she was compelled to be viewed as a participant during her ethnographic research in western France. In the United States, as Sydel Silverman writes (2005: 261), the emphasis in the Boasian tradition on “disappearing native cultures” led not to participant observation but to interviews and recording of languages and texts in research among elders. Silverman (ibid.: 268) credits Margaret Mead with being the first American to adopt the sort of participant observation methods associated with Malinowski in her early work in Samoa. Roger Sanjek (1990) cites Frank Cushing, however, as an earlier participant observer (learning the language, living in a pueblo, paying attention to everyday activities) in his work among the Zuni in the late 1800s, 58

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much earlier than Malinowski and in contrast to Boas. In her historical overview of participant observation, Rosalie Wax (1971: 33) notes that “there is little evidence in Boas’s letters that he himself did much participant observation research or learned any native language well.” She also points out (ibid.: 34–36) that some early American anthropologists of the generation after Boas (Lowie, Kroeber, Mead) did participant observation research, but that since Malinowski was the first to write about his fieldwork experiences in detail and explicitly promoted these research techniques, he became most closely associated with this method. After Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard (1940) wrote briefly about his encounters with the Nuer during fieldwork, and then such anthropologists as Alice Lee Marriott (1952), Laura Bohannan (Bowen 1954), Gerald Berreman (1962), Kenneth Read (1965), and Hortense Powdermaker (1966) started a trend of more extensive autobiographical writing about experiences during what had come to be known as participant observation research.These forms of writing have come to be known as “reflexive” (see Ruby [1982] for early appraisals of this approach). As Jennifer Platt notes (1983: 388), a very early explicit mention of and reflection upon participant observation methods was published by Florence R. Kluckhohn (1940), who wrote about the fieldwork she conducted with her husband Clyde among the Navajo. Florence Kluckhohn asserted that “participant observation is conscious and systematic sharing, in so far as circumstances permit, in the life-­ activities and, on occasion, in the interests and affects of a group of persons” (1940: 331). In foreshadowing the type of reflexive and critical approach to ethnography that has become more prevalent since the 1980s, Kluckhohn maintains that in the dual role of participant and observer, “objectivity, far from being sacrificed, is increased. The investigator, forced to analyze his own roles, is, on the one hand, less misled by the myth of complete objectivity in social research and, on the other, more consciously aware of his own biases” (ibid.: 343). Participation has always been in an uneasy relationship with observation in the moral career of ethnography. Questions about how much to participate in the field and what that should mean are part of the involvement and detachment dilemma facing many researchers. Kuklick (2011) has usefully traced the rising status of ethnographic fieldwork as opposed to so-called “armchair” scholarship. “The characteristics of fieldwork that had once made it dirty work,” she writes, “now made it a purifying ordeal” (ibid.: 13) through a changing Victorian mindset that saw fieldwork as a form of “moral education,” much like other forms of travel to unfamiliar places.The endurance of the former view is evident in Clyde Kluckhohn’s (1943: 213) obituary of Malinowski, where he writes that “while ‘dirt ethnology’ and participant observation were not invented by Malinowski, he set a superlative example along these lines and advertised their merits.” Associations of fieldwork and dirt seem to have long left reflections on ethnographic writing, and it is archaeological fieldwork that would more immediately come to mind in this type of association today. The juxtaposition of dirt and ethnology, however, signals the messiness of ethnographic research. More common in recent approaches has been an ennobling view of fieldwork associated with this emphasis on participation. Fieldwork came to be seen as an ordeal that would “test and build character,” according to Kuklick (2011: 14), and this led to the heroic model in which rapport and empathy became standard ideals of interaction with the people studied. The predominant narrative about fieldwork and ethnography in contemporary times is a linear one of increasing reflexivity, increasing “I-witnessing” (Geertz 1988), whereby the anthropologist as hero or heroine has developed greater depths of introspection and in many cases empathy with their research participants. As Barbara Tedlock (1991: 69) has described it, “this simultaneously empathetic, yet distancing, methodology, which is widely believed by ethnographers to produce data that somehow reflect the native’s own point of view, in time became the principal mode of production for anthropological knowledge.” 59

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The issue of empathy in fieldwork is one that has nevertheless had strong critics, notably Clifford Geertz and Pierre Bourdieu. Geertz called it into question in his classic essay (1974) on the concept of “the native point of view,” that phrase introduced by Malinowski and bearing so much symbolic weight in anthropology. By deploying the distinction between “experience-far” and “experience-near” concepts, Geertz argues that our task is not to seek “fellow feeling” and “communion” with the people among whom we do fieldwork (which is an illusion in any case); rather it is to understand how they see themselves through their public symbols and displays of meaning. The tensions between involvement and detachment were also expressed, in a slightly different register, by Bourdieu, who advocated “participant objectivation,” writing that “one does not have to choose between participant observation, necessarily fictitious immersion in a foreign milieu, and the objectivism of the ‘gaze from afar’ of an observer who remains as remote from himself as from his object” (2003: 282). The task of participant observation is difficult, according to Bourdieu, because it demands a “doubling of consciousness.” “How,” he asks, “can one be subject and object, the one who acts and the one who, as it were, watches himself acting?” (ibid.: 281). The aim of participant objectivation is not to uncover the “lived experience” of those among whom one does fieldwork; rather, it is to understand the “social conditions of possibility” of their experience, including the limits on it (ibid.: 282). Bourdieu also argued that anthropologists should objectify themselves and their social positioning as scholars, in order to understand fully their assumptions about the world and to be aware that they have a particular way of seeing the world that is not shared by their informants (who do not objectify in the same way) and therefore not impose this upon the informants. It is a form of reflexivity that helps one to see more “objectively” those whom we study. To use the vocabulary adopted by Geertz, it is about not imposing our experience-far concepts on their experience-near concepts, even while we seek to understand the world with those concepts. The involvement and detachment dilemma has been explored in “narrative ethnography” wherein anthropologists increasingly produce writing about their experiences in the field so as to interrupt the division between the experience of the fieldwork and the “data” produced there. The idea of the neutral observer has been questioned increasingly since the 1980s in anthropology. Tedlock (1991: 78) argues that “beginning in the 1970s, there was a shift in emphasis from participant observation to the observation of participation.” She sees this as a shift from a division between the ethnographic monograph and the ethnographic memoir to a new hybrid form of writing, narrative ethnography, which combines the ethnographic analysis and the experiences of the fieldworker in one text. For Tedlock, this new genre marks a significant epistemological development and arose primarily as audiences for anthropological writing expanded and as anthropologists become more engaged with their publics.Tedlock notes the explosion of both monographs and edited volumes on ethnographic fieldwork experiences in the 1980s. Despite the textual and narrative “turns” and experimental trends in anthropology since the 1980s (captured by the two volumes Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography [Clifford and Marcus 1986] and Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences [Marcus and Fischer 1986]), there are many anthropologists still doing experiential fieldwork and writing about it. When I wrote a review essay on autobiographical writing by ethnographers that was originally published in 2001 (Reed-Danahay 2007), I assumed that this trend had peaked. Since that time, however, there has been a steady production of writing on the process of and experiences during fieldwork.The tension between closeness and distance in ­ethnography is expressed in several recent edited collections. Hume and Mulcock (2004: xi) caution, for example, that “Good participant observation thus requires a self-conscious balance between intimacy with, and distance from, the individuals we are seeking to understand.” 60

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Contributions to this literature in the early twenty-first century have posed questions about how participant observation research can be framed in terms of location when the idea of going to isolated and bounded sites is no longer possible or a claim to virtue, about the nature of collaboration in fieldwork, and about the blurring or maintenance of boundaries between the personal and the professional “self ” during fieldwork (cf. Amit 2000; De Soto and Dudwick 2000; Hume and Mulcock 2004; Coleman and Collins 2006; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006; McLean and Leibing 2007; Halstead, Hirsch, and Okely 2008; Collins and Gallinat 2010; Davies and Spencer 2010; and Coleman and Collins 2011).

Fieldwork as encounter Seeing fieldwork and participant observation in terms of an “encounter” has been an attempt to move beyond concerns about spatial or interpersonal distance that characterize discussions of such work. Johannes Fabian (1983) has famously chastised anthropology for positioning those we study as distanced in time through their distance in space. Since he wrote his treatise Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, anthropologists have been increasingly sensitive to the imperialist origins of our discipline and to the need to maintain a perspective of coevalness and contemporality with the people we study. The idea of the fieldwork encounter in early ethnographic writing reinforced the idea of going and being someplace else. George Marcus (2007: 1134) notes that the enduring ethnographic “scene of encounter within the tale of fieldwork,” goes back to Malinowski’s (1922) “Imagine yourself, suddenly set down…” The idea of the ethnographic encounter has, Marcus argues, nevertheless developed more recently into a way of setting the scene not only to reinforce the “being there” quality of ethnography but also to capture contemporary disruptions and displacements of ethnography in multi-sited fieldwork. The idea of “ethnography as a species of encounter with the observer as part of the subject” (Anderson 1986: 64; cf. Kluckhohn 1940) is prominent in the genre of narrative ethnography that started to appear in the 1970s (e.g. Rabinow 1977; Crapanzano 1980). Crapanzano (1980: 151) framed his interactions with Tuhami and with his research assistant Lhacen in terms of encounter and asks toward the end of his book: “How did it come to pass that I, an American anthropologist, should have met Tuhami, a Moroccan tilemaker and entered so deeply into his life and allowed him to enter so deeply into my own?” For Crapanzano, the “ethnographic encounter” is about intersubjectivity and yet it also respects, as he writes, the “mystery” of the Other. The advantage of encounters in the field for intersubjective understanding has also been mentioned by other more recent writers. For example, Elizabeth Krause (2005: 593) reveals that in her research on low fertility in Italy, she did not expect the “encounters with peasants” that eventually caused her to see the strong role that the figure of the peasant plays in what she calls “family-making practices.” She argues (ibid.: 595) for a view of ethnography as a “space of encounters” that has an improvisational aspect of “structured spontaneity,” and where “the term encounter points to entities that are at odds with one another” and can lead to an opening up of “new possible worlds.” In a form of narrative ethnography that shares aspects of the process of knowledge production in the field through somewhat unexpected “encounters” with peasants and peasant memories in Italy, Krause positions herself as an observer who is “part of the subject” of the ethnography. In a recent edited volume that calls for a renewed commitment to experiential ethnography and to “the fieldwork encounter,” Borneman and Hammoudi (2009: 20) suggest that “objectivities-in-progress are possible only if ethnographers reestablish a critical distance from the people and processes they study.” They see the fieldwork experience as “engagement with 61

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both Being There and with forms of distancing that help make cultural difference visible” (ibid.: 19). Borneman and Hammoudi are scornful of approaches in anthropology that place theoretical and rhetorical claims above experience in the field. It is in the unexpected and unplanned encounters in the field, they argue, echoing Krause’s work in Italy and Crapanzano’s with Tuhami, that an unsettling event occurs which opens up new perspectives for both the anthropologist and their indigenous interlocutor. In many ways these approaches are close to Bourdieu’s idea of participant objectivation, in that they argue for an encounter that is a form of critical reflexivity and calls into question the anthropologist’s assumptions, providing distance from them in productive ways. This sense of encounter implies the coevalness (sharing of time and space) that is essential to a collaborative view of the ways knowledge is constructed in the field. Another, related use of encounter is one that calls attention to broader social processes, collisions, and connections. In her multi-sited ethnography of global connections as viewed from the rainforests of Indonesia, Anna Tsing (2005: xi) adopts the concept of “friction” to capture what she calls “zones of cultural friction” that arise out of “encounters and interactions.” An example of this is in her fieldwork among Indonesian student “nature lovers” whom she interviewed and among whom she hiked up Mt. Merapi. She sees their sensibilities and understandings of the environment in terms of global and local encounters. In Tsing’s writing, it is not so much the anthropologist’s meeting with interlocutors that is foregrounded, but the encounters observed (or witnessed) by the anthropologist.

The participant observer as witness Historian Joan Scott (1991) has written about “the evidence of experience” as a form of documentation of history, especially forms of life that were previously hidden from history. This is connected, as she notes, to the idea of the witness and, as Raymond Williams (1985: 128) has written, “the notion of experience as subjective witness is offered not only as truth, but as the most authentic kind of truth,” as “the ground for all (subsequent) reasoning and analysis.” This newer privileging of experience is connected, Williams argues, to Protestant reliance on “religious experiences” as forms of witness to truth. Participation is thereby associated with experience, and witnessing is viewed as a form of participation. The idea that being a witness is a form of experience entails co-presence, whereby one can enter into another’s world through forms of encounter. The witness, in order to be trusted as authentic, must engage through experience. We are in what Wieviorka (2006) has termed “the era of the witness” in her book on Holocaust testimony. The recent growth of writing about the anthropologist as witness must, therefore, be placed within a wider framework in which various “witness regimes” (Givoni 2013) have broadened the idea of witnessing associated with legal and religious testimony to an ethical stance now adopted by various social actors—from journalists to anthropologists to political activists. The uses and meaning of testimony and witnessing in humanitarian organizations have been explored by Didier Fassin (2011) in his book Humanitarian Reason. Fassin explains that there are two Latin words for “witness”—one (testis) is more focused on the observer and the other (superstes) on the participant, so that “one testifies on the basis of his observation, the other on the basis of his experience” (ibid.: 204). The first is listened to because of his or her neutrality and role as “objective” witness external to “the scene”; whereas superstes is listened to because s/he is more “subjective” and suffered as victim of the event. These bipolar positions are, Fassin argues, becoming increasingly blurred, even though “the witness, in the sense of the superstes, has become a figure of our time” (ibid.: 205). Although Fassin brings up these features of the 62

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figure of the witness in order to trace developments in humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders, his discussion also has implications for rhetorics of witnessing in anthropology. His etymological tracings of the term display the tensions between objective observer and subjective participant that have marked ethnography. By calling attention to the privileging of the witness in contemporary times, Fassin is also underscoring this importance of experience, as earlier noted by Raymond Williams, for authority. In a collection of essays published in the journal Cultural Anthropology during his tenure as editor during its first six years, George Marcus (1992) identified an “emerging genre of witnessing/reportage” among anthropologists through his discussions of articles by Orin Starn and Enrique Mayers on political violence in Peru. In two subsequent essays, Marcus has elaborated upon the figure of the “anthropologist as witness” (Marcus 2005 and 2010). He argues that almost all contemporary anthropology takes place in settings influenced by what he calls post– Cold War “regimes of intervention.”These include (2005: 32) “international multilateral authorities” such as nongovernmental organizations, humanitarian and other aid organizations, social movements, political parties, armed factions, and so on. A new form of “disinterest” must be cultivated during research when fieldwork is dominated by these regimes, which have their own reporters, witnesses, policy analysts, and narratives. His argument is that the anthropologist is the sole figure who is “liminal” in these policy discussions and so must assume a more independent and “disinterested” stance in claims of knowledge production, based on fieldwork experiences. There are three possible “identity poses” for an anthropologist under these circumstances, argues Marcus: that of the expert, that of the journalist, and that of the witness (2005: 34; see also 2010). He chooses the focus on the witness. Witnessing in contexts of regimes of intervention takes two rhetorical forms. The first is testimony, in which “accountings and narratives of suffering, victimhood and injustices take center place” (2005: 43). This form “stays close to the classic documentary function of ethnography” (ibid.: 43). The second form, he writes, is “a more intellectualized and conceptually abstracted account or narrative of the emergence of new orders, techniques, structures and social/cultural forms coming into being” (ibid.: 43). According to Marcus, “in both forms the anthropologist as scholar remains a classic bystander as witness who in one or another genre witnesses in detachment, despite the moral power of his or her rhetoric” (ibid.: 43). Marcus believes that: “The identity of witness preserves as much as possible the kind of detachment to which I believe even the most committed anthropology is still deeply bound” (ibid.: 43–44). He gives as one example the study done by Amitav Ghosh (1994) on UN peacekeeping missions in which “his mode is that of an observer witnessing the emergence of new forms of governmentality in failed or failing states” (Marcus 2005: 39). Marcus characterizes Ghosh as “an observant traveler with the sensibility of an anthropologist” (ibid.: 39–40). Marcus writes that “the witness in Western law is the truthful observer based on what she or he can describe as having seen rather than heard” (ibid.: 37). This type of legal authority resting upon the idea of the expert is not, however, the basis for the authority of the anthropologist as witness, he argues. Rather, the experience of fieldwork lends a more sacred aspect to their witnessing, a form of transcendent knowledge placing the anthropological witness between the realms of the legal and the sacred. Here, the division between participant experiencing and observer is combined in the figure of the witness. For Marcus, however, the observations of the witness are less engaged and more “disinterested.” At the end of his essay (ibid.: 45), Marcus concludes that being a detached witness is a form of activism, in that it produces an “independent voice” and a way to promote and protect anthropological insights in the face of challenges from the regimes of intervention. Marcus’s view of the detached witness minimizes the role of the ethnographer as participant that has characterized other recent perspectives on the witness role for anthropologists. 63

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Witnessing as experience, participation, and engagement On the basis of his experience of altered consciousness during a death divination ritual among the Sisala of Ghana, Bruce Grindal (1983: 76) argues that “to truly to witness such an event precludes one’s being a detached observer.” Grindal’s approach privileges the “experience” of witnessing. He uses the language of witnessing repeatedly in his personal account of the ritual: “Near midnight came a moment in which I saw before my eyes and felt within my body a phenomenon totally unnatural to my previous experience—I ‘witnessed’ the raising of the dead” (ibid.: 60). It is only through “the ethnographic art of participant observation” (ibid.: 76), according to Grindal, that an anthropologist can acquire the knowledge and experience needed to understand death divination. For Grindal, participant observation implies witnessing, and witnessing is not a detached act of observation but an experiential form of participation. The privileging of narrative expressions of experience as a form of witnessing can be found in the work of Ruth Behar, who sees ethnography as the chronicling of stories. She has written (2003: 16) that “there is a strange hunger for ethnography in the contemporary world, which is shaped by concepts of the ‘really real’ and the desire for stories based on the truth and urgency of witnessing.” With the phrase “the vulnerable observer” used to frame the role of the ethnographer/anthropologist, Behar calls attention to the emotional aspects of fieldwork. She labels the photographer Rolf Carlé “the vulnerable observer par excellence” after he put down his camera, while shooting the aftermath of an avalanche in Colombia, in order to embrace a young girl buried in the mud (Behar 1996: 1). This incident is from a short story by Isabel Allende. For Behar, Carlé “incarnates the central dilemma of all efforts at witnessing” (ibid.: 1), in which the impulse to record a traumatic event can be in tension with the impulse to intervene. Behar focuses on the experiences recounted in the stories of those she encounters during fieldwork and also on her own essay form of writing as an “act of personal witness” (ibid.: 20). In her research among Detroit inner-city residents with HIV/AIDS, Sylvie Tourigny (2004) performs what she refers to as “high-risk” ethnography and she came into close contact with gang members, drug deals, and shootings. She writes: “I tagged along, listening in and observing and asking questions and challenging interpretations until I felt respondents’ realities were as much my own as possible, a process I call ‘empathic witnessing’.” She sees ethnography as a form of documentation of reality, of witnessing, and of understanding “the participant’s point of view” (ibid.: 124), so that entering into threatening situations that are part of everyday life for her informants is essential to empathy. In common with Grindal, Tourigny sees her experience in the field as one that helped her gain this perspective and be an empathetic witness. For Behar, it is hearing and then telling the stories of people such as the Mexican street peddler, Esperanza, the subject of her book Translated Woman (1983), which provides the witnessing role of the anthropologist. In these three examples, the anthropologist assumes the role of witness through a spiritual experience that is a deep form of participation (Grindal), through writing essays that entail a form of bearing witness to forms of human suffering (Behar), and through experiences leading to profound empathy for populations living in precarious and dangerous circumstances (Tourigny). The framing of fieldwork as a form of “witnessing” has been particularly noticeable since the 1990s—especially in research on “social suffering” (cf. Kleinman, Das and Lock 1997; Bourdieu et al. 1996). This literature has raised important questions about how we can understand the violence and trauma experienced by our interlocutors and has provided critical analyses of the uses of ideas of witnessing and testimony in discourses and practices associated with humanitarianism and human rights (Redfield 2006; Fassin 2011). Ethnography as a form of witnessing 64

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(and the figure of the anthropologist as witness) has been particularly visible in research on tragic circumstances and events. In order to develop methods for contemporary ethnographies of violence and the state,Veena Das focuses on the ways in which violence is connected to what she calls “the descent into the ordinary.” In her book Life and Words (2007), Das details research among Punjabi women in India whose lives have been marked by the violence toward women during and after the Partition of India and Pakistan and its aftermath. She also writes of her own fieldwork experiences during the violence following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Das is interested in subjective experiences of violence and the ways it tests the limits of the world as known. She raises questions about “what it is to write an ethnography of violence—one that is not seen as bearing an objective witness to the events as much as trying to locate the subject through the experience of such limits” (ibid.: 5). In her work, Das differentiates between the witness of violence, forms of witnessing, and the anthropologist as witness to violent events either directly or via their interlocutors. She notes the presence of ideas in classic Indian literature about the need for women, in particular, to bear witness to death in order for it to be a “good death.” Finding parallels to this in Greece, Das draws upon Nadia Seremetakis’s (1991) work on Greek mourning rituals to discuss notions of “good death” and “bad death,” wherein women must witness death (through lament) in order to give voice to something silent. The “silent death is the asocial ‘bad death’” (Das 2007: 48). Das uses this to discuss the silences following the violence of the Partition when the “work of mourning” could not be carried out because women have been “abducted, raped, and condemned to a social death” (ibid.: 48). She writes also that whereas women’s mutilated and dead bodies bore “passive witness” to violence, attempts to recover narratives of violence can be problematic because sometimes they cannot be voiced. In this way, Das challenges the privileging of narrative as the major way to recover or “witness” trauma. In her portraits of women such as Asha, she underscores the legacy of violence as not just what happened to women directly, but in “what they had to witness—namely, the possibility of betrayal coded in their everyday relations” (ibid.: 72). The violence of communal riots (as happened both after the Partition and after the assassination of Gandhi) can create bonds, Das writes, but can also threaten to break intimate kin relations. This is what Das means by “the descent into the everyday.” She defines witnessing for the women she interviewed as “engaging in everyday life while holding the poisonous knowledge of violation, betrayal and the wounded self from seeping into the sociality of everyday life” (ibid.: 102). Das poses the question of how best to do an ethnography of the state and “be responsive to suffering” (2007: 207). She writes: This is how I see the public role of anthropology: acting on the double register in which we offer evidence that contests the official amnesia and systematic acts of making evidence disappear, but also witnessing the descent into the everyday through which victims and survivors affirm the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild—leading words home, so to speak.” (ibid.: 221) The role of the anthropologist as witness is more prominently at the center of Nancy Scheper-­ Hughes’ (1995) approach to fieldwork in what she calls “extreme situations.” Scheper-Hughes has argued for a “barefoot anthropology” and a “womanly-hearted anthropology” that constitute an anthropology of witnessing as a moral philosophy. She rejects the act of observation in which the anthropologist is neutral spectator, seeing witnessing as something which “positions the anthropologist inside human events as a responsible, reflexive, and morally committed human 65

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being, one who will ‘take sides’ and make judgments …” (ibid.: 419). In her article “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology” (1995), Scheper-Hughes marks her fieldwork among poor shantytown women in Northeast Brazil (see also Scheper-Hughes 1992) as a turning point in her movement from a more “traditional” idea of the anthropologist as “objective observer of the human condition” (1995: 410) to a morally engaged anthropologist. The women became angry with her for not joining them in their struggles and taking a more active role in fighting for better conditions for them. She overcame her initial reluctance to do so and eventually, she writes, “divided my time (and my loyalties) between anthropology and political work …” (ibid.: 411). In her ethnography of the violence of infant mortality in Brazil, she views her role as that of “being there” and “bearing witness” (1992: 286) to the sufferings of mothers and babies by documenting the rates of infant mortality and the poverty experienced by the mothers. Scheper-Hughes views participant observation as “an act of witnessing” and the writing of ethnography as something that makes others (readers) “party to the act of witnessing” (1992: xii). She sees herself, using a vocabulary of friendship among women from her fieldwork in Brazil, as a companheira. Her approach is similar to Ruth Behar’s in that Behar also positions herself as comadre to Esperanza in Translated Woman (1993). And although both anthropologists see their writing as a form of witnessing and reject objectivist claims for ethnography, Behar’s activism is primarily performed through her writing and self-revelations as the “vulnerable observer” (Behar 1996). Scheper-Hughes sees her role as witness not only in terms of her written documentation, but also in terms of engagement through direct political participation. Veena Das refuses the objective/subjective dichotomy which informs the work of Behar and Scheper-Hughes (who both claim the impossibility of detachment), seeking to understand at the level of everyday life the public forms of violence she and her interlocutors witness. Das does not reject activism, however, and her fieldwork during the riots after the assassination of Indira Gandhi was conducted while she also was acting to help survivors of violence as part of a rescue group (2007: 13). These examples of witnessing all depend on the “being there” quality of the fieldwork encounter. There is, however, another emerging view of the witness that does not depend on co-location.

Virtual witnessing and co-presence Concepts of “virtual witnessing” have been recently discussed in ethnographic research in STS (Science and Technology Studies), but the concept is not something only relevant to the study of the Internet and virtual worlds, as one might expect. Historian of science Stephen Shapin (1985) uses the concept of “virtual witnessing” in his discussion of the literary devices used by a seventeenth-century experimental scientist and inventor of an air-pump, Robert Boyd. This is of interest to anthropology because Boyd used textual strategies not dissimilar to those used by ethnographers to convince readers who were not present at his research of his claims to authority and to the validity of his research. For Shapin (1985: 491), virtual witnessing involves “the production in a reader’s mind of such an image of an experimental scene as obviates the necessity for either its direct witness or its replication.”The reliability of scientific experiments, according to Boyd, was usually based on multiple witnesses to the original experiment and their testimony of its validity, or on witnesses to replications of the experiment. Boyd, however, also found a third way and that was through texts. He employed several devices, with much in common with ethnographic texts seeking to validate the “being there” aspect of fieldwork and the authority of the ethnographer. He used visual representations of the experiments (elaborate drawings and diagrams). More importantly, he sought to convince the reader of his 66

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authority by writing about failed experiments and by displaying claims to “modesty” in his writing. His literary techniques “served to portray the author as a disinterested observer and his accounts as unclouded and undistorted mirrors of nature. Such an author gave the signs of a man whose testimony was reliable” (ibid.: 497). Autoethnographic “tales from the field,” in which anthropologists modestly recount their mistakes and stumbles during participant observation research, likewise attempt to convince the reader of the reliability of the author by unveiling their recognition that sometimes there are also failures. In doing so, readers become virtual witnesses to the ethnographic encounter when reading ethnography or watching an ethnographic film. Anne Beaulieu has called attention to a distinction between co-presence and co-location in ethnographic fieldwork and prefers co-presence to the term witnessing. She works in STS and argues (2010: 457) that conceptually, co-presence foregrounds the relationship between self and other and interaction that achieves presence in a setting. Co-presence is an interactive accomplishment by participants and ethnographers alike, and it does not share the unidirectional and oculocentric connotations of witnessing (Woolgar and Coopmans 2006). Most importantly, doing ethnographic research by focusing on co-presence highlights the centrality of shared meaning achieved in and through interaction. Co-location is associated with “being in the field,” and this is not always the best way to study knowledge production in science and technology settings. Rather than seeing mediated technologies as barriers to fieldwork, Beaulieu argues, we should regard them as contemporary means of sociality. Therefore, “space, texts and infrastructures become so many resources in establishing co-presence that can be embraced as constitutive of the field” (ibid.: 458). Whereas travel has been an essential part of the classic idea of participant observation, “co-presence involves not so much the ability to travel but rather emphasizes coordination, flexibility, and availability” (ibid.: 459). She also points out that coordinating of schedules, time zones, and other commitments may be as important as co-location. Research on websites, for example, does not require travel, and these sites are also available to many others who are not anthropologists. Consequently the idea of “being there” can no longer be a claim unique to ethnography. Beaulieu proposes that we think of the field as a site of co-presence, but not necessarily co-location in the geographic and physical sense. It is possible that the notion of “encounter” discussed above could reflect this idea of co-presence if broadened to include encounters in social spaces that are more virtual than physical.

Conclusions In a critique of the anthropologist as witness to forms of human suffering, Asale Angel-Ajani (2006) calls into question the figure of the “noble witness” as advocated by such writers as Ruth Behar and Nancy Scheper-Hughes. Because she has done fieldwork in Italian prisons and is familiar with the legal terminology used in those contexts, Angel-Ajani is particularly sensitive to the rhetoric of the witness. Anthropological claims to witnessing are, she argues, largely about reclaiming forms of ethnographic authority, and establishing “the centrality of the anthropologist by suggesting that as a witness she not only bears witness (was there) but has testimony to give” (2006: 80). The version of the witness advocated by George Marcus, one who claims neutrality rather than emotional vulnerability or militant activism, is also connected with a view of nobleness and authority. By advocating that engaged anthropology focus more on listening, 67

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rather than providing testimony, Angel-Ajani suggests we might open up possibilities for more critical forms of understanding. A focus on the noble witness as a figure for the anthropologist as hero is, I suggest, yet another turn in the moral career of participant observation. Those who do fieldwork in “extreme situations” of suffering and even experience danger during fieldwork have assumed a position of moral authority within anthropology today. The idea of building moral character through fieldwork in difficult and extreme situations and by being what Scheper-Hughes calls a “barefoot” anthropologist is a theme that goes all the way through the history of participant observation. Just as anthropologists have critically examined many assumptions of participant observation research, we might do well to pay attention to the cautionary point made by Angel-Ajani, when she writes that “the act of witnessing is not as uncomplicated as is often represented” (2006: 81). Angel-Ajani follows Lisa Malkki (1997) in her observation that police work and anthropology share in vocabularies of investigation and witnessing. For Malkki, the role of listener (ibid.: 96), attentive to the relationship between oneself and those being studied, is a different role from that of investigator. She sees (ibid.: 96) these as two “different modalities of ethnography” and labels the role of the witness as one of “caring vigilance” in opposition to the other of “unlocking a mystery.” Malkki positions the witness more toward the participant side of participant observation and the investigator more toward the side of the observer. The anthropologist as witness emerged in the context of a focus on what Joel Robbins has recently termed “the suffering subject.” Although his concern is more with what we study rather than how we do it, Robbins (2013) has provocatively argued that anthropology moved from “the savage to the suffering slot” (ibid.:448) since the 1990s, as our object of study moved from “the other”’ to “the suffering subject.” He observes that “the subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence or oppression now very often stands at the centre of anthropological research” (ibid.:448). Robbins makes this point as part of his larger task of identifying a new trend toward what he calls “an anthropology of the good” in the ways in which people imagine and work toward “better worlds” (ibid.: 459). He does not suggest a new role for the anthropologist in this emphasis on “the good” and it may be that the trope of the witness (not discussed by Robbins) can adapt itself to work on the good. It may also be that new vocabularies for the role of the anthropologist will develop as our research topics shift. By offering these reflections on some historical trends and more recent contributions in anthropology, I have attempted to show that by adopting a rhetoric of witnessing, anthropologists have not dissolved the long-standing tension between objectivity and subjectivity, distance and proximity, or detachment and involvement that has characterized discussions of fieldwork from the very beginning. The very term “witnessing” is related to experience, to observation, and to the act of reportage through testimony. In many ways, this points back to the autobiographical nature of anthropology and to the conundrum at the heart of our discipline—we are the instruments of research and observe ourselves and others while we participate. As Fabian (1983: 88) has written: All anthropological writing must draw on reports resulting from some sort of concrete encounter between individual ethnographers and members of other cultures and societies. The anthropologist who does not draw on his own experience will use accounts by others. Directly or vicariously, anthropological discourse formulates knowledge that is rooted in the author’s autobiography. He uses this idea to argue that “objectivity can never be defined in opposition to subjectivity” because “The Other” is always part of the anthropologist’s own past (ibid.: 89). This point is 68

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related to the perspective adopted by Das in her understanding of the figure of the witness and the role of the anthropologist in the field. It is also present in the criticism of participant observation, with its impossible division between the participant and observer, offered by Bourdieu. All three call into question the subjective/objective division. When we read the reports (or stories) of others, we are engaging in a form of virtual witnessing of what Fabian calls “some sort of concrete encounter” (ibid.: 88). The witness figure in anthropology adopts a certain moral authority—either as a somewhat disinterested witness or as a highly engaged and politically active witness.This signals to me that anthropologists increasingly (since Malinowski’s time) view themselves not as neutral bystanders to global processes (that are at once political, economic, and cultural) but as social agents who are affected by them and implicated in them. The growing trend identifying the anthropologist as witness reflects the same tensions surrounding distance and proximity, engagement and detachment, which have long been associated with participant observation. As the social spaces of our research change with new technologies and new topics, the emphasis on “being there” for the ethnographer may be shifting toward one of encounter and co-presence in which the dual role of observer and participant takes on new meanings.

Further reading and additional sources Goffman, A. (2014) On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grandia, L. (2015) “Slow Ethnography: A Hut with a View”, Critique of Anthropology, 35(3): 301–317. Reed-Danahay, D. (2001) “Autobiography, Intimacy and Ethnography”, in P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland, and L. Lofland (eds.), Handbook of Ethnography. (pp. 407–426). London: Sage Publications. Sanjek, R. and S. W. Tratner (eds.) (2016) eFieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology in the Digital World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Deborah Reed-Danahay Bowen, E. S. [Laura Bohannan] (1954) Return to Laughter, New York: Harper. Bradbury, D. (1998) Being There:The Necessity of Fieldwork, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. E. (eds.) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press. Coleman, S. and Collins, P. (eds.) (2006) Locating the Field: Space, Place and Context in Anthropology, Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. Coleman, S. and Collins, P. (eds.) (2011) Dislocating Anthropology?: Bases of Longing and Belonging in Analysis of Contemporary Societies, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press. Collins, P. and Gallinat, A. (eds.) (2010) The Ethnographic Self as Resource:Writing Memory and Experience into Ethnography, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Crapanzano,V. (1980) Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Das, V. (2007) Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary, Berkeley: University of California Press. Davies, J. and Spencer, D. (eds.) (2010) Emotions in the Field: The Psychology and Anthropology of Fieldwork Experience, Stanford: Stanford University Press. De Soto, H. G. and Dudwick, N. (eds.) (2000) Fieldwork Dilemmas: Anthropologists in Postsocialist States, ­Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1940) The Nuer, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Fassin, D. (2011) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present, transl. R. Gomme, Berkeley: University of California Press. Favret-Saada, J. (1980 [1977]) Deadly Words:Witchcraft in the Bocage, transl. C. Cullen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Geertz, C. (1974) “‘From the Native’s Point of View’: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding”, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28(1): 26–45. Geertz, C. (1988) Works and Lives:The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ghosh, A. (1994) “The Global Reservation: Notes Toward an Ethnography of International Peacekeeping”, Cultural Anthropology, 9(3): 412–422. Givoni, M. (2013) “The Ethics of Witnessing and the Politics of the Governed”, Theory, Culture and Society, 31(1): 123–142. Grindal, B. T. (1983) “Into the Heart of Sisala Experience: Witnessing Death Divination”, Journal of Anthropological Research, 39(1): 60–80. Halstead, N., Hirsch, E., and Okely, J. (eds.) (2008) Knowing How to Know: Fieldwork and the Ethnographic Present, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Hume, L. and Mulcock, J. (2004) “Introduction: Awkward Spaces, Productive Places”, in L. Hume and J. Mulcock (eds.), Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation, New York: Columbia University Press. James, W. and Allen, N. J. (eds.) (1998) Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Kleinman, A., Das,V., and Lock, M. (eds.) (1997) Social Suffering, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kluckhohn, C. (1943) “Bronislaw Malinowski 1884–1942”, Journal of American Folklore, 56: 208–219. Kluckhohn, F. R. (1940) “The Participant-Observer Technique in Small Communities”, American Journal of Sociology, 46(3): 331–343. Krause, E. L. (2005) “Encounters with ‘the Peasant’: Memory Work, Masculinity, and Low Fertility in Italy”, American Ethnologist, 32(4): 593–617. Kuklick, H. (2011) “Personal Equations: Reflections on the History of Fieldwork, with Special Reference to Sociocultural Anthropology”, Isis,102: 1–33. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955) Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Librairie Plon. Malinowski, B. (1922) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, New York: E. P. Dutton and Company. Malkki, L. H. (1997) “News and Culture:Transitory Phenomena and the Fieldwork Tradition”, in A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds.), Anthropological Locations: Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. Marcus, G. E. (2005) “The Anthropologist as Witness in Contemporary Regimes of Intervention”, Cultural Politics, 1(1): 31–49. Marcus, G. E. (2007) “Ethnography Two Decades After Writing Culture: From the Experimental to the Baroque”, Anthropological Quarterly, 80(4): 1127–1145. Marcus, G. E. (2010) “Experts, Reporters, Witnesses: The Making of Anthropologists in States of Emergency”, in D. Fassin and M. Pandolfi (eds.), States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Intervention, New York: Zone Books.

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Participating, observing, witnessing Marcus, G. E. (ed.) (1992) Rereading Cultural Anthropology, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Marcus, G. E. and Fischer M. M. J. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marriott, A. L. (1952) Greener Fields: Experiences among the American Indians, Garden City: Doubleday. McLean, A. and Leibing, A. (eds.) (2007) The Shadow Side of Fieldwork: Exploring the Blurred Borders Between Ethnography and Life, Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Parkin, R. (2005) “The French-Speaking Countries”, in F. Barth, A. Gringrich, R. Parkin, and S. Silverman, One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Parkin, R. and de Sales, A. (eds.) (2010) Out of the Study and Into the Field: Ethnographic Theory and Practice in French Anthropology, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Platt, J. (1982) “The Development of the ‘Participant Observation’ Method in Sociology: Origin Myth and History”, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 19: 379–393. Powdermaker, H. (1966) Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist, New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Rabinow, P. (1977) Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press. Read, K. (1965) The High Valley, New York: Columbia University Press. Redfield, P. (2006) “A Less Modest Witness: Collective Advocacy and Motivated Truth in a Medical Humanitarian Movement”, American Ethnologist, 33(1): 3–26. Reed-Danahay, D. (2004) “Tristes Paysans: Bourdieu’s Early Ethnography in Béarn and Kabylia”, Anthropological Quarterly, 77(1): 87–106. Reed-Danahay, D. (2005) Locating Bourdieu, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Reed-Danahay, D. (2007 [2001]) “Autobiography, Intimacy, and Ethnography”, in P. Atkinson et al. (eds.), Handbook of Ethnography, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Richards, A. (1943) “Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski”, Man, 43: 1–4. Robbins, J. (2013) “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good”, JRAI: Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19: 447–462. Ruby, J. (ed.) (1982) A Crack in the Mirror: Reflexive Perspectives in Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sanford, V. and Angel-Ajani, A. (eds.) (2006) Engaged Observer: Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Sanjek, R. (1990) “The Secret Life of Fieldnotes”, in R. Sanjek (ed.), Fieldnotes:The Makings of Anthropology, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1992) Death Without Weeping:The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, Berkeley: University of California Press. Scheper-Hughes, N. (1995) “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology”, Current Anthropology, 36(3): 408–420. Scott, J. (1991) “The Evidence of Experience”, Critical Inquiry, 17(4): 773–797. Serematakis, C. N. (1991) The Last Word: Women, Death, and Divination in Inner Mani. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silverman, S. (2005) “The United States”, in F. Barth, A. Gringrich, R. Parkin, and S. Silverman, One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Tedlock, B. (1991) “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography”, Journal of Anthropological Research, 47(1): 69–94. Tourigny, S. (2004) “‘Yo, Bitch …’ and Other Challenges: Bringing High-Risk Ethnography into the Discourse”, in L. Hume and J. Mulcock (eds.), Anthropologists in the Field: Cases in Participant Observation, New York: Columbia University Press. Tsing, A. L. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wax, R. H. (1971) Doing Fieldwork:Warnings and Advice, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wieviorka, A. (2006) The Era of the Witness, J. Stark, trans., Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Williams, R. (1985) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Rev. ed., New York: Oxford University Press. Woolgar, S. and Coopmans, C. (2006) “Virtual Witnessing in a Virtual Age: Prospectus for Social Studies of E-science”, in C. Hine (ed.), New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production, Hershey: Idea Group.

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4 BEYOND SItES AND MEtHODS The field, history and global capitalism Patrick Neveling

Introduction For a largely research-driven science such as anthropology the object(s) of investigation are crucial choices. The “field” is what most anthropologists may identify as just such an object, be this the entire world or a rural, suburban, or urban setting, a factory, a university department, or whatever other scales we may think of where human interaction and sociability take place.What is possibly significant for anthropology in contrast to other disciplines is the uneasy relationship they have with their “field” – both as individuals with academic biographies and as an epistemic community of scientists with their common quarrels over politics and analytical strands. Bronislaw Malinowski, who is often identified as the founder of mainstream anthropological research practices, himself established the practice of field research in a setting where he ended up as living for a time as a detainee on Australian territory because of his German origin in the years of the First World War. He made good use of his somewhat unwanted residence pattern and, as we all know, wrote several all-time classics about the Trobriand Islands in what was then an Australian protectorate. The following is about the field and the changing historical “relationship” that anthropology has had with it. I set off with my own research in Mauritius in the early 2000s in order to assess what the “field” should be, in my view, for a modern anthropology that is necessarily at odds with the workings of global capitalism and what they do to humankind. Importantly, humankind is facing decisions on how it determines the nature of social life in time and space. Likewise, anthropologists, past and present, also have had a choice to make with respect to what concepts to make canonical in the discipline; how “the field” should be framed remains central among such choices. Accordingly, I assess recent debates over globalization and multi-sited ethnography, as well as earlier trends in research frameworks against their capability to capture the past and present workings of global capitalism, worldwide. I examine the specifics of these processes as they play out in a location such as Mauritius, aiming to outline a contemporary research agenda able to consider continuity and change in the face of hierarchies, inequalities and the many efforts to overcome or sustain these systems of inequality. Now, off to Mauritius. In the early 2000s the small-island nation-state Mauritius was in crisis. Like any nationstate, Mauritius has a history shaped by incorporation into global capitalism—and as everywhere, this history is both particular on the one hand and a reflection of global trends on 72

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the other. Accordingly, that crisis was a reflection of a changing global economic setting. The ­member-states of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) had been advancing plans for what they said would be a liberalization of world trade (for an overview on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT] and WTO see Hoekman and Kostecki, 2001). In such agreements, two or more nation-states, or trading blocs such as the European Union, grant each other or one party preferential access to their markets; for this reason, the WTO viewed them as obstacles to the establishment of a system of global free trade and sought to therefore have them abolished by January 1, 2005. Once we turn to Mauritius, the particularities kick in. Not all nation-states experienced the run-up to the above deadline as a time of crisis. Mauritius, however, had been one of the winners of a global trading system with many bilateral and multilateral trade agreements in place. In fact, such agreements had contributed crucially to labels such as “economic miracle” or “Africa’s first tiger,” which had become attached to the island around 1990 (Aladin, 1993; Morna, 1991). The Mauritian particularity in that period was one of anti-cyclical boom and bust. While many nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America saw their economies decline during what is called the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s, the Mauritian economy grew rapidly. The driving force behind this growth was an export processing zone (EPZ), where foreign and local investors set up an extensive network of businesses in the textile and garment sector and brought full employment to an island-state that had been considered one of the poorest nations in the world in the late period of British colonial rule up to 1968 (Neveling, 2015b). Among the reasons that made Mauritius so attractive for investments in the textile and garment sector during the 1980s was that in addition to cheap labor, tax- and customs-free manu­ facturing in an EPZ, and other laws that put capital in the driving seat vis-à-vis trade unions and the state, Mauritius also had an export-quota to the market of what was then the European Economic Community that other nations did not have (even while they had everything else, such as an EPZ, and more, such as cheaper labor and even fewer workers’ rights than Mauritius). After those export-quotas were phased out in the late 1990s, Mauritius lost its major competitive advantage and with this change, tens of thousands of jobs and a good share of export revenues on the foreign trade balance sheet of the island nation disappeared for good. Obviously, the crisis had been looming in Mauritius for quite some time. In mid-July 2003, when I began my research on the textile and garment industry and on the Mauritian EPZ, that crisis came to a climax. It manifested itself (again) in a number of ways after two of the leading foreign EPZ-investors announced the closure of their Mauritian operations. These investors, Leisure Garment and Summit Textiles, two Hong Kong–based consortia, would take with them 4,000 jobs. This development came on top of previous relocations from other Asian and Mauritian multinationals like Novel Garments and CIEL Textile Group. On an island with 1.2 million inhabitants and an officially registered workforce of around 400,000, unemployment rose by 5 per cent within three years (for figures see Central Statistics Office, 2004). By the end of August 2003 the above-mentioned closures seemed inevitable and around 1,000 people took to the streets of Curepipe, one of the largest Mauritian cities, where one factory had employed around 50 per cent of Summit Textiles’ Mauritian workers. The demonstrators asked for swift and determined state action to guarantee the survival of the ailing textile and garment sector and for the introduction of a national unemployment scheme. In the week before, a Mauritian weekly with considerable circulation, News on Sunday, reprinted an article that the Wall Street Journal had recently featured on Mauritius. Under the headline, “The downside of globalisation,” the journal had painted a picture of doom and gloom for the small-island state, saying that “…this poster child of globalisation is starting to see the downside of free trade. As trade barriers ease around the world, China and India are flooding the world‘s market with 73

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their own textiles and undercutting Mauritius‘s prices by drawing on their own vast pools of cheap labour” (Tejada, 2003). Now, Mookeshwarsing Gopal, acting president of the private sector-driven Mauritius Export Processing Zones Association, announced that “all textile and garment companies are experiencing difficulties” (La Gazette de Maurice, 2003, my translation). Either the Textile Emergency Support Team, the latest in a series of collaborative efforts by the government and the private sector, would succeed and the sector would recover or the whole country and particularly all those workers already dismissed or about to be dismissed would have to look for a new (industrial) future. The state, he added, was definitely not in a position to support households affected by unemployment with “additional benefits” (La Gazette de Maurice, 2003, my translation). As these brief episodes show, a number of actors had their say during the Mauritian crisis of 2003. Transnational corporations announced that they would shut down production sites, workers and others who were affected by these changes demonstrated against the closures and what would presumably follow, national and international media commented on the changing embeddedness of the island in the global system; last but not least, there was the Mauritian state-private sector alliance seeking to turn the leading EPZ sector around, which, interestingly, meant that a leading representative of a private sector organization felt empowered to speak out about the limited redistributive capacities of the state. What these episodes also show is that Mauritian debates during the early 2000s were greatly concerned with temporality. From the articles in the Wall Street Journal to the activists taking the streets and asking for a change in state policies, concern was both with the past development of the Mauritian economy as well as with its future prospects. Such a consciousness of change in public expressions also indexed a variety of scales. For one, we find an assessment of Mauritius’s position vis-à-vis a global economic system with nation-states competing with one another for foreign direct investment and employment. Secondly, there was concern about the prospects of individual households in the face of local repercussions from changes in the global economy. Thirdly, a debate over changing relations between capital, state, and labor emerged as the state gave support to companies in the textile and garment sector while it denied support to those workers who had been made redundant (laid off ). The first section of this chapter will expand the discussion of how different actors developed and articulated some of the above-mentioned concepts in order to enhance our understanding of economic changes in Mauritius during the years 2003 and 2004. Importantly, all of the concepts I came across in Mauritius included reflections on how historical integration into the capita­list world-economy had shaped access to means of production, in the broad sense of the term, and social stratification in Mauritius, and how these historically embedded inequalities might be sustained into the future due to the crisis of the present. I suggest that the best way to capture the conversation between the various actors who took the stage in Mauritius in 2003 and 2004 is by perceiving them as the socio-genealogical positioning of actors (and of the institutions they may represent) in light of the multifarious manifestations of globalization. ­Globalization, suffice it to say for now, in the case of Mauritius has shaped this previously uninhabited territory since the early seventeenth century, when Dutch colonisers first took possession of the island. The contemporary crisis of the textile and garment industry and what this meant for households, the state, the private sector, and so forth, thus was then only one in a sequence of such manifestations of globalization.Whereas globalization surely generated different phenomena over the centuries, in structural terms the outcome of its manifestations, the real-world changes and what people make of them, is the same; different, competing explanations of what is going on, why it is going on, and what the best way to move forward should be. 74

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In order to broaden this agenda developed based on ethnographic detail from Mauritius in section one, section two discusses new understandings of “the field” in anthropology. These came to the fore in the discipline’s globalization debates of the 1990s and I show how they reveal a lack of focus with regard to historical process and hierarchy. In the concluding section, I open up a more comprehensive notion of the “field”, which I exemplify with a short overview of macro-anthropology writings concerned with the history of the twentieth century. In this way an anthropological inquiry emerges that is attentive to historical processes and hierarchies, and to how these have informed the socio-genealogical positioning of actors and institutions in times of crises, aiming to make sense of the prospects for their future lives and times.

Crisis and the global system: Mauritius as a field of inquiry in 2003 and 2004 The most striking occurrence in Mauritius during the time of my research was surely the crisis in the textile and garment industry. As noted, the phasing out of the preferential export quota came on the heels of the liberalization of world trade. This also had an impact on the island’s other revenue-generating economic sectors—the sugar industry and tourism. What struck me in particular in the first weeks after my arrival was that anthropological writings on Mauritius had little or nothing to say about the island’s dependency on world market trends or on the diverse political arenas where decisions with crucial impact on the lives and times of all Mauritians had been made in the past and were made in the present. Rather, the writings of one Scandinavian anthropologist, for example,Thomas Hylland Eriksen, focused chiefly on Mauritius as a nation whose supposedly multicultural inhabitants were descendants of French colonial immigrants, African slaves, Gujarati and Chinese traders, and South Asian indentured laborers, and who, despite this diversity engaged in (surprisingly) peaceful inter-ethnic relations (Eriksen, 1998). The longer I lived in Mauritius, the more I felt that something was wrong with Eriksen’s declaration that “non-ethnic” options were secondary to how Mauritians made sense of their world. My initial impulse was to think that class interests must have been of little or no relevance in everyday life at the time when Eriksen had conducted research in the 1980s (cf. Eriksen, 1998: esp.: 20, 48), until I realized that it was not only leftist political movements (mentioned only to be dismissed by Eriksen) that rallied against ethnic politics but also that most Mauritians used “communalism” as the pejorative term to describe those who still believed that reference to ethnic origin was the paramount way to find a position in the economy and in society in general. Indeed, I regularly heard references to how a so-called best-loser-system kept the island’s political parties stuck in ethnic politics as they hoped that in the case of a bad election campaign they would be allocated one of eight seats reserved for those parties who represented ethnic groups who were otherwise underrepresented in parliament after the 69 “regular” seats had been filled via direct elections. Shortly before independence in 1968, the British had introduced this system as a way to disrupt the possibilities for class-based alliances to develop throughout the twentieth century. Such an ethnic paradigm was the dominant lens through which the Colonial Office in London and the colonial administration on the island had viewed and organised Mauritian society since the mid-1800s. This was despite the fact that the colonial census in Mauritius meant regular frustration on the side of enumerators, who found it hard to maintain a rigid, albeit ever-changing classificatory system combining one’s ancestors’ origin in France, India, Africa, and so forth with religious belief in the face of permanent migration, intermarriage, and religious conversions (cf. Christopher, 1992). Still, these classifications were upheld throughout the colonial period, based on a deliberate ignorance of a strong labor movement since the 1930s, which organized numerous general strikes, 75

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and increasingly came into conflict with proto-fascist political movements that emerged around the same time. Despite the fact that such movements grew larger and larger, Burton Benedict, a sociologist who was sent to study Mauritius on behalf of the Colonial Office, maintained in the late 1950s that the island was a “plural society” with ethnic groups in the driver’s seat of social life (e.g. Benedict, 1965). There is much to say about the ways in which ethnic politics dominated Mauritian society and domestic political-economy in some periods and how they took the backseat in other periods, or, how it was particularly the sugar sector and to some degree the colonial and early postcolonial state where ethnic politics secured patron-client networks that kept workers’ rights movements at bay (cf. Neveling, 2012). All this could be referred to historical inquiry were it not for the fact that the anthropology of Mauritius has so far not come clean on the impact of its “colonial encounter” (Asad, 1973) on the prevailing representation of Mauritius as a ­multi-ethnic “paradise”. Instead, Eriksen had “written in stone” (Neveling, 2015a) Benedict’s predicament when he wrote that “Mauritian society, if anything, is a plural one” (Eriksen, 1998: 20). By “anything” he meant ethnicity, and this remains an inevitable frame of reference for any otherwise excellent inquiry into the nature of Mauritian social relations (e.g. Boswell, 2006; Eisenlohr, 2006; Salverda, 2015). Such a focus can hardly account adequately for the dominance of very few industries in Mauritius in everyday life. The textile and garment industry, for example, employed around a quarter of the Mauritian workforce from the 1980s to the early 2000s and these workers’ lives were driven by up to 60-hour weeks in factories responding to the industry’s order cycles for winter and summer seasons, as well as to a changing global commodity chain that came to be dominated by ever shorter lead times for orders in the 1990s, when retailers such as the Swedish Hennes & Mauritz, the British Primark, or the Spanish textile and garment giant Inditex entered the market (on lead times see Gereffi and Memedovic, 2003). Another core industrial sector of postcolonial Mauritian society is the tourism industry, which grew especially rapidly from the 1980s and now brings close to one million visitors to the island each year with the bulk of arrivals during the Christmas season (Schnepel, 2009). The sugar industry, on the other hand, while important for the postcolonial state’s economic trajectory, was purely a colonial creation. It is, in many ways, what Mauritian society is built on, as the islanders are well aware. In 2003, most of the land utilized for agricultural purposes was in the hands of the sugar industry. Therefore, the sugar sector and its historical foundations and legacies in the present deserve special attention in any effort to frame an anthropological “field” for Mauritius. A tour d’horizon shall illustrate why. When Mauritius fell from the French to the British in 1810 towards the end of the Napoleonic wars, it had been this industry in part that enabled a truce between the resident French-­Mauritian population and the new British colonial rulers. In 1825, Mauritius had been incorporated into the preferential West Indian Sugar Protocol and had quickly become one of the British Empire’s leading sugar-producing colonies. As the industry boomed throughout much of the nineteenth century, descendants of French planters set up joint ventures with British trading houses and a Euro-Mauritian business community emerged as the second power alongside, and often in close cooperation with, the colonial administrations. A local banking sector provided capital on a seasonal basis until the Mauritian produce had been sold on the markets in London and later also in British India. The principles governing the trade were delineated early on as in 1835 the Empire enforced the abolition of slavery in the face of rioting Mauritian mobs. The huge compensation paid to slave-owners not only provided capital for the banking sector but also for modernizing the sugar industry and promoting milling technology. The Empire provided indentured laborers from its South Asian colonies. As hundreds of thousands of such laborers moved 76

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between Mauritius and India, trade relations grew and British-Indian banking houses provided credit, which an increasing number of indentured laborers used to set up their own small and medium plantation businesses. For the Euro-Mauritian bourgeoisie, such business activity was a blessing as it facilitated the partition and sale of plots with soils depleted by decades of intensive cultivation and stricken by the El Niño weather pattern of the 1870s. The Euro-Mauritian petty bourgeoisie established new outlets during this period as they moved from being planters into real estate brokering since they found it ever more difficult to compete with the large estates and their state-of-the-art milling technology. Between the 1870s and the 1920s, Mauritius was a hothouse for small and medium sugar cane businesses. However, as the global crisis of the 1930s hit, tens of thousands of households lost their newly acquired smallholdings. They were driven into growing urban agglomerations while others, who managed to hold on to their land, became ever more dependent on moneylenders working in close collaboration with the large mills and on job contractors whom the large estates sent out during the cane season to recruit temporary labor by the hour, the day, or by the week at best. The sugar industry was driven by preferential access to particular markets from its inception and remains dependent on the export quota up to the present. The 1825 incorporation of Mauritius into the West Indian Sugar Protocol was nullified by the Corn Laws in 1845, only for the flow of Mauritian sugar to be diverted back from India to the United Kingdom at the onset of the First World War, which has remained the direction of exports ever since that time. But, as with the other sectors, the WTO liberalization of global trade meant that Mauritian sugar would lose its competitive edge over larger producers such as Brazil and Thailand in 2000 with the Cotonou Agreement, running to 2020, intended to phase out preferences step-by-step to allow the Mauritian industry to restructure (for more comprehensive summaries see Neveling, 2013, 2015b). Mauritius is then an island of political and economic history rather than an island of ethnic history. Culture in Mauritius “is the world-system” (Wallerstein, 1990). For it is not only the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of workers on an island with 1.2 million inhabitants that are driven by the seasons of the global textile and garment or the tourism industry, or the seasons of sugar cane cultivation and processing, but also the various cosmological notions of the islanders, past and present, reflected in ritual and other practices. For example, the International Workers’ Day, May 1, is a central ritual for all islanders and Mauritians refer to it as “the war of the crowds,” meaning that the major political parties open their war-chests and hire public buses to drive as many islanders as they can afford to political rallies held in Quatre Bornes, Rose Hill, Beau-Bassin, and other large Mauritian cities. Once the rallies are over and the increasingly drunken crowds have listened to up to five hours of speeches amplified to deafening levels, rewards are paid in kind as thousands are now bused to the beaches where the respective party’s “agents” will have arranged for free barbecues and drinks. Stemming from the days of slavery and the French Code Noir, Mauritian Kreol1 has dozens of words to capture the kinds of beatings that the elaborate sadism of mainly ­European slave-­owners created. This violent history surfaces in public events as a consequence of the excessive consumption of alcohol, which in Mauritius is predominantly local cane-rum, whose “trium­phant” success came with the introduction of a severe anti-“ganja” law that was possibly meant to create a new stream of revenue for sugar millers at the onset of the global crisis of the 1930s. Consumption of alcohol is excessive on Mauritian beaches during the May First festivities, where party allegiances sometimes emerge when, at the end of a long and hot day, parties of men sponsored by oppositional parties face off. Other rituals of global capitalism and its ­Mauritian “cultural” manifestations are less violent. La Coupe, which marks the start of the cane cutting season, is held each year in a different mill where the owners host a selection of their employees, journalists, and high-ranking politicians.2 When I observed this ritual in 2004, people listened to 77

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the Minister of Agriculture speaking about the Mauritian position in negotiations over agricultural goods in the WTO before he symbolically set in motion the wheels of the cane-crushing machine and expressed his wishes for a good cane-cutting season, a “bonne campaigne a tous.” In addition to such rituals that emerge from an embeddedness into global capitalism and its particularities and commonalities, the Mauritian state has its rituals. In common with most other postcolonial states there is a national Independence Day, which has often been a condenser of Mauritian embeddedness into the global system. Independence Day is held on March 12 when, in 1968, the British handed over authority to the first elected Prime Minister, ­Seewoosagur Ramgoolam. That particular day and date was not necessarily a celebration, as one important Mauritian politician noted in his autobiography (Cuttaree, 2011: 104–111).Violent clashes between gangs in the capital Port Louis broke out and were soon framed as ethnic riots. The British army had to step in to calm the situation and a curfew was declared on the night when independence celebrations should have been held (see also Simmons, 1982: 186–187). Many Mauritians regarded the sugar magnates, who were fierce opponents of independence, and their political arm, the “Parti Mauricien Social Democrat,” as the instigators of this violence, which they hoped would make the British see that the island was not capable of self-rule. A different argument sometimes deployed against independence was that Mauritius was too reliant on sugar, which was the only export commodity. Having one of the fastest-growing populations among the world’s colonies in the 1950s and 1960s, a British survey mission headed by famous Keynesian economist James Edward Meade in 1960 had attested that with such a high degree of dependency on world market trends and limited capacities for diversifying its economic base due to a comparatively small domestic market made it likely that an independent Mauritius might encounter serious difficulties in sustaining itself (Meade, 1961). The fact that immediately following this period, the economy of independent Mauritius transformed from a supposedly lost cause to the economic hothouse of Africa has been a central feature of World Bank reports, which have portrayed Mauritius as an example for successful export-­oriented development that all other postcolonial nations should follow (World Bank Group, 1992). Similarly, international and Mauritian scholars published dozens of articles trying to explain the Mauritian boom, which they say was mainly driven by the government’s decision to establish an export processing zone (EPZ) in 1970 where so many textile and garment businesses set up shop in the 1980s (e.g. Subramanian and Roy, 2001). Not only did the boom come to an end in the early 2000s, it also meant that more than one generation of Mauritians, most of them women, spent their early adolescence in world-market factories where they were subjected to sexist and otherwise oppressive regimes of labor, only to find that after the collapse of the EPZs in the 2000s, there were no obvious prospects for continuing to make a living in the textile and garment sectors (Burn, 1996; Neveling, 2006). It was these workers who took the streets of Curepipe in the demonstration mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. Others I spoke to at that event and at other occasions had spent 15 or more years working on rolling night-shifts in dyeing and finishing factories, working with dangerous chemicals and machines that might easily kill a tired worker who showed a lack of caution. Not everyone was threatened by unemployment. For some, corporate restructuring aiming at higher profit margins meant revisions to shift-systems that meant they would have even fewer opportunities to engage with their families, friends, and neighbors. Many protesters were members of one of the several hundred Mauritian trade unions, which owing to the Mauritian single union agreement are put in permanent competition over who represents the workers in which factory (on this system see Neveling, 2012: 228–247). In addition, a number of smaller political parties and civil rights groups were present, many of them looking to mobilize a protest on September 10, when the Ministerial Meetings of the 78

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World Trade Organization (WTO) in the Mexican coastal city Cancun would begin. A broad coalition of parties, unions, and civil rights groups had announced a protest march through Port Louis and their mobilization proved highly successful. Around 800 people took to the bustling streets of the capital on a weekday morning, a number that would be the equivalent of around 200,000 protesters in the United States based on a comparison of the percentages of total popu­ lation of the two countries. The route taken and the demands made had been carefully selected in the weeks before. A small pavilion at Champs-de-Mars, just outside the city-center, was the assembly point. Here, Maurice Curé had officially proclaimed the formation of the Mauritian Labor Movement in 1936. From there, the demonstration moved past various ministries, reminding ministers that many legal regulations to be abolished for meeting the WTO standards were actually not achievements of the postcolonial era, but of colonial times when various British colonial commissions had recommended old-age pensions, the rights of workers to unionize and so forth. These were achievements that the people of Mauritius had wrestled from the British only by dint of the efforts of the labor movement. The postcolonial state had no right, and, it was implied, not even the legitimacy to take these away. The demonstration culminated in the following address to the Minister for Industry and Trade: Sir, do you want to go in history [sic] as the Minister who destroyed the Pension Right of the present generation of workers? Will you assume the responsibility of abolishing a right that was affordable even in colonial time [sic]? How will you explain to future generations that in the present century, with the immense progress and wealth created by people’s labor, the state could not afford Universal Old Pension to its citizens? (Protest March Platform on World Trade Organsiation, 2003) The protesters had fronted what I have called a socio-genealogical positioning (SGP) in the introduction and which is a structural term for analyzing how humans make sense of the mani­ festations of globalization. This particular SGP put the people of Mauritius as sovereign—albeit a sovereign under threat from the forces of global capital, which, according to their chants, used the WTO as a front for imposing their wishes on national governments. History was central to (re-)claiming the people’s sovereignty. Mauritians of the present were the righteous recipients of social services and of the social welfare system that the colonial government had put in place.This was because earlier generations had risked their lives in protests against exploitation and other injustices and, to emphasize this, the protesters actually quoted from a 1938 report of a British commission that had made inquiries into deadly riots in the sugar industry (Hooper, 1938: 168). Not only did the Minister for Trade and Industry feel the urge to respond in parliament to such accusation; around the same time, he also ran for the position of Director General of the WTO. Possibly to support the Minister’s campaign, the governing coalition invited the acting WTO Director General, Supachai Panitchpakdi, as honorable speaker for the Independence Day celebrations in 2004. The WTO Director General, to my surprise, also made references to Mauritian history in general and to colonial survey missions in particular: In my file, my staff did, however, refer to a 1960 prediction about the future of Mauritius by a Nobel Prize winning economist. In his report to the then Government of Mauritius, the Nobel Laureate James Meade predicted that the island’s development prospects would be bleak. Mauritius, as he saw it, was too dependent on one ­commodity—sugar, too vulnerable to terms of trade shocks, too overpopulated and 79

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had too much potential for ethnic tensions. James Meade has long since been proven wrong. He was wrong not because he miscalculated Mauritius’s adverse inheritance following independence but because, he overlooked, in his otherwise thorough analysis, the determination of the Mauritian people to succeed. (Panitchpakdi, 2004) In this speech, we encounter a very different SGP, informed by the policy ambitions of the WTO and especially so by the urge to praise the future benefits of free trade. The “Mauritian people” have a determination to succeed, which is independent of the way the global economy is organized, it seems. No attention is given to the question of why the same Mauritians who succeeded and proved wrong the predictions of a world-famous economist had come to be in such a miserable and bleak situation in the first place. This is because, as one may read between the lines, only an independent nation-state enables its population to establish themselves as independent actors on the world market. This, of course, does not take into account the persistence of Mauritius and other countries’ economic dependency on preferential bilateral and multilateral trade agreements granted by their former colonial powers. As evidenced by the crisis of the Mauritian textile and garment industry in 2003 and 2004 such preferential market access had been badly needed to gain comparative advantages and secure economic growth in the postcolonial period. Another particularity of Mauritian history, which has so far not been touched on in this chapter, is that it was the work of the British economist James Meade and his support for one Mauritian businessman that enabled the establishment of a factory in 1965 that would become the blueprint for the Mauritian EPZs and, ultimately, for the booming textile and garment industry that constituted the Mauritian “economic miracle” (Neveling, 2014). It is not the ambition of this chapter, however, to provide a highly sophisticated historical anthropology account of Mauritian political economy. Instead, the major aim is to critically assess notions of “the field” in mainstream anthropology. This is what the following section delivers, informed by the above analysis of events in Mauritius.

A tale of two fields My overview of how globalization has manifested itself in Mauritius since around 1825 could be extended significantly (Neveling, 2012). Suffice to say here that the crisis of the textile and garment industry in 2003 and 2004 created events of a looking-glass quality. The two SGPs I have outlined in the preceding section obviously seek to substantiate political and economic worldviews of the present by highly selective references to the past. Such ideological moves were crucial at the time because Mauritians commonly refer to the three sectors sugar, textiles, and garments, which were all threatened by WTO policy changes, as “economic pillars” of their nation. With all pillars crumbling, literally, immense political labor was invested by competing alliances to establish a nexus between the present and Mauritian historical incorporation into global capitalism. It is this practice of socio-genealogical positioning that makes for macro-level moralities. However much these may be contradicting each other, they are all macro-level efforts to “keep sane” (Zigon, 2007) in the face of crisis and the competition here is over who offers the better, more convincing narrative and historical analysis. Lest not forget, however, that socio-genealogical positioning is not a phenomenon of a twenty-first-century world-system but an everyday life practice. Particular efforts in Mauritius are vividly present in the historical record – especially for earlier times of crisis. One possible socio-genealogical positioning, which was largely rejected in 2003 and 2004, took center stage in Mauritian politics in the 1950s and 1960s, when the London Colonial Office eagerly jumped 80

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to the occasion for narrowing the analysis of Mauritian society to the “ethnic lens” (for how anthropology frames the study of migration in general in this unfortunate way see Glick Schiller et al., 2006). Instead of following the legacy of other anthropologists working on Mauritius who feed their writings analytically from this colonial encounter, what I have said so far in this chapter rests on an analysis of Mauritius as a “field” of political and economic constellations (what I call manifestations of globalization) and socio-genealogical positioning as actors and institutions aim to deal with changing manifestations of globalization, past and present. Many of the themes that inform such SGPs, past and present, bear close resemblance to a debate that was central in anthropology during the 1990s. This revolved around a notion called “globalization.” Globalization, it was said, captured the very fact that the inhabitants of the globe engaged with one another in increasingly interconnected ways. Therefore, the lives and times of contemporary humans were much more interdependent than before. Many have claimed that the very fact of “globalization” meant there was a new global empirical setting that had profoundly changed anthropological theory and the notion of “the field”.3 An important intervention in this regard came from Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, who asked: “What are we to do with a discipline that loudly rejects received ideas of ‘the local,’ even while ever more firmly insisting on a method that takes it for granted?” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 4). This illustrates, for once, that “the field” is one of the crucial tropes for anthropology as a social sciences and humanities discipline. It has come to define the subject of study in the twentieth century as anthropology increasingly fetishized the idea that “the field” should be an individual research project undertaken in a bounded area. It was said now that anthropologists should study “small places” and their “large issues” (Eriksen, 1995). But the problem with this formulation was that the assumption that the anthropologist would encounter an “alien” culture “in the field” remained in place. Following a particular set of methods this encounter was meant to turn the research process, ultimately, into an individual scientist’s rite of passage to full membership in the academic community of anthropologists (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 16–27). Such persistence, according to Gupta and Ferguson, meant that globalization, which they understand as a recent phenomenon, was largely ignored because a particular notion of “the field” as something local still allowed for “smuggling back in assumptions about small-scale societies and face-to-face communities that we thought we had left behind” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 15). In sum, the problem identified by this critique is that in a world ever more connected and driven by a large variety of complex and contradictory movements, globalization meant there were now deficits in anthropology’s concept of the “field” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1992: 6–8; Marcus, 1995: 96). Obviously, no anthropologist can be everywhere at once and it would be pointless to even think about capturing the entire world. Any empirical social science is dependent on certain paradigmatic decisions that compartmentalize the infinite relations that make for human sociability. Several recommendations for such decisions have therefore emerged from the globalization debate. Arjun Appadurai’s widely received concept of scapes sought to delineate dominant streams of global movements into “ethnoscape,” “mediascape,” “technoscape,” “financescape,” and “ideoscape.” His ambition was to capture the new quality of flows as well as their disjuncture (Appadurai, 1996: 32). This proposition has a striking similarity with the way that “multi-sited ethnography” (MSE) was framed. MSE is possibly the most influential methodological move in present-day anthropology and has received wide acclaim since George Marcus proposed it in the subtitle of his 1995 publication as an “ethnography in/of the world-system” (Marcus, 1995). MSE anthropologists should, for example, follow the movement of humans, the spread of conflicts, or biographies (note the resemblance of Marcus’s proposal to Appadurai’s “ethnoscape”), the movement of things (for Appadurai “technoscape”), the circulation of metaphor 81

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and allegories (for Appadurai “ideoscape” and “mediascape”) (Marcus, 1995). MSE is framed as offering “radical alternatives to the norms that have traditionally regulated fieldwork” (Marcus, 1999: 7) and its impact on the discipline has been labeled by Falzon (2009: 1) as a “standard reformative thesis,” which George Marcus “nailed […] to the door of the 1995 Annual Review of Anthropology”. So does MSE, within the field of anthropology, stand up to the claim that it marks a historical watershed in our notions of “the field”? A first crack in the mirror of radicalism appears if we consider that Marcus’s 1995 widely acclaimed article was informed in many ways by the reconsideration of a publication he had co-authored in the 1980s, where it appears as “multi-locale ethnography” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 93). The difference between labeling “the field” as “site” or as “locale” points us to the central void in the entire MSE framework. While the new state of the world, as a globalized one, is considered in detail, no issue is taken with how it should be framed epistemologically, that is, what “the field” should be and, more importantly, what it should not be. Instead, Ulf Hannerz, a second important figure in anthropology’s globalization debate (cf. Hannerz, 1992), has established a reading of MSE that takes the debate about ethnographic representation full circle. That debate was central to the interpretive and postmodernist turn in anthropology during the 1980s, of which Marcus was a central protagonist (for an up-todate summary of the debate see Carrier, 2012). Hannerz argues that only a limited number of sites can ever be covered, which, in turn, means that the coverage of interactions in the now global field is partial (Hannerz, 2003: 207). More importantly though, Hannerz argues that a researcher’s encounters in the many sites that make for his or her global field will always raise questions regarding the relationship between cause and effect. Therefore, Hannerz says, MSE changes the ethnographer’s position towards his informants. While he or she may have lesser intimate knowledge of a given setting because there is less time to remain in one site and study the particularities, he or she will have a much more thorough understanding of cause-effect relations in the global field (Hannerz, 2003: 209–210). This approach, in short, brings back ethnographic authority on the grounds of unequal access to the means of knowledge production, which, in this case, is embodied by the relative mobility of the anthropologist in contrast to that of our informants. What it also reveals is that MSE rests in many ways on the researcher’s access to sites in settings that are hierarchically ordered. But is this sufficient to assume an absolute (rather than a relational) difference in the understanding of cause-effect relations on the side of the two parties (informant and researcher)? Consider, for example, that the workers in a textile and garment sweatshop will most likely not get to see the Western retail stores where the products of their labor are displayed for sale. Similarly, such workers in Mauritius will not have access to the British colonial record. As the above assessment of Mauritian reactions to the crisis of the textile and garment industry in 2003 and 2004 has shown, this does not mean that there are not people other than the ethnographer who are more than happy to facilitate such access. They may even be acting in ways that make them “alter egos” of anthropologists, as a study of a South Korean EPZ has revealed (Kim, 1997). In sum, it is thus much more likely than Hannerz is ready to acknowledge that the informants have their own and fairly elaborate views on global cause-effect relations.These may be at odds with a scholar’s political views on the world, however.This may actually take the extent that (Mauritian and other) informants reject notions of a world that has only recently been globalized, as was proclaimed by Hannerz, Appadurai, Marcus, and other “globalisers” of the 1990s (to borrow a term from Friedman and Friedman, 2008). My observations address a possible second coming of ethnographic authority as much as they reveal shortcomings in considerations of what a “site” or a “locale” actually is (and was). The interpretive turn in the 1970s and 1980s focused, for example, on the practice of writing as 82

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opposed to the method of study. An important point of departure for this was a critical reading of Bronislaw Malinowski’s field diaries, which included his possibly problematic views of the Trobriand Islanders among whom he was living, and which also revealed how literary style was actually a central feature of one of anthropology’s classics, Argonauts of the Western Pacific. This point has been summarized by an introduction to the now classic volume Writing Culture (Clifford, 1986, for an excellent more recent discussion see Zenker and Kumoll 2009). If we take the subtitle for the book, Partial Truths, literally and apply it to the findings of the interpretive turn in anthropology, we discover that, in fact, among the Writing Culture crowd, there was little interest in the possibilities of discovering alternative possible truths. Instead, it was left to others to emphasize the point that Malinowski had deliberately ignored the rapid social, political, and economic changes that the Trobriands and the wider region had been experiencing in the decades before his arrival. These changes have been highlighted by anthropologists like British diffusionist Julian Pitt Rivers, who worked in the region around the same time as Malinowski and described how blackbirding4 turned thousands of locals into forced laborers on Australian sugar plantations (cf. Gupta and Ferguson, 1997: 20;Vincent, 1990).5 Similarly, Marcus and other proponents of the interpretive and postmodernist turn of the 1980s showed little interest in the fact that Clifford Geertz, who is identified as a kind of guiding light, made his career in a setting financed by the deadly US Cold War machine. This is ever more striking as the central “partial truth” in Geertz’s writing until today is how, in his early writings on Indonesia, he ignored a standoff between religious and nationalist right-wing forces on one side and one of the largest communist movements of the 1960s on the other side. In the aftermath of what was possibly a communist coup d’etat at least half a million people would be slaughtered in rural and urban regions alike, throughout the entire Indonesian archipelago, all because they were allegedly communists. This happened with the backing of the US Central Intelligence Agency and the secret services of other advanced capitalist nations and had a significant impact on Indonesian society, which is fundamentally underrepresented in Geertz’ writings (cf. Ross, 1998; Price, 2003; Geertz et al., 2004).6 An assessment of the conception of “the field” in anthropology, or of “sites” and “locales” should therefore start with a historical inquiry into the relations not covered by the proponents of new approaches to methods and the discipline in general.The globalization debate, for example, despite the plethora of monographs of an ever-more connected world, paid little attention to the grave inequalities going along with “globalization” (for a summary of this work see Kalb, 2011). The emergence of such voids in analysis might have had to do with the dominant question of the early globalization debate, which was whether increasing interconnectedness led to homogeneity or whether this still allowed for heterogeneity. Such emphasis on identity led Appadurai to find a disjuncture at work because identities fragmented and many resorted to new (or possibly old) nationalisms and fundamentalisms despite, or because of, the emergence of a so-called “global culture.” A second elision came from an emphasis on movement, understood as obvious and without concern for the intricacies that made movement happen or not happen (or made some people and not others move or not move). Examples of seemingly powerless nations such as India that were now sending highly qualified workers to take up important positions in leading global corporations in Silicon Valley and elsewhere should serve to show that there was a multiplicity of movements working in contradictory directions.What those analytical absences boiled down to, then, was a notion of the global as a system that had functioned in orderly manner but had now turned chaotic because of “a cannibalizing dialectic between tendencies to homogeneity and tendencies to heterogeneity” (Friedman, 1994: 210). In other words, the problem was treating globalization as an evolutionary shift without giving sufficient attention to the very system’s history (Friedman, 1994: 211). 83

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This point is what my introductory account of Mauritius in a time of crisis illustrates. In the face of developments in Mauritius throughout the twentieth century, the prominent analytical and categorical propositions of globalization scholars in anthropology are ahistorical. ­Appadurai’s “ethnoscape,”“mediascape,”“technoscape,”“financescape,” and “ideoscape,” designed to capture the new quality of flows in the global system as much as their disjuncture in the 1990s (Appadurai, 1996: 32), could be just as easily applied to earlier historical events such as Mauritian incorporation into the global sugar commodity chain in 1825, the abolition of slavery and the compensation paid in 1835, and the influx of indentured laborers that followed abolition. Mainstream anthropology of the 1990s and its focus on a recently globalized world therefore rested on a notion of “newness” (see Tsing, 2000; Baca, 2005; Neveling, 2006) that was not a partial truth but impartially wrong because it neglected the violence of that imperial history which had produced globalization in the first place. Recent writings suggest that around the turn of the 1990s, the term globalization emerged as a mere renaming of modernization (Tsing, 2000: 328–330). Likewise, Roland Robertson, who has been credited for establishing the term “globalization” in the social sciences, pointed out that it soon turned from an analytical concept into a new telos of progress, similar to earlier uses of the notion of “modernization”. Importantly, Robertson initially distinguished between globalization, deglobalization, and reglobalization (Robertson, 1992: 10). But in its raw form, as proposed by Appadurai and many others, globalization was a technocratic notion that rested on an evaluation of connections created by new technological means. This understanding of globalization had little to say about macro-political ambitions, let alone about the fact that worldviews related to geopolitical constellations (such as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionist movement, or the global movement for freedom and democracy that created, for example, the United States of America) had been spread into each and every single household of the world during the eras of colonization. What is more, such competing world-views became even more relevant for the everyday life of humans in every corner of the world during the era of imperialism. The first half of the twentieth century saw two global wars. Even in a remote colony of the British Empire such as Mauritius, the colonial state was contested by socialist and fascist movements during the 1930s and after. Put less politely, one may say that the global circulation of political ideas during the era of decolonization and the Cold War was deliberately ignored by anthropology’s globalizers, and so was that fact that the promises of modernization and development had spread in the decades after 1945 in the Third World as much as in the other worlds. It is now time to pick up the bits and pieces from the above and put them together to frame a more comprehensive notion of the anthropological “field”.

A window toward future “fields”: reconsidering the road not taken In his seminal book, “The Three Worlds”, the late Peter Worsley states that “[p]aradoxically, the world has been divided in the process of its unification, divided into spheres of influence, and divided into rich and poor” (Worsley, 1964: 15). This 1964 statement signaled a very different take on global developments than that which was proposed by the globalization debate of the 1990s.Worsley was possibly the founder of an anthropology that was global from the outset. Such anthropology considers the ubiquity of inter-dependencies in world history, without neglecting the fact that inter-dependencies vary across time and space. From such a vantage point, anthropology’s 1990s notion of “globalization” is a phenomenon calling for anthropological analysis rather than for changing the foundations of the discipline. For it is one of several deus ex machina concepts that the particularities of global capitalism have generated since the mid-nineteenth century (cf. McKeown, 2007; Neveling, 2010). Once we look beyond teleological worldviews 84

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such as “modernization” and “globalization”, we encounter a political economy of capitalism that has, instead, produced a long history of “uneven development” (Smith, 2010). Uneven development captures a different “globalization”: one that may be studied for the past 5,000 or so years (see Frank, 1998; Friedman and Friedman, 2008; and with some reservations also Graeber, 2011), for the past 600 or so years (e.g. Arrighi, 2002 [1994];Wolf, 1982); and, of course, also for the most recent decades or for the present. This debate is increasingly important also for anthropology’s dealings with another recent and very central trope. Similar to the globalization debate of the 1990s, the 2000s have seen a plethora of works on “neoliberalism” and, more strikingly, “neoliberalization”. But phenomena such as the mobility of capital and a constant search for cheaper labor, which are commonly framed as genuinely neoliberal (e.g. Ong, 2006), have been analyzed in detail by historians and historical anthropologists for earlier decades of the twentieth century (e.g. Cowie, 1999; Nash, 1995; Neveling, 2015b). Similarly it has been pointed out that what is considered to have been the predecessor regime of neoliberalism—global Keynesian and Fordist patterns of regulating capitalism—was neither global nor uniform (cf. Baca, 2005). Unfortunately, it was not the mainstay of anthropology’s 1990s’ engagement with globalization to establish meaningful links between political and economic developments of global reach and how these were mirrored in the lives and times of the powerful and the powerless alike. But this does not mean that there is not a rich anthropological literature on global capitalism and its workings throughout the twentieth century, and so we turn to a consideration of that rich literature against the background of the insights developed from the Mauritian example. The episodes from the Mauritian crisis of 2003 revealed a babble of voices from a number of actors. Transnational corporations announced that they would shut down production sites, workers and others negatively affected by these changes demonstrated against the closures and what would follow, national and international media commented on the changing embeddedness of the island into the global system, and last but not least, there was the Mauritian state-­ private sector alliance seeking to turn the leading EPZ sector around—which, interestingly, meant that a leading representative of a private sector organization felt empowered to speak out about the limited redistributive capacities of the state. In a parallel case, it has been pointed out how, in the wake of the International Rubber Regulations Agreement, dated 1934, small-scale planters in Dutch East India, now Indonesia, dreamt of rice-eating rubber and rose up against new agricultural policies (Dove, 1996). Another monograph reveals how in Dutch East India, on the Sumatran oil palm and rubber plantations—a hotspot of early multinational corporate ventures such as the United States Rubber Company, later Uniroyal, now part of Michelin, and one of the first Dow Jones listed companies—socialist and communist ideas spread widely from the 1920s on (Stoler, 1985; for multinational activities see pp. 17–22). John Gledhill has also shown how local initiatives of the colonized, sometimes in collaboration with sections of the colonizers, responded to the conjuncture of the 1930s with the establishment of populist regimes driven by “a nationalist economic model based on industrialization and political control over the working class” (Gledhill, 2000: 93). As Gledhill points out, these regimes were quite diverse, and their shape and the policies pursued had much to do with their particular roots in the middle and upper classes as well as with the export-oriented policies that had nurtured former elites. From 1945 onwards, the Cold War would see many such regimes turn to either the capitalist or the socialist bloc, shift their allegiance from one bloc to the other, maneuver between them, align with emerging powers such as the People’s Republic of China, or try to find a third way in the non-aligned movement of the 1960s. Cold War politics would see regimes ousted often in violent and murderous internal warfare that was orchestrated mainly in Washington, and sometimes in Beijing, Moscow, London, Paris, Brussels, 85

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Bonn, or even Havana. It is important to keep in mind that the crucial policy element of most such regimes, the promise of modernity and development, survived the Third World debt crisis, while the populist developmental regimes did not, and lived on only as “expectations of modernity” (Ferguson, 1999) by the time anthropologists had begun to speak of globalization in the 1990s. Possibly fueled by this shift and by the Third World debt crisis, by the end of the 1980s, the political system that had in many ways dominated world politics, and in lesser but still significant ways the global economy, had collapsed. A world that had, since the end of the Second World War in 1945, been torn apart by the struggle of two power blocs, a capitalist one and a socialist one, had ceased to exist, it seemed. But the geopolitical order had crumbled also because many governments in industrially advanced liberal capitalist democracies and in the pro-Western dictatorships created during the Cold War (e.g. Chile, Indonesia) had pursued a new path of capitalism. The globalization debate of the 1990s showed little interest in this path while this would, in the 2000s, emerge as a central concern for anthropologists known as “neoliberalism” (Edelman and Haugerud, 2005: 15–21). If we want to assess this development, it is important to reconsider what explanations have been offered for the turn from Cold War confrontation and socialism versus Keynesian economics to neoliberalism on a global scale. Although many now write about neoliberalism, few contemporary anthropologists have sought to trace the immediate impact of this important pattern of exploitation in the global system back to the critical turning points that allowed for its dominance in particular settings. Among those few, Ida Susser analyzed the impact of the New York City bankruptcy on an urban neighborhood in Brooklyn, and described how working-class inhabitants were ousted by urban redevelopment and by the loss of industrial employment. Her book was original published in 1982 and in a new edition in 2012. Susser is close on the trail of big capital’s double movement, which in many instances triggered neoliberal dominance over other exploitation patterns, when stating that the “same banks which withdrew financial support in 1975 rapidly reinvested in real estate development in 1980” (Susser, 2012: 76). Also, in 1960, 140 of the largest US corporations had had their headquarters in New York while this stood at 44 by 1975 when acres of office spaces in Manhattan were vacant and the average income of the city’s population had declined significantly in comparison with the national median (Susser, 2012: 85). Christopher Gregory focuses on Richard Nixon’s abandoning of the Gold Standard. He shows how in the post–Bretton Woods era the world turned from “organised capitalism” (cf. Lash and Urry, 1987) to “disorganised capitalism” (Gregory, 1997: 1) and what this meant for the lives and times of the inhabitants of the Bastar District in India. Here and elsewhere, “savage money,” which is the title of Gregory’s highly recommended monograph, has emerged in 1971, when World Bank initiatives such as the “all India Land Mortgage Bank” introduced loan schemes that created bankrupt, and ultimately landless debtors. As Gregory points out, the common regional view of such schemes is that they are usury because the World Bank policies comply with the very regional money lending standards that the Bank claimed it wanted to overcome as they do not consider the borrower’s risk (Gregory, 1997: 236). Gregory’s work and “field”, which I am tempted to call “macro-anthropology”, is matched by studies such as that of June Nash (1989) in Pittsfield, an industrial city in the northeastern state of Massachusetts. Nash has vividly analyzed the history of the industrial rise of this region from the late eighteenth century to its decline in the 1980s, when the major employer, General Electric, failed to “take responsibility for the chaos” that resulted from efforts to increase revenues and net profits by forcing fewer workers to increase their productivity (Nash, 1989: 330–331).7 86

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It is no wonder that highly influential humans play an important role in macro-­anthropology “fields”. In Gregory’s study, it is mainly US President Richard Nixon, whose policies are detailed in a key chapter and are analyzed as the trigger for “free market anarchist values” (Gregory, 1997: 305). The historical development of Nash’s field site in Massachusetts was even more closely linked with the policies and influence of Ronald Reagan from the 1950s to the 1980s. Reagan at first appeared “on stage” as labor relations manager for General Electric who came to town regularly to give “pep talks” to workers at the end of which he might randomly sack unpopular foremen as a gesture suggesting that the company management was closing ranks with workers when, in fact, this was an anti-union effort intended to increase productivity. When General Electric fired workers on a large scale in the 1970s and 1980s, it would be the Reagan administration that took away important relief measures, from unemployment benefits to community funds (see also Nash, 1995). There are many macro-anthropology “fields” and one way to frame these is to establish legacies and genealogies of institutions and types of actors, policies, and political movements throughout the twentieth century. One might compare recent policies of the Reagan administration with the UK Thatcher administration’s post-welfare policies of the 1980s, which declared that now the inhabitants of post-1945 housing estates were in charge of their fate and many estate flats would be privatized (Hyatt, 2005). A medium-range historical comparison for macro-­anthropology would consider the short- and long-term effects of such policies in comparison with those of the “ethical colonialism” of the late imperial period that sought to make dependent populations take charge of themselves. Think also, for example, of the post-­ indentured servitude policies in Mauritius and how these are comparable to present-day policies of outsourcing risk. In 1920s Mauritius, an array of colonial policies encouraged what would have been free wage laborers to become smallholders. As noted previously, these smallholders ended up bankrupt and landless. For some time they had felt that they were now in charge of their own destinies, though they were actually pushed into pooling their incomes to survive. Smallholding also meant selling their produce to the large estates that had mills to process sugar cane. To make ends meet (and meet mortgage payments) they had to sell their labor by the day or the week to job contractors who would sell it on to the same sugar plantation estates that had before been responsible for offering complete wages, welfare benefits and housing to many workers. The few skilled technicians and foremen who still held such positions in 1930s ­Mauritius would become a labor aristocracy that, in one instance of a smallholder uprising, would shoot to kill on the orders of a plantation owner (Neveling, 2012: 195–198). To end this chapter on another productive note, I would like to hammer home a few important points with regard to the major proponents of the 1990s postmodernist approach to globalization. What is impossible to grasp using either Appadurai’s or Hannerz’ approaches, is the primacy of the production of hierarchies. This is because the focus was on “flows,” and the analytical viability of reproducing a disjuncture of global developments rested on flattening world history by chopping up entangled developments into “scapes.” But, as Peter Worsley stated so boldly in the quotation that opened this section, hierarchy was, is, and most likely will continue to be an omnipresent variable for anthropology (cf. Heyman and Campbell, 2009). Instead, I suggest that we can see the field of anthropology as a field of history, or, rather, as many fields with many histories that incorporate what Friedman, in his quotation above, identifies as a cannibalizing dialectic between tendencies to homogeneity and tendencies to heterogeneity. Although George W. Bush declared the coming of a new world order in the early 1990s and despite wars beginning, ending, or dragging out forever, “in so many ways things have not changed” once we (re-)engage in thorough anthropological analysis that is “[r]ooted neither in some philosophical binary adrift from social process, nor in any kind of ontological necessity 87

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(which may amount to the same thing)” (Smith, 2010: 242). What may have changed though is that anthropologists and many other social scientists have too uncritically taken on an important agenda in the neoliberal portfolio, which is “the idealist refusal to even recognize capitalism as a coherent category” (Smith, 2010: 241). As my brief map of “the road not taken” has shown, there are many anthropologists whose work recognizes capitalism as a coherent category. From this vantage point, mainstream anthropology and the perceptions of the field it has produced may appear like an eternal detour, with the discipline itself severely impacted by colonial, imperial, neo-imperial, Keynesian, and neoliberal encounters and, hence, vulnerable to the movement of capital and the (mis-)perceptions of crisis and prosperity that such movement creates.

Notes 1 I here use the local term and spelling for Kreol morisyen, which some may want to translate as Mauritian Creole. 2 Since the 1960s, Mauritian sugar corporations have been part of multinational consortia, connected to plantations and mills located in Eastern and Southern Africa, which is another way they are embedded into global capitalism besides the already mentioned bilateral and multilateral trade agreements. 3 Much has been written both during the globalization debate and about it—so much that already by the turn of the millennium one scholar emphasized that it was impossible to give an overview of the literature (Kalb, 2000: 12). The following acknowledges this and offers only references to the literature that is of relevance for the argument of the chapter. 4 Blackbirding refers to a practice that emerged in the Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, which was the coercion of labor from local populations. This often came with excessive use of force and may have included abducting people to work on far away plantations, for example. 5 Another important debate about Trobriand ethnographies published since Malinowski’s days is now emerging in anthropology and this concerns the fact that Trobriand people, as much as many other supposed “natives”, have generally been treated as traditionalist, backward-looking whereas many of their actions may as well be regarded as future oriented, aiming to change the patterns of their everyday lives (Shah, 2014). 6 William Roseberry offered one of the earliest and a very profound critique of Geertz’ writings on the Balinese cockfight. It would be beyond the scope of this chapter to summarize the debate. Importantly, Roseberry pointed to the same weaknesses in the treatment of culture as text that would later make the careers of the writing culture proponents (see Marcus and Fischer, 1986). Notice, though, that Roseberry argues from a perspective that emphasizes the relevance of history in the making of any culture: “A text is written; it is not writing. To see culture as an ensemble of texts or an art form is to remove culture from its creation. If culture is a text, it is not everybody’s text. […] we must ask who is (or are) doing the writing. […] This is the key question, for example, in the transformation of the cockfight after the arrival of the Dutch” (Roseberry, 1982: 1022, my omissions). 7 Some may want to object here and say that industry and finance are frames for “fields”, which are particularly “global”. Although many macro-anthropological studies of the kind I am promoting here indeed deal with finance (an excellent recent study is Palomera, 2014) and industry (e.g. Strümpell, 2014), there is an increasing number of comprehensive macro-anthropological works in the field of ethics and morality, for example (Zigon, 2014; Narotzky, 2015).

Further reading Friedman, J. 1994. Cultural identity and global process, London, Sage. Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 1997. Discipline and practice: ‘The field’ as site, method, and location. In: Gupta, A. & Ferguson, J. (eds.) Anthropological Locations. Boundaries and Grounds of a Field Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1–46. Marcus, G. E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 95–117. Ross, E. B. 1998. Cold Warriors without Weapons. Identities 4, 475–506. Wolf, E. R. 1982. Europe and the People without History, Berkeley; London, University of California Press.

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References Aladin, I. 1993. Economic miracle in the Indian Ocean: Can Mauritius show the way?, Stanley, Republic of Mauritius, Editions de l‘Océan Indien. Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large. Cultural dimensions of globalization, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Arrighi, G. 2002 [1994]. The long twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our times, London, New York,Verso. Asad, T. 1973. Anthropology and the colonial encounter, London, Ithaca Press. Baca, G. 2005. Legends of Fordism: Between myth, history, and foregone conclusions. In: Kapferer, B. (ed.) The retreat of the social:The rise and rise of Reductionism. New York, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 31–46. Benedict, B. 1965. Mauritius: Problems of a plural society, London, Institute of Race Relations. Boswell, R. 2006. Le malaise créole: Ethnic identity in Mauritius, New York, Berghahn Books. Burn, N. 1996. Mauritius. In: Kothari, U. and Nababsing, V. (eds.) Gender and industrialisation: Mauritius, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka. Stanley, Rose Hill, Editions de l‘Océan Indien, 33–79. Carrier, J. G. 2012. Anthropology after the crisis. Focaal, 2012, 115–128. Central Statistics Office. 2004. Mauritius in figures 2003, Port Louis, Central Statistics Office. Christopher, A. J. 1992. Ethnicity, community and the census in Mauritius, 1830–1990. Geographical Journal, 158, 57–64. Clifford, J. 1986. Introduction: Partial truths. In: Marcus, G. E. and Clifford, J. (eds.) Writing culture:The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1–26. Cowie, J. 1999. Capital moves: RCA’s seventy-year quest for cheap labor, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Cuttaree, J. 2011. Behind the purple curtain: A political autobiography, Mauritius, Editions Le Printemps Ltd. Dove, M. R. 1996. Rice-eating rubber and people-eating governments: Peasant versus state critiques of rubber development in Colonial Borneo. Ethnohistory, 43, 33–63. Edelman, M. and Haugerud, A. 2005. Introduction: The anthropology of development and globalization. In: Edelman, M. and Haugerud, A. (eds.) The anthropology of development and globalization: From classical political economy to contemporary neoliberalism. Malden, Blackwell Publishing, 1–74. Eisenlohr, P. 2006. Little India: Diaspora, time, and ethnolinguistic belonging in Hindu Mauritius, Berkeley, University of California Press. Eriksen, T. H. 1995. Small places, large issues: An introduction to social and cultural anthropology, London, Pluto. Eriksen,T. H. 1998. Common denominators: Ethnicity, nation-building and compromise in Mauritius, Oxford [u.a.], Berg. Falzon, M-A. 2009. Introduction. Multi-sited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. In: Falzon, M-A. (ed.) Multi-sited ethnography: Theory, praxis and locality in contemporary research. Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington,Vt., Ashgate, 1–23. Ferguson, J. 1999. Expectations of modernity: Myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt, Berkeley, University of California Press. Frank, A. G. 1998. ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian Age, Berkeley, University of California Press. Friedman, J. 1994. Cultural identity and global process, London, Sage. Friedman, K. E. and Friedman, J. 2008. Historical transformations: The anthropology of global systems, Lanham, AltaMira Press. Geertz, C., Eidson, J. R., Eriksen, T. H., Feuchtwang, S., Goldstein, D. M., Gullestad, M., Henley, D., Lomnitz, C. and Nordholt, H. S. 2004. What is a state if it is not a sovereign? Reflections on politics in complicated places [Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology, 45, 577–593. Gereffi, G. and Memedovic, O. 2003. The global apparel value chain: What prospects for upgrading by developing countries. Sectoral Studies Series. Vienna, United Nations Industrial Development Organization. Gledhill, J. 2000. Power and its disguises: Anthropological perspectives on politics, London, Pluto Press. Glick Schiller, N., Çaglar, A. and Guldbrandsen, T. C. 2006. Beyond the ethnic lens: Locality, globality, and born-again incorporation. American Ethnologist, 33, 612–633. Graeber, D. 2011. Debt:The first 5,000 years, New York, Melville House. Gregory, C. A. 1997. Savage money:The anthropology and politics of commodity exchange, Amsterdam, Harwood Academic. Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 1992. Beyond “culture”: Space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7, 6–23.

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Patrick Neveling Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. 1997. Discipline and practice: ‘The field’ as site, method, and location. In: Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J. (eds.) Anthropological locations. Boundaries and grounds of a field science. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1–46. Hannerz, U. 1992. Cultural complexity: Studies in the social organization of meaning, New York, Columbia University Press. Hannerz, U. 2003. Being there … and there … and there! Reflections on multi-site ethnography. Ethnography, 4, 201–216. Heyman, J. M. and Campbell, H. 2009. The anthropology of global flows: A critical reading of Appadurai’s ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. Anthropological Theory, 9, 131–148. Hoekman, B. M. and Kostecki, M. M. 2001. The political economy of the world trading system: The WTO and beyond, Oxford, OUP. Hooper, C. A. 1938. Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Unrest on Sugar Estates in Mauritius, 1937, Port Louis, Mauritius, Government Printer. Hyatt, S. B. 2005. Poverty in a ‘post-welfare’ landscape: Tenant management policies, self-governance and the democratization of knowledge in Great Britain. In: Shore, C. and Wright, S. (eds.) Anthropology of Policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power. London, Routledge, 217–238. Kalb, D. 2000. The ends of globalization: Bringing society back in, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Kalb, D. 2011. Introduction, Headlines of nation, subtexts of class: Working-class populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal Europe. In: Kalb, D. and Halmai, G. (eds.) Headlines of nation, subtexts of class: Working-class populism and the return of the repressed in neoliberal Europe. New York [u.a.], Berghahn Books, 1–36. Kim, S.-K. 1997. Class struggle or family struggle?:The lives of women factory workers in South Korea, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. La Gazette De Maurice. 2003. Toutes les entreprises sont en difficulté! La Gazette de Maurice, 22.–28. 08. 2003, p. 12. Lash, S. and Urry, J. 1987. The end of organized capitalism, Madison, University of Wisconsin Press. Marcus, G. E. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 95–117. Marcus, G. E. 1999. What is at stake–And is not–In the idea and practice of multi-sited ethnography. Canberra Anthropology, 22, 6–14. Marcus, G. E. and Fischer, M. M. J. 1986. Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Mckeown, A. 2007. Periodizing globalization. History Workshop Journal, 63, 218–230. Meade, J. E. 1961. The economic and social structure of Mauritius (Report to the Governor of Mauritius), London, Methuen and Co. Morna, C. 1991. Africa’s first tiger. Africa Report, 36, 42–44. Narotzky, S. 2015. The organic intellectual and the production of class in Spain. In: Carrier, J. and Kalb, D. (eds.) Anthropologies of class: Power, practice, and inequality. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 53–71. Nash, J. 1995. Post-Industrialism, Post-Fordism, and the crisis in world capitalism. In: Gamst, F. C. (ed.) Meanings of work: Considerations for the twenty-first century. Albany, State University of New York Press, 189–211. Nash, J. C. 1989. From tank town to high tech: The clash of community and industrial cycles, New York, State University of New York Press. Neveling, P. 2006. Spirits of capitalism and the de-alienation of workers: A historical perspective on the Mauritian garment industry. SCM Working Paper Series [Online], 2. Available: http://www.scm.uni-halle. de/gsscm/die_graduiertenschule/online_papers/2006/mauritian_garment_industry/. Neveling, P. 2010. Einleitende Überlegungen: Wissen um Veränderung - Entwicklung, Geschichte, sozialer Wandel (Engl.: Introductory Remarks - The Production of Knowledge about Change: Development, History, Social Transformation). Sociologus, 60, 1–14. Neveling, P. 2012. Manifestationen der Globalisierung. Kapital, Staat und Arbeit in Mauritius, 1825–2005 (DPhil Thesis, engl.: Manifestations of globalisation. Capital, state, and labour in Mauritius, 1825–2005), Halle/Saale, Martin-Luther-University Library. Neveling, P. 2013. A periodisation of globalisation according to the Mauritian integration into the international sugar commodity chain (1825-2005). In: Curry-Machado, J. (ed.) Beneath and beyond the commodities of empire. Basingstoke (UK), New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 121–142. Neveling, P. 2014.Three shades of embeddedness, state capitalism as the informal economy, emic notions of the anti-market, and counterfeit garments in the Mauritian export processing zone Research in Economic Anthropology, 34, 65–94.

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Beyond sites and methods Neveling, P. 2015a. Export processing zones and global class formation. In: Carrier, J. and Kalb, D. (eds.) Anthropologies of class: Power, practice and inequality. Cambridge, CUP, 164–182. Neveling, P. 2015b. Flexible capitalism and transactional orders in colonial and postcolonial Mauritius: A post-Occidentalist view. In: Kjaerulf, J. (ed.) Flexible capitalism: Exchange and ambiguity at work. Oxford, Berghahn, 286–324. Ong, A. 2006. Neoliberalism as exception: Mutations of citizenship and sovereignty, Durham, N. C., Duke University Press. Palomera, J. 2014. Reciprocity, commodification, and poverty in the era of financialization. Current Anthropology, 55, S105-S115. Panitchpakdi, S. 2004. Speech held at National Day Celebrations. WTO, Geneva, http://www.wto.org/ english/news_e/spsp_e/spsp23_e.htm, March 11. Price, D. H. 2003. Subtle means and enticing carrots:The impact of funding on American Cold War anthropology. Critique of Anthropology, 23, 373–401. Protest March Platform on World Trade Organsiation. 2003. Common declaration of Mauritius: 10 September day of protest action. Mauritius, General Workers Federation (et al.). Robertson, R. 1992. Globalization: Social theory and global culture, London, Sage. Roseberry, W. 1982. Balinese cockfights and the seduction of anthropology. Social Research, 49, 1013–1028. Ross, E. B. 1998. Cold warriors without weapons. Identities, 4, 475–506. Salverda, T. 2015. The Franco-Mauritian elite: Power and anxiety in the face of change, Oxford, Berghahn Books. Schnepel, B. 2009. Two beaches: The globalization of Mauritian waterfronts. In: Hookoomsing, V. Y., Ludwig, R. and Schnepel, B. (eds.) Multiple identities in action: Mauritius and some Antillean parallelism. Berlin, Peter Lang, 287–317. Shah, A. 2014. ‘The muck of the past’: Revolution, social transformation, and the Maoists in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20, 337–356. Simmons, A. S. 1982. Modern Mauritius:The politics of decolonisation, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Smith, N. 2010. Uneven development: Nature, capital, and the production of space, London,Verso Press. Stoler, A. L. 1985. Capitalism and confrontation in Sumatra’s plantation belt, 1870–1979, New Haven, Yale University Press. Strümpell, C. 2014. The politics of dispossession in an Odishan steel town. Contributions to Indian Sociology, 48, 45–72. Subramanian, A. and Roy, D. 2001. Who can explain the Mauritian miracle: Meade, Romer, Sachs or Rodrik? In: Department, I. M. F. A. (ed.) IMF Working Paper. Susser, I. 2012. Norman street: Poverty and politics in an urban neighborhood, New York, Oxford University Press. Tejada, C. 2003. The downside of globalization. News on Sunday, 22.-28.08.2003. Tsing, A. 2000. The global situation. Cultural Anthropology, 15, 327–360. Vincent, J. 1990. Anthropology and politics:Visions, traditions, and trends, Tucson, University of Arizona Press. Wallerstein, I. 1990. Culture is the world-system: A reply to Boyne. Theory, Culture and Society, 7, 63–65. Wolf, E. R. 1982. Europe and the people without history, Berkeley, London, University of California Press. World Bank Group. 1992. Mauritius: Expanding horizons.Washington, DC, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/The World Bank. Worsley, P. 1964. The third world, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Zenker, O. and Kumoll, K. 2010. Beyond writing culture: Current intersections of epistemologies and representational practices, New York, Berghahn Books. Zigon, J. 2007. Moral breakdown and the ethical demand: A theoretical framework for an anthropology of moralities. Anthropological Theory, 7: 131–150. Zigon, J. 2014. An ethics of dwelling and a politics of world building: A critical response to ordinary ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 20, 746–764.

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5 ANtHrOPOLOGY AND tHE INtErNEt Anna Stewart

Introduction Anthropology is chasing a moving target. The social and cultural life we study shifts not only according to place but according to our own engagements with it in time, as practices and objects that seem strange at first gain familiarity, and those we would find familiar are cast into strange new formations. This fact has been especially evident in the anthropological approach to the constellation of technologies termed “the internet.” The physical devices associated with these technologies have evolved from the bulky computers housed in specialist institutions in the late 1980s to the slim, fashionable devices carried around by a growing multitude every day. And yet we find that through their widespread use these remarkable tools become mundane. The gadgetry that would have seemed so thrilling twenty-five years ago is by now part of the furniture, another tool we can use to work, shop, and date (Miller and Horst 2010: 4).This casual, everyday ownership of the internet appeals to anthropological sensibility. Clifford Geertz (1973: 452) famously described culture as an “ensemble of texts […] which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they more properly belong.”The internet seems to provide this ensemble with material form. Peering over the shoulders of our informants, anthropologists have sought to understand the place of these technologies in their lives. In this chapter I will describe some of the ways that the internet has been brought into the work of anthropologists. I split my discussion into three sections. The first flush of anthropological interest in these technologies was among scholars who saw in the internet a kind of place-making that invited ethnographic research. In these approaches the spheres of online sociality are treated as sites that, in the traditions of ethnographic research, can be journeyed to. Related to this site-focused research, a second trend has considered the manner in which internet technologies are embedded in existing cultural practices; a perspective that invites the scholar to situate online research in broader ethnographies of life in a given setting. Finally, it should be noted that anthropology is a part of the world as much as any subject that we might choose to study, and that changes brought to bear on strange and far-off cultures also influence the discipline. This history is complex; the rate of adoption of internet technologies around the world over the last quarter-century has been uneven, and it is worth noting that a great many people do not have any connection at all. Rhetoric surrounding the internet often brings to mind a 92

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vision of a glowing digital web in which humanity is encompassed, but this is not yet the case. Figures published by the United Nations indicate that around 40% of the world’s population were using the internet in 2014 (ITU 2014). The reach of these technologies is wide, and it is growing, but it is not total. Barriers include literacy, infrastructure, finance, state censorship, and practical interest, and there are those who remain unconnected living in the globalizing cities of the United Kingdom as well as in the Amazon basin (Reisdorf 2011). Throughout this chapter, then, I am speaking about technologies that are routinely accessed by a minority, albeit a growing minority, of human beings.Where we seek to understand the current anthropological interest in these gigantic, global, networks of information, it is helpful to look back to our early engagements with what was once a tiny—though promising—area of activity.

A virtual field The emergence of the internet as we recognize it today is tied to the rise of home computers in much of the Western world throughout the 1980s, and the development of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. Though versions of the technologies that we would come to describe as “the internet” were in use in military and later academic spheres as early as the 1970s, the reach and extent of these technologies started to cohere in the popular imagination as they were brought into the home. Writings from this era communicate excitement and anticipation, and there was a widespread sense among journalists and academics that we were on the threshold of something new (Hakken 1999: 6). This threshold was understood both literally and metaphorically. Early articles by anthropologists share with those of other disciplines a sense of the internet as a territory, a metaphorical understanding that was to become central in these discussions. The internet was frequently referred to as a Cyberspace, dazzling in complexity and possibilities (Escobar 1994: 211), which anthropologists, in their desire to seek out new sites of culture, “must venture into.” Though anthropologists remarking on these technologies were quick to note that the distribution of them was for the most part restricted to the wealthy, university-educated West (Escobar 1994: 214–215), the internet seemed to offer in these settings the promise of a new frontier. “Close to home,” one writer remarked, “but oh so far away, new worlds are being constructed” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1996: 60). These worlds required some force of imagination. The early internet was composed almost entirely of text. Images took a long time to load on the majority of computers, and were rarely incorporated in most websites until later on in the 1990s. Many perceived in the restricted registers of the early internet the possibility of personal invention; textual worlds provided users with opportunities for self-presentation that seemed to outstrip those of previous social settings (see Turkle 1995). In chat rooms and multi-user role-playing games, for example, tethers in physical space such as embodiment and community seemed loose and flexible, more open than ever to manipulation and play. The journalist Julian Dibbell provides a fascinating depiction of this early online life in his article A Rape in Cyberspace. Dibbell relates events that took place in the early 1990s in the virtual setting of the LambdaMOO, a large chat room in which people could engage in discussion and role-play in the form of text-based avatars. The normal friendly atmosphere of the chatroom was overturned one night when it was invaded by a malevolent clown figure who was able to impersonate the presence of other members and who used this ability to put on a violent, sexually explicit pantomime in which they were unwilling virtual participants. In his article Dibbell narrates the negotiation by the LambdaMOO community of the reality and significance of their online identities in the face of a breach of these identities that was experienced by several members as genuinely traumatic (Dibbell 1993; see also Golub 2010: 18–19). For anthropologists, the possibility that these systems of code could come to be 93

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inhabited as a site of meaningful interaction was, perhaps, particularly compelling. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the discipline was undergoing its own negotiations and upheavals following the publication of several critiques of ethnography discussing the possibility that, in our ethnographies of famous and far-off cultures, anthropologists had performed a similar kind of stage-craft, creating stable, unified, “fields” out of the mess of human life (see Gupta and ­Ferguson 1997: 13–18). If there was the possibility of a textual world to go to, the discipline seemed primed to make the trip. But we were slow to get moving. Despite expressions of interest among a scattered few in the discipline, as late as 2002 there was little disciplinary interest in empirical, ethnographic studies of the internet. The anthropologist Maximillian Forte, despairing of what he saw as a lack of professional engagement with an area of social life that held potentially revolutionary importance, wrote to the heads of various anthropology departments in the United States to gauge their interest in this emerging field. The replies were, for the most part, negative. Though many of Forte’s correspondents personally agreed that the internet held potential for anthropological study, they suggested that it was too Western, that the issues raised around its use were unrelated to the core interests of the discipline, and that it was besides already being studied by colleagues in other departments (Forte 2002). This latter point was certainly true: scholars across a range of disciplines were at the time starting to publish their own investigations of these technologies (see Wilson and Peterson 2002). Interestingly, however, these scholars did not seem to agree with the assessment that anthropology was irrelevant to their interests. The sense that the new networks of social life created by the internet could be better understood through sustained participant-observation generated a turn among many scholars to the existing research strategies of anthropology, particularly to the practices and writing styles of ethnography (see e.g. Hine 2000: 4–5). In a review of the anthropology of online communities published in 2002 we see that much of the work that considered the value of ethnography to internet studies was at this time being carried out by researchers outside of anthropology (see Wilson and Peterson 2002).Topics included the significance of ethnic and national identity in online chat rooms, the potential of the internet as a site for political organization and protest, and the manner in which access and education aided or inhibited digital engagement. Convinced that the electronic arenas of the internet comprised suitable settings for ethnographic research, many of these early texts were concerned with the practicalities and pitfalls of participant observation in them.What quality of understanding is lost, for example, if a researcher downloads and reads in minutes an exchange that, for its participants, may have taken place over several days (Paccagnella 1997: 10)? How is the authority of an ethnographer diminished when her expertise is no longer earned through travel to difficult and remote locations, or indeed any travel at all (Hine 2000: 45–46)? And so while anthropology as a discipline was hesitant in its approach to the internet, the field of social science in general demonstrated a huge appetite for ethnographic studies of virtual worlds. “The paradox,” Forte claimed, “is that anthropology is not just falling behind other disciplines, it is falling behind itself ” (Forte 2002: 21). The uncertainties regarding research procedure that were expressed by those attempting to adapt ethnography to the internet may be particularly troubling for anthropologists. The structured association of fieldwork assumes a physical proximity of the fieldworker with those she studies, and one of the most notable features of social life online is the fact that such proximity is no longer required or, in many cases, even possible. For researchers, this shift has a very immediate practical effect. Sharing social space with our informants is often important to building up the kind of closeness and trust through which the everyday, intimate data that we seek become available. One of the first anthropologists to carry out research on the internet, David Hakken 94

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(1999: 37–38) relates an interesting anecdote from his participant observation among a community of computer experts in Norway in the early 1990s. Part of his research strategy was to participate in discussions hosted on a message board used by the group. Shortly after introducing himself to the group, however, he found that a former colleague had tracked him down to this new project and used the message board to publicly denounce Hakken’s character and his research. When Hakken had previously experienced a crisis of trust among informants in mining communities in the north of England, he was able to overcome it through working alongside people in their daily lives. In this online project, however, such close familiarity was not possible, and Hakken wonders (1999: 38) if his research project ever “recovered” from it. But these problems of personal presence carry important insights. In the late 1990s Donald Slater carried out work on online chat boards in which mostly anonymous users shared pornographic images with one another. Here, the absence of physical bodies was as much of a problem for participants as it was for the researcher. In the early stages of transaction and chat, there is no need to know much about the body or bodies that have produced the words that appear on the screen. But as relationships develop over time, and long-standing exchanges of pictures and text morph into something that approaches intimacy, there is a desire to know more. This leads to a “progressive embodiment” (Slater 1998,:114) in which members start to share more and more personal information, pictures, an address or a phone number, perhaps leading to a physical meeting. As the participants’ experience of their relationship changes, so does the desire to know and be known in terms more typical of meeting someone offline. Slater draws these insights from his informants as they share with him their stories of loves that have been lost and bonds that have broken as they discovered that those with whom they had become romantically entangled were not who they claimed to be. And yet, he notes, he himself cannot be sure of the identity of those he was speaking to. The “high school” (1998: 116) atmosphere of romantic intrigue and heartbreak that he encountered among the members of the “sexpics” group was a manifestation of the general insecurity of social connection in a site in which links to physical bodies and locations are unseen and uncertain. Anthropology in virtual field sites reaches something of a culmination in Tom Boellstorff ’s 2008 ethnography Coming of Age in Second Life. In the opening to his book as well as its title Boellstorff invites direct comparison with the more traditionally located forms of fieldwork of his forbears and his own career as an ethnographer of Indonesia. He plays on the famous field research of Margaret Mead in the title of his book and that of Bronislaw Malinowski in its opening scene (2008: 1), as he invites the reader to imagine herself “suddenly set down […] alone on a tropical beach close to a native village.” The beach in this case is composed of pixels, part of the large, multiplayer simulation of Second Life. During a year of fieldwork he logged hundreds of hours in this expansive virtual environment of suburbs and beaches and open green spaces. He made friends with inhabitants, attended ceremonies and visited shopping malls, built his own home, and organized interviews and focus groups, all within the simulation. In Boellstorff ’s description of this work we see clearly the idiosyncrasies of research carried out in simulated environments. In the interests of privacy anthropologists typically replace the names of informants and often the locations of their research with pseudonyms. In order to maintain the same level of confidentiality, Boellstorff was compelled to make further changes, adapting even the words of his correspondents so that they could not be tracked by search engine back to their original utterance (2008: 83). Boellstorff notes that his “devotion to confidentiality may seem quaint” at a time when the internet has made personal information so readily available, and in a setting in which people were not, regardless, speaking with the same names that they would use offline but with pseudonyms. And yet if we are to take the inhabitants of Second Life at their word, the personas that they developed online had their own integrity as 95

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research subjects. Boellstorff (2008: 80–81) recounts his unease when friends, interested in his project, watched over his shoulder as he showed them his field site. Boellstorff felt compelled to tell his informants when another person was there, as those engaging with him in the simulation would see only his avatar. He provides (2008: 81) a transcript of a rather awkward encounter that followed, as his Second Life informant and offline friend tried to exchange greetings with one another through speech in their respective locations, using Boellstorff as an intermediary. As always for anthropologists, much can be learned about a shared cultural world in the places where the assumptions that underpin it start to break down. But the sense of a shared world can be broken on purpose. Maintaining presence as a participant observer in field sites that are, self-consciously, trying to be sites, though useful as a research strategy, may not tell us the whole story of engagement for their inhabitants. So argues Alex Golub (2010), who finds that in the competitive arenas of high-level World of Warcraft players, fantasies of location take a back-seat to the practicalities of play. Azeroth, the virtual world that provides a setting for the game itself is, in the manner typical of the fantasy genre, resplendent with maps, complicated histories, and colorful, atmospheric locations. And yet it is not these elements that the players of Golub’s study seem most engaged with. Those who had the ­highest-level characters, arguably those with the greatest investment in the game, are not engaged in the “world” as a space but as a system. As high-level players such as Golub himself work as teams (or guilds) to defeat powerful in-game enemies, they often reduce the quality of the graphics to speed up the performance of their computers, turn off the atmospheric sounds of the world itself in order to ensure clear lines of audio communication with their guild-mates, and install software that changes the information displayed on screen to reveal the numerical systems that would otherwise be taking place under the surface of the simulation. In other words, their engagement necessitates “decomposing” (2010: 34) something of the virtual world that has been so lovingly crafted in order to maximize the efficiency of the eyes and ears that must process the information relayed on screen and the fingers that must respond quickly. Golub (2010: 18) therefore argues that, although “purely in-game research is methodologically legitimate,” researchers would do well to bring their focus to the fact that the “worlds” constructed online are endlessly dependent on the offline settings in which their inhabitants eat, sleep, and type. Engagement with World of Warcraft, as with any online site, makes demands of the knowledge, intentions, and physical capacities of participants who are rooted in their wider social context. Ethnographic work based on research that is conducted entirely online draws our attention to practices of place-making, at the cost of “a narrow focus on only one aspect of members’ lives” (Golub 2010: 24). This is an issue that has become more obvious as the internet has evolved from its previous status as a niche technology used by a tiny fraction of humanity to an increasingly ubiquitous part of contemporary life. Anthropologists, themselves increasingly “native,” like the rest of the world, to these technologies no longer require advanced technical knowledge or experience to be able to participate in these systems, and their research will often invite such participation (see Peterson in Postill 2009: 338). The growing incorporation of the internet into everyday life in a myriad of cultures has been addressed in a second wave of anthropological research.

A wider world The idea of social life and technological fabrication as separate entities has played an important role in the historical framing of anthropology as a discipline (Pfaffenberger 1988; Ingold 2000). The result has often been that, where technologies have been the subject of anthropological inquiry, the focus has been on “the impact of technology on culture, while the impact of culture 96

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on technology is ignored” (Hakken 1999: 66). Though anthropologists have been comfortable considering how steel axes might impact on the lives of native Australians (Sharp 1952), or how new forms of ritual practice sprang up around the introduction of shotguns to the mountains of Papua New Guinea (Mitchell 1973), studies of the ways in which a particular technology is shaped according to cultured desire have historically been less frequent (see Pfaffenberger 1988). The rise in internet adoption around the world, however, invites consideration of how the networks formed through this use harmonize with wider cultural practices and ideals. As internet services have become increasingly ubiquitous, and the forms of media available have become more diverse, narratives of cyberspace and virtual realities have started to decline. The landscape of large, globally dominant online applications and services in the 1990s and early 2000s was filled with the language of space, with early applications and services taking names such as Explorer, Myspace, and Geocities. In more recent years the semantic field has shifted, and we see a more casual, colloquial connection between internet services and prior forms of communication.YouTube suggests a vernacular revision of the television that allows for a more personal experience, Facebook presents a literal catalogue of intimacy and acquaintance, and Twitter likens its gigantic networks of commentary to the song of birds. The growing enmeshment of the internet in everyday life necessitates an understanding of these technologies as part of wider cultures of media practice (see Postill 2010). The value of such a perspective was cemented at the turn of the new millennium through an ethnography of internet use on the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Daniel Miller and Don Slater combined their respective experience in the ethnography of Trinidad and of online environments to conduct a research project that took in both online and offline settings. They spent time in internet cafes and other places of work, conducted formal and more casual interviews with Trini people to gain a sense of the place of the internet in their lives, and organized house-to-house surveys on the everyday uses of these technologies (2000: 22). This personal approach to the internet runs through their resulting ethnography. In the late 1990s in Trinidad the internet was, as in the rest of the world, still a relatively niche set of technologies. Despite this Miller and Slater found enthusiasts and specialists among their informants, and came to the conclusion that “the internet” as it exists in this setting cannot be understood apart from the wider project of “being Trini.” Histories of colonialism and migration have shaped an atmosphere of global interconnection in the culture of Trinidad, and Miller and Slater paint a picture of an island nation whose inhabitants share an intense interest in staying abreast of current happenings at the local and global levels. The authors found this preoccupation was manifested widely in the online activities of their informants, as young people sought to recreate the casual street-corner banter and gossip referred to as “liming” in online chat rooms, and fashion buyers consulted the websites of prestigious clothing brands and MTV to ensure that they were on the cutting edge of global culture (Miller and Slater 2000: 88–93; 162–164). In this ethnography, then, the internet is described as a technology of “expansion,” through which users are to pursue a project of becoming the person they would like to be, and projecting the image of themselves that they wish to present to the world. This is a project that is deeply rooted in their wider culture. It is not that technologies do not bring change to societies, but rather that the form that the technology takes in use, and the changes it brings, are intertwined with existing cultural preoccupations and interests. In this ethnography we see an anthropological approach to technologies that, despite their global reach and availability, are very local, part of the “articulation” of diverse cultures across the world (Coleman 2010a: 488). We see in this ethnography of Trinidad the coherence of the internet with its offline context. The internet uses of Miller and Slater’s informants are consciously and unconsciously patterned 97

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by their past experiences and the cultural expectations associated with their national identity. The same has been found to be true in the case of identities based in race (Nakamura 2008), age (Jones and Schieffelin 2009), religion (Campbell and Lövheim 2011), and gender. Playing a game of virtual poker in Second Life, Boellstorff (2008: 143–144) encountered an atmosphere of conventional masculinity as male avatars discussed heterosexual relationships and cracked jokes around a virtual poker table. I have found that the evangelical Christian women I work with in the United Kingdom carry a similarly gendered voice into their online activity, decorating their Facebook and Twitter pages with images of flowers and domestic life, and speaking with the same kind of personal, humble tone that women employ in church. Though the internet does in some respect heighten our ability to experiment with identity, languages through which we present ourselves online, even in the absence of our bodies, are more often than not fairly conventional. In order to understand an instance of online speech we therefore need to understand the habits and expectations of the speaker, and this invites the internet ethnographer to expand the frame of her “field” to the world beyond the screen. “If you want to get to the internet,” Miller and Slater (2000: 5) argue, “don’t start from there.” Research that straddles online and offline settings presents its own specific methodological challenges. Internet sites and services are connected not only to one another but also to physical infrastructures of cables and computers, the offices of global corporations and the privacy of our own homes, and we cannot always be sure which contexts will be relevant to our study before starting research. Working on a project on internet use in Accra, Ghana, Jenna Burrell found that the internet cafes she had intended to work in were not really functioning as social environments in themselves; the physical presence of visitors became “muted and hollow” (2009: 188) as they poured their attention into the words and images on the screen. In order to find relevant contexts for research, Burrell recommends that we attend to the connections that are actively cast between different contexts by our informants. Language practices may prove particularly instructive here, as cultural habits of speech work to forge association between settings (2009: 192; see also Wilson and Peterson 2002: 459). So we see that Persian bloggers may seek to recreate something of the emotional pitch of mourning ceremonies in their devotional writing (Doostdar 2004: 654), evangelical Christians seek to preserve a flow of vocalization that starts with their Pastor in church (Stewart 2011), and women accessing chat rooms in Kuwait negotiate the appropriate level of contact to have with the opposite sex in deference to wider cultural norms regarding contact and communication in public spaces (Wheeler 2001). As we follow connections between settings, bringing online and offline content together into the same project, we are able to see how practices in one site can work to inform and enhance those in another. Gabriella Coleman shares an account of a conference for the community of volunteers who contribute to a large open-source operating system. Like many conferences, the field of shared interest is somewhat esoteric (at least to this reader) but the “festive interactivity” (2010b: 50) of collected humanity described is instantly recognizable. The conference is a scene of concentrated engagement; Coleman finds pockets of drunkenness and dancing and staying up all night, the periods of collaboration in which stubborn bugs are fixed, banks of computers and cable that must be hauled to the venue and wired up, and exhausted bodies lying sprawled in corridors. Finally, we see something of the emotional aftermath of the conference for its participants in their communications following the event, in which they indicate that their future engagements with this software will be colored by a more vibrant sense of the social life that surrounds it. Coleman (2010b: 64) describes the conference as a “ritual underside” of this social collective, allowing people to see that the network to which they devote so much time is more than “just themselves, alone at home,” bestowing on members of the group a sense of community. 98

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Coleman’s discussion of the conference as a kind of ritual, bringing online community to a more vivid sense of itself, draws on the anthropology of religion.This is a sub-discipline that may prove particularly useful in studies of the internet. Religious practice enables adherents to enter a kind of virtual reality, to assert a sense of control over their world, and to experience the presence of spirits, gods, and demons in their lives (see also Miller and Horst 2012: 13–15). Among my evangelical Christian informants in Brighton, there is much time and prayer devoted to the “spiritual warfare” that is constantly being waged between God and the Devil. Several of the Christians I worked with would walk around their neighborhoods praying, identifying particular areas—gay districts or those known for crime—as possessed by a demonic spirit that could be “prayed against” by believers. This set of commitments was carried over to their internet use. YouTube comments, Twitter hashtags, and the Facebook pages of unbelieving friends became identified, for many, as territories that could be “won” for Jesus. In some cases, online practices were deployed to open new fronts in this battle that were otherwise hard to perceive. Though the Christians I worked with were deeply preoccupied with the ongoing work of the Devil through discourses of atheism, offline engagements with atheists themselves were for the most part infrequent. In online discussions, however, these opponents are brought into proximity. One woman described to me the spiritual battle waged in comments threads on YouTube as “more visible and pronounced” than anything she had encountered previously. Online practice, far from feeling ‘virtual’ and insubstantial, brought this conflict into immediate, material, presence (see Stewart 2015: 3905). Ritual engagements and cosmic battles aside, one of the more evident features of internet media is their ready embrace of the unremarkable. The better an object is at doing its job, the better it avoids our notice (Miller and Horst 2012: 25). Mobile technologies such as smartphones, tablets, gaming platforms, and GPS devices are in many contexts becoming so ubiquitous that, up until the point that they malfunction, we may fail to notice them at all (see Eisenlohr 2009: 8–9). The internet presents an increasingly diverse landscape of media capabilities, from text to images to videos, and these offer different ranges of expression and gesture to their users.We have moved from the black-on-grey texts of early websites to a more visual and increasingly aural digital landscape, and the incorporation of more diverse forms of media into the internet provides new insights. In the visual archives of video and image hosting services, for instance, we see an ongoing documentation of the details of life that we would not necessarily think to articulate in words (see Stewart 2013). As early as 2003 the camera-phone was so common in urban Japan that the simulated shutter sound made when a picture is taken became a familiar feature of everyday life (Okabe and Mizuko 2006). As well as being banal in their own physical presence, these devices can offer further windows into cultural understandings of what counts as “normal.” Unlike the more permanent and expensive film cameras that were generally reserved for events deemed significant, the eye of the camera phone documents those things that we would take in with a glance. Every day millions of people around the world take pictures of fellow passengers on the morning commute, the food they have eaten for lunch, cats, interesting graffiti, and the clothes they choose to wear, all recorded and shared for the fleeting attentions of friends and family and the wider audiences that can be reached through Twitter or Instagram (Hjorth 2008: 95; Okabe and Mizuko 2006).This everyday archiving provides a wealth of visual data, highlighting for ethnographers the personal, emotional value that we find every day in the mundane (Hjorth 2008). Julie Archambault’s recent ethnographic work draws on the everyday invisibility and revelation that mobile phones offer to her informants in Mozambique. For the young women and men she worked with, phones are displayed as status items and deployed as tools for concealment.The economic hardships of the area mean that young women may be unwilling or unable to devote the entirety of their romantic attention to a man who cannot financially provide for 99

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them. Such was the case for Archambault’s friend Bela, who pursued a primary romantic relationship with her boyfriend, but had several other male friends who would help her to buy such everyday luxuries as clothes, beauty treatments, and phone credit. Though this kind of distributed courtship would be considered very improper behavior were it conducted openly, it was rendered somewhat socially acceptable through the veiling that her mobile phone could provide. “Instead of having these different men knock on her door for everyone to see,” Bela “used her phone to logistical advantage,” managing her relationships with other men with discretion (Archambault 2013: 96). Archambault returns to Miller and Slater’s ethnography of Trinidad, and particularly its concept of “expansive realisation” in her work, suggesting that these technologies allow people to “come closer to idealised versions of themselves” (Archambault 2013: 91). Mobile phone users in Mozambique are able to seek pleasure and a degree of economic independence in their lives, and manage their significant relationships with the minimal scandal. However, this steady navigation of social and romantic ties can be easily disrupted. As well as concealing, the mobile phone leaves evidence of the interactions it mediates, so that a jealous lover looking through a phone might be confronted with evidence of deceit. Archambault compares this to the footprints her informants leave on the sandy roads where they live, tracks that can show where a person has been. It is a compelling metaphor. Once we abandon the idea of the online site as an enclosed field we are met with a dizzying range of different contexts that might, perhaps, be relevant, and we must choose a path to follow (Burrell 2009). But the same is true of all fieldwork. Footprints run outwards from a given location in many directions and part of the skill of our discipline lies in learning to judge which of these connections to follow.This is, after all, the way that the internet has been formed over the last few decades, as cultural desires leave previously popular applications in obscurity and bring others to global dominance. If we were ever able to take in the entirety of a relevant context, it is certainly less possible today. Anthropologists are responding to this increasingly connected world with studies in which cultural practices of connection, be they ritual, emotional, linguistic, or emotional, are brought to prominence. The danger that ignoring internet technologies would lead to anthropology “falling behind itself ” (Forte 2002: 21) seems to have been averted. But these technologies may offer a further invitation to anthropologists to consider our place in the world, offering a valuable—sometimes uncanny—perspective on the current life of a changing discipline.

A reflective discipline The approaches to the internet described in this chapter so far have been divided according to their ethnographic focus. Both a genre of writing and a style of research, ethnography comprises a set of methodological and literary habits that have become almost totemic for our discipline. It was arguably our investment in ethnography that made the prospect of virtual worlds so compelling, and our experiences in the field that led to the insistence that internet use must be viewed in a wider context. But anthropology is not ethnography (Ingold 2008; see also Postill 2009). What defines our approach as a social science is not one particular way of working or indeed of writing up the result of our work, but our orientation to social life. Anthropologists, it has been argued, do not only write about the world, or indeed in the world, but with the world, yielding our personal experience and insights to a broader project of meaning (Ingold 2008). In this volume Paul Basu describes the communicating life of the discipline. As anthropologists we talk, we teach, we read, we present, we write.The growth of internet technologies offers us more opportunity to open these diverse fields of communication to a wider world, and so come to a fuller sense of our own place in it. 100

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Shifts in the way that words, images, and sounds are able to circulate through new media networks carry important implications not only for our research practices but also for the wider culture of anthropology as a whole. In a 2002 article Johannes Fabian reflects on this potential. Fabian and colleagues deposited material that he had translated from Swahili, a language spoken widely across south eastern Africa, in a large, publicly accessible online database. Filled with oral histories, plays, religious teachings, conversations, and letters, the archive provides a fascinating insight into the historical life of the region.1 Stepping back from these rich data, we may see in this series of stills from the past something of the future of a changing discipline. Fabian argues that large archives of digitized information provide the opportunity for cultural data to reach a greater range of audiences, and for anthropologists to engage in a different kind of writing. A typical ethnography is built on a mountain of evidence, discussion, field notes, and wrong turns, and only a fraction ever finds its way into publication. Online archives present the opportunity to place this material into wider circulation, opening the opportunity for ethnographic dialogue that goes beyond the interpretations of the solitary researcher and extends, perhaps, to her subjects (Fabian 2002: 779). A common characterization of our discipline, and a source of great consternation for many of its members, is that it revels, rather than languishes, in obscurity. Anthropologists have stored their writings and artifacts in libraries and museums, and pursue interests in aspects of life that may be considered too mundane or too unusual to be of much interest to anyone besides themselves. Christopher Kelty (2006) exhibits something of this disciplinary insecurity as he expresses his surprise at finding the venerable anthropological concept of “gift exchange” circulating among the developers of free software in the United States. The concept holds consi­ derable symbolic prestige in the discipline, significant for its association with an important and original body of social theory and with an iconic ethnography of life in the South Pacific. In an organized system of ceremonial trade famously described by Bronislaw Malinowski and still in operation today, members of the Kula ring sail boats around the Trobriand Islands in order to exchange items of jewelry to enhance their prestige and strengthen ties to other men in the ring. For the “hackers and geeks” studied by Kelty, the concept provided an explanation of how, on a daily basis, they were able to forge bonds of community and reciprocity through the distribution and modification of valuable code. Perhaps these free software developers, like the Trobriand Islanders before them, have charted a course that we can follow. Kelty himself has been a prominent advocate of open-access forms of publishing in academia, which make use of internet technologies to allow freer distribution of academic texts. The books and journal articles that are the typical results of anthropological research are generally held in either physical or digital collections which require significant sums of money or access to a university library to access. Open-access models comprise a range of shifts in copyright and more open systems for archiving academic literature to ensure that it can be accessed more freely through the internet (see Baird Jackson and Anderson 2014). Though this is an exciting prospect for academics who seek wider audiences for their work, the cultural and economic implications of opening up these new forms of publishing are not yet fully understood. In an article published in a special edition of the newly open-access Cultural Anthropology, the authors celebrate the potential of this form of publishing, asking “if a leading anthropologist publishes a ground-breaking new article, does it truly matter whether it appears in an elite journal or on WordPress.com?” (Baird Jackson and Anderson 2014: 239). The question is framed somewhat rhetorically, and yet it is clear that the authors do consider the answer to be far from settled. Though both are equally capable of carrying text, the difference between an elite journal and a blogging site is one of symbolic prestige that translates to social and financial capital within the academic culture of anthropology. Publishing work outside of existing, traditional routes can seem an uncertain prospect. 101

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Aside from its potential to confuse and disrupt traditional channels of distribution and the systems of symbolic prestige associated with them, opening access to our work may elicit concern in a discipline whose members have often sought a sense of boundedness and enclosure in their work (see Gupta and Ferguson 1997). As my doctoral research drew to a close in the late 2000s changes to the requirements of funding bodies and universities prompted an announcement at my university, as at many others, that PhD theses would thenceforth be placed in online databases, freely accessible to anyone who might search for them. This change in policy prompted a ripple of nervousness among my doctoral colleagues. Part of this concern was ethical; many of us had promised our informants a level of confidentiality and anonymity that seemed realistic when our theses were destined for the obscurity of a university library but became less certain in the context of online publication. Lurking behind such concerns there is also perhaps an insecurity around the idea of our informants themselves having easier access to the words that we have written about them. Anthropologists have historically written from a position of political, rhetorical, economic, and physical distance from their subjects (Lassiter 2001), and the knowledge that informants are able to read and judge work for themselves can be a daunting prospect (see e.g. Lawless 1992). A recent study of open-access policies across universities in the United States and Europe (Schöpfel and Prost 2013) found that a large percentage of doctoral students, in the face of online distribution, are choosing to place their entire thesis under some form of embargo, restricting all access to their work. It seems that the same anxieties of exposure that we see in the tangled love lives of youths in Mozambique are at play among academics in Western universities, as institutional moves to greater access and transparency confound expectations, leading instead to further “secrecy and concealment” (Schöpfel and Prost 2013: 78). Though efforts to promote openness and transparency may be contested in practice, we have seen in recent years the importance of maintaining open dialogue in our discipline. In 2007 it came to light that the US military had been recruiting anthropologists and other social scientists to conduct work in populations targeted for military intervention, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of a program of research termed the “Human Terrain System” (HTS). To date, three social scientists have been killed in the course of this research, and the manner in which research findings are fed back into the military intelligence of occupying forces is difficult to ascertain. When the HTS story broke it was met with widespread alarm and discussion within the anthropological community. The sheer number of online publications referenced in a review of the HTS debate for the journal Public Anthropology bears witness to the importance of the internet in enabling this discussion (see Forte 2009). Anthropology blogs like Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and Culture Matters, along with a dedicated blog set up by the American Anthropological Association, provided forums in which anthropologists, military personnel, and interested civilians could engage in debate and discussion of this controversial program. One writer suggested we were seeing in these discussions the formation of an online “civil sphere” within which anthropology is increasingly able to watch over itself (Golub 2007). It is not only anthropologists who are watching. In his discussion of the Swahili archive, Fabian (2002: 777) describes the excitement that he and his colleagues feel when they see the thousands of page views their site has gained but notes that they have no idea who these visitors are, or what brings them to the archive. It is important to remember that the vast audiences that we are able to find online are not boundless or faceless, that all sites and services have specific, socially and geographically located audiences who consume online media for specific reasons. We can gain new ways in which to render ourselves, our subjects, and our audiences visible to one another by opening our research projects up to wider collaboration. Anthropologists working at University College London have in recent years launched MyStreet, a site that hosts short films that capture everyday life in the United Kingdom, organized and displayed according to 102

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data from Google maps. Filmmakers are invited to the university for an annual festival, and those organizing the project hope that such experimentation will “undermine the traditional, commonly under-theorised, division between informants’ and ethnographers’ perspectives” (Stewart 2013: 305). Through this kind of merging we gain opportunities for people from communities that have often been marginalized, such as those identified as suitable for global development interventions (Tacchi 2012) or people with disabilities (Ginsburg 2012), to be more present in discussions about their lives. Aside from the ethical and practical benefits of this kind of collaboration it is surely also valuable to a discipline that seeks to broaden the range of available commentaries on our world. The internet has moved from an interest at the margins of anthropology to something like a frontier, where the world opens up to us and where, in engagement with others, we are able to be open to the world. The field of anthropological study is a field in progress (Ingold 2008). Like weapons, or irrigation, or the written word, the final form of the internet is unknown and unknowable. Internet technologies and the social relations they are part of arise in a remarkable variety of constellations according to their wider conditions. Like the inhabitants of Trinidad, anthropologists have an interest in remaining abreast of developments, and must find ways of doing so that remain in keeping with the practices of our informants and the spirit of our discipline. In this, perhaps teaching anthropologists will turn increasingly to the guidance of their students, whose knowledge of current trends in digital practices will often outstrip their own. This idea is suggested by the work of Michael Wesch and his students, who have produced a range of videos for YouTube on the theme of digital ethnography. In one video his students describe their daily habits of media engagement, and we see that though they devote much of their time to their studies they find Facebook profiles far more compelling reading material than the words found in textbooks or on blackboards.2 Since being uploaded in 2007 the video has been viewed over five million times. Such work invites professional anthropologists to find ways to work alongside the media habits of their students, and students to consider the manner in which their aptitude for digital media can contribute to and shape the discipline. In a media landscape in which free distribution and reproduction ensure that it is increasingly difficult for anyone to claim ownership of anything, anthropology can benefit from a greater flexibility and spirit of collaboration in our engagement with those we write about, and those we write for.

Conclusion Throughout the history of their discussion of the internet, anthropologists have emphasized the fact that the future of these technologies and their interaction with diverse cultures around the world is uncertain. But the future is always uncertain. Anthropology seeks to render “the exotic familiar, and the familiar exotic” (Eriksen 2009: 34), and it is always too early to tell what will arise from these transformations. Perhaps our particular sensitivity to the newness of the internet is heightened by the fact that, unlike other technologies (Pfaffenberger 1988), and other forms of media (see Spitulnik 1993), we have come to the internet as an object of interest at the same time as—or only very shortly behind—the rest of the world. And so the internet unfolds to us as it unfolds to those we work alongside. In this short history, we see the endurance of our own traditions.The perspectives, insights, and methods that we developed through engagements with Kula traders in the South Pacific or the ritual lives of African tribes, or the chattering publics of European cities, continue to yield value to us as we approach new and emerging objects of inquiry. The shores that we have ended up on seem strangely familiar, as we exchange goods of value and look for love and point out to others the places where demons lurk and struggle to find recognition and status among our peers. Just as the habits and tendencies of our discipline 103

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have shaped our approach to these technologies, they are part of the unfolding of our discipline not only in the world, but as part of the world. Though it is difficult to offer a definitive map of this shifting landscape of research, the anthropology of the internet to date suggests ways that we can work within it. A key lesson arising from this history is to anticipate and work alongside change. We cannot come to understandings of social processes by attempting to hold them still, even in the brief moment of analysis. Many of the sites and services that have been featured in this chapter no longer exist.The trading of pornographic images is very different now in a world in which highspeed connections make such material plentiful and easy to access. Second Life is now something of a relic of an earlier online age; subscriptions for World of Warcraft are falling each year. In the face of this change, the constancy that arises in the problems that internet users face is striking. In their online practices, internet users navigate issues of co-presence and embodiment, of trust and authenticity, of invisibility and revelation. To take part in these practices is not to parti­ cipate in communities or indeed to inhabit “sites” that are already there, it is to actively create and renew the possibility of community and location. Anthropologists can learn much, not only about the internet but about the basic conditions of social life through attending to the active work that goes in to generating a sense of meaningful togetherness out of networks of code. This sensitivity to local understandings and experiences of what is taking place online may lead us to bring events that take place away from the screen into the wider frames of our research. The promise of early discourse on the internet was of a world that was opening up, and in the various ways that people have used the internet to expand and augment their lives we see something of this promise fulfilled. As we contemplate the place of the internet in social life, it makes sense to pay attention to paths laid out in the habits of our informants. Weaving online and offline together into a single research project brings challenges but also invites us to consider the specific ties that bind online activity to offline lives. Following such various threads anthropologists can bring different research settings together in a kind of semantic fieldwork, ensuring that the frame of ethnographic inquiry harmonizes with the wider cultural imagination. Our field is intensely concerned with association, as the gestures of culture cast links between different people, different spheres of practice, and different settings. Everyday millions of people are making these kinds of connections explicit in their use of online media.We might lean on the language conventions of our work environment when emailing colleagues from home, or experience our time spent on a long train journey as empty space to be filled with the pleasing distractions of celebrity gossip, or see a beautiful sunset and be reminded of someone we love. Following these various paths of association may lead the ethnographer from a screen to an internet café, or an office, or a bedroom, or a church, and from any of these locations back to a screen. Chasing life online, we catch up with ourselves. Anthropologists, so used to peering over the shoulders of others, may be surprised to find those others reading over ours. Under the light of these new technologies we can reveal the tumble of data that lies behind our ethnographies, expand our habits of debate and commentary beyond the classroom, the paper, or the conference, and contemplate different registers in which to communicate with those who matter to our work, and who find our work matters to them. This is an uncertain future for anthropologists as individuals as much as for anthropology as a discipline. We do not yet know exactly how our work will be affected by publishing texts that anyone can read and comment on, we cannot always predict or know how our informants will react to the words we write about them, and we cannot predict the shape of a project that is forged in collaboration with others. The future is always uncertain though, and our history gives us reason to believe that we will come away wiser from our experiences in the world and the guidance of those we work with. Engaging with 104

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the world from the vantage point of the internet provides us with new perspectives on it (see Ingold 2008: 84). There is certainly the potential for isolation and uncomfortable revelation, but also for closeness and connectedness. In their encounter with the internet anthropologists find themselves in a widening world, by turns stranger and more intimate.

Notes 1 The archive is available at: http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/. 2 Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGCJ46vyR9o [Accessed 15 August 2014].

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6 HAND IN HAND Homelessness, heritage and collaborative approaches to the material past Rachael Kiddey

Introduction ‘This whole project has given me positivity, focus + hope’, the message read. Handwritten, in black marker pen, the message formed part of a montage in which Jane (a homeless colleague) had annotated photographs and maps, excited to be co-curating an interactive public heritage exhibition. The words ‘positivity’, ‘focus’ and ‘hope’ are not often associated with homelessness but this is what Jane felt she had gained from taking part in the Homeless Heritage project. The project was originally conceived of over the spring of 2009. Back then, I worked for a small, independent community arts group called the Peoples’ Republic of Stokes Croft (P.R.S.C.). Stokes Croft is a small urban neighbourhood in central Bristol (United Kingdom) which was, at that time, a deprived and much neglected area of the city. The P.R.S.C. group formed in part in reaction to an aggressive onslaught of rapid planning decisions which were felt to threaten the independent, if shabby, character of ‘The Croft’. Part of my job with the P.R.S.C. was to research the architectural and cultural history of the area and use existing heritage protection legislation to speak up at planning meetings in favour of planning decisions that had conservation and reuse, rather than demolition and replacement, at their heart. During the course of my research, I visited ‘empty’ and ‘disused’ buildings and found that many of them, in fact, showed signs of being ‘in use’ by homeless people or of having been used as shelter in the very recent past. Spending time at these sites, I came to meet homeless people, as individuals. We talked about their circumstances, how they related to the local environment, how they adapted it to create shelter from inclement weather (cf. Olsen 2010). We talked about how homeless people survived on the street. I was told that some ‘abandoned’ buildings had ‘street’ (or homeless) names and the significance of these places to homeless people was made clear, as spaces of shelter, safety or privacy, or as places to socialise (cf. Lucas 2013). It became apparent that homeless people experienced the city differently from non-homeless people but that attachment to particular places was no less felt. In this chapter I provide a brief thematic overview of the ways in which this fieldwork was theoretically and epistemologically contextualised. I examine ways in which archaeology might be considered a magpie discipline, borrowing bits of theory (and methodologies) from a range of social sciences and humanities in its effort to attend to questions about the past. I draw out important ways in which some poststructuralist principles concerning perspective and 107

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interpretation influenced archaeological thinking and argue that the practice of Contemporary Archaeology specifically cannot be done well without proper attention paid to anthropological ethics (see also Graves-Brown & Kiddey 2015). At this early stage, let me make clear that the term ‘Contemporary Archaeology’ is used in this context to describe what might otherwise be referred to as ‘archaeology of the contemporary world’ (cf. Graves-Brown 2000; Buchli & Lucas 2001; Harrison & Schofield 2010; Graves-Brown, Harrison & Piccini 2013). Having established the intellectual context from which the Homeless Heritage project grew, I describe how I approached it by utilising collaborative methodologies, the central objective of which was ensuring genuine participation from homeless people in the construction of their own (to some, an alternative) heritage narrative. I describe the outcomes from the Homeless Heritage project and include results that were surprising for the significant ways in which homeless colleagues experienced profound changes in themselves following active participation in the project. At the close of the project, colleagues reported feeling a heightened sense of personal identity and self-worth and experiencing positive shifts in their attitudes towards ‘mainstream’ culture. Perhaps the most surprising result from the Homeless Heritage project was the level of social connectedness that colleagues reported gaining from participation in the project, to the extent that several homeless colleagues made extended efforts to reconnect with family. This chapter concludes that these unexpected yet positive psycho-social outcomes represent genuine ways in which archaeology and participation in cultural heritage practices may be considered ‘socially useful’ work and could be made to contribute constructively to rehabilitative programmes for people who have experienced trauma and/or social isolation or marginalisation.

Themes in contemporary archaeology If archaeology works at all, that is, if archaeological theory and established methodologies can aid our understanding of past societies then it stands to reason that the same principles might usefully be applied to contemporary society (Foucault 1972). This suggestion is not new, having first been mooted almost forty years ago (Rathje 1981; Gould & Schiffer 1981). However, ­Contemporary Archaeology remained a marginal subfield of its parent discipline until two important books were published and gave rise to something of a revival of interest in approaching contemporary society archaeologically (Graves-Brown 2000; Buchli & Lucas 2001; see also, González-Ruibal et al. 2015).To begin with, we might ask why we should bother to use archaeological methodologies to investigate the contemporary period.There are plenty of other disciplines – anthropology, sociology, psychology, cultural geography, for example – that already investigate contemporary society and perhaps archaeologists should stick to ‘the past’? Harrison and Schofield (2010:6) answer this question by suggesting, and here I paraphrase, that archaeologists approach the contemporary past with three unique points of view: (1) archaeologists begin with material culture; (2) archaeologists are familiar with a concept of time depth that is shared perhaps only by geologists; and (3) archaeologists recognise that change happens, whether we like it or not. I would like humbly to add to these arguments a fourth reason why archaeologists are well placed to shed new light upon contemporary society and this is that our field of study is uniquely accessible to everyone. We can, and I argue that we should, involve everyone in the business of constructing and sharing heritage narratives because the past, contemporary or otherwise, is a resource that belongs to us all. Anyone can be an archaeologist – they just have to do some archaeology! It is not my intention here to attempt to reproduce a history of archaeology, a topic expertly navigated elsewhere (Trigger 1996; Johnson 1999; Hodder 2001). However, it is important, to 108

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provide the theoretical and epistemological context for the Homeless Heritage project. I begin in the early twentieth century when anthropological research methods and theory increasingly had an impact on archaeological work1. For example, Adam Kuper (1978) claims that Bronislaw Malinowski may be considered the founder of British social anthropology due to his conception of what has become perhaps the defining of anthropological study, namely, the process of spending time doing fieldwork within a community (see also, Malinowski 1922, cf. Boas 1940). This ‘new’ anthropology was distinguished from ethnology as ‘social anthropology’ and derived much theoretically from the writings of French sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858–1917), a founding father of sociology, along with Karl Marx and Max Weber (Giddens1971). Observation of living cultures was increasingly advocated within archaeology on the basis that people are motivated by customs, social structures and perspectives and that such ideas therefore lead people to intervene in the physical environment in ways that have material, at times archaeologically detectable, effects (cf. Olsen 2010:157–160). Increased incorporation of sociological and psychoanalytical theory into archaeological practice also reflects a wider recognition that material remains are partly produced by multi-sensorial individual humans operating within historically situated sets of relations (Lacan 1977; Jung 1967; Durkheim 1984; Spriggs 1984).

The past active in the present Drawing widely from post-1970s social theory (Foucault 1972; Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1986, 1995), interpretive and phenomenological approaches to the past remain contentious (for example, Binford 1977; Wylie 1985; Hodder 1986; Leone 1987; Shanks & Tilley 1987; Pinsky & Wylie 1989; Shanks & Tilley 1992; Preucel & Hodder 1996; Fleming 1999; Wylie 2002; Fleming 2008; Barrett & Ko 2009; Leone 2010; Olsen 2010). However, aspects of such approaches are common within Contemporary Archaeology and, I argue, useful because they recognise the multiple ways in which ‘human beings live in not on the world’ (Ingold 2011:47, emphases in original). We cannot imagine a world without things – toothbrushes, plants, cars, stones, plates etc. – therefore, the relationship between humans and their environment is dialectical (Lefebvre 1991). The things themselves act upon us as we (humans) interact with them (Olsen et al. 2012:32–33). However, people are motivated at times by what they perceive as much as by what can be shown empirically to exist. Thus psychological theory (Williams & ­Costall 2000) and developments in neuroscience (Stafford 2011) contribute meaningfully to our understanding about how humans make their social and material environments (and how they might have related in the deeper past). Harrison and Schofield describe the archaeology of the contemporary past as ‘… critical engagement with the spaces in which the past intervenes in the ­present’ (Harrison & Schofield 2010:8). The contention here is that archaeological data are always active within the present, routinely reinterpreted according to new paradigm perspectives which themselves have an impact on interpretation (Martin 1972).

Interpretation and perspective Hermeneutics, the science of interpretation, developed largely from critiques of positivism and is particularly important to the practice of Contemporary Archaeology because it affords the possibility of the construction of multi-vocal and conflicting narratives on the past. This is necessary for the representation of diversity and challenges to historical narratives which have tended to dominate. Hermeneutics can be unsettling because it decentres but leads us back to ourselves (Ricoeur 1984) but so long as we are prepared to make our methodologies explicit hermeneutic approaches need not slip into relativism. Hermeneutic thought removes universal 109

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truth and liberates the possibility of seeing things – the past, wars, landscapes – from multiple perspectives. It does not deny the reality of the landscape but recognises that the landscape is always subject to the subjectivity of the observer; that the observer is active within their own habitus (Bourdieu 1977) which impacts the way they interpret the landscape (the past or the war). In accepting that we are always already in the world, not able to decide to be objective, we are relieved of the true/false dilemma and instead asked ‘… how to decide our reaction to different views’ (Lucas 1997: 41). We can never recover essential ‘meaning’ from archaeological data, only hope to understand from more perspectives and improve upon the way we think around things (Giddens 1995) and ‘from things’ (Wylie 2002; cf. Olsen 2010). Shanks and Tilley describe the position of the archaeologist as the ‘fourfold hermeneutic’ by which they mean that the archaeologist works within four points of interpretation: working within the archaeological discipline, conducting contemporary archaeology within contemporary society, trying to understand the ‘alien’ culture and attempting to transcend the past and present (Shanks & Tilley 1992:108). Shanks and Tilley (1992) suggest that what is necessary is more theory so that we further question why we construct the past in certain ways and avoid romanticising or reducing the past to sanitised, logical narrative. Gavin Lucas observes that to be inclusive of ‘alternative’ interpretations of the past does not mean we have to agree with them. ‘Our problem is whether that view is represented, since we [archaeologists] hold the power of vocality’ (Lucas 1997:41). As we will see later in this chapter, this resonates in important ways with the suggestion that archaeology can function as activism or advocacy because representation in the past is a form of recognition and can aid the development of rights in the present. We do not slip into relativism because, as Tilley reassures us, ‘The past resists our constructions; its empirical materiality has to be respected’ (Tilley 1990:136). In short, ‘Things appear to us not only from where we are but from where they are and from what they are (e.g., as stones, cars, mountains, prisons, refugee places and so on)’ (Olsen 2010:133). Interpretive archaeologies do not throw out scientific method; rather, they explicitly acknowledge that archaeological remains do not excavate themselves any more than cakes bake themselves. In order for material culture to become archaeological data, intervention by people is required and takes place within materially and historically constituted social and political relations. Stories, and history is no exception, involve foregrounding some things and masking others which is what makes all archaeology inherently political. Contemporary Archaeology is explicitly political precisely because it is reflective, conscious of itself as an active network bearing influence that can give voice to subaltern narratives and function as a particularly apposite form of political activism (McGuire 2008; Little & Zimmerman 2010; Gokee & De León 2014).

Advocacy In recent years there has been a swell in the number of archaeological projects that have intended to highlight injustice in the past (for example, Byrne & Nugent 2004; Schofield 2009; ­Zimmerman et al. 2010). Let us put aside, in this instance, the debate as to whether or not anthropological researchers should seek for their work to operate as a form of advocacy (Hastrup & Elsass 1990; Scheper-Hughes 1995). Instead, it has been suggested that all anthropological work (and a lot of Contemporary Archaeology) functions inadvertently as advocacy in the sense that by researching and presenting a particular worldview, its existence is automatically highlighted. As Mullins has noted (2011:236), when the task of the researcher is to document human experiences that involve suffering it is surely unethical to argue that we should not call for change of some kind. Looking at the surge in projects and publications that insist that our work as anthropologists (among whom I count contemporary archaeologists) should 110

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consider advocacy to be a way in which our research might ‘earn its keep’ (Little & Zimmerman 2010:134) it is surprising that the topic has received comparatively little critical attention and that so little practical guidance has been produced (Graves-Brown et al. 2013:9; cf. GravesBrown & Kiddey 2015). Several projects that have intended to highlight injustice in the past have also evolved to concern issues of advocacy for descendants in the present (McDavid 2010; Gadsby & Barnes 2010) and included promoting a decolonised approach to cultural heritage management (Smith & Wobst 2005). Some projects have resulted in archaeological data functioning as ‘evidence’ that actively support resistance stories and materialise experiences of oppression and mistreatment in the very recent past (Gokee & De León 2014). A central objective of some projects has been to give archaeological training to (or work collaboratively with) descendants (or self-identifying representatives) in order that living people take ownership of heritage narratives by actively constructing them (Preucel 2002; Sabloff 2008; Kiddey 2014a, 2014b). Such methodologies do not call for the abandonment of established archaeological approaches but for better questions to be asked. Rather than telling audiences what they should find significant about a particular landscape (place, object or event), we must ask what people relate to and why – and take note of our own ‘new ruins’ (DeSilvey & Edensor 2013:466). In this way, we start to develop truly dynamic and specifically archaeological interpretations of the past that respect the integrity of things at the same time as enhancing rights in the present. As Gavin Lucas has suggested, archaeologists might intentionally offer three-dimensional interpretations of data (Lucas 2006). If this were to become the norm the practice of Contemporary Archaeology might become an activist methodology, accessible to anyone who wanted to gather evidence of current injustices and argue for the protection of diversity (human, ecological, material). In its capacity to deal with current issues, the practice of Contemporary Archaeology unavoidably affects living populations and may influence how people alive today are conceived of and ultimately, treated. As we will see later in this chapter, the Homeless Heritage project actively challenged stereotypes about homeless people in Britain. However, it was also apparent that in materialising homelessness through maps, photographs, installations, audio and film pieces, the practice of Contemporary Archaeology directly influenced real, living homeless people. For this reason, it is my belief that Contemporary Archaeology must be contextualised within anthropological ethics, a topic I wish to explore now in more detail.

Bearing witness and the importance of anthropological ethics The literature on ethics and how we wrestle with them in archaeology is abundant (for example, Pels 1999; Tarlow & West 1999; Tarlow 2001; Caplan 2003; Zimmerman 2003; Zimmerman et al. 2003; Meskell & Pels 2006; Scaare & Scaare 2006; Hamilakis & Duke 2007; Fairclough et al. 2008; Harrison & Schofield 2010; Kiddey & Schofield 2011). For many scholars, the ways in which we recruit people into the process of archaeology should be brought under close scrutiny (Smith 2006; Smith & Waterton 2009). A perennial question has remained – for whom do we do archaeology and what right do we, archaeologists, have to make claims about knowledge of the past or decisions about how the past is reconstructed (Strang 2003; Zimmerman 2003; Zimmerman et al. 2003)? The Executive Committee of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) spent the first part of the 1990s developing an ethics code that recognised the archaeologist’s role as ‘guardian’ of the past.The responsibility this entailed moved the SAA to revise its ethics code and, in 1996, publish a code with ‘the principle of stewardship of the past in both practice and promotion …’ at its core (Zimmerman 2003:8).There is ‘… some level of recognition of [archaeology’s] publics 111

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in virtually every principle’ (Zimmerman 2003:8). Academic and professional strides towards a de-colonised approach to the material past in countries such as America and Australia were mirrored, to an extent, in Britain. For example, attempts were made to be inclusive of working-class and immigrant perspectives on the past. Examples include The National Trust’s ‘Whose Story?’ project which sought to tell the story of migration to Britain from the perspective of those migrating, although problems of imbalance persist where ‘interpreters’ of subaltern heritage narratives remain overwhelmingly white, middle-class people (Littler 2005; Harrison 2010) and many groups and communities remain under-represented in heritage interpretations (for example, people with mental and physical disabilities, people lacking formal education, homosexual people, elderly people, single parents, prisoners). Archaeologists have the ‘power of vocality’ (Lucas 1997:41) and therefore the onus is on us to develop the necessary methodologies. Central to the use of collaborative methodologies employed throughout the Homeless Heritage project was the aim of enabling homeless people to publish materials and produce presentations that represented their heritage in their own words. Through the publication of popular articles in which colleagues’ words are reported verbatim (Kiddey & Schofield 2009, 2011), co-presentation at conferences, co-curated exhibitions and in making films2 this end was achieved in small ways. That said, I am aware that, through my privileged social position – non-homeless, an associate of a good university, commissioned to write this book chapter – I remain a key ‘proprietor’ (Strang 2003) of the data we gathered which poses ethical questions perhaps more commonly experienced by scholars working with indigenous and Aboriginal groups. Effort was made to counter this position by explicitly asking homeless colleagues to construct narratives themselves but I could not ask every homeless person their view and there of course remains as much diversity of experience within the homeless population as there does in any other social group (Said 1979; Anderson 1983; Hamilakis & Duke 2007; Smith & Waterton 2009). As archaeologists, we have a moral responsibility to ‘bear witness’ (Thomas 2004:32) to other human lives, regardless of whether the people have been dead for thousands of years or they stand beside us, alive and kicking. Julian Thomas reflects that it is ‘the connectedness that arises from difference’ (Thomas 2004:32) that should be our focus as we engage with realities that might, often do, seem utterly alien in comparison to our own. I suggest this is of particular relevance to Contemporary Archaeology because the people whose lives our work testifies to are usually alive and remain vulnerable to harm. This is why for Contemporary Archaeology to be done well it must be firmly located within the context of anthropological ethics (Graves-Brown & Kiddey 2015). As Graves-Brown, Harrison and Piccini note in the introduction to their edited volume the archaeologist’s subject matter is ‘… not just the buried remains of past societies, but as often as not the circumstances of living people’ (GravesBrown et al. 2013:7). Some archaeologists have argued that we should ‘… treat [archaeological evidence] not as a record of past events but as evidence for particular social practices’ (Barrett 1988:6, emphasis in original). This shift in thinking emphasised the way in which the past is socio-politically and ideologically constructed in the present, part of which includes the process by which community groups and so-called ‘non-experts’ are engaged and involved in interpreting the past (or not). Archaeologists must be accepting of ‘difference’ – different world views, customs, perspectives and experience - or the relevance of working collaboratively is lost (Smith & Waterton 2009) and, arguably, it would be unethical to ignore difference where it arises.We must also take into account phenomena such as technological change and globalisation (Harrison & Schofield 2010). The absorption of postcolonial discourse and critical Marxist theory by archaeologists across a shrinking planet, linked in ever more immediate ways can be regarded to have increased the viewpoint that the conditions in which we practice archaeology are not only significant but 112

Figure 6.1  Kiddey records Punk Paul talking about Temple Church, Bristol (UK) in situ (photo: John Schofield)

Figure 6.2  Dan and Mark bagging finds at ‘The Pavilion’,York (UK) (photo: Rachael Kiddey)

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they actively impact the way the past is constructed and understood (Wylie 2006). For example, one of the founding principles of the World Archaeological Congress (WAC) was that archaeology cannot stand aside from the political climate. Archaeology had to integrate values of equality and social justice into its everyday practice (Hamilakis & Duke 2007:19) – or risk returning to its earliest and uncritical roots. My intention throughout this section of the chapter has been to provide the philosophical context from which fieldwork undertaken for the Homeless Heritage project was conducted. I move on now to describe how the Homeless Heritage project was approached methodologically and emphasise the ways in which this was a truly collaborative piece of research, with findings co-presented across a number of platforms. It is important to stress that I refer to homeless people with whom I worked regularly as ‘colleagues’ rather than ‘respondents’ or ‘participants’ because the term ‘colleague’ more accurately represents the relationship. It is hoped and intended that the Homeless Heritage project goes a small way towards including homeless people and perspectives in the construction of heritage narratives on the cities of Bristol and York, places we inhabit together.

The Homeless Heritage project 2009–2014 Between 2007 and 2010 I worked for a small arts group in Bristol, one of the United ­Kingdom’s largest cities. Based in Stokes Croft, then one of Bristol’s most neglected and deprived inner urban areas, I came to meet homeless people regularly. Some people defined themselves as ‘homeless’ and others as ‘home free’, seeing the lack of responsibility for belongings and bills as a positive attribute (see also Kiddey & Schofield 2010, 2011). In 2009, together with Dr. John Schofield, I undertook a pilot fieldwork project to see whether homeless people would be at all interested to work with us on what we envisaged could be ‘an archaeology of contemporary homelessness’. The pilot fieldwork was successful and the longer-term plan to work collaboratively with homeless people to map and document their heritage became the subject of my doctoral research (Kiddey 2014b). Supported by both the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol and also the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, I developed a project in which I intended to work collaboratively with contemporary homeless people from the cities of Bristol (and later,York) and also students from each of the universities.

Methodology From the very beginning, a central concern was to ensure that the project involved the genuine recording of homeless heritage by homeless people, in words and ways meaningful to them. Put simply, if homeless people had not been keen to undertake fieldwork with me, I would not have continued with the task of recording homeless heritage. In order to achieve the aim of producing an ‘authentic’ record of homeless heritage it was essential to ensure that all aspects of the process were truly collaborative and open to everyone (cf. Graves-Brown 2013:219). Thus, initial field-walking exercises through to the excavation of two sites of contemporary homelessness, the post-excavation process and the presentation and publication of results were open to all members of the Homeless Heritage team, comprising homeless people, students and professional archaeologists. Drawing on previously established contacts within the homeless population in Bristol, I made contact with other homeless people and prepared to work with everyone who expressed interest in the idea of documenting contemporary homeless heritage. I was explicit about the 114

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purpose of the project. I explained that, working together, we would generate archaeological data through a variety of ways. We would walk around the city noting down places of significance and names for particular areas and places. We would make and annotate maps – memory maps and counter-maps. We would take photographs, record audio clips and film and through these materials our aim would be to show continued or historic use of the city by homeless people. In so doing, we would literally put contemporary homelessness in Bristol (and later York) ‘on the map’. I explained that this work could, if colleagues wished it to, usefully counter stereotypes associated with homelessness through presenting alternative views of this familiar social status. There were several stages to fieldwork. To begin with, we undertook a survey of the city by walking and talking together, sometimes working with individual colleagues, sometimes working in small groups. The nature of homelessness in the United Kingdom is chaotic. Often homeless colleagues would intend to take part in fieldwork but then something would happen that meant that they could not or that they had to leave suddenly. For example, someone might receive a telephone call (from a housing or health professional) or not want to go into a particular part of the city on a particular day (often to do with owing someone money or avoiding detection by fellow homeless people or authorities). During these field-walks we carried maps of the city, plain paper and pens, audio recording equipment and a camera. It was hoped that homeless colleagues would actively take notes, draw and annotate maps and take photographs. However, it became evident fairly quickly that although homeless colleagues were very keen to relay information verbally, most were hesitant when it came to writing and drawing. On deeper questioning, it seemed that colleagues often felt that they lacked the necessary literacy skills or were overly concerned that they might ‘get things wrong’. To my mind, these are important observations because they actively influenced how I worked with homeless people in a heritage context. For example, in the interest of utilising methodologies that preserved, as far as possible, the active involvement of homeless colleagues, we came to rely less on paper maps and pens and more on the Dictaphone and camera. Interestingly, the experience of finding that homeless colleagues were reluctant to write or draw corresponds with that of American sociologist Nels Anderson, almost a century previously. While studying ‘hobos’ in Chicago in the 1920s Anderson experienced a similar dislike for writing: At first the writer tried to gather his data by revealing his identity and purpose and asking the [homeless] individual to fill out the case card, upon which were about twenty five questions of a general nature. He was not long learning that such a method was not practical, as the reactions of the men were generally negative. (Anderson, cited in Rauty 1998:81) Within the Homeless Heritage team we were careful to develop and maintain a culture of mutual respect. It was important to remind colleagues, homeless people and students, that we each brought different skills and experiences to the project and that we were all able to usefully contribute. For example, I had no clue where to begin sourcing the materials necessary to sleep rough through a British winter, although I was fairly confident making notes on maps. Colleagues were less comfortable writing notes but, for example, able to identify which direction the weather – rain, sleet, sunshine – was coming from and use the built environment for shelter from it at a moment’s notice. It was important to acknowledge that within the team as a whole we had the expertise and knowledge necessary to undertake an archaeological survey of contemporary homelessness. Agreeing upon methods of recording took time but it was necessary in order for us to proceed with the aim of genuinely documenting homeless heritage in 115

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words and ways meaningful and accessible to colleagues. Later, encamped in a café, I worked with individual colleagues to annotate maps, create memory maps and add to these, information about places, objects and available resources. Overlaid, these individual maps showed how homeless people perceived the landscape and revealed where homelessness materialised in each city. Some distinct routes became detectable, certain areas of the city were characterised by homeless use more heavily than others. Landscapes of contemporary homelessness emerged dotted with places that were identified as significant to homeless individuals or groups of homeless people. In keeping with the overall character of the Homeless Heritage project, the next stage of fieldwork evolved organically from a conversation that took place on a small tract of land, at the time synonymous with homelessness and known colloquially as ‘Turbo Island’ (Bristol). The presence of ‘the archaeologists’ in Stokes Croft had sparked a palpable interest among homeless people generally about the history of ‘their’ places. On this particular occasion, an animated discussion was taking place between several homeless people about the origins of ‘Turbo Island’. Suggestions included that it had been a ‘place where pirates were hanged’, a ‘kind of Speaker’s Corner’ or perhaps, that it was the entrance to ‘Bristol’s largest crack den’. It was suggested that an archaeological excavation might help to shed light on the historic use of ‘Turbo Island’. This suggestion was met with great enthusiasm and took place in December 2009. As with all other aspects of the Homeless Heritage project, the excavation was undertaken collaboratively by homeless colleagues and students and the invitation was extended to the wider local community that if they were keen to be involved they would be made welcome. Two local policewomen agreed to take part in the excavation of ‘Turbo Island’, seeing it as an opportunity to engage positively with the local community. A detailed analysis of the excavation of ‘Turbo Island’, co-authored by homeless colleagues, has been provided elsewhere (Crea et al. 2014). In May 2010, I relocated to York, an historic city in northern England and much smaller than Bristol. It was here that I continued my doctoral study by first establishing contact with an existing homeless centre called Arc Light. Having arranged a ‘peer-to-peer’ introduction in which several Bristol-based homeless colleagues came to York to give an informal presentation on the project to York-based homeless people, we recruited new, interested homeless colleagues to the York Homeless Heritage team. Following the same methods we used in Bristol, we identified a site of contemporary homelessness in York, known colloquially ‘The Pavilion’ and decided to undertake stratigraphic excavation in order to establish the historic use of the site. As with the ‘Turbo Island’ excavation, the work was undertaken by a team comprised of students from the University of York and homeless colleagues. In keeping with central objectives, all those who wished to remain part of the project were supported to participate in post-excavation sessions (which were held at the University of Bristol and the University of York, respectively). Essential archaeological training was given on how to process finds (for example, it was made clear that it was necessary to clean each artefact before replacing it in the tray that corresponded with the context in which it had been found) (cf. Olsen et al. 2012:58–78).

Interpretation and presentation of data: a collaborative process The penultimate stage of the Homeless Heritage project involved agreeing on ways of interpreting material. There exists a wealth of literature on the problems of classification (Bowker & Star 1999), and across archaeology specifically the arguments surrounding the topic are well-­ rehearsed (see, for examples, Adams & Adams 1991; McGuire 1993; Little 1994; Knapp 1996; Whittaker et al 1998). Traditionally, classification might involve typological grouping on the basis of the composite material of a find, which can be useful in differentiating between artefacts and determining their function (for example, flint, bone, CBM, metal, worked stone etc.). In 116

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cataloguing finds from two contemporary sites we were faced with an enormous ‘miscellaneous plastic’ category which at first meant that few distinctions or meaningful comparisons could be gleaned. Following numerous discussions and conversations within the Homeless Heritage team, themes such as ‘sleeping’, ‘eating’ and ‘communication’ began to emerge. A key concern remained that data revealed homelessness to exist as both an ideologically constructed concept and simultaneously a phenomenological experience lived out by human agents whose different creative responses to homelessness were best represented using interpretive archaeological methodologies. If we interpreted finds (and other materials) according to a typological focus the important themes of multi-functionality and adaptation of environment risked being lost. For example, bridges might be perceived to offer shelter to homeless people but their function as home space to which homeless colleagues return regularly or store belongings would evade narration. There was consensus that the best way to present data was through the creation of a public heritage exhibition but how we interpreted data remained the subject of some debate, for several weeks. We concluded that we would clearly state our methodology at the beginning of each exhibition and offer multiple interpretations of material under thematic headings. For example, under the heading ‘sleeping’ we included photographs and audio recordings of a variety of places identified by homeless colleagues as places at which they had slept, drawing out characteristics and comparable features. Alongside pictures, maps and descriptions one homeless colleague (Andrew) constructed a ‘bed’ from wooden pallets, cardboard and blankets, to demonstrate how he made somewhere to sleep from materials he found in skips and in bins in the city. Taking a thematic approach to the presentation of data allowed us to represent the ways in which human creativity is as much shaped by constraints as it is by access to resources, and we were able to highlight diversity. Importantly, in reflecting the individual human agency of homeless people, we effectively countered homogenising stereotypes of ‘the homeless’, a derogatory term rendered meaningless by the fact that it is all-encompassing. Throughout fieldwork homeless colleagues (and students) were reminded that an intended goal for the Homeless Heritage project was to present our findings to the general public. This was achieved through a variety of co-authored articles in diverse publications, including a magazine sold by homeless people, The Big Issue (Kiddey & Schofield 2009) and British Archaeology magazine (Kiddey & Schofield 2010). Two further co-written and peer-reviewed articles were published in academic journals Public Archaeology (Kiddey & Schofield 2011) and the Journal of the Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology (Crea et al. 2014). A book chapter, which contained comments verbatim from homeless colleagues, was also produced (Kiddey 2014a). Homeless colleagues were encouraged to co-present at a variety of popular and academic seminars and conferences. For example, homeless colleagues Jane, Danny, Deano and Whistler co-presented a paper titled ‘Punks & Drunks: counter mapping homeless heritage’ at the conference of the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) at the University of Bristol in 2010. Andrew, Jane, Dan and Mark co-presented a paper called ‘Stories from the Street: contemporary homelessness as heritage’ at the postgraduate conference in historical archaeology at the University of Leicester Centre for Historical Archaeology in 2011. Papers were put together collaboratively by the team with each homeless colleague taking responsibility for a particular aspect of contemporary homelessness about which they felt comfortable speaking. For example, Jane presented on her ‘Hot Skipper’3 (Bristol TAG 2010) and Andrew explored the theme of ‘anti-homelessness tactics’ using photographs of locations at which sheltered areas had been fenced or grilled off and rendered inaccessible (Leicester 2011). Using truly collaborative methodologies and in presenting findings in ways and words that were genuinely meaningful to homeless colleagues led to the creation of two interactive heritage exhibitions. The first, presented in a squatted shop in Stokes Croft, was called ‘A History 117

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of Stokes Croft in 100 Objects’ and it located homelessness in Bristol within local post-war context. The second exhibition, in York, was called ‘Arcifacts’, and held in a timber-framed ­fifteenth-century building called Wealden Hall, kindly loaned to us by York Conservation Trust for the duration of our exhibition. Each exhibition was interactive and open to the general public. Visitors were confronted with material which centralised the humanity of the individual homeless people involved and facilitated a more critical appreciation of the concept of homelessness and its phenomenological and material reality. Homeless knowledge, like academic knowledge, is not a coherent body but rarely do such diverse dialogues converge. Findings from this project included positive outcomes for individuals involved and suggest that approaching the contemporary past using collaborative archaeological approaches can function therapeutically and contribute meaningfully to social sustainability (Kiddey & Schofield 2015).

Therapeutic outcomes from the homeless heritage project Outcomes from the Homeless Heritage project were surprising, particularly with respect to the degree to which homeless colleagues reported that they found involvement in the collaborative archaeological process therapeutic. Firstly, everyone involved in the project reported feeling happier than they did at the start of the process and expressed desire to undertake similar educational projects in the future. In several cases (Jane, Andrew, Dan and Richard) a genuine interest in archaeology and social history was sparked and led to colleagues following the project with independent reading and library research. Colleagues reported that the main reasons they were enthused by the project were that fieldwork – mapping each city, identifying places according to their use and significance, taking photographs, excavation, processing finds and developing exhibition narratives – was fun, interesting and involved learning and practising a variety of practical and social skills which were transferable and immediately useful. The opportunity to make new friends and increase feelings of ‘social connectedness’ with people from a variety of social backgrounds (often with no previous experience of addiction or homelessness) was cited by colleagues as a major reason they felt happier and experienced enhanced self-esteem. Furthermore, colleagues found it appealing that they were engaged in real work and that the two exhibitions provided genuine opportunities to present homelessness to the public from their perspectives. The collaborative approach adopted throughout fieldwork ensured a sense of ownership of the project and the materials it generated (for example, the maps, photographs and films) and greatly contributed to colleagues feeling a sense of personal achievement. Colleagues were enthused by the fact that the work they undertook actively contributed to attempts to understand homelessness. Colleagues cited the social usefulness of Contemporary Archaeology and its capacity to challenge stereotypes and bust myths about homelessness as an extremely important and energising factor (see also Graves-Brown & Kiddey 2015). Of those homeless people with whom I worked in Bristol, Andrew, Jane, Punk Paul, Disco Dave and Ratty are now housed. Of York colleagues, Mark, Dan and Richard have now moved into independent housing. Several colleagues now have employment. Punk Paul is employed delivering vegetables and newspapers in Bristol and Mark is a full-time delivery driver for United Parcel Service in York. After spending time as a volunteer on a community archaeological excavation of a Roman site, Richard secured a full-time job as a cleaner at a hotel in York. Dan has part-time work as a gardener, volunteers in a charity shop and continues to give self-­ devised lectures on homelessness as heritage at several schools in York. Of those colleagues who suffered addiction to alcohol and/or drugs, several people have reported that their consumption has decreased markedly since taking part in the heritage project. Reasons given included the fact that they feel happier and continue to benefit from widened social circles, which include 118

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people who do not have addictions, an uncommon luxury for the majority of homeless people in Britain. Several colleagues reported that involvement in the heritage project inspired them to re-engage with existing addiction services in Bristol and York. This outcome is particularly valuable because it suggests that colleagues actively chose to make this move voluntarily, rather than accessing services due to punitive external pressure (for example, threats from a court). Realising something for oneself is a far more powerful way to learn or accept something than is absorption of information through lecture or punishment (Lacan 1977). Further to those positive outcomes described above, colleagues undertook important identity work as a function of the specifically archaeological – thing focussed – process. For example, Andrew cited the project directly as having enabled and inspired him to reject his ‘street name’ Smiler (by which he had been known for twenty-five years) in favour of his birth name, Andrew. Andrew explained that the experience of counter mapping Bristol made him realise that he was tracing his former self – Smiler, the homeless heroin user. At the time, Andrew was moving into independent accommodation and no longer used heroin. The archaeological process, by which places were mapped according to memory and meaning, led Andrew to the realisation that the places – the social activities, people and things which constituted them – were aspects of his (recent) past. The difference between Smiler and Andrew is fewer than five years but Andrew remained haunted by his street name and its associations. The active experience of being directly involved in the heritage process led him to insist that change had occurred. Following this life-­ changing realisation, Andrew spent Christmas Day 2012 with his parents for the first time in over thirty years.This is a good example of the powerful way in which archaeology can aid construction (or reconstruction) of identity through locating aspects of it in time and space, thus revealing the future as a ‘place’ as yet unlived, ripe with opportunities for things to be different and positive. Reconnecting with family was a strong and happily recurrent theme among the positive outcomes from the Homeless Heritage project. Jane made contact with her children through Facebook in April 2012 and has since seen photographs of her grandchildren and made plans to visit her family in Brighton. Deano decided to look for regular work in Bournemouth and, still busking for a living, moved to the city full time so that he could see his children more regularly. Richard resumed contact with his family in York and now shares a house with his father. Dan, now housed independently, had his parents to stay for a weekend for the first time in twenty years and had them back again for Christmas 2013. If only one colleague had been motivated to resume contact with family following participation in the Homeless Heritage project we might not see a correlation. However, several colleagues were motivated to reconnect with their families and cited the project directly as having influenced their actions. For this reason, it is argued that involvement in heritage as a collaborative social process can have therapeutic outcomes perhaps more familiar to fields of psychology and counselling where reminiscence and reconciliation are central features of the approach.

Conclusion and where next? All archaeological work may be considered an act of political activism in the sense that all archaeology involves working on the past where it intervenes or ‘gathers’ (Olsen 2010:161) in the present, and foregrounding a particular viewpoint. I have argued here that approaching contemporary society using archaeological methodologies is an explicitly political act because it has the capacity to directly impact living people. Therefore, for Contemporary Archaeology to be executed well it must pay close attention to anthropological ethics or risk causing harm, often irreparable damage, to the very people whose experiences it intends to highlight. It has been suggested that one way in which we can ensure that the work we do is ethically sound 119

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is to further develop collaborative methodologies, which retain archaeological and anthropological integrity whilst enabling so-called ‘non-experts’ to take ownership of and genuinely construct their own heritage narratives. On a wider scale, offering multiple and conflicting interpretations of archaeological data which intentionally represent alternative perspectives on the past could usefully aid our understanding and tolerance of difference in the present. For example, how does life in a sixteenth-century English village look from the point of view of a wheelchair user? Does this perspective influence how we think about conservation principles and disabled access to historic buildings in the present day? These are important on-going debates and Contemporary Archaeology can help to illuminate our thinking in both practical and philosophical ways. Further to the suggestion that increased representation of human diversity in the past can help to reveal where injustice and oppression continue in the present, results from the Homeless Heritage project show that collaborative heritage projects can aid reconciliation between past and present and help form positive conceptions of ‘the future’. These results were highly surprising and further work is necessary to test and measure impacts. However, results would seem to correlate with findings from within psychology, which have shown the importance of identity work in relation to offender rehabilitation and recidivism (Ward  & Marshall 2007:279). The rehabilitative potential of collaborative heritage work is where my own research is heading. It is exciting because it demonstrates clearly that meaningful engagement with cultural heritage is not just ‘interesting’ or socially useful, it is ultimately vital and necessary for human beings to live happy and fruitful lives.We do not live as ‘social constructs’, bobbing around in an empty universe. Material culture – jugs, shoes, iPhones, bird-tables, four-wheel drive vehicles etc. – constitutes part of all relations and archaeology has important contributions to make to how we understand societies and how and why they change. In a postcolonial and globalised world in which technologies have sped up the ways and frequency with which humans are connected to one another (whether they want to be or not), identity work is difficult for most people. It is even harder for those displaced from their native homelands by political and economic forces or divorced from their roots by circumstances beyond their control. People who feel disconnected from the environments in which they find ­themselves – or excluded from creating home environments altogether – are prone to unravel, be that metaphorically or more literally in the case of people who suffer addiction problems and mental breakdowns. Engagement in collaborative heritage projects in which work is undertaken as a participatory public process can help to provide social environments conducive to undertaking necessary identity work which may, at times, be difficult and involve complex emotional reactions; it also helps to produce windows on material worlds that we, the general public, might otherwise struggle to understand or tolerate. I do not propose that archaeology can cure all ills but I do believe that heritage as a collaborative social process can equip people with a framework through which they are enabled to choose how they react to situations in which they find themselves. Heritage can serve as a safe vantage point from which to contemplate the kaleidoscope world. Heritage is a place to piece together the people, events, places and things that constitute life.

Acknowledgements This work would not have been possible without sustained co-operation from homeless colleagues. I thank Jane, Andrew, Paul, Mark and Dan, in particular. Also, I remain indebted to my doctoral thesis supervisor, Dr John Schofield at the University of York, United Kingdom, for encouraging me to pursue this project. 120

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Notes 1 For some, the incorporation of anthropological methods, in particular participant observation, led to increased anthropocentrism in archaeology or ‘forgetting the lesson of things’ (Olsen et al. 2012: 27). 2 The excavation of ‘Turbo Island’, Bristol was the subject of a short film by the BBC, available to view online here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GbiQrbp33s. In York we made a documentary film called ‘Arcifacts’ which may be viewed in full online here – https://archaeotout.com/films-2/. 3 The word ‘skipper’ was used by Bristol-based homeless colleagues to denote a sleeping place. It was also used with the same meaning by homeless men with whom George Orwell spent time before writing his 1933 book, Down and Out in Paris and London. For more information, see Kiddey and Schofield (2011:10).

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7 COMMUNIcAtING ANtHrOPOLOGY Writing, screening, and exhibiting culture Paul Basu Introduction In the popular disciplinary imagination, “doing anthropology” is often equated with the idea of doing anthropological fieldwork and conjures up images of journeying to faraway places, negotiating the social mores of people whose languages we might only have a rudimentary grasp of, putting into practice our celebrated method of participant-observation, and jotting down fieldnotes in stolen moments. Despite the fact that many of us now work “at home” as well as “away,” in our own languages, and in multi-sited “fields” across which we track the flows and frictions of global processes and migrations, we are still caught up in the adventure of ethnographic research. Ironically, however, if asked what we actually spend our time doing, aside from grumbling about the burdens of departmental administration, most practicing anthropologists would probably admit that they spend a lot more of their professional lives teaching, writing, preparing and giving conference papers, perhaps collaborating on an exhibition or participating in a film or digital media project. In other words, most anthropologists spend much more of their time communicating anthropology than carrying out anthropological fieldwork. Fieldwork is often the welcome interruption to the everyday business of being an academic, the reward for having written a successful funding proposal or else squeezed into the fast-diminishing quieter times of the academic calendar. While much is written about “doing fieldwork,” little intellectual energy is devoted to reflecting on our media and methods of communication or on how important this aspect of the anthropological endeavor actually is. The objective of this chapter, therefore, is to consider “communicating anthropology” not as an after-the-fact adjunct, but as an essential part of doing anthropology. In turning the spotlight on communication there is, of course, no desire to displace the significance of fieldwork in the “doing” of anthropology. Indeed, there is perhaps a greater emphasis on the importance of conducting original research than ever before. The reputation—and financing—of individual university departments in a growing number of countries is increasingly dependent on their ability to demonstrate both the quantity and quality of research being undertaken by their staff, which is periodically assessed through evaluative mechanisms such as “Excellence in Research for Australia” or the “Research Excellence Framework” in the United Kingdom. There are many contentions surrounding the measurement of the quality of research that a given institution generates, but it is clear that evaluation is overwhelmingly based on the 124

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communication of research and, through communication, the “impact” of research in society (stimulating public debate, contributing to policy development, etc., see Gibbons et al. 1994). Few contemporary anthropologists can therefore afford to ignore the significance of communication, whether to peers, students, or to the wider public. Communicating anthropology is an integral part of doing anthropology, and of being an anthropologist. Although teaching is central to the communication of anthropological knowledge, since another chapter of the Companion is devoted to the subject (see Chin, this volume), I shall focus on three other important arenas of anthropological communication: text, moving image, and museum/exhibition display. Before going on to explore these interrelated media, I should say that my comments are mostly restricted to the sphere of sociocultural anthropology, and do not address the fields of biological anthropology or archaeology. Issues surrounding the communication of biological anthropology share much with broader discussions concerning the public understanding of science in society, which constitutes almost a discipline in itself. And, while archaeology continues to form a subfield of anthropology on many North American campuses, elsewhere its disciplinary identity has become quite distinct, particularly in Europe. Whereas public awareness of archaeology is relatively strong, not least as a result of popular television series and community archaeology projects, sociocultural anthropology remains a largely “invisible” field of inquiry, lacking a significant public profile beyond the academy (Callan 2006). Despite the relative obscurity of their discipline, sociocultural anthropologists are nevertheless convinced that it has a significant contribution to make in public life and are committed to sharing anthropological insights more broadly. The challenges of communicating anthropology to non-academic audiences are therefore a particular concern of this chapter.

Communication and the mediation of anthropological knowledge The perceived separation between “doing” and “communicating” anthropology arises out of a notion that anthropological knowledge is independently formulated through empirical fieldwork and then merely disseminated through lectures, ethnographic monographs and articles, films, or museum displays. This reflects an overly simplistic—and deeply unanthropological—­ “transmission”-type model of communication, in which packets of information are regarded as being conveyed from a sender to a receiver through a medium that ideally generates a minimal degree of distortion or “noise.” Communication theorists have long since acknowledged that such models bear little relation to actual processes of communication, and that communication is not a “secondary phenomenon,” but rather a “primary, constitutive social process” (Craig 1999: 126). Thus: Communication constitutes reality. How we communicate about our experience itself forms or makes our experience. The many forms of experience are made in many forms of communication. People’s meanings change from one group to another, from one setting to another, and from one time period to another because communication itself is dynamic across situations. (Littlejohn and Foss 2008: 6) Although this is not the place to rehearse the epistemological debates of communication studies (see Anderson 1996), recognizing the inextricability of communication and the creation of knowledge has profound implications for all academic disciplines. This is not only a matter of understanding the social and political dynamics of the production and consumption of knowledge, the critique of which has produced a “crisis of representation” in anthropology no 125

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less—and perhaps more so—than in other disciplines, but it is also to acknowledge the agency of communication media to give shape to inchoate ideas, translating the unformed “raw data” produced through the research encounter into a form that is comprehensible to both audience and author. As Goody remarked in his study of the impact of literacy on human societies, “a significant attribute of writing is the ability to communicate not only with others but with oneself ” (1986: 83). Indeed, I doubt I am alone in finding that the “meanings” of my ethnographic research, although intuited in the field, only fully emerge in the dialogical processes of talking with colleagues and students, preparing a lecture or seminar presentation, or writing an article. As a trained film-maker and occasional exhibition curator, I also find that the knowledges produced through juxtaposing images and sounds, or objects and texts, or sentences and paragraphs are of a quite different nature, and it is therefore useful to compare different forms in which communication takes place. The medium is not the message, but meaning is certainly mediated by these distinct processes of communication. Yet it is not enough to merely focus on the medium of communication either. Whether book, film, or exhibition, every medium requires an audience, and audiences—be they fellow anthropologists or members of an imagined “general public”—are far from homogeneous entities, to say the least. Gay y Blasco and Wardle have recently argued that “ethnographic facts exist as facts only within socially embedded conversations going on at different levels of complexity and significance” (2007: 191). Such “facts” are conjured in the specific contexts of each interlocution, and are highly contingent upon the particular knowledges, perspectives, and emotional investments of each interlocutor. Understanding communication as conversation reminds us that the author (or filmmaker or curator) is but one participant in this process of knowledge creation. Communicating anthropology is more, then, than the mere expression of preformulated “anthropological facts,” more than an acknowledgement of the agency of the medium to shape meaning: it is, rather, a space of dialogue and uncertainty in which potentially competing “anthropological knowledges”—indeed, possibly competing “anthropologies”—may be posited, negotiated, and contested.

Writing anthropology Writing remains the primary medium of anthropological communication, and the research monograph—the “ethnography”—remains the primary genre of anthropological writing. Sanjek identifies the first true ethnography as L.H. Morgan’s League of the Iroquois, published in 1851. What distinguishes this work from the writings of nineteenth-century explorers, missionaries, journalists, and other travelers, which often contained what we might regard as ethnographic description, was, argues Sanjek, “its attempt to depict the structure and operation of Iroquois society from the Iroquois viewpoint” as well as its engagement with the anthropological theory of the period (Sanjek 2002: 193–4). These qualities are important since they established anthropological principles that are still relevant for the discipline today: an insistence on understanding social phenomena in their particular cultural contexts, combined with maintaining a generalizing framework that allows for comparison across different social and cultural contexts. The aspiration for the anthropologist “to grasp the native’s point of view,” to use Malinowski’s words (1922: 25), and to communicate this emic perspective in writing, remains a central—though much debated—tenet of anthropological research. Sanjek cites other early exemplars of ethnographic monographs, including Cushing’s Zuni Fetishes (1883), Spencer and Gillen’s Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), and Rivers’s The Todas (1906). With the publication of Malinowski’s famous monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, in 1922, the form of the classic “realist ethnography” had begun to taken shape, and this 126

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was further refined in the canonical texts of his students, reaching its apogee in works such as Firth’s We, the Tikopia (1936) and Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940). The emergence of realist ethnography as the “approved genre” of sociocultural anthropology was, as Marcus and Cushman argue, associated with both “the establishment of anthropology as an academic discipline and the elaboration of professional fieldwork as the essential prerequisite for ethnographic accounts” (1982: 29). These texts were an embodiment of the new “scientific” paradigm in anthropology, inaugurated by Malinowski, which had become firmly established in university departments and research institutes by the mid-1930s. A central conceit of realist ethnography was that human social and cultural life was amenable to being studied using the positivistic methods of the natural sciences, and that the writing up of research was a straightforward matter of reporting upon phenomena observed by the appropriately trained anthropologist in the field.The dominance of the genre lasted into the 1980s when, with the influence of wider postcolonial, postmodernist, and feminist critiques, anthropologists increasingly acknowledged that the representational practices of ethnography were in fact far from straightforward and began to deconstruct the textual conventions that underpinned their disciplinary authority (Clifford 1983). In an important synthesizing critique, which prompted the so-called “Writing Culture debate,” Marcus and Cushman identified a series of characteristics of ethnographic realism, summarized in Table 7.1 using their original nomenclature (1982: 31–37). Table 7.1  Characteristics of the realist ethnography (Marcus and Cushman 1982: 31–37) 1. The narrative structure of total ethnography The realist ethnography aims to present a “complete description of another culture or society” (e.g. the Nuer, the Tikopia). This involved dividing the ethnography into an “orthodox table of contents” (e.g. geography, kinship, economics, politics, and religion) or else focusing on a particular theme (e.g. kinship among the Tallensi) with the assumption that other anthropologists will focus on different aspects in order to complete the “total ethnography.” 2. The unintrusive presence of the ethnographer in the text Realist ethnography is marked by the absence of “the narrator as a first-person presence in the text” and dominated instead by the “scientific (invisible or omniscient) narrator who is manifest only as a dispassionate, camera-like observer.” “The collective and authoritative third person (‘the X do this’) replaces the more fallible first-person (‘I saw the X do this’).” This heightens the sense of “scientific objectivity projected by the text,” but also obfuscates the relationship between “what the ethnographer knows and how he came to know it.” 3. Common denominator people The existence of the individual informant is suppressed in the realist ethnography. The individual informant is merged into a “composite creation, the normative role model or national character.” This results in a further “disconnection between fieldwork data and resulting ethnographic generalization.” 4. The marking of fieldwork experience The realist ethnography includes “some direct indication of fieldwork conditions and experiences” in order to establish the legitimacy of the observations recorded. This is often relegated to footnotes and appendices, though sometimes included in the introduction as a context-setting device. The inclusion of maps, drawings, and photographs provides “symbolic markers” of the anthropologist/ author “having really been there.” 5. The focus on everyday life situations The presentation of details of spatially and temporally bounded real-life situations validates the sense of the ethnographer’s intimacy with his subjects as well as providing opportunities for the synthesis of “interpretive and realist goals.” (Continued)

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Paul Basu 6. Representations of the native point of view The realist ethnography presents material as if it were articulating the point of view of its cultural subjects rather than embedded in the cultural references of the ethnographer. The ethnographer claims to represent the worlds of others as they themselves see it. 7. The stylistic extrapolation of particular data The style of reportage in realist ethnography is characterized by generalization “rather than maintained at the level of a mere detailing of the particular facts accumulated through research.” A particular event witnessed is rarely presented in its individuality, but comes rather to stand for a typical event. 8. Embellishment by jargon The development and use of jargon words signals that the work is an ethnography intended primarily for an academic, rather than popular, readership. The use of specialist vocabularies also serves “as a symbolic statement of the anthropological competence of the author.” 9. Contextual exegesis of native concepts and discourse Demonstration of the ethnographer’s linguistic competence is key to establishing the authority of the text and its author as “omniscient fieldworker.” The selective inclusion of local linguistic terms and concepts within the ethnographic analysis disguises the fact that few anthropologists “achieve the ideal of perfect control of a field language” implied in the realist ethnography.

Such analyses of the textual conventions of realist ethnography gained momentum through the 1980s, culminating in Clifford and Marcus’s edited volume Writing Culture:The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986) and Geertz’s Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988). In Works and Lives Geertz undertakes a more extended discursive analysis of the writings of ­Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, and Benedict. Significantly, in his chapter on ­Malinowski, it was not the textual conventions of Argonauts of the Western Pacific that Geertz focused on, but rather Malinowski’s fieldwork diaries, excerpts of which had been published posthumously as A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term in 1967 (Malinowski 1967). Malinowski’s personal diaries record a very different experience of fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands than that communicated to academic audiences in his ethnographic monographs. The significance of the publication of A Diary lay in its power both to explode the myth of the Malinowskian fieldwork paradigm and, in the light of this, to expose the literary techniques through which the authority of ­Malinowski’s classic ethnographies—and others of the realist genre—were established. Unsurprisingly, the so-called “literary turn” in sociocultural anthropology was not met with unanimous enthusiasm within the discipline. As Geertz notes, some regarded what was perceived as an “excessive concern” with how ethnographic texts were constructed as “an unhealthy self-absorption” and “hypochondriachal,” while “perhaps the most intense objection … is that concentrating our gaze on the ways in which knowledge claims are advanced undermines our capacity to take any of those claims seriously” (1988: 1–2). Others, however, responded to this crisis in anthropological representation by experimenting with alternative forms of ethnographic writing that intentionally disrupted realist conventions. Indeed, the majority of the chapters in the Writing Culture volume were either engagements with such experiments, such as Clifford’s discussion of Shostak’s Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (1981), or else authored by exponents of such experimentation themselves. Thus, along with Shostak’s Nisa, Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), Crapanzano’s Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), and Rosaldo’s Ilongot Headhunting 1883–1974 (1980) were all prominent attempts to break from the conventions of realist ethnography. Such works acknowledged that ethnographic truths were necessarily “partial truths” (Clifford 1986) resulting from the inter-subjective experiences of the fieldwork encounter.They 128

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made no pretense at aspiring to present a “total ethnography;” made visible both the presence of the ethnographer in the field and the particular individuals and interlocutions from which understanding of “the other” arose; and they brought the ethnographer’s own first-person narrative and the distinct voices of informants into a more dialogical relationship. Marcus would later refer to these experimental ethnographies as “messy texts” (Marcus 1994): Calling them messy was an affectionate way to draw attention to their often-systematic strategies for writing against the key controlling conventions that established the social scientific authority of [the ethnographic] genre. Such texts were self-conscious experiments in bringing out the experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic process at work in any ethnography. There was an aura of “opening up,” of excess about these works, a pleasure in taking advantage of the emerging license to write into ethnography the reflexive tales of fieldwork, which always had an important role to play in the oral [if not literary] culture of anthropology. … (Marcus 2007: 1128) Other commentators have been less generous in their assessment of the experimental “excesses” of the literary turn, arguing that “its assault on ‘realist’ ethnography was too categorical” and not nuanced enough in its reading of earlier ethnographic writing; that its “subjectivist agenda … was too obviously an inversion of perceived scientific objectivism to offer a plausible alternative:” and that its focus on the textual problems of ethnography led to a focus on textual solutions too (Englund and Leach 2000: 225). An adjunct to this latter point is made by Aunger when he claims that an objective of experimental ethnography was the creation of “a conscious reading experience,” in which “the book-as-object” was interposed between the reader and the reality being depicted (1995: 110). Although the literary theorist Roland Barthes is not cited by Aunger, his argument may be reframed using Barthes’s contrast between the “readerly” (lisible) and “writerly” (scriptible) text, in which the reader of the lisible realist ethnography passively consumes “ready-made” meaning, whereas the reader of the scriptible experimental ethnography is forced into making an active effort to reconstruct the text and become a “producer” of its meaning (Barthes 1970). Aunger argues, however, that, without the author’s privileged experience of the context, the majority of readers are ill-equipped to shoulder the burden of analysis and interpretation of ethnographic texts. Furthermore, it may be argued that experimental ethnography is no less “authored” by the ethnographer through the selection of textual fragments (fieldwork vignettes, transcriptions of interviews with informants, quotation from archival materials, etc.), and the reader has no way of knowing whether all the relevant information has been presented to them and hence ascertaining the reliability of an ethnographic text beyond the rhetorical persuasiveness of the text itself. Despite such limitations, the Writing Culture debate provided a necessary hiatus for the discipline and many of its criticisms—not least, the need for reflexivity—are now largely taken for granted. The continuing significance of the debate is also evident in the regular appearance of publications devoted to reflecting on that “experimental moment” (e.g. Abu-Lughod 1991; Behar and Gordon 1995; James, Hockey and Dawson 1997; Clifford 1999; Marcus 2007; Zenker and Kumoll 2010). Indeed, since the 1980s, there has been an ongoing proliferation of different forms and genres of ethnographic writing, from fieldwork diaries and memoirs (e.g. Kumar 1992; Hendry 1999; Borneman 2007) and explorations of embodied experience and intersubjectivity in the ethnographic encounter (e.g. Stoller and Olkes 1987; Jackson 1998) to experiments in writing “native anthropology,” “autoethnography,” and the “ethnographic novel” (e.g. Panourgiá 1995; Ashforth 2000; Hernández 2002; Biehl 2005; Hecht 2006). 129

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At the same time, a forceful counter-current against the literary turn has insisted that anthropologists would do better to lift their critical gaze from their textual productions and instead concern themselves with the challenge of how to ensure that the discipline remains relevant and engaged in a fast-changing and increasingly mobile world. Anthropology, it was argued, needed to “‘reenter’ the real world” (Fox 1991: 13), become more “issues led,” more politically engaged, and more adaptable in its methodological approaches to respond to the flows and disjunctures of what Appadurai describes as “the new global cultural economy” (1990). Thus we have seen an increasing tendency for the ethnographic gaze to be turned on such contemporary contexts as bioethics, climate change, conflict resolution, corporate social responsibility, environmentalism, human rights, international development, and labor migration.This shift is discernible in the titles of recent edited collections such as MacClancy’s Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Frontlines (2002), Sanford and Angel-Ajani’s Engaged Observer: ­Anthropology, Advocacy, and Activism (2006), and Armbruster and Lærke’s Taking Sides: Ethics, Politics and Fieldwork in Anthropology (2008). In his review of MacClancy’s Exotic No More, Carrier takes the critical view that such volumes are exercises in “disciplinary self-presentation,” vehicles for anthropologists “to put their case before the public by trying to show the sorts of things that [they] do, and by trying to show that these things are both worthy and relevant” (2003: 610–11). Indeed, this particular collection of essays was organized and sponsored by the Royal Anthropological Institute as a corrective to popular misconceptions about the discipline. All the same, in recent years we have witnessed the emergence of what is variously termed “engaged anthropology” or “public anthropology:” an anthropology that is committed to the pursuit of civic engagement, both in terms of its research foci on topics of public relevance, and its attempt to address a readership beyond the academy. While there have been instances of ethnographies that do reach a broader, non-academic audience, these are quite exceptional, and, in the words of Purcell, public anthropology remains largely “an idea searching for a reality” (2000). As the website of the Centre for a Public Anthropology reports on an associated book series that explicitly seeks to engage with a non-academic readership, ethnographic writing still struggles “to move beyond traditional academic audiences and styles” (Centre for a Public Anthropology 2011; see also Vine 2011). Thus, while writing continues to be the primary medium for communicating anthropology within the academic community, it has to be acknowledged that its reach beyond the academy (or even beyond the discipline) is severely restricted. Ironically, one suspects that the sheer number of ethnographic titles that are published each year is greater than ever before. The economies of scale of academic publishing mean, however, that print runs are small and the cost of monographs and essay collections is often prohibitive to all but institutional buyers (mainly university libraries). At the same time, the academic publishing industry is undergoing considerable transformation in response to technological advances in the production and distribution of digital texts as well as to pressure from public research funding bodies.While the respective advantages and disadvantages of “open access” online publishing are debated by academics, scholarly associations, publishers, and funding bodies alike, it seems likely that such platforms will replace traditional print publication, especially of s­ubscription-based academic journals, within a relatively short time span (see, for example, Boellstorff 2012; Kelty et al. 2008). It remains to be seen, however, whether the democratizing promise of public access will have a significant impact on the accessibility of anthropological writing to a wider readership, and, indeed, whether ethnographers will be able to exploit the possibilities of these digital platforms to engage new audiences in the anthropological project—particularly through the primary medium of text. 130

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Televising anthropology If written ethnography struggles to reach beyond a specialist academic readership, I should now like to turn to consider the communication of anthropology (or something like it) in the popular media of film and, particularly, television. The use of cameras to film moving images of “ethnographic” subjects can be traced to the earliest days of cinema when Félix-Louis Regnault filmed a Wolof woman making clay pots at the Paris Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale of 1895 (Rony 1992). Three years later, along with stills cameras and wax cylinder sound recorders, A.C. Haddon included a Newman and Guardia cinematograph in the kit of the famous Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits (Griffiths 1996). The few minutes of footage that Haddon shot in the Torres Straits set an early precedent in the use of moving images as a medium for anthropological research and communication, which, despite the production of subsequent “ethnographic fictions” and documentaries such as Edward Curtis’s In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), and Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison’s Grass (1925), was then largely abandoned by anthropologists until the popularization of lightweight 16mm cameras and synchronous sound recording equipment in the 1950s and 1960s. It is in the period from 1955 to 1985 that the classic ethnographic film canon was established by filmmakers working on 16mm such as Jean Rouch, John Marshall, Robert Gardner,Timothy Asch, David and Judith MacDougall, Gary Kildea, Ian Dunlop, and Melissa Llewelyn-Davies. With notable exceptions (Rouch, in particular), the screening of these films was largely restricted to specialist film festivals and anthropology lectures, and it was only in the 1970s that mass audiences began to be reached with popular anthropology television series such as Granada Television’s much-discussed Disappearing World strand (Loizos 1980; Banks 1994; Henley 2006). In the United Kingdom, Disappearing World ushered in a golden age of television programming with an explicitly anthropological content, with as many as 100 hour-long documentaries being made “based directly on the fieldwork of one or more consultant anthropologists” (Henley 2006: 171). This canonical body of ethnographic film and television has been examined at length in the visual anthropology literature, the more significant contributions to which include Loizos’s Innovation in Ethnographic Film (1993), MacDougall’s Transcultural Cinema (1998), Ruby’s Picturing Culture (2000), Grimshaw’s The Ethnographer’s Eye (2001), and Henley’s The Adventure of the Real (2010). As well as providing a detailed account of the development of ethnographic filmmaking and positioning the practice within the broader subdiscipline of visual anthropology (see Banks and Morphy 1997), this literature debates such issues as the relationship between written and filmic ethnography, the power inequalities between those controlling the means of representation and those represented in ethnographic films, and the innovation of more participatory filming techniques. My intention here is not to rehearse these debates again, so much as to relate these issues to continuing controversies over the “framing” of ethnographic film in specifically televisual and academic contexts. It is at the interface of these two very different contexts that we find the communication of anthropology—or, more to the point, the communication of what anthropology is—being contested. Thus, in tandem with the changing object of anthropological inquiry itself, a question obstinately remains: just which films are ethnographic? And, crucially, for whom? These are not new questions. Indeed, much early writing on ethnographic film from within the discipline was concerned with defining the genre (e.g. Hockings 1975; Ruby 1975; Heider 1976). The approach of these early commentaries was chiefly to assess films according to the established textual conventions of realist ethnography discussed in the previous section. Heider, for example, identifies as most ethnographic those films that most closely replicate the “scientific 131

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enterprise” of ethnographic research and writing (1976: 5). Aside from disregarding the possibility of a distinctively cinematic anthropology (cf. Rouch 2003), a fundamental problem here is that, as we have seen in relation to the Writing Culture debate, the “scientific” basis of the ethnographic enterprise is itself vulnerable to critique. More recently, Banks has returned to the question of definition, reminding us that the “ethnographicness” of a film or television program may be determined differently in relation to the various processes which together constitute the complete work. A film’s ethnographic character may thus be located in the intentions of the filmmaker, in the event filmed, or in the reactions of audiences (Banks 1992). It is clear, for example, that not all documentaries filmed in or about non-Western societies are necessarily ethnographic. What constitutes them as such may be the anthropological training of the filmmaker, the degree to which the circumstances of filming correspond to the methods of ethnographic fieldwork, or the use of specialist vocabularies in voice-over narration. But, equally, a film may be perceived as being ethnographic by audiences who may themselves have only a limited knowledge of what ethnography is. Whereas the discipline retains some editorial control over the medium of the ethnographic monograph—not least through the peer review of book proposals and manuscripts—it has no equivalent control over what is presented or perceived as anthropological in the popular media. Despite their relative powerlessness to influence television producers and commissioning editors, it is nevertheless interesting to see how anthropologists attempt to frame particular films and television programs in relation to the discipline. Through written critiques or the awarding of prizes at film festivals, for example, the discipline places certain films within an ethnographic frame, while excluding others, and in this way it attempts to assert some control over the communication of anthropology in the mass media.To illustrate this practice, I should like to contrast the discipline’s response to a recent television series entitled Tribe with its engagement with the work of the documentary-maker Kim Longinotto (Basu 2008). Tribe (or Going Tribal as it was known in the United States) was a BBC-Discovery Channel co-production broadcast in three series between 2005 and 2007, and comprising a total of 15 one-hour programs. From East African hunter-gatherers, Amazonian rain forest dwellers and Melanesian islanders to Siberian reindeer herders and Himalayan hill tribes, each program is concerned with a particular indigenous group, and follows the trials and tribulations of an on-screen presenter, Bruce Parry, as he undergoes various initiations and seeks to “go native” and live as the tribespeople do. Each episode follows a similar structure, which sees Parry traveling to a remote destination, meeting and interacting with members of the host community, learning about and attempting to participate in often stereotypically exotic cultural practices, reflecting on his experiences and on the endangered lifeworlds of his hosts, and eventually bidding his farewells and heading off for another adventure. While Tribe was not explicitly presented as an “ethnographic” or “anthropological” series when it was first broadcast, it is interesting to observe how it has been received as such by audiences and, indeed, how the programs were framed within this rubric on a BBC website that accompanied the series.The Tribe website, for example, included sections concerning indigenous knowledge, daily life, and language relating to each of the ethnic groups featured, and it provided reasonably comprehensive bibliographies comprised mainly of anthropological references and links to such resources as the Royal Anthropological Institute’s “Anthropological Index Online.” (At the time of writing the complete website is no longer live, but elements of it have been archived at www.bbc.co.uk/tribe/archive.shtml.) While viewers have praised Tribe as being “informative and educational,” providing “insight into ways of life totally different to our own” and thus “raising questions about our own culture,” the series has been strongly criticized by professional anthropologists and characterized as a “Victorian romp,” “more primitive, representationally, than the societies it purports to represent” 132

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(Hughes-Freeland 2006: 22). Much of this invective has been directed toward the macho antics of Parry, the on-screen “front man” of the series, an ex-Marine Commando and self-proclaimed “adventurer,” “expeditioner” and presenter of “extreme outdoors” television programs. Superficially, Parry’s persona in Tribe is that of the ethnographer: someone who travels to remote indigenous communities and who braves numerous discomforts in attempting to live as his/her local informants do, staying in their homes, eating their food, participating in their “traditional” customs and so forth as a way of learning about their society. The superficiality of the resemblance to an ethnographic methodology is, however, drawn to our attention by Caplan when she reminds us that, (1) Parry is not a trained anthropologist; (2) he did not speak any of the local languages; (3) he spent only an average of a month in each area; (4) there was little or no reference to any previous anthropological research in the region; (5) the material presented lacked much in the way of social or cultural context. (Caplan 2005: 4) Academic anthropologists, in contrast, are, generally speaking, trained doctoral and post-doctoral researchers who learn the languages of those they are studying, engage in long-term immersive fieldwork (typically a year or more), explicitly position their work in relation to previous research in the region, and are at pains to contextualize the phenomena they are studying within the broader social, political, economic, and cultural worlds in which they are embedded and from which they gain their meanings. It is, of course, naïve of anthropologists to expect this kind of academic rigor from a popular television series. As André Singer, a prominent figure in both ethnographic film and mainstream television documentary production, has noted, the mass audience for whom Tribe is made probably would not dream of watching the earnestly ethnographic works collected in the Royal Anthropological Institute’s film library (2006: 24). But the stark differences between anthropologists’ and popular audiences’ experiences of the series are revealing of a more significant disjuncture between the popular perception of anthropology (such as it exists at all) and the realities of anthropological inquiry in the twenty-first century. The vehemence of the anthropological critique of Tribe may thus be explained by the fact that the series reproduces the very exoticist stereotypes that anthropologists have, for generations, striven to problematize and distance themselves from (see my earlier discussion of an “engaged anthropology”).The problem is that, while anthropologists have long worked in much more diverse settings—including in their own and other complex urban societies—and are more interested in engaging with global modernity in its many localized forms rather than collecting “pre-modern,” primitive survivals, in the popular imagination the discipline is still associated with nineteenth-century adventure and exploration, and with the investigation of exotic esoteria and tribal customs. There is, however, a more profound issue here, beyond a lay misrecognition of the object of contemporary anthropological study. We might ask just why mass audiences are drawn to these stereotypical, “primitivist” representations of indigenousness rather than to the more typical contexts of current ethnographic research. And here one encounters a tenacious myth, and one with which the discipline of anthropology has been thoroughly implicated: that of the “noble savage” (Ellingson 2001). Tribe thus reproduces a romantic fantasy of the modern Western mind, which idealizes and constructs indigenous peoples as being closer to the “natural” state of humankind, and innocent of the moral corruption which is perceived to blight modern, industrialized society. Connected still to their more authentic ways of life, their traditional customs and beliefs, the endangered tribespeople are portrayed as living in harmony with their 133

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environments, keepers of all that we in the West have lost or destroyed. The problem with Tribe is that the more complex realities of indigenous societies—realities which do not accord with the myth—are not filmed or are edited out, and thus, in a way, denied. While seeming to advocate social responsibility, the representational approach of Tribe reproduces a cultural evolutionist worldview, which may once have informed anthropological inquiry (Stocking 1987), but which has long since been discredited and found to be morally insupportable. I suggest, then, that a significant reason why Tribe so rankles academic ethnographers is that it represents an image of anthropology once exorcized from the discipline, but which forever seems to return to haunt it via the popular media. While anthropologists therefore place television series such as Tribe outside the frame of ethnography, they are just as keen to place other productions within this frame and claim them for the discipline. The work of the documentary filmmaker, Kim Longinotto, provides an interesting example. Not an anthropologist herself, Longinotto has an ambivalent attitude towards ethnographic film. On the one hand, she herself associates ethnographic film with the primitivist representations reproduced in Tribe and thus distances herself from the genre. On the other hand, Longinotto acknowledges that many anthropologists also reject such outmoded stereotypes and are more likely to identify her own films as being ethnographic. Indeed, many of Longinotto’s films are distributed in the United Kingdom by the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), and they are regularly screened and win prizes at ethnographic film festivals. Her film Divorce Iranian Style (1998), for example, won the RAI Film Prize at the 7th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film (a prize awarded “for the most outstanding film on social, cultural or biological anthropology”), while her film Sisters in Law (2005) won the Audience Prize and received a special commendation for the Basil Wright Film Prize at the 9th RAI International Festival of Ethnographic Film (the latter being a prize awarded for “films in the ethnographic tradition which exemplify the power of film to evoke a concern for humanity” (Benthall 1986: 1, emphasis added)). It is interesting to consider, then, how the anthropological community frames Longinotto’s films within an “ethnographic tradition,” even though this does not correspond with Longinotto’s intentions or how she would herself necessarily position her films. Adopting an observational filming approach first encountered under the tutelage of Colin Young while attending Britain’s National Film and Television School in the 1970s, Longinotto’s films address contemporary gender-related issues such as female genital mutilation, domestic violence, divorce, and sexual politics in geographical contexts as diverse as Iran (Divorce Iranian Style, 1998; Runaway, 2001), Cameroon (Sisters in Law, 2005), Kenya (The Day I Will Never Forget, 2002), South Africa (Rough Aunties, 2008), India (Pink Saris, 2010), and Japan (Gaea Girls, 2000; Shinjuku Boys, 1995). Many of these films have been commissioned by the United Kingdom’s Channel Four Television or the BBC for their major documentary strands, but have also been broadcast internationally. At the core of each of the films is a collaboration both with the subjects of the films and with co-directors who have local language and cultural skills (leading Longinotto to describe her approach as more participatory than observational). Longinotto has described her films as being about “strong women, and particularly about women who are brave outsiders”—women who dare to speak out “against customs that oppress them” (Geritz 2006). In this respect, whereas Tribe portrays change as a negative, external influence, capable only of damaging the supposedly harmonious balance of traditional lifeworlds, for Longinotto, tradition is often repressive, and change is regarded as emancipatory and empowering. As we have seen, this departure from what are popularly understood as the traditional objects of ethnographic study is consistent with changes within the discipline of anthropology itself. While Longinotto insists that her films are “documenting change that’s already happening” rather than explicitly advocating change (pers. comm.), it is also clear that they have an impact 134

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on the people and issues with whom and with which they engage. Unencumbered by academic anthropology’s ethical and moral quandaries regarding advocacy (see Hastrup and Elsass 1990), Longinotto is proud of the capacity of film to contribute to what she perceives as positive social transformation.Thus, whereas the anthropologist and filmmaker Melissa Llewelyn-Davies adopts a neutral stance on female genital mutilation (FGM) in the Disappearing World film Masai Women (1974), Longinotto has no qualms about the partisan perspective of her film The Day I Will Never Forget. And whereas the actual act of female circumcision is represented only elliptically in Masai Women, Longinotto was unhesitatingly encouraged by her Kenyan collaborators to film the practice explicitly and retain it in the edit. Committed to championing what she regards as unequivocal human rights, Longinotto expresses some relief that she is not an anthropologist and hamstrung, as she sees it, by academic quandaries over cultural relativism or fears that her interventions might bring about social change rather than merely observe it (pers. comm.). If anthropologists are typically more hesitating when it comes to advocacy, Longinotto’s films nevertheless raise ethical and moral dilemmas that they also regularly confront, and, indeed, as MacClancy’s and other recent edited volumes attest, many anthropologists have an equal commitment to directing their ethnographic means towards such socially transformative ends (2002: 2). If one were to assess Longinotto according to the same criteria that Caplan applies to Bruce Parry, one would have to conclude that she too has few “ethnographic credentials:” she is not a trained anthropologist; she does not speak the languages of many of the people she films; her films are shot over a relatively short period (typically two or three months); and they do not refer to previous anthropological work in the area or provide much in the way of social or cultural context (Caplan 2005: 4). But whereas Tribe at best reproduces an inaccurate, though still popular, impression of anthropology as a Victorian romp, concerned with exotic customs and ennobled traditions, it is clear that Longinotto’s films more closely reflect the realities of contemporary anthropological inquiry and are therefore often framed as “ethnographic” by the discipline. While they lack the academic and cultural context that an academic monograph affords, Longinotto’s stories of gendered negotiations of power in complex and dynamic social environments are played out across the same terrain as that with which anthropologists are now typically engaged.This makes Longinotto’s films particularly useful within undergraduate teaching, for example, where they speak to mainstream issues within the contemporary anthropology curriculum, and where a broader cultural context can be given by a lecturer. If an episode of Tribe is shown in such a teaching context, it is usually as an illustration of what anthropology may seem to be, but is not.

Exhibiting anthropology The institution of the museum played an important role in the development of anthropology as an academic discipline (Stocking 1985; Bouquet 2001; Penny 2002). Indeed, anthropology was very much a museum-based discipline prior to its migration to the university. The collection, classification, analysis, and display of ethnographic collections lay at the heart of anthropological studies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Ames 1992; O’Hanlon and Welsch 2000), and many of the founding figures of academic anthropology also held positions in museums. The celebrated “father of American anthropology,” Franz Boas, for example, began his career as Adolf Bastian’s assistant at the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, and, after emigrating to the United States, held positions at Chicago’s Field Museum and the American Museum of Natural History before taking up a lectureship in anthropology at Columbia University. Historically, ethnographic collections have also been central to the public understanding of different cultures and societies. Starting with the Great Exhibition, staged in London in 1851, 135

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the era of world fairs and colonial expositions has also been described as “the museum age,” a period which saw the establishment of a huge number of new municipal museums in towns and cities throughout Europe, North America, and beyond. It was chiefly through the display of ethnographic objects in these exhibitions and museums that knowledge of far-away colonies was communicated to the general public. As Coombes has argued, the effectiveness of these displays as “constituents of an imperial ideology” was achieved not merely through a simple reproduction of imperial propaganda, but also much more subtly through the broader educational role of the museum as an institution for public improvement: The curators of ethnographic material cast themselves in the role of benevolent educators, dispensing rational and more particularly “scientific” knowledge about the colonies and their indigenous peoples. As a self-image, this relied on distinguishing a set of referents and terms which qualified their contribution as “scientific,” and which differentiated knowledge defined as “anthropological” or “ethnographical” from other forms of knowledge of the colonies. (Coombes 1994: 43–44). In Britain, the golden age of museum ethnography came to a close in the 1920s with the advent of Malinowskian social anthropology and its associated method of participant-­observation (Kuper 1983). However, while Malinowski was vocal in his rejection of what he regarded as “antiquarian anthropology,” with its institutional base in the museum, its “pernicious” theories, and its “necrophilous” fascination with “skulls, bones, debris, [and] dust” (quoted in Young 2000: 183), his critique was largely limited to the academic world, and a parallel ethnological tradition continued well into the post-war era, long after Britain ceased to be a significant colonial power. Indeed, it was only in the 1980s that the seeming irrelevance of what were, by then, essentially historical ethnography collections reached a point of crisis and many museums dismantled their dated ethnographic displays, relegating these collections to their storerooms. Ironically, just as it became commonplace to assert that the era of the ethnographic museum was finally over, there was a remarkable revival among academic anthropologists in material culture studies (Basu 2012). This contemporary “material turn” in anthropology coincided both with the discipline’s own “crisis of representation,” which acknowledged anthropology’s participation in the production of colonial forms of knowledge, and with the rise of academic museum studies, which sought to engage more critically with museum practice, including interrogating the politics and poetics of museum display (Vergo 1989; Karp and Lavine 1991; Shelton 1992). By the late 1990s and 2000s, while curatorial staff continued to struggle with how best to negotiate the material legacy of decades of colonial collecting (redesignating their ethnographic collections as “world art” or “world cultures,” for instance), the ethnographic museum itself was enjoying a significant renaissance. This resurgence of popular interest in ethnographic museums, abundantly evident at institutions such as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, has been understood in relation to a so-called “return to curiosity” (Bann 2003). This is not, of course, the same “curiosity” that drew ­nineteenth-century citizens to gawp at the spoils of empire and reassure themselves of the superiority of their own civilization when faced with the “fetishes” and “primitive technologies” of “subject races.” Rather, as Henning argues, this “return to curiosity implies a different construction of knowledge in the museum,” “the rejection of linear, historicist arrangements of objects” (2006: 145), and “a turn to a plurality of perspectives, of ways of attending to objects, and of narratives” (ibid.: 154). Significantly, in considering the museum as a medium distinct from other mass media such as television, this return to curiosity is also a “return to the object.” 136

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For Huyssen, for example, the power of the museum lies in its capacity to offer “something that cannot be had on television:” … “the real, physical materiality of the museal object, the exhibited artifact that enables authentic experience as opposed to the always fleeting unreality of the image on the screen” (1995: 32). As Huyssen acknowledges, the museum’s capacity to enable “authentic experience” is not unequivocal since the “exhibited artifact” is always mediated through the museum’s representational strategies of “selection and arrangement, presentation and narrativization” (ibid.). Indeed, Weibel and Latour remind us that a museum exhibition is “a highly artificial assemblage of objects, installations, people and arguments, which could not reasonably be gathered anywhere else” (2007: 94). Reflecting on their exhibitionary collaborations at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, Germany, Weibel and Latour argue that it is precisely because exhibitions entail a suspension of “the usual constraints of time, space and realism” that they are such effective media for addressing the crises of representation they perceive as continuing to afflict anthropology and other disciplines (ibid.). The exhibition, as an affective and experiential medium (Basu and Macdonald 2007), possesses a number of potentialities or “affordances” that ought to make it particularly effective in the communication of anthropology. For example: 1 Exhibitions are composite media that can incorporate and combine multiple other media including objects, images, moving images, sound, text, interactive programs, and elements of graphic and three-dimensional design to create an information-rich and affective “narrative environment.” 2 Through the above devices, exhibitions can provide multiple pathways through a given theme as well as multiple layers of engagement targeted at different audiences. This is also true of websites and other digital resources associated with exhibitions. 3 Exhibitions can provide a space for juxtaposing alternative curatorial paradigms: techniques of didactic display may be juxtaposed with contemporary approaches to art installation, for example. 4 Exhibitions can provide opportunities for participatory and collaborative curation, which seek to explore and displace curatorial authority and introduce a plurality of voices. 5 Contemporary exhibitions are often accompanied by programs of events aimed at engaging with different audiences, including related academic talks, school study days, family events, film screenings, creative workshops, as well as online resources. 6 Ethnographic collections provide a powerful material connection with different cultural traditions from around the world.These can be rearticulated to address contemporary issues around multiculturalism and difference, or to provide cross-cultural comparison. To varying degrees, these affordances have been exploited in many recent ethnographic museum and exhibition projects.To give just one—admittedly high profile—example, one might cite the development of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which opened on the National Mall in Washington DC in 2005 (Lonetree and Cobb 2008). As is to be expected of a multi-million-dollar national museum project, the NMAI employs a wide array of exhibitionary techniques and media technologies to display its vast collections and communicate its various narratives. With its symbolically charged architecture and landscaped grounds, its central performance space, immersive audio-visual auditorium, and educational resource center, this modern museum is much more than a series of “ethnographic” galleries. However, perhaps the most significant departure from conventional museum practice at the NMAI was the way in which these galleries were developed collaboratively with Native American communities.While co-curation 137

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has its own politics, it is clear that this shift from “curator-controlled presentations of the American Indian past, to a more inclusive or collaborative process with Indian people actively involved in determining exhibition content … has changed the manner in which Indian history and culture is represented” (Lonetree 2006: 632–633). The “ownership” of the cultural property and cultural knowledges displayed at the NMAI is asserted in the very names of its permanent galleries: Our Lives, Our Peoples, Our Universes. As Phillips notes, with such approaches, the role of the museum professional—who may well be an anthropologist—becomes that of a facilitator, “who puts his or her disciplinary and museological expertise at the service of community members so that their messages can be disseminated as clearly and as effectively as possible” (2003: 163, emphasis added). Other well-known examples of collaborative curation and exhibition-making include Te Papa in New Zealand (Henare 2004) and the African Worlds gallery at the Horniman Museum in London (Shelton 2000). Museums can make more modest contributions to the communication of anthropology, too, particularly through the development of educational resources. At Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, for example, anthropologists and museum education staff worked together to use ethnographic and social history collections to introduce pre-university-level students to anthropology—a discipline that few students had previously encountered in their educational careers. This was achieved by raising students’ (and teachers’) awareness of the value of objectbased learning and developing a resource pack around a series of objects from different cultural contexts and time periods that speak to themes such as “belief,” “ethnicity,” “family,” “gender,” “identity,” and “power.” The learning resource encourages the development of observational skills, the understanding objects in context, and cross-cultural comparison, enabling students to draw upon a wide range of materials and perspectives with which to explore familiar topics that are encountered in a number of more prominent subject areas from history and sociology to religious studies (Basu and Coleman 2010). Such resources can provide students with their first encounter with the discipline of anthropology, and demonstrate how even historical ethnographic collections can be used to engage with contemporary issues. Indeed, the arts of contemporary anthropological exhibition-making are not limited to the sphere of “tribal museums” or the rearticulation of what might be perceived as stereotypically “exotic” ethnographic collections. As we have seen, many anthropologists reject this tenacious exoticist image of anthropology, regarding it as a misrepresentation of what is, after all, also an engaged contemporary social science. The challenge for anthropologists concerned about the visibility and public perception of their discipline is that this alternative, contemporary anthropological perspective, is rarely communicated as anthropology. In the United Kingdom, for example, perhaps the most anthropologically informed series of public exhibitions in recent years has been that staged as part of the Wellcome Collection’s vibrant temporary exhibition and events program. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, a major sponsor of biomedical research, these exhibitions are focused on issues dealing with health, medicine, and the body, but usually in a manner that engages with broader human interest themes that draw upon perspectives from across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Recent exhibitions have explored themes such as identity (Identity, 2009–2010), mental illness (Madness and Modernity, 2009), sleeping and dreaming (Sleeping and Dreaming, 2007–2008), psychoactive drug use (High Society, 2010–2011), and the belief in the divine intervention in human wellbeing (Miracles and Charms, 2011–2012). A clear anthropological “sensibility” is discernible in many of these thematic shows. Since the Wellcome Collection is not reliant on public funds, it is also free of many of the constraints that affect publicly funded museums. This position enables the gallery to engage with often challenging subjects in compelling ways that succeed in bridging academic and popular interests. 138

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A signature of many Wellcome Collection exhibitions is the use of art to engage with contemporary social issues. This is perhaps most evident in the Collection’s permanent Medicine Now gallery. In the context of a section concerning the human body and body shape, the monstrous form of John Isaacs’ sculpture, “I Can Not Help the Way I Feel” (2003), provides a disturbing contemplation of how the “emotional landscape of the body” might become manifest in the body itself. The outsized eloquence of this sculpture, described as “a two-metre-high humanoid figure engulfed by its own obesity,” lies beyond text, and beyond narrative, and yet it is hard to imagine a more articulate statement on the experience of obesity as a contemporary psychosocial or biocultural phenomenon. Art practice has itself undergone an “ethnographic turn” and artists have become increasingly interested in engaging with what might be construed as anthropological themes and methods. Kutlug Ataman’s multi-screen video installation, Küba, provides an interesting case example. Ataman’s exploration of this Istanbul ghetto involved the “artist-ethnographer” living intermittently among its inhabitants over a two-year period, forging relationships with his informants and recording what he refers to as the “research documents” which are at the center of his artwork (Kent 2005: 8). The visitor to Ataman’s exhibition was confronted by 40 “thrift store” television sets, each placed in front of a battered armchair. On each television was played a loop of a lengthy, seemingly unedited interview with an informant or group of informants, such that the exhibition space was filled with an array of “talking heads,” a hubbub of disparate voices. Amounting to over 30 hours of linear viewing time, it was impossible for visitors to apprehend the video material in its totality. Rather, within a typical two- or three-hour visit, audience members were compelled to move physically from television set to television set, sampling what they could of the material according to their inclinations and stamina (Basu 2008). What Ataman’s Küba illustrates applies more generally to the medium of non-­didactic exhibitions. What such exhibitions demand is the active participation of visitors to “make sense” of the materials with which they are confronted (again, there are resonances here of Barthes’ distinction between the lisible and scriptible text). In this way Ataman extends the work of the artist-ethnographer to his audience. While the voices, words, and faces that Küba’s visitors encounter are, of course, mediated by Ataman’s camera as well as the broader exhibition scenography, they are nevertheless immersed in social worlds other than their own in a deeply affective manner. Simultaneously, however, visitors are made conscious of the limitations of what they are able to apprehend when confronted by the excess of information or experience they are presented with. Visitors to Küba and similar non-didactic anthropological exhibitions are thereby transformed from passive viewers of the lives and worlds of others into reflexive researchers—“audience-ethnographers,” one might say—within the exhibition space. Here, then, is an alternative, dialogic, model for the communication of anthropology—one which relies on the active participation of interlocution, which facilitates visitors’ own sense-making explorations and which is open to the plurality of interpretations or knowledges that may ensue.

Intercultural communication? The focus of this chapter has been to explore the communication of anthropology as something that anthropologists do as part of their professional lives. It is through communication that academic knowledge is advanced within the professional community. While text remains the primary medium for academic debate, by exploring other media, anthropologists have begun to reach beyond these closed quoting circles and engage with more diverse publics. This approach is crucial if the discipline is to demonstrate its relevance in society and, in any case, it is clear that public funding agencies are increasingly demanding such engagement. The “impact” of a 139

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discipline such as anthropology is highly dependent on effective communication. At the same time, anthropologists face significant challenges exploiting the opportunities presented by different media to reach new audiences: not least, the relative invisibility of the discipline in public consciousness and the fact that, if it does enter the popular imagination, it is often in a form that is anathema to the majority of anthropologists working on contemporary issues. These are not new observations. It is true to say, however, that the challenges persist and it falls to the anthropological community itself to get better at communication—expanding its ­fluency in a wider range of media, for example. The irony is, of course, that one of the discipline’s core subfields—linguistic anthropology—has long influenced what is today called “intercultural communication” research and has developed sophisticated understandings of the complexities of communication—and miscommunication—across different “discourse communities.” Perhaps it is time to apply some of these insights closer to home, and to recognize, and seek to better understand, the intercultural dimensions of communicating anthropology beyond our own disciplinary discourse community.

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8 TEAcHING ANtHrOPOLOGIcAL THEOrY IN NEOLIBErAL TIMES Elizabeth Chin

In the current moment, the discipline of anthropology is enmeshed with the shifting ground upon which higher education is situated in ways that present both challenges and opportunities to those of us engaged in the work of teaching. Knowledge has never been apolitical, but the overt politicization – and monetization – of forms of knowledge makes gains at an astonishing rate, and these changes have ongoing implications for what, and how, we teach. Colleges and universities are, increasingly, run as businesses by those who operate more as CEOs than they do as educators. There can be little denying that running a business and being in the ‘business’ of education are (or should be) radically different endeavors. Students increasingly come to the classroom oriented as consumers rather than scholars, and teachers must demonstrate their good teaching through conformity to market-research-style assessment tools, providing measurable ‘value’ for expenditures. Meanwhile, because certain forms of science are viewed as worthy, and as having monetary worth, ours is among the disciplines cleaving along intellectual lines that map remarkably well onto money streams. That is, in the pursuit of federal dollars for so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), anthropologists, like other social scientists, find much deeper funding streams in which to swim when their work is framed in the form of “hard” science, as opposed to highlighting humanist and interpretive stances. In short, the model of the university as a space for the free exploration of ideas is on the wane; disciplines and their practitioners must demonstrate their relevance in market terms: grant monies, employed graduates, high enrollments, and so on. We are challenged, then, to demonstrate our usefulness in these terms if we want to survive individually and collectively. It is not necessarily a bad thing to be held to account on the relevancy question. When it comes to teaching anthropology, the current situation offers a number of compelling opportunities for broadening our discipline’s impact and profile. The effort to increase the role of anthropologists in public discourse is, in large part, about demanding a seat at the table of public debate and framing of important issues ranging from war and militarization to preschool education – to choose somewhat randomly from the plethora of questions we are wonderfully equipped to address in ways unique to the ethnographic, holistic approach valued by Boas. Stepping up as public anthropologists is certainly one very important way we can enter into and shape ongoing debates. Teaching well is another, and one with the added benefit of reaching thousands and thousands of students in deeply personal, lasting ways.To my mind, the opportunity presented to us at this juncture is one that challenges us to ask students not just how they can master concepts 144

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and technicalities of the anthropological, but to mobilize them as they move through the world, building anthropology into their daily lives and experiences. How does one teach meaningfully about a discipline that claims to cover everything human from the beginning of primates to now, with credible attention to each of the four subfields: biology, archaeology, linguistics and culture? When I was a graduate student, there was a rumor in the air that several faculty were going to team teach a “unity course,” one that would approach an issue or question drawing from each of the four fields.The idea of that class sowed a seed in my imagination that such an approach might be a powerful way to teach and to experience anthropology in the American tradition. My dedication not only to anthropology, but to four-fields approaches might seem a surprise, given that while at Occidental College I helped to dismantle our anthropology department in order to found the department of Critical Theory and Social Justice (CTSJ); more recently, I have given up tenure and a full professorship to join an art school, teaching in a graduate program in Media Design. These experiences have actually been exciting for me because I have found that working in interdisciplinary settings has strengthened, rather than diminished, my ability to creatively place the subfields in dialog with each other. In the face of increasing silo-ization, specialization, and even the cleaving of departments and subfields into areas that either do not or cannot speak to each other productively, I have been able to work with clinical psychologists, education scholars, book designers, and computer programmers in ways that have continually demonstrated the relevance of the anthropological enterprise. A second emphasis I want to explore in this chapter is uses of webbased resources such as YouTube and mapping technologies both for teaching and student learning. While I myself have not yet tried using such social media tools as Twitter, these hold promise for innovative educational engagement as well. In this chapter I do not address pedagogy apart from teaching, though I have addressed this elsewhere (2011). They are, of course, mutually constitutive, and I hope it is evident that my commitment to an engaged and progressive educational process is woven throughout the ways I approach crafting courses, assignments, and learning more broadly.

Unity example one: race and its discontents As I have developed my own teaching of a course called “Race and Its Discontents” for the CTSJ department at Occidental College, I have framed it explicitly (at least for myself) as an anthropological and four-field exploration. Some caveats are needed: first, I am a cultural anthropologist, and the course is dominated by cultural material; second, I am weakest in linguistics and that subfield gets the shortest shrift of all and is not discussed here, largely because the section of the course I describe touches three, not four subfields.Were I to continue teaching that course, I would work to rectify both of those issues, expanding the linguistic and archaeological elements included in students’ reading and work. The largest and most ambitious goal of the course is to get students to reexamine their world, and their understanding of their own place in it. I do this by asking them to approach the question of race in terms of scientific, historical, and cross-cultural context, as well as examining their own racial attitudes through experiential assignments. My goal, then, is less for them to master anthropology as a point of view, but rather as an orientation toward moving through life. Drawing upon a wide range of materials from theatrical films, literature, web sites, ethnographies, peer-reviewed journal articles, the holistic and eclectic approach that is the essence of the anthropological viewpoint is built into the course from its very foundations. The books we read are these: Carnal Knowledge by Ann Stoler (2010); Cholas and Pishtacos by Mary Weismantel (2001), and Sarah Dorow’s Transnational Adoption (2004) (the full syllabus is available at the AAA teaching resources website, 145

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http://www.aaanet.org/resources/teachers/). Case studies come from a variety of geographical and cultural locations including Mexico, Brazil, China, Haiti, and Australia. On the first day of class we begin with a test, which can be found at the website http:// www.alllooksame.com. The test “faces” presents photographs of 18 Asian people, each of whom is either Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. The screen presents a bubble-style answer sheet, where students answer either “a”, “b”, or “c”. After administering the test, we view the results, and as students check their correct and incorrect answers, they give themselves high fives, or shake their heads. By the finish, they usually are spontaneously announcing their scores. “I only got six right!” (The format of the test, all on its own, is a rich opportunity for discussion, but I usually opt to skip that in the interest of time.) We begin a discussion of the kinds of things they thought about when making decisions about whether a particular person in the photo was Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. It doesn’t take long for students to note that they took account of such things as hairstyle and fashion choices as they tried to determine the racial identity of each person. This sets the scene for us to discuss American racial ideologies and their contradictions. While dominant constructions discuss race as biologically determined, our practices do not map well – if at all – on biological factors. Our next reading is the New York Times article “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Picture Scandal” (Rosenbaum 1995), which describes the massive eugenic project based upon W.H. Sheldon’s theory of “somatypes.” One reason for choosing this article is that it emphasizes the degree to which the dominant suffer from ideologies of race and racism; it also raises questions of research ethics. For X years, all students at a number of elite colleges and universities (among them Yale, Harvard, and Vassar) were required to pass the “posture pictures” in order to graduate. Students had to pose entirely nude for photographs that were taken from the front, rear, and side; and informed consent was never sought. Sheldon’s theory of somatypes is an excellent example of a theory that appears to be scientific while being utterly devoid of scientific rigor, and it dovetails well with Peter Wade’s article “Race, Nature, and Culture” (1993), which we read at the same time. The main point of emphasis I use in Wade’s article is his critique of the scientific notion of phenotype, which he argues is culturally bounded and deeply flawed. Thus, scientific theories of race that invoke phenotype are, for Wade, scientifically insupportable. Actually showing pages from Sheldon’s book is simultaneously instructive and frighteningly hilarious: he gave each of the specific somatypes animal names, such as “anteaters,” or “jaguars,” providing psychological and other assessments of individuals who were examples of that somatype (1970). The resulting categories and descriptions are utterly preposterous, but as pointed out by John Hersey in the New York Times article, this is just the kind of junk science that fueled a range of eugenic experiments that resulted in sterilization and other real-life outcomes of horrifying nature. So, within the first week, we have brought in ideas of scientific rigor, questions of culture and history in shaping scientific investigation, and the roles of biology and culture in shaping racial ideologies. As a case study of all these elements in motion, we turn to Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings; in tracing the complexities of race, descent, kinship, and family, a number of aspects specific to racial ideologies in the United States are illustrated. This case study also offers an excellent opportunity to show the usefulness of anthropological approaches to kinship, and building the Jefferson/Hemings kinship chart across several generations shows quite starkly how race, family, and kinship need not move together or even in synch (Nicolaisen 2003; PBS n.d.). Sally Hemings is now widely acknowledged as the mother of several of Jefferson’s children. What is less often noted is that Sally Hemings shared a father with Jefferson’s wife Martha.Thus, Sally and Mrs. Jefferson were, biologically speaking, half-siblings. However, culturally they were not kin; the man who had fathered both women gave Sally to Mrs. Jefferson as a gift. Diagramming these relationships in a kinship chart materializes for students ideas that they often find 146

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very difficult to reconcile: how can people be biologically related but not considered family? Sally’s children by Jefferson were, in terms of absolute descent, at once cousins and half-siblings to Martha’s children. Yet they, like Sally, had no acknowledged kinship to Jefferson, his wife, or their children, working as slaves in Jefferson’s house, and for their own blood-relations. This example really hits home with students and makes them grapple with the apparent strangeness of kinship systems, where, as in Jefferson’s case, one can give one’s biological offspring away as chattel, require them to pay you for their freedom, pay them a wage, sell their cousins (or not), all of which Jefferson did in relation to his own children with Hemings. Going into greater detail also illuminates the degree to which law and custom – and not biology – shaped the racial dynamics at work in the Jefferson/Hemings family. Jefferson was obligated to have his white children inherit; in the case of his slave children, however, he could merely request that they be freed upon his death, and they had no legal access to either family wealth or its prestige. Watching the documentary Jefferson’s Blood (PBS 2000), which follows the results of the DNA testing proving the Hemings’ relationship with Jefferson, while also chronicling the efforts of a white Hemings descendant to connect with black family, students see that these apparently strange kinship arrangements undoubtedly continue into the present. There are any number of analyses that students might do to further investigate the governing rules and customs regarding race, kinship, and family using this case study. The frequency with which white men took slave women for concubines jumps out, for instance, and comparing the status of white offspring versus slave is a rather sobering exercise. Beginning with Sally Hemings’ grandmother Susannah, an unbroken series of such concubinage relationships across at least five generations can be demonstrated. Another interesting exercise would be to trace the social relationships of race among this group, following lines of ownership, concubinage, freedom, and bondsmanship. The case of Betsy Hemings is especially fraught with contradictions. When Jefferson’s daughter Mary (known as Polly) got married, Jefferson gave Betsy Hemings to her as a wedding gift. Betsy’s mother was Mary Hemings, half-sister of Sally Hemings; thus Betsy was a cousin of Polly’s own half-siblings, the children of Sally Hemings. Polly Jefferson’s husband was her cousin John Wayles Eppes, son of Elizabeth Wayles Eppes, who was half-sister to Jefferson’s wife, Martha, and Sally Hemings: all three women were daughters of John Wayles by different mothers. Meanwhile, after Polly Jefferson’s death, the widower John took the enslaved Betsy as his concubine, and together they had several children. In terms of biological descent, Betsy was both John’s and Polly’s relative, being the niece of his mother’s half-sister through one line, and the niece of his wife’s mother’s half-sister through another; these overlapping relationships were furthered into the generation of their own children. Visualizing this via a kinship chart makes the intricate nature of these relationships much clearer and, if not exactly easier to understand, at least easier to trace and follow. Kinship charts then become a really useful tool rather than a technical exercise. (A plus: all of this information can be gleaned from Wikipedia, and might make a great in-class exercise.) Finally, I ask students to watch the film Manderlay (Trier 2006).This film is highly and overtly theatrical, filmed on a sound stage in which much of the set is only half built, or indicated only by drawn lines on the floor. The setting, however, is somewhere in the South in the 1930s, and the storyline is one in which a young white woman and her father stumble across a plantation where the slaves have not yet learned of emancipation. The action that ensues revolves around the complex events that take place when the daughter decides to stay upon the plantation, eager to let the workers know they are not (and have not been) slaves. The stark and openly performative format of the film provides an excellent grounding for suggesting that race is a performance, or a form of theater and the ways in which racial formations require people to play particular roles. Over the course of the film, the issue of role-playing becomes more and 147

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more evident for all involved, and the degree to which racial ideologies trap all participants is particularly starkly illustrated. I do not have them read performance theory at this point, mostly because there simply is not time, but it would be a great thing to introduce.Together, this opening brings in biological, cultural, and historical analysis, and introduces students to the study of kinship systems in the context of the historical development of racial ideologies. Further, having them watch the film and think about it has the added value of demonstrating to them the importance of interpretation, since most of them come to class with only this to say “that film was really weird. I didn’t understand it.” That race requires particular performances is clear when reconsidering the Jefferson/Hemings case; numerous descendants who passed from black to white were “lost to history,” in part because the act of passing requires an utter and complete severing of relationships with black kin in order to preserve the appearance of whiteness. Black descendants, however, did not face the need to efface their complex family history, and thus the specifics of performing race in the United States were one vehicle that led to the preservation of oral histories attesting to the Jefferson/Hemings family relations.These performances are also echoed in the Jefferson’s Blood documentary. Once we have worked through the notion of race as performance, they really run with that idea and are able to mobilize it in rethinking the film, but throughout the semester. In the next segment of the course, I take on questions of evolution and equality (Santos and Maio 2004; Foster and Sharp 2002). Here again we continue with some biological material, which I gloss as “which are the black genes?” and ask students to read material to identify what, in fact, are the kinds of units and ideas that biological anthropologists studying race work with. These two articles focus on Brazil, and providing students with a global sense of the great variety of racial formations is one of my goals. They also examine research methodology and point out problems with a prominent study of race that was implemented in Brazil. The Santos and Maio article opens with a discussion of a well-known Casta painting, and this alone provides an excellent foundation for demonstrating the very different historical and cultural trajectories taken in racial formation, particularly in New World contexts. Casta painting is a tradition in Spanish and Portuguese new world outposts, usually a series of 16 paintings illustrating various racial mixtures and the resulting offspring, who are of a third race. These paintings traveled themselves, serving as both illustration and inculcation of racial norms and ideas. Bringing enduring questions into the present, Santos and Maio examine how genomics, identity, and race are constructed in Brazil around questions including nationhood and manliness. Here, genes and DNA are more than mute, transparently operating materials; rather, they are notions powerfully mobilized in the service of a range of cultural, historical, and ideological projects. Exposure to a very different racial formation allows us to connect back to the US material to see how ideas about genetics and eugenics are differentially mobilized in the service of ideologies embedded in culture and history.These complexities are illustrated by the careful way in which the authors point out inconsistencies and even errors in the scientific procedures through which genetic materials were obtained, and racial identity determined in a study whose goal was to in many ways move beyond the very categories it mobilized to do its work. For example, in some areas, racial identity was assigned by researchers; in others, racial identity was based upon self-reports. While not necessarily a problematic inconsistency from a cultural perspective, as a scientific method of data collection, it creates pretty big problems. Foster and Sharp, for their part, critique the ways in which genetic researchers similarly use common-sense notions of race and ethnicity as they seek to create resources for genetic research on human variation.Their concern addresses with more detail issues touched on by Santos and Maio, particularly regarding rigorous scientific methodology and thinking. Getting students to focus on the contradictions being pointed out is important, not least because of their tendency to take science at its word as “objective.” 148

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The point, for many, is a subtle one and difficult for them to come to grips with. Connecting these notions to eugenics, we discuss the ways in which science and ideology can become entwined, and thus the need to develop a critical eye toward the “truth” science presents. While it is easy to lambaste Nazi-era scientists for horrifying experiments on concentration camp internees, understanding that well-intentioned mistakes and misconceptions are also damaging (if not dangerous) is more difficult. Here MacEachern’s article on African archaeology is very useful since it uses archaeological evidence to handily challenge racist ideas of IQ espoused by Philip Rushton in particular. One of the appealing aspects of this article is that it shows how deeply political knowledge can be, and further demonstrates that something as supposedly dusty as archaeology can speak quite directly to current political issues. It also brings in an area of the world not yet directly addressed, bringing a global context more fully to bear upon our discussions. Antoinette Jackson’s recent article on slave life portrayals would work beautifully here (2011); unfortunately for me, it was published months after my last iteration of my class. This article bridges a number of themes already addressed, and introduces ethnoarchaeology as well. In interviews with living African Americans with close ties to specific slave quarters and plantations, Jackson learns that understanding what slavery was – and is – in peoples’ lives is one of unfolding complexities. Expecting to find that these places held nothing but negative associations for slave descendants, she found, instead, specific memories embedded in ancestry, tradition, attachment to place. These peoples’ memories which go against the grain, Jackson argues, have themselves been subjugated to dominant knowledge about the horrors of slavery, effectively negating the realness – and relevance – of that which does not fit in with those ideas.

Unity example two: the unbearable whiteness of Barbie This course is a freshman writing seminar, the frame is primarily that of social theory and popular culture. Luckily, anthropological interest in Barbie is significant, and threads its way through the entire fabric of the semester. Here, I will focus on the section that deals with standards of beauty and body modifications to illustrate how I approach moving students through a series of challenges aimed at refining their understanding of normativity, embodied politics, and construction of knowledge. In addition, my aim is to familiarize them with analyzing various forms of text ranging from peer-reviewed articles to podcasts and art pieces, with an added emphasis on application of ideas across formats and situations. This section begins with Bordo’s “Material Girl: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture” (1995) coupled with a podcast from This American Life (episode #347 “Matchmakers,” the story by Elna Baker). Using the Baker podcast helps update the Bordo writing, which with its focus on Madonna was, by 2010, seeming a little behind the times, despite the continuing relevance of her arguments about effacement, body as machine, and the limits of “choice” offered by the consumer sphere.Within the frame of the Barbie course, Baker’s podcast also connects to the toys theme, and illustrates in a hilariously chilling way the politics of race in a realm where one might imagine they do not matter. Baker shows race matters mightily, and in ways many of us might never have thought. Having established ideas and questions about beauty, changing bodies by choice, and the contextual pressures that normalize some choices over others, we begin to complicate things. Magubane’s essay “Venus Hottentot” (2001) shows how racial ideas are transferred onto bodies in the case of Sarah Bartmann. In pursuing this theme of beauty, power, race, and gender, we turn to the highly disturbing and provocative work of the artist Orlan. Orlan is a French artist who, over the course of more than 20 years, has engaged in a series of surgical performances that have transformed her face 149

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into a monstrous project. Her object is, in part, to expose (literally) the meaty issues in plastic surgery and patriarchally defined standards of beauty. She does this by engaging in surgery itself as an outrageously theatrical act, complete with Issey Miyake-clad surgeons, reading from Jacques Deleuze, and portrait photographs of her face being cut open, slivered, sutured. This work exposes the ugliness and violence of plastic surgery that is nearly always (as Bordo would say) effaced, and forces students to consider its real effects. In undertaking a project that leaves her uglier and uglier as she moves through it, Orlan ends up not looking that different from any other surgery aficionado such as Joan Rivers. More recently, Orlan’s “self hybridation” projects bring questions of colonialism, race and culture to the fore in really interesting ways. The series of self-portraits in which she replicates paintings by George Catlin are especially useful, given that one of the threads of the course deals with indigeneity. What are the multiple layers of fantasy, projection, and co-optation involved in a French feminist artist transforming herself into the “native” subject of a painting done by a white man on the 19th-century American frontier who sought to memorialize upon canvas members of a supposedly dying race? Students can be tasked with locating versions of the original paintings used by Orlan, and analyzing the two versions side-by-side. Vincent Crapanzano’s essay “Hermes’ Dilemma” would fit very nicely here, particularly because of the long section on Catlin, though I do not include it for lack of time/space. The final portion of this section addresses issues of body norms through Urla and Swedlund’s wonderfully astute article “The Anthropometry of Barbie,” (1995), paired with the exceptionally problematic essay by Magro, “Why Barbie Is Perceived as Beautiful” (1997). Together these essays bring questions of the social construction of scientific knowledge to the fore.The tonguein-cheek, playful approach in the anthropometry essay comes along with a hefty dose of firstrate analysis, and a thoughtful discussion of anthropometry in general. In particular, the question of normativity emerges, as well as some really excellent examples showing how averages become oppressive ideals, particularly when tied to a war effort (in this case, World War II). Supposedly scientifically neutral notions like ideal weight, then, are shown by Urla and Swedlund to be deeply tied to militarism and nation-building. “Why Barbie Is Perceived as Beautiful” is what I call “an article I love to hate.”The study asked respondents to choose among pairs of traits, one “derived” and one “primitive” and identify one of each pair as the more attractive. In a nutshell, this essay argues that based upon responses from several hundred college students (97% of whom were white) Barbie is perceived as beautiful because she possesses “derived” physical traits rather than “primitive” ones. I ask students to prepare comments, reading critically, with an instruction that I hate this article and they should come to class ready to explain what my critiques might be. The first few times I taught the article, I assumed that the problematic nature of the claims it contained would be obvious to students. How wrong I was. Students did not critically approach either the data or the framing of the research, instead allowing the scientific format of the paper to establish an opaque authority they would not challenge. Telling them I hate the article gives them permission to find specific things to critique, and primes them to critically examine science methodology and framing. This article also brings much of the import of elements of “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Picture Scandal” into the present, demonstrating how persistent problematic ideas about race continue to be, even in “real” science – however dubious that science might be. Asking students to understand and articulate the basic premises of scientific investigation and thinking is among one of the most important tasks we, as educators, can undertake. I am continually surprised – and often shocked – at the degree to which received notions of what constitutes the scientific shape students’ approaches to knowledge-making and to their understanding of material. Getting below the surface of these received notions, I often find students have little specific understanding of even the most basic scientific assumptions and 150

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procedures, even when they are science majors. Making science and scientific knowledge the object of study, then, and urging students to critically assess when and how “scientific” information is presented, constructed, and implemented is important both because these notions are so widespread, and because they are so profoundly powerful.

Student-led learning Student-led learning injects freshness and variety into the class proceedings. I generally teach this course on a schedule that is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for 55 minutes. Fridays are reserved for student-led class-sessions, and students lead class in teams of three or four persons. This strategy encourages students who are leading class to understand the depth of preparation required for teaching; it also tends to disrupt patterns in which specific people dominate discussion. Pedagogically this strategy builds on the idea that it is not me, as the professor, who is the only person qualified to facilitate learning in the class. It encourages students to get to know each other, and often results in a shift in the conversational and discussion dynamics, allowing quiet students to participate more fully and otherwise re-balancing the way people engage. Furthermore, students are specifically tasked with bringing in material of their own, and they often bring in videos, essays, or photographs that are startling and provocative, and this allows them to explore ways in which web-based resources can be critically examined, researched, and put to use in the service of disciplined enquiry. Each team is required to meet with me as they prepare, to present a lesson plan and to brainstorm about in-class activities and materials. The completed lesson plan, along with a write-up of their goals and ideas, must be turned in on the day of their class-facilitation. The preparatory meeting is key, and allows me to troubleshoot, as well as to suggest strategies and materials they might find interesting or useful. Students have proven quite adept in locating materials on their own! In conjunction with a student-led session connected to our reading of Carnal Knowledge (Stoler 2010), which examines the intimacy of racial constructions in colonial Indonesia, one group of students unearthed black and white films from the 1930s showing Dutch Indonesia (Colonial Dutch-Indies [1938–1939 in Colour] [Part 1 of 4] 2007); they selected clips to show to the class and connected them to discussions of daily interactions in the book that had been described but for which we had no visual references. Among the most striking is a scene in which a long line of at least 20 household servants waits table for a couple having dinner; each servant holds one implement or item – a fork, napkin, or dish – and presents it to the diners. Having students take charge leads to explorations of material that is off my own radar screen: other student presentations have explored the racial construction of the Los Angeles Chola as compared to the Andean Cholas that are the focus of Mary Weismantel’s book Cholas and Pishtacos (2001) or critical examinations of tourist advertisements as examples of colonialist, racialized discourse. One of the best parts of these class sessions is that they introduce me to interesting material I probably would never have discovered on my own, and I happily make use of that material in other classes. Having students lead class also helps them understand some of the rigors of teaching, and I point out to them that the preparation they do in terms of understanding the readings, for instance, is really what they should do as students for every class. Further, it sensitizes them (sometimes rather painfully) to the challenges posed by a class where attention may wander, preparation may be lacking, or a planned exercise might fall flat. Understanding their own role, as students, in helping class sessions to succeed – by being prepared, by being engaged, by being fully present – becomes much easier once they have attempted to lead class themselves. 151

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Experimenting with new forms Making use of web-based and social media technologies is something I find both interesting and useful in terms of challenging my own knowledge and allowing students to explore their relationships to material in creative ways. These strategies and resources are not necessarily anthropology specific, but given the stodgy nature of classroom culture, both professors and students are often leery of incorporating these elements into the classroom. I do not advocate technology for technology’s sake; on the other hand, the web, GPS technology and a range of other tools and resources offer an exciting new range of possibilities for learning and for generating knowledge. One of the best advantages of these resources is that they often allow students whose learning modalities are not centered on reading and writing to fruitfully demonstrate their capacities for sophisticated thinking, whether through visual or other means. Strategies range from using tools to assist me in gathering useful information about my students, to allowing them to experiment with podcasts and mashups to demonstrate their engagement with class materials. I remain strongly committed to requiring students to become clear and sophisticated writers (which is why I never use multiple choice exams, and teach writing and revision in all my classes). At the same time, expanding the repertoire of tools and media available for exploring ideas is an approach that goes far beyond a kind of bells and whistles engagement with technology for technology’s sake. As the digital humanities gain breadth and depth, encouraging students to become familiar and fluent with these resources is an important element in developing their research and scholarly toolkits – and our own, as well. I make regular use of Google tools for surveying students, both to cull information from them and to demonstrate to them how easily such material can be gathered and transformed into very nice looking charts and graphs. For example, in deciding how much to require webbased activities, I surveyed students on whether they had their own computers, and what other technologies they used readily and regularly (smartphone, Facebook, Twitter, etc.). Upon learning that 100% of my students had their own computers, I required web-based work without worrying that I was placing students on an uneven playing field in terms of educational resources they might or might not have. On something of an eco-friendly note, I have gone 100% paperless in my teaching, through a combination of Moodle and an iPad. I never hand out paper copies of assignments or the syllabus, but require students to find them on Moodle, where all their readings are also available. Also built into my syllabus is the requirement that students master some very basic online research skills. Any article that is available either on the web or in college databases is listed only with information that will allow them, via searching, to locate the article in full text or pdf. Students turn in their papers electronically to Moodle. Using the “downthemall” add-on for Firefox makes downloading all submissions for a particular assignment very quick and easy. Dropbox also makes managing files across different machines easy, particularly since the iPad’s capability on downloading and managing files directly is still clunky. I download files to a Dropbox folder, which is synched to my iAnnotate app on the iPad. These assignments can then be easily imported to iAnnotate where I can both type and hand-write responses directly into students’ pdf documents; the response files are then uploaded to Moodle. Personally, I really like having the flexibility to use a very visual marker-type notation plus typed comments, and the ability to highlight passages. I also use the Zagg keyboard with the iPad, which makes typing a whole lot easier and faster than trying to type on the touch screen. This strategy has a number of advantages: having them turn in papers on Moodle prevents lateness (I set each assignment to close submissions on the due date/time so that late work cannot be uploaded); all my comments are legible; it provides me with a record of my comments to students, prevents the coffee-ring-on-the-paper problem, and I cannot lose 152

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student papers. Some of you will no doubt find this old-hat; others may think it’s ridiculously complicated.Yes, there was a learning curve, but personally, I wouldn’t go back to hand-marking paper copies of student work. In short: it’s worth a try.The preservation of comments to students can be particularly important for junior faculty, who live and die by student evaluations. In my own case, I received two or three complaints on student evaluations about a lack of feedback. As a result, a pre-­promotion letter from the dean stated there were concerns in that area with regard to my teaching quality and effectiveness. Moving to this all-electronic system of student work submission and my responsive commentary allowed me to submit a promotion file that included electronic copies of all feedback provided to all students over a couple of years, establishing without a doubt that I routinely provide extensive and specific feedback to students; the smattering of complaints were reframed effectively (and to my mind correctly) as an aberration, not a symptom of a larger pattern in my teaching. Another web-based resource I cannot praise highly enough is Zotero, which is a free and open-source citation management database add-on. With the available word processor plugins, Zotero will also create bibliographies for your papers in virtually any journal format in the known universe. I want every one of my students conversant with Zotero, since spending one’s time hand-compiling and formatting bibliographies is not a meaningful learning experience in my view. During the first week of classes, I offer Zotero workshops in a computer lab rather than holding office hours in my office (and, inevitably, sitting there all by myself). I schedule these sessions using Doodle, which is a free-to-use meeting-coordination tool available at doodle.com. I send students a doodle request offering a number of different time options. Their responses allow me to schedule office hours at times when the largest number of students are available. (This strategy also ensures that students do not have the excuse later on that they have a class during my office hours and so cannot get to my office hours.) My goal is to have all my students competent in Zotero as quickly as possible. The carrot/stick I offer to them on this is that if there are any mistakes on their papers in terms of references, the paper will be automatically lowered to a grade of C.The stick is hardly needed; once exposed to Zotero, student enthusiasm for this tool is usually demonstrated by them literally jumping around the room in joy. When they see how powerful and easy it is, they begin shouting out, “Wow, I really could have used this in high school! How come nobody ever showed me this before!?!?!” The Harvard Kennedy School has a number of very good basic how-to videos on YouTube that show how to install and begin using Zotero (Meet Zotero: Part I – Setup 2010). I can teach students the basics of building their library and using the word processor plugin in about 20 minutes, with an additional 20 minutes usually needed before this for them to install Zotero and word processor plugins. Mapping technologies can be useful for giving students a grounded geographic sense of where our case studies are located and how they might be related. Over the course of one semester, I encouraged students to contribute to a Google map that placed markers upon the geographic sites discussed in our course materials; each marker had links to additional materials addressing themes or issues discussed in class. For example, in a section that addresses state intervention into native families both in the United States and Australia, I found a YouTube video of an Aboriginal man singing a song about his own experience being taken from his mother as a young child; students found a BBC news report about social issues in an Aboriginal community that they argued showed ongoing colonialist dynamics they had seen when viewing the film Rabbit-Proof Fence (Noyce 2002). The mapping exercise encouraged students to seek out materials relevant to our discussions and contribute them to a collective project that could be useful later on for other students taking the course who at some point in the future could then potentially add their own materials. This is a very basic way to use mapping technologies, and the application can get very sophisticated and complex. What even a basic exercise such as that 153

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described here illustrates for students is that these tools can be very productively integrated into research and intellectual enquiry, and that ideas can shape the ways in which we use and present information in infinite ways. At this introductory level, the goal is mainly to expose them to a variety of tools so that they might feel confident in using them in the future. Mashups and podcasts offer additional opportunities for students to demonstrate their knowledge in forms other than the traditional written paper. At the risk of explaining too much, a mashup is the bringing together of different media, edited together by the maker to create something new. In the context of a college course, one important requirement might be that the juxtapositions should proceed from a critically engaged position, or make a theoretically informed proposition. Mashups can take many forms, but one of the most common is an editing of video material to make it “say” something new. Podcasts are, essentially, audio pieces that can be uploaded to the net, and their most common format is journalistic reportage, though other formats are most certainly possible. I do not view these as substitutes for rigorous writing, but they are important for a number of reasons. First, lots of really smart students may not be great writers. While continuing to require them to work on their writing, a range of assignment formats allows knowledge to be demonstrated in a number of non-traditional registers. Many of these technology-engaged media enlist skills that are increasingly needed by students; opening up the ways in which students may produce assignments provides an element of choice or flexibility that allows students to explore knowledge-making by following their own priorities and interests, at least to a limited degree. Like any form of intellectual production, these kinds of assignments can be done well or badly; preparation is key, as is a clear outline of expectations that could include a grading rubric, examples of successful submissions, and the like. One of my favorite examples comes from my colleague Mary Christianakis, who had asked students to critically comment upon Disney’s Pocahontas (Goldberg and Gabriel 2000). Student Samantha Figueroa used Adriel Luis’ spoken word performance “Slip of Tongue” as the soundtrack for images from the Disney film, which she re-edited to create a critical reading of Pocahontas that goes against the grain (Once Tongue Tied 2010). Professor Christianakis submitted Ms. Figueroa’s YouTube video “Once Tongue Tied” to the blog Sociological Images, and as a result, it was picked up by a number of other blogs. The video has had, at this writing, over 24,000 views – certainly a much wider audience than most students expect to gain from a class assignment; Adriel Luis himself posted a thank-you to Ms. Figueroa for bringing his work to a wider audience. One of the most exciting outcomes in this case is the degree to which a class assignment moves out of the classroom and into a world where the work becomes meaningful to a social circle much larger than anyone might have imagined. In the ongoing effort we invest in asking students to imagine their work as having an audience, actually finding an audience is a material, and meaningful outcome, and one much less likely to be achieved by a five-page essay. Here again, my preference is to introduce the technical side of things as workshops offered during office hours. Targeting my office hours at specific issues makes them more useful to students. Furthermore, once students have come to see me outside of class and learn that I don’t breathe fire, scream, yell, or in other ways frighten them, they are more likely to come back to office hours without needing a structured reason for doing so.

Experiential exploration Erasing the perceived barriers between the classroom and “the real world” is a deeply important goal, and for anthropology, demonstrating the degree to which ideas and theories can be witnessed and experienced in students’ own lives is key for demonstrating the legitimacy of our field, and, even more importantly, to broadening students’ vistas as human beings. To this end, I give at least 154

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two assignments per term that require students to explore ideas we have been dealing with in the classroom via experiential, and in-the-world activity. In some ways these assignments come close to asking students to do very simple fieldwork, but I prefer not to frame the assignments this way, in part because I want them to be personally engaged rather than doing their imitations of “scientists.” The first assignment asks students to take public transportation to one of three easily accessible sites in Los Angeles. They must document their journey as well as observe and analyze their chosen site, where I task them with thinking about the ways that race shapes peoples’ interactions, movements, or use of the space in question. Students are asked to format their write-ups in three sections: (1) strict observation and description, (2) personal responses, and (3) analytical application. This strategy forces students to distinguish between layers of responses they very often get mixed up, while allowing – and even requiring – them to assess the degree to which their own personal responses might shape their observations and interpretation. I have found these assignments very powerful, and students’ write-ups provide extraordinarily rich resources for class discussion. One 19-year-old student, for instance, had never in her life taken public transportation, despite growing up in Pasadena; several others found themselves unable to even locate the proper bus stop, located only three blocks off campus. Many students spoke of their fears of taking public transportation, but after we analyzed their descriptions of their journeys, it became clear their fears had little to do with the reality they experienced: sharing buses with elderly Chinese ladies, young Latino moms, and moderately rowdy schoolkids. For many, taking the bus was a triumphant moment and they discovered that the mobility it offered was appealing. Once having arrived at their chosen location, students negotiate their own racial identities as well as their understandings of those people around them. This kind of assignment might not work everywhere, but certainly experiential exercises with similar goals can be crafted for any group of students living in any kind of locality. Asking students to viscerally experience and examine race at work in their own lives facilitates their ability to critically assess differing racial experiences that are described in course materials, allowing distant settings to become more real to them while also demonstrating how anthropological knowledge can be meaningfully put to use in everyday life. This experiential exercise worked especially well when paired with reading from Allison Pugh’s work on children and childhood in the Bay area (Pugh 2009).With this particular assignment, students were tasked with taking something of a social geography approach to looking at spaces in Los Angeles, reading them for the ways in which they constructed children in those spaces, or worked to constrain children within (or outside) various boundaries. Of particular relevance were the ways in which middle-class parents in Pugh’s study practiced “symbolic deprivation,” while poorer families were more invested in “symbolic consumption” – both practices aimed at helping children and families negotiate what Pugh calls “the economy of dignity.” I asked students to reflect upon their own childhoods and the degree to which their own childhoods were marked by “symbolic deprivation” or “symbolic consumption” and how this might allow them to understand their own childhoods, those being discussed by Pugh, and the social spaces in which Los Angeles children are growing up. Student reflections were startlingly powerful, revealing, and remarkably candid. This reflective element, I found, immeasurably improved their field observations, and contributed greatly to a better understanding both of Pugh’s ideas, and their application via analysis of Los Angeles social space.

Resources In an effort to provide resources for teachers, the American Anthropological Association has initiated a teaching materials exchange, and as more people contribute, it has the potential to 155

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become a very useful resource. Individuals may contribute syllabi, lesson plans, assignments, and so forth. The resource is searchable and organized in a straightforward fashion. The more resources that we contribute, the more useful that database will become, so here is my plea for all of you to contribute your ideas and materials so that others might make use of them. For years, Patricia Rice and David W. McCurdy have spearheaded an effort to gather teaching strategies used by those working in all four fields. The series of yearly volumes they have produced are wonderfully varied, containing well-described exercises, simulations, and teaching plans (Rice and McCurdy 2001). In 2011 the Royal Anthropological Institute inaugurated a new opensource online journal Teaching Anthropology; a range of other journals devoted to teaching offer practical advice as well as more research-oriented perspectives on teaching. I find the journal Radical Teacher especially useful for its mix of first-person accounts of what did (and did not) work, practical examples, reviews, and critical perspectives from educators working from elementary to university levels.

Conclusion I suppose that whatever we do in the classroom, we are always teaching anthropology. From my perspective, one of the most effective ways to do this is to follow that sage bit of writing advice: “show, don’t tell.” I have tried here to illustrate the ways in which, by way of showing, I try to introduce students to four-field anthropology in a way that brings subfields together, showing the ongoing relevance of multifaceted ways of investigating the kinds of questions anthropologists are always taking on. Working with new media, communication tools, and the like is another way to creatively approach teaching (as well as scholarship). For me, the excitement of being able to engage knowledge in new ways far outweighs the learning curves that might accompany specific tools; at the same time, I try to pace myself, and make use of them judiciously. The focus is always on improving learning and teaching, for providing a variety of ways to engage with knowledge and knowledge-making. Most of us will spend far more time in classrooms, teaching anthropology, than we will in the field. Teaching is key to what we do – as anthropologists – for a great many reasons, not the least of them being that it is through teaching that the greatest lessons from anthropology can be communicated beyond the confines of our discipline.Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more people had absorbed anthropological ideas as part of common knowledge and common sense, the way they seem to have absorbed (albeit at times a tad incoherently) notions of science or economics? Part of demonstrating the relevance of anthropology is through making it matter, reaching the hearts of our students and simultaneously opening their minds. That is a project that rests entirely upon good teaching, whatever form it might take, whatever approach it might entail.

References Bordo, Susan. 1995. “Material Girl”: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture. In Unbearable Weight: Feminism,Western Culture, and the Body, by Susan Bordo, 245–276. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chin, Elizabeth. 2011. Reflections on Race, the Body and Boundaries: How to Get on the Bus. Ethnologia Europaea 41(1): 41–52. Colonial Dutch-Indies (1938–1939 in Colour) [Part 1 of 4]. 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= pWFeVQoVy1s&feature=youtube_gdata_player, accessed November 8, 2011. Crapanzano,Vincent. 1986. “Hermes’ Dilemma:The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and James Marcus, 51–76. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dorow, Sarah. 2004. Transnational Adoption. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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Teaching anthropological theory in neoliberal times Foster, Morris W., and Richard R. Sharp. 2002. Race, Ethnicity, and Genomics: Social Classifications as Proxies of Biological Heterogeneity. Genome Research 12(6): 844–850. Goldberg, Eric, and Mike Gabriel, dir. 2000. Pocahontas. Walt Disney Video. Jackson, Antoinette T. 2011. Shattering Slave Life Portrayals: Uncovering Subjugated Knowledge in U.S. Plantation Sites in South Carolina and Florida. American Anthropologist 113(3): 448–462. Magro, Albert M. 1997. “Why Barbie Is Perceived as Beautiful.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 85(1): 363–374. Magubane, Zine. 2001.Which Bodies Matter: Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Odyssey of the “Hottentot Venus.” Gender and Society 15(6): 816–834. Meet Zotero: Part I – Setup. 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgdrnxlzV8Y&feature=youtube_ gdata_player, accessed November 8, 2011. Nicolaisen, Peter. 2003. Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and the Question of Race: An Ongoing Debate. Journal of American Studies 37(1): 99–118. Noyce, Phillip, dir. 2002. Rabbit-Proof Fence. Miramax Home Entertainment. Once Tongue Tied. 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy08vi8bGSE&feature=youtube_gdata_ player, accessed November 8, 2011. PBS, dir. 2000. Frontline by PBS; Jefferson’s Blood. PBS. Pugh, Allison J. 2009. Longing and Belonging: Parents, Children, and Consumer Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Rice, Patricia C., and David McCurdy. 2001. Strategies in Teaching Anthropology. 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall. Rosenbaum, Ron. 1995. The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal. The New York Times, ­January 15. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/15/magazine/the-great-ivy-league-nude-posture-photoscandal.html?pagewanted=all, accessed January 27, 2011. Santos, Ricardo Ventura, and Marcos Chor Maio. 2004. Race, Genomics, Identities and Politics in Contemporary Brazil. Critique of Anthropology 24(4): 347–378. Sheldon, William. 1970. Atlas of Men: A Guide for Somatotyping the Adult Image of All Ages. New edition. London: Macmillan. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. 2nd edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Trier, Lars Van. 2006. Manderlay. [New York, NY]: Del Mar, CA: IFC Films; Distributed by Genius Entertainment. Urla, Jacqueline, and Alan C. Swedlund. 1995. “The Anthropometry of Barbie: Unsettling Ideals of the Feminine Body in Popular Culture.” In Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jaqueline Urla, 277–313. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wade, Peter. 1993. “Race”, Nature and Culture. Man 28: 17–34. Weismantel, Mary. 2001. Cholas and Pishtacos: Stories of Race and Sex in the Andes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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PART III

Transforming disciplinary conversations

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9 DOING AND BEING Process, essence, and hierarchy in making kin Susan McKinnon

Beginning in the 1970s, anthropologists began to critique the dominance of analytic models that presupposed a universal biological foundation underlying the social relations of kinship. Many people accused David Schneider (1972, 1984), the main proponent of this critique, of bringing about the “death” of kinship studies. Despite the accusation, Schneider’s critique simply shifted the grounds for the comparative study of kinship from functional to meaningful relations and from universal biological referents to semiotic systems (Schneider 1972, 1984; Boon and Schneider 1974; Wagner 1977; Boon 1982). Rather than presupposing universal categories, domains, and relations, it became imperative to ask of each culture not only what the relevant units are and how they are related (Schneider 1972) but also what is understood to be given in the nature of the world and what must be created (Wagner 1967, 1977;Yanagisako and Collier 1987; M. Strathern 1988;Viveiros de Castro 2009; see McKinnon in press for an account of this transformation). Following upon this critique and repositioning of kinship studies, there was an explosion of work that followed the lines of relatedness “wherever they may lead” (Schneider 1972: 51) and revealed a multiplicity of ways of generating forms of kinship. Much of the new work either strove to uncover alternative cultural understandings of biology and bodily substances and/or emphasized conceptions of kinship that denaturalized relatedness, that involved social processes of doing rather than being, and that were deemed to be inherently more fluid and flexible. Energized by the novel turn in kinship studies, scholars focused on the ways in which kinship is created through such processes as residing in houses and on land, cooking and eating, laboring, exchanging valuables, and remembering. Yet, despite the productivity of this line of inquiry, it is evident that these diverse processes of creating kinship are most often attached, to different degrees, to distinct forms of materialization. If not inheritable bodily substances, other forms of materiality—such as houses, land, trees, food, heirlooms, and photographs—emerge as critical to the creation of kinship relations and to the processes that revolve around them. This chapter is organized in three parts. First, I explore various sites that became the foci of studies that emphasized the processes of doing and making kinship. Second, while anthropologists might have reasonably embraced the analytic move toward process, creativity, flexibility, and fluidity in the study of kinship relations, I suggest that we should not lose sight of the diverse ways in which kinship is materialized, naturalized, objectified, and essentialized in culturally 161

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particular ways (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). I therefore consider the tension between process and essence, doing and being, code and substance, fixity and fluidity that gives shape to systems of relatedness. Finally, I argue that it is important to attend to this tension precisely because the difference in degree of materialization and objectification of kinship relations turns out to be central to comprehending the structures and dynamics of hierarchy.

Against biological essence: relatedness as process As anthropologists began to turn to the processes whereby kinship relations are brought into being, a number of sites of novel kinship production—including adoption, gay and lesbian families, and the reproductive technologies—were central to challenging the hegemony of the biological grounding of kinship.1 Working against this hegemony, scholars focused on alternative grounds for kin-making, including “work” (care, nurturance, etc.), choice, and intention. In cultures where a “natural” foundation for kinship is presupposed, the value of choice, intention, and work is made especially evident when that biological relatedness fails to produce social relatedness (as in adoption, or gay and lesbian relations with natal families) or fails to discriminate amongst competing claims to “natural” relation (as in the reproductive technologies). Such alternative grounds for kinship pushed theorists to move beyond biology and the genealogical grid as the inevitable foundation for kinship and allowed them to make evident the social work involved in all forms of kinship, whether biological or not.

Adoption and the work of kinship The fact that, in Euro-American cultures, adoptive relations had long been characterized as “fictive” kin—in contrast to “real” biological kin—made evident the biologism that underlay Euro-American anthropological and cultural understandings of what “really” counts as kinship (Bowie 2004: 4; Howell 2006: 38–40). The study of adoption and fosterage provided an avenue for testing the primacy of social versus biological grounds for kinship. Attention was paid to alternative valuations of adoption in non-Euro-American societies; to the paradoxical results of adoptive children searching for their birth parents; and to the processes of making kin in adoptive relations and other forms of child circulation. A number of important edited volumes and articles explored societies in Oceania, Africa, and the Americas where the incidence of adoption and fosterage is high and the social relations created through such practices are, for various reasons, highly valued—often more highly than biological relations, however these were understood (Carroll 1970; Brady 1976; Weismantel 1995; Modell 1998; Bodenhorn 2000; Bowie 2004; Dickerson-Putman and Schachter 2008; McKinnon 2008; Riley and Van Vleet 2012). It became evident that in many cultures where adoption is prevalent, the logic of kin-making emphasizes processes of nurturance and the work of doing kinship over any essentialized biological kinship being. This provided an argument against the presumption that kinship everywhere is fundamentally biological and that any non-biological kin relation is somehow “fictive” or “less real.” Barbara Bodenhorn convincingly shows the primacy of labor in creating Iñupiat kin relations. She argues that, “whereas both ‘biology’ and ‘acting’ are categories Iñupiat use when talking about kin, it is the latter category that renders kinship ‘real’. In curious ways, then, ‘labour’ does for Iñupiaq kinship what ‘biology’ does for many other systems” (Bodenhorn 2000: 128). In Euro-American societies, adoptive children’s compulsion to search for their biological parents seemed, at first glance, to confirm the cultural importance of biology—of knowing one’s “real” parents and, thus, who one “really” was—for a sense of identity, wholeness, and kinship. 162

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However, paradoxically, the search frequently ended up having the opposite effect (Modell 1994; Carsten 2000b; Howell 2003; Yngvesson 2005; Kim 2005, 2010). Modell explains that, often, when adopted children found their birth mothers “the thinness of a purely biological relationship became apparent” (1994: 164); “there was no such thing as natural, untended love; even the ‘unconditional’ love between mother and child required conscious, reciprocal effort” (1994: 166). Adoptees learned that it is the everyday work of kinship, care, and nurturance that makes kinship “real,” not the sheer fact of biological relation. The unprecedented rise in both domestic and transnational adoptions over the past several decades provided a venue for exploring the processes by which kinship relations are actively created. Signe Howell provides an in-depth analysis of the process she calls “kinning”—which involves both debiologizing and biologizing strategies—as children are incorporated into parental kin networks and located in a cultural nexus and temporal trajectory that provides a place/ time of origin that reorients the past, present, and future of the child and his or her parents (Howell 2003, 2006). Similarly, Jessaca Leinaweaver (2008) details the slow processes of becoming “accustomed” to new living arrangements and relations when circulated children in Peru are adopted or sent to “accompany” higher status adult relatives and godparents. In all this, what is apparent is the enormous amount of work involved as adoptees and their parents habituate themselves to one another, creating the habitus (Leinaweaver 2008), as it were, of what will count as kinship. The fact that this work is always necessary, even in biologically related families, is made evident by the absence of a sense of relatedness experienced by adoptees when they finally meet their birth parents.

Gay and lesbian chosen families A similar revaluation of the presumption that biology naturally generates enduring kinship relations and an appreciation of the work involved in creating kinship occurred in the context of gay and lesbian family-making. In her groundbreaking work, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (1991), Kath Weston traces the shifts in cultural logics that made gay and lesbian families conceivable. If one follows David Schneider’s (1980) argument that American kinship is structured by the distinctive features of nature and law, substance and code for conduct, biology and choice—all mediated and symbolized by procreative heterosexual intercourse—then it is clear why gays and lesbians were deemed to stand not only outside of nature and law but also outside of the heterosexual, marital procreative logic that defined family (Weston 1991: 22–23). However, Weston notes, while “dominant cultural representations have asserted that straight is to gay as family is to no family… at a certain point in history gay people began to contend that straight is to gay as blood family is to chosen family” (1991: 29). Gays and lesbians challenged dominant ideas of what counts as family in several ways. Weston argues that they disputed “the belief that procreation alone constitutes kinship, and that ‘nonbiological’ ties must be patterned after a biological model (like adoption) or forfeit any claim to kinship status” (1991: 34). Indeed, when natal family members rejected or disowned their gay and lesbian relatives, the latter were forced to recognize that biologically based relations did not “naturally” and inevitably produce enduring kinship relations (Weston 1991: 43–76). It became painfully evident that the love and nurturance that is supposed to follow from blood ties could be broken, after all. As with adoption, the “bonds symbolized by blood prove terminable precisely because they are selectively perpetuated rather than ‘naturally’ given. A degree of choice always enters into the decision to count (or discount) someone as a relative” (Weston 1991: 73). Gays and lesbians asserted that families could be “chosen” and created through everyday acts of love, friendship, nurturance, care, and solidarity, which are not predefined by blood, marriage, 163

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or procreative sex. It is choice and work that makes kinship “real” for gay and lesbian families (and, actually, also for straight families) (Weston 1991: 103–5). Moreover, not delimited by the bounds of procreation and biology, gay and lesbian families could—unlike heterosexual nuclear families that are more rigidly defined by blood lines—be more open and flexible, extend laterally, and blur the lines between family and friendship (Weston 1991: 117–22). In the end, the proposition that blood kinship is what lasts and endures was inverted to assert that what lasts and endures is kinship (Weston 1991). Here it is all about the process of making kinship, and kinship is what is effectively made to last over time.2

Intention, the artifice of nature, and the reproductive technologies Because the reproductive technologies are so evidently grounded in the specifics of biological procreation, it may seem odd to include them in a discussion of non-biological processes of kin-making.Yet, the reproductive technologies require choice and a massive amount of work, so much so that the naturalness of these otherwise seemingly “natural occurrences”—and nature, itself—is called into question. Moreover, it is precisely because the reproductive technologies highlight the difference between biological and social grounds for parenthood and split the biological grounds for maternity into distinct parts (gestation and genetics, which itself can now be divided) that intention and other social factors become the key to negotiating which of several possible parents will become the “real” parents. Marilyn Strathern (1992) and Sarah Franklin (1997) note that consumer “choices” circulate, now more than ever, around the processes of procreation: whether or not to use birth control, to undergo amniocentesis or abortion, to try one or another form of the reproductive technologies, or to contemplate genetic engineering. Strathern asks the significance of the fact that “procreation can now be thought about as subject to personal preference and choice in a way that has never before been conceivable” (1992: 34; see also Herz 2006): If till now kinship has been a symbol for everything that cannot be changed about social affairs, if biology has been a symbol for the given parameters of human existence, what will it mean for the way we construe any of our relationships with one another to think of parenting as implementing an option and genetic make-up as an outcome of cultural preference? (1992: 34–35) How then do the “choice” and the work involved in the reproductive technologies complicate our understanding of biology and nature? Franklin details “the obstacle course” of endless procedures and tests that consume those undergoing assisted reproduction and often lead to no result other than a diminished sense of control, agency, and opportunity (Franklin 1997: 105–8, 180–81). “From a simple causal chain of events, conception becomes a badly designed process that hardly ever works. … it is a miracle indeed that nature even gets off the starting blocks without technological assistance” (Franklin 1997: 189). Conception is no longer an effortless natural occurrence between a man and a woman; it is something that is achieved through choice and intensive work on the part of the woman, her sperm and/or egg donor, and a team of clinicians. While popularly conceived of as “giving nature a helping hand,” in assisted conception, the “’helping hand’ is more like a corporate takeover, through which the agency of technology becomes dominant” (Franklin 1997: 96). More broadly, Strathern contemplates the ways the reproductive technologies model a cultural process through which nature is “enterprised up”: that is, the “essential” qualities of what is considered a “natural” entity are culturally enhanced. The result is “not a new essentialism but a 164

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collapse of the difference between the essential and the superadded” (M. Strathern 1992: 39). In this collapse, nature is no longer prior to the human elaboration that constitutes culture, but is itself an artifact and artifice of human labor. As Strathern puts it: “nature becomes a department of human enterprise, and we discover that it was never autonomous. The distinction between the natural and the cultural is revealed for the cultural construction it always was” (1992: 55; see also Franklin 2013). Not only has the “natural” process of reproduction become a cultural artifact, but so too the “naturalness” of the resultant kinship relations must be actively created, particularly where there are perceived to be multiple or asymmetrical claims to biological relatedness.Thus Helena Ragoné (1994), Janet Dolgin (1997), Valerie Hartouni (1997), and Charis Thompson (2001, 2005) demonstrate that, in cases of gestational surrogacy and donor egg IVF, considerable effort is required to foreground and make visible one biological claim to maternity and, at the same time, background and make invisible another in order to make either the gestational or the genetic mother correspond to the intended mother. Two factors are critical to this process of “strategic naturalizing” (Thompson 2001). One is the intention (by initiating a contract) to become a mother; the other is the status of the mother in a nuclear, marital, middle-class family (Dolgin 1997). Thus, the social assertion of intention and contract is, paradoxically, what counts in the naturalization of contested maternity. Gays and lesbians who use reproductive technologies to achieve parenthood amplify the creativity entailed in assisted reproduction. They may seek to connect both parents biologically to the child or to balance biological and other contributions; and they may choose to emphasize or de-emphasize the biological contributions of men or women outside the intended couple. Lesbians might divide genetic and gestational roles or emphasize “kinetic” as well as “genetic” contributions, or choose the brother of the non-genetic/gestational mother to become a sperm donor (Hayden 1995). Gay fathers might mix their spermatic contributions to emphasize equal paternity; choose an egg donor of the same ethnicity as the non-sperm-donating partner; or choose the sister of the non-sperm-donating father to be the egg donor and gestational mother (Weston 1991; Smith 1999; Mamo 2007; Lewin 2009). While in the service of establishing a naturalized or essentialized relation to their children, such efforts creatively innovate upon and reconfigure the procreative process.

Beyond genealogy In their edited volume, Kinship and Beyond:The Genealogical Model Reconsidered, Sandra Bamford and James Leach probe “the ways in which assumptions that lie behind a genealogical model— in particular, ideas concerning sequence, essence, and transmission—structure other modes of practice and knowledge making in domains that lie well beyond what we normally label ‘kinship’” (2009: 2).The volume explores systems of kinship and knowledge that challenge precisely such ideas of sequence, essence, and transmission that are at the heart of Western social science and popular understandings of what constitutes kinship. Bamford provides a striking account of the Kamea (Papua New Guinea) category of “one blood.” Contrary to expectations, it does not refer to intergenerational transmission of substance but rather to the relation between siblings who have originated from the same womb. “Kamea women bestow upon their children a ‘horizontal’ type of relatedness that is imagined in terms of ‘containment’ rather than the lineal transmission of bodily substance” (Bamford 2009: 163–64, 2004, 2007).This kind of careful exploration of the kinds of relations that do and do not underlie particular forms of kinship and knowledge challenges the presuppositions and universality of the genealogical model. 165

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Tim Ingold has proposed an alternative to the genealogical model that he calls a relational model, which he sees as applicable to systems of both kinship and knowledge. Rather than presupposing the transmission of essential, substantive components of a given endowment down a fixed descent line, as he characterizes the genealogical model, his relational model focuses on life lines and life processes that, rhizome-like, generate a profusion of relationships through particular, environmentally situated, experiences. This is a world of relations that are fluid, constantly developing, unfolding, and changing (Ingold 2002: 134–46). Ingold’s singular focus on de-­ essentialized relatedness epitomizes the turn toward process, fluidity, and flexibility that emerged from the critique of the fixed biologism of the genealogical grid. Finally, from different directions, a number of scholars have returned to the question of whether it is still possible—in face of the particularistic turn in kinship studies—to define kinship in cross-culturally universal terms, but also terms that transcend the biological/non-­biological divide. Thus Mac Marshall (1977) hones in on “sharing” as a cross-cultural foundation of kinship; John Borneman (2001) and Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) highlight “care,” and “intimacy” and “love,” respectively, in contrast with the formal structures of descent, affinity, and genealogy that anthropologists (and law courts) have focused on; Krista Van Vleet (2008) and Michael Lambek (2013) have considered the dialogic and performative nature of kinship; and Marshall Sahlins (2011) points to a “mutuality of being” that he argues is the universal underpinning of kinship relations.

The cultural contours of choice, intention, flexibility, and fluidity The importance and productivity of the critique of biological analytic models of kinship, which had been presumed to be universal, cannot be overestimated. It allowed scholars to follow the lines of relatedness “wherever they may lead,” and to explore the diverse processes through which kinship relations are realized.Yet, we should also be mindful of the fact that many of the terms of these analyses—choice, intention, flexibility, and fluidity—also carry the weight of a particular historical moment in late twentieth-century Euro-American culture. The culturally specific nature of these terms is evident in a number of ways. Weston early on pointed to the cultural entailments—including individualism, autonomy, and free will—of the concept of choice but argued for a politically astute use of the term as a specific rhetorical strategy (1998: 88–87). Emily Martin (1994) has drawn attention to the cultural resonances of “flexibility” in her study of immunology, as she traces changing understandings of the structure and functioning of cells, bodies, nations, and corporations in an era of late capitalism that emphasizes flexible specialization and production. And as noted above, Dolgin (1997), Hartouni (1997), and Thompson (2001) emphasize the relation between “intention” and Euro-American middle-class marital family formations. I would suggest that even such ideas as “sharing,” “caring,” “love,” and “mutuality of being”— like Fortes’s (1969) earlier “axiom of amity”—tend to prejudge what kinship is all about. It is not irrelevant that, in Euro-American culture and anthropological analysis, the domestic domain of kinship was deemed to be a haven of “diffuse enduring solidarity” precisely in contrast to the domains of economics and politics, which were understood to be animated by individualism, sheer self-interest, the profit motive, and the gyrations of the “free market” (Dolgin 1997; McKinnon and Cannell 2013). Finally, it is also evident that the critique of kinship has primarily questioned systems where consanguinity is a natural given and affinity is a social creation. However, Wagner (1967, 1977) and Viveiros de Castro (2009) offer an analytic model in which it is possible to contemplate, for instance, systems in which affinity is given and consanguinity must be created—a possibility that has remained outside the main line of critique. 166

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All these queries suggest that the conceptual architecture of these kinship studies may continue to build on Euro-American cultural foundations, which perhaps need to be more carefully examined. Moreover, to the extent that kinship analysis focuses solely on doing—on choice, intention, flexibility, fluidity—it leaves little room for local understandings of being—of essence, fixity, materialization, and naturalization—that, as we will see, are so often in entangled in one another and give shape to the structures of social hierarchy.

The process and substantial materialization of relatedness While some analysts emphasized the social processes of creating kinship ties over the essential qualities of biological relation, others attempted to transcend this divide, which had long structured kinship studies. Janet Carsten, for instance, introduced the comparative construct of “relatedness” not only “to signal an openness to indigenous idioms of being related” but also to suspend a particular set of assumptions about what is entailed by the terms social and biological. I use ‘relatedness’ to convey, however unsatisfactorily, a move away from a pre-given analytic opposition between the biological and the social on which much anthropological study of kinship has rested. (2000a: 4–5) The popularity of this term indicates its ability to sidestep, if not entirely solve, the domaining problems inherent in the term “kinship” and to point to understandings of kinship practices that confound the analytic divide between nature and culture, substance and code, essence and process, being and doing. In this section, I highlight the diverse forms of materialization—houses, hearths, food, land, trees, photographs, and documents—that become the pivot around which the processes that create kinship relations circulate.

The processes of other substantial logics While anthropologists have long explored different cultural understandings of procreation (e.g., Malinowski 1927, 1954; E. Leach 1967; Delaney 1986), in the wake of the critique of kinship these became important venues for challenging the universality of biogenetic conceptions of procreation and kinship. Increased attention was given to the diverse gendered logics of procreative substances and to their manipulation and combination over the life-cycle. Here, the process and substance of kinship are inextricably bound together. Scholars investigated the multiplicity of ways in which different bodily substances—semen, blood, milk, bone, flesh—are associated with different genders, brought together through different procreative processes, transformed into one another, and enhanced and amplified through feeding certain foods and even bodily substances (Böck and Rao 2000; Janowski 2007). In various cultures of Papua New Guinea, for example, female bodily substance has to be ritually removed and male vital substance, in the form of semen, has to be introduced into the bodies of young boys—who otherwise lack sufficient semen at birth—in order for boys to grow, mature, and have sufficient life force to engage in their own acts of reproduction and nurturance (e.g., Kelly 1976). Marilyn Strathern (1988) analyzed how, in the Melanesian context, cross- and same-sex qualities are, through ritual and exchange, brought together and separated at various points in the life-cycle to create androgynous and gender-differentiated persons. Cultural understandings of procreation involve not only gendered substances but also ideas about creativity, nurturance, and containment. For instance, Karen Middleton shows how Karembola men become mothers to the extent that they “are held to be the ‘root’ or ‘source’ 167

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(foto), the hidden but effective cause of growth, the power that makes others give birth” (2000: 108). As noted previously, Bamford points to Kamea sibling “one blood” relation that depends not on the bilateral and vertical transmission of substance, but rather on a notion of horizontal relation derived from containment in a common womb. Similarly, Carol Delaney (1991) early on pointed to the contributions to procreation of Turkish men (conceptualized as “seed”) and women (conceptualized as “soil”), which were seen as “categorically different, hierarchically ordered, and differentially valued. With seed, men appear to provide the creative spark of life, the essential identity of a child; while women, like soil, contribute the nurturant material that sustains it” (Dube 1986; Delaney 1991: 8, 1986; Böck and Rao 2000; see also Ott 1979 for a cheese curdling analogy of procreation). The effect of such studies was not only to broaden the notion of what might count, in different cultures, as “biology” and as procreative processes and substances but also to determine the consequences of these for establishing who does and does not count as kin. Such work also expanded beyond bodily substances, as such, to consider how processes of creating kinship were realized through other substantial materializations, such as houses, food, land, and trees.

Houses and the processes of exchange and enterprise One of the strands of kinship theory that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s derived from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1982, 1987) concept of “house societies” (sociétiés à maison). For Lévi-Strauss, house societies foreground the continuity of property, rather than biology, as an organizing principle. Houses are seen as a corporate body holding an estate made up of both material and immaterial wealth, which perpetuates itself through the transmission of its name, its goods, and its titles down a real or imaginary line, considered legitimate as long as this continuity can express itself in the language of kinship or of affinity and, most often, of both. (Lévi-Strauss 1982: 174) Here, the house/estate is the primary agent and enduring entity. People may cycle through the house—placed there by variable forms of recruitment—but it is the estate of the house, not the people, that counts (Lévi-Strauss 1982: 174). A number of volumes developed various directions of “house theory” for both socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology (Barraud 1979; Macdonald 1987; McKinnon 1991; Fox 1993; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Fox and Sather 1996; Carsten 1997; Helms 1998; Joyce and Gillespie 2000; Beck 2007). Some scholars found the concept of Lévi-Strauss’s house societies to be a productive way to transcend the (biological) strictures of the prevailing lineage theory (McKinnon 1991, 1995, 2000a; Kuper 1993; Carsten 1995a, 1997; Gillespie 2000a, 2000b). For instance, McKinnon (1991, 1995) shows how, in the Tanimbar Islands, both houses and the relations between houses are produced through a complex system of exchange that articulates multiple possible forms of affiliation and marriage. Following Wagner’s (1967, 1977) analogic kinship, it is exchange rather than biology that differentiates houses and determines their membership against the flow of life, which is understood to follow affinal pathways. In a way that has not been theorized, the literature on “house societies” might profitably be related to that on family firms, in which kinship comes to be configured by reference to the family estate and business. Antónia Pedroso de Lima (2000), in her account of elite Portuguese family firms, articulates a kind of double dynamic that characterizes the interplay between kinship and enterprise typical of family firms. On the one hand, “familial values—the ways 168

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of being and living in a family—are crucial elements in defining the ways in which the economic group works and continues through time” (Pedroso de Lima 2000: 152). On the other hand, the enterprise itself becomes a cultural symbol of kinship. Its effectiveness in bringing people together attributes greater power to the enterprise by maintaining active kinship relations than to the sharing of a common substance: ‘blood’—one of the most important Portuguese cultural symbols of the family. (Pedroso de Lima 2000: 153; see also Yanagisako 2002) Extending this line of inquiry one step further, Elana Shever (2012, 2013) details the parallels between the paternalism of national and family enterprise. In Argentina, the oil industry was organized as a (national) paternalistic family, in which intergenerational relations were marked, among other things, by the inheritance of jobs and houses. Relations between workers were simultaneously relations between kin; and oil itself came to be seen as the cultural symbol and very substance of (familial/national) reproduction as much as (economic/ national) production. In all of this, houses, estates, property, enterprise—and even the substances of enterprise, like oil—become the materializations and objectifications of kinship and family.

Houses, hearths, food, and the processes of nurturing kin into being A particularly fruitful line of study that emanated from an engagement with the “house society” literature focused on houses, cooking hearths, and the creation of kinship relations through residence together as well as cooking, feeding, and eating from the same hearth. In itself, a shared hearth often delimits a kinship unit in both the ethnographic and archaeological record (Janowski 1995, 2007). In her innovative work on the processes of creating kin among the Langkawi, Carsten (1995a, 1997) emphasized the central importance of eating food—particularly rice meals— cooked on the same hearth. Significantly, Carsten shows that shared blood relations can be created over time—making strangers into kin—out of shared rice meals, since rice is understood to be transmuted into blood. This is a good example of the impossibility, and irrelevance, of distinguishing bodily substance and social process, since the social process of feeding and eating rice together generates shared bodily substance, in the form of blood (Carsten 1995a, 1997; see also Weismantel 1995; Janowski 2007). A number of the authors call attention to the parallels between the production of food and the reproduction of people, and between feeding and sexual reproduction (Fajans 1988; ­Feldman-Savelsberg 1995; Janowski 2007; Janowski and Kerlogue 2007). Feeding is equally—if not more—generative of kinship relations as sexual reproduction. On Goodenough Island, Jane Fajans notes, “[i]t is by feeding a pregnant woman, a baby, and a child that a father asserts his claims over his offspring. If the biological father does not perform these duties, the man who does can claim the child” (1988: 145). Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg masterfully unravels Bagangté associations related to the concept of “cooking inside,” which “refers to both the cooking of food and the cooking of sex and children inside the mud brick walls of the kitchen and the social walls of marital relations” (1995: 484). In her introduction to Kinship and Food in South East Asia, Monica Janowski (2007: 12) makes clear that, whatever people’s understandings of sexual reproduction and birth may be, the production of kin entails feeding people the right foods (particularly core foods, such as rice, that are associated with cosmological origins and spiritual connections to ancestors and divine beings). Indeed the cultural understandings of the gendered 169

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contribution of parents in sexual reproduction are often mirrored in the gendered contributions to a proper, full meal (e.g., female rice and male meat) (Janowski 2007: 15–16; see also Boddy 1982; Fajans 1988; Feldman-Savelsberg 1995). Going further, Janowski argues that the very conditions for fertility, health, and life require not only the continued feeding of those who would be kin but also of ancestors, who will reciprocate in the form of blessings for continued fertility and health (Janowski 2007: 19).

Land, trees, food, and the processes of living, eating, and laboring The processes of creating kinship are materialized in relation not only to houses and shared food cooked on the same hearth but also to residence, labor, and shared food derived from ancestral land. In a brilliant 1973 essay, Andrew Strathern explored the links between ideas of shared bodily substance/descent, residence on land, food, and ancestral spirits. The common idea running through various New Guinea societies is captured by this example from the Siane: Siane korova [ancestral spirits] are directly identified with clan territories and make the land fertile. Food grown on the land is thus impregnated with ancestral spirit. Locality and descent are in this set of ideas exactly fused. A Siane non-agnate who grows up on the land of his host-clan might thus expect to partake of that clan’s ancestral spirit to a degree approaching that of agnatic members, especially if he is a second-generation, and thus patrifilial, member. (A. Strathern 1973: 31) Kin are thus delineated not by biogenetic relation, as such, but rather by residing and working together on ancestral land and sharing food and spiritual substance that derives from that land. Fajans also notes that, in many Melanesian societies, people who live together, garden on the same land, and eat the same food are believed to share the same substance. The bonds created by these social and substantive acts cumulatively supercede those of blood, and the members of a group see themselves as related. … For these societies, it is the land that feeds and thus creates people, and so it is through land that people become related. … The Baining say “the land is our mother because it gives us food.” (1988: 161) Thus, as someone from Mount Hagen said to Andrew Strathern: “’Yes, you were born in ­England and your father is there, but now you have come to live on our ground and have grown up on our food and so you belong to us’” (A. Strathern 1973: 33). James Leach also links the growth of people and kin to land, and, more particularly, know­ ledge of the land: People share substance, and are therefore connected, because they have grown in the same land. Knowledge, with the effective action based upon it, is the form that this substance takes. Growth does not take place in isolation, but in what I have called a field of nurture dependent upon others knowing a place and its history, possibilities, forms. Critically, this field is constituted in the work of other people; hence knowledge is a social relation and an essence shared by people of a particular place. (2009: 188) 170

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In focusing on the knowledge (of the land) that creates kin relations, Leach emphasizes process over essence; changeability over fixed forms. Knowledge, Leach suggests, is “mutable, changing, and open. People therefore are mutable, changeable, and open to the intervention and agency of others” (2009: 176). While Kamea sibling relations index maternal containment, as noted above, Sandra Bamford shows that the lineal relation between a man and his sons is established by means of knowledge of ancestors’ travel and work on the land and in the cultivation of trees. Of particular importance in these arboreal relations is the yangwa tree, whose milky white sap replaces semen that is otherwise lost in sexual intercourse. Rather than bodily substance, Kamea men provide their sons with an externalized and partible equivalent of seminal fluid that gets handed down through time and across generations. Men plant trees, and trees, in turn, operate to elicit the growth of future generations of men. In the absence of an ideology based on descent, the nonhuman world serves as a point of attachment between generations, giving Kamea sociality its decidedly patrilineal cast. (Bamford 2009: 167) Bamford (2007, 2009) notes that it is precisely because intergenerational relations between humans are not conceived in terms of substantial relations of descent (which in the West isolates species as distinct natural types with differentiated reproductive histories) that they can be configured in terms of cross-species relations (which, in the West, would be destructive of the distinctiveness of reproductive type).

The materialization of relatedness, domestic doings, and the process of memory Several authors have recently considered the interpretive work involved in memory—the processes of remembering and forgetting, including and excluding, creating and negating r­ elations— that is at the core of what comes to count as kinship (Sutton 2001; Carsten 2007c). Yet the interpretive work of memory does not operate in the abstract; it circulates around, attaches to, and interweaves certain material sites and objects—such as food, houses, land, graveyards, photographs, documents—and a wide range of everyday domestic and ritual activities. Joëlle Bahloul’s book, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria 1937–1962 (1996), is a remarkable evocation of the importance of houses and domestic spaces and processes to both the creation and memory of kinship. Bahloul provides an account of the way the memories of house and family—in this case, those of a set of Jews and Muslims occupying a two-story courtyard apartment building—are inextricably bound together. A notion of family and relatedness emerges, here, less from biological relations than from co-residence in the house and the participation in everyday domestic life together. “The house/family pair actually limits biological kinship to its most frequent and most immediate usage, living together. Coresidence brings unrelated people together, blending them into a symbolic world of all-inclusive kinship through its practical function and the daily experiences it entails” (Bahloul 1996: 53). B ­ ahloul powerfully evokes the intimate details of everyday life—the acts and smells and tastes of cooking and eating, the intimacies of sharing bathrooms, and a million details of a shared life in cramped quarters—as well as the powerful importance of the ritual cycles that give life to the memories of the kinship forged through co-residence within a single domestic house. As much as the house objectifies and materializes memories, it is also the deep accumulation and embodiment of daily and ritual practices within the shared domestic space of the house that, in the end, is 171

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perhaps one of the most potent architects of relatedness and of the memory that extends relatedness in and across time (Bahloul 1996: 136). Land, landscape, and graveyards—as much as houses—are also often central to the interpretive memory work that generates a sense of kinship relatedness. They materialize memories of labor and production; they fix a sense of ancestral rootedness and continuity—and thus of historical and political belonging—in a place; and they serve as a memorial that connects families to the larger scope of the events of political history that traverse the land (Bear 2007b, 2007b; Carsten 2007b: Pine 2007). Houses and land stand as a fixed anchor not only in the flow of time but also in relation to the migrations of people abroad and the incorporation of adoptees from abroad: houses and land are the foci around which both the centripetal and centrifugal movements of people revolve (Howell 2003, 2006; Empson 2007; Pine 2007). Finally, the connections and disconnections that are central to the memory work of kinship are materialized and objectified in a host of different ways. Of importance, here, are names, photographs, documents (such as birth or death certificates, adoptive papers, medical histories, passports, or visas), letters, clothing and textiles, furniture, traits of physical appearance, body parts (hair, teeth, umbilical cords), and jewelry (Modell 1994; Bahloul 1996; Howell 2003; Bear 2007a; Carsten 2007a, 2007b; Empson 2007; Pine 2007).

The process and materialization of kinship In the end, the scholarship on the varieties of relatedness that has emerged over the past couple of decades has not only emphasized the cultural processes by which kin categories and relations are brought into being. It has also—in an attempt to move beyond a Western biogenetic notion of kinship—revealed other substantial media through which a sense of relatedness can be materialized and objectified. It is, therefore, important to recognize that the de-construction of a universal biogenetic model of kinship does not necessarily leave us in a world of unrestrained flexibility and fluidity, a world of process without essence, a world of doing without being. Rather we discover how forms of human relatedness are created through a wide range of materializations and substantiations—sometimes intertwined with and sometimes independent of diversely conceived bodily substances and processes. It is in this entwinement of social process and varied material substantiations that we find a multiplicity of distinctive cultural realizations of what relatedness might be and how it comes to be constituted.

Hierarchy and the objectification and naturalization of relatedness If the efforts to reveal the processual nature of kinship thus found themselves circulating around other forms of materialization, it is worth asking how we might theorize the import of the differential valuation of fixity and fluidity, of essentializing and de-esentializing moves, of naturalizing and denaturalizing efforts, and of relative materialization and objectification. I argue that one reason it is important to attend to the means by which cultural categories and relations are naturalized, sacralized, essentialized, and objectified, is because it is in these processes that the structures of social hierarchy and equality are delineated. In this section I consider several ways in which the processes of objectification and naturalization have been conceptualized and their significance for our understanding of hierarchy.

Hierarchy and relative objectification Within the “house society” literature, scholars have noted that the top of social hierarchies and access to ancestral and other forms of power are often objectified in the material weightiness 172

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of houses, land, heirlooms (hard, heavy, precious objects made of bone, shell, and metal), monumental stone grave markers, and deep genealogies. By contrast, the periphery, margins, and bottom of social hierarchies and distance from ancestral and other forms of power are often marked by the absence of extensive materializations and objectifications and by shallow, horizontal structures of relations that are more fluid, flexible, and changeable (McKinnon 1991, 1995, 2000a; Carsten 1995b, 1997). Drawing on work on cosmologies of origins and the “flow of life” (Fox 1980; Traube 1986; Lewis 1988), researchers have focused on the ways in which houses—or, that is, their relative material elaboration and possession of estates of land, trees, alliances, people, valuables, titles, and ancestral graves—index the differential permanence and proximity of kin groups to origin places and ancestral or divine sources of life-giving power, thereby forming the grounds for the emergence of hierarchy (Fox 1980, 1993; Errington 1983, 1989; Traube 1986; Waterson 1990; McKinnon 1991, 1995, 2000b; Kuper 1993; Bloch 1995; Fox and Sather 1996; Helms 1998; Joyce 2000; Joyce and Gillespie 2000; Kirch 2000; Beck 2007; Heitman 2007, 2011; Plog and Heitman 2010). Enduring access to ancestors and ancestral powers over life, health, fertility, and death is often objectified and made evident in the build-up of durable materials (bones, shells, hardwoods, metals, stones), house posts, cashes of valuables or heirlooms, cosmological markers (colors, directions, other symbolic associations), and/or other elaborated altar and ritual spaces. Attention to this concentration of weighty materializations—in contrast to their relative absence or paucity elsewhere—has been useful to cultural anthropologists and archaeologists attempting to understand the relation between cosmology, ritual, and the both the structure and emergence of hierarchy.

Naturalization, sacralization, and hierarchy It was perhaps inevitable that the denaturalization of the presumably universal categories of comparative kinship analysis would lead researchers to ask how people in different cultures come to see specific categories and relations as essential and given in the nature of the world. In Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (1995), Sylvia Yanagisako and Carol Delaney emphasize how cultural categories, relations, and domains—and their differential valuation and power—are essentialized by reference either to the order of nature (as revealed by science) or to the order of the divine (as revealed by religion), both of which are understood to transcend culture and human agency. The unassailable quality of these categories is further enforced by taboos on reading across domains in ways that would denaturalize or desacralize their hierarchical order. Delaney takes up the case of religion: “religion seems to be about god rather than about gender; the family seems to be about reproduction and childrearing rather than about gender and religion” (Yanagisako and Delaney 1995: 12). But if one reads across domains, one sees how specific notions of gender and kinship are naturalized—indeed sacralized—by reference to religious ideas about divine creation. Delaney (1986, 1995) argues, for example, that the seed and soil model of procreation (noted above) is only fully understood when seen in light of cosmological ideas of creation. “Paternity has meant begetting; paternity has meant the primary, creative, engendering role, and it means the same thing whether the male is a human or God the Father. … The theory of conception and the conception of the deity are … two aspects of the same system” (Delaney 1991: 11). This gender asymmetry in relation to ideas of divine creation and human procreation, Delaney argues (1991, 1995), underlies gender inequality across a wide array of social contexts, including education and rights to national citizenship. With regard to science, there is ample evidence in the history of science of the ways that ostensibly objective scientific work has served to naturalize culturally specific presuppositions 173

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about the qualities of kinship, gender, class, and race. This is most obvious in the record of eugenics and the new genetics (e.g., Rafter 1988; Kelves 1995; Duster 2003; Lombardo 2008) and in the contemporary strains of sociobiology (Sahlins 1977) and evolutionary psychology (McKinnon 2005). In evolutionary psychology, conservative Euro-American gendered kinship roles are naturalized by being written into accounts of deep evolutionary and genetic prehistory. It is only by disentangling the culturally specific assumptions about gender and kinship from the presuppositions about genetics and evolution, that one can see how such accounts successfully naturalize culturally particular visions of gender and kinship (McKinnon 2005). For Yanagisako and Delaney, it is precisely by reading across such domains that it is possible to reveal the processes of naturalization and sacralization that hold relations of power, knowledge, and social hierarchy in place. Rather than presume the existence of natural, universal categories, their project focuses on the manner in which different systems of gendered relatedness and hierarchy are naturalized and made to appear universal, fixed, and essential.

The hierarchical contours of relative fluidity and fixity in the global political economy In Euro-American anthropology and culture, the possibilities for creating kinship out of non-biological relations have been increasingly embraced and positively valued. It is nevertheless important to remember that this is not universally the case either cross-culturally or within Euro-American cultures. It is therefore imperative that we understand the various ways in which cultural processes of naturalization tie kinship, in some cultures and contexts, unequivocally to blood and biology and to consider what the hierarchical and political implications of this are. I point to just a few of the many possible contexts in which we can think about the differential social and political valuation of the relative fluidity and fixity of forms of relatedness. First, consider those sites—such as adoption, gay and lesbian kinship, and the reproductive technologies—that became the focus of attention for exploring the social creation of kinship. It is important to note that these are contested domains in which opposition to the creation of certain forms of relatedness remains strong. For example, because formal adoption is understood to introduce alien blood into a marital relation and family line, it is prohibited and/or stigmatized in Hindu and Muslim contexts in India, North Africa, and the Middle East (al-Azhary Sonbol 1995; Bargach 2002; Bharadwaj 2003; Inhorn 2006) as well as in Confucian Korea (Kim 2010: 29–31). What logics of purity and procreation drive these forms of exclusion, and what are their hierarchical consequences? Similarly, what logics of kinship and gender hierarchy have, until quite recently, compelled the legal prohibitions on gay and lesbian marriage and ­family-making in the United States and elsewhere (Santorum 2005: 28–39)? And what ideas about the fundamental “nature” of paternity and maternity make specific aspects of the reproductive ­technologies—sperm donation, surrogacy, egg donation, cloning, etc.—the focus either of strict prohibition or of rampant exploitation and commercialization (Dolgin 1997; Hartouni 1997; Lock 1998; Kahn 2000; Inhorn 2004, 2006; Franklin 2007) and how do these differentially affect various populations in the United States and elsewhere? Second, despite the increasing acceptance of non-biological forms of kinship, there are significant consequences (for inheritance, for border crossings, etc.) of the fact that Euro-­ American legal understandings of what counts as “real” kinship—defined in terms of biology, nuclear families, and individual autonomy—have been, and continue to be, written into the legal codes of (post)colonial societies and of international treaties (Modell 1998; Borneman 2001; 174

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Povinelli 2002; Howell 2006; McKinnon 2008; Bodenhorn 2013). Schachter (Modell) shows that, in Hawaii, adoptive kin are granted inheritance rights by the courts only if they had been formalized through written legal contracts to constitute “as-if-biological” kin within marital families. Absent a will to the contrary, this effectively disinherits those who see themselves as related through indigenous forms of adoption and family-making and who do not have the resources to legalize their relation (Modell 1998; Schachter 2008). Similar consequences are revealed in the border crossing logics of transnational adoptions. For instance, because US immigration law requires that “children must be ‘eligible orphans’ to enter the United States as ‘immediate relatives’ of the adopting parents under the family reunification provision” it effectively erases relations with natal kin. “This severing and erasing process not only produces a child who is legally and socially ‘free’ to be incorporated into another kin network but also reduces the child’s complex origins—social, political, and cultural—to generic categories” (Kim 2010: 11; see also Leinaweaver 2008: 2–13). This is done with the goal of creating a singular, unambiguous claim on the child with a naturalized “as-if ” biological birth certificate and identity. Third, the social process of creating kin in adoption also runs into other cultural forms of essentialized and naturalized difference such as race and even cultural and national origin (Volkman 2005a, 2005b; Yngvesson 2005, 2010; Howell 2006: 111–134; Leinaweaver 2008; Riley and Van Vleet 2012). Kim (2005, 2010) shows, for instance, how “racial” difference makes it virtually impossible for Korean adoptees to become “as-if-biological” kin within their white adoptive families in the United States at the same time that their US cultural identification makes it difficult to identify with their birth families and the national culture of their birth country. Against the force of this kind of naturalized race and national culture, Korean adoptees in the United States forge a new kind of relatedness and their own “fourth culture” or counterpublic that denaturalizes and transcends territorialized nation-states (Kim 2005). Fourth, violence, war, political turmoil, and economic impoverishment force dislocations and migrations that shatter communities and require a kind of fluidity and flexibility in the creation of new lines of relation that may or may not be positively valued. Migrants and refugees may escape particular circumstances only to find themselves in refugee camps, in slums, or in marginalized or diasporic spaces where their resources to rebuild the continuity and stability of houses, homeland, and families are fragile at best (Glick Schiller 2005; Bahloul 1996; Bear 2007b; Day 2007; Snell-Rood 2011). The contours of larger global hierarchies and inequalities are outlined in this discrepancy in people’s ability to secure enduring relations to kin, home, and land.

Conclusion Over the course of the last several decades, kinship theorists have sought to open up the study of kinship to the diverse processes through which people bring relatedness into being, emphasizing, at first, the fluidity and flexibility involved in the doing and making of kinship. It was not long, however, before they discovered a wide range of other media—houses, hearths, food, land, trees, photographs, documents—though which the being of relatedness is materialized. Moreover, and perhaps paradoxically, the deconstruction of biology as the universal foundation for kinship comparison elicited an exploration of the myriad media in which kinship might be essentialized, naturalized, sacralized, and objectified in culturally specific ways and the significance of this for the creation of social hierarchy and equality. In the end, kinship is rarely all about either being or doing, essence or process, fixity or fluidity; rather, it is crafted out of a tension between the two and their differential valuation in accordance with local cultural projects and global structures and agendas. 175

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Acknowledgements Parts of several paragraphs in this paper were originally published in an earlier paper in the Journal of Family Issues (McKinnon 2015) and are reprinted here with permission.

Notes 1 I regret that space does not permit me to consider spiritual kinship, which is an important site for creating a form of relatedness that is explicitly meant to transcend the biological (see Mintz and Wolf 1950; Gudeman 1972; Chock 1974; Bloch and Guggenheim 1981; Chipumuo 2011; Wellman 2014). In March 2014, Todne Thomas, Asiya Malik, and Rose Wellman hosted a workshop funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the results of which are currently under review for publication as an edited volume entitled New Directions in Spiritual Kinship. 2 In the years following Weston’s pioneering work, much has been written on gay and lesbian parenthood, family, marriage, and the uses of the new reproductive technologies (Lewin 1993, 1998, 2009; Hayden 1995; Weston 1998; Warner 1999; Bernstein and Reimann 2001; Borneman 2001; Sullivan 2004; Marzullo and Herdt 2011).

Further reading Carsten, Janet (ed.). (2000) Cultures of Relatedness: New Approaches to the Study of Kinship. Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press. Franklin, Sarah, and Susan McKinnon (eds.). (2001) Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies. Durham: Duke University Press. Bowie, Fiona (ed.). (2004) Cross-cultural Approaches to Adoption. London: Routledge. Bamford, Sandra, and James Leach (eds.). (2009) Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Doing and being ———. (2011) “What kinship is,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 17(1): 2–19; and 17(2): 227–42. Santorum, R. (2005) It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, Wilmington: ISI Books. Schachter, J. (2008) “‘A relationship endeared to the people’: Adoption in Hawaiian custom and law,” in J. Dickerson-Putman and J. Schachter (eds), Relative Power: Changing Interpretations of Fosterage and Adoption in Pacific Island Societies, special issue of Pacific Studies, 31(3/4): 211–31. Schneider, D. M. (1972) “What is kinship all about?” in P. Reining (ed.), Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year, Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington. ———. (1980) American Kinship: A Cultural Account, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1984) A Critique of the Study of Kinship, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Shever, E. (2012) Resources for Reform: Oil and Neoliberalism in Argentina, Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2013) “‘I am a petroleum product’: Making kinship work on the Patagonian frontier,” in S McKinnon and F. Cannell (eds), Vital Relations: Modernity and the Persistent Life of Kinship, Santa Fe: SAR Press. Smith, S. (1999) “Two men and a baby. Part 6 of The Fertility Race. American RadioWorks, http://­ americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/fertility_race/part6/, accessed July 31, 2012. Snell-Rood, C. (2011) “‘I have my own two hands’: Re-interpreting the risks of slum life in Delhi and cultivating the self through neighborhood, citizenship, kinship, and health,” unpublished PhD. Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Virginia. Strathern, A. (1973) “Kinship, descent and locality: Some New Guinea Examples,” in J. Goody (ed.), The Character of Kinship, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia, Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. (1992) Reproducing the Future: Anthropology, Kinship, and the New Reproductive Technologies, London: Routledge. Sullivan, M. (2004) The Family of Woman: Lesbian Mothers,Their Children, and the Undoing of Gender, Berkeley: University of California Press. Sutton, D. (2001) Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, Oxford: Berg. Thompson, C. (2001) “Strategic naturalizing: Kinship in an infertility clinic,” in S. Franklin and S. McKinnon (eds), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, Durham: Duke University Press. ———. (2005) Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies, Cambridge: MIT Press. Traube, E. G. (1986) Cosmology and Social Life: Ritual Exchange among the Mambai of East Timor, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Viveiros de Castro, E. B. (2009) “The gift and the given: Three nano-essays on kinship and magic, in S. Bamford and J. Leach (eds), Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered, New York: Berghahn. Van Vleet, K. E. (2008) Performing Kinship: Narrative, Gender, and the Intimacies of Power in the Andes, Austin: University of Texas Press. Volkman, T. A. (2005a) “Embodying Chinese culture: Transnational adoption in North America,” T. A. Volkman (ed.), Cultures of Transnational Adoption, Durham: Duke University Press. Volkman, T. A. (ed.) (2005b) Cultures of Transnational Adoption, Durham: Duke University Press. Wagner, R. (1967) The Curse of Souw: Principles of Daribi Clan Definition and Alliance in New Guinea, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1977) “Analogic Kinship: A Daribi Example,” American Ethnologist, 4(4): 623–42. Warner, M. (1999) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life, Cambridge: Harvard ­University Press. Waterson, R. (1990) The Living House: An Anthropology of Architecture in South-East Asia, New York: Whitney Library of Design. Weismantel, M. (1995) “Making kin: Kinship theory and Zumbagua adoptions,” American Ethnologist, 22(4): 685–709. Wellman, R. (2014) “Feeding moral relations: Kinship and nation in Iran,” unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia. Weston, K. (1991) Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship, New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1998) Long Slow Burn: Sexuality and Social Science, New York: Routledge. Yanagisako, S. J. (2002) Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Susan McKinnon Yanagisako, S. J. and Collier, J. F. (1987) “Toward a unified analysis of gender and kinship,” in J. F. Collier and S. J.Yanagisako (eds), Gender and Kinship: Essays Toward a Unified Analysis, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yanagisako, S. and Delaney, C. (1995) “Naturalizing power,” in S.Yanagisako and C. Delaney (eds), Naturali­ zing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis, New York: Routledge. Yngvesson, B. (2005) “Going ‘home’: Adoption, loss of bearings, and the mythology of roots,” in T. A. Volkman (ed.) Cultures of Transnational Adoption, Durham: Duke University Press. ———. (2010) Belonging in an Adopted World: Race, Identity, and Transnational Adoption, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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10 “RELIGION” AftEr RELIGION, “RItUAL” AftEr RItUAL Jon Bialecki

Secular distant pasts, religious far futures? I would like to start off this chapter with two chronologically disparate scenes.The two moments I have selected, though, should not be taken to stand as either a point of origin or the potential realization of a human telos. Rather, they are merely effective temporal horizons different enough from one another in their subject matter to give us a certain parallax on our actual object, the current state of the anthropology of religion and ritual. The first moment that I am thinking of is the neolithic Anatolian settlement of Çatalhöyük, a site often invoked as a sort of shorthand for the initial moments of Levantine agriculture, animal husbandry, and permanent settlements; the second is “the singularity,” another shorthand used by some for a future moment when human-born technology surpasses human understanding, and possibly also human control. Let us start, then, with Çatalhöyük. Inhabited for roughly 1,400 years (7400–6000 BCE), covering about 34 acres, and having a population that ranged from 3,500 to 8,000 souls, this site stands as one of the largest and best-documented records of the start of agricultural practice and long-duration settlement (Hodder 2006, 2010: 2). Since its initial excavation in late 1958, it has also stood as a privileged locale for thinking through the role played by religion in creating human settlements. People turn to Çatalhöyük when considering this question in part because of the wealth of material that seems, at least from the perspective of archeology, obviously religious: ritual human burial underneath the floors of crowded houses, often with bodies carefully decapitated after death; skulls plastered over and covered with ochre pigments to mimic flesh; evidence of large, ritualistic sacrificial hunts of large wild bulls, with the remains embedded in the walls of houses; adornments made from the claws and beaks of raptors and great cats, such as leopards; crane wings, possibly worn as clothing during special events; figurines of what appear to be rather voluptuous female figures, often seated on what is described as thrones (Hodder and Meskell 2010). That this surplus of somewhat ambiguous but compelling material should lead to different interpretations is not surprising; the most heated debates between archaeologists seems to center on whether or not Çatalhöyük could be characterized as a religiously motivated matriarchy or not (the current evidence seems to suggest that the answer is “no” [Hodder 2006]). Rather, the surprise lies in the fact that to contemporary socio-cultural anthropological eyes, there was no religion in Çatalhöyük at all. In a recent 2010 edited volume that grew out of a multi-year 183

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collaboration between the current archaeological team overseeing the excavation and some leading anthropologists of religion, there was a great reluctance on the part of the anthropologists to use the term religion without couching the term such that it was obvious that “religion” used here should not be taken to mean what it is commonly understood to mean; three of the four anthropologists who contributed to the volume used the term with only the greatest degree of hesitation, and one of the cultural anthropologists that was consulted, Maurice Bloch, even went as far as to say that he was confident “that there was no religion in Çatalhöyük” (2010: 161).1 That is not to say that there were not evocative elements that might remind one of religion, plays of presences and absences in the way that these items were either displayed or secreted (Keane 2010; Pels 2010), of social hierarchies made transcendent so that they could outlast the specific humans that constituted them (Bloch 2010). However, even these religion-like phenomena should be treated suspiciously, as elements potentially on the wane during the longue durée at Çatalhöyük. Another of the anthropologists who was consulted, Peter Pels, suggests that these elements were slowly being eclipsed as individual housing settlements became more autonomous in self-sustenance as agricultural techniques improved; Pels even speaks of a kind of “secularizing” as the inhabitants increasing technological mastery foregrounded their own agency (Pels 2010: 263). Secularism, then, in early Anatolia, even if it is not the secularism of the current day. But religion, without scare quotes? No. Second, “the singularity.” Taken from a mathematical sense of the word, where it denotes the point where a function’s value reaches the infinite, the term was brought into speculative Anglophone futurism in 1993 by Verner Vinge, a professor of mathematics, computer scientist, and sometimes science fiction author.2 In a talk sponsored by the NASA Lewis Research Center, Vinge anticipated a time when exponential increases in technology would lead to human-crafted artificial intelligences that would surpass their makers in speed and capacities.This would be the moment,Vinge warned, where inhuman speed and intelligence would start bootstrapping itself, leaving Homo sapiens behind; human cognitive powers to foresee, or even comprehend and compete, would be permanently eclipsed, and humans would “enter a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals” (Vinge 1993: 89).While this was originally posited as an existential threat to the species, in the hands of futurists and proponents of life-extension such as the technology entrepreneur and popular author Ray Kurzweil (2005) the argument became instead an opportunity; those humans who managed to live long enough would have the possibility of uploading their consciousness, transferring what was effectively their very selves from the “wetware” of the human brain to the presumably near-­infinite new artificial intelligences. Indeed, some singulitarians hold out the prospect that with the growth of computational capacity and nanotechnology, all matter will become thinking matter, transforming the universe itself into a kind of superconsciousness. These thoughts have become the kernel around which numerous conferences, panels, websites, chatrooms, email list-serves, and eventually seminars, organizations, and institutes, have crystalized; these in term have been the medium through which a small community has assembled itself. However, as observed by anthropologist Abou Farman (2010a), this is not a community without divisions or disagreements. Debates about the relative “abruptness” of the singularity, and even its actual possibility, are not uncommon. Even more telling is the fact that the later utopian vision has never quite succeeded in uprooting the initial dread that accompanied the singularity’s earlier formulation. For Farman, this mixture of futures leaves the singularity’s proponents in the affective space of the sublime, suspended between wonder and terror. Given this tonality of this affective state, and the tenor of the overarching speculative meta-history that the singularity’s proponents are putting forward, it makes sense that Farman sees this (possibly pseudo-) science as taking up the sort of existential questions that over the last few hundred years have usually 184

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been ceded to religion (Farman 2010a), an attempt to make “a quasi-transcendent purpose to human toil in the hitherto indifferent universe” (Farman 2010b: 90). At once eschatological and soteriological, the singularity seems akin to a religion in itself—it is no accident that it is sometimes referred to as the “rapture of the nerds.” The point here in the discussion of the singularity is not to claim that this technological romance is in some way a unique marriage of the scientific and the magico-religious, because it is not. Other technologies that have the patina of futurity have been marked by what one is tempted to term ritualistic, magical, or religious thought (see, e.g., Weibel and Swanson 2006, Weibel n.d. on manned space flight) or have been made more explicable by being analytically juxtaposed with religious categories (see, e.g.,Vidal 2007 on robotics, possession, and divination). There are also self-consciously “religious” groups that have replaced the supernatural with the alien in order to create a spiritual narrative that is, at least in their view, more in harmony with a scientific world view (Bataglia 2005), and preexisting religious groups (such as mid-­twentiethcentury liberal Protestants) that have attempted to think through already extant aspects of their religious practice in light of then-new technologies and scientific speculation in order to create a more “modernist” form of religion (Klassen 2007). Even anthropology itself, in both foundational (Pels 2003) and contemporary (E. Turner 2003) stages, has at times entertained the possibility that the supernatural might be a valid ontological as well as cultural-analytic category (though such a position usually involves bridging some rather serious epistemological fault lines). Given all this, it would be hard to say that finding an element of the religious in the technocratic speculation of the “singularity” is unique. Nor is the point to take the narrative of “the return of the religious” and blow it up to the scale of all of human history, with a primordial secularism of Çatalhöyük juxtaposed against a futurist techno-spiritualism, a new animism in which all matter will be made intelligent. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century social science prediction of a growing global secularism, where technology, education, and modernity would see to fulfilling needs that were usually covered by religion, has proven to be spectacularly incorrect, especially when applied to areas other than Western Europe. As this chapter will show, the current historical moment is marked by a proliferation of what we will call the religious. But to see this as part of a large-scale master narrative that could cover all of our species is at best overreaching. Rather, we start with a “secular” Çatalhöyük and the rapture of the nerds to suggest that it is the reluctance to pronounce the former as unproblematically an instance of religion that allows religion to come to the forefront in the latter. The current moment in anthropology, as opposed to world history, is characterized not by the proliferation of religion, but by the erasure of religion as a category; or rather, to be more precise, by an erasure of religion as a category that has concomitantly allowed various forms of religiosity to come into view. Alongside this there has been an uncoupling of religion and ritual which has worked such that the latter has also been enabled to thrive as a concept, even if it loses some of its particular grounding and analytic specificity. The current moment in the anthropology of religion, then, is dominated in a sense by the undoing of religion as a category; this has resulted not in an impasse, but rather in the proliferation of the religious.

Religion erased, ritual uncoupled What does it mean to say that a category such as religion has been put under erasure in anthropology, and how is it that something so fundamental to the history of the discipline can be struck out? The initial step to answering this question is to realize that “religion” is not the first anthropological category of thought to be removed. One of the most recurrent moves made in 185

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the history of the discipline is to either question the validity of a category, or to suggest that the category is a non-essential social artifact that helps create (and, at times, to regulate) the very object that it innocently claims to name. In fact, many of the categories that were foundational to the establishment of anthropology (kinship, totemism, society) have been placed under suspicion, interrogated as to whether they were either projections or constructions of a social science too influenced by its own presumptions and cultural blinders (see, e.g., Latour 2008; Lévi-Strauss 1963; Schneider 1980; Strathern 1990). Given the ubiquity of this type of turn, it should be no surprise that religion has been through the process as well. Despite the repeated insistence that not only was it possible to produce a cross-cultural definition of religion, but that it was essential as well (Spiro 1994), there have been several attempts to unmask any definition with universal pretensions; or, if not producing complete unmaskings, at least attempts to de-essentialize the category by emphasizing, say, the historical contingency of the term or the variegated and disparate nature of what it is that the term has been used historically to signify (Masuzawa 2005; Nongbri 2013; Saler 1987; Saler 2000). By far the most influential of these in the field of anthropology, though, has been authored by Talal Asad. In a series of essays written during the early and mid-1980s, and published collectively as Genealogies of Religion (1993), Asad has argued forcefully that, as historically used in anthropology, religion as an autonomous category was in effect merely a de-theologized variant of post-Reformation Christian thought, and therefore mirrors a historical moment marked by both a transition of disciplinary and policing powers from the Church to the State, and an attempt to postulate a human universalism in the wake of increasing exchange with a plethora of non-European populations. Asad’s signal essay in this department, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” presents what is a proximate critique of a definition of religion offered by Clifford Geertz (1973); the true target of the essay, though, is any attempt to produce an overarching definition of religion. Asad does this by showing that Geertz’s definition assumes the primacy of a special category of religious symbols, which in turn give rise to inner affective states (or in Geertz’s parlance, “moods and motivations”) that lend a sense of reality to overarching religious postulates (what Geertz calls “a general order of existence”[Geertz 1973: 90]). In short, according to Asad, this seemingly innocent causal chain is not one that can be attributed to “religion” writ large, as shown by Asad’s counterexample of medieval Christendom. In the medieval church, it was not individual adherence to a domain of self-evidently religious symbols that was primary, but rather a set of institutional, authorized discourses and disciplines that not only regulated how one interacted with “religious” symbols, but even demarcated what was to be included and excluded from the space of “religion.” Under this dispensation, it was submission to authority, rather than the communicative load delivered by the symbol, which made the religious subject. It was only later, as the Church lost the capacity to define and compel the state and actors in the public arena, that religion became a matter of internal adherence; what occurred was not so much that authorizing discourses on what was to count as religion disappeared, but rather that such discourses fell under the powers of secular authorities who were more concerned with creating an autonomy from religion than an autonomy for religion. Asad’s point is not that this places Geertz’s particular definition under question; others have questioned how well Geertz’s account of religion holds together (for a full review and partial defense of Geertz, see Schilbrack 2005). Instead, Asad’s point is that any definition of religion must include the authorizing discourses and disciplines that parse what is and what is not religion in the case at hand—but since that parsing is always an empirical question, and particular to each circumstance, any definitional fixing in advance is outside of the question. We must therefore eschew talking about religion as any kind of a universality. 186

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Asad’s own particularization of religion has been well received; as just an example, in the Çatalhöyük essays both Keane and Pels invoke Asad in their reluctance to use the term religion, and while Bloch does not invoke Asad by name, his argument against the term seems to share some of the same sensibilities (in a similar spirit, see also Bloch 2008). Asad’s critique certainly was an intervention that resonated with the moment in the discipline when it occurred. The 1980s were a time when earlier anthropological concerns with symbols, social and symbolic structures, and various functionalisms was on the wane, and new interests in power differentials and practice-orientated anti-foundationalisms was on the rise (Ortner 1984); strands of both of these lines of thought were easy to identify in Asad. The same anti-foundationalism that created an interest in practice was more generally leading to a nominalist turn; nominalism is a position “that rejects the existence of abstract objects, of universals, or of both of them altogether” (Bialecki 2012: 302), and in anthropology usually takes the form of a denial of the existence of any large-scale abstract entities such as “culture” or “society” (Bunzl 2008; Rabinow 1988; Zenner 1994). While Asad denied that his view constituted any kind of “simple nominalism” (1994:29)—he affirmed the existence of intangible social forces, even if they were crafted by techno-rational means—his tendency to present religion as being without essence certainly was amenable to a nominalist mode of thought. Though it did not receive as strong a reception as his claims about religion, Asad’s critique also encompassed another classical anthropological concept in a later essay, “Towards a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual” (1993: 55–82). Asad’s observation here is that according to the word’s original, pre-anthropological definition, a rite or ritual meant an instruction book for how to engage in a religious ceremony or services; in short, it directed how one was to engage in a process, but not what meaning might be attributed to the process. Later definitions liberated the word from its specifically Christian context (rites and ritual referring originally to Christian religious manuals) by expanding what was indicated from the instructions for how to perform such practices, to now include the practices themselves.The shift from book to performance did not mean that ritual lost its referential edge; rather, the rituals themselves were taken to be representational, to mean something that had to be interpreted by the anthropologist. Asad traces this shift to a larger change in the Western conception of the person, from an earlier medieval understanding where a virtue was achieved by the outward imitation of its signs, to the reversal of that template in the early modern era, so that one’s outward signs were indices, and not the causes, of individual character, and one had to learn to read them to understand others (or simulate them yourself, if you wished to dissemble). It was this particularized, post-Reformation Christian logic that anthropology had adopted in its insistence that there was something legible in the ritual. The logic implicit in other configurations of ritual had been bypassed by the discipline, such as the medieval one where ritual (to be anachronistic) served as a kind of moral training and pedagogy, where adherence rather than an underlying meaning was what was important. This aspect of Asad’s work has not had the same effect as his writing on the category of religion, and there is some reason to think that he did not wish it to have—Asad notes that his project was more along the lines of “a historical inquiry into the conditions that makes ritual in its contemporary sense visible to and theorizable by modern anthropology” than he was in in attempting to “criticize anthropological theories of ritual” (1994: 55). Again, though, Asad’s contribution was still a timely one, running roughly thematically parallel to other work. As already noted, theories predicated on direct action in the world, such as practice theory, were increasingly becoming salient in anthropology. Most notable in this was the work of Catherine Bell, who emphasized moments of practice that consisted of “ritualization,” and questioned whether “ritual” as an abstract category was even capable of being given an internally coherent, commonly acceptable definition (Bell 1992). Bell’s concern with ritual as a form of practice 187

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was concurrent with an interest in the experience generated by and implicit to ritual that was also coming to the fore (see, for instance, Jackson 1983; Csordas 1990, 1997a, 1997b); and Bell’s questioning of the boundaries of ritual was joined by linguistic anthropology, which thought of ritual as being a degree of emergent formalization rather than an autonomous entity (see, e.g., Goffman 1967; Silverstein 2004). Even in those cases where the concept of ritual has not been placed as much in question, some of the more basic associations with “ritual” have been argued against: The idea of ritual as having a particular relationship, either at the level of the imaginary or the actual-historical, with something called “tradition” or “custom” has been argued as unnecessary, if not ideological (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993).The idea that ritual’s effectiveness lies in setting up a separate sacred spatio-temporal sphere and linguistic practice that stands in opposition to the quotidian has been criticized as well; under this reading, it is not so much that ritual is set-apart from the everyday, as much as ritual provides training for how to comport oneself in the everyday (Mahmood 2001, 2005). Given this tendency to see ritual as not customary, as not set-apart, and as measured in incremental increases instead of binary absence-or-presence, it should not be surprising that ritual has been emancipated from religion almost completely, and people can speak of “ritual” when discussing any densely patterned semiotic activity (Basso and Senft 2009); it is even now possible to speak of ritual merely as recursive patterning, apart from context or representation entirely (see Handelman and Lindquist 2005, and especially Handelman 2005).3 One might imagine that these various critiques of the idea of “religion” and “ritual,” exemplified in this essay by Asad, would be crippling to the anthropology of religion. After all, what can be more devastating than to discover that one has been studying an object that may not exist, such as the aether or phlogiston? However, as Joel Robbins has observed, the kind of “object-dissolving critiques” that have been launched against both religion and ritual often “lead to an efflorescence of creative work focused on the very object they would banish,” especially when addressing a field that already has been the object of a great deal of attention (Robbins 2003: 193). That certainly has been the case with the fields of religion and ritual. As Simon Coleman has noted, as a subdiscipline the anthropology of religion is thriving (Coleman 2010: 103); the health of the anthropology of religion as a topic is also vouchsafed by the fact that in recent years other religion-concerned social-science disciplines are increasingly turning to ethnography, the methodological approach that is almost synonymous with anthropology (Bender 2011). As for ritual, emancipated from religion or not, it is as hale as it has ever been, with thousands of articles and book chapters published on the subject over the last 20 years, and on average about one article per issue on ritual appearing in American Anthropologist and Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Stasch 2011: 160). Even sacrifice, the form of ritual that has suffered the most from accusations that it is a Eurocentric, Christian-derived projection, is receiving renewed ethnographic attention (Mayblin and Course 2013). Knowing that ritual and religion is thriving, though, does not tell us how it is thriving, nor does it tell us in what way this was either a fruit of, or a rebuttal to, the broad critiques offered of ritual and religion by Asad and others. Nor does it address another, related question: what are we to make of work done prior to the de-essentialization of religion and the uncoupling of ritual? Unless one believes without doubt in a triumphalist version of the intellectual history of the discipline, it would stand to reason that whatever merits there are in the critiques of religion and ritual that came out in the eighties and nineties, there must be aspects of prior thought on religion and ritual that would have a use for us now that would exceed the mere historical or genealogical. For the remainder of this essay, we shall turn to these questions, dealing first with the possibilities opened up, and then with the question of what is to be made of prior material in the current day. 188

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“Religion” after religion, “ritual” after ritual The first thing to observe is that this crossing-out of any definition of religion has meant not that people have stopped interrogating religion, but that they have begun to take on religion from different angles. Specifically, to take on religion from angles other than as a kind of belief. As Asad noted in his critique, in the modern West religion has been thought of most often in terms of belief; in anthropology this probably goes back to the famous definition of religion as the “belief in Spiritual Beings” put forward by the Victorian Anthropologist Edward Tylor (1874: 424). Prior to the current moment, of course, the primacy of belief had been questioned by some anthropologists as analytically incoherent, as incapable of evidentiary support, as historically variable, and/or as not a universal category (Needham 1973; Ruel 1982), but these were often lonely voices in the anthropological discussion. Contrast that with the contemporary moment, where a major special issue of a well-received anthropological journal can collect a full set of authors to take up the argument that belief is something that is best written “against” rather than “with” (Lindquist and Coleman 2008). Even those who wish to foreground “belief ” in their ethnographic description and analysis of their informants are at pains to note how this category functions differently than the forms of “belief ” borrowed from Latin Christendom, and taken as a default in an earlier anthropological dispensation (see, e.g., Kirsch 2004). If anthropology is “against” belief, can one ask what it is “for”? The answer is bodies, pedagogies, power, ethics, media, and language. In one sense, though, it is the body that is first, at least conceptually, for all these categories in the contemporary moment—even for that of language. This interest in bodies could be seen as in part a result of the already mentioned nominalism in the field. Another catalyst of this turn to the body is an earlier generation of feminist critique of anthropology, which has given birth to a greater attention to the dynamics of gender; the ethnography of religion has found that paying attention to the way that gender is inscribed on religious bodies is a particularly fruitful way of thinking through this question (see Boddy 1989; Austen-Broos 1997). Just as important is the already-noted interest in phenomenological accounts of religion; if one is denying the primacy of beliefs, then both the experiential and the engine of the experiential—the body’s interactions with and embedding in the world— becomes the obvious site of inquiry. Related to this has been an interest in affect, a word used to indicate culturally conditioned, embodied states; affect is similar to emotion, but most people working in affect decline to use the word emotion, because they wish to emphasize the communal, intersubjective, kinesthetic, and circulating nature of this experience, which is imagined as a sort of subliminal prior moment occurring before the kind of individual psychologizing that is associated with the word emotion (see for instance Bialecki 2010; O’Neill 2013; Richards and Rudnkyj 2009; Rudnkyj 2011). For those interested in affect, it is the forms of subjectification that these quickly moving states produce that are of interest. An interest in bodies and their related subjectivities (phenomenological, gendered, or affective) is often allied with another concern for the anthropology of religion: power. This is much more along the lines of a change in the mode through which an anthropology of religion expressed its concern for power, than it was the inauguration of a concern for power, since an eye for how religion can be used to promote, regulate, or inaugurate social regimes goes back to the founding moments of the discipline. The point is illustrated by the work of Durkheim, for whom religion and ritual was the trans-human aspect of the social, concretized in the force of the sacred; a similar concern for religion as a legitimating and regulating force in social life can be seen in the works of structural functionalist such as Radcliffe-Brown (1922, 1957). Structural functionalism was a view of religion that, while conservative to the extent that it envisioned religion as sustaining a preexisting social order, was relatively benign (or at least as benign as 189

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the social order it was upholding in any particular case). Not all anthropological conceptions of religion saw it as so innocent. In the earlier works of Maurice Bloch, there was a turn to framing religion and its constitutive rituals as a form of ideology, in as much as they functioned as a block to thought and argumentation; for him, the fixity in religious and ritual thought gave ritual and religion a cognitive poverty that made it the ideal engine of traditional authority (Bloch 1974). What stands apart in the current moment, then, is not this interest in religion as a modality of sociality-shaping power, but in how this power is imagined to function, and the suspicion with which it is treated. An example is in the marriage of religion as ideology to a more overtly late Marxian account of colonial theory and the state in the works of John and Jean Comaroff, who (building on the work of Max Gluckman) specialize in the relationship between economy, statecraft, and religion in Africa (Comaroff 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1997). The resonance with the contemporary moment in the anthropology of religion lies in how they concern themselves with how capital flows and colonialism work, through the guise of religion, on the body, shaping it in furtherance of a particular political-economic regime. This interest in the body as a site where religion does formative work to make pliant subjects is often articulated using the language of the French intellectual historian, Michel Foucault (who was, unsurprisingly, an inspiration for Asad as well). In the anthropology of religion, Foucault-influenced accounts of religion as a disciplinary exercise usually focus on religion as an institutional authority that individuals submit themselves to, and which they are in turn crafted by; accounts organized by this logic can be found addressing such diverse entities as New York Hasidic girls schools (Fader 2009), Neo-Pentecostal megachurches (O’Neill 2010), and Islamic-themed worker-productivity and self-development training seminars in Indonesia (Rudnyckyj 2010). The focus in this type of analysis is on how the techniques that are deployed in these sites make subjects who are agreeable with the demands placed on them by the larger institutions that they are embedded in; authors see this formative work as a kind of power separate and apart from other means of effectivity, such as outright coercion or violence. Other Foucauldian-­ influenced works frame the question slightly askance, asking rather how it is that people take techniques that are found in their religious milieus, and use these techniques to reform their own selves in ways that they aspire to. Following Foucualt’s usage in his later work (1986a, 1986b, 1997), this attempt to make oneself into a vision of the good through a series of reflexive exercises on the self is seen as a form of ethics. Accounts of Islamic (Hirschkind 2006; Mahmood 2005) and Christian (Faubion 2001; Robbins 2004; Zigon 2010) prayer, devotion, and penitential practices have proven quite agreeable to an articulation that emphasizes the subject’s role in her own self-fashioning; beyond monotheism, this line of thought has also shown itself amenable to accounts of religions centered around ascetic practices, such as Jainism (Laidlaw 1995), and to spiritual practices oriented around ritualistic forms of spirit possession in Madagascar (Lambek 2002; see generally Faubion 2011; Laidlaw 2013; Lambek 2010). Not unrelated to this take on anthropology of religion as an anthropology of ethics is a parallel interest in the pedagogy of religion (see, e.g., Berliner and Sarró 2007; Brahinsky 2013; Fader 2009; Lester 2005; Reinhardt 2014). Oftentimes the anthropology of religious pedagogy, rather than focusing on how institutions form certain subjects, or how subjects learn to remake themselves into the sort of ethical person they yearn to be, takes instead as its focus how it is that religious practitioners learn to sense the world around them as being filled with the kind of supernatural agents that stand as the central of many forms of religion. Of particular note here is the work of Tanya Luhrmann, who has documented how both middle-class English pagan witches (1991) and American Neo-Charismatics (2004, 2007, 2012) learn to train their senses, increase their imaginative capacities, and reconfigure their evidentiary standards in such a way that personal 190

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encounters with ancient Gods on one hand, or the Holy Spirit on another, have a patina of both plausibility and realism that they otherwise might lack. The idea of a pedagogy suggests, of course, a prior uneducated state; extending our focus more to our overarching theme, the notion that there is no universal definition of what we call religion, and hence no “essence” to it, suggests as well that what we call religion is contingent, and subject to change. If “religion” has no center, then transformations, sometimes of a radical nature, should be expected. Sometimes this change is at the level of the individual, or of small collectives. Amira Mittermaier’s Dreams That Matter (2011), for instance, has documented how practices of Islamic dream interpretation in Cairo leave adherents open to a divine alterity; depending on the way that nocturnal visions interact with interpretive hermeneutics derived from sources such as Sufi dream manuals and Freudian psychoanalysis, lives can be redirected in ways that might not comport with the received stereotype of reformist Islam. More often, though, this interest in the possibility of religious transformation has been turned to larger-scale institutions. For this reason the anthropology of religion has been very much an anthropology of cultural and social change as well—or at least in its best moments it aspires to be. Part of this has taken the form of an interest in religious “becomings,” religion not as a state, but as an aspiration that people struggle to achieve—and often fall short of (Elisha 2011; Khan 2012). A similar interest in religious change has led some anthropologists to revisit the old issue of syncretism, a topic which goes back to both nineteenth-century diffusionist theories of anthropology as well as early Boasian anthropologists of creole cultures such as Melville Herskovits. This new interest in the syncretic can be differentiated from the earlier literature by the careful way it attends not only to when various forms of religiosity choose to highlight or deny any constitutive heterogeneity in their origins, but also in asking when such internal heterogeneity is something that anthropologists have to be mindful of at the level of theoretical analysis as well as ethnographic description (Hoskins 2013); at the same time, it has led several of these same scholars to consider with a degree of suspicion the fact that syncretism itself, by suggesting a practice that can be identified as “mixed,” is a backdoor way of suggesting a form of essentialism in religious practice, albeit an essentialism where that essence is always located at some other, prior scene (see generally Stewart and Shaw 1994). Such concerns with backdoor essentialism have led anthropologists such as Joel Robbins (2007) to emphasize the importance of rupture in moments of religious change, and particularly in moments of conversion. Such a stress on discontinuity is necessary because despite the theoretical waning of conceptions of religion as somehow autonomous, there is a countervailing tendency to see new religious practices as continuations of previous religious practices under a different name, especially if the new religious practice is drawn from a “world religion.” This has been a particular problem in the ethnography of recently Christian populations, Robbins has argued, owing in part to the unconscious assumption that Christian practice is too much like the forms of religiosity found in the North American/European metropole to be of interest ethnographically. This situation, according to Robbins, has caused some anthropologists to underemphasize not only the historical fact of rupture, but also an internal logic of rupture common to many Christian religious imaginaries. Robbins’s claim has been challenged, at least as far as Melanesian ethnography goes, by Mark Mosko (2010), who has claimed that a common Melanesian conception of partible personhood, often referring to “dividuals” (Strathern 1990), can be found in post-conversion Melanesian Christian practices; Liana Chua (2012), drawing on fieldwork with Bidayhu Dayak Christians in Borneo, has also argued that Christian forms may in some circumstances create narratives centered around claims of cultural continuity rather than sharp breaks (also see Scott 2005; for a full review of this controversy, see Bialecki 2015 and Bialecki and Daswani 2015). Maya Mayblin’s (2010) work on Catholic peasants in Brazil 191

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also suggests a different economy of rupture and continuity, and of religious adherence and religious disavowal, as does the literature on Orthodox Christianity (see Boylston 2013; Hann and Goltz 2010). Despite these challenges and exceptions, there have been many anthropologists of religion who have taken up conversion and temporality as a problem, focusing in large part on the new forms of sociality and understanding that come both during and in the wake of religious change (see, e.g., Engelke 2004; Hefner 1993; Meyer 1999; Robbins 2004;Vilaça 2016) or intensification (Webster 2013; on Christianity and anthropology generally see Bialecki, Haynes and Robbins 2008).4 The possibility of change also suggests the possibility of absence (even though at some abstract level it is hard to articulate in a language of the universal what it would mean to have an absence of something that has no essence through which it could be identified). This point is addressed mostly by the anthropology of religion not through religion’s removal, but through secularism—that is moments where religion has been scaled back from social prominence and lost its taken-for-granted nature. While numerous non-anthropological thinkers from philosophy, political science, and sociology have considerable influence in anthropological discussions on the nature, history, and extent of secularism (see, e.g., Casanova 1994; Connolly 1999; Martin 2005; Taylor 2007), the leading anthropological voice on this topic is again Talal Asad (2003), who has insisted on secularism not as the overcoming of religion or the sacred, nor as religion’s anti-type, but merely as a divergent historical trajectory, albeit one that has been influential on the global stage owing to its historical co-mingling with other important global forces such as the nation-state and capitalism. This attention to secularism and secularization not as fate but as contingent, socio-cultural formations has allowed for ethnographic accounts of the contents and clashes between local “secularizing” forces and religious ones, both within and outside of Europe (Bowen 2008; Engelke 2009, 2011, 2013; Mahmood 2005; Navaro-Yashin 2002; see generally Cannell 2010). Taken in concert, these trends in anthropology sketch a variegated landscape, a global patchwork where various forms of religiosity are being transmitted to (or at times, seized by) convert cultures, while at the same time diverse secular logics struggle to carefully demarcate the role played by these religions in an often newly emergent “public sphere.” This has led to a series of complex religious identities, unlikely importations of spiritual practices, and dispersed personal and institutional networks consisting of nodes that are often as marked by a similarity in, say, doxa or practice, but which still results in wild divergence owing to the differing contexts in which they are played out (see, e.g., Coleman 2000; Coleman and Collins 2004; Csordas 2009). The scale and breadth of this new religious landscape have also called for a revisitation of older anthropology of religion objects such as pilgrimage. The new interest in pilgrimage differs in that it focuses not so much on the site of pilgrimage as a sacred space apart from the quotidian, as had been done in the past (Turner and Turner 1995), but rather as nodes in flows of people, flows that are very much embedded in day-to-day social and cultural arenas (Coleman and Eade 2004; Kaell 2010, 2012a, 2012b, 2014).This denaturing of an older anthropological sharp divide between the sacred and the secular has also meant a blurring of boundaries between pilgrimage and other modes of travel that are typically understood as secular, and not “religious” or “cosmological” in nature, bringing out the spiritual often lying hidden in tourism and the consumption often present in pilgrimage (Badone and Roseman 2004). The more complex and dispersed religious geographies implicit in discussions of globalization and pilgrimage also raise the question of communication within and between various religiously inflected social spaces. Influenced in large part by latter observations made by the French Philosopher Jacques Derrida (1996) and by a prominent interdisciplinary collection of essays edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (2001), this discussion has led to a movement that 192

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has focused on the particular manner with which the materiality of religious objects engender particular forms of religiosity; examples here might be the way that the portability, ease of copying, and sonority of mosque sermons have played a role in the Islamization of Cairo (Hirshkind 2006), or the effect of Nollywood-style made-for-video productions have had in shaping what might be called a Ghanaian public sphere that is informed by a Pentecostal visual vocabulary of the miraculous (Meyer 2006). Irrevocably bound to sensation and the aesthetic (Meyer 2008), mediatization is religion to many who follow this line of thought (see Engelke 2010), a spectacular play of simultaneous presence and absence which cannot but help index else-wheres owing to their representational nature. This claim mirrors a parallel one made regarding religion and language. Anthropologists of religion (and particularly anthropologists of Christianity—see Bialecki and Hoenes 2011) have gone as far as to see the acquisition of religious language as effectively leading to religious conversion (Harding 1987), and to understanding the internal aesthetics of religiously inflected language as being constitutive of religious thought (Crapanzano 2000; Robbins 2001; Scheifflin 2002, 2007;Tomlinson 2009).The logic behind many of these claims (when they are not simply relying on the impressive ordering power of language per se) is that religious language, in dealing with the particular problem of communication with invisible and silent divine others, plays with what might be thought of as the Janus face of language. In this double-sided conception of religious language, the immaterial aspect of spoken communication is implied by both the private thoughts and transient sounds that it produces, which plays against the materiality of the physical substrate, bodies and things, necessary to sustain this immateriality. This leads to numerous choices for the religious practitioner: The question for those who prefer to think of the divine as by nature corporeal and co-present, then, is how to give religious “mere words” a sense of material force in the here and now. For those who frame the divine as intangible, the problem is how to engage in modes of speech that keep this necessary physicality as far from consciousness as possible. Concomitant with these decisions is the question of where to situate agency: In the human who speaks? In the divinity who may have originally fashioned the words? In the material items used to bridge the human-divine divide (see Keane 1997a, 1997b, 2007)? These decisions regarding which aspects of communication to privilege and which to deny, where agency lies and where it does not, coalesce to form collective normative judgments about how communication works. These judgments are called “semiotic ideologies” (after the linguistic-­anthropology concept of “language ideology”—see Woolard 1997) in the anthropological literature; and the idea of “language ideology” has been successful not only in working out the contours of Christian-Eastern Indonesian contact situations, where the term was first fashioned by Webb Keane, but also in forms of Christianity that reject the Bible as being too material for a supposedly spiritual religion (Engelke 2007). Beyond Christianity, the concept has been used to think through Islamic responses to the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed (Mahmood 2009) and to chart changes in Tibetan religion, politics, and gender (Makley 2007).

Conclusion: making peace between “religion” and religion If the idea of a “semiotic ideology” is familiar, it is because this is not the first time that we have encountered it; it was a similar play of presence and absence, although then suggesting a concern with alternatively foregrounding and occulting particular aspects of Neolithic life, that Webb Keane also identified in his discussion of Çatalhöyük. But recall as well that this play was not to be considered by Keane to be “religion.” As previously stated, to consider Çatalhöyük to be “religious” was ahistorical. Asad has shown us that religion is an idea with a particular pedigree. But the problem with using the term “religion” goes beyond this, as we can also see that the 193

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idea of some aspects and objects of speech being stressed at the expense of others is not anything particular to religion. Keane would say that we moderns, in stressing our own agency, sincerity, and spontaneity in speech, engage in similar obfuscation and emphasis as well, and if there is one thing that is certain about the moment called modernity, it is that it is one in which there is always at least a possibility of leaving religion by the wayside. Religion and areligion are but different modes of presentation and concealment, similar processes working to different ends, with different intensities. But this is not particular to the analytic category of religion alone. Similar things can be said of ritual as well—recall from our previous discussion that if there is no hard and fast line between ritual and non-ritual, but increasing layers of repetition, complexity, and formality that are measured in increasing qualitative intensities, as we saw in our discussion of ritual, then the figure of ritual is implicit in any action or event that can be said to in some way be patterned. But this also, in an odd way, brings us back to our other opening case, that of the singularity. If plays of presence and absence, emphasis and disavowal are present in any semiotic system, it is the way that they play out in realms not conventionally thought of as “religious” that allows us to see a certain background “religiosity” even in these near-future technological imaginings. In his account of the productive engine behind religion and morality, the nineteenth-century philosopher Henri Bergson claimed that it was a very similar play of presences and absences, tied to a concomitant dialectic of openness and closure, that allowed humans to engage in the what he called “the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods” (Bergson 1935: 275; compare Bialecki 2011); if this is not a literal description of the dreams of singulitarians, attempting to open themselves to potential new ways of being in the world, then what is? But we should note the following as well. Remember it was the erasure of religion as a category that allowed us to dissolve the border between “religion” and “technology,” and allowed us to see the religious aspects of the singulitarian moment in a technological/scientific community without subsuming it; however, this meant that religion still thrived underneath the ban. That is, we could only recognize singularity as religious because, despite the anti-essentialist work done by Asad, we still had an idea of religion, even though we do not have the category. This spectral continuity of the religious suggests that there are three futures to the anthropology of religion. First, we could continue to root out the idea of religion; this is something that is being done more and more in anthropology today, though owing to the sub rosa nature of this move, it is not easy to see the fruit of this work. (How does one identify a true, that is, a completely unmarked, absence?) This is taking Asad’s critique further than Asad perhaps intended—rather than removing a set of socio-culturally fashioned blinders, we are trading then for another, a hard functionalism that does not reduce religion to the social work it does, but obliterates it entirely from the record.The second option is a retrograde one, to acknowledge the inevitability of our thinking religion, and returning to essentialist framings of it—something, for instance, we see in the cognitive sciences.5 This also seems to be a mistake, an attempt to rebut Asad by ignoring him. The third option is to attempt to revisit the vast wealth of thought on religion crafted from previous dispensations of anthropology, but from the standpoint that sees them as numerous directions, as different “lines of flight,” as various discussions of particular manifestations of religious imaginaries. Here, both the thought of anthropologists of religion, and those practices where anthropologist can sense a religiosity, might be seen as various solutions to some underlying problematic, one that may bear little resemblance to all the differential solutions that in engenders (Bialecki 2012; Deleuze 1994). True, this material would sometimes be best thought of as concerning the societies that were documented, and sometimes as unconscious fictions of the anthropologists themselves, but nonetheless they would all be human imaginings, 194

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and therefore they would fall under the anthropological mandate. Given that many of the nominalist readings made of realist anthropologies during the 1980s and 1990s essentially ignored much of the pliability present in the earlier works they were critiquing (see Brightman 1995), we may find that, as in the cases of secular Çatalhöyük and a futurist quasi-religious singularity, our presumptive temporal indexes are all mixed up. These previous generations of scholars may perhaps therefore be more our contemporaries and our futures then we imagine—but that is another essay, regarding at once an anthropology that was past and may be future.

Notes 1 It should be noted that the one anthropologist who would use the term religion without being self-conscious was not a cultural anthropologist, but rather orientated toward a cognitive science approach (Whitehouse and Hodder 2010). Predicated for the most part on assumption that the biological commonality of the human species is determining in the last instance, cognitive anthropologists such as Whitehouse (1995, 2004) and Boyer (1994, 2002) have taken a decidedly different tack from socio-cultural anthropology (for more, see Dulin 2011). 2 Though, as the philosopher David Chalmers has observed, the idea of humans being outstripped by their technological progeny has a long, and somewhat academically neglected, intellectual pre-history (Bostrom 2005; Chalmers 2010). 3 This conception of ritual as a recursive complex patterning, though, has had the unexpected result of allowing for discussions of “ritual” among groups, such as Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians, that deny that they engage in ritual, and see ritual as in fact opposed to their forms of religious practice; see Lindhardt 2011. 4 Though published too late to be fully taken account of in this particular essay, Matt Tomlinson’s (2014) recent article on Christian time in Fiji as an impossible, compulsive repetition promises to further expand this particular conversation. 5 See footnote one.

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Jon Bialecki Kaell, H. (2012b) “Of Gifts and Grandchildren: American Holy Land Souvenirs.” Journal of Material Culture 17(2):133–151. Kaell, H. (2014) Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christians and Holy Land Pilgrims. New York, New York University. Keane, W. (1997a) “Religious Language.” Annual Review of Anthropology 26:47–71. Keane, W. (1997b) Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Keane, W. (2007) Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, Berkeley, University of California Press. Keane, W. (2010) “Marked, Absent, Habitual,” in I. Hodder (ed.) Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Khan, N. (2012) Muslim Becoming: Aspiration and Skepticism in Pakistan. Durham, Duke University Press. Kirsch, T. (2004) “Restaging the Will to Believe: Religious Pluralism, Anti-Syncretism, and the Problem of Belief.” American Anthropologist 106(4):699–709. Klassen, P. (2007) “Radio Minds: Protestant Experimentalists on the Forefront of Healing.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 75(3):651–683. Kurzweil, R. (2005) The Singularity Is Near:When Humans Transcend Biology, New York, Penguin. Laidlaw, J. (1995) Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, Oxford, Clarendon Press. Laidlaw, J. (2013) The Subject of Virtue: An Anthropology of Ethics and Freedom, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Lambek, M. (2002) The Weight of the Past: Living with History in Mahajanga, Madagascar, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Lambek, M. (ed.) (2010) Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action. New York, Fordham University Press. Latour, B. (2008) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Lesster, R. (2005) Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent, Berkeley, University of California Press. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963) Totemism, New York, Beacon. Lindhardt, M. (ed.) (2011) Practicing the Faith: The Ritual Life of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christians, Oxford, Berghahn Press. Lindquist, G. and Coleman, S. (2008) “Introduction: Against Belief.” Social Analysis 52(1):1–18. Luhrmann, T. M. (1991) Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, Harvard, Harvard University Press. Luhrmann, T. M. (2004) Metakinesis: How God Becomes Intimate in Contemporary U.S. Christianity, American Anthropologist 106(3):518–528. Luhrmann, T. M. (2007) “How Do You Learn to Know That It Is God Who Speaks?” in D. Berliner and R. Sarró (eds.) (2007) Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches, Oxford, Berghahn. Luhrmann, T. M. (2012) Hearing God: An Anthropological Account of the Way God Becomes Real for American Evangelical Christians, New York, Knopf. Mahmood, M. (2001) “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual: Disciplines of Salāt.” American Anthropologist 28(4):827–853. Mahmood, M. (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Mahmood, M. (2009) “Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide?” Critical Inquiry 35(4):836–862. Makley, C. (2007) The Violence of Liberation: Gender and Tibetan Buddhist Revival in Post-Mao China, Berkeley, University of California Press. Martin, D. (2005) On Secularization:Towards a Revised Theory, Aldershot, Ashgate. Masuzawa, T. (2005) The Invention of World Religions, or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Mayblin, M. (2010) Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives, New York, Palgrave Macmillan. Mayblin, M. and M. Course. (2013) “The Other Side of Sacrifice Introduction.” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. (Electronic Preprint:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2013.841720). Meyer, B. (1999) Translating the Devil, Trenton, Africa World Press.

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“Religion” after religion, “ritual” after ritual Meyer, B. (2006) “Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism,Vision, and Video Technology in Ghana,” in B. Meyer and A. Moors, Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Meyer, B. (2008) “Religious Sensations: Why Media, Aesthetics, and Power Matter in the Contemporary Study of Religion,” in H. de Vries (ed.) Religion: Beyond a Concept, New York, Fordham University Press. Mittermaier, A. (2011) Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination, Berkeley, University of California Press. Mosko, M. (2010) “Partible Penitents: Dividual Personhood and Christian Practice in Melanesia and the West.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16(2):215–240. Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2002) Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Needham, R. (1973) Belief, Language, and Experience, London, Blackwell. Nongbri, B. (2013) Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept, New Haven, Yale University Press. O’Neill, K. (2010) City of God: Christian Citizenship in Postwar Guatemala, Berkeley, University of California Press. O’Neill, K. (2013) “Beyond Broken: Affective Spaces and the Study of American Religion.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion. (Preprint: doi:10.1093/jaarel/lft059). Ortner, S. (1984) “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26(1):126–166. Pels, P. (2003) “Spirits of Modernity: Alfred Wallace, Edward Tylor, and the Visual Politics of Fact,” in B. Meyer and P. Pels (eds.) Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Pels, P. (2010) “Temporalities of ‘Religion’ at Çatalhöyük,” in I. Hodder (ed.) Religion in the Emergence of Civilization: Çatalhöyük as a Case Study, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Rabinow, P. (1988) Beyond Ethnography:Anthropology as Nominalism. Cultural Anthropology 3(4):355–364. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1922) The Adaman Islanders, Cambridge, Cambridge University. Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1957) “Religion and Society,” in A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Structure and Function in Primitive Society, Glencoe, IL, Free Press. Reinhardt, B. (2014). “Soaking in tapes: the haptic voice of global Pentecostal pedagogy in Ghana.” ­Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(2):315–336. Richards, A. and D. Rudnkyj (2009) “Economies of Affect.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(1):55–77. Robbins, J. (2001) “God Is Nothing but Talk: Modernity, Language and Prayer in a Papua New Guinea Society.” American Anthropologist 103(4):901–912. Robbins, J. (2003) “What Is a Christian? Notes toward an Anthropology of Christianity.” Religion 33(3):191–199. Robbins, J. (2004) Becoming Sinners: Christianity and Moral Torment in a Papua New Guinea Society, Berkeley, University of California Press. Robbins, J. (2007) “Continuity Thinking and the Problem of Christian Culture: Belief, Time, and the Anthropology of Christianity.” Current Anthropology 48(1):5–38. Rudnyckyj, D. (2010) Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Rudnyckyj, D. (2011). “Circulating Tears and Managing Hearts: Governing through Affect in an Indonesian Steel Factory. Anthropological Theory 11(1):63–87. Ruel, M. (1982) “Christians as Believers,” in John Davis (ed.) Religious Organization and Religious Experience, London, Academic Press. Saler, B. (1987) “Religio and the Definition of Religion.” Cultural Anthropology 2(3):395–399. Saler, B. (2000) Conceptualizing Religion: Immanent Anthropologists,Transcendent Natives, and Unbounded Categories, Oxford, Berghahn Books. Scheifflin, B. (2002) “Marking Time: The Dichotomizing Discourse of Multiple Temporalities.” Current Anthropology 43(S):5–17. Scheifflin, B. (2007) “Found in Translating: Reflexive Language Across Time and Texts in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” in M. Makihara and B. Schieffelin (eds.) Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Schilbrack, K. (2005) “Religion, Models of, and Reality: Are We Through with Geertz?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73(2):429–452. Schneider, D. (1980) American Kinship: A Cultural Account, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

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11 LANGUAGE, GENDEr, AND DESIrE IN PErfOrMANcE Peter C. Haney

Introduction July 20, 2000, was a Thursday, often a slow night for entertainment. But at Chamizal in Los Angeles, a sizable audience of male-female couples, groups of friends, and even a family celebrating a child’s birthday had turned out and stayed late for the floorshow. As a female impersonator who had just finished a bawdy send-up of the singer Paquita la del Barrio glided off the dance floor, the master of ceremonies introduced the next artista (“performer”) as “la más jota—digo la mascota de cuanto cuesta el show. BETO” (“The biggest faggot—I mean the mascot of the show … BETO”). As “Beto el Chistólogo” (“Beto the Jokologist”) entered from a narrow hall that led to restrooms and the kitchen, he threw his head back, opened his mouth wide, filled his lungs with air, and called out in a voice that could be heard at the restaurant’s farthest end. Example 1 .hhh A ver el aplauso el aplauso: fuerte: (.hhh All right let’s have a bi:g ha:nd) ((The band plays music. Scattered applause.)) Ay pinche voz de macho que me sale ¿ve’da’? ((laughs)) (Ay damned macho voice that comes out of me, right?)1 With these two off-the-cuff sentences, Beto highlighted a paradox that would animate his routine. Having gotten the audience’s attention with a strong, throaty call for applause, he switched to a softer, ironic tone and distanced himself from the “macho voice” of his first sentence. But while the referential contents of his statements set up a strict correspondence between speech style, gender, and sexual identity (i.e. ‘jotos like me don’t talk this way’), the pragmatic fact of his juxtaposing the two vocal styles implied the opposite conclusion. In other words, Beto introduced himself to his audience by simultaneously reinforcing and undermining stereotypes of “masculine” and joto (roughly “feminine gay male”) speech and by pushing the boundaries of the ideology of respeto that defines “a responsible sense of self and others” among ethnic Mexicans (Limón 1994: 110). This sort of metalinguistic reflection places Beto’s routine at the center of contemporary debates about the relationship between language and social identity. By some accounts the 201

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study of this relationship is the very stuff of linguistic anthropology itself (Bucholtz & Hall 2004a: 369). In recent years, however, the discipline’s presumed identity with the topic has come under scrutiny. In a series of critiques of the literature on gay and lesbian language, Don Kulick and Deborah Cameron have challenged what they see as that literature’s “unhappy fixation on identity” and called for new focus on the operation of desire and repression in language (Kulick 2000: 272). Although focused on the study of verbal behavior among bearers of policed sexualities and gender identities, the criticisms have broader implications and have generated responses that address not only sexual identity but also social identity quite generally. Indeed, the irony of Kulick’s challenge is that fourteen years later, it appears to have generated more theoretical refinements and innovations in the study of the linguistic dimensions of identity than it has in studies of language and desire. Identity keeps returning in the literature despite efforts to move beyond it. This chapter offers an ethnographic example that addresses the concerns of the original challenge while acknowledging the continued salience of social identity. A close examination of Beto’s routine as realized across several different performances supports Kira Hall’s important, if perhaps un-sexy, point that sexual identity and sexual desire must be seen as “mutually dependent intertextual productions” (2005: 127). It also demonstrates the usefulness of some Kulick’s objections to the ways in which linguistic anthropologists’ have applied selective interpretations of the philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of performativity (1990) to the study of something called “gay and lesbian language.”

Language, identity, desire In its original sense, of course, identity means sameness (“A=A”). In the case of social identity, the term typically refers to the processes by which individuals come to perceive and act upon relations of sameness and difference among themselves based on membership in broad social categories. In recent reviews and programmatic statements about the role of language in these processes, linguistic anthropologists have defined social identity in the following ways: … the linguistic construction of membership in one or more social groups or categories. (Kroskrity 1999: 111) … the active negotiation of an individual’s relationship with larger social constructs, in so far as this negotiation is signaled through language and other semiotic means. Identity, then, is neither attribute nor possession, but an individual and collective-level process of semiosis. (Mendoza-Denton 2002: 475) … an outcome of cultural semiotics that is accomplished through the production of contextually relevant sociopolitical relations of similarity and difference, authenticity and inauthenticity, and legitimacy and illegitimacy. (Bucholtz & Hall, 2004a: 382) All of the authors cited above emphasize identification as a dynamic, fluid, and unpredictable social process over identity as a fixed attribute or given social fact (Hall 1989: 15; Kulick 2013: 80). In the latter two definitions, a tension emerges between the authors’ desire to highlight the active and agentive nature of social identity-as-process and their use of the passive voice, which suggests that the process operates independently of the will of any individual. All of these definitions are grappling with the essentialist legacy of Romantic nationalism and its linkage of language, ethnic identity, and worldview. They also seek to move beyond quantitative variationist approaches, in which researchers sort linguistic variables according to the social identities of speakers and draw 202

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conclusions about the distribution of those variables based on the categories used for sorting. Finally, they seek to complicate the assumptions behind studies of miscommunication, which have traditionally understood identities to be stable attributes that impede communication across lines of difference. Of course, early students of miscommunication acknowledged that the social categories they believed to be interactively important were partly “communicatively produced” attributes rather than constants to be taken for granted (Gumperz & Cook-Gumperz 1982: 1). Nevertheless, the emphasis of earlier researchers was on the correlations between social categories and subconscious differences of communicative habit and expectation. By contrast, contemporary researchers have focused on the production of identities in discourse, highlighting the importance of individual agency and intentionality in making one or another social identity salient in a given interaction (Ochs 1993: 290; M ­ endoza-Denton 2002: 492). This newer, deeply constructivist line of inquiry has led to a sophisticated understanding of how indexical relations between linguistic signs and social identities operate. Rather than directly signaling social identities, linguistic forms typically encode “stances, social acts, social activities, and other … constructs” which are in turn linked to identities by chains of association (Ochs 1992: 337). Beto’s opening lines quoted above illustrate this neatly. What he called his “macho voice” did not directly invoke manliness but rather conveyed a strong, confident, assertive stance that was in turn linked with ideologies of masculinity. This perspective recognizes that all linguistic forms have many potential functions and that any given form may encode different acts, stances, and identities in different contexts (Ochs 1993: 297). One of the key tasks for the critical ethnographer of language, then, is to describe and analyze the social labor involved in the production of identity categories and their complex links with linguistic signals. According to Kulick, most accounts of gay and lesbian language have failed in this task and in many others. Instead of attending to the work that links some linguistic signs with sexual identities, he argues, researchers have imagined the aggregate of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer speakers in the Romantic mold as a nation with its own language. In so doing, they have tended to equate the verbal behavior of such individuals with an abstraction called “gay” or “lesbian language” rather than demonstrating that such languages actually exist in the first place or making a serious case for the distinctiveness of the features assumed to mark them (2000: 262). Kulick’s objections here are not based on anomalous data that existing models fail to explain, but rather on a sense that cultural presuppositions have led researchers to misinterpret their object of study and to ignore whole classes of phenomena that could improve our understanding of the relationship between language and sexuality. These arguments are not without precedent. Criticisms of the presumption of a homogeneous queer speech community and calls for a translinguistic approach to queer speech, centered on the “operation of language across lines of social differentiation,” were already present in the literature (Pratt 1987, quoted in Barrett 1997: 191). But Kulick’s proposal to “declare a moratorium on ‘sexuality’” because of the term’s tendency to assimilate all aspects of sexual life to sexual identity is a potentially radical stance (2000: 272). His later call, with Deborah Cameron, to “bracket identity, leave it behind and forget about it for a while” in favor of an increased focus on desire, repression, and the erotic raises important questions about what has been the status quo in sociocultural linguistics (Cameron and Kulick 2003: 105). In a series of responses to Cameron and Kulick, sociolinguists and linguistic anthropologists have echoed their concerns about the dangers of ratifying vernacular essentialisms by reifying identity categories and their associations with verbal forms (e.g. Eckert 2002: 101; McElhinny 2002: 116). Most have welcomed the idea of finding more room for desire in the conceptual apparatus of linguistic anthropology. Furthermore, Cameron and Kulick’s call for more studies of the linguistic construction of heterosexuality (2003: 134) has been well received. On the level of high theory, it would seem that there are few differences among the parties to 203

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this debate. After all, Butler’s emphasis on the importance of the stylization and iterability of the signs of both identity and desire informs the arguments of all of the key participants (e.g. Barrett 2002: 29; Bucholtz & Hall 2004a: 381; Cameron & Kulick 2003: 130). Nevertheless, the call to ‘bracket’ the study of identity has generated more apprehension than enthusiasm. Eckert, for example, acknowledges the danger of an exclusive focus on identity categories, but warns that it is impossible to “do sociolinguistics without them” (2002: 100). For his part, Barrett proposes moving away from “the old essentialism” not by discarding identity but by examining “emic identity categories that emerge through local practice” (2002: 31). Perhaps the most significant and influential response has been that of Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall, who have pointed out theoretical inconsistencies and omissions in Kulick’s reviews of the literature and warned against artificially limiting the scope of linguistic anthropology by excluding considerations of identity (2004b). For their part, Cameron and Kulick have reacted to concerns about their critique by recognizing that sexual identities “are not completely irrelevant to an understanding of language and sexuality” (2003: 133). Nevertheless, they maintain that an exclusive or excessive focus on identity distracts from aspects of the language-sexuality relationship that have received less attention. Partly in response to the debate, Bucholtz and Hall have proposed a framework called “tactics of intersubjectivity” that seeks to account for the ways social actors manage and challenge their own and others’ relationships with larger identity constructs in everyday encounters. This useful and straightforward model synthesizes insights from two decades of empirical research and theoretical reflection, and it has enjoyed considerable influence since its introduction. For Bucholtz and Hall, identity work operates according to three oppositions. In the first place, actors may emphasize the similarities between speakers and varieties (adequation) or the differences (distinction) (Bucholtz and Hall 2004a: 383). In the second place, they may advance claims to genuine group membership and the proper or ‘natural’ use of linguistic features that mark membership (authentication), or contest such claims (denaturalization) (385). And finally, they may use power to authorize some identities as culturally valued and intelligible or illegitimate their own or someone else’s identity claims and language use by denying such validation (386). Mindful of the danger that their model could be interpreted simplistically as an argument that people are free to make their own realities as they choose, Bucholtz and Hall take care to emphasize that social conditions may limit the agency of individual actors.They also note that the tactics they describe may occur in combination and with varying degrees of intentionality, and that contestation rather than mutual consent may drive any given encounter (384). For all these caveats, their model does seem to presume that human life unfolds in a series of encounters between more or less rational, complete, and self-aware actors seeking to “accomplish social goals” in the face of “externally imposed constraints” (382). Where, we might ask, do those goals come from? Bucholtz and Hall would surely answer, following Bourdieu (1990), that the field of social action structures those goals even as actors pursuing goals structure the field, constituting themselves as subjects in the process. Or they might answer, with Kiesling, that they come from actors’ ontological desire to measure up to unattainable but persuasive ideal categories (2012). In any case, their examples and rhetoric sometimes lead to a sense of actors as causes rather than effects of the processes they describe. For this reason, their model is vulnerable to the criticisms of Cameron and Kulick, who ask us to move beyond the identities that individuals claim and acknowledge for themselves, focusing instead on the “inconsistencies, contradictions, incoherences, gaps, and silences” in verbal behavior (2003: 139). Indeed, such gaps and inconsistencies seem to be the heart of the “desire/identity” debate itself. If there is actually a disagreement among the parties—and this is an open question—it lies not in their self-conscious theoretical claims but in the different ways they read examples and the conclusions they consequently draw from them. In the end, the debate stems from differences of emphasis and interpretation 204

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rather than from disagreement about fundamentals.What is clear is that language, sexual identity, and desire involve phenomena that are only imperfectly available to everyday consciousness, and an account of their intersection must move beyond what actors themselves acknowledge and recognize.

The present study My own account of Beto’s nightclub act addresses several areas that have been identified as gaps in the literature on language and sexual identity. In the first place, because the performance involves a playful yet conflictive encounter between a primarily “straight”-identified audience and a comedian whose presentation of self onstage invokes off-stage sexual involvement with men, it moves away from the “queer peer” focus that has limited previous research (McElhinny 2002: 116). On July 25, the comedian ended his act with an ironic barb that highlighted this aspect of the performance. As he thanked an audience volunteer who had participated, he added, “Dios se lo pague con un hijo como yo” (“May God repay you for it with a son like me.”) This joke implies that a son like Beto is the last thing most members of the audience would want and may be seen as a referentially explicit example of what Bucholtz and Hall (2004a) call “distinction.” With it, the comedian highlighted his own non-conformity with socially sanctioned systems of gender, kinship, and sexual practice in greater Mexico and hailed his addressees as people who, for the most part, lived within those systems. Of course, the audiences Beto faced in July of 2000 were by no means homogeneous in terms of class, gender, sexual identity, immigration status, or anything else. Furthermore, the system of meanings that informed their understanding of sexuality, kinship, gender, and sexual identity was by no means uniform, stable, or internally consistent. Indeed, the performance displayed the “contradictory consciousness” of gender and sexuality that anthropologist Matthew Guttmann has attributed to working-class participants in Mexico’s dominant Hispanophone culture. From it, we can learn much about what it means in concrete, interpersonal terms to negotiate the “indeterminacy and ambiguity” of gender roles in the shadow of received ideas (Guttmann 1996: 23). The routine also highlights the flux and hybridity that characterizes the relationship between gender and sexual identity in greater Mexico. For much of the twentieth century at least, an understanding that centered on the stigmatization of an eroticized feminine masculinity appears to have been hegemonic.Writing at midcentury, the poet Octavio Paz summarized this system from a psychoanalyst’s etic perspective, noting that “masculine homosexuality” was “regarded with a certain indulgence insofar as the active agent is concerned,” while “the passive agent [was] an abject, degraded being” (1985: 39). The so-called “passive agent,” often called a puto, joto, or maricón, was assumed to speak and move in ways that evoked femininity, and it was this way of doing gender, rather than choice of partner, that was salient for the purposes of identity. In addition, transvestites known as jotas and normatively masculine mayates who sought them out as sexual partners, formed and still form part of this system (Carrillo 1999: 234). After introducing himself to the audience one night, Beto began his act with a song that illustrates the shifts currently underway in Mexican understandings of gender and sexual identity. Starting out a stately march, the song then took on a more sprightly rhythm halfway through. 1.Yo soy de esas jotitos a la Antigua

 (I’m one of those little old-­ fashioned jotas) 2. Que todavía se ajustan con los hombres (Who still get on with men) 3. ((habla)) ¿Verdad que es puro pedo?  ((speaks)) (It’s a load of crap, right?) 205

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4. No soy de esas jotitas descaradas

 (I’m not one of those shameless little jotas) 5. Que andan con las güeras más (¿?)  (Who run around with the (?) blond women) 6.Yo quiero que este mundo se componga (I want this world to be fixed) ((Enter drums. Accompaniment speeds up)) 7.Y todo vuelva a ser igual que antes  (And for everything to go back like it was) 8. Las viejas que se busquen sus maridos (Let the women go chasing after husbands) 9.Y todos los jotitos sus mayates  (And all the little jotos their mayates) The mock nostalgia expressed by the song’s speaker and the exaggerated confusion of identity labels aptly capture the juxtaposition in contemporary Mexico of a gender-centered system with something closer to the US model of ‘sexual orientation,’ in which partner choice determines identity. In recent years, the English loan-word gay has entered Mexican Spanish as a term of self-affirmation (226). And as in many other peripheral and semiperipheral countries, gay identity is experienced as a modern and cosmopolitan escape from an outmoded past tainted by shame (227). Furthermore, this situation has a class dimension like that observed by Hall in India, in which an educated middle class gravitates toward the notion of sexual orientation while a gender-centered system with local roots is increasingly associated with the lower classes (Hall 2005: 127). In this context, gendered understandings of dress, demeanor, and language use that many people experience as traditional find themselves increasingly denaturalized, as normatively masculine men who acknowledge sexual relations with other men become increasingly visible (Carrillo 2003: 367). In his routine, as we will see, Beto highlights this climate of ambiguity by playing with relationships between sexual identities and particular stances and actions, a technique whose use by drag performers is well documented (Barrett 1998: 153). His routine illustrates the complex negotiation of social and sexual meanings across increasingly blurry lines of difference. In addition, Beto’s interaction with his volunteers and audience demonstrates an important aspect of the ways social identities emerge in daily interaction that Bucholtz and Hall’s (2004b) framework does not fully cover. We have already seen examples of how their processes of distinction/adequation and authentication/denaturalization were at work in the routine. At the same time, however, the comedian, the male volunteers he called up to the stage, and the audience were dealing not only with their immediate surroundings but also with links between the evening’s encounter and other contexts.With every word and move, in other words, participants in the routine demonstrated concern for the accessibility of their actions to interpretations at later times and in other encounters. They also demonstrated concern for the ways in which observers could associate their actions with broad cultural models and the effects of those associations on their ongoing identity work. For this reason, I would like to propose another pair of tactics as a sort of friendly amendment to Bucholtz and Hall’s model: linking and circumscription. Linking describes a move in which a party to an encounter seeks either to bring past actions to bear in present identity work or place aspects of the present encounter on record for future work. In circumscription, by contrast, a party seeks to isolate a given encounter from the past or remove it from the future consideration. Both techniques necessarily involve qualitative elements as well as elements of selection—questions of “how” and “what” as well as “whether.” In other 206

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words, linking and circumscription deal with the question of what about any given encounter “stays there,” as the saying goes. These tactics may be similar to the operations described by Erving Goffman (1963) by which the bearers of potentially stigmatized characteristics limit the circulation of information about themselves. And of course, his later work on frame analysis remains an essential reference point. Goffman notes, for example, that when people perform “a tasklike activity out of its usual functional context” (1974: 66) in order to show how the task is done, problems may arise if the action being demonstrated is “reprehensible or horrible or improper” (70). In such a situation the performer of the task may be held responsible for the action in spite of its being understood as a demonstration. For this reason, an attention to linking and circumscription should answer Cameron and Kulick’s call to address the verbal manifestations of desire. Furthermore, as will become clear, this ethnographic example addresses Kulick’s (2000:268) objection that ‘claim staking’ accounts of identity focus exclusively on ‘successful, happy performatives that always work’. Here we will see efforts to elicit parodies of a stigmatized identity fail when that identity and the desires with which it is associated are explicitly named and placed on record.

The floorshow and the routine I observed this routine and the floorshow of which it was a part on four separate occasions in July 2000. Performed by a loosely knit group of six artists, most of whom were immigrants from Mexico, this show ran two nights per week at Chamizal restaurant and another two nights at a seafood restaurant called “La Isla.” Both institutions doubled as bars and dance venues. The performance was a variety show consisting of comic sketches, stand-up routines, renditions of popular songs, and dance, including vaudeville-style hoofing by a clown and the gyrations of an extremely blond Russian belly-dancer. New jokes and routines were introduced every three weeks. In both venues, a house back-up band consisting of guitar, bass, drums, and keyboard accompanied the actors, and the performance took place on a dance floor, relying on microphones to be heard over the crowds. Because neither place offered a raised stage that everyone could see, and because of the distractions offered by a restaurant setting, these venues surely were and probably remain challenging places to perform. Chamizal seemed the more upscale venue, and its walls were festooned with tourist handicrafts and other stylized representations of Mexico’s rural material culture. La Isla sported seashells and palm thatch, with fewer overt national symbols. One was frisked at the door there, and the crowd dressed less formally and participated more boisterously in the show than did the patrons of Chamizal. At La Isla, however, I was able to record video as well as audio. The owner of Chamizal forbade the use of video, saying that married men frequented his restaurant late at night with illicit paramours. He warned that these men might suspect an Anglo with a video camera of collecting evidence for a divorce case, and that he could not guarantee my safety or that of my equipment in such a situation. Although neither venue advertised itself as catering to a community defined by gender nonconformity, transvestites watched the show from the edges of the crowd inside La Isla and propositioned male patrons, myself included, in the parking lot. When I asked a waitress about these customers, she rolled her eyes and replied, “Aquí viene de todo” (“Everything comes here”) suggesting to me that their presence was more a grudgingly allowed nuisance than a central feature of the venue’s identity. Beto’s routine came either fourth or fifth on the program and was always his first appearance for the night. After warming up the audiences with a few jokes, he usually called for a shout from the women in the audience and a whistle from the men. He would then recruit three male volunteers to join him on the dance floor, often making off-the cuff double entendres such as 207

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“te va a doler pero te va a gustar” (“It’s going to hurt but you’re going to like it”) that analogized participating in the act with a sexual encounter. Sometimes these overtures placed the comedian in the ‘active’ position and sometimes in the ‘passive’ mode; the mixture of these was the message. In part because of this, men hesitated to volunteer and usually made a show of declining to participate at first when asked. After assembling his group of volunteers, and after asking them their names, places of origin, and sometimes their marital statuses, Beto would bring out a rubber chicken and instruct them to perform a fixed dialogue, repeating the following lines after him: Example 2: Prescribed dialogue 1. A: Te vendo este pollo (“I’ll sell you this chicken.”) 2. B: ¿Pica o no pica? (“Does it bite/poke or doesn’t it?”) 3. A: No pica (“It doesn’t bite/poke.”) 4. B: Te lo compro (“I’ll buy it from you.”) 5. A: Te lo vendo (“I’ll sell it to you.”) Standing in a row and facing the audience, the volunteers would go through this dialogue three times. The leftmost man (from the position of the volunteers) would first “sell” the chicken to the man on his right. Then, this second man would “sell” to the man immediately on his right, who would finish the round by “selling” the chicken to the comedian. Beto would then direct the performers to repeat the dialogue, saying the same lines as if in anger. Once the volunteers had gone through the above sequence, shouting their lines at each other with mock rage, they were asked to repeat it again, this time in tears. Once this was finished, Beto would introduce the final and most important phase of the game. Example 3 1. B: ((laughs)) .hhh Ahora vamos a la última jefe (.hhh Now we’ll go to the last one, chief) 2. ((stereotypically “gay” intonation)) Vamos a jotear todas (We’re all going to fag it up) 3. ¿O.K.? ((keyboardist plays some low tones))2 In this instance, Beto referred to himself and his male volunteers in the feminine gender, a  usage commonly associated with in-group interactions among gay men (Kulick 2000: 9), language which was highly marked and unexpected in this encounter with ostensibly “straight” volunteers. By addressing his victims in this way, Beto invoked a set of interpersonal rights and obligations characteristic of such settings. Because those rights and obligations at least appeared not to apply to the group on stage, this tropic use of grammatical gender put the men “on the spot.” Furthermore, the tag question “O.K” in this example was equally ironic, for Beto’s volunteers surely knew they had no choice about what the prescribed intonation for the lines would be. In most cases, Beto proceeded to demonstrate “jotear” (“fagging it up”), as in the following example: Example 4 1. B: Yo les voy a decir cómo muchachos ¿eh? Muy fácil (I’m going to tell you how boys eh? Very easy) 2. E “Te vendo este poll:o” [poʃ:o] ((laughter)) (“I’ll sell you this chicken”)3 208

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In addition to using the high pitch and wide intonation contours stereotypically associated with feminine male speech, Beto here elongates the “elle” (/ʎ/) in “pollo” and renders it as /ʃ/, an unvoiced alveolar fricative.This pronunciation, more typical of the Spanish of Buenos Aires than of any part of Mexico, suggests stereotypes about gay male hypercorrection and lengthening of fricatives, that are common among English speakers (Podesva et al. 2002: 182), and that may be current in this Spanish-speaking audience as well. Thus instructed, the volunteers would run through their dialogue again, “fagging it up,” and when the game reached the stage in which the third volunteer was to “sell” the chicken to the comedian, Beto would substitute “¿Ay, si no pica pa’ qué lo quiero?” (“Ay, if it doesn’t bite/peck/poke what do I want it for?”) for “te lo compro” (“I’ll buy it from you”), thus making explicit the double entendre implicit in the verb “picar.” This was the punchline of the act, and it should have brought a final, big laugh from the audience and give a sense of closure to the routine. But, in the performances I observed, Beto was seldom able to pull it off adequately due in part to resistance from his volunteers. Sometimes the punch line elicited no response at all from the audience. Other times the comedian skipped it entirely. As we shall see, very few aspects the routine went smoothly according to the “script,” especially once the demand to “fag it up” appeared. After the end of the dialogue, Beto would call for the audience to applaud for each volunteer separately. The one who earned the loudest applause would win a bucket of Corona longnecks on ice—the brand of the beer was prominently mentioned—courtesy of the restaurant. In spite of this tempting bit of product placement (itself an example of what I call “linking”), most of the volunteers reacted to the final phase of the act with surprise and embarrassment. Some hid their faces at first or shook their heads and looked away from the audience. Others grinned sheepishly and mimed trying to leave the stage, walking a few steps until the comedian stopped them with a word or a hand on the shoulder. No one actually quit the game, and it seems unlikely that the audience would have let anyone do so. Nevertheless, it was clear from the volunteers’ demeanor that they experienced being asked to perform joto mannerisms in front of an audience as a threat to their ostensibly “straight” identities and their senses of masculinity. Beto contributed to this threat by using irony to question the integrity of the play frame surrounding the men’s actions. Example 5 1. B: Es pura broma Es pura broma ¿verdad? Es pura broma ¿verdad que sí? Pura (huata) chinga’o pa’ que vean que los hombres le entramos a todo cabr—échale (It’s all a joke It’s all a joke right? It’s just a joke isn’t it? Fuck it’s just (?) so then can see that us men will enter into anything bastar—go on) 2. .hhh Ay concéntrate manita concéntrate concentra tal (.hhh Ay concentrate sister concentrate concentrate like) In these extemporized remarks, Beto seemed intent on troubling the volunteers’ future efforts to minimize the consequences of their performances for their off-stage identities and reputations. He seemed, in other words, to be trying to disrupt their efforts to circumscribe their experience on stage in the sense I have outlined earlier. Central to this strategy were his multivalent self-presentation and his explicit use of the verb “jotear.” Note also that the Spanish word “entrarle” above can either mean “to enter into something,” “to engage,” “to take on” or “to attack,” and is susceptible to sexual double entendre involving “entry” into a bodily orifice. Here Beto was not only making an off-the cuff joke but also demonstrating his competence in the albur, a type of insult involving double entendre that occurs frequently in everyday life among Mexican speakers of Spanish. Although speakers of 209

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all genders use the albur, it is ideologically linked with primary group interaction among normatively masculine men. Here, in other words, Beto presented an onstage self that was neither macho nor maricón (Carrillo 2003), but, perhaps, both at the same time, inviting questions about whether what happened on the dance floor was really a game.

Tradition and change I encountered the variety show described in this chapter during research for a historical project on Mexican American theatre and tent shows in southern Texas. Struck by what seemed to be similarities between the performances that artistas who had been active before World War II described and those I was able to observe in contemporary California nightclubs, I sought to share the fruits of my fieldwork with some of the performers I had been interviewing. Their reactions to the contemporary immigrant comedians, I reasoned, would reveal much about continuity and change in ethnic Mexican comedy. The results of my efforts, however, were disappointing. When I loaned a cassette copy of my field recordings to a consultant whose family had owned a traveling carpa (“tent show”) in southern Texas for much of the early twentieth century, he was so offended by California comedians’ use of tabooed language in front of an audience that he refused to continue listening after a few minutes. Soon, as word about the tape’s vulgarity spread among the performers I was working with, I found that few of them would listen to it at all. These artistas were no prudes. They had all cursed freely and shared ribald jokes with me in earlier interviews.What they objected to was the not tabooed vocabulary in itself but it use onstage. This reaction is revealing in itself, of course. One performer, however, was willing to provide more detailed comments. According to this veteran artista, Beto’s act is well known and widely performed entrada de payaso (“clown routine”) used in Spanish-speaking circuses since the early twentieth century and perhaps further back. The performer, however, was critical of Beto’s rendition of the act, which he said differed from more traditional versions in ways that detracted from its entertainment value. In the first place, he argued, the dialogue should revolve around a duck rather than a chicken. In Spanish, as in English, various words for “chicken” are susceptible to sexual double entendre, but the word “pato” (“duck”) is also a slang term meaning something like “feminine gay man” in many Spanish-speaking countries. Here, it seems, the performers have needlessly discarded an obvious comic resource. A second objection concerned Beto’s elicitation style. In more traditional versions of this act, my consultant claimed, the clown announces that he is the casting director for a film and frames the whole performance of the dialogue as an audition, a play within a play within the overall performance frame of the show itself. Furthermore, rather than simply eliciting emotions, the clown or comedian provides scenarios that explain the emotional displays: “You’re too poor to afford food and this duck is a cherished pet you have to sell.” In other words, the performer offers Stanislavskian “motivations” for the volunteers’ actions. Beto’s routine, by contrast, has cast off nested frames and elaborate motivations, leading in my consultant’s judgment to an arid, sterile focus on the game itself. Although my consultant disapproved of both these changes, he reserved his harshest criticism for the use of the word jotear (“fag it up”). Although he found the overall use of tabooed language vulgar and unsubtle, he noted that in a cabaret setting, such profanity was at least partly acceptable. The word jotear, by contrast, disrupted the entrada. My consultant claimed that he used this routine himself when performing as a clown for children’s birthday parties, where it was considered entirely appropriate. However, he reported that instead of saying, “vamos a jotear,” he instructed his volunteers, usually parents or other adults, to sell the duck as the late singer Juan Gabriel would. Although Gabriel did not publicly acknowledge sexual 210

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involvement with men, his flamboyant mannerisms attracted considerable comment and parody, and many ethnic Mexicans take him as the archetypical joto or maricón. My interviewee claimed that his own volunteers never displayed embarrassment or resistance when he elicited joto intonation in this euphemized way. Of course, referring to Juan Gabriel not only avoids explicit acknowledgement that feminized masculinity and homosexuality are being parodied, but also sets up an external figure as a lightning rod for the stigma associated with male-male desire and gender nonconformity. If we accept this account of the traditional versions of the act, it is clear that Beto’s version, which dared to speak the name of the sexual identity being parodied, both stripped the routine down to essential elements and, with a minimal change in wording, maximally increased both its frankness and its riskiness for participants. The change from clown to comedian as the routine’s animator may also contribute to the inhibition demonstrated by Beto’s volunteers. In most European-derived performance traditions, the clown is a liminal figure, who is neither adult nor child, master nor slave, wholly female nor wholly male. The clown’s stylized behavior, garish clothing, and gaudy makeup strengthen the barrier between his or her performance and world of daily life. In greater Mexico, the clown is a versifier who addresses everyone in a register generally used by adults to speak to children. But even as Mexican clowns entertain children, they also engage adults in duels of veiled, offcolor insults that children are believed not to understand. Beto retained some of the clown’s mix of adult savvy and childlike mischief. But unlike the clown, he appeared in street clothes, and although he did not use his real name in performance, his presentation of self in the nightclub gestured toward an off-stage identity. There was, in other words, the illusion that the comedian was “himself ” and that he was in the show as he would have been if one encountered him on the street. Although he played with the social expectations surrounding different gendered ways of speaking, the comedian was not the liminal figure that a clown would have been. Because the comedian’s onstage persona appears to bear traces of an off-stage self, in other words, his presence may invite questions about the boundary between the make-believe world of the dance floor and the off-stage private lives of the volunteers. Further research lends credence to my consultant’s account of this routine. Although I have not directly observed its performance in such contexts as children’s birthday parties, I have found twenty amateur videos of such performances on the video-sharing site YouTube, which were posted between 2008 and late 2011 from the United States, Mexico, and Peru. Performers featured in the videos typically dress as clowns, but comedians in street clothes also appear. Contexts in which the routine seems to be occurring include children’s birthday parties, baby showers, church camps, stage shows, and circuses. In one video uploaded from Peru, a comedian performing in a classroom with a stuffed duck encourages a group of boys who appear to be under the age of ten to enact stereotypical joto mannerisms. Although some of the videos may be copies of commercial productions, most appear to be homemade digital commemorations of family gatherings, and they occur together with other highlights of these events. Indeed, it is striking that this parody of a kind of masculinity associated with non-procreative sex outside heterosexual marriage should figure so prominently in the visual records of gatherings intended to mark life-cycle milestones in heterosexual families. Although the act does vary from one video to another, the variations are minor. Some of the performers use a duck. Others use a chicken. Still others use a balloon or no prop at all, asking participants to imagine the object as a duck or chicken. In some of the videos, the clown elicits emotions other than those enumerated in my summary above, laughter and fright for example, and uses more than three participants. Although the act mostly involves male performers and volunteers, women volunteer in a few examples. I have found no examples of female comedians leading volunteers in the act. In many cases, the clown elicits joto-style delivery of the prescribed 211

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lines simply by demonstrating, rather than naming the style. In at least one Web example, the clown names the singer Ricky Martin, whose “coming out” made international headlines, as the example to follow just as my consultant claimed to use Juan Gabriel. In none of the Web videos does the comedian or clown present himself as a man who is sexually involved with other men offstage, and in none does he flirt with male volunteers or joke about their sexual identities as Beto did in the performances I observed. Furthermore, in none of the Web videos, or at least none in which the audio is intelligible, does the comedian or clown use “jotear” or an equivalent word to describe what he asks the volunteers to do. Some kind of indirection always seems to be the rule. Perhaps as a result of these differences, the rivalry and tension between clown, volunteer, and audience that animated Beto’s California performances in 2000 seem largely absent from the Web videos. Indeed, what is striking about these more recent performances is the enthusiastic cooperation between comedian, volunteers, and audience members. Although there are occasional missteps and displays of shyness or uncomfortable laughter, most of the men throw themselves into their roles with apparent gusto. A video uploaded in 2009 by a user named “gmcarloncho” in 2009 is typical. The men in the video swish. They prance. They skip. They lisp. They kiss each other’s cheeks. They touch each other’s rear ends. They slap their own. They add feminine-gendered vocatives and off-the-cuff sweet nothings to the prescribed lines. If any feel reluctant to imitate the joto, few show it, and the audience’ s laughter and applause suggest that the whole exercise is a rollicking good time for almost everyone. In other words, the routine functions as a ritual of distinction, “in which speakers mock characteristics or practices ideologically associated with particular identities” in order to reinforce their sense of not sharing such traits (Bucholtz & Hall 2004b: 497). Furthermore, the mocking itself is directed at people who are assumed to be at a safe distance. Although the inhibition and resistance displayed by many of Beto’s volunteers are unusual, the loss or skipping of the punch line is not. If the Web videos are any indication, this element, which would seem in the abstract an essential device to give closure to the routine, is in fact dispensable and secondary to the antics of the volunteers. In the Web videos, as in Beto’s performance, the routine seems to have been reduced to its basic elements, with nested frames and elaborate motivations eliminated.

The struggle for the floor In the rivalry that emerged between Beto and his volunteers, the comedian structured the field in which volunteers had to act. The idea that a lone queer-identified man in a predominantly heteronormative space could lay down the law in this way may seem surprising at first, and Beto’s ability to do it derived from several factors. One was his association with the management of the restaurant, by whose consent he was able to set the rules of the game on the dance floor and rely on bouncers to control members of the audience who might disrupt the act.4 The attention afforded Beto by the lighting system and his momentary monopoly of amplified sound was also important. Because speech was inaudible in the restaurant without amplification except at close range, that microphone became, in the comedian’s hands, a skeptron, enabling him to give and take the floor at will.5 Although audience members could shout to make themselves heard over the crowd and volunteers used gestures to poach the floor when they were not officially “on,” the comedian never lost control entirely. While his actions defined the space in which the performance occurred and set parameters for the performers, the volunteers resisted within his frame by introducing variations and deviations of their own. A key element of Beto’s strategy consisted in dividing the largely straight-identified audience against itself by the very act of selecting volunteers. Once the men reached the stage, they were spatially separated from other patrons. Placed in the spotlight, and in contact with the comedian, they 212

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acquired interests and face-wants different from those of the rest of the audience. The audience, of course, wished to be entertained by the spectacle of joto mannerisms being enacted and parodied on stage. This desire, however, seemed to run contrary to the desires of the men, who seemed to feel compelled to preserve their ostensible normative sexual identities and senses of masculinity in front of friends. Of course, the audience was more numerous than the volunteers, and this meant that once the men consented to participating in the routine, they faced pressure from a roomful of people to act within the framework Beto had established. One example of this kind of pressure occurred on July 21, the only occasion in which a potential volunteer refused to participate in the act after being specifically invited.When a fair-skinned man (a “güero”) at La Isla refused to leave his seat between two female companions, Beto called on audience support to persuade him.6 Example 6 1. B: 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.Ch. & All: 7. 8. 9. B: 10.

Míralo está en medio de dos muñecas o sea que es bien macho el güero este. (“Look at him. He’s in between two dolls, which is to say he’s really macho this güero.”) Güero güero no le hace. Güero (“Güero güero it’s no big deal. Güero”) Güero Bájate (“Get down here.”) Ay que le pase (“Ay let h  im come down”) ((chants rhythmically, invites audience to join him with hand gestures)) Que le pa:se (“Let him come down”) ((keyboardist plays notes with the rhythm of the chant)) Que le pa:se (“Let him come down”) All: //Que le pa:se ((shouts and applause die off)) Güero Güero

When chants from the audience failed to persuade the young man to leave his seat, Beto almost seemed to give up, until members of the audience steered him toward another güero in the audience … the ethnographer! On the night I was chosen, my participation changed the dynamic between comedian, volunteers, and audience. The novelty of an Anglo volunteer led my fellow victims to loosen up and even compete with me for laughs. What is clear from the example above is that the decision whether or not to participate was the volunteers’ only opportunity to resist the frame of the routine entirely. Once they reached the dance floor, they had no choice but to respond one way or another to the comedian’s demands. Even within this framework, however, there was still room for maneuver, and the volunteers used a variety of tactics to get “one up” on the comedian. One such tactic, as I have already indicated, was gesture. In a July 25 video recording taken at “La Isla,” a volunteer competes with the comedian for the audience’s attention by holding the rubber chicken near his groin in a display of phallic assertiveness. Unfortunately for him, the chicken has seen better days, and as he tries to hold it erect, 213

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the head flops down, leading to the opposite of the visual message he had sought to convey. Later on in the routine, Beto picked up on this, soliciting a weeping delivery of the prescribed lines by saying “hazte cuenta que se te quedó así como el pollo mira” (“look, just notice that your thing ended up like the chicken”). But after this line the volunteer (L) responded with a sort of spoiler: Example 7 1. L: ((joteando)) Te vendo este pol:lo [poʃ:o]= ((risas)) ((“fagging it up”)) (“I’ll sell you this chicken”) ((laughter)) 2. B: =Llora: =(Cry:) 3. L: Te vendo este pollo (“I’ll sell you this chicken”) 4. A: y 5. B: ((fuera del micrófono)) “Pica o no pica” ((off-mike)) (“Does it bite/peck/poke or doesn’t it”) 6. E: Pica o no pica (“Does it bite/peck/poke or doesn’t it”) 7. B: Llórale: (“Cry:”) In the example above “L” jumps the gun, delivering his line with the anticipated joto intonation that he knows will come next, even imitating Beto’s “sheismo.” Note that this was the latest of the performances that I observed. In earlier shows at both restaurants, there was clearly an element of surprise to Beto’s routine. But by the time of this second performance at “La Isla,” it was clear that many in the audience had already seen the show. In early performances, Beto struggled to recruit volunteers, but by July 25, men from the audience were ready for the act and eager to find ways to upstage the comedian as “L” is trying to do here. Most of Beto’s volunteers, however, especially in the earlier performances, reacted not by showing the wrong emotions but by showing none at all. Example 8 1. JN: Te vendo este pollo (“I’ll sell you this chicken”) 2. B: Enojado (“Angry”) 3. JN: Te vendo este pollo (“I’ll sell you this chicken”) ((laughter)) In the above example, from July 20, JN complied minimally with the comedian’s elicitations, repeating his lines with no affect. When prompted to speak angrily, JN increased his volume, but did not change his vocal timbre or deviate from a monotone. Exchanges like these were common, as volunteers sought to avoid embarrassing themselves by refusing to display emotion as asked. It is worth noting, however, that one volunteer who was willing to “ham it up” could motivate the others to follow his lead. Typically, however, volunteers sought to inject humor of their own making into the routine not by following Beto’s commands but by substituting their own lines for the elicited ones, as in the following example from July 21 (“P” below refers to the ethnographer). Example 9 1. B: A ver jefe (“Let’s see, chief.”) 214

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  2.   3. P:   4. B:   5. JM:   6. B:   7.   8.   9. 10. JM: 11. B: 12. 13. JM:

“Te vendo este pollo” (“I’ll sell you this chicken”) Te vendo este pollo (“I’ll sell you this chicken.”) “Pica o no pica” (“Does it bite/peck/poke or doesn’t it?”) Pico ((audience laughter)) ((two chords from the keyboardist)) (“I bite/peck/poke”) No creo que me picas mano (“I don’t think you’re gonna poke me buddy.”) No que— No te dije si picas o no picas tú (“Didn’t I—I didn’t ask if you poked or not.”) Por mí ¿qué me importa chi— ((laughs)) ((audience laughter)) (“For my part what do I care fu—”) “Pica o no pica” (“Does it bite/peck/poke or doesn’t it?”) No pica ((audience laughter)) (“It doesn’t bite/peck/poke.”) ¿No ven que no le sirve la chingadera? (“Can’t you see the fuckin’ thing’s no good?”) Pica o no pica dile así (“Does it bite/peck/poke or doesn’t it? Say it like that.”) Pica o no pica ((brief audience laughter))

Here JM first treats Beto’s elicitation, “Pica o no pica” as a question directed at him and proceeds to answer it, getting a laugh from the audience at the comedian’s expense. When Beto renews his elicitation, JM gives the next line in the dialogue rather than repeating the line he was asked to deliver, forcing the comedian to ask him to speak once again. Note that just as the double entendre surrounding the verb “picar” set up the punch line, it also provided a resource that volunteers could use to subvert the act and position themselves as ‘active agents’ in jokes about sexual encounters. However, the example above also makes clear the limitations of the volunteers’ room to maneuver. Although the rebellious volunteer could upstage the comedian by interfering with the smooth working of the dialogue, and sometimes by substituting his own variations on the prescribed lines, he could not say just any old thing. And though the rules of the game forced Beto to allow the volunteers to speak, they ultimately obliged those volunteers to acknowledge and, in the end, comply with the comedian’s elicitations.

Discussion Looking at these examples of resistance, we might be tempted to write this act off as a failure. This was certainly the conclusion of those older performers who agreed to comment on my recordings.This artista noted the comedian’s repeated failure to get the audience members to do their part and took strong exception to his constant use of foul language, which struck them as a lack of respeto. My field assistant José Manuel Galván-Leguízamo, an actor, clown, and playwright who was part of the theatrical arm of Mexico City’s 1968 student movement and who has studied the earlier popular theater extensively, agreed with this assessment. After watching my field video he sneered, “Hay una falta de atención a lo que es el lenguaje teatral. Es chamba para ellos.” (“There’s a lack of attention to what theatrical language is all about. It’s just a job for these 215

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guys.”) Indeed, of the three performances I observed, the longest and most vigorously applauded was the one in which I volunteered, distracting the other two victims from their anxieties and showing how play within the comedian’s rules could entertain everyone. Mr. Galván and the older performer may not be far wrong. The stark differences between Beto’s routine and the naïve, perhaps more ‘successful’ versions documented on amateur videos give the sense of a natural experiment. In the videos, ­semantico-referential silence or oblique implicature about the nature of the identity being parodied reigns. Words like joto and maricón do not occur. The clown or comedian does not mention his own offstage sexual behavior in ways that signal a stigmatized sexual identity; nor does he express desire for the volunteers, flirt with them, or question their sexual identities. Furthermore, he does not use feminized male mannerisms outside of the final, potentially surprising elicitation. All of these omissions tend to circumscribe the actions of the volunteers on stage in the sense I have described above. In other words, they tend to reinforce the understanding “this is mocking” that surrounds the men’s use of stereotypical joto intonation and other verbal cues and limit its accessibility to potential future interpretations of their demeanor. They thus help to ensure that the particular iteration of feminized masculinity that occurs on stage is not interpretable as part of the sequence of stylized enactments of identity that form the volunteer’s “true” self. In Beto’s version of the act, all the prohibitions mentioned above become visible because they are violated. And as the “real” world bleeds into the play world on the dance floor through various linking moves on the comedian’s part, the sense that what happens there is ‘off the record’ for the future diminishes. So although the older performers’ criticisms capture some technical faults in the performance, they neglect the power of the act’s frankness and its play with received ideas about language, gender, desire, and sexuality. Indeed, the very discomfort that the volunteers showed during early performances may itself be the strongest sign of this power. As the act progressed, some people probably never came back, especially those who felt humiliated by the comedian. These audience members may well have left the performance scandalized by the play with the ambiguities and paradoxes of language, gender and sexuality, and hardened to any further challenges. But I know from observation that some people returned, fully aware of what would happen and ready to engage a male comedian who highlighted his sexual engagement with men in the kind of agonistic verbal and gestural play they would ordinarily have reserved for their more gender-conforming cuates (“buddies.”) In other words, Beto managed, through his own presence and a few minor changes in wording, to transform a “straights-only” ritual of distinction that tended to reify associations between speech styles and sexual identities into a more inclusive ritual of adequation in which all parties demonstrated verbal flexibility. Crucially, this flexibility centered on the participants’ command of a register of obscene verbal dueling that is ideologically coded as male. The process of reaching this understanding was messy, and there were awkward moments in Beto’s version of the act when a naïve performance might have elicited more laughter and applause. Breaking silences can be messy business. But what seems to have happened toward the final performances at La Isla, at least, was a kind of agreement between comedian and volunteers about the kind of game that was to be played, with a touch of the kind of intimacy that, as Cameron and Kulick (2003: 115) note, comes with the public violation of taboos. Anthropologists, sociologists, and journalists who have studied sexual mores in greater Mexico suggest that today we are seeing a process in which ordinary people are challenging received notions about what it is to be male and female and what it is to be a sexual being. If this is true, then acts like Beto’s that give old jokes new meanings may be one of the mechanisms that move this process forward. There are surely tragedies and awkward moments along the way. But I would submit that when Beto said to his reluctant volunteers, 216

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“Te va a doler pero te va a gustar,” “It’s going to hurt but you’re going to like it,” his words carried a significance beyond that of the implied double entendre.

Notes 1 From field recording made in Los Angeles, CA. July 20, 2000. “Chamizal.” 2 From field recording made in Los Angeles, CA. July 25, 2000. “La Isla.” 3 From field recording made in Los Angeles, CA. July 20, 2000. “Chamizal.” 4 During my observation of these nightclub acts, bouncers had to intervene only once. This occurred when an audience member ran onto the dance floor during the performance of a comedian who was dressed as a charro singer with costume “horse” at his waist with short fake legs hanging at his sides. When the audience member tried to “mount” the horse’s rear end and mime a sexual encounter, bouncers quickly and peacefully escorted him off stage. 5 In many amateur Web videos of this act, clowns also use amplified sound, and the background noise of children playing creates a similar dynamic. 6 The term güero can refer to a fair-skinned ethnic Mexican but is often used to refer to foreigners such as Euro-Americans who tend to be fair skinned.

References Barrett, R. 1997. The “Homo-genius” Speech Community. In Anna Livia and Kira Hall (eds.) Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 181–201. ———. 1998. Markedness and style switching in performances by African American drag queens. In Carol Myers-Scotton (ed.) Codes and Consequences: Choosing Linguistic Varieties. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 139–161. ———. 2002. Is queer theory important for sociolinguistic theory? In K. Campbell-Kibler, R. Podesva, S. Roberts, and A.Wong (eds.) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford: CSLI Publication, pp. 25–44. Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Richard Nice (trans). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bucholtz, M. & Hall, K. 2004a. Language and identity. In A. Duranti (ed.) A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 268–294. ———. 2004b. Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33(4):469–515. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Cameron, D. & Kulick, D. 2003. Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carrillo, H. 1999. Cultural change, hybridity, and male homosexuality in Mexico. Culture, Health, and Sexuality 1(3):223–238. ———. 2003. Neither machos nor maricones: Masculinity and emerging male homosexual identities in Mexico. In M. Gutmann (ed.) Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America. DurhamDuke University Press, pp. 351–369. Eckert, P. 2002. Demystifying sexuality and desire. In K. Campbell-Kibler, R. Podesva, S. Roberts, & A. Wong (eds.) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford: CSLI Publication, pp. 99–110. Gaudio, R. 1994. Sounding gay: Pitch properties in the speech of gay and straight men. American Speech 69(1):30–57. “Gmcarloncho” (YouTube username). 2009, video recording of “Los cómicos ambulantes” uploaded October 21, 2009. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgMEGRo1JM8&feature=related, accessed November 5, 2011. Goffman, E. 1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall. ———. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gumperz, J. & Cook-Gumperz, J. 1982. Introduction: Language and the communication of social identity. In J. Gumperz & J. Cook-Gumperz (eds.) Language and Social Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–22. Gutmann, M. 1996. The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hall, K. 2005, Intertextual sexuality: Parodies of class, identity, and desire in liminal Delhi. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1):125–144.

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Peter C. Haney Hall, S. 1989, Ethncity: Identity and difference. Radical America 23(4):9–20. Kiesling, S. 2012. The interactional construction of desire as gender. Gender and Language 5(2):213–239. Kroskrity, P. 1999. Identity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9(1–2):111–114. Kulick, D. 2000. Gay and lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:243–295. ———. 2013. Language and desire. In Susan Ehlich, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Janet Holmes (eds.) The Handbook of Language, Gender, and Sexuality. Chichester, Sussex; Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 68–84. Limón, J. 1994. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. McElhinny, B. 2002. Language, sexuality, and political economy. In K. Campbell-Kibler, R. Podesva, S. Roberts, & A. Wong (eds.) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford: CSLI Publication, pp. 111–134. Mendoza-Denton, N. 2002. Language and identity. In J. K. Chambers, P. Trudgill, and N. Schilling-Estes (eds.) The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 475–499. Ochs, E. 1992, Indexing gender. In A. Duranti & C. Goodwin (eds.) Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335–358. ———. 1993. Constructing social identity: A language socialization perspective. Research on Language and Social Interaction 26(3):287–306. Paz, O. 1985. The Labyrinth of Solitude. Kemp, L. et al. (trans.) New York: Grove Weidenfelds. Podesva, R. J., Roberts, S., and Campbell-Kibler, K. 2002. Sharing resources and indexing meanings in the production of gay styles. In K. Campbell-Kibler, R. Podesva, S. Roberts, & A. Wong (eds.) Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice. Stanford: CSLI Publication, pp. 175–190. Pratt, M. L. 1987. Linguistic utopias. In N. Fabb, D. Attridge, A. Durant, and C. MacCabe (eds.) The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments Between Language and Literature, pp. 48–66. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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12 SELVES AND CODIfIED BODIES Subhadra Channa

Postcolonial anthropological scholarship, engaged with understanding the social through ­subjective and reflexive perspectives, interprets identities as constructed in response to histori­ cally constructed power fields, and thus neither essentialized nor frozen in time and space (Bayart 2005; Chomsky 1998; Moore 1994; Anderson 1991). Concepts such as “nations,” “ethnicity,” “ethnie,” “race,” “caste,” “gender” and also “self ” and “other” are understood as politically informed and historically situated terms that have no out-of-context reality. Answers to questions such as “What am I?” and “Who am I?” emerge out of a contested relationship between inner subjectivity and the effectiveness of external controls. Humans do not appear in the social world as metaphorically unclothed: they are socially constructed into bodies. Socially perceived bodies are coded to present a visual and cognitive imagery that corroborates hierarchy, yet the correspondences between social expectations and inner realizations are less than perfect. The more dynamic and fluid the social situation, the more the likelihood of successful contestations of identity that in turn lead to social movements and protests that attempt to change the normative pattern of these codes, though with varying success. In this chapter I shall focus on some of the social constructs of differentiation informed by power dynamics historically distributed on a global basis. More importantly the discussion will center on how constructed differences lead to discrimination, dehumanization and often denial of right to life to those who are not fundamentally different from the ones to perpetrate the crimes against them. Race, Gender, Caste and Class are only some of the forms of differentiation that codify human bodies, rationalized and legitimized by the same discourse and political action that creates them. The degradation can take the extreme form of the Homo Sacer (Agamben 1998) when it can be the human life that is seen as “raw’ and without any personhood, and therefore “killable.” My main focus is the crafting of bodies, both symbolically and quite literally, to create stereotypes that are also self-reproducing to a large extent.The political and the economic are written into biological bodies so that the markings are self-sustaining but not unchangeable. Anthropological literature in its initial phase of development supported such stereotypical constructs under the rubric of tradition and ahistorical notions of the “primitive” and “native” (Etienne and Leacock 1980). However, postcolonial anthropology has challenged the efficacy of some earlier assumptions, including that of culture (Gledhill 1994: 73). Humanities have also been

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re-scripted to take into account the subjectivity of explanation and the intersections of knowledge with historical conditions (Clifford and Marcus 1990; Said 1978; Wolf 1982).

Rethinking hierarchies In South Asia the subaltern school has scripted an alternative history that looks at the sequence of events from the point of view of the marginal rather than the elite (Guha 1997). Inclusive of Mencher’s work (1974) on the bottom-up view of the caste system, an effective critique of the South Asian caste structure has been formed where it has been shown that the dominated do not necessarily share the point of view of the elite and the centuries-old system of caste ranking.The social stigma attached to being untouchable in particular may not be acceptable to the people so stigmatized (Deliege 1999; Ilaiah 1996; Narayan 2001). There is continued tension between the view that the dominated possess dissenting voices and those who believe in common with Moffat (1979) and Dumont (1968) that caste values are shared by everyone in the system. In a more general framework Moore raises the point of integration of “people’s self-­images and self–representation with dominant cultural ideologies and/or discourses” (1994: 5). In their critical analysis of pedagogy, Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) introduce the notion of the reproduction of arbitrarily fixed values and conditions of inequality through the active process of pedagogy, where “arbitrariness applies, in another of its uses, to pure de facto power” (ibid: xi). Not only do social institutions tend to reproduce structural forms but they also create subjective dispositions that recreate the subject, who in turn tends to help reproduce structures of domination and subordination. Thus “Doxa” refers to those largely unconscious and deeply imbibed dispositions that reproduce inequality (Knauft 1996: 117; Bourdieu 1972). Bourdieu and Passeron describe the pure arbitrariness of the bodily codifications practiced throughout the world to discriminate one human being from another. In this chapter the notion of differences is discussed in two broad aspects: firstly how differences are translated into inequalities; and secondly how differences are created in response to inequalities; that is, the crafting of bodies or the creation of cultural stereotypes to justify hierarchies. Both of these are social processes that have recourse to cultural constructions to reproduce and justify their operation. While discussing the production and sustenance of discrimination I shall also document how groups challenge and negotiate the imposed “constructions” of their bodies and identities and how an inner sense of self may be evoked to counter the externally imposed sense of identity. From an “insider” point of view W.E.B. Du Bois (1903, 1920) has talked about the double self, the “self ” as the one the black person experiences and the “self ” that is constituted and projected in response to the creation of stereotypes by dominant white others. Such projected selves are constrained by and made necessary as strategies for survival for marginal groups. Price (1970: 65) writes thus about his first visit to the Boni Bush people of French Guiana and Surinam: “I was struck by the transformation in my boatman when the journey began. From hat in hand subservience in St Laurent he became a dashing, ten feet tall extrovert on the river.” The author is referring to his journey into the jungle territory of the Boni, away from the coastal cities occupied by whites and Bakkanenge (those black people who live in towns) and where “They are easily identified” – “and are automatically relegated to the lowest social rank and most menial jobs” (ibid: 64–65). Thus physical movement away from a zone of imposed marginalization is evident in a completely transformed body language. The so-called subservient body language is evidently a “presentation of the self ” and not the version of the person that emerges when and where the self is liberated from the external constraints of a hierarchical power situation. Such self-evoked identities may remain implicit or may in certain historical contexts challenge the power fields that created them in the first place, for example in relation to the Dalit movement 220

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in India, civil resistance movements in the United States and Africa against racism, and feminist movements across the globe.

The ‘dispensable’ or the dehumanized While moving through a museum housing narratives of expeditions to the Himalayas, I found that the names of British men were explicitly mentioned when they died on such an expedition but the added small print would often say “a coolie also died” along with perhaps a mule or two. During the British colonial period the life of a “coolie” was probably worth nothing more than that of a pack animal and may have evoked equal amount of sympathy from the white man, who led the expedition. This example of course is not isolated as throughout human history some bodies have found no mention at all, if they perished or were made to perish while doing hard labor, or providing support to the persons in power or in servitude to the “people who matter.” In his account of the British takeover of the Kond territories in India, Padel mentions an officer Captain Butterworth as saying that the surgeon who attended to the wounded in battle considers “one officer’s life of more consequence than 50 sepoys (native foot soldiers)” (Padel 2011: 46). Similar examples are abundant across history. A very recent one is of high civilian deaths resulting from US airstrikes in Iraq, where lives of the US pilots, flying at safe heights, are deemed more valuable than those of civilians on ground, “who are expendable” (Chomsky 1998: 17). Many cosmological, economic and social theories have been invoked to make society turn its head away from the faceless victims of its own discrimination. This kind of devaluation of human bodies is always mystified in such a way that the persons or groups responsible for it cite higher or esoteric levels of justification to retain their own claim to humanity. Thus it may be justified in terms of “Karma” theory as in the South Asian caste system, or in the name of a scientific categorization as in the case of race science of the nineteenth century; or it may have theological or ideological base, such as the corvée laborers who perished to uphold the glory of the God-Kings of ancient Egypt. Winston Churchill had strong convictions along with many other Europeans that they were justified to rule the world. Such attitudes help prompt those situations of aggression where the basic humanity of the enemy is not recognized in order to put the conscience of the aggressor at rest. Thus atom bombs may be dropped; air strikes take place on unsuspecting women and children, hospitals and schools razed, agricultural fields destroyed with chemical bombs, with equanimity.This is a kind of conversion or marking of certain bodies as “destined to extinction” (Chomsky 1998: 30). Shanklin (1994: 51) has quoted from Darwin’s Voyage, where Darwin noted, with repugnance, the practice of the governor of Santa Fe of hunting down native Americans like animals, killing in particular the women who appeared to be of prime reproductive age, giving the reason that they “breed so.” For the governor, Rosas, these actions were justifiable just as he was getting rid of wild animals and clearing the space for civilized “whites.”Yet Darwin predicted that this very Rosas would be a “good, benevolent ruler” (ibid.). This dehumanization on the one hand and moral justification for their own actions on the other led to the impunity with which the colonizers brutalized the people whose land and resources they were taking over. At the same time, as pointed out by Davis (2011: 116), the brutalities were often directed towards subjugating labor and creating profit for the capitalists/ colonizers/upper castes; whosoever may be in the role of exploiter. She tells us that it was the “Black people, immigrants and the uneducated native white workers” who were used as fodder to feed the industries built up by the men who built America, the “Morgans, the Rockfellers, Mellons,Vanderbilts” and that such repression had its economic advantages as “Terror and violence compelled Black workers in the South to accept slave like wages and working conditions that were frequently worse than slavery” (ibid.). 221

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Technology of classification The concept of bio-politics has been introduced into sociological theory by the works of scholars such as Foucault (1979) and Agamben (1998), while the social processes of reproduction of inequality have been analyzed by Bourdieu (1984) and many scholars working on race, caste and gender.

The power of knowledge Foucault has been successful in demonstrating that the epistemic power of Western knowledge has created a world of divisions and inequalities, where people have been classified in various ways (e.g. IQ tests) and in “institutionalizing subordination and stigma through the projection and classification of differences” (Knauft 1996: 142). The notion of the Self plays a central role in Foucault’s analysis, in what he calls “technologies of the self.” Foucault’s work has extensively focused on the creation of the subject, for example the legal mechanism to get rid of what Foucault (2010: 55–79) has called the monster, a juridico-biological construct—a demonization of a body that legitimizes its elimination. In the seventeenth century, it was enough for a person to be born, say, as a hermaphrodite, to be legally eliminated; later when medical knowledge denied the possibility of existence of the hermaphrodite, it then became an issue that was ­juridico-moral; for example if a person legally recognized as a male or a female was found living with a person of supposedly the same sex. In either case the creation of a monster was by reference to the creation of the “normal.” Unless there is a recognized standard of normal, the abnormal cannot exist. Yet, as Foucault shows by reference to historical data, the normal varies according to the knowledge and power systems that form its referent.The arbitrary power ascribed to the knowledge-holder such as the medical practitioner legitimizes the creation of subjects whose existence can be legally compromised; they may be deemed fit for elimination or punishment or medical treatment; whichever way they are constructed. Thus society may, through its own technologies of power, attribute certain qualities to subjects that in some cases may legitimize their marginalization, elimination or confinement—any way in which they are removed from the everyday life of “normal” human beings. Technologies of power are “techniques and practices for the disciplining, surveillance, administration and shaping of human individuals” (Gledhill 1994: 148). At the level of the collective, entire communities, groups or categories may suffer the same fate, as during the Holocaust or during the many incidences of “ethnic cleansing”: Kurds in Iraq, Muslims in Bosnia, Tutsis in Rwanda, and so on. Always what is arbitrary is presented as rational, through naturalization or by recourse to some form of knowledge whose source may be cosmological or scientific, depending upon the historical and temporal context.

The power of seeing There can be no immutable hierarchies or differences, for, as pointed out by Munro (1997: 5), differences also demand “labour” from people, in other words they are not self-sustaining. They need to be constantly worked upon, and then there is always the possibilities of counter-­ hegemonic forces coming into play. Thus contestation and interactions, negotiations and challenges are constantly at play in society; yet we find that dominant discourses maintain their power over a long period, insidiously working their way through social fabrics; thus racism, caste, ethnic prejudices and gendered discriminations keep reinventing themselves, because “modes of seeing” are established well in advance. It is the ways of “seeing” that ensure that the hierarchies will continue, for one can monitor action but not vision. 222

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Thus “race,” “caste” and “gender” remain alive in the way people perceive and look at each other. In this sense premium is placed on “looks” in a postmodern world of dissolving boundaries and increased distance from community life (Csordas 1994: 2). Bodies are crafted by external constraints although actions may appear to individuals to be of the result of “free will.” What appears in the person as “desire” is ultimately a control exerted by the social techniques of reproducing power hierarchies. Mernissi (2001: 208–219) describes a situation in the United States when she was told by a saleswoman in an expensive store that she could not find any skirt in her size because she was not a size 4 or 6 but “deviant.” She is told that the “norm” is set by the media and the fashion giants such as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Gianni Versace and Giorgio Armani, Enlightened by what she refers to as the equivalent of the veil for Western women, Mernissi makes a significant comment about Western male’s control over women: “By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility” (ibid.: 213). Western patriarchy is reflected in men’s control over women’s fashion that requires women to voluntarily subject their bodies to extreme control, sometimes leading even to death (by anorexia), in order to gain visual approval from the men. But such approval is not limited to sexuality, it extends to all dimensions of social and economic life. A “successful” woman in the Western world must “look good” to obtain a job, attract votes or function as a politician or professor. Another telling story involves a young Barack Obama thumbing over a Life magazine in a waiting room, when he came across a picture of a horribly disfigured black man, who seemed to have had his skin peeled off. The explanation lay in an advertisement promising that black skin could be turned to white, to which thousands of people had responded, in response ultimately to a “technology,” not of control over their skins or bodies, but over their minds, and one that promised them that through paying money they could become “normal” white people. The child Obama, perhaps not yet influenced sufficiently by the controlling apparatus of society, recorded his horror: “I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page” (1995: 30). Aesthetics too, is a powerful tool for creating hegemonic stereotypes. In most societies, there exist criteria of physical beauty that demonstrate their ambiguity by being subject to change. Shrinking sizes in the West have now reached suicidal proportions. In India the recent obsession with fair skin has become evident. There is fair evidence from ancient texts and folklore and even commonly used terms in daily life that for Indians beauty was not necessarily associated with a fair skin. Thus bodies are subjected to crafting in a situation not of tradition or the past, but in the present, in the post-modern world of globalization, where the power of sight is becoming privileged over all others. Thus, in Foucauldian terms, “what is” is more truly represented by “what should be” by an exercise of power. But behind all these constructions there are histories, where the differential natures of controlling apparatuses have been shaped in one guise or the other, including race, caste, and gender, as discussed in the next section.

The power of words Foucault among other post-modern thinkers has shown the power of speech—how subjects are constructed within a discursive paradigm, how words reflect the construction of bodies in significant ways. Thus while carrying out acts of extreme brutality on the local populations the British colonial administration, while claiming to be honest, just and rational, used words such as “necessity,” “justice” and “peace” to describe their actions, at the same time using words such as “thugs,” “barbarians” and “unlawful” to characterize the native populations such as the Konds described by Padel (2011: 55). Channa (1992: 19) has shown how the bodies of the 223

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native populations were described in animal-like terms by the early British administrators such as J.H. Hutton in their ethnographies. As Das (2011: xxix) points out, making a distinction between taking a life by human sacrifice (the Kond way) and taking life through wars or judicial executions (the British way) was the critical boundary set between barbarity and civilization. Modernist theories of evolution and the classical anthropological construction of the “primitive” were successful in laying down the criteria for “higher” and “lower” in human cultures and creating the concept of “development” as a movement towards Westernization and progress. It is under this insidious concept of development, whose meaning has once and for all been set by the nexus between knowledge and power from the colonial period, that indigenous people and forest dwellers in countries such as India, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia—viewed as “developing” by the world at large and by their own governments—are brutalized, displaced and killed with as much impunity as was afforded to the British troops who fired upon the Konds in the nineteenth century. The construction of the human and the not-so-human are informed by the complex mechanisms by which personhood is understood and conceptualized as well as the sense of self or identity formation in play.We construct our own identity with respect to the Other: “We situate some Others quite close to the Selves we are calling into being; others, we place so far away as to make them utterly inhuman” (Deloria 1998: 21). In every epoch of history of domination and exploitation and of unimaginable violence against others, there is a concomitant process of demonization of the Other; to the extent, as Taussig (1987) describes, that at times the demon takes on a fearful aspect that leads to a desire for destruction and elimination even if it is at the cost of self-interest. Another powerful tool is the concept of culture itself, which poses immutable differences where, as Bayart (2005: ix) puts it, there can be no natural differences between humans. So-called “cultural identities,” the basis of all nationalism, and subsequent wars, conflict and genocide in the names of such nationalism, are cultural, ideological and political constructs and also historical in nature. There is both a disjunction and a close relationship between the biological or what may be considered the scientific basis of race and its translation into a systematic mode of discrimination. The sociologist and civil-rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois had a strong sense of his “Negro” identity and his considered opinion about race was not to negate it but to turn its vertical character into one of horizontal and complimentary differentiation. His notion of self was to place him in a category of racial distinction based on “blood” and “common history” (Du Bois 1903) and he was of the opinion that the Negro race must not only maintain its identity but also contribute its genius to the common good of human civilization (1903). He launched scathing criticisms of the white man for his un-Christian cruelty and discrimination against black bodies. Much later Barack Obama’s autobiography narrates the final anchoring of his black self, after a childhood and youth full of turmoil. Both these men present success stories of being at peace with their “black bodies” but the story is different for many other black men and women. There is much literature on slavery, colonization and domination of black bodies and their devaluation—not uniformly but in gendered and even class-related ways. Thus Davis (2011 [1981]) points to the specifically gendered nature of slavery where, although the black woman’s body was viewed as equal to the man in terms of her labor input, she was also subjected to a gendered form of torture by virtue of her femininity: “Rape was a weapon of domination, a weapon of repression, whose covert goal was to extinguish the slave women’s will to resist, and in the process demoralize their men” (2011: 24). Although race is apparently about color, it is really about the metaphoric representation of blackness in white, Anglo-European culture. If one examines the English language one realizes how “dark” and “black” are treated as synonymous with evil, despair, degradation and practically 224

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every negative trait or condition. It is this transposition of symbolic meanings to the black body that to some extent justifies the dehumanization of dark bodies. Thus the black body is coded not in terms of what it is but according to the cosmological representation of blackness in the European mind. That such an interpretation of blackness is not universal can be seen in the cultural interpretation of “black” in many other cultures, especially the non-white ones (Channa 2008: 161). This conjunction of metaphorical qualities with actual color has led to a de-recognition of the humanity of those labeled “black.” Historical evidence indicates that such labeling can be graded as one group may be in a dominated situation in one context and dominating in another. The best example is of the Jews who were subjected to extreme violence and genocide because of their ethnic darkness as compared to the fair Aryans under the Holocaust.Yet, in Israel, these very Jews derecognized the legitimacy of the Arabs to their land (Said 1978) as well as of the local (non-European) Jews (Sadig Al-Ali 2007). The continued support of the Western world for Israel as against the Arabs is an expression of evaluative judgment.When Du Bois mentioned “race” it was in the sense of a value-neutral, scientific description, but even he realized that when race becomes a marker for lynching and torture it ceased to have any scientific value. The complex relationship between race and racism has been discussed by many authors (Shanklin 1994; Van den Berghe 1967; Banton 1988); “racism” being the political interpretation of race in a manner that justifies inequality, often in the garb of scientific rationality. Race was justified for a long time through the use of scientific technology such as anthropometry and other measurements, including psychological and medical tools. These so-called scientific procedures have created myths that reiterate already existing stereotypes about race and psychobiological differences. Wheeler (1995:51) refers to an Asian psychiatrist, Dr. Sasidharan, who has shown that racism is inherent in methodological lapses that imply that mental illness is much higher in black populations than in white. The doctor blames the interpretative framework of psychiatry that leads to more black, than white people being labeled as mentally ill. In this way most black people in Britain tend to see psychiatry as a method of “social control or punishment” (ibid.). One example of racist rationality couched in scientific terms was eugenics. We find many critical assessments of the so-called “Race Science” (Gould, 1981; Stepan 1982) and of the works of scientists such as Broca, Ripley and Morton; whose overtly meticulous scientific measurements served to establish that different races had differential mental capabilities based on variables such as skull size, shape of head and stature. It was almost conclusively demonstrated, according to such scholars, that some people were incapable of being “civilized” because of deficient physical characters. Eugenics was a “scientific” movement that had as its goal the selective reproduction of humans, eliminating those perceived as inferior and encouraging the superior (Chase 1980). One of eugenics’ practical outcomes was the introduction of the law for compulsory sterilization in 30 out of 48 states of the United States by the time of the second World War, and one may be surprised to know that in at least 22 American states such laws persisted until 1992 (Shanklin 1994: 84). In an interesting way Afshar and Maynard (1995: 1) point out that “whiteness” is a race too, and to be labeled “white” gives one a minority status, albeit one that is “privileged and unanalyzed, taken for granted.” However white as a color may not be always viewed in a positive light. Few scholars have attempted to analyze what white means to those for whom it is the Other (Channa 2011). In South Asian literature and movies made in India, white men are more often than not portrayed as the associates of the villain or otherwise cruel, dominating and with “bad habits.” To the South Asian, white is representative of the invader and the enemy as well as the “untouchable” (mleccha) in caste terms. Racism in itself may be understood as a dominant 225

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discourse, where one assumes that the Other is always non-white, giving the privileged position to the white or unanalyzed central subjective position. No doubt the discourse of racism is rooted in the historical reality of slavery, but slavery too was not always black and was color-blind in ancient societies of the West and East. Racism is still directed towards white Others such as the Irish (Shanklin1994: 3–4) and the Welsh, the Poles and the Turks. Often this stereotyping of the Other is also the trigger for negative action, including that by the British against the Irish. A class full of American students was very surprised when I showed them a picture of Iraqi women, saying that they had expected something very different and that “these women looked more like American women!” Even today most parts of the world are flooded with mythical stereotypes about the Others that sustain and perpetuate cleavages, often leading to dangerous repercussions. The South Asian phenomenon of caste has engaged the attention of anthropologists and sociologists specializing in this region, yet there remains much to be understood about this cosmological interpretation of the universe (Smith 1994). Caste differs considerably in its ideological and practical aspects. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the myriad philosophical dimensions of the caste system but it is sufficient to point out that at the level of practice, the specific aspect of caste called untouchability comes close to the practice of race. Some bodies are condemned by their very birth to be inferior and polluted and to be at the service of the upper castes or the so-called, “clean” or “unpolluted” castes. Although caste is not intrinsically about appearance but about the guna or quality of the body composed through an integrated process that includes the place where one is born, the food that one eats and the ways in which one worships (Inden 1976: 17), at the level of day-to-day practice the metaphor of “appearance” comes up in verbal discourse in such a way as to create an undefined and undisclosed verbal stereotyping (Channa 2005). There are cultural practices that define and mold the bodies of the lower castes, including both men and women, where some signifiers are explicit but others are implicit. In actual appearance there is little to distinguish one caste from the other yet social rules prohibit the lower castes from appearing as the upper castes. The lower castes are not supposed to put on good or clean clothes, wear shoes or gold jewelry as worn by upper castes, carry umbrellas or ride a bicycle or any vehicle; even today the infringement of such rules leads to organized violence against them. More importantly they are expected to carry a body language of submission and slavery, such as keeping away from eye contact, assuming a submissive attitude, and trying to be as invisible as possible. Thus visibility remains an intrinsic dimension of discrimination, and although race and even gender may be more, if not perfectly visible; caste is made visible by cultural and social means (Channa 2008). Centuries of adherence to such norms can make body language such an intrinsic part of personhood that it may become a part of a person’s identity and selfhood as well. The upper castes are driven by a great fear that if the rules of appearance and appropriateness are broken the lower castes would become indistinguishable from them. Such fears have become more real in the contemporary society of urbanization, population density and cosmopolitan life-style, where it is feared that people of lower castes may masquerade as upper castes, especially for the purpose of marriage. Several times I have heard upper caste women in India expressing their fear of dhokha, quite literally “betrayal,” that some lower caste boy or girl may enter their house as a spouse for their son or daughter. Such fears are more imagined than real as close-knit and far-flung social networks that still operate in South Asia tend to make it quite impossible for a person to hide their real caste identity, especially if they happen to belong to a lower, especially “untouchable” caste. It is in this context, where earlier sanctions placed upon the lower castes are being eroded, where in a cosmopolitan city such Delhi or Mumbai a person in a public place is not 226

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necessarily exhibiting any external signifiers of caste status, that the obsession with fair skin and ­Europeanized/Americanized looks are becoming more and more emphasized as a mark of distinction. According to the prevailing stereotypes, a person of upper caste is fairer than a person of lower caste, to say nothing about the nose (Trautmann 2004: 203). In other words, Caucasian looks are associated with a high caste status and therefore more and more Indians are aspiring for such looks—by artificial means, if necessary. Such values are strongly supported and promoted by marketing mechanisms of a free market, where advertisements routinely evoke the merits of a fair skin as linked to success in all walks of life and every kind of product; soaps, lotions, creams, beauty aids of all kinds are sold to a public striving to look, “superior.”: a superiority that distances itself from a body burning in the sun, that of a landless laborer or of a woman standing and ironing clothes by the way side. Such bodies are inferior, dark and unattractive. They are the bodies of the poor, the underprivileged and powerless sections of society.Thus “fair” is symbolic of success, of power and privilege.Thus, as Godelier puts it: “In order for there to be domination, the bodies of the dominators must be disjointed from those of the dominated, and their substances altered” (2009: 98). The leader of the Dalit movement in India, B.R. Ambedkar, had shunned the Indian looks of the leaders of the Nationalist movement (in the colonial period), opting for a completely Western appearance as he associated the so-called Indian look with upper caste and elitist Hindu supremacy. He is the only Indian leader always illustrated sporting immaculate Western wear. Nationalist Hinduism too was a constructed identity (Chatterjee 1993), and Bayart (2005: 37) points to Christopher Jaffrelot’s concept of “strategic syncretism” borrowing “prestigious and efficacious elements” (ibid.) from the dominant, to assert their equivalence and worth. It is worth noting that most identity building movements that were began to assert an indigenous identity, such as the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj and even the nationalist movement led by leaders such as Vallabh Bhai Patel, Nehru and Gandhi, were molded on Western principles acquired by the leaders as a consequence of their Western education. Thus the monotheistic, universalistic and non-ritualistic religious movements took great care to identify anything that might seem abhorrent to the British, such as hook-swinging (Dirks 2001: 166) and snake worship, as outside the realm of classical Brahmanical Hinduism and as superstitions of the backward and marginal sections of society. This reconstructed religious and ethnic identity (Aryan for example) was a means of separation of the elites (upper castes and classes) from the masses, partially supported by science (Trautmann 2004) and partially by ideology. The elite Indians spoke European languages or refined versions of local languages and scorned both the British and more radically the ignorant masses of their own society.The dress worn by elite Indians is crafted out of a combination of the Western and local and is maintained as distinctive from any indigenous dress of India and certainly from what is worn by rural, tribal or lower classes. The masses were and are still are scorned for their “ignorance,” adherence to “outdated” customs and “superstition”—labels that make it convenient to bull-doze them out of existence in the name of development. It is the marginal people who still wear to a large extent clothes that are indigenous and which are again considered exotic and not truly Indian by the globally projected nationalist culture of India. For the elite, the modern sari and other forms of so-called Indian dress are made more and more distinctive by the highly globalized fashion industry. “Real” Indian dresses serve to mark out the rustic and marginalized sections of society from these elite. Thus the so-called ‘Ethnic” fashion, introduced by the late Mrs. Indira Gandhi (prime minister of India, known for her style and chicness) was a re-invention of the local and an urbanized and also Westernized version of what actual peasant and indigenous women wear. 227

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While the masses sought to emulate the looks of the superior strata of Indian society, after the assurance of a caste- and class-free India, envisioned in the Constitution of a postcolonial India, they found themselves losing out constantly in the search for “distinction.” Even today the visual chasm is complete and unmistakable to all Indians. Economic liberalization, the fashion and cosmetics industry and the media are all complicit in the game of restructuring and propagating a new “racism” of visual culture. Every Indian knows what is meant when it is said that you are looking like a low caste or are rustic. Without having any physical distinction a constructed racism serves very well to keep marginalization and hierarchy alive. Gender is a powerful tool of coding although in itself it is purely a symbolic as well as historical construct. Inequality and separation of groups is always marked by separate set of norms of men and women. Wilson (1973: 193) in his study of race in the Caribbean mentions that the one thing that was an exception to total separation of the races was the physical mating between white men and black women. Access to the body of the women of the dominated groups has marked both race and caste relationships, as well as all other domains of unequal power. The bodies of women of lower caste have always been exploited by men of higher caste. In this context, it is notable that although the norms of purity and pollution prevent a man from accepting food and water from the hands of a woman of lower caste, they do not prevent him from having sex with her. Patriarchal norms had further created an aura of purity of the upper class women’s body that had served to desexualize it in a manner reminiscent of the elitist Catholics of Seventeenth to nineteenth century France (Foucault 2010). Thus sexuality was inappropriate if attached to the pure body of an upper caste woman, but highly appropriate and expected in a lower caste women. The upper caste men thus confined their pure wives inside the domestic domain and sought pleasure in the “untouchable” bodies of the marginalized women. Such relationships need not always have been in the nature of rape but may have involved a hegemonic acceptance by the women of the dominated group of the inevitability of such relationships. In some cases sexual exploitation may even be dispensed as a favor. Thus in the Caribbean, “To black women concubinage offered the opportunity to ‘improve the color’ and, through their children, improve their social standing—but according to white values” (Wilson 1973: 193). In all cases of subjugation, the power equation is worked out between men; but it is done over the bodies of women. Thus black men were marginalized within the slave family as the woman and her children were the property of the white owner. In caste society, the bodies of lower caste women were viewed as common property and the norms of modesty were rarely allowed for them. In Southern India, the women of lower caste were not allowed to cover the upper part of their bodies. Cohen (1996: 139) cites a case where the lower caste Nadars had appealed to the British authorities, evoking their egalitarian values to allow the Christian converted women of untouchable castes to wear a breast cloth like upper caste Nayar women. The ruler of the state had objected, voicing the fundamental worry of all upper castes that it would make the women of the upper and lower castes indistinguishable from each other. The British administrators in trying to keep both sides pleased had offered that the lower caste women could wear Western-style blouses designed for them by the missionaries. But the lower castes were not really concerned about modesty. The wearing of a blouse was not the concern; the concern was to obliterate the coding of the bodies by which the women of the marginal group were marked out for exploitation. Both sides understood the implications, and their demands were directed towards either maintenance of status quo (for the upper castes) or reversing it (lower castes). Meanwhile, the relationships between gender and bisexuality and hetero-normativity are complex and problematic. The dialectical division of the world into masculine and feminine may not be as universal as in the Anglo-Saxon culture and normative structuring of male and 228

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female bodies not as rigid. Nanda (1999) has described the acceptance of intermediate and mixed sexualities and their bodily expressions in several non-Western cultures including the Hijra (neither man nor woman) of India. The extreme intolerance shown by European cultures to any transgression of heterosexuality is chronicled by writers such as Foucault.The historical transition that was made in Europe from regarding sexuality as a matter of relationships to a matter of the singular body and its pleasures may not have been made in non-Western countries, where by and large the “relational” aspect was maintained in assessing what may be called “transgressive sex.” For example in India, when the homosexuals were celebrating at the repeal of an outdated colonial rule about homosexuality being a crime, most people on the streets were rather taken aback at what was happening. A majority of Indians were not even aware that such a law existed and most of society does not condemn such states, although they may find them unacceptable in the light of family and kinship values. In other words, if a man or woman agrees to get married and have children and carry out homosexual activities on the side, not too much social distress is anticipated.The resistance to gay marriage would be more in the line of violation of caste and kinship norms than in terms of sexuality per se. Deep friendship and physical contact between people of the same sex such as holding hands in public places have always been tolerated in South Asia and considered “normal.” In this context it is important to bring out the notions of public and private, and the cultural practices of “silence” to camouflage flouting of norms. Thus in South Asia it is more important to preserve social propriety than to think about individual selves; it is social personhood that is always given prominence. Thus as Alexeyeff (2009: 113) states about the people of Cook Islands, it is not homosexuality as such but its public declaration that is seen as transgressive. But there are socially accepted ways in which the otherwise unacceptable behavior can be normalized; in the Cook Islands it is in the form of performative displays, while in South Asia, it is normalized in a ritual context. The Hijras are seen as sacred and given a ritually high status in society (Nanda 1999) and their physical state is legitimized by reference to mythology. Even at the level of performance, it is a part of marriage festivities in Northern India, for women to crossdress and dance with each other, often with overt sexual overtones. This attitude that embeds the individual in his/her social context is in sharp contrast to the Western, especially modern Western attitude, “in the context of recent historical evolutions in the notion of personhood as a holistic and atomistic entity, a trend closely tied to the elaboration of individualism as a foundational value of capitalism” (Besnier 1994: 300; cf. Alexeyeff 2009: 120). It is valid to note that such individualistic notions of Self are becoming prominent among the sections of South Asian society most exposed to Western capitalism.

The global spread of the poverty disease With the spread of economic liberalization and the global take over by the giant economic institutions known as multinational companies, symbolized by the giant “M” of McDonalds colonizing every landscape of the world, a new kind of racism and stigma is condemning bodies to rot on the deserts of Arizona (Urrea 2004), to drown in the waters of the Pacific, in vain attempts to cross the ocean in small boats, to be used as human guinea pigs in the slums of India, to be sold in the markets all over the world as child slaves; in other words human bodies that are seen as of no value, no sanctity at all. India in the twenty-first century is one of the most dynamic of economies in terms of its statistical growth rate, yet a large number of people are getting pushed out of their right to life, just as in Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia and Korea; all the so-called ‘developing’ countries. 229

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In the place of color and caste, a new kind of stigmatization is beginning to emerge, that of being poor. On July 31, 2011 (The Statesman, New Delhi), a newspaper report in India described the bodies of poor women in slums of India being fed with an experimental drug, manu­ factured by the US-based drug company Pfizer. The drug for treating breast cancer patients in the United States was being tested on the bodies of poor women in India, without their informed knowledge and with extreme negative reactions on their health. This is just one example of thousands of such experiments being carried out on the bodies of the poor, marginal populations all across the world in ghettos and slums. It is not just profit-making, but the right to profit-making that is being projected as a right that transcends the right to life, health and happiness of millions of people. From where does the sanction come for such blatant dehumanization of people? A number of political anthropologists have deliberated and commented in nuanced ways on the complexities of such neo-liberal, neo-colonizing processes being witnessed by the world as new forms of racism, and I would add “casteism” as well (Kingsolver 2001; Harrison 1995; Chomsky 1998; Escobar 2008). In the neo-liberal world of today we can see another form of racism—an economic racism that justifies the condemnation not only of bodies but also of cultures and ways of life, where the massive bulldozer of economic capitalism is eroding people and their habitats in the process of taking over resources for profit. Padel (2011: xxxiii) points out that Konds laid high value upon this life even when it was offered as human sacrifice. But in the contemporary world, Western capitalism and market economy negate the sacredness of human life.Thus the poor and marginal provide what Kingsolver (2001: 111) calls “unfree laborers sustaining free-marketeers.” In developing countries, the rhetoric of national interest, which reflects strongly the Gramscian notion of hegemony, has bulldozed people out of their homes and habitats. Destroying environments and ways of life has created what Guha (2003) has called “ecological refuges.” As Kingsolver (2001) has explained in her stories about NAFTA, the policy documents and the goals envisioned are rarely transparent; they hide more than they tell and common people have no access to the “real” meaning of things. In India, Brazil, Indonesia or Mexico, the stories are the same, where policies are made at the top with little regard for ordinary people and their lives. Referring to the work of Mills (1997) I would like to extend the notion of “white supremacy” to its local version; exclusion of people of minority status, low social prestige (like low castes in India), low economic and cultural valuation (indigenous people all across the world). In short the policies and programs are designed to benefit most the people at the top, and who also collude with each other to create a stratum of “Brahmins” (as this word was used to describe the WASPS [White Anglo-Saxon Protestants], in the United States). The British in India had found allies in the upper castes and ruling elites, who readily situated themselves favorably within the new power equation, to continue with their suppression of the marginal, albeit in different ways, and mostly with new justifications. Similarly the neo-liberal power-holders too are colluding across the globe to create powerful economic institutions that ensure the generation and continuation of capitalist exploitation, in one form or the other. The Konds described by Padel as fighting the British, are still fighting, not the colonial officers, but their own Indian political and economic power-holders. They are fighting to save their God, Niyamgiri, against mining giant Vedanta, the US multinational Monsanto and the chief minister of the state of Orissa.

Selves and codified bodies: conclusion Let us sum up this fight between selves and others, involving the historical contestation of rights to dignity and self-respect and imposed indignities by powerful forces.The Western world has seen several philosophical doctrines such as the Hobbesian axiom of the unruly self, the Spencerian 230

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doctrine of “survival of the fittest,” the capitalist free market theories of “to every individual what they deserve” that legitimized exclusion and put in place the structural mechanisms of inequality. In a more recent era scholars such as Gramsci, Bourdieu and Passeron, Foucault and a generation of political anthropologists, including feminist scholars (Haraway 1988; Harding, 1991) have carried out finely nuanced dissections of the ramifications of power in social life, the tools and technologies of its implementation, showing how minds and bodies are controlled and crafted, not by overt mechanisms of coercion alone, but by the more subtle mechanisms of influencing minds and life-ways and more specifically knowledge systems. It is only through such understandings that power itself can be countered. Thus Haraway (1988: 580) writes, “We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and bodies that have a chance for life.”When imposed categories, linguistic and cognitive, are contested, the lived conditions that are encapsulated in such terms are being challenged; thus when African-Americans rejected being called “niggers” they put a challenge to the concept of racism.When the untouchables of India coined the politically charged term Dalit, they rejected the discrimination imposed on them by upper castes. In his autobiography Dalit writer Vasant Moon (2001) has written how the lower castes were radically divided over the use of the term ‘harijan’ (children of God) coined for them by Gandhi, and the term ‘Dalit’ that reflected the militant aggression directed by an oppressed people, to the extent that they became like two groups who did not even like to marry with each other. Similarly the term “indigenous” encapsulates the emerging power of the displaced and marginalized. Thus when people gain the power to reinvent their own names and redefine who they are we see the beginnings of a transformative social and political order.

Further reading Channa, SM (2013) Gender in South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Channa, SM and JP Mencher (eds.) (2013) Life as a Dalit:Views from the Bottom on Caste in India, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

References Agamben, G (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Alexeyeff, K (2009) ‘Dancing Sexuality in the Cook Islands’ in H. Donnan and F. Magowan (eds.) Trangressive Sex, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books. Anderson, B (1991) Imagined Communities, London:Verso. Banton, M (1988) Racial Consciousness, England: Longman. Bayart, J (2005) The Illusion of Cultural identity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Besnier, N (1994) ‘Aspects of Literacy’ in Tim Ingold (ed.) Encyclopedia of Anthropology, Humanity, Culture and Social Life, London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P (1972) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bourdieu, P (1984) Distinction, Tr. R. Nice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourdieu, P and Passeron, J (1977) Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, London, California: Sage. Channa, SM (1992) ‘The Classical Ethnographies’ in S. M. Channa (ed.) Nagaland a Contemporary Ethnography, New Delhi: Cosmo. Channa, SM (2005) ‘Metaphors of Race and Caste-Based Discriminations against Dalits and Dalit Women in India’ in F. V. Harrison (ed.) Resisting Racism and Xenophobia, Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Channa, SM (2008) ‘The Crafting of Human Bodies and the Racialization of Caste in India’ in Nandu Ram (ed.) Dalits in Contemporary India,Vol. 1, New Delhi: Siddhant, 157–174. Channa, SM (2011) ‘Global Economy and Constructed Social imagination: Intersection of Aesthetics, Race, Gender and Caste in India’ in Peter J. M. Nas (ed.) Key Note Speeches in Cultural Anthropology, China: Intelligence Property Copyright Press.

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Subhadra Channa Chase, A (1980) The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chatterjee, P (1993) The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chomsky, N (1998) World Orders, Old and New, Delhi: Oxford University Press. Clifford, J and Marcus, G (1990) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Delhi: Oxford University Press. (org. 1986). Cohen, BS (1996) Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Csordas,TJ (1994) ‘Introduction:The Body as Representation and Being in the World’ in T. J. Csordas (ed.) Embodiment and Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Das,V (2011) ‘Foreword’ Sacrificing People, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, xxvii-xxxii. Davis, A (2011) Women, Race and Class, New Delhi: Navayana (first published). Deliege, R (1999) The Untouchables of India, London: Bloomsbury Pub. Tr. Nora Scott. Deloria, P (1998) Playing Indian, New Haven: Yale University Press. Dirks, N (2001) Castes of Mind, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Du Bois, WEB (1903) (2007) The Souls Black Folk, New York, Oxford University Press. Du Bois, WEB (1920) Dark Water:Voices from Within the Veil, New York: Washington Square Press. Dumont, L (1968) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, Trans. Mark Sainsbury, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson. Escobar, A (2008) Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes, Durham: Duke University Press. Etienne, M and Leacock, E (eds.) (1980) Women and Colonization: Anthropological Perspectives, New York: Praeger. Foucault, M. (1979) History of Sexuality,Vol. 1, New York: Pantheon Books. Tr. Robert Hurley. Foucault, M (2010) Abnormal: Lectures at the Collẻge de France, New Delhi: Navayana (org. 2003). Gledhill, J (1994) Power and Its Disguisess, London: Pluto Press. Godelier, M (2009) In and Out of the West, London:Verso. Gould, SJ (1981) The Mismeasure of Man, New York: W. W. Norton. Guha, R (2003) ‘How Much Should a Person Consume’, Vikalpa 28(2):1–11. Guha, R (1997) A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Haraway, D (1998) ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question on Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspectives’, Feminist Studies 14(3):575–600. Harding, S (1991) Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Harrison, Faye V (1995) ‘The Persistent Power of “Race” in the Cultural and Political Economy of Racism’, Annual Review of Anthropology 24:47–74. Ilaiah, K (1996) Why I Am Not a Hindu? Calcutta: Saumya. Inden, RB (1976) Marriage and Rank in Bengali Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kingsolver, A (2001) NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States, Boulder: Lynne Rienner. Knauft, B (1996) Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology, London: Routledge. Mencher, JP (1974) ‘The Caste System Upside Down, or the Not-So Mysterious East’, Current Anthropology 15(4): 469–493. Mernissi, F (2001) Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems, New York:Washington Square Press. Mills, CW (1997) The Racial Contract, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Moffat, M (1979) An Untouchable Community in South India: Structure and Consensus, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Moon,V (2001) Growing Up Untouchable in India: A Dalit Autobiography. Tr. from Marathi by Gail Omvedt, New Delhi:Vistaar. Moore, HL (1994) A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munro, R (1997) ‘Ideas of Difference, Stability, Social Spaces and Labor of Division’, in K. Heatherington and R. Munro (eds.) Ideas of Difference, Oxford: Blackwell. Nanda, S (1999) The Hijras of India: Neither Man nor Woman, New York: Wadsworth. Narayan, B (2001) Documenting Dissent: Contesting Fables, Contesting Memories and Dalit Political Discourse, Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Studies. Obama, B (1995) Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, New York: Three Rivers Press. Padel, F (2011) Sacrificing People: Invasions of a Tribal Landscape, New Delhi: Orient Blackswan (First pub. 1995).

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Selves and codified bodies Price, TJ (1970) ‘Ethnohistory and Self-Image in Three New World Negro Societies’, in N. E. Whitten Jr. and J. F. Szed (eds.) Afro-American Anthropology: Contemporary Perspectives, New York: Free Press. Sadig A-Ali, N (2007) Iraqi Women, London: Zed Books. Said, EW (1985) ‘An Ideology of Difference’, in H. L. Gates, Jr. (ed.) ‘Race’,Writing and Difference, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, W (1978) Orientalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Shanklin, E (1994) Anthropology and Race, Belmont: Wadsworth. Smith, BK (1994) Classifying the Universe;The Ancient Indian Varna System and the Origins of Caste, New York: Oxford University Press. Stepan, N (1982) The Idea of Race in Science, Great Britain 1800–1960, London, Macmillan. Taussig, M (1987) Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Trautmann, TR (2004) Aryans and British India, New Delhi:Yoda Press (first pub. 1997). Urrea, LA (2004) The Devil’s Highway, New York: Little, Brown and Co. Van den Berghe, P (1967) Race and Racism, New York, John Wiley. Wheeler, E (1995) ‘Doing Mental Health Research: Observations and Experiences’, in H. Afshar and M. Maynard (eds.) The Dynamics of ‘Race’ and Gender, London, Taylor and Francis, 41–62. Wilson, PJ (1973) Crab Antics, New Haven: Yale University Press. Wolf, EW (1982) Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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13 LAW AND POLItIcS An anthropological history, and research and practice among vulnerable populations Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban

Political and legal anthropology originated in the colonial experiences of Great Britain and the United States and their administrative requirement to have detailed knowledge of the power structures and customary laws of peoples to be governed. Much of the early work created documents mainly for administrative purposes, often commissioned by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs or the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs (Hoebel, 1969: 92). Characteristically, both the American and British ethnographers of law were sympathetic chroniclers of indigenous legal systems and were critical of cases of injustices carried out by ignorant US judges describing them as “kangaroo courts” (Hoebel, 1969: 95). Hoebel argued for increased understanding of ‘native’ world view or traditional systems of politics and advocated a more enlightened view of indigenous law related to policy decisions. Eventually these commissioned studies appeared as unique ethnographies of law. Hoebel’s classic work The Cheyenne Way was a collaboration with a noted jurist (Llewellyn and Hoebel, 1941), a pattern that continued. Likewise the British ethnographers hoped that their studies, as Gluckman wrote for the Lozi, “may help others to understand them, and them to understand themselves” (1955: xxiii). Eventually ethnographic descriptions led to analysis of “primitive” law by E. Adamson Hoebel (1954). This American pioneer of the study of law and politics was followed by Laura Nader (1969) who advanced the subfield of ethnography of law with her study of Zapotec (Mexico) law cases (1964, 1965). Nader’s effort at comprehensive study of the ‘anthropology of law’ was described as “the study of process, structure, comparison, and perception of the law” (1969 inside cover). Her effort at compiling and establishing the new field was the result of two ­Wenner-Gren conferences that preceded its publication.Two major subjects were addressed: the position of jurisprudence in social science and the study of dispute settle in terms of individual and societal processes (Intro, p. 2). British social anthropology’s origin in colonial times and under colonial conditions yielded generally synchronic contemporary studies, normally of a single society, meant to be used by colonial administrators. A Manual of Nuer Law (Howell, 1954) stands as one example with its explicit subtitle: “Being an account of Customary Law its evolution and development in the courts established by the Sudan Government,” recalling that the ‘Sudan Government’ is the colonial government. The classic work African Political Systems (1940) was edited by social anthropologist colonial officials Meyer Fortes and E.E. Evans-Pritchard and introduced a theory of political organization that explained a range of types as acephalous and cephalous societies, 234

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those respectively without and with a “head,” or decentralized and centralized types of political organization. In practical terms cephalous societies could be governed by controlling a chief, king, or otherwise a leader in a stratified society. These early studies evolved to advance models of political organization in American anthropology as ‘egalitarian’ and ‘stratified’ societies (Evolution of Politics in Society, Morton Fried). Eventually the study of law and politics became accepted as subfields within Euro-American anthropology.

Early theoretical debate A lively debate between British and American anthropologists emerged over appropriate terminology to be employed in describing and analyzing politics and law in human society. British social anthropologists advocated the use of western legal categories for analyzing non-western societies—such as the use of ‘tort’ for property cases and the ‘reasonable man’ for criminal cases—while American Paul Bohannan argued for the use of “native” categories that are generated from within the culture being studied. These differing perspectives were outlined in their classic works of legal anthropology, Bohannan’s Justice and Judgment among the Tiv [of Nigeria] (1957) and Max Gluckman’s The Judicial Process among the Barotse [of the former Northern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe] (1955). This debate revealed significant theoretical differences between American and British social anthropology in that Bohannan argued for the use of what he called “native” categories in analysis of law and politics while Gluckman argued for universal ones. Bohannan found western legal categories inadequate to full description of the richness of difference between non-western and western legal categories and he developed a distinction between “folk” or native categories and western-based “analytical” categories, especially juridical terminology. This debate was a part of those leading to the founding of ethnoscience in anthropology whereby folk categories are generated for other subfields, such as ethnobotany. Both scholars rooted their discussion in their respective extensive fieldwork. For Bohannan the Tiv of central Nigeria possess a fundamentally different meaning of “truth.” Unlike the legal-social standard of truth as verifiable fact in the west, in Tiv land the truth is bent in order to achieve the higher goal of mending social relations. Gluckman preferred western legal terms with common meaning, such as tort and the western standard of the “reasonable man” which he argued “is a canon of judgment which is basic to human thinking” (Gluckman, in Nader, 1960: 367). During the colonial era a number of law and anthropology studies were produced (among them, Isaac Schapera’s 1938 work) that continued from colonial times through the great wave of newly independent African nations in the post–World War II period of decolonization including not only the works by Bohannan and Gluckman, but also works by Adam and Hilda Kuper as well as Victor W. Turner (1957). Eventually Bohannan would describe this new arena of study as “a small field in which the quality of the work is extraordinarily high and thus serves as a microcosm for some of the fundamental problems with which anthropology struggles (p. 401). He surmises that “facts” are always colored by the ethnographic instrument [the anthropologist], the perceiver of the fact” (p. 407) in Nader “Ethnography and Comparison in Legal Anthropology” (pp. 401–418). In what Sally Falk Moore (2001) has described as “fifty turbulent years of legal anthropology, 1949–1999,” concepts of local law, politics, and conflict resolution were explored while broader historical issues of decolonization and postcolonial politics were addressed as the global colonized world underwent the process of nation-building. Matters of citizenship in new, multicultural nations involved explorations and analysis of internal, divisive conflicts that 235

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threatened new nations and complicated analysis of the concept of the “other” in anthropology. The ‘other’ had been used to delineate the complex relationship between the west—the realm of the ­colonizer—and the rest of the world—the colonized nations. Subjects comprising new areas of analysis that have come up in my ethnographic research in Sudan (1976, 1987, 2012) include: legal pluralism; refugees in camps of Internally Displaced Persons, resulting from both external and internal conflict; anthropology and human rights; and ideas of “personhood” and the “human being” (Messer 1993). Likewise, broad issues of anthropology and international law and of cultural relativism and universal rights as citizens have been a part of recent scholarship (Fluehr-Lobban, 1995; Goodale, 2009).

Human rights: universal or culturally relative Cultural relativism asserts that since each culture has its own inherent integrity with unique values and practices, value judgments should be withheld or suspended until cultural context is taken into account. What members of one culture might view as strange and bizarre in another culture (for example, polygamy, body tattooing, or strict dietary laws) can be understood best within that culture’s context. Anthropologists are usually only observers and recorders and do not make judgments about customs and values of cultures. However, with an increasing emphasis on human rights as universal rights, some anthropologists are questioning an absolute objectivity and challenging the tenet of cultural relativism. Human rights and cultural relativism are not philosophically or morally opposed to one another. The terrain between them is fluid and rich.

Anthropology’s role in human rights Historically, anthropology as a discipline declined to participate in the international dialogues that produced conventions regarding human rights, mainly due to philosophical constraints stemming from cultural relativism.This meant that anthropology’s voice was not included in the drafting of human rights statements such as the United Nations’ “Conventions for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women” (1979) or the “Rights of the Child” (1989). Fearing a theoretical isolation from issues about which anthropologists are knowledgeable, in recent years anthropologists have been active in the “cultural survival” and human rights of human groups threatened by ethnocide, genocide, and a variety of human rights violations based upon gender, race, ethnic origin, or other differences. They have testified in US courts against government rules that impinge on the religious traditions or sacred lands of Native Americans. They have lent their expertise in public education and advocacy in a host of social issues from domestic violence, to female circumcision, to culturally based forms of homicide. Anthropologists have established an interest and an accumulated experience in the area of human rights informed by cultural relativist considerations (Fluehr-Lobban, 1995; Goodale, 2009). The application of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights to anthropological cases has been challenging as the wording of the declaration contains a strong western bias. Nonetheless, fundamental issues of universal rights of citizenship; of gender rights in politics and law; of rights for persons living under military rule and dictatorship; and of overarching patterns of law and social change—all have been addressed by legal and political anthropologists.

The limits of cultural relativism Anthropologists realize that cultural relativism may be taken to extremes. Although anthropologists accept that cultures vary and have unique ethical and moral systems, this does not 236

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mean that they cannot make judgments about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in comparing one culture to another. Following a strictly relativist viewpoint it is impossible to reject any form of culturally acceptable homicide—for example, ‘honor’ killing of women in Mediterranean and Middle East societies for alleged sexual misconduct. Relativism could argue that cultural acceptance or condemnation of the practice are equally valid.This extreme relativist position is actually a form of absolutism with which few anthropologists would agree. Anthropologists did not defend Nazi genocide or South African apartheid with cultural relativist arguments, and many have been critical of relativist defenses especially of western practices they see as harmful, such as cultural institutions that justify violence against women and children, or other vulnerable persons. The truth about our complex world of cultural difference is that moral perplexity abounds. The ability to accept that another person’s or culture’s position with which one disagrees is nevertheless rational or intelligible lays the basis for discussion of differences. Relativism can be used as a way of living in society with others. An egalitarian relativist sees all human beings as moral agents with equal potential for making ethical judgments. Though moral judgments in and of themselves are not scientific, they can be socially analyzed. That is, relativism and universalism in cultural values or practices—including international standards of human rights—need not be opposed morally, but they can be discussed, debated, and assessed by the social sciences, including anthropology. Ellen Messer (1993: 221–49) reviewed how anthropologists have contributed to the human rights framework by asking the following types of questions: (1) just what are rights cross-­ culturally; (2) who is counted as a full person or human being eligible to have these rights; and (3) how can anthropologists monitor compliance with human rights standards and violations? Annelise Riles (2006) argues that the problems that anthropologists encounter with human rights organizations can be understood by the nature of the legalistic character of human rights and the dominance of legal discourse. Anthropologists have worked with other social scientists, activists, and lawyers to understand how international law is produced and how it works, ranging from high-level commercial dispute settlement systems to grassroots human rights organizations around the world. Sally Engle Merry (1992) argued that national and international perspectives are vital to analyses of law in society using, for example world system theory, theories of dominance and resistance and that transnational processes are important to consider in theorizing about the nature of local legal phenomena. Annelise Riles (2003) notes that with the global spread of American dominance has come the epistemological and theoretical pragmatism that is characteristic of American studies.

Vulnerable research participants Many, if not most of the people that anthropologists study can be considered “vulnerable” in the sense that they are not social elites and may possess one or more of the recognized qualities of vulnerability by virtue of their age, gender, ethnic, racial, or class status, or by having been victimized by repressive governments or institutions. Informed consent simply means that the researcher offers the fullest possible disclosure of the goals and potential uses of research before it is undertaken, then the application of informed consent guidelines in anthropological research need not be as controversial as might appear at first glance. In the first place, consent forms are not a necessary component for obtaining informed consent, and the chilling effect on research that most anthropologists fear can be reduced or eliminated entirely. Philosophically, informed consent might be interpreted as a professional responsibility or a charge that in research, anthropologists will practice full disclosure, to the best 237

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of their ability, and that issues affecting participants regarding methods, use, or publication of research will be discussed with them in advance. Among vulnerable indigenous populations—who are increasingly connected to global conversations about human rights, including the ethical conduct of scientists, researchers, journalists, and others who seek their collaboration—obtaining informed consent is not only possible, it is necessary. The documentation of that consent—whether from an individual(s) or a group(s)— may be recorded orally or in writing, using the language of the people studied as well as that of the researcher (Fluehr-Lobban, 2000). All research involving vulnerable populations must be reviewed not only by the relevant IRB, but also by multiple layers of accountable persons or institutions, including funders, national or tribal research boards, and the profession. Where increased vulnerability exists, as with HIV+ persons, the process of obtaining informed consent and its documentation need to be “double blind,” in the sense that multiple parties with no vested interest in the research be consulted for approval. Openness and disclosure is a fundamental part of informed consent in research. Reference is increasingly made in social studies to “participants” instead of the older term “informants.” Models of collaborative research that incorporate informed consent are all components of anthropological research that is fully current with developments taking place in the world we study and the professions that study it. Informed consent may only be a convenient summary term for what has taken place in biomedical and social science research, but when its spirit is implemented it results in better researchers and better research (Fluehr-Lobban, 2003a).

Case study: Sudan Elite populations My research necessarily depended upon working with elites and professionals who provided me with access, information, and collaboration for data collection. Over four decades of research many of these professionals, especially the women judges who comprise about 10 percent of the Judiciary, have been helpful with providing access and have been generous with their time and expertise. Indeed, several of these women judges have been among my closest friends and collaborators. My first book on Shari`a law was dedicated to the first woman judge appointed to the Sharia court in 1970. I was also dedicated to her mentor and former professor, the Shari`a Chief Justice, who also became a mentor to me. I was invited to the Lawyers and Judges Club, one of the many professional clubs that are part of elite society in Sudan. The remainder of this chapter explores the fields of legal and political anthropology using the lens of my career in anthropological research in the United States, Sudan, Egypt, and Tunisia from 1970 to the present. This research, for the most part, dealt with the field studies sanctioned by legal and political elites providing me with access to the courts and to their good offices, while the litigants from the United States to North Africa have been overwhelmingly the poor, women, minorities in their own nations and vulnerable. While not a substantive literature review of current political anthropology, the chapter is informed by current literature in political anthropology and the comparative study of law that “speak” to the research that I have carried out. That research covered diverse subjects and contexts as observation of the lower criminal courts in Philadelphia to a study of homicide in Sudan, to studies of the Islamic courts in the three countries mentioned above from 1979 to 2011. My latest book on law and anthropology was published in English in 2012, “Shari`a and Islamism in Sudan: Conflict, Law and Social Transformation” and has now been translated into Arabic, and I am seeking Arabic publishers inside and outside of Sudan at the moment. My previous work on Shari`a (Islamic 238

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Law and Society in the Sudan,1987; Arabic ed. 2004) was carried out before the state underwent extreme Islamism that brought about renewed civil war for 22 years and ended in separation into two Sudans in 2011—and now, of course, South Sudan is having its internal difficulties. So, one insight I would be able to provide is the difference of fieldwork in these two time periods and the difference between the reception of these books for English language (United States and United Kingdom compared) as well as for Sudanese Arabic readers. Sudan’s decades of oppression of marginalized non-Muslims and Muslim non-Arab ethnic minorities offers an important case study for the examination of vulnerable persons as a social caste. It began using the guise and the legitimacy of an Islamic discourse that quickly turned into “Islamism,” a political program calling for the exclusive application of Islamic institutions in law, governance, and society. Beginning in 1983 and becoming the general social order after 1991, Sudan’s Islamist project was called the “Civilization Project” (Mashru`a al-hadari in Arabic) and its main targets were the country’s most vulnerable populations, women, non-Muslims, and its majority marginalized peoples in the South, Nuba Mountains and in Darfur. “Public Order” morality laws were introduced in 1991—following an Iranian and Saud Arabian model of ‘public morality.’ Enforced by a special ‘Public Order’ police, the most vulnerable populations were targeted using the initial ruse of the protection of women’s morality. Initial fear and intimidation among the general populace eventually gave way both to acquiescence but also to subtle and overt forms of resistance to the new ‘public order’ that was essentially foreign to old Sudanese more relaxed Muslim ways. “Immodest” dress became an offence punishable by “flogging” and alcohol consumption, once prevalent and tolerated, was treated with imprisonment as well as flogging. Although the new criminal code exempted non-Muslims, the laws nonetheless were applied to many non-­ Muslim Southerners in the North, especially targeting harsh application for men and women in the camps of the internally displaced where beer brewing and sale are often the only means of self-support in the general absence of government assistance.These practices continued until the separation of the Sudan into two countries when the camps began to be dismantled. The 2009 arrest and threatened flogging of UN worker and Muslim Northerner Lubna Hussein, along with twelve other mostly non-Muslim women, for wearing trousers attracted international attention and protest and was contested legally in Khartoum. The required head covering (hijab) was extended inappropriately to Christian women for official state purposes, such as a driver’s license or photo ID. Public Order Police (Nizam al-Am) on occasion entered university campuses to enforce dress codes. Eventually urban women wearing trousers in residential areas, or with their heads uncovered, were left alone and were not accosted by the police as frequently as in the past. However, it was the poor, the slum dwellers, and the lady public tea sellers in the cities who were targeted.

Research in camps of the internally displaced The most vulnerable Sudanese are living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps, estimated in 2003 at 11 percent of the entire population. These displaced persons are the result of chronic wars in the south, the Nuba Mountains and in Darfur and Kordofan, and are extensions of the coercive arm of the state, its army and police who run the camps. Before separation into two Sudans in 2011, it was estimated that more than one half of the population of the Southern Sudan either lived in Northern Sudan or had fled to neighboring countries. Perhaps 25 percent of Sudan’s IDP population lived in camps or slums in and around the greater Khartoum metropolitan area. Persons in these IDP camps are Sudanese nationals who have been denied full citizenship. UN figures for 2008 estimated that over 2 million IDPs live in greater Khartoum, 239

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either in the camps or in the slums growing out of them as a result of long-term residence in the urban area. They represent a semi-permanent underclass of vulnerable people, citizens without basic civic or human rights. I was granted permission by the government-run Muslim Humanitarian Assistance Commission to conduct research in these camps, an experience that forever has given meaning to my idea of vulnerability. Official statistics are one measure:Years of conflict left the country with an extreme shortage of labor; the 2008 census counted 84 percent of Southerners were engaged in non-wage work with an illiteracy rate of 27 percent (US Department of State 2013 Investment Climate-South Sudan, http://www.state.gov/e/eb/rls/othr/ics/2013/204855.htm). The typical house types in the IDP camps that ring Khartoum are as follows: (1) mud houses, 42.4 percent; (2) cardboard houses, 23.8 percent; (3) straw hut/cloth, 14 percent; (4) others and unidentified, 20 percent. The camps are governed by a mixture of what former colonial officials called “direct” and “indirect” rule. They are policed directly by the state’s military and special-purpose police for the camps and public order for the control of women in the camps. Camp residents are granted limited self-rule by giving indirect power to the indigenous chiefs known as “salateen” who mediate and negotiate solutions to conflicts that emerge within the camps. They conduct ethnically based courts which are basically customary courts dealing with marriages, divorces, and quarrels between people. There is a joint council of the salateen that meets as need arises for community matters and responses to government action or inaction. We have a system here. There is a big tent, adult people meet there. Those under 15 cannot go there. When a dispute arises, it is settled there. This morning there was a dispute, but instead of going to the formal authorities, we solved it in judiya (folk mediation) there under that tent.We solve our problems by ourselves.When somebody comes here for the first time, we invite him to attend meetings to know where he comes from, and to introduce him to the community, and we make a meal. (Kafino Satarnino, interviewed by Salma Abdalmunim and cited in Fluehr-Lobban 2012) The Public Order courts are quite another matter; they are government operated and are still enforcing Shari`a, despite the mandates in the CPA about the non-application of Islamic law upon non-Muslims, a fact about which they complain bitterly. The fine for alcohol possession and/or consumption is 150,000 SD or about $75USD, and the physical punishment is 40 lashes for a non-Muslim and 100 for a Muslim. In the Wad al-Bashir camp there are 12 sultans, one `omda or mayor, and a Court President, Raīs al-Mahkama. “It was better before the peace when we had some power. We are the Salateen bidūn sulta—the Chiefs without power,” they laughed; we all laughed with a shared sense of irony and sarcasm.

Women in the camps, the most vulnerable At the Wad al-Bashir camp I met Sudanese indigenous worker Um Abdu Al-Jabber, who is responsible for assisting and providing information to refugees returning to their home areas after the negotiated Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. She came to the camp in 1994, and works for the UN International Organization for Migration (IMO), among the largest nongovernmental organizations operating in the camps. She reported that women are the major source of economic income for their families. “The majority of women are working outside their homes, the children are without care and the men don’t do anything but sit around—the only ones helping out are the foreigners,” she says. 240

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Men in the camps have been almost entirely emasculated both in terms of culture as well as gender. Lacking the traditional base of a cattle economy and with an existing, plentiful supply of cheap labor for construction projects in booming Khartoum, they remain isolated in the camps in almost every respect from linguistic skills in Arabic to basic literacy in any language. The limited education available is limited to primary school in Arabic with a standard Islamist curriculum focusing on religious studies. Loss of dignity, hope, and a resulting despair among these men create conditions for alcoholism, domestic abuse, and fights. Women moved in to fill this economic void. During my visits to the camps in the daytime hours, few women were visible or available for interviews as they work in a variety of informal sector jobs in the urban areas and peripheries.They are mostly tea sellers in the outdoor markets. They also sell small bags of sunflower seeds, peanuts, and peanut products such as ground peanuts (dakwa) used in Sudanese cooking.They also supply most of the nearly ubiquitous cheap domestic labor for urban and suburban middle-class families.These legal economic activities that camp women fulfil may nonetheless result in ethnic or racial discrimination in the homes where they work. But they also learn Arabic and are familiar with the intimate details of Northern family life. Harassment and criminal prosecution have accompanied their illegal brewing of beer and other types of alcohol. Um Abdu reports “In the camps the woman has the two jobs—daytime outside the camps and night work at home—the men just sit doing nothing in the camps while the women do all the work.” Thousands of women were prosecuted for beer and alcohol brewing and served extended sentences in Omdurman Women’s Prison. Most were held for several years until 2007 after the signing of the CPA, despite their new amnesty from prosecution or further imprisonment under Shari`a law.1 They were fined $75USD which they could not pay or were given 3 months sentences that have been indefinitely extended, perhaps as a form of preventative detention to prevent them from resuming alcohol production after their release. They say directly to me “You should go to the prison and see for yourself.” After the negotiated peace with the North, inter-ethnic fighting among Southerners broke out and a general lack of security in the South made many fearful of returning, even after independence in 2011. Added to the security concerns was the lack of basic services and resources of the new Government of South Sudan.

Anthropologists as expert witnesses in asylum cases For the past several decades my husband Richard Lobban and I have been called upon to utilize our anthropological expertise in asylum cases that have ranged a gamut from persons seeking asylum for political reasons to human rights violations. Richard is a fellow anthropologist who has also conducted research in Sudan, Egypt, and Tunisia. He is a specialist in African Studies and has authored or coauthored books on Sudan, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, and Libya. Recognized for our expertise in Sudan and African Studies, the two of us were contacted by attorneys representing immigrant clients seeking asylum in the United States, usually in fear of being forcibly returned to conditions of war, ethnic cleansing, or other forms of violence in dysfunctional countries. In need of country or subject area experts, lawyers and their clients seek academics as witnesses to verify the contexts in which asylum seekers fled their country. Reading a client’s personal statement and writing an expert witness affidavit is a simple way to help victims of abuse. Attorneys have contacted us to work on cases for clients from other countries for which our expertise was extended—Nigeria, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, Egypt, Eritrea. We began to understand that a new, utterly unanticipated branch of applied anthropology was opening to us. We have now served as expert witnesses in dozens of cases and together possess a body of data and experience that includes testifying in person in Immigration and Naturalization 241

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Service (INS) Courts, or testifying remotely by phone, interviewing clients in prison, and even being asked to advise on a case involving a Guantanamo detainee. This unique application of anthropological knowledge represents a unique set of experiences. We have had vigorous personal discussions between ourselves about differing views of cases, a host of ethical issues, credibility of the clients, attorneys’ expectations and views of experts, and the surprising variety of “successful” outcomes. Neither of us has lost a case thus far, underscoring the value of anthropological knowledge in immigration courts and the respect for third-party persons with first-hand experience. Our cases have included the following subject areas: government political repression, imprisonment, torture (Sudan, Nigeria); Convention Against Torture, or CAT (Sudan, Nigeria); Civil war or chronic conflict (Eritrea, Ethiopia, Sudan, Guinea Bissau); New Republic of South Sudan, rising intra-ethnic violence. These cases have involved ethnic/racial discrimination, alleged genocide, or systematic religious discrimination recognized by the INS. Specifically cases of Sudanese marginalized populations alleging ethnic cleansing, ‘genocide’, discrimination, abuse (South Sudan, Darfur); Christian Muslim inter-communal violence (Nigeria, Sudan); Apostasy in Nigeria; and the Boko Haram terrorist organization. Working with these cases has brought my practice as an anthropologist into a global, universalist framework of law and international conventions, such as the Convention Against Torture, The Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Protection of Women and Girls against Harmful Cultural Traditions.These international standards challenge anthropologists’ traditional ideas of cultural relativism that can no longer be said to be an absolute principle in anthropology or law and politics. Cases such as those discussed in this chapter require us to pause and consider the context of each and the evolving international discourse on what constitutes human rights in national and global citizenship. Anthropology can and should be a vibrant participant in this discourse.

Note 1 Extracted from my book Shari`a and Islamism in Sudan: Conflict, Law and Social Transformation (2012).

References Bohannan, Paul. 1957. Justice and Judgment among the Tiv. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 1976. “An Analysis of Homicide in the Afro-Arab Sudan,” Journal of African Law, 20(1): 20–38. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 1987. Islamic Law and Society in the Sudan. London: Frank Cass. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 1995. “Cultural Relativism and Universal Rights,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 9. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2003a. “The Spirit and Intent of Informed Consent in Anthropological Research with Vulnerable Populations,” Paper presented for the Committee on Ethics- sponsored session, “Conducting Ethical Fieldwork Among Vulnerable, Indigenous Groups,” American Anthropological Association, November 20, Chicago, Illinois. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2003b. Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology: Dialogue for Ethically Conscious Practice. Lanham: AltaMira, Rowman and Littlefield. Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2012. Shari`a and Islamism in Sudan: Conflict, Law and Social Transformation. London: I. B. Tauris. Fortes, Meyer and Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1940. African Political Systems. London: International African Institute, Oxford University Press. Fried, Morton Herbert 1967. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. New York: Random House. Goodale, Mark (ed.). 2009. Human Rights: An Anthropological Reader. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Law and politics Gluckman, Max. 1947. The Political Annals of a Tswana Tribe, University of Cape Town, School of African Studies, Communication, n.s. No. 18. Gluckman, Max. 1955. The Judicial Process among the Barotse of Northern Rhodesia. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hoebel, E. Adamson. 1940. “The Political Organization and Law-Ways of the Comanche Indians.” American Anthropological Association Memoir, No. 54.1954. The Law of Primitive Man. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.1969. “Keresan Pueblo Law,” in Law in Culture and Society, L. Nader ed. Pp. 92–116. Howell, Paul Philip 1954. A Manual of Nuer Law. London: Oxford University Press for the International African Institute. Humanitarian Affairs Ministry, South Sudan, “IDPs and Their Fears of returning Home” September 16, 2010) (http://www.Gurtong.net). Kuper, Adam and Hilda (eds.). 1965. African Law. Berkeley: University of California Press. Llewellyn, Karl and E. Adamson Hoebel, 1941. The Cheyenne Way. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Merry, Sally Engle. 1992. “Anthropology, Law and Transnational Processes.” Annual Reviews in Anthropology, 21:357–379. Messer, Ellen. 1993. “Anthropology and Human Rights.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 22:221–249. Moore, Sally Falk. 2001. “Certainties Undone: Fifty Turbulent Years of Legal Anthropology, 1949–1999” (Huxley Memorial Lecture). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7(1):95–116. Nader, Laura (ed.). 1960. Law in Culture and Society. Chicago: Aldine Press. Nader, Laura. 1964. “An Analysis of Zapotec Law Cases.” Ethnology, 3(4):404–419. 1965. “The Ethnography of Law.” American Anthropologist, 67(6):3–32.(ed.). 1969. Law in Culture and Society. Chicago: Aldine. Riles, Annelise. 2003. “Ethnography in the Realm of the Pragmatic: Studying Pragmatism in Law and Politics.” PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 26(2):1–7, November. Riles, Annelise. 2006. “Anthropology, Human Rights and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage.” American Anthropologist, 108(1):52–65, March. Schapera, Isaac. 1938. A Handbook of Tswana Law and Custom. London, OUP for International African Institute, 2nd edition.1957. “The Sources of Law in Tswana Tribal Courts.” Journal of African Law, 1:150162. Turner, Victor Witter 1957. Schism and Continuity in an African Society. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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14 OBJEctIfYING EcONOMIES Contemporary themes in the anthropology of economic knowledge and practice Daromir Rudnyckyj

Perhaps at no time in the history of anthropology as a discipline has the economic demanded such urgent analysis. The scale of recent, ongoing crises around the world, the increasing division between the extremely wealthy and most others on the planet, and the ever-increasing integration of labor markets, production systems, and financial activities across national borders have a profound effect on the human condition and what forms of contemporary human life are emerging. Given that a focus on human beings (or anthropos in Greek) is part of its self-­ definition, anthropology plays a key role in analyzing the forms of human life that are constituted through the deployment of contemporary economic knowledge and practice. In this chapter I focus on three key themes that characterize contemporary anthropological work focusing on the economic: rationalization, reflexivity, and practice. In so doing, I treat economies not as autonomous domains of production, exchange, circulation, and consumption that can be accurately modelled along the lines of natural systems. Rather, I treat economies as effects of the exercise of economic knowledge and action. I argue that a distinctive contribution that anthropology and its allied disciplines make in diagnosing contemporary economic phenomena lies in its close attention to the reflexivity between economic knowledge and economic practice. This approach shares common strategies with research in science and technology studies that analyzes how scientific facts are constructed and pays special attention to the reflexive nature of the relationship between economic knowledge and practice. I focus on how economics and economic knowledge are simultaneously intended to both comprehend and intervene in the world that they document. Thus, economic knowledge does not merely describe the phenomena that are the objects of its analysis, but actively constitutes those very phenomena. Further, modern economic processes and phenomena are characterized by an imperative toward rationalization. The imperative toward rationalization is not a characteristic particular to liberal, neoclassical economic systems, but also toward communist and socialist systems as well. However, the imperative toward rationalization is perhaps most pronounced in neoliberalism, the relatively mundane but increasingly ubiquitous technology that makes economic calculation a universal standard for the organization and management of human life and conduct (Barry et al. 1996; Shore and Wright 1999; Strathern 2000; Rudnyckyj 2010). It is this economism, the extension of economic rationality and calculative reason into diverse domains of human existence, that is perhaps most portentous for the future of anthropos in the contemporary. 244

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Anthropological attention to the production and circulation of economic knowledge and practice offers a distinctive contribution to understanding contemporary economic predicaments. Such an approach offers a counter-method to the removed theoretical models that are characteristic of other social sciences. Disciplines like economics and political science emphasize the abstract dimensions of economic systems, creating highly abstract theoretical representations to model economic processes. Even the subdiscipline of microeconomics, which purports to analyze the behaviour of firms, households, and individuals assumes that the abstract concepts of supply and demand shape behaviour and that rational self-interest guides human action. As none other than George Soros has pointed out, economics is often unaware of its own reflexivity (Soros 1988).That is to say, unlike natural sciences, which maintain a distance from the objects of their inquiry, economics is more closely implicated in the reality that it represents. Much of the knowledge developed by economists is intended to simultaneously diagnose and intervene in the reality that it observes and describes. As Timothy Mitchell has astutely observed, economics is always already implicated in the “economy”—the very object that it denotes (Mitchell 2005). Because it is engaged in a tight feedback loop with the phenomena that it analyzes, economic knowledge is in many cases constitutive of those very phenomena. Owing to its disciplinary commitment to ethnography, the fine-grained documentation of empirical reality, anthropology holds the ability to document how knowledge about the economy is produced and put in to practice. Rather than building abstract theoretical models to explain empirical reality, as most social scientists do, anthropology sees the recursive relationship between those models and the world that they purport to stand apart from. As such, anthropology occupies a distinctive position in which it can document the world that is made by economics and economic knowledge and further document instances in which economic knowledge fails to meet its objectives.

The agency of economy The anthropological approaches to economic knowledge that I outline here treat economies not as an autonomous realms of production, exchange, and consumption, but rather as technologies for eliciting certain types of subjects and practices (Callon 1998a; Mitchell 2002: 80–119). This approach builds on Foucault’s argument that the concept “economy” was central to the emergence of a distinctly modern form of political rationality he called governmentality (Foucault 1991). Governmentality links management of the self, the family, and the state (Barry et al. 1996; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Li 2007; Ong 1999; Rudnyckyj 2004; Rose 1999). ­Foucault identifies the emergence of this form of power in the transition from sovereigntist modes of rule toward systems that emphasize self-government: In an upwards direction the sovereign must first learn how to govern himself, his goods, and his patrimony after which he will be successful governing the state. Downwards continuity means that when a state is well run, the head of the family will know how to look after his family, his goods and his patrimony, and consequently individuals will behave. The central term of this continuity is the management of individuals, goods and wealth within the family: economy. (Foucault 1991: 92) Thus, Foucault chronicles the resignification of the compound word economy, which in ancient Greek had referred to the management (nomos) of the household (oikos). During the early modern period the term economy comes to denote a domain for the administration of subjects and ultimately a domain for the deployment of techniques which elicit dispositions complicit in the 245

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project of self-government. This occurs initially through the application of an unprecedented mode of knowledge (statistics) on a new object (a population), but can be more generally applied to the role of knowledge in constituting self-government. Drawing on this intervention, below I show how anthropologists have sought to document the formation of subjects of economies in a variety of contemporary settings. In developing this argument about the representation of economies as both a theoretical and practical project, I supplement Foucault’s genealogy of economy with certain convergences in his work and the work of Max Weber, particularly regarding questions of reflexivity, rationalization, and practice. Both Weber and Foucault sought to comprehend the reflexive nature of modernity (Foucault 1997;Weber 1990).Their mutual interest in reflexivity stemmed from their realization of the contingent nature of historical processes and their awareness of the inherent flaws in any investigations guided by a search for ultimate causes or universal truths. Instead, through detailed empirical studies both sought to understand how facets of modern life came to be such as they are and not otherwise.Weber demonstrated how Protestant practices created the conditions of possibility for the emergence of what he called the “spirit of capitalism.” Foucault analyzed how scientific knowledge (medicine, criminology, psychology, and political economy) and the institutions in which it was deployed (hospitals, prisons, schools, and factories) constituted modern human beings (Foucault 1973, 1977, 1978). They shared a common recognition of the inherent reflexivity of modernity, as modern human beings are ensnared in what Foucault referred to as an “empirico-transcendental doublet” (Foucault 1970: 319). By this he meant that modern humans stand in a doubled relationship with themselves because they are simultaneously the subjects and objects of the knowledge they create. Thus, human beings appear as facts “among other facts to be studied empirically, and yet as the transcendental condition of the possibility of all knowledge” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983: 31). Foucault and Weber both recognized that this existential doubling posed a methodological problem for the human sciences because it illuminated the pitfalls inherent in any claims to ultimate or transcendental knowledge about humans. How can any knowledge exercise a claim to universal objectivity when it cannot be separated from the subjective experience of him or her who created it? Furthermore, as human beings create knowledge about themselves and other human beings, this knowledge is often used reflexively in the “conduct of conduct,” that is to say to modify and affect human activity. Their mutual recognition of this problem led both Weber and Foucault to eschew attempts at generalization and universal explanation, which Weber referred to as the imperative in the West to produce knowledge with “universal significance.” Significantly for anthropologists, both authors focused on the empirical investigation of historical singularities, recognizing the West as but one contingent historical formation among others. Take, for example, the opening sentence of The Protestant Ethic, in which Weber observes that the objective of universally valid knowledge was a problem that was peculiar to the West. He writes, “A product of modern European civilization, studying any problem of universal history, is bound to ask himself to what combination of circumstances the fact should be attributed that in Western civilization, and in Western civilization only, cultural phenomena have appeared which (as we like to think) lie in a line of development having universal significance and value” (Weber 1990: 13). Similarly, in The Order of Things, Foucault argues that the crisis of modern representation emerged when the human was recognized as simultaneously the subject and object of knowledge (Foucault 1970). He distinguishes three domains (life, labor, and language) through which the sovereign subject, man [sic], was constituted as the object of scientific knowledge (Rabinow 2003: 13). Furthermore, Weber and Foucault mutually recognized that rationalization is a characteristic feature of modern life. Thus, the modern imperative toward rationalization, the reflexive application 246

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of knowledge to human practice to achieve optimal standards of efficiency and productivity, is a key concern for both authors. For Weber, the ascetic, sober practices of Protestants and their ontological heirs is an effect of the methodical application of Calvin’s doctrine of predestination to their everyday existence. In contrast to Catholics, “the God of Calvinism demanded of his believers not single good works, but a life of good works combined into a unified system.… The moral conduct of the average man was thus deprived of its planless and unsystematic character and subjected to a consistent method for conduct as a whole” (Weber 1990: 117). In similar fashion, Foucault’s germinal concepts of governmentality and biopower both emerge out of inquiry into the effects of rationalization on human life. Governmentality (which he also referred to as governmental rationality) refers to the deployment of statistical calculation and enumeration by early modern states to manage populations (Foucault 2007) and has been read more broadly as the deployment of knowledge to administer human life in modern nation-states. The related notion of biopower refers to efforts to bring “life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of the transformation of human life” (Foucault 1978: 143). For both authors rationalization was not an inevitable effect of history, but a practice implemented in multiple domains of modern life by a range of experts who sought to optimize human life by subjecting it to an array of specialized modes of knowledge. Finally, both Weber and Foucault focused on action rather than ideas or mental states. The dominant anthropological interpretation of Weber has led to overly mentalist readings of his work in the discipline (Geertz 1973). Geertz’s definition of culture as composed of webs of meaning was inadequately attentive to Weber’s emphasis on ethics and embodied practices that is central to the latter’s analytical framework. Indeed, the central question of Weber’s comparative sociology of world religions (Weber 1920) was how work, perhaps the signature practice of modernity, became a moral obligation for Protestants and their ontological heirs. Thus, Weber’s works are perhaps best read not as an idealist counterpoint to Marx but rather as an inquiry into the peculiar attachment of moral value to diligent labor. Although Weber positioned his approach against what he called “the doctrine of the more naïve historical materialism” (Weber 1990: 55),Weber does not discount material conditions. Rather he looks at the recursive relationship between ideas, most notably the Protestant doctrines of the calling and predestination, and the embodied practice of material production, labor.Thus,Weber’s approach is instructive because it does not treat ideas and matter as separate, but rather shows how they are mutually constitutive. Along analogous lines, although Foucault is often read as a theorist of discourse, he was as, if not more, interested in the bodily practices through which subjects were inculcated in particular courses worldly activity. This emphasis on embodied practices is apparent in his work on both docile bodies and technologies of the self. Docile bodies, such as those of soldiers, schoolchildren, hospital patients, and factory workers, were those that could be “subjected, used, transformed and improved” (Foucault 1977: 136). Foucault describes how, in modernity, the body was treated like a machine: the object of precise, repeated, targeted interventions to optimize its economic capacity. After the eighteenth century the body was subjected to techniques of rationalization to become more efficient, organized, and productive. Technologies of the self, on the other hand, involve less external manipulation. Rather they focus on how individuals are enlisted in the projects of self-discipline and self-control to achieve desired states complicit with certain moral prescriptions (Foucault 1988: 18).

Performing economies: reason and reflexivity in action Recent work in economic anthropology has shifted from asking whether rational economic action is a quality intrinsic to human beings, to analyzing the diverse techniques through which 247

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human beings are rationalized. Particularly generative in this respect has been the observation of economics in action, that is to say the exercise of economic and financial knowledge in empirical settings, not only by economists, but in a diverse range of sites where economic knowledge is put into action from schools to development programs to health care. This work in large measure has drawn on the work of Michel Callon and his observation that economic knowledge does not simply model existing reality, but rather is instrumental in constituting that reality. Callon’s pioneering approach, which resonates with interventions developed in the social studies of science and technology (Latour 1987; Dumit 2004; Lowe 2006; Hayden 2003; Rabinow 1999), is dedicated toward analyzing how economic and financial knowledge is constructed and made into an effective force in the world. Callon treats economics as a form of expert knowledge with effects on human beings as, if not more, far-reaching as any of the natural sciences. Drawing on the speech act theory of J.L. Austin and his followers (Austin 1962; Butler 1997) and work on how expert knowledge constitutes the objects that it purports to simply describe (Foucault 1977, 1973), Callon suggests analyzing how economics “performs, shapes and formats the economy, rather than observing how it functions” (Callon 1998b: 2). This “performativity program” is not a denunciation of economics, but rather a call to analyze the effects that economics has in the world. Callon’s approach addresses another long-debated problem in economic anthropology: the universality of homo economicus, the classic self-interested rational actor of liberal economic theory most commonly identified with the work of Adam Smith, at least in its initial formulation (Smith 1976). Callon stresses a focus on the techniques and knowledge through which rational actors are produced, rather than searching for an essentially true human nature that is either economically or socially disposed.Thus, Callon asks the generative questions “under what conditions is calculativeness possible? Under what conditions do calculative agents emerge?” (Callon 1998a: 4). Rather than arguing over whether calculation is an intrinsic feature of human life, he suggests that the central problem is to document how calculative agents are produced “since this competence is neither in human nature nor in institutions” (Callon 1998a: 6). Callon observes that “homo economicus does exist, but is not an ahistorical reality; he does not describe the hidden nature of the human being. He is the result of a process of configuration, and the history of the strawberry market shows how this framing takes place” (Callon 1998a: 22). Thus, Callon’s performativity program focuses more on the norms and knowledge through which the self-­interested rational actor theorized by economists is produced, rather than assuming that it describes the true nature of human beings.Thus, there is a whole range of institutions and technologies that presuppose that humans are rationally self-interested, and in so doing universalize the model of homo economicus. This situation results in an array of techniques, programs, and interventions that, because they presume a self-interested, rational actor, have in fact brought this agent into being in a diverse range of settings. In a recent series of essays, Callon and his co-author Koray Çalışkan have sought to extend the performativity program, by developing an analytics of economization: “the assembly and qualification of actions, devices and analytical/practical descriptions as ‘economic’ by social scientists and market actors” (Çalışkan and Callon 2009: 369). Economization entails designating certain dimensions of human practice as economic and then describing and analyzing them as such. Reflexivity is central to economization, but Çalışkan and Callon note that the human sciences, like the natural sciences “have always been extremely reluctant to consider the impacts of their own inquiries on the objects they seek to study” (Çalışkan and Callon 2009: 370). In their account, economics has for too long proceeded under the assumption that the representations that it creates are independent of the actual empirical objects under analysis.Thus, Çalışkan and Callon note that academic disciplines, like economics, can no longer proceed under the 248

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assumption that its representations do not impact the world and must “question its own contribution to the constitution of its research subjects” (Çalışkan and Callon 2009: 371). Indeed, the fiction that academic economists operate at a remove from the real world has recently been exposed by calls for economics professors who serve on corporate boards to disclose such service. These demands were spawned in part by the film The Inside Job (2010), which in part documents the close relationship between academic economists, such as Larry Summers, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Martin Feldstein, and Wall Street firms. The film attributes the financial crisis of 2008, in part, to the role that some economists played as proponents of deregulation while simultaneously sitting on the corporate boards of firms which benefitted from deregulation (Chan 2010).

Anthropological approaches to economic knowledge and practice Recent anthropological work on the economic focuses on rationalization, reflexivity, and practice. This work has analyzed the reflexivity of knowledge, not just as a methodological tool for anthropological inquiry, but also as an actually occurring process in the world. Second, this work examines economism and economic rationality, documenting both techniques for the rationalization of human conduct, but also the limits of such rationalization. Finally, it analyzes the economic not as an abstract construct or theoretical model, but as observable in practice. In large measure this work has been conducted under two rubrics: the anthropology of finance and the ethnography of institutions. The anthropology of finance has analyzed the deployment of economic knowledge and practice inside some of the central sites that constitute the contemporary economy, including central banks (Holmes 2009), brokerage firms (Miyazaki 2007), stock and commodities exchanges (Hertz 1998; Knorr Cetina and Bruegger 2002; Zaloom 2006), investment houses (Abolafia 2001; Ho 2009a), regulatory regimes (Riles 2011; Abolafia 2004), and alternatives to conventional finance (Maurer 2005). This research has affinities with ethnographic work that focuses on how institutions shape economic action. New ethnographies of institutions have been executed in a diverse array of sites including various branches of state administrations (Chalfin 2008; Collier 2005; Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Karpiak 2010; Silvey 2007), religious networks (Bornstein 2005; Froystad 2009; Soares 2005), nongovernmental organizations (Elyachar 2005; Leve and Karim 2001; McKay 2009; Mole 2008; Muehlebach 2011; Richard 2009), family firms (Yanagisako 2002), universities and educational institutions (Hayden 2003; Osella and Osella 2009), development efforts (Li 2007; Smith 2008), and international bodies tasked with managing the global economy (Deeb and Marcus 2011; Harper 2000).

From rationality to rationalization An earlier generation of anthropologists asked whether economics was “embedded” in society or whether the principles of economics were universally valid for all human beings and cultural groups (Burling 1965; Polanyi 1957; Bohannan and Dalton 1965). Subsequently, anthropologists and other social sciences debated whether economic calculation and rational choice were essential attributes of human beings (Sahlins 1972; Scott 1976; Popkin 1979). In recognition of the historicity of the object represented as the human, recent ethnographic work has focused more on the norms and knowledge through which the human is created, rather than a search for its essential nature (Fassin 2008; Merry 2003; Ong 2006; Rabinow 2003). This shift means that rather than seeking an essential reason within the figure of “man,” contemporary anthropologists have illuminated the techniques, programs, and interventions through which human action is 249

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rationalized. That is to say, rather than asking whether economic rationality is an intrinsic attribute of all human beings, the central economic problem confronting the discipline today is documenting and analyzing the techniques, institutions, and mechanisms through which humans are made rational. In a recent, widely read ethnography of New York investment banks Karen Ho demonstrates the rationalization of the everyday operations of corporate America through the deployment of the concept of “shareholder value.” She shows how increasing “shareholder value” became an overriding concern of corporations in the United States during the 1980s. In so doing, Ho demonstrates that economic rationality is not an abstract concept but an empirical object that corporate managers on Wall Street put into action. She describes how the overwhelming preoccupation with maximizing shareholder value marked a radical break in the way in which corporate America conducted business, insofar as it marked the end of what she calls “the dominance of welfare capitalism” (Ho 2009b: 125). Dating to the New Deal, American corporations exercised paternalistic corporate practices and were, for the most part, insulated from the pressures of the stock market. According to the participants in Ho’s research, until the 1980s corporations could disregard the pressures and expectations of the stock market, which led them to insufficiently heed the dictates of economic rationality. Instead they sought to cultivate employee loyalty through generous salaries and benefits and the guarantee of lifetime employment. Ho richly documents the stunning transformation that Wall Street investment banks precipitated: making firms in the United States conform more thoroughly to market calculations. Making shareholder value the central tenet of corporate life was absolutely instrumental in achieving this transformation. Prior to the 1980s the stock market had relatively little impact on corporate America.The regulatory regime put in place after the crash of 1929 insulated corporate life from the stock market and its fluctuations (Ho 2009b: 136). Sheltered from the market, corporations acted in ways that did not conform to the logic of the market. Ho reveals that the concern with shareholder value reveals the effort to rationalize corporate practice, thus making firms more efficient, productive, and competitive, but at the same time leading to massive dislocations as many employees were laid off (or, in Ho’s terms, “liquidated”).This in turn incites workers who, unable to depend on the largesse of paternalistic corporations, must become entrepreneurs of themselves. Anthropologists have also explored the different forms of economic rationality that proliferate beyond the confines of liberal regimes. Janet Roitman has documented economic conduct in the absence of legitimate state power. She describes how, in the Chad Basin, the complete absence of effective institutions creates a redefinition of legitimate accumulation as economic rationality becomes grounded in a morality very different from that evident in Europe and North America. What is produced are not “self-governing citizens…[those] who enact the spontaneous payment of official taxes” (Roitman 2005: 432). Rather the absence of the state creates a morality in which notions of work, legitimate wealth accumulation, and reciprocity do not conform to their counterparts in the West. Thus, Roitman notes that for “the general population, smuggling activities and large-scale banditry are forms of ‘work,’ which they contrast quite explicitly to ‘fraud’ and ‘theft’” (Roitman 2005: 422). Furthermore, the moral legitimacy of robbery and taxation is reversed compared to how they are viewed in Europe or North America. Spoils collected from robbery and illegal trade are a disavowal of social obligations like paying taxes (426). Instead these spoils represent a form of reciprocity, distinct from “legitimate” seizures by the state (taxes), inverting a state-citizen paradigm in favor of one that might be coded as robbed-robber. What results is the “normalization of particular definitions of licit wealth and manners of appropriating such wealth” (Roitman 2005: 426). Thus, the bandits, smugglers, and 250

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tax evaders documented by Roitman have a set of norms that constitute legitimate economic action. In the absence of an effective state, the exercise of a pure economic rationality produces a new set of moral justifications that invert the censure on banditry and lawlessness that prevails in the West.

Reflexive assemblages Commensurate with broader trends within and outside the discipline, anthropologists focusing on economic topics have sought to develop approaches that account for the reflexivity of economic action. This has meant addressing reflexivity as a characteristic feature of contemporary knowledge (Collier and Ong 2005; Beck 1992; Beck et al. 1994; Luhmann 1998). Attention to the reflexive relationship between economic knowledge and practice, this work treats reflexivity not so much as a demand to analyze the subject position of the ethnographer (Rosaldo 1989; Behar 1996), but as an actually existing dimension of social and cultural action. In their everyday lives those under ethnographic observation are often engaged in critical reflection on their own knowledge and practices (Soares and Osella 2009). Thus, culture is not read as if from a text by members of specific groups (Geertz 1973; Sahlins 1976), but rather is something that is constantly in the process of making and remaking. Thus, the anthropologist does not have an exclusive vantage point, but rather documents and analyzes the way in which those under observation seek to revise or reformulate their worlds. In his study of central banks, Douglas Holmes extends Callon’s performativity program by showing how economics, unlike other natural sciences, is often explicitly dedicated to reflexively manipulating (rather than merely analyzing) its object. He demonstrates how reflexivity is a central problem for central bankers in that they must constantly act on conditions of their own making. Bankers express unease about the effects that their actions in the present might have in the future. Holmes notes that “the challenge for central banks is to discipline expectations with persuasive narratives, informed by a continuous stream of data and analyses, articulated in a measured and consistent fashion. To address this challenge these institutions cultivate an experimental ethos focused not on the lab, but performed in situ, within and across the economy at large” (Holmes 2009: 385–386). Holmes notes a key difference between the knowledge practices of economics and that of other scientific disciplines: financial experimentation is something that takes place in practice, rather than at an artificially created distance from the world. For applied economists managing world markets there is no laboratory that exists separate from the world, rather their action is always made in the world and thus economists find themselves acting on conditions of their own making. Holmes describes an economy of words in which language is mobilized by economic authorities and financial governors in an effort to create conditions conducive to economic growth. The foremost objective of the economy of words is to keep inflation at a level that is conducive to growth. Holmes reveals how financial governors rely as much, if not more, on language than statistics and numbers in managing inflation. He shows that there exists a complex, but subtle practice of reflexive interpretation among the key economic players (including bankers, journalists, investors, and corporate managers) when they read the policy pronouncements of central banks. Perhaps most notably, the economy of words operates at the limits of calculation “where knowledge is imperfect, and where information is asymmetrical, and experience and intuition can or must inform judgment” (Holmes 2009: 384–385). In a fascinating passage Holmes quotes how those who work in central banks are in many cases aware of their doubled role as both representing and affecting the economy. Tim Ng, a senior economist at the Bank of New Zealand, explains “if we feel there is a risk that depositors 251

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might have doubt about that and start a bank run, then the risk is that this doubt will become self-fulfilling. Hence we issue various calming statements to reassure them that we don’t know something nasty that we are keeping from the public. So there is a more general phenomenon of central banks trying to influence behavior by what they say, and steering the economy towards what they believe is a superior outcome” (Holmes 2009: 407). Holmes notes that the reflexivity of economics extends into the practices of those members of the population who constitute national economies at large—virtually all consumers who do not produce their own subsistence. He writes “as ‘economic agents’—that is, you and I—assimilate policy intentions as our own personal expectations, we do the work of the central bank. As our expectations about prices become ‘anchored’ by virtue of these econometric allegories we adjust our practices and thereby participate in the general development of consumer prices in the future” (Holmes 2009: 395). Holmes demonstrates how modern financial power acts on the action of those who are subject to an economy.The “economy of words” enlists the practices of those who in turn constitute the economy in realizing the representation of the experts who articulate its characteristics. Similarly, Hirokazu Miyazaki demonstrates how the imperative toward rationalization becomes a way of life for those who are involved in its execution (Miyazaki 2003). He shows how Japanese securities traders become engrossed with the application of extending market rationality to domains that do not conform to its strictures. He focuses on arbitrage trading, which seeks to exploit differences in the price of a particular asset in two different markets. Among the participants in Miyazaki’s research, arbitrage becomes more than just a job or means of earning a living. Rather, these traders apply the logic of the market to their own lives and surroundings. They find their raison d’être in extending the logic of the market into domains not presently structured by its calculus. For traders the imperative toward rationalization is not something that is conducted during office hours, but rather a reflexive form of action that traders seek to apply in their daily encounters outside office hours. One trader named Tada whom Miyazaki engages with at length proposes various domains in which to exercise fiscal reason. One idea he floats is purchasing a money-losing religion, restructuring it to operate better, and thus turning it into a financially viable enterprise (Miyazaki 2003: 261). Tada also notes that golf club memberships are overvalued in Japan and that people purchase memberships based on concerns about status and prestige. Tada proposes buying poorly managed golf courses, improving their management, and selling memberships to the public at large instead of just a select group, “thereby at once turning a profit and dealing a blow to the irrational Japanese propensity to overvalue status” (261). Tada is fixated on extending economic rationality into domains that were not strictly organized according to its calculus, both on the side of management and consumers. Consumers do not act according to the dictates of market logic as they overpay for something that is not as valuable as the make it out to be. Managers do not act rationally because they are mismanaging their enterprises, at once profiting off the irrationality of consumers but also not garnering maximum profit due to poor administration of their resource. Notable here is that in both these examples, economic rationality is not an abstract model of how the world works. Rather, traders like Tada, seek to implement it in action to reform institutions and individuals that do not conform to its logic. Donald MacKenzie also demonstrates the reflexive relationship between economic knowledge and the world that it engages with, by investigating the Black-Scholes options pricing model. Drawing on Callon’s performativity program, MacKenzie and his colleague Yuval Millo argue that economics “does not describe an existing external ‘economy,’ but brings that economy into being: economics performs the economy, creating the phenomena it describes” (MacKenzie and Millo 2003: 108). In their historical analysis of the emergence of the Black-Scholes model they argue that this theory, developed in part by several economists who were later awarded 252

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the Nobel Prize, “succeeded empirically not because it discovered preexisting price patterns but because markets changed in way that made its assumptions more accurate” (107). MacKenzie and Millo describe how the Black-Scholes options pricing model became more accurate over time and options theory reflexively conditioned the world that it purported to describe. They attribute this convergence to several developments. First, “the markets gradually altered so that many of the model’s assumptions, wildly unrealistic when published in 1973, became more accurate” (122). MacKenzie notes in a separate single-authored paper that many of the assumptions about the market were inaccurate in the early 1970s, but a wave of deregulation and changes in rules, promulgated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, meant that the world gradually began to resemble the economic landscape assumed by those who created the options pricing model (MacKenzie 2003: 851–856). Second, MacKenzie and Millo note that traders began to adopt the Black-Scholes model as a “guide to trading” (MacKenzie and Millo 2003: 123). Thus, it was no longer just used to describe the options trading market, but it was reflexively used by traders as a basis for their action in the market. They conclude that “gradually, ‘reality’ (in this case, empirical prices) was performatively reshaped in conformance with the theory” (MacKenzie and Millo 2003: 127).

Economies in action Whereas other social sciences treat economies as abstract systems, recent anthropological research has sought to understand economies in action. Thus, anthropologists have sought to address critical contemporary economic problems by avoiding abstractions and instead analyzing the empirical formation of economic knowledge and its exercise in practice. A particularly insightful recent collection that sheds light on economies in action has been brought together in a collection of essays analyzing the increasing prevalent position of corporations in human life (Welker et al. 2011). Extending anthropological research on the “corporate form” (Dunn 2004; Benson 2008; Sunder Rajan 2006), the contributors argue that corporations are key sites to empirically document recent and future economic transformations. This work builds on interventions in other subfields of anthropology that sought to refigure ethnographic investigation from a mentalist emphasis towards a focus on practice (Ortner 1984; Sahlins 2000; Bowen 1998; Marchand and Kresse 2009). Bill Maurer’s work is exemplary in this regard. In a series of writings on Islamic finance, he focuses both everyday and extraordinary practices to illuminate the material and embodied dimensions of economic life (Maurer 2006, 2005, 2008). As he notes, much of the scholarly work in Islamic finance is highly abstract, focusing on the creation of acceptable forms and somewhat arcane debates regarding these forms (Maurer 2002). What is often lost in this work is any sense of the pragmatic efforts that go in to create a working Islamic financial system. By focusing on what practitioners of Islamic finance are doing, rather than what they are writing or thinking or on the models that they propose, Maurer demonstrates how many unanswered questions circulate in contemporary efforts to ground economic action according to rationalities that do not strictly conform to those economism. Along analogous lines Melissa Fisher and Greg Downey draw together a range of studies that demonstrate how “cultural labor” is instrumental in creating contemporary markets (Fisher and Downey 2006). They argue that classical economic theory assumes that “market mechanisms invariably create agreement through open price negotiation, that information is widely available and transparent, and that modes of rational calculation are universal” (Downey and Fisher 2006). Thus, they ask how different forms of economic calculation are possible in volatile economic conditions and demonstrate the “cultural labor” is critical to produce market consensus. 253

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Annelise Riles examines what might be called the “metapractices” of central bank regulators in the Bank of Japan as they attempt to transform what they term “market practice” to address “systemic risk” in the nation’s financial system (Riles 2004: 397). Regulators seek to transform their payment scheme from a designated time net settlement system in which interbank balances are settled at a fixed point in time each day to a new system, Real Time Gross Settlement, in which each transaction would be settled individually and in full in real time. In so doing, regulators seek to transform the market practices of bankers. The new order that they envision would reduce the technocratic intervention of regulators and create an interbank settlement scheme which reflections the “aggregation of the actions of individuals, rather than as an artifact of… planning” (Riles 2004: 397). Riles thus documents not simply the actions of economic agents, but rather how those actors seek to reflexively act on the actions of others. In a different context altogether, Deirdre McKay examines how economies are practiced in the everyday life of a fishing village in the Philippines. In contrast to Callon’s focus on the role of expert knowledge in producing economies, McKay looks at the more prosaic, everyday knowledge that people in a small and remote municipality use in creating their local economy (McKay 2009). She found that official economies are often defined by powerful people from outside the municipality. However, in contrast to the hegemony of this official vision, she found that “community-based enterprises … perform a different version of economy, one that contested the consensus view of the ‘real’ economy as delimited by salaried wages, formal markets and capitalist relations” (335). While government officials sought to “materialize the ‘real’ economy” through the performance of assessments, statistics, projections and comparisons with representations of large-scale projects elsewhere” (McKay 2009: 335–336), McKay and her colleagues found that residents used a bevy of social networks and informal credit relationships to procure commodities, like fish, and resell them in the marketplace, thus engaging in practices that do not conform to the abstract models concocted by distant bureaucrats.

Reflexivity and rationality in action In my own work, I have sought to examine reflexivity and rationality in economic action in two specific ethnographic projects. The first analyzed self-styled “spiritual reformers” in Indonesia who sought to enhance Islamic ethics among corporate employees under the presumption that so doing would make firms in the company more transnationally competitive. The second project examines the globalization of Islamic banking and finance by documenting efforts to make Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur the central node in an Islamic financial alternative to the conventional system of banking and finance centered in New York, London, Hong Kong, and other financial hubs. The participants in both of these research projects sought to combine Islamic doctrine and practices with capitalist economic action. However, the manner in which this is done and the assumptions about the relationships between Islam and capitalism differ greatly. In both examples the participants in my research seek to represent an economy and then shape the practices of market actors in an attempt to elicit practices commensurate with their definitions. In my book, Spiritual Economies: Islam, Globalization, and the Afterlife of Development, I analyzed the introduction of Islamic ethics into corporate workplaces in Southeast Asia. Spiritual training sessions for corporate employees were intended to eliminate widespread corruption, increase productivity, and augment the ability of the company to compete globally (Rudnyckyj 2010). Spiritual reformers sought to enhance Islamic faith to resolve Indonesia’s development crisis. In so doing they were reflexively posing a question that has long been asked by anthropologists: how do cultural norms inflect economic action (Geertz 1963; Mauss 1990; Peacock 1978)? However, this was not an abstract question.Those who sought to enhance the Islamic practice of 254

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corporate employees did so to better equip Indonesian companies to compete in an increasingly integrated global economy. They endorsed ethics that they had identified as intrinsic to Islamic practice and conducive to greater transparency, productivity, and competitiveness. Based on research mostly conducted at a massive state-owned steelworks in western Java called Krakatau Steel I analyzed how in the early years of the twenty-first century corporate employees found their company confronted by increasing international economic integration and sought to address this problem by introducing a training program grounded in moderate Islam. Long protected from transnational competition by protective tariffs on steel and generous government subsidies conferred under a program of nationalist developmentalism, this company and others like it were faced by the twin challenges of a massive economic crisis that engulfed Southeast Asia in the late-1990s and increasing pressure to compete with firms outside Indonesia. Faced with these dilemmas they devised a practical program to ensure the survival of stateowned enterprises and the competitiveness of other firms. This effort, which was intended to precipitate what proponents referred to as “spiritual reform,” sought to construe religious ethics as conducive to market reason. The manner of execution was striking. Elaborate spiritual training programs, called Emotional and Spiritual Quotient training and often shortened to a more manageable ESQ, mixed the latest human resources management theory with collective prayers and lessons in Islamic history. The founder of the program, Ary Ginanjar, asserted that economic practices conducive to business success were intrinsic to the five pillars of Islam. For example, the fourth pillar, the duty to fast during Ramadan, was recast as a model for self-control and individual accountability. A charismatic former businessman, Ginanjar represented the prophet Muhammad in the training programs as the model for a successful corporate executive and participants were encouraged to emulate his example in business and trade. Ginanjar deployed elaborate high-tech media centered on a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. His presentations featured graphs, charts, tables, and a steady stream of bullet points, as well as entertaining film clips, vivid photographs, and popular music with a heavy bass line and catchy lyrics. He used a diverse array of popular media, web sites, and academic journals, drawing as much on Hollywood blockbusters as the sober scholarship of the Harvard Business School. These engaging, interactive ESQ sessions began in 2001 and had attracted a total of over one million participants by 2011. Although Krakatau Steel was one of the first companies to embrace them, the program has since spread across Indonesia to some of the country’s most prominent governmental institutions and state-owned firms including Pertamina (the national oil company), Telkom (the country’s largest telephone company), and Garuda (the nation’s flag air carrier). Current and former military generals also are avid participants in ESQ and several sessions have been held at the Army’s officer candidate training school in Bandung (SESKOAD). By the middle of the decade ESQ had met its goal of becoming a national movement, establishing branch offices in 30 out of 33 Indonesian provinces. In late 2005 the ESQ company broke ground for a 25-story office tower and convention center in south Jakarta funded in part through investment shares sold to past participants. Finally, ESQ has “gone global,” offering regular trainings in Malaysia and Singapore starting in 2006 and also holding versions of the program in Singapore, Brunei, the Netherlands, Australia, the United States, and elsewhere. These efforts to introduce Islamic ethics into corporate workplaces highlighted reflexivity and rationalization in action. Proponents of and participants in spiritual reform represented the economic crisis in Indonesia and the threat posed by globalization not as abstract problems but rather as challenges that could be addressed through the cultivation of specific practices. This strategy involved developing and conveying mechanisms for the rationalization of corporate conduct. For example, participants were instructed in the value of time in the workplace and 255

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encouraged to be hard working and disciplined. Corruption, even at small scales, was represented as immoral and the kind of behavior that would lead to the bankruptcy of the company. Employees were lectured on the importance of individual accountability and admonished to take care of problems as they arose, rather than waiting to be ordered to do so from a superior. Furthermore, this effort involved explicit reflection on the practices of corporate employees and citizens of the nation. They sought to diagnose the failures in both their specific workplaces and the nation at large and devise practical solutions to address them. In this sense, the economy and the economic crisis were not viewed as something outside the experience and intervention of employees. Instead it was seen as something in which they were directly implicated, but which through their own action they could also affect. By reforming their everyday practices in the workplace, employees could address the challenges that the company and the nation faced.

The double bind of reason In 2010 I began ethnographic research on efforts by corporate managers, government planners, and shariah scholars to make Kuala Lumpur the “New York of the Muslim world” by transforming it into the world’s central node for Islamic banking. The problem facing these experts is the inverse of that faced by those in my earlier project. Rather than reinterpreting Islam to make it conducive to capitalism, they seek to reconfigure capitalist action to conform to Islamic requirements. In the first case, anxieties regarding Southeast Asia’s economic crisis and transformations in government policy spawned the effort to introduce religious practice as a means of inculcating economism and calculative reason. In contrast, in Islamic finance, a central debate concerns the viability of alternative forms of economic action that are grounded in Islamic doctrine and history.Thus, the objective is not to refigure Islamic practice as conducive to economic rationality, but to make capitalist economic action conform to Islamic moral prescriptions. Thus, rather than seeking to formulate and inculcate what in some respects looked like an Islamic version of the Protestant ethic, a key objective for experts in Islamic finance is to create an alternative to globalization that conforms to shariah principles. The observation and attention to religious ethics is pivotal, but instead of representing hard work, accountability, and self-discipline as Islamic values, proponents of Islamic finance seek to enable a more prosaic set of commercial practices. The main criterion for creating these forms is that they conform to the Qur’anic injunction against riba, which is sometimes translated as usury, but most often as interest (Maurer 2005: 10; El-Gamal 1999). Indeed for shariah scholars and most Islamic finance professionals, the issue has been settled and riba is taken to mean interest in any form, whether it is exorbitant or not. In addition, some proponents argue that Islamic finance requires instruments that will enable economic action compliant with other Islamic prescriptions beyond simply prohibiting interest. These include promoting risk-sharing and equity-based (rather than debt-based) mechanisms of finance. In both projects a central problem I have sought to address is: what are the limits to economic reason and calculative rationality? This question is prompted by my interest in the increasing ubiquity of neoliberalism as the dominant means of organizing economic action. I have approached neoliberalism as the introduction of economic calculation into domains of human life that were previously insulated from (or considered outside of) the imperative toward economic rationalization (Foucault 2008). The second project offers an alternative perspective on this problem. In Islamic finance, religion is not invoked as a means of rationalizing economic action. Instead it is recognized as putting certain limits on the spread of economization. Islam is invoked not just to elicit greater economic efficiency and productivity, but rather to implement an alternative type of rationality not solely focused the imperative to efficiency, productivity, 256

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and cost reduction. Islamic finance puts limits on the financial bottom line inasmuch as it is not based on the premises of lowest cost or greatest efficiency, but rather on ensuring adherence to shariah prescriptions. The tension between economic rationality and religious rationality endemic to Islamic finance creates a quandary insofar as Islamic finance is in competition with conventional finance, but the playing field on which the two operate is by no means level. Conventional finance can follow the dictates of economic rationalization, while its Islamic version must adhere to external constraints (Maurer 2010: 34). Furthermore, Islamic financial instruments can be quite cumbersome in comparison to conventional financial instruments. Bill Maurer has described the complexity and “fractal”-like quality of the accounting practices conducted in Islamic finance in comparison to conventional accounting practices (Maurer 2005). Rather than a balance sheet listing credits and debts, the accounting books for risk and profit-sharing instruments like mudaraba and musharaka (equity-based Islamic financing contracts somewhat akin to venture capital instruments) are premised on “nested” accounts that overlap with one another in long chains and are structured more like Russian dolls than the binary balance of conventional accounting. Ultimately, Islamic finance is governed by the dictates of shariah prescriptions such as avoiding interest, distributing risk equitably, and improving social values. Thus, while economic rationality is still relevant, in Islamic finance it does not constitute the final bottom line. Furthermore, most proponents of Islamic finance do not frame their claims for the benefits of Islamic finance in its greater economic rationality. To the contrary, they assert that meeting shariah requirements is the chief objective of Islamic finance. If one is a devout Muslim and believes that practicing interest-based finance will inhibit one’s ability to achieve eternal salvation in the afterlife, then one’s economic actions carry implication far beyond the corporate bottom line. A different set of calculations, which are not economic, enter into play. Thus, whereas in my previous project, Islam was reconfigured to be conducive to rational economic action, in my current project Islam places certain limits on the forms of economic action in which one can legitimately engage. The effort to conform to divine injunctions in Islamic finance leads to what Jessica Cattelino, following Gregory Bateson, has called a “double bind” (Cattelino 2010). On the one hand, Islamic finance professionals recognize that it differs fundamentally from its conventional alternative insofar as the bottom line is not economic, but instead has to do with questions of morality and adherence to divine law. On the other hand, they assert that Islamic finance must demonstrate that it can “compete” with conventional finance. Thus, in Islamic finance there is a tension between the limits placed on rationalization and the acceptance of the norm of competition, which is guided by the logic of calculative reason and is the key mechanism of the imperative toward rationalization. Indeed, the Malaysian state promoted Islamic finance under the presumption that it should prove its competitiveness when it initially established the national Islamic banking system in the early 1980s (El-Din and Abdullah 2007). Whereas countries like Iran, Sudan, and Pakistan attempted the wholesale transformation of their national banking systems from conventional to Islamic in one fell swoop, Malaysia adopted a more measured “dual banking system” model, in which the newly established Islamic system would operate alongside the conventional banking system that the country inherited from the British. The presumption that the Islamic system is in competition with the conventional system persists among many proponents. For example, as Dato’ Razif, the Deputy Governor of Malaysia’s Central Bank who holds the Bank’s Islamic finance portfolio, proclaimed in a speech marking collaboration between the Malaysian and Bahraini stock exchanges, “Efforts, time and resources must be pooled among the Islamic finance community to expand the industry and compete healthily with the larger conventional finance markets” (Razif Abdul Kadir 2010). 257

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Furthermore, the Central Bank has sought to spur growth and innovation by opening its borders to competition from Islamic financial institutions based outside Malaysia. These include the Gulf-based companies Kuwait Finance House, Asian Finance Bank, and the Saudi-based Al-Rajhi bank, which proclaims itself the world’s largest Islamic bank. Malaysia is the first jurisdiction to allow foreign firms to operate domestically, and the governor of the country’s Central Bank, Zeti Akhtar Aziz expressed optimism that “the new entrants…will have the opportunity to bridge the two regions [Southeast Asia and the Middle East], participate in the growing Islamic banking industry as well as tap new markets in Malaysia and in the region, and promote healthy competition thereby contributing to elevate the industry to new levels of dynamism” (Aziz 2005). The focus on competition demonstrates the difficulty that proponents of Islamic finance have in negotiating the specter of economic rationality.While Islamic finance attempts to accommodate other rationalities outside the economic, in practice it is always already enmeshed in a global system in which Islamic finance must compete with conventional finance which is premised on economic reason. Thus, perhaps ironically, it is compelled to compete on the basis of a rationality to which it seeks to provide an alternative. The norm of competition, its attendant logic of calculative reason, and the imperative toward rationalization were evident in versions of a story that was repeated to me in different settings no fewer than three times during my fieldwork in Malaysia.The central theme of these accounts illustrates how the market reason characteristic of conventional finance structures the finanscape in which Islamic finance must compete (Appadurai 1990).The story involved an Islamic finance professional arranging an investment fund for a client in the Middle East. Usually the client was from Saudi Arabia, but I also heard variations of the story in which the client was from Kuwait or the United Arab Emirates. According to the legend a client expressed interest in investing some of his capital and phoned an Islamic financier to find out the scale of returns that would be generated through an investment with their firm. The financier reported that his firm could sell him an Islamic bond (sukuk) that would pay a certain percent return on his investment, whereupon the client responded that he could make several percentage points more on a bond offering comparable security in the conventional market. As the financier was unable to guarantee a lucrative return, the Muslim investor decided to eschew the Islamic system and chose to invest his capital in the conventional bond. Interestingly, in none of the various renditions of this story that I heard did the banker emphasize that investing in the Islamic system would better enable the investor to get to heaven according to the revealed word of Allah and the examples set forth by the Prophet Muhammad. Islamic finance is premised on the conviction that concerns other than economic calculation should be considered in economic action. However, it finds itself in a global finanscape that is structured by the norm of competition as the primary means to achieve economic rationalization. In this sense, Islamic finance finds itself seeking to advance non-economic values in a finanscape that has already largely been created by the presumption that efficiency and productivity are best achieved through the norm of competition. This is an illustration of the postcolonial paradox, whereby postcolonial nation-states wind up replicating the very forms and structures to which they established themselves in opposition (Anderson 1983; Spivak and Morris 2010; Povinelli 2002). It would appear, then, that there are three possibilities for ensuring the viability of Islamic finance. First would be the provision of substantial non-market support for Islamic finance from the state or transnational institutions. Second would be that investors choose to embrace Islamic instruments based on the conviction that not doing so would entail jeopardizing other-worldly salvation. A third possibility would be that Islamic finance professionals successfully redefine economic rationality to take in to consideration balancing long-term interests with short-term 258

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interests and create a system of finance less volatile and disruptive than contemporary finance. Absent either of these courses of action its growth (and perhaps its survival) will be constrained by the logic to which it sets itself in opposition.

Conclusion: economies in practice Contemporary anthropological work is making a fundamental contribution to understanding contemporary economic action. Concordant with developments in science and technology studies, anthropologists and those in allied fields are critically examining the manner in which economic truth is produced. That is to say, they are developing a sophisticated set of analyses that demonstrate the truth of the economy comes to be accepted as such (Foucault 2008: 35–36). Foremost among these cherished truths is the figure of homo economicus, the classic self-interested rational agent of liberal capitalism. An earlier generation sought to refute the supposed universality of this figure through a cross-cultural comparison that illuminated a diversity of economic logics. Today, the problem has shifted as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism has meant a reduced field of existing economic alternatives. Instead anthropologists are examining homo economicus in formation. That is to say, they are diagnosing the techniques, instruments, and forms of reflective action through which humans are made rational. The limitations on economic thought and action today are evident in the remarkable constraints that condition the debate in the United States over how to remedy the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. In spite of the fact that the crisis was in no small part brought about by a stalwart commitment to neoliberal orthodoxy, politicians and managers of the economy remain largely committed to deregulation and free market solutions. The exemption of key financing mechanisms, especially the derivatives market and sub-prime real estate loans, from government regulation precipitated an economic cataclysm the effects of which we are still suffering. In a set of developments that would be ironic were they not tragic, politicians have used the recession to leverage an even more far-reaching program of deregulation carried out under a neoliberal orthodoxy. Neoliberal principles have come to be so pervasive in creating economic truth to which it has become well nigh impossible to articulate alternatives. In this context, contemporary anthropology is offering pivotal insights and has the potential to provide even more. A focus on rationalization and reflexivity in practice can illuminate the assumptions that undergird economic reality in diverse sites around the world. Whereas other social sciences focus on model building and often seek abstraction as offering privileged insight into objective truth about economies, anthropology—with its ethnographic focus on finegrained, empirically observable practices—is ideally positioned to get beyond the assumptions and abstractions that can conceal the embodied action and practical knowledge that constitute these economies. As such, a focus on economies in practice might explain how the dominant economic thought and practice that has increasingly come to govern human life became natural and, perhaps, illuminate alternatives to it.

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15 RESEArcH, REPrESENtAtION, REDEMPtION, AND REPAtrIAtION Archaeology and community relationships in 21st-century America Joe Watkins This chapter looks at the field of archaeology and the many publics who maintain an active interest in the study of the past. Historically, archaeology maintained an academic interest that often precluded the perspectives of the populations who had a direct relationship with the material culture unearthed by archaeologists. It really was not until the active participation of the federal government in protecting America’s cultural heritage that archaeologists were required to share the archaeological enterprise. While heritage management, community participation, and archaeology as a humanistic scientific enterprise are at a nexus globally, this chapter will focus primarily on the situation as it exists in the United States.

Research What is archaeology as a field of anthropology? In the United States, archaeology is considered a branch of anthropology, along with biological or physical anthropology, cultural anthropology, and linguistic anthropology. It is, according to Renfrow and Bahn (2007: 9),“the study of former societies through the remains of their material culture.” Sharer and Ashmore (1993: 7) call it “the study of the human past through its material remains.” Wikipedia defines it as “the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes (the archaeological record).” Regardless of whose definition of archaeology one uses, it is important to note that archaeologists gain the majority of their explanatory ability to discuss human cultures of the past through the material culture that is left in the deposits that comprise the archaeological record. Archaeologists are generally united in the understanding that archaeology is a science that uses the scientific method to tease out information about the cultures that existed in the past. It is, as former president of the Society for American Archaeology Jerry Sabloff, notes, “one of the broadest intellectual endeavors in the scholarly world, as it straddles the physical and natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities; in its techniques, methods and theories” (2008: 28). 264

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What is material culture? “Material culture” can be considered to be all the physical objects that make up a human’s (or culture’s) inventory. Archaeologists study the material culture of a past society in order to try to better comprehend the ways that individuals interacted with their environment, with their contemporaries, and other cultural groups with whom they came into contact. These objects often serve as “proxies” for archaeologists’ interpretations about human groups in the past; that is, artifacts can help archaeologists make assumptions about particular actions that past human groups may have performed. For example, while archaeologists cannot know for sure when human groups in North America began using the bow, the change in general size of flaked stone projectile points from heavy, large, thick pieces ranging from 3 to 8 inches in length associated with large fauna to light, small, thin pointed pieces often about 1 to 2 inches long associated with smaller game implies that the points were attached to arrows propelled by bows. Similarly, even though wood is rarely preserved in open archaeological sites, archaeologists assume that the presence of chipped stone axes implies that local populations used wood materials. While it might seem to be rather self-evident to say, it is important to realize that all humans have material culture, even those who may not be expected to have it at first glance. Studies of contemporary homeless people in this volume and also in Indianapolis, Indiana, demonstrate that even those believed to have nothing have their own material culture. Larry Zimmerman and Jessica Welch note that “the nature and distribution of artifacts … suggests that many homeless people seek a degree of physical comfort and security as defined by the standards of the encompassing cultures from which they came” (Zimmerman and Welch 2011: 82). In fact, many of the more personal items within the temporary camps of the homeless have special functions – “it can be a part of who they are as a person” (Zimmerman and Welch 2011: 70) – that help them survive the uncertainty of life on the streets. While the material cultures of individuals are distinctive and personal, archaeologists can identify broad, general classes of artifacts that occur consistently within a particular culture. In this way, archaeologists have identified “archaeological cultures” that they use to describe a recurring assemblage of artifacts within regional and temporal boundaries. In the American Great Plains, for example, archaeologists generally identify the association of particularly flaked stone projectile points in context with particular species of extinct fauna as “Paleoindian”. As scientific shorthand, “Paleoindian” relates to the time of early habitation of North America at a time when early inhabitants hunted large animals with particular spear points made of relatively high-quality flaked stone. Because of the poor preservation of organic materials in the archaeological record over a 12,000-year period, very few artifacts other than these stone tools are found that date to this time period. Therefore, archaeologists’ knowledge of the real material culture of these people is extremely limited; perhaps as much as 99 percent of the material culture of the early inhabitants of North America is unknown and unknowable. The amount of perishable materials used by historic inhabitants of the Plains from buffalo, for example – their clothing, their habitation structures made from animal skins, fiber artifacts, bone and wooden tools, skin and fiber bags, and so forth – give us a glimpse of what we might be missing in the archaeological record of 12,000 years ago. The physical properties of artifacts can give archaeologists information beyond the use of the item. A piece of obsidian in western Oklahoma, for example, offers hints at social networks between the people who originally picked up the obsidian at its source and the people who ultimately ended up with it. The obsidian does not occur locally in western Oklahoma, and the obsidian did not transport itself to its ultimate location, but people (or groups of people) were 265

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involved in transporting the material from source to final location. Whether the material was traded from one group to another or whether the individual walked from one place to another to gather it, the implications of relationships inherent in the process of getting (let alone using) the material dives under the surface of human interaction. Linda Hurcombe, in her book Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture (2007: 4), notes that “artefacts and material culture are always going to be at the heart of an archaeological investigation.” In fact, because of the importance of artifacts to archaeology, and the very important role they play in interpretations about past (and contemporary) cultures and their ability to provide information about social aspects of those cultures, she produced an entire volume oriented to helping others understand the ways such objects contribute to our understanding of the past and those who peopled it. She closes her book with insights into material culture: “Artefacts are objects that often endure from remote periods and transcend the scale of human lives. We know about people we will never meet because of them. It is humbling to think that one day, in the remote future, others might know about us because of the objects we create and use” (2007: 211). Thus, it is easily understandable why material culture is important to archaeologists. “Material remains,” according to Elizabeth Brumfiel, past president of the American Anthropological Association, “can physically demonstrate the links between the past and the present” (2003: 214). It provides answers to questions that anthropologists wish to understand about the cultures of humans in the past, cultures whose denizens we cannot ask directly. Those past cultures are not dead because their cultures (or at least aspects of them) are evidenced in the materials that remain in the archaeological record.

Representation How is material culture used to “represent” the past? In general, North American archaeology can be subdivided into the study of the “preContact” past (the archaeological record of cultures of North America that existed prior to colonization by European or other cultures), the “protohistoric” past (the study of the archaeological record of those cultures that existed at or shortly after the time of contact wherein the culture was based primarily on continuing preContact ways but with the addition and minor impact of Contact with the colonizing culture), and the “historic” past (the study of cultures after the period wherein written records are available to help interpret the cultures of the period). It is important to note that each of these periods in North America overlap due to the inconsistent and uneven spread of contact between indigenous and colonizing cultures and the geographic variables that impacted that colonization of the North American continent.

Social and ethnographic archaeology In her “Editorial Statement” in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Social Archaeology, editor Lynn Meskell notes “Archaeologists … have specialized in understanding the material traces of human presence through time. … Our challenge is to be committed to understanding past societies in terms of their social contexts and lived experiences while, at the same time, to remain cognizant of how the knowledge of the past that we produce is used in the presence” (2001: 9). In this regard, the archaeologist’s job is to not only discover information about the societies of the past but also to be aware of how the representation of that past society has impacts on contemporary populations. 266

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In A Companion to Social Archaeology, editors Meskell and Preucel (2004: 16) note how “Archaeology is being used … by indigenous peoples throughout the world as they seek to control the representation of their pasts as a means of reclaiming their presents.” They go on to note that “This too is an appropriate social use of archaeology” (2004: 16). This perspective, coupled with the material culture archaeologists are faced with, is one of the major ways that non-archaeological communities are impacted by archaeologists. As an outgrowth of this complex concept of social archaeology, “ethnographic archaeology” seeks to “critically assess and reformulate the way they [archaeologists] do and practice archaeology” (Castañeda and Matthews 2008: 1). In this regard, the direct relationships between archaeologists and the stakeholders with whom they work is the object of study rather than the archaeological record. By critically evaluating these relationships, ethnographic archaeology hopes to find more general information that stakeholder communities can use to strengthen weak relationships, to increase community involvement in the archaeological enterprise, and to strengthen community voice in the resultant representations of the archaeological record. This concept, perhaps, is reflexively informed by “archaeological ethnography” (Meskell 2005: 83–85), which focuses on the contemporary relevance of archaeological heritage and the ways archaeology works in the real world. Selective representation of the past can have political repercussions that reach far beyond the academic portrayal of human populations. When archaeologists set themselves up as experts about the past, the communities whose past is being interpreted generally are not able to share in the creation of that interpretation. I have discussed some of the issues that exist on a global scale (see Watkins 2011; Watkins 2005a), but, in the United States, the Moundbuilder Controversy (see Watkins 2005b: 8–10; Watkins 2004: 338–339) had far-reaching impact. Developing out of mid-nineteenth-century American antiquarian efforts to explain the earthworks found in the eastern United States, the controversy worked to remove American Indian ancestors from the history of the United States in such a way that eased the interpretation of early American Indian cultures as “‘vanished’, as ‘primitive’, or as ‘simple’” (Watkins 2011: 55). But this situation does not exist only within the United States. A 2002 conference entitled “Toward a More Ethical Mayan Archeology” held at the University of British Columbia brought together academicians and students with varied perspectives on archaeology. Indigenous people and professional archaeologists offered their opinions not only on the economic impacts of archaeology, but also on some of the philosophical aspects of archaeology as it is practiced in Mesoamerica (Watkins 2011: 52). These people spoke of the political impact of the reliance on “archaeologists-as-experts” by heritage tourism industries and government policy-makers at the near exclusion of local, Indigenous non-professionals. This, then, is the challenge that anthropologists and archaeologists encounter when trying to work with various communities who have active relationships with the materials impacted by the practice of archaeology. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh writes about the need to better share the field of archaeology: “Including Native Americans and other descendant communities is a categorical means of expanding the circle of archaeology’s moral community” (2009: 195). Even while archaeologists struggle to understand the impact of their field of study on contemporary social groups, it is important to continue to try to understand the importance of the archaeological material culture to other communities (“stakeholders”) who have relationships – real or imagined – with the past cultures. Other communities are directly impacted by the practice of archaeology, including descendant groups, stewardship communities, and professional communities. Each of these groups has differing relationships and perspectives on the material culture. Additionally, each of these groups, in turn, has sub-groups whose relationships with the materials archaeologists study depending on the age of the materials. 267

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Direct descendant communities In the United States, the direct descendants of the human groups that created the archaeological record studied by archaeologists interested in preContact cultures are generally recognized as American Indian nations. While there are more than 550 federally recognized tribes in the United States, there are many other local groups that recognize relationships with the preContact past. Each of these groups has a different relationship and perspective on that past, and it is very difficult to generalize those relationships. However, one example should prove elucidating. Archaeologists Kurt Dongoske, Michael Yeatts, Roger Anyon, and T.J. Ferguson (1997) wrote of the perspectives that two American Indian groups had with the archaeological cultures with which they have relationships. The authors note that “Hopi and Zuni view their past in terms of their ancestors, the real people who lived at the sites now studied by archaeologists. Archaeologists, conversely, have traditionally classified the past in terms of archaeological cultures – abstract units of analysis defined by comparative sets of material traits” (1997: 600). They affirm the importance that archaeologists must remember that contemporary “cultural, ethnic, and tribal affiliation is not necessarily synonymous with archaeological cultures” (1997: 605). The authors draw attention to the need to “bridge contemporary work to past units of analysis … to move beyond identifying archaeological units as if that were the ultimate research goal” (1997: 606). Within the practice of archaeology of the historic period, other groups besides American Indians have interest in the practice of archaeology. For example, Kelly Fong, in a 2007 article, wrote how Asian-American archaeology suffers under the influence of stereotypes by archaeologists who portray Chinese-Americans as “the opium-addicted, rat/cat/dog-eating, abnormal, foreign, exotic, alien, and therefore non-assimilable ‘heathen Chinee’” (Fong 2007: 115). Archaeology, she notes, while it can be used to flesh out particular histories of underrepresented people in the past, can also fail to live up to its promise because “material culture is also subject to researchers’ conscious and unconscious interpretive biases, similar to those reflected in the documentary record—the very biases they attempt to evade” (2007: 115). Ultimately, she calls on historical archaeology to “become increasingly responsible for accurately representing the voices and histories of documentary-marginalized communities through what they leave behind—that is, the archaeological record” (2007: 117).

Indirect descendant communities Another type of community with interest in the practice of archaeology is a community that does not have a direct relationship with the archaeological record. These “indirect descendants” may have a relationship with the archaeological past, but that relationship may have been broken by temporal, geographical, or genealogical distance. Many American Indian tribes probably are genetic descendants of some of the earliest people who created the material culture known archaeologically as the Late Paleoindian inhabitants of North America, but the temporal distance is so great that the likelihood that any one particular tribal group has “more” of a claim on the materials than another is remote. Historically, the US Indian policy of removal and relocation created instances where tribal groups were forced great distances from their traditional homelands. The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, for example, was physically removed from its historical territory as a result of treaties between the United States and tribal officials in the 1830s. As a result, the Choctaw Nation has a relationship with the archaeological record of Alabama and Mississippi, but it is not in a position to offer physical protection of that heritage due solely to the geographical distance. Many of the 268

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tribes that are located within present-day Oklahoma are geographically situated far from the areas where much of their archaeological material culture lies. There are also situations where the ethnic group that created the archaeological record might be known, but only within its broadest sense. One example is the African Burial Ground Project of New York City (Blakey 2010; US Government n.d.), where government participation in a construction project in lower Manhattan galvanized the African-American population of the area to become involved in the project, even though none of the parties could demonstrate genealogical descendancy relating them to any of the human remains encountered during the excavations. In this situation, the shared culture of being African American was enough for the community to become involved in the project. Other situations have existed where a broadbased community has participated, especially in situations where cemeteries are involved.

Stewardship communities In some ways, these indirect communities might also be considered to be “stewardship communities.” That is, while there might be some relationship with the archaeological record under consideration, the community more aptly is involved out of the idea of protecting or watching over the archaeological record. Many of the American Indian tribes who currently reside in Oklahoma are stewards of the materials that comprise the preContact archaeological record in their areas. Using the Choctaw as an example again, their removal from Mississippi to Oklahoma displaced the tribal groups whose ancestors created the archaeological record – groups who historically became known as either the Caddo or the Wichita (depending on which archaeologist one wishes to believe). While the Choctaw have authority under federal laws to control the archaeological actions that occur on lands under their control, they practice stewardship over the material remains of the Caddo and the Wichita. These stewardship values stem from the recognition that the archaeological heritage needs protecting, and that the tribal groups have the responsibility to protect that heritage, even if it was not produced by direct tribal ancestors. But perhaps the strongest “stewardship community” in relation to the archaeological record is the archaeological community. This concept of stewardship is seen as the main principle of the Society of American Archaeology’s Principle of Archaeological Ethics (Lynott 1997: 592; Lynott and Wylie 2000: 35–39). In this regard, the protection of the archaeological record from destruction is seen as the primary goal of this professional organization. The United States’ first legislative attempt to protect cultural resources, the Antiquities Act of 1906 (Public Law 59–209), provided for the protection of historic and prehistoric remains on public lands, established criminal sanctions for unauthorized destruction or appropriation of antiquities owned or controlled by the federal government, authorized a permit system for the scientific investigation of antiquities on federal land, and established a process whereby the President could set aside areas of “importance” for National monuments. It established the principle that cultural resources, regardless of origin, were important to the cultural history of the United States and worthy of protection. But it also had an unintended impact – the permit system established in it essentially by-passed American Indians by failing to take into consideration any interests they might have in protecting their unwritten history and material culture from appropriation by outside researchers (Watkins 2006). However, since 1906, a myriad number of other laws and regulations passed concerning the protection of America’s cultural heritage have included American Indian tribes in the management of cultural resources on their property. In this regard, archaeologists have begun sharing the management and protection of heritage resources and are trying to better integrate American Indian sensibilities and perspectives in the discipline. 269

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Professional communities In addition to the communities above, another community – perhaps a subset of the stewardship communities described above – is composed of those whose livelihood relies on the economical aspects associated with the archaeological enterprise. In the United States, the involvement of the federal government in large construction projects that had direct or indirect impact on the nation’s cultural and historical resources led to the passage of numerous laws and regulations. These laws created a group of archaeologists and businesses that carried out archaeological projects to help federal agencies meet the requirements of the laws. This community has evolved into big businesses that rely on federal money to maintain economic viability; many of the projects conducted by the groups within this community meet the highest levels of archaeological standards, and many outpace the projects conducted by researchers who are not employed in cultural resources/heritage resources management. However, because of the nature of the driving force behind which the research is conducted, this community stands out from the others because of the integration of financial, stewardship, and research interests. Each of these “communities”, as well as others not identified in the above examples, has a strong commitment to the archaeological record with which they are involved. Archaeology, as a discipline, has a different relationship than the others, perhaps because of the research interests to illuminate and elucidate human history. Archaeologists, because of the academic aspects of their research and regardless of whether they are members of the stewardship or professional communities, have often placed their own interests above those of the other communities. In more recent years, however, archaeologists have begun to recognize that other communities are more interested in the ways that the archaeological past is integrated into the contemporary communities associated with that archaeological record.

Redemption Since archaeology’s beginning strides toward public outreach and community involvement, the involvements of communities within the archaeological endeavor has grown as a sort of community-based approach to research. Archaeology is not the only anthropological discipline that has reached out to try to involved communities but it has been relatively recently that archaeologists have encouraged the direct participation of various communities in the research enterprise.

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) As a result of numerous issues and problems with many different sorts of research carried out on human subjects, some anthropological researchers have turned toward a more community-based form of research. Minkler (2004: 684) defines CBPR as a “partnership approach that breaks down the barriers between the researcher and the researched and values community partners as equal contributors to the research enterprise [that] underscores ethical principles such as self-­ determination, liberty, and equity …” It is a collaborative approach to research that attempts to involve all partners in the research process by recognizing the unique strengths that each brings to the research enterprise. CBPR begins with a research topic that the local community has identified to be of importance to it, rather than a research topic identified by the academic researcher without input from the community. In this manner, the project operates with the goal of combining knowledge with action and achieving social change to improve outcomes and eliminate the social disparities experienced by the identified community. 270

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CBPR is used primarily in public health research, but it is gaining momentum in general anthropology as well as within archaeology. This focus is due to many converging factors, including an increased understanding of the complex issues that affect communities, the importance of both qualitative and quantitative research methods as means of understanding those issues, and the need to translate the findings of research into understandable forms with a goal of affecting positive change. These models of research, in which communities are actively engaged in the research process, are becoming more relevant to contemporary research agendas. Community members play pivotal roles in getting the word out about the research and promoting the use of the research findings. They also serve as liaisons between the community and the researcher, and serve a dual purpose in translating material from the local community to the academic one. The goal of community-based archaeology is to improve the utility and benefit of the archaeological process to the people in the community studied. In traditional research, the community is not actively involved in designing the projects or in sharing the information derived from the research project. Often, when these projects run into problems—for example, the study takes a long time or costs too much money—community members, who frequently give their time and energy for no compensation, discover that they are left without information about the outcome of the research or any findings that can benefit the community. Over time, when these problems occur, communities become suspicious of researchers. CBPR helps counter these suspicions by making the researchers and community groups partners from the early stages of the research. Thus, CBPR offers positive opportunities for communities to become fully engaged in the research process. Many anthropologists have become involved in trying to change anthropology into a discipline that not only takes into account the wishes of descendant populations in its research, but also one that tries to work with descendant groups to do research that is beneficial to the communities. Anthropologists are trying to answer questions that the communities want answered in order to demonstrate the utility of the research. Archaeologists are also trying to find ways to better include community wishes in their discipline. They are trying to change the way they view the past from one that is the exclusive “property” of the scientist to a perspective that recognizes the true implications of such ownership and the ability to share the interpreting and modeling of the past.

Community archaeology Community archaeology’s most distinguishing characteristic, according to Yvonne Marshall, is “the relinquishing of at least partial control of a project to the local community” (2002: 211). Many of the non-archaeological communities have been disenfranchised in the past – either as a result of economic, social, or other issues – and are therefore less likely to share in the opportunities to participate in the archaeological enterprises. Scham (2001: 190) writes: “The archaeology of the disenfranchised can be defined as a unique combining of culture with current and past political realities. … To the extent that archaeologists in all societies typically place themselves in the role of mediator between the past and the present, however, it is disingenuous to suggest that popular views do not affect our work.”This recognition that the practice (and discipline) of archaeology has political impact on existing populations is important for practicing archaeologists to consider, for, as Wesley Bernardini notes, “Archaeological conclusions increasingly have legal and ethical implications that affect descendant communities” (2005: 47). But archaeologists have become much more involved in sharing information and interpretations of the past cultures of North America. While outside (non-archaeologist) perspectives of the cultures of the 271

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past hovered in the background for decades, recently archaeologists have purposefully reached out to include other communities’ perspectives and voices in the process. More recently, Sonya Atalay (2012) has written extensively about this type of research and the ways that archaeology can help better involve communities. The following sections offer examples of the ways that archaeology has sought out alternative perspectives relating to the archaeological record.Within it, I will offer examples of projects that have included (and often prioritized) non-archaeological voices in the production of archaeological knowledge and interpretation, primarily within the United States.

United States With the passage of the SAA’s Principles of Archaeological Ethics in 1996, the relationships between the discipline of archaeology and the various communities with which it dealt became more and more under scrutiny. Helaine Silverman (2011: 157), in a special edition of Historical Archaeology, notes “[t]he change (albeit not universal or even pervasive) in archaeological practice that began in the 1980s was codified in 1996 in some of the ‘Principles of Archaeological Ethics for the Society for American Archaeology’, most notably ‘Principle 2: Accountability’, which states ‘Responsible archaeological research, including all levels of professional activity, requires an acknowledgment of public accountability and a commitment to make every reasonable effort, in good faith, to consult actively with affected group(s), with the goal of establishing a working relationship that can be beneficial to all parties involved’” (Lynott 1997: 592; Lynott and Wylie 2000: 40; Watkins et al. 2002: 40–44). It was this principle that encouraged archaeologists to consider their relationships with the communities that were affected by archaeological work. In addition to Principle 2, archaeologists who are members of the Society for ­American Archaeology also are bound under two other principles to consider the impact of their research – most notably Principle 4 and Principle 6. Principle 4: Public Education and Outreach makes it the ethical responsibility of archaeologists to “reach out to, and participate in cooperative efforts with, others interested in the archaeological record … who find in the archaeological record important aspects of their cultural heritage” (Lynott and Wylie 2000: 11). This Principle has been instrumental in the growth of broad programs intended to include the “public” in the practice of archaeology in a burgeoning “public archaeology” sub-discipline (Herscher and McManamon 2000). Principle 6: Public Reporting and Publication encourages archaeologists to make the results of their findings accessible within a reasonable time period after the conclusion of their work, but, more importantly, in forms oriented to as wide a range of publics as possible in order. In this manner, public involvement and awareness of the information held within the archaeological record are more widely disseminated (Parezo and Fowler 2000). These three principles related to all of the many publics with which archaeologists work. In addition, the recent SAA publication Voices in American Archaeology (Ashmore, Lippert and Mills 2010) examines some of the issues relating to the different “voices” in archaeology. While perhaps the most widely sought after perspectives relating to archaeological materials are those of American Indian groups, other communities have been involved as mentioned above. Many of these non-American Indian communities have been asked to participate in projects that relate to the historic period and which are geographically contained within small regions of a larger, more cosmopolitan region. The following sections discuss the relationships of archaeologists with some of the interested publics affected by impacts to the archaeological record. 272

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American indian community involvement Roderick Sprague and Walter Birkby (1970) describe the analysis and reburial of skeletal remains encountered during water and sewage line construction in Weippe, Idaho, and during a cemetery relocation project in the Lower Granite Dam Reservoir. Both projects involved the Nez Perce tribe. In the Lower Granite Dam project the “… graves were located and excavated by teams of University archaeologists and tribal members working together. The skeletal remains were analyzed by physical anthropologists and then reburied on tribal land with appropriate ceremony” (Sprague 1974: 2), but this cooperation was indeed the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, during the latter part of the 1960s and the early part of the 1970s, American Indians and archaeologists were at odds over control of the material culture of the American past. The American Indian Movement’s disruption of excavations in the American Midwest (Watkins 2000: 3–4; 2005b: 12–14) created open conflict on issues about which many archaeologists had been blissfully unaware. Questions concerning the appropriateness of excavating and displaying American Indian human remains continued to concern American Indian groups, ultimately leading to the passage of repatriation legislation in 1989 and 1990 (Watkins 2005b). Still, there have been programmatic attempts by archaeologists to alleviate the tension between American Indians and the discipline most closely associated with studying their past. The Society for American Archaeology, perhaps the most representative society for professional archaeologists in the United States, established a “Working Together” column in its Bulletin in 1993 to document and to chronicle the attempts of archaeologists to further involve American Indians in their work. Under the editorship of Kurt Dongoske it explored not only the successes but also the pitfalls of working with tribes. Many of the column’s articles were later published by the SAA (Dongoske, Aldenderfer and Doehner 2000).The Society established a Task Force on Native American Relations at its 55th Annual Meeting in Las Vegas in 1990 to “… advise the society on how to make a programmatic beginning in bettering its communications and working relationships with Native American communities” (Watkins 1995: 14). Ultimately, the Task Force was reformed into the current Committee on Native American Relations in 1995. At the meetings of the SAA in New Orleans in 1996, three linked sessions (“Native Americans and Archaeology” organized by Kurt Dongoske and Roger Anyon; “Roles and Relevancy: Native American Perspectives on Archaeology” organized by Nina Swidler and Alan Downer; and “Stepping Stones to Common Ground: Native Americans, Archaeologists, and Consultation” organized by Joe Watkins and Lynn Larson) were devoted to exploring the relationships between American Indians and archaeologists. The fact that these sessions were proposed independently of one another and later organized into a meaningful series was an indication of the need for such discussion.The papers of the symposia were edited and published as Native Americans and Archaeologists: Stepping Stones to Common Ground (Swidler et al. 1997). Numerous edited volumes have come onto the archaeological scene since 2005 that actively involved American Indian communities in archaeological projects. Jordan Kerber’s Cross Cultural Collaboration (2006) details involvement between archaeologists and Indian communities such as the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois Confederacy of Sovereign Nations of New York, the Wampanoag, the Abenaki, and the Mashantucket Pequot Indians of the northeastern United States, among others. T. J. Ferguson and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh’s History is in the Land (2006) offers discussion of the relationships between the archaeological community and the Tohono O’odham, Hopi, Zuni, and San Carlos Apache nations of the American Southwest concerning an archaeological project in southern Arizona’s San Pedro Valley. Stephen Silliman’s Collaborating at the Trowel’s Edge (2008) describes field schools and projects involving the White 273

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Mountain Apache of Arizona, the Mohegan Indians of Virginia, and the Oneida of New York State to name a few. Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson’s Collaboration in Archaeological Practice (2008) offer examples of relationships between archaeologists and descendant communities on a broader, more general scale. These are not the only volumes to have come out since 2005, but they form a representative sample of the various approaches archaeologists have taken to pursuing American Indian involvement. One of the best case studies concerning a general history of the relationships between American Indians and archaeologists can be found in the controversy involving a set of human remains from the Columbia River in the state of Washington known as the Kennewick Man or the Ancient One (Owsley and Jantz 2014; Watkins 2000: 135–254; 2005c: 197–199). A set of human remains was discovered in the Columbia River near Kennewick,Washington, in July 1996. Initial examination of the bones by archaeologist James Chatters indicated the likelihood that the remains were those of a nineteenth-century person. When radiocarbon dates came back dating the remains to about 9,300 years ago, the Corps of Engineers (on whose land the materials were found) began procedures established under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) to repatriate the remains to local American Indian tribes. In October that year, eight scientists sued the federal government for the right to conduct scientific research on the human remains before the intended repatriation and reburial. In August 2002, nearly six years after the case was initiated, Magistrate John Jelderks issued a decision that K ­ ennewick Man did not meet the definition of “Native American” under NAGPRA. Since then, the already tenuous relationship between archaeologists and American Indians has cooled even more.

Other community involvement As archaeologists have sought further involvement of various communities, more and more the archaeology that is created takes on a more public aspect, involving not only public education and public outreach, but all aspects of involving the public in the results of archaeology. Shackel and Chambers’ Places in Mind: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology (2004) pulls together a collection of articles that look at the public uses and benefits of archaeology to empower subordinated groups, to make archaeology relevant and applicable to nontraditional communities, and to use archaeology to help communities understand and create a sense of heritage. In his Introduction to the volume, Shackel (2004: 14) notes that “Public participation … is now about reaching out to members of the community and making them stakeholders in the archaeological discourse.” In his epilogue Chambers (2004:197) broadens the definition of public archaeology from one associated with “new incentives on the part of varied constituencies and interests to make claims on the significance and ownership of heritage materials and their interpretation” to one where “the public can be seen as having come to play important roles in determining the nature of archaeological practice in various contexts of heritage resource decision making” (207, note 2, emphasis in the original). In this regard, the public takes on an active rather than a passive role in archaeological resource management.

African-American community involvement A 2005 Annual Review of Anthropology article on the archaeology of black Americans in recent times (Leone, LaRoche and Babiarz 2005: 575–598) provides a review of work on African Americans through archaeology. But, perhaps one of the most famous situations concerning African-American community involvement with archaeologists is the African Burial Ground Project in New York City. The US Government maintains a website devoted to the project 274

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(https://www.nps.gov/afbg/index.htm) where it stores the scientific publications which include chapters that detail the public involvement in the project. In a recent discussion of the project, Michael Blakey (2010: 61) writes:“The discovery of this burial ground in downtown Manhattan materially confronted us with a decision: whether to realize our capacity to disregard these remains, sanctify them, or restore their stories to memory, whichever advocacy was the most powerful.” With this as an introduction, he chronicles the bureaucratic history that led to the movement of 419 human remains to the leading African-American research institution, Howard University, for study in 1993. Blakey (2010: 62) comments: Here, many African-Americans felt, the Eurocentric distortions and omissions of history might be averted. Ten years later, the 419 human remains were reinterred at the site after a six-city week-long ceremony named the Rites of Ancestral Return. Four years after that, the African Burial Ground was declared a US National Monument, alongside Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and brought under the auspices of the National Park Service. While this is perhaps the most known, it is by no means the only involvement of an ­African-American community in the interpretation of the archaeological record.Another example is the Levy Jordan Public Archaeology Project (McDavid 2002, 2004), which evolved from “a ‘traditional’ archaeological project with little public involvement … to a public archaeology project controlled by members of ethnically diverse local descendant communities” (McDavid 2004: 36–37). By using the concepts of reflexivity, multivocality, interactivity, and contextuality, McDavid was able to “decenter the archaeologist as the authoritative source of The Truth about the history of this plantation” (2004: 40). In this manner, McDavid was able to “empower” subordinated groups as a means of contributing to their own local and regional history. These are by no means the extent of examples of archaeology’s approaches to the archaeology of African-American communities in Annapolis, Maryland (Leone 2005), Indianapolis, Indiana (Mullins and Jones 2011), New Philadelphia, Illinois (Fennell, Martin and Shackel 2010), among others; these are merely a small indication of the additional focus that archaeologists have turned to the culture history of “non-White” communities in America. None of these studies portray the African-American life in the United States, but they do add color to the fabric of American history and point out not only the similarities these diverse groups of people shared but also the social, economic, and religious differences.

Asian-American community involvement While archaeologists have conducted research on Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans since the 1960s (Williams and Voss 2008: 1), the involvement of the Asian-­American community as partners is relatively recent. As noted by Fong’s missive for archaeology to “become increasingly responsible for accurately representing the voices and histories of documentary-­ marginalized communities” (2007: 117), archaeology has not included Chinese and Japanese-­ American communities at the same level of involvement as American Indian and other minority-based communities. There are some examples, however, that tend to foreshadow a growing involvement in the future. Mary Praetzellis and Adrian Praetzellis (2011: 89–97) discuss the involvement of the ­Chinese-American and Japanese-American communities concerning a cultural resources management project in San Jose, California. The authors discuss the San Jose Heinlenville Project and the civil engagement of the communities with the archaeologists. Heinlenville is the 275

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name that was given to the area where early Asian-American communities were allowed to live within San Jose in spite of the many anti-Chinese and anti-Japanese feelings by the non-Asian inhabitants of the area. The archaeological project did more than just recruit Asian-American community members as advisors; it embedded them into the project as excavators, monitors, and workers alongside the archaeologists. In this way, the community gains not only from the excavations, but also from direct involvement in the interpretation and writing of its own history in relation to the region. These are examples of the growing relationships between the archaeological community and the stakeholders who have social, cultural, and genealogical connections with the material culture of the past. While these groups are firming up their relationships, the archaeological community is actively reaching out to include them. This outreach has strengthened relationships and has given the archaeological community a more positive reputation.

Cross-cultural, non-geographic communities Other communities can and have been identified within the archaeological record.The study of the ways gender is represented in the archaeological record and interpreted in the archaeology of today, for example, represents another broad-based community that does not relate to a single genetic or geographical location, but one that crosses numerous cultural, social, and economic backgrounds. Margaret Conkey and Janet Spector (1984) brought attention to the role of gender in the archaeological record, followed by Gero and Conkey (1991); Bettina Arnold and Nancy Wicker’s (2001) edited volume on gender and the archaeology of death draws attention to the role of “gender in the context of mortuary ritual” (2001: ix); Lynn Meskell (2002) wrote on the intersection of identity and politics in archaeology; Sarah Nelson’s volume on gender in archaeology explored further the ways that “an emphasis on power and prestige has obscured gender in the past” (2004: 1). On a broader scale, James Adovasio, Olga Soffer, and Jake Page offered a volume that investigated the “female side of evolution and prehistory” (2007: xv). More recent articles have also examined gender in the preContact archaeological record (Ardren 2008) and the archaeologies of the recent and documented pasts (Wilkie and Hayes (2006). Suffice it to say, there are numerous sub-sets of global communities that have (or are lacking) relationships with the archaeological record that are developing, growing, or burgeoning. These communities are perhaps less “related” to the archaeological record, but nonetheless have strong interests in the way that record is interpreted and how their “community” is represented.

Repatriation Perhaps the most public act of “redemption” that can be attributed to the discipline of archaeology in relation to descendant communities (at least in terms of American Indians) has been the legislated requirement for the return of human remains and other specialized artifacts (“repatriation”). Again quoting Silverman (2011: 152): “Civil engagement, public outreach and community collaboration appear to have exploded on the archaeological scene following passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, although there were outstanding earlier individual efforts …” There appears to be some merit to pointing out the passage of repatriation laws that, to some extent, legislated archaeologists’ involvement with descendant groups, specifically American Indians, even though other communities have benefited from the programmatic approach to outreach, education, and conversation. The National Museum of the American Indian Act (NMAIA) of 1989 and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) both require museum personnel to 276

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consult with American Indian communities primarily concerning the objects associated with American Indian human remains (funerary objects) in their museum’s collections. The Acts also require archaeologists to consult with American Indian communities when human remains are encountered during on-going construction projects or prior to excavations on federal lands operating under federal excavation permits which might encounter human remains. Funerary objects are a special class of material culture in that their association with human remains as part of a funerary rite gives them special meaning. Archaeologists have long held that, because of their placement with deceased individuals, they offer insights into ceremonial and religious aspects of the people who placed them. The pragmatist might ask why “throw away” perfectly useable objects by placing them within a grave; the humanist might argue that these personal objects “belong” to the dead person and should therefore accompany the body; the archaeologist might argue that the objects associated with the dead give glimpses into the social order and ritual world the dead occupied in life. The use of grave goods as one aspect of mortuary studies indicates the social relationships that are inherent in the choices of artifacts placed with the deceased. The sorts and number of artifacts associated with dead individuals have been used to try to gather information on status and rank (Brown 1981) as well as gender issues (Cannon 2005), but such objects also allow interpretations of social ritual as well (Smits 2008). While archaeologists and biological anthropologists can understand the scientific information residing within these sorts of objects, non-scientific community members are more likely to view the associated artifacts differently. The body of academic works on the practice and process of repatriation is long and ever-growing. Tamara Bray and Thomas Killion (1994) documented the processes involved in repatriating sets of human remains from the Smithsonian Institution to the contemporary Larsen Bay people; Watkins (2005b) provided a volume on repatriation and sacred sites issues for high school students; Mihesuah’s 2000 edited volume and Bray’s 2001 edited volume provided a well-­ balanced depiction of the backgrounds of repatriation. Likewise, Fforde, Hubert and Turnbull (2002) provided more global examples and perspectives on repatriation while Fine-Dare (2002) provided a more American Indian–centered view on the impact of repatriation. These volumes, in conjunction with the many others that have been written before and since, provide students and archaeologists with examples of the impact that human remains and archaeological objects have on contemporary populations. Repatriation is not just about the process of giving material remains back to contemporary communities, but instead has also become an academic study in itself, as evidenced by a recent Master’s thesis from the University of Nebraska (Grabouski 2011), one of many devoted to the topic nationwide. A conference held at the School for Advanced Research on the Human Experience (then the School of American Research) in 2004 examined the impact that repatriation has had on the practice of archaeology. A group of researchers convened at the SAR campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to discuss the ways that repatriation has opened up the domain of archaeology to the “participation by individuals and groups historically on the margins or completely outside the field and excluded from the rewards and challenges of professional practice” (Killion 2007: 8). Perhaps most important, as Killion notes, “one of the most salient outcomes of repatriation for the discipline is the long-term place this process has established for itself within archaeology and related fields” (2007: 7).

Conclusions As archaeologists continue to explore the ways that our research plays into nationalist agendas, we must also struggle with coming to terms with the ideas that the ways we represent 277

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the societies of the past based on the refuse we uncover. Community involvement within the archaeological programs – from setting the research agendas to sharing the results of the research processes – can help lessen our ethnocentric perspectives on the past as we construct it, and can also strengthen the voices of the all-too-often under-represented ethnic and social groups of American culture. There have been some interesting transitions in my work with Indigenous communities over the course of my career. Since 2003, most of my work with Indigenous communities in the United States and internationally has been of an advisory nature – working with communities on issues related to repatriation, helping provide training in tribal archaeology programs, or helping a university creating Indigenous Archaeology in Japan – rather than directing field work or excavations. In 2004 I served as a Research Associate on the Finders University “Ethnoarchaeology in Aboriginal Australia Field School” in the Northern Territory of Australia, as part of an on-going project under the primary direction of Claire Smith of Flinders (cf. Smith and Jackson 2008). This project integrated the general concerns of the local community about the way their traditional methods of transferring knowledge to the younger generation were no longer happening (Brett 2001), as well as a local recognition that recording knowledge for posterity was an important part of gaining “authority” in the government’s eyes. Smith’s work helped students gain knowledge of the ways that community control contributes to better understanding of the meaning of the archaeological record to local contemporary populations. Since 2008, I have been involved in working with Ainu communities and individuals on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. In Japan, Ainu individuals and communities have lost much of their relationships with their archaeological past as a result of the colonization of the area by the dominant Japanese culture beginning in the 1400s and extending throughout the twentieth century. In 1997, the passage of the “Law for the Promotion of Ainu Culture and the Dissemination and Advocacy of Knowledge in Respect of Ainu Traditions” started the contemporary process of recognition of the Ainu as a distinct population; in June 2008, the Japanese government gave official recognition to the Ainu as an “indigenous people” under the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). I have been involved with the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies (CAIS) of Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, as a Research Associate on its archaeological field school near Utoro along the Shiretoko peninsula’s northern coast.This field school is part of the Center’s “Indigenous Archaeology in Shiretoko” (IAS) project aimed at involving Ainu people in the development of the archaeological research program to better involve Ainu views and voice in the research and conservation plan. Secondly, the program is aimed at creating a means whereby local and Ainu people can contribute to the dialogues and opinions. Hirofumi Kato of the Center has been excavating at archaeological sites in northern Hokkaido Island in the hopes of better integrating the archaeological record with Ainu histories (Kato 2010, 2014). Excavations have continued to expand the boundaries between two archaeological cultures found in the northern part of the island: the marine-adapted Okhotsk culture in the northern and northwestern portions of Hokkaido and Sakhalin islands and the more agricultural Satsumon culture to the south. These two archaeological cultures derive from the epi-Jomon culture in the northern Japanese archipelago, with the Okhotsk extending from about 300 to 1000 AD and followed by the Tobinitai culture from 1000 to 1200 AD, and the Satsumon from about 600 to 1200 AD. The Ainu are recognized historically from about 1200 AD and are thought to have derived characteristics from both of these two cultures. The project has been successful in increasing (or initiating) collaboration with local communities and Indigenous people by actively questioning the role of research ethics in the excavation 278

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program. CAIS has organized the archaeological field school not only to train Hokkaido University students in the techniques of archaeological excavation, but it has also involved international instructors as research associates and instructors on topics of interest to the students and local populations. In addition, they have been involved in creating the opportunities for Ainu community members to develop guided tours of Ainu heritage locations not only in the Shiretoko Peninsula area but also in other parts of Hokkaido (Yamamura 2014). Carol Ellick was involved from 2008 in initiating her “Parallel Perspectives Program” (Ellick 2012, 2014) among the Japanese archaeology students at the Hokkaido field schools. In addition, she was in charge of the first “Public Archaeology Day” in Japan at the archaeological site in 2009 (Ellick 2012), and more than 30 local students and community members attended. A secondary school history teacher who attended the event noted that this was his first exposure to the archaeology of the area and lamented the fact that the history of the Ainu was presented only in a single page in Japanese high school texts. In 2012, Ellick utilized her “Parallel Perspectives Program” during the University of Oklahoma’s American Indian Math and Science Society’s Summer Institute. She taught young middle school and high school (7th, 8th, and 9th grade) American Indian students from rural Oklahoma schools about archaeology as a way of integrating traditional and scientific ways of knowing about the past. The class culminated in a visit to the Badger Hole archaeological site excavations near Woodward, Oklahoma, being undertaken by the University of Oklahoma under the direction of Dr. Leland Bement.There, the kids learned about archaeological techniques such as excavation and screening, mapping the finds, making stone tools, and throwing spears with atl-atls. Archaeology, as a sub-discipline of anthropology, has continued moving beyond the closed halls of the academy in more recent years as it has participated in an internal review of its complicity in the colonial enterprise. This “reflexivity” has pushed archaeologists toward critical evaluations of the archaeological enterprise, the questioning of the role of archaeology in nationalist agendas, and the concern over the ways that archaeology as a social science can be used in the contemporary world. Whether practicing “ethnographic archaeology” (Castañeda and Matthews 2008) or “archaeological ethnography” (Meskell 2005), practitioners have become more focused on understanding the contemporary implications of the archaeological enterprise. As a result of this questioning of the impact and relevance of archaeology in today’s world, there has been a greater move toward involving more numerous and varied “communities” in the interpretation of the archaeological record as well as the public representation of those communities.The roles of these stakeholders has changed over time until now there are growing programs that collaborate extensively with non-archaeological groups; ethnic and social groups are participating as “communities” (however defined) that have vested interests in the outcomes of the process. These programs, grounded in the ethical responsibilities of the archaeologist to living populations, are also gaining acceptance as relevant academic approaches to understanding the discourses of archaeology and the information that we can derive from past worlds.

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Joe Watkins Atalay, Sonya 2012 Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bernardini, Wesley 2005 “Reconsidering Spatial and Temporal Aspects of Prehistoric Cultural Identity: A Case Study from the American Southwest.” American Antiquity 70 (1):31–54. Blakey, Michael L. 2010 “African Burial Ground Project: Paradigm for Cooperation?” Museum International 62(1–2):61–68. Bray, Tamara 2001 The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation. New York: Garland. Bray, Tamara and Thomas Killion (eds) 1994 Reckoning with the Dead: The Larsen Bay Repatriation and the Smithsonian Institution. Washington, DC: Smithsonian. Brett, Kirsten 2001 Lenimbat Brom Jad Oldintaim en Tudei en Wek Bla Tumoro. A Community Education Approach:Towards a More Relevant Indigenous Archaeology. Unpublished master’s thesis, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia. Brown, James A. 1981 “The Search for Rank in Prehistoric Burials,” in The Archaeology of Death, R. Chapman, I. Kinnes, and K. Randsborg, eds, pp. 25–37, New York: University of Cambridge. Brumfiel, Elizabeth 2003 “It’s a Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 32:205–223. Cannon, Aubrey 2005 “Gender and Agency in Mortuary Fashion,” in Interacting with the Dead: Perspectives on Mortuary Archaeology for the New Millennium, G. Rakita, J. Buikstra, L. Beck, and S. Williams, eds, pp. 41–80, Gainesville: University of Florida. Castañeda, Quetzal and Christopher Matthews 2008 Ethnographic Archaeologies: Reflections on Stakeholders and Archaeological Practices. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Chambers, Erve 2004 “Epilogue: Archaeology, Heritage, and Public Endeavor,” in Places in Mind: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology, P. Shackel and E. Chambers, eds, pp. 193–208, New York: Routledge. Chilton, Elizabeth S. (ed.) 1999 Material Meanings: Critical Approaches to the Interpretation of Material Culture. Salt Lake City: University of Utah. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip 2009 Inheriting the Past:The Making of Arthur C. Parker and Indigenous Archaeology. Tucson: University of Arizona. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip and T. J. Ferguson 2008 Collaboration in Archaeological Practice: Engaging Descendant Communities. Lanham, MD: AltaMira. Conkey, Margaret and Janet D. Spector 1984 “Archaeology and the Study of Gender.” Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory 7:1–38. Dongoske, Kurt E, Mark Aldenderfer, and Karen Doehner 2000 Working Together: Native Americans and Archaeologists. Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. Dongoske, Kurt E., Michael Yeatts, Roger Anyon, and T. J. Ferguson 1997 “Archaeological Cultures and Cultural Affiliation: Hopi and Zuni Perspectives in the American Southwest.” American Antiquity 62(4):600–608. Ellick, Carol J. 2014 “Public Archaeology: Cross Comparisons of Growth and Recommendations for the Future,” in Indigenous Heritage and Tourism: Theories and Practices on Utilizing the Ainu Heritage, Mayumi Okada and Hirofumi Kato, eds, pp. 153–157, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan: Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies. ———. 2012 “Archaeology, Education, and Identity.” Paper presented in the Routes of Indigenous Research session of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science’s 17th Annual Science in Japan Forum, Washington, DC. Fennell, Christopher C.,Terrence J. Martin, and Paul A. Shackel (eds) 2010 “New Philadelphia: Racism and the Illinois Frontier,” Historical Archaeology 44(1):1–157. Ferguson, T. J. and Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2006 History Is in the Land: Multivocal Tribal Traditions in Arizona’s San Pedro Valley. Tucson: University of Arizona. Fforde, Cressida, Jane Hubert, and Paul Turnbull (eds) 2002 The Dead and Their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy, and Practice. One World Archaeology 43. New York: Routledge. Fine-Dare, Kathleen 2002 Grave Injustice:The American Indian Movement and NAGPRA. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Fong, K. 2007 “Return of the ‘Heathen Chinee’.” Chinese America: History and Perspectives, pp. 115–118, MasterFILE Premier, EBSCOhost, viewed 7 June 2011. Gero, Joan M., and Margaret W. Conkey 1991 Engendering Archaeology: Women and Prehistory. New York: Wiley-Blackwell. Grabouski, L. R. 2011 Smoke and Mirrors: A History of NAGPRA and the Evolving U.S. View of the American Indian. Electronic version at http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historydiss/37.

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Research, representation, redemption, and repatriation Herscher, E. and F. P. McManamon 2000 “Public Education and Outreach: The Obligation to Educate,” in Ethics in American Archaeology: Second Revised Edition, M. J. Lynott and A.Wylie, eds, pp. 49–51.Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. Hurcumbe, Linda M 2007 Archaeological Artefacts as Material Culture. New York: Routledge. Kato, Hirofumi 2014 “Indigenous Heritage and Community-Based Archaeology,” in Indigenous Heritage and Tourism: Theories and Practices on Utilizing the Ainu Heritage, Mayumi Okada and Hirofumi Kato, eds, pp. 17–32, Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan: Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies. ———. 2010 “Whose Archaeology? Decolonizing Archaeological Perspective in Hokkaido Island,” in Martin Wobst, Sioban Hart, and Marge Bruchac, eds, Reader on Indigenous Archaeologies, pp. 314−321. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Kerber, Jordan (ed.) 2006 Cross Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Killion, T. W. 2007 Opening Archaeology: Repatriation’s Impact on Contemporary Research and Practice. Santa Fe, NM: School of Advanced Research. Leone, Mark 2005 The Archaeology of Liberty in an American Capital: Excavations in Annapolis. Berkeley: University of California. Leone, Mark P., Cheryl J. LaRoche, and Jennifer J. Babiarz 2005 “The Archaeology of Black Americans in Recent Times.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34:757–598. Lynott, Mark J. 1997 “Ethical Principles and Archaeological Practice: Development of an Ethics Policy.” American Antiquity 62(4):589–599. Lynott, Mark J. and Alison Wylie 2000 Ethics in American Archaeology: Second Revised Edition. Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. Marshall,Yvonne 2002 “What Is Community Archaeology?” World Archaeology 34(2):211–219. McDavid, Carol 2004 “From ‘Traditional’ Archaeology to Public Archaeology to Community Action: The Levi Jordan Plantation Project,” in Places in Mind: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology, P. Shackel and E. Chambers, eds, pp. 35–56, New York: Routledge. McDavid, Carol 2002 “Archaeologies That Hurt; Descendants That Matter: A Pragmatic Approach to Collaboration in the Public Interpretation of African-American Archaeology.” World Archaeology 34(2):303–314. Meskell, L. A. 2005 “Archaeological Ethnography: Conversations around Kruger National Park.” Archaeo­ logies 1(1):81–100. Meskell, L. A. 2002 “The Intersections of Identity and Politics in Archaeology.” Annual Reviews in Anthropology 31:279–301. Meskell, L. A. 2001 “Editorial Statement.” Journal of Social Archaeology 1(1):5–12. Meskell, L. A. and R. W. Preucel (eds.) 2004 A Companion to Social Archaeology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Mihesuah, D. S. 2000 Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? Lincoln: University of Nebraska. Minkler, M. 2004 “Ethical Challenges for the ‘Outside’ Researcher in Community-Base Participatory Research.” Health Education and Behavior 31(6):684–697. Mullins, Paul R. and Lewis C. Jones 2011 “Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The Politics of Slumming, Engagement, and the Color Line.” Historical Archaeology 45(1):33–50. Nelson, S. M. 2004 Gender in Archaeology: Analyzing Power and Prestige, 2nd edition. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Owsley, Douglas W. and Richard L. Jantz 2014 Kennewick Man: The Scientific Investigation of an Ancient American Skeleton. College Station: Texas A&M Press. Parezo, N. J. and D. D. Fowler 2000 “Archaeological Records Preservation: An Ethical Obligation,” in Ethics in American Archaeology: Second Revised Edition, M. J. Lynott and A.Wylie, eds, pp. 57–62.Washington, DC: Society for American Archaeology. Renfrow, Colin and Paul Bahn 2007 Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, 3rd edition. New York: Thames and Hudson. Sabloff, Jeremy 2008 Archaeology Matters: Action Archaeology in the Modern World. Walnut Creek, CA: LeftCoast. Scham, Sandra Arnold 2001 “The Archaeology of the Disenfranchised.” Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8(2):183–213. Shackel, Paul A. and Erve J. Chambers 2004 Places in Mind: Public Archaeology as Applied Anthropology. New York: Routledge. Sharer, Robert and Wendy Ashmore 1993 Archaeology: Discovering Our Past, 2nd edition. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield.

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16 CRITIcAL BIOcULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY A model for anthropological integration Thomas Leatherman and Morgan Hoke Preface We begin with an observation and a particular point of view. American anthropology emerged as an integrative discipline, one which has espoused holism and engaged in a “four-field” conversation since its inception (Boas 1940). There have been challenges to this holistic framing of the discipline as more “myth” than reality (Borofsky 2002; Segal and Yanagisako 2005; see also Calcagno 2003), and equally strong concerns over fragmentation and fissioning of disciplinary subfields that advocate for a holistic anthropology (Peacock 1995; Brown and Yoffee 1992). We come to this essay as anthropologists committed to the vision of anthropology’s unique ability for the integration of multiple perspectives on humans and humanity that is the promise of a four-field, holistic, approach. By ‘four-field’, however, we do not mean four, five or six silos of expertise that can somehow, if uncomfortably, inhabit the single space of a department or discipline. Departments that ‘cover’ and ‘represent’ anthropological breadth, but without integration, are hardly more holistic than those units that eschew one or more perspective (usually from biological anthropology) or that have split into separate departments or programs over seemingly irreconcilable differences in approaches to anthropological sciences. Rather, we are talking about the sort of anthropology that blurs divisions among the subfields, that occupies hybrid spaces at the margins of normative approaches, that bleed into and demand input from other perspectives within and out of anthropology, and that allow for and even privilege the anthropological promise of integration of natural and social sciences and humanities. These are also often uncomfortable spaces – perhaps more so the more integration one seeks. We live and work within a political economy of specialization and expert knowledge, especially within universities, granting agencies, and publishers, that promotes and rewards depth over breadth, and believes that success is better ensured by developing more narrowly conceived and specialized academic departments with a comparative advantage of particular “expert knowledge” in the global exchange of knowledge production.  Thus, as ‘common sense’ and seemingly necessary as holism might be to anthropology, and a biocultural approach might be for the studies that include human biology, intra-disciplinary integration is not always rewarded and indeed not frequently used to frame research and publications (Calcagno 2003; Goodman 2013). Nevertheless, we argue here for an anthropology that seeks integration across historically traditional subfields to make ‘anthropological connections’ (Wolf 1982) – in this case between 283

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the social and the biological across spaces and times – recognizing the mutually constitutive, dialectical nature of these connections.

Introduction Biocultural anthropology is an approach to examining relationships between human society, culture, and biology. It is a necessarily broad approach that by definition encompasses any attempt to study human biology within social and cultural contexts, or socio-cultural realities as they are shaped by biology. So, for example, studies of human origins, human ecology and adaptation, psychosocial stress, nutrition, and health frequently identify their orientation as biocultural. Studies of inequalities and health disparities within anthropology, other social sciences, and public health are also necessarily biocultural (Leatherman and Jernigan 2015). Yet, the term biocultural is usually associated with the subfield of biological anthropology, and to a lesser degree medical and nutritional anthropology. Because of its link to biology and a history of deterministic frameworks that were part of the legacy of studies of biological race in the first half of the 20th century, as well as other forms of genetic determinism (e.g., sociobiology), there exists an unfortunate knee-jerk reaction among some anthropologists to anything touching upon the study of human biology as deterministic and narrow. A one-drop rule within anthropology tends to locate studies of human biology and evolution on a slippery slope toward reductionism. Lance Gravlee, a cultural and medical anthropologist who employs a biocultural framework has recently discussed how the “one-drop” rule also operates for subfield affiliation within the discipline and in his own scholarly identity. He states, “To wit, cultural anthropologists who exhibit any trace of another subfield are automatically reclassified to that subfield. One consequence is that biocultural approaches are generally defined as outside the scope of cultural anthropology, and interactions between human biology and culture become the purview of biological anthropology alone. This pattern impoverishes anthropology as a whole but constitutes the unique contribution of biological anthropology to science” (Gravlee 2013: 135). Perhaps for this reason, Alan Goodman, in his presidential address recently published in the American Anthropologist (2013), used the term “cultural-biologicals” as a way to denote a more deeply social and cultural biocultural approach. Among biological and biocultural anthropologists, the question is not whether there is anything inherently deterministic about biocultural approaches; there is not. Nor is there a question whether a biocultural approach should be central to a holistic framing of humankind; it should. The larger question is what it means to have a deeper integration of the social and cultural with studies of human biology. Goodman (2013) termed much of what passes as a biocultural approach in anthropology as integration lite; work that demonstrates relationships between biological, social, and cultural variables, but does not develop a richer historic and ethnographic context for understanding and interpreting results more completely. He uses this term not to impugn the contribution or importance of this research – indeed the term applies to all of our work – but to note the limited and sometimes superficial aspects of the relationships. Efforts at more integration deep approaches that took a particular starting point – an attention to social relations of power and inequalities within an anthropological political economy – emerged in the 1990s as one way to forge a stronger integration between socio-cultural and biological anthropologies. Contributions to these efforts were brought together in the volume Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology (Goodman and Leatherman 1998a), and appeared in this volume and elsewhere under multiple names such as “Biology of Poverty” (Thomas 1998), “Political Ecology of Human Biology” (Leatherman 2005; Leatherman and Thomas 2001), “Humanistic Biological Anthropology” (Blakey 1998), 284

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and perhaps most broadly as a “Critical Biocultural/Biosocial Anthropology” (Leatherman and Goodman 2011; Singer 2011). This critical biocultural/biosocial approach is the particular slant we take on a broadly defined biocultural anthropology. In the following section, we review the development of this approach, transformations in biocultural anthropology since that time, and highlight several promising directions for future research. We then present a case study from southern Peru to demonstrate one example of theoretical and methodological boundary crossing within a critical biocultural anthropology.

Background to a critical biocultural anthropology The volume Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political Economic Perspectives in Biological Anthropology (Goodman and Leatherman 1998a), was the product of a Wenner-Gren Conference held in 1992. The conference brought together biological anthropologists, archeologists, and socio-cultural anthropologists from medical and nutritional anthropology and those with strengths in political-economic and political ecology theory. The central goal of the conference was to expand the scope of research in biological and biocultural anthropology by explicitly incorporating political-economic perspectives into analyses and interpretations of human biological well-being. In doing this, the contributors hoped to advance biocultural theory and offer new directions in biocultural analysis that could enlist the interest and collaboration among sub-disciplines of anthropology, and work against the “chasms” that separated seemingly disparate but complementary perspectives in anthropology (Goodman and Leatherman 1998b). A related goal was to present alternative paths, especially to students in biological anthropology, that might show how their work can and should be more socially informed and relevant, as well as biologically grounded. In particular, they envisioned a need to develop approaches capable of addressing critical social and biological dimensions of an ever-expanding list of global problems that had been largely ignored in biocultural anthropology; problems ranging from growing economic inequalities and health disparities, to environmental degradation and climate change, to conflicts and violence. Around the time of the conference, Constance Holden (1993) wrote in Science that anthropology had become so divided along the lines of ‘science’ versus the more humanistic and interpretive approaches, that there was a growing inability to find common language, concerns, and relevance. This divide was manifest in departments splitting often along the fault lines of biological versus socio-cultural anthropology. Many biological anthropologists bemoaned that the “postmodern”, hyper-relative, overly self-reflexive anthropology presented at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association had little to offer their more empirical orientations. At the same time, many socio-cultural anthropologists dismissed any focus on human biology as inherently reductionist without examining the framing or deployment of biological data and concepts. The organizers and the majority of the participants at the 1992 Wenner-Gren Conference shared the belief that a biocultural approach can provide relevant insights into the sorts of conditions people face around the world, from environmental degradation to ethnic conflicts to immense and growing levels of inequality and consequent health disparities. However, this potential had not been fully realized because of an over-reliance on normative evolutionary, ecological and adaptation theory within biological anthropology, and a failure to ground biological investigations and interpret their biological findings within social, economic, and historical contexts. Evolution, adaptation, and developmental plasticity are central features in biocultural analysis, and provide a lens through which we continue to view biological, behavioral, and social 285

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responses to local conditions. Yet, critiques of the “adaptationist program” from within evolutionary biology (e.g., Gould and Lewontin 1979; Lewontin 1978) and anthropology (e.g., Singer 1989, 1998), questioned the over-reliance on programmatic evolutionary explanations and just so stories of human biology and behavior, and the common understanding of adaptation as response to problems posed by an environment that is external and alienated from people (Smith and Thomas 1998); adaptation without agency. Rather, drawing on Levins and Lewontin (1985) and others, the contexts of adaptation were seen as set by the rich dialectical interplay of organism and environment (Leatherman and Goodman 2005, 2011). Rather than adapting to pre-existing niches, humans and other organisms use environmental features to construct niches – the environmental contexts of their own adaptive responses. In this sense, the notion of adaptive process as a series of ongoing “responses” to ever-changing conditions is more useful than “adaptation” as a product or end point. It was also clear that a biocultural approach to environmental problems needed to expand the conceptualization of local environments to include the ways global historical processes shaped local conditions. It is not enough to know that poverty causes illness and diminished well-­being. We also need to understand the multiple dimensions of poverty that emerge from different historical forces and how these underlay unequal exposure to problems, access to resources, and the biological and social responses to a range of conditions. In the 1960s and early 1970s, human biologists were largely concerned with understanding adaptations to physical and biotic extremes.  In the late 1970s and 1980s, human adaptability research increasingly noted that stressors such as undernutrition were more pervasive and often had a greater impact on human biology than purely environmental ones.These are quintessential social and economic issues, and suggest that relative degrees of wealth, poverty, and inequality underlie people’s vulnerability to a host of problems and to change. However, while it had become relatively common to associate biological variation with some aspect of socio-economic variation (Goodman’s integration lite), it was rare that the context or roots of the socio-economic variation were addressed. More­ over, the contexts of vulnerability that shaped the lives and health of so many were too often conceptualized as natural and even inevitable, rather than a product of a global history of human political and economic relations. A perspective was needed that looked beneath socio-economic variation to social relations of power that help shape unequal access to resources, and the local to extra-local processes that shaped local conditions and relations. For more than two decades, anthropologists working within political-economic perspectives had shown how global and local histories intersect (e.g., Mintz 1985; Roseberry 1988; Wolf 1982), with far-reaching implications for the genesis of human biological and cultural variation. Sister subfields to biological anthropology, such as archaeology and medical anthropology, had also been involved in this paradigmatic expansion (e.g., Brumfiel and Earle 1987; Paynter 1989; Morsy 1990). American biological anthropologists in the later 1980s began to follow the lead of their medical anthropology and archeology colleagues and attempted to integrate perspectives from anthropological political economy and human adaptability to examine how social inequalities shape human biology through nutrition, health, and psychosocial stress (Blakey 1994; Goodman et al. 1988; Leatherman et al. 1986). These and later efforts were characterized by several features including an expanded view of environmental and historical contexts and contingencies, attention to the social relations that structure (and are structured by) human-environment interactions, and a notion of constrained human agency (what Levins and Lewontin called “conditional rationality” 1985: 246) in coping with social and environmental problems (see, Goodman and Leatherman 1998; Leatherman and G ­ oodman 2011).  In this sense, critical biocultural approaches shared much with perspectives emerging from critical medical anthropology and social epidemiology (Farmer 1999, 2004; Krieger 2001; 286

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Singer 1998). Like structural violence approaches, they seek to combine history, political economy, and biology in a framework that examines inequalities and biology in social and environmental contexts that are ‘geographically broad and historically deep’ and that recog­nized the limits of human agency in dealing with structures of inequality (Farmer 2004). Like eco-social approaches in Public Health (Krieger 2001), they share an explicit focus on embodiment and pathways to embodiment; how lived realities “get under the skin” and directly impact human biology (Krieger 2001).  The goal of the critical biocultural approach is to link structures of inequality, constrained agency, and pathways to embodiment within ethnographically grounded local contexts, lived experience realities, and local biologies.

Recent shifts in critical biocultural/biosocial approaches Two decades have passed since the publication of the Biocultural Synthesis, and recent trends in biocultural research reflect a greater concern with addressing biological dimensions of social and environmental problems, paying attention to broader social contexts and contingencies, and employing new field methodologies that can better elucidate the pathways to embodiment in ethnographic contexts. Some of the former points of contention around the goals and possibilities of “objectivity” in science are also no longer so viscerally central to debates about science. A new generation of students increasingly understands that scientific questions, methods, and interpretations emerge within social contexts, and understands that the way we do our science and the results we produce inevitably have political implications. Some of the areas of biocultural research that illustrate trends toward a more socially contextualized research include work on poverty, inequalities, and health (Leatherman 2005; Singer 2011), on food insecurities (Hadley and Crooks 2012; Himmelgreen and Romero-Daza. 2009; Ruiz et al. 2015) on impacts of violence, trauma, and conflict (Martin et al. 2012; Leatherman and Thomas 2008; Panter-Brick et al. 2009, 2011; Pedersen 2002) on lifestyle and status incongruities and loss of cultural consonance (Dressler et al. 2015; McDade 2002), and on the embodiment of race and racism in the biology of race and racial health disparities (Blakey 1994, 1998; Goodman 1997; Gravlee 2009; Gravlee and Dressler 2005; Kuzawa and Sweet 2009; Dressler et al. 2005). Others have employed psychobiological models of stress and distress to examine trance states (Seligman 2014), and how poverty poisons the brain (Lende 2012). Singer and Clair (2003) have introduced the notion of “syndemics” to label the synergistic interactions of two or more diseases often clustering within populations suffering from multiple axes of inequalities in biosocial contexts. Syndemics has been adopted as a framing concept to address clusters of disease and social problems in specific biosocial contexts such as depression, diabetes, and social distress among Latina immigrants in Chicago (Mendenhall 2012) to substance abuse, violence, and HIV/AIDS in inner-city impoverished women (Singer 2001). Despite these advances the critical biocultural approach has faced critique along several conceptual and methodological fronts: (1) that the approach is more “biosocial” than “biocultural” and had largely ignored cognitive dimensions of culture in its analyses; (2) that it needs to better operationalize and measure various dimensions of culture, political economy, and biology and to better elucidate the pathways of embodiment linking inequalities and biology; and (3) that it needs a better integration of evolutionary theory and mechanisms in critical biocultural research. We discuss these critiques and implications below along with new developments that have advanced methodologically and conceptually our ability to link inequalities and human biology. In a 2005 article, Dressler asks what is cultural about biocultural research, and suggests focusing on more cognitive dimensions of culture manifest in schemas or cultural models. He examines 287

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culture through shared norms around a variety of life domains, measured in terms of “cultural consensus,” and an individual’s ability to align themselves with those norms in their own beliefs and behaviors, or achieve “cultural consonance” (Dressler 2001; Dressler et al. 2015). Dressler and his colleagues have been able to use these methods to demonstrate significant relationships between levels of consonance and specific health outcomes such as blood pressure (e.g., Dressler and Bindon 2000; Dressler et al. 2015). Other scholars have expanded this work, employing cultural consensus and consonance to explore the significance of culturally constructed racial typologies on the health of individuals in Puerto Rico (Gravlee and Dressler 2005), the role of cultural norms of consumption and blood pressure among African American youth in Chicago (Sweet 2010, 2011), and shifting (conflicting) social status among adolescents in Samoa (McDade 2002). The model has been particularly attractive to biocultural anthropologists because it provides a way to measure and quantify levels of shared consensus and consonance around a set of specific cultural ideas and behaviors that emerge as relevant through ethnographic research, and link these to specific health outcomes via the stress pathway. The effectiveness of this method relies on the execution of in-depth and thoughtful ethnographic research. While this form of quantification of culture can be useful, it is not necessary for the inclusion of cultural dimensions in critical biocultural work (Leatherman and Goodman 2011). Furthermore, quantified representations of culture must be employed cautiously given the elusiveness of culture as an analytical category (i.e., a measure of cultural consensus within a particular lifestyle domain should not come to stand for “culture” in its many and often fragmented forms). Culture comes in countless forms and contributors to the New Biocultural Synthesis did deal with culture albeit less so the cognitive dimension of cultural models. For example, systems of labor reciprocity in the Andes are well-established features of Andean culture, reflected in both ideology and behavior (Alberti and Mayer 1974; Mayer 1974, 2002; Murra 1985). ­Biocultural research on the reproduction of poverty and poor health among Andean households (­Leatherman 1998) noted how a decline in reciprocity concurrent with the expansion of capitalist relations into rural economies constrained households’ access to these forms of labor and led to greater impacts of illness on agro-pastoral production. In a completely different context, biocultural scholar Andrea Wiley (2004) has demonstrated how the political economy of milk production and national dietary policies intersects with the cultures of milk consumption and beliefs in the goodness of milk, with important implications for human biology. In short, it is important to take culture seriously in biocultural research, and it is always important to seek methods that clearly operationalize variables under investigation, but there is no one best way to do this. Rather, one chooses variables to include in analyses and how to best operationalize these variables depending on questions and ethnographic contexts. As noted above, the study of anthropological political economy and a focus on relations of power is a key element of the critical biocultural approach. However, some biocultural anthropologists have sought techniques of quantifying political economy similar to cultural consensus and consonance analyses, and without these have struggled to effectively incorporate political economy into their analyses. This is largely because it is impossible to distil relations of power and global economic forces into single variables that can be readily measured and used in statistical analyses – culture presents a similar challenge. In an early framing of a critical biocultural approach Goodman and Leatherman (1998b; and see Leatherman and Goodman 2011) argue that integrating perspectives from anthropological political economy into studies of human biology implies: (1) attention to history and historical contingency; (2) attention to local-global interactions; and (3) the identification through ethnography of the most important relations of power and production at the local level. Elements of social and human capital are signposts for these relationships but they are often contextually specific so there can be no single method 288

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or measure of power and inequality across different contexts. The key to identifying the most important and relevant dimensions of political economy in studies of local biologies depends on historical and ethnographic analysis; there is no escaping ethnography in critical biocultural/ biosocial approaches. For example, in the Andean work cited above (Leatherman 2005), two of the most critical dimensions of local political economy were relations of power that shaped access to land and labor for agro-pastoral production. In other research contexts, it might be about access to equal pay and benefits, political and economic policies and structures that limit where someone can live (e.g., redlining), or access to healthy foods (e.g., food deserts) and health care. Wilkinson and Pickett in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2011) argue that for more economically developed nations income inequality drives disparities in both health and social well-being. What is relevant depends on the local contexts but it is always important to be attentive to the historical roots of these inequalities or they become naturalized and “taken for granted” parts of the environment. Examining who benefits and who pays the price (Krieger 2001; Leatherman 1998; Singer 1998) is another way to hone in on relations of power that shape people’s biology. In the same way Krieger (2001) calls for a greater attention to “pathways to embodiment” in an eco-social approach to health disparities in public health, so critical biocultural approaches have needed more and better ways to methodologically link biology to inequalities in local ethno­g raphic contexts. Advances in the use of biomarker-based field methods (McDade et al. 2007; Worthman and Costello 2009) enhance the ability to link ethnographic contexts, local biologies, and a variety of indicators of stress and health. Field friendly and minimally invasive methods such as whole dried blood spots allow biological researchers to move beyond the laboratory and collect data from diverse field settings. Biomarkers can provide information on multiple physiological pathways (neuroendocrine, cardiovascular, metabolic, and immune/ inflammatory) through which social factors can contribute to health (McDade et al. 2007). Biocultural scholars have used dried blood spots to measure biomarkers of immune function such as Epstein-Barr virus, C-reactive protein, and IgG, chronic stress using IgG, and bacterial translocation/gut permeability through endotoxin antibodies, as well as a number of nutritional indicators (e.g., hemoglobin, cholesterol) and hormones ranging from cortisol to leptin. Hormone sampling from saliva has also permitted the study of a range of hormonal variation and socially induced hormone changes, from cortisol reactivity in infants (Thayer and Kuzawa 2014) to shifts in testosterone levels in new fathers (Gettler et al. 2011). While not all of these investigations utilize a critical biocultural approach, their biological methodologies could easily be employed in the service of a critical biocultural approach. Both theoretical and methodological advances in work that encompasses fetal and/or metabolic programming, DOHaD (developmental origins of health and disease), and epigenetics also represent a significant shift in biocultural anthropology.This work has provided new insights into how biological impacts of lived realities might be traced across the life course and generations, and thus new potentials for connecting evolution, social inequality, and biological plasticity (Hicks and Leonard 2014). The capacity for culture and a high degree of biological plasticity are the major products of human evolutionary history. Given our propensity to move across landscapes and construct new niches in novel environments, a high degree of plasticity, flexibility, and potential reversibility makes good evolutionary sense (Slobodkin 1968). Developmental plasticity plays a particularly important role in aiding an organism in adjusting biologically to its environment (Frisancho 1993). Developmental plasticity refers to non-genetic but often irreversible processes through which an individuals can change their biology (and behavior) during development in response to environmental changes (Lasker 1965). Put in other terms plasticity refers to the ability of a given genotype to “generate a range of possible phenotypes (body and 289

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behavior) contingent on environmental experience,” including the notion of developmental programming as “an environmentally induced, durable change in the structure or function of a tissue, organ, or biological system” (Kuzawa and Quinn 2009: 132). Research on the developmental origins of health and disease, or DOHaD hypothesis, shows the importance of early life environments to the programming of a number of major physiologi­ cal systems including the hypothalamic-adrenal-pituitary axis (HPA axis), the immune system, and metabolic functioning (Barker et al. 2002). While much of the work on DOHaD has used experimental animal models, important findings have been made in human populations. Perhaps the best-known example is the relationship between prenatal, and early nutrition with adult cardiovascular disease, known to many as the thrifty phenotype hypothesis (Barker et al. 2002; Hales and Barker 1992). Anthropological studies of developmental plasticity have included a variety of outcomes ranging from early growth and adult stature (Leonard 1989; Leatherman et al. 1995), immune function (McDade 2007), and early and adult stress response (McDade et al. 2013; Thayer and Kuzawa 2014). Such studies have advanced biocultural anthropology by working against genetic determinism and revealing instead the complex interplay between genetics and environment. One of the primary mechanisms to which anthropologists are turning to study developmental programming and its effects is epigenetics.The term epigenetics was initially used by Conrad Waddington to explain the ways in which genes interact with the environment during early life to create an observable characteristic or phenotype ( Jablonka and Lamb 2002; Non and Thayer 2015). We now understand epigenetics to refer specifically to heritable changes in gene expression that are not caused by changes in the underlying DNA. Rather, these changes are caused by a wide variety of environmental exposures ranging from psychosocial stress to toxic chemicals to the kinds of foods we eat. Because our environmental exposures are largely influenced by both cultural and social factors, epigenetics and developmental plasticity serve as an obvious avenue for biocultural work. Methods for measuring methylation and the alteration of gene expression have advanced significantly in recent years, providing us with a mechanism and means for demonstrating developmental plasticity and its possible inheritance in a fundamentally new way. Thus far, epigenetics has largely been employed theoretically in anthropological work as a potential mechanism linking environmental experience and health outcomes (Hoke and McDade 2015; Kuzawa and Sweet 2009; Thayer and Kuzawa 2011). However, recent biocultural studies have successfully demonstrated the potential that epigenetics holds for the study of the embodiment of our social and cultural environment. Research conducted by Mulligan and colleagues (2012) found a relationship between maternal experience of psychosocial stress, epigenetic changes in infants, and infant birth weight in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Mulligan et al. 2012; Rodney and Mulligan 2014). A second unpublished study by Thayer and colleagues identified associations between maternal experience of ethnic discrimination and infant methylation at the site of growth-related genes.Those epigenetic differences were in turn associated with growth rate between birth and six weeks of age.These studies represent some of the first forays into the anthropological study of epigenetics. Recent additional pieces by Non and Thayer and have offered insight on both the methodological and theoretical incorporation of epigenetics in biocultural work (Non and Thayer 2015; Thayer and Non 2015). It is important to maintain a healthy skepticism and acknowledge the limitations and potential pitfalls of the study of epigenetics and perhaps other mechanisms of plasticity as we incorporate them into critical biocultural inquiry (Lock 2013, 2015; Meloni 2014a; Meloni 2014b; Meloni and Testa 2014; Thayer and Non 2015). Some scholars have suggested that epigenetics may experience many of the same problems as genetic research. For example, a focus on epigenetics may lead to what Lock refers to as somatic reductionism and neoreductionism, 290

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wherein our use of epigenetics as a form of acknowledging the role of environment allows us to actually ignore those social, economic, and political forces that shape the environment (Lock 2013, 2015). Another problem that may emerge alongside epigenetic studies of health is mother blaming (Thayer and Non 2015). Much of the current epigenetics research focuses on the effects of prenatal exposures.This puts scholars at risk for – intentionally or not – heaping responsibility for epigenetic changes associated with poor health on mothers for their choices and actions during pregnancy. By focusing on the choices of an individual mother, research results that enter the broader public discourse risk becoming entangled with contemporary neoliberal notions of “personal responsibility” that minimize the larger structural and systemic factors that impact human biology. Finally, there is the ever present risk of over-reliance or over-interpretation of epigenetic findings (Thayer and Non 2015), which may lead again to reductionist thinking and reduce attention to other potential mechanisms of plasticity and inheritance, both biological and social. The aforementioned difficulties only increase the imperative that we actively seek to incorporate political economy and relations of power into biocultural scholarship. Currently, several theoretical frameworks are emerging that can aid scholars of plasticity in executing an integration deep approach (Goodman 2013). Hoke and McDade (2015) have proposed the framework of ‘Biosocial Inheritance’ as a way of integrating political-economic and sociohistorical variables into considerations of inter and transgenerational health outcomes. They define biosocial inheritance “as the process through which social adversity or advantage is transmitted across generations through mechanisms both biological and social in nature” (194). For example, biological insults in the form of psycho-social stress, undernutrition, and disease in adults can be transmitted to offspring in the form of physiological patterns of response, but also in the form of impoverished environments that can lead to poor child health outcomes, reduced social capital in the form of education attainment, employment, and subsequently diminished health for those children as they reach adulthood.Thus intergenerational influences often have the effect of perpetuating or amplifying biosocial traits across generations, thereby increasing the importance of an intergenerational perspective. The mechanisms of biosocial inheritance might include nutrition, psychosocial stress, immune function, and developmental programming and epigenetic alterations, but equally so civil conflicts, food preferences, and parenting styles. Biosocial inheritance leads us to reconsider the way we think about contemporary environments – social, ecological, or otherwise – as products of intergenerational forces. It includes attention to what cultural practices, social norms, ideologies, and economic opportunities or constraints are transmitted from one generation to the next and how they interact with human biology to harm or enhance health. Furthermore, it brings to focus the ways in which health disparities and poverty interact to compound in a population across time, reducing the mobility for some and increasing the opportunity for success for others, thus contributing to the ever-widening disparities in contemporary society. By situating contemporary health outcomes in their generational context, we are forced to grapple with the larger historical and political economic forces that have acted across those generations. In this sense, it serves as a natural extension of work on the spaces of vulnerability and spaces of hope begun by Leatherman (2005) as well as the study of the biology of poverty (Goodman et al. 1988; Leatherman and Goodman 1997; Thomas 1998).

Embodiment of social and economic change in child growth and nutrition We turn to a case study based in the District of Nuñoa (Melgar, Puno) in the Andes of southern Peru where we both have conducted extensive fieldwork; Leatherman since the 291

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mid-1980s and Hoke since 2012 and including 12 months of dissertation research in 2014–15. The goal is to highlight how shifting living conditions associated with the changing economic and political landscapes of southern Peru are embodied in nutrition and health. Nuñoa has been the site of biocultural anthropological research since the late 1960s, and thus has great potential for examining the impacts of social and economic change, and intergenerational processes, on biology and health. We frame our presentation within the inequalities and the extreme poverty that is a product of over 500 years of structural violence which in turn produce inequities in health and well-being, and we trace these through child and adolescent growth which is a consistent biomarker though all the studies from the 1960s to the present. We also reflect upon how new research designs framed in terms of biosocial inheritance might provide added insight on pathways to the embodiment of lived experiences into local biologies both in the past and future.

Brief historical background Located in the Peruvian Altiplano at an altitude of 4,000 meters, Nuñoa has long been home to agro-pastoralist populations that constructed large hilltop settlements across a diverse ecozone, accessing a variety of resources from vertical niches at different altitudes (Arkush 2011). The expanding Inka Empire conquered Nuñoa in the early 15th century, and introduced a labor taxation system that built upon notions of reciprocity (Murra 1980). Following the Spanish conquest of the Inkan Empire in the 1530s, Nuñoa became a part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Early chroniclers noted its relative wealth but also its decline due in large part to re-ordering of settlement and productive relations by the Spanish (Garrett 2005). Additionally, the Spanish appropriated and transformed the Inkan system of labor taxation into the Mita, which required each community to annually send one-seventh of their population to work as forced labors in Spanish mines, extracting Andean wealth to fund the ambitions of the Spanish or Hapsburg Empire in Europe (Garrett 2005; Stein and Stein 1970). These colonial practices re-ordered the Andean landscape, creating a legacy of institutional underdevelopment that persists to this day (Dell 2010). The District has long been a center for alpaca production and by the 1800s had been organized into larger haciendas, smaller landholdings and a few indigenous ayllus. Relatively few families controlled the majority of the land in the District, and through feudal/patron-­client arrangements controlled the labor of much of the indigenous population. Historically, few resources were invested in the town or district infrastructure by the national, regional, or local governments, and rather, most local infrastructural development depended on the largess of these large landholders; reinforcing their political as well as economic power. Intersecting with these historical political and economic structures are structures of race and class that supported, socially and through legal/juridical systems, efforts to take the land and exploit the labor of indigenous groups. This ongoing legacy of racial and class discrimination remains palpable today. Women suffered additionally from the double day of work in their multiple roles in economic, social and biological reproduction. Given an intensive reproductive history of eight or more children in a 20-year period, much of their young adult life was spent pregnant or lactating in contexts of poverty, marginal nutrition, and heavy workloads. An agrarian reform made law in the late 1960s and implemented in the 1970s expropriated land from these larger landholders but concentrated landholdings in state-run cooperatives. Living conditions improved for some indigenous families formerly tied to haciendas whose members became socios of the cooperative, but deteriorated for others not tied to a new cooperative and who became effectively landless as a result of losing patron-client or other informal 292

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economic arrangements with larger landholders. Many moved to the largest town in the district to work in poorly paid ($1/day) and intermittent manual labor, or left the area in search of other work. Increased outmigration of males left 20 percent of the households in the 1980s with a female head, further contributing to the work load of women and exacerbated by the fact that women’s work was valued and remunerated as half that of males both in communal and agro-pastoral labor. The agrarian reform was largely seen as a failed effort in part because of the inability of most newly formed cooperatives to thrive economically and in part because the reform failed to address the chief concern among the largely indigenous peasantry – access and control of land. Chronic extreme poverty and the disillusionment of a failed reform are often cited as two major factors that propelled the rural Andes into a civil war pitting the revolutionary forces of the Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru against the Peruvian state. By the early 1990s, the District was a “zona roja” more under control of Sendero than the state and living in the fear of abuses by both the revolutionary and Peruvian counterinsurgency forces. This was a time of fear that disrupted agro-pastoral production and market infrastructure, and hence a period of great economic and food insecurity (Leatherman and Thomas 2008). The history of exploitation of land and labor as well as a set of structural inequalities significantly shaped the spaces of vulnerability (Leatherman 2005) and contributed to unsupportable levels of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, and illness. In the 1980s, this district, along with much of the central and southern Andes, was extremely poor, with inadequate and substandard infrastructure in terms of transportation, markets, economic opportunities, and health care. Sixty percent of the population was deemed to be in extreme poverty, illiteracy was five to nine times higher than in Lima, and there was limited potable water, even more limited electricity, and no sewage system. Health-care infrastructures were similarly limited; throughout this part of the Andes, there was roughly one physician for every 10,000 people (Aramburu and Ponce Alegre 1983). Caloric and nutrient intakes in local diets were inadequate, especially seasonally (Leonard and Thomas 1989), and a prevalent pattern was for households to sell or trade ­nutrient-dense foods such as meat and eggs for greater volumes of processed carbohydrates (sugar, flour, pasta, rice) to be able to eat two meals a day (Leatherman 1994; Leonard and Thomas 1989). In fact, although this region was one of the largest meat producers in the southern Andes, very little meat was found in local diets. Chronic undernutrition in the form of growth stunting (low height for age) was almost 60 percent and more severe stunting was found in 20 percent of children and adolescents. Infant mortality rates in the District were 129/1,000 and overall mortality rates were 17.4/1,000 among the very highest in Peru and Latin America (Carey 1990). In the past two decades, the redistribution of land to indigenous communities has generated hope for rural agro-pastoral producers. National economic growth (between 9 and 10 percent in three years between 2007 and 2010) and policies of decentralization, and new development projects funded by government revenues from mining as well as international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), have generated some guarded optimism for improved rural livelihoods. While living conditions (electricity, potable water, etc.), literacy rates, and health statistics have improved much in the past 30 years, Nuñoa remains a site of extreme poverty; estimates place over 80 percent of the population as below the poverty line and 49.7 percent living in extreme poverty (INEI 2010). New state-funded social assistance programs have been implemented to address some of the extreme poverty, although these at best provide only a small relief and carry a social stigma not unlike accusations of freeloading of welfare recipients and “welfare queens” in the United States (Stumo 2015). They also serve as a form of surveillance of families, especially women and their reproduction (Stumo 2015). 293

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Embodiment of poverty and inequality in child growth One of the most obvious effects of extreme poverty in any group is chronic malnutrition and poor health, reflected in stunting or low height for age in children and adolescents. Child and adolescent growth is frequently used as general measure of community health and well-being, and especially in poor rural communities. Rural highland populations are short compared to international or urban Peruvian standards. Earlier research in the Andes identified stature as a product of adaptation to high altitude (Frisancho and Baker 1970; Frisancho 1969, 1976) while later interpretations attributed short stature to chronic malnutrition resulting from poverty and marginalization (Leonard 1989; Leonard and Thomas 1989; Leonard et al. 1990, Leatherman et al. 1995). Indeed, this work has demonstrated shifts in levels of chronic malnutrition in communities in the district due to shifting economic circumstances, and irrespective of relative elevation in the district (Leatherman 1994). As noted above, in the 1980s, almost 60 percent of children and adolescents were considered moderately malnourished and 20 percent severely malnourished as assessed through growth stunting or low height-for-age. Leonard (1991) demonstrated that poor children were buffered to some degree from more severe malnutrition by their parents, which suggests that parental malnutrition might be worse. Moderate malnutrition was estimated as those children more than two standard deviations below average height for age for an international reference standard (i.e., in the lowest fifth percentile) and severe malnutrition at three standard deviations below the standard (around the lowest 1 percent). While the effects of hypobaric hypoxia at altitude clearly have effects on growth in Nuñoa and other high-altitude regions (Beall et al. 1977), the influence of poverty, undernutrition, and illness exert even greater pressures. Growth data from the 1980s demonstrated relatively small increases in the secular growth rate over the late 1960s, evidence in part for the failure of agrarian reform to improve health and well-being for many throughout the district (Leatherman et al. 1995). Growth data from the mid-1990s following the years of turmoil, trauma, and food insecurity demonstrated no further increase in height and perhaps even a loss of small gains in height made between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Pawson et al. 2001); this despite the fact that other highland communities less directly affected by civil war did show marked improvements in growth. A comparison of two communities differentially impacted by reform illustrates the plasticity of growth in response to social and economic conditions. One was a highland zone at about 4,300 meters elevation whose families had transitioned from peons on haciendas to socios in a cooperative. They had ample land for herding, fields for farming potatoes, received a small permanent salary, and in addition owned private herds which generated income through sales of fiber, wool, animals, and meat. The second area is the site of a former ayllu (3,900 meters elevation) before the agrarian reform of the late 1960s that became an unofficially recognized communidad campesino in the 1980s. While they neither lost nor gained lands directly in the agrarian reform, they lost access to pasturelands through informal arrangements with haciendas. Thus, their herd sizes became smaller and they raised primarily sheep, which needed less land for grazing, but brought less money in sales of wool. Changes in herd size and composition also led to a lack of animal dung for cooking fuel or fertilizer in their fields, further straining their limited resources. They were by far the poorest community in which we worked in the 1980s. Before the agrarian reform, the ayllu consumed a greater variety of foods (18 items) versus the hacienda population (12 items) and almost double the quantity of food consumed in daily diets of the hacienda families. Frisancho (1979; Frisancho and Baker 1970) also reported that the children’s and adult’s heights and weights during the same period reflected greater stunting among hacienda families. In the 1980s after implementation of the agrarian reform 294

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the ayllu/communidad campesino actually reported fewer foods regularly consumed than in the 1960s (from 18 to16 items) despite a growth of markets in the area, while the socios of the newly formed alpaca herding cooperative consumed almost double the food items over their living and working on the hacienda (from 12 to 21 foods) (Leatherman 1994). In the 1980s, 73 percent of children in the communidad campesino were stunted and over 30 percent severely so (more than three standard deviations below the international standard), compared to 54.5 percent stunting in the cooperative (and 16 percent with severe stunting). While altitude can have an effect on heights, it is clear that in these comparisons, altitude effects are not determining these shifts in relative heights or stunting. In fact, it was the more advantaged children from the highest zones that were growing better than less advantaged children from lower zones in the district. If we now look at growth in the district and between highland and lowland communities studied in the 1960s, 1980s, and at present, a different picture emerges. All but one cooperative in the district has been dissolved and the land and animals redistributed to pre-existing or newly formed indigenous communities. Lack of state support in economic development as well as poor quality of herd stock and low prices in the international market for alpaca fiber has limited broad-based economic improvement in highland zones. Much of the lowland areas of the district, including the ayllu/communidad campesino studied in the 1960s and 1980s, received development aid from the state and NGOs and is now the site of a burgeoning dairy industry in part to furnish the growing number of pizzerias that have paralleled an increase in tourism in Cuzco 175 kilometers to the northwest. One of the lowland communities now has the largest school and health center outside of the District capitol. Hoke has collected data on early child growth in multiple communities in highland areas where alpaca herding dominates and in lowland areas where dairy production dominates; including in the same lowland ayllu/communidad campesino studied in the 1960s and 1980s (Hoke et al., in prep). She finds that while mothers in both zones are similar in age, height, and weight, that children 2 months to 2 years of age from the lowland dairying zones were much less stunted than those from the higher zones. Preliminary analysis suggests that almost 54 percent of the children from the lower zones were at or above the median height for age of the World Health Organization (WHO) standard, and 18 percent were considered stunted (only one individual was severely stunted).This is similar to estimates of stunting for the same region (about 20 percent) based on data collected by the health center in the capitol of the district. On the other hand, in the families from upper zones only 23 percent of children were at or above the WHO median for height for age, and 40 percent were stunted; 17 percent severely stunted (Hoke et al., in prep). Therefore, it appears that while infants in both zones may be growing better than in the 1980s and early 1990s, those in the lowland dairying communities show much greater improvement.

Biosocial inheritance and pathways to embodiment One straightforward way to explain changes in growth during different periods in Nuñoa is as a response to shifting social and economic conditions; and indeed this is the case. Put another way, it provides evidence for how lived environments become embodied in biology and health. What is not clear are which of many potential pathways of embodiment and which social and economic conditions are most important in contributing to biological plasticity. For example, improvements in growth could be linked to better diets and nutrition, or perhaps due in part to improved social and physical security that came with the end of civil war. Pathways to stunting might be related to impaired immune systems and higher disease loads, nutrient deficiency, parasite exposure during the weaning period, or a combination of all three. 295

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Framed within a model of biosocial inheritance, children in each period are heavily influenced by inheritance from previous generations. First, children are often bequeathed a similar socioeconomic status as their parents. For many living in a household reliant on agro-pastoral production and low paying irregular wage work (trabajos eventuales), they may inherit an environment where the balance between survival and starvation, education or illiteracy, depends on one major incident of parental or family illness (Leatherman 2005). Conversely, if aided by a strong kinship network and collective resources such as a wealthy aunt and uncle in a nearby city, children may have an opportunity to live away from home, experience a different nutritional environment, and attend school undisturbed by family illness; with positive effects on their nutrition and thus growth. Second, children may inherit metabolic programming based on their mother’s experience of trauma and malnutrition during the 1980s and early 1990s under the threat of the Shining Path and counterinsurgency efforts, or a different sort of programming in the economic environment of lowland dairying communities in 2012. This programming, as in the case with previously researched famines, may have significant consequences for their metabolic health both in childhood and later in life (Lumey 1992; Lumey et al. 2011; Lauderdale 2006; Roseboom et al. 2001). Third, they inherit a social hierarchy in place since the colonial period in which their dress, language, and lifestyle may lead to discrimination or ease their passage through society and thus their access to nutrition, health care, and social capital. These are just a few of the elements of biosocial inheritance affecting the lives and growth of this contemporary Peruvian cohort. Much of the pattern of growth that contributes to stunting and related physiological changes to metabolism, immune systems, and other forms of development are established early on and the period between fetal stage and age two is critical.Thus, in order to shed more light on pathways to embodiment in the growth process, it is important to study early growth as it relates to maternal and child health and nutrition, maternal care during pregnancy and patterns of infant feeding post-pregnancy, the stress associated around weaning, and a variety of biomarkers related to child health, immune function, and parasite load. This is precisely the project Morgan Hoke recently completed for dissertation research that provided the preliminary data cited previously. The study of early growth and infant feeding contextualized in relatively detailed family histories set within economic, racial, and gender inequalities faced by these mothers and their offspring provides important opportunities for future work. The long history of studying growth in Nuñoa may allow for the tracking of generational shifts in growth within families before and after major political events such as the land reforms occurring just after the study period in the 1960s and preceding that of the 1980s or before and after the emergence of the Shining Path or the dairy industry. Moreover, this initial study can serve as a baseline for follow up over the next twenty years and beyond with collection of anthropometric and dietary data as well as measures of immune function, incidence of illness, and other health-related biomarkers. Subsequent periods of data collection should include repetition of all biological and nutritional data but could also be expanded to include data on cognitive function, academic achievement, experience of psychosocial stress or life stressors, and other measures that may shed light on the ways in which early environments are connected to later life social and health outcomes. While such studies do exist elsewhere, by framing this study with attention to the nuances of social, economic, and political inequalities as they are in infancy and develop across the life course, it has the opportunity to make unique contributions to how inequalities are embodied in human biology and health.

Conclusion The forces of globalization drawing ever-tighter the interconnections among culture, societies, and peoples, demand approaches able to address the multiple dimensions of social inequalities 296

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and human biology and health. If we look only at a few of the larger global problems affecting human societies – climate change, civil and political conflicts and violence, growing poverty amidst opulence that increasingly defines social and economic inequalities – each has profound impacts on human biology, health, and well-being. The biological impacts and health disparities that result from social inequalities are as viscerally human and humane a focus as any for anthropological analyses of inequalities. Moreover, these very impacts produce and reproduce the social machinery of inequality. Profound health disparities now define almost every society world-wide, from the poorest to the wealthiest of nations. Drawing on the Alma Ata and WHO (2006) definition of health as “a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” the health effects of inequalities are not limited to mortality, morbidity, and life expectancy, but social trust, sense of connectedness, belonging, and hope (Wilkinson and Pickett 2011). Anthropology is one of the few disciplines explicitly prepared to make the connections between environments, culture, inequalities, biology, and health. A biocultural approach that takes each dimension of these webs of interconnectedness seriously is central to these efforts. In this paper we have argued for a critical biocultural/biosocial approach that attempts to draw these links between global political economy, human biology, and health.The processes through which forces of inequality impact biology and health are complex to be sure, however the connections are often more straightforward and linear than assumed. As Merrill Singer noted in his conclusion to a paper on critical biosocial approaches to the HIV/AIDS syndemic in southern Africa: In other words, while the social distance from the comfortable office suites of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. to the crudely dug grave of a poor man or woman who dies of AIDS/malnutrition in an obscure village in southern Africa is seemingly enormous, and hence highly disguisable and deniable, they are united by a fairly straight and deadly line of political economic micro–macro connection. (Singer 2011: 21–22) In the past two decades, advances in methods and mechanisms elucidating pathways to embodiment have furthered the goals of a critical biocultural anthropology. It is now more possible to examine a whole range of potential ways that inequality “gets under the skin” such as psychosocial stress, immune function, and nutrient absorption, across the life course and generations in grounded ethnographic contexts. The renewed interest in biological plasticity and mechanisms of plasticity (e.g., in developmental systems theory, DOHaD, metabolic programming, and epigenetics) makes clearer the potential to connect political economy and evolutionary biology, and this in part has generated greater interest in a critical biocultural anthropology amongst a broader cohort of biological anthropologists. We wish to emphasize, however, that methodological advances in no way diminish the need for exploring the historical dimensions of political economic forces that create and maintain inequalities, nor the ways inequalities play out in local ethnographic contexts; there is no escaping history, political economy, biology, or ethnography in a critical biocultural approach. Models such as ‘Biosocial Inheritance’ (Hoke and McDade 2015) provide one means for exploring the intergenerational transference of embodied realities in local biologies. This model attempts to trace biological, socio-cultural, and economic modes of inheritance within contexts and contingencies of larger political economic forces. We have outlined what this might look like in the highlands of Peru within our discussion of how changing political economic landscapes have shaped human biology and health, illustrated in this case through child growth. 297

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Demonstrating these intergenerational connections requires longitudinal research employing comparable methods alongside continuous ethnographic grounding of local conditions shaped by global processes. Realizing such an approach within multiple ethnographic contexts will be a challenge for the future of critical biocultural approaches in anthropology. Achieving these objectives will require even greater collaboration, integration, and consilience among the subfields of anthropology and sister disciplines; consonant with the original and future goals of a critical biocultural anthropology.

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Critical biocultural anthropology Morsy, S. (1990) ‘Political Economy in Medical Anthropology’, in, Sargent, C. M. and Johnson, T. M. (eds.), Medical Anthropology: Contemporary Theory and Method, New York: Praeger, 26–46. Mulligan, C., D’Errico, N., Stees, J., and Hughes, D. (2012) ‘Methylation Changes at NR3C1 in Newborns Associated with Maternal Prenatal Stress Exposure and Newborn Birth Weight’, Epigenetics, 7:853–857. Murra, J. V. (1980) The Economic Organization of the Inka State, Greenwich, CT: Jai Press. Murra, J. V. (1985) ‘The Limits and Limitations of the “Vertical Archipelago” in the Andes’, in Masuda, S., Shimada, I., and Morris, C. (eds.) Andean Ecology and Civilization: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Andean Ecological Complementarity, Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 15–20. Non, A. L. and Thayer, Z. M. (2015) ‘Epigenetics for Anthropologists: An Introduction to Methods’, American Journal of Human Biology, 27:295–303. Panter-Brick, C., Eggerman, M., Gonzalez,V., and Safdar, S. (2009) ‘Violence, Suffering, and Mental Health in Afghanistan: A School-Based Survey’, The Lancet, 374:807–816. Pawson, I. G., Huicho, L., Muro, M., and Pacheco, A. (2001) ‘Growth of Children in Two Economically Diverse Peruvian High-Altitude Communities’, American Journal of Human Biology, 13:323–340. Paynter, R. (1989) ‘The Archaeology of Equality and Inequality’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 18:369–399. Peacock, J. (1995) ‘Claiming Common Ground’, Anthropology Newsletter, 4:1–3. Pedersen, D. (2002) ‘Political Violence, Ethnic Conflict, and Contemporary Wars: Broad Implications for Health and Social Well-Being’, Social Science and Medicine, 55:175–190. Rodney, N. C., and Mulligan, C. J. (2014) ‘A Biocultural Study of the Effects of Maternal Stress on Mother and Newborn Health in the Democratic Republic of Congo’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 155:200–209. Roseberry, W. (1988) ‘Political Economy’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 17:161–185. Roseboom, T. J., van der Meulen, J. H., Ravelli, A. C., Osmond, C., Barker, D. J., and Bleker, O. P. (2001) ‘Effects of Prenatal Exposure to the Dutch Famine on Adult Disease in Later Life: An Overview’, Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology, 185:93–98. Ruiz, E., Himmelgreen, D., Romero-Daza, N., and Peña, J. (2015) ‘Using a Biocultural Approach to Examine Food Insecurity in the Context of Economic Transformations in Rural Costa Rica’, Annals of Anthropological Practice, 38:234–251. Segal, D. and Yanagisako, S. (eds.) (2005) Unwrapping the Sacred Bundle: Reflections on the Disciplining of Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Seligman, R. (2014) Possessing Spirits and Health Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Singer, M. (1989) ‘The Limitations of Medical Ecology: The Concept of Adaptation in the Context of Social Stratification and Social Transformation’, Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 10(4):223–234. Singer, M. (1998) ‘The Development of Critical Medical Anthropology: Implications for Biological Anthropology’, in Goodman, A. H. and Leatherman, T. L. (eds.) Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: ­Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 93–123. Singer, M. (2001) ‘Toward a Bio-cultural and Political Economic Integration of Alcohol,Tobacco and Drug Studies in the Coming Century’, Social Science and Medicine, 53:199–213. Singer, M. (2011) ‘Toward a Critical Biosocial Model of Ecohealth in Southern Africa:The HIV/AIDS and Nutrition Insecurity Syndemic’, Annals of Anthropological Practice 35:8–27. Singer, M. and Clair, S. (2003) ‘Syndemics and Public Health: Reconceptualizing Disease in Bio-Social Context’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 17:423–441. Slobodkin, B. (1968) ‘Toward a Predictive Theory of Evolution’, in Lewontin, R. (ed.) Population Biology and Evolution, Syracuse, NY: University of Syracuse Press, 187–205. Smith, G. and Thomas, R. B. (1998) ‘What Could Be: Biological Anthropology for the Next Generation,’ in Goodman, A. H. and Leatherman, T. L. (eds.) Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 451–473. Stein, S. J. and Stein, B. H. (1970) The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective, New York: Oxford University Press. Stumo, S. R. (2015) ‘“For Their Own Good”: An Ethnography of Health Experience in the Southern Peruvian Andes’ Unpublished thesis, Commonwealth Honors College. University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Sweet, E. (2010) ‘“If Your Shoes Are Raggedy You Get Talked About”: Symbolic and Material Dimensions of Adolescent Social Status and Health’, Social Science and Medicine, 70:2029–2035.

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Thomas Leatherman and Morgan Hoke Sweet, E. (2011) ‘Symbolic Capital, Consumption, and Health Inequality’, American Journal of Public Health, 101: 260. Thayer, Z. M. and Kuzawa, C.W. (2014) ‘Early Origins of Health Disparities: Material Deprivation Predicts Maternal Evening Cortisol in Pregnancy and Offspring Cortisol Reactivity in the First Few Weeks of Life’, American Journal of Human Biology, 26:723–730. Thayer, Z. M. and Non, A. L. (2015). ‘Anthropology Meets Epigenetics: Current and Future Directions’, American Anthropologist, 117(4):722–735. Thayer, Z. M. Unpublished Study. Thomas, R. B. (1998) ‘The Evolution of Human Adaptability Paradigms: Toward a Biology of Poverty’, in Goodman, A. H. and Leatherman,T. L. (eds.) Building a New Biocultural Synthesis: Political-Economic Perspectives on Human Biology, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 451–473. Wiley, A. S. (2004) ‘“Drink Milk for Fitness”:The Cultural Politics of Human Biological Variation and Milk Consumption in the United States’, American Anthropologist, 106:506–517. Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2011) The Spirit Level:Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, London: Bloomsbury Press. Wolf, E. R. (1982) Europe and the People without History, Berkeley: University of California Press. World Health Organization (WHO). (2006) ‘Constitution of the World Health Organization’, Online. Available at: http://www.who.int/governance/eb/who_constitution_en.pdf (Accessed 27 May 2015). Worthman, C. M. and Costello, E. J. (2009) ‘Tracking Biocultural Pathways in Population Health:The Value of Biomarkers’, Annals of Human Biology, 36:281–297.

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PART IV

Anthropology in conversation with other fields

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17 ANtHrOPOLOGY AND ScIENcE Jonathan Marks

Introduction The engagement of anthropology with science involves several different kinds of questions, and each is an ongoing field of research and debate. Here, anthropological work is most transparently inter-disciplinary, as an anthropology of science necessarily draws on the nearest science (human biology or physical anthropology), as well as work in the humanities, from areas of history, philosophy, and sociology of science.

The scientific tension between anthropology and biology Anthropology arose largely in contrast to a group of biologized theories about human differences that were prominent in the 19th century. Obviously people, and groups of people, differ from one another biologically. But what did that difference mean, in terms of the important issues of the age – slavery, colonialism, urban poverty, nationalism? With the growth of science over the 19th century, scholars looked to nature to explain the facts of social history. Perhaps other kinds of people are genealogically distinct from your kind, and are therefore fundamentally different sorts of beings (Knox 1850; Nott and Gliddon 1854; Hunt 1863); perhaps other kinds of people are imperfect, undeveloped Europeans, and thus are beings of a lesser order (Chambers 1844; Haeckel 1868); perhaps civilization is attributable to racial ancestry (Gobineau 1853); perhaps one’s lot in life is dictated by the size and shape of one’s head, which houses the brain, which is where thoughts come from, after all (Combe 1828; Morton 1844;Topinard 1876; Sergi 1893). Anthropology was conceived as “a reformer’s science” by its first professor, E. B. Tylor of Oxford. Tylor (1871:1) formally designated for analysis the “capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society,” which are of a different order than the attributes acquired by people from their parents’ gametes. What Tylor was interested in as a “science of culture” was “that complex whole” which subsumed, at very least, “knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, [and] custom” (Tylor 1871:1) in a scientific domain distinct from the study of biology and biological facts. Academic domains based on similar ideas were institutionalized by his contemporaries, Émile Durkheim in France, and Adolf Bastian in Germany.

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Anthropology thus coalesced around a specific approach to a scientific problem – an approach that would be non-reductive, and would try to understand the differences among human groups, and specifically those mental and behavioral differences, as the result of non-biological processes. The contrast can most readily be seen against the eugenics movement of the 1920s. In 1911, as Franz Boas published the founding text of American anthropology, The Mind of Primitive Man, the leading geneticist in America, Charles Davenport, published the founding text of human genetics, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. This book attributed differences of class and civilization to the distribution of Mendelian factors, and most notoriously, to the gene for “feeblemindedness”. Davenport was a co-founder of the American Eugenics Society in early 1926. With his friend Madison Grant (whose 1916 best-seller, The Passing of the Great Race, advocated sterilizing the poor and restricting the immigration of Italians and Jews as solutions to America’s social problems, so that the reproductive future of America would lie in the genitalia of the Nordics), Davenport maneuvered politically against the anthropological science that Boas was attempting to establish (Spiro 2009). Beneath Davenport and Grant, on the large Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society, were the names of nearly every leading biologist in America, from the physical anthropologists Aleš Hrdlička and Earnest Hooton, to the geneticists Sewall Wright and Raymond Pearl. To oppose eugenics was to oppose biology, modernity, Darwin and Mendel; the opposition was anti-science.Who constituted that opposition? The Catholics opposed the intervention of human agency into human procreation; the civil libertarians opposed the state’s interest in personal matters; political conservatives opposed the social engineering advocated by the eugenicists; and the anthropologists opposed the reductive biological explanation for social history (Boas 1916; Kroeber 1916). In Anthropology and Modern Life (1928) Franz Boas positioned anthropology scientifically in just that way. He contrasted the science of the eugenicists against that of the anthropologists, the latter appreciating the irrationalism that governs human behavior, thus precluding the rational society envisioned by the eugenicists, who ridiculously had aimed “to improve the race by inducing young people to make a more reasonable selection of marriage mates; to fall in love intelligently” (Davenport 1911:4). To Boas, then, science meant cold, hard rationality, and there was a limit to the amount of science that the contemporary human mind could tolerate; anthropology, appreciating this, became the science that recognized the limitations of science. If this reflected a background of German philosophical humanism, Boas nevertheless had unimpeachable credentials as a scientist: a doctorate in physics, and the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1931. (The only other anthropologist to hold that post in the 20th century was his student, Margaret Mead, in 1975.) Early British social anthropologists grappled with science often as an implicit contrast against witchcraft. While the preceding generation had seen magic and religion as imperfect approximations to science, Bronislaw Malinowski (1925) adopted a more relativist position, contrasting scientific thought against magical thought in terms of their context and uses, rather than in terms of their overall accuracy (see also Fortune 1932 and Kluckhohn 1944). It was not that the native mind was wired to be unscientific or irrational, but that magical thought could coexist with scientific thought, and be invoked in situationally appropriate ways. Malinowski (1931:81) thus separated magic, religion, and science non-hierarchically: “Religion gives man the mastery of his [eternal] fate, even as science gives him the control of natural forces, and magic the grip of chance, luck, and accident.” The role of non-scientific thought, both for explanations of earthly phenomena and for the maintenance of social order, was explored influentially in East Africa by Evans-Pritchard (1937).

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Post–World War II anthropology Anthropology was enlisted selectively in the war effort (Benedict 1946; Price 2008), and the “social sciences” were eventually included as a directorate within the National Science ­Foundation in the 1950s. The space race, stimulated by Sputnik in 1959, generated new prestige and funding for science. Archaeological and linguistic anthropology moved to reconceptualize their central approaches in more formal scientific ways (Binford 1962; Clarke 1972; Sturtevant 1964). By the late 1960s, however, popular resentment against the “military-industrial complex” (which was also a techno-capitalist establishment) began to foster cultural critiques of science (Carson 1962). Influential historically based critiques have tracked the influence of gender (Rosaldo and Lamphere 1974; Haraway 1989), colonialism (Hymes 1972; Asad 1973; Wolf 1982), and ­biomedical authority (Foucault 1973) into the production of scientific knowledge. As early as 1950, E. E. Evans-Pritchard had notoriously backed away from defining British social anthropology into science, seeing it rather as primarily an historical, interpretive and humanistic endeavor. This view was convergent with those of the influential American cultural anthropologist of the next generation, Clifford Geertz (1972). The tipping point came in 1983, when Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman published the grandiose claim that anthropology had been fundamentally misled by the cultural anthropology of Franz Boas, which strategically undervalued the role of biology in explaining human behavioral diversity. In particular, Freeman attacked the ethnographic work from the 1920s by Boas’s student Margaret Mead, published in her 1928 best-seller, Coming of Age in Samoa, which Freeman quite bizarrely believed to be the linchpin of contemporary anthropological theory (Shankman 2009). For anthropology the recognition that different ethnographers could see different things in the same “culture” implied simultaneously that ethnography might be a more highly subjective enterprise than had been previously assumed (Clifford and Marcus 1986), and that “culture” itself, as an object of study, might need to be re-examined (Kuper 1994). Freeman’s considerably overstated critique was nevertheless uncritically invoked by a new generation of hereditarian biological theories, which often cast themselves explicitly against normative anthropology (e.g., Wrangham and Peterson 1996; Pinker 2003). Convergently, the Human Genome Project’s propaganda or “geno-hype” (Holtzman 1999) also seemed to give renewed scientific legitimacy to hereditarian, often explicitly anti-­ anthropological, theories.These had been falsified decades earlier, but nevertheless again included “scientifically” invoking the innate IQ as an explanation for social differences (Herrnstein and Murray 1994); reifying race as a naturalistic category (Sarich and Miele 2004); confusing the facts of social, political, and economic history for those of microevolution (Rushton 1995); postulating a simple genetic basis for complex human behaviors (Wade 2006); overstating the continuity between human and ape by privileging the deep genetic similarity over the obvious difference (Diamond 1992); and casting opposition to an extreme hereditarian scientific philosophy as anti-Darwinian, indeed, as anti-scientific (Pinker 2003; Wade 2014). The reflexive gaze of anthropology began to guide explorations of how scientific authority itself is deployed (Fujimura 1998; Nader 1997). Consequently, in the early 21st century, a renewed anthropological engagement with science is underway.

Existential, epistemological, ethnographic, and ethnological questions about anthropology and science In the analysis that follows I will divide the approaches of the anthropology of science into four diverse research programs, each built around a central cultural question about science: (1) an

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existential question (Is anthropology science?); (2) an epistemological question (What differentiates scientific facts from other facts?); (3) an ethnographic question (How is scientific knowledge produced and institutionalized?); and (4) an ethnological question (What are the limitations of science in the modern world?)

Existential: is anthropology science? Anthropology occupies an ambiguous institutional grey zone in between C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” of academia – as a social science, neither humanities nor really science.Where does science end, and what lies beyond it? Philosophers call this “boundary work” (Gieryn 1999).There are many ways to answer the question, by considering science oppositionally against whatever lies on the other side of the fence (magic? ignorance? art? religion? opinion? humanities? superstition? thoughts?), but one consistent answer is: Anthropology. Whatever is constituted by science, anthropology seems to straddle its boundary, and lies on both sides of the fence. The question can only be approached in terms of the particular definitions of the terms employed. For the discussion that follows, I will use “anthropology” to denote the study of humans as group members (Boas 1928), recognizing that human groups extend from the family to the species, and are contested, biocultural units; and “science” to denote the production of convincing knowledge in modern society (Marks 2009). Science has its origins in the reshuffling of late medieval categories of knowledge. In Leviathan (1651), for example, Thomas Hobbes juxtaposed History against Science – the former consisting of collections of facts, and the latter of explanations. But it was not an axis that we would now recognize as “humanities” versus “science”. Hobbes recognized two kinds of History, Civil History and Natural History, both of which relied on the collection of data, and neither of which was science. Science, on the other hand, was Natural Philosophy, which was a system for ordering facts, for making sense of them – and it was juxtaposed not against humanities, religion, or culture, but against the accumulation of information. Isaac Newton’s training (1687), then, was in natural philosophy; while Charles Darwin’s (1859) was in natural history. Even so, Newton could not have been called a “scientist”, since that word was only coined in the 1830s. The late 19th century saw the breakdown of the distinction between natural history and natural philosophy, and the alignment of physical, natural, and social science – fields that sought to describe and explain diverse, complex-yet-understandable phenomena – against history, art, drama, literature, law, and philosophy – fields that analyzed the particular products of unique human intellects and activities.There was consequently never any doubt that the earliest cultural anthropologists in the late 19th century were doing science. Physical anthropology began as the field that studied the “physical” aspects of human diversity (as opposed to the mental aspects, which were nevertheless often considered to be unproblematically connected). Indeed, in 19th century Europe, physical anthropology and anthropology were widely considered synonymous; Émile Durkheim’s chair in Paris was “sociology,” to differentiate it from the craniological work, “anthropology”. As physical anthropology expanded in the 19th century to incorporate the study of human origins, it began to rely more upon medical anatomical knowledge. The “4-field approach” to anthropology grew out of the German humanistic philosophy of the mid-19th century. For example, the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte, established in the late 1860s, linked [physical] anthropology, ethnology, and prehistory under a single institutional umbrella. This comprehensive approach to studying exotic peoples of the world provided the framework for studying Native Americans, once they no longer constituted a threat to the expansion and modernization of the United States (Segal and Yanigasako 2005). Renamed after World War II, “biological anthropology” 308

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continued to expand, incorporating research in population genetics and primatology (Little and Kennedy 2009). Even before World War II, Ralph Linton (1938:242–243) had observed that “[t]he study of man’s origins and varieties is a branch of the natural sciences” and consequently is problematic for its relationship to cultural anthropology. “The connection is already so tenuous that a complete break between the two seems well within the bounds of possibility. The phenomena with which the two disciplines deal are of different orders and the question is whether there is any real link between these orders.” There was a subtle difference between physical anthropology and other natural sciences, however. Our evolutionary place in the diversity of life can only be understood dialectically, that is to say, as a negotiation between the simultaneous states of apehood and non-apehood. “[W]hether from [the apes] or not, he is most assuredly not of them,” wrote Thomas Huxley (1863:130) in the first book on the subject. That is evolution, after all – the production of difference.The further one moved from anthropology, however, the more readily one encountered an alternative reductive approach, which Huxley’s anthropologically inclined grandson, Julian Huxley (1947:20), derided as “the nothing-but school – those, for instance, who on realizing that man is descended from a primitive ancestor, say that he is only a developed monkey”.To fail to acknowledge our ape ancestry is anti-evolutionary, but to fail to acknowledge the uniquely derived aspects of human behavior is also anti-evolutionary. Biological anthropologist Sherwood Washburn (1978) would satirize the reductive approach as “the science that pretends humans cannot speak”. Biological anthropology, in other words, must grapple scientifically with the emergence and meanings of the things that make us human, that is to say, the humanities – speech, art, dance, social relations, technology, rule-based behavior, aesthetics, and the like – from whatever nonhuman substrate they may have originated in.There can be no natural history of the extant human species as somehow severed from culture, for that becomes a contradiction in terms (Geertz 1973; Sahlins 2008; Marks 2012). Consequently, works purporting to be such natural histories (e.g., Morris 1967; Diamond 1992) are not accurately representing the science of human origins. If the scientific study of humans incorporates the emergence, development, and analysis of the symbolic, humanistic aspects of being human, then the scientific study of humans must itself expand beyond the borders of the scientific. That is to say, it must incorporate the domain of things that are not themselves amenable to scientific analysis, for they are meaningful subjectively, and consequently can only be fully understood hermeneutically. These are the things that literally make us “human”. Earlier generations tried to deal with this paradox by distinguishing a scientific, objective, comparative “ethnology” from an experiential and subjective “ethnography”; or using a linguistic model, an “etic” analysis from an “emic” analysis. In practice, this often means juxtaposing what people think they are doing and what it means to them, against what it “really” means, in a functional or economic sense (White 1949; Rappaport 1966). This, however, tends to essentialize human thought and action, freeing them both from context and history. If context and history are what make human activities meaningful, then even “what they are really doing” can only be relevant to the particular time and situation, and the entire enterprise of comparing and generalizing about cultures necessarily becomes more humanistic. This does not necessarily render the comparisons and generalizations wrong, but it does make the process of generating rigorous conclusions daunting. In one notable recent example, a scientific bestseller purported to explain the general collapse of civilizations (Diamond 2005, 2010), but archaeologists were at pains to find even a single case in the historical record that was adequately explained by the model, which was to them uselessly reductive and simplistic (McAnany and Yoffee 2009, 2010; Lawler 2010). 309

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The simplest way to answer the question of whether anthropology is science in the affirmative is to define science in a formulaic manner, and then to apply the formula to the products of anthropological research.Thus, if science is “testing hypotheses,” then one need only proceed by testing hypotheses in order to be science (e.g., Durham 1991). This is problematic, not least of all for defining the Human Genome Project out of science, although sequencing human DNA is self-evidently more scientific than piecing together potsherds and inferring social arrangements. There are simply diverse ways to produce scientific facts (Salmon and Salmon 1979, Wylie 2000). The influential philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend (1975) debunked the idea that science can be reduced to a simple recipe or method; his critique is notable for being very anthropologically inflected.

Epistemological: what constitutes scientific knowledge? In addition to Feyerabend, the influential historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1962) also centralized anthropological arguments in his critique of science as the application of a singular method leading to an accumulation of facts. Different approaches to understanding the world are bounded by their modes of knowledge production, or what Kuhn called “paradigms”. What distinguishes science, then, is not what one does, but how one does it – the mindset one brings to the study of the things in the world. How can we describe that mindset? Philosopher John Dupré (1993:243) suggests several possible “epistemic virtues” of science: “sensitivity to empirical fact, plausible background assumptions, coherence with other things we know, [and] exposure to criticism from the widest variety of sources.” A simple list of four epistemic assumptions of science might be naturalism (the idea of bracketing “nature” apart from supernature, and limiting oneself to the former), empiricism (matching ideas up against perceived reality, and adjusting the former to fit the latter), rationalism (privileging reason and logic in constructing explanation), and the goal of maximum accuracy. Perhaps the broadest engagement of modern anthropology with scientific epistemology lies indirectly in its long-standing engagement with the perceived opposite of science – magic, witchcraft, religion. Although most students of magic and witchcraft still tend to take science as an unproblematized opposite, some have grappled creatively with philosophy of science and the nature of modern knowledge (e.g., Luhrmann 1989; Ingold 1990). Robin Horton (1967a,b), Gregory Bateson (1972), and Ernest Gellner (1974) attempted the most overt anthropological engagements with science, identifying and exploring many of its critical cultural assumptions. From the other end of anthropology, so to speak, biological anthropology is obliged to grapple with the cultural issue of creationism. Although it has understandably tended to adopt a defensive posture, biological anthropology has also begun to grapple with creationism culturally (Scott 1997; Robbins and Cohen, 2009). And to the extent that science is a fundamental aspect of modernity, anthropologists interested in engaging with an anthropology of modernity have begun to attract the attention of philosophers, on old subjects such as human nature (Wells and McFadden 2006), and new ones like biosociality (Hacking 2006).

Ethnographic: how is scientific knowledge produced? In a broad sense this is one of the oldest research questions in anthropology: How do natives come to understand their world? Traditionally anthropology focused on remote, indigenous, colonized peoples and left the study of modern society to sociologists (Lynd and Lynd 1937). Prior to the Vietnam War era, scholarly studies of science were fairly isolated in corners of the social sciences, notably sociology (Merton 1973) and psychology (Roe 1953). 310

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Laura Nader’s (1972) exhortation for anthropologists to invert the traditional power relations in ethnography by “studying up” also entailed a commitment to make anthropology more socially relevant.This was complemented by the development of social histories of science, which focused on the processes of scientific knowledge production and its cultural meaning (Barnes 1974), convergent with the radical goal of a reflexive anthropology of modernity (Scholte 1972). By 1980, then, convergent intellectual trends in the United States, United Kingdom, and France had begun to yield ethnographic works in which the field sites were scientific laboratories, and the anthropological gaze was directed at the principal source of cultural authority in the modern world (Traweek 1988; Latour and Woolgar 1979). Several notable works by biological anthropologists in the nascent study of the anthropology of science deserve mention here. The peripatetic Ashley Montagu (1943) wrote a definitive historical monograph on the 17th-century anatomist Edward Tyson (responsible for the first scientific dissection of a chimpanzee), and served on the editorial board of George Sarton’s landmark history of science journal Isis from 1937 to 1958. Misia Landau’s (1984, 1991) historiographic analysis called attention to ways in which scientific reconstructions of human evolution draw upon the folk-tale motif, involving the emergence of a heroic character through sequential challenge, transformation, and triumph. Feminist scholarship also began to supplant the dubious assumptions about gender that had long permeated the dominant narratives of primatology and human evolution (Tanner and Zihlman 1976; Hrdy 1981; Fedigan 1986). Broad reviews of the emerging exploration of science by social anthropologists began to appear in the mid-1990s (Franklin 1995; Hess 1995). Here the roots of the anthropology of science in traditional and normative anthropological interests can be seen – for example, in kinship studies (Strathern 1992; Franklin 2007); medical anthropology (Martin 1987), gender studies (Rapp 1999; Richardson 2013), anthropology of religion (Hess 1993), political ecology (Escobar 1999) and race (Goodman et al. 2003).The introduction of new approaches from cultural studies (Haraway 1989), technology studies (Marcus 1995; Skibo and Schiffer 2008), and “biosociality” (Gibbon and Novas 2007) have contributed additional complementary perspectives. As in the earliest days of ethnography, the question is to document what the natives (in this case, scientists) do, how they spend their time, how they make sense of their lives and the products of their efforts. As well, there is the question of how the fruits of the scientist’s labor – knowledge and technology – affect other people’s lives. How does the knowledge become useful and then culturally valuable – in other words, how is science commodified? How does an idea become a methodological revolution (Rabinow 1996)? Here the work of cultural historians becomes very anthropological, as the temporal distance between scholar and subject (coming from a different time) can replace the spatial distance classically associated with ethnographic research (coming from a different place).The result has been the production of cultural histories of science.With a few notable exceptions, such as J. D. Bernal’s (1969) Science in History, the history of science as written by scientists has tended to “blackbox” scientific achievement by making it the province of inexplicable genius, and presenting it in a largely untheorized, time-line fashion. The Polish biomedical researcher Ludwik Fleck published an insightful historical-philosophical analysis of the origin of medical knowledge in 1935, but it was not translated into English until 1979. By the 1970s, independently inspired by the work of Michel Foucault in France, and by the very anthropologically inflected “strong program” of science studies at the University of Edinburgh, cultural histories of science were interrogating the origins of scientific facts as active negotiations between nature and culture, that is to say, as being “under-determined” by nature. Thus, the task of writing the history of science was being wrested from the scientists, and the new histories of science insisted on contextualizing knowledge and discovery, and relating scientific discovery to the studiable cultural forms 311

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(rather than to the less studiable dead geniuses) that produced it. To some extent this was a source of contention in the “science wars” of the 1990s; for the question of how history gets written, and who gets to write it, is invariably political. Archaeology, long engaged in writing the history of prehistoric technology, now incorporates cultural histories of modern technology (Schiffer 1991, 2008). Complementing the study of scientists themselves is the more classically anthropological question of how science affects the impoverished, the rural, the disempowered, the subaltern peoples of the world, through the modern global political economic system. If science is a leading edge of modernity, then how is it integrated into traditional ways of seeing and doing things? Classical functionalist work had documented the ways in which technology can be transformative, in ways beyond simply utilitarian (Sharp 1952). Does science improve people’s lives, or is it a tool for the economic exploitation of the poor by the rich? If it is both, is that acceptable? That is a major concern with genomics, which was promoted in the 1980s with the promise of curing genetic diseases. Decades later, there are no cures for genetic diseases, but a considerable number of private fortunes have been made on the patenting of diagnostic tests, marketing genetic identities to the public, and whole-genome sequencing, all of which are only beginning to be regulated (Cho and Sankar 2004; Bolnick et al. 2007; Greely 2007; Nelson 2008). Contemporary ethnographic research may examine the impact of nuclear disasters (Fortun 2001; Petryna 2002), or genetically modified organisms (Stone 2010), or ecology programs upon local populations (Lowe 2006), or the government-industry collaboration known as “bioprospecting” (Hayden 2003), or the scientific meanings and processes of discovery of the life in sea water (Helmreich 2009). Fischer (2007) reviews much of the new engaged ethnography of science and technology. Shortly after the public debates about the Human Genome Project, and in the wake of the “science wars”, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research sponsored an interdisciplinary conference on the evolving relationship between anthropology and genetics. It attempted to break down the oppositional conception of “nature” and “culture”, and to re-establish the “brand” of anthropology as the rigorous study of the domain of the bio-cultural, in this case “genetic nature/culture” (Goodman et al. 2003). Another conference attempted to explore the cultural aspects in the natural scientific objects of primatology (Strum and Fedigan 2000). Oddly, although Jane Goodall’s earliest best-selling vision of chimpanzee society (1971) has held up considerably more poorly than Margaret Mead’s best-selling vision of Samoan ­society (1928), primatology has not felt the same existential doubts about its status as “science” as cultural anthropology has. Yet its facts may be just as contested (Rees 2009). New approaches in primatology explore the ecological and political-economic connections among humans and other species of primates, as participants in common ecosystems and cultural systems (Riley and Fuentes 2011; Fuentes 2012; Strier 2013).

Ethnological: what are the limitations of science in the modern world? The fourth question has always been a central concern to anthropology, as the continual percolation of scientific racism into scholarly discourse, which concerns the relationships of science to politics, business, and other putatively non-scientific arenas. For much of its history science has postured toward value-neutrality, while simultaneously producing highly value-laden work (Barzun 1964). The anthropologically inflected science studies that emerged in the 1970s acknowledged that science, as a cultural system, cannot be free or independent of other cultural elements – ideological, economic, political. By the 1990s, it was clear that one could simply not understand science – particularly human science – as being value neutral (Proctor 1991). Nowhere is this more readily visible than in the history of anthropology itself, although 312

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nevertheless still remaining a very small corner of the history of science (Chase 1977; Kuper 1983; Bowler 1986; Barkan 1993; Spencer 1996; Stocking 1998; Darnell 2001; Kuklick 2008; Lipphardt 2008). Understanding contemporary scientific controversies involves beginning with a basic functionalist anthropological approach, and examining the relations between science and culture, that is to say, between science and the political, ideological, and economic interests in modern society.Thus one can begin with the overtly political aspects of The Bell Curve (Fraser 1995) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Thomas 2000); the ideologies of evolutionary psychology (Rose and Rose 2000) and intelligent design theory (Scott 2005); and the businesses of genomic ancestry testing (Bolnick et al. 2007) and racial pharmacogenomics (Kahn 2012) – and their interconnections – to attest to the falseness of dichotomizing science against culture. What, then, does it mean to be scientific, in the global marketplace of ideas and practices? It cannot mean to be abstracted from concerns of morality and power, for science is inextricably a cultural practice, situated in a matrix of social, economic, and political relations. The fiction of earlier generations was that science was somehow corruptible by cultural concerns, and occasionally corrupted; the anthropological reality is that culture is always there. Observations and experimental data always need to be rendered sensible. Consequently, when confronted with an earlier generation’s scientific racism, or eugenics, or dehumanization of research subjects, scientists no longer have the luxury of dismissing it as “that was then, this now.” Rather, they are obliged to show that whatever social and moral lessons the rest of us have drawn over the last generations – say, in the notably unscientific area of human rights – are also being drawn by scientists, despite a formal training that is deliberately intended to shield them from such concerns. To take a notable case, the rise of bioethics after World War II involves an explicit attempt to negotiate the progress of science against the cultural values of human rights. Once we acknowledge that scientists cannot do anything they want, to anyone they want, for any reason at all, we open up the cultural space of how to evaluate and regulate the possible harm to participants, the possible risks and the possible benefits of the proposed science. The public debates concerning the Human Genome Diversity Project in the 1990s (Reardon 2004; M’Charek 2005) showed that scientists who may regard bioethical questions as obstacles will not get public funding. The question “What can I discover?” is invariably accompanied by the question “What can I get away with?” – and someone has to separate them. The Genographic Project, begun in 2005, shows more chillingly that you do not really have to worry about those issues if you have private funding in place (Harmon 2006; Wald 2006) – which in turn raises questions about the relationship between academic science and privatized science, and public accountability (Shapin 2008). The engagement of indigenous peoples with population genetics, which often amounts to their exploitation at the hands of science, is ongoing (Marks 2010;TallBear 2013), and extends to other people as well – for example, to the family of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black Maryland woman whose cells provided the basis of the great bulk of our knowledge of human genetics and enabled private fortunes in biotechnology to be amassed, but with little acknowledgment of her contribution (Skloot 2010). It even extends to the students at America’s elite universities (Scheper-Hughes 2010). Indeed, the cultural role of genetics in creating private wealth, validating ancestry narratives, and as general cultural authority, has been a subject of particular attention (Nelkin and Lindee 1995; Taussig 2009; Abu El-Haj 2012; Bliss 2012; Lopez-Beltran and Garcia Deister 2013). As a perceived instrument of social power, science’s impact upon local communities is consequently a focus of the study of social movements (Hess 2007). The anthropological field that has engaged with these questions most enthusiastically is medical anthropology. The global trade in human body parts (Scheper-Hughes 2000), and 313

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genetic samples (Anderson 2008), testify to the overall commodification of the human body as a bio-economic site (Sharp 2000), and exemplify the engagement of anthropology with science as one of cultural critique. Medical anthropology is also at the forefront of the theory of race as embodiment, the inscription of racism and its attendant health risks upon the organism (Krieger 2005; Gravlee 2009; Montoya 2011; Fullwiley 2011). The field of mental health incorporates the authority of modern science, the economic power of pharmaceutical corporations, the subjectivity of mental illness, the largely obscure bio-medical etiology, and the construction, diagnosis, and treatment of non-normative behavior. Not surprisingly, this has made it particularly attractive as an anthropological site for cultural critique (Kleinman 1988; Luhrmann 2000; Martin 2007).

Anthropology and the biocultural “brand” Anthropology is such an intellectually broad field that it is subject to unique centrifugal forces: biological anthropologists migrate to biology, archaeologists to art history, social anthropologists to cultural studies, and linguistic anthropologists to cognitive science. What connects them as anthropologists is an appreciation for the biocultural nature of human existence. The premodern view that human physical and cultural differences need to be studied simultaneously was eventually superseded by appreciating that the relationship between them is correlational, not causal.They can indeed be studied separately, and although the microevolutionary and historical processes that determine their patterns occasionally converge, most often they are phenomenologically distinct. Biological difference can thus generally be taken as a constant, or at least as an irrelevant variable, in explaining the origin and diversity of human cultural forms (Tylor 1871). The mid-19th century saw the application of scientific rationalism to the human condition, the human species coming to be seen as the product of a naturalistic history, rather than of supernatural miracles; and social inequalities within the species coming to be seen as a product of naturalistic history, rather than of essential God-given status differences, such as “the divine right of kings”. But history, like evolution, has no goal and cannot be understood deterministically, only processually. It is not at all clear that we are “going” anywhere in particular, either biologically or culturally, except in the very local, short term. The attempt to understand historical processes deterministically is one of the great fallacies of the modern age (Popper 1957), but it resurfaces in diverse contexts, nowadays commonly invoking imaginary genes as its basis (Wade 2014). A genetic interpretation of history is effectively unhistorical, however, for it renders history inevitable (a mere outgrowth of the gene pool), when actually the most obvious feature of history is its unpredictability. Late 19th-century European biologists, who were unable to entertain the fictional possi­ bility that Africans might have enslaved their own ancestors for cheap colonial labor, or that their homeland might have been repopulated as an imperial outpost for Mesoamerican political ambitions, commonly rejected the anthropological assumption that history is indeed so precarious. They widely imagined that cultural history was the expression of innate forces, which could ultimately be revealed by medical or anatomical research, and thus conceptually unified with biology. Thus, Ernst Haeckel (1876, orig. 1868) espoused Darwinism to an international audience and somewhat immodestly explained that his work would usher in “a full and fruitful reform of Anthropology. From this new theory of man there will be developed a new philo­sophy, not like most of the airy systems of metaphysical speculation hitherto prevalent, but one founded upon the solid ground of Comparative Zoology.” In detail, this would incorporate Haeckel’s view that there are twelve species of living humans, lying at varying distances from the apes – his own people, of course, lying furthest away from the beasts, based on the inferred inevitability 314

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of the technological, political and economic dominance they enjoyed. This was a deterministic, biologized view of human history that stood in opposition to the contingent, social theories that were being developed contemporaneously in Europe by scholars such as Émile Durkheim in France, Adolf Bastian in Germany, and Edward Tylor in England. To Durkheim, notably, human social facts are the products of historical forces, and can only be understood in terms of prior social facts, not biological states. The botanical geneticist Cyril Darlington (1969) attempted a genetic synthesis of human history, which was popular only among like-minded reactionary political conservatives. A recent science best-seller, Germs, Guns, and Steel (Diamond 1997), from the opposite side of the political spectrum, likewise attempted to explain history biologically (although not genetically), and was understandably more popular with biologists than with historians. A newer bestseller speculatively posits a genetic explanation for global geo-political history (Wade 2014). The term “pseudo-science” is difficult to apply rigorously, since it is usually a label assigned in retrospect. It generally connotes, however, the inappropriate application of scientific authority, which is precisely what the genetic view of history is, even though the people promoting it are often themselves scientists. The earliest textbook of Mendelian genetics, for example, by R. C. Punnett in 1905, concluded in a crassly self-interested vein,“As our knowledge of heredity clears and the mists of superstition are dispelled, there grows upon us with an ever increasing and relentless force the conviction that the creature is not made but born.” This is, of course, not at all what the science of genetics tells us. The science of genetics is about how biological heredity works, not about adherence to the tenet that it governs our lives. Nevertheless such theories of history seem to arise every generation, for there seems to be a perennial market for the bio-political idea that things are as they must be, and could not possibly be any different. In the 1920s, the eugenicists believed that the origin and future of civilization lay in the germ-plasm of northwest Europeans; they were mainstream scientists of their era. What they had in common with later sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, over the decades and across diverse political and scientific agendas, was: first, a self-conscious opposition to the normative anthropology of the day; second, the conviction that their alternatives were more scientific; and third, the accusation that anthropology was incorrect on account of ideological bias, accompanied by an unwillingness or inability on the part of these scientists to see the ideological biases in their own work. Contemporary naturalized theories of history, although diverse, invariably begin by casting themselves in explicit opposition to anthropology (Darlington 1969; Diamond 1992, 1997; Rushton 1995; Wrangham and Peterson 1996; Entine 2000; Sarich and Miele 2004; Cochran et al. 2005; Wade 2006, 2014), generally oblivious to the fundamentally anti-intellectual posture this assumes. The history of anthropological science is consequently that of a long-standing two-front intellectual war. Not just against the anti-scientists – that is to say, against the creationists, who have their particular reasons for dismissing what anthropologists have learned about people; but against the hyper-scientists as well, who also have their particular reasons for dismissing what anthropologists have learned about people, and for approaching human biocultural facts naively and reductively (Besteman and Gusterson 2005). The problem of the creationists does not appear to be readily soluble, but it seems certain that answers do not lie in: (1) belittling their views; (2) denying that evolution contains an ideological component; or (3) uniting evolution to atheism. The problem of the hyper-scientists, on the other hand, requires reasserting the fundamental contribution of anthropology, namely, the discovery that human facts are never just natural facts, but are biocultural facts (Franklin 2003; 315

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McKinnon and Silverman 2005). The facts of human biology are interpenetrated by culture in three ways. First, our evolutionary lineage has been co-evolving with technology for millions of years, and consequently the environment into which our own species evolved and adapted was necessarily a cultural one; culture is an ultimate evolutionary cause of human biological facts. Second, as individuals we develop in environments that are profoundly cultural – ranging from uterine conditions to post-natal nutrition, exercise, social stimulation, child-rearing practices, and personal experiences; culture is a proximate physiological cause of human biological facts. And third, these facts have always been produced in a context of conflicting interests of patronage, political ideologies of diverse kinds, professional aspirations, and cultural expectations, and still are ( Jasanoff 2004). This of course does not mean that there is no reality. It means, rather, that our perception of reality is not fully determined by the reality presented to us.We meet reality partway. Archaeologists have long known that archaeological facts are often produced in the service of nationalism or other political ideologies, for they may authorize the historical identity of a nation (Abu El-Haj 2001). Physical anthropologists have long known that taxonomic judgments in paleoanthropology are likewise significant compromises with reality, with authoritative estimates of species diversity among the hominids presently ranging from less than ten to over twenty, and disagreement over whether they should even be called hominids, or hominins instead (Cartmill and Smith 2009).The problem is not that culture corrupts our understanding of nature; it is that culture is integral to understanding nature. One literally cannot understand natural facts any way other than culturally; and particularly so for the natural facts of human biology, which are what concern anthropologists. Consequently, anthropologists are now understanding human biological facts as not so much facts of nature, but as facts of “nature/culture” (Goodman et al. 2003; Marks 2013), following the work of culture theorists. This serves to highlight the falseness of the dichotomy between natural and cultural facts. Anthropology is fundamentally a field of mediation, finding common ground between entities that seem opposed: the indigenous and colonial, folk and scientific, past and present, human and animal, nature and culture. How is the dichotomy of nature and culture false? We can begin by noting that “innate” and “learned” are not antonyms, for the most fundamentally hard-wired human adaptations – walking and talking – are actively learned by every person, every generation. Nor are the physical differences among people easily separable from the conditions of life that differentiate them (Wolf-Meyer and Taussig 2010). Culture is inscribed upon the human body, in ways ranging from the prominent (such as tattoos and scarification patterns, cranial deformation, genital and cosmetic surgery, and patterns of consumption leading to obesity), to the subtle (for example, class-based mortality patterns, stress-related illnesses, or the skeletal consequences of repetitive movements). This recognition now forms the basis for approaching most race-based risk differences in health care (Fullerton et al. 2012; Cooper 2013). Franz Boas initiated the earliest studies of human developmental plasticity over a century ago; it is now a hot area of biomedical research (Gluckman and Hanson 2010). The name “cyborg anthropology” has been given to the study of the boundary (or lack thereof) between the organic and technologically produced human body (Downey et al. 1995). Kinship is the oldest area of anthropological research, for it universally gives people their identity and place in the social order (Franklin and McKinnon 2001; Carsten 2004; Franklin 2013). Our biological relationships encode a paradox, in that we are all relatives and non-­relatives simultaneously. It is famously taboo to have sexual relations with relatives, and yet our species is monophyletic, so it is biologically inescapable. We reconcile this paradox with the cultural facts of kinship, beginning with the binary decision that some people are relatives and others are not; 316

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and there exists a surprising amount of cultural latitude in deciding who those people are. Thus kinship is neither nature nor culture, but something in between, partaking of both. The relationship of our species to the apes is also a matter of kinship, and despite seeming like a biological problem, also has a strong cultural component. Our “place in nature” is often given with reference to the discovery in the 1980s that we are apes genetically, a fact deduced from data that had been known in one form or another for about a century. The data showing that we are apes genetically, however, had previously been balanced by the recognition that we are not apes ecologically. The idea that our place in some natural order ought to be understood solely by reference to our blood, our genes, our DNA, was a fringe perspective in the 1960s (Simpson 1963) which had gradually become acceptable as a scientific description of human identity by century’s end (Diamond 1992), justified by the reductive technical successes of molecular genetics. In other words, we were not always apes; in a significant sense we became apes with the ascendancy of the Human Genome Project. We are actually both apes and not-apes simultaneously (Marks 2002). To understand our “place in nature” entails confronting the historical and theoretical conception of “nature” that underlies establishing “our place”. That is to say, “we are just apes” is a highly situated scientific fact – it is a natural/cultural fact, not a natural fact. So are all facts of the human condition. The outstanding contribution of anthropology to science is the recognition that scientific facts about humans are natural/cultural facts, not natural facts.

Further reading Biagioli, M. ed. (1999) The Science Studies Reader, New York: Routledge. Collins, H. M. and Pinch, T. (1993) The Golem: What Everyone Should Know about Science, New York: Cambridge University Press. Marks, J. (2009) Why I Am Not a Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press. McKinnon, S. (2005) Neo-Liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. Nader, L. ed. (1996) Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge, New York: Routledge. Weber, M. (1946 [orig. 1918]) ‘Science as a vocation’, in H. Gerth and C. Mills (ed.) From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 129–156.

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18 JOINED At tHE HEAD Anthropology, geography and the environment Michael J. Watts

Almost fifty years ago, the University of Chicago cultural geographer Marvin Mikesell (1969:232) remarked upon the close family resemblances between geography and anthropology: they are, he said, like sisters “separated in infancy and taught to speak separate languages”. In some respects his assessment now seems dated. Even by the late 1970s, a large posse of geographers and anthropologists were speaking in quite similar tongues: the languages included ecosystems, materialisms of various stripe, and deepening engagement with social theory and Marxian political economy. A half a century on, the conversational traffic across the boundaries between the disciplines has in some respects disappeared, and the family relations, as it were, are ubiquitous and intimate. As Roy Ellen (1988:230) put it, “Geography and anthropology share a protean appetite in terms of their intellectual interests…. they [each] have some claim to be the nomads, foragers and bricoleurs of the human sciences.” Spurred in part by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in the social sciences (see Conley 2012; Warf and Arias 2009) – in effect an effort to spatialize Fred Jameson’s injunction to “always historicize”1 – and by a common drift toward post-structural discourse theory and the intersections of culture and power in a world dominated by neoliberal thought and practice, the two disciplines had become, for want of a better turn of phrase, joined at the head. The two disciplines had always shared a common commitment to fieldwork, to spatial categories (the region, place, cultural area, ethnic group) permitting comparative analysis across space, time and cultures, and to what Roy Ellen calls polymorphic and wide-ranging “loose coalitions of ideas and practices” (1988:231). On this canvas, the current moment – certain disciplinary imperialistic urges notwithstanding (see Wolf 1999) – resembles a family structure exhibiting limited sibling rivalry rather than sister-separation at birth. In 1988, Roy Ellen could complain that there was little cross-disciplinary discussion among geographers and anthropologists about field research methods and forms of inquiry. Such a claim even then had its exceptions – for example the path-breaking Melanesian research projects of Harold Brookfield and Paula Brown of the Australian National University during the 1960s and 1970s – and it holds even less water today. Qualitative methods and ethnography now possess an unmatched caché across the social sciences, and has produced from geography a more systematic engagement with anthropological methods and forms of inquiry (see for example Perecman and Curran 2006). Even by the 1970s a number of geographers – Karl Butzer and David Harris – working on prehistory and the

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domestication of plants and animals were interacting closely with archaeologists and ecological anthropologists on questions of methods and theory. Historically speaking the kinship between the disciplines runs deep. Any undergraduate textbook offering a synoptic account of the history of geographical or anthropological ideas typically begins in similar places at similar times with an identical cast of progenitors: the Hellenistic period, the early Christian Middle Ages, and the Arab world of the medieval era, populated by the likes of Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle and Strabo, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Ibn Khaldun and Ibn Battuta.Thereafter it was the making of what Stuart Hall (1992) called the ‘West and the Rest’ – the fifteenth-century birth of European empire and global commercial plunder – that left an indelible mark on Enlightenment thinking (natural law, social contract, race as much as reason and science) from which both Anthropology and Geography were to draw inspiration. The global reach of European societies anchored in their newfound scale and complexity, conspired to produce unprecedented intercultural encounters: exploration, trade, warfare, missionary work, colonisation, and settlement were its avatars.Virtually all aspects of European cultural life, whether botany, cartography, Shakespeare’s plays, French museums, or literary societies, were shaped by these cross-cultural encounters around the globe. Every major philosopher from Descartes to Nietzsche developed a unique doctrine of human nature and philosophical anthropology, often basing it directly upon the prevailing knowledge and beliefs about non-European peoples. Ethnographic museums – one of the earliest was founded by Danish King Frederik III, dates back to 1650 and would later form the basis of the Danish National Museum – engaged in the systematic collection of ethnographica from the middle of the eighteenth century. Specialised ethnographic museums of this sort proliferated in German-speaking areas – Munich (1859) and Berlin (1868)2 – consistent with, and forged by, East Prussian philosopher-critic Johan von Herder’s research program on folk culture (volk), either Volkskunde (the study of peasant cultures at home) or Völkerkunde (the study of remote peoples), the latter developing later. The geographical story is strikingly similar, shaped both institutionally and substantively in relation to European expansionism.The German Bernhardus Varenius published his enormously influential textbook Geographia generalis in 1650 during his residence in Amsterdam at a time when the Dutch achieved not just formal political independence but in effect exercised a global commercial reach, and advanced a free intellectual openness expressed through its printing industry and the presence of the French philosopher René Descartes. It was from this atmosphere that Varenius drew inspiration and experience after he arrived from Hamburg via Leiden. As the centre of economic power moved from the Low Countries to Britain, Germany and France a host of new geographical institutions emerged (the Société de Geographie de Paris was established in 1821, the Gesellschaft fur Erdkunde zu Berlin in 1828, and the Royal Geographic Society in 1830) devoted to exploration and the cataloguing of newly ‘discovered’ regions of the earth. By 1900 there were over 120 geographical associations across Europe. In the early institutional histories of anthropology (ethnology) and geography, the anthropo-geographical prime movers were to all intents and purposes indistinguishable: they assiduously pursued the same mission through almost identical means for essentially similar ends.3 Writers, scholars, explorers and scientists were typically members of several learned societies while a number of key institutes – the Berlin Geographical Society, the Royal Society and Royal Asiatic Society in Britain, and the Royal Institute of Languages, Geography and Ethnology in the Netherlands – served as umbrella organizations for both fields of knowledge and practice. If Geography provided the master narrative by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was Germany – specifically German intellectuals, explorers and scholars – that figured centrally in the modern intellectual formation and institutionalization of both disciplines.

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In other words, during their formative periods from the late nineteenth century onwards, the two disciplines navigated the same intellectual currents: the tensions and oscillations really between synchronic and diachronic analysis, the Kantian polarities of the ideographic and nomothetic, and not least contested understandings of the respective powers of Nature and Nurture, determinism and possibilism, and, of course, Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian evolutionary thinking. Each discipline emerged from, and had been profoundly shaped by, Enlightenment ideas and post-Enlightenment social forces while simultaneously engaging in a process of gradual institutionalization as separate disciplines and ‘subjects’ within architecture of the emerging modern university. Geography and anthropology appropriated, in a word, their own ‘market share’ within the human and social sciences. Geography’s strong suit – its first intellectual move – was always the earth, that is to say the biophysical and the terrestrial, typically shaped by evolutionary and Lamarckian thought (and later understood as chorology or areal differentiation). Among anthropologists, through the foundational influence of Boas (who incidentally identified as a geographer, and who explored the geography job market in Germany and the United States up until his founding of the Columbia Department of Anthropology), the environment was present but largely static and contextual, particular and inductive and customarily turned toward the particularities of cultures and social structures in which, to invoke Alfred Kroeber turn of phrase in the 1930s, the immediate cause of culture was culture. There is perhaps no better perch from which to survey these common between anthropology and geography – histories – and of course the tensions and points of departure – than Berkeley geographer Clarence Glacken’s magnificent history of ideas of nature and culture, Traces on the Rhodian Shore published in 1967. Glacken’s longue duree account of Western ideas of an inhabitable earth – which necessary included the early philosophy underpinnings of environmental determinism, theology and natural design, and reflections upon the human transformation of the earth – does not address academic disciplines as such but Eurocentric ideas. (Glacken’s story terminates in the nineteenth century.) What is crystal clear in his panoptic survey is the interlacing of what we would now call ethnology, culture and studies of the earth woven around a trio of themes: the idea of a designed earth, the idea of environmental influences on culture, and the idea of humans as a geographic agent. Glacken emphasizes in his account the Hellenistic age (from the death of Alexander in 323 BC to the founding of the Roman Empire by Augustus in 30 BC), a period he considers more crucial than the times of Herodotus or Plato. For our purposes Glacken considers the founding of what we might call anthropo-geography in early modern Europe as crucial, and he identifies the figures of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and Johan von Herder (1744–1803 as “representatives of the ideas held toward the earth as a whole in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (1967:537). What they had in common was not simply a fascination with the earth as such but also a sensitivity – whether through exploration or historical scholarship – to the complexities of how humans were shaped and in turn shaped by the environment. Herder’s “ethno-geography” and what Isaiah Berlin (1976:176) called his “regionalism” (which resonated with later German cultural nationalism), and the Humboldtian project of geography (and ethnology) as a synthesizing science embracing Baconian empiricism, Kantian notions of a universal science and Goethe’s Naturphilosophie, represented the foundations on which each academic discipline was to arise in the late nineteenth century. To these two figures one should add the later presence of German geographer Fredrich Ratzel (1844–1904) whose Anthropogeographie (praised by Robert Lowie and E.B.Tylor), shaped in a way that neither Herder nor von Humboldt had been by Darwinian thinking, offered an embracing theory in which movement, migration and raum4 constituted a network of natural laws within which space, culture and social organization could be understood. This

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menu of foundational ideas, in ways Glacken largely failed to fully recognize, were central to ­nineteenth-century theories of race, imperialism, nationalism and state building.5 The figure of Boas provides an intriguing subject to explore the ways in which the two disciplines were organically connected yet also separated, and the contrasting points of emphasis that marked the divergent their disciplinary and intellectual trajectories particularly in the early twentieth century.The young Boas was a brilliant geography student at his gymnasium and after transferring from Heidelberg to Bonn for university studies he continued while pursuing graduate training in physics and mathematics (he was finally awarded his PhD in 1881 from Kiel) to study geography and sit in on lectures by distinguished German geographers. His sister wrote in 1883 that after “long years of infidelity, he was reconquered by geography” (cited in Koelsch 2004:1). Yet he came to lose his “false consciousness” as a result of the fresh air therapy of his Baffin Land expedition in 1883–1884 and his exposure to “primitive people” both of which led him back to anthropology. Doubtless there are robust reasons to provide the founding figure of American anthropology with a clear identity and pedigree but in fact Boas cannot be fully grasped outside of nineteenth-century German geography and the process of academic institutionalization of both geography and anthropology on both sides of the Atlantic. By the 1860s, German geography had produced a considerable body of research on culture though ethnology still remained a stepchild of geography. In the German tradition ethnology was largely institutionalized in the museum world whereas the Prussian state had aggressively created number chairs of geography during the 1860s and 1870s. Geography housed the study of the peoples of the earth (ethnology). At the time Boas was appointed in anthropology at Columbia (1899), German anthropology was only understood institutionally as physical anthropology; ethnology was, as I have explained, the terrain of geography departments. Boas was heir to the exploratory and human geographic traditions of von Humboldt, Ratzel (who he met at the German geographers meetings in 1881 where he delivered a research paper) and the Ritter-influenced German geographer Theobald Fischer with whom he studied at Bonn and Kiel. As is well known, Boas in fact searched unsuccessfully for appointments in geography in the United States and in Germany between 1882 and 1885, and finally was appointed to junior position at Berlin in 1886. He departed Berlin quickly, however, and returned to the United States to land, after much frustration, an appointment in geography at Science magazine and was promptly elected a fellow of the American Geographical Society in 1887. But it quickly became clear in the wake of his famous paper “The Study of Geography” published in 1887 – and as a result of continuing ethnographic work in Canada – that Boas’ geographical vision rubbed against the American temper of the times.To Boas, forged in the geography of Carl Ritter6 and Ratzel, geography was a historically grounded human science; for William Davis, then dominating American geography from his high-table at Harvard during the 1880s, it was an ahistorical earth science draped in the language of evolution and universal laws. Boas’ scholarly future did not reside in American academic geography. Opportunities for professional advancement finally arose at Clark University where he was expected to teach anthropology and this led in turn to his founding of Anthropology at Columbia. The emergence of distinctive market shares for the two disciplines within the American academy at the turn of the century did not signal the demise of Boas’ interest in geography as such, or indeed mark the erasure of his German geographical heritage. He strongly identified as a geographer throughout the 1890s and sought to implant his Humboldtian-Ritterian-­ Ratzelian – and neo-Kantian – reinterpretation of human geography onto an American university landscape in which, for Carl Sauer, geography was the study of physical environment, and for William Davis an earth science based on deductive methods.The leading geographers of the moment – H ­ alford MacKinder at Oxford, William Davis at Harvard and Friedrich Ratzel 326

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at Munich – were to a person physical geographers and came to the discipline with expertise in biophysical systems and evolutionary thinking often of a neo-Lamarckian sort. In differing ways each geographer’s core ideas – whether Mackinder’s ‘pivot of history’, Ratzel’s lebensraum or Davis’s ‘geographical cycle’ – were exemplars of what Livingston (1992:210) calls a “geographical experiment” to hold the natural and social world together under one unifying umbrella. But the centre of gravity in geography always resided in environmental processes, and this typically came with costs: universal theory, environmental determinism as a rubric, robust organic analogies and a heavy dose of evolutionist thinking. Boas, of course, offered a strong counter-current to both: a critique of the prevailing ideas of universal laws, of crude evolutionism, and of environmental determinism (the latter dominating the geographical field through the writings of Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Semple). Boas was, as has been noted, out of phase with geography in the United States (see Koelsch 2004) yet many of his ideas re-entered the discipline later in part because of the critical role played by the Berkeley School of Geography and their renewed interest in the local, the regional, culture and institutions (Sauer 1925, 1941). As Mikesell (1967:619) put it: “The Zeitgeist of the first gene­ ration of…professional anthropologists was …rather like that of American geographers in the 1920s”. At these different moments the tenor was nevertheless identical: to react against hasty overgeneralization whether evolutionary, diffusionist or environmental. Boas meanwhile never forgot his geographical roots. In his 1938 General Anthropology he sang the praises of Ratzel and included his essay entitled “The Study of Geography” in the collection of his classic essays in Race, Language and Culture (1940). If in 1899 – the year that Boaz established the anthropology department at Colombia and Rollin Salisbury founded the first graduate department of geography at the University of Chicago – the two disciplines went their own ways, the incontestable fact was that they shared a common overall objective: they both united natural and social sciences, they were both concerned with scale and place, and they were united “by bonds of temperament and rationale” (Mikesell 1967:618). There is a sense in which Boas’ geographical (if not necessarily theoretical) leanings have been retained within anthropology and in some respects the cross-talk and inter-disciplinary traffic has deepened over the last century. As a consequence at some universities the linkages between the two disciplines remained exceptionally close: one thinks of Kroeber and Sauer at Berkeley in the 1920s and 1930s, the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University in the 1950s and 1960s, and of course the affinities between geography and anthropology at University College, London (UCL) under the auspices of Daryll Forde. Notably there are some joint departments – famously Louisiana State University and St. Andrews ­University in Scotland. At Oxford geography, ethnology and prehistory constitute a single faculty and on some campuses – for example Colorado State – geography is a track within anthropology. The proliferation of professional MA programs across Europe and North America has also brought anthropologists and geographers together in new configurations around substantive questions such as refugees, development practice, cities and sustainable development. A similar argument might be made for the proliferation of environmental studies programs since the late 1960s in the United States. The two disciplines’ affinities were sealed in a number of universities by joint appointments. Herbert Fleur was Gregynog Professor of Geography and Anthropology at Aberystwyth for a half century up until 1970 and Paul Richards – arguably one of the most distinguished scholars whose entire research corpus has blurred the boundaries between the two disciplines (see ­Richards 1986) – held a joint appointment at UCL before moving to Wageningen.The Cold War proliferation of area studies in the United States also brought together the two constituencies in new and compelling ways; the US Social Science Research Council in particular between the 327

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1960s and the mid-1990s (when its area studies structure was abolished) was a major vehicle for facilitating conversations and collaborations (including research funding) between anthropology and geography. Appointments across disciplinary boundaries have almost certainly become more commonplace. Long before David Harvey, Neil Smith and Ruthie Gilmore were appointed in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center, anthropologists had been hired in a raft of North American geography departments (the Chair of my own department at Berkeley, for example, is a Chicago-trained anthropologist, and other ethnographers and cultural anthropologists can be counted at UCLA, Madison, Wisconsin, Boulder, Colorado and so on).7 The same might be said as regards funding. The Wenner-Gren Foundation has a remarkable track record in funding geographers and collaborative anthropology-geography research projects: ditto the National Geographic and the National Science Foundation disciplinary programs which, if comparative small in budgetary terms, have often jointly funded collaborative research programs. And not least, there has been an increasing traffic and interchange of theory and ideas between geo­ graphers and anthropologists, particularly around the twin themes of space (and spatial theory) and the environment (whether construed as ecological anthropology or political ecology). The traffic – or perhaps borrowings – has been especially heavy if one thinks of figures such as Arjun Appadurai, Anna Tsing, Eric Wolf, Paul Rabinow, Tania Li, James Ferguson, Akhil Gupta, Donald Moore, and Jane Guyer on the anthropological side, and David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Derek Gregory, Neil Smith, Jake Kosek, Nigel Thrift, Ash Amin and Susanna Hecht among geographers. But it is worth recalling that an earlier location theory – especially the work of von ­Thunen and Christaller made available by geographers Richard Chorley and Peter Haggett (1968) – was readily adopted by anthropologists in the analysis of marketing systems (Skinner 1964) and into the archaeology of central place systems.8 Two decades later space again re-­entered the anthropological lexicon (see for example Gupta and Ferguson 1992) this time armed with the insights of David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and others working at the intersection of spatial and social theory/political economy. Cultural geography in turn was enriched by a direct engagement with a deeper immersion in the work of Clifford Geertz, Jean Comaroff, and Katherine Verdery (see for example Jackson 1989; Watts 1992). It goes without saying that individual biographies9 have been formatively shaped by these interchanges and to the same degree there is a long track record of especially close and generative relations between individual geographers and anthropologists (Allan Pred and Paul Rabinow jointly teaching at Berkeley for example). Lest I be accused of assuming the mantle of Dr. Pangloss, let me immediately say that there were, and remain, tensions between the disciplines. Roy Ellen (1988:250) is as correct now as in 1988 when he referred to the lack of territoriality in geography and a “willingness to seek explanations of spatiality wherever these might lead”. Anthropology, in my view, still polices its boundaries in ways which both limit and fail to acknowledge geographical traditions and inheritances. (I am struck, for example, how an important book such as Friction by Anna Tsing [2005] has almost entirely read out of her theoretical account the vast conceptual and empirical research by geographers practicing political ecology.) Sometimes this looks awfully like what Eric Wolf (1999) called “swallowing other disciplines”. I recall giving a paper at the AAA in the early 1990s entitled: “Here come the barbarians: anthropologists colonize space”. It also needs to be reiterated that whatever insecurities anthropology as a discipline may have, geography in comparison is much more weakly institutionalised in the American academy. (The European picture is another story completely insofar as geography is a social science powerhouse and this contrast demands a full analysis in itself.) Geography after all has to operate in the dark shadow of closures of departments at Harvard,Yale, Columbia and Michigan. It bears repeating that a full genealogy of the relations and intersections that I have sketched here has barely started yet alone been completed. My charge in this chapter is not to attempt 328

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such an accounting but to delve into one small but important chapter, namely the emergence of critical studies of the environment – what in geography (and anthropology) operates under the sign of political ecology. Much could and needs to be said about the space story – and it occasionally raises its head in my account here on the ways in which anthropology and geography came to critically think about the human transformation of the earth – but on this history I am largely silent.10

From culture area to cultural ecology to ecological anthropology The Berkeley School of Cultural Geography is inextricably associated with the name of Carl Sauer, a child of the Ozarks who trained in Geology and Geography at the University of ­Chicago (his PhD was awarded in 1915) and who, after a seven-year sojourn at the University of Michigan, migrated west to California where he presided over the Department of Geo­g raphy at the University of California, Berkeley, for over three decades from 1923 to 1957. Much ink has been spilled over Sauer’s work, his legacy and his theoretical project (see Mitchell 2005; Mathewson 2009), and particularly over the concept of culture as he deployed it. Between 1925, when he delivered his famous essay entitled The Morphology of Landscape, and his 1940 address to the Association of American Geographers Foreword to Historical Geography, Sauer laid out a research program of how to think about human agency in relation to the transformation of the earth. In his earlier research program laid out in The Morphology of Landscape Sauer had a simple morphological model of the cultural landscape in which biophysical processes were central. Two decades later Sauer’s project rested on four pillars: culture, Anthropology, the longue durée of history (what he called genetic history), and biophysical systems. Geography’s proper domain was “territorial localization” through the comparative study of “modes of living”. The human landscape was seen as the product of human agency and “practical experience”, of accumulated residues as he put it quoting Vilfredo Pareto. Fossils, ruins and palimpsests were the forms Sauer pursued. Unreservedly anti-deterministic, anti-evolutionary, and anti-positivist, Sauer was fully resistant to forms of universalist argument. One might say he was resolutely materialist and historical (but certainly not a historical materialist). The culture-area, anthropology, diffusion and deep time were the building blocks of any human geography of worth, an approach that had little to do in his account with individuals, “only with human institutions or cultures” (Sauer 1941:2). There is good reason to be critical of Sauer’s early ruminations on geographic observation and fieldwork, on the manner in which he construed culture narrowly as material form, and of a view of history understood as sequence. Perhaps most troublesome was the degree to which human agency – the driving force in the transformation of the earth – was not understood in social terms. Despite his cosmopolitan intellectualism and immersion in Franco-German geographical ideas (Eduard Hahn, Freidrich Ratzel,Vidal de la Blache, Alfred Hettner), there is little evidence that he read or seriously thought about the work of Karl Marx, or Emile Durkheim or Max Weber.When all is said and done, nevertheless, if one places Sauer’s work alongside the two other giant intellects of 1950s Berkeley Geography – Clarence Glacken and Paul Wheatley11 – both of whom Sauer hired, then one can identify a broad approach, a Berkeley School, that integrated history, environment, culture, space and economy into a distinctive and compelling research program. Glacken charted a deep history of ideas and beliefs about nature and culture in the Western tradition, while Wheatley, in his pursuit of pre-industrial urbanism, linked city and symbol to the production of social surpluses and forms of market behavior derived from the work of Karl Polanyi. Both exhibited close affinities with Sauer’s project.The enormously influential conference held at Princeton in 1955 entitled Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth 329

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that Sauer organized with urbanist Lewis Mumford and ecologist Marston Bates, represented in many respects an intellectual road map of the questions and concerns dear to the Berkeley School but surprisingly had almost no anthropological presence.12 Ironically the conference was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Two contributions by Sauer and Glacken opened, and indeed anchored, the influential volume of the same name that subsequently appeared in 1956.13 But any account of the origins of a Berkeley School of Geography must acknowledge the huge impact of the sustained traffic in ideas between Geography and Anthropology. Anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie were colleagues of Carl Sauer at Berkeley and shared an interest in the relations between culture, land and environment.14 Such traffic was in fact hardly rare. Cross-fertilization and inter-disciplinarity (similar exchanges were to be found later at Columbia and Michigan) were integral to the emergence of one of the most important legacies of Sauer and the Berkeley School, namely cultural ecology. Even though Sauer never deployed the term, cultural ecology is one of the red threads running through the Berkeley School’s corpus (the others would be cultural landscape and historical morphology).15 Cultural ecology was not the sole preserve of Geography or Sauer. It was anthropologist Julian Steward (1955) who first deployed the term – building upon it must be said a prior history of anthropological and geographical research on the culture-area concept that had its origins in the work of Ratzel, and it passed into the American tradition through Sauer but earlier through Boas and Otis Mason and in modified forms to Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber who provided the first analysis of the relations between cultural and environmental variables. For Steward (a student of Kroeber) cultural ecology entailed a way of identifying how ‘adaptational strategies’ led to multi-linear pathways of cultural evolution among Native American groups in the southwest.16 Steward’s central claim was that environmental assemblages revealed functional and causal relationships to specific forms of social organization. Rather than thinking that all aspects of culture and nature are functionally interrelated, he identified a “culture core” in which functional ties with the natural setting are more explicit, and the interdependencies between cultural patterns and organism-environment relationship were most crucial. Subsistence and food activities were functionally related to the properties and structures of specific ecosystems and they provided the ground on which cultural groups and their culture evolved. Steward’s ideas can be located on a larger canvas of environmentally oriented anthropologists including Raymond Murphy, Frederick Barth, Robert Edgerton, Clifford Geertz, Robert Netting and Marshall Sahlins during the 1950s and 1960s.17 For my purposes, the key point here is that any institutional and intellectual road map for cultural ecology as a theoretical field must necessarily reflect a resolutely dispersed, transnational and inter-disciplinary genealogy of ideas, institutions, research sites and theoretical personalities. The arc linking anthropology and geography was pronounced, unequivocal and foundational in all respects. Cultural ecology in both anthropology and geography was always centrally concerned with processes of adaptation (Zimmerer 1996; Denevan 1983), a concept borrowed (along with others like niche and ecotope) from evolutionary biology. In anthropology the early ethno-ecology of Harold Conklin (1975) who studied indigenous Hanunóo agricultural practice and knowledge (in part through local taxonomic knowledge systems), and Clifford Geertz’s (1963) famous concept of “involution” – inward directed intensification and elaboration in padi rice systems also referred to by Geertz as “overadaptation” – both focused on how internal system equilibrium or homeostasis in swiddening and padi rice systems were central organizing forces for society and culture in southeast Asia.18 While each saw the defining properties of social systems as a stable ecology and the adaptation of the society to its local ecosystem, neither saw ecology as a totalizing explanatory framework as such. To quote Geertz (1963/1974:6), cultural ecology entailed a “… strict confinement of the application of ecological principles and concepts 330

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to explicitly delimited aspects of human social and cultural life for which they are particularly appropriate rather than extending them, broadly and grandly, to the whole of it”. Ecology, culture and adaptation were powerfully sutured nevertheless. Cultural ecology’s epistemological position resonated in many disciplines across the social sciences as ecological and systems thinking of various sorts entered social science discourse and especially the behavioral sciences.19 Robert Netting’s important book Cultural Ecology published in 1977 synthesized much of this anthropological work though he was careful to acknowledge the complex intellectual histories that linked anthropology to geography, and to Sauer and the German tradition in particular.20 Even Eric Wolf ’s (1966) foundational book on peasants – an anthropologist most closely associated with political economy – devoted space to the ecological adaptation of peasant households seen through a system of material and energy transfers from the environment to human communities.21 Adaptation too provided a consistent analytical current linking several generations of the Berkeley School. It appeared in Karl Butzer’s archaeological work on civilizations as adaptive systems (Butzer 1980a, 1980b), in the analyses of material flows in so-called primitive subsistence systems (for example, the work by David Harris [1971] on swiddening along the Orinocco, and William Denevan’s [1970] reconstructions of pre-Columbian intensive cultivation systems) and in cultural geography’s concern with how built material form, patterns of settlement and inheritance, and landscapes generally were functionally related to specific environmental settings. But perhaps the most rigorous and influential of these early forms of cultural ecological analysis in Geography lay in the extraordinary long-term research program directed by geographer Harold Brookfield in association with anthropologist Paula Brown and a bevy of Geography students (including William Clarke, Diana Howlett and Eric Waddell) conducted through the School of Pacific Studies (now defunct) at the Australian National University in Canberra and largely focused on the highlands of Papua New Guinea.22 At its core was the relation between population, carrying capacity and territory on a larger canvas of regional agrarian intensification and social change since the 1930s. Human population and land relations were to be understood through “formal ecosystem analysis” (Clarke 1971:183). Exceptionally detailed and granular community studies, beginning in the late 1950s, examined the cycles and fluctuations in segmentary social groups among the Chimbu and other groups shaped by what Paula Brown (1972) called “forces of change”.While focusing on feasts, conflict, settlement, and forms of stratification, this body of research disclosed significant “geographical and historical variations in adaptive strategies” (Waddell 1972:220). Here the anthropology-geography connection was robust and enduring. From a related but rather different vantage point, two other force-fields shaped the ways in which anthropology and geography approached the environment. One turned on the work of University of Chicago geographer Gilbert White and his students, most prominently Robert Kates, which focused on environmental hazards and “purposive adjustments” to them (this was in fact their definition of adaptation; see Burton et al 1978). In his dissertation, Human Adjustment to Floods: A Geographical Approach to the Flood Problem in the United States, White (1945:87–88) defined adjustment as the human process of occupying or living in an area and the transformations of the initial landscape which result. He went on to specify a raft of forms of human adjustment to floods: elevating land, abating floods by land treatment, protecting against floods by levees and dams, providing emergency warning and evacuation, making structural changes in buildings and transportation, changing land use to reduce vulnerability, distributing relief, and taking out insurance. In subsequent studies, geographers (and sociologists) extended the concept to a variety of natural and technological hazards, demonstrating the myriad adjustments people and societies had made to survive and even prosper while living with recurrent hazards. It was 331

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these adjustments or adaptations that made possible what geographer Robert Kates (2001:6) called “the fruitful occupance by human societies of an enormous range of environmental settings”. North America provided the setting for much of the early hazards work – and increasingly developed close relations with the insurance industry and federal relief agencies – but there was an emerging body of cross-cultural research on the anthropology of environmental disasters and the relations between culture, behavior and so-called extreme events such as typhoons in Micronesia or drought in East Africa. There were close family resemblances between the hazards research and cultural ecology because each turned its gaze to the relations between human communities and environmental events and perturbations. Behavioralist in orientation, hazards research placed particular weight on environmental perception and cognitive dissonance (how, for example individuals perceived or misperceived the risk of flood losses) and the menu of strategies (including the structure of decision-making trees) which corresponded to the local or emic understanding of the threat.23 There is a direct parallel with anthropological studies of disaster and indeed both fields were shaped by the Cold War and the post-1945 boom in foundations and federal funding for the behavioral sciences. Raymond Firth (1959) had famously written at length about environmental disasters on Tikopia but throughout the 1950s anthropologists had examined typhoons, tornados, and volcanic eruptions focused in part “traditional responses”, on social organization before and after and disasters as a “behavioral event” (see Wallace 1956, Spillius 1957 and Oliver-Smith 1996 for a review). Under the dark cloud of the atomic threat and amidst the paranoic rhetorics of Communist challenge, disasters (of a military and security sort) came to be seen as indivisible from the threats posed by environmental and biophysical perturbations. How individuals, families and communities responded to shocks and hazards – how resilient they were and how able to recover and rebuild – were seen to be central to Cold War security and it is no surprise that hazards and disasters as object of study and policy were rapidly institutionalized in universities employing both anthropologists and geographers and behavioral scientists of various stripe. Centers of hazard and disaster research were set up at Ohio State University, University of Delaware and the University of Colorado, with other major centres of research emerged at Clark University and the University of Toronto.24 The behavioral sciences tended to address decision processes and communication strategies within and between organisms in a social system while the anthropological and sociological research on hazards typically examined the impacts of social organisation on structural adjustment of the individual and of groups (Quarantelli and Dynes 1977). Across much of this early work there was little understanding or interest in how power, class, status, or the webs of production relations shaped the capacity to “adjust” to environmental hazards (see Hewitt 1983 for a critique). The second field was in direct dialogue with cultural ecology but sought in some respects to distance itself from it. Adopting the moniker of ecological anthropology (Vayda and Rappaport 1967; Vayda 1969), it drew explicitly on new theoretical developments from ecological theory, and the analysis of living systems (hence its being dubbed the “new ecology”). As a body of theoretically driven work it was the product of collaborations and cross-pollinations in the 1960s shaped by the famous Macy Foundation Conferences on cybernetics held between 1946 and 1953, and developments in evolutionary biology and ecology (see Alland 1975). Ecological anthropology in its most elaborated form was the long-term research conducted in Melanesia that linked Roy Rappaport and Peter Vayda (both at Columbia University at the time25) with geographers from Berkeley and the Australian National University. It gave birth to a raft of empirically rich and intensive local studies of subsistence and ecological dynamics – ­typically involving careful measures of labor and energy flows and other socio-demographic survey 332

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data – systems ecology associated with, and indices of, so-called adaptive processes (Rappaport 1968; see Dove and Carpenter 2008).26 Ecological anthropology sought to identify how cultural institutions and relations functioned with respect to key environmental variables, and more abstractly with what Rappaport called the “orderly adaptive structure” (structured sets of processes and regulatory hierarchies) that inhered in all living, general purpose systems (i.e. systems in which the goal is simply survival sustained by an economics of evolutionary flexibility27).The canonical text – and by far the most theoretically elaborated deploying the conceptual architecture of living systems theory – is Roy Rappaport’s hugely influential Pigs for the Ancestors (1968/1984) which was expressly written as a “reaction against the special form of ecology that Steward thought necessary to accommodate the concept of culture” (Rappaport 1994:167). Rappaport’s approach, and in fact ecological anthropology in general, construed human society as analogous to any animal population when viewed as parts of ecosystems. More critically, ecological anthropology saw the relations between human populations (his own case study was among the Tsembaga Maring in Papua New Guinea) and the environment through functions: “statements of ‘what it does’ and ‘how it does it’ may well be among the most informative, important and interesting that can be made concerning an organ, an institution or a convention” (Rappaport 1968/1984:34). For Rappaport one of the main purposes of ethnography was to see how systems work, and how rituals regulate social life.The “new ecology” was not the same as the old functionalism (of cultural ecology) because when the field of application had changed to focus on the rationality of institutions with respect to environments, it exposed “organic and adaptive considerations” (Rappaport 1968/1984:352). As he put it, the regulatory function of ritual among the Tsembaga and other Maring helps to: … maintain an undegraded environment, limits fighting to frequencies that do not endanger the existence of the regional population, adjusts man-land ratios, facilitates trade, distributes local surpluses of pig in the form of pork throughout the regional population, and assures people of high-quality protein when they most need it. (Rappaport 1968/1984: 224) In his account, aspects of culture such as ritual should be grasped as parts of a transcendent adaptive structure, that is to say, an order or sequences of response to environmental variables or perturbations inherent in all living systems. A key theoretical reference point here was important research by biologists Roberto Frisancho, Lawrence Slobodkin and others, but most especially the work of Gregory Bateson on the economics of somatic flexibility.28 The Tsembaga ritual cycle accordingly was construed by Rappaport as a ‘first-order’ negative feedback mechanism, “operating to maintain the values of a number of variables within ‘goal ranges’ (ranges of values that permit the perpetuation of a system, as constituted, through indefinite periods of time)” (Rapapport 1968/1984:224). Such analysis was conferred, according to Rappaport, a high degree of “objectivity” and empirical rigor rooted in the ecological and biological criteria deployed through detailed case studies. Indeed a number of geographical studies operating under the sign of cultural ecology closely resembled the sort of ecosystemic analysis promoted by Rappoport (see Clarke 1971; Waddell 1972). Ecological anthropology, in sum, took populations as analytical units, examining the trophic relations (energy flows for example) within the ecosystem (Odum 1971). The notion of an ecosystem provided a convenient frame for the analysis of trophic exchanges between ecologically dissimilar populations occupying single localities.To overcome the problem that ecosystem analysis emphasized one trophic exchange between populations occupying different ecological 333

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niches within a local bounded area, Rappaport (1968/1984:226) suggested the concept of “regional population” in which local populations of humans (as other species) participated in regional systems in which the Maring ritual of pig slaughter (kaiko) was of great importance in articulating the local and regional subsystems. Kaiko operated, in short, as a homeostat, maintaining a number of variables that comprise that total system within ranges of viability, but also functioned as a transducer (a term derived from cybernetics), translating changes in the state of one subsystem into information and energy capable of producing changes in the another subsystem: Like thermostats, rituals have a binary aspect. As the thermostat switches on and off, affecting the amount of heat produced by the furnace and the temperature of the medium, so the rituals of the Tsembaga are initiated and completed, affecting the size of the pig population, the amount of land under cultivation, the amount of labor expended, the frequency of warfare, and other components of the system. The programs that should be undertaken to correct the deviation of variables from their acceptable ranges are fixed. (Rappaport 1968/1984:234) In Maring communities, women begin to complain that the pig population is getting too large to manage which indicates there are sufficient numbers of animals for the performance of ritual sacrifice. A triggering of the kaiko ritual has a corrective effect on the animal-human-­ environmental balance; it functioned as a homeostatic operation, a sort of giant servo-­mechanism involving a complex chain of interactions between the “cognized model” of the Maring, the ritual cycle, the regional system and wider adaptive order of the ecosystem. One of the great strengths of Rappaport’s program was the clarity and rigor with which adaptation (and indeed its counterpoint, maladaptation) was formulated. Adaptation referred to the processes by which living systems maintained homeostasis in the face of short-term environmental perturbations and long-term non-reversing changes in their environments.29 As he put it,“beneath specific and categorical differences, adaptive systems are organized by a generally similar architecture” (1984:412 my emphasis). The architecture or order reflected a temporal and economic structure. In the face of a perturbation of a key variable (say, the late onset of the rains) the adaptive responses (of, say, a peasant community in rural Africa) might begin with small, and flexible responses that commit limited resources and in the event of their inadequacy in the face of continuing or deepening threats (severe drought for example), larger and higher-­order responses as it were “kick in”, typically committing greater resources and exhibiting less flexibility (or reversibility).30 Order and structure inhere in all systems exhibiting a raft of salient properties relevant to understanding how human populations adapt to their environments: lower-order controls are flexible and shallow; higher-order controls tend to correct not minor deviations but control relationships between lower regulators and their outputs.31 Rappaport sees the hierarchy of the adaptive structure as “ordered along axes of specificity, concreteness, reversibility, authority, time, sanctity …”(1974:14). High-order controls among human population are typically draped in sanctity and abstraction; they are the high-order propositions or principles which pertain to the normative conditions prevailing among the critical sub-systems or components of the ecosystem32. Of course, under some circumstances the ‘first-order’ negative feedbacks that inhere in the adaptive order may be unable to dampen the perturbation and ‘second-order’ negative feedback will attempt to control the disequilibrium. At that point ‘second-order’ negative feedback produces what Wilden (1972:209) calls a meta-system (the elaboration of new structures or morphogenesis) or alternatively the ecosystem is destroyed: as he puts it: “In social systems the first (meta-system) is known as revolution; the second (ecosystem destruction) is extinction” (1972:209). 334

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Maladaptation in social systems occurs when the temporal and hierarchical order of adaptation is subverted. For example the goals appropriate to lower-level responses might become those of higher-level orders (for example what is good for General Motors is good for America). Rappaport (1968/1984) identifies a number of pathologies of the maladaptive order – that is to say conditions in which human populations do not respond to perturbations, and perturbations consistent with homeostatic principles and self-regulation of the system of which they are part. For example, the goals of a key variable can be mis-specified (maladaptation of the goal) or the structure of adaptation can be ‘misordered’ (cybernetic malfunctions or hierarchical anomalies). One part of a social system might capture another in a way that compromises evolutionary flexi­bility or parsimony, or a social system might be overcentralized or too loosely coupled to its environment such that, in hierarchical or temporal terms, individuals, households, communities, or governments cannot respond appropriately and adequately.33 For Rappaport, then, the essential problematic for ecological anthropology is “the relations of actions formulated in terms of meaning to the systems constituted by natural law within which they occur” (1984:402 my emphasis).

Cultural ecology and ecological anthropology in question A number of advantages stemmed from seeing social and cultural systems adaptation through the lenses of evolutionary theory, cybernetics and systems theory – that is to say through the reigning conceptual and theoretical apparatuses within American social and behavioral sciences during the post-war period. One was the sorts of quantitative data on material, energy and information flows (in effect a sort of economism) required to calibrate the sorts of regulatory functions attributed to culture: detailed accounting of ecological relations and survey data on demographic change, labor flows and land use was a hallmark of much of this work. Another was conceptual, namely that causality in biophysical systems was circular (the so-called feedback loop). Cybernetic principles emphasized what Luhmann (1993, 1993a) called “recursivity”, that is a process which uses its own outputs as inputs (this is key to the operations of negative feedback for example). Implicit here too is the notion of contingency of all observation: that A causes B and B causes A points to the fact that it is always possible to observe otherwise. In Gregory Bateson’s (1972) language, the sort of knowledge you get depends upon the code or map that you use. In this sense systems theory contained an epistemological claim to the effect that the boundaries between system and environment or organism and environment were social constructions and arbitrary. Put this way, both cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, to the extent they framed adaptation as recursive, had unsettled the hard and fast boundaries between system and environment and the billiard board world of stressors and responses.34 As ecological and ecosystemic thinking penetrated into the social sciences at large in the 1960s, the ideas of adaptation and the systems-theoretic or cybernetic ways of linking culture and nature provided a powerful paradigm for thinking theorizing the relations between information, behavior, culture and social reproduction. Social systems understood in terms of structure, function and organizations and the properties of living systems in general were central to the so-called behavioralist revolution in the social sciences that was so linked to post-war American capitalism. But there was suspicion too, in the face of transformations wrought by global capital flows, the second great wave of marketization, and the dynamics of postcolonial development, that talk of self-regulating systems, of Third World communities adapted to the ecological niches they occupied, and cognized models in the service of evolutionary flexi­bility all appeared increasingly problematic. Where then did the challenges to what one might call adaptation as a mode of thought – as practiced by anthropologists and geographers alike – originate? One source was paradoxically from with the Berkeley school 335

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itself. None other than Sauer himself was acutely aware of these tensions: not only the extent to which pre-capitalist and colonial practices could be deeply destructive of the environment, but the massive costs of a post-war rational, instrumental scientific hubris attached to ­American hegemony and growing global influence. In a letter to the Rockefeller Foundation (Sauer Papers, ­Bancroft Library, available at http://rockefeller100.org/items/show/2590) in response to a request to reflect upon their early Green Revolution initiatives in Mexico, Sauer expressed a withering contempt for a program designed to “destroy the ecologic balance” of peasant communities, in which their “wisdom” is “greater than that of the scientific Deadaluses”. It represented an intervention – a “crusade” as he put it – of an “alien group in another country” predicated upon an “over­accelerated economic and industrial growth”. Many of us would call this empire. These ideas did not sit easily with certain notions of cultural ecological adaptation to the environment. Neither did they sit well with the Rockefeller Foundation. A minute on Sauer’s report reads: “this must never be shown to anyone” (Sauer Papers, Bancroft Library, available at http://rockefeller100.org/items/show/2590). A second challenge came from within ecological and evolutionary theory itself. To say that organisms adapt to their changing environments implies there are processes of adaptation and end states of being adapted. Darwin’s great materialist revolution was to show how evolutionary change is the result of variation among individuals converted into variation among species through dynamic and kinematic forces: the principles of variation, heredity and natural selection.These principles were necessary and sufficient conditions for evolution by natural selection to occur. Adaptation was added by Darwin to explain the mechanical causes of differential reproduction and survival, namely the struggle for existence (which he took from his reading in 1838 of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population). Adaptation was to be understood in relation to an organism’s niche – the ‘fit’ – but also in relation to individuals’ competition for the same resources, ‘the struggle for existence’. In the classical Darwinian paradigm, variations within a species indexed different probabilities of success, while the external environment of the species or organism posed specific and concrete ‘problems’ and challenges for which only certain morphological, physiological and behavior traits were ‘solutions’. As Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin put it, within the Darwinian frame: “organisms are the objects of the force of natural selection…..[which] sorts out the form that is the best solution to the problem” (1985:97). Stanford human ecologist35 Bill Durham extended this logic in his neo-Darwinian account proposing that “culture is generally adaptive in the biological sense” (1976:91). Biological and cultural attributes are seen in terms of the selective retention of traits that enhance the inclusive fitnesses of individuals in their environments. To put it differently, adaptation derived from organic evolution is seen as simply a special case of a more general world view, what Levins and Lewontin (1985) call “evolutionism”. Yet within the confines of evolutionary biology however, adaptation and adaptive processes have been, and remain, contested, freighted terms.36 Levins and Lewontin in their important book The Dialectical Biologist provide a sense of the controversy. In their view, the concept infers a problem or model that pre-exists to which organisms are fitted through dynamic processes. Even if there are assumed to be niches to which organisms adapt, evolution cannot be seen to be a process of becoming adapted. Furthermore the partitioning process of an organism into traits (which purportedly served adaptive ends) and the partitioning of environments (into niches or problems) raises the question of whether these are real or human constructions. Environmental problems are typically isolated and the fit to them is independent of other interactions with the environment. And not least while the fact that adaptation has occurred seems self-evident, it is equally clear that many and perhaps most changes are not adaptive. The architecture of adaptation seems to rest on a billiard table view of organisms and their environments when in fact 336

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the organism is both subject and object. Organisms constrict every aspect of their environment: they are “creators and modulators of these objects of external forces” (Levins and Lewontin 1985:104). To see the organism or the community as an agent, a subject active in the construction of its own environment, leads to a much more complex dialectical view, one in which the metaphor of adaptation must be substituted by a metaphor of construction. The organism, says Levins and Lewontin, organizes its own evolution by being an object of natural selection and the creator of the conditions of that selection (1985:106). Inner and outer forces of which it is both subject and object must be held in tension.37 These broad sorts of challenges were central to the wider debates that linked biology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence and so on to the emerging cybernetics and behavioral sciences which the Macy Conferences, and subsequently the Ford Foundation, promoted in the 1940s and 1950s. Such concerns became absolutely central to the debates within cultural ecology and ecological anthropology from which political ecology was to emerge during the 1970s. One way to think about the conditions of possibility for the emergence of the first generation of political ecology – associated with Piers Blaikie, Harold Brookfield, Ben Wisner, Susanna Hecht, Larry Grossman and so on – is that the very concepts of adaptation, of adaptive structures, adaptive orders, adaptive traits and functions were put into question largely because they could not be made to speak to the conditions – often the realities of peasant communities in the throes of what Michael Burawoy (2014) calls the “second great wave of marketization”. There were, in sum, all sorts of anomalies political ecologists confronted in their analyses of rural and agrarian communities in the postcolonial world (it was almost exclusively this world form which political ecology emerged). To revisit some of these works is to be immersed in the debates over functionalism and neo-functionalism, the uses and abuses of the organic analogy, the constraints imposed by “vulgar materialism” the limits of systems theories and of living systems, and of adaptation as ideology (the idea that Darwinian and evolutionary theory was an expression of nineteenth-century bourgeois sentiments and the flowering of an exuberant industrial capitalism). Whig history and Whig biology shared family resemblances if not affinities. A third and powerful critique focused on the functionalism and empiricism of systems and cybernetic theory, the strongly behaviorist thrust of this work, and the Cold War context out of which this science of control emerged (Heims 1991), all of which cast a long analytical shadow. Cybernetics was an instrument of technocratic management in which the angel of control was emphasized over the devil of disorder (Galison 1994:266). Any sense of self-regulating equilibrium and balance or harmony seemed increasingly out of touch with the realities of communities marked by new patterns of social differentiation and inequality and what could only be called ecological destruction. In anthropology in particular the withering assaults by Maurice Godelier (1972) and Jonathan Friedman (1974) exposed not just the mechanistic and often Hegelian character of much of what passed as adaptation theory (the idea that regulation of the environment was happening behind the backs of the actors through cultural thermostats), but the difficulty of seeing how the adaptive structure of societies could be squared with not just the clear patterns of ecological destruction but with the questions of power, class, property and access which were central to other theoretical approaches, most especially Marxian political economy.38 Central to this critique was a suspicion of organic analogies – subjecting social systems to an overriding logic of living systems or ecological rationality as Godelier (1972) called it – and the grave dangers of functionalism and a sort of inductive or crude materialism.39 Social systems seemed to operate like giant servo-mechanisms. As Godelier put it: Here [in cultural ecology and ecological anthropology] we recognize empirical materialism, the ‘economism’ that reduces all social structures to nothing but epiphenomena 337

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of the economy which is itself reduced, through technique, to a function of adaptation to the environment… a materialism like this is unable to explain the reasons why, the fundamental necessity of what exists, i.e. the reasons why the history of societies that are not always completely integrated totalities but totalities whose unity is the provisionally stable effect of a structural compatibility that enables different structures to reproduce themselves until they reach the point at which internal (and external) dynamics of these systems forbids this totality to go on existing as such. (1972:xxiv–xxv) As a number of commentators noted, this form of ecological materialism was innocent of any form of contradiction. Sahlins said that ecologic rationalities “exchange… meaningful content for functional truth” (cited in Rappaport 1968/1984:308). Levi-Strauss put it powerfully: “to say that a society functions is a truism, but to say that everything in a society functions is an absurdity” (1968:13). Economic and cultural anthropologists like Maurice Goldelier and Marshall Sahlins provided a powerful critique of what they saw as functionalist (in their view largely descriptive40) analysis, but it was from geographical research struggling with these same misgivings over adaptation and ecosystems as a conceptual language that political ecology was born during the 1970s and early 1980s. It bears repeating that the intellectual milieu was one in which peasant studies (the Journal of Peasant Studies was founded in 1973) and a reconsideration of Marxist theory of development (the modes of production debate, world systems theory, unequal exchange and so on) were new and exciting centers of theoretical innovation. It was also an historical conjuncture in which a dominant Malthusianism and technological determinism (one thinks of the ubiquity of the tragedy of the commons-style thinking) operated on a landscape of rising Third World nationalism and left-wing radicalism. Drawing inspiration from new research on the political economy of peasant societies – a veritable boom in peasant studies transformed both disciplines from the late 1960s and over the next long decade (see for example Wolf 1969; Shanin 1972; Scott 1976) – in part propelled by the Vietnam War and a reconsideration of peasant radicalism and politics, but also by a reinvigorated interest in the role of the state in postcolonial development, a generation of anthropologist and geographers were drawn to agrarian political economy, questions of peasant differentiation and the commodification of peasant life and the transformation of what Eric Wolf called the close corporate community, in short, to the so-called agrarian question. Laid out provocatively almost a century earlier by Karl Kautsky (1899/1988), the agrarian question was concerned with the ways in which capital was taking hold of and transforming agriculture, how these transformation contained political implications for the communities involved, and how the globalization of agriculture emphasized not just the role of trade but how the agrarian and industrial sectors related to each other (the so-called unequal terms of trade question and inter-sector accumulation, something that Alain de Janvry in his hugely influential book The Agrarian Question in Latin America [1981] called “disarticulated development”). Rather than adaptation, niches and trophic structures, and homeostasis, the new lexicon spoke of exploitation, peasant resistance, commodification, class differentiation, merchant’s capital, state extraction, and proletarianization. In anthropology figures such as William Roseberry, Claude Meillassoux, Barbara Bradby, and Michael Taussig were crucial to the turn toward political ecology, and in turn were part of a return to many of the older questions that had animated Marxist debates on the transition from feudalism to capitalism.41 In short the mad house invoked by William Clarke in highland Papua New Guinea. Political ecology addressed a postcolonial rural world in the throes of what Karl Polanyi (1944) called the ‘great transformation’. In short, central to the new critical approaches to the environment in both anthropology and geography was 338

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not systems ecology or adaptive orders but political economy, circuits of accumulation and the demise of the moral economy. The reference was of an agrarian world turned upside down. Its avatar in global terms was of course the Green Revolution, precisely the “scientific Deadaluses” that Sauer had identified in his “not-to-be-shown-to-anyone” memorandum to the Rockefeller Foundation penned in 1947.

The birth of political ecology and a new environmental anthropology Rather than examining the functional adequacy of culture or social structure, political ecology and critical environmental anthropology emerged as a distinctive approach which privileged property rights, access to and control over resources, the relation of producers to the market, the commodification of land and labor, the forms of surplus extraction and the prismatic forms of social differentiation with peasant communities, the breakdown of the moral economy, emerging forms of class structure and the changing relations of production.42 Rather than seeing environmental questions through the prism of society and nature or human response and biophysical trigger or homeostasis and energy flows, political ecology, drawing on Marxist ideas of the labor process and notions of first and second nature, saw nature and society as dialectically constituted (Smith 1977). Environment was not some pre-given context, but was an object that could be construed in different ways by different communities and classes. Political ecology problematised what the environment meant and to whom – a central plank in Piers Blaikie’s (1985) work on soil erosion for example.43 What this meant was that the planetary ecosystem was constructed out of “the contradictory unity of capital and nature” (Harvey 2014:248), that capital is a working and evolving “ecological system” in which “nature and capital are constantly being produced and reproduced”. There is no transcendent adaptive or ecological order here, but an ecological system in which capital necessarily privatizes, commodifies, monetizes and commercializes every aspect of nature. Political ecology constructed an approach – I am hesitant to call it a theory – upon a more-or-less Marxist analysis of political economy in which the social relations of production, access to and control over resources, and power relations rooted in state and capital figured centrally. The dynamics of specific historical forms of capitalist accumulation, whether in the Brazilian Amazon (e.g. Susanna Hecht) or the Himalayan foothills (e.g. Piers Blaikie), constituted the essential scaffolding upon which environmental questions – of management, regulation, degradation and sustainability – were constructed. Its object of critique was not only adaptation a such, but also organic analogies, the putative homology of ecological and social relations, the purported function of culture, and not least a dominant Malthusianism (‘population pressure’ on the environment, carrying capacity) which the rise of ecosystem thinking did little to problematize. The birth of political ecology was, not unlike its predecessor cultural ecology, a transnational, multi-sited and trans-disciplinary enterprise (though geography took pride of place44). There were four geographically interconnected institutional settings each marked by the appearance of a sort of foundational text focused on field research four different regions (Africa, Brazil, South Asia and Melanesia). What they all shared was a common engagement – in related but different ways – with the political economy of development and what Harvey (2014:262) calls the “mindless extension of capital’s ecology into our lifeworld”. Systems of access to and control over resources, growing commodification of the resource base and social life, circuits of capital accumulation, and the role of the state were absolutely central. Each of these four sites and their founding figures – ANU (Harold Brookfield), Berkeley (Susanna Hecht), the University of Michigan (Bernard Nietschmann and immodestly myself), Clark University (Ben Wisner), and the University of East Anglia (Piers Blaikie) – questioned not just functionalism and adaptation 339

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as a form of thought in cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, but also the cost-benefit and behavioralist assumptions of much of the hazards research construed as human responses and adjustments to threats and stressors. Political ecology turned the flashlight inward toward commercialization of agrarian societies, to how communities were being torn asunder and radically reshaped by the twin processes of globalization and to how the exercise of power was indispensable to the understanding of the institutions of property, resource control and market dynamics (Watts 1983). More critically, in all of these locations engagements with anthropologists working on the political economy of peasantries – one thinks of the work of Ben White and Anne Stoler in providing an alternative account of Geertz’s Indonesian involutory model – was critical in the reorientation away from ecosystems towards social structures, power and the relations of production. The confluence of differing trajectories that merged to become political ecology not surprisingly contained a number of different points of intellectual departure, reflecting important analytical and institutional differences among its founding figures. The ANU-Melanesia group reflected the sense that Rappaport’s account described adaptation without evolution, or as H ­ arold Brookfield (1973:155) put it ecological function rather than sociological explanation. The sorts of adaptive functions imputed to pig cycles were not about the disposability of pigs but the reproduction of “a whole system of social relationships” rapidly being transformed by cattle, coffee and the advancing frontier of capital. As Clarke put it describing the uplands in New Guinea, the communities were, in fact, at the “edge of a madhouse” (1977:372). Brookfield himself was drawn to studying the costs of what he called inter-dependent deve­ lopment and the forms of specialization and risk associated with “the course of development” ­(Brookfield 1973).45 In the ANU lineage, the death knell of adaptation was the appearance of Larry ­Grossman’s book Peasants, Subsistence Ecology and Development in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea (1984, and originally a 1979 ANU PhD dissertation). Grossman – a geographer deeply shaped in training and disposition by anthropology – identified his approach as cultural ecology yet his analysis saw the region through the lens of peasant theory and patterns of social differentiation, that is to say capital at work. A similar set of developments was reflected in work that linked the universities of Michigan and Berkeley. Bernard Nietschmann’s (1973) stimulating study of the Miskito communities on the Pacific Coast of Nicaragua entitled Between Land and Water, proved to be a sort of limit case for cultural ecological analysis exposing the sorts of constrictions imposed by adaptation as a framework.46 By making use of Marshall Sahlins’ (1972) account of Marx’s commodity circuit – and implicitly Karl Polanyi’s (1944) work on markets – Nietschmann was profoundly shaped by the likes of Eric Wolf, Marshall Sahlins and Michael Taussig after he arrived at Michigan, and showed how the central dynamics of Miskito fishing and subsistence systems were increasingly driven by broader market changes, in large measure the commercialization of the turtle industry. My own 1979 dissertation in geography at Michigan – which appeared as a book called Silent Violence (Watts 1983) when I had relocated to Berkeley – certainly was influenced by these Polanyian insights into patterns of resource use and the politics of “fictitious commodities”. But in examining the relations between drought and famine in West Africa I made use of structural Marxism and especially the so-called agrarian question (and on a personal note anthropologists Michael Taussig and Bob Hefner (then a graduate student) were enormously influential in shaping my own English New Left Marxism that I had brought across the Atlantic). It was the intersection of markets (the role of merchant capital), patterns of social inequality and climatic perturbations that shaped what sorts of decision peasant households could make in relation to manage risks like drought as well as why the systems of which they were part might collapse (i.e. famines as crises of social reproduction). 340

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Ben Wisner – who completed his PhD in 1977 (Wisner 1977) working in eastern Africa – was exploring precisely these issues with students at Clark University, in a different part of the continent, as a way of upending the stimulus-response models of hazard research associated with the scholars at Chicago, Toronto and Clark itself.47 It was rigorous political economy analysis that demonstrated how vulnerability and marginality (both ecological and socio-economic) was being produced by particular sorts of social and economic exposure rooted in the circuits of capital and in the operations of what passed as state policy. At Berkeley Geography, Susanna Hecht’s48 work on tropical deforestation in Brazil (1985) engaged with both the ideas of Alain de Janvry and his student Carmen Diana Deere, and Latin American state theorists exploring the relations between authoritarian and military rule and so-called “savage capitalism”. In her case this led to a brilliant analysis of a frontier of land clearance in Para in the eastern Amazon, how and speculation propelled by a powerful logic of political alliances between landed elites and state-derived rents and subsidies propelled the conversion of forest to pasture even if the ranches themselves were both ecologically and economically inefficient. Finally, centred in the United Kingdom at the School of Development Studies at the University of East Anglia, there was the work of Piers Blaikie and his direct engagement with the political economy of development (which included anthropologist David Seddon). Blaikie’s hugely influential work (1985) emerged largely, but not exclusively, from South Asia on the subject of soil erosion and land management.49 Again adaptation was not the central concern so much as the “causal chains” of inter-dependency linking farmers, household, and communities to the state and the world market which shaped – and often undermined – the capacity to manage the land and soil resources. None of this should infer a common theoretical point of reference among those political ecologists for whom adaptation seem to confer a set of analytical blinders. For example, Blaikie and Brookfield were a mix of world systems theory, dependencia, and a very broadly defined (and not unequivocally Marxist) political economy. My own work drew heavily on Althusserian Marxism and the work of Karl Kautsky; Larry Grossman’s book reflected the influence of peasant studies; Hecht’s initial research on Brazil was shaped by Latin American theories of the state and rent seeking. Subsequent path-breaking work – one thinks of Nancy Peluso’s (1992) research on Indonesian forests, and a raft of important anthropological work by the likes of Peter Brosius, Tania Li, Anna Tsing, Donald Moore and so on – drew on social historians like E. P. Thompson, on neo-Gramscian analysis, on the work of Michel Foucault, on social movement and feminist theory as much as theories of the postcolonial state or of the peasantry. What the early political ecology and environmental anthropology all shared, I think, was common focus on – or at least a sensitivity to – patterns of accumulation, access to and control over resources, and changing class structure; political ecology could demonstrate that some individuals and households were rendered marginal (to their resource base) and made vulnerable to anticipated and unanticipated environmental processes in new ways. Small farmers might be degrading their environment because they had no choice (they were subject to a simple reproduction squeeze; see Watts 1983a); forests were destroyed in a desperate attempt to establish property rights in areas where the rule of law was lacking; peasants worked harder and longer, often degrading their land, in order to ensure social reproduction in the face of price squeezes. In short, this political ecology had as its reference point what I would call regimes of accumulation, operating at a multiplicity of scales and through complex chains of causation, providing structures of opportunity and constraint – imposed by social relations of production and exchange and by property relations – that shaped how resources, environments, and perturbations might be managed and governed. As a constellation of ideas and conceptual tools, political ecology became, not surprisingly, something of a moving frontier. By the 1990s this first-generation political ecology had been 341

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broadened in two ways and here anthropology played a key role in pointing to questions of identity, rule and resistance and social movements. To put it crudely, to Marx and regimes of accumulation were added Foucault and regimes of truth (Forsyth 2013; Li 2007), and Gramsci and regimes of rule or hegemony (Moore 2005; Escobar 1999, 2006). The new palette was partly a result of changing intellectual fashion (the growing influence of forms of post-structuralism), partly a function of cross-fertilization with other fields (science studies, race theory, environmental history, green justice), partly a function of the interest of deploying political ecology in First World, industrial and advanced capitalist settings (rather than the world of peasants), and not least because of the blind spots and silences within Marxian political economy. Political ecology had been relatively silent on the forms and dynamics of political contention surrounding the environment (see Peluso 1992). Environmental movements, the role of civil society, and later armed struggle (militants struggles over forest or oil) pushed political ecology to expand and deepen its understandings of the operations of power. No surprise then that the knowledge-power-institutions nexus, drawing especially from post-structural and discourse analysis, was taken up quickly. Careful examinations of forms of environmental expertise, such as how institutions like the World Bank were “greened”, how conventional models of environmental degradation (e.g. the tragedy of the commons) constructed referent objects in particular ways with consequences for policy, and especially a focus on forms of green governance – for example understanding the effects of decentralized governance on forest regulation or common property institutions, and the politics of differing management regimes – all became central to political ecology in the 1990s (see Watts 2013).50 There was a sort of intellectual traffic in other words between questions of rule, hegemony, discourse and regimes of accumulation. Why did some environmental ideas and practices became dominant, and how might subalterns or oppressed groups contest and build alternatives to these practices and centers of power? Such questions once again brought anthropology into conversation with geography51. Tania Li’s book The Will to Improve (2007) explored what one might call environmental rule and green governmentality in Indonesia, exploring the power of a liberal “will to improve”, understood as a two-century-long project to secure the welfare of populations, but rooted in a historically complex situation of government practice, operating within the jagged rhythms of capitalist accumulation. Government programmers draw boundaries around and ‘render technical’ aspects of landscape, conservation and livelihood. Simultaneously, Li demonstrates how these practices have limits, imposed by the contradictions between improvement and sovereign power, and between the rationalities and practices of government and their ability to actually regulate dynamic social relations. Jake Kosek’s52 book Understories (2006) provides another illustration of how forests (in this case the US southwest as political ecology extended its domain both to the Global North and to the urban world) are classified, organized and ruled in a way that is intended to produce particular sorts of subjects (including Smokey the Bear!) and property relations. At the very moment that forests are declining as local sources of revenue and employment, they become the basis for powerful (yet different) sorts of insurgent consciousness and practice among both Hispano and white rancher communities. These open up the terrain of “contestation and debate between people with different interests and claims” (2006:270).Whatever else one may say about these broadly construed post-­structural approaches to political ecology – many of which retained it should be said a commitment to political economy in some way – the language of adaptation or adaptive order is entirely absent. In addition the traffic between anthropologists and geographers was robust, direct and continual. By the same token critical studies of the environment – political ecology in broad – enrolled, or at least meet up with, other disciplinary orientations, most obviously environmental history, cultural studies and science studies. In any case, anthropologist and geographers still remained joined at the head.53 342

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Adaptation redux?: risk, resilience and complex adaptive systems Adaptation as a form of thought has never really disappeared of course, any more than systems or evolutionary theory lost its appeal in the social sciences with the rise of political ecology. Quite the contrary, over the past two decades, adaptation has returned with arguably more robust than ever, attached now to the risks of global climate change and indeed to global threats of virtually all sorts. Since the first IPCC report in 1991, adaptation – defined by IPCC (2014) as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects” – has emerged as the lodestar of public and development policy coincident with the realization that mitigation has receded into a distant future. ‘Adapt Now’ is the rallying cry of the moment (or one might say, ‘adapt or die’). Bassett and Fogelman (2012) show how pervasive is the adaptation lexicon not just within IPCC but in the citational world of key research journals. It is a term that has ‘gone viral’ (Ribot 2011). IPCC has worked with a conceptual understanding of adaptation as adjustment that actually harkens back to 1960s cultural ecology.The focus is on proximate rather than structural processes regarding adaptation in social systems, and on passive, reactive or anticipatory adjustments. In the latest IPCC report there is talk of climate-resilient pathways, of the “limits to adaptation”, and the need for “transformational adaptation” (Summary, IPCC 2014:24–25) but nothing here challenges Bassett and Fogelman’s overall assessment that IPCC operates with a pedestrian, and in many respects, old-fashioned notion of adaptation as “adjustment to climate stimuli” (2014:49). Adaptation’s revival and rehabilitation, after a long period in which it fell from grace, is seemingly not in question. It constitutes a hegemonic discourse, anchored now in equally powerful discourses of security, risk management and resilient social systems. Re-tooled and re-purposed, adaptation and adaptive governance are put to the service of a new framework, designed to assist in the construction of resilient social systems54 (Folke 2006). Adaptive capacity is, as some of its foremost theoreticians put it, “a core feature of resilient socio-ecological systems” (Nelson, Adger and Brown 2007:395). In place of the managed environmentalism or neo-Malthusian models of the 1960s and 1970s, is a new-fangled language of resiliency, adaptive community institutions and market governance (see WRI 2008). Radical uncertainties about the effects of global climate change – global climate change models are robust on system dynamics but weaker on regional and local predictions – are the harsh realities to which adaptive and resilient systems are to be made to speak. The resilience framework jettisons much (though by no means all) of the old modes of calculation – the insurance-based logic of calculable risks assessed through probabilities – and replaces them with modalities that can render an uncertain (and perhaps catastrophic) future thinkable, something that can be prepared for and remediated. It is at this point that governance and institutions meet up with theories of ‘complex adaptive systems’ (CAS)55 (see Miller and Page 2007) designed to incorporate social and economic systems into an overarching science of “socio-ecological resilience” (Adger et al 2009; Holling 1986, 2001; Folke et al 2005). The scope and scale (and institutionalization) of resiliency thinking is now considerable, encompassing most fields of expertise which address security in the broadest sense from cybersecurity to global pandemics (see Zolli 2012; Alexander 2013). Local knowledge and practice, notions of vulnerability and exposure – in other words the conceptual armory of political ecology – have been grafted onto this new turbo-charged systems theory, derived in particular from the work of ecologist C. S. Holling (1973), and brought together in a highly influential think tank called the Stockholm Resilience Center. Resiliency is a risk-management tool for the sorts of communities – whether in New Orleans or Lagos or rural Papua – that political ecology saw as under threat or now confronting radical ecological change (or for that matter global terrorism, biosecurity or financial crises). 343

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Building resilient persons, communities and institutions has become the sine qua non of contemporary forms of liberalism; that is to say a means by which all of us are purportedly able to anticipate and tolerate the disturbances, dangers and radical contingencies of inhabiting a complex world in which, to quote the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, “we cannot predict where the next major shock to our well-being will manifest” (2013:1). Resilience occupies a common semantic space with a post-9/11 vocabulary: the keywords include risk, uncertainty and security (O’Malley and Bougen 2009; Coaffee 2006; Bougen 2011). Each year sees another raft of books, policy documents, mission statements and websites devoted to rearing resilient children, building resilient communities, constructing resilient states, critical infrastructures, cities, livelihoods and financial systems, and naturally to the pressing task of making a resilient military populated by men and women emboldened by ‘enhanced resilience training’ (Bene, Wood, Newsham and Davis 2012; Neocleous 2013; Lentsoz and Rose 2009). A brief trawl through any internet search engine reveals many millions of resilience citations – roughly 20 million from a very cursory Google search – covering virtually every aspect of modern life, both ecological and social. So expansive is the prescriptive reach of that it resembles what Paul Nasaday (2007) calls a ‘gospel’. Resilience represents, in sum, the offspring of the meeting up of complex adaptive systems with what Amoore (2013:12) calls the politics of possibility, that is to say a set of risk and security technologies “arraying and acting upon uncertain futures….[through] the fractionation of ever more finite categories of life” and degrees of safety and danger”. The origins of the resiliency framework lie in the 1970s within ecology and in fact the framework was often made use of by cultural ecologists and ecological anthropologists alike. At the heart of Holling’s early work is the question of how systems retain cohesiveness under stress or radical perturbations (such as drought). Resilience determined the persistence of relations in a system. He explored the implications for management of ecosystems by emphasizing less stability than the unpredictable and unknowable nature of complex system interdependencies, which implied (in policy terms) a need to “keep options open, the need to view events in a regional rather than a local context, and the need to emphasize heterogeneity” (Holling 2001:392). Through his Resilience Alliance and later the Resilience Center, resilience and adaptive systems thinking was pushed far beyond ecology as such to encompass a co-evolutionary theory of societies (Gunderson and Holling 2002) and ecosystems as a single unified science (“panarchy”). Holling extended his view of resiliency by suggesting that all living systems evolved through disequilibrium, that instability was the source of creativity: crisis tendencies were constitutive of complex adaptive systems. What linked the social, economic and ecological was, according to resilience theory, a theory of “capital accumulation” marked by episodic change, turbulence and a lack of predictability. Hollings attempted to locate the equilibrium-centered work of systems ecology on the larger landscape of the biosphere as a self-organizing and nonlinear complex system (Lindseth 2011). Complexity science – the hallmark of contemporary systems ecology – represents a meeting point of several multidisciplinary strands of science, including computational theory, non-­ equilibrium thermodynamics, evolutionary theory, and earth systems science.56 In this account adaptation, organization and robustness transcend the disciplines and fields of expertise: the cell, the firm and networks of machines also possess organizational properties in common (Miller and Page 2007).Viewed through this optic, adaptive social systems are “composed of interacting, thoughtful agents”; they stand between stasis and utter chaos (ibid.:12). Much of the focus is on how social agents, processing and deploying information, and engaging in complex interactions, lead to emergent phenomena. Through complexity science and resiliency thinking, adaptation has had a remarkable new lease on life triggered by the growing recognition of the implications of global climate change. 344

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The overwhelming and self-evident need to adapt – “we already know that adaptation is necessary” (Adger, Lorenzoni and O‘Brien 2009:2) – is anchored in a binary world composed of an external climate now capable of generating unprecedented threats and perturbations and a social systems characterized by uneven vulnerabilities (Taylor 2015).57 But what, in conceptual terms, is entailed in adaptation when “adaptation to global environmental change” is now invoked by a small army of theorists, practitioners and policy wonks? In what ways has it addressed or transcended the earlier political ecological critique? Pelling (2011) has properly pointed out that adaptation in this world of resiliency is “slippery”. He distinguishes three forms: resiliency adaptation which he sees as technocratic and politically conservative; transformational adaptation that emphasizes the need for change and barriers to adaptation, and transitional adaptation which is situated between the two. This, of course, says very little about how and whether adaptation is old wine in new bottles. In more theoretically oriented work (Adger 2006a; Folke 2006) adaptation is a process of deliberate change or decision making in anticipation of, or in reaction to, external stimuli and stress (system adaptedness is its outcome) while adaptive capacity refers to the preconditions for adaptation to occur (available resources and systemic attributes). Insofar as resilient systems embody adaptive capacity, then to the same extent resiliency is understood as the amount of change a system can undergo while retaining “the same controls on function and structure” (Nelson, Adger and Brown 2007:398) through self- organization, capacity for learning and capacity to absorb change. In resiliency talk, adaptation is always coupled with a set of affinal terms – vulnerability, capacity and exposure – while being embedded in larger socio-ecological living, self-organizing complex systems. All of this is then harnessed to governance – adaptive governance is the moniker – which links self-organization to particular sorts of environmental problems (ecosystem restoration in the Everglades or water catchment systems in Kenya).Adaptation to drought in Nigeria would involve adjustments (switching occupations say) and resilience (social networks). The governance of drought-related issues involves “building knowledge”, “networking” and “leadership” (Olsson et al 2006). Not u ­ nusually, much of this adaptation and resiliency is draped in the language of community empowerment, adaptive management, community regulation and insurance using market mechanisms. The notion of adaptive capacity with respect to climate change, for example, relies upon a substantial body of anthropological and geographical research which demonstrates, for example, how rural communities in Africa (and elsewhere) adapt to climate change through mobility, storage, diversification, communal pooling, and exchange by drawing on social networks and their access to resources (Adger, Lorenzoni and O’Brien 2009; Agrawal and Perrin 2009; Adger et al 2009). It is one thing to say that “vulnerability is driven by inadvertent or deliberate human action that reinforces self-interest and the distribution of power in addition to interacting with physical and ecological systems” (Adger 2006a:270) but quite another to move from indicators of exposure to a causal structure of vulnerability and a robust theory of power and circuits of capital. Political ecology, after all, in its account of vulnerability emphasized structures of domination; the community was seen as a theatre that had no simple unity, coherence or equality, but was one in which power was contested and fought over, often violently. In these communities nature is internalized within the circulation and accumulation of capital. All of this – to say nothing of a broader grounding in social theory – is strikingly absent from the new adaptation studies. Rather what is on offer instead is a bland and bloodless shopping list of “conditions” for adaptive governance, including “policy will,” “coordination of stakeholders,” “science,” “common goals” and “creativity.” A canonical policy statement like Roots of Resilience (WRI 2008) proposes to scale up “nature based income and culturing resilience,” which require ownership, capacity and connection. Ecosystem-based enterprises, rooted in community resource management, will entail local-state and private-civic partnerships and enterprise networking. 345

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Markets in ecosystem services, and delegation of responsibility to communities and households as self-­organizing productive units, will constitute the basis for survival in biophysical, political, economic and financial worlds defined by turbulence, risk and unpredictability. Some will be resilient, but others will be too resilient or not resilient enough. Adapting to climate change appears in sum as a form of liberal governance that resembles what Michel Foucault calls biopower (Foucault 2008), in which the art of governing involves the exercising of power in the form of the economy administered to and through populations. How then can we understand the re-emergence of adaptation as a way of confronting not just global climate change but virtually any of the radical challenges currently the goal of global human security? This question is especially intriguing because the new wave of work on adaptation, adaptive capacity and adaptive governance claims to have subsumed within it the insights of political ecology and indeed much else (see Adger 2006a; Smit and Wandel 2006; Janssen and Ostrom 2006). The short answer is the development of second-order cybernetics and the field of complexity science (Rausch and Wolfe 2000;Varela and Maturana 1992; for anthropology see Escobar 2006). Far from invoking immanent determinism and the larger adaptive order, autopoietic organizations of second-order cybernetics58 are totally self-referential because they exist by virtue of what Varela, Maturama and Uribe (1974) call operational closure. All living things are autopoietic in that they are continually self-reproducing according to their own internal rules and requirements; these systems are closed on the level of organization but open to perturbation on the levels of structure.59 What is recognized as a trigger or perturbation is specified by the entity’s organization and operational closure. All of this leads to unpredictable effects, emergent properties and radical contingency. In his application of the new systems theory to human social systems, Luhmann (1993, 1993a) sees modern society as a particular species of functionally differentiated social system composed of operationally closed self-referential function systems. Modern capitalism operates on a horizontal plane in which different autopoietic function systems exist side by side with no one system able to overdetermine the others (Rausch and Wolfe 2000:24). This account reproduces all of the problems of liberal technocratic functionalism. It is incapable of addressing the radical asymmetries of power which make some autopoietic systems function well for a few but badly for many others. Complexity, as Wolfe notes (1994), seems utterly beside the point. The epistemological insights drawn from second-order cybernetics – contingency and the partiality of knowledge – run up against the principle of contradiction: that a sort of philosophical idealism and the formal equivalence of different observers in the social field confronts the real lack of equivalence in the world of political economy. Haraway’s (1991) critique of systems theory, as a form of technological functionalism with an ideological appeal to the alleviation of stress that is crucial to the reproduction of capitalist social relations, seems as applicable to the second- as to the first-order cybernetics. Climate adaptation is now embedded within a view of life understood as a living and complex adaptive system characterized by self-organization, non-linear, combinatorial transactions and radical contingency. Adaptation can only be meaningfully performed through contingency, which is to say through the conduct of shaping our exposure to, and creative exploitation of, contingent events and processes in nature and from the “independent actions and interventions of biological being itself ” (Dillon 2008:315 and 2007). Contingency and transformation are the modalities of safety and survival, or more properly qualitative change in the nature of the living thing itself is the condition of possibility of security. Adaptation and resilience cannot be achieved solely by actuarial logic alone but is governed by an anticipatory logic: it seeks not to forestall through calculation but “to incorporate the very unknowability and profound uncertainty of the future into imminent decision” (Amoore 2013:9). 346

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Irrespective of its specific referent object (drought, youth, finance), the defining quality of virtually all resilience thinking, at least in the social and socio-ecological sciences, is a robust relationship to systemic durability, flexibility and a culture of preparedness, preemption and precaution (Anderson 2010). But as Dillon and Reid note of contemporary liberal rule, resilience’s reference point is all of life itself, and the practices required to “pre-empt the emergence of life forms in the life process that may prove toxic to life” (2009:87). Resilience is in the business of forming governable subjects, a technology that, as Neocleous (2013:4) observes, facilitates the connection between state bureaucracy and the political imagination. It is he says “nothing less than the attempted colonization of the political imagination by the state” (ibid.:4). In sum, resilience provides a powerful anticipatory calculus, one of a flotilla of technologies associated with a security assemblage, rooted in a full-spectrum, and in some respects paranoid, social imaginary – a hyper-dangerous and threatening future. It is to this world of possibilistic logic that climate adaptation – and environmental risks more generally – must speak.

Geographies and anthropologies of global environmental threats The ubiquity of resilience as a category to understand a whole raft of environmental risks and threats – that is to say the securitization of Nature – is a textbook illustration of biopolitics understood as the administration and regulation of life processes (Lemke 2011) drawing, in this case, upon a distinctively modern theory of life as a complex adaptive system. Resilience as it has emerged as a set of practices deployed by state and civil society groups, forms the basis for addressing the uncertainties and instabilities not simply of nature, but of contemporary capitalism, as well as the national security state, and it does so by endorsing a distinctive form of biopolitics and technologies of the self. Building resilient systems draws upon the adaptive and self-organizing capacities of the market above all else; resilience dissolves directly into neoliberalism understood as a way of life (Foucault 2008). At the time that Holling was laying out his first ideas, Friedrich Hayek delivered his Nobel Prize speech, which, as Walker and Cooper (2011) brilliantly show, has an elective affinity with Holling’s ideas. Hayek was moving toward his mature theorization of capitalism as an exemplar of the biological sciences: the extended market order is “perfectly natural… like biological phenomena, evolved in the course of natural selection.” (Hayek 1988 cited in Walker and Cooper, 2011:158). In his Nobel lecture, he returned to the epistemology of limited knowledge and uncertain future, a position which led him to explicitly reject and denounce the Club of Rome Limits to Growth report. It was to biological systems and complex, adaptive, and nonlinear dynamics that he turned to provide the guide for his “spontaneous market order” of capitalism. The world of climate adaptation – but one could select virtually any environmental threat (see Chen and Sharpe 2015) – is a world of shocks, contingencies, tipping points, thresholds and risk (Collier 2008). Not surprising anthropologists such as Andrew Lakoff and Stephen Collier and geographers like Jake Kosek have begun to think about disasters, threats and environmental risks as inseparable from questions of security, militarism, Big Science and the global neo-liberal order. Drawing from the putative self-organizing properties of social systems, climate adaptation and resiliency constitutes a calculative metric for a brave new world of turbulent capitalism.The Global South’s ‘bottom billion’ provides a laboratory in which the poor will be tested as the impacts of change manifest (IPCC 2014). Resiliency has become a litmus test of the right to survive in the global order of things (Cooper 2008, 2006;Watts 2013).To return to Foucault and his notion of an expanded sense of biosecurity, resiliency-adaptation is an apparatus of security that will determine the process of “letting die.” The Global South in particular has become the testing ground for a vision of security and care in which life is nothing more than permanent 347

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readiness and flexible adaptiveness. As such, it is a deeply Hayekian project – an expression of the neoliberal thought collective – in which the idea of a spontaneous market order has become, ironically, a form of sustainable development. Building resilient peasants and resilient communities in say the West African Sahel or north India turns on an unleashing their self-organizing potential by welding together indigenous capabilities and knowledge with the powers of the self-organizing market. Adaptation is self-organizing and self-engendering – consistent with life itself – entirely resonant with a sort of Hayekian economic subject and a spontaneous economic order (O’Malley 2010, 2011). From the vantage point of anthropological and geographical political ecology, the new ­adaptation-resiliency theory raises at least two sorts of concerns. First, even if self-organization is taken as a powerful expression of the “laws of social systems”, one can plausibly ask what are the analytical consequences of one form of self-organization (the market) dominating others; and why is it that the self-organizing capacities of the state seem correspondingly underplayed (Connolly 2013). At the very least self-organization must address why some forms of self-­ organization in a complex field of self-organization trump others. We are in short back in the world of how climate adaption analyses capture the fact that capital is a dominant working and evolving ecological system. And second, in normative terms adaptive capacity and resilience should be placed on the larger canvas of modern forms of biopower: theoretically they are consistent with a particular theory of life which is enrolled as a form of rule and governance. Adaptation entails embracing risk by linking the politics of the possible with “the drive for new areas of profit and the authorization of new actions and decisions” (Amoore 2013:11). Adaptation, security, risk management, and resiliency are the contemporary hegemonic forms in which particular forms of life constitute the basis of neoliberal rule and governance. The challenges of adapting to the radical uncertainties and perturbations of global climate change invoke a new sense of homo economicus. A decision-maker in self-organizing, adaptive systems confronting catastrophic threats becomes “an entrepreneur of himself ” (Foucault 2008:241), a sort of hedgefund manager for her contingent, turbulent and unpredictable life.

Notes 1 One thinks here of John Berger’s prescient observation penned in the early 1970s that “it is now space rather than time that hides consequences from us” (1974:40). It also needs to be said that Jameson himself was a key player in this spatial turn, a booster of the work of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey in particular and the progenitor of the term “cognitive mapping” (see Jameson 1990). 2 Institutionalised anthropology and ethnology outside of museology appeared, at roughly the same time, in a raft of associations and societies spawned by exploration and commerce. The Ethnological Society of London and the Anthropological Society of London, for example, were established in 1843 and 1863, respectively. The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland (1871) was the result of a merger between these two rival bodies. The Société d’Anthropologie de Paris was founded in 1859. 3 David Livingston (1992:163) notes that: “…for many years certain key members of the Ethnological Society of London – men like John Crawfurd, Francis Galton, ….Richard Burton, A.R. Wallace, and Thomas Hodgkin – were also members of the Royal Geographical Society, and that at the British Association of the Advancement of Science, Section E was established in 1851 under the rubric of Geography and Ethnology”. The Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography was founded in 1878 as an extension of the activities of the Association of Anthropology founded in 1873 in large measure as a result of the Vega voyage through the passage north of Siberia. 4 Ratzel’s Political Geography published in 1897 drew upon Spencer’s evolutionary history to offer an organic theory of the state and included his famous idea of lebensraum (additional territory deemed to be necessary for national survival). The natural laws of the territorial growth of the state were consistent with, and indeed legitimated, the notion that imperial history was the spatial story of the struggle for existence (Livingstone 1992:200).

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Joined at the head 5 For an excellent discussion of race, empire and nation in geography and anthropology see: David ­Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition. Blackwell, London, 1992, chapter 7. 6 Carl Ritter (1770–1859) was appointed to the first modern Chair of Geography in Berlin in 1819. He offered a unitary vision of geography as a science of the totality, a living picture of all human and natural features. He offered, like Herder, the prospect of an essential unity of history, anthropology and geography, nature and culture capable of constituting a science of regions and areal differentiation. All of this was nothing less than the very laws of the Creator. Ritter’s notion of Erdkunde was the last in the tradition of providential theories of geography (see Livingstone 1992:124). 7 It needs to be said I think that the disciplinary boundaries in anthropology are more rigorously policed than in geography as regards the porosity of movement (meaning appointments) between the disciplines. 8 There is also an untold history of the relations between geography and archaeology. It is significant for example that the director of the Institute of Archaeology in London between 1980 and 1996 was Berkeley trained geographer David Harris (and as it happens my old undergraduate tutor). 9 In my own case it was quite profound both at University College London as an undergraduate where Daryll Forde was obligatory reading for geographers, and at Michigan during the 1970s where I spent as much time with anthropologists Skip Rappaport, Mick Taussig, Aram Yengoyam, and Kent Flannery as I did in the Department of Geography. 10 I have addressed this question in my paper Space for Everything, Cultural Anthropology,Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 115–129 but it is of course now somewhat dated. 11 Glacken’s foundational book Traces on the Rhodian Shore (1967), and Paul Wheatley’s Pivot of the Four Quarters (1972) are the definitive statements of their theoretical projects. 12 About 40 percent of the participants were in the geosciences, 28 percent in biological sciences, 12 ­percent in the social sciences, and 20 percent in applied fields like administration, urban planning and the like. 13 The conference included seventy scholars of wildly different theoretical persuasion (and the book was no less diverse). In a review of the book, Eric Wolf (1957) noted the sharp conceptual rift between those who believed in ecological equilibrium and the logic of systems theory, and the “technologists” who emphasize change and accumulation. As I argue this was central to the tensions between cultural and political ecology. 14 See Philip Wagner of the University of Chicago:Wagner P.L. 1960. The Human Use of the Earth. ­Glencoe, IL: Free Press. 15 Berkeley Geography had sister departments, institutions and theoreticians of cultural ecology in the discipline. A trio of Geography Departments at the University of Chicago, the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, all of which had connection to Sauer in some way and each with connections to anthropology, were key sites in the emerging network of cultural ecological thought. 16 Curiously neither Kroeber nor Steward seemed to have been familiar with the French geographic tradition of terroir and genre de vie associated with Paul Vidal de la Blache, and Lucien Febvre and Max Sorre. 17 For a review of this anthropological research see Robert Nettings’ Cultural Ecology published in 1977 and Peter Vayda’s edited collection Environment and Cultural Behavior published in 1969. 18 Geertz (1963/1974:6) considered that his research could be considered within cultural ecology while Conklin viewed his program in terms of the ‘ethnoecological’ interpretations of key moments and conjunctures in the ordered sequence of the swidden cycle (Conklin 1957/1975:154). 19 The Macy Conferences held during the 1940s on cybernetics and the influence of Gregory Bateson in particular were seminal influences on the incorporation of what one might call ecological and systems thinking into the social and behavioral sciences (Heims 1991). 20 Marvin Harris’s (1968, 1968a) controversial cultural materialism while claiming to integrate Marxism and the earlier cultural ecological work of Steward resembled in many respects the sort of evolutionary functionalism of much ecological anthropology. 21 Much of this cultural ecological work was brought together in two canonical collections: Y. Cohen (ed.), Man and Adaptation, University of Chicago Press 1971. 22 The geographer Marvin Mikesell identified a ‘New Guinea syndrome’ centered on ANU comparable in importance to Sauer and his students’ research focus in Mexico. The key figure for our purposes was British geographer Harold Brookfield. He was appointed to the Research School of Pacific Studies at ANU in and actively recruited postgraduate students and, as a result, the numbers

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of geographers and anthropologists conducting research in PNG grew. What was often called the ­‘Brookfield School’ at ANU spawned a raft of influential cultural ecologists such as Eric Waddell and Diana Howlett. Brookfield’s program was in quite fundamental ways driven by an engagement with Esther ­Boserup, The Conditions of Agricultural Growth. London, Allen and Unwin, 1965. Much of this ANU research is drawn together in Harold Brookfield and Paul Brown, The Struggle for Land: ­Agriculture and Group Territories among the Chimbu of the New Guinea Highlands, Oxford University Press, 1962; and ­Harold Brookfield and Doreen Hart, Melanesia: A Geographical Interpretation of an Island World. London, Methuen, 1971. Hazards analysis operated on quite naïve and culture-bound perception studies and rather pedestrian stressor-response models. This early work is quite different from some of the later critical sociological and anthropological analysis of so-called natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina (see for example the Social Science Research Council project on Katrina: http://understandingkatrina.ssrc.org/, or the extraordinary documentaries on New Orleans and the Katrina disaster by Spike Lee, especially When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006). Likewise disasters (operating under the sign of humanitarianism and complex emergencies) have been taken up recently in a quite different register by anthropologists (see Lakoff 2010) and geographers (Greenberg 2015). In addition to Gilbert White, the three major geographers in hazards research were Ian Burton, Robert Kates and Martin Bowden. The Environment as Hazard, Oxford University Press 1978; see also Kates R.W, and Burton I, eds. 1986. Geography, Resources, and Environment.Vol. 1. Selected Writings of Gilbert F. White. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Andrew (Peter) Vayda was Rappaport’s doctoral advisor at Columbia and while they are typically seen as foundational figures (and holding similar views) in ecological anthropology, their theoretical opinions actually diverged quite sharply. Vayda believes, contra Rappaport, that ecosystems are not in fact self-regulating, self-organizing, and adaptive, and that Rappaport’s program is a “chimerical undertaking” (1986:298). In their Melanesia research both Vayda and Rappaport had close connections with geographers at ANU. A hallmark of much (but by no means all) ecological anthropology was its attentiveness to material and energetic flows in ecosystems, an approach that built upon the foundational work of ecologist Howard Odum developed in the 1950s (see Odum 1971). Much of the best of the early work is collected in Dove and Carpenter (2008). General purpose systems are, as Slobodkin and Rapoport (1974:181), put it, forms of “existential games” in which there is no way of using the winnings for any other purpose than continuing to play the game for as long as possible. Successful evolution requires the maintenance of flexibility maintained in the most parsimonious way (organisms and populations must not make excessive or unnecessary commitments to perturbations in the system). Rappaport met Bateson in Hawaii in 1968 and noted that he was “the most profound of influences upon me” (Rappaport 1994:167). See Bateson’s hugely influential collection of essays, Steps to an Eco­ logy of Mind (Ballantine, New York) published in 1972. Homeostasis is understood as “a set of goal ranges on a corresponding set of variables…taken to be vital to the systems under consideration” (Rappaport 1969:4). Bateson’s (1972) economics of somatic flexibility, Frisancho’s (1975) research on human functional adaptation to high-altitude hypoxia, and the theoretical work of Slobodkin and Rapoport (1974:198) on parsimonious evolutionary flexibility are cases in point. Specificity in Rappaport’s model refers to the nature of the goals of regulatory mechanisms at different levels. Low-order controls regulate specific operations in accordance with reference values established by higher-order operations. In social systems the higher order the goals or propositions are general ‘principles’ which, in Rappaport’s account, are often sacred and unverifiable or beyond reach. A number of behavioral scientists explored, in the 1960s and 1970s, how these principles of living systems can be deployed in public policy or in the analysis of social systems more generally (the work of Ross Ashby, Gordon Pask, Emilio Lazlo, Edgar Dunn, and James Miller for example). But the person whose work – sadly neglected and largely unrecognized – who followed Bateson and Rappaport most diligently, operating in the frontierlands of social theory and post structuralism, was the brilliant Canadian communications theorist Anthony Wilden and his account of morphogenetic systems: see System and Structure, Tavistock, London, 1972 (see Watts 1983 for a review). The work of Flannery (1972) on ‘hypercoherent systems’ extended this approach in his archaeological work, and Catalan biologist Ramon Margalef ’s very influential book Perspectives in Ecological Theory (1968) also explored similar lines of thinking.

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Joined at the head 34 Wolfe (2000:177) makes the important point that Bateson for example emphasized contingency in observation yet smuggled back in the notion of an overarching “pattern that connects” – this is in effect Rappaport’s adaptive order of living systems”. What at first glance looks like contingent observation is instead determined ‘from behind’ by the total pattern of existence immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology. 35 Some anthropologists such as Bill Durham identified as human ecologists which, for the purposes of this essay, I am taking as roughly synonymous with ecological anthropology. In their concern with fitness and evolutionary theory this form of human ecology is quite different from the famous Chicago School of Sociology and its human ecology subfield which emerged in the 1920s. 36 The concept of adaptation, with its inevitable affinity to evolutionary thinking, to Charles Darwin and to modern ecological theory, is a textbook example of what Raymond Williams (1977) calls a keyword. What distinguishes keywords like adaptation is that they are ‘binding’ in relation to certain activities and their interpretations and ‘indicative’ of certain forms of thought (Williams 1977:15). Keywords, by definition, circulate widely and are deployed among heterogeneous communities in a variety of ways. Their historical semantics are typically complex and unstable.The language of adaptation is ubiquitous, if not promiscuous, traveling effortlessly across biological, cultural, social and ideological boundaries. Whether deployed as a cover term for simply being in synch with a particular context or as an expression of evolutionary fit and fitness, by the 1970s the term could be found in research institutions, in the professions, in popular discourse: swimming animals have adapted by developing flattened appendages like fins; a lawyer is well adapted to her profession; therapists help us adapt to the stresses of urban living; rituals and cultural institutions among indigenous groups function as adaptive mechanisms for sustainable development; the Federal Reserve fulfills adaptive functions with respect to contemporary American capitalism. 37 These issues were central to two lines of thinking that subsequently shaped the ways in which adaptation and adaptive governance has been applied in the contemporary period especially around global climate change. One emerged in the early 1970s and is associated with C.S. Holling’s theory of resiliency in ecosystems (1973, 1986, 2001) to which I return below); the other is the so-called ‘second-­ order cybernetics’ which attempts to address the dialectical character of organisms and environments, and the contingency of observation (to which I also return below). 38 It needs to be said that Rappaport in the second edition (1984) of Pigs for the Ancestors provides an extraordinary 200 page (!) response to his critics/these critiques in which he concedes that he was not able to actually demonstrate that the kaiko pig ritual acted as a thermostat: “I probably did not emphasize sufficiently the role of conscious, pragmatic decision making in the affairs of the Maring. It did not occur to me that they would be noticed by readers in the course of the account even if they remained, in part, implicit... [Moreover] nowhere in the text is there any suggestion that it is otherwise” (Rappaport 1968/1984:321). He spent much time defending his version of functionalism and responding to much of the critique of his putative negative feedback model by outlining his theory of maladaptation, that is to say how social systems were not adapting, or were deviating from a normative adaptive order. Rappaport however made no systematic effort to shows how the dynamics of capitalism as a system was or was not maladaptive. 39 Cultural ecology was attacked as vulgar materialism reinforcing rather than redoing the classical capitalist fetishization of “things”, the domination of subjects by objects rather than by the social relations embodied in, and symbolized by, those objects (see especially Friedman 1974). Some of this critique was directed at “cultural materialism” associated with Marvin Harris (1968). 40 Sahlins (1976:298) criticized the kind of ” empiricism” expressed in Pigs for the Ancestors as a type of “ecology fetishism”, because it practice “the idea that nothing is in fact what it appears, i.e. culturally, but is translated instead into natural coordinates or consequences”. 41 Robert Brenner’s (1976) foundational work on agrarian capitalism provided both a provocation and a central point of debate in the return to these “transition questions”. 42 For fuller accounts of the history and development of the field see Watts and Peet (2004). 43 While this concern with perception typically was expressed in terms of indigenous knowledge’s and subsequently green discourses of various sorts, there was nevertheless a powerful echo here of Rappaport’s notion of a cognized environmental model. 44 Eric Wolf (1972) had in fact pointed to a very similar agenda in which he invoked the term political ecology in exploring the relations between ownership, property and local ecosystems. 45 Brookfield teamed up subsequently with Piers Blaikie to organize the important political ecological text Land Degradation and Society (1987).

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Michael J. Watts 46 Nietschmann, who had received his degree under William Denevan at Madison (a student of Sauer and James Parson at Berkeley) was part of the Michigan group working with anthropologists Roy ­Rappaport, Kent Flannery, Henry Wright, Bill Durham and others, but left Michigan in 1977 to join the Berkeley Geography Department. His paper entitled “Cultural Ecology: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” (sadly unpublished) delivered to the AAG meetings in Seattle in May 1974 made his grave misgivings about the adaptation framework explicit. 47 Wisner was involved in a major study of drought in eastern Kenya (and subsequently on water work in Tanzania) in the early 1970s which represented an important critique of the earlier natural hazards work of White and Gilbert that I described earlier. His work on “denaturalizing” natural disasters with Phil O’Keefe and Kirsten Haring was especially important. Much of the political ecology work on hazards and disasters was pulled together in P. Blaikie, T. Cannon, I. Davis, B. Wisner, At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’s Vulnerability and Disasters (London: Routledge, 1994). Wisner’s critical approach was very much shaped by the Marxist inspired critical development debates in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi during the 1970s. 48 Hecht completed her PhD dissertation in 1980 and moved to the Planning Program at UCLA. A number of other persons – both faculty and students – on the Berkeley campus were working on political ecological questions including Louise Fortmann, Carolyn Merchant, myself, Nancy Peluso and in a subsequent generation Donald Moore, Nathan Sayre and Jake Kosek. 49 Piers Blaikie received his PhD in 1971 and had worked on family planning, diffusion theory, and the spatial structure of agriculture in the 1970s before turning to land degradation and his regional political ecology approach. Again this emerged from an engagement with the political economy of development, in his case through work in Zambia, north India, Morocco and Nepal. 50 Bruno Latour (2004) offers a rather different account of political ecology (including a political ecological critique of cybernetics, hierarchical and adaptational thinking) which turns on its inability or unwillingness of political ecology to grasp its own politics and ecology, not the least of which is the fact that the risk-free objects they study that are increasingly becoming tangled, boundaryless and invisible (indeterminate) (ibid.:21–23). 51 It needs to be said, however, that much of the current writing from Anthropology on ecological questions is woefully ignorant of the earlier (and indeed much current) Geographical research on political ecology. 52 Kosek is a Berkeley trained geographer but spent two years in the Stanford anthropology department and perhaps more than any other geographer working on ecological issues has continually engaged with anthropological theory and with cultural anthropologists. 53 The Journal of Political Ecology established in 1994 has been, since its inception, a joint anthropology-­ geography enterprise typically edited by a consortium drawn from both disciplines (currently Simon Batterbury [geographer at Melbourne] and James Greenburg [anthropology at Arizona]). 54 In their comprehensive theoretical overview, Martin-Breen and Anderies define resilience as “the ability to withstand, recover from, and reorganize in response to crises (2011:7). Drawing upon the lineage of ecological theory and the influential work of C.S. Holling, Nelson, Adger and Brown (2007) define resilience as the amount of change a system can undergo while retaining (i) the same structure and function, and (ii) the options to develop (2007:396). Both of these definitions clarify the extent to which system, function, structure, and capacity to adapt – that is to say the conceptual hardware of General Systems Theory and the work on adaptive orders – are resilience’s defining properties. 55 A complex adaptive system is a system in which “large networks of components with no central control and simple rules of operation give rise to complex collective behavior, sophisticated information processing and adaptation via learning or evolution” (Mitchell 2009:13). 56 Complex adaptive systems (CAS) entail (i) complex collective behavior, (ii) signaling and information processing, and (iii) adaptation which together qua system exhibit non-trivial emergent self-organizing behaviors. 57 Marcus Taylor’s important book The Political Ecology of Climate Change Adaptation covers much of the ground I cover here and is deeply critical of the climate adaptation framework (see also Bahadur, Ibrahim, Tanner 2010). He argues that adaptation turns on a separation of climate and society that mirrors the modernist (Cartesian) distinction between natural and social world.While I agree with much of his critique, the theory of complex living systems draws this line very differently by folding all systems into an overarching theory of self-organization and functional differentiation. 58 The key theoreticians are drawn from biology (Francisco Varela), and physics (Ilya Prigogine), and from the social sciences (Niklas Luhmann).

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Joined at the head 59 Organization denotes the relations necessary among components for a system to be a member of a class while structure denotes the actual relations and components that constitute a unity, making its organization real (see Wolfe 2000:255). Structure and organization are continually self-producing.

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19 ENtANGLED SUBJEctS AND Art OBJEctS Shelly Errington

After Picasso and Vlaminck “discovered” l’art negre (African art) at the turn of the twentieth century, the category “Primitive Art” gradually emerged during the first half of that century: galleries of Modern Art sold it; avant-garde collectors acquired it; it was promoted in major museums’ temporary exhibitions (see Errington 1998; Flam 2003). The “it” came to mean not just African art, but also Oceanic, pre-Columbian, and American Indian. Prototypical Primitive Art was made by “tribal” peoples, at that time living mainly in Europe’s colonies or in the colonized margins of nation-states in the Americas. They were thought to live in a static, repetitive realm of tradition outside history or before it; the hallmark that qualified it as “Authentic” was that it was made for local ritual purposes rather than manufactured to sell.The fiction at the time was that those authentic tribes were virtually untouched by the West, and that they continued their “traditional” ways. After World War II and the concomitant de-colonization of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, what was being called collectively “Authentic Primitive Art” was promoted to a much wider audience. For several decades, from roughly 1960 to 1990, it had a Golden Age. During these years, the category was at its most visible and most prestigious, and its constituent terms (authentic, primitive, art) were least questioned. I choose these dates to bookend the Golden Age because in 1957 Nelson Rockefeller opened the Museum of Primitive Art, housing his own collection, on 54th Street in New York, just across the street from the Museum of Modern Art; and in 1960, the first PhD in art history written on Primitive Art (pre-Columbian) was awarded. It was the beginning of a 30-year era of scholarship, prestige, increasing popularity, and rising prices. But by around 1990 the implications behind the thinking that produced the 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in 20th Century Art” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art had been explored and exploded (see Clifford 1987; Price 1989; Torgovnick 1990) and the assumptions behind the idea of Authentic Primitive Art had been all but dismantled. Further, in 1989 the Asia Society of New York exhibited “Dreamings: the Art of Aboriginal Australia,” paintings done with acrylics on canvas—which mixed elements of traditional/modern and authentic/inauthentic in confounding ways. By the early 1990s the category Authentic Primitive Art was dissolving rapidly in scholarly circles. By then, “authenticity,” especially linked to “the primitive,” ceased to be convincing labels for anything, much less “art.” “Primitive Art” became “tribal art,” “ethnic art,” “art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas,” art from the “Global South,” or “art from the Fourth World” 359

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(marginalized peoples within nation-states). “Authenticity” and pure types, whether used of peoples or of arts, has also been discredited from its prior sense that “tribal” peoples lived in a mystical condition of timelessness prior to history (see Clifford 1987). Moreover, in the twenty-first century, everyone everywhere is known to be living in contemporary time, not the Stone Age, and it is widely known that everyone is globally connected to markets—if only through commodity supply chains and the Internet. It is true, of course, that notions about “authenticity” and the “primitive” persist and continue to influence and even to shape the markets for the Art, arts, crafts, artifacts, and souvenirs made by people from the Global South—usually to their disadvantage. Nonetheless, by the end of the twentieth century, those two terms had lost credibility, at least when linked to the term “Art.” Unlike the terms “authentic” and “primitive,” however, the term Art has not fallen into disuse or been discredited. Quite the contrary. The term Art has been an expansive and expanding rubric since it acquired its modern meaning at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was separated from Craft (see Kristeller 1965 and Abrams 1985 for its “modern meaning”). In the nineteenth century, for instance, Joseph Alsop (1982) claimed, four “revolutions in seeing” allowed more and more kinds of objects and architectures to be classified as “art”; and “decorative art” and “folk art” also expanded the term’s capaciousness. In the twenty-first century, I have argued (2007), a combination of market forces, prestige factors, and the collapse of the distinctions between “high” and “low” arts resulted in a tendency in the art marketplace and increasingly in the museum world to elevate all “crafts” to the status of “arts.” In short, objects gathered under the rubric Art have multiplied hugely in both kind and number during the last couple of centuries. But, prototypically, they were art objects—paintings, certainly, and free-standing sculptures, or things from ancient civilizations and colonized peoples that could pass as such. Art objects in this traditional sense were relatively autonomous and free-standing; they could be bought, sold, displayed, and collected as commodities. And that was the situation of most art objects for most of the twentieth century, whether it was art made in the European tradition or arts from other traditions. Art historians and others studied them as autonomous objects, and typically they were seen as depictions or representations of something else. The Renaissance canon supposedly had been smashed at the cusp of the twentieth century, but Renaissance art remained at the center of the discipline—not only for its prestige and beauty, but also as a model of what art at its best should be. Generations of art historians, trained on Panofsky’s (1955) essay “Iconography and Iconology,” analyzed art objects (bounded by their frames or isolated on their pedestals) for form, color, line, and (iconic) content. Art historians were trained to practice what James Elkins has called “Normal Art History,” whose rhetorical moves include periodization and categorization, and whose content “is concerned principally with documentation, archival evidence, patronage, conservation, and iconography” (Elkins 2002). By the time of Abstract Expressionism, Modernism was considered to be over, and iconic content was a non-issue—but painting and sculpture still dominated as main art forms. But Euro-American Art itself broke out of the frame and hopped off the pedestal around 1960, the date art historians usually give as the end of the trajectory of Modern Art and the beginning of Contemporary Art. Commodifiable art objects did not disappear by any means, nor will they ever, but artists experimented with new possibilities. “Contemporary Art” is not one thing—indeed, what distinguishes it from Modern Art is that it has no clear linear historical trajectory, hence no avant-garde on the cutting edge of the new. Contemporary Art from the 1960s to the present has little unity of theme or form, but an important recurrent theme in arts known as “Contemporary” is an antipathy to object-ness: think of Happenings, Fluxxus, Performance Art, Relational Aesthetics, and Social Practice Art, not to mention installations, temporary 360

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or site-specific, and thus not transferable. Rather than being solid objects, for instance, Art could be an evanescent performance; or a projected image; or a temporary wrapping of buildings or telephone poles; or a social practice that reveals troubling conditions; or a device that reveals an environmental condition, and so on. Then too, by the early 1990s the notion of Visual Culture and Cultural Studies began having a serious impact. With Visual Culture legitimized, art historians could study street art, outsider art, hybrid art, kitsch, and all manner of things. These developments shattered conventional art history’s subject matter and eventually its methods. Few of these new “arts” could usefully be conceptualized as autonomous art objects, and many of these artworks, both elite and not, have little representational content. They mean by other means. New ways of thinking about art have perforce emerged in the discipline of art history. Here is something at first glance curious: just at the period that hip Euro-American artists were turning away from objects and toward temporary, evanescent, not-museum-based ways of making art (around 1960), that very same moment initiated Authentic Primitive Art’s Golden Age, when it emerged into prominence as highly collectible and displayable Art objects, suitable for prestigious galleries and for décor in expensive modernist living rooms. Of course, how could it be otherwise? The most prestigious and “authentic” arts had been looted or rescued and brought from the former colonies to Euro-America during the colonial expansion and stabilization in the nineteenth century, deposited into natural history museums as material culture. Coming to rest in museums, they were necessarily shorn of the cosmologies and practices in which they had been embedded. In the twentieth century, having become primitive art, they were sometimes modified so as to conform better to the aesthetic of Modern Art (see Rubin 1984). They had become Art, which is to say, art objects, bounded usually not by a frame but by a vitrine, or perched on a pedestal. Or both. Isolating them thus had the effect of emphasizing their formal qualities, promoting them as Art rather than as “culture” (see Clifford 1998). Indeed, curators who promoted “tribal” arts as modernist tended to emphasize their formal qualities, even claiming that to know anything about their context of production and use detracted from our ability to see them as Art (see Errington 1998). This view was widespread; as one curator at a major art museum said to me in the late 1980s, he would exhibit primitive art to provide aesthetic context but not cultural—not like natural history museums, he said, that put beautiful artifacts in dioramas along with tools, cooking pots and stuffed chickens running around. (He had a point: to be seen as works of art, they must be seen as works of art.) Whereas Authentic Primitive Art in Euro-American art museums was largely shorn of cultural context, much was being learned about it in situ during its Golden Age. The former colonies had become nation-states in mid-century, and by around 1960 had opened up to researchers from all over the “developed” world, including anthropologists and art historians. Those researchers who studied “art” in situ by doing fieldwork found that the objects were intrinsically multimedia, entangled in cosmologies, songs, chants, stories, and bodily movement. They discovered not just art in the form of objects but also aesthetic sensibilities that pervaded life.Thus Clifford Geertz (1983) wrote of art as a “cultural system.” Jeremy Coote, writing about the aesthetics of the cattle-keeping Nilotes of the Southern Sudan, remarked he was convinced “that progress in the anthropological study of visual aesthetics has been hampered by an undue concentration on art and art objects” (Coote 1992: 245). Masks, say, or basket-making, or designs impressed upon stones and clubs, emerge in some studies looking less like objects and more like the tangible results or traces of other processes and ideas, all connected. In this chapter, I will propose a view of “Art” different from both a conventional understanding of art objects and also different from the work on aesthetics. It is my conviction that when a work has been designated as a piece of Art, we see it and understand it in ways deeply 361

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inflected by long histories of art-making and art-viewing in the West. Our visual habitus (broadly, disposition) and rhetorical strategies for describing and analyzing art are difficult to escape; they are so pervasive and commonsensical that they go largely unnoticed.1 Our unconscious presuppositions about the nature of art objects probably have their origins in Renaissance theories of representation and the scholarship on it. Here they are, simply and baldly. We have naturalized the distinction between two and three dimensions as common sense. We continue to make the eighteenth-century distinction between fine Art and mere craft and utility, and to naturalize that century’s categories of Belles Arts—especially painting, sculpture, and architecture—as though they are both natural categories and distinct from each other. We tend to imagine that the viewing subject is separated from the seen object, and that the object’s meaning lies largely in its recognizable content—what I call the “iconic presupposition.” In the following, I will first of all argue that our habits of seeing shape the ways we imagine and therefore see the arts produced outside the traditions and historical eras for which these deep habits of seeing were appropriate and enlightening. A basic aspect of the notion that art gains meaning by representing is a distinction and separation between the viewing subject and the viewed (art) object. After a brief foray into some Renaissance and humanist presuppositions about art, and an equally brief primer on semiotic theory, I will explore some alternative “ways of seeing” and ways of imagining the arts made by Fourth World peoples. I will argue that inscribing the world with meaningful marks and thereby acting upon it is a more basic art-making deed than is representing the world; that explicating artworks by analyzing their facture will be more enlightening than decoding their iconography; and that subjects and objects make each other rather than occupy different realms. I discuss some helpful scholarship derived from ecology and action-network theorists and suggest some implications for the study of non-Western arts, both older ones now largely in museums, whose meanings should be revisited and recuperated in this light, as well as Modern and Contemporary Art made by Fourth World peoples. Subjects and objects construct each other. As a preface to the oddity of the Renaissance, I begin with a striking anecdote by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss that links the subject to art, in this case, face painting.

A famous anecdote In Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s memoir, travelogue, and reflections on his trip to Brazil in the 1930s, he recounts asking a Caduveo woman of South America in 1935 to draw her facial painting. Rather than producing a representation of a face with a painting on it, she drew the face painting directly on the paper, as though the paper were a face. He reflects on it further in his article on “Split Representation”: It is clear that the artist intended to draw, not a face, but a facial painting; it is upon doing the latter that she concentrated all her attention. … . The artist drew the facial design in a realistic manner; she respected its true proportions as if she had painted on a face and not on a flat surface. She painted on a sheet of paper exactly as she was accustomed to paint on a face. And because the paper is for her a face, she finds it impossible to represent a face on paper, at any rate without distortion. It was necessary either to draw the face exactly and distort the design in accordance with the laws of perspective, or to respect the integrity of the design and for this reason represent the face as split in two. It cannot even be said that the artist chose the second solution, since the alternative never occurred to her. (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 259) 362

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Figure 19.1  Caduveo woman with painted face (left). Facial design reproduced by a Caduveo woman on a sheet of paper (right) Source: Drawing by Boggiani, 1892 (left); collection of C.Lévi-Strauss (right)

Comparing the two drawings that Lévi-Strauss reproduced in this article, one a sketch by a ­ uropean of a woman’s face with a painted design, the other the sketch made by a Caduveo woman E of a design for a face, we can see that the European drawing, done on a quadrilateral surface made of paper, represents what is in the world (in this case, a person’s head with a painting on her face). The Caduveo woman, by contrast, treats the piece of paper as a piece of the world, and inscribes the design upon it, just as she would inscribe a face with a design (as Lévi-Strauss points out). For the Caduveo woman, the difference between the face and the paper as a surface upon which to apply a drawing is that one is lumpy (the face) and the other, flat (the paper). Drawing on a quadrilateral flat surface did not signal to her that she was supposed to represent a face-design; she took Lévi-Strauss’s request to be to draw the face-design. From this anecdote I draw two conclusions for my argument. One is that the woman treated the human face and the piece of paper as surfaces on which to inscribe her design. Designs could be inscribed on either one. Second, the blank flat piece of paper in front of her was not “two dimensional,” and it did not signal to her that she should use it as a surface on which to depict something that exists in the three-dimensional world. Indeed, why should a person who is marking a surface need or want to distinguish conceptually between two and three dimensions unless the person was trying to represent three dimensions in two? That was the discovery or invention of the Greeks, rationalized and perfected in the Renaissance.

Subjects and objects in the renaissance: representation and resemblance Writing about Renaissance art, the art historian David Summers calls the representation of three dimensions in two dimensions the first “virtual space” (Summers 1987; and see Grau 2003). It is 363

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a way of creating an illusion of space when there is none. Indeed, it creates a parallel world, one that looks just like the one we live in. Summers uses the term “optical naturalism” for the style adopted and rationalized in the Renaissance to assert that a representation or picture or image is constructed to look the way it looks when viewed from a single eye. Another term for “optical naturalism” is “perspectival art” or “illusionistic art.” A persistent theme in the vast literature about perspectival art is how it constructs a certain type of subjectivity, the individual. The doyen of those studies was Erwin Panofsky, whose Perspective as Symbolic Form (1925) inspired others to explore these and related issues. In his illuminating article “The history of the theory of human proportions as a reflection of the history of styles” (Panofsky 1955), he relates different styles of art in the West to different notions of the subject, which are discernable in the formal organization of the works of art. He points out that Egyptian art made no concession to subjectivity. The Classical Greeks, by contrast, acknowledged the subjectivity of the artist, whose individual talent and vision created the work of art; the subjectivity of the person depicted (the statue seemed “life-like,” full of energy and movement, contrasted to the stiff statues of Archaic Greece or to Egyptian art); and the subjectivity of the viewer (for there was acknowledgment of the viewer’s position when looking at the art).The culmination of this trend, which was in abeyance in the Middle Ages, was in the rationalized space of one-point perspectival art of the Renaissance, in which the picture plane is organized for a viewer who is outside the frame of the picture.2 As he writes, Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically ‘modern’ conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast. (ibid.: 99) Another classic work on perspective is E.H. Gombrich’s (1968) Art and Illusion, particularly his chapter “The Greek Revolution.” In it Gombrich divides all the world’s art into two fundamental types: illusionistic (think Renaissance, think optical naturalism, think perspective) and “conceptual” or “schematic” art. Gombrich writes that most of the world’s art traditions (apart from those of the Greeks and the Renaissance) are Conceptual or Schematic art, because, he writes, the artist is drawing a concept, or working from a schema, rather than trying to represent the way something looks to an observer. Renaissance art also depended on the learning of schemata, but, Gombrich claims, the artist who strives for illusionism modifies the schemata he has learned to more nearly approximate the way things look to him or to an imagined observer, from a particular point of view at a particular moment in time. The artist does that not just by making the art/ drawing, and so on, but by matching it to whatever he is looking at and trying to represent. Thus Gombrich sees a constant back and forth between “making and matching” as the fundamental process of the artist who strives to achieve illusionism (largely between roughly 1450 and 1800). In foundational studies of Renaissance Humanism, the development of perspectival art is linked not just to an emerging notion of the subject, but also to its opposite, what lies outside the subject: an emerging notion that space is empty and homogeneous, a secular container for objects (see White 1987; Summers 1987). The implication drawn by some commentators is that the style of optical naturalism separates the viewer from the world, making the viewer into the subject and the world outside into the object. Readers will realize that these notions of the world “outside” the subject resonate with notions of Cartesian space and mind/body dualism. Here I want to emphasize two related features of the style of optical naturalism/illusionism that imply each other. 364

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First, we tend to take it for granted that a drawing or an image put onto a flat surface is a representation of something in the real, three-dimensional world. The second is that “art” (what counts as art, what is made as art, what is designated art) historically in the European tradition is itself an illusion, it is not “real.” It is not the world itself, it is an imitation of the world. Flat surfaces may be used in this style to depict three-dimensional space, thus to create virtual worlds or parallel worlds, as Summers argued; but sculptures, if they are “art,” are similarly illusionistic and representational, even if they exist in three dimensions.3 In practice, if art “represents” something outside itself, something in the “real” world, we often assume it is, at some level, figurative. (See Errington 1998 for examples from the nonWest.) After all, if something is done in the style of optical naturalism, it will be recognizable to the art-viewer. The aim of the style is to make a piece of art that looks like something in the world from a particular subject’s point of view. It is presumed to be at some level mimetic, an imitation of reality, which at its most basic means that it is presumed to signify, to convey meaning, to point at its referent, by resembling it.The philosopher C.S. Peirce called this type of referencing (by resemblance) “iconic” signification. A piece of art or an image does not actually have to be optically naturalistic, or be figurative, or to have iconic content; for instance, a painting can be said to “represent” inner processes or a mood; or it can be said to be represent something mythical or fictional; or it can represent something schematically, using a diagram or a stick figure. In all cases, convention and cultural habits of looking play a big part in a viewer’s recognition that something “looks like” something else. The habit of decoding iconic content and asking what a piece of art “represents” are widespread among viewers and non-expert commentators on art.

The obsession with iconic content Many works have been written that qualify or modify the notion that a picture made in the style of optical naturalism achieves meaning by resembling something in the world, and to dispute what I call “the iconic presupposition.” For instance, Nelson Goodman (1976) insists that recognition of “resemblance” between a piece of art and its reference is a matter of convention. E.H. Gombrich (1963) suggests that art functions as a substitute for something, for example, an ancestor figure substitutes for the ancestor/s, or a stick for a horse in a child’s play. In much Contemporary Art the notion that a piece of art must be self-contained and that it is readable through its iconic content has become irrelevant. Moreover, anthropologists have tried to modify the iconic presupposition by insisting that artworks aggregate meanings through use, through the cosmologies that inform their production, through bodily practices and social relations. Nevertheless, these insights have generally not entered the common-sense viewing habits of most viewers and scholars in the Euro-American world. I have mentioned that the default “way of seeing” a piece of art is to strive to understand its content as though it represented something in the “real” world figuratively, as though it was constructed to be viewed by an upright observer—as though its basis was realistic but it became modified and “stylized.” The presumption is that the observer’s primary semiotic act is to look—that art is an object to be read by a subject who stands outside it. And of course the categories of art, derived from the eighteenth century, are taken for granted—how many surveys or textbooks of non-Western arts have we seen that divide the works into Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture? Such assumptions have been deeply naturalized, including especially those distinctions required by the invention of virtual space: that is, between the “real world” of three dimensions which we inhabit and the virtual world of fictive space, the realm that art inhabits. 365

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Examples abound—in museum labels, on the Internet, in textbooks—and certainly in the art market and in art writing.4 Two older examples include a book that Bill Holm (1965: 13) wrote on Northwest Coast design. His section called “Degrees of Realism,” divides designs into three types, from the most recognizable (“configurative”) to the least (“distributive”).To raise the issue of “degrees of realism” suggests that Holm and his readers share a notion that art is essentially mimetic; his ostensibly neutral “descriptive” typology in fact itself re-naturalizes that notion. By the same token, non-Western arts are sometimes deemed “stylized” or “abstract,” terms that make sense only if one imagines that the natural or obvious way to depict the world is in optically naturalistic styles. In the 1984 exhibition “‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Giacometti’s “Tall Figure” [1949] was juxtaposed with an elongated figure from Nyamwezi, the label claiming that both of them “rejected realism.” How could one of the pair reject realism (optical naturalism) when its makers never tried to achieve it in the first place? We can make sense of the label only if we recognize the implicit assumption, a very deep one in Western art-thought, that Art seeks to imitate a visible reality from a human’s point of view (see Rubin 1984). Even in the twenty-first century, insightful anthropologists of non-Western arts may struggle to untangle such presuppositions for viewers. In an enlightening chapter called “A Totemic Landscape: arts, maps, and people,” Howard Morphy discusses how Aboriginal paintings (acrylics on canvas) can, and cannot be, likened to maps of territory. He writes humorously that these paintings “are often discussed as though they were bird’s-eye views of particular areas of land, as though reflecting an aboriginal tradition of aerial photography” (Morphy 1998: 101). In 2012, the anthropologist of contemporary Australian Aboriginal art Jennifer Biddle explains that paintings of even the most “abstract” Aboriginal artists’ paintings are often juxtaposed to representations of the real, including cartographic maps, “iconic” translations, and photographs …. For in stressing the “real” as the only possible interpretation, Central and Western Desert paintings are depicted not as landscapes constructed in complex cultural terms, but as imitations of it. Landscape—nature itself—is objective in this model. It is simply present, unmediated by the work of culture, code, and art. Easily grasped, readily reproduced, and visually apprehended by iconographic keys, maps, and photographs, Central and Western desert paintings look like what they represent in a proto-symbolic system of assumed universal reference and vision: anyone and everyone—Aboriginal or not—can “depict” its signs. Such forms of documentation actively encourage a “decoding” interpretation, one in which deciphering the relationship between icon and referent, symbol and landscape, painting and place, becomes the primary task: here is karnta (woman); there is wardapi (goanna)…. (Biddle 2012: 80–81) I am not suggesting by any means that iconography is either absent or irrelevant to understanding some, perhaps many, arts from the Fourth World, both made in the past and contemporary. I am suggesting that concentrating our efforts to find referents for marks and designs in art work results in an impoverished understanding of them, and it can be highly misleading, particularly if it includes an idea that the viewing subject stands apart from the work. I believe that to be the case not only for classic pieces of Authentic Primitive Art, which ought to be revisited and restudied, but even for many newer Contemporary “Tribal” Arts made to be displayed as art and inhabiting quadrilateral frames. To begin, it will be useful to expand the vocabulary with which we can approach signification or meaning-making. 366

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Saussure and Peirce among the indigenes: a primer on semiotics A great semiotician of the twentieth century, Ferdinand de Saussure, was a Swiss linguist whose lectures were published posthumously in 1918 (Saussure 1959). He was more interested in language than in other kinds of signs as the foundation of his semiotic theory. His ideas became useful to many thinkers in the second half of the twentieth century, especially during the years of post-structuralism and post-modernism in the 1980s and 1990s (see Culler 1976). Saussure’s semiotic theory rested on the notion that Signs are arbitrary—in fact doubly arbitrary. First, he claims that the linguistic Sign (roughly, a word) has two parts, the Signifier (i.e. the sound in a language) and the Signified (the concept it evokes in the minds of the speakers of that language), and that those two parts are arbitrarily connected to each other. Second, he does not believe that linguistic signs, even nouns, correspond to or point to things in the world; therefore, direct translation between languages is impossible. Rather, for him the part of a sign that has content (the Sfd) is a concept, not a reference to a thing, and not necessarily in the world. Further, Saussure is interested in la langue (“language,” more or less, but not as spoken), not in la parole (utterances by people). As a result, the subject—certainly any sort of humanist, intentional subject—disappears from Saussurian theory. It would seem that la langue itself hovers over the world, only very occasionally connecting to it or with it. It gives shape to the world (largely as a field of oppositional contrasts) and creates categories for the people who participate in that langue. It does not directly refer to the world, and certainly does not map it mimetically. Saussure-derived theories are profoundly anti-essentialist: according to them, one cannot know something in itself, for it has no positive value, no meaning, and no existence except in relationship, which many usefully call the “semiotic field.” French Structuralists and post-Structuralists use many aspects of Saussurian thought: the absence or contingent existence of human subjectivity; anti-essentialism; and the shaping of human thought and therefore of the world itself (insofar as it means) by linguistic categories and by discursive fields. Saussurian-derived thought has been on the whole more influential and more used in literary and human sciences, especially in their post-modernist phase, than its Peircian rival (described below). Here is the problem, however, if one is interested in art, its makers and its users: news of the arbitrariness of the sign has not reached the vast majority of humankind! Leaving out the subject has some advantages (in my view), but that generally requires leaving out the human sensory apparatus, its habitus, and its local ways of making and understanding human thought and art-making “from the inside,” which anthropologists usually strive to do. The semiotic theory of the early twentieth-century logician C.S. Peirce stands for many thinkers as an alternative. Most important, Peirce thinks that signs require an interpretant (somebody who recognizes them as signs) and that signs (including arbitrary ones) refer to something in the world. This stance has both advantages and disadvantages, but it provides us with some useful vocabulary and concepts. Here I will explain only the most basic and (for me) useful aspects of Peirce’s ideas. Peirce (1958) proposed terms for three basic modes of signification: iconic, indexical, and arbitrary. (He called arbitrary signs “symbolic,” but I will call them “arbitrary.”) According to Peirce, anything can be a sign—but signs do not exist in themselves; they exist as signs in relation to what they point to or refer to. Furthermore, somebody (let us stick with humans for now) has to make these associations—a sign refers to something outside itself when it is a sign for someone, that is, when someone recognizes that it is a sign. That someone Peirce calls the interpretant. He writes that signification therefore inevitably has these three components—the thing referred to, the sign, and the interpretant who recognizes it as a sign—even if in any given instance one of this trio is “empty.” 367

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Peirce’s Iconic signs point or refer to something outside themselves by resembling it. Peirce divides iconic signs into three types: the image, the diagram, and the metaphor. I do not know what exactly counted as an image for Peirce, but I am sure that a piece of art done in the style of optical naturalism, or a photograph with recognizable content, would. A diagram is more obvious: a blueprint for a house, a stick figure, an international symbol for “luggage” at an airport, or for that matter, a mandala. A metaphor is the third type of iconic sign. I would think that the mandala would also be regarded by Peirce as a metaphor of the Buddhist cosmos, as well as a diagram of it. Another example might be a house construed as having a human life-cycle, as among the Batammaliba (Blier 1987).5 Indexical signs for Peirce are traces or leavings of an event. Peirce uses the example of smoke as the index of fire. An excellent example is a footprint left in the sand, and, as we shall soon see, the Walpiri of Australia regard the footprint as the primary model of the signifier; indeed, they view the landscape itself as the traces left by ancestral beings.The whole landscape for them indexes the goings and comings of such beings. Arbitrary signs point to things outside themselves only because of conventional associations. Language, especially nouns in language, are prime examples. Hence, the words arbol, pohon, and tree all refer to … hmmm, we will call them “trees,” for the moment, and assume for the sake of clarity that Spanish speakers and Indonesian speakers and English speakers are all referring to the same sort of thing. No signs are pure for Peirce—all signification uses more than a single modality. Peirce gives the example of the thermometer, measured by mercury expanding in it. The mercury reacts physically to heat and cold by expanding or contracting. In that sense, it indexes the ambient temperature—its movement inside the glass tube is a trace of a physical event, and can be read as such. But the calibration of temperature itself by numbers is arbitrary, entirely conventional— witness the fact that water freezes at 0º Centigrade but at 32º Fahrenheit. Another example is a photograph. On the one hand, it is an indexical signifier, because light (a physical wave or particle) came through the lens of the camera, hit the prepared surface (film), and its differential effect left traces, which, once the film is developed and printed, can be read as an indexical sign, an evidencing of what really happened.6 At the same time, a photograph often resembles (in our trained conventions)—something outside itself—a person, a scene—and hence has an iconic component. And at the same time, the notion that some 3×5″ flat shiny paper with colored marks on it “looks like” and therefore refers to the Grand Canyon or whatever, is highly conventionalized and requires training to be recognized as “looking like” the referent. Much has been written about photographs and their indexical, iconic, and conventional status, or lack of it. And so it goes for anything that signifies anything to anyone by any tangible means: the modalities of signification are mixed. As an anthropologist, I would say (far more than Peirce would have) that reference is largely in the eye of the beholder. Or, to echo Nelson Goodman (1976), the connection between an iconic signifier, even a perspectivally rendered picture, is conventional; the resemblance lies in the trained and cultured/cultivated/socialized perceptual apparatus of the beholder. (As Goodman points out, the resemblance between any two portraits is far greater than the resemblance between one of them and the person it depicts.) Understanding the culturally formed motivational structures, the affects, the concepts of the cosmos, their trained sensibilities and culturally formed motivational structures and viewing habits, can help us understand how things mean in a particular culture or historical period. The art historian Michael Baxandall (1972) calls this trained visual habitus “the Period Eye.” Arbitrary or conventional codes loom large in some formalist semiotic theories of meaning derived from Saussurian thought. For our purposes here, it is interesting that the semiotician 368

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Umberto Eco, who makes much of the idea of codes, rejected the Saussurian notion of the pure arbitrariness of signs and drew on Peirce’s semiotic theory in order to construct his own comprehensive theory of semiotics (Eco 1976). He embraced (some) of Peirce because he wanted his theory to include “natural signs,” such as heartbeats and earthquake tremors, collected by scientific instruments as EKG and numbers on the Richter scale, from which a trained scientist can “read” and make inferences. Eco’s scientists can “read” the marks made by nature, but they must be highly trained to do so and their reading of nature’s inscriptions is mediated, indeed made possible, by technology. Unlike scientists using instruments to read natural processes that inscribe the screen or write on the graph, Australian Aboriginal peoples read the landscape directly, as traces of natural real events and ancestral beings.

The world and art as indexical signs The Walbiri people of the Northern Territory of Australia are semioticians of the first order. They think through art, through the markings that they and the Ancestral Beings made when they roamed the world. Collectively, they have reflected deeply and concretely about signification. They think with and through their world by reading the landscape and making marks (jiri) upon it, upon the ground or the soil, which is a membrane (my metaphor) separating and joining the Dreaming (djugurba) from everyday life (yidjaru).The Dreaming or Dreamtime is located beneath the ground when it is contrasted to yidjaru; its visible and materialized manifestation is above ground, the realm where humans live. The anthropologist Nancy Munn’s foundational work on Walbiri semiosis, from which I draw the above, was a revelation at the time. She studied with great sensitivity and detailed analytical rigor their system of signs (the marks or jiri), linking it to narrative and ceremonial practices, embedding it in their cosmology. Her book Walbiri Iconography (1973) and some shorter accounts (Munn 1964, 1966, 1973a) open us to understanding the Dreaming, the system and meanings of marks, and the ancestral potency they depict and enable as a force. Explaining the “Dreaming” in a deep and comparative but accessible and beautifully illustrated book on Aboriginal art, Howard Morphy tells us that in the beginning, the world was a flat featureless plain, with no humans. Ancestral beings emerged from the earth and began to give shape to things. Some looked like animals, like the witchetty grub or the emu or the ­kangaroo; others like rocks or trees; others were complexes of things, like bushfires or beehives and honey (paraphrased from Morphy 1998: 68). The ancestors were concerned that the “humans who succeeded them on the earth would continue in their footsteps, would follow the rules of conduct they had instituted and would commemorate their lives. As the ancestral beings journeyed across the earth they therefore made a record of their actions not only in the form of the landscape, but also in the songs, dances, paintings, ceremonies, and sacred objects that they created on the way” (ibid. 1998: 84). The Dreaming names a time in the past when the ancestral beings roamed the earth, and at the end they went into the ground. But the Dreaming is “as much a dimension of reality as a period of time … .it is time in the sense that once there was only Dreamtime. But the Dreamtime has never ceased to exist, and from the viewpoint of the present it is as much a feature of the future as it is of the past. And … the Dreamtime is as concerned with space as with time—it refers to origins and powers that are located in places and things” (ibid.: 68). Returning to Munn’s book’s title, Walbiri Iconography does indeed deal with “iconic” markings. These marks are multivalent and polysemic. All round-ish enclosed shapes denote vaginas or breasts, but also waterholes and camps, and holes where the ancestors went into 369

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the ground after the Dreaming; all elongated enclosed shapes denote penises, but also tracks and digging sticks that penetrate the sand; thus fertility and sex and abundance resonate with these key shapes, although there are more lines and shapes. The marks, called guruwari when controlled by the patrilineages, also depict elements such as people sitting or lying on the ground, snake and kangaroo ancestors, tracks, streams and trees, and more. Combinations of the marks, in the context of the songs sung while they are being made, can become the “tracks” of multiple stories. The “landscape” does not pre-exist the ancestral beings; therefore, guruwari both resemble (diagrammatically) aspects of the landscape and also resemble (diagrammatically) the marks left by Ancestors during the Dreaming—but those are the same thing. As Munn puts it, “[d]esigns constitute pictorial presentations of objects such as paths, camp sites (waterholes or hills), footprints or other items which Walbiri regard as marks left by the ancestor in his travels. A guruwari design is essentially a picture of the ancestor’s marks” (Munn 1964: 88). Interestingly, Munn never mentions the term “indexical sign” in this particular book, but elsewhere as she puts it, the system of marks that the Walbiri inscribe upon the world is closely associated with “the kind of sign relation exemplified by the footprint, [which] seems to provide the controlling metaphor or model governing Walbiri thought concerning the relation between graphic signs and the ancestors for which they stand” (Munn 1964: 90). Munn discusses the fact that these signs are potent because, although iconic, they are equivalent to the ancestral beings’ footprints. Writing decades later about the Walpiri (different spelling, same people), who now make paintings on canvas with acrylic, Jennifer Biddle explains even more emphatically why signs are potent. The kuruwarri (Munn’s guruwari), she writes, are the signs—the potent designs whose power is derived from their being ancestral markings: the marks made, left over by Ancestors during the time of the Dreaming as they roamed the same country as Walpiri do (where they still have access to traditional countries)—camping, hunting, fighting, defecating—creating the landscape, flora, fauna, weather and people as they are today. The corporeal marks made by the ancestral beings during the Dreaming, she continues, are the same marks (places, features, forms) used in painting. Hence the constitutive force, power and effects associated with marks and mark-making: to rejuvenate country, species; to control fertility; to regulate social relations and relatedness; to cause illness, to heal and to harm are just some of these effects. (Biddle 2007: 56) Like other signs in Peirce’s view, the indexical signs made by the Dreaming are mixed—part indexical, part iconic, and part arbitrary—and inference is possible only for trained eyes and sensibilities.

Making subjects who make objects who make subjects Saussure’s and Peirce’s theories are replete with insights and useful ideas, even when applied to arts and to worlds their authors never contemplated. The theories I have briefly outlined might help us go a long way in understanding art if the primary human way of interacting with the world and with art were to look at it from a point of view standing outside it all. 370

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Significant attempts have been made to construe art not as merely passive—something to be looked at—but as active, as having a kind of agency. Alfred Gell’s (1998) Art and Agency, with considerable rigor and/but firmly within a framework of British Social Anthropology, claims agency for art, albeit “secondary agency.” (I write “and/but” because I find it difficult to extract his senses of the “agency” of art apart from that framework.) The art historian David Freedberg’s (1989) The Power of Images focuses not just on images within the frame but on viewer response, which means images have “power” (especially erotic art and pornography). The anthropologist Liza Bakewell (1998, 2011) points out that some images (such as The Virgin of Guadalupe) do not just describe the world but act upon it, and uses the term “image acts,” to parallel Austin’s “speech acts.” My point in contradistinction to the semiotic theory I just sketched, however, is not about the power of images or even about images per se, but about the act of inscription. True, humans “read” their worlds using culturally encoded interpretive habits, but we also act on the world and on ourselves as part of the world by pounding, piercing, carving, tracing, cutting, incising, wrapping, beading, scarifying, painting …. shaping both the world and ourselves, and activating the world’s powers, in the process of making and marking. In the process of making, we make things, but we also make subjects: we make ourselves. One way that persons make themselves in the process of making things is through movements and training of bodily capacities, which have been “cultured,” that is, formed and cultivated, into culturally specific motivational and embodied conscious entities.7 In an article on “spatial presentation of cosmic order in Walbiri iconography,” Nancy Munn makes this point as clearly as it is possible to do: I have been concerned with the circle-line figure as a spatial “concept” which may be actualized in a range of concrete media and social contexts.That is, I have approached the problem largely from the point of view of langue rather than parole. From the perspective of the social process, however, the circle and line emerge in temporal activities and are parts of bodily behavior.Thus during the construction of ceremonial objects or drawings in the sand, the extrinsically produced forms are meshed with the bodily behavior of the producer. In sand drawing or painting, for example, the hand itself circles to produce the visual shape, and in ceremonial performances, as I have pointed out, the shapes may sometimes be acted out by the dancers’ movements. In ceremonial also, the contact between sacred objects or designs and the body is an important aspect of the activity: designs are painted on the body and ceremonial objects are handled or worn, sand paintings form the focus of bodily actions and are obliterated through dancing. … Philosophical premises about the macrocosmic order are continuously brought into the sense experience of the individual Walbiri man through the agency of this iconic symbolism. The symbols thus articulate the relationship between the individual or microcosm and the macrocosm, and through the immediacy of touch and sight bind the two together. (Munn 1973a: 215–216) Munn’s reference to langue and parole is a reference to Saussurian semiotics. Munn focuses on the Aboriginal art maker’s parole, making “utterances” in the form of the making of art and ritual. Their utterances are both about the world, speaking its meaning and shape, and on the world, giving it meaning and form and animating it as the Dreaming, making at the same time their own bodies/selves as culturally specific embodied consciousnesses through “making utterances” using the system of culturally encoded elements (langue) in making designs and performing rituals. In these actions/utterances, they are thinking through art and acting in, with, and upon the world. 371

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The fact that subjects make themselves is well known in earlier Japanese and Chinese music-­ making and calligraphy, where concentration and practice result in a product—a performance of shakuhachi music on the flute, a picture done in brush strokes—but where the product itself can be read not only for its autonomous beauty but also as an indication of the spiritual state of the musician or artist: an indexical sign of their inner state. In those cases, the making of art is about individual character development as much as it is the incorporation of cosmic values, although they can amount to the same thing. Making art is no less a bodily training than is wrestling. Sometimes, indeed often in the history of the world, self-making is by direct inscription onto persons. One strand of anthropological thought regards persons as inscribed and thereby made human within a particular social structure, as Turner (1980) has the Kayapo and Gell (1993) has the Polynesians; inscribing persons is a way to inscribe them with social statuses and to reproduce society, which they perforce reflect. Some other approaches imagine person-making as world-making (Goodman 1985) in a larger sense than social organization-reflecting and -reproducing. Humans inscribe designs onto themselves and artifacts, turning artifacts—what is made—into animate and cultured beings. Suzanne Blier’s The Anatomy of Architecture (1987) explains in many ethnographically rich pages how houses in Batammaliba (in Africa) are treated as people, as they are “born,” their mud “skins” smoothed to a state of flawless beauty, then incised with the cicatrice designs of women so that the houses, too, can enjoy their beauty and youth when they are young. An example used by Clifford Geertz, drawing on the work done by Robert Farris Thompson, is the Yoruba use of incised lines. Thompson writes The same verb which civilizes the face with marks of membership in urban and town lineages civilizes the earth: Ó sá kéké; Ó sáko (He slashes the [cicatrix] marks; he clears the bush).The same verb which opens Yoruba marks upon a face, opens roads, and boundaries in the forest: Ó lànòn; Ó là ààlà; Ó lapa (He cut a new road; he marked out a new boundary; he cut a new path). In fact, the basic verb to cicatrize (lá) has multiple associations of imposing human pattern upon the disorder of nature: chunks of wood, the human face, and the forest are all “opened” … allowing the inner quality of the substance to shine forth. (Thompson 1974: 35–36; quoted in Geertz 1983: 98–99) In that respect, the act of incising among the Yoruba is reminiscent of the South American Yekuana’s practice of painting themselves and other artifacts and items in their realm with pigments that were ritually prepared from particular plants: “Canoes, paddles, baby swings, baskets, gourds, bows, arrows, benches, drums—all are coated with enough paint to safely incorporate them into the sacred circle of Yekuana culture. Without the symbolic coverage these pigments provide, an object, animate or inanimate, is simply not considered human” (Guss c.1990: x). Among the Yekuana, the safety and protection of the inscription lay in the pigments and their preparation, more than in the design. Thompson wrote about the “civilizing” line among the Yoruba, whereas Guss discusses the specially prepared paint among the Yekuana as “protecting.” Morphy, Biddle, and Munn show us how the markings made by Australian aboriginal peoples enliven, reenact and recreate the world through meaningful form. Lévi-Strauss, long ago, wrote of designs creating the person and the world as a piece: [in] native thought, … the design is the face, or rather it creates it … . (Lévi-Strauss 1963: 255). Decoration is actually created for the face, but in another sense the face

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is predestined to be decorated, since it is only by means of decoration that the face receives its social dignity and mystical significance. Decoration is conceived for the face, but the face itself only exists through decoration. (ibid.: 262) A vase, a box, a wall, are not independent, pre-existing objects which are subsequently decorated. … Thus, the chests of Northwest Coast art are not merely containers embellished with a painted or carved animal. They are the animal itself, keeping an active watch over the ceremonial ornaments which have been entrusted to its care. Structure modifies decoration, but decoration is the final cause of structure, which must also adapt itself to the requirements of the former. The final product is a whole: utensil-ornament, object-animal, box-that-speaks. (ibid.: 260–261) At a highly abstract level, we might say with Lévi-Strauss that inscribing the world makes the world for humans, giving it social existence. Slightly closer to the ground, we might say that humans work on the world (including themselves) in order to make itself and themselves comprehensible, to socialize it, to turn the unknown and unsignificant and unformed into the understandable, the signifying, and meaningful form, to make the world “human,” to enculture it and themselves. At an ethnographic level, we could say that inscribing the world with designs does not do just one thing; meanings are located in local practices, and are embedded in local materials’ significance and in local practices of making. That cannot surprise: not all people went through Europe’s eighteenth century Enlightenment, which invented l’homme, as Foucault (1977) put it. The notion of l’homme (derived ultimately from the Humanism of the Renaissance) imagines a Human Nature prior to historical and cultural construction and opposed to Nature. For close to two centuries the enabling assumption of social sciences was the universality of Man, who most resembled white European upper class men; the great question and issue for nineteenth century social sciences and their twentieth century descendants was to ascertain why and how everyone else (largely the colonized) managed to fall short of that ideal. Knowledges produced on the presupposition of l’homme and all it implies adopt what I call the “manikin” theory of persons, in which cultural (etc.) differences are merely decoration, like clothing hung on a manikin. Body inscriptions, for instance, will be seen as mere decoration on a pre-existing and universal Man, or alternatively as emblems of a pre-existing status and identity. Cultural form is superficial decoration on a universal core. Subjects as well as objects and materiality have been rethought in the last decades of the twentieth century in a range of human and biological sciences, enabling us to construct our knowledges in newer frameworks. Scholars of STS (Science Technology and Society) and archaeologists have led the kinds of rethinkings I turn to now.

All things considered subjects and objects The drift of the rethinking of materiality and meaning that has taken place is to imagine humans and all else in their worlds as things in interacting relationships, often called “ecologies” or “networks,” depending on the intellectual genealogy being evoked. In networks and ecologies, there is no prior pre-existing objective world (see both Goodman [1976] and Latour [1993] for very

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different takes on that claim); hence everything has presence rather than representing something else (see Dean 2014). What appear to be objects are in fact assemblages of things that have come together for a short or a long period of time. Because humans and other assemblages—from mountains to monuments to feather headdresses to mushrooms to your beloved pet dog to lichen and bacteria—exist in their own time frames, they all appear to each other as relatively permanent or relatively short lived. They are all entangled with each other in complex ecologies of symbiotic and interacting materiality and agency. All are constantly in a condition of becoming and unbecoming, of entangling and disentangling, of coalescing and loosening. These things live in worlds of multiple co-evolving species, in which all things have agency to affect and shape each other. As such they exist in and at different levels and logics and ecologies, which themselves are networks of relationships with each other. To identify some thing is less to name a self-enclosed entity than it is to draw a temporary circle around what we (in our particular temporal embodied state) perceive as an entity in order to conceptualize it—identifying not an object but a focus of attention. In this scheme, humans are not imagined as the usual skin-bounded entities who stand apart from the world. Antedating or bypassing trends in STS, anthropologists have long thought about notions of subjects as well as objects that are not self-contained. Mauss’s The Gift (1990 [1925]) and his article “Techniques of the Body (2006 [1934]” have lately become highly usable.Archaeo­ logists analyze the chaîne opératoire, the concept introduced by Mauss’s student Leroi-Gourhan (1993), which provides a methodological approach for examining the integration of tools and techniques, or the relationship between matter and the cognitive routines and embodied gestures used to transform it.The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern referenced Maussian notions of the person and the gift in her The Gender of the Gift (1998); her work on the performative self made the partible self comprehensible in a rigorous analysis of society as a system of exchange, performance, and connections; gender, for instance, becomes not an aspect of “biology” of the unitary person but an aspect of intentional cultural transaction (ibid.: xi). But note that intentions exist within culturally shaped motivational systems, likewise exchanges and connections. Although she wrote on art and self-decoration, the implications go far beyond either. In this scheme, likewise, things are not autonomous and unitary but exist within semiotic and material fields which can be analyzed as constructed by culturally shaped intentions in historical moments. Two recent works explicitly pull together actor-network theory with the study of things that might be art. The scholar of art and religion David Morgan writes about sacred art, whereas the archaeologist Ian Hodder analyzes ordinary things like tools and bones. In “The Ecology of Images” David Morgan (2014) envisions an ecology or network of things whose nodal points present themselves as unitary objects but which are in fact assemblages. The nodal points of greatest interest to him are sacred arts, and he spells out his views using the golden reliquary of Sainte Foye, in Languedoc, containing skull fragments of a tenth century saint. Why does this image have power? Devotees would answer that it is the power of the r­ elics itself; but without the framing device of a reliquary, a shrine, an altar, a church interior, an authorizing narrative, proof of ownership, and provenance to stabilize its identity, a bone or a tooth or a strand of hair easily loses its value and slips out of the category of being special, ­Morgan points out (citing Geary 1986: 174). Moreover, the relic lies within an assembled apparatus of material scaffolding and a network of social relations—the pilgrimage route, and protocol of petitioning the saint, the competition between abbeys: “Without the apparatus, the relic is virtually invisible” (2015: 19). And, as a category of experience, the sacred is not a single thing but takes place over time. Morgan calls Sainte Foye a “focal object,” “a pivotal node in a network because it is responsible for constructing subjects … [by meeting] the eye of the viewer as a corresponding other… 374

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[it] works in tandem with an entire field or ecology to draw our attention to it” (ibid: 21). And a “focal object is an interfacial node, the place where all that is unseen becomes visible and interactive.This happens in many different forms . …” (ibid: 22). He views the focal object as an interactive device, like a mask used in ceremonies of the Northwest Coast of North America, a node that makes the network accessible and usable. He notes that religious and political iconoclasts understood that “[t]o destroy the mask is to destroy the performance of the network” (2015: 37). (Anthropologists might add that colonial victors understood it as well: not just graven idols were smashed, but ways of making worlds; in fact, tattoos and body painting were almost always forbidden.) Ian Hodder’s book Entangled (2012) builds on the work of other archaeologists and STS scholars to present a comprehensive and useful vision of networks, assemblages, and “entanglements.” He understandably focuses on “material culture” and useful things such as tools; he names and leaves conceptual space for affect and cultural cognition, but does not develop them. He beautifully explicates assemblages and emphasizes their impermanence—for they (things) have no essences as either material things or categories. Eventually they will disassemble and reassemble into other configurations that will appear to someone, no doubt, to be solid, bounded, and autonomous. Both authors give us ways to envision art-things and their entanglements in various worlds over time. Thinking of art-things as assemblages provides a way to imagine the social relations and framing devices that enable or force them to be visible as “art objects” or sacred things in particular historical/cultural moments and to appear to be unitary and autonomous. But if we consider art-things in this sense rather than art objects, we can imagine them as interactive devices or nodes giving access to their powers in the entangled relations and memories and practices that constitute their particular ecologies; this idea also suggests that performances around and with them constitute their meanings and shape our bodies and how we mean to ourselves. The case of stones as gods among the Andean Inka (Dean 2014) or inhabited by divinities among South Asian Hindus (Eck 1981) is especially telling, since they precisely do not represent—Eck calls them “aniconic art”—but have presence. In the case of images of the gods in India, Eck explains darsan, which is the gaze of the god looking at the worshipper. We can see these things—“art” hardly fits either—as links and portals to powers rather than as representations. Recognizing art-things as assemblages provokes us to see them not as completed and solid objects that represent something else, but instead to look for their constitutive meanings as the result of the processes, materials, and intentions that went into them. Art historians call this facture—how a piece was made, the histories embedded in the materials that it is composed of, the cognitive, historical, cultural, and affective resonances they have for maker/s of the piece and that they produce in viewers by their textures and associations, the histories of the materials … are all brought together, assembled, by the artist, who is of course using meanings, materials, and motivations entangled in the historical and cultural context.8 Anthropologists, happily, are past masters at describing facture in rich and tedious detail. Indeed that is what makes reading older, densely ethnographic works about house-building, canoe-making, and so forth so slow. Previously, anthropological studies of facture were done in the interests of understanding “primitive technology” and “material culture,” whose presumed intention was generally utilitarian; magic and spells entered the account as an accompaniment to technical processes. (Of course, making and inscribing the world has never been merely a technical and utilitarian matter; as the art historian Esther Pasztory [2005] has argued, making things is a cognitive process, and people think with things.) In some exemplary anthropological accounts of technes, such as Guss’s (1989) account of basketry among the Yekuana, the product of 375

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the techne almost dissolves before the reader’s eyes, as we come to realize that the basket-thing is itself a trace of the social relations, songs, ancestors, stories, and persons who went into making it. Archaeologists, likewise, have always studied facture in order to uncover technical matters (could this arrowhead have been made with a rock shaped like this?). Since the 1980s and earlier, they have been rethinking materiality, aesthetics, and social relations, using the idea of the chaîne opératoire among others. What if anthropologists were to revisit facture in the making of older “authentic primi­ tive arts,” as a semiotic material process rather than a utilitarian technique informed by magical beliefs? What if anthropologists were to attend to facture in the making of Contemporary Fourth World arts? For several decades, those artists have been making what I  have called “art by intention,” that is, items made as art in a Euro-American sense, to be sold and displayed, rather than what I have called “art by appropriation” (mainly ritual objects from the colonies re-contextualized in museums as Authentic Primitive Art; see Errington 1998). Some of these artists are only recently working on portable flat quadrilateral surfaces, and they are inscribing designs and using technes that they previously used on other surfaces and media. Breasts, Bodies, Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience, a remarkable book by Jennifer Biddle (2007), for instance, shows with sophisticated theory and in great detail that Walpiri women artists prepare their skin for body painting, and the canvases on which they paint with acrylics, in the same ways, effectively treating both surfaces as “the ground.” The ground is hugely significant in Aboriginal thought—ancestral beings are below it, their energies actualized in ritual that makes and remakes the above-ground world. Sometimes one sees only hints that noticing facture might expand our understandings. A Mithila artist, Jumuna Devi, “in the early 1980s made a major innovation in the painting tradition: she began preparing the entire surface of the white paper all the painters were using, with a light brown gobar (cow dung) wash . …” (Szanton and Bakshi 2007: 62). Thus prepared, the surface of the paper resembled in color the mud wall the artist was accustomed to inscribing; but it also was the appropriate texture and ground to receive the designs; and we should not neglect to mention the purifying effect of gobar in India, used to cleanse and order the world’s surfaces.

How inscriptions became (art) objects The cicatrices on Batammaliba architecture, the designs in Yekuana baskets, Navajo chants, Yoruba lines … are meaningful and artful, but are diffused over many kinds of surfaces and bodies. Producing commodifiable and displayable art objects out of thoroughly entangled processes and inscriptions was slow in coming. For one thing, many of these inscriptions were intentionally ephemeral, brought into being for particular occasions, sometimes with restricted access to the seeing or making of designs, and then destroyed or hidden or allowed to deteriorate. They had to become art, which, for the most part, meant being converted to media—three-dimensional figures (sculpture) and quadrilateral frames—made for the market. A classic book on this topic is Nancy Parezo’s (1983) Navajo Sandpainting: From Religious Act to Commercial Art, which sketches the slow and jerky transition beginning in the 1920s of sacred sand designs that the Navajo did not want even photographed or sketched, to their eventually being glued onto a stiff quadrilateral surface which could be sold and hung on a wall. A recent and unsurpassed book about the larger process, historically situated in Australian and global markets and categories, is Howard Morphy’s (2007) Becoming Art: Exploring Cross-Cultural Categories, which is about the spectacular success of Aboriginal art, as is Fred Myers (2002) also excellent Painting Culture. 376

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For another, if Fourth World people made tangible objects as art or commodity, it was considered inauthentic. Although Western art has been made for a paying patron or a market for centuries, Fourth World people’s arts, in order to be called “authentic,” could not be made for the market nor use industrial materials. The idea was partly that Fourth World people and their arts should remain pure and untainted by the West, a view disabused by Colonial Discourse. In those decades of the Golden Age (~1960 to ~1990), even beautifully made and cosmologically significant works were deemed “inauthentic” if they were made for sale; lack of authenticity was signaled by the presence of an individual artist’s signature, or if the artist were “tainted” by living in an urban area, or if the form of the piece was not “traditional.” I am thinking here, for instance, of the extraordinary yarn paintings of the Huichol, made in the 1970s and 1980s, which were formerly dismissed and are now highly esteemed (see Neurath 2005), as well as Aboriginal arts painted and inscribed on bark made in the 1950s and 1960s. Such works had a few enthusiastic patrons and collectors, but on the whole they were dismissed as inauthentic, as mere souvenirs or considered as a curiosity. Such arts and crafts used to languish in museum storage, under the radar for art historians and curators, as art historian Ruth Phillips (1998) has pointed out. The conceptual groundwork for reevaluating art objects made for the market by Fourth World people was launched in Anthropology in the middle of the Golden Era of Authentic Primitive Art by Nelson Graburn’s edited (1976) Ethnic and Tourists Arts. But it took a change in the world itself to rid the art world of the idea that art made by Fourth and even Third World people should be “authentic” and “traditional,” not modern or contemporary, to be of value. By the 1990s, ruptures and revolutions in the world’s economies, politics, communications, events, master narratives, scholarship, and popular culture, long hidden and suppressed, had become visible. The most comprehensive shift of the nineties was the de-centering of Europe and reframing of world history as global. With the more-or-less definitive demise of the master narrative of Progress, which for nearly two centuries had put Europe at the top and center of the story of world history (in its eyes), formerly dichotomous contrastive pairs (Europe/non-Europe, Modern/Traditional, Advanced/Primitive) also lost analytical and market power. Those dichotomies had made the non-European side of the pair seem to live outside history, in the “Stone Age” or in a timeless zone, and their arts had to be “authentically” pure and non-European.With the demise of the idea of Progress, it could be acknowledged that we humans are all living at the same time—we are all contemporaries, as Fabian (1983) long ago pointed out. Among the perturbations and fallout of these ruptures and revolutions, we can note changes in the market’s and the larger world’s evaluation of Fourth World arts. In the high-end art market, Aboriginal Art, painted not on bark but on canvas with acrylics, had a major show (not without controversy) in New York in 1989 (see Myers 2002). This exhibition was a ­landmark and turning point in the international market (and see How Aborigines Invented the Idea of Contemporary Art (McLean 2011). At this point, in the twenty-first century, people from Africa, O ­ ceania, and the Americas are producing Contemporary Art (see Smith 2009). A few professional artists are hugely successful, their works admitted to Biennales or featured in one-person shows at major museums. Art history PhDs, and some in anthropology, are being written about them as we speak. And of course some of these PhDs are from the same backgrounds and ­countries as those of the artists. In Anthropology, studying global circuits, transnational processes and global imaginaries moved closer to the center of the discipline, kicked off by Appadurai’s (1996) Modernity at Large and Marcus’s (1995) “Ethnography in/of the World System: the Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography.” Studying modern and contemporary art became possible in new ways for anthropologists—for Southeast Asia (my own area), some outstanding works include Sandra Cate’s (2003) Making Merit, Making Art: A Thai Temple in Wimbledon, Kenneth George’s (2010) 377

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Picturing Islam: Art and Ethics in a Muslim Lifeworld, and Adrian Vickers’s (2012) Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali 1800–2010. Since the late 1980s, commentators have proposed labels and ways of imagining encounters between “the West and the Rest” that point to their relationships (however asymmetrical) rather than their respective purity and authenticity. Many terms have been proposed to name these spaces and attributes of interaction—most prominently, the Middle Ground, the Contact Zone, Hybridity (see White 1991; Pratt 1992; Bhabha 1994). Arts invented by Fourth World peoples and made as art are imaginable only in a space of interaction. These arts are made in collaborations among the artists, the patrons, the market, the materials, the surfaces, the venues, the curators. Perhaps “the Art Market” or “The Art Zone” should name another such space of encounter, parallel to Pratt’s “Contact Zone.” In the Art Zone, arts are not authentic or inauthentic in the old sense, and arts are not purely “traditional” or “modern.” Artists, who only recently (yesterday, or two generations ago) began making art by working on high-end quadrilateral surfaces, may use designs and compositions drawn from, say, body tattoos, or sacred or festive wall paintings. Design ownership may be communal not individual. Artists may have to negotiate and reconceptualize issues such as copyrights and signatures (see Geismar 2013). These recent works can be electrifyingly vibrant in their compositions and messages, and exceptionally beautiful as display objects—even if the buyers understand only superficially what went into them or what they are “about.” Forty or fifty years ago, works in new formats and display venues by Fourth and even Third World artists would have been called inauthentic. Now they are being recognized as leaps of creativity and imagination, as visual/intellectual engagements with the global, national, and planetary conditions we all inhabit. Which is what Art—Contemporary (née Tribal) Art ought to be.

Acknowledgements Thanks to Simon Coleman for his patience, courtesy, and useful comments. Thanks to John Bowles, independent curator, who read an early draft. Thanks to my colleagues in the arts and archaeology, who generously shared their expertise—Jennifer Gonzalez, Carolyn Dean, Diane Gifford-Gonzalez, and Judith Habich-Mauche. And thanks to Larry Silver, who read a very late draft and as always was generous and perspicacious in his comments.

Notes 1 See David Summers (1986) and Carolyn Dean (2006) and (2014). 2 The general point applies to all perspectivally organized picture planes, but Mantegna’s The Dead Christ (circa 1480) shows it dramatically: it places the viewer at the base of the marble slab, near the feet of the radically foreshortened depiction of the Christ-figure, but outside the picture. 3 Here it is more or less mandatory to invoke Plato’s myth of the cave, from which we can infer that the world itself is an imitation of the Ideas or Forms, and that—even worse—art is an imitation of an imitation, hence a third-order reality, an illusion of an illusion. 4 In the nineteenth century, in regimes of visual colonialism as well as in the political and economic sorts, optical naturalism (indeed, the Greek ideal), stood as the explicit criterion by which non-Western arts were judged to be art at all. (See Errington 2007.). 5 Here is a caveat. The term “metaphor” suggests that one item in the pair referent/metaphor is prior, is real. If, however, there is no unmediated knowledge of the world for humans and the terms and frameworks of meaning through which humans perceive and understand the world—then the term “metaphor” applied to some arts is misleading at best. See Langer (1957) and (1967), and Lakoff and Johnson (1980).

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Entangled subjects and art objects 6 It’s for that reason that the inventor of what would eventually become photography, Louis Henry Talbot, called his 1839 publication The Pencil of Nature—the idea was that light itself was a pencil, and it “drew” on the prepared ground. 7 Clifford Geertz’s (1973) article on humans as embodied and conscious animals was prescient, as was Gregory Bateson’s (1973) about the body and the nervous system as the location of the unconscious. 8 See Summers (2003) on facture, especially Chapter 2.

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Entangled subjects and art objects Munn, N. D. (1966) “Visual Categories: An Approach to the Study of Representational Systems.” American Anthropologist 68(4): 936–950. Munn, N. D. (1973a) “The Spatial Presentation of Cosmic Order in Walbiri Iconography,” in A. Forge (ed) Primitive Art and Society. London and New York: Oxford University Press, for Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research University of Chicago Press. Munn, N. D. (1973b) Walbiri Iconography: Graphic Representation and Cultural Symbolism in a Central Australian Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Myers, F. R. (2002) Painting Culture:The Making of an Aboriginal High Art. Durham: Duke University Press. Neurath, J. (ed). (2005) Arte Huichol. Mexico D. F: Artes de Mexico. Panofsky, E. (1955) The History of Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History. Garden City: Doubleday. Panofsky, E. (1991 [1925]) Perspective as Symbolic Form. New York: Zone Books; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Parezo, N. J. (1983) Navajo Sandpainting: From Religious Act to Commercial Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Pasztory, E. (2005) Thinking with Things:Toward a New Vision of Art. Austin: University of Texas Press. Peirce, C. S. (1958) Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Phillips, R. B. (1998) Trading Identities:The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900. Seattle: University of Washington Press; Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pletsch, C. (1981) “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, Circa 1950–1975.” ­Comparative Studies in Society and History 23(4): 565–590. Pratt, M. L. (1992) Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge. Price, S. (1989) Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Saussure, F. D. (1959) Course in General Linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library. Schildkrout, E. (2004) “Inscribing the Body.” Annual Review of Anthropology 33: 319–344. Smith, T. (2009) What Is Contemporary Art? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strathern, M. (1988) The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Summers, D. (1986) “This Is Not a Sign: Some Remarks on Art and semiotics,” Art Criticism 3(1): 30–45. Summers, D. (1987) The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Summers, D. (2003) Real Spaces:World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London and New York: Phaidon. Szanton, D., and M. Bakshi. (2007) Mithila Painting: The Evolution of an Art Form. Berkeley, CA: Ethnic Arts Foundation. Thompson, R. F. (1974). African Art in Motion: Icon and Act in the Collection of Katherine Coryton White. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Frederick S. Wight Art Gallery, University of California, Los Angeles. Torgovnick, M. (1990) Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, T. (1980) “The Social Skin,” in J. Cherfas and R. Lewin (dir.), Not by Work Alone: A Cross-Cultural View of Activities, Superfluous to Survival. Beverly Hills: Sage. Vickers, A. (2012) Balinese Art: Paintings and Drawings of Bali, 1800–2010. North Clarendon: Tuttle. White, J. (1987) The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. London: Faber. White, R. (1991) The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Witherspoon, G. (1977) Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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20 PSYcHOLOGIcAL ANtHrOPOLOGY An awkward hybrid? Andrew Beatty Introduction Psychological anthropology is that branch of the discipline concerned with things psychological— questions of mind, consciousness, cognition, emotion, memory, sanity, rationality, motivation, and personality—in diverse social and cultural contexts. The formula is deliberately vague: outside our own cultural comfort zone we cannot say in advance what should count as “psychological.” Indeed, the indeterminacy of the concept, cross-culturally, forces us to reflect on the validity of our own categories, few of which have exact equivalents in other traditions. If they do not straightforwardly apply everywhere, like the categories of natural science, what objectivity do they possess? Why is an analysis of Melanesian morality with reference to mind, we might wonder, any more valid than a Melanesian analysis of English morality in terms of mana? In psychological anthropology, the challenges that attend any anthropological investigation (do I have the appropriate tools? am I describing the reality out there or only circling my own categories? what difference does my presence make?) are posed in acute form. The ways we imagine, feel, judge, and remember are, on the face of it, less amenable to detached, methodical study than the harder facts of economy and society. Thoughts and feelings cannot be counted like households or observed like markets. By definition, psychological anthropology is up close and personal. And precisely because it deals with the tools of thinking, it must continually struggle with questions of subjectivity and cultural relativism. How to describe the experience of someone who hears ancestral voices or believes she is controlled by God? Delusion or divine inspiration? Whose criteria apply? Evidently, the cultural setting, the responses and expectations of listeners, will form part of the answer. But within the same society we commonly find doubts and contradictory interpretations. Was Joan of Arc a visionary, a witch, or mad? Judgments of sanctity and sanity were partisan but they were also contestable—and contestable on competing grounds. At Joan’s trial different sorts of evidence were sifted, different criteria brought into play. For an anthropologist, the truth of the matter is not independent of these rival constructions. The labeling as one thing or another, the praising and damning, the discrepant conceptions of virtue and deviance are part of the total picture: what needs to be accounted for, not something to be factored out or graded as right or wrong on some external measure. The case of Saint Joan (a title granted as late as 1920, showing the issues are never settled) reminds us that we miss something fundamental in assuming there is a simple singular answer—a psychological 382

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one—that underlies the circumstances. Psychological anthropology can help us understand the rival perspectives, revealing the cultural and social underpinnings of thought and behavior. If there is a truth to be attained, it is in this complexity and diversity of perspectives. One of anthropology’s more quietly influential figures, George Devereux, argued that behavioral scientists protect themselves from the anxiety aroused in the research encounter by hiding behind a battery of techniques and methodologies that, far from enhancing objectivity, introduce systematic distortions (Devereux 1967). In the case of anthropology, the selection and framing of material, the filtering of fieldwork experience, the placing of a distance between researcher and subject are motivated by unacknowledged anxieties and are fetishized as scientific methods—the ethnographer’s figurative white coat. Better, he argues, to recognize the inevitable subjectivity of the encounter and build from there. His argument finds an echo in the many writers who insist on the crucial difference between the social and natural sciences, which can be simply put as follows: because meaning is created in interaction between people, it cannot be adequately explored or understood from a position outside. The motivations, feelings, and personal significances which guide and interpret action are unavailable to the detached observer. The ethnographer discovers meaning through personal engagement and a self-aware exploration of his or her own responses. We are better off without the white coat. This argument is by no means to reject claims to scientific (properly, social scientific) credibility or the possibility of making valid generalizations and explanations. It is, rather, to recognize the distinctive meaning-constituted nature of social reality which necessitates a reflexive methodology. Questions of evidence and the coherence of arguments remain as important as in other disciplines, whether in the sciences or humanities. Reflexivity is not a charter for Anything Goes. A theme of this chapter will therefore be to hold anthropology to account: to press the issues of context, meaning, and practice that tend to get left behind in the urge to generalize; and to argue that psychological anthropology no less than other subfields is best served by methods that preserve the density and integrity of human action and meaning. This is less of a platitude than might appear. (Who would argue, you might ask, for caricature or reduction?) Psychological anthropology has borrowed from psychology some of its sharpest but also some of its most dangerous tools. The risk of false precision is ever-present. Against the cross-cultural claims of psychology and cognate sciences, ethnographic fieldwork remains not only the mainstay of anthropological understanding, but the best check. Surprisingly, this check is not always applied.

Divergent orientations: humanistic, scientific, social scientific Anthropology’s engagement with general psychology has been controversial and multi-stranded. However, a broad division between the experimental approaches of academic psychology and the humanistic engagement of psychoanalysis is reflected in divergent orientations within psychological anthropology. (A general objection of anthropologists to their psychologist colleagues is that the latter have tended to be culture-blind or to regard culture as noise that can be filtered out by experimental design.) Anthropologists of experimental bent concern themselves with devising culturally appropriate tests to illuminate such psychological processes as reasoning, classifying, and remembering, while those of a more humanistic orientation tend to focus on the ingredients of experience, individual biography, and the conflictive aspects of interpersonal life that do not readily find public formulation in crystallized symbols or standardized behavior. Perhaps surprisingly, this broad professional division between the cognitivists and humanists (with many in-betweens) does not map neatly onto a division between universalists and relativists. Indeed, theorists of all persuasions differ on the existence, definition, and range of psychological universals. Cultural diversity notwithstanding, anthropologists influenced by 383

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psychoanalysis are committed, at some level, to a universal human nature grounded in allegedly invariant facts of sex and family; while much work in cognitive anthropology—traditionally more scientific and generalizing in approach—has demonstrated variety where one might have expected commonality, for example in the classification of emotions. Despite the deep disagreements over where one reaches bedrock (in the Oedipus Complex? in neural networks? cultural models? modes of production? ecological adaptations?), few would disagree that anthropology, uniquely among the human sciences, has thrown up serious challenges to Western psychology. Where to draw the line between self and other, mind and body, emotion and reason? In many languages such questions cannot even be framed because equivalent concepts are lacking. This situation certainly gives us pause and forces us to question whether, for example, emotions form a natural class that just happens to have different labels in other languages, or whether the grouping of anger, sadness, and disappointment under the heading of emotion (or similar) is an invention of European civilization, with a particular history, and that the very concept of emotion, as such, is a cultural construction with no cross-cultural application (Lutz 1988; Wierzbicka 1999; Beatty 2005, 2014). Faced with the diversity of cultures and the plasticity of mental processes, the psychological anthropologist is compelled to ask: can you have psychology without psyche? If we look at ways in which consciousness is conceived in different cultures, we quickly find that Western understandings of psychological processes appear distinctive and unusual. One long-standing tradition has been to conceive of the mind as a kind of puppeteer or homunculus guiding the person. In the Western philosophical tradition from which anthropology emerged, mind is typically connected with brain, and feeling with body or “heart.” There are two ways of seeing this linkage: either as reflecting a materialist perspective, so that mind and body are parts of a single machine; or as a reflection of the distinction Europeans have made since classical antiquity between mind and body or between the material and the non-material. Both views, the materialist and the dualist, have entered popular culture and shape our experience of ourselves: what are, in fact, no more than theories have psychological and social consequences. Our sense of the body as a machine changes the way we experience illness and pain, our moral valuation of suffering, and our means of coping with disease. Our sense of the emotions as a hydraulic system (bottling up anger, letting off steam, suppressing fear) changes how we experience feelings and respond to the emotions of others. (Reversing this argument, Lakoff [1987] contends that physicalist models of anger—widely encountered in world ethnography—reflect universal properties of cognition.The metaphors have a basis in physiological experience.) The current model of the brain as a supercomputer, and computers as adjuncts of the brain, changes our sense of human interconnection and memory, bringing changes in behavior. The theory—or analogy—changes the reality, it does not just describe it; the way we think about and explain behavior changes that behavior (Hacking 1995). This is another reason why a social science is different from a natural science and requires in the researcher a different form of engagement, an inside view.

Self and experience observed Once we start examining our ordinary categories of self and experience away from home their limitations soon become apparent. Most readers of this book will typically see thoughts and feelings as pertaining to unique, separate individuals. After all, we reason, how could anyone else have my thoughts? The supposition that people can share thoughts is taken as a sign of the breakdown of personal identity, the beginning of madness. Indeed, the clinical diagnoses of some psychiatric disorders depend on this very point. Elsewhere in the world, however, personal identity and self-image are more closely bound up with the social group; individuality—standing 384

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out, “being oneself ”—is seen as aberration or illusion. This is classically the case across South Asia. Notions of common substance, values of purity and status, posit the person as coming into being within a field of relations rather than existing prior to or separate from other people (Dumont 1980, Marriott 1989). In Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Oceania, related people or co-residents may be regarded as permeable to one another’s influence, just as they share flesh and blood. Lutz writes of the Ifaluk: “People are frequently characterized as ‘following the thoughts/ feelings’ of others; in so following, they take on the attitudes, angers, or plans of the other” (1988: 88). White and Kirkpatrick suggest that in such societies, “‘shame’ [for example] may be less a personal feeling, and more a connective tissue in a social unit” (1985: 11). A c­ ommon-sense objection to these contentions, which tend towards relativism or at least a West/Rest dichotomy, is that they refer to ideology not experience or cognition, and that, dogmas aside, we are all the same under the skin. But ideas reflect and channel experience; indeed, they may be implicit in behavior rather than explicitly formulated in theory. The point of these examples is not to show that there are many ways of conceiving human beings, and that only one of them—the scientific perspective of psychology—is right. Comparison forces us to acknowledge that many of our assumptions about human psychology are neither objectively based nor exempt from cultural influence. They have a certain validity within a particular cultural context but that does not mean they are applicable elsewhere.The same can be said of any folk psychology, any indigenous theory about persons: they structure experience within a particular form of life and participate in it rather than interpret it neutrally from outside (White 1992). This is not to equate common idioms and folk models with formal academic psychology, merely to point to an overlap, a two-way street whose signs and warnings are sometimes ignored. The methods of psychological anthropology, to the extent that they take account of its peculiarities as a social science, are different from those of experimental psychology and tend to be subversive of scientific generalizations and laws. When a psychologist makes some statement about cognition or madness or moral development, the anthropologist is obliged to ask: What was the experimental context of that statement? Does it apply to all human beings everywhere and at all times or only to people in the psychologist’s society, or perhaps only to a subsection of that society reflected in the sample? (Most experimental subjects are psychology students.) Would the same findings have been obtained in a naturalistic setting? Does the evidence of other cultures challenge the results? A common finding is that analytical procedures based on formal methods such as structured interviews and word-sorting tests work best (are most valid and reliable) close to home—that is, when conducted in the researcher’s own cultural setting. There are two possible reasons for this problem, with different implications (neither very encouraging) for the proponent of experimental approaches. 1 Experiments and tests are difficult to administer in other cultures because extraneous factors confound the results. The questions are interpreted in ways unintended (perhaps unrecognized) by the researcher; the language and concepts of the test are imperfectly translated; the apparatus is off-putting; the roles of researcher and subject unfamiliar; the context unnatural. This is a problem of application. If the cultural difficulties could be overcome and the instruments made culturally appropriate, it is argued, the tests might be productive.This “reason” assumes that universal facts underlie and are separable from cultural forms. 2 Such tests may be framed in terms of psychological categories peculiar to the experimenter’s culture, reflecting an unacknowledged overlap between scientific and folk psychology. This deeper source of bias cannot be overcome by shedding the white coat and making the tests more “reader-friendly.” 385

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There is always the possibility—often camouflaged by technical wizardry—that similar findings can be obtained by introspection or simple observation, in which case the experiment becomes an exercise in re-description. The skeptic is therefore entitled to ask: “Does the exercise tell us something that we didn’t already know or could discover by simpler means?” Faced with this challenge, the experimenter can reply: “Yes, you knew that anyway. But I have demonstrated the logic and organization of your knowledge, shown you the process of reasoning or structure of assumptions underlying what you know.” This is of course a perfectly good response. Much work in cognitive anthropology rests on this justification (D’Andrade 1995; Holland and Quinn 1987).

The fieldwork factor: putting tests to the test Although experiments and structured interviews remain a vital source of data in psychological anthropology, participant observation remains the gold standard for research, the likeliest source of unforeseeable insights, and the ultimate test of whether experimental findings hold water. Unlike other human sciences where there is an emphasis on eliminating the personal factor, anthropology no longer accepts that this is possible and even embraces the fact. The ethnographer learns how a society works by entering into social relations not by observing at a distance. If I help a villager build a house, the meaning of the activity derives from participation and from the history of our relations: perhaps I owe him or her a favor; perhaps I have been a bad neighbor and want to make up; perhaps I want to show others what a good citizen I am so they will vote for me in the village election. As an ethnographer, you discover these things by taking part, not by asking questions, because people cannot articulate all the meanings of an activity and because meanings emerge in action. Meaning, in this broad sense, is not something fixed by tradition but is constantly created anew. From this perspective, the ethnographer becomes part of the “experiment.” By helping build the house, I discover the personal cost in time and effort and the social rewards of good will, enhanced status and favors owed. For an anthropologist, there is little point in describing behavior from the outside without reference to the meaning the actors themselves give that behavior and a sense of what is at stake for them. This is very different from the laboratory psychologist who remains at a distance, in total control of the experiment. Consider another example. If one of my neighbors falls into trance, “possessed by an ancestral spirit,” I get nowhere by making an amateurish diagnosis of mental illness. The point is to see how the meaning of the episode is generated in action: how others react, how they interpret the behavior (in terms of past history, parallel cases, interrelations between key persons, rival explanations), how the possessed person, in turn, responds to their words, and how the course of action (not to say “treatment,” which implies “illness”) is based on the deliberations. As an anthropologist, I can go behind the folk explanation to look for other relevant factors—family tensions, inequalities, hidden conflicts—that may not enter into explicit discussion, but I have to be there, interacting with the people and familiar with their lives, to make sense of what is happening. The meaning and significance lie in this nexus of activity. If most anthropological research depends on a sympathetic engagement with people, the psychological anthropologist is particularly concerned with how the world looks from the others’ perspective, their mental habits and predicaments, their grasp of reality. So the concepts people use, the way they talk, their styles of thought and expression, are crucial material (Wilce 2009). Rather than simply applying the lessons of academic psychology, one of the aims is to elicit an indigenous “psychology” and to see what purchase it has on their social world (Heelas 1981; White and Kirkpatrick 1985). But this is only a first step. An important goal is 386

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to understand diverse experiential worlds within their broader social and economic contexts. If we want, for example, to understand what is going on during spirit healing, it is not enough to record ideas about cosmology and observe a few healing sessions—merely to describe. Janice Boddy (2002), in her study of Sudanese spirit possession, goes much further in considering the special circumstances of female mediums, their political position within a male-dominated social order, the construction of gender and personhood, and the ways in which spirit sessions enable women to understand themselves, gaining a critical and liberating perspective on their everyday lives. A tension between the holism implied in participant observation and narrower experimental approaches runs through the history of psychological anthropology, with many heated arguments about what should count as the relevant explanatory frame. The standard anthropological appeal to context (usually implying holism) is enshrined in the very practice of ethnographic fieldwork and in countless critical judgments of what makes a valid explanation or a good interpretation. A concern with how the part relates to the whole (the formal question of context) underlies paradigms as different as British functionalism, the Culture-and-Personality school of Benedict and Sapir, the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss, and the interpretivism of Geertz. The latter, especially, found powerful support in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, for whom meaning is always located in practice, in “forms of life,” not in ideas brought to, or separable from, specific social contexts and trained dispositions. Geertz’s take on this meaning-as-public position is what he calls “local knowledge” (Geertz 1983)— the point being that anthropological knowledge must respect the practical rootedness of cultural worlds, not that it should be similarly parochial. Inevitably, the scientific goal of generalization, so far as this is shared by the anthropologist, brings in train the vexed question of selection and abstraction. Because of the disciplinary respect for contextual meaning and a recognition of the density of social phenomena—their resistance to simplification and formulaic hypothesis—most anthropological theory is pitched somewhere between the particularistic description characteristic of the humanities such as history and the drive for universals characteristic of the hard sciences. Psychological anthropology, however, has had a persistent urge toward the universal end of the spectrum in the perennial quest for the keys to human nature. This is one of the things that make it both attractive and challenging.

Culture and cognition How deep does culture go? In a seminal paper, Hallowell (1955) argued that selfhood and the possibility of experience develop in a “culturally constituted behavioral environment.” Hallowell asked the question: “By what cultural means is self-awareness built up in different societies?” (1955: 81), and demonstrated that culture shapes not just personality and the content of behavior, but the very possibility of self-awareness, framing the many and diverse ways of being human. As he showed with the example of the Ojibwa Indians, person and environment are mutually constituted through the orientations of individuals to other people (in kinship systems), to objects in space, to a sense of time and its divisions, and to values and norms. Hallowell’s article remains important for two quite different reasons. An emphasis on the experiencing subject—on self-consciousness—becomes, once fully grasped, an ethical imperative with profound implications for the practice of anthropology. As Cohen (1994) has argued, to ignore the fundamental fact of self-awareness is to deny in others a reflexivity and complexity of motivation that we take for granted in ourselves. Hallowell can be credited for recovering for anthropology a dimension of the human condition that the Durkheimian approach, epitomized in Mauss’s (1985 [1938]) famous essay on the person, had excluded by its focus on public culture. 387

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Equally important, however, (and more prescient) was Hallowell’s interactive conception of culture and cognition: For the world of human awareness is mediated by various symbolic devices which, through the learning and experience of individuals, establish the concepts, discriminations, classificatory patterns, and attitudes by means of which perceptual experience is personally integrated. In this way assumptions about the nature of the universe become, as it were, a priori constituents of the perceptual process itself. (Hallowell 1955: 84; italics added) That italicized clause—a straw in the wind—foreshadowed half a century of debate. It invites us to consider how far the categories of understanding shape, or are shaped, by culture/ society/the world. Is the world as we find it or as we make it? Is cognition best understood as a set of dispositions, processes, and capacities brought to a context, or are such processes themselves dynamically and developmentally related to context? The former view implies a universalist position based ultimately in biology and evolution. The latter introduces an element of relativism above the level of cultural content. By virtue of growing up in specific cultural environments, people in different groups inhabit diverse experiential worlds and must themselves, in some respects, be differently constituted. Such a view, as Garro (2005: 57) points out, appears to challenge the doctrine of the psychic unity of humankind that was fundamental to psychological anthropology from the time of Boas. At the very least it pushes back that unity to an earlier developmental stage in the life cycle or frames it in terms of potentialities rather than givens. As it developed from the 1950s through the 1970s, cognitive anthropology was content to explore the structuring of knowledge in different societies without presuming too much about how that knowledge was acquired or constructed (for examples, see Tyler 1969). Culture was an external phenomenon that was internalized through learning. In Goodenough’s formulation (published in 1957) which became the charter of the movement: “A society’s culture consists of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members” (Garro 2005: 50). Following Goodenough’s manifesto, numerous studies were produced of the classification of plants and animals, the procedures of rice cultivation, the principles underlying kinship terminologies, and of routine interactions such as ordering a meal. Often brilliant in their execution, these studies brought a new level of technical expertise to the discipline, something to confound the critics and prove that anthropology possessed the rigor of a proper science. Comparative analysis, moreover, revealed cross-cultural regularities in the ordering of knowledge which paved the way for later developments in cognitive science. Culture, in this view, was a matter of knowledge, and knowledge essentially a matter of language, the object of analysis being a kind of cultural grammar. A key distinction in mid-century cognitive anthropology was between emic and etic, terms borrowed from linguistics, a discipline with which it had a close affinity. Emic referred to the categories and perspectives of the insider, “the native”; etic, to those of the outsider, the scientist. What the “new ethnography,” as it was called, brought to emic perspectives was a systematic, exhaustive methodology that went far beyond recording the native voice. Studies of folk classification charted the scope and structure of experience and perception, revealing an unsuspected complexity and elegance of form. These classifications could then be subjected to “componential analysis,” a breakdown of their governing principles and rules of combination. Malinowski’s aspiration to realize “the native point of view,” hitherto reliant on the haphazard method of participant observation, had found a sophisticated and highly productive toolkit. 388

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Cognitive analyses were mostly derived from structured interviews, not from the observation of natural behavior. They begged the question of how far the highly schematized knowledge revealed by questioning reflected practical know-how and left open the issue of what “psychological reality” they corresponded to (D’Andrade 1995: 51). The principal weakness was that they overstated the orderliness of knowledge, missing the vagueness, uncertainty, contradictoriness, and unevenness of responses typically encountered in the field. Anyone who has collected a genealogy knows that the practical tracing of connections is dependent on a variety of factors— self-interested manipulations, the vagaries of memory, skewed personal perspectives—rarely matching the fieldworker’s neat synoptic chart or the framed pedigree pinned to the wall. Symbolic and political dimensions, idiosyncratic variants, and adventitious circumstances powerfully affect the ways in which knowledge is constructed and transmitted. Despite its impressive yield, the new ethnography offered a vision of culture too closely tied to language and remote from the messy, improvised quality of everyday life. And, like the culture-as-text paradigm of Geertzian interpretivism (with which it had little else in common), it would come to jar with a more political, fractured view of culture as a battleground of competing interests and values. Thirty years after Goodenough’s clarion call, it was much more difficult to write of “a society’s culture.” Yet the cognitive revolution continued, forging links between anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and the emerging interdisciplinary field of cognitive science to develop methods and models that better reflected the psychological reality of acting human beings (Casson 1994; D’Andrade 1995; Shore 1996). One of the pioneers of psychological anthropology, Edward Sapir, whose work underlies both the humanist and cognitive orientations discussed in this chapter, had early on pointed out that culture is an abstraction, a synthesis made by the observer, not an objective entity. “Cultures, as ordinarily dealt with, are merely abstracted configurations of idea and action patterns, which have endlessly different meanings for the various individuals in the group,” he wrote (Sapir 1949: 200–201). Instead of seeing culture as something that was handed down intact from one generation to another, Sapir looked forward to a more dynamic and creative conception of cultural transmission as “not something given but something to be gradually and gropingly discovered” (ibid.). But his central question—“Where do socialized patterns leave off and the primordial human being begin?” (Sapir 1994: 44)—could not be tackled with the information then available to him.The problem of the location of culture which preoccupied Sapir led him up the blind alley of culture-and-personality theory. How could you reconcile individual variation with the shared externality of cultural forms? Was culture to be found in people’s heads, in their interactions, or in public forms? As Sapir intuited, the answer had to include all three. But it was not until the development of schema theory (described below) in the 1980s that serious progress could be made (D’Andrade 1995). The advantages of the new approach were readily apparent. In the first place, schema theory does not presuppose an overarching system called culture into which people are inducted and to which they conform. With the schema, the problem of variation within a cultural setting disappears. The sharing of schemas (or schemata) is something to be established, not assumed. Second, the schema can better account for the organization of knowledge in specific domains. As simplified models of the way things are in the world or the way things are done, schemas can apply to diverse situations; moreover, organisms putatively equipped with schemas are better able to function in a complex environment than blank slates that have to learn everything piecemeal. Cognitive anthropologists had learned from Chomsky that, like language, culture was far too complicated to be swallowed whole. Schema theory gave a much more plausible account than older behaviorist theories of how individuals were able to process vast amounts of information and navigate their social worlds. So what is a schema? I shall rely here on the work of two prominent theorists. A schema, writes D’Andrade, “is a cognitive structure through which interpretations about the world 389

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are made” (1992: 52). Schemas “structure our knowledge of objects and situations, events and actions, and sequences of events and actions” (Casson 1994: 64).You cannot buy a loaf of bread, order a meal, greet someone, say a prayer, recognize a flower, select an item of clothing, or name a child without some schema in mind. Some schemas incorporate lower-level models: the “commercial event” incorporates sub-schemas of “goods,” “money,” “deal,” “buyer,” and “seller.” Without knowing what constitutes a good example of each of these elements, you would not be able to carry out the transaction or activate the higher-level schema (Casson 1994: 64). As with the earlier studies of folk classifications, most of the examples discussed by schema theorists are derived from the study of language use because “linguistic forms label schemata and provide the means of verbalizing them” (Casson 1994: 65). But not all categories are labeled, and not all schemas find verbal expression. The methods of schema analysis are technically sophisticated and the findings not easily summarized (see examples in Holland and Quinn 1987; Shore 1996; and D’Andrade 1995). So, by way of illustration, I shall give an example of how the non-specialist can draw upon schema theory within the broader analytical frame typical of mainstream anthropology (Beatty 2002). The Indonesian island of Java is well known for its cultural diversity and its tolerance. The scope of ideological variation is exceptional in the Muslim world. In the close-packed rural villages of Banyuwangi in East Java, orthodox Muslims, skeptics, pantheists, and animists live cheek-by-jowl, taking part in one another’s household rituals and looking after each other’s children. How is this possible? A sociological explanation would focus on mechanisms of integration—communal rituals, the exchange of labor, mutual aid. But what enables people to get on when they differ so radically over the fundamentals—the authority of the Koran, the transcendence of Allah, the existence of an afterlife, the basis of morality? The clue lies in a nesting set of practices and cultural models which can be summed up in the formula changing places, which I take to be the underlying schema. Here are some examples. 1 The Javanese language contains distinct registers that reflect the relative status of interlocutors. To speak to a social senior one uses the higher forms, to speak to a junior, the lower. In conversation one is required to shift positions, sometimes talking up, sometimes down, sometimes placing a third person through precise choice of words. Language use involves changing places and a cultivated relativist perspective. 2 Children move freely between households, sleeping overnight with neighbors, eating with favorite “aunts”—an arrangement that may be formalized in ritual fostering. A child may live in half a dozen households (pious or impious, zealous or relaxed), developing a fluidity of attachment and learning to get on among people who may be ideological adversaries. 3 Life-cycle rituals involve a staged, sometimes comical, switching of roles—a ritualized musical chairs—in which husbands play wives (dressing as a woman to bury the newborn’s placenta), wives “impregnate” husbands (squirting porridge-semen into the man’s hands), and the young “replace” the old. In the interpretation of cultural symbols, folk etymologies emphasize the equivalence of rival ideologies. Through domestic arrangements, language use, and ritual, the Javanese grows up changing places, learning how to see (or, as they say, feel) things from another’s point of view. The embedding of the changing places schema in daily routines accounts for the emotional motivation of the lower-level cultural models that express it and for a characteristic relativism in assessments of behavior and ideas.Tolerance is much more than an idea or a value: it becomes part of the habitus (Bourdieu 1977), an embodied disposition, a seemingly natural way of going on. 390

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The influence of cognitive psychology and evolutionary psychology The study of schemas and cultural models gained a new impetus with the development in cognitive science of new ways of looking at the mind. Schemas could be accounted for by the cognitivists’ computational model of the brain as an information-processing mechanism that was compartmentalized into specialized neural networks or modules corresponding to particular human capacities and practical domains. But how did we acquire this modular brain and what are its implications for the study of human behavior? Here we enter the brave new world of evolutionary psychology. Consider the paradox: cognitive anthropology grew out of efforts to map the scope of cultural knowledge. It was scientific in approach but doggedly faithful to the “native point of view,” an etic exploration of the emic. The newer evolutionary approach, which joins hands with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology in a common enterprise, is much less squeamish about disrespecting the native point of view, seeking causal explanations not in word patterns but in cognitive architecture (Carruthers et al. 2006; Whitehouse 2001). This is emphatically anthropology from the outside. Whether this interdisciplinary field, or its flourishing anthropological corner, should count as psychological anthropology is debatable and probably not very important: two recent collections which aim to cover a representative range of psychological anthropology contain no discussions of evolutionary approaches or contributions by people working in the field (Casey and ­Edgerton 2005; LeVine 2010). But the question does indeed matter if psychological anthropologists are missing a trick. Bloch (2005a, 2012) has argued that in failing to take account of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, anthropologists have continued to work with obsolete assumptions about human capacities, ignoring cross-cultural regularities that point to universals. They are missing out on a scientific venture that promises to illuminate fundamental aspects of human nature—the oldest anthropological question of all. One of the liveliest areas of cognitive evolutionary research is in the study of religion (Whitehouse and Laidlaw 2004; McCauley and Cohen 2010). Cognitivists turn sociological accounts on their heads in that they begin with human nature rather than society. In his classical account Durkheim argued, notoriously, that social ties are formed in the heat of collective ritual—a society that prays together stays together—and that the content of religion bears the impress of social structure. In the simplest societies, the division of the cosmos into earth and sky, male and female, reflects the tribal division into moieties. Cosmic dualism mirrors—in some obscure sense, is caused by—societal dualism. In this formula there is no room for the mind. Cognitivists argue, on the contrary, that the characteristic traits of religion (belief in supernatural beings, in their agency and knowledge of human motives; the acceptance of bizarre dogmas; the precautionary actions of ritual) derive not from social causes (though they may be socially reinforced) but from human nature, that is from the brain as it evolved in the Pleistocene (Atran 2006; Boyer 2001, 2008). Traits that helped our fur-clad ancestors survive, such as attributing intention to moving objects (important in predator detection) or the ability to tell cheats from allies, sculpted the brain and account for key features of religion, not to mention its persistence and ubiquity. As wolves are born to run, so humans are born to believe. The argument is not that evolutionary pressures favored the emergence of religion as a package, but that natural selection created diverse, unrelated cognitive mechanisms that happen to have, as a by-product, predispositions to certain features of religion. (It is an interesting question how and why these features come together, when they do.) Our aesthetic sensibilities may have the same accidental derivation. But just as evolution cannot help us tell a Picasso from a Poussin or reveal much of interest about a symphony, so the 391

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bearing of evolution on the diversity of religious forms and experiences is quite limited. If we want to understand what is going on during a session of Sufi chanting in Jakarta it will not help to talk about the generic brain, however much brains and bodies are involved. Cognitivists might explain the function of repetitious chanting as a tool of memory, but if we want to know what the event means to the individuals involved and how it works socially (what is specifically meaningful rather than generically illustrative), the answers will have to do with biography and experience, doctrines and techniques, social pressures, notions of power and gender, and not least, history. Evolutionary explanations remain resolutely alien to, and on a different level from, the thinking of individual actors and the cultural frames through which they view the world. And because they are generalizing and ultimately biological, they do not help us understand the particular differences that fascinate most anthropologists: what makes a Sunni different from a Shia, or a pilgrim to Mecca like or unlike a pilgrim to Lourdes. This is not, by any means, to deny the intrinsic interest of evolutionary accounts; but it helps explain why they have not, despite their appeal across disciplines, captured center stage in social and cultural anthropology. Few anthropologists have the expertise to evaluate the claims of cognitive science. What we can evaluate is the usefulness of anthropology that draws upon this work. The Boasian doctrine of cultural relativism assumed an unlimited diversity of cultural forms and an infinitely malleable human nature. Cognitive psychology and anthropological approaches that have built upon it have, in contrast, demonstrated regularities and constraints in cognition that earlier anthropologists missed or denied; they have provided evidence that cognitive universals underlie and set limits to cultural diversity; and they have provided insights into the structuring and transmission of knowledge. These are significant achievements. On the other hand, explanations in terms of a common human nature have a limited bearing on particular ways of life that are the anthropologist’s stock in trade (Laidlaw 2004). This is because, as is often stated, constants cannot explain variables (a difficulty shared with orthodox psychoanalytic approaches.) The evolutionist can respond that differences are a product of some higher level operation realized in diverse circumstances, or that differences are superficial. But the ethnographic devil—the local significance, the practical working-out—is in the detail. It was a belated recognition of differences between formally similar lineage systems worldwide that led to a collapse in their cross-cultural comparison as equivalent entities (Kuper 1982). Differences between, say, “animistic” beliefs (or a neglect of their embedding in specific ecologies) may be more significant than their similarities, undermining explanations that depend on equivalence or the definition of an abstract type. As with the ill-fated lineage theories, a closer attention to context tends to undermine the validity of cross-cultural concepts. To take one example, the pre-eminent role given to counter-intuitive beliefs in cognitive explanations of religion runs into a number of ethnographic difficulties. Because ideas of the supernatural violate our intuitive, genetically primed expectations of the natural world—so it is argued—they are more likely to stick in memory and be transmitted (Atran 2006; Boyer 2001). We remember the bizarre details of a story—a flying prophet, a talking animal, a resurrection; things that do not happen in ordinary experience and which contradict our “intuitive ontology” (Boyer 1999: 213), our default understanding of the world. In this view, the paradigm of a good story is a ghost story. But the common experience of ethnographers who have lived where such things are found is that ancestral spirits fade out not because they cease to do odd things, but because they lose their current relevance. It is the recently dead who impose on the living, who haunt the memory, and about whom we retain powerful feelings. More remote ancestors are anonymized and forgotten. The cognitivist might respond that the issue in question is retention of the spirit concept, not anxiety about which particular spirit is troubling us. But memory and motivation are not so easily disentangled.The motivating factor in belief, its grip on the present, 392

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is not oddity but relevance, and relevance is by definition particularizing, tailor-made to the self-interested, puzzled individual. There would be no point in an afterlife that offered nothing to the living (however memorable), and no point in postulating spirits whose doings had no practical import or explanatory power. Moreover, if you have grown up assuming spirits to be factual, unquestionable entities, they are not counter-intuitive. Or at least, as Bloch (2005b: 105) has pointed out, they are counter-intuitive in unpredictable ways and to varying degrees, for the ethnographer cannot know in advance what seems normal to his or her informants. What makes religious ideas compelling is not the admixture of oddity but their bearing on our interests and anxieties (about health, prosperity, feelings toward the dead), and of course their traditional force—or else we should all believe in Eskimo myths.This is where interpretive and psychodynamic approaches are more persuasive. They can better account for the content of religious notions and attitudes, which correspond to steady factors in the human condition, and for the motivation of believers. In contrast, a sociological account can better explain why and how religious traits hang together and how religion functions in society.The power of a creed is usually not in the content of dogmas (whose meaning may change, vary, or be poorly grasped) or in their adhesive counter-intuitiveness but in their fetishized possession by the group. Despite its weakness as an origin theory, Durkheim’s contention that religion functions as social glue, forging bonds of solidarity and common identity, has been demonstrated in countless cases, from the Javanese prayer-meal to the marches of Protestant Ulstermen, and generally gives a more persuasive account of what binds people to their religions than one based upon belief. In starting with human nature—or rather Stone Age human nature—selectionist accounts of religion underplay the fundamental factor of society.

Psychoanalytic approaches In an elegy written after Freud’s death in 1939, the poet W.H. Auden suggested that the founder of psychoanalysis had become “a whole climate of opinion.” For much of the twentieth century he was literally inescapable.The theories and doctrines may have faded or mutated, but the kinds of things in which Freud was interested entered the repertoire of psychological anthropology and set the stage for theoretical debate. His influence can be seen in the following: 1 An attention to child development and childhood experiences; their influence on adult personality and motivation and on the kinds of relationships we form. 2 A concern with the irrational and expressive—dreams, fantasies, myths, and rituals. 3 An attempt to relate individual psychology to social relationships and to broader social processes. 4 A skeptical questioning of religion in terms of abnormal psychology. 5 A semiotic approach to culture. 6 A stratified view of humanity and culture; the idea that there are levels, for example, manifest and latent content in dreams. 7 A dynamic view of the mind in which behavior is governed by conflicting and unconscious drives—primarily sexual and aggressive—and civilization is a compromise with instinct. In looking at the direct influence of psychoanalysis (the localized shower rather than the climate of opinion), we are really talking about three more or less distinct periods: the early impact contemporary with Freud himself; mid-century culture and personality theory; and the recent period beginning around 1980. Since the first two periods have been well discussed in handbooks and histories (Paul 1992; Bock 1995; Lindholm 2007) I shall concentrate mainly on the third. 393

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By the 1950s, Freudian and neo-Freudian concepts—repression, reaction formation, the unconscious, the Oedipus Complex, defense mechanisms—had been widely assimilated into culture and personality theory. Kardiner and his associates developed causal models interrelating social forms, personality types, and religious institutions. Whiting postulated causal relationships between childhood socialization practices and religious institutions based on cross-cultural statistical comparison, arguing, for example, that in Papuan societies where mother and son slept close together, to the exclusion of the father, boys had difficulty in establishing their gender identity; this was remedied by the extreme expedient of violent initiation rites. The intense Oedipal situation predicted the drastic ritual remedy (Whiting, Kluckhohn and Anthony 1958). In the 1960s and 1970s causal explanations of this kind fell out of fashion, to be replaced by a greater concern with cultural meaning. Culture and personality theory came to seem over-­ simple, assuming (or endlessly qualifying) cultural homogeneity and the uniformity of human types; the master concepts of “culture” and “personality” now meant too many things to be analytically useful (Shweder 1991: 269–312; Bock 1995: 97–101). As new theories of mind emerged, including those proposed by cognitive psychology, the old psychoanalytic warhorse was looking jaded, the Freudians branded unscientific and ethnocentric. But newer approaches were in some ways as resistant to psychology, as defensive of anthropological territory as the outmoded functionalists. In the interpretivism of Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983), who had raised the flag for meaning, individual psychology and experience were discounted as irrelevant. Symbols and meanings were public and observable, their hold on individuals largely assumed. The considerable gain in nuance afforded by Geertzian “thick description” was therefore, paradoxically, a diminution of human complexity. As Katherine Ewing (1992) has argued, in constructing an anthropology of the person in terms of public, intersubjective meaning, Geertz managed to appropriate even the self for anthropology, totally driving psychology out of court. Rather like the Balinese of whom he wrote so entrancingly, Geertz’s impersonal concept of the person left little room for the idiosyncratic or biographical, the public effects of individual experience that Sapir had wanted to register. This lacuna invited a return of the “psychoanalysts”—a return of the repressed, one might say. The way had been pioneered by Turner (1967), whose studies of symbolism and ritual linked public forms to private experience, hard social facts to softer personal affects. (Even here, however, psychological factors were generic: ritual symbols tapped into the primary psycho-­ physiological experiences of sex, growth, and decay.) Through extended case histories, Turner situated conflicting values and emotions in “social dramas.” These were not unlike the case histories of the psychoanalyst, played out on a larger stage with shifting African scenery. In recent decades, the work of two psychological anthropologists close to the Freudian fount (and neglectful of later schisms) stands out. Melford Spiro and Gananath Obeyesekere, both formidable polemicists with vast fieldwork experience, overcame many of the objections that were leveled at their predecessors. Spiro, the more orthodox of the two, retained an unfashionably positivist stance, seeing the anthropologist’s job as “the discovery of regularities in social and cultural phenomena and of the causal laws by which they may be explained” (Spiro 1967: 6). Recognizing that the best form of defense is attack, he exposed weaknesses in the cultural relativism that had re-emerged as the default position in the 1980s, undermining, as he thought, the whole project of the human sciences. In a critique characteristic for its tough argumentation and close reading of the ethnography, he tackled Michelle Rosaldo’s cultural explanation of the motivation of Ilongot headhunters in the Philippines (Rosaldo 1984; Spiro 1987: chap. 2). Rosaldo had claimed that Ilongot motivation could not be translated into the terms of Western psychology, that emotions are culturally relative, and that headhunters simply cast off their anger with the 394

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heads of their victims. On the same evidence, Spiro pronounced them a classic case of repression. In small-scale, kin-based Ilongot society, displays of anger are dangerous and unacceptable; anger is displaced from rivals onto the headhunters’ victims. Where Rosaldo (1984: 144) contends that “in important ways [Ilongot] feelings and the ways their feelings work must differ from our own,” Spiro finds the pattern of frustration, anger, repression and displaced expression to be exactly what Western theory predicts. “This indicates … that human feelings and the ways in which they work are determined not so much by the characteristics of particularistic culture patterns but by the transcultural characteristics of a generic human mind” (Spiro 1987: 45). Spiro further developed the neo-Freudian concept of defense mechanisms, arguing that “although religious systems are cognitive systems, they persist because of powerful motivational dispositions and affective needs of the social actors to which they are responsive” (1987: 162). The attachment to primary symbols that Turner had identified at the generic level Spiro ascribed to specific, often conflicted, emotional patterns laid down in childhood experience and the organization of the family. For example, the monastic life in Burma serves to resolve the inner conflicts and narcissistic anxieties of young men in a socially acceptable form. This psychological function helps sustain the institution (1987: 153–158). The “deep motivation” of symbols and their foundation in experience is explored in greater depth by Obeyesekere (1981) in his work on female ascetics in Sri Lanka. The ascetics’ matted snakelike locks are, in his analysis, “personal symbols” that connect private trauma with the conventional symbols of public culture. The difference between such personal symbols and conventional cultural symbols is that they are optional (unlike the shaven head of the Buddhist monk); and although they have a general significance for the lay person (renunciation), they are generated by painful experiences undergone by the ascetics and recreated anew “on the anvil of their personal anguish” (1981: 33).The meanings of personal symbols are partly unconscious and unarticulated, rooted in buried traumas and the evolutions of the soul; they are more complex than the meanings assigned by doctrine and popular understanding. Nevertheless, in common with Spiro, Obeyesekere sees the attachment to certain “psychogenetic” symbols, their deep motivation for certain individuals, as necessary for the perpetuation of the custom. As modern monks become more involved in worldly matters, they modify the conventional tonsure, signifying a relaxation of strict chastity and of the motivating sexual anxiety (1981: 44). The symbols change as the personal emotional meaning wanes. Despite common ground, there are significant differences between these two writers. Spiro’s ethnography is robustly confident in its scientific status and access to objective truth. Cultures are not cognitively equal. The difference between anthropology (of the right kind) and the customs that ethnographers report is in the scientist’s superior grasp of reality. We can make judgments among cultures or “cultural frames” using criteria of “reality testing” (the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy), by utility, and by assessing liability to conflict and emotional disturbance (Spiro 1987: 47–57). In this sense, whole cultures can be judged on the basis of their irrationality. Obeyesekere, especially in his later work, is more critical of Western scientific discourses, less wedded to rationality. His reflexivity is based not only on his Janus-like doubleness as a Princeton professor and a native of Sri Lanka (his own informant, as it were) but also on his analytical emphasis on transference and counter-transference and on the key role of dialogue in the ­psychoanalytic-ethnographic encounter. His mode of intense fieldwork engagement, like that of Crapanzano (1980) in his psychobiography of a Moroccan spirit-medium, makes for a different kind of anthropology, at once personal, humanistic and philosophical, bringing a dimension to the “native point of view” that Malinowski, whose people appear so much simpler, can scarcely have imagined. 395

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Person-centered anthropology Although he does not call it such, Obeyesekere’s Medusa’s Hair (1981) would certainly count as an example, indeed an exemplar, of “person-centered anthropology,” an approach that reunites what should never have been separated: culture, self, and experience. Studies of “the person” are not quite the same thing. In the Durkheimian tradition exemplified in Mauss’s (1985) essay, the person is a social fact, distinct from individual psychology and experience. British ­structural-functionalism was very much concerned with persons as elements within a socio-­ legal system, to the exclusion of their biography and selfhood. Geertz’s (1973, 1983) influential essays explored symbolic dimensions of personhood but his persons are either anecdotal or generic: The Balinese, The Moroccan, “Cohen the sheep dealer.” What they gain in analytical sweep, they lose in psychological conviction, as a comparison with Wikan’s (1991) study of a young Balinese woman will show. The structure of ideas about personhood can, to a degree, be usefully discussed in the abstract. After all, some of the most heated moral and political debates today concern the boundaries and definitions of the person. Does personhood depend on rationality (excluding the senile, the young and the mad)? Can personhood be forfeit (as criminals lose the right to vote) or lost through illness or social exclusion? Does the person begin at conception (with the infusion of the Christian soul) or with a certain neurological complexity (permitting abortion before a certain threshold)? At what point does, or should, life end? These questions of life and death are worthy of anyone’s attention, and anthropologists are better placed than most to deconstruct ideas of personhood and show how they are located in social processes and actual lives. In “person-centered” approaches, however, you start with the flesh-and-blood individual and work outwards, building a picture from informants’ biographical perspectives, operational cultural categories and the residues of experience; basing cultural abstractions on concrete perceptions (Levy 1994; Parish 1994; Hollan and Wellenkamp 1996). The finest example, by general acclaim, is Levy’s Tahitians (1973), a book that wonderfully embeds Hallowell’s “culturally constituted behavioral environment,” Bateson’s ethos (the patterning of emotions), Geertzian worldview, and the Freudians’ deep motivation in the varied, but still typical, personal experiences of his informants. Through a series of psychoanalytic-style interviews, Levy constructs a picture of interactional styles, experiences of time, and notions of character, sexuality, emotions, morality, personhood, body, and soul. His list of questions (1973: 509–511, and passim) should be packed with the malaria pills by any student heading for the field. Each question could trigger a chapter. Here are a few of them. Note physical postures in action and repose. Do the still postures indicate relaxed or inner conflict and tension? How do people think that they think? How are truth and falsehood expressed and assessed? How to ask about guilt? Do you have impulses or desires on which you do not act, and why not? What do you think about yourself, what would you change, is the self immutable? The risk with person-centered ethnography is of overpsychologizing, of misrepresenting how people act and think by asking them to put in words and reflect upon what happens spontaneously. Human beings are reflective, self-conscious, verbal creatures, but not always; and their reflexivity works rather differently in the flow of action and emotion than in the artificial setting of an interview. What we are getting, in many cases, is not so much the person on the street as 396

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the person on the couch—which is, of course, the besetting problem of psychoanalysis. An odd effect of person-centered anthropology—surely to do with this reframing and recollection—is that the strangeness of life and experience in different cultural settings, which comes across powerfully in narrative ethnographies such as Briggs’s Never in Anger (1970), Abu-Lughod’s Bedouin books (e.g., 1993) and in the work of Scheper-Hughes (2001), tends to get filtered out in the ethnographic interview. In general (Levy’s monument apart), the psychoanalytic-style, person-centered interview works better with unusual and extreme cases, such as Crapanzano’s Tuhami (1980) and the Sinhala ascetics, than with ordinary types, precisely because extreme cases are not reducible to type: the individuality and circumstantiality shine through. We all possess this individuality to a degree, but it takes a stronger narrative context, resistant to the generalizing format of question-and-answer, to give it full expression (Beatty 2010).

Conclusion To the extent that culture frames and directs experience, people in diverse settings lead different lives. But how different? A focus on ideology tends to exaggerate differences; a focus on behavior and experience to narrow them. As we have seen with the Ilongot headhunters, analytical disagreements over the same case may depend less on substance than on focus. In the strongly relativist position, a distinction between culture and experience is excluded: life is governed by discourse; nothing escapes the cultural frame. Levy (1984), in contrast, argues that experience is more complicated and various than our schemes—or theirs—allow. There is much in our own lives, as in the lives of others, that cannot be fitted to formula, much that goes unrecognized. As Hamlet mutters beside the grave: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And in this gap between cultural formula and inchoate experience we find all sorts of fascinating problems: differences in conformity and motivation; differential knowledge; maladjustment, misfits and deviance; muted groups; human variety and individuality. Fieldwork shows us all this: it is our challenge to capture it in ethnography.

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Andrew Beatty ———. (2001) Religion Explained:The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, London: Heinemann. ———. (2008) “Religion: Bound to believe?” Nature, 455: 1038–1039. Briggs, Jean L. (1970) Never in Anger, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Carruthers, Peter, Stephen Laurence and Stephen Stich (eds.) (2006) The Innate Mind, vol 2. Culture and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Casey, Conerly and Robert B. Edgerton (eds.) (2005) A Companion to Psychological Anthropology, Blackwell: Oxford. Casson, Ronald (1994) “Cognitive anthropology” in Philip K. Bock (ed.) Psychological Anthropology, Westport: Praeger. Cohen, Anthony P. (1994) Self Consciousness: An Alternative Anthropology of Identity, Routledge: London. Crapanzano,Vincent (1980) Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. D’Andrade, Roy (1992) “Cognitive anthropology” in T. Schwartz, G. White, and C. A. Lutz (eds.) New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 47–58. ———. (1995) The Development of Cognitive Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Devereux, George (1967) From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences, The Hague: Mouton. Dumont, Louis (1980) Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ewing, Katherine (1992) “Is psychoanalysis relevant for anthropology?” in T. Schwartz, G. White, and C. A. Lutz (eds.) New Directions in Psychological Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 251–268. Garro, Linda C. (2005) “‘Effort after meaning’ in everyday life” in Conerly Casey and Robert B. Edgerton (eds.) A Companion to Psychological Anthropology, Blackwell: Oxford, pp. 48–71. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books. ———. (1983) Local Knowledge, New York: Basic Books. Hacking, Ian (1995) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hallowell, A. I. (1955) “The self and its behavioural environment” in Culture and Experience, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 75–110. Heelas, P. and A. Lock (eds.) (1981) Indigenous Psychologies: The Anthropology of the Self, London: Academic Press. Hollan, Douglas W. and Jane C. Wellenkamp (1996) The Thread of Life: Toraja Reflections on the Life Cycle, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Holland, Dorothy and Naomi Quinn (eds.) (1987) Cultural Models in Language and Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirkpatrick, John and Geoffrey M. White (1985) “Exploring ethnopsychologies” in Geoffrey M. White and John Kirkpatrick (eds.) Person, Self, and Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–32. Kuper, Adam (1982) Lineage Theory: A Critical Retrospect. Annual Review of Anthropology, 11: 71–95. Laidlaw, James (2004) “A well-disposed social anthropologist’s problems with the “cognitive science of religion” in H. Whitehouse and J. Laidlaw (eds.) Ritual and Memory:Toward a Comparative Anthropology of Religion, Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, pp. 211–246. Lakoff, George (1987) Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. LeVine, Robert A. (ed.) (2010) Psychological Anthropology: A Reader on Self in Culture, Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell. Levy, Robert E. (1973) Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. (1984) “Emotion, knowing, and culture” in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. Levine (eds.) Culture Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–237. ———. (1994) “Person-centered anthropology” in R. Borofsky (ed.) Assessing Cultural Anthropology, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 180–189. Lindholm, Charles (2007) Culture and Identity, Oxford: Oneworld. Lutz, Catherine A. (1988) Unnatural Emotions: Emotions on a Pacific Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marriott, McKim (1989) “Constructing an Indian Ethnosociology” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 23(1): 1–40. Mauss, Marcel (1985 [1938]) “A category of the human mind: The notion of person; the notion of self ” in M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes (eds.) The Category of the Person, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25.

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21 WHItHEr ANtHrOPOLOGY IN PUBLIc POLIcY? Reflections from India Soumendra Mohan Patnaik Introduction This chapter traces the role of anthropology in public policy with special reference to issues of administration and governance of indigenous communities from colonial to contemporary times, as background for understanding the relationship between anthropology, governance and public policy in India today. The national discourse on the use, location and implications of anthropological knowledge has undergone several shifts as governance of institutions involved in the generation of anthropological knowledge such as the Anthropological Survey of India, the National Museum Institute, and the Museum of Man have been shuttled between several government departments like the ministry of Home Affairs, Tourism, Human Resources and Culture, signifying ambiguities in the minds of policy makers about its application. With globalization and the increasing role of international organizations, anthropology has re-entered development debates in significant ways. Globalization has led to a greater inflow of foreign capital to India. In addition to the expansion of the market, that capital has also influenced civil society institutions and development practice. International funding of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in India is one of the manifestations of globalization relevant to this discussion. Based on my research in Central and North East India with both government and civil society organizations, I look critically in this chapter at the ways development practices are shaped by anthropology and anthropologists and how and why anthropologists’ contribution often remains invisible.This chapter seeks to examine some of the ways in which anthropologists as consultants or advisors working in interdisciplinary teams comprising experts from different disciplines like economics, management, statistics, public administration and social work interact and mutually inform each other in everyday practice, with implications for public policy. Anthropology and public policy have many areas of convergence, especially in terms of themes of research, but there has also been an historical uneasiness in India about any dialogue between the two. One of the areas of tension between the disciplines of anthropology and public policy is the differential importance attached to the study of the local versus universal. Anthropologists tend to be more comfortable with a nuanced understanding of a local culture exploring its richness, complexities and interfaces with the wider world. Use of the ethnographic method encourages its practitioners to have a thorough understanding of a particular cultural context. Though in the formative years of the discipline, some of the practitioners had 400

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envisioned its goal as discovery of universal principles explaining human behavior through comparison across the globe, such exercises were rarely undertaken after the 1950s. Once postmodernist and poststructuralist approaches had been adopted by many anthropologists by the end of the twentieth century, the search for ‘general’ or ‘universal’ cultural explanations became an irrelevant proposition. Policy makers and others with whom anthropologists work in interdisciplinary development teams, however, may not share this view and may be working to create or apply more general models. I find the intersections between anthropological and other disciplinary vantage points not only fascinating but also connecting to the disciplinary ambition, if not practice, of moving from microcosm to macrocosm, accounting for diverse scales and perspectives. Globalization has offered fresh challenges for anthropology, and it is up to the practitioners to unfold the inherent potential of the discipline in a meaningful and creative way. My interdisciplinary experience as a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Institute of the Policy and Governance at Virginia Tech ­University in the United States during the fall of 2011 made me realize that anthro­ pologists participating in larger conversations about policy must acknowledge the prioritization of ­generalizable concerns in conversations about transnational governance. The shrinking role of the state coupled with a robust civil society having links with international donor agencies contri­butes to such a necessity. In an institute based on the insights of practitioners from the fields of political science, public administration, policy studies, economists, geographers, environmental scientists and medical doctors, the dominant focus was on macro-generalizations. Participating in that environment gave me insights into the challenges that I encountered during the multiple roles I had played in the development sector over the past decade among indigenous and marginalized communities of north-east and central India, and also in Tamil-dominated northern Sri Lanka and the Himalayan foothills of Nepal.Those experiences in interdisciplinary development teams have led me to explore critically the role of macro-claims in formulating regional, national, and transnational policy. One challenge for anthropologists participating in conversations that naturalize macro-claims can be to anthropological ethics.While disciplines like economics, statistics, and political science can naturalize macro-claims, anthropologists tend to have our own reservations. For example, while development professionals from other disciplines might search for a set of universal ethical guidelines in development practice and discourse, anthropologists prefer to refrain from generalizations about local ethics at the universal level. The United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights from 1948 is often considered as an example of cultural specifics being transcended in the interest of universal generalizations, but there are challenging aspects to speaking globally when the local discussions of concepts may not only be worded but understood in a variety of ways. Another area of tension between the disciplines of anthropology and public policy can be the differential importance given to qualitative and quantitative data, respectively. In public policy the role of statistical data is quite significant in elucidating the conditions of social phenomena. Large-scale quantitative data with sophisticated statistical treatment are generally the basis on which policy makers derive their understanding of social processes. Such data may be very useful in capturing the macrocosm, but often miss the multiscalar nuances with which anthropologists deal well. Both of these perspectives complement each other in exploring complexities of different orders, and combining the fields’ strengths has the potential to lead to more successful formulation of public policy. What, then, might explain the relative invisibility of the discipline of anthropology in the field of public policy in India? Drawing insights from the author’s own experiences in public policy as a consultant to development initiatives carried out by international aid NGOs in Central India in 2009, and as an advisor to the Government of Nagaland for the formulation 401

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of a Sustainable Tourism Development Plan (2005) – with the technical assistance of the World Tourism Organization based in Madrid, and with financial support from the UNDP, New Delhi – this chapter reflects upon some of the challenges anthropologists may face in contri­ buting to interdisciplinary development policy teams.

Anthropology and public policy Anthropology has long been engaged with the study of social themes that implicitly deal with policy, but has had disciplinary concentrations in anthropology and public policy only more recently. Research on social organization, social systems, social process, networks, patterns and traditional social capital lying at the center of anthropological inquiry have direct implications for public policy (Wedel and Feldman 2005). Studies of conceptualization of democracy, morality, citizenship, ethics and values in a given cultural context have gained momentum in anthropological research, and these topics comprise possibilities for more meaningful dialogue with experts on public policy. Anthropological knowledge was used (or misused) by colonial rulers for establishing racial and cultural hegemony over the non-Western “other”. This is what the colonial governments “chose to do,” to borrow a phrase from Thomas R. Dye’s (1987) definition of public policy. The criticism accruing from the unholy alliance of colonizers and anthropologists in the mid19th and early 20th centuries has often led the latter to maintain a conscious distance from the former in subsequent periods. Anthropologists have been involved in later scandals regarding gathering clandestine information for national governments, thus raising renewed wariness among many potential participants in anthropological research projects. Many anthropologists in the post–World War II era, particularly in the Global South, have made the decision to keep a conscious distance between themselves and policy makers in order to “remain clean.” This has led to a perceptible absence of anthropologists from the domain of public policy in India. As Nkwi (2006: 157–158) points out, this differs from the direction anthropology has taken in many African nations in which anthropology has been funded through the state and contributed strongly to policy discussions, with those African anthropologists sometimes being at odds with anthropological communities in the Global North which tend to regard with suspicion such close alliances between anthropology and the state. In interdisciplinary teams, the criticism sometimes leveled by public policy scholars that anthropologists are comfortable with micro-studies without taking into account the larger forces which could be made intelligible within a systems frame work does not hold much ground. Logical movement from the study of a microcosm (a village or a community) to the understanding of a macrocosm (a nation or a region) through the use of the comparative method constituted a part of disciplinary goals during the periods of its inception. In fact, anthropologists, among other social scientists, are known for their ability to make sense of the whole by tracing relationships among parts, through the methodological narratives of holism and comparison. In one of the early philosophical treaties which was empirically grounded on the North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA) or the present Arunachal Pradesh of India, Verrier Elwin (1958) emphatically stated “a model tribal administration might well inspire the psychological approach, the techniques of development and the general ‘philosophy’ of officials and social workers operating in other parts of the Indian Tribal World’ (1959: ppxvi). In the foreword to the first edition of the book A Philosophy for NEFA (1957: xii), the Prime Minister of India at the time, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote, “I hope that this broad approach will be applied outside the NEFA also to other tribes in India.” Though the discipline had the heuristic strength to relate micro with macro, and to arrive at generalizations, scholars rarely attempted such exercises as they were not 402

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motivated to initiate a dialogue on indigenous affairs at a national level. As stated earlier, this was mainly to protect the image of their academic ventures as ‘theoretical’ and not ‘applied.’ Post– World War II discourses also witnessed a resistance on the part of scholars in India to make any reference to applied anthropology which was considered in many nations in that period to be an agenda of the government, colonial or otherwise. Dependence on the state for the application of anthropological knowledge created bureaucratic “red tapism,” short-sightedness and even corruption. Anthropologists have identified alternative role models for facilitating decision making in community settings. Sol Tax came up with the term ‘action anthropology’ in 1950 while directing the Fox Indian Project in Tama, Iowa, which he continued for nearly 25 years, from 1938 to 1962. According to Tax, action anthropology requires the “intellectual and the political independence that one associates with the pure researcher… it depends on university and foundation connection for support rather than those of a client or government” (Tax 1964: 227). In the action anthropology approach, the anthropologist assumed the part of both actor and observer (Tax 1964: 256). However, an anthropologist trained in the structural functional tradition shaping the discipline in many national contexts at that time was expected to maintain objectivity or value neutrality, therefore somehow eschewing taking any moral or ethical position within the research context. It was believed that as a detached observer, the anthropologist was supposed to play a passive role as a political or moral individual. Her participation was limited to the everyday life of the community including culturally routinized and ritually critical activities. Sol Tax, by crafting the term ‘action anthropology,’ expanded the role of the anthropologist by pointing out that all anthropologists were participating in a moral and political domain. In action anthropology, the anthropologist’s activities directed toward the welfare of the community being studied acquired theoretical and methodological legitimacy. Tax challenged anthropologists to make an attempt to realize the discipline’s applied potential in the public domain. The shift from the positivistic tradition of the structural functionalist school (more resonant with the language of policymakers) to the phenomenological one of symbolic anthropology and new critical ethnography contributed to the widening gap between anthropology and public policy in some ways. Some saw that as a difference between Malinowskian approaches (still informing a lot of NGOs’ assessments of “basic human needs”) and Geertzian approaches to doing ethnography. One concern that I heard voiced among applied anthropologists with reference to the more pubic role of interpretive anthropology, sometimes in jest, was that if potential employers knew that every anthropologist could potentially produce a report with a very different interpretation it might make it harder to find work. On the other hand, of course, looking through another lens, exactly the same could be said of reports from other disciplines with the reputation of scientific objectivity. Contemporary anthropology in many nations has shown a perceptible shift in its interest in, and engagement with, public policy. As stated earlier in this section, anthropology has been dealing with issues of shared concern with students of public policy. As a field of inquiry, public policy is not a single academic discipline; there is no unifying theory or conceptual framework, and no unique analytical tool. As a multidisciplinary inquiry, it has remained mainly as a derivative science of policy economics and policy political science (Dunn 2014). Its object of study – policy – is viewed as a fluid site of political contestation over resources and their distribution. Thus “public policy connects varieties of stake holders in complex power and resource relations which reproduce, resist or affect larger non-localized regimes of power” (Wedel and Feldman 2005: 2; Shore, Wright and Pero 2011; Wedel et al. 2005). Policy studies draw on a social organizational approach, network analysis, systems theory and processual analysis relying mostly on quantitative data generated through econometric and psychometric tools. Anthropology, with its ability to generate qualitative data through the 403

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ethnographic method, can contribute significantly to the field of public policy. By tracing the manner in which individuals, institutions and agencies are interconnected, anthropologists try to elucidate the structure and process that ground, order and give policies direction.Therefore, social network analysis with its focus on complexity of social relations, for example, can illuminate the working of transnational policy processes in the emerging global order. It also helps us to see how various levels of policy formulation and execution operate at local, national and global levels in an interwoven manner using terms being defined in diverse and even contradictory ways.

Dealing with “the indigenous”: engagement of colonial anthropologists Anthropologists are seen by some members of development policy teams as advocates of culture that help in the percolation of development gains smoothly to communities. By virtue of its emphasis on the study of minute details of subjects and its embeddedness in the study of culture, the discipline has complementary contributions to make for policy makers and planners alike, though the acknowledgement of that is slow in coming. Arturo Escobar (1997) states that anthropologists have served as ‘cultural intermediaries’ between development planners and communities. Anthropology has carved out a niche for itself in the development paradigm, especially in the West, attributable to the discipline’s ability to solve development puzzles. These puzzles related to culturally appropriate interventions, development critiques, evaluations of cultural and ‘emic’ results of interventions, and the remodeling of programs and effects of interventions on societal processes. In the latter part of the 1930s, two significant events occurred signifying application of critical anthropological knowledge in formulating policies for indigenous communities in central and south India. In his magnum opus on the Baiga, an indigenous community of central India, missionary anthropologist Verrier Elwin (1939) advocated for protective measures in the tribal-dominated areas of Bastar eliminating exploitation of all forms – economic, political, cultural and sexual – by outsiders. This constituted the basis for the declaration of “excluded” or “partially excluded” areas in regions of tribal concentration under the Government of India Act of 1935, meaning that those not local to the area, especially traders and money lenders, were prohibited from entering or interacting with communities there. The policy of isolation triggered much controversy among social workers and social scientists because the colonial administrators and the missionaries continued to enjoy access to these tribal dominated areas while social workers and non-tribal traders and money lenders were denied entry. Renowned social worker of the time A.V Thakkar, popularly known as Thakkar Bapa, severely critiqued Elwin’s policy on the ground that isolation creates an iron curtain between the indigenous communities and the the so-called ‘mainstream’ of India. It prohibits the spontaneous cultural interactions that have been going on for centuries between tribal groups and neighboring caste groups, potentially denying agency in assessing and having access to the benefits of development for the tribal communities. Thakkar was also criticized for his view on the cultural practices of local tribal communities, which he regarded as superstitious and hedonistic without any planning for the future. It followed from his thinking that these practices needed to be changed, or else there would be no hope for ‘tribal upliftment’. He chalked out a road map to achieve this by incorporating the tribals completely into the civilizational matrix of India. Thakkar Bapa’s policy of assimilation marked the basis of one of the nationalistic approaches to `the tribal question’ in colonial India. The nationalistic discourse on tribal policy marked a complete split between the social workers and anthropologists. Defending the anthropologists against the criticism of social workers that the former wanted to maintain the status quo in tribal areas, Elwin argued that when anthropology 404

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is equipped with the study of change and has developed a set of concepts and methodology for dealing with tribal transformations, there is no reason why they should oppose any kind of change. Elwin explained that protecting tribal people from exploitation was his goal, and not isolation per se. He could clarify this when his philosophy for NEFA appeared in 1957, the second edition of which contained a foreword from the first prime minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. The close relationship between Nehru and Elwin laid the foundation for a tribal policy for independent India inspired by ideas of integration through self-respect, dignity and rights over resources. The five principles, which Nehru states that he got from Elwin, capture the national imagination and came to be regarded as Tribal Panchsheel. These principles are discussed later in this chapter, in an example of development policies implemented in tribal areas. The second event from the 1930s that defined later applications of anthropology in India was when Christoph von Furer-Haimendorf arrived in Hyderabad in August 1939 with plans to visit the Naga Hills. With the beginning of World War II, he was not allowed to go to the Naga Hills with a German passport. The Nizam of Hyderabad promptly invited him to work among the tribes of his state, which the anthropologist continued to do for the next nine years until 1949. He soon gained the confidence of the Nizam, who appointed him as an official advisor on tribal policies to the government in 1945, a position he held for four years before leaving for London to take up an academic assignment at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Furer-Hameindorf conducted fieldwork on tribes with diverse socio-economic formations in different environmental locations. Beginning from the study of the Chenchus, the ‘food gatherers’ (1943), he moved on to the hill Reddis, the ‘shifting cultivators’ (1945), and finally to the Raj Gonds, the ‘settled agriculturalists’ (1948). Adopting a multidisciplinary approach to arrive at a holistic understanding of these tribal communities, he examined the ecology, agricultural dynamics, forest activities, land tenure systems, and customs and rituals. He never treated these communities as isolated microcosms; he tried to trace the linkages that connect these communities with the wider state through market, social network and informal travel necessitated by kinship obligations. He also collected population figures and demographic details, sometimes undertaking collection of a detailed household census for as many as 426 families in the upper plateau of the Krishna basin in Chenchu settlements. In 1943, the Nizam’s government declared vast tracts of the plateau as a Chenchu reserve again with the idea of protecting these communities from outside exploitation. Treating the problems of tribes as systemic problems, Furer-Hameindorf began to formulate the Gond education scheme and in May 1943, a training school was formally established and also started imparting training to the teachers with a view to create new leaders for the future. In primary schools the medium of instruction was the Gondi language, for which local teachers were appointed. He was also appointed as Warden to the civil service house which imparted training to freshly recruited young civil servants, building their capacity in skills that they would require as district administrative officers. Critiquing the existing land tenure system that alienated the tribal owners, he suggested alternatives that ensured a non-interference policy and respected tribal rights. Following his advice, the Nizam Government distributed pattas (or deed documents) as proof of the tribal ownership of land which later became very popular in the name of Haimendorf Pattas.

Situating anthropological knowledge: criticality and (in)visibility Anthropologists are not always supported within the discipline in India for attention to public policy. Many graduate students, recent PhDs and junior scholars who study policy, for example, find the anthropological validity of their work called into question not for compelling 405

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intellectual reasons, but rather on the grounds that the study of policy is the domain of other disciplines such as political science, economics or sociology. This argument, however, undercuts the notion that anthropology has a distinguishable theoretical contribution to make to the social sciences because it assumes that the only difference between disciplines is the chosen object of study (e.g., other disciplines study policy while anthropologists study rituals). The development of a coherent body of research in the anthropology of public policy can make crucial contributions both to the discipline of anthropology and to the debates and field of public policy (Shore and Wright 1996). There is now, for example, a Committee on Public Policy and an Anthropology of Public Policy Award in the American Anthropological Association (AAA). In 2004, an Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy (IGAPP) was created under the auspices of the AAA to provide an institutional framework to identify and promote the works of anthropologists engaged with policy discourses and development practice. IGAPP is also involved with the development of curricula and syllabi for courses on the Anthropology of Public Policy discussing its concepts, practice, and impact. There are other examples of international venues in which critical anthropological knowledge is used for public purposes. Another global body of professional anthropologists, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), in its last world congress held at Manchester in 2013, decided to revive its long hibernating scientific commission on Anthropology in Policy and Practice under new leadership, renaming it as the ‘Anthropology of Public Policy and Development Practice’. In 2010, the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA), in its biennial meeting held at Maynooth, Ireland, decided to establish a task force on ‘Anthropologists without Borders’. It draws upon knowledge and experience acquired by anthropologists around the world and connects to groups like self-identified communities, NGOs, government bodies and civil society organizations. Thorough deliberations were made on its vision document during the WCAA-sponsored international symposium on the Anthropology of Global Issues hosted by the Indian Anthropological Association (IAA) and the Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, held at the University of Delhi in 2012. Finally, in 2013, Anthropologists Without Borders—or Antropologos Sem Fronteiras (ASF) in Portuguese—was registered in Brazil as an inclusive network of critical readers and not as an advocacy group, a funding source, or a network of field-based research teams. Thus, there have been several concerted efforts to create more visibility for anthropological knowledge in the domain of public policy. Recent studies on nation-states, especially in South Asia, have dealt with interconnections between democracy, identity and conflict, demonstrating how anthropology can take a central role in understanding issues of public affairs such as development politics and practice (Chatterjee 2005; Spencer 2007). Seeking to explain chronic and widespread poverty in India, Gupta (2012) identified the relationship between the State in India and those who are impoverished and excluded as one of structural violence. This is often carried out under the guise of poor citizens’ participation in democratic projects and the State’s enthusiasm in sponsoring poverty amelioration programs. Using ethnographic methods, Gupta studied the bureaucrats and other officials responsible for coordinating development programs in rural Uttar Pradesh. In an earlier work, Sharma and Gupta (2005) developed an anthropological sense of the State as a cultural artifact, in the context of a neoliberalizing, transnational world. These works opened up possibilities for an interdisciplinary research program between anthropology and political science in India. In terms of its contributions to anthropology, the study of policy has considerable potential to pioneer theoretical and methodological innovations in the discipline. A key reason is that it forces anthropologists to reconceptualize ‘the field’ as a site of ethnographic inquiry (Gupta 406

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and Ferguson 1997). Studying policy makes it necessary to follow processes that connect actors, organizations and institutions, and to ask how policy discourses help to sustain those connections even if the people involved are never in face-to-face contact. The changing nature of the anthropological field also calls for discussion of how to conduct ethnographic research among loosely connected actors possessing varying levels of institutional leverage, and located in multiple sites. Attending to that range of contexts necessitates greater use of a wide range of ethnographic methods–of which participant-observation is but one – that enable the field to be conceived more broadly in terms of power and resource relations.

Anthropology in conversation with other disciplines about public policy A highly important aspect of anthropology is its practitioners’ potential to work diligently in conjunction with other disciplines. Anthropological methods inform and refine work in economics, contextualize the numbers in statistics, add to understandings of historical processes, situate problems of development within appropriate cultural contexts and - perhaps most importantly - allow room for alternative discourses to emerge, sometimes challenging the dominant (development) discourse itself. In the postcolonial era, anthropologists in India have had less influence on policy and government than some of the disciplines with which we collaborate, especially economics. A leading economist at the Delhi School of Economics once quipped that if anthropology is the ‘queen’ of social sciences, economics is the king. This statement reflected the pervasiveness of his discipline in governance and policy circles and might also be heard as critiquing the lack of generalizations in anthropology. Beteille (2000), in his article on what economics has contributed to sociology and social anthropology, also talks about this pride of place that economists enjoyed in the government, especially in the planning commission of India. But he goes on to state that the biggest contribution of economics to social anthropology is the idea that individual action is constrained by a material and social framework that has a definite and determinate structure. Anthropology, however, has always contributed to development discourse either in manifest or latent ways. If the Nehruvian era saw anthropology as playing key roles in policy formulation vis-à-vis the native populations in India, since the 1980s the discipline has served policy in conjunction with other disciplines and in more subtle ways. For instance, the NGO sector in India has been a strong parallel force to the state and relies quite a lot on anthropologists as experts, workers, researchers and even negotiators in certain situations. Anthropological work on migrant populations, minority groups, marginalized groups, resistance movements, deconstruction of policies and governance practices for the public as a whole, and sometimes documenting specific political events and situations, have all been enriching the policy and development circles as well as demystifying, pointing out the lacunae in, and thus potentially improving the “interventions”. Though my intellectual foundations have firmly taken route in the anthropological tradition, I have always been looking for interdisciplinary collaborations. A few years ago I came to know about a collaborative research study in one of the tribal areas in Madhya Pradesh, the district of Jhabua. One of my graduate students, Supriya Singh, who was then pursuing her M.Phil. in Anthropology, joined the project. We often discussed the challenges the project faced in developing a multidisciplinary perspective on natural resources, livelihood and gender (Chopra, et al. 2007). The research was essentially economic in character, aimed at examining the dependence of the tribal population on their immediate environment. It entailed elaborate surveys and collection of a lot of socioeconomic data along with data on vegetation, livelihoods, gender, and other foci. When the trends, based on data, began to emerge, there were quite a few areas where 407

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the trends went against ‘economic logic’. One prominent one was that collection of resources, especially firewood, increased during times of scarcity. This meant that the people, especially women, were spending more time collecting firewood when less of it was available, to stock up for the future. It made more sense to collect resources when they were abundant than to spend extra time in collection during scarcity. Similarly, the same women spent almost double their time in water collection during the summer, the season of scarcity, and households did not spend any money on buying water. So where did this extra time come from, and how did these decisions affect time spent on other essential activities in the household? Statistics alone could not explain this satisfactorily, but anthropological inquiry revealed that collecting firewood for stocking up in the summer saved the household’s time in the agricultural season. Summer being a lean period, there was very little work available near the village so the men migrated out of the state and the women had more time on their hands. By the same logic, spending additional time in water collection was tedious but did not cut into any major activity time. Buying water was not an option due to the abject poverty in the area. So the qualitative study serves to complement the quantitative analysis by putting it in a cultural perspective and explaining some of the results in a satisfactory manner (Chopra et al, 2007). The role of anthropology has been pivotal in the formulation and implementation of health-related policies, as well. In the field of public health, the science of epidemiology is the backbone of investigation of disease outbreaks, their causes, and controlling measures, while anthropology contributes by pulling in more variables like culturally constituted risk factors, belief patterns, and practices related to health and disease. Thus together, these disciplines can provide a more holistic understanding of health and illnesses in local communities (Nagarkar 2012). Equipped with ethnographic methods for eliciting “the view from within” (which is, of course, not coherent in itself) on relevant economic, political and historical phenomena, anthropology can meaningfully contribute to a more holistic and nuanced understanding of the phenomena the policy is trying to address. The role of a team of experts belonging to different disciplines is crucial. Usually the economists are at the centre of such multidisciplinary teams carrying out dialogue with representatives of other disciplines, including anthropologists. According to Bardhan and Ray (2008), research in economics is primarily driven by the need to predict outcomes while anthropology is driven by a concern with social relationships, cultural values, and power dynamics. Thus, there has been significant complementarity of disciplines in the pursuit of policy making. Robbins (2003) has pointed out that anthropology, because of its cultural sensitivity and ethnographic capabilities, is uniquely equipped to engage with what economists call ‘market externalities’. These externalities, largely dismissed in most economic analyses, comprise the subject matter of most work in applied anthropology. Contemporary cultural forms and patterns of social relations are governed by market factors. Robbins further argued that anthropology can be regarded as policy science only if it devises means to better articulate the cost of externalities, by focusing on the stuff of everyday life and by conveying to the public the real cost of things. This logic is grounded on economic rationality rather than on the rationality of value. However, this opens the way for new dialogue between anthropologists and economists negotiating their ideas and insights toward improvements in policy making. Synergies between the field of history and anthropology are also abundant. As Cohn (1980) puts it, both study cultural differences: anthropologists constructed otherness in space and historians in ‘time’. According to Macfarlane (1988), anthropological works also had the effect of distancing the familiar, making historians aware that much of what they had regarded as normal in the past really required investigation because it was, in comparative perspective, unusual. 408

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A particularly striking example of this was in the field of family relationships. Much of traditional social anthropology was concerned with kinship and marriage. These works helped to stimulate many of the studies of sexuality, marriage, childhood, parental ties, domestic groups, women, love, incest and other topics. Anthropologists joined up with representatives from historical demography and women’s studies, leading to proposed policy intervention. A recent study by the UN Women and UN Population Fund (UNFPA) on India’s declining child sex ratio speaks of a culture in which gender inequality is deeply ingrained. “The discourse on gender biased sex selection in India has evolved over time from the realm of private spaces to that of public policy” (Meijer and Tavares 2014: 1). The study examines the policy implications of such a phenomenon around the key concepts of culture, violence and political economy. It has the potential to be a useful resource and guide for informed policy discourse on the issue. At a time in which publications in public policy remain present and future oriented, and light on history, historical studies emphasize aspects that differ from mainstream policy analyses (Pollitt 2008). However, according to Rosenberg (2006: 28): policy is always history. Events in the past define the possible and desirable, set of tasks, and define rewards, viable choices, and thus the range of possible outcomes. As we move through time those choices reconfigure themselves and trends may establish themselves—but at any given point the ‘actionable’ options are highly structured. It is the historian’s disciplinary task to define those likelihoods….Most important, what history can and should contribute to the world of policy and politics is its fundamental sense of context and complexity, of the determined and negotiated. Thus, translation of historical studies for policy audiences is a desirable but complex process. Reuler (2011) developed a typology of modes of policy-relevant history, arguing for the application of historical scholarship in the policy environment. He articulated a four-fold classification: (1) history as ‘the past,’ (2) history as a method to study the social world and its unfolding, (3) problem-oriented study, and (4) understanding-oriented study. The first two perspectives deal with the meaning of history as the past or as a method, while the next two dimensions deal with the focus of the study either with a motive to solve or to understand. In my attempt to inform policy considerations through historical insights, I have adopted the first and fourth perspectives of Reuler, i.e., history as the past and understanding history in order to comprehend policy and its context.

Anthropology and development discourse In traditional ethnographic research, an ethical code was used primarily to elicit the rhetoric of ‘scientific truth’, objectivity or lack of bias. Paradoxically, the same research process is based on an unequal dyadic relationship between the anthropologist and the local people. Pels (1999) argued that the rhetoric of ethics ‘masks’ the politics of ethnographic research. In other words, the production and politics of ethnographic knowledge have been taking place in settings where ethnographers are usually more powerful than their subjects. In the early 1970s, the rising concern of anthropologists with development issues evoked mixed reaction from interdisciplinary development practitioners. While some welcomed it, the majority of them critiqued development anthropology as ‘lacking intellectual rigor’, ethically suspect, unimaginative and bereft of theoretical sophistication. This became more pronounced when the consultant anthropologists were employed in private agencies or outside academia. Working for aid agencies and grassroots NGOs was usually looked down on in relation to 409

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academic positions in university departments or research institutes. The bridge between theory and practice, all the more necessary because of this bifurcation, is the need of the hour in development studies. ‘Insider anthropology’ (Mosse 2006) comes up when the ethnographic text generated by the anthropologist is made public among the stakeholders: especially the donor, the research collaborators and the partner NGOs. This has implications for the power equation between the anthropologist and the informant. Elucidating the rationale for studying the middle and upper end of the social power structure, Laura Nader (1969) coined the term “studying up,” in the edited volume Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1969), as a perspective to implement in anthropological research. Drawing on Nader’s term in a specific development anthropology context, Campbell (2010) calls this ‘studying up’ approach a significant one for capturing differential power dynamics in a development context. The “studying up” approach discusses the ethnography of powerful individuals and institutions and the shift in the relationship between the ethnographer and her/his subjects which has allowed the informants the right to object to anthropologists’ interpretations and accounts. Over time, anthropological subjects have acquired considerable power over what we write, say and do. Sometimes, the ‘agendas’ of powerful individuals involved in international aid or national development policy pose challenges to anthropologists’ ethical code. Shore and Wright (1997) pointed out, following Laura Nader, that a ‘study through’ approach is essential to establish the policy connections between the key institutions, organizations and various categories of actors, given that policy is a continuous process of contestation across an extensive political space in which actors in different sites do not know each other or share a moral universe. Development discourse in India is undergoing a paradigm shift (Patnaik and Mehrotra 2010). The role of the state as a key player in the development sector is fast shrinking to its “optimum minimal”. On the other hand, international aid agencies along with the local partner NGOs are carrying out the task of development more effectively. The flow of resources, expertise and ideas is mediated through a network made up of international agencies, state machinery, local NGOs and CBOs (community-based organizations), pointing toward increasingly transnational governance in a neoliberal state like India. The mission of public/private partnership under the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has given space to local CBOs and NGOs to be active in the development sector. This is not to argue that the ‘State’ has lost its interest or its significance, but to point out that while individuals associated with the state, and the state bureaucracy, are inventing new kinds of regulatory policy measures, those who play an effective role on the ground are no longer tending to be the government officials, but the development professionals from donor agencies or national and local NGOs. The decreasing visibility of the state in development practice is not only being felt but also questioned (Patnaik 2013; Menon 2009). With a colonial history of more than two centuries, the Indian state is yet to come out from under that legacy as far as the development sector is concerned. The pre-independence era was marked with a rising concern for the poor and disadvantaged section of the society among the Western-educated, upwardly mobile elite who took up ‘social service’ or ‘social work’ for what was understood to be the weaker section of the society such as women, those who were disabled, street children, widows and deserted women and orphans. Institutional networks were formed to handle the well-being of such individuals on a philanthropic platform, as a part-time vocation, which mainly boosted their self-image and reassured their role in social uplift. Such networks were called voluntary organizations, and they operated without much professionalization of this vocation. The colonial rulers demonstrated considerable apathy toward the poor and downtrodden, and whatever programs they did initiate when pressured by Indian nationalists employed a 410

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welfare approach to development. After independence, the Government of India, especially the subordinate bureaucracy, virtually continued the colonial hangover of dealing with the poor and marginalized in their effort to uplift them or ‘bring some comfort to their miseries’ in a paternalistic manner. The adoption of a neoliberal capitalist economy which unleashed several structural changes contributed to a new kind of development discourse mainly centering on a rights-based approach. Such an approach sought to realign the power imbalances in the development sector and advocated new values of empowerment, participation and equity through a new kind of language often neither intelligible nor acceptable to the government practitioners. In such a situation of development initiatives, it is highly essential to deliberate on development ethics and an associated code of conduct for all the stakeholders in the field (Moore 2009). The Indian state has come up with some recent legislative measures having implications for development ethics in the emerging scenario. Historically, the constitution builders realized the vulnerability of certain areas primarily inhabited by the indigenous/tribal/adivasi communities of India. Pockets of concentration of tribal communities were identified as “scheduled areas” where state legislators cannot adopt a resolution or pass a law that might affect the tribal peoples adversely. Therefore, under the 5th and 6th Schedules of the Indian constitution (which have been there since its inception in 1950), the state Governor (the executive head) can declare any law passed by state legislature as null and void if it contravenes tribal interests. The 5th Schedule is for central India, and the 6th Schedule applies to northeastern states bordering China, Myanmar and Bangladesh. Nearly 50 years later, a significant constitutional amendment to the constitution of India took place in 1996 when the provisions of local governance (Panchayati Raj) were extended to the 5th scheduled area. Under the Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA 1996) Act, the village councils or gram sabhas became nodal centres of governance and acquired legal sanctions. The gram sabhas comprising all members of the village (representing one member from each household) were not only entrusted with the task of managing local resources such as community land, forest, timber and water, but also to preserve the culture, tradition and identity of the community. Any decision made by the gram sabha has a legal binding and has a mandate of the court of law. Such provisions have paved the way for participatory democracy and empowering the community members. This provides a potentially rich ground for the emergence and strengthening of participatory development through a rights-based approach.

Anthropology in policy making In 2004, the Government of Nagaland, a northeastern state on the international border of India, constituted a multidisciplinary team to provide technical advice on the formulation of a sustainable tourism plan in collaboration with the UNDP and World Tourism Organization. I joined the team as an advisor/anthropologist and encountered many ethical dilemmas. Initially, the team members thought that anthropology would fill in here and there in terms of cultural descriptions while the economist, management specialist, community development planner and environmental scientist would contribute the most significant sections of the report, as these areas were assumed to be critical for planning. Later on, anthropological insights turned out to be significant for developing the plan (Patnaik 2007). Nagaland is a state with 16 distinct tribes that have well-defined territorial bases displaying rich social capital and strong communities. The Nagaland Government passed the Communitization of Public Institutions and Services Act (CPISA) in 2002, which sought to revitalize and improve public services based on the principles of three Ts: “Trust, Training and Transfer” of 411

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power and resources.The government expressed its trust in the local communities and therefore transferred to them all power and resources involved in the delivery of public services. Periodic training to build up and enhance community capacity to deal with these administrative and managerial responsibilities continued. This Act has provisions in the fields of education, health care, water supply, electricity, tourism and biodiversity conservation. The idea was to privatize these, but to keep control in the hands of the user community. State government would be providing salary, technical advice and support. Thus, the Village Council and Village Development Boards became the managers of the programs under CPISA. This Act created enthusiasm and reignited community creativity, though some supports were lacking in terms of the environment and leadership for community administration of these programs.This program received the UN Public Service Award in 2008. Members of the Naga tribes have been described as head hunters, based on the customary practice of internecine war among feuding tribes. Chopping off the enemy’s head and putting his skull on the main entrance used to be regarded as an act of courage and great valor. The colonial government banned headhunting in the late 19th century, and the Christian missionaries persuaded communities to give up the practice. On their advice, the human skulls were buried inside youth dormitories, the “morungs.” Residents of Nagaland became reticent about discussing the practice in public. International tourists, however, preferred visiting those villages where the skulls are on display. These are mainly areas Christianity reached later. Consequently, the village youth now wanted to dig up the skulls and showcase them to tourists. The local church and the elders, on the other hand, opposed the idea. This led to some tension between the two groups. This is also reflective of how market forces shape community discussions and can lead to divisions. Another case of the market leading to friction may be seen in the illegal liquor trade in Nagaland. Nagaland is a dry state, but liquor is readily available. It is served even in official state parties. The Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA), a powerful civil society group, has been opposing this trend. The NMA has even gone on to barricade roads, search vehicles for liquor, seize and empty the bottles and protest state apathy on the issue. The market earns from the liquor trade while the state loses on the excise duty, which would be a great burden on the public treasury.The political leaders can therefore afford to annoy representatives of Christian churches, who are not in favor of reversing the ban. Many NGO leaders and activists face a continuous dilemma of whether to take a stand supporting the ban on liquor or not. Many of the tour operators and tourist guides are young women who escort the tourists to interior sites in Nagaland as these areas have a strong presence of insurgents. The tour professionals are popularly referred to as ‘Flying girls’ who are reported to be providing consensual sexual services as well. The village elders and the Church are threatened lest this disturb the moral fabric of the community. The whole range of work done by these women might appear to be voluntary, but a closer examination reveals structural constraints such as poverty and male relatives with addictions to drugs and alcohol affecting household economic resources, for example. It is important to note whether the consent is by choice or under compulsion. Such veiled freedoms are ethically questionable. The Naga HOHO, an apex political body of the community, is opposed to tourism but the state and many young people see a possibility of development through tourism. When I pointed out the dangers of sex trafficking, the drug trade and rising consumption of liquor to the advisory team, I was asked to delete these ‘negative implications’ from my report as it would jeopardize the possibility of funding the tourism planning. On my strict refusal, the language of the report was toned down but the issues remained. From my experience in Nagaland, I infer how engagement with neoliberal capitalist globalization is compelling 412

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religious organizations and insurgents to redefine their agendas, which poses newer ethical challenges. It also made me think about the way anthropologists could be seen as a challenge to dominant ways of thinking in policy making. Informed interventions and deep negotiations are required to inform and improve the process of formulating policy. This becomes even more urgent and apparent in the context of rapid industrialization and resource conflicts. Issues of ethics, community rights, alternative paths to/of development, and the role of the arbitrators – the anthropologists (increasingly members of the tribal communities, themselves) – take on a new meaning warranting new modes of thinking and action. My other experience as an anthropologist engaged in policy work comes from the tribal-­ dominated Chattisgarh of Central India where 5th Schedule and PESA have been operational since 2007. The idea of participatory development and planning from below were being experimented with, funded by several international agencies (Mosses 2005). The idea of participation leading to empowerment and consequently challenging the existing power structure appeared to be problematic in local political arenas.The village elite and land-owning group never wanted to share the village resources with the economically and socially excluded residents. Reservation of seats in the Panchayats (village councils) for women has turned out to be an act of tokenism. The husband, sarpanchpati, and son, sarpanchputra, attend the meetings and make decisions on behalf of the women. The term ‘harmonic’ system of social stratification has been used by Andre Beteille (1965) to explain experiences of social inequality in India. The politico-jural functions have often been the male prerogative and women are assumed to be accustomed to this idea. As stated earlier the village councils, gram sabhas, have acquired enormous power under PESA, 1996.The construction of roads, building of schools, and other infrastructural projects are looked after by the construction committee (Nirman Samiti) at the village level. Most of the influential people of the village want to be members of this committee, while there are few takers for the committees focused on sanitation, health and education. The nexus between the local contractors and the members of the construction committee unraveled the fact that new subjecthoods were emerging in contemporary development practice. These subjects are no longer representative of community interests but instead of the funders. The Build India (Bharat Nirman) program of the federal government has been focusing on a “total sanitation campaign” in rural areas. This is referred to as Nirmal Gram Yojana, in which toilets are constructed in every household. An award has been instituted to recognize the efforts of the district collector and the Panchayats by selecting the ‘best villages’ and rewarding them with ‘Nirmal Gram Puraskar.’ The local leaders and administrators pool all their resources, including the NGO efforts, to meet the targets and compete for it.Villagers are being ‘coerced’ to use the toilets (Mehrotra and Patnaik 2008). The execution of this modernity-laden, top-down international agenda misses the point. In the name of participation of the community, direct and indirect coercion is in fact distancing residents of the village from the development process. The nature of the state and governance is changing, but in some ways is very much continuing with older structures. In an era in which India is increasing engagement with global capitalist enterprises, the entry of multinationals into the mineral-rich tribal areas has resulted in large-scale displacement of indigenous people without proper compensation, and other human rights violations. This is in contradiction to the Tribal Panchsheel, elaborated by the first Prime Minister (in Elwin 1958). Panchsheel, or the five principles advocated by Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted on (1) safeguarding the tribal rights over their resources such as land and forests, (2) allowing the tribes to develop along the lines of their own genius, (3) building a team of their own people to do the work of administration and development, (4) avoiding over-administering them with a multiplicity of schemes, and working through, and not in rivalry with, their own social and cultural institutions, 413

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and (5) finally, judging the results not by statistics or the amount of money spent but qualitatively in relation to human well-being. Quite contrary to Nehruvian Panchsheel, capitalist interests inform the new state policies where a token lip service is paid to the interests of tribals. The mushrooming of tribal protests around the country raise several larger ethical questions about the rights of local people verses ‘the larger public good’ and the state’s rights. Thus, Nehruvian Panchsheel was in disagreement with the policy of industrialization in India. Since tribal areas are also the most resource-/mineral-rich areas, the process of industrialization was brazen in its disregard for tribal rights to water, forests and land. Anthropologists in India are also caught up in the debate around Maoist movements with violent tactics (matched by state violence).These political movements are most active in the tribal areas that have remained marked as underdeveloped and poor. The discussion of the lack of ‘development’ and the state coming down heavily on the Maoists (many are locals) divides the stakeholders on ideological planes. Development practitioners face the ethical dilemma of taking sides. While they support the concerns of the community, violence is being condemned. Anthropologists have recently emerged as negotiators between the government and the Maoists. Human rights violations in these areas from both sides are a major area of concern. Another issue of concern is the degree of tolerance for corruption in all spheres of life, a major ethical dilemma; things do not seem to move without bribes in their various forms. In the development sector, corruption is well entrenched. The subordinate bureaucracy in eastern India refers to it as ‘mamuli’, which means the ordinary and done thing.This is also connected to ‘red-tapism,’ or bureaucracy.The value of zero tolerance to corruption has to be located on new grounds of negotiation over a long drawn-out period of struggle. There are popular movements in India countering corruption that anthropologists are following, and these will perhaps shape anthropologists’ participation in interdisciplinary development teams.

Summing up Finally it can be said that ‘tolerance’ and ‘dialogue’ can themselves be guided by values negotiated within a larger context. All the stakeholders in development practice need to reflect on whatever moral commitments they may have that stand above the petty concerns and ­squabbles of everyday life, and how those inform their participation in development conver­ sations. ­Giddens (2003) refers to this as ‘cosmopolitan morality’. Development practitioners are ­constantly ­moving between different spheres in which decisions are justified morally, and this needs to be addressed more directly than in the indirect ways in which moral frameworks are imposed through development policies and processes. I would argue that in any attempt to inform policy making, one needs to revisit the concepts that have acquired the position of a fetish in development discourse. Three such notions are worth mentioning here – ‘community,’ ‘tradition’ and ‘democracy.’ The distinction between communities of interest and communities of location is vital. Understanding this distinction in local contexts can contribute to the resolution of some of the ethical dilemmas faced by participants in development collaborations. The idea of tradition as a product of modernity needs to be demystified. Douglas (2004) maintains that there is nothing called ‘traditional culture’; what obstructs development, however it is defined, is an inability to articulate future aspirations. Sometimes new rituals of hope have to be invented and celebrated (Appadurai 2004) by local residents themselves. Tradition has nothing to do with the past; it is more grounded in ritual and repetition performed collectively (Giddens 2003). Development policy and practice benefit from questioning an institutionalized notion of tradition. 414

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From my experience of working in interdisciplinary teams, I have considered the ways in which anthropologists should try to understand (1) devolution of power in different cultural settings, bringing in rich local understanding and voices, and (2) how local community members and other stakeholders in development processes negotiate new structures through emerging networks; (3) this can lead to a new art of governance and have implications for (4) changing notions of state and citizenship. In all these ventures, anthropology can be useful in collaboration with other disciplines in formulating, critiquing and negotiating public policy.

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Soumendra Mohan Patnaik Moore, H. L. 2009. Epistemology and Ethics: Perspectives from Africa. Social Analysis, 53(2): 207–218. Mosse, D. 2005. Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid Policy and Practice. London: Pluto Press. Mosse, D. 2006. Anti-Social Anthropology? Objectivity, Objection, and the Ethnography of Public Policy and Professional Communities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 12(4): 935–956. Nader, Laura. 1969 (1974). Up the Anthropologist—Perspective Gained from Studying Up. In Hymes, Dell (ed.) Reinventing Anthropology. New York:Vintage Books, pp. 284–311. Nagarkar, Aarti Kaulagekar. 2012. Exploring New Horizons: Medical Anthropology in Public Health. International Review of Social Sciences and Humanities, 3(1): 170–175. Nkwi, Paul Nchoji. 2006. Anthropology in a Postcolonial Africa: The Survival Debate. In Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins and Arturo Escobar (eds.) World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. Oxford: Berg, pp. 157–178. Okongwu, Anne Francis and Joan P. Mencher. 2000. The Anthropology of Public Policy: Shifting Terrains. Annual Review of Anthropology, 29: 107–124. Padel, F. and S. Das. 2010. Out of This Earth: East India Adivasis and Aluminium Cartel. New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan. Patnaik, S. M. 2007. Anthropology of Tourism: Reflections on Sustainable Tourism Development Plan for Nagaland. The Eastern Anthropologist, 61(3–4). Patnaik, S. M. 2013. Ethical Debate in Development Discourse in India: Towards the Formulations of Universal Ethical Guidelines. In Bliss, Frank and Marco Heinz (eds.) Entwicklungsethnologie. Bonn: Politischer Arbeitskreis Schulen. Patnaik. S. M. and Nilika Mehrotra. 2009. Preparing Communities for Disaster Management: Myths and Challenges. Himalayan Journal of Development and Democracy, 4(1): 44–51. Patnaik, S. M. and Nilika Mehrotra. 2010. Micro-Level Development Practices Among Tribals: An Exploration in Bastar. Social Action, 60(October-December): 385–399. Pels, Peter. 1999. Professions of Duplexity: A Prehistory of Ethical Codes in Anthropology. Current Anthropology, 40(2): 101–136. Pollitt, Christopher. 2008. Time, Policy, Management: Governing with the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reuler, Ellen van. 2011. History and Policy: A Typology and Its Issues. Proceedings of Second Annual Conference on Qualitative Research for Policy Making. Belfast: Merlien Institute. Rosenberg, Charles E. 2006. Anticipated Consequences: Historians, History and Health Policy. In Stevens, R. A., C. E. Rosenberg and L. R. Bums (eds.) History and Health Policy in the United States: Putting the Past Back In. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 13–31. Sharma, Aradhana and Akhil Gupta. 2005. The Anthropology of the State: A Reader. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Shore, C. and S. Wright. 1996. Policy: A New Field of Anthropology. In Shore, C. and S. Wright (eds.) Anthropology of Policy. London: Routledge, pp. 1–34. Shore, C. and S. Wright (eds.). 1997. Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power. London: Routledge. Shore, C., Susan Wright and Davide Pero (eds.). 2011. Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books (EASA Series). Spencer, Jonathan. 2007. Anthropology, Politics and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Vol. 3 of New Departures in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tax, Sol. 1964. Horizons of Anthropology. Chicago: Aldine. Wedel, Janine R. and Gregory Feldman. 2005. Why an Anthropology of Public Policy? Anthropology Today, 21(1): 1–2. Wedel, Janine R., Cris Shore, Gregory Feldman, and Stacy Lathrop. 2005. Toward an Anthropology of Public Policy. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 60(1): 30–51. UN Women and UNFPA. 2014. Sex Ratios and Gender Biased Sex Selection: History, Debates and Future Directions (Foreword: Frederika Meijer and Rebecca Reichmann Tavares). New Delhi: Multi City Office for India, Bhutan, Maldives and Sri Lanka.

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22 HEALtH AND ANtHrOPOLOGY IN tHE ErA Of ANtHrOPOGENIc CLIMAtIc AND ENVIrONMENtAL CHANGE Merrill Singer Introduction Global climate and other systemic environmental changes are emerging as primary contributors to the most perilous health concerns of the 21st century (Costello et al 2009). From the ominous rise of ocean levels that threaten low-lying island and coast communities to the global spread of disease vectors to new environments, and from notable increases in violent storms to upsurges in the frequency and size of wildfires, many of the changes occurring on Earth reflect a steady trend of planetary warming. While some commentators, most consistently those with conservative political views, have questioned the certainty of global warming, McCarty (2001:396) notes that, “Perhaps the strongest support for the role of climate change comes from the remarkable consistency in the types and magnitude of changes observed across multiple studies.” McCarty is referring here to studies produced by a wide array of disciplines which demonstrate an extraordinary level of cross-disciplinary teamwork. Consistently, as seen by the fact that no scientific body of national or international standing has embraced an alternative perspective, there is agreement across disciplines, research methods, and research topics that Earth is warming at a sufficient rate to be a cause of grave public concern. Also noteworthy are the perspectives of people from areas already being significantly impacted by environmental change (Singer 2011). As Herman Chavez, El Salvador’s Minister of Environment, explains, “Climate change for us is not a hypothesis… It is a very concrete reality that strikes us. The disasters we’ve been having are very clearly linked to climate change” (quoted in Jamail 2011). Like other countries in Central America, in recent years El Salvador has been hit by a succession of extreme weather events, including intense rainfall and flooding triggered by tropical storms and hurricanes. As a result, Chavez reports, “We put Climate Change as the number one issue for the region” (Jamail 2011). At the same time, for the often marginalized communities commonly studied by anthropologists, the effects of global warming are not experienced as isolated from other sociopolitical and environmental challenges to survival. For example, the African delegates to the 2009 Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change, echoing the concerns of other regional delegations as well, stressed that “Climate change is not only about land and development, but also a human rights issue. [Responses] must be sensitive to cultural, spiritual, social and economic activities of indigenous peoples.” (McLean 417

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2009:42). More boldly, in March 2007, Inuit representative and Nobel Prize nominee Sheilah Watt-­Cloutier and over 60 Inuit hunters filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that charged that the United States, as one of the largest producers of greenhouse gases, with violating their human rights under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man and the American Convention on Human Rights (Cherrington 2008). This response, broadly speaking, is seen as well among the campesinos of Hidalgo, Mexico studied by Richard (2008:406), who had developed a ‘discourse of desiccation’ that refuted the Mexican government’s “attempts to ‘naturalize’ the demise of the countryside as a result of impartial market rationalities, the presumed ‘backward’ nature of campesinos themselves, or even a capricious environment.” Instead, the campesinos came to understand that the cycles of drought and deluge they were experiencing were caused by changes in climate and land use patterns and not a consequence of chance natural events or as result of their maladaptive interaction with the land. Instead they came to view the weather extremes they were experiencing as ecological evidence of government failure to act to protect them. Notably, the changes that are encumbering the lives of indigenous peoples and local communities of historic anthropological interest are not only climatic in nature. Beyond climate change, other transformations occurring on Earth that are of similarly grave importance signal a range of additional ecocrises befalling the planet, ranging from the effects of the dumping of toxic substances to the destruction of the habitats of diverse species, and from deforestation to the loss of ocean biodiversity. A UN evaluation, entitled The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005), concluded that during the previous 50 years humans have altered Earth’s ecosystem more rapidly and more extensively than in any comparable time in human history. As a result, there has been a sweeping and in many cases permanent loss of animal and plant species, with profound implications for human well-being (e.g., loss of food sources, disappearance of pollinators needed for crop fertilization). Furthermore, the report emphasized that 60 percent of the ecosystem services—that is, the array of benefits humans derive from the natural ecosystems of the planet—are being degraded or used in unsustainable ways. In short, the report concluded “human actions are depleting Earth’s natural capital, putting such a strain on the environment that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted” (United Nations 2005). One thing these “other” biophysical environmental degradations and contaminations all have in common with global warming is their anthropogenic origins. A second shared feature is the fact that, despite being caused disproportionately by actions in the wealthiest nations, they most immediately threaten the health and social well-being of the poorest regions and communities around the globe. In this sense, they express the health effects of globalization and global enactments of power, social inequality, and political injustice as mediated by the biophysical environment. As Patz and co-workers (2007) stress, climatic and environmental issues constitute the most significant health inequities of our time because: (1) exposure is involuntary (those who suffer the most adverse effects, the poor, are the least responsible for causing the problems); (2) almost 90 percent of the disease burden attributable to climate and environmental change afflicts children under 5 years of age, a group that is not responsible for environmental degradations nor are they able to “consent” to these impacts; and (3) some heralded mitigation strategies, such as promoting the use of biofuels, may drive up the cost of staple foods and amplify malnutrition among poorer populations. Moreover, collectively—as ecocrises often are intertwined, interactive and mutually enhancing—­ intentional and unintentional human reconfigurations of the climate and environment threaten to rebound and drastically alter the quality of the fabric of contemporary global societies 418

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(Singer 2009). Examination of the causes, character and health-related consequences of anthropogenic climate and environmental change, including the operative pathways of biosocial interaction and ecocrises entwinement, especially as reflected in the work of anthropologists, is the focus of this chapter. In short, in light of the growing evidence that the changes of concern are already adversely affecting the health of human populations around the world, and that these impacts will continue to escalate in the future, this chapter seeks to put global health at the center of the climatic and environmental change discussion.

The theoretical framework of political ecology The issues raised by a consideration of contemporary environmental health are complex and require a holistic, multi-sited, and interdisciplinary perspective, features that characterize contemporary anthropology. Further, they require conceptual movement beyond modernist distinctions between “natural” and “social.” In that the changes of concern reflect intricate interactions between national and global structures of socioculturally influenced political and economic relationships on the one hand, and human and other biologies and physical/climatic environments, on the other—or more simply put, the dialectic of society and nature—this chapter is framed by a perspective known as the political ecology of health. Political ecology, a term probably coined by anthropologist Eric Wolf (1972), expresses “a confluence between ecologically rooted social science and the principles of political economy” (Peet and Watts 1966:6). Its starting point is the holistic recognition that “any tug on the strands of the global web of human-environment linkages reverberates through the system as a whole” (Robbins 2004:5). However, as contrasted with other social scientific and physical science approaches to the biophysical environment, including the cultural ecological orientation within anthropology, it emerged as an explicit alternative and corrective to apolitical ecological thinking (of the sort, since Malthus, that sees “overpopulation” in the underdeveloped world as the primary threat to global health and development, and fails to recognize that smaller, wealthier populations use up far more resources and cause far more ecological damage than much larger poorer ones). As Robbins (2004:11) observes, apolitical accounts of contemporary environmental crises “tend to ignore the significant influence of political economic factors” on both population growth and disease. Furthermore, with reference to health issues, political ecology asserts that in developing an understanding of modern global health “it is not enough to focus on local cultural dynamics or international exchange relations, and that the past and present relationship between policy, politics or political economy in general and the environment needs to be explicitly addressed” (Greenberg and Park 1994:8). In short, the political ecology of health is concerned with the impacts on environmental systems, human environmental health, and health-related subjectivities, behaviors, and governance, as well as differential control over processes, means, outputs, and by-products of production. Consequently, political ecological approaches seek to denaturalize environmental and health conditions by revealing their historic production in political economic contexts. Moreover, unlike natural science understandings of ecological features and systems (which, with reference to climate factors, are referred to as “natural forcing mechanisms”), the approach taken here is to portray anthropogenic climate and biophysical environmental change with a human face (Finan 2009). As Charnley and Durham (2010) emphasize, there are many good reasons for anthropologists to be concerned with environmental issues, including the ability of the peoples we study and work with to make a livelihood, exercise human rights, achieve social justice, be healthy, and survive.While intertwined climate and environmental changes involve global processes, they have profound, and varying, short- and longer-term 419

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consequences for the populations being studied anthropologically in all local settings, and thus requires an integrative paradigm like the political ecology of health.

Climate and environmental change through time: the human scale Climate change is not a new issue in human biology and society. Human communities have been affected by changing micro- and macroclimate patterns throughout their history, having at various times and in particular biophysical environments had to struggle with adverse climatic changes that resulted in diminished access to food, water, or other resources, and that consequently affected health outcomes (Bogin 1982; Hassan 2009; Thompson et al. 2002). As Cruikshank (2001:390) points out, for instance, a dominant theme in the historic narratives of peoples from New World subarctic regions “concerns living with unprecedented risks associated with rapid climate change, and specifically with the behavior of glaciers—unexpected advances, violent surges, catastrophic floods, and accompanying weather variations.” Doubtless the largest literatures on the societal impacts of climate change and human responses to such environmental alterations are found in the fields of history, paleontology, and archaeology (McIntosh et al. 2000). A number of archeologists, for example, have argued that climate change played a role in multiple societal collapses and area abandonments through history (Cullen et al. 2000, Hodell, Curtis and Brenner 1995,Weiss 1997, 2000). One illustrative case is the desertion of Viking settlements in Greenland between 1350 and 1400; while involving multiple factors, including the overharvesting of indigenous trees and social resistance to dramatic cultural change in response to changing environmental conditions, abandonment was also driven by the effects of a cooling climate on island food production (Orlove 2005). As Weiss and Bradley (2001:610) stress, while past climate changes were unrelated to human activities, “future climate change will involve both natural and anthropogenic forces and will be increasingly dominated by the latter; current estimates show that we can expect them to be large and rapid.” Consequently attention increasingly is focusing on the human role in climate change, as reflected in recent discussions of Earth’s geographic history. The 4.54 billion years of Earth’s past is divided by geoscientists into major eras, which are, in turn, segmented into periods and epochs. We are said to be living in the Holocene Epoch, which began approximately 11,700 years ago after the last Ice Age. The Holocene typically is described as a time of fairly stable if warming climate (Roberts 1998). In the 1870s, however, recognizing that what might be called a “quiet environmental transformation” had occurred, the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani coined the term anthropozoic. He used this neologism to label the distinctive geological strata deposited since the appearance of modern humans, especially once their numbers and growing technological capacity increased the size and depth of the human footprint on the planet. While the term never really caught on, that people had become “a large-scale geological force” (Vernadsky 1945:10) could not long be ignored. Even popular science writers began alluding to the dramatic change that had occurred in the biophysical environment (Revkin 1992). About 125 years after Stoppani, at a point at which extensive human influence on Earth’s climatic and ecosystems had become undeniable, Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen proclaimed that the Holocene was over and that Earth had entered what he called the Anthropocene. This time the notion of a human-shaped geological epoch found a ready audience among geoscientists and others. As Crutzen argues (2002:23), For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global environment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come. . … The 420

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Anthropocene could be said to have started in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens to coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in 1784. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and the rise of coal, oil, and natural gas as our dominant sources of energy, human impact on Earth has accelerated dramatically, producing varied but significant consequences for all of the biophysical environments that sustain human life (Ruddiman 2005). As early as 1896, Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, predicted that the burning of coal would increase atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting in global warming (Hardy 2003).While over the last 400,000 years the concentration of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere has ranged between 180 and 280 parts per million (PPM), current levels are approaching 380 PPM. Other greenhouse gases produced by human actions include methane, nitrous oxide, the chlorofluorocarbons, and ozone. Anthropogenic sources of atmospheric methane, for example, include rice farming, domestic ruminants, bacterial decay in landfills and sewage, leakage during fossil fuel mining, escape from natural gas pipelines, and biomass burning (Hansen et al. 2000). In 2007, the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2007a:5) reported that “eleven of the last 12 years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850).” Based on the integration of research findings from across varied disciplines, the IPCC further reported that numerous natural systems are being impacted by regional climate changes, most notably increases in temperature, and that anthropogenic factors are very likely (66 to 90 percent probability) the source of the changes being observed (Canziani et al. 2007). Expressions of contemporary planetary warming—involving a mean temperature increase of about 1.37°F (0.76°C) between 1850–1899 and 2001–2005 (IPCC 2007)—are seen in melting glaciers, permafrost, ice caps, and sea ice; rising ocean, lake and river temperatures; shrinking rivers; growing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and wildfires; and the occurrence of droughts in subtropical regions (Rosenzweig et al. 2008). Moreover, local research and syntheses of studies worldwide reveal notable recent changes in the phenology and distribution of well-studied plants and animals across marine, freshwater, and terrestrial environments that are consistent with global warming and have been linked to local or broader climate changes. Based on a review of this literature, Parmesan (2006:639) concludes, “Twentieth-century anthropogenic global warming has already affected Earth’s biota” and will continue to do so in increasingly more dramatic ways as Earth continues to warm. While humans have a long history of contributing to the extinction of planetary life forms, including accelerating the loss of species by as much as 1,000 times the “natural” rate documented in the pre-human fossil record, it is estimated that climate change and other human impacts on the biophysical environment will result in 12 percent of bird species, 25 percent of mammals, and over 30 percent of amphibians facing annihilation over the next century (Watson and Zakri 2005).The ultimate consequences of such loss for human health and well-being (e.g., sources of protein, new medicines, pollination of plants, control of crop and other pests) are expected to be sizable. But how sizable? Already, the World Health Organization asserts that in recent decades the effects of global warming alone claim the lives of over 150,000 people annually and that these numbers will continue to climb as anthropogenic warming continues (Patz et al. 2005). Reflecting the interconnectedness of ecosystems, however, some anthropogenic changes have the potential to set in motion positive feedback loops that significantly accelerate global warming independent of further human action and may constitute the single-greatest threat to human societies from a changing climate (Torn and Harte 2006). Examples of such loops 421

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include the melting of arctic permafrost, which releases trapped methane (which has over 20 times the greenhouse blanketing effect of carbon dioxide); the melting of sea ice, a reflector of solar heat, causing a further rise in temperature and more rapid ocean heat absorption; deforestation due to both cutting and rising temperature, transforming previously forested areas from carbon sinks to sources of atmospheric carbon dioxide; and wildfires caused by rising temperature that release stored CO2 into the atmosphere (Flannigan et al. 2006; Oechel et al. 1993).

Driving the Anthropocene Because of the complex and not always readily evident relationships that have evolved over Earth’s history among floral, faunal, microscopic, climatic, hydraulic and other environmental components, the transition from gradual to catastrophic change can occur with little discernible warning. As Watson and Zakri (2005:18) indicate, crossing critical thresholds can lead suddenly from slow to very abrupt changes that “have devastating impacts on human communities.” However, given our existing limited technological capacity to identify looming tipping points and interpret the nature and magnitude of environmental changes once they are reached, the full impacts on human health and society are difficult to predict. Some, like the shifting distribution of urolithiasis (kidney stone disease) prevalence might be hard to anticipate (Brikowski et al. 2008). As a result, there are, to use the language of the IPCC, “reasons for concern” that just as climate scientists have tended to underestimate the pace of climate change and its effects, health scientists have tended to underestimate the full global health consequences of planetary warming (National Research Council 2002). As a result “risk,” “vulnerability,” “confidence,” and “uncertainty” have become important concepts of health assessment in a time of global warming (Confalonieri et al. 2007; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 2002). This pattern is no less true of the local knowledge systems of indigenous peoples as reflected in the observations of Jerry Wongittilin, Sr. of Savoonga, St. Lawrence Island (quoted in Craver 2001:9): There have been a lot of changes in the sea ice currents and the weather. Solid ice has disappeared, and there are no longer huge icebergs during fall and winter. The ice now comes later and goes out earlier, and it is getting thinner. The current is stronger, and it is windier on the island. We had a bad hunting season with lots of high winds. Our elders tell us that our earth is getting old and needs to be replaced by a new one. While the terms Anthropocene and anthropogenic are now commonly used to identify the important role of human behavior in greenhouse gas production and other environmental degradation, a shortcoming of these concepts is that they imply uniform contribution by our species to the dramatic changes in the environment that have occurred since the industrial revolution. In other words, they suggest not only collective responsibility but further that there is something about the environmental attitudes of humans that inherently cause us to befoul our surroundings. Viewed from the long gaze of human life on earth—which, if narrowed to only include fully behavioral modernity, still encompasses a span of over 50,000 years—then it is clear that the so-called Anthropocene labels no more than about 0.01 percent of human history (Wolf 1982). Dramatic alteration of Earth’s climate and atmosphere, the current appearance and composition of its terrestrial surface, the particular chemical and biological makeup of its vast bodies of water, and the appearance and operation of its varied ecosystems, however, is especially associated with a specific political economic configuration, as signaled by the fundamental transformative role 422

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of the Industrial Revolution. Notes Baer (2008:1), “global warming is ultimately rooted in the capitalist treadmill of production and consumption” and is not narrowly determined by human biology, cultural capacity, or communal nature. Global capitalism, in all of its varied configurations (e.g., United States vs. China), with its core productivist dependence on unfettered growth as its engine, drives the contemporary depletion of Earth’s natural resources, the environmental release of toxic by-products of production, and the reconfiguration of environmental systems, and hence is the dominant force in contemporary ecocrises and their health sequalae (Baer and Singer 2009; Singer 2010a; Singer 2010b;Wallerstein 2007). Moreover, as captured in microcosm in the following example, under capitalism the distribution of the consumption benefits and health-related environmental consequences of production can be starkly inequitable: “Shrimp on the dinner plates of Europeans may well have started life in a South Asian pond built in place of mangrove swamps—weakening a natural barrier to the sea and making coastal communities more vulnerable” (Watson and Zakri 2005:5).

The multiple threats to health of climate and other environmental change The IPCC (Confalonieri et al. 2007:393) concluded with high confidence that climate change “currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths.” To date, however, assessment of the full health impacts of contemporary climate change have been limited in part because analyses of total health burdens have been carried out for only a small number of climate-sensitive diseases and our understanding of all of the ways and the extent to which diseases may be climate sensitive is limited (Campbell-Lendrum, Pruss-Ustun and Corvalan 2003; Campbell-Lendrum and Woodruff 2006; Patz et al. 2008). Nowhere are these limitations more evident than in the literature of medical anthropology. For example, the edited volume, Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions (Crate and Nuttall 2009) makes only brief and passing mention of health issues across its 24 chapters. While this pattern will change (and possibly rapidly), as the impacts of climate change on the health of populations multiplies, our discipline has yet to fully engage climate change as a central issue in global health and society in the 21st century (Townsend 2011). Nonetheless, it is evident that there are multiple, and often interconnected, threats to health raised by global warming—some directly, some as mediated by impacts on livelihood and residence, and many as entwined with other anthropogenic environmental changes—threats that are unequally distributed by region and population vulnerability. Despite limits in available knowledge, sufficient information had been assembled so that by the summer of 2010 a consensus had formed among healthcare professionals and their disciplinary organizations that climate change had become an overwhelming threat to human health (Epstein and Ferber 2011). Some of the key dimensions of this threat are examined below.

A thousand tempests and floods Water claims a conflicted place in human experience; it is both a vital substance that sustains existence and a destructive force capable of sweeping life away. At the same time, and because of its necessity, power, ubiquity and fluid character, it is both a rich source of meaning and metaphor across cultures and an historic and ongoing stimulus in the development of anthropology (Helmrieich 2011; Strang 2004). Moreover, there is growing evidence that the destructive potential of water is being heightened by global warming and the resulting increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, including storms that result in deadly and destructive flooding 423

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and droughts that devastate food production. For example, using climate model simulations, Pall et al. (2011:382) assert that global greenhouse gas emissions “substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence” in England and Wales in the fall of 2000 (during the wettest autumn in these areas since record keeping began in 1766). The frequency of heavy precipitation events leading to flooding are expected by climate scientists to be ever more likely in the future as a greenhouse gases continue to heat up Earth. Simulation studies suggest that a doubling of the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, which is expected to occur over the next 80 years, will cause a small increase (about 6 percent) in the average windspeed of hurricanes but a significant jump (about 300 percent) in the frequency of the largest type (i.e., category 5) of storms (Knutson and Tuleya 2004). Another modeling effort, a comparative study of the impacts of global warming on two regions, projects a fivefold increase in the frequency of “very wet” winters (i.e., exceeding two standard deviations above normal) in the United Kingdom and “very wet” summers in the South Asian monsoon region (Palmer and Ralsanen 2002). Climate models of these sorts suggest that an increase in ocean temperatures of 2 to 2.5 degrees elevates the average intensity of hurricanes by 6 to 10 percent. A number of researchers, however, report evidence that global warming may be having an even greater impact on hurricanes than the earlier climate models might suggest (Elsner 2006; Emanuel 2005; Knutson and Tuleya 2004). Recent analyses of the historic record show that there definitely has been an increase in the number of category 4 and category 5 storms in recent years, while studies of ocean temperature indicate that as surface temperature goes up so does the number of tropical cyclones (Webster et al. 2005). The consequences of increasing rates of major storms are already being seen in the frequency of “great floods” (those large enough to only have 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year, also known as 100-year floods). Research by Milly and co-workers (2002) indicates that the frequency of great floods increased significantly during the 20th century. For example, during the last 37 years, there have been four floods in the US Mississippi River basin area that, based on their scale, would be characterized as 100-year floods, while large Midwestern storms that used to occur once every 20 years now arrive every 4 to 6 years (Zabarenko 2008). The reason a warmer climate leads to more intense storms is that warmer air can hold more moisture. Consequently, as the average temperature in the United States has gone up there has been a disturbing jump in the amount of rain that falls during the heaviest downpours. As compared with 50 years ago, today the heaviest 1 percent of storms in the United States accounts for 67 percent more precipitation in the Northeast, 31 percent more in the Midwest and 15 percent more in the Great Plains. Further, climate scientists project that the amount of rainfall during the heaviest precipitation events will increase by more than 40 percent by the end of the century. Intense rain falling over short periods of time—in conjunction with human reshaping of the environment (e.g., replacing deep-rooted wild plants with shallow-rooted grain crops, straightening rivers, eliminating wetlands and other natural barrier environments) is a recognized recipe for damaging flooding (Singer 2009). This is exactly what is occurring in many places in the world. According to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (Jakubicka et al. 2010), between 1980 and 2010 there were 3,119 floods worldwide, resulting in the deaths of more than 200,000 people and affecting the lives of more than 2.8 billion others. The Centre’s examination of flooding in a comparatively well-monitored area like Europe found that the continent experienced some of the greatest floods in its recorded history between 2000 and 2009, including seven of the 20 most significant known floods. During this 10-year period, floods in Europe killed more than 1,000 people and impacted over 3.4 million others, especially in Romania, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Great Britain. 424

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The toll floods take In terms of deaths, injuries, and most affected populations, floods and hurricanes have their greatest impact in South Asia and Latin America (Guha-Sapir et al. 2004; Nicholls 2003; Schultz et al. 2005). Regions vary significantly in their risk for climate-associated flooding due to a variety of factors. The Climate Change Vulnerability Index (Maplecroft 2010) offers assessment of the impact of 42 social, economic, and environmental factors in determining level of climate-­ related risk. These factors include a country’s exposure to climate-related disasters and sea level rise; its population density, level of poverty, and dependence on flood-prone agricultural lands; as well as its ability to adapt to the impacts of climate change. The Index rates 16 countries as being at ‘extreme risk.’ Leading this highly vulnerable group is Bangladesh as a consequence of the country’s large population, extreme level of poverty in the rural sector, and significant risk from flooding (due to a variety of factors, including climate change, the monsoon cycle, deforestation, and having an elevation of less than 8 meters above sea level in half of its territory). Thus, in October 2010, Bangladesh suffered flooding caused by torrential rains that drove half a million residents from their homes. In coming years, as discussed further below, Bangladesh faces an additional source of flooding because of rising ocean levels. It is expected that as much as 17 percent of the country, including 13 percent of cultivated land areas, will be submerged, with direct impacts on 35 million people living in about 20 coastal zones (Rahman 2010). Other Asian nations judged to be at very high risk are India, Nepal, the Philippines, ­Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, and Pakistan. The latter is still recovering from deadly floods that hit in 2010, immersing one-tenth of Pakistan’s landmass, adversely impacting the lives of more than 20 million people (over 10 percent of the total population), and killing more than 1,700 people. The intensity of the flooding and its experiential effects on local residents in Pakistani villages is captured in the words of Jehanzeb, a resident of Mian Gujar, a settlement in Peshwar in northwestern sector of the country. Early in the morning of August 31, villagers were awakened by cries from their neighbors whose homes were being inundated with water from the overflowing Shah Alam River. Reports Jehanzeb, “As I opened my eyes, I found a pool of water in my house and saw the level going up. The first thing I did was to immediately shift my family members to the rooftop;” but the continually rising waterline convinced him to lead his family through the flowing water to higher ground. When he then returned to see what could be salvaged, he found that his house was submerged below 10 feet of water. The speed at which the water was still rising astonished him (Khan 2010). Peshwar has been experiencing sharp climate changes for a number of years. A study carried out by the Pakistan Forest Institute found that there was a 0.85°C increase in Peshawar’s temperatures between 1985 and 2009, an increase of 0.034°C per year. The study also identified other signs of change, including the arrival of spring 15.6 days earlier than in the past and ending 17.8 days earlier. Summer, by contrast, has grown longer in Peshawar with higher temperatures (Bukhari and Ali Bajwa 2010). All of the Asian nations mentioned above have been described in the climate literature as being particularly vulnerable to flooding because of rising air temperature, precipitation and humidity. These changes have been linked, in turn, to melting snow packs and glaciers in the Himalayas, which are diminishing at a rate of 15 m per year, the highest rate in the world. But these climatic and weather features are insufficient explanations. In the case of Pakistan, for example, anthropogenic deforestation has played a critical role. By trapping rain, forests serve to slow down flood waters; deforested areas, by contrast, are highly susceptible to rapidly flowing flood waters. According to the World Wildlife Fund (2010), “Pakistan has only 2.5 percent of forest cover with an alarming rate of deforestation. The annual rate of deforestation in Pakistan 425

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is - 2.1 per cent, no Asian country has a forest degradation rate higher than this.” Officially, much of this deforestation is illegal, the work of the so-called “timber mafias.” But as United Press International (2010) reports, illegal corporations involved in timber cutting and export cannot operate without covert government support, including corrupt law enforcement agencies and politicians who exchange access to forests for bribes.

Glacial floods and droughts In many higher altitude and traditionally cooler areas of the world, glacial melt poses its own set of threats to human health and well-being. To a degree, glacial shrinkage in some locations has been going on for at least 150 years. Since the 1980s, however, the pace of ice loss has grown significantly in several regions, in conjunction with increases in the global mean air temperature, culminating, by the end of the 21st century, in the potential loss of many of the over 100,000 glaciers on the planet. Depending on local conditions, as glaciers retreat, melted ice may form lakes that periodically overflow and cause flooding (known by glaciologists as glacier lake outburst floods). Such floods have occurred in Nepal, Pakistan, Bhutan and China for over a century. A study of the frequency of glacial flooding in Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan found that while fewer than five occurred annually from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, in the closing years of the 20th century over 30 such events were being recorded annually (Richardson and Reynolds 2000). More recently, they have begun to be seen in South America as well (Dussaillant et al. 2010). At times, glacial floods have been very destructive. A glacial lake outburst in Bhutan in 1994 killed 21 people. In 1985 in eastern Nepal, a glacial flood inundated farmlands, destroyed a hydropower station, and washed away numerous bridges. Many lives were spared because at the time the flood occurred people were participating in a religious ceremony rather than working the land (Vuichard and Zimmerman 1987), “but there is little doubt that the potential for more outbursts as well as drastic consequences will increase” (Kaltenborn et al. 2010:25). According to Madhave Karki, deputy director general of the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, which assesses the impact of climate change on the stability of fragile mountain ecosystems, “The risk to lives and livelihoods in the fragile Hindu Kush Himalayan region is high and getting higher” (Environmental News Service 2010). Moreover, in dry glacial regions, including Central Asia, Chile, Argentina and Peru, which have limited annual precipitation, receding glaciers, or what might be termed glacial droughts, are beginning to compromise access to potable water. In the view of environmental activist, Lester Brown (2009), president of the Earth Policy Institute, “The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia” Glacier melt in the Andes mountain range already is threatening the water supply of 30 million people in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador (while causing significant flooding in the Amazon rainforest). At the local level, where options are limited, especially in poorer farming communities, the threat is grave. In Pucarumi, a small community in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes, for example, residents have watched the continued shrinkage of the Ausangate glacier, the primary source of their water supply with trepidation. Felipe, a Pucarumi alpaca herder, explains, “This loss of snow means we receive less water… This climatic factor is causing us great danger.” The loss of water has begun to affect the alpaca herds, which are producing less wool. As a result, people of the village have had to buy synthetic fiber to weave clothing. Moreover, the community can no longer plant its potatoes in fields located at lower elevations because there is insufficient water flow. In response, people have begun to plant potatoes at higher elevations, but the shrinking glacier is limiting the amount of land that can be planted. Says Felipe, “In a few years more, no longer we will have a place to seed these potatoes …. All the community 426

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is worried. We do not know what to do or what to say about this chaos” (Environment News Service 2008). A similar pending crisis exists in Bolivia, where glacial loss has surpassed 30 percent. In the poor rural township of Palca, which is dependent for annual melt from Illimani glacier for its water, for example, the Andean Regional Project on Adaptation to Climate Change (Kornmann 2009) says that residents have begun reporting declines in water flow, in part because of drastic changes in local rainfall patterns. Worried about the pending threat to their lives and livelihoods many residents of Palca have migrated to La Paz, or more precisely to El Alto, the adjacent overcrowded slum and one of Bolivia’s largest and fastest-growing urban areas. But El Alto too is running out of water.

Rising seas On October 17, 2009, members of the government of the Republic of Maldives donned scuba equipment and held a meeting 20 feet below the surface on the sea bottom. Their purpose was to draw world attention to the grave threat facing the Indian Ocean nation’s over 1,000 coral islands (200 inhabited) that on average stand only 5 feet above sea level. Melting glaciers and ice caps is having global effects on sea level, leading to extensive coastal erosion flooding. Rising sea levels already threaten populations in countries as widely scattered as Bangladesh, Egypt, China, the Netherlands, and the United States, as well as many smaller populations living on low-lying islands. Notes Hardy (2003:148), a sea-level rise of 0.2 to 0.7 meters would produce significant coastline flooding, imperiling communities, and causing the displacement of millions of peoples, as well as enabling the intrusion of saltwater into drinking and agricultural water supplies. Globally over 300 million people live within 12 feet of sea level (Dressler 2007). It is estimated that there are already ten million environmental refugees in the world, and that there may be as many as 150 million by 2050 (Cohen and Deng 1998). In a review of the population and urban settlement patterns in low elevation (less than 10 meters above sea level) coastal zones around the global, McGranahan et al. (2007) found that while such zones account for only 2 percent of the world’s land mass they contain 10 percent of the world’s population and 13 percent of urban dwellers. Further, they note that although a disproportionate number of countries with populations living at low elevations are in smaller island nations, some larger countries have considerable populations living at low elevation, including some with heavily populated delta regions. Importantly, the least developed countries of the world have a greater proportion of their populations living in areas at risk of ocean flooding than wealthier countries, and that this is especially the case with urbanized populations at low elevation.Thus, almost two thirds of urbanized areas that have populations greater than 5 million are found in low elevation coast areas. At present, some 360 million city-dwellers live in coastal area and the number is rising rapidly. Moreover, in some cases, such as China, urbanization is pulling people toward the coast as seen in the growth in China’s low-lying areas by more than three times the national rate between 1900 and 2000. This pattern reflects the country’s “trade oriented economic strategy, and policies that favour urban development along the coast” (McGranahan et al. 2007:33). Further, this pattern underlines the importance of governance and the factors driving policy formation in a time of global warming. One of the places at extreme risk of rising ocean levels is Bangkok, the capital of Thailand and home to 10 million people. Built on swampy land at the northern edge of the Gulf of Thailand where the Chao Phraya River drains into the sea, Bangkok rises only 3–5 feet above gulf waters, which have been rising approximately one-tenth of an inch a year in recent years. Indeed, Bangkok has been sinking at the rate of 4 inches per year (accelerated by the pumping, 427

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legally and illegally, of 2.5 million cubic tons of fresh water from underground aquifers for the growing urban population and due to the demand of industrial corporations). At this rate, the capital is expected to be below sea level by 2030 (Gray 2007). Barring successful adaptation, the city will be inundated, as will surrounding rice paddies and other vital resources concentrated in the capital that provide food and other necessities for all of Thailand. Within the last three decades, half a mile of shoreline has slipped below rising sea water, portending an alarming future for the city and its residents.

Katrina is the future As the foregoing discussion indicates, the rising level of damage and loss of life due to flooding is a consequence of the intersection of climatic factors, on the one hand, and societal, and political economic factors that impact the environment, on the other (Pielke and Downton (2000). The interplay of these factors in flooding was on agonizing display when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005. On that day, residents of the city and the world watched as water breached the city’s levees in 50 places and flooded the homes of over half a million people in Louisiana (and many more in Mississippi and Alabama). In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the subsequent arrival of Hurricane Rita, almost a million people in Louisiana were forced to leave their homes, many never to return. Events such as these have led to the emergence of concepts like “unnatural disaster” (Hartman and Squires 2006, Klinenberg 2003) that are designed to highlight the fact that human activity and political economic structures, often as manifested in the nature of human interactions with the environment (e.g., degradations of the ecological systems, the practices and policies of environmental injustice), are as much (or often, more) important contributors to health-threatening environmental crises as are natural processes and physical dimensions in nature (although, as climate change suggests, the boundary between the social and the natural is never very easy to draw and at this point in human history the effort to do so is of diminishing value). Moreover, in light of global warming, as anthropologist Martha Ward aptly phrased it, “Katrina is not just something that happened in the past. Katrina is the future” (quoted in Adams,Van Hattum and English 2009:615). The worst hurricane to hit the Gulf coast in almost 80 years, Katrina was the immediate source of almost a 1,000 deaths in Louisiana, with drowning being the most frequent cause of death (40 percent of known fatalities), followed by injury and trauma (25 percent). At Memorial Medical Center of New Orleans alone rescuers found dozens of bodies, some floating face down in flood water, left behind when the medical staff and ambulatory patients fled; “evacuees told horror stories of dank hallways, terrible isolation, and fear of disease” (Brinkley 2006:605). Most vulnerable were Blacks (53 percent) and people 75 years of age and older (49 percent). In Orleans Parish, home of New Orleans, for example, the mortality rate among Blacks was several times higher than that of whites (Brunkard, Namulanda and Ratard 2008). In addition to risk of drowning, as happens with storms and floods that hit urban areas or toxic storage structures, Katrina brought with it “contamination from arsenic, lead, volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (untreated sewage, with a bacterial and viral load … and standing water … a breeding ground for mosquitoes other insect vectors of disease)” (Walker and Warren 2009:28).

Vectors of suffering The spread of vector-borne diseases is a major potential threat of hurricanes and flooding (Hunt 2003). In the case of Katrina, the storm was the first major hurricane to hit the United 428

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States after the arrival of West Nile disease in the country during the summer of 1999 (which also was probably a consequence of global warming). Prior to Katrina, Louisiana had become a key site of West Nile virus infection in the United States, reporting about 6 percent of the cases that were recorded nationally in 2005. After the storm, despite a significant loss of population to other states, storm-impacted parts of Louisiana suffered a jump in West Nile infections in 2006 to over twice the number of the previous 4 years. By contrast, parts of the state that were not directly damaged by the storm exhibited a decrease in West Nile infections (Caillouët et al. 2008). In northwest Pakistan, the rising temperatures and periods of intense rainfall described above have been correlated with increases in autumnal outbreaks of Plasmodium falciparum malaria (Bouma, Dye and van der Kaay 1996). In the case of the 2010 flood, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported an overall incidence of almost 300,000 suspected malaria cases in Pakistan, including a heightened number of falciparum malaria cases, in flood-affected areas. According to WHO (2010), “The increased number of malaria cases is definitely caused by the floods that have displaced millions of people, leaving many in poor shelter, and has left many water ponds, which are ideal breeding sites for Anopheles mosquitoes.” Outbreaks of various water-borne infectious diseases are also more likely with global warming and consequent heavy rainfall and flooding (Curriero, Patz and Rose 2001). Storms that hid Bangladesh in 1998 and 2004, for example, led to large outbreaks of flood-related diarrheal disease that reached epidemic proportions in the capital city of Dhaka, with thousands of individuals being stricken. Two pathogens were identified as the primary sources of infection, Vibrio cholerae and enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (Qadri et al. 2004). Research by Hashizume et al. (2008) on the 1998 outbreak found that low socio-economic status and inadequate hygiene and sanitation facilities were associated with flood-related infectious diarrhea. High temperatures, in addition to causing flooding, may have elevated the risk of cholera in Bangladesh, as warm temperature on the ocean surface has been linked with plankton bloom that is associated with outbreaks of the disease (Speelmon et al. 2000). In Khartoum, Sudan, catastrophic flooding in 1988 caused by heavy rains was found to be the source of outbreaks of hepatitis (McCarthy 1994), as well as post-flood increases in an array of other infections including cryptosporidiosis, poliomyelitis, rotavirus, typhoid and paratyphoid. At special risk from flood-driven infectious disease epidemics are the kinds of small and more isolated communities often studied by anthropologists. Parkinson and Butler (2005), for example, examined multiple infectious diseases that likely to become more common in indigenous artic communities in a time of global warming. Climate change is not the only anthropogenic factor driving the spread of diseases and disease vectors to new environments. Deforestation, for example—which has resulted in the loss of between 7 and 11 million km2 of forest over the last 300 years—and changing land use patterns have also contributed to the spread of infectious diseases as well as a rise of emerging and reemerging diseases.This pattern is seen in distribution changes in malaria and/or its vectors throughout tropical regions (Myers and Patz 2009). In various locations (e.g., Amazon basin, East African Highlands) deforestation is contributing to the density of several Anopheles mosquito vectors and to human/vector contact. Other anthropogenic environmental changes, such as dam-building, have also contributed to high disease vector concentrations. In India, for example, irrigation projects during the 1990s resulted in endemic “irrigation malaria” that impacted over 200 million people (Sharma 1996). When combined with the effects of global warming, it is evident that contemporary and future anthropogenic factors will significantly impact human vulnerability to infectious disease risks. 429

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Toxic mold Another health threat from flooding is caused by mold. In the case of Katrina, a survey carried out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals in October of 2005 found that 45.5 percent of inspected properties in New Orleans were infected by mold. Mold poses a threat to human health through the release of airborne spores that can lead to fungal infection following inhalation, a significant threat especially to individuals with compromised immune systems. Repeat exposures can cause severe allergic reactions (Bush et al. 2006; Robbins et al. 2000). Moreover, some molds produce toxins that are harmful or even lethal for humans.

Food availability Climate-related flooding also poses significant health-related challenges to societies by impacting agricultural and other food production systems.The floods that hit large sections of Pakistan in 2010, for example, are estimated to have destroyed at least one-fifth of the country’s irrigation infrastructure, livestock, and planted crops (Nessman 2010). Analysis by Parry and colleagues (2004), however, emphasizes the difficulties in assessing the overall impacts of climate change on total food production especially at the global scale. These complications stem both from complex regional patterns of projected climate change conditions and the variability in the agricultural systems that contribute to overall crop production. Nonetheless, these researchers suggest that because of rising temperatures, over the next 70 years there will be notably harsh decreases both regionally and globally in total crop yields. Production disparities between developed and underdeveloped regions will be exacerbated, although these researchers believe that existing data suggest that “for the most part” most societies will be able to feed their populations. This conclusion, however, is based on presumed equities in the distribution of food (which do not exist) across and within nations. At the same time, they recognize that some countries and regions will not have adequate food and will not be able to afford to import or distribute it with potentially devastating consequences. Further, as Rosenweig and Parry (1994:137) indicate, household adaptations to climate change effects at the farm level in many societies are not likely to significantly reduce growing disparities, “and thus the population at risk of hunger, [will be] increased despite adaptation.”

Trauma A final, often overlooked, health impact of climate-related flooding is emotional trauma and the development or exacerbation of mental health problems. Vincanne Adams and co-­workers (2009) use the term “chronic disaster syndrome” to label the cluster of trauma- and post-­ trauma-related distress that is uniquely and subjectively experienced at the level of individual bodies, but involves shared features at the group level as a form of social suffering, and has its roots in the wider political economy that both conditions the nature of disasters and serves as a false cure for the damages that are wrought. In particular, they argue, this syndrome “represents the health outcome of life in an ongoing state of ‘disaster’ or ‘emergency’ … that, as in this case, is perpetuated by industries of ‘disaster’ and [neoliberal] capitalism …” Thus, the study participants—survivors of the disaster—interviewed by these researchers came to experience Katrina as a never-ending onslaught of loss, betrayal, and disillusionment. In particular, the trauma experienced by participants came to be focused on the way the storm and the flooding it caused was used to permanently displace many people from their homes and the city of 430

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New Orleans, enrich the coffers of mega-corporations that landed highly profitable clean-up contracts, privatize schools and other social institutions, and mislead people about what they could expect in the way of aid from their government.

Malnutrition, food insecurity, and access to potable water As suggested above with reference to storms and flooding, climate change is already beginning to threaten lifestyles and livelihoods in several ways involving impacts on food production and consumption. The extent of impact, however, is not limited to damage caused by storm and flood waters. Human social, cultural, and emotional interaction with food is complex and its study has a long history in anthropology, including appreciation of the fact that in communities studied ethnographically it is often insufficiently available (Mintz and du Bois 2002). At highest risk of future climate-related food insufficiency and its consequences are those areas already facing notable levels of malnutrition. In most developing countries, rates of malnutrition range from 4 to 12 percent; in sub-Saharan Africa, however, estimates as high as 32 percent exist (Steyn and Walker 2000). In the Horn of Africa, for example, Somalia and neighboring countries are facing extensive famine and looming catastrophe because, most immediately, of a severe drought that has lasted over several seasons. Already the famine has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, mostly children. Climate analyses link drought during two consecutive “rainy seasons” to global warming (Funk et al. 2009). According to Chris Funk (2009) of the University of California, Santa Barbara, a member of a team of researchers studying weather in East Africa, back-to-back droughts in the Horn of Africa are connected to the definite pattern of warming in the region. With further heating, droughts in the region are going to get more frequent and more intense. As the time between droughts decreases, so will the ability of populations to recover, creating an accelerating cycle of drought and starvation. Note Funk and Brown (2009:272), “Greenhouse gas-induced reductions in monsoonal rainfall could exacerbate … grain shortages” creating extensive famine. Among populations exposed to hunger because of climate change (or for other reasons), ethnographic research across several Western ethnic and age groups suggests a possible patterned response scenario (Habicht et al. 2004). The initial reaction identified by ethnographers to the threat of hunger is expressed anxiety as household members run out of food stores. This is followed by cutbacks in the quantity of food consumed each day leading eventually to skipping meals and not eating for entire days. Additionally this body of research indicates differences between the behavior changes adopted by adults in their own eating patterns and those they instituted with their children, with adults protecting children from exposure to hunger as long as possible. Concomitant with these changes researchers find evidence of growing social alienation and loss of self-esteem. Based on research in Darfur, Sudan, de Waal (1989) notes an additional social response to severe food shortages, namely overcrowding, which can lead to the development of unsanitary conditions that have the potential to expose people to infectious diseases. Under such conditions, with individual suffering from macro- and micro-protein deficiency, people’s ability to mount an effective immune response to infection is compromised. Working in the Inner Niger Delta and surrounding dry land areas of Mali and a review of behavior changes among farmers in India and Brazil, de Garine and Harrison (1988) and Mendelsohn and Dinar (1999), respectively, emphasize that populations that are regularly exposed to food insecurity may develop culturally constituted early warning and coping strategies for responding to food shortages.While these adaptive mechanisms are important, in resource-poor settings, resiliency may break down under conditions of persistent drops in food availability, as 431

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are likely to occur with mounting planetary warming (Baro and Deubel 2006). The eventual outcome is what Edkins (2001), in Whose Hunger?, refers to as “mass starvation” (as opposed to famine) to emphasize the need to assess responsibility and demand accountability. As this discussion indicates, in some regions global warming will usher in a transition from periodic but transitory famines to permanent food vulnerability. In Niger, the poorest country in the world, food production and arable land per capita are in clear decline in a time of global warming. Niger has been unable to feed itself since the 1980s, with many rural families only able to produce enough food for half a year. The result has been the adoption of survival strategies that are “incompatible with sustainable natural resource management” (Baro and Deugel 2006:529). As found with other tipping points associated with global warming, beyond a certain point reversals in system breakdown may be impossible to achieve. Beyond issues of food insecurity, a large proportion of the world’s population (as many as 6 billion people) is already facing relative water stress because of lack of access to potable water, a situation that is growing worse because of the combined effects of global warming and other human-caused environmental restructuring. One of the factors pushing such restructuring is global population growth, particularly in urban areas. Densely populated urban centers are significant producers of water contamination and, increasingly, water-borne disease (Gleick 1998; United Nations 1997). In the assessment of Vorosmarty et al. (2000:287) while both factors will be important “impending global-scale changes in population and economic development over the next 25 years will dictate the future relation between water supply and demand to a much greater degree than will changes in mean climate.” After that point, however, global warming will play an even greater role in issues of water access and the health consequences associated with them.

Conclusion In addition to climate change and all of the health consequences it portends, Earth faces multiple other types of ecological declines and degradations, including irreversible ecosystem changes (West and Vásquez-León 2008). As emphasized in this chapter, these “other” ecocrises do not occur independent of climate change, with resulting accelerating rates, locations, and kinds of vulnerability in human populations. While, as O’Brien et al. (2004, 2003) emphasize, “vulnerability to climate change has traditionally been studied in isolation from other stressors… exposure to multiple stressors is a real concern, particularly in developing countries.” Indeed the level of social suffering tied to entwined climatic and environmental change will increasingly constitute a critical health disparity of the future. Note Myers and Patz (2009:243), “To a large extent, our global society will decide how much suffering [and by whom] results from large-scale environmental change.” Health-driven popular struggles for change are already in motion (Adger 2003; Cole 2001). To date, however, anthropologists have played only a limited role in such efforts (Baer 2009; Checker 2005, 2007; Johnston 1997). At a moment when anthropology is struggling with how to have more impact on public discourse and action in response to the pressing issues of our world, the combined effects of anthropogenic climatic and environmental change constitute a topic about which anthropologists, given their ethnographic approach to assessing on-theground beliefs and behaviors embedded within a holistic global perspective, long history of society/environment assessment, and understanding of the biosocial nature of health, have much to contribute (Barnes et al. 2013). What anthropologists have to add to the work of climate sciences in addressing climate change is a multifaceted focus on humans, the driving engine of global warming (Baer and Singer 2014; Singer 2014). Moreover, in light of the significant role of social disparities in insuring that the health burdens of climatic and environmental change 432

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will fall disproportionately on poorer, less empowered populations, the established approach of engaged advocacy offers a strategy for anthropologists to play a role in helping to level the heavily slanted playing field (Kirsch 2002). Additionally, anthropologists, I believe, need to become [further] involved as observers and engaged scholars in applied initiatives seeking to respond to climate change at the local, regional, national, and global levels. This requires that anthropologists be part of larger collective efforts to mitigate and, when necessary, adapt to climate change, whether it is on the part of international climate regimes, national and state or provincial governments, NGOs, or climate action and sustainability groups. (Baer and Singer 2014:5)

Further reading Auyero, Javier, and D’ebora Swistun. 2009. Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baer, Hans and Singer, Merrill. 2009. Global Warming and the Political Ecology of Health: Emerging Crises and Systemic Solutions. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. Checker, Melissa. 2005. Polluted Promises: Environmental Racism and the Search for Justice in a Southern Town. New York: New York University Press. Johnson, Barbara. 2007. Half-Lives and Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War. Sante Fe: School for Advanced Research. Kirsch, Stuart. 2002. Anthropology and advocacy: A case study of the campaign against Ok Tdei Mine. Critique of Anthropology 22(2):175–200. Petryna, Adriana. 2002. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schell, Lawrence and Denham, Melinda. 2003. Environmental pollution in urban environments and human biology. Annual Review of Anthropology 32:111–134. Whiteford, Linda and Whiteford, Scott. 2005. Globalization, Water and Health: Resource Management in Times of Scarcity. Santa Fe: New Mexico School for American Research.

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23 IMMErSIVE POLItIcS AND tHE EtHNOGrAPHIc ENcOUNtEr Anthropology and political science Joseph MacKay and Jamie Levin Introduction This chapter surveys the use of anthropological findings and, especially, ethnographic methods, in political science. We show that immersive inquiry is increasingly used to study politics.1 Indeed, the use of these methods is rapidly expanding across a wide variety of topics and geographical areas. Nonetheless, we find in this area of inquiry a central tension: On the one hand, use of immersion to study power has proven strikingly fruitful, opening a range of new avenues of inquiry for the discipline. On the other, this method, and its attendant theoretical ethos, remains somewhat marginal in a discipline widely influenced by statistical and formal or rational choice methods. We also find some practical limitations on how politics can be studied ethnographically, owing to problems of access (because political institutions may be closed to immersive study) and aggregation (because political science often deals with large-scale phenomena).We conclude that political scientists using ethnographic methods have nonetheless tended to convert these limitations into strengths, using ethnographic methodology to open new areas for inquiry. In reviewing research across the discipline, we emphasize our own field of International Relations (IR), and secondarily the field of comparative politics. We emphasize IR for two reasons. On the one hand, the aforementioned practical barriers to ethnographic research have been especially significant in IR. Over and above ambivalence about ethnographic methods as such, this is in part because IR’s traditional objects of study—including major wars, global trade, and international institutionalization—are resistant to encapsulation in locally focused immersive research. Moreover, accessing sites of potential research on those subjects has proven especially difficult, since they tend to be closed to outsiders. In spite of these constraints, IR scholars have nonetheless managed to produce an impressive range of empirical research across a range of subject matter, including many path-breaking studies in their areas. IR thus offers a useful subdisciplinary “site” for inquiry into the limits and potential of political ethnographic research. We additionally emphasize comparative politics simply because an exceptionally wide range of work has been done in this field, showing the potential strength of political ethnography in practice. Indeed, comparative politics represents perhaps the most frequent site of political ethnography.

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The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we briefly survey the broad history of political science and anthropology, exploring the reasons for political science’s traditional ambivalence about anthropological approaches and reviewing the current state of play. Second, we focus on a several distinct ways in which ethnographic methods have been brought to bear on the study of politics, answering distinct kinds of questions in varying ways. In so doing, we illustrate recurring problems of or limits on ethnographic research in political science, especially in IR. Finally, we suggest two adaptations of ethnographic methodology that aid in overcoming barriers to political ethnography, especially in the context of international politics.

Anthropology and political science—the state of play The use of anthropology and ethnographic methodology in political science has an impressive but nonetheless mixed record in political science. While ethnography has proven strikingly useful for the study of politics, the widespread (and likely increasing) use of formal and statistical methods, often adapted from economics, has meant that the tools of immersion have not generally been applied at the “center” of the discipline.2 Thus, political ethnography remains a minority pursuit though it has, in many respects, been extraordinarily productive.3 The approach has emerged gradually over recent decades among political scientists. Methodological handbooks aimed at qualitative, interpretive, or critically oriented scholars increasingly include chapters on ethnographic research (Cohn 2006; Gusterson 2008, pp. 57–63; Klotz & Lynch 2007). A richly detailed recent edited volume (Schatz 2009b) now provides a general point of entry. Still, these approaches have not entirely found their way into the political science mainstream. Beginning in 2000, the “Perestroika Movement” in political science called attention to the marginalization of non-statistical, interpretive, or critical methods in the discipline— dissident voices that perceived themselves as both radical and marginalized (Laitin 2003; Monroe 2005). A decade and a half later, qualitative, interpretive, or otherwise descriptively “thick” research is tolerated but remains in the minority.4 Conversations about ethnography in political science have often been preoccupied with scholars’ theoretical purpose in deploying the method, focusing on what kinds of questions anthropological methods can answer,5 and furthermore on what the deeper philosophical or ethical purpose of doing so should be. Thus, Schatz notes a central tension at work: Taken together, the two parts of the term political ethnography thus imply a creative tension. Ethnography suggests a particularizing impulse, a desire to avoid premature empirical generalization, and a preference for inductive thinking … . Political suggests a willingness to bracket aspects of what we see, to simplify for analytic coherence, and to seek to produce generalizations. (Schatz 2009a, p. 306) Political science conversations about ethnography have often focused on this tension, often and understandably turning to theoretical and methodological advice from anthropologists. In so doing, these conversations have tended to lag behind the relevant anthropological literature, promoting ideas or practices a decade or more after they first appeared in anthropology journals. A recent exchange of articles on these matters usefully illustrates this point. Vrasti (2008, pp. 280–81) has recently argued that “a critical lag that exists between the two disciplines, a delay in cross-disciplinary reading practices. The modes of ethnographic research and writing that are presently being pursued in international studies are reminiscent of the productions cultural anthropologists started questioning during the 1980s.” She notes (correctly, in 440

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our estimation) that IR scholars continue to draw largely on Geertz (1973a) and his immediate intellectual descendants, for their ethnographic methodology, taking less note of the more critical turn in the field that followed such now-seminal works as Writing Culture (Clifford & Marcus 1986) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus & Fischer 1986), which re-examined the power relations underlying the construction of ethnographic texts. The result, in IR, has been a field that expects the ethnographic approach to do things for which anthropologists no longer see it as entirely well suited.Vrasti (2008, p. 281) emphasizes three such (mis)uses: ethnography as data-gathering tool, as writing style, and as “theoretical sensibility.” None of these reflect the critical self-examination she and her anthropological sources take to be necessary. Vrasti’s critique would appear to question the seriousness of political science’s efforts at ethnography. Scholars have responded in a variety of ways. Rancatore (2010) has responded that these critiques are somewhat overdrawn, while nonetheless sympathizing with Vrasti’s plea for ethnographic autocritique in IR. At least one anthropologist has weighed in on the debate (Lie 2013), emphasizing practical challenges to political ethnography. However, perhaps the most nuanced critique has come from Wedeen, who notes that “Vrasti’s plea for adopting the insights of critical ethnography, and for reading anthropological theory ‘post-Geertz,’ oddly has her stuck in that fertile but rather dated debate of the 1980s” (Wedeen 2010, pp. 262–63). She continues: Instead of deriving inspiration primarily from the anthropology of the 1980s and early 1990s, we might want to chug ahead to the anthropology of the 2000s … . [M]oving on suggests discarding assertions and strategies that now seem stifling, tired, or wrong, and building creatively on what seems useful and true. (Wedeen 2010, p. 263) She goes on to suggest that, “rather than romanticizing ethnography’s potential contributions to political science or insisting on its particular penchant for radicalism (a position most anthropologists would disavow),” we should approach ethnographic research as an opportunity for theoretical distance provided not by the presumed objectivity of neo-positivism, but instead by theoretical distancing “made possible by an active cultivation of one’s critical and innovative faculties” (Wedeen 2010, p. 264). If this is now the “state of play” in political ethnography, the method’s purpose would seem to be dual—both to broaden the scope of possible inquiry into the political by adding immersion to the disciplinary toolkit, and also to deepen researchers’ self-assessment. Indeed, for Wedeen at least, the two tasks would seem to be deeply linked. On the one hand, locating oneself appropriately within the site of immersion requires self-examination. On the other, self-examination as a researcher requires that one engage in active empirical research. More broadly, her approach to locating ethnography in the discipline (and, we should disclose, our own view), is to advocate a middle ground or “big tent” approach, an understanding of political ethnography that makes room for both critical approaches and for explanatory ones. In some respects, this debate reflects larger concerns about the status and purpose of ethnography in political science as such. Vrasti’s appeal for a more critical international political ethnography taps into a long-standing thread in the discipline’s culture. In IR especially, self-­ consciously critical or radical voices, including broadly historical materialist (Cox 1986), postmodern (Ashley 1986; Der Derian & Shapiro 1989), feminist (Enloe 1990;Tickner 1992; Sjoberg 2009), and postcolonial (Barkawi & Laffey 2006; Jones 2006; Geeta & Nair 2013) perspectives, have long been a vocal minority. Many proponents of ethnography in IR either fall broadly into these camps, or are in some sense fellow travelers or sympathizers with such critical projects. 441

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Such approaches are perhaps the longest standing alternative to increasingly technical quantitative and formal approaches to studying politics. Nonetheless, many other IR-ethnographers, including many of those we review below, are located in the relatively new, but nonetheless largely non-critical, social constructivist camp (see for example Barnett 1997; Neumann 2012). Another potential basis for ethnography in political science might be said to come in the form of a wide-ranging set of pleas for methodological pluralism in the field. Such approaches generally do not advocate ethnographic research as such, but do advocate heterodox approaches to conducting research. Thus, Sil and Katzenstein (2010a, 2010b) have advocated an eclectic approach to methodology, grounded in a reading of philosophical pragmatism. Friedrichs and Kratochwil (2009) also emphasize pragmatism, but encourage a somewhat more unified approach. Monteiro and Ruby (2009a, 2009b) have advocated setting aside philosophical debates altogether, in the name of accepting a “prudent” plurality of approaches to research. In contrast, Jackson (2011) advocates close attention to philosophical foundations, but finds that no one set should be preferred over others—the field should instead accept multiple approaches to research design. He derives from this view a disciplined pluralism about methods. These approaches are clearly quite varied, but have in common a belief that a range of methods ought to be available to IR scholars, and indeed to political scientists writ large. Approaches that remain in the minority in the field are the likely beneficiaries—ethnography among them.6 More generally, many political scientists conduct research that, while not ethnographic, is nonetheless informed by a cognate focus on culture and social difference broadly conceived. For example, social constructivists in IR practice what Schatz (2009a, p. 308) has called “an ethnographic sensibility that goes beyond face-to-face contact.”7 While scholars of comparative politics do not have an entrenched school of constructivism as such,8 a range of related approaches, such as “discursive institutionalism” (Schmidt 2008) offers similar insights in similar ways. We can thus locate the “ethnographic turn” in political science in a broader turn toward more socially thick research.

Varieties of political ethnography With these foundational matters in mind, this section briefly surveys a range of approaches to the use of anthropological and ethnographic methods in the study of politics. While some instances find political scientists making use of ethnography, other contributions are influenced not by methodology so much as by theoretical or substantive empirical lessons from anthropology.We make no pretense of offering an exhaustive survey. Instead, our purpose is, first, to make clear the variety of research that has been conducted and the methods employed. Second, in so doing, we aim to highlight a few practical limits on anthropological and ethnographic methods in the study of politics. Few if any political scientists are as broadly and deeply associated with anthropology as James C. Scott.9 Scott’s work is perhaps linked to as much to anthropological theory or styles of reasoning as to ethnographic methods. This influence includes his emphasis on local knowledge and on what might be called cultures of non-state politics. One of his major works, Weapons of the Weak, a study of peasant resistance against local elites, reflects extensive immersion in a Malaysian village (Scott 1985). However, his subsequent books became increasingly broad in scope and theoretical in focus, describing for example the overt and private records (“public” and “hidden transcripts”) of claims elites and subalterns make against one another across a range of historical contexts (Scott 1990). His seminal Seeing Like a State (Scott 1998) describes the efforts of states to make their populations and territories “legible,” rendering them easier to observe and thus manage by simplifying or eliding the detail, nuance, and complexity that 442

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comprise localized social life in practice. The frequent failure of such efforts constitutes a limit on the normalizing, rationalizing power of modernization.10 The result reorients the study of power politics toward the lived and the particular, suggesting that the conventional study of politics has missed bottom-up operations of power for broadly the same reasons that states often fail to restructure and subjugate them. Scott thus exemplifies one important way in which anthropology has influenced political science. His work offers theoretical generalizations that could not readily be arrived at through the conventional methods of positive, rationalist political science. Scott remains focused on the traditional subject matter of political science—power: who has it, how it is used, and why—but brings to it an anthropological focus on locality and subaltern knowledge. If Scott’s work aims to reorient the discipline toward an anthropological way of thinking, a second approach aims to do roughly the opposite, adapting anthropological methods to answer orthodox political science questions, alongside the positivist tools already in use. The exemplary figure here is David Laitin, whose work on civil conflict in Nigeria (Laitin 1986) and identity formation by Russian minority groups in post-Soviet states (Laitin 1998) has leveraged ethnographic data to address core political questions about the origins of violence in identity, and the formation of group identity itself.11 Laitin identifies a tripartite typology of methods, linking formal or rational choice approaches, quantitative analysis, and narrative, with ethnographic inquiry corresponding roughly to the narrative approaches, insofar as both emphasize descriptive detail over nomothetic theory. Laitin’s, ethnographic data, gathered under relatively disciplined or circumscribed conditions, provides source material for his rationalist theory building and for coding quantitative data. Elsewhere, Kalyvas takes a similar approach, beginning with in-depth interviews he characterizes as ethnographic (Kalyvas 2006, p. 247), and then testing an elaborate rationalist explanation of the distribution of violence during civil wars, using statistical methods. Similarly, Driscoll (2015) has used ethnography to provide locally specific data from the post-Soviet Central Asia for a rationalist explanation of state consolidation in the context of warlordism.These approaches all have in common a deployment or disciplining of ethnographic inquiry to answering core questions about political violence and political order, often with an eye on ethnic identity and other fundamental questions that, in many respects, exemplify the hallmark of the anthropological approach. In these studies, however, ethnography as such becomes something rather different from the freeform and immersive method applied by anthropologists, since their research design requires that it be deployed in a relatively structured way. A third approach addresses does something quite different again. Here, political scientists proceed not by deploying ethnographic methods, but instead by drawing on substantive anthropological findings. Typical is a literature in IR that addresses war from a cross-cultural perspective. For example, Snyder (2002) draws on the anthropology of war to argue that while processes of social construction may create wide varieties in societies’ propensities to engage in armed conflict, the underlying structural dynamics of international anarchy nonetheless does impose constraints on prospects for peaceful coexistence. Relatedly, Donnelly (2012, pp. 610–16) deploys anthropological lessons about social structure, particularly in the context of forager societies, to argue that hierarchy and violence are not necessary corollaries of social order, and thus need not be features of international society. Azar Gat (2006, 2009) draws on anthropology in combination with evolutionary theory, archaeology, and a broad range of other social sciences to derive a long-run view of the origins of war in human society. These studies both offer substantive lessons and sound a cautionary note. On the one hand, these studies provide rich detail to the study of armed conflict, much of it new to political scientists. In so doing, they raise the prospect of a new basis for IR’s trans-historical generalizations, 443

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such as those of Waltz (1979), and for understanding cross-cultural variation on the causes of war and peace. However, the range of findings in itself suggests potential difficulties. Where anthropologists have tended to focus on the socially or culturally localized or specific, political scientists commonly generalize across contexts, in search of law-like regularities.Taken together, the findings of these studies appear to be at least partially inconclusive, disagreeing on their basic claims and conflicting on cross-cultural propensity to warfare.12 This suggests constraints on the use of extant anthropological findings to draw systematic conclusions in political science. (And, given their discipline’s orientation toward the local and heterogeneous, anthropologists may find this outcome entirely appropriate.) While IR faces especially strong barriers to ethnographic research, scholars of comparative politics have clearer opportunities to conduct immersive studies. The result has been a relative proliferation of work in that subfield, including studies focusing on the political lives of citizens, their beliefs, perceptions, and understandings of the political structures in which they find themselves. Here, a few examples from the modern Middle East, prior to the Arab Spring, illustrate. Singerman (1996) assesses how Cairo’s residents formulate opportunities for political participation on a communal level, in the context of an authoritarian state. In the absence of formal political participation, she finds informal networks have emerged, often originating in the family, to take their place and to provide access to essential resources. Similarly, Ismail (2006) investigates how residents of Cairo’s “new quarters”—relatively recent and unregulated parts of the city—experience the authoritarian state apparatus, as it attempts to impose regularizing neoliberal norms and structures on its population. In a study of Syrian politics, Wedeen (1999) asks why the Assad regime persisted in presenting an image of an all-knowing, all-powerful autocrat, despite widespread disbelief among the Syrian population. Elsewhere, Wedeen (2009) has investigated the fragile but persistent foundations of political unity in Yemen, linking the social fabric of political life not to institutions, but instead to shared events. She notes in particular the importance of qat chews, events where qat (a leafy, mild stimulant) is consumed at length, and deliberation across a wide range of subjects takes place (Wedeen 2007). These studies vary in their focus, but have in common investigating the interface between citizen and state, doing so in a “thick” ethnographic way. They are, in an important sense, “completely” ethnographic, mobilizing immersive methods to answer questions about identity and thickly conceived lived experience. They are properly works of political science in the sense of having politics as their subject and in being conducted by trained political scientists borrowing from anthropology, rather than relying on the conventional toolkit of the contemporary political scientist. There is, of course, nothing unique about studying political immersion in the Middle East—similar ethnographic studies of politics have been conducted in China (Fu 2009), Central Asia (Schatz 2004), Africa (Schatzberg 1988; Fujii 2011; Fujii 2014), Latin America (Arias 2006), and elsewhere. Indeed, while the above studies of the Middle East focus on relationships between citizens and authoritarian states, analogous work can and has been conducted under democratic governments. Indeed, such studies presumably provide fewer barriers to research. For example, Walsh (2003) investigates popular political deliberation in middle America, by focusing on the discursive formulation of attitudes and beliefs around a single table at a single neighborhood coffee shop, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In an important sense, Walsh’s coffee shop table and Wedeen’s qat chews are comparable events, sites of regular, political deliberation and debate by citizens, out of which solidary and shared understandings of political life can be formulated. Such thoroughly ethnographic research has been at least somewhat less common in IR. As we suggest below, this has to do in no small part with the problems of access to closed institutional sites. In some instances, international political ethnographers have dealt with this 444

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challenge by focusing on quasi-official political activity in public or quasi-public settings. Cohn’s (1987) classic study of the professional culture and discourse of American defense intellectuals is a useful example.13 Elsewhere, anthropologist Hugh Gusterson (1998) embedded himself in the professional culture of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons development site in California. Unable for security reasons to access the site directly, he instead inserted himself into the Laboratory’s attendant public spaces: “I joined a softball and a basketball team at the Lab; I joined the Lab singles group (more of a Friday evening and weekend outings club than a dating arrangement); I hung around bars in town, and I sometimes went for lunch to the Lab cafeteria” (Gusterson 2008, p. 99). Such approaches make international political ethnography work by creatively making do as best the researcher can.Where institutional sites are closed, as with sites of US defense policy decision making and weapons research, socially adjacent sites may nonetheless provide access to the cultural spaces they constitute.14 Iver Neumann has been almost alone in directly and repeatedly immersing himself in the operations of a states’ foreign policy apparatus. In his book-length study of the Norwegian foreign ministry (Neumann 2012) and in a series of related articles (Neumann 2007, 2008b), Neumann develops a detailed account of the conduct of the diplomatic service at home.15 Here, the focus is on the quotidian practices of diplomatic life. Despite this, Neumann’s access is still relatively exceptional, being based on his citizenship in a relatively small, developed liberal democracy, as well as his long-standing links to the ministry in question.16 Thus, this brief survey suggests that, while opportunities for ethnographic research have been relatively rich and extensive among students of comparative politics, scholars of international politics have faced greater barriers to making use of ethnographic methods. In the remainder of this chapter, we explore opportunities to work around these constraints, opening new opportunities for political ethnographies of (among other areas) the international arena.

Two kinds of political ethnography Elsewhere (MacKay & Levin 2015), we have identified two approaches for making ethnography more readily available to IR scholars. In this section, we sketch them briefly, and provide strategies for research design. The first is a historical approach to ethnography—approximating the ethnographic ethos and answering ethnographically minded questions with reference to primary source historical research.The second is multi-sited ethnography.These approaches may well be useful to other political scientists, and indeed to other social scientists as well. These methods are well suited to addressing two of the practical barriers that confront the ethnographic study of world politics. The first, discussed in the previous section, is the problem of access. Institutional environments like the bureaucracies of international organizations, or the political structures of national security establishments, are often partially or wholly closed to outsiders. The second is the problem of aggregation.17 IR’s subject matter is necessarily global or transnational in scope. Scale and an attendant imperative to generalization almost necessarily come along with it. The field’s tradition of seeking law-like regularities is thus not strictly a matter of convention. The field’s stated objective to understand the “causes of war and the conditions of peace” (Levy 1998) necessarily involves generalizing across cases. However, widely distributed phenomena like “interstate wars, 1815–1989” do not in any sense lend themselves to immersive investigation. There is therefore a need to distinguish between those lines of inquiry that benefit from immersion and those that do not or cannot. Of course, these problems are not unique to international politics. As Schatz (2009a, p. 307) notes, “Conducting ethnographic immersion about matrimonial relations between spouses might be no more possible than conducting a similar study about the causes of war.” Secrecy 445

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is a recurring feature of almost all of social life; it is hardly unique to governments are their intergovernmental agents. Nor is scale insurmountable—anthropologists long ago branched out beyond traditional immersion in the archetypal remote village.18 Our purpose below is to show how these problems can be grappled with in studying politics.

Historical ethnography From a conventional point of view, a historical approach to ethnography may seem a contradiction in terms, eliding as it does firsthand immersion in a social milieu. However, the conceptual leap this implies is not as great as it may appear. Anthropology has a long history of involvement with history and historiographical methods. As Cohn (1980, p. 198) writes, “Both aim, whatever else they do, at explicating the meaning of actions rooted in one time and place, to persons in another.”19 As a range of anthropologists have noted in various ways, social orders necessarily emerged gradually out of distinctive and idiosyncratic historical processes. De-historicizing culture risks reifying or naturalizing it (Marcus 1986; Ohnuki-Tierney 1990; Sahlins 1993). Indeed, the subfield of ethnohistory has persisted for decades precisely on the premise that past cultures and social contexts can be reconstructed historically (Krech 1991; Harkin 2010).20 Historical ethnography aims to provide quasi-immersive experience of a past institutional or other social context. It necessarily proceeds from primary historical materials: texts, of one form or another. These will likely, but not at all necessarily, be archival. The approach is closely linked to two methods likely already familiar to anthropologists: discourse analysis and genealogy. Discourse analysis is relatively well established in the IR methodological toolkit (Milliken 1999; Hansen 2006; Neumann 2008a). In IR, as elsewhere, it undertakes textual interpretation focused on shared subtexts and implied disagreements across textual sources, with the aim of understanding the discursive or textual milieu in which they operate. Similarly, a historical-ethnographic approach aims to reconstruct a socially thick historical setting out of textual material. However, it does not limit its findings to the texts themselves, aiming instead taking them as documentary evidence with which to more broadly recreate the cultural settings that produced them. Alternately, genealogists in the Foucauldian tradition aim to create a “history of the present” (Foucault 1977, pp. 27, 31) that makes sense of present social conditions by documenting the idiosyncratic and happenstance events and conditions in the past that created them. Historical ethnographers may also have such processual aims, but may alternately aim to make comparisons, contrasting one past setting to another in order to better understand both, or indeed contrasting the past with the emerging, not-taken-for-granted present.21 An ethnographic approach to historical inquiry offers distinctive advantages and pitfalls. While archives are less likely to “push back” than are live research subjects, they can nonetheless lie, dissemble, distort, omit, and otherwise mislead the researcher, just as might a live subject (Luehrmann 2011).22 Moreover, archives are not naturally occurring—they are generally construed as archives before the researcher encounters them, with attendant sorting, and selection processes (Feldmann 2011). In other words, archives have been constructed—have been given form, order, and perhaps some elements of a narrative—before the researcher arrives. Therefore, the leap from conventional to archival immersion is not as extreme as it may sound. As Geertz (1973b, p. 15) once noted, “what we call our data are really our own constructions of other people’s constructions of what they and their compatriots are up to.” In this sense, the ethnographer immersed in an idealized remote village is every bit as caught up in the act of interpretation as a researcher working through the dusty materials of an archive.23 Participant observation may be preferable, simply because it is more interactive and offers more opportunity to collect immersive data, but the difference is in no way absolute. 446

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We offer four basic prescriptions for designing historical ethnographic research. First, and most straightforwardly, the subject of immersion must be in some sense amenable to immersive research. While many historical contexts and questions addressed by political scientists may be amenable to historically approximate immersion, many will not be. Second, the historical “site” of research must be sufficiently localized to be equivalent to a site of conventional immersion or participant observation. The purpose is not merely to emulate the operation of traditional immersion, but rather to ensure the object of study has a sufficient density of social links and commonalities to permit study as a site of cultural production or activity. Third, the textual sources used should be primary and first person. Since the purpose is to interpret the interpretations of others, research should appeal first and foremost to the in situ writings of participants in the activity being studied. Fourth and finally, those points of view should be multiple. The purpose, after all, is not to assess individual subjectivity, but rather intersubjectivity, in the form of shared cultural space or activity. Distributing source material across multiple points of view should allow the researcher to document not the isolated individual impressions, but instead the shared interpretations of groups or communities (Pouliot 2007).24 Elsewhere (MacKay & Levin 2015), we have outlined a potential historical-ethnographic study of the founding of the UN institutions, accounting for the emergence of their bureaucratic cultures. This approach might be equally well used to assess major diplomatic meetings, especially where—as with the Paris peace talks (MacMillan 2001), for example—negotiations persisted long enough to acquire a kind of social order of their own. Alternately, were sources available, a study could address the bureaucratic culture of a military establishment during a major war.

Multi-sited ethnography While multi-sited approaches will no doubt be familiar to anthropologists, they have received surprisingly little overt attention from political scientists.25 The elision is unusual because politics—whether governance within states or interactions in the international sphere—tends to occur in more than one place. Extending political ethnography across multiple sites may thus be not just desirable, but necessary. This goes double for researchers in IR, whose objects of study are distributed transnationally or globally. Multi-sitedness offers a way to end-run the closed doors of institutions, by focusing on their far-flung publically accessible effects. The essence of multi-sited research is to follow people, connections, associations, and relationships across space (because they are substantially contiguous but spatially non-contiguous)… Multi-sited ethnography involves a spatially dispersed field through which the ethnographer moves—actually, via sojourns in two or more places, or conceptually, by means of juxtaposition of data. (Falzon 2009a, pp. 1–2) The most visible proponent of multi-sited research in anthropology has been George Marcus (1995, 2009). As he notes, “fieldwork as traditionally perceived and practiced is already itself potentially multi-sited” (Marcus 1995, p. 100), insofar as the boundaries of the traditional research site are themselves always tacitly elastic. Even a canonical immersion in a remote village must begin by demarcating the site itself, which implicitly requires that judgments be made about neighboring communities, geographical zones, and so on. Beyond the traditional village research site, much anthropology has explicitly located itself in multiple locations. Hannerz (2003, pp. 203–06), for example, embedded himself with foreign correspondents, members of a 447

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professional community who are necessarily mobile. Garsten (1994) took a multi-sited approach to the Apple Corporation, bringing the approach to multinational corporate culture.26 Such approaches may be especially useful for the study of world politics. Indeed, in his original statement of intent for the method, Marcus emphasized the study of transnational or globalized phenomena (Marcus 1995). Multi-sitedness also permits, and indeed encourages, a practice somewhat unusual for ethnography: collaboration. Multiplying observers permits a greater volume of documentation, but may also lead to questions about consistency. Such concerns are perhaps best dealt with head on. Thus, one research team advocates a reflexive approach that “requires negotiation across epistemologically diverse terrains … . The methodological work of collaboration should not be hidden; the knowledge we gain depends on it” (Matsutake Worlds Research Group 2009, p. 198). Moreover, concerns about consistency are in no way limited to collaborative or multi-sited research, since two conventional ethnographies may still disagree with one another (Heider 1988). Collaboration may force disclosure and analysis of such disagreements, broadening and deepening interpretation.27 Since multi-sited research rather minimally revises conventional ethnographic methods, and since it is already well established, we offer only two basic guidelines for research design, above and beyond existing ethnographic best practices.28 First, sites must be in some way linked. Marcus identifies several forms of such linkages, framed in terms of things the researcher may “follow” across multiple sites. We emphasize two as especially useful for studying politics. One may follow people: “the procedure is to follow and stay with the movements of a particular group of initial subjects” (Marcus 1995, p. 106). Alternately, one may follow objects, tracking them across multiple social settings, “tracing the circulation through different contexts of a manifestly material object of study (at least as originally conceived), such as commodities, gifts, money, works of art, and intellectual property” (Marcus 1995, pp. 106–07).29 Second, the research sites should share some core cultural activity or production. In political contexts, this will often be a professional or institutional culture, but need not be. For example, the shared culture of a group of refugees, tracked across the multiple sites of their migration, could well be useful in the study of politics.30 The range of possible uses in studying politics may thus be quite wide. Elsewhere (MacKay & Levin 2015), we have suggested that one could undertake the study of food aid distribution using a multi-sited approach. In addition to the aforementioned refugee flows or global markets for manufactured goods, diplomacy or transnational activist networks might also be studied this way.

Conclusion Our purpose here has been to survey the use of anthropological ideas and particularly ethnographic methods in political science.We have aimed to show that their place in the study of politics is partial or incomplete, in two senses. First, despite the remarkable intellectual productivity these ideas have offered, political science as a discipline has accepted these insights somewhat incompletely or conditionally. Pachirat (quoted in Wedeen 2010, p. 256) describes their place in the disciplinary toolkit as follows: “Ethnography as a method is particularly unruly, particularly undisciplined, particularly celebratory of improvisation, bricolage, and serendipity, and particularly attuned to the possibilities of surprise, inversion, and subversion in ways that other methods simply are not.” Studies of politics that fully embrace this style are often perceived as somewhat marginal within the discipline, subject to polite acceptance, but also a certain measure of confusion. Happily, there are at least some signs this is changing. Political ethnography is no longer new, and now has an established track record to which new practitioners can refer. 448

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Second, political ethnography’s acceptance has been incomplete insofar as it is often burdened by constraints, and requires adaptations, or alterations to the method itself—indeed, we have advocated some such adjustment above. Pachirat (quoted in Wedeen 2010, p. 256) goes on to note that senior figures in the discipline “often revert to the language of ‘disciplining’ and ‘harnessing’ ethnography.” Such work has often been extremely productive. Even where these adaptations involve narrowing or disciplining the method sufficiently to provide data for formal or statistical analysis, the resulting research has been strikingly productive, as studies by Laitin (1986, 1998), Kalyvas (2006), and Driscoll (2015) should make clear. Our own purpose in briefly sketching methodological advice above has been pragmatic, insofar as we aim to split the difference between these two paths. On the one hand, we aim to make ethnography more practical for the study of core political subject matters. On the other hand, doing so has involved varying degrees of adaptation or methodological translation. Our intent has been to make political ethnography as potentially useful as possible.

Notes 1 Given the breadth of the task, we limit ourselves to political scientists, setting aside the anthropology of politics or policy as conducted by anthropologists themselves (see for example Shore et al. 2011; Shore & Wright 1997). 2 Such influences are too broad to easily survey. By way of example from IR, one might emphasize the use of bargaining models to explain the onset of inter-state war (Fearon 1995; Wagner 2000; Powell 2002). Alternately, the influence of economic globalization on peace is a key feature of democratic or liberal peace theories—accounts which are generally formalized using rational choice approaches (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 1999) and tested using advanced statistical methods (Oneal & Russett 2001; Gartzke 2007). Such studies vary widely in their claims, but are consistent in their methodological approaches. This has led to perceptions of a “methodological monoculture” in the field (Jackson 2011, p. 210; McNamara 2009). 3 Political ethnography nonetheless has deeper roots than we might expect. Aronoff (who holds PhDs in both anthropology and political science) has been conducting ethnographic research on politics for four decades (e.g., Aronoff 1974, 1993). 4 For example, a recent poll of IR scholars found that, while IR-theoretic orientations are increasingly diverse (only 16 percent of scholars now identify with the once-dominant realist school), a majority of US-based IR scholars continue to identify as neo-positivists (Maliniak et al. 2012, pp. 27, 32). 5 On what kinds of questions ethnography can answer, see Bayard de Volo and Schatz (2004), Jackson (2008), Wedeen (2010). 6 For a moderately skeptical view from the disciplinary mainstream, see Chernoff (2007). 7 Among constructivists, see especially the recent “practice turn” (Pouliot 2008; Adler & Pouliot 2011), which draws on practice theory in social theory (Schatzki et al. 2000), particularly on Bourdieu (1990). 8 Although, exceptionally see Green (2002). While such research is not strictly ethnographic, it often involves thickly described research on social and cultural practices, often drawing on extensive interviewing (e.g., Pouliot 2009). 9 Indeed, Scott, whose doctoral research was conducted in political science at Yale, is frequently mistaken for an anthropologist (Schuessler 2012). 10 Scott has since focused more regionally on state-nomad relations in highland Southeast Asia (Scott 2009), and offered a popularized account of his work on the power and politics of local knowledge (Scott 2012). 11 Laitin’s conception of the relationship between ethnography and other political science methods seems to have gradually shifted over time. See a useful critical assessment in Hopf (2006), along with others in the same symposium. 12 This approach also suggests debts to older, more social evolutionary research in anthropology and archaeology. Similarly, see Galtung’s (1986) social-structural account of the UN institutions, which he describes as anthropological. 13 Cohn’s experience of immersion was perhaps especially “thick” in that she found the experience affected her own thinking. On the one hand, she found her subjects wholly unguarded in their lack of

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feminist critique: “I had naively imagined myself as a feminist spy in the house of death—that I would need to sneak around and eavesdrop on what men said in unguarded moments…. Of course, I was wrong. There was no evidence that any feminist critiques had ever reached the ears, much less the minds, of these men” (Cohn 1987, p. 693). On the other hand, “I learned… that talking about nuclear weapons is fun. I am serious. The words are fun to say; they are racy, sexy, snappy…. Nearly everyone I observed clearly took pleasure in using the words” (Cohn 1987, p. 704). Only immersion could let her recognize that fun as real, while still taking feminist critique seriously. An additional form of political ethnography may result from accident. The researcher, happening to be in the right place at the right time, finds him or herself immersed in an event or process worth documenting. Here we think especially of the odd—perhaps unique—case of Barnett’s (1997, 2003) documentation of the UN bureaucracy during the Rwandan Genocide. On a government fellowship away from his academic post, Barnett happened to be attached to the US mission to the United Nations during the crisis, and witnessed the bureaucratic inaction that accompanied it.The resulting study offers unique insights into the operation of an international security bureaucracy at work. However, for just that reason, it offers few opportunities to develop general prescriptions for research design. (Moreover, given the unflattering light in which he portrays the UN institutions, it seems unlikely they would put him in the same place again.) It may be telling that Barnett’s (1997) original article appeared in an anthropology rather than political science journal, suggesting residual ambivalence about ethnographic approaches in the latter discipline. Neumann is consequently a political anthropologist in the literal sense, the study having served as dissertation for his second doctorate. Another recent locus of connection between IR and ethnographic methods is a recent interest in Actor-Network Theory (ANT). ANT originated in science and technology studies (Latour 1987; Law 1992), as a way to study practice of laboratory science. While approaches have varied, the method of choice has generally been ethnographic immersion in laboratories and other natural sciences research sites (Latour & Woolgar 1986; Callon 1986; Mol 2002). Since its origins in the 1980s, applications of ANT have proliferated. While some accounts have been chiefly theoretical or methodological in objective (Walters 2002; Best & Walters 2013), empirical applications in IR have been widely varied, including studies of global finance (Porter 2013), airport security (Schouten 2014), international organizations (Bueger 2013), and state failure (MacKay 2006; Bueger & Bethke 2013). Such studies are not always methodologically immersive, but have in common a shared ethnographic style or ethos carried over from actor-network theory. For general methodological advice, see Law (2004). Schatz refers similarly to problems of “scale and secrecy” (Schatz 2009a, p. 307). Moreover, ethnography as a method is not alone in being challenged by scale. Research techniques ranging from interviewing to archival work must grapple with how what one learns can be applied across contexts. In principle, all methodological tools must grapple in some way with the task of scaling up. See also Comaroff and Comaroff (1992) on history and chronology in anthropology. Elsewhere, a doctoral program in “anthrohistory” has flourished for years at the University of Michigan, providing training that bridges historical and anthropological methods (Murphy et al. 2011). On genealogy in IR more generally, see Vucetic (2011). Examples include Bartelson (1995) and Price (1995). Political scientists are already well acquainted with actors’ “incentives to misrepresent” their circumstances and intentions (Fearon 1995). On archival research in practice, see Farge (2013). Pouliot (2007) refers to “triangulating” social or intersubjective ideas and beliefs, thus referring to the shared ideational space of culture—that is, the subject of most ethnography. The concept has a lengthy history, dating at least to Davidson (1991). Others use the term somewhat differently to triangulate across methods to establish eclectic or pluralist findings (Denzin 1978; Jick 1979). Exceptionally, see methodological advice in Cohn (2006). See also two recent edited volume on this approach (Falzon 2009b; Coleman 2011). Multi-sited ethnography has not been without critics. Falcon (2009a, p. 7) summarizes such concerns: “A programme that proposes to be more routes than roots… could well end up… robbing ethnography of its central tenets.” Put differently, immersion spread out risks being spread too thin, losing the very thickness that defines the method. For an additional example, see Holland et al. (2007). Introductions to ethnographic method include Hammerley and Atkinson (2007) and Maanen (2011).

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Immersive politics and the ethnographic encounter 29 Thus, objects may be straightforwardly material—such as manufactured goods moving in the globalized economy—but need not be persistently so: see, for example, Knorr Cetina and Breugger (2000, 2002b, 2002a) on global derivatives markets. 30 Gusterson’s (1998) make-do study of nuclear researchers is in some basic sense multi-sited. Elsewhere, Bevir and Rhodes (2003) have taken a comparable approach to the study of the British government.

Further reading MacKay, J. & Levin, J., 2015. Hanging Out in International Politics: Two Kinds of Explanatory Political Ethnography for IR. International Studies Review, 17(2), pp. 163–188. Schatz, E. ed., 2009. Political Ethnography: What Immersion Contributes to the Study of Power, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vrasti, W., 2008. The Strange Case of Ethnography and International Relations. Millennium—Journal of International Studies, 37(2), pp. 279–301. Wedeen, L., 2010. Reflections on Ethnographic Work in Political Science. Annual Review of Political Science, 13(1), pp. 255–272.

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24 SOcIAL MOVEMENtS AS PrOcESS Marianne Maeckelbergh

Introduction When I began my anthropological research into social movement organizing, I had already been involved in social movements for over ten years. When I started to delve into the literature on social movements, how they work, why they work that way, and what they actually are, I must admit, I was disappointed. I felt very strongly that there was something missing. Although there were many interesting theories about how social movements work and why, none of these theories seemed to capture what was most interesting to me – the perspectives of the social movement actors themselves. As someone who had experienced firsthand what it was like to watch the entire realm of human possibility seem to transform as a result of an exciting and dynamic interaction between hundreds or thousands of inspiring, passionate, committed people who were willing to take considerable risks in the fight for their own freedom or the freedom of others, I could not help but feel that the literature left a great deal unsaid about what it means to struggle for social change. Perhaps this absence is inevitable because the written word necessarily captures and fixes in place ideas and experiences that are expressed in motion. Perhaps it is the result of the academic tendency to create analysis through abstraction in the search for a universal explanation for the way social movements are structured, how people get involved and how they bring about the social changes they desire. To be sure, there are many insights to be gained from this literature, which comes from the fields of political science, philosophy, history and sociology.These insights have already been discussed from an anthropological perspective elsewhere (see, for example, Escobar 1992a; Edelman 2001). My concern in this chapter will be not the place of anthropology within this literature, but the question of what might be missing from the literature and the way that anthropology might fill this gap. The anthropology of social movements is currently a disparate body of literature that spans many continents, time periods, philosophical positions, thematic issues, groups of people and types of actions. Still, at least two characteristics of anthropology unite this body of literature. The first is the shift within anthropology in the 1960s toward the study of politics as a process of meaning-making rather than politics as a set of structures or institutions. The second is a methodological position – the centrality of participant-observation to the practice of anthropology. In this chapter I explore what both of these unique contributions of anthropology mean for the 456

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study of social movements and highlight the insights that are gained when an anthropological approach is taken to the study of social movements. The combination of an understanding of politics as a process and participant-observation makes it possible for anthropology to say more about the everyday practices of social movements, most of which occur ‘behind-the-scenes’ sheltered from the public eye. The opening up of this realm of social movement activity has theoretical implications; it allows for a shift in analysis away from the public messages and written documents of these movements, which are artificially created for particular purposes and audiences, and toward an analysis of practices, actions and behaviors as part of a dynamic process in which people attempt to bridge the distance between the ideal and the real of politics. Consequently, the main contribution of anthropology to the study of social movements has been that it allows us to understand social movements as being in perpetual motion, as always changing, as fluid even when they create elaborate organizational structures. I show how contemporary anthropology allows us to comprehend social movements as internally diverse, at times even contradictory, and it creates space for an analysis in which people themselves can be understood as being internally divided.

The anthropology of politics In order to understand the specific approach that anthropology takes to the study of Social Movements, it is necessary to examine the history of anthropological approaches to politics.The difference in studying politics from an anthropological perspective is that politics does not necessarily “exist within the formal political institutions [that] are associated with modern state formations” (Kurtz 2001: 2). Anthropologists take what Balandier (2004 [1967]) has called a “maximalist” approach because “they discovered that in the preindustrial, precapitalist, non-Western societies that provided their research subjects, practices and structures of government and other political practices often transpired in unlikely contexts” (Kurtz 2001: 2).They considered politics as “belonging to all social formations” and not just to clearly defined organizations and institutions (Balandier 2004 [1967]: VIII). The political scientist, Easton (1959) criticised anthropology’s inability to separate ‘politics’ from the rest of social relations, arguing that this would limit the impact of anthropology in the field of politics. According to Lewellen (2003: xi), however, it is precisely this refusal to treat politics as independent from other aspects of social relations, that is “political anthropology’s greatest virtue.” This refusal to isolate politics, he argues, stems from anthropologists working in places where politics cannot be so easily separated from other structures because there is no clearly defined state apparatus or institutionalized leadership. Lewellen (2003: xi) argues that “in many societies and political subgroups within larger societies, ‘government’ either does not exist or is irrelevant at the local level” and given anthropology’s tendency to study precisely these “local level” societies, Lewellen suggests that “the specification of the manner in which the idiom of politics is expressed through the medium of apparently nonpolitical institutions, ideologies and practices may be the primary contribution of anthropology to the study of comparative politics.” It is this willingness to define the political as a relation that can also be found outside of official political institutions that makes anthropology an ideal framework for studying social movements which are usually consi­ dered to be outside of, separate from and/or acting against official political institutions. Vincent (2002) argues that there are three phases in the anthropology of politics, the first being the “formative era” from 1851 to 1939 in which “anthropologists studied the political almost incidentally to other interests” (2002: 2). Second, came the period from 1940 to 1960 in which political anthropologists “developed a body of systematically structured knowledge” (2002: 2). These anthropologists studied societies that were often referred to as non-state or 457

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‘acephalous’ societies. Although these were not the first anthropologists to write about tribal political systems and structures, they were the first to do so “self-consciously” (Vincent 2002: 2). Finally, there is the phase that began in the 1960s and continues into the current period. This final phase is characterized as more diffuse and accompanies the major transitions within anthropology away from the study of the ‘other’ as a reified whole that lives far away, fixed in time, and toward an increased awareness of the fluidity of boundaries and the internal diversity of the populations studied. Vincent (2002: 3) characterizes this phase as breaking away from “‘business as usual’ (i.e. developing the canon) in order to confront the issues of the objective world of national liberation movements, imperialism, and colonialism, communism and growing global inequalities.” This transition was not only occurring in anthropology, but in nearly all social sciences, and was, in many ways, a consequence of the political upheaval caused by social movements during the historical period of mass student, workers’, anti-colonial and independence movements known as the ‘long 1960s’. What these times of political and intellectual turmoil meant for the anthropology of politics can be summed up, somewhat over-simplistically, as a transition from more structural approaches to ‘politics’, such as structural functionalism, to a more ‘process’-oriented understanding of politics which came to the fore in the 1960s. While structural-functionalism had declined in popularity by the 1960s,“process theory is very much alive and kicking” (Lewellen 2003: xii). Swartz,Turner and Tuden (1966) are perhaps those best known within the processual paradigm. The processual paradigm emphasizes,“a ‘becoming’ rather than a ‘being’” (Swartz,Turner and Tuden 1966: 1) and looks at political processes as continuously constructed and contested by social agents.This makes it an ideal lens through which to understand social movements, which are made up of social agents collectively expressing contestation over politics. In their book Political Anthropology (1966) Swartz, Turner and Tuden describe the transition within anthropology as follows: Since the last major benchmark in the anthropology of politics, African Political Systems (edited by Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940) … there has been a trend – at first almost imperceptible, then gaining momentum in the late 1950s and early 1960s – away from the earlier preoccupation with the taxonomy, structure, and function of political systems to a growing concern with the study of political processes. (1966: 1) This new trend shifted the focus of political anthropology to topics such as “repetitive and radical political change, the process of decision-making and conflict resolution, and the agitation and settlement of political issues in a variety of cultural contexts” (1966: 1). Swartz, Turner and Tuden (1966: 4) attempt to define a political process as follows: A political process is … an activity that affects a neighborhood, a whole community, a whole society, or a group of societies … politics always involves … goals desired for the group as a whole … but it is useful to recognize that ‘goal’ is not a univocal concept and that all we are requiring here is that there be a striving for something for which there is competition … political allocations are those that require the consent of an entire group in order to be effectively made. (1966: 4, emphasis added) The group is not assumed to be everyone living within the geographical boundaries of the ‘nation-state’. Anthropology has a long-standing focus on how conflicts are mediated at the local level among and between groups and subgroups of people – this has been the case at least since Max Gluckman’s work on political institutions (1965). In this way, the door is opened up to examine how rebel groups (as they are often referred to) can compete for the 458

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right to represent the interests of an imagined group or subgroup, and makes it possible for us to understand social movement activity as political whether the movements engage with the nation-state apparatus or not. Kurtz (2001: 11) identifies five paradigms within the anthropology of politics. These include the structural functional paradigm, the processual paradigm, the political economy paradigm, the political evolution paradigm and the postmodern paradigm. Of these, he argues, “only the processual is exclusive to political anthropology” (2001: 11). This processual paradigm is also the paradigm most relevant in the discussion of what anthropology specifically contributes to the study of social movements.1 The processual approach is “concerned with the role of the political agent” (Kurtz 2001: 2) rather than only political structures as static constraints; it is “more dynamic and agent oriented” (2001: 12). Politics then becomes a fluid process that is determined by the “goal-oriented practices of human agents” (2001: 10). How goal oriented most people are in the creation of politics is questionable, but the processual approach at least allows for an understanding of politics as something created and transformed through human agents.This starting point is something of a prerequisite for the study of social movements, unless the aim of the research is simply to prove that social movements are unnecessary. How to analyze the role of the social agent, however, is complicated. This point brings us to one of the forms in which the processual paradigm continues into the present day – practice theory. Practice theory, pioneered by Bourdieu, Giddens and Sahlins, “restored the actor to the social process without losing sight of the larger structures that constrain (but also enable) social action” (Ortner 2006: 3) to show that “social action, or social practice, modified existing normative patterns and produced new forms of social life” (Gledhill 2000: 131). Gledhill argues that Turner was “ahead of his time, anticipating Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘practice’” (Gledhill 2000: 131). Turner’s focus on “social dramas” and the transitory and unstable nature of social fields, however, is more suited to the study of social movements than is Bourdieu’s theory of practice which rests on the notion of habitus, a concept Gledhill argues is better suited “for explaining reproduction than for explaining change” (2000: 141). Ortner builds on the basic practice theory framework by drawing on the work of James Scott, Michel Foucault and Raymond Williams. Especially Foucault’s work on the question of power has had a profound influence on anthropological approaches to politics. Foucault has had a major impact on anthropology in part because he emphasizes the importance of micro-level power relations – power as it is enacted at the level of everyday social interactions as well as by the official structures and institutions of government. In this theoretical framework, every agent becomes an agent of power; they just don’t all do so equally. In fact, a crucial form of power that agents exercise is a power over themselves as “self-regulating subjects”: Between every point of a social body, between a man and a woman, between members of a family, between a master and his pupil, between everyone who knows and everyone who does not, there exist relations of power which are not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign’s great power over the individual; they are rather concrete, changing soil in which the sovereign’s power is grounded.The conditions which make it possible for it to function. (Foucault 1980: 187) Part of the reason Foucault was so influential within anthropology was because his theories could help to explain “the ways in which such systems were ‘grounded’ in various kinds of 459

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social relations” (Ortner 2006: 4). This point brings us full circle to the attacks on early political anthropology for not being able to isolate politics from other social relations (Easton 1959) and “for viewing politics simply as a matter of power and inequality” (Vincent 2002: 1). As Vincent (2002: 1) points out, in a post-Foucault academic world “political anthropologists consider sensitivity to the pervasiveness of power and the political a prime strength.” Political anthropology, therefore, with its attention to process, pervasiveness of power, and interest in people as active agents who help determine these political processes through construction and contestation sets anthropology up to be an ideal framework for the study of social movements.

The anthropology of social movements What we are precisely referring to when we use the term ‘social movements’ is a matter of much debate. Some scholars emphasize the necessity of a unity forged through a common adversary, common goal and common identity (Touraine 1985; Castells 1997). Others describe social movements as “a network of informal interactions … engaged in a political or cultural conflict on the basis of a shared collective identity” (Diani 1992: 13). The degree to which movements have to be outside of or separate from the state and official governing structures is also debated, but there is some agreement that social movements are by definition distinct from the official structures of political power. Social movements, however, were often thought to be present only in ‘advanced’ stages of democracy and consequently social movements in the global south were analysed through different theoretical frameworks than those in northern America and western Europe. In today’s world of increased interconnectedness, however, such an analytical distinction is problematic as movements all across the world forge networks and alliances.2 There are at least two types of literature on social movements within the field of anthropology: first there is the literature that examines the literature on social movements to provide an analytical overview, and second, there is the literature on specific social movements themselves, usually focused on a particular place or group of people. It was not until recently, however, that the research being done on groups who are struggling against their own oppression has been recognized as being research on ‘social movements.’ June Nash published an edited volume compiling some of the most important work done by anthropologists on social movements in 2005, but there has not been a coherent attempt to create an analytical framework for an anthropology of social movements. Several articles on the anthropology of social movements focus not on the contribution of anthropology to the study of social movements, but on the contributions of other social sciences to the study of social movements in order to emphasize the absence of anthropology in these debates. Edelman (2001) is perhaps the most extreme in this approach. He writes (2001: 285) referring to the 1960s period of worldwide political upheaval and subsequent rise in social scientific research on social movements, that anthropologists “remained to a large extent on the periphery of social scientific theorizing about collective action.” But Escobar (1992a: 395) too, takes the absence of anthropology as his starting point and goes as far as to describe what he calls an “invisibility of social movements in anthropology.” Escobar, however, points to some potentially fruitful contributions for anthropologists to the study of social movements. Still, nearly a decade later, Gibb (2001: 3) claims that “there is little evidence to suggest that Escobar’s call for anthropologists to ‘pay serious attention’ (1992: 396) to social movements has been heeded.” Since 2001, however, there has been a great deal written by anthropologists on social movements and groups of people who could certainly be considered to be involved in social or political movements, even if they are not always referred to as social movements. Anthropologists were central to the analysis of the Zapatista uprising and the alterglobalization movement 460

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that continuously protested the gatherings of the world’s most powerful leaders for the first decade of the 21st century (Graeber 2002, 2009; Harvey 1998a; Juris 2008; Khasnabish 2008, 2010; Maeckelbergh 2009, 2011; Nash 2001, 2005b; Razsa 2015; Speed 2007). Anthropologists are today possibly more engaged in debates on social movements than ever before, taking a central role in the analysis of the wave of uprisings that have been sweeping across the world since 2011 (Appel 2014; Graeber 2013; Juris 2012; Juris and Khasnabish 2013; Juris and Razsa 2012; Khasnabish 2013; Maeckelbergh 2012; Razsa 2012). These anthropologists have been key contributors, indeed perhaps some of the main theorists to date, of the process-oriented ‘prefigurative turn’ that has come to define many social movements transnationally since the early 2000s (and to a lesser degree since the 1960s) and which, in the aftermath of the occupation and assembly-based movements of 2011 onward, is quickly becoming a key concept in social movement studies. Edelman (2001) offers an extensive review of the literature on social movements by tracing the common paradigms within social scientific research on social movements and giving examples of how anthropological research fits within these paradigms. The question he poses is “how did NSMs [New Social Movement theories] and POS [Political Opportunity Structures] theories fare when they traveled outside Europe and North America?” (2001: 291). This starting point leads him into a discussion of how each of these dominant paradigms within social movement studies have either successfully been applied or have failed to be fully applied in the context of anthropological research. The result is an excellent discussion of the existing social movement paradigm from the point of view of anthropology, but framing the discussion in this way has the limitation of making it hard for him to examine what the contribution of anthropology might have been outside of or in addition to these paradigms. If anthropology is largely absent from these social movement studies paradigms, but we know that anthropology is not absent from the literature on disadvantaged and discriminated groups many of which continuously challenge and reject this marginality, then what is anthropology saying about these groups of people struggling against their marginality? Escobar (1992a) has more to say about the potential contribution of anthropology to the study of social movements. During the early 1990s, Escobar took the analysis of the relationship between anthropology and social movement studies one step further to argue that although anthropology had thus far been mostly silent on the subject of social movements, there was need for a specifically anthropological contribution to this field and he speculated on what such a contribution might look like. Escobar (1992a), drawing on Rosaldo (1989), argues that one of the reasons anthropology was largely silent in the literature on social movements was because anthropology was predisposed toward static and objectivist modes of inquiry as Rosaldo famously wrote, “If it’s moving, it isn’t cultural” (1989: 209). Since the late 1980s, however, anthropology has heeded Rosaldo’s (and many others’) critique and with the literary, engaged and postmodern turn, anthropology went the opposite direction to develop a focus on the study of diversity and transition within populations and of cultural representation as contingent and contestable (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Tsing 1993, 2004), on the fluidity of boundaries (Appadurai 1991; Hannerz 1992; Kearney 1991; Marcus 1995), and on complex notions of personhood that challenged the idea of the ‘individual’ (Busby 1997; Inden 2001; Strathern 1988). These analytical perspectives and assumptions require that rather than taking structures and meanings as given, we need to create methods to understand how people construct and contest meaning – an analytical perspective in which meaning becomes something that is continuously created and transformed rather than fixed in place and time. The rise in the 1970s of new approaches within anthropology, including a turn to Foucaultian notions of power and practice theory, as described above, as well as the rise of subaltern studies, feminist anthropology and 461

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the postmodern turn, have all contributed to this opening up of a terrain of analysis that today makes anthropology one of the most productive disciplines for the study of social movements. Escobar discusses many of these developments within anthropology, which had already begun to take hold by 1992. However, he argues that although there was an upsurge in the study of “resistance” within anthropology, the “organized aspects of collective resistance still prove[d] elusive for anthropology” (Escobar 1992a: 397). It is true, while most social scientific literature was concerned with the questions of social movement organization, political opportunity structures, resource mobilization and strategic movement practice, anthropology was often applying James Scott’s notion of “everyday forms of resistance – the prosaic but constant struggle between the peasantry and those who seek to extract labour, food, taxes, rents, and interest from them” (Scott 1985: xvi) in the form of “foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on” (Scott 1985: xvi).These were forms of resistance that were not necessarily ‘organized’ in the sense that is usually implied when speaking of social movements as collective, (semi-)intentional organizations. Most definitions of social movements, especially into the 1990s, employ this limited definition of what social movements are, and maintain a focus on ‘organizations’ rather than fluid groups of people, thereby reinforcing the gap between anthropology and other social movement studies literature. Two of the earliest attempts by anthropologists to create an anthropology of social and political movements are that of Gerlach and Hine (1970) and that of Ralph Nicolas (1973). Gerlach and Hine (1970) leave the reader with a rather formulaic and functionalist approach to movements that is akin to those found in most social movement studies of that time. Nicolas, however, opens up the door to understand the insights gained from anthropology for the study of social movements. His article focuses not on the use of the words ‘social’ or ‘political,’ but rather on the word ‘movement’. Although this may not seem remarkable, it does set this article apart from most work done on social movements which rarely addresses the question of what “movement” means or what it implies for our understanding of social movements and how they work. Nicolas (1973: 64) argues that “movements are often structurally simple and unstable; and they are functionally paradoxical in that they can be seen as at the same time ‘disruptive’ (of a stable social order) and ‘adaptive’ (to a changing social order).” His focus on the notion of ‘movement’ rather than ‘organizations’ allows him to describe movements as “sociologically and ideologically evanescent, rarely appearing the same for more than a short span of time” (Nicolas 1973: 64). Nicolas argues that in an anthropology of social movements, we cannot maintain a distinction between political, religious, and other kinds of movements because “in some of the ‘simpler’ societies with which anthropologists deal, the absence of a state, a government, or a king or council in which a differentiated political function might be lodged is now a well-established fact.” He goes on to argue that “the dichotomy between scared and secular or spiritual and temporal, which is crucial to the definition of ‘the political’ in Western cultures, is not drawn (or is drawn differently) in the civilizations of China and India” (1973: 67). This point, although made in a now-outdated anthropological style, leads to one of the reasons that anthropology can yield useful insights for the study of social movements. If our starting assumption is that we cannot take the meaning of the ‘political’ for granted, then we must determine what ‘politics’ and the ‘political’ mean in each context through empirical research. This approach is often not necessary when studying politics in western Europe or northern America, but when studying social movements, it is essential because part of the task of any social movement is to redefine the meaning of politics, through practice, to define it differently than those they oppose. Each movement, however, may be different in this redefinition of the political and it therefore becomes a question of empirical research. 462

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Nicolas also provides the reader with a very good example of precisely the kind of contributions anthropologists can make to the study of social movements. He uses the example of the Bengali word āndolan, the closest equivalent of the English word ‘movement’ to show how even notions of movement can be different across contexts. The word āndolan has three connotations: first, agitation in the sense of swinging back and forth, oscillating; second, exercise or repeated practice; and third, discussion, criticism, debate, controversy. He uses this example specifically to highlight the contrast to what he calls “our general notion that a movement is unidirectional (preferably ‘forward’)” (1973: 68). Here we see an analysis of movement activity that much better captures what it feels like to be a part of a social movement: the constant back and forth, little victories, major setbacks, people coming, people going, continuous internal debate and conflict. Especially his second connotation, that of repeated practice, seems incredibly important. Not only are movements, as all social action, involved in a great deal of repetitive behavior, part of the theory of social change, of how social movements bring about transformation is linked to the idea of repeated practice. Contemporary movements, such as the alterglobalization movement (those protesting the meetings of multilateral organizations like the World Trade Organization and the World Bank), the anti-climate change movement, and the ‘square’ occupation movement that overtook Spain at the end of May 2011 with knock-on effects all over the world, are movements that transform politics through their own actions. The strategy for social change they employ is one based on “prefiguration” – enacting in the here and now within movement decision making the political structures and practices that they would like to see used to govern their country or the world at large. These new political structures have to be created from (more or less) scratch and so they have to be practiced, they have to be tried out and improved upon continuously through trial and error. As I have argued elsewhere ­(Maeckelbergh 2011), in western Europe and northern America these political practices emerged during the 1960s and represent the start of shift away from social movement ‘organi­zations’ and ‘revolutionary programs’ towards a network-based, open-ended form of social struggle in which democratic participation is the primary value (Graeber 2002, 2009; Juris 2008; M ­ aeckelbergh 2009). In light of the work done by Nicolas and other anthropologists more recently, which I explore below, it would seem that Escobar’s concern that anthropology as a discipline has few theoretical or conceptual resources with which to study collective political action and its part in creating the world in which we live, is no longer a concern if, indeed, it ever was one. If the above cannot be described as a theoretical or conceptual resource, which perhaps it cannot be, then it can certainly be considered a methodological resource. Anthropology is able to take this open-ended constructivist approach to the political and to practices of social change because it is based on the method of participant-observation and the methodology of ethnography. In the next section I show how participant-observation helps anthropologists determine how politi­ cal meaning is made as well as how even slow, almost invisible, processes of social change can become visible through long-term fieldwork.

Participant observation and social movements One of the defining features of anthropology is its methodology – the doing of fieldwork, the method of participant-observation and the interpretivist approach with which this method is applied. As Berger (1993: 174) puts it, “Fieldwork is – it goes without saying, and thus must be said – the sine qua non of modern anthropology.” Fieldwork involves an “intimate participation in a community and observation of modes of behaviour and the organization of social life … 463

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The value of sustained fieldwork over time [is that it] yields insights into a culture and into the processes of continuity and change, scarcely attainable any other way” (Keesing and S­ trathern 1998:  7–9). This is equally true, if not especially true, of political anthropology. As  ­Vincent (2002:  1) argues, “What gives political anthropology its vitality is the complex play of field research with ethnography, ethnography with theory, and theory with critique.” The benefits of fieldwork for the study of social movements are manifold. As ­Nicolas (1973:  69) argues, “social movements are processes, not of the regularly repetitive type that restore and maintain a social structure … but rather of the type that lead to a qualitatively altered structure with reference to a changed pattern of meaning.” However, as Escobar points out (1992b: 38) “meaning cannot be permanently fixed; it is always changing such that even the very recognition of identity relies on an ongoing process of articulation of meanings.” For anthropologists, “social movements … bring about social practices which operate in part through the constitution of space for the creation of meaning” (Escobar 1992b: 41).The anthropology of social movements, then, even where the term is not used, centres on the notion of contested ‘meaning’ where movement actors “strategically and selectively appropriate and transform transnationally circulating discourses, sometimes filling foreign words with their own meaning” (Paley 2002: 485; Nash 2001). This opens up the door to include other systems of knowledge (Escobar 1992b: 44; Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990) as patterns of meaning become an “empirical ethnographic problem” that need to be discerned through “fieldwork” (Nicolas 1973: 64) which rests on the “belief that the empirical referents of the theory must be observable human actions – ‘behavior’ is the official term” (1973: 65). As Harvey (1998b) shows in her study of popular movements in Mexico, crucial information would go lost if we took the meanings of terminology used by social movements for granted. She argues that “we cannot assume any universal meaning of rights to which these movements appeal” (1998b: 24). Instead we have to decipher these meanings through an in-depth exploration of practices, of behavior (Speed and Reyes 2002). Merry and Stern (2008) show how even within a single, relatively narrowly defined, social movement – the female inheritance movement in Hong Kong – the meaning of people’s actions can be very different depending on the position they hold within the movement. They demonstrate that the international language of human rights is employed primarily by the middle- to upper-class women while the lower classes tended to express their grievances in terms of personal needs and family dynamics. Not everyone was capable of framing their grievances in a way that would reach every potential supporter and consequently movement ‘roles,’ such as ‘translators,’ emerged – people who were able to speak to both the local needs of specific women and to an international audience concerned with human rights. These ‘translators’ facilitate collaboration and network building between groups in Hong Kong and groups all over the world. This attention to the internal dynamic of a movement brings Merry and Stern closer to a sense of what the movement feels like for its participants. Social movements always have what Merry and Stern (2008) refer to as “layers”. There is the public message (usually several different public messages compiled with a specific audience and a particular set of goals in mind) and then there is the private message – the messy sphere of conflict and contestation. Once you get involved in the process of organizing the events you are researching, you start to see how much controversy, happen-stance, personal politics, social hierarchies, internal differences and so on, come to play a role in shaping the trajectory of social movements. These are the sites where the public message is shaped and reshaped through conflictual debates and discussions. Without detailed information about how a ‘public’ message is produced, there is very little one can say about the significance, representativeness or implications of the statement. With a rich analysis 464

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and a high level of ethnographic detail, the reader can come to grips with the way movements generate multiple messages for multiple audiences as well as how and why this tactic works or does not work and for whom. It has often been suggested that the most effective form of participant-observation in the study of social movements is an engaged, even militant, approach (e.g. Juris and Khasnabish 2013). When the researcher commits to not only observe and research the movement from a distance, but also to share in the responsibility of bringing about the social change desired by the movement, or at the very least to support the actors in their attempts to do so, the amount of access to movement organizing that the anthropologist can achieve is greatly expanded. Of course, if the anthropologist’s only motivation for becoming engaged is to access information, it will likely backfire. Still, some of the best ethnographies of social movements or similar groups have been written by anthropologists who took a genuine and active role in the field (Graeber 2009; Hale 2006; Juris 2008; Lyon-Callo and Hyatt 2003; Scheper-Hughes 1995; Speed 2006). In my own research, I found that social movements were often reluctant to share certain domains of movement organizing with ‘outsiders’ until they showed a certain degree of commitment. For example, during my research into the alterglobalization movement that regularly gathered to protest the meetings of multi-lateral organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the IMF/WB (International Monetary Fund/World Bank), the Group of 8 (G8), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and so on, taking on an active role from day one was essential to becoming a part of the political processes that I was researching. While in my case I was usually involved as an organizer already long before the specific counter-­ summit began, and so the choice to participate generally preceded the choice to research, the political commitment involved in political participation was a pre-requisite to ethical and thorough research. Whether the need to commit was communicated to me explicitly or implicitly, the essence of these moments of mass mobilization is defined by the coming together of people willing to take risks in order to fight for something they believe in.To be present as a researcher without allowing oneself to step inside this world-view and without becoming a part of the affective social dynamic it creates, would, to say the least, lead to the loss of valuable insights. Through active engagement I quickly learned that different levels of engagement grant access to different spheres of movement organizing. When I participated in meetings, I would have access to what was said at the meetings and perhaps what was said during breaks and after meetings, but when I offered to facilitate the meetings myself, I gained insight into how the agenda was compiled and the negotiations that go into determining the when, where and how of a meeting. In my case, this engaged approach became doubly important because the movement networks I was researching were global in scale and long-term immersion in a particular place was not an option for the development of mutual trust. By honestly demonstrating (through my actions) that I shared their commitment to social change, I was able to gain access to social movement activity across contexts quickly and easily. There can be no ethnographic research without trust between the researcher and her informants – or those being researched – and in a social movement context, trust is built through common struggle. Engagement is also a learning process. Participation is the main, perhaps the only, way to learn the practical skills required to be a part of these movements. Understanding these practical dimensions in turn leads to much deeper conversations and interviews with those involved. For example, before I began my research I was already trained (by activists) in facilitation of consensus decision-making processes, in dealing with various public order situations (e.g. snatch squads, pepper-spray, tear gas, media and police interactions, civil disobedience), and had taken several ‘know your rights’ trainings. I had even given trainings (to activists) in many of these matters myself. Still, over the past decades of research into decision-making 465

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processes internationally across many different social movement settings, I have continuously learned new skills and gained practical experience that are invaluable for gaining new analytical insights. Having this knowledge makes every conversation I have with those involved in political meetings and actions more fruitful. In response to specific reflections of others on specific meetings, not only can I respond with my own reflections on that specific meeting and how the decision-making process went at that meeting, but I can reflect on how the meetings are supposed to work in theory, on how they work in other countries, at other times, for other groups, and so on. Having this knowledge also allows me to take an active role in new groups and situations very quickly. When researching social movements, sometimes the need for engagement is even insisted upon by the research subjects. When Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1995: 410–411) explained to her research subjects that she could not participate in their political work because she “could not be an anthropologist and a companheira at the same time,” the response she received was unequivocal: They gave me an ultimatum: the next time I came back to the Alto do Curuzeiro it would be on their terms, that is, as a companheira, “accompanying” them as I had before in the struggle and not just sitting idly by taking field notes. This same ultimatum exists silently in many movements. As Juris (2008: 6) writes of the anti-corporate globalization movement, what I have been referring to as the alterglobalization movement, i.e. those protesting multi-lateral organizations such as the WTO, the IMF/WB and the G8 among others, “what impressed me most about so many of those I came to know and respect during my time in the field was their fierce dedication to egalitarian, collaborative process, which demanded of me a politically engaged mode of ethnographic research.” The access gained through participant-observation to non-verbal practice, to behavior, is of crucial importance not only because it adds an extra dimension to the analysis at any given moment, but also because it adds to the potential for a dynamic analysis, and therefore to an analysis of ‘movement’. When primarily written sources are being used, an element of stasis is introduced. Although written documents can be compared across time, the sense of transition from one document to the next is often lost. For example, when I was doing research with the Dissent! Network in the United Kingdom that mobilized against the G8 summit in 2005 there was a considerable difference between the information made public on specific occasions and their long-term and ongoing political process. In order to understand how the network transformed over time it was essential to be at the meetings between public events. During an anti-G8 summit mobilization they might release a statement about the injustice of centralized power in the form of eight world leaders determining the future for five billion people, but a few months later they might release a statement about the importance of building local social centers. The shift from one to the other, or the logical relation between these two seemingly different political statements, cannot be ascertained from the documents alone. It is only when these political statements are contextualized within a larger ongoing process of political organization that we can see the connections and transitions. This level of detail can be crucial to explaining how, when and why movements emerge, submerge and transform over time. There has been a recent upsurge in the number of studies that use participant observation to produce precisely such detailed accounts of the backstage life-world of self-proclaimed social movements. A key political development in spurring on this research agenda seems to be the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994. Several anthropologists were already doing longterm fieldwork in Chiapas when the Zapatista uprising went ‘viral’ – through the Zapatista’s savvy use of internet technology.Today the ethnographies of the Zapatista’s are some of the most 466

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innovative social movement ethnographies, showing how complex, internally contradictory and yet emancipatory these struggles for autonomy and self-determination can be (see Collier and Quaratiello 1994; Harvey 1998a; Khasnabish 2008, 2010; Nash 2001; Stahler-Sholk 2007). The Zapatistas are often cited as one of the first visible signs of the ‘alterglobalization movement’ a transnational network of social movements that challenge the legitimacy of multi-lateral organizations and corporations’ right to, as they say, “rule the world.” This movement, perhaps lays rest to Escobar’s (1992a) concern that one of the reasons anthropology had so little to say about social movements was that there was very little social movement activity to be found in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see Graeber 2009; Juris 2008; Maeckelbergh 2009). Within anthropological literature the social struggle to attain basic needs or political rights is often written about not with the terminology of “social movements” but in the literature on “development.” The study of social movements has often been disguised under different termi­ nology. Povinelli (2001: 319–320) identifies several terms such as street-dwellers (Appadurai 2000), ferals (Rajagopal 2002), indigenous movements (da Cunha and Almeida 2000; Jackson and Warren 2005), religious movements (Asad 1993; Mahmood 2001), subaltern counter-­publics (Frazer 1993) and the term she herself uses “radical worlds” (Povinelli 2001). Other places to find anthropological analysis of social movements is in the literature on peasants (Fals Borda 1992) and identity (Hale 1997; Pratt 2003). Much of the anthropology of social movements, however, is to be found within the body of literature that is generally categorized as part of the post-modern critique of development. Edelman (2002 [1999]: 412) describes how in Costa Rica the word ‘development’, “could be appropriated and infused with new meaning” as part of a strategy of ‘resistance’. This is part of a wider trend in the anthropology of development to argue that, “locating power does not show that it is determinant or that a particular discourse is not appropriable for other purposes” (Cooper and Packard 1997: 3) and is influenced by the post-Foucaultian assumption that power and resistance are interconnected processes ­(Foucault 1983). The concept of ‘resistance’ (Scott 1985) in anthropology includes not only social movements, but also the smaller-scale daily measures taken by “those-to-be-developed” (Hobart 1993) to subvert, circumnavigate and appropriate development projects (see Apffel-Marglin and Marglin 1990; Crewe and Harrison 1998; Li 1999; Moore 2000).3 This level of “daily life” is central in anthropological analysis of social movements “because it is at this level … that many of today’s forms of protest emerge and exert their influence” (Escobar and Alvarez 1992: 4). Establishing the site of resistance in ‘daily life,’ therefore, allows anthropologists to put their unique skills to use by focussing on locality, which is presumably where ‘daily life’ takes place. As Escobar (1992b: 29) argues, “it is in relation to social movements that questions about daily life, democracy, the state, political practice, and the redefinition of development can be most fruitfully pursued.” And indeed, many studies of social movements examine the way local struggles react to the fragmentation and/or homogenization of “globalization” by reinforcing “their own culture, ideas and traditions” (Escobar and Alvarez 1992: 10), emphasizing ties to imagined cultures or communities (in the past, present and future) and asserting particular identities or differences through notions of ‘autonomy’ (see Calderón et al. 1992; Findji 1992; Pratt 2003; Doane 2005; Nash 2005b; Sylvain 2005). This notion of ‘daily life’ is important to understand the distinct contribution of an anthropological methodology to the study of social movements: Reflection on daily life has to be located at the intersection of micro-processes of meaning production, on the one hand, and macro-processes of domination, on the other. Inquiry into social movements from this perspective seeks to restore the centrality of popular practices, without reducing the movements to something else: the logic 467

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of domination or capital accumulation, the struggle of the working class or the labour of parties. (Escobar 1992b: 30) The access that fieldwork grants to the daily practice of the social movements anthropologists study transforms the framework of analysis so as to allow for a detailed description and interpretation of these “popular practices” without reducing social movements to their relationship to the state or other institutions of domination. This results in a transformation in the notions of agency that can be employed to understand how social change occurs. As Ortner (2006: 145) argues there are at least two types of agency: agency-in-the-sense-of-power and agency-in-thesense-of-(the pursuit of) projects: the point of making the distinction between agency-in-the-sense-of-power and an agency-in-the-sense-of-(the pursuit of) projects is that the first is organized around the axis of domination and resistance, and thus defined to a great extent by the terms of the dominant party, while the second is defined by local logics [in which] people seek to accomplish valued things within a framework of their own terms, their own categories of value. (Ortner 2006: 145) The agency-of-projects goes hand in hand with conceptions of agency that reject the notion of a unitary agent with a singularity of purpose at any given moment, that place that agent in a dividing relation with the ‘system’ or ‘structure.’ These common notions of agency obscure the reality that people are often at once internally divided and not acting entirely on their own. Rather than taking a unitary approach to agency where the agent and the individual are conflated, anthropologists often invoke notions of agency that allow for the ‘agent’ to be understood as actively constructed through the combination of parts of people into groups of people through communication (Inden 2001). These analytical insights stem from the anthropology of personhood that acknowledges multiple ways of recognizing and interpreting the “person” including concepts such as the “permeable person” (Busby 1997) and the “partible person” (Strathern 1988). When anthropology examines how social change occurs and the role that social movement actors play in bringing it about “both individual and dividual modalities or aspects of personhood” are taken into consideration: … It is a misunderstanding to assume either that the social emerges out of individual actions (a powerful strain in Western ideology that has seeped into much of its scientific epistemology) or that the individual ever completely disappears by virtue of indigenous forms of relational totalization . … It would seem rather that persons emerge precisely from that tension between dividual and individual aspects/relations. (LiPuma 2000: 131–132) Along similar lines, Inden (2001) defines human agency as: the power of people to act purposively and reflectively, in more or less complex inter-relationships with one another, to reiterate and remake the world in which they live, in circumstances where they may consider different courses of action possible and desirable, though not necessarily from the same point of view. (Inden 2001: 23) 468

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When you delve into the everyday realities of any group of people for an extended period of time, you become acutely aware that it is often overly presumptuous to “assume that the purposes or intentions of agents consists of master plans which actions implement or even that agents are always conscious or clear about their purposes” (Inden 2001: 24). Instead of the homogeneous individual as agent, Inden argues that “persons as agents are themselves composed of entities that overlap. … Not only do the parts overlap, but the relationships among them seem to undergo a process of continual change or reproduction” (Inden 2001: 25). The only way to ascertain what constitutes these overlaps and how they are constructed and reconstructed in interaction between people and with the environment is through participant-observation and extended fieldwork. As Inden (2001: 26) adds, entities of which the agent is composed – the “content” of the agent – can also change over time in interaction with others and as a result of circumstances. Finally, it is important to recognize that although the emphasis on meaning and process is unique to anthropology, this is not all anthropology contributes to the study of social movements. Many anthropologists have critiqued this approach, calling it a “postmodern” approach that over-emphasizes “struggles over meanings, symbols, collective identities, and rights to ‘specificity and difference’ (Edelman 2002 [1999]: 417). Edelman stresses instead the need to historically contextualize these meanings in material processes. Anthropology often goes beyond a mere examination of “meaning” and provides, “a coherent attempt to overcome the material/ symbolic divide” (Wade 1999: 450), where social movements are viewed “equally and inseparably as struggles over meaning as well as material conditions” (Escobar 1992c: 69; see also Mintz 1985; Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1992). One need only to look at the work of June Nash (2001, 2005b) to understand how anthropology can merge a detailed analysis of the political process of contesting and constructing meaning and a thorough analysis of the broader structures and material conditions in which movements find themselves. These analyses represent an attempt to “construct a synthesis of the two approaches that treats social movements as both expressive and instrumental” (Foweraker 1995: 13) to bridge the perceived gap between “postmodern theoretical innovation and materialist reassertion” (Hale 1997: 570).

Conclusion The anthropology of social movements, therefore, when viewed in its own right outside of the dominant paradigms within social movement studies revolves around an understanding of social movements as complex and fluid made up of political actors embedded in a process of contestation and construction of meaning. In other words, social movements are a site of political ­meaning-making. This particular approach to social movements is no accident and stems from the transitions within the anthropology of politics from structuralist to processual understandings of politics which has led anthropologists to treat social movements as dynamic, conflictual and internally diverse – in short not only to examine the social and structural characteristics of social movements, but also to understand how and what creates ‘movement’. When we consider social movements as a site of political meaning-making, then we can see how meaning is constructed, by whom, when, where, and over time also how this meaning is transformed when it encounters new situations, people, actions, repressions – in other words, as it encounters the structures that constrain, but also enable, social agents. An anthropology of social movements, therefore, is an ethnography of an evolving political process and it consequently requires that we understand social movements not as resting on a common identifiable element that remains fixed over time, but as a confluence of diverse elements that are in perpetual motion. Anthropology is particularly well suited to this task because 469

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anthropology has avoided narrow definitions of “the political” as something outside of people’s everyday practice and as something carried out by the state on behalf of the people. Political anthropology has stressed the processual dimension of politics, exploring non-state-based ­political practices, understanding political systems as “belonging to all social formations” (Balandier 2004 [1967]:VIII) emphasizing “a ‘becoming’ rather than a ‘being’” (Swartz, Turner and Tuden 1966: 1). The analysis of these political processes by the Manchester school made conflict a central analytical category because these anthropologists “worked in plural societies, characterized by ethnic diversity, sharp economic inequalities between ethnic groups, religious differences, political and legal heterogeneity” (Swartz, Turner and Tuden 1966: 3; cf. Llewellyn and Hoebel 1941; Gluckman 1954, 1965). Emphasizing conflict and discord as part of an unstable and dynamic social order rather than theories of social reproduction, makes it possible for anthropologists to grasp both the inner diversity of social movements and the transitory process of ‘movement’. All scholars today would agree that social movements are internally diverse, but there are few analytical or methodological approaches that can come to terms with this internal diversity. An analysis is needed in which social systems can be understood not as coherently integrated wholes, but as multi-dimensional, with constituent parts that can be highly integrated, loosely integrated or largely independent from each other (cf.Wilson 1968 [1942]; Furnivall 1948; Mitchell 1960), or as Appadurai (1996) more recently formulated it, as “fractal” and “overlapping”. Anthropology provides many of the tools needed for just such an analysis. This fluid, context-specific and processual approach to the study of social movements allows anthropology to capture in the data, in the analysis, and in the writing up of research findings the sense of motion and construction that defines the life-world of a social movement. Anthropologists often paint a picture of a group in flux, in between worlds in terms of being between the world they live in and the world they would like to live in, but also being simultaneously both inside and outside of the mainstream political structures of the government, the market and more institutionalised sectors of civil society. Rather than an elaborate typology of protest repertoires or mobilizing structures; rather than the five, six or seven key elements of protest organization; we get an analysis of groups of people (not always the same people) who take on different roles at different times, have varying skill sets, diverse aims, and any number of different identities, some of which are mobilized to give shape to the political process and some of which are not. Who is involved, with which aims, under which circumstances, in relation to which other groups or individuals is a matter that remains in flux even in the final analysis. Certainly, this has the limitation of making it impossible for anthropologists to make far-reaching generalizations about social movements, but it has the distinct advantage that it can paint a far more complex and accurate picture of any given social movement, thereby shedding light on how the participants themselves see the movement and how the movement is situated within a wider set of social and political relations not always visible to those involved.

Notes 1 There is also a “process paradigm” within social movement studies that needs to be mentioned here for clarification. Unlike in anthropology, the process paradigm in social movement studies is concerned with the “emergence and development of insurgency” (McAdam, McCarthy and Zald 1988: 697) and particularly how resources and political opportunity structures influence this process of emergence (see Olson 1965; McCarthy and Zald 1973, 1977; Tilly 1973, 1978; for a critique see Kitschelt 1991). 2 Whether this distinction was ever meaningful is another matter – see Escobar (1992a) and Gledhill (2000) on the implicit hierarchy within Touraine’s notion of historicity. 3 See Abu-Lughod (1990) on the tendency within anthropology to romanticize resistance and Keesing (1992: 61–0) for a discussion of some conceptual problems linked to this term.

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Further reading Edelman, M. (2001). “Social Movements: Changing Paradigms and Forms of Politics” Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 285–317. Escobar, A. (1992a). “Culture, Practice and Politics: Anthropology and the Study of Social Movements” Critique of Anthropology 12(4): 395–432. Escobar, A. and S. Alvarez (eds.) The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy and Democracy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Jackson, J. and K. B. Warren (2005). “Indigenous Movements in Latin America, 1992–2004: Controversies, Ironies, New Directions” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 549–573. Nash, J. (ed.) (2005). Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. Nicolas, R. (1973). “Social and Political Movements” Annual Review of Anthropology 2: 63–84.

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25 EtHNOGrAPHY AS AprendiZaje Growing and using collaborative knowledge with the People’s Produce Project in San Diego A. L. Anderson-Lazo Introduction: ethnography as aprendizaje As scholars newly trained in anthropology increasingly construct their livelihoods around shifting combinations of academic affiliation and public as well as private sector employment, discussions of how meaningful ethnographic collaborations and partnerships develop over time also can address questions about sustaining the discipline. There are many rich examples of how longterm ethnography leads to collaboration in more than merely data collection. Ethnographers engaging this expanding diversity of potential collaborators, then, can reveal as well as examine the dynamics of long-term collaboration. Joanne Rappaport, for instance, describes how collaborative fieldwork creates a space for “co-conceptualization.” Reflecting on years of team ethnography in Colombia, she explores, ethnographically, the tension between academy-based ethnographers who “engage in cultural description with an eye to analyzing it,” and “indigenous autoethnographers [who] study culture to act upon it” (2008:21). The online photo archive and prefaces contributed by participants in Susan B. Hyatt’s (2012) recent ethnography about a collaborative community history project demonstrate how multiple interpretations and uses of anthropological knowledge can coincide. As one contributor astutely notes, often the process is more valuable to communities than the “end products.” This ethnography provides an example of how anthropologists’ long-term relationships and commitments with ethnographic research partners and collaborators across community, disciplinary, and institutional borders can lead to the co-production of anthropological knowledge and multiple perspectives. In 2010, I launched Co/LAB, a research and organizing collective with residents and community workers of the Southeastern San Diego, People’s Produce Project (PPP), and students and researchers from several universities. The initial research design built on the long-term relationships and commitments I had forged as a professional social justice organizer and nonprofit worker over the past decade in local communities.We aimed to use ethnography to discover and communicate stories about Southeastern San Diego that could generate community-based solutions to the neighborhood’s food system challenges. As the project commenced, I was uneasy simply re-introducing myself as a researcher affiliated with an elite, white university, perceived as, culturally and socioeconomically, “worlds away.” I also resisted

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over-selling what I alone could do, what ethnography could fix. Instead, I offered them a story about aprendizaje to suggest how collaborative ethnography can grow. Since the late 1990s, I have written about ethnography as aprendizaje—that is, most simply, learning (cf. Anderson 2003). Initially, I translated my experience of fieldwork with Garifuna women leaders during the Implementation of the Guatemalan Peace Process as apprenticeship, or “learning in the presence of experts and elders.” The deeper meaning of aprendizaje, learning with as well as from others, began to emerge when Garifuna organizers insisted that I apprentice with Don Roberto Pablo Mejia in political storytelling. Don Beto, an octogenarian activist, musician, and retired schoolteacher, had founded the town’s first desegregated high school, taught most of the adults now Livingston’s parents and leaders, and was renowned for his incomparable knowledge of Afro-Latino histories in Central America. As it turned out, Garifuna leaders deployed Don Beto’s stories to exercise their new constitutional right to an autochthonous, indigenous worldview, or cosmovisión. In so doing, they reframed their participation in post-peace development and democracy-building projects around Garifuna ways of knowing, traditional practices and respect for sacred places. Quite literally, Garifuna leaders changed places at the table.They began to run meetings and draft projects with the support of nongovernmental organization (NGO) workers and UN monitors, rather than the other way around. In what follows, I describe a process of collaborative critical inquiry, where my primary contribution has been a toolkit of qualitative research skills, an engaged, anthropological perspective, and the accruing experience of ethnography as learning from and with research participants. I place in the foreground the relationships of aprendizaje with community elders such as Miss Moss, the director of the Project New Village, who was open to exploring how our previous work together as community organizers could provide the basis for a collaboration based in ethnography. Thus, learning alongside an experienced community leader and coalition builder, I anticipated the value of creating a research/organizing collective that could involve university-based researchers and residents of Southeastern San Diego in a self-conscious re-arrangement of researcher-participant and university-community power dynamics. Initially, Co/LAB, as we called the research collective, assumed a place at the table as a university partner providing a bridge between the Center for Global California Studies, the Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and Project New Village. As Co/LAB became a recognized contributor to the People’s Produce Project initiative, a group, comprising sometimes five, sometimes as many as 15 social science graduate students, residents, city workers, and myself, began to discuss the areas of inquiry we shared with the organization and others in the group. We explored a variety of approaches and tools that might facilitate collaborative ethnography, teaching each other about ethnographic interviews, qualitative community-based participatory research (CBPR), asset-based community development models and mapping, GIS, Photo Voice, and participatory video narratives. Learning together, we found ways to listen, record, present, and revise ethnographic representations, all of which informed how I write about our collaborations as “ways of seeing” Southeastern San Diego. Today my ethnographic practice has evolved into learning with and from others, by employing collaborative approaches, participatory methods, and technopedagogies to share a multiplicity of anthropological perspectives as well as to acknowledge and study the mixed epistemologies that traverse community, disciplinary, and institutional borders. Exploring these partnerships further, my purpose is to understand how collaborative ethnography can lend itself to modes of inquiry that develop around shared questions about culture and power. Rather than suggesting that conjuncture signals harmony, I seek to build on the interplay of different, sometimes contravening, perspectives, objectives, and stakes to track a story about collaborative ethnography that is also many other things. Anna Tsing’s deployments of friction elucidate how the descriptive analytic 476

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mode of ethnography works this tension, in which “heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (2005:5). In other words, a story about a community of activists, organizers, and researchers working together to create more equitable access to food, reduce health disparities, and foster economic development follows only a few of what are likely many possible trajectories. In this particular telling, I seek to shed light on the relationships, approaches, and perspectives that enable and sometimes constrain the co-production of knowledge about human social activities, including research. Of course my approach does not arise sui generis or in a vacuum. Activist-scholarship has deep ties to popular education and participatory action research, with the works of Paulo Freire (1970, 1973) and Orlando Fals Borda (1979) as prominent examples. These research traditions directly speak to how ethnography can accrue new questions with an eye on social change and build the capacities of collaborative partners to engage them. Groundbreaking discussions about the principles of collaborative anthropologies also reflect on mixed methods and explore the mixing of epistemologies in traditions of participatory-, action-, or community-centered research (see Holland et al. 2010). Further, qualitative social science approaches increasingly are employed in public health arenas, precipitating a spate of federal and local initiatives calling for reflexive understandings of health disparities and setting guidelines for engaged and participatory research (c.f., National Institutes of Health [NIH] 2011). Meanwhile, careful efforts to connect an Americanist tradition of public anthropology and the histories of the “collaboration of researchers and subjects in the production of ethnographic texts” to the critical praxis of postcolonial, poststructuralist, and feminist approaches lay important groundwork for reconciling the complex accountabilities mobilized in research conducted with people (Lassiter 2005). My approach places in the foreground the contemporary imperative to situate engaged and activist ethnography in long-term commitments that directly challenge the complicated disciplinary roots of anthropology in colonization, empire-building, and other forms of civilizational and institutional thinking (see Hale 2006). Thus, I seek to more than merely acknowledge that research participants and collaborators from other disciplines have myriad ways of understanding research and its purposes. Rather, my analysis will focus on the processes—such as defining the research community and finding a suitable research subject without forgoing social scientific emphases, rigor, or interpretation—that are vital to incorporating social change objectives into a collaborative ethnographic project. I discuss how a variety of stakeholders can interpret and contend with collaboration in knowledge production, or “research.” Unlike case studies that describe the “development and application of a team approach organized by applied anthropologists” within “standard social impact assessment frameworks” (Austin 2003), I develop an analysis that examines the resonance among shared concerns, questions, and critiques about culture, power, and representation. Thus, the following discussion attends to a very specific confluence of symbolic, material, and political conditions—that is, a research/ organizing context with its own terms, relationships, and objectives. Ethnographically speaking, I stay close to the conversations I have had with my research partners about re-conceptualizing frameworks for addressing social issues from within the historically specific cultural space of a neighborhood-level organizing context. To be clear, my investment in contributing ethnographic research to food system change work was neither shared by my interlocutors in Southeastern San Diego, nor unwelcome; our mutual interests, however, in constructing dialogue, ensuring community engagement with research, and bridging ways of knowing across policy and decision-making settings landed questions about the usefulness of qualitative research approaches squarely in my domain. Moreover, our explicit commitments to reciprocity, mutual respect, and accountability as research/organizing partners imparted a heightened significance to understanding a certain representational 477

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economy, where confronting and engaging particular ways of seeing health in relation to culture, behavior, political structures, and environment fell within the primary scope of our collaborative work. I argue that the epistemological work of repurposing ethnographic tools for more democratic use provokes an interrogation of qualitative research practice in situ or “on the ground.” One overarching question arising from discussions about the relevance of anthropology to the world we inhabit became “how can collaborative ethnography contribute anthropological perspectives useful to participants in neighborhood-level organizing around food system change as well as advance broader understandings of the roles of human agents, institutions, and political power in the formation of social movements that seek to create change?”

“Telling our own story”: establishing a basis for collaborative ethnography According to Miss Moss, a respected community elder and the director of the community-based nonprofit organization, Project New Village, “Southeast” San Diego has “long suffered from an image problem.” Despite the area’s historical roots as a once-thriving, middle-class community of African-American home and business owners with strong social, economic, and political solidarities with similarly positioned families in nearby Mexicano neighborhoods, infrastructure and morale quickly began to deteriorate when several major employers left the region in the 1980s. Beyond the increasing rates of unemployment, poverty, teen pregnancy, and high school non-completion, the area has many of the region’s highest rates of chronic disease and health-related mortalities. Furthermore, while this cluster of neighborhoods has been the site of a state redevelopment zone and a city business improvement district for several decades, nearly 160,000 residents continue to rely on one discount grocery store, and the services provided by fifty small retail or fast food outlets and liquor stores. In 2008, after three decades of organizing around issues primarily related to youth—such as restorative justice for previously incarcerated youth and “wrap-around” health, education, job-training, and childcare services for teen mothers—Miss Moss invited her network of residents, community workers, and allies to join her in launching the “People’s Produce Project,” a Southeastern San Diego–centered food system change initiative. Together this group began to explore the possibilities of connecting a farmers’ market to community gardens, a backyard-growers cooperative, healthy cooking circles, and a food distribution hub.When asked how the “PPP” came into being, she explains, “Some people look at Southeastern San Diego and see a food desert; I look at our community and see opportunity. Look at all these vacant lots that could be community gardens!” In mid-2009, Project New Village initiated a series of semi-monthly community forums with a plenary session organized around the theme of reducing health disparities in underserved neighborhoods. The regular attendees—a group comprising approximately 35 residents, including parents, seniors, students from several local institutions of higher learning, and community workers from a range of nonprofits, agencies, and research centers—began to review various food-related frameworks for community-based approaches to improving health and well-being. For instance, after viewing a series of film clips about community efforts to create “Healthy Places” in nearby Northern California and far away Detroit, the group discussed whether focusing on “health disparities” would enable them to bring fresh produce to liquor stores, make school lunches healthier, and launch a farmers’ market that accepted WIC, SNAP, and EBT. When a university-based research team presented the unsatisfactory results of a survey aiming to elucidate local food access issues, the group discussed how to hone accuracy and increase participation. It was at this point that the group also began to discuss the strengths and limitations of 478

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policy-driven research, media reporting, community information campaigns, and official demographic data. Consequently, it was also in the context of these public forums, leadership meetings, and board discussions that members of the People’s Produce Project agreed to participate in an exploration of collaborative ethnography with me. As a result of my ongoing relationships with members of the PPP and my fellowship opportunity to engage the organizing community through research, I proposed that we use participatory approaches to integrate qualitative research methods, including ethnography and community history. From the outset, I found that attempting to share the researcher role would require creating an inclusive research community with negotiable boundaries and an ever-present possibility of total dissolution. For instance, my explanation of the Institutional Review Board’s definition of consent to a community of potential co-researchers raised suspicions about the role of the University of California, San Diego, and a discussion about negotiating university/community power relations that I addressed not solely once, but at many critical junctures throughout the research period. In another instance, I arranged a meeting to discuss possible funding for a community event from one of the university research centers sponsoring my project. The center’s director listened attentively while Miss Moss, several board members, and other community elders recounted their experiences with university researchers, who used the community to establish cultural and socioeconomic diversity in studies but contributed little or nothing to their long-term social change efforts. Miss Moss explained that partnership and collaboration entailed more than merely establishing rapport and deciding to work together. She said, “In this community, it’s better to have no reputation at all than a bad reputation. If you’ve got a bad reputation, we cannot work with you, because people’s memories are long.” In my view, the previous statement touches on a primary problematique for participants in and practitioners of community-engaged research alike. The relationships we forge through research are more than merely long term; they are steeped in particular and broader histories that connect research to power. Clearly, collaborative research exceeds the conventional norms and accountabilities of independent scholarly inquiry. Thus, the basis for our collaboration had to grow out of an explicit engagement with questions of power, knowledge, representation, and culture. In many ways, members of the People’s Produce Project recognized that the pursuit of appropriate research, organizing, and policy frameworks would be a significant challenge from the very moment they decided to invest ten years of neighborhood organizing into a new initiative in 2008. Immediately, they found themselves at the forefront of a growing popular movement focused on fixing the “broken” food system. They were heartened especially by First Lady Michelle Obama’s visit to a local community garden and a large federal grant that promised new resources to support “resident leaders” in underserved communities. Meanwhile, the PPP secured a piece of land and monies to develop a community garden, and they established the first farmers’ market in the neighborhood in over twenty years. Simultaneously, they were active participants in a citywide coalition fighting to change prohibitive ordinances excluding community gardens from commercial zones.1 Ultimately, the city council and mayor agreed to revise the zoning codes, a much-anticipated outcome drawing on three years of alliance building, advocacy, and federal grant writing by ordinary San Diegans. When members of the PPP organizing committee reflected on this hard-won success and discovered that it would be several more months until the new zoning would allow them to break ground for the garden, one community resident said, “this process is too slow, we are ready now.” The conversation turned from the pace of change to the kinds of information officials needed to understand that underserved communities had their own resources, capacities, and will to make change. Rather than being disillusioned by the city policies as well as state and federal public health initiatives that continue to overlook the conditions of everyday life 479

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experienced by residents, Miss Moss often challenged her neighbors to maximize the community’s “natural assets.” She modeled this philosophy, saying, “we may have the highest rates of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, and some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy, joblessness and crime, but now we come to find that we don’t qualify as a ‘food desert.’ We know we need gardens and a farmers’ market, but we don’t register in the language of lack. We have to tell a different story, our story.”

The “story of vacant lots” becomes the “good food legacies” Over the next several months, PPP members began formulating a healthy foods initiative that would both educate city officials and mobilize neighborhood residents to participate in making change. Tracking these conversations, I noted that as members explored the available frameworks for understanding and representing the overlapping effects of poverty, economic underdevelopment, and urban decay, they often found conflict where they sought connection. For instance, the “food justice” movement galvanized university students to confront the political, economic, and environmental effects of a globalized agro-industrial food complex by demanding locally grown organic food in their cafeterias and coffee shops. However, as we carpooled to student-organized conferences at local universities, folks from Southeastern San Diego began to bristle at the absence of connections with local community concerns. In discussions back at the office, resident-leaders wondered aloud whether they were part of the same effort. At another community forum, the PPP leadership invited the general membership to discuss whether accepting grant monies to train residents in advocacy approaches to reduce childhood obesity could advance the group’s aim to develop resources for a local food distribution hub. One woman, an African-American marketing consultant and graphic designer, took issue with employing the obesity lens. While childhood obesity is the primary “target” of a host of programs and funding opportunities, she pointed out that there were two problems with telling people that obesity puts them at risk for short life expectancies and other diseases. First, “calling black and brown people fat” was accepting a dominant cultural definition of health that used “punishing white standards of beauty” to hold individuals responsible for systemic community health problems. Further, others agreed audibly when she expressed that simply claiming or adding precision to the statistics about the high incidence of childhood obesity, diabetes, and other diet-related illnesses failed to “tell the whole story.” Again the conversation turned to issues related to community representation. When several residents talked about unsatisfactory experiences with organizing around “food justice” themes, others suggested that “self-reliance” and “self-determination” better connected present efforts to a history that “empowered” them. As a diverse multicultural and intergenerational resident group forged in an historically African-American neighborhood, these leaders sought frameworks that would enable them to build on unique community resources, including a legacy of working and middle-class home ownership, backyard growing, and an empowering, historical rhetoric of “uplift.” In late 2010, I began to conduct informal and semi-structured interviews with the most active members of the PPP, eliciting suggestions about the kinds of stories that should be told. When I shared some of what I was hearing in a PowerPoint presentation incorporating maps, photos, and stories entitled, “the Story of Vacant Lots,” the organizing body felt future ethnographic interviews could highlight community assets that everyone—including members of the new majority of Spanish speakers, the large numbers of resettled refugee families from African and Asian countries, and the small, but prominent population of African Americans—could employ to better understand the community’s needs and “lift up” its resources. I also continued to wrestle with how all aspects of an ethnographic project could incorporate genuinely 480

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participatory approaches. Thus, in early 2011, I recruited several co-researchers with established ties or residency in Southeastern San Diego, including several graduate students from the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University. Over several revisions with the Institutional Review Board, these co-researchers could only be included as consenting “study participants.” Yet, as active contributors to the PPP and other related, local programs and initiatives focused on public health, education, economic development, and regional planning, we worked together with the broader membership to align the aims of research with community mobilization and advocacy efforts. We began to refer to the research committee as Co/LAB (short for community-based research and organizing collaborative), and over the course of several conversations, we hit on a name for a shared initiative that worked for both the organizing and research efforts, “The Good Food Legacies of Southeastern San Diego.” Thus, the PPP membership tasked Co/LAB with finding, learning about, and creating the appropriate research tools to engage an ever-widening “community” in discovering, chronicling, and presenting its own story.

Collaborative inquiry as ethnographic description Over the course of approximately nine months, Co/LAB employed ethnographic methods including participant observation, semi-structured, open-ended as well as exploratory life-history interviews, and snowball sampling to ground and conduct a community-based participatory research project focused on collecting stories about “Good Food Legacies.” Along the way, we created several interim or secondary research products that built on individual interests and skills, a broad range of social science training, and independent research projects. By collaboratively producing PowerPoint presentations, interactive online story-maps, as well as participatory video narratives and sharing them at meetings, venues such as the Farmers’ Market, and community celebrations of Cesar Chavez, Fannie Lou Hamer and Earth Day, CBPR became a strong component of the PPP initiative. Conversely, the PPP initiative shaped how we conceived of participatory research, specifically collaborative ethnography. This chapter draws most heavily on an iterative process that involved the primary research team, interviewees, as well as members and allies of the partner organization and of the wider public in co-creating secondary ethnographic products, which were presented, discussed, and revised by more than 50 people in excess of three times over the course of a year. Yet, within these collaborative processes, I was also a participant observer expecting to connect our work with broader anthropological and social scientific concerns. As I found myself negotiating and chronicling an historical memory of university-initiated research, public health interventions, policy decisions, and empowerment schemes, I noted how the areas of inquiry suggested by participants in the PPP initiative touched sparks across a vast field of multiple and competing affiliations and solidarities. These community memories sometimes enabled, but more often constrained, the meanings and uses of the terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘partnership.’ In the following sections, I begin to address the questions raised in the introduction about navigating the multiple, local meanings of collaboration while also inhabiting a particularly anxious historical moment for anthropology, which James Peacock (2000) so elegantly cast as the imperative to move into the “public, or perish.” Whereas collaboration can connote a seemingly simple agreement to combine purposes, consider recent writings by two seasoned ethnographers working in highly charged political contexts. CR Hale (2006) and Anna Tsing (2004) both chose to draw attention to collaboration’s etymological underbelly; that is, a sense of collusion or “traitorous cooperation with the enemy” (2004:245), which signals how shared power arrangements rely on potentially 481

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dangerous asymmetries of knowledge and its interpretation—that is, where it gets used, how and by whom. I propose that what made our research both anthropological and collaborative was our collective focus on the specific cultural and historical contexts of power in Southeastern San Diego. The community “stories” we engaged through collaborative ethnography also revealed sites where anthropological modes of inquiry might interact productively with other forms of representation and knowledge construction. Pushing my earlier question further toward shared questions that engage the real power effects of research in Southeastern San Diego, I ask, “can collaborative ethnography communicate a ‘cultural interpretation’ capable of informing, and when necessary, challenging other interpretations?”

Collaborative ethnography as analysis and interpretation While objective measures show that involving communities in health disparities research improves both research and health outcomes, national research institutions such as the NIH have determined that connecting research aims to those of social justice efforts remain vital to establishing a scientific basis for health disparities research (Potvin et al. 2005).This, I argue, makes rocky epistemological terrain for ethnographers collaborating across communities and research domains in research/organizing contexts. In public health arenas, where social scientists currently find some of the most vibrant transdisciplinary conversations and strongest institutional supports for community engaged research or community-based participatory research methods (Minkler and Wallerstein 2009), a health disparities perspective confirms that diminished health outcomes in Southeastern San Diego correlate with geographic, socioeconomic, and other particularities recognized as the “social determinants of health.” Yet, members of the PPP’s discomfort with employing the interpretive frameworks that target communities of color for interventions suggests one of the ways in which authentic CBPR challenges qualitative researchers to confront social issues as well as the ways of seeing these issues.Translation research—the reflexive, self-study public health sub-discipline—identifies additional challenges for academics seeking to illuminate social determinants of health. For instance, multi-city studies have shown that members of urban communities of color often feel “over-researched,” that research either misrepresents the strength and character of underserved neighborhoods, or fails to generate change (Clark 2008). Moreover, the length of the “translation pipeline” can distance the applications of social behavioral theoretical models from the personal narratives and reflexive analyses formed by researchers and participants in what are supposed to be participatory, applied contexts (Glasgow and Emmons 2007). In other words, “identifying roots of racial health disparities can overshadow possible channels for them” (Chowkwanyun 2011:265). Thus, qualitative “data” in the absence of a respected cultural interpretation fails to contribute wider, critical perspectives that get at the interplay between institutional logics and sociohistorical forces such as “the political economy of real estate, intraracial power dynamics, and political regimes” (2011:266). Qualitative approaches are not exclusive to anthropology, but in H. F.Wolcott’s estimation what distinguishes the ethnographic “way of seeing” is having “a sense of what is meant by the broad charter of cultural interpretation” (1999:51). Building on Hortense Powdermaker’s classic explication of her fieldwork, circa 1965, as “moving back and forth between involvement and detachment,” Wolcott invokes a central polemic for contemporary anthropologists seeking to engage rather than distance research partners and their perspectives. What kind of detachment is necessary for transitioning from the stages of fieldwork that Wolcott describes as experience, inquiry, and examination to those of description, analysis, and interpretation that constitute the write-up process? Ethnography has long claimed the advantages of holism, an interpretation created by a single author, or perhaps two, who step away from the particular ethnographic scene to reflect 482

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on the general picture composed of all the interconnections among aspects of social and cultural life. In this model, crafting an interpretation that incorporates the analyses of team researchers would seem to require either an incredibly discreet (possibly non-ethnographic) research question or an infinite amount of time, patience, and resources. I propose an analogy using the visual terms “resolution” and “perspective” to modify Powdermaker’s notions of involvement and detachment and illustrate the analytical relationship between collaborative story-collecting and ethnography that tells political stories. Whereas participant observation and interviewing provide resolution or a view from up close, where patterns and linkages may be “discovered,” a broad cultural interpretation seeks to offer perspective. Hence, in the upcoming section, I present not a single perspective, but a range of intersecting—sometimes contravening—views about how social relations shape the objective conditions of the food system change landscape. I explore “ways of seeing” Southeastern San Diego as a telescopic kaleidoscope with three lenses, the themes of race and inequality, place and identity, as well as space and scale, which emerged as the project proceeded. I show how the PPP analysis evolved as a view of culture and power, seen through these lenses, accrued by bringing into focus in different ways the symbolic and material repercussions of envisioning the healthy food system they sought to create.

Good food legacies: ways of seeing and envisioning a healthy Southeastern San Diego Culture and power: adjusting the kaleidoscope at the nexus of issues In the PPP’s efforts to create a healthy food system, re-educating potential allies, politicians, and agencies focused on poverty, hunger, and redevelopment to recognize the connection between Southeastern San Diego’s cultural riches and its economic potential is paramount. At a monthly meeting composed of members of partner organizations, Kamaal, a recently elected board member, explained why this is a necessary and complex transformation. He said, “the global food movement is growing,” because people have discovered the many “lies” of “the scarcity myth—that there isn’t enough food to go around…My belief is that it extends to our financial resources as well, not simply food.” Another lie, he observed, is that the food movement is just for rich, white people in Northern countries. “But, as people begin to understand that the social relations propping up the industrial food system were put in place by processes like the transatlantic slave trade,” we can see why food has become the “great nexus issue demonstrating the ­global-connectedness of issues.” After reading a draft of this article, Kamaal added, “it is important to me that the discourse of food justice begins to make the transition to these larger foundational and thematic economic questions.” Kamaal is also an African-American, Muslim father in his thirties, who works for the California State Assembly and grows vegetables and raises chickens in the backyard with his family. His participation in the first several months of forming the research collective, Co/LAB, helped us connect our research questions to the PPP’s emerging food systems change approach to working the “nexus” among issues. In another conversation, Kamaal characterized the fundamental work of food system change as exposing “the dishonesty in the dialogue” that segregates conversations about GATT and NAFTA in Sacramento and Washington from those about local jobs and economic development in San Diego. This recognition that macro-processes such as global capitalism systematically under-develop many places all over the globe like Southeastern San Diego runs deep in conversations around the PPP office. Robert Tambuzi, the board chair, who grew up in the neighborhood, graduated from University of California, San Diego, in the 1970s, and returned home to work and raise a family, seizes every opportunity to educate, cajole and challenge the 483

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people around him to think about their implicated roles in constructing these unequal relations of power. He also especially enjoys talking about how the food justice movement unwittingly and ineffectively borrows from US people of color movements. When asked to expand on this idea in an interview, Tambuzi exclaimed, “I cannot describe the joy I experienced, when I held my own conference.” He was referring to the PPP’s recent “Day of Dialogue,” which was the first “food justice” conference to be held in Southeastern San Diego. The conference focused on the relations and potential of the food system and was framed in terms of local understandings of justice, rights, and dignity. He elaborated on the gratification that “assuming ownership” of the dialogue provides by talking about why the civil rights movement is seen as a “world historical movement”—that is, because black people articulated the struggle in a “common language” that applied to all oppressed peoples. “The right to food, shelter, and clothing is a human right … but, you cannot have a critique of domination, unless you’ve been hungry.” He went on to enumerate other borrowed elements of the maturing food movement, such as the growing interest in food labeling, which are “all about recuperating stolen knowledge.” Tambuzi had read an early draft of this chapter when this interview took place. Since then, I have continued to build on the desire among my interlocutors to reclaim ownership of know­ledge about and representations of Southeastern San Diego to also consider whether focusing on the analytical “products” of collaborative ethnographic processes can contribute to an anthropology that engages research “collaborators” as epistemic partners (Marcus 2007). If ethno­g raphy can offer a view of theory “as the stories we tell to make sense of our lives and to navigate where we are in social space” (Kingsolver 2001:4), Tambuzi’s words suggest that he believes that alternative theoretical and analytical frameworks for navigating definitions of culture and identity and the entitled investments in so-called social problems often already exist in local understandings of the social, political and economic landscape.

Lens #1: the uses and meanings of race and diversity Turning a lens on the uses and meanings of race in Southeastern San Diego should be distinguished from producing an exhaustive study or deconstruction of the idea of “race.” Rather, employing this lens exposes some of the limitations and possibilities for harvesting the fruits of a diverse, collective critique of the food system. Here I follow the practical lead offered by Miss Moss, who met and befriended Tambuzi four decades ago when they were students participating in civil rights actions. She often gently redirects Tambuzi’s long, if eloquent, historical asides by reminding him to announce upcoming activities, such as the yearly Fannie Lou Hamer Awards event or the decision to hold a food justice conference as the organization’s 11th annual commemoration of Cesar Chavez. In other words, the critiques, perspectives, and memories of the Good Food Legacies do not belong solely to African-American men. Nor are they exclusively, “happy” stories. In word and deed, the members of the PPP draw on traditions from many perspectives that acknowledge race, class, language, and gendered experiences of struggle, survival, and even prosperity as significant components of a critique mobilized for collective ends. To illustrate how the PPP wrestled with group-level factors that articulate with larger social, economic, and political processes, I look at organizational and community-level conversations that explored whether recovering African-American roots could or should be connected to a critique of race. In interviews included in the “Good Food Legacies” video-narrative, two community elders, a married African-American couple, reminisce about the previous abundance of grocery stores. Together they listed eight grocers “that just left” in the 1980s. Other interviews with seniors have “re-discovered” the elements of a once-vibrant food system powered by local business 484

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acumen and a positive view of agricultural activities, such as the family dairy on Logan Avenue, a sheep farm near Radio Drive, and a church that made space for backyard growers to sell greens, tomatoes, avocadoes, pecans, and flowers to their neighbors after services and other social activities. When asked about what changed and why, each interviewee described a variety of factors and forces. For instance, several PPP members suggested that many African-American residents negatively associate gardening and farming with sharecropping and slavery. One participant in a leadership training shared that she wasn’t interested in “getting down in the dirt,” because before moving from Texas as a girl, she had worked alongside her parents in the fields. On the other hand, Mr. Robinson, a retired fireman and master gardener in his eighties maintains a multi-acre “garden and insectary,” where local school children take fieldtrips almost weekly. A walking tour of his garden elicits a history of Southeastern San Diego from the point of view of each of his fruit trees, a grove of bamboo, and a variety of food and flower crops. Everything he grows tells a story about significant ecological and economic events, such as an especially rough drought-year thirty years ago, an unexpected bird migration that decimated trees, or the rare pest infestation that led the US Department of Agriculture to shut down his sweet potato crop for good. When asked about whether fewer younger African Americans are interested in farming, Mr. Robinson both confirmed what we had heard from others and offered another view. Numerous times over his forty years as a master gardener, he has been enlisted to help schoolchildren start gardens, but this required parents to participate after school, on weekends, and over the summer, and they were just “too busy” with work and other interests. “The way people live has changed.” While Mr. Robinson was more than willing to share his life-history, including his career with an all-black, firefighting brigade, over a long series of multiple interviews, he explained that he knows about plants and growing and that questions about how race or other processes have shaped or changed Southeastern San Diego don’t fall with in his realm of expertise or “way of looking at the world.” I recount this conversation to illustrate how the PPP’s decision to focus on local-level legacies such as Mr. Robinson’s “knowledge bank” also reveals a small bit of the diversity within community perspectives. These intergenerational conversations reflect distinct ways of remembering the neighborhood as a landscape of social relations; they also invoke the heterogeneity of viewpoints about the roles of race and class in shaping the food system. Discussions that invoke race, place, and identity are always about power. Logically, health disparities research makes race and socioeconomic status the center of studies about inequities that impact health. In fact, “over the past two decades, thousands of studies have demonstrated that black adults and children are less likely to receive appropriate, guideline concordant, and cutting edge-medical care than their counterparts,” yet turning the lens on clinicians, policy, or societal factors has been rare among social scientists working in the health disparities research arena until recently (Van Ryn et al. 2011:200; cf. Griffin et al. 2007).2 While additional studies show that these disparities persist more tenaciously in both low- and middle-income African-American communities than in white, Latino, or other neighborhoods, residents of Southeastern San Diego have struggled with how to employ these analyses to improve health outcomes, services, and job opportunities in their neighborhoods.3 In part, this challenge exists because Southeastern San Diego is changing demographically, putting more distance between how people remember the neighborhood and how it can be represented as a “community” with verifiable data and official maps. After World War II, Southeastern San Diego began to flourish as an African-American community, where land covenants ensured that all people of color looking to purchase homes found them exclusively in the southern areas of the city.This divide was further ossified in 1957, when 485

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Interstate-8 cut the city into two unequal parts with wealthy white neighborhoods to the north and underserved communities of color lying “below the 8,” a well-used euphemism for class, color, and caste, which survives today in public discourse. Nowadays, in addition to 31,000 African-American residents and the new Latino majority, Southeastern San Diego’s 160,000 inhabitants include significant populations of Samoans, Filipinos, and Laotians, as well as continental Africans and other members of several recent immigrant groups who came to San Diego as refugees, or technically speaking, “official resettlement populations.” This diversity has been recognized alternately as an asset and as a challenge. In fact, “outsiders” often see Southeastern San Diego’s diversity as discordant, which some established community members recognize as an especially pernicious kind of exploitation. For instance, the increased population and the new Latino majority recorded by the 2010 census triggered redistricting at the state and federal levels and the addition of a ninth city council seat, which a variety of actors attempted to use for their own ends. Most notably, newspaper and media coverage in San Diego represented the city dimensions of the county-wide redistricting process as a fight among African Americans, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Latinos, and the gay community to either preserve or secure a city council seat based on the special rights that pertain to a “community of interest.” This legal definition of community gets at what I see as the major contest in the nonprofit arena where PPP members navigate the uses of race and the deeper meanings of struggle for people of color mobilizing history as a legitimate claim on power over the conditions of everyday life. Unlike other representations, the Voice, a slightly more independent online-newspaper ran a story that cast historical light on what many San Diegans had previously considered an unexplained “tradition” of electing a member of the African-American community to represent District 4. In an interview with Leon Williams, the first person of color to sit on the San Diego City Council, the reporter discovered that in 1969 the members of a political caucus called BOMB, the Black Oriental and Mexican Brothers, lobbied the City Council and forced them to appoint Mr. Williams to provide representation for southern neighborhoods (Florido 2011). The reporter astutely asked the octogenarian Mr. Williams to explain why multicultural coalitions seem rare today, who replied, “[b]efore that, it was more or less accepted that white people had the power. Asians as well as Hispanics and blacks, we knew where the power was, and there was no significant feeling that we were going to be able to penetrate that. But there was a rising feeling with the civil rights movement that we were going to change it.” While PPP members mostly steered clear of public positions on the redistricting process, which became increasingly divisive and vitriolic, the redistricting story illustrates how uses of “race” and “racializations” operate in a multidimensional field of power offering, more often than not, a considerably unwieldy tool for representing the people or place of Southeastern San Diego. As the upcoming lenses bring further into view, employing critiques of racism effectively in the organizing context requires communities to mobilize around a shared sense of identity, place, and historical memory. Members of the current majority are newly established populations, who largely live in apartments, do not own cars, and have only just begun to attend services in Spanish, visit food pantries, or participate in other outreach activities at one of the forty black churches in the area and may not easily identify with an empowering communal memory celebrating middle-class, African-American, Mexicano, or “Californio” roots. Further they may not relate to the conversations mentioned thus far, which have touched on such topics as the negative associations of black communities with poverty and crime, the perceived “whiteness” of the food movement, and the resistance of residents to participating in development and agricultural activities that ignore histories of exploitation and the related experiences of people of color in the United States. On the other hand, each of these “structures of feeling” provides 486

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momentary insights into why home-grown notions of self-determination and (racial) uplift grounded in a local history that dignifies agricultural labor and economic struggle are preferable to programs initiated elsewhere that profit from Southeastern San Diego’s disadvantages.

Lens #2: place and identity—food desert or rich community with a history? As they sought research-based and financial support for their food system change efforts, PPP members identified at least two pronounced effects of persistent representations of Southeastern San Diego as a disadvantaged community. Often the available models reinforce negative stereotypes, or they “just don’t fit.” For instance, while a plenitude of studies has demonstrated that residential segregation “contributes to increased concentrations of neighborhood poverty, substandard schools, persistent unemployment, as well as increased crime and social disorder” (Colen 2011:84), a rather recent transdisciplinary emphasis involving public health, environmental studies, urban studies, and planning has yielded a governmental focus in California and San Diego on “health in all policies” that acknowledges the nexus among negative health outcomes and planning processes that exclude communities from decision making about the built environment. Employing models such as the “food desert” concept has been requisite for making use of the discursive power and resources that these higher-level analyses avail. The recognized factors for declaring an official food desert, devoid of healthy food, in 2010 included the distance to supermarkets, density of supermarkets and fruit and vegetable stores, housing density, distance to a high-income area, and percentage of households that do not own a vehicle (Dutko 2012). How to measure the availability of fresh foods, however, has sparked both controversy and “push back.” Gottlieb and Joshi (2010) prefer the term “grocery gap.” These authors describe recent place-based studies in areas ranging from large urban centers to small, rural towns that used the grocery gap to identify such local interpretations as “food swamps,” the calorie-dense snacks that “inundate” food outlets in New Orleans, and place-specific “metrics” addressing such community concerns as the high levels of diet-related diseases by measuring the distance to the closest grocer divided by the distance to the closest fast food restaurant (2010:41–42). A brief analysis of aggregate data collected by San Diego County and regional health agencies offers a statistical view of Southeastern San Diego at the time of this work, which remains largely the same today: •

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The twenty-two urban neighborhoods corresponding with San Diego County Subregion 5—the only intact political entity containing most of what is considered Southeastern San Diego by residents—had one discount chain grocery market, seven small neighborhood markets, and more than forty fast food outlets. The population of 156,124 persons was 75% non-white, with 50% of persons over 16 not participating in the labor force, and 18% of families with children living in poverty.4 Southeastern San Diego residents experienced chronic diabetes, heart disease, and obesity at some of the highest rates in the County. (Contrast the 28% mortality rate with the overall County rate of 17.6%.)5 Three out of five zip codes in Southeastern San Diego registered the highest health needs in the county.6

Other data such as increasing numbers of children eligible for subsidized school lunch programs, seniors who receive SSI benefits but do not make use of food subsidies because of transportation 487

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or other limitations, and a growing number of families who use food pantries to make it through the month can also be used to demonstrate significant food insecurity in Southeastern San Diego households (Dutko et al. 2012). Yet, “census tracts are identified as food deserts [by the USDA] if they meet both low-income and low-food-access criteria” (2012:1). The presence of a single discount grocery store, a trolley stop for a transportation system that prices out many riders, the concentration of single family homes, the larger size of residential parcels, redistricting and sometimes even the presence of a handful of retired millionaires who have chosen to continue living near their churches and community can skew many of the measures that would qualify Southeastern San Diego as a food desert. “Trying on” the food desert concept, however, revealed and amplified a desire among PPP members to create their own framework for understanding and representing the need for food system change. In particular, the food desert model helped to identify a range of material, cultural, and historical assets in the community that could support a healthier food system. While several early conversations explored the subjective effects of employing a model that “calls our neighborhood a desert,” the conjoined research and organizing emphasis on “Good Food Legacies” reflected more than a desire to accentuate the positive. Rather, the PPP began to seek a food system change model that connected the recuperation of “stolen knowledge” about local assets to a broader critique about forgotten places in the global political economy.

Lens #3: space and scale—vacant lots in local/global and bioregional perspectives Here I have chosen space and scale as the final lens in this discussion, because it facilitates the exploration of a connection between anthropological perspectives about how social relations are reproduced spatially and the PPP’s focus on creating venues, new linkages in a soil-to-fork chain of production, distribution, and consumption that can restore the social, economic, and historical relationships that put people in touch with food, the land, and their neighbors. If anthropological “place can be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity” (Augé 2005:77), then this lens focuses on space, which is “formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure)” (101). Alternately, scale brings into view how previous lenses, such as perspectives about place (the symbolic landscape of cultural tradition and human connection to the tangible landscape) conjoin and contravene the views “from space” that include landuse policies, development schemes, the global political economy, and, not incidentally, received paradigms of local-global processes in broader food system movements. Sociocultural analyses of the latter have become increasingly cautious about valorizing the local in “an emancipatory food agenda that relies primarily on the naming and following of a particular set of norms or imaginaries about place” (Dupuis and Goodman 2005:360). For instance, looking closely at the “inequalities of wealth that serve both to enable different food economies and to separate people by their ability to consume” leads Rachel Slocum to an examination of how “whiteness emerges spatially in efforts to increase food access, support farmers, and provide organic food to consumers” (2007:526). Thus tracking “progressive whiteness” in the very particular combinations of “science and ideology concerning healthful food and healthy bodies” in public health, planning and foundation requests-for-proposals can reveal how romanticized notions of community mobilize the clustering and expansion of “resource allocation to particular organizations and programs.” This kind of examination broaches the “dangerous” topics of race and racism in an effort to “enable thinking about ethical relations” in terms of the proximities and distance that segregated movements reproduce (531). Similarly, the attention of Dupuis and Goodman to “unreflexive” localisms that draw on the “saving nature” rhetoric of environmental social 488

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movements points to an alternative reading of the landscape, or foodscape if you will, as highly, socially constructed, and hotly contested. Early in my collaboration with the PPP, I pursued the “story of vacant lots,” exploring how to focus critically and analytically on Southeastern San Diego’s “assets.” In a sense, Southeastern San Diego was free from the zoning restrictions of the City in its early years, and thus allotted larger parcels of land, allowing residents to farm and raise livestock.Today these larger lots persist, and the majority of undeveloped parcels are relatively free of contaminants, ripe for development as gardens, urban farms, housing, schools, parks, or any salubrious use the community sees fitting. Yet, even as these undeveloped lots represent the potential of Southeastern San Diego’s burgeoning food movement, they are, like the forgotten places Ruth Gilmore Wilson writes about, “places that have experienced the abandonment characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state organization” (2008:31). They do not, however, as she says, “stand outside history.” Many additional ways of imagining and grouping the neighborhoods of Southeastern San Diego as a community suggest a complex, multi-scalar landscape of social, economic, and political relations. These also signal discursive landscapes connecting symbolic struggles to material effects. For instance, following the redevelopment zones created by the State of California in the 1980s, the City of San Diego created Business Improvement Districts (BIDs). They were designed to provide additional tax incentives to spur private sector investments in underdeveloped areas. Two of the BIDs sited in “historic communities of color” in Southern San Diego attracted private family foundations, one of which located its headquarters and focuses exclusively on development in Southeastern San Diego.7 Residents closely scrutinize the Jacobs Family Foundation’s successes and failures, which the Foundation can safely claim are among the only significant housing and commercial real estate development projects to have resulted from the special city- and state-level tax incentives. At one of the Foundation’s community engagement events in 2011, 600 residents turned out to eat a complimentary dinner and discuss the question succinctly posed on the invitation as, “Target or Walmart?” While some participants welcomed a big box store in the neighborhood, many vocal responses raised some of the familiar divisions in the community around the conflicting investments of new and established populations, especially outsiders like the Foundation family, who were seen, among other things, to be exploiting mono-lingual Spanish speakers by over-representing them in their tightly-scripted community engagement processes. A conversation at my table of 20 was just touching on suspicions about the Foundation’s opportunistic land-banking practices when an African American resident stepped up to the mic to present a direct accusation that the Foundation’s view of what was appropriate development for Southeastern San Diego was condescending and racist. Several additional participants who were willing to speak publically and have their views recorded by a large team of professional videographers took the opportunity to expand on this theme. One man proclaimed that the discount grocery store serving as the cornerstone business in the Foundation’s commercial development project, Market Street Plaza, was the “end of the line” for nearly dead produce and other products that “wouldn’t sell elsewhere. How do we know it won’t be the same with Target or Walmart?” Augé’s (1995) notion of non-places such as supermarkets, highways, and airport waiting rooms, in which people relate not to each other, but as individuals using space according to the instructions or “contract,” points to how resistance to Target as a symbol for imposed notions of appropriate development and urban renewal figures into the complex work of food system change. Launching the PPP in 2008, Project New Village set out “to use food to re-energize and re-connect people to their neighborhoods, explore opportunities to address food security, and 489

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honor our legacy of environmental stewardship in Southeastern San Diego.” Their first tangible success came after three years of working to change zoning codes, so that the PPP garden and others like it could be sited on undeveloped commercial and residential parcels, also known as “vacant lots.” Ironically, Mt. Hope, the hard-won community garden, was threatened again in 2012. When the California Governor disbanded all redevelopment zones, the South East Development Corporation was ordered to sell or transfer its properties, including the Mt. Hope lot, where people had just begun to establish relationships and build up their soil. After another long series of negotiations, the lease was extended and Mt. Hope is currently flourishing, but the future is hardly certain. The precariousness of this situation illustrates the embedded-ness of scales of policy and decision making that impact daily life, as well as the significance of time as another dimension of spatial relations. It takes time to build healthy soil, change policies, and transform relationships. Thus, a notion of time (i.e., community-based, institutional, geological, global historical, immemorial) is needed to peel back the layers of memory and forgetting (Douglas 1986) to comprehend the landscape as a composite of the places that have been in relation to the variety of processes, interpretations, and uses of space that also have their own life cycles.

Story-maps: co-constructing spatial narratives over time In addition to video narratives, another secondary product of our collaborative ethnography was the construction of interactive online “story-maps.” For a brief moment, Co/LAB aspired to incorporate layered dimensions of GIS-maps that could demonstrate change over time, but what was most usable and manageable by contributors was a static, view of Southeastern San Diego using Google Maps to pin video-recorded interviews, photographs, and collaboratively produced video-narratives to fixed places. Our desire to harness a slicker, better technological mode of representation beyond our resources was an attempt to convey the deeper concern we were hearing in Southeastern San Diego and among PPP members that the memories of people, places, and events are not only forgotten but also elided and erased. Dupuis writes about this process in which global industrial agriculture “has succeeded through the creation of a systemic ‘placelessness’… [which] has a role in the building of alternative food systems.” As in Gilmore’s analysis of forgotten places in rural California that become the obvious sites for such unsavory uses as penitentiaries, foodscapes also can fall out of the larger imaginary of global inter-connectedness and (capitalist) productivity and then be re-mapped as alternative, new, or vacant. Abandonment occurs in both urban and rural communities. In fact, like local and global distinctions, urban and rural divisions can erase the relations, shared conditions and memories, between cities and farming communities, between unemployed factory workers and displaced farmworkers from the same or different countries, and in Southern San Diego, between quite proximate neighbors. I also interviewed several planners, whose long-term work in Southeastern San Diego and expertise in zoning helped PPP provide the winning solution to the community garden ordinance stalemate. When I asked about whether racism was visible or relevant from a planning perspective, intriguingly they talked about the effects of con-urbanization on infrastructure such as roads and water and sewage systems. They felt it was no coincidence that the still unrevised, Community Plan created under the leadership of the first Black City Councilmember was one of the first in the country to recognize “sprawl” and the dangers that city-level inequities presented to the whole region. Connecting this to successive periods of development and abandonment of southern neighborhoods, the planners expressed frustration with the inadequacies of various participatory planning models to address the traumas that were “quite literally built into the landscape.” For instance, “walkability” studies did not discover how the trolley station 490

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was placed at the site of numerous shooting deaths, or how many other projects held complex stories about divisiveness, exclusion, disempowerment, and erasure. With the erasure of memories of place also comes the abandonment of social and spatial relationships. From the closure of the aerospace factory in the 1980s to the installation of several new federal highways, Southeastern San Diego’s abandonment as an historical, economic, and cultural place has been multiple. Literally paving over history, the highways wiped out the commercial corridors that connected Southeastern San Diego to older communities, where successful businesses were owned by people of color since the Gold Rush, to farming communities in eastern San Diego that were once nearer than downtown, and to the people, events, and shared experiences of Chinatown, Barrio Logan, and Chicano Park that lies directly alongside the port. Yet as residents heard that we were collecting stories, we met more and more people who wanted to talk about the beautiful places Southeastern San Diego had been. At a celebration of Juneteenth, we met one woman who described the social space that Chollas Creek provided before it dried up and became a dumping ground for old couches and shopping carts. She talked about a time in the 1960s and 1970s, when “kids” from all the surrounding neighborhoods swam and played together in the creek. She also waxed particularly enthusiastically as she described how she and her other African-American girlfriends and her Japanese cousins would sneak along the creek to attend teen dance parties in Barrio Logan and flirt with the “handsome cholos.” She then made a list of people she thought we should interview. The list of people we hoped to record, whose stories should be “on the map,” kept growing. As did the conversation about an emerging, alternative view of Southeastern San Diego as a rich, historical place that offers a critical, counter-discourse to other ways of seeing. In short and in sum, ways of seeing Southeastern San Diego that emphasize need, poverty, crime, and urban decay to mobilize redevelopment, “urban renewal,” or public health “interventions” often overlook ways of envisioning food system change as an organic, place-based effort to recuperate the memories that connect the physical landscape to the relationships that have been severed, abandoned, or stolen, but not wholly forgotten.

Conclusion: how collaborative ethnography can grow In late 2012, I presented this project to my long-time interlocutors in Livingston, Guatemala. I shared a PowerPoint and the Co/LAB video. The reception and discussion were tremendous. Not only did they relate their own youth training initiative combining sustainable development, communal agriculture, and heritage to the multicultural community mobilization around urban agriculture, backyard grower certification and farmers’ markets in San Diego, but they also claimed their influence on my work. Like the people in Southeastern San Diego, who discarded the food desert label in favor of a place-based narrative that empowered residents, they remembered how Garifuna people had fought for a political process that honored their rights to shape and change it. Ethnographic description can emphasize how members of communities seeking social change confront “representational” power in the discourses and policies of public health, planning, development, and food movements. Accounts like mine often address those who share an interest in ethnography or participatory research methods, but here I also have sought to contribute to a broader discussion about the research orientations that arise from particular, local sociopolitical contexts. In Southeastern San Diego, my research partners identified assuming ownership of the ways of knowing and representing the community as the first step toward authentically community-engaged, collaborative research. They also found it significant to discuss their experiences with researchers and to incorporate their challenges to frameworks relying 491

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on external explanations of cultural difference, inequities, and disparities. These challenges have led me to reconsider how research participants contribute to changing the relationships between primary knowledge producers and their intended audiences. I have argued that the accruing analysis by contributors to various kinds of community-engaged research practice suggests the need for a theoretically grounded critique of power that enables research participants to confront and change the limitations of authoritative knowledge production. Exploring collaborative ethnography as a tool for social change, this discussion has engaged an experimental partnership built around improving food systems and reconfiguring disciplinary and university-community power arrangements. Members of the People’s Produce Project and Co/LAB, a community-university research collective, forged new ways of inhabi­ ting “community” by trying on, incorporating and rejecting frameworks for understanding race, racism, diversity, place, space, and identity. By building a conjoined research/organizing partnership around “Good Food Legacies,” we explored ways of seeing Southeastern San Diego, as well as ways of doing anthropology. Thus, I also recognize that understandings of collaborative ethnography, including mine, have ample room to grow. Mark Whitaker (1996) also has described ethnography as learning, where the products of ethnography can be seen as “representational tries” establishing the basis for an ongoing conversation. Like the videos and story-maps we created as Co/LAB, this chapter seeks to further engage a variety of perspectives that are currently evolving around the very practical aims of creating markets, gardens, growers’ collectives, cooking circles, and a food distribution hub. Thus, I have used anthropological perspectives to look at the connection between the material and symbolic work of the People’s Produce Project, which sought to move the discussion beyond health disparities, food deserts, and even food justice. Raj Patel (2009) has described this very shift from justice to sovereignty in food movements, wherein people pursue not only the right to healthy food but also the “right to have rights.” Reclaiming the right to shape the spheres of policy and decision making, the PPP set the table, around which a growing community of collaborative partners convenes. Today, at monthly meetings, university researchers, representatives of local agencies and government, and residents divvy up the work of creating business plans, grant proposals, legal guides for landowners who want to see their vacant properties developed as gardens, and curricula for several overlapping courses that have been co-taught at local universities and the Educational and Cultural Complex (ECC) for continuing education. As these projects develop, conversations around the PPP table continue to “try on” new frameworks such as sustainability, bioregionalism, and, as one Urban Studies professor suggested “agropolitanism.” Collaborative ethnography offers one way in which these discussions can continue to explore how reconceptualizing the community food system also reconfigures the arrangements of power that shape, interpret, and mobilize social, cultural, and historical relations in Southeastern San Diego and beyond.

Acknowledgements I extend my deepest gratitude to the entire community of residents, community workers, and researchers, whose efforts to improve the food system in Southeastern San Diego and throughout the county provide the basis for this independent account of our collaborative work. My accruing analysis of how collaborative ethnography can support organizing owes a great deal to a number of people who have committed their time and intellectual resources to make this a shared journey. In particular, I thank N. Diane Moss for sharing her experience, wisdom, and vision; Robert Tambuzi and Professor Hugh Mehan for commenting thoughtfully; Professors R. Alvarez and A. Kingsolver for engaging this piece as if it were a part of me; Kamaal Martin, 492

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and my graduate student collaborators, Camille Campion, Keryna Johnson, and Ivan Rosero, for embracing both the risks and promise of collaboration in their independent research and for co-creating the video narratives, website, and other ethnographic products that made Co/ LAB “real” and useful to a broader audience. I also gratefully recognize the support of my postdoctoral mentors, Roberto Alvarez, Ph.D., of the University of California, San Diego, Center for Global California Studies, and Sandra Daley, M.D. This study was supported in part by the University of California, San Diego, Comprehensive Research Center in Health Disparities, Grant Number 5 P60 MD 000220 from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, National Institutes of Health.

Notes 1 As in many underserved neighborhoods hosting city Business Improvement Districts and state Redevelopment Zones, zoning laws encouraged economic development but forbade community uses such as gardens and outdoor markets. We noted that these two vital efforts were at odds. 2 This is quickly changing. Explicit conversations today are evident in the American Public Health Association’s current webinar series, “The Impact of Racism on the Health and Well-Being of the Nation.” By personal communication with an affiliated researcher, I learned that several thousand listeners have attended each session thus far, at https://cc.readytalk.com/cc/s/ meetingArchive?eventId=tm4vbyyuw044. 3 Studies also demonstrate that racial disparities in wealth acquisition as well as in healthcare are more persistent in African-American communities than in new and established Latino communities, but how can multi-cultural organizing efforts make use of these insights to reduce racialized health disparities? C.f., “Separate and Unequal: The Neighborhood Gap for Blacks and Hispanics in Metropolitan America.” John R. Logan, Director Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research University at Albany. October 13, 2002. http://mumford1.dyndns.org/cen2000/SepUneq/ PublicSeparateUnequal.htm 4 See SANDAG Census 2000 profile for SOUTHEASTERN SAN DIEGO/SRA5. http:// profilewarehouse.sandag.org/profiles/cen00/reg999cen00.pdf. 5 See Community Health Improvement Partners (CHIP), Charting the Course V: 2007 San Diego County Health Needs Assessment Health Issue Profile. http://www.sdchip.org/chip/publications/needs_ assessment/pdfs/2007-NA-Processes.pdf. 6 Source: Family Health Centers of San Diego. http://www.fhcsd.org/. 7 The roles of these two private foundations receive prominent attention in Cosio, Maria Martinez and Mirle Rabinowitz Bussel (Forthcoming) Private Foundations’ Role in “Race to the Top” Initiatives: Investment in People and Investment in Places. Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Working Paper. LIR #DMM012209.

References Anderson, Joan M., Patricia Rodney, Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham, Annette J. Browne, Koushambhi Basu Khan, and M. Judith Lynam (2009) “Inequities in health and healthcare viewed through the ethical lens of critical social justice: Contextual knowledge for the global priorities ahead. Advances in Nursing Science 32(4):282–294. Anderson-Lazo, A. L. (2003) Of One Accord: Garifuna Collective Action and the Social Transformation of the Guatemalan Peace Process in Labuga (1996–1998). Doctoral thesis. Santa Cruz: Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Cruz. Anderson-Lazo, A. L. (2009) “A reflection on political research and social justice organizing,” New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry 2(2):61–72. Augé, Marc (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London:Verso. Austin, Diane E. (2003) “Community-based collaborative team ethnography: A community- university-­ agency partnership,” Human Organization 62(2):143–151. Barker, Derek (2004) “The scholarship of engagement: A taxonomy of five emerging practices,” Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 9(2):123–126.

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A. L. Anderson-Lazo Clark,Tom (2008) “‘We’re over-researched here!’: Exploring accounts of research fatigue within qualitative research engagements,” Sociology 42:953. Chowkuanyun, Merlin (2011) “The strange disappearance of history from racial health disparities research,” Du Bois Review 8(1):253. Colen, Cynthia G. (2011) “Addressing racial disparities in health using life course perspectives: Toward a constructive criticism,” Du Bois Review 8(1):79–94. Douglas, Mary (1986) How Institutions Think. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. DuPuis, E. Melanie, and David Goodman (2005) “Should we go ‘home’ to eat?: Toward a reflexive politics of localism,” Journal of Rural Studies 21:359–371. Dutko, Paula, Michele Ver Ploeg, and Tracey Farrigan. (2012) Characteristics and Influential Factors of Food Deserts, ERR-140, US Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, August. Fals Borda, Orlando (2001) “Participatory action research in social theory: Origins and challenges.” In Handbook of Action Research: Participatory Inquiry and Practice. P. Reason and H. Bradbury, eds., pp. 27–37. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Fals Borda, Orlando (1979) “Investigating reality in order to transform it: The Colombian experience,” Dialectical Anthropology 4(1):33–55. Florido, Adrian (2011) “One of San Diego’s Black pioneers,” Voice of San Diego. Electronic document, accessed January 15, 2016: http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/2011/04/08/one-of-san-diegos-black-pioneers/. Freire, Paulo (1973) Education for Critical Consciousness. New York: Seabury Press. Freire, Paulo (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (2008) “Forgotten places and the seeds of grassroots planning,” Engaging Contradictions. C. R. Hale, ed., pp. 31–56. Berkeley: University of California Press. Glasgow, Russel E., and Karen M. Emmons (2007) “How can we increase translation of research into practice? Types of evidence needed.” Annual Reviews in Public Health 28:413–33. Gottlieb, Robert, and Anupama Joshi (2010) Food Justice. Cambridge: MIT Press. Hale, Charles (2006) “Activist research vs. cultural critique: Indigenous land rights and the contradictions of politically engaged anthropology,” Cultural Anthropology 21(1):96–120. Holland, Dorothy, Dana E. Powell, Eugenia Eng, and Georgina Drew (2010) “Models of engaged scholarship: An interdisciplinary discussion,” Collaborative Anthropologies 3.1: 1–36. Hyatt, Susan B. with Benjamin J. Linder, Margaret Baurley, et al. (2012) The Neighborhood of Saturdays: Memories of a Multi-ethnic Community on Indianapolis’ South Side. Indianapolis, IN: Dog Ear Publishing. Israel, Barbara A., et al. (1998) “Review of community-based research: Assessing partnership approaches to improve public health,” Annual Review of Public Health 19:173–202. Kingsolver, Ann (2001) NAFTA Stories: Fears and Hopes in Mexico and the United States. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Marcus, George E. (2007) “Ethnography two decades after Writing Culture: From the experimental to the baroque,” Anthropological Quarterly 80(4):1127–45. Minkler Meredith, and Nina Wallerstein (2009) “Community-based participatory research for health: From process to outcomes,” Health Promotion Practice 10(3):317–18. National Institute of Health (PCE) (2011) Principles of Community Engagement, second edition. Publication No. 11–7782. Patel, Raj (2009) “What does food sovereignty look like?” Journal of Peasant Studies 36(3):663–706. Peacock, James (2000) “Public or perish.” Global View, UCIS, Winter. Potvin, Louise, Sylvie Gendron, Angèle Bilodeau, and Patrick Chabot (2005) Integrating social theory into public health practice. American Journal of Public Health April 95(4):591–94. Rappaport, Joanne (2008) “Beyond participant observation: Collaborative ethnography as theoretical innovation.” Collaborative Anthropologies 1:1–31. Slocum, Rachel (2007) “Whiteness, space and alternative food practice,” Geoforum 38(3):520–33. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2004) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Van Ryn, M., Diana J. Burgess, John F. Dovidio, Sean M. Phelan, Somnath Saha, Jennifer Malat, Joan M. Griffin, Steven S. Fu, and Sylvia Perry (2011) “The impact of racism on clinician cognition, behavior, and clinical decision making,” DuBois Review 8(1):199–218. Whitaker, Mark P. (1996) “Ethnography as learning: A Wittgensteinian approach to writing ethnographic accounts,” Anthropological Quarterly 69(1):1–13. Wolcott, Harry F. (1999) Ethnography: A Way of Seeing. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press.

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26 INtErDIScIPLINArY APPrOAcHES tO CULtUrAL CItIZENSHIP AND MIGrAtION Mattia Fumanti

Introduction: (multi)cultural citizenship and migration The notion of cultural citizenship emerged in the United States in the 1980s as a response to the need for reconceptualizing theoretically the nature of the battle for civic rights and recognition of ethnic minorities and migrant groups. Initially used among Chicano activists the notion emphasised identity, political recognition and cultural effervescence of the Latino population in America (Gomez-Quiñones 1990; Flores 1997). As Rosaldo (1994a, 1994b) pointed out, cultural citizenship responded primarily to the demands of disadvantaged subjects for full citizenship in spite of their cultural difference from mainstream society. In this respect, the notion of cultural citizenship signified the emergence of the notion of culture and cultural performance in relation to migrants’ claims for citizenship. This early notion, despite opening up the theoretical debate on the migrant battle for rights and civic recognition, encountered a certain degree of criticism. First, it remained anchored in a rather essentialized notion of culture and ethnic identity. Second, as Aihwa Ong (1996) pointed out, this early notion of citizenship failed to recognize the dialectical nature of the process of “citizen-making” that takes place between the state and its subjects. Ong stressed the fact that Rosaldo’s definition only attended to one side of what she described as the unequal relationship: “This gives the erroneous impression that cultural citizenship can be unilaterally constructed and that immigrant or minority groups can escape the cultural inscription of state power and other forms of regulations that define the different modalities of belonging” (1996: 738). On the contrary, she argued, there was the need to understand cultural citizenship as the beliefs and practices produced out of negotiating “the often ambivalent and contested relations with the state and its hegemonic forms that establish the criteria of belonging within a national population and territory” (Ong 1996: 738). Ong’s ideas on cultural citizenship remained centered on governmentality and the complex making of normative ideas brought forward by the state and civil society agencies in order to instil what she terms “proper normative behaviour and identity in newcomers” (1996: 738).1 Today the notion of cultural citizenship has taken on a new dimension. It is a dimension that shares, as I will show below, much with recent conceptualizations of citizenship and multiculturalism. While the early notion of citizenship focused on identities and on citizenship as a system of rights and roles within society, this new notion moves beyond the early legalistic framework 495

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to explore how cultural citizenship calls attention to the fact that identities and subjectivities are embedded within wider “social fields and institutions including religion, commerce, work and leisure” (Gaudio 2009: 8). As Gaudio suggests, the “cultural reminds us that participation in social life is not simply a matter of power relations, but it also pertains to aesthetics, emotions and beliefs” (2009: 8). In this novel sense cultural citizenship refers to the things people do in their daily lives. It also pertains to the effects these daily acts have for them and others. This is a point raised by Pnina Werbner (2005) in her work on the translocation of culture.Working with Pakistanis in Britain and in Pakistan, Werbner underlines how for migrants who have experienced dislocation and relocation in an age of transnational migration, the emotional affect of experienced and perceived culture cannot just simply be dismissed, as the critics of multiculturalism do. Culture is “real, a force generating social conflict, defensive mobilisation and creativity” (2005: 746). As Werbner argues, culture, in conferring agency, can be understood theoretically in three senses: “as a field of transactions and relatedness; as a performance [that] is embodied and confers experiential force; and finally … as a discursive imaginary of selfhood, identity, subjectivity and moral virtue [that] constitutes a field of power” (Werbner 2005: 746).Werbner’s theorization of culture in relation to multiculturalism has the potential to open up discussion on cultural citizenship to ideas of relationality and intimacy, to notions of citizenship that deal with gender and affection, i.e. intimate and sexual citizenship, and to those that deal with the realm of morality and the making of an ethical world, i.e. ethical and virtuous citizenship (Fumanti and Werbner 2010; Fumanti 2010a). Thus in this chapter, nothwithstanding the importance of Ong’s argument to our understanding of cultural citizenship, in particular her notion of citizenship as dialectical and as subject-making, I want to move beyond her concept of cultural citizenship, which remains anchored in a discussion of the concepts of class, race and economic liberalism in America, and instead to build my argument on the more recent definition of cultural citizenship suggested by Werbner and Gaudio, to propose a possible synthesis. In particular, I want to argue that recent discussions of multiculturalism and multicultural citizenship (Modood 1997; Modood and Meer 2012; Werbner 2012, 2008) have opened up our understanding of citizenship beyond class and race to incorporate alongside it different and alternative conceptions of citizenship along with novel understandings of “culture.” In this sense what the multiculturalism debate has to say is that, contrary to Ong’s understanding, the nation-state does not have to be homogenous and or hegemonic. The nation is a plural space, a plural arena inhabited by several actors, by diasporans and ethnic minorities but also by the disabled, by women, and other groups who remain largely excluded from the public sphere. These groups remain in a dialogue with the state and with one another and also compete over civic rights, resources and cultural distinction. As Werbner (2010, 2012) underlines, top-down policies are not simply an instrument of governmentality and hegemonic control: they also create “bridges” and “links” that migrants utilize in order to make their claims and stakes in the public sphere. Moreover, multiculturalism, like cultural citizenship, is not produced solely from above, as a top-down process, but is a bottom-up process produced by the activism of minorities. Multiculturalism is a politics of citizenship like all other forms of group politics (Werbner 2005). Also, while citizenship still remains for Ong and others a rational concept based on the notion of rights, multicultural citizenship, much like the novel studies of cultural citizenship, is about passionate issues. It is about the issues that migrants, like other minorities and groups excluded from the public sphere, want to fight for and want to defend at all costs. As Werbner reminds us, “Critical multiculturalism… is a mode of dissent adopted by excluded or marginalized minorities to attack old paradigms and desanctify tabooed discourses and sacred cows” (Werbner 1997). In this sense multicultural citizenship opens up also novel spaces where 496

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migrants clash with the state over cultural issues.These are issues and spaces imbued with deeply felt emotions, where there is an ongoing battle to define what citizenship is and what are the rights of migrant communities within the nation-state: “Rather than reifying culture, then, multiculturalism is a way for ethnic groups to claim a place and a voice in the public sphere” (Werbner 2000). Taking multicultural citizenship, here intended to overlap theoretically with the novel understanding of cultural citizenship, as the starting point of this chapter, I feel there is scope to further explore citizenship beyond much rehearsed arguments by moving to an analysis of a wider spectrum of different and alternative concepts of citizenship suggested above. Anthropology, I feel, has much to say in this regard. In the next section I will review some of these studies while showing how my own work departs in significant ways from it by advancing novel definitions of citizenship that are useful to the debate on multicultural citizenship and migration.

Theoretical orientations: toward anthropology of alternative citizenships Citizenship is a growing field of enquiry in which anthropologists, among others, have been grappling with major questions of cosmopolitanism, human rights, transnational belonging, the location of culture and diasporic loyalties. As I have stressed already, Aihwa Ong’s definition of “cultural citizenship” (Ong 1996) advanced anthropological understandings of citizenship as subject-making in relation to power inequalities and normative reconfigurations of race and culture in nation states, civil society and transnational processes. Richard Werbner’s (2002, 2004) “cosmopolitan ethnicity” argued for an understanding of citizenship that is simultaneously ethnic and multicultural, transcending ethnic difference and promoting a universalist civic consciousness of justice and the public good beyond the local. His argument echoed that of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (1998, 2006), whose notion of “cosmopolitan patriotism” stressed that cosmopolitans are simultaneously rooted in their countries and communities while pursuing cultural rights, equal dignity and the rule of law within postcolonial states. Building on these ideas, contributors to the volume on “Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism” (2008) stressed the possibility of vernacular and rooted cosmopolitanisms that move the focus beyond elite and traveling cosmopolitans. Hence Pnina Werbner proposed that cosmopolitan citizenship is shared equally by educated elites and “working class cosmopolitans” (1999, 2008). In this theoretical context my research of Ghanaian Methodists explored the extent to which African migrants with different histories of migration and exile vary in their “cosmopolitan” or “transnational” convictions, and how these come to be (re)-configured in London, as they create emotionally and morally significant communities of church, family, ethnic group and nation. My analysis starts from the understanding that citizenship is dialogical, a status mediated by a subject’s multiple and intersecting identities. Hence, my ethnography highlighted the limitations of existing conceptualizations of migrant citizenship for Ghanaian Methodists in London. Aihwa Ong’s notion of “flexible” citizenship, for example, which refers to the capacity of elite migrant families to acquire multiple passports and to move between countries (Ong 1999), or Soysal’s notion of “postnational” citizenship (Soysal 1994), are both anchored in strategic, legal definitions of citizenship which give protection and advantage to passport holders. Constructs such as the “transnational social field” (Levitt and Glick-Schiller 2004) are, at the other extreme, vague and disembodied as others too have noted (Smith and Guernizo 1998). Notions of “participatory” or “active” citizenship distinguish invidiously between active public and passive private citizens in the official public sphere, or between volunteers and public employees. 497

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Interdisciplinary approaches remain helpful for a conceptualization of citizenship. Thus here I draw on feminist theories and political philosophy to suggest a number of possible theoretical approaches useful for advancing the debate on multicultural citizenship. In particular I propose a synthesis between Aristotelian and feminist approaches to citizenship as well as reflecting on the relation between intimacy and citizenship, in order to rethink the public versus private sphere dichotomy. This approach will enable us to respond to a central issue at the core of the multicultural citizenship debate. I refer to two distinctive stances toward multiculturalism, one based on political theory that focuses on “civil society,” the other that recognizes citizenship as a dialogical process, and that emphasizes the role of the public sphere. This second approach in particular seems to have had a resurgence of late with a novel interest in communicative and dialogic citizenship. As Pnina Werbner points out, “citizenship as a subjectivity is deeply dialogical, encapsulating specific, historically inflicted, cultural and social assumptions about similarity and difference” (Werbner 1999: 5). In order to further unpack the dialogical nature of citizenship, in the next section I aim to locate my work within current debates on multiculturalism.

Locating the multiculturalism and citizenship debate A major outcome of the current debate on multiculturalism and migration in Europe and elsewhere has been the recognition that culture remains central for an understanding of the practices and politics of citizenship. While for a long time definitions of citizenship remained confined around the sphere of civic, political and social rights, more recent contributions have highlighted the need to bring culture in the debate. Pro-multiculturalists, following Charles Taylor (1994), argue that the denial of cultural recognition, of identity as being deeply grounded in specific cultures and moralities, represents a form of discrimination. Multiculturalism is thus central to human rights debates. As Blum (1994) reminds us, because the distinction between culture and race is untenable in reality, multiculturalism without anti-racism does not make sense as a radical political program. Multiculturalism has had many critics, including more recently interculturalists,2 for being based on essentialist, illiberal notions of culture, and for encouraging cultural relativism. These are well-rehearsed critiques. Coming from the Left, the argument is that multiculturalism does not address inequalities and differences (Hutnyk 1997; Sinavandan 1990). The Right includes both traditionalist and racists, who object to the privileging of minorities. As Pnina Werbner reminds us, rather than thinking of multiculturalism, then, as a discourse that reifies culture, it needs to be thought of as a politics of equal and just citizenship which bases itself on the right to be different within a democratic political community (2008: 5). In a recent article Modood and Meer (2012) make a renewed plea in defense of multiculturalism. Tracing the emergence of multiculturalism within Western liberal theory the authors restate why multiculturalism remains central to current debates on citizenship and migration, despite its critics. In particular, they argue for the possibility of linking multiculturalism to a third theoretical strand, that of Kymlica’s policy-oriented multiculturalism (1995). Multiculturalism has political implications for a concept of citizenship “which includes the recognition that social life consists of individuals and groups, and that both need to be provided for in the formal and informal distribution of powers; not just in law, but in representation in the offices of the state, public committees, consultative exercises, and access to public fora” (Modood and Meer 2012: 178).This recognition, they argue, will mean the re-forming of national identity and citizenship, while offering an emotional identification with the whole to counterbalance the emotional loyalties to ethnic and religious communities (Modood 2007a). 498

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Of course multiculturalism is a polysemic term that encapsulates a variety of sometimes contested meanings (Modood and Meer 2012), simultaneously used to describe pluralism and diversity, or a moral stance to underline that cultural diversity is a desirable feature of a given society. Similarly, multiculturalism means different things in different places (Samad 1997).While in the United States and Canada it refers to legislation affording rights to the native indigenous populations, in Europe it refers to “a ‘post-immigration’ urban mélange and the politics it gives rises to” (Modood and Meer 2012: 180).Yet, it is to the claims of post-immigrant groups that the dominant meaning of multiculturalism in politics has referred to in recent debates, particularly after the events following bombing of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. In relation to this aspect of multiculturalism, Modood and Meer argue that it remains important to reconcile “ideas of multiculturalism with ideas of citizenship, within a reciprocal balance of rights and responsibilities, assumptions of virtue and conceptions of membership in the nation and of civic status” (Modood and Meer 2012: 182; see also Meer 2010). As they point out, while the membership conferred by citizenship should entail equal opportunity, dignity and confidence, different views remain about the proper ways of conferring this civic status in culturally diverse societies. In response to this argument, Pnina Werbner points out that their approach to multiculturalism rests on the understanding that multiculturalism is a political theory. Contrary to that, she argues that multiculturalism is not simply a political theory but is also a discourse “in which scholars participate along with cultural actors, politicians and the media” (Werbner 2012: 197). As she stresses further, “multiculturalism in this sense is often a performative utterance, played out in front of an audience” (Werbner 2012: 197). The question of performativity is crucial for our understanding of multiculturalism but similarly for our understanding of citizenship as a critical rather than simply a reifying discourse (Werbner 2012). In both cases, we need to take into account two aspects central to the conceptualization of cultural citizenship. First, an idea of culture that is inescapably hybrid and permeable: “For this reason too, cultures does not have a single, unified leadership and any attempt by the state to impose one is false and oppressive” (Werbner 2012: 198). Second, an idea of multiple and plural identities: “Critically also, diasporas have multiple and intersecting identities, including party political affiliations to the left and the right” (Werbner 2012: 198; see also Werbner 2002). These two points, argues Werbner, pose an important challenge to our idea of multicultural citizenship. If the challenge of the new multicultural politics is how to transcend certain constructions, to eliminate current subordinations while stressing both universalism and difference (Werbner and Modood 1997; Modood and Werbner 1997), for citizenship there is a similar challenge: the need is to devise an anthropological “theory of citizenship as neither a pure realm of ideas nor simply an arena of political advocacy.Yet at the same time such a theory has also to share with the activists an engagement with the false universalisms of citizenship claims” (Werbner 1998: 2). As in the case of multiculturalism the new discourse on citizenship opens up our discussion to alternative conceptualizations of citizenship. And as for multiculturalism, this is not merely a top-down discourse, but a discourse “from below,” generated by a multiplicity of social actors and movements rejecting homogenizing views of citizenship and transcending exclusivist and exclusionary moral imaginaries. Lister (1997) emphasizes that there is the need to think of citizenship beyond the logic of inclusion and exclusion. Citizenship needs to rest, she tells us, on an idea of “differentiated universalism” where boundaries are present but shifting and changing as they become more porous. The new discourse aims toward a universal citizenship that recognizes the right to be different: that stresses the dialogical, transnational and global dimensions of citizenship, while at the same time recognizing how citizenship is always locally embedded in the particularities of culture, place and history. As Pnina Werbner points out: “citizenship… is 499

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not permanently fixed by universalist philosophical principles, whether liberal or socialist, but it is changing and dialogical, inventive and responsive to world events, a negotiated political order” (Werbner 2005: 746). In this sense the notion of citizenship becomes crucial for the way we understand the experience of migrants. I take this challenge as a very important point to start the exploration of alternative concepts of citizenship, cultural citizenship and multiculturalism, and in particular anthropology’s contribution to this debate. In the next section I contextualize my own research on Ghanaian Methodists in London within the current debate on citizenship.

Virtuous citizens in the Ghanaian London diaspora My recent field research in London addressed the way in which Ghanaians in Britain negotiate their sense of belonging and citizenship while remaining doubly rooted, committed to both Britain and Ghana, and despite being in some cases overstayers who are neither British citizens nor legally resident in Britain.With millions of undocumented migrants in Europe and America it is increasingly important to understand citizenship, beyond the formality of “papers,” as perceived by migrants themselves. In particular, I want to reflect on the way that membership in the Methodist church in Britain and Ghana mediates for Ghanaian Methodists a sense of citizenship, based on moral and ethical ideas of virtuous performance and belonging (Fumanti 2010a). For first-generation Ghanaian Methodist migrants in London the Methodist church has become a space for the construction of a unique “diasporic” citizenship, irrespective of the formalities of passports and voting rights. This is because the church constitutes for migrants a transnational polity, one that is both British and Ghanaian, a naturalized, taken-for-granted continuum, arising from the long history of Methodism as a British mission in Ghana (Bartels 1965). For Ghanaians in Britain, whether or not they are officially full British citizens outside the church assumes secondary importance to their sense of entitlement as postcolonial citizens returning to the home country (i.e. Britain). Critical is their status and role within the church itself.Though in many cases lacking official papers, and frequently suffering discrimination and loss of status at work, with many employed in manual labor despite their educational qualifications, the Methodist church provides the space where Ghanaian migrants can construct their sense of being both “British” and worthy citizens. This stems from migrants’ understanding of the Methodist church as an essentially British institution which recognizes their loyalty and allegiance whatever their formal status. By working and achieving recognition within the church, they see themselves as living virtuous and dignified lives in British society more generally, and contributing to the community of their adopted nation.3 The church is thus a space where their contribution to Britain as good Christians within a Christian nation is morally acknowledged. Ghanaian Methodists construct their subjecthood as virtuous performance. According to this ideal, citizenship, the right to national belonging, is achieved by being law abiding, hardworking, and actively involved in Methodist fellowships through acts of caring, charity, nurture and human fellowship. Nevertheless, the space of the church is also the space in which tensions inherent in the wider concept of citizenship between universalism and particularism are played out. On the one hand, citizenship for Ghanaians is founded on universal Christian values of love and care. They phrase this in terms of the Akan concept of empathy, ɔtema. On the other hand, universal caring remains in tension with particularistic membership in Ghanaian “ethnic” fellowships. These often exclude Caribbeans and other African groups within and outside the church. Moreover, their highly moralistic ideal of “proper” conduct promotes a sense of moral superiority in relation to the “English,” that is, the host society, and a negative judgment of the 500

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latter’s perceived immoral and sinful behavior. Hence, competition and opposition both within and beyond the ethnic group typifies membership in Akan Methodist fellowships. Indeed, as my earlier article disclosed (Fumanti 2010a), the Akan tendency toward encapsulation and ethnic particularism within the church has come to be regarded as highly problematic by the church hierarchy, and has led to calls for an internal debate and reflection on the role of ethnic minorities within the Methodist polity. This marked tendency toward local and transnational encapsulation among Akan speakers has implications for the wider debate on multiculturalism in Britain. In effect, their ethnically exclusive fellowships lead to the creation of a bi-polar transnational social field within the confined space of a single institution, the Methodist church, which itself is both British and transnational. This feature of the church allows for the simultaneous negotiation of different citizenships. On the one hand, being members of a transnational polity whose roots and center are in Britain makes Ghanaians in their own eyes naturally British citizens, but it also permits them to create ethnic fellowships which transcend the boundaries of the nation, while at the same time transforming the church into a multicultural polity. For more recent Ghanaian migrant arrivals, living in London without residence visas or work permits, the presence of Ghanaian Methodist fellowships signifies a British recognition of the contribution made by Ghanaians to the United Kingdom as British citizens. It thus helps legitimize their presence in Britain in their own eyes since, despite their illegal status, they are citizens within the British Methodist Church. For those who have been settled in the country over a longer period of time and possess all the necessary legal documents, the Ghanaian Methodist fellowship becomes a space to celebrate diversity, by maintaining their unique cultural link with their home country and remaining engaged in the project of Ghanaian nation building while living in the diaspora (Mercer, Page and Evans 2009). Both these groups come together within the framework of the church. Within multicultural Britain, the church constitutes an ideal space for intercultural dialogue. As a British religious institution with a long history of engagement in social justice and progressive themes, British Methodism has undergone considerable transformation in recent years in order to accommodate a growing number of ethnic fellowships, including the Ghanaian.The ensuing debate created by the efflorescence of such ethnic fellowships mirrors wider debates on citizenship and multiculturalism in Britain. As in Britain as a whole, themes of allegiance to the British Methodist church, of active citizenship, of cohesion and integration, are central to this internal debate in the church, especially as it relates to the more highly encapsulated ethnic fellowships like the Ghanaian ones.

Virtuous citizenship: toward a synthesis between Aristotle and feminist theory Over the last decade Britain has seen the affirmation and consolidation of a more communitarian definition of citizenship. Based largely on the American republican model in its late ­twentieth-century version (see for example Etzioni1993; Putnam 2000), the communitarian tradition places great emphasis on active citizenship and on shared rights, obligations and common standards for citizens. This stance is seen largely as opposing an individualist, liberal tradition. It aims to promote the sense of collective duties and social rights over individualism, technical expertise and the alienating tendencies of market capitalism. As the sociologist T.H. Marshall famously emphasized (1964), individual definitions of citizenship, although potentially emancipating, cannot eradicate class and inequality. Instead, he defined citizenship as “a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community” (1964: 84). Although Marshall’s view 501

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was progressive, laying the philosophical foundations for the welfare state, a number of feminist scholars have pointed out that the communitarian stress on belonging and “actively joining with others to promote the common good in a community” (Assiter 1999: 44), is exclusionary in the sense that it tends “to homogenise groupings” and “to gloss over class, gender, racial and other power differentials between groupings, in the interest of generating a common identity and a common value system” (Assiter 1999: 45). Against the homogenizing vision of the communitarian tradition and the alienating approach of the liberal tradition, feminist critics have suggested alternative constructions of citizenship. Lister (1997), for example, proposes a feminist synthesis of the liberal and communitarian traditions that would address citizenship’s exclusionary power and the public-private dichotomy (see also Prokhovnik 1994 and Yuval-Davis 1997). Lister argues that contrary to the stress on universalism, citizenship has long excluded women and other groups, such as ethnic minorities and the disabled, “from the theory and practice of citizenship” (Lister 1997: 38), relegating women to the private sphere. As a corrective to this false universalism, Lister proposes the notion of a “differentiated universalism”—“a universalism which stands in creative tension to diversity and difference and which challenges the divisions and exclusionary inequalities which can stem from diversity” (Lister 1997: 39). Writing about the disability movement, Judith Monks suggests that it advocates an “alternative form of citizenship which provides for a flexible kind of participation” based on intersubjectivity and relationality (Monks 1999: 66). Assiter suggests that citizenship should “not take it for granted that individuals are members of nation-states” (1999: 41), while Stasiulis and Bakan argue that citizenship “is negotiated and is therefore unstable, constructed and re-constructed historically across as well as within geo-political borders” (1994: 119; see Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). These theoretical alternatives to legalistic definitions of citizenship are seminal, allowing for a novel conceptualization that aims to take into account intersubjective moral relations between citizens. Assiter uses the notion of an “epistemic” community, drawing on Aristotle, to refer to “a group of individuals who share certain interests, values and beliefs in common … and who work on the epistemic consequences of those presuppositions” (Assiter 1999: 47). A key aspect in Aristotle’s theory overlooked by Assiter, however, is his invocation of virtue, ἀρετή, to describe the good citizen, καλὸς κἀγαθόs, as the ideal (Adkins 1963; Develin 1973; Newell 1987). For Aristotle, citizenship is negotiated through intersubjective communication and pragmatic responsiveness to circumstances (Aristotle 1950; Adkins 1963; Develin 1973). In this latter respect, citizenship is always specific, limited to a particular community and particular historical setting, and the right to be a participatory citizen is dictated by individual status. For Aristotle the virtuous citizen, the ἀγαθός, remains an ideal, achievable only by those able to combine the universal qualities of humanity proper, of the virtuous man, with the particular qualities of being a citizen subject to the law of the πόλις.4 As he says in the Politics, “Now in general a citizen is one who both shares in the government and also in turn submits to be governed’ (1950: 92). As Adkins (1963: 35) points out, the good man/citizen, καλὸς κἀγαθόs, relied for his survival and well-being on a clearly defined and demarcated community in which virtue, mutual assistance, cooperation and trust were debated and agreed upon. This was all more so for those living in a foreign land (1963: 35). There, survival was often reliant on the patronage of good men within the household or οἶκος. It was in this highly encapsulated space that the individual made sense of his experience and was taken care of, nurtured, protected and recognized. If we extend this notion of οἶκος to the migrant community, we may argue that encapsulation within the church, as in my case study, provides the protective environment needed to survive in a foreign land. In Aristotelian terms, a flexible, postcolonial, diasporic citizenship 502

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is expressed by the notion of virtuous citizenship within the British Methodist church. The church provides a “nurturing” space where Ghanaians organize themselves in encapsulated fellowships, coming together to worship and celebrate their contribution to Britain and Ghana through their efforts in the church. In the process they construct an ideal model of virtuous citizenship, one that encompasses their experience as subjects and citizens in Britain and in Ghana. Within the fellowships differences in immigration status and time are erased. There is space for both newcomers and pioneers, the long-term settlers, to cooperate, engage and negotiate their presence in Britain. Encapsulation within the fellowship thus allows even newcomers to achieve status, regardless of legal formalities. In the context of the Methodist church these formalities are rendered meaningless, conflated with the “British” qualities of being virtuous, hardworking and law abiding. Ghanaian Methodists in London thus understand their role as citizens not through their direct active engagement in the national British public sphere, but through their active participation in the Methodist church, its fellowships and associations, and the help they extend to their families in Ghana and to Ghanaian nation-building. Being virtuous in their conduct toward their fellow Ghanaians in Britain and at home qua subjects-citizens, they also perform a moral role in bringing back the word of God to Britain.5 They work hard, pay taxes, attend to the needs of others, donate generously to the church and to other causes, help organize and attend public events and traditional rites of passage such as weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals, and take part in welfare initiatives within the church and other national and ethnic associations. This ideal of the virtuous, postcolonial citizenship is informed both by Protestant Christian ethics, in particular the Methodist concept of holiness, the pursuit of individual Christian perfection, and by Ghanaian cultural values, specifically the Akan concept of ɔtema, a relational and dialogical concept meaning empathy and compassion, which contains the idea of the pain people feel when pain is inflicted onto others or people are thought to be suffering. To have ɔtema means to possess the emotional and human capacity for sociality, to feel and attend to the needs of others.This concept, shared by several ethnic groups in Ghana, defines Akan inter-subjectivity. For Akan in London it is cited to explain why Ghanaians are law abiding and caring, and are apparently not involved in criminal activities. Yet like the Aristotelian and Greek concept of καλὸς κἀγαθόs (Donlan 1973), there are tensions between the universalist Christian message of holiness and the Akan concept of ɔtema, on the one hand, and the particularism practiced by encapsulated Ghanaian Christian fellowships, on the other. These exclude non-Ghanaians, while also generating a great deal of competition among the different Christian fellowships. As for the Greek καλὸς κἀγαθόs, the Ghanaian virtuous citizen is pulled between personal interests and civic excellence (Develin 1973: 71). To be an ideal citizen is hard, achievable by a few celebrated individuals, but the concept nonetheless helps make sense of their lived experience as African migrants in London, living in an often alienating and sometimes hostile environment, without recognition and distinction in the public sphere. The concept of empathy and the ethic of virtuous citizenship raise important reflections regarding our discussion of multicultural citizenship and the public sphere. If migrants from Africa are able to engage with the wider debate on citizenship and multiculturalism by constructing an alternative notion of citizenship through the culturally encapsulated spaces of the Akan Methodist fellowships, then it is important to reconsider the relationship between the private and the public sphere to further conceptualize intimacy, citizenship and multiculturalism. In the second part of this chapter I thus aim to explore this important theoretical perspective by looking at the construction of intimate citizenship through the ways in which Ghanaians in the diaspora imagine their place in the world. 503

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Multiculturalism and intimate citizenship Across Europe and elsewhere much of today’s debate on citizenship and multiculturalism is constructed around personal identity and individual rights. The dramatic changes in intimate lives at the turn of the millennium have increasingly bound private decisions to public dialogues on human rights, medicine, cultural recognition and migrant rights. This situation has signified the emergence of a novel understanding of citizenship rights, one that focuses on intimacy and the right to choose, to choose your partner, your sexual activities, what do with one’s body, etc. Often theoretically expressed through ideas of sexual citizenship (Evans 1993; Richardson 1998; Weeks 1998; Bell and Binnie 2000; Plummer 2003, 1995; Gaudio 2010), the novel concept of intimate citizenship has opened up a new array of opportunities to understand the ways in which migrants claim their presence in the public sphere. It also signals a need for the reconceptualization of the distinction between the public and private sphere. Of course, as Pnina Werbner reminds us, the paradox that sexual intimacy is neither intimate nor private but is the subject of much public deliberation is associated with the work of Michel Foucault (Werbner 2007). Foucault argued that individual choices on intimacy are subjected to normalization and discursive practices by a wide range of professionals and the state apparatus. One example of this normalization in Western Europe, in France in particular but now in Belgium and Italy too, can be seen in the politics of multiculturalism over veiling, forced marriages and honor killings among Muslims. These very sensitive issues, regarding choices that individuals and families make, have wider consequences for the public construction of Muslims as a “difficult minority” and one that does not want to integrate. More dramatically it has given rise to Islamophobia in the West, and events in Norway in July 2011 this summer are an example of the danger posed by anti-Muslim feelings in Europe. What the debate on intimate citizenship brings to bear for our novel understanding of citizenship is its stress on the dialogical and communicative dimensions of citizenship and its potential for rethinking the public and private sphere dichotomy. Kenneth Plummer is very clear on this point. Intimate citizenship, he tells us, developed from the telling of sexual stories, a phenomenon that has changed the public discourse on rape, sexual abuse and sexual orientation: “As individuals have made public their stories of sexuality and intimacy for the first time, they have created new cultural spaces and new and individual cultural identities” (Plummer 1995 cited in Russell 2002). It was through these coming out stories that the Gay and Lesbian movement, Plummer reminds us, became organized in a visible, empowered political movement (Plummer 1995).6 Similarly, I want to argue that for migrant communities, the encapsulated space of family, church and migrants’ organizations provides an opportunity for people to engage with citizenship and the making of political subjectivities. Plummer reminds us that what he calls “the luxury of postmodern intimacies” (1995) needs to be contextualized in the political economy of the nation. Inequalities, poverty, racism and discrimination restrain people’s choices and their command over intimate citizenship. Choices, he tells us, are not equally distributed and this distinction has a powerful impact on the way people think their role in society. The issue of choice and its limits thereof, is an important aspect to consider in relation to migration as migrant communities face an onslaught on their intimate lives. One has to think again of the attack on intimacy, the body and the sexuality of Muslim communities in Europe for example. Similarly it is equally important to reflect on the global interconnectedness of work and the impact this has on intimate lives across the globe. One aspect of it, is the whole industry of caring, with a great number of poor women migrating to care for other’s people children, providing elder care, doing housework and often providing sex under duress. This is for example the case of Filipina migrant women who, while living and 504

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working in Saudi Arabia and confronted with the restriction of Islamic law, are finding ways to reclaim their selves through their exercise of womanhood (Pingol 2010). It is a choice fraught with difficulties and ambivalence. While the act of marrying Muslim men grants them privilege through protection, at the same time it makes them more vulnerable to shame—a status rendered even more fragile because of their foreignness. Working often without contract and legal documents, their plight is the same as that of millions of other workers across the globe who work in demeaning jobs. Intimacy becomes invisibility and work is done by a non-person (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). As Plummer reminds us, “this suggests major shifts in the dynamics of world families while creating dilemmas for first world feminism: how liberated women with good jobs can employ poor women from low incomes societies in this way with little conscience” (Plummer 2005: 17). Thus, intimate citizenship is a helpful tool to be looking at cultural citizenship. While traditionally citizenship was seen as pertaining to issues of belonging to a group with obligations in return for certain rights, the new debate is open to an array of different conceptualizations of citizenship. This, argues Plummer, must be part of a novel approach to intimacies which highlights the doings of gender, eroticism, relationships, reproduction, feelings and identities. As he stresses, “intimate citizenship is concerned with all those matters linked to our most intimate desires, pleasures and ways of being in the world” (2005: 23). It is to this dialectic I turn next. In particular, I want to look at the experiences of Ghanaian migrants who—faced with separation through migration—re-imagine their place in the world through the re-articulation and re-invention of citizenship via family lives. To understand this better we need to appreciate how the concept of “entrustment” is central to the ways in which family obligations are tied in with ideas of citizenship and choices. Entrustment becomes a way for families to respond to separation caused by different immigration status. In particular, the entanglement between emotions and materiality serves to re-articulate intimacy and the making of subjectivities on the personal, political and moral level (see also Constable 2010). Before I discuss my ethnographic examples I will locate my work within the current anthropological debate on intimacy.

Remotely intimate: aspirations, entrustment and citizenship in transnational Ghanaian families My research has aimed to respond to a growing anthropological interest in the dialectics of intimacy (Yan 2003; Cannell 2006; Povinelli 2006; Shipton 2007; Bernstein 2007; Constable 2009). In what is still ongoing research I started to investigate the intimate ethics and emotional aesthetics of Ghanaian transnational families in London and Kumasi, focusing in particular on personal and collective projects which require trust in exchange relations and joint investments among Ghanaians at home and in the diaspora. The project, which builds on my most recent research in London and Ghana (Fumanti 2010a, 2010b, 2013), has begun to illuminate the role of intimacy and ethical expectations for an anthropology of gender, class and generation in transnational families and for an understanding of citizenship. Recent anthropological discussions of globalization, transnationalism and diaspora have shifted the focus from political, economic and technological transformations onto the realm of intimacy—how these transformations are experienced in daily lives, in the most intimate acts and practices (Padilla et al. 2007). Discussing love and affect (Rebhun 1999; Ahearn 2001; Povinelli 2006; Navarro Yashin 2009; Napolitano 2009; Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009), gender and sexuality (Bernstein 2007; Day 2007; Laura Maria Augustin 2007), anthropologists have considered the ways in which global forces shape marriage, sex, and intimacy in transnational settings (Constable 1997, 2003, 2009; Salazar Parrenas 2001; Rosario 2007), shedding light in 505

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the process on the novel reconfiguration of relationship and ethics in a globalizing world.To this growing research interest Nicole Constable (2009) has recently responded with an analysis arguing that recognition of the intensification and complex interconnectivity of local and global processes has to take into account two important processes for an analysis of intimacy. On the one hand anthropologists have to be aware of the ways in which social relations have become ever more dispersed, impersonal, and limited by new regimes of governmentality; on the other hand we need to look at how intimate and personal relations have become more explicitly linked to commodities and to commodified global processes, and to transnational mobility and migration. My research on Ghanaian transnational families responds to this current debate with a “trans-paradigmatic” approach, to follow Navarro-Yashin (2009), which merges theories of subjectivity, materiality and language for the conceptualization of transnational migration in Africa and elsewhere. Starting from a rethink of the widely accepted idea of family investment as the primary impetus for migration, my research has privileged the hitherto unexplored space of entrustment as a site for unearthing the complex articulations of intimacy with personal and collective aspirations. I use entrustment after Shipton (2007) as the basis for morality and ethical relationships that imply obligation, trust and confidence but not necessarily a repayment, like for like, and not in a determined time. Thus entrustment, Shipton suggests, becomes a matter of cultural context and strategy and one that potentially binds individuals across gender, class and generation and from one historical moment to the next. In so doing my argument adds a theoretical dimension to the growing literature on transnational families (Shaw 2000; Gardner 2002; Grillo 2009). Today, many Ghanaian families live apart.With different members of one family living in the ever-growing Ghanaian diaspora in Europe, America, Asia and the Middle East, the strain on intimacy is very potent. Young couples are separated and parents leave their children at home in the care of grandparents, uncles or aunts. And because of the lack of papers, many travel as tourists only to remain as over-stayers, leading to separations often over many years, with, in the extreme case, migrants never reunited back with their family in Ghana. However, it is in separation that migrants and their families re-imagine and re-construct their intimate relations and in so doing rethink their place in the world. They do so by entrusting people and possessions to significant others, and by embodying the aspirations of those left behind for a better future, while harboring nostalgia and idealized memories of those left at home. My aim here is to discuss the ways in which citizenship is reconfigured through intimacy and how this is done so “remotely.” For many Ghanaians, having regular papers to work and live in Europe or elsewhere in the diaspora becomes the most important aspect of their sojourns abroad. Obtaining citizenship is crucial to achieve stability in work and in family relations, and also in order to access state services and benefits. While there are many ways of achieving this, finding a suitable partner to marry remains the preferred choice. Here there are different strategies to be deployed, using a local middleman to find a suitable person and paying the person for a staged marriage, or simply falling in love with someone who is a citizen in the host country. But while some of these strategies revolve around establishing a relationship with a third party, often a friend or family, the most successful and often preferred method of finding a suitable candidate with whom to establish a transaction remains within the family. Ideas of entrustment and mutual obligations among members of the family set and reconfigure relations in order to obtain citizenship. Family members also rely on mutual trust and the understanding that a secret is preferably shared and kept within a family. It is a well-rehearsed story among Ghanaians that if in a family one person holds an overseas passport, preferably of a Western country, there would be high demands on that person to marry, 506

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albeit only temporarily and only formally, within the family, in order to extend the citizenship status to a brother, a sister or another relative. For example John who was born in Holland and grew up in Ghana, returning to Holland later to sustain his family, told me that from his early childhood he always felt he was made to feel special among his other siblings because he held a European passport: “People always told me about my status, they reminded me how lucky I was to have one, how when I grew up I would have to marry my sister so that she could become a citizen herself and then marry someone else and pass it on.” John’s comments underline the ways in which migrants with citizenship status living abroad embody the aspirations and expectations of other members of the family. His citizenship was re-imagined through intimate practices, albeit remote, of an arranged marriage with one of his siblings or family member. In this sense for John, like other Ghanaian migrants, citizenship is re-imagined intimately through the ways in which the status conferred on the person can be transferred materially or symbolically onto others. Migrants thus are entrusted not only with the well-being of others, through the circulation of commodities and remittances; they are also entrusted with the future and aspirations of others through their citizenship status. This is not a one-way process. In return for this they entrust others with the well-being of significant others left in Ghana. Citizenship thus appears to be based on intimate practices that connect different generations of people within one family around the practices of care, entrustment and reconfiguration of family relations. Family relations are reconfigured around the access to a host country and its job market. Travelling from Ghana to Europe within the novel regimes of governmentality which impose greater restriction of movement on people is now a much more complicated affair than it was in the past. But it is a surmountable obstacle if relatives living abroad extend the person a letter of invitation. Citizenship status or permanent residence, a stable job and a bank account are necessary prerequisites for the invitation to be successful. Once the invitee has landed, the host would help them find a job. They would also be entrusted for their well-being with a place to stay for the initial period of their stay overseas. Citizenship thus is not a personal or legalistic affair. It is not simply a matter of individual choices and responsibilities toward the rights and obligations set by the state. Citizenship is re-imagined intimately as the reconstruction of the self through intersubjective relations. Trust, entrustment and the reconfiguration of family obligations are all crucial to the understanding of citizenship as intimate citizenship.

Conclusion The notion that citizenship needs to be understood beyond the legal parameters of rights and obligations to include culture and cultural performance remains one of the most important contributions of the early debate on cultural citizenship. This turn signaled a significant shift in the way we have come to understand migrants experiences and their conceptualizations of citizenship. However, this early notion worked within the parameters of a narrow definition of culture and failed to take into consideration the dialectical nature of citizenship, as state-making and subject-making. Moving beyond such a notion of cultural citizenship I suggested shifting the emphasis toward a synthesis between a novel notion of cultural citizenship and the current debate on multiculturalism and multicultural citizenship. Building on recent contributions to multiculturalism, most notably Modood and Meer (2012) and Werbner (2005, 2007, 2008, 2012), I showed how the multicultural debate opens up our understanding of the migrants’ experiences of citizenship toward an analysis that privileges several analytic strands: from aesthetics, emotions and beliefs and ideas of relationality and intimacy, to other alternative notions of citizenship; and from those that deal with gender and affection, i.e. intimate and sexual citizenship, to those which deal with the realm of morality and the making of an ethical world, 507

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i.e. ethical and virtuous citizenship (Fumanti and Werbner 2010; Fumanti 2010a). Furthermore, citizenship in the multicultural debate is understood as always locally embedded in the particularities of culture, place and history; it is inventive, dialogical and responsive to the changing political order. The notion of citizenship so constructed becomes crucial for the way we understand the experience of migrants. I took this challenge as a very important point to start the exploration of alternative concepts of citizenship, cultural citizenship and multiculturalism, and in particular anthropology’s contribution to this debate. In the course of the chapter I contextualized my own research on Ghanaian Methodists in London and on Ghanaian transnational families within the current anthropological debate on citizenship. Building on it, but also departing from it in significant ways, I showed how my two ethnographic examples illustrate how the novel debates on citizenship and migration need to bring into relief the ways in which migrants construct and imagine their own version of citizenship in response to the normative and legalistic versions of citizenship. Both examples showed how Ghanaian migrants in Britain re-imagine citizenship through a moral discourse based on virtuous performance and through intimacy. In so doing they escape the limits imposed on their lives by novel regimes of governmentality and reconfigure their presence in Britain beyond official discourses on multiculturalism and migration.

Notes 1 In this chapter I make use of the term governmentality in the Foucauldian sense as the organized practices and the production of knowledge and discourses through which subjects are governed. 2 With the term interculturalists I refer broadly to scholarly supporters of interculturalism. Interculturalism has emerged in the last decade as a response to the “failure” of the policies of multiculturalism. Starting from the critique of multiculturalism as encouraging segregation and isolation of communities, interculturalists argue that cross-cultural dialogue between cultures is the only antidote to self-segregation tendencies within cultures and the sole alternative to multiculturalism’s emphasis on cultural relativism and identity politics. 3 It is worth remembering here that T.H. Marshall (1950) defined citizenship as “membership” in a community. 4 This is the Polis, the classical Greek term for city, and by extension the locus of political and civic life in Classical Greece. 5 For a comparative analysis with Ghanaian Pentecostals in London and Ghana see Daswani (2010, 2013). 6 On lesbian political activism in the United Kingdom see Sarah Green (1997) Urban Amazons.

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INDEX

5th Schedule (India) 411 6th Schedule (India) 411 Aboriginal Art 366, 369, 371, 376–7 Aboriginal paintings and iconic content 366 Abu-Lughod, Lila 397 acephalous society 234 Achebe, Chinua 41 action anthropology 403 active citizenship 497 activism 110–11, 119, 477 Adams,Vincanne 430 adaptations to environment 286, 330–2, 336–7, 343–7 adaptive capacity 343, 345 adoption and kinship 162–3, 174–5 Adovasio, James 276 advocacy 110–11 affect 189 Africa: as source of anthropology 39–43; theorizing experiences in 39–46 African Americans: community involvement with archaeological projects 274–5; and the food system 484–7 African Burial Ground Project (Manhattan) 11–12, 269, 274–5 African migrants to London and cultural citizenship 497, 500–1, 503, 505–7 African Worlds gallery 138 Agamben, G. 222 agrarian question 338 Ainu as indigenous people 278–9 Akan Methodist 500–1 Alexeyeff, K. 229 Al-Jabber, Um Abdu 240–1 Alsop, Joseph 360 alterglobalization movement 463, 465, 467

alternative citizenships 497–8 Amadiume, Ifi 44 Ambedkar, B. R. 227 American Anthropological Association (AAA) 155, 406 American Anthropologist 11 American Indian Movement 273 American Indians 35, 138; and archaeological communities 268–9; involvement with archaeological projects 272–4; removal and relocation of 267–8; and repatriation of artifacts 276–7 Amoore, L. 344 Anderson, Nels 115 Anderson-Lazo, A. L. 20–21 Andes: case study in biocultural anthropology 291–6; and glacier melt 426–7; labor reciprocity in 288 andolan 463 Angel-Ajani, Asale 67–68 aniconic art 375 Anthropocene 420–3 anthropogenic climate and environmental changes 418–22 anthropologists 1–22; dealing with the indigenous 404–5; as expert witnesses in asylum cases 241–2; involvement and detachment 59–60, 63, 66, 386–7, 482–3; marginality of African 39–43; neutrality of 6; role in climate sciences 432–3; studying microcosm 402; as witness 62–63, 111–14 Anthropologists Without Borders 406 anthropology 1–22; action 403; of alternative citizenships 497–8; archaeology as a branch of 264; and art 18–19, 359–78; and availability of information on the Internet 101–2; barefoot 65, 68; being a science 308–10; biocultural 283–98;

513

Index biological 284, 305–9; and climate change 19–20; cognitive 384, 386, 388–93; collaborative 3; and colonialism 10; communicating 124–40; conceptualizing the field of 5–9; contemporary 7; cyborg 316; decolonizing 112; and development studies 409–11, 467; dimensions of 3–4; diversity of 3; dominance of U.S. 29; ecological 332–9; economic 244–59, 407–8; engaged 3; environmental 339–42; ex-centric sites in U.S. 46; exhibiting 135–9; of finance 249; four-field approach 3, 145, 283, 308; and geography 18, 323–48; globalization of 4, 11; of the good 68; and governance 19; having a moral aesthetic 7; and health 417–33; and history 408–9; integration of subfields 283–4; interconnectedness of 4–5; interdisciplinary 16–21; and the Internet 7–8, 92–105; legal 234–42; linguistic 13, 140; medical 313–14; person-centered 396–7; physical 308–9; in policy making 411–14; and political science 234–42, 406, 439–49; of politics 409–10, 457–60; psychological 19, 382–97; public 3, 130; and public health 408; and public policy 19, 400–15; and relationship to the field 72, 82–83; role in human rights 236; and science 18, 305–17; of social movements 109, 456–7, 460–70; social theory in 30–31; and sociology 18; students of 7; teaching 11–12, 144–56; televising 131–5; viability as a field 17; in virtual field sites 95–96; womanly-hearted 65; world perspective of 4, 6, 10–11; writing 126–30 Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter 9 anthropozoic 420 Antiquities Act of 1906, 269 Anyon, Roger 268 Appadurai, A. 29, 38, 81, 377 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 497 Apple Corporation 448 Aravamudan, Srinivas 40 arbitrage trading 252 arbitrary signs 367, 368 archaeological community 269 archaeological cultures 265 archaeological ethnography 267 archaeologists 266–8; encouraging participation of communities in research 270–6; including non-archaeological input 271–2; relationships with American Indians 271–4 archaeology 16, 107–8, 125; as activism or advocacy 110–11, 119; community 271–6; of the contemporary world 108–14; definition 264; and indigenous peoples 13; involvement of descendant communities 268–9; social and ethnographic 266–7 Archambault, Julie 99–100 archives 446 Aristotle and citizenship 502

Arrhenius, Svante 421 art 359–78; and act of inscription 371–3; aniconic 375; and anthropology 18–19; being mimetic 366; conceptual 364; and ethnography 139; having agency 371; iconic content of 365–6; illusionistic 364–5; as indexical signs 369–70; non-Western forms of 19; perspectival 364; Renaissance 362–5; representing three dimensions with two 363–5; schematic 364; seeing it and its meaning 361; subjectivity of the individual 364–5; as a term 360; -things as assemblages 375 artifacts 265–6; repatriation of 276–7 Asad, Talal 9, 38, 186–7, 189, 192 Ashmore, Wendy 264 Asian Americans: as archaeological stereotypes 268; community involvement with archaeological projects 275–6 Assiter, A. 502 asylum cases and anthropologists as expert witnesses 241–2 Ata, Alma 297 Atalay, Sonya 272 Ataman, Kutlug 139 Augé, Marc 489 Aunger, R. 129 Austin, J. L. 248 Australia 38 Authentic Primitive Art 359–60 axiom of amity 166 ayllu/communidad campesino 294–5 Aziz, Zeti Akhtar 258 Badger Hole archaeological site 279 Bahloul, Joëlle 171 Bahn, Paul 264 Baiga 404 Baker, P. T. 294 Bakewell, Liza 371 Balandier, G. 457 Bamford, Sandra 165, 171 Bangkok 427–8 Bangladesh 425, 429 Banks, M. 132 banks representing and affecting the economy 251–3 Barbie and race 149–51 Bardhan, Pranab 408 barefoot anthropology 65, 68 Barrett, R. 204 Barth, Fredrik 58 Barthes, Roland 129 Bartmann, Sarah 149 Bassett, T. 343 Bastian, Adolf 305, 315 Basu, Paul 6, 100 Bates, Marston 330

514

Index Bateson, Gregory 257, 333, 335 Baxandall, Michael 368 Bayart, J. 224 bearing witness 111–14 Beatty, Andrew 19 Beaulieu, Anne 67, 69 beauty and body modifications 149–51 Behar, Ruth 64, 66 behavior in social movements 465–6 belief 189 Bell, Catherine 187 Benedict, Burton 76 Berkeley School of Cultural Geography 329–31 Berlin, Isaiah 325 Berlin Geographical Society 324 Bernal, J. D. 311 Bernardini, Wesley 271 Berreman, Gerald 59 best-loser-system in Mauritius 75 Beteille, Andre 407, 413 Beto 13, 201, 205–17 Beto, Don 476 Bialecki, Jon 12 biases in historical archaeology 268 Biddle, Jennifer 366, 370, 376 biocultural anthropology 283–98; background to 285–7; case study in the Andes 291–6 biocultural research 285–91 bioethics 313 biological anthropology 284, 286, 308–9 biological foundation of kinship 12, 161–3 biological plasticity 289, 294–5 biology 316–17; and anthropology 284, 305–7; and culture 15 biomarkers 296; and biocultural anthropology 289 bio-politics 222 biopower 247 biosocial inheritance 291, 295–7 Birkby, Walter 273 bisexuality 228–9 Black feminist theory 41–42 Blacks and dehumanizing view of their bodies 224–5 Black-Scholes options pricing model 252–3 Blaikie, Piers 339, 341 Blakey, Michael 275 Blier, Suzanne 372 Bloch, Maurice 184, 187, 190 Bloch, Philip K. 391 blood kinship 161–2, 164 Boas, Franz 3, 9, 59, 135, 306, 307, 316, 325, 326–7, 330 Boddy, Janice 387 Bodenhorn, Barbara 162 body: codifications 219–31; having attributes 13; modifications and beauty 149–51; norms 150–1; and power 189

body painting 362–3, 376 Boellstorff, Tom 95–96, 98 Bohannan, Laura 59 Bohannan, Paul 235 Bolivia and glacier drought 427 BOMB (Black Oriental and Mexican Brothers) 486 Boni Bush people 220 book-as-object 129 Borda, Orlando Fals 477 Bordo, Susan 149 Borneman, J. 61 Bourdieu, P. 60, 220, 222 Boyd, Robert 66–67 Bradley, Raymond 420 Bray, Tamara 277 Briggs, Jean L. 397 Brighton Museum and Art gallery 138 Bristol 114 British colonialism 9 Brodkin, Karen 42 Brookfield, Harold 331, 340 Brown, Lester 426 Brown, Molly 431 Brown, Paula 331 Brumfiel, Elizabeth 266 Bucholtz, Mary 13, 204, 205, 206 Build India program 413 Burawoy, Michael 337 Burrell, Jenna 98 Bush, George W. 87 Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) 489 Butler, Jay 429 Butler, Judith 202 Butzer, Karl 323, 331 Cahskan, Koray 248 Cairo and political anthropology 444 Callon, Michel 14, 248 Cameron, D. 202, 203, 216 Campbell, John R. 410 camps of the internally displaced 239–40 capital: and nature 339; transforming agriculture 338 capitalism 230, 246; causing environmental changes 422–3; conforming to Islamic morals 256–9; and Islam 254–6 Carlé, Rolf 64 Carrier, J. G. 130 Carrithers, Michael 6–7 Carsten, J. 167, 169 Casta painting 148 caste system in South Asia 220, 221, 226–8 Catalhöyük 183–4, 187, 193 Cate, Sandra 377 Catlin, George 150 Cattelino, Jessica 257 cause-effect relations 82 Cavell, Stanley 37

515

Index Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies (CAIS) 278–9 cephalous society 234–5 Chad Basin 250–1 chaîne opératoire 374, 376 Chalfin, Brenda 41 Chambers, Erve J. 274 changing places schema 390 Channa, Suhbadra 13–14, 223 Charnley, Susan 419 Chatters, James 274 Chattisgarh 413 Chavez, Herman 417 Chenchus 405 child growth: impacted by malnourishment 294–6; impacted by poverty 294–6 Chin, Elizabeth 7 Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma 268–9 choice in kinship 166–7 cholera 429 Chorley, Richard 328 Christian, Barbara 34 Christianakis, Mary 154 chronic disaster syndrome 430 Chua, Liana 191 Churchill, Winston 221 circumscription 206–7 citizenship: alternative concepts of 499–500; communitarian definition of 501–2; definition 502; intimate 504–6; and multiculturalism 495–508; re-imagined 507; and the state 443–4; virtuous 21 Civilization Project (Sudan) 239 Clark, Garcia 41–43 Clarke, William 338, 340 Clifford, James 10 climate adaptation 346, 347 climate change 420–2; and anthropology 19–20; diminishing food availability 430; impact on health 423 Climate Change Vulnerability Index 425 codified bodies 219–31 cognition and culture 387–90 cognitive anthropology 384, 386, 388–93 cognitive psychology 391–3 cognitive science 388, 389, 391–2 Cohen, Anthony P. 387 Cohn, Bernard S. 408 Cohn, C. 445, 446 Co/LAB 475, 476, 481, 492 Coleman, Gabriella 98–99 Coleman, Simon 188 collaboration in multi-sited ethnography 448 collaborative anthropology 3 collaborative ethnography 475–92 collaborative inquiry 481–2 Collier, Stephen 347

Collins, Patricia Hill 32, 42 colonialism: and anthropology 10; and breakdown in social relationships 15; exploitation 8 colonial relations of inequality 9 Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip 267, 273, 274 Comaroff, Jean 31, 39, 190, 328 Comaroff, John 17, 31, 39, 190 Combahee River Collective 42 common substance notion 385 communicating anthropology 124–40 communication mediating knowledge 125–6 communitarian definition of citizenship 501–2 communities: cross-cultural, non-geographic 276; direct descendant 268; indirect descendant 268–9; professional 270; representation of past 267; stewardship 269; working with archeologists 271–6 Communitization of Public Institutions and Services Act (CPISA) 411–12 community archaeology 271–6 community-based organizations (CBOs) 254, 410 community-based participatory research (CBPR) 270–1, 481 community outreach in archaeology 270–6 comparative politics 439 complex adaptive systems (CAS) 343–7 complexity science 344, 346 conceptual art 364 conditional rationality 286 Conkey, Margaret 276 Conklin, Harold 330 connectedness 108, 112, 118 Connell, Raewyn 30, 36 contemporary anthropology 7 contemporary archaeology 108; themes in 108–14 Contemporary Art 360–1 Cook Islands 229 Coombes, A. E. 136 Cooper, M. 347 Coote, Jeremy 361 co-presence 8, 66–67 corporations: in human life 253–4; impacted by shareholder value 250 corruption in India 414 cosmopolitan ethnicity 497 cosmopolitan patriotism 497 counter-storytelling 33–34 Crapanzano,V. 61, 150, 395 creationism 310, 315 Cruikshank, Julie 420 Crutzen, Paul 420–1 cultural citizenship 21, 495–508 cultural commodification 46 cultural consonance 288 cultural ecology 330–1, 335–9 cultural histories of science 311–12 cultural identities 224

516

Index cultural labor 253 cultural relativism 14, 236, 394; limits of 236–7 culture: and anthropology 316; archaeological 265; and biocultural anthropology 287–8; and biology 15; and cognition 387–90; and developing healthy food system 483–4; and environment 329–30; and geography 325; impacting economies 254–6; impacting experimental approaches 385–6; impacting technology 96–97; local versus universal 400–1; and science 313; translocation of 496 culture-in-process 12 Curé, Maurice 79 Curepipe demonstration 73, 78 Cushing, Frank 58 Cushman, D. 127 cybernetics 335, 337, 346 cyberspace 93 cyborg anthropology 316 daily life and social movements 467–8 Dalit movement 14, 220, 227, 231 dam-building causing malaria 429 D’Andrade, Roy 389–90 Danish National Museum 324 Darlington, Cyril 315 Darwin, Charles 221, 308, 336 Das,V. 36–38, 65, 66, 69, 224 Davenport, Charles 306 Davis, A. 221, 224 Davis, William 326 decolonizing anthropology 4, 112 Decolonizing Anthropology (Harrison) 4, 10, 11 Deere, Carmen Diana 341 defense mechanisms 395 deforestation: and flooding 425–6; and spread of diseases 429 de Garine, I. 431 dehumanization 221 de Janvry, Alain 338, 341 Delaney, Carol 168, 173–4 demonization of the Other 224 Denevan, William 331 Derrida, Jacques 192 Descartes, René 324 desire and language 202–5 detachment by participant observer 59–60, 63, 66, 248–9, 482–3 developmental origins of health and disease (DOHaD) 289, 290 developmental plasticity 289, 290 developmental programming and developmental origins of health and disease 289, 290 Devereux, George 383 Devi, Jumuna 376 de Vries, Hent 192 de Waal, A. 431

Dharmeratnam, Sivaram 34 diarrheal disease 429 diaspora 46 Dibbell, Julian 93 differences: accepting 112; become inequalities 220 differentiated universalism and citizenship 502 Dinar, Ariel 431 direct descendant communities 268 dirty theory 30, 38 Disappearing World (television) 131 disasters, anthropological studies of 332 discourse analysis 446 discrimination 220; and gender 228; and visibility 226 dispensable humans 221 distinction 205, 212, 228 Divorce Iranian Style (film) 134 DOHaD (developmental origins of health and disease) and biocultural anthropology 289, 290 Dolgin, J. L. 165, 166 domestic doings and relatedness 171–2 domination and subordination 220 Dongoske, Kurt 268, 273 Donnelly, J. 443 double self 220 doubling of consciousness 60 Douglas, Mary 414 Downey, Greg 253 Drake, St. Clair 46 Dreaming (Walbiri) 369–71 Dressler, W. W. 287–8 Driscoll, J. 443 droughts: caused by climate changes 431; glacial 426 Du Bois, W. E. B. 220, 224 Dumont, L. 220 Dupré, John 310 DuPuis, E. 490 Durham, Bill 336, 419 Durkheim, Émile 109, 189, 305, 308, 315, 391 Dye, Thomas R. 402 earth and beginnings of geography 325 Easton, D. 457 Eck, D. L. 375 Eckert, P. 204 Eco, Umberto 369 ecological anthropology 332–9 ecological destruction 337 ecological materialism 337–8 ecological refuges 230 ecology of things 374 economic anthropology 244–59 economic knowledge: and practice 244–59; and reality 14 economic racism 230 economics: and anthropology 407–8; and biocultural anthropology 286

517

Index economies: agency of 245–7; objectifying 244–59; performing 247–9; in practice (action) 253–4 economization 248–9 economy of dignity 155 economy of words 251–2 ecosystem 333–4 Edelman, M. 460, 461, 469 Edkins, J. 432 Elkins, James 360 Ellen, Roy 323, 328 Ellick, Carol 279 Elwin,Verrier 402, 404–5 emic 388 Emotional and Spiritual Quotient (ESQ) training 255 empathic witnessing 64 empathy in fieldwork 59–60 empiricism 310 encounter in fieldwork 61–62 engaged anthropology 3, 130 engagement: of anthropologists 6; in social movements 465–6 entrustment 505, 506 environmental anthropology 339–42 environmental changes 417; impact on health 423 environmental rule 342 environment and political ecology 339–40 epigenetics 290–1; and biocultural anthropology≈289 epistemic community and citizenship 502 era of the witness 62 Eriksen, Thomas Hylland 75 Errington, Shelly 18–19 Escobar, Arturo 6, 11, 18, 28, 47, 404, 460, 461, 462, 467 essentialism 191 ethical colonialism 87 ethics 190, 401; in anthropology 14, 111–12; in development sector 409, 411 ethnic cleansing 222 ethnic diversity 8 ethnic fashion 227 ethnic politics in Mauritius 75–76 ethnographer 386 ethnographic archaeology 266–7 ethnographic encounter 61–62 ethnographic museums 324 ethnographic realism 127–9 ethnography 6, 17, 45, 126, 307, 310–12, 333; access issues 445; aggregation issues 445; as aprendizaje 475–92; in biocultural anthropology 289; collaborative 475–92; high-risk 64; historical 445–7; of institutions 249; and Internet 94; multi-sited 81–82, 445, 447–8; in political science 439–49; and social suffering 64–65

ethnography of the particular 31 ethnology 326 etic 388 eugenics 146, 148, 149, 174, 225, 306 Euro-Mauritian bourgeoisie 76–77 Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 59, 127, 234, 306, 307 evolution 224, 336–7; and biocultural anthropology 286; and race 148 evolutionary psychology 391–3 Ewing, Katherine 394 excavations and community involvement of the American Indians 273–4 ex-centric sites 46; shift to for anthropology 28–30 exhibiting anthropology 135–9 experience-far concept 60 experience-near concept 60 experience of witnessing 62, 64, 66 experiential exploration 154–5 experimental approaches impacted by culture 385–6 expert witnesses in asylum cases 241–2 export processing zone (EPZ) 73, 78 Fabian, Johannes 61, 68, 101, 102 face painting 362–3 Fahim, Hussein 35–36 Fajans, Jane 169, 170 families, gay and lesbian 163–4, 174 Farman, Abou 184 Fassin, Didier 62–63 Favret-Saada, Jeanne 58 Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela 169 feminism: and anthropology 10; Black 41–42 Ferguson, James 81 Ferguson, T. J. 268, 273, 274 Feyerabend, Paul 310 Fforde, Cressida 277 fictive kin 162 fieldwork: within a community 109; as encounter 61–62; history of 57–61; in Homeless Heritage Project 114–18; importance of 124, 386–7; with the Internet 94–95 Figueroa, Samantha 154 films, ethnographic 131–5; defining 131–2 finance: anthropology of 249; Islamic 253 Firth, R. 127, 332 Fischer, Theobald 325 Fisher, Melissa 253 Fleur, Herbert 327 flexibility in kinship 166–7 flexible citizenship 497 flooding: created by global warming 423–4; glacial 426; and increase in diseases 428–9; by rising sea levels 427; risk in South Asia and Latin America 425–6 Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn 14 fluidity in kinship 166–7

518

Index focal objects 374–5 Fogelman, C. 343 folk psychology 385 Fong, Kelly 268, 275 food: availability impacted by climate changes 430; and kinship 169–71; shortages and insecurity 431–2 food desert concept 487–8 food justice movement 20, 480, 484 Forbes, Jack D. 35 Forde, Daryll 327 forms of life 387 Fortes, M. 94, 166, 234 Foster, Morris W. 148 fosterage 162 Foucault, Michel 18, 43, 190, 222, 223, 245–7, 311, 373, 459, 504 four-field anthropology approach 3, 11, 145, 283, 308 fourfold hermeneutic 110 Fourth World people making art 359, 362–3, 366, 376–8 Fox Indian Project 403 France 58 Francis, Pope 21 Franklin, Sarah 164 Frederik III, king of Denmark 324 Freedberg, David 371 Freeman, Derek 307 Freire, Paulo 477 Freud, Sigmund 393 friction, cultural 62 Friedman, Jonathan 337 Friedrichs, J. 442 Frisancho, A. R. 294 Frisancho, Roberto 333 Fumanti, Mattia 21 functionalism 337 funerary objects 277 Funk, Chris 431 Furer-Haimendorf, Christoph von 405 Gabriel, Juan 210–11, 212 Galván-Leguízamo, José Manuel 215 Gandhi, Indira 37, 227 Garifuna communities 20, 476 Garro, Linda C. 388 Garsten, C. 448 Gat, Azar 443 Gaudio, R. P. 496 gay and lesbian language 203 gay family-making 163–4, 174 gay identity 206 Gay y Blasco, P. 126 Geertz, Clifford 60, 83, 92, 127, 186, 247, 307, 328, 330, 361, 372, 387, 394, 396, 441 Gell, Alfred 371

gender: in archaeology 276; and discrimination 228; issues represented in film 134; and kinship 174; relations and state power 37; and sexual identity 205–6 gendered violence 36 genealogical model of kinship 165–6 genealogy 446 genetics 315 Genographic Project 313 genomics 312 geography and anthropology 18, 323–48 George, Kenneth 377 Gerlach, L. 462 Germany and formation of geography and anthropology 324–5 Ghana and neoliberalism 41 Ghanaian London diaspora 497, 500–1, 503, 505–7 Ghanaian Methodists and cultural citizenship 497, 500–1, 503, 505–7 Ghosh, Amitav 63 Gibb, R. 460 Giddens, Anthony 14, 414 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson 328, 490 Ginanjar, Ary 255 glacial droughts 426 glacial floods 426 glacier melt 426–7 Glacken, Clarence 325–6, 329 Gledhill, J. 85, 459 global capitalism 84–85; causing environmental changes 422–3; and Mauritius 72–88 global climate change 343, 417 globalization 8, 46–47, 400, 401; health effects of 418; in Mauritius 74, 75–80, 81; as a term 84 global warming 417, 421–2; causing droughts 431; producing flooding 423–4 Gluckman, Max 235, 458 Godelier, M. 227, 337 Goffman, Erving 207 Golub, Alex 96 Gombrich, E. H. 364, 365 Goodall, Jane 312 Goodenough, Ward H. 388 Good Food Legacies of Southeastern San Diego 481 Goodman, A. H. 284, 288 Goodman, Nelson 365, 368 Goody, J. 126 Google tools 152 Gopal, Mookeshwarsing 74 Gottlieb, Robert 487 governance and anthropology 19 governmentality 19, 20, 245, 247, 495 Government of India Act of 1935, 404 gram sabha 411 Grant, Madison 306

519

Index grave goods 277 Graves-Brown, P. 112 Gravlee, Lance 284 “Great Ivy League Nude Posture Picture Scandal,” 146, 150 green governmentality 342 greenhouse gas emissions 424, 431 Gregory, Christopher 86 Griaule, Marcel 58 Grindal, Bruce 64 grocery gap 487 Grossman, Larry 340 grounded theory 38 group identity 443 Guha, R. 230 Gupta, Akhil 81, 406 Guss, D. M. 375 Gusterson, Hugh 445 Guttmann, Matthew 205 habitus 110, 163, 459 Haddon, A. C. 131 Haeckel, Ernst 314 Haggett, Peter 328 Hakken, David 94–95 Hale, C. R. 481 Hall, Kira 13, 202, 204, 205, 206 Hall, Stuart 324 Hallowell, A. I. 387, 388 Hammoudi, A. 61 Haney, Peter 13 Hannerz, U. 82, 447 Haraway, D. 32, 48, 231, 346 Harcourt, Wendy 18 Harding, Sandra 48 Hardy, John 427 Harris, David 323, 331 Harrison, Faye 4, 6, 10, 17, 46 Harrison, G. 431 Harrison, R. 108, 109, 112 Hartouni,V. 165, 166 Harvey, D. 328, 339 Harvey, N. 464 Hashizume, M. 429 Hayek, Fredrich 347 headhunting 412 health: and anthropology 408, 417–33; impacted by climate and environmental changes 423; outcomes and biocultural anthropology 287–91; political ecology of 419–20 health disparities 294–6; and biocultural anthropology 289; research 482; and social conditions 15 Hecht, Susanna 341 Hefner, Bob 340 hegemony, racial and cultural 402 Heider, K. G. 131–2

Hemings, Sally 146–7 Henning, M. 136 hepatitis 429 Herder, Johan von 324 hereditarian biological theories 307 hermeneutics 109–10 Hersey, John 146 hierarchies 220–1 hierarchy in kinship 172–4 high-risk ethnography 64 Hijras 229 Hine,V. 462 historical ethnography 445–7 historical inquiry 446 historic past 266 history and anthropology 408–9 Hiyazaki, Hirokazu 252 Ho, Karen 250 Hobbes, Thomas 308 Hodder, Ian 374, 375 Hoebel, E. Adamson 234 Hoke, M. K. 15, 291, 296 Hokkaido Island 278 Holden, Constance 285 holism 387, 482–3 Holling, C. S. 343, 344, 347 Holm, Bill 366 Holmes, Douglas 251–2 Holocene Epoch 420 Homeless Heritage Project 107–8, 111, 114–20; interpretation and presentation of data 116–18; methodology 114–16; therapeutic outcomes 118–19 homeless people 7, 107–8; having material culture 265; presenting their heritage 112; reconnecting with family 119 homeostasis in living systems 334 homo economicus 248, 259 Hooton, Earnest 306 Hopi and archaeological communities 268 Horn of Africa 431 houses: and kinship 168–9; and relative objectification 172–3 house societies 168 Howell, Signe 163 Hrdlicka, Ales 306 Hubert, Jane 277 human agency 468–9; and transformation of the earth 329 human biology. See biology Human Genome Project 307, 310, 312, 313 humanistic orientation to psychological anthropology 383 human rights 14, 236–7; and climate change 417–18 humans: role in climate change 418–22; as the subjects and objects of knowledge 246

520

Index Human Terrain System (HTS) 102 Hume, L. 60 Hurcombe, Linda 266 Hurricane Katrina 428 hurricanes 424, 428 Hussein, Lubna 239 Huxley, Julian 309 Huxley, Thomas 309 Huyssen, A. 137 Hyatt, Susan B. 475 Hymes, Dell 9 iconic content of art 365–6 iconic presupposition in art 361, 362 iconic signification 365 iconic signs 367–8; of the Walbiri people 369–70 identity: fluidity of 13; and language 201–17; reconstruction of homeless people 119, 120 Ifaluk 385 illusionistic art 364 immersive inquiry 439, 441–7 immigrants: and citizenship 21; incorporating 21 Inden, R. 468–9 Independence Day in Mauritius 78 indexical signs 367, 368; world and art as 369–70, 372 India: anthropology in public policy 400–15; caste system 226–8; homosexuality 229; social inequality for women 413; state’s involvement in development sector 410–11 Indigenous Archaeology in Shiretoko (IAS) project 278 indigenous movements 38 indigenous people 14; being vulnerable 238; excluded from archaeological communities 267; and impact of climate change 422; and impact of environmental changes 417–18; legal systems 234; as marginalized 224; and relationship to archaeologists 13, 404–5 indigenous theory 34–36 Indios of Zumbagua 34–35 indirect descendant communities 268–9 individuality 384–5 Indonesia and Islamic ethics in the corporate workplace 254–6 Industrial Revolution 421, 423 inequality: and biocultural anthropology 286–7, 292–6, 297; and colonialism 9; health effects of 294–6; and race 9; through power 220 informed consent 237–8 Ingold, Tim 166 inscription in art 371–3, 376–8 insider anthropology 410 Institutional Review Boards 14, 16 intention in kinship 166–7 interconnectedness 4–5

interdisciplinarity 16 Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy (IGAPP) 406 Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 343, 421, 423 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps 239–40 International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences 11 International Relations (IR) 439, 441, 444, 446 International Rubber Regulations Agreement 85 International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) 11, 406 International Workers’ Day in Mauritius 77 Internet: and anthropology 92–105; as articulation of culture 97; and coherence with offline context 97–98; and cultural understanding of the normal 99; and ethical challenges for anthropology 7–8; and ethnography 94; as a territory 93 interviews as participant observation 58 intimate citizenship 504–6 Inuit 418 Inupiaq kinship 162 involution 330 IPCC. See Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Iran and Islamic finance 257 Iraq War 7 irrigation malaria 429 Islam: and capitalism 254–6; ethics in the corporate workplace 254–9 Islamic finance 15, 253, 257–9 isolation policy of indigenous people in India 404 Jackson, Antoinette 149 Jackson, P. T. 442 Jacobs Family Foundation 489 Jaffrelot, Christopher 227 Jameson, Fred 323 Janowski, Monica 169–70 Japanese Americans’ involvement in archaeological projects 275–6 Java 390 Jefferson, Thomas 146–7 Jefferson’s Blood (film) 147 Jelderks, John 274 Jews 225 Joan of Arc 382 Jones, Delmos 36 Joshi, Anupama 487 joto mannerisms 201, 209, 211–14, 216 Juris, J. 466 Kalyvas, S. 443 Kamea 165, 168, 171 Karki, Madhave 426

521

Index Karma theory 221 Kates, Robert 331–2 Kato, Hirofumi 278 Katzenstein, P. J. 442 Kautsky, Karl 338 Keane, Webb 193–4 Kelty, Christopher 101 Kennewick Man 274 Kenya 43 Kerber, Jordan 273 Kibuyu women 43 Kiddey, Rachael 7 Killion, Thomas 277 Kim, E. J. 175 Kingsolver, A. E. 31, 230 kinning 163 kinship 316–17. See also relatedness; and adoption 162–3; based on houses 168–9; blood 161–2, 164; challenging biological foundation for 161–3; choice, intention, flexibility and fluidity 166–7; doing and making 161–75; fluidity of 174–5; and gender 174; hierarchy and relative objectification 172–3; materialization of 172; social creation of 174–5; study of 12; systems 146–8; Zumbagua views of 34–35 Kirkpatrick, John 385 Kleinman, Arthur 38 Kluckhohn, Clyde 59 Kluckhohn, Florence 59 Kosek, Jake 342, 347 Krakatau Steel 255 Kratochwil, F. 442 Krause, Elizabeth 61 Krieger, N. 289 Kroeber, Alfred 325, 330 Kuala Lumpur 254, 256 Küba 139 Kuhn, Thomas 310 Kuklick, H. 59 Kulick, Don 13, 202, 203, 207, 216 Kumasi women 41–42 Kuper, Adam 109, 235 Kuper, Hilda 235 Kurtz, D. 459 Kurzweil, Ray 184 labor: and moral value 247; reciprocity in the Andes 288 Lacks, Henrietta 313 La Coupe 77–78 Laitin, David 443 Lakoff, Andrew 347 Lambek, Michael 166 land and kinship 170–1 Landau, Misia 311 Lange, Michael 16

language: games 37; gay and lesbian 203; ideology 193; and sexuality 13, 203–5; and social identity 201–17 langue 367, 371 Late Paleoindian 268 Latin America: flooding risk 425–6; social movements in 47 Latour, B. 137 law and anthropology 234–42 Leach, James 165, 170–1 learning: and ethnography 475–92; student-led 151 Leatherman, T. L. 15, 288, 291 Leenhardt, Maurice 58 Lefebvre, Henri 328 legal anthropology 234–42 Leinaweaver, Jessaca 163 Leisure Garment 73 lesbian family-making 163–4, 174 Levin, Jamie 18, 20 Levins, R. 286, 336–7 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 58, 168, 338, 362–3, 372–3 Levy, Robert E. 396, 397 Levy Jordan Public Archaeology Project 275 Lewellen, T. 457 Lewontin, Richard 286, 336–7 l’homme 373 Li, Tania 342 life and extraordinary violence 37–38 linguistic anthropologists 16 linguistic anthropology 13, 140, 203–4 linking 206–7; and performing 13 Lins Ribeiro, Gustavo 4, 11, 18 Linton, Ralph 309 lisible and scriptible text 129, 139 Lister, R. 498, 502 Livingston, D. 327 Llewelyn-Davies, Melissa 135 Lobban, Richard 241 local knowledge 34–36, 387 London and cultural citizenship of African migrants 497, 500–1, 503 Longinotto, Kim 132, 133–5 Lower Granite Dam Reservoir 273 Lowie, Robert 330 Lucas, Gavin 110, 111 Luhmann, N. 335, 346 Luhrmann, Tanya 190–1 Luis, Adriel 154 Lutz, Catherine 32, 385 Macfarlane, Alan 408 MacKay, Joseph 18, 20 MacKenzie, Donald 252–3 MacKinder, Halford 326 macro-anthropology 86–87 macro-claims 401 Macy Foundation Conferences on cybernetics 332

522

Index Madhya Pradesh 407–9 Maeckelbergh, Marianne 20 Mafeje, Archie 43, 45, 46 Magro, Albert M. 150 Magubane, Zine 149 Maio, Marcos Chor 148 maladaptation 335 malaria caused by dam-building 429 Malaysia and Islamic finance 257–8 male discourse 32 Malinowski, Bronislaw 57–59, 72, 83, 95, 101, 109, 126–7, 136, 306 Malkki, Lisa 68 malnutrition 294–6, 431–2 Manderlay (film) 147–8 Maoist movement in India 414 mapping technologies 153–4 Marcus, George 10, 61, 63, 67, 81, 127, 129, 447 marginalization, imposed 14, 220, 222 Maring 334 market externalities 408 Marks, Jonathan 18 Marriott, Alice Lee 59 Marshall, Mac 166 Marshall, T. H. 501–2 Marshall,Yvonne 271 Martin, Emily 166 Martin, Ricky 212 Marx, Karl 109 masculinity: parody of 205–17; stereotype 201 mashups 154 Mason, Otis 330 material culture 108, 136, 265–6 materialization: of kinship 161, 167, 172; of relatedness 171–2 matrix of domination 42 Maurer, Bill 253, 257 Mauritian crisis of 2003, 73–74 Mauritius 8, 72–88; globalization in 74, 75–80, 81; loss of jobs and economic crisis 73–74 Mauss, M. 58, 374, 387, 396 Mayblin, Maya 191 Mbembe, Archille 39–40 McCarty, John 417 McCurdy, David W. 156 McDade, T. W. 291 McDavid, Carol 275 McGranahan, Gordon 427 McKay, Deirdre 254 McKinnon, S. 12, 168 Mead, Margaret 58, 95, 307 Meade, James Edward 78–80 media. See also specific types: and anthropology 7–8 medical anthropology 286, 313–14 Medicine, Beatrice 35 Medicine Now gallery 139

Meer, N. 498, 499, 507 Mejia, Don Roberto Pablo. See Beto, Don memories and kinship 171–2 Mencher, J. P. 220 Mendelsohn, Robert 431 men’s subjugation over women 228 Mernissi, F. 223 Merry, S. E. 237, 464 Meskell, Lynn 266–7, 276 Messer, Ellen 237 metabolic programming 296 metapractices of bank regulators 254 Methodist church and diasporic membership 497, 500–1, 503 Middle East and political anthropology 444 Middleton, Karen 167 migrants and citizenship in new country 495–508 Mihesuah, D. S. 277 Mikesell, Marvin 323 military rule and capitalism 341 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 410 MIllennium Ecosystem Assessment 418 Miller, Daniel 97 Millo,Yuval 252–3 Mills, C. W. 230 Minkler, M. 270 Miskito 340 Mitchell, Timothy 245 Mitternaier, Amira 191 Modell, J. S. 163 Modood, T. 498, 499, 507 Moffat, M. 220 mold, toxic 420 Monks, Judith 502 Montagu, Ashley 311 Monteiro, N. P. 442 Moodle 152 Moon,Vasant 231 Moore, Sally Falk 235 moral authority 65, 68 moral dimension 7 moral value to labor 247 Morgan, David 374 Morgan, L. H. 126 Morphy, Howard 366, 369, 376 Mosko, Mark 191 mother blaming 291 Moundbuilder Controversy 267 Mozambique 99–100 Mulcock, J. 60 Mulligan, C. 290 Mullings, Leith 42 Mullins, Paul 3, 110 multiculturalism 495–6, 498–500; and intimate citizenship 504–5 multi-sited ethnography 81–82, 445, 447–8 Mumford, Lewis 330

523

Index Munn, Nancy 369, 370, 371 Munro, R. 222 museum ethnography 135–9 museums, ethnographic 324 Myers, Samuel 432 MyStreet 102–3 Nader, Laura 234, 311, 410 Nagaland 411–14 Naga Mothers’ Association (NMA) 412 narrative ethnography 60, 61 Nasaday, Paul 344 Nash, June 86, 460, 469 National Geographic 328 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) 137–8; Act (NMAIA) 276–7 National Science Foundation 328 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) 13, 274, 276–7 Native Americans. See American Indians native anthropologies 35–36 native legal categories 235 native point of view 60, 126, 388 naturalism 310 naturalization and kinship 173–4 natural selection 336 nature and procreation 165 Navarro-Yashin,Y. 506 Nehru, Pandit Jawaharlal 402, 405, 413 Nelson, Sarah 276 neoliberalism 86, 244, 256 neoliberalization 46–47, 85 neoreductionism 290 Netting, Robert 331 network of things 374 Neumann, Iver 445 neutrality of anthropologists 6 Neveling, Patrick 8 New Guinea 170 Newton, Isaac 308 Nez Perce tribe 273 Ng, Tim 251–2 Nicolas, R. 462, 463, 464 Niger 432 Nirmal Gram Yojana 413 Nixon, Richard 87 Nkwi, Paul Nchoji 402 noble savage being portrayed in film 133–4 noble witness 67, 68 nominalism 187 Non, A. L. 290 nongovernment-based organizations (NGOs) 410 non-Western forms of art 19 Nordstrom, Carolyn 33–34 North being influenced by Southern theory 39 North Eastern Frontier Agency (NEFA) 402 Northern metropolitan anthropologies 29

Ntarangwi, Mwenda 4, 17, 45–46 Nuñoa 291–6 Nyamnjoh, Francis B. 44–45 Obama, Barack 223, 224 Obama, Michelle 479 Obbo, Christine 45 Obeyesekere, Gananath 394, 395, 396 objectification of kinship 172–3 O’Brien, Karen 432 observer, vulnerable 64, 66 ocean levels rising 427 offline context influencing online presence on Internet 97–98 Okhotsk 278 “one blood” relation 165, 168 one-drop rule in anthropology 284 Ong, Aihwa 495, 497 open access of information 101–2, 130 optical naturalism 364–5 Orlan 149–50 Ortner, Sherry 30–31, 468 Other: demonization of 224; stereotyping of 225–6 others and relationship with selves 13–14 overadaptation 330 Pachirat, Timothy 448–9 Padel, F. 221 Page, Jake 276 Pakistan 430; and flooding 425–6; increase in vector-borne diseases 429; and Islamic finance 257 Paleoindian 265 Pall, Pardeep 424 Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas (PESA 1996) Act 411 Panitchpakdi, Supachai 79 Panofsky, Erwin 360, 364 “Parallel Perspectives Program,” 279 Parezo, Nancy 376 Parkinson, Alan 429 Parmesan, Camille 421 parody of masculinity 205–17 parole 367, 371 Parry, M. 430 participant objectivation 60 participant observation 446, 456–7; history of 57–61; in the Internet 94–95; involvement and detachment 59–60, 63, 66, 386–7, 482–3; observer as witness 62–63; and social movements 463–9 participatory action research 476–7 participatory citizenship 497 Passeron, J. 220 past: active in the present 109; material culture representing 266

524

Index Pasztory, Esther 375 Patel, Raj 492 “pathways to embodiment,” 289 Patnaik, Soumendra 19 Patz, Jonathan 418, 432 'The Pavilion,' 116 Paz, Octavio 205 Peacock, James 481 Pearl, Raymond 306 peasant societies 338 Pedroso de Lima, Antónia 168–9 Peirce, C. S. 365, 367 Pelling, M. 345 Pels, Peter 184, 187 Peluso, Nancy 341 People’s Produce Project 20–21, 475, 478–92 Peoples’ Republic of Stokes Croft (P.R.S.C.) 107 Perestroika Movement 440 performative self 374 performativity theory 202 Period Eye 368 peripheral zone of theory 29 personal presence on the Internet 95, 96 personal symbols 395 person-centered anthropology 396–7 personhood 396 perspectival art 364–5 phenotypes 146 Phillips, R. B. 138, 377 physical anthropology 308–9 Piccini, A. 112 Pickett, K. 289 Pitt Rivers Museum 136 plasticity 316; and biocultural anthropology 289–90 plastic surgery 149–50 Plummer, Kenneth 504, 505 podcasts 154 Polanyi, Karl 329, 340 policy making and anthropology 411–14 political anthropology 234–42; in Sudan 238–41 political ecology 18, 20, 337–42, 419–20 political economy: and biocultural anthropology 288–9; of development 339–41 political ethnography 439–49; kinds of 445–8; varieties of 442–5 political science 20; and anthropology 439–49 political violence 443 politics: anthropology of 276, 457–60; and biocultural anthropology 286; comparative 439; ethnic in Mauritius 75–76; as a process 456–7; and social movements 462 popular culture and social theory 149–51 positionality of anthropologists 6 postnational citizenship 497

poverty: and biocultural anthropology 292; impacting child growth 294–6; and its stigma 229–30 Povinelli, Elizabeth 166 Powdermaker, Hortense 57–58, 59, 482–3 power 9, 18, 459–60; and biocultural anthropology 288–9; of knowledge 222; and political anthropology 441; and religion 189; of seeing 222–3; of words 223–9 power politics 443 practice of economies 244 practice theory 459 Praetzellis, Adrian 275 Praetzellis, Mary 275 pragmatism 442 Prah, Kwesi Kwaa 44 preContact 266, 268, 269 prenatal exposure 290, 291 prestige zones of theory 29 Preucel, R. W. 267 Primitive Art 359–60 Principle of Archaeological Ethics 269, 272 processual paradigm in anthropology of politics 458–9 procreation 164–5; logics of 167–8 professional communities 270 progressive embodiment on the Internet 95 Project New Village 478 Protestants attaching moral value to labor 247 protohistoric past 266 pseudo-science 315 psychoanalysis 383–4; impact on psychological anthropology 393–5 psychological anthropology 19, 382–97; divergent orientations to 383–4 public and private sphere dichotomy of citizenship 504–5 public anthropology 3, 130 public health: and anthropology 408; and biocultural anthropology 289 Public Order morality laws in Sudan 239 public policy and anthropology 19, 400–15 Pucarumi 426 Pugh, Allison 155 Punnett, R. C. 315 queer speech 203 race: and anthropology 145; and the food system 484–7; and inequalities 9; and kinship 175; and stereotypes 224–5 Race Science 225 racial ideologies 146–8 racism 225–6; economic 230; in San Diego 485–6, 488, 490; scientific 9 racist rationality 225 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 189

525

Index Radical Teacher (journal) 156 Ragoné, Helena 165 Raj Gonds 405 Rancatore, J. P. 441 Rappaport, Roy 332–5 rationalism 310, 314 rationalization of economies 244, 246–7, 249–53; case study 254–9 Ratzel, Friedrich 325, 326 Ray, Isha 408 Read, Kenneth 59 Reagan, Ronald 87 realist ethnography 127–9 recursivity 335 Reddis 405 reductionism 290–1 Reed-Danahay, Deborah 6, 8 reflexivity of economies 244–6, 248–9; case study 254–9; exhibited by central banks 251–3 regimes of accumulation 341 regimes of intervention 63 regimes of rule or hegemony 342 regimes of truth 342 regionalism 325 regional population 334 Regnault, Félix 131 Reinventing Anthropology 9 relatedness 161–2. See also kinship; decoupled from biology 12; materialization of 171–2 relational model of kinship 166 relativism, cultural 236–7 religion 12, 189–93, 306; in Catalhöyük 183–4; erasure of 185–8; and evolutionary psychology 391–3; globalization 192–3; pedagogy of 190–1; and procreation 173–4 religious becomings 191–2 religious ethics in the corporate workplace 254–9 religious language 193 Renaissance art 360; and representation 362–5 Renfrow, Colin 264 repatriation of artifacts 276–7 repression 395 reproduction of inequality 222 reproductive technologies 164–5 Republic of Maldives 427 resilience in ecology 343–7 resiliency adaptation 345–7 resistance and social movements 467 Reuler, Ellen van 409 riba 256 Rice, Patricia 156 Richard, Analiese 418 Richards, Audrey 57 Richards, Paul 327 Riles, Annelise 237, 254 Ritter, Carl 326 ritual 12, 187–8, 194, 333–4

Rivers, Julian Pitt 83 Robbins, C. 419 Robbins, Joel 68, 188, 191 Robertson, Roland 84 Rockefeller, Nelson 359 Rogers, Susan Carol 17 Rosaldo, Michelle 394–5 Rosaldo, R. 461, 495 Rosenberg, Charles E. 409 Rosenweig, Cynthia 430 Rotiman, Janet 250–1 Royal Anthropological Institute 156 Royal Asiatic Society 324 Royal Institute of Languages, Geography and Ethnology 324 Royal Society 324 Ruby, K. G. 442 Rudnyckyj, Daromir 14–15 Rushton, Philip 149 Sabatier, Léopold 58 Sabloff, Jerry 264 sacralization and kinship 173–4 sacred arts 374 Sahlins, Marshall 166, 340 Sahlins, Maurice 338 Sakhalin Island 278 Salisbury, Rollin 327 San Diego 475, 478; story maps of 490–1; vacant lots and healthy food system 488–90 Sanjek, R. 58, 126 San Jose Heinlenville Project 275–6 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 28 Santos, Ricardo Ventura 148 Sapir, Edward 389 Satsumon 278 Sauer, Carl 326, 329–30, 336 Saussure, Ferdinand de 367 scale in anthropology 20 Scham, Sandra 271 Schatz, E. 440, 442, 445 schema theory 389–90 schematic art 364 Scheper-Hughes, Nancy 65–66, 68, 397, 466 Schneider, David 12, 161, 163 Schofield, J. 108, 109, 114 science: and anthropology 18, 305–17; cultural histories of 311–13; limitations of 312–14 scientific investigation 148, 150–1 scientific knowledge: characteristics of 310; producing 310–12 scientific orientation to psychological anthropology 384 scientific racism 9 Scott, James C. 442–3, 462 Scott, Joan 62

526

Index scriptible and lisible text 129, 139 sea levels rising 427 secularism 184, 185, 192 self: awareness and culture 387–8; double 220; presentation on the Internet 93; relationship with others 13–14; various ways of perceiving 384–5 semiotic ideologies 193 semiotics 367–9; Walbiri 369–71 Seremetakis, Nadia 65 sexual identity: and gender 205–6; linked with language 13 sexuality 228–9; and language 203–5 Shackel, Paul A. 274 Shanks, M. 110 Shapin, Stephen 66 shareholder value impacting corporations 250 Sharer, Robert 264 shariah principles 256–7 Shari`a law 238, 240 Sharma, A. 406 Sharp, Richard R. 148 Shaw, Carolyn Martin 43 Sheldon, W. H. 146 Shever, Elana 169 Shipton, P. 506 Shore, C. 410 signification of signs 367–8 signs: being a concept 367; being arbitrary 367; signification of 367–8 Sikhs, violence against 37 Sil, R. 442 Silliman, Stephen 273 Silverman, Helaine 272, 276 Silverman, Sydel 58 Singer, André 133 Singer, Merrill 19–20, 297 Singerman, D. 444 Singh, Supriya 407 singularity 194 “the singularity,” 183, 184–5 Sisters in Law (film) 134 situated knowledges 32 Slater, Don 95, 97 Slobodkin, Lawrence 333 Slocum, Rachel 488 smallholding 87 Smith, Adam 248 Smith, Claire 278 Smith, Linda Tuhiwai 35 Smith, Neil 328 Snow, C. P. 308 Snyder, J. 443 social anthropology 109 social archaeology 266–7 social conditions and health disparities 15 social conflict 8

social connectedness of homeless people 108, 112, 118 social context of biocultural research 287 social grounds for kinship 162 social identity: definition 202–3; and language 201–17 social media 152 social movements 20–21, 456–7, 460–70; definition 460; in Latin America 47; and participant observation 463–9 social scientific orientation to psychological anthropology 384 social suffering 64 social theory: in anthropology 30–31; and popular culture 149–51 social workers 404 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 111, 269, 273 socio-genealogical positioning (SGP) 79, 80–81 sociology and anthropology 18 Soffer, Olga 276 Somalia 431 somatic flexibility 333 somatic reductionism 290 somatypes theory 146 Song of Lavino (p’Bitek) 45 Soros, George 245 South Asia and flooding risk 425–6 South Asian caste 220, 221, 226–8 Southeast Asia and Islamic ethics in the workplace 254–6 South theory 36–40; counter-evolving to the North 39 Soysal,Y. N. 497 space impacting developing healthy food system 488–90 spatial narratives 490–1 Spector, Janet 276 spiritual reformers 254–6 Spiro, Melford 394–5 Sprague, Roderick 273 state: and the citizen 443–4, 495–6; and gender relations 37 stereotypes: power of knowledge 222; power of seeing 222–3; power of words 223–9 Stern, R. E. 464 Steward, Julian 330 stewardship communities 269 Stewart, Anna 7–8 Stokes Croft 107, 114, 116 Stoler, Anne 340 Stoppani, Antonio 420 story maps 490–1 storytelling 33–34 strategic naturalizing in procreation 165 Strathern, Andrew 170 Strathern, Marilyn 17, 18, 164–5, 167, 374

527

Index structural functionalism 458 student-led learning 151 students of anthropology 7 “studying up” perspective 410 subjectivity: of the individual with art 364–5; in psychological anthropology 383 subjects 373–6; of economies 245–6; making objects who make subjects 370–3; and objects in the Renaissance 362–5 subordination and domination 220 Sudan: and Islamic finance 257; and political anthropology 238–41 suffering subject 68 sugar industry in Mauritius 76–77 Summers, David 363–4 Summit Textiles 73 Susser, Ida 86 Swartz, M. J. 458 Swedlund, Alan C. 150 symbolic consumption 155 symbolic deprivation 155 syncretism 191 syndemics 287 Syria 444

three dimensions represented in two with art 363–5 thrifty phenotype hypothesis 290 Tilley, C. 110 Tiv 235 Tobinitai 278 Torezani, Silvia 17 tourism: in India 411–14; in Mauritius 76 transformational adaptation 345 transitional adaptation 345 translation research 482 transnationalism 46 trauma from climate changes 430–1 trees and kinship 171 tribal art 359, 361 Tribal Panchsheel 405, 413 Tribe (television) 132–4 Trinidad and use of the Internet 97–98 Tsembaga 333 Tsing, Anna 62, 476, 481 Tuden, A. 458 'Turbo Island,' 116 Turnbull, Paul 277 Turner,Victor 235, 394, 458 Tylor, Edward 189, 305, 315 Tyson, Edward 311

tactics of intersubjectivity 204 Tambuzi, Robert 483–4 Taussig, Michael 224, 340 Tax, Sol 403 Taylor, Charles 498 teaching: anthropology 11–12, 144–56; experiental exploration 154–5; resources 155–6; using webbased technologies 152–4 Teaching Anthropology (journal) 156 techne 375–6 technologies of the self 222 techno-spiritualism 185 Tedlock, Barbara 59, 60 television and anthropology 131–5 Te Papa 138 testimony by participant observer 63 textile and garment industry in Mauritius 74–76 Thakkar Bapa 404 Thayer, Z. M. 290 theoretical moment 27–28 theory: defining 30–31; disembodied 32; embodied 33–34; and gender, race and other differences 31–33; gendering 32; prestige and peripheral zones of 29 things considered subjects and objects 373–6 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 30 Third World contributions to anthropology 10 Third World Debt Crisis 86 Thomas, Julian 112 Thompson, Charis 165, 166 Thompson, Robert Farris 372

Uganda 45 United Press International 426 United States: archaeology and community relationships in 264–79; and community archaeology 272–6; political and legal anthropology of 234–42 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) 236, 401 universities, reorganization of 21–2 untouchable in society 14, 226 Urla, Jacqueline 150 US Social Science Research Council 327–8 Van Vleet, Krista 166 Varenius, Bernhardus 324 Vayda, Peter 332 vector-borne diseases 428–9 Verdery, Katherine 328 Vickers, Adrian 378 Viking settlements in Greenland 420 Vincent, Joan 45, 457, 460 Vinge,Verner 184 violence: and neoliberalization 46–47; and ordinary life 37–38; political 443; against Sikhs 37; and the state in India 65; witness of by Indian women 65; against women 36, 37 virtual witnessing 66–67 virtuous citizenship 21, 500–3 visibility and discrimination 226 Visual Culture 361 Viveiros de Castro, E. B. 166

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Index von Humboldt, Alexander 325 Vrasti, W. 440–1 vulnerable observer 64, 66 vulnerable research participants 237–8 Wad al-Bashir camp 240–1 Waddington, Conrad 290 Wade, Peter 146 Wagner, R. 166, 168 Walbiri people 369–71, 376 Walker, J. 347 Walsh, K. C. 444 Waltz, K. N. 444 war and political anthropology 443–4 Ward, Martha 428 Wardle, H. 126 war orphans 33 Washburn, Sherwood 309 water and flooding 423–4 water-borne infectious diseases 429 water stress 432 Watkins, Joe 12–13, 277 Watson, Robert 422 Watt-Cloutier, Sheilah 418 Watts, Michael 18 Wax, Rosalie 59 web-based technologies in teaching 152–4 Weber, Max 109, 246–7 Weber, Samuel 192 Wedeen, L. 441, 444 Weibel, P. 137 Weismantel, Mary 34–35 Weiss, Harvey 420 Welch, Jessica 265 welfare capitalism 250 Wellcome Collection 138–9 Wenner-Gren Foundation 285, 328 Werbner, Pnina 496, 497, 498, 499, 504, 507 Werbner, Richard 497 Wesch, Michael 103 West Nile virus infection 429 Weston, Kath 163, 166 Wheatley, Paul 329 Wheeler, E. 225 Whitaker, Mark 34, 492 White, Ben 340 White, Geoffrey M. 385 White, Gilbert 331 whiteness as a race 225 'Whose Story?' project 112 Wieviorka, A. 62 Wikan, Unni 396 Wilden, A. 334 Wilkinson, R. 289

Williams, Leon 486 Williams, Raymond 62 Wilson, Ruth Gilmore 489 Wisner, Ben 341 Wissler, Clark 330 witchcraft 306 witnessing 62–63; by anthropologists 111–14; empathic 64; experience of 64–66; noble 67, 68; of violence by Indian women 65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 37, 387 Wolcott, H. F. 482 Wolf, Eric 5, 331, 338, 346, 419 womanly-hearted anthropology 65 women: and anthropology 10; discourse associated as beneath male discourse 32; excluded as citizens 502; of Kibuyu 43; social action in Kumasi 41–42; subjugated by men 228; and violence against them 36, 37; vulnerable in internally displaced persons camps 240–1; witnessing death 65 Women Writing Culture 10 Wongittilin, Jerry 422 World Anthropologies Network (WAN) 11, 29 world anthropology 4, 6, 10–11 World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) 406 World Health Organization (WHO) 429 World of Warcraft 96 World Trade Organization (WTO) 73, 80 World Wildlife Fund 425 Worsley, Peter 84, 87 Wright, Sewall 306, 410 writing anthropology 126–30 Writing Culture 10 Yamashita, Shinji 4 Yanagisako, Sylvia 173, 174 yangwa tree 171 Yeatts, Michael 268 Yekuana and inscription 372 Yemen 444 York (England) 116 York Homeless Heritage 116 Yoruba and inscription 372 Young, Colin 134 Zakri, A. 422 Zapatista uprising 466–7 Zapotec 234 Zimmerman, Larry 265 zones of cultural friction 62 Zotero 153 Zumbagua’s indigenous theory 34–35 Zuni and archaeological communities 268

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