Is the discipline that brought us knowledge of the kula ring and the mother’s brother slated for extinction? Has the labor of Morgan and Malinowski been for nought?1Stanley Barrett
Whenever the end of anthropology has been proclaimed from within there has been a renewal of both external interest and internal theoretical energy. Michael Herzfeld2
Anthropology has been an apocalyptic academic field ever since Tylor’s revelation that culture is a complex whole cemented by the psychic unity of humanity. Like its older sibling, sociology, it evolved to make sense of what it means to be human without a literal Adam and Eve as parents.3 But the subject matter of all human diversity, up from the apes in a global sense, had a time-sensitive half-life from the very start. Those early social evolutionists who saw in “primitive cultures” a comparative resource for uncovering the past were well aware that progress would eventually deprive them of their workshop. Tylor and Boas urged their students to study exotic others before they melded into the rapidly expanding modernity of the West. Malinowski’s ground-defining fieldwork among the Trobrianders was also the start of a salvage operation. Even when new tribes were found, the missionaries usually got there first, as Margaret Mead discovered for her own coming of age in Samoa. Over a century ago, when Alfred Kroeber greeted the last native Yahi, a man whose name he would never know, in the new Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley, museums had already become the mausoleums of primitive humanity.4
Critics of anthropology at times characterize the discipline as suffering from an “anthropological imperialism that would encase cultures in a permafrost.”5 In this sense the ethnographer becomes both the antithesis of the missionary, in not wanting to convert the native, and at the same time an academically inclined Luddite unwilling to civilize the native with the benefits of modernity. There is a misperception here about the nature of cultural change. No anthropologist has ever studied a totally isolated “primitive,” if such were to be found in the last century or so. Malinowski recognized this early on, noting “Just now, when the methods and aims of scientific field ethnology have taken shape, when men fully trained for the work have begun to travel into savage countries and study their inhabitants – these die away under our very eyes.”6 All ethnography in the modern sense has been salvage work. Ethnographers have often been concerned about protecting the people they study from the dangers imposed from without, but the emphasis has almost always been on promoting self-determination rather than creating an isolated human zoo.
Although anthropology has invariably been associated with the study of “primitive” peoples, the broader focus has always been on working out the details of all human diversity, past and present. Robert Lowie’s sentiment, presenting “culture” to the public in 1917, noted that ethnology was concerned with “cruder cultures of peoples” for practical reasons. But he then argued that such an exclusive focus was “illogical and artificial,” since the anthropologist “might examine and describe the usages of modern America as well as those of the Hopi Indians.”7 And ethnographers did begin to study Western societies in earnest, including pioneers such as Nora Zeale Hurston, who studied with Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia in the 1920s. Her work on African Americans in the South and in the Caribbean has at times been styled as “folklore,” but it was based on participant observation and the same training that her fellow student Margaret Mead had received. Before the end of the second World War American anthropologists received Ph.D.s for ethnographic study at home of rural farmers, New Deal projects, Jewish intermarriage and community studies in America.8
The earliest generation of anthropologists, plagued by a dominant Western worldview which was ethnocentric and still imperially inclined, were products of their time. Some thought of the others they studied as inferior; others saw the people they met in the field as equals. Some documented customs in their ethnographies that otherwise would have been lost forever; others floundered in trying to understand the other. Through it all, the major figures in the evolution of the contemporary field of anthropology contributed to debunking the insidious notion of racism, promoting the need to understand the “native point of view,” and championing the human rights and dignity of the people studied, female as well as male. Far from merely fixing cultures as discrete units, anthropologists engaged in cultural critique of the ethnocentrism that Western societies perpetuated; this ongoing engagement with the center as well as the periphery has come full force in the last three decades.9 Sociologist Anthony Giddens suggests that anthropology “does have a past which has to some degree to be lived down, but that past contains ideas that either remain as important as they ever were, or have actually become more significant today.”10
A recent presentation of anthropological analysis of the race issue is the “Race: Are We So Different?” multi-media project of the American Anthropological Association with a website, traveling exhibit and book.11 This project provides a clearly written rebuttal to the racism that continues to influence thought and behavior in American society. For over a century anthropologists, stimulated in large part by the work of Franz Boas, have debunked the claim that “race” has a meaningful biological basis and demonstrated through ethnographic and biological research that it is a invented concept. As Yoland T. Moses explains, “Anthropology’s traditional focus on race, its multidisciplinary expertise, and its evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives all position it as the appropriate discipline for replacing myth and folk beliefs about race with data and facts.”12 For example, the linguist Jane Hill explores the “everyday language of White racism” against Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans in both its overt supremicist slurs and covert racist discourse. Using specific comments in films, by politicians, pundits and ordinary people, Hill shows how “linguistic ideologies – ideas about language itself that are shaped by political and economic interests –” promote the creation and circulation of negtive stereotypes in everyday speech.13
The word “primitive” which figured in the titles of major anthropological texts from Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) up until Robert Redfield’s The Primitive World and its Transformation (1953) no longer defines the subject of anthropological interest. While the public still views anthropologists as explorers of the exotic other, ethnography is being done everywhere. As Marcus and Fischer noted in 1986, “Fears that the subject of anthropology, the exotic other, is disappearing have proved groundless: distinctive cultural variation is where you find it, and is often more important to document at home than abroad.”14 In studying their own cultures, anthropologists rub shoulders with sociologists; both share ethnographic methods. Talal Asad suggests that anthropology is more than a method.15 Nevertheless, method is essential and the debate over the ways in which anthropologists collect and interpret data is vital to the growth of the field. While original ethnographic fieldwork can never be duplicated exactly, a case in point being the controversy over Samoan views of casual sex after Derek Freeman’s critique of Margaret Mead, this hardly puts ethnography on the same level as the search for Plato’s Atlantis, ufo sightings or an American astronaut mooning over Noah’s ark in Turkey.
Being more than a method does not mean that method is not needed or that there is only one kind of method. In my field research on Yemeni water rights, I combined a variety of methods. My training in archaeology and environmental science provided a basis for examining the ecology of local water use in a springfed irrigation system; my conversations with Yemeni farmers and scholars yielded access to local values in customary law and mediation of disputes over water use; my observation of irrigation activities over an entire year created the opportunity to discuss what I saw with farmers as they worked; my course work in Arabic historiography played out in analysis of Yemeni legal and agricultural texts regarding water rights. As a result I was able to provide a detailed analysis of this important mode of production and at the same time develop a conceptual framework for the study of water allocation in ecological anthropology.16 My field research enabled me to challenge a simplistic diffusionist model by a geographer who argued that a distinct form of water allocation had been brought directly by Yemenis to Spain during the Arab conquest.17 Methods matter.
Ethnography can also be brought to bear on ethnocentric assumptions that have guided American foreign policy. A case in point would be the formulation by Samuel Huntington of a “clash of civilizations” in the post Cold War period. Resurrecting the notion of “civilization” in a way that even Arnold Toynbee would find problematic, Huntington divided the world into seven current civilizations: Western, Latin American, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu and Slavic-Orthodox.18 In a sense Huntington simply echoes the separation of the West from the Rest, since secular Western civilization is clearly the dominant system in his mind. He also draws on the blatantly Eurocentric prejudice that peoples in Africa and various parts of South Asia are not properly “civilized” and do not warrant entry into his system. Among the critics, several anthropologists weighed in.19 “Remarkably,” writes Hugh Gusterson, “Samuel Huntington has written a three-hundred-page heavily footnoted book about all the cultural civilizations of the world without citing any foreign language sources and with scarcely any reference to the anthropologists who study them for a living.”20 Gusterson takes Huntington to task for committing seven deadly sins, one of which is running with an antiquated view of cultures as distinct entities that anthropologists have long since rejected.
Another anthropologist, Keith Brown, invites Samuel Huntington to meet the Nuer, noting that his facile understanding of the dynamics of conflict and conflict mediation has less to offer than the classic ethnographic study by Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer.21 Here is an example where Huntington’s misuse of a retired use of the culture concept among anthropologists is corrected, not just by the logical inconsistencies that almost any scholar might see, but by refutation based on the findings of ethnographic fieldwork. As Brown observes from his own fieldwork in Macedonia, both anthropologists and some of the individuals he has studied present culture as “a work in progress yielding ground to human agency and will,” rather than as fixed categories for political gamesmanship.22 It is precisely an understanding of the complexity of cultural categories informed by fieldwork that allows anthropologists to contribute a critique that arm-chair scholars can not.
Colonialism, Neocolonialism and Neoliberalism are pressing issues that anthropologists have taken to task, including the negative influence on research, for several decades. Sherry Ortner refers to this as a turn to “dark anthropology,” in which “theories emphasizing exploitation, inequality, and the workings of power, have come to dominate the field theoretically.”23 The ethnographic trope of “being there” can no longer be seen as locating in a tabula rasa; no “field” is an island. It is not just the missionary who drags his or her cultural baggage into the field, but the global spread of economic and political systems that trap, denigrate and at times punish people being studied. The light that anthropologists can bring to bear on the dark shadows of Neoliberalism is resistance through critique, a cultural critique that begins at home.24
My own career after fieldwork began as a social scientist engaged as a development consultant. I returned to Yemen more than a dozen times on a variety of projects, as well as applied work in Egypt, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. This type of non-academic work has generally been called “Applied Anthropology,” and often considered of lesser value than supposedly “pure” research. In my case it was initially a fall-back for not starting out as a college professor, but for a decade I had an opportunity not only to contribute to projects with anthropological insights, but also could engage in further research. I am under no illusion that my effort made each project a success, but I do believe I was able to mitigate misperceptions and create awareness of local concerns with the economists, engineers and environmental scientists I worked with. The knowledge I gained from my fieldwork and the ability to work in Yemeni dialect facilitated my interaction with colleagues who often had no experience in the country.
The project I am most proud of was one I designed for the Yemen Arab Republic’s Plant Protection Unit on Integrated Pest Management.25 Agriculture has long been the major mode of production in Yemen, with its fertile highland terraces and coastal flood zones. When development aid for agriculture poured in during the 1970s and 1980s, a number of new crops were introduced along with chemical pesticides that were dangerous to health. Few Yemenis knew these dangers and they were unaware of how to properly apply pesticides. Having lived with farmers who dealt with pest and diseases through traditional means, I knew that some of these methods were more viable than relying on expensive, imported items. I assembled a team of a botanist, ecologist, entomologist and historian, all of whom were Yemeni. We traveled to three specific ecological zones, interviewing farmers and collecting relevant scientific data. In one case we talked to a coastal farmer who was applying a chemical pesticide to combat the date palm moths in his date palms. He was not wearing any protective gear. He noted that in the past he would take a trip into the mountains and gather some black ants, bring them back and set them up in the palm trees. This was a practice documented in a Yemeni agriculture treatise from the 14th century and a prime example of successful integrated pest control using a harmless and indigenous species.
Anthropologists have been practicing outside academe for at least half a century in international development organizations, the World Bank, the State Department of the United States, state governments and private businesses.26 To argue, as Edward Said once did, that such work is on the wrong side of the colonial divide, is disingenuous even if due to ignorance. Anthropologists also practice as activists and advocates, working with indigenous people to help them protect their rights, engaging in legal cases, raising awareness of victims and acting out of concern for people they interact with in their research. An example of this kind of “engaged anthropology” is the work of Stuart Kirsch who first conducted ethnographic research in Papua New Guinea in the 1980s. Although his focus was on ritual, magic and sorcery, he found that one of the major local concerns was over pollution from a large copper and gold mine in the region. He later participated in legal cases to protect the local environment, as well as working with refugees. Such work is not only a contribution to the local community, but, as Kirsch argues, such engagement is “where the rubber meets the road, providing opportunities to develop, test, and refine anthropological understandings of the real world.”27
I find it absurd that any serious assessment of the history of debate over culture concepts, the documentation of diverse ways of life, the speaking out against troubling ethnocentric, racist and sexual stereotypes and the goal of understanding humanity in a holistic sense would lead to a death wish for anthropology. Anthropology, as it has evolved for the last century, did not invent colonialism, nor have outdated views about human origins, so-called “racial” characteristics and blatant ethnocentrism by earlier scholars been perpetuated in the field. As practiced in the United States, the field has expanded into a seemingly endless number of subsections with the inevitable result that no single anthropologist can claim expertise across the range. The result may seem like a “tattered umbrella,” in Johannes Fabian’s left-handed metaphor, but that umbrella serves an important function in the current global political and economic context.28 Despite the naysayers, the vitality of the research results of several thousand trained anthropologists over the past century shows that rumors of an academic death rattle are greatly exaggerated.
1 Modern or Postmodern?
In a sense, anthropology has lost its glamor and gone into the wings from where it tries to retrieve power vicariously through conjuring with the texts and names which are at center stage. Michael Jackson29
Literary anthropologists’ demands for the repudiation of science, and for its replacement with a thick description innocent of validation, means that they hold a doctrine that allows them to know next to nothing. S. P. Reyna30
The anthropology I am concerned with is the “modern” variety inaugurated by Tylor and Boas, not the prehistoric musings of “Enlightenment” social philosophers that clearly influenced the birth of the formal discipline at the end of the 19th century. There is no birth certificate for the birth of modernity as a distinct period in human history. Its conceptual genealogy can be traced to the advance of reason in the Enlightenment, the commercial windfall of industrial capitalism, the rise of modern science, the 19th century belief in progress and the emergence of academic disciplines to define such a period. We know we are modern because we drive cars, eat fast food and connect to the Internet. But when were we not yet modern? Were we modern in the 19th century, when Thomas Edison invented both the phonograph and the electric light? In 1903 Picasso was defining modern art just as the Wright Brothers took off in an airplane at Kitty Hawk and Henry Ford formed the Ford Motor Company; Stravinsky did not produce his Rite of Spring until a decade later. Who decides when “modern” is transformed into “modernism” and “modernity”? Or is it the case, as Bruno Latour asks, that we have never been “modern.”31
One problem with “modernity” is reifying the idea as a period of time rather than, as Marshall Berman argues, “a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world.”32 Modernity is politicized through and through, but for Berman it is modern capitalism, not modern art or culture, that marks life as a “maelstrom.”33 The corruptive power of politics becomes the bane of academic critique of the modern world. As Talal Asad argues, “The important question, therefore, is not to determine why the idea of ‘modernity’ (or ‘the West’) is a misdescription, but why it has become hegemonic as a political goal, what practical consequences follow from that hegemony, and what social conditions maintain it.”34 This is where the best anthropological analysis has gone in recent years. The cultural repercussions of neoliberal policies have become the focus of many recent ethnographies.35
It is important to distinguish modernity as a set of possibilities ushered in by the Western intellectual menagerie of rationalist thought, science and technology from what James C. Scott (1998:4) labels “high modernism,” an ideology “that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology” but that was “uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.”36 It is understandable that reputable scholars, like philosopher Herbert Spencer, at the turn of the 20th century could envision a better world with the aid of science and education. But two major world wars and many minor ones, brutal authoritarian regimes, religious intolerance, economic disparity and endemic poverty have dashed any kind of utopian vision. Humans, being diverse and malleable creatures, are not robots to be be progressively programmed. It is precisely this diversity and flexibility in defining cultural norms that have been the aims of anthropological study over the course of the so-called modern era.
If there is one point that I think anyone could agree with, it is that modernity is an ephemeral concept. It is a way of separating something we want to refer to as the past from the seemingly immobile present, which in fact is always evolving, continually changing. One can talk about modern science, modern art, modern technology or just about anything that has a recent history that we in the present feel an affinity with. It does not help to over-philosophize the issue, recasting the obvious in a new set of jargon. A case in point is the following attempt by Paul Rabinow to replace “modern” with “contemporary”: “The contemporary is a moving ratio of modernity, moving through the recent past and near future in a (nonlinear) space that gauges modernity as an ethos already becoming historical.”37 Ratios do not move; ethos is an imaginary with a long history in the discipline. The bottom line is that the notion of “modern” or “contemporary” is inevitably a very Western way of looking at the world. From an anthropological perspective this is a problematic viewpoint, since it implies that a large number of people and cultures either do not belong to this modernity or that they must be helpless victims of it.
The idea of modernity is always going to be problematic when approached in the singular. “There are, in short, many modernities,” argue Jean and John Comaroff. “Nor should this surprise us.”38 The multiple claims across academic disciplines and in the public media as to what constitutes modernity cannot be reduced to a singular set of agreed upon traits. The term evolved in a Eurocentric mode under a capitalist umbrella and fueled by a rationalized Christian missionizing mantra of civilized superiority. Whatever a particular perspective of modernity entails, it has a past that makes it possible and a future that will necessarily unsettle it. Even if one limits modernity to a certain Eurocentric project, what was seen as modern in the center of empire was never the same in the periphery. Nor was the center immune from those who were assumed not be modern, or at least not modern enough.
Not having a precise date of birth makes it difficult to predict the longevity of our present perceived modernity. Those who claim we became postmodern by the 1970s refer to a critical juncture when the metanarratives justifying capitalism and socialism, the bitter post-war standoff of the nuclear age Cold War, were no longer seen as viable. Civil Rights for African Americans, women’s equal rights and Native American rights had been simmering throughout the century but had finally made their mark during the 1960s. The postmodern condition was a rejection of the problems that modernity had not solved but without a new metanarrative to carry life on.39 Terry Eagleton, for example, laments that the postmodernized field of cultural studies has shown a far greater interest in sex than in socialism.40 Radical rhetoric does not necessarily result in revolutionary change. If modernity is a “project,” as Asad suggests, then the Borg-like reach of neoliberal capitalism, the incessant flare up of civil strife and warfare, the sectarian violence, the environmental devastation and the continuing political dominance of “Western” nation states can hardly be “postmodern.” One could say the world is experiencing a neo-modern effect, like neo-colonialism to formal colonialism, but the “neo” must itself be perpetually “neo-nized,” giving way in the future to yet another shift in the power dynamics of a global population now measured in the billions.
If we are already postmodern, then what comes next? A Luddite conviction that this is the end of history is ludicrous, unless a real apocalypse sends life back to the stage of bacteria.
Our terminological impasse is neither about a beginning nor an end, but the middle that has become an ephemeral modern. The three age system that once placed a medieval mentality between the ancients and the Renaissance has been modernized to become a default pre-modern before the all-important-to-us modernity that is overcome by a postmodern condition of civilizational doubt. To the extent pre-modern has replaced prehistoric, the shift has only been from a 19th century Eurocentric worldview to a post 20th century Euro-Amerocentric one. Modernity as a project, one that never stands still, can only end with the end of our species, since modernity is simply the name we give the present, no matter what we make of the past or fear about the future.41 We continue to be modern because we can never escape the present, but we have trapped our thinking into posting new jargon that ends up making us ever more modern. To speak of the postmodern is often little more than a dislike for what has happened in the past, suffering at the end of the last century from a secular apocalyptic “millenarian malaise.”42
One rhetorical sidestep of the periodization dilemma is calling the postmodern a “condition” rather than a period, as though it can be detached intellectually from the time in which it was invented. But if this condition is heralded by the collapse of all previous metanarratives, is not the narrative of such a condition in itself yet another metanarrative? If some critical theorists have not met a metanarrative they can believe in, if Enlightenment rationalism and positivist science are to be jettisoned, then the resulting anarchy becomes a new metanarrative. The problem with such theorizing is that the reality that narratives seek to understand is not dependent on any particular point of view. Nature defies human imagination of the supernatural without a need for vindication by Lyell’s uniformitarianism. Species evolve and adapt or die out, despite the epistemological jousting over what is really real.
The perennial question that haunts the discipline is not just if there will be an end to its subject matter, but to the theory and methods that have been defined as anthropological. John Comaroff’s provocative title of “The End of Anthropology, Again” in a 2010 American Anthropologist article was followed in 2011 by an edited volume reframing yet again The End of Anthropology?43 There seems to be no end in sight of ending scenarios. These endings span both modernity, when the four fields of anthropology blossomed in North America, and what some call postmodernity, a critical panopti-iconoclasm that, as Signe Howell suggests, entered as a “fifth column within our own ranks” that “knocked away the foundations from beneath the discipline” in their critique of ethnographic practice as a colonial handmaiden.44 Robin Fox has dismissed the postmodern “Lit Critters” as lazy minds only interested in the mere voicing of their own opinions, claiming that “Only Kafka or Lewis Carroll could do it justice.”45 Fox’s gibes aside, there is nothing inherently lazy about scholars in any discipline; anthropologists can be as lazy in their thinking as anyone else. One might retort in a poetic joust to Fox: “and has thou slain the Jabberwock?”
Those who aggrandize a variety of approaches as “postmodern” can be as guilty of creating a polemicized straw text as those who suggest positivism and Orientalism are hermeneutically sealed discourses with obvious boundaries. The variety of views that are pressed into the bloated rubric of postmodernism or postcolonialism are not, in themselves, easily dismissed, nor should they be.46 Science and education have not eradicated bigotry and ignorance, as the optimistic philosopher-sociologist Herbert Spencer once prophesied. The world as we know it today still suffers from the colonization of new worlds where native populations are killed off, die off or have little choice but to assimilate while remaining inferior. Sexism and gender discrimination are not simply objects of anthropological discourse, but endemic in the cultural baggage even ethnographers (male in particular) bring to the field as well as to professional meetings. Capitalism, through the neoliberal power structure which feeds off it, aids and abets the age-old injustice of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Just-so alibis for the ongoing War on Terror do not alleviate the conditions that lead people to terrorize in the face of being terrorized.
Anthropologists have hardly dropped the ball in speaking the truths learned from ethnography and borrowed from sibling disciplines back to the power brokers and the consumptive media which support them. Texts like Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines, Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back and The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It have come a long way from Malinowski’s description of canoe building in the Trobriands.47 Volumes such as Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations indicate that anthropology is not stuck on the exotic.48 This kind of engaged, public anthropology demonstrates that “in spite of obstacles and opponents, anthropology still matters.”49 As noted in the “Future anthropologies manifesto,” there is much space for an ethnographically-informed anthropology to grow in the future: “Anthropology of the future is accretive. It builds on traditions, reflects on pasts.”50
The topics covered in Catherine Besteman and High Gusterson’s edited volume The Insecure American: How We Got Here and What We Should Do About It speak a number of “truths” to power in contemporary America. The contributors draw on ethnographic experience to analyze social problems ranging from neocon warmaking and Walmart economics to gated communities and homeless drug addicts. Brett Williams, an anthropologist who studies poverty in the nation’s capital, documents the predatory lending of pawnshops, harassment of debt collectors and health impacts of endemic poverty. “Washington, D.C., has the highest rate of infant mortality and low birth-weight babies in the nation, but it shares with other American cities the horrific distinction of infant morality rates and low-birth-weights babies rivaling the poorest countries of the world,” she writes, documenting the chilling statistics with stories of individuals living in public housing.51 This activist anthropology proves that the field is neither locked away in an ivory tower, nor trapped in an unending circular hermeneutic of texts. Anthropologists are even wooed by the military and security agencies, as problematic as that can be.52
One of the strengths of contemporary activist anthropology is bringing the ordinary to light. Consider the ethnographic work of Didier Fassin, a French anthropologist who published a study of police behavior in the troubled suburbs of Paris. His research began after a major riot in October, 2005 over the accidental deaths of two youths. Although events like this were the focus of the news, Fassin “observed the everyday activity of the patrols, the relationships developed by the officers with the population, the differentiation of their attitudes according to the public, the spiral that sometimes ended in violent acts and near riots.”53 Commenting on Fassin’s book, a newspaper journalist remarked how it allowed him to see police activities in the suburbs “in a completely different light.”54 The value of the ethnographic analysis was the depiction of everyday life, the routine that was often tedious, the mundane reality that journalists rarely saw beyond explosive events. As Fassin’s work illustrates for contemporary social issues, ethnography matters.
Only through ethnography can one gain an on-the-ground understanding of what Michael Herzfeld calls “cultural intimacy.” Drawing on his fieldwork experience in Greece, Italy and Thailand, Herzfeld shows how intimate details of ordinary life, including those which are self-disparaging and self-stereotypes, provide a balance to the cultural identity created and promoted by the nation state. The use of ethnographic data, argues Herzfeld, works against a “static, elitist, and conflationary reading” of nationalism that fails to analyze “how nationalism is understood (and sometimes recast) by living social actors.”55 In the case of Greece, for example, the nation has been imagined metaphorically as “a single, unified patriline” that links the cultural concept of what defines character and values with genetic nature.56 Thus the nation is conflated with ethnicity, ignoring the non-comformist aspects of everyday discourse. By engaging with social actors and listening to what they say, as opposed to what the political structure assumes about them, the anthropologist contributes to the ongoing debate over what it means to live in a modern nation state.
The formal discipline of anthropology has an obvious beginning, no matter what figure is cited as a founder, but the interest in thinking about who we are as human beings is what makes us sapiens. Until we evolve into a new species or a cyborg, it is doubtful there will be an end to what is subsumed under the conceptual umbrella called culture. As John Comaroff responded belatedly to a certain Mrs. Evans some four decades after his first job interview in South Wales, anthropology “is not about to die. Nor is it in ‘suspension.’ It is very much producing new kinds of knowledge, new theory work, new empirical horizons, new arguments.”57 This view is shared by Talal Asad, who notes that anthropology “is not one that imposes absolute boundaries, beyond which one can never go or which one can never question.”58 Joan Vincent states that “ethnography is critically important as the one vehicle above all others through which anthropologists represent and transform theory.”59 Particular theories rise and fall, at times to rise again. No one is suggesting a return to the social evolutionism of Lewis Henry Morgan, the historical particularism of Franz Boas, the shreds-and-patches patterns of Ruth Benedict, the structural functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown, the energy harness of Leslie White, the raw structuralist data and cooked interpretations of Claude Lévi-Strauss, or any of the theoretical approaches that dot, like ghosts, the landscape of anthropologies past. It is our methodological relativism, the “indiscipline” of our maligned discipline, that bodes well for the future of anthropology as one among the many academic fields of knowledge. As Michael Fischer reminds us, “It is a form of knowledge, ever evolving, urgently needed in today’s world.”60
2 Back to the Tool Box
Culture is certainly a working tool, good only until we invent something better and more precise, but is there any scientific concept that is different in this regard? And should we really throw out culture without having anything better61Christoph Brumann
The concept of culture has become over-extended, flabby, over-weight. It needs not replacement, nor more puffery, but some good, healthy, theoretical and empirical exercise. Roy D’Andrade62
If “culture” is to be written off the ethnographic charts, and field research replaced by story telling, what will fill its place? Scholarly writing, like nature, abhors a vacuum. As Gregory Starrett warns, “Were we to choose another concept to be central to our field, we would eventually complain that it, too, was impossibly muddled, the result of our using the concept as a focus for working through manifold concerns.”63 In her desire to write against culture, Lila Abu-Lughod borrows the Foucauldian notion of discourse, reducing what people do to a latent substructure visualized through institutions and writing. As applied by Edward Said to the generalized genre of Orientalism, discourse becomes a binary power play of us vs. them played out through an imaginative geography of texts. Culture becomes all about power, which Marshall Sahlins reminds us “is the intellectual black hole into which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked.”64 In his critique of postmodern studies of the human/animal dichotomy, Gary Steiner isolates the fundamental problem with an overemphasis on the dimension of power: “Principles thus become reduced to nothing more than weapons in polemical struggles in which those in power seek to preserve their position of dominance and thwart the endeavor of the powerless to attain recognition and empowerment.”65 This is not to deny the reality of power politics but to challenge the reduction of humanity to one problematic dimension of culture.
Writing against culture is logically impossible; no matter what label is used or abused, there is a reality of behavior and circulation of ideas that concepts of culture are applied to represent. It is important to recognize that our concepts are instrumentalities and not finalities, discerning difference rather than becoming dogmatically doctrinaire. As expressed eloquently by Michael Jackson in a perceptive, pragmatic account of his field experience among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, “Together with tools, physical skills, and practical knowledge, they belong to a world whose horizons are open, the quotidian world in which we live, adjusting our needs to the needs of others, testing our ideas against the exigencies of life.”66 We conceptualize and we generalize in order to communicate, not to explain something away as unassailable dogma. With the proper amount of Weberian Verstehen, the use of concepts should never be Verboten. Neither should we engage in perpetual contestation of culture concepts, as Johannes Fabian suggests; this would amount to an end with no end and little insight in sight.67
Those who are determined to denigrate the work of anthropologists past constantly dredge up the specter of “cultural determinism,” as if Tylor, Boas and their students could not see beyond the particulars of individual cultural groups or else were too quick to super-organicize humanity. It is important to remember the revolution that Darwin started: humans are related to earlier species by degree and not by kind. Thus, there is little about human “culture” that transcends nature apart from the imaginative reasoning of our species. “Culture” as a concept does not explain “Culture” as the assumed reality we as humans share any more than the chemicals of the human organism explain what it means to be human. As Roy D’Andrade warns, “if we define culture in such a way that it consists of the behavior acquired and transmitted by a society, we then cannot properly use the idea of culture to explain this behavior.” 68 Humans, in the reality they share with the rest of observable nature, are a complex interplay of biological givens and potentials as these mature in a given social environment. Yet, to better situate ourselves in the diverse pan-human sense, conceptual tools like culture concepts come in as handy to social scientists as the first hand axes were to the early hominids. And like those hand axes, it is well to remember Kroeber’s reminder that “the concept of culture is two-edged,” tying some things together and separating others.69
Since anthropology covers the entire range of human behavior, past and present, it is not surprising that it has borrowed from other disciplines along the way. There is, of course, no consensus on how best to study what it means to be human. Paul Rabinow, who laments this situation, argues that one way to proceed into the future is to “adopt a metaposition that begins with a principled affirmation of the inevitable plurality of positions.”70 This is hardly a new idea, echoing the interdisciplinary nature of anthropology from the start. The problem is when he concludes that the “anthropological problem” “lies in the apparently unavoidable fact that anthropos is that being who suffers from too many logoi.” It is not clear who this abstract “anthropos” is apart from the object of philosophical speculation over which Hegel, Freud, Dewey Heidegger, Foucault and other intellectuals have speculated. Philosophy has played a critical role in interpreting the human condition, but it is precisely this kind of thinking from a Eurocentric perch that anthropologists should not emulate. My problem is not with Rabinow’s meditations on anthropos, which are at times quite insightful, but with the claim that his philosophical musings by European critics are anthropological. He ignores or deflates previous anthropological theory and minimizes the role of ethnography. This is certainly his right, but the fact that he has a degree in anthropology does not make his work anthropological in a meaningful way when it jettisons the lessons that can be learned through ethnographic fieldwork.
It is precisely because human society is so complex and the biological nature of us all so intertwined with cultural learning that we need to constantly refine our methods as social scientists rather then casually reject a scientific approach. Culture concepts are heuristic tools, not ends in themselves, rhetorical playthings nor sacred writ, and only part of the many ways we try to make sense of who we are. Because we humans have been writing for some five millennia, texts are an important part of who we are. But the human culture that has evolved over several million years transcends any set of words ever written down. The vast majority of people, even today, live outside what is written about them in texts. It is this quotidian dimension, the almost infinite variety of the ways people live, that anthropology and sociology seek to better understand by actually studying the myriad others in our diverse species. Until there is a better method for understanding others than through the contact and dialogue of actually “being there,” anthropology will have an important role to play in defining, redefining and refining useful culture concepts.71
It is hard to imagine why anyone would want to ignore the anthropological emphasis on the “native points of view,” the battle against crude biological determinism and racism or repeal reasoned cultural relativism in an age of increasingly globalized diversity.72 The business of anthropologists from the start has been to make sense of human behavior, recognizing that we differ by degree not kind from earlier primate species and that our intellectual abilities and range of social interaction should be studied as objectively as humanly possible. Fieldwork, the quintessential rite of passage, for the cultural anthropologist, allows for the collection of information and generation of conceptual tools to analyze that information in a vital way that no one sitting in a library or academic armchair could do in the same way. Fieldwork as a method is important for providing data not only to test theories but to correct them. Eric Wolf summed up this point well: “Fieldwork, however, never goes forward without theory: the theories of the time direct what the anthropologist looks for, but what is seen in the field may expose difficulties in those theories and lead to new formulations.”73 Our discipline, as a field, could not exist without the field we live and work in as ethnographers.
As a methodology, fieldwork provides a unique opportunity to test the theoretical jetties from which our academic research is launched. As Tobias Rees suggests, it can be “knowledge producing practice (a science) at the core of which is the field’s particular potential to lead astray; to profoundly derail the fieldwork scenarios one has laid out before one entered the field; to lead into yet uncharted, not thought through terrains of marvel and surprise; with the intellectual challenge to embark on an essentially uncertain journey, a journey in part defined by the goal of reporting back from ‘there’ the unforeseeable discoveries one has made, a goal that entails the challenge of finding adequate means of depicting the singularities one has become part of.”74 This does not mean that the theories which swirl through our heads are wrong or necessarily inadequate, but that models and concepts are worth refining and improving when there is sufficient reason. The long standing debate in anthropology over how to define culture demonstrates the importance of being immersed in diverse cultural contexts rather than simply buying into canonized social theories.
Being in the field is an open-ended endeavor, imperfect for coming away with a total understanding of what one observes. Empirical methods, which anthropologists share with sociologists and other social scientists, are never immune from producing error, exaggeration or misleading statistical validity. But interpreting the thick and thin of all this description is an important part of the process. The patterns and norms proposed to better understand behavior do not become dogma, no matter how badly taught in undergraduate anthropology courses. The key point is that the cumulative effect of the vast amount of ethnographic research now available stimulates our thinking about what it all means to be a diverse species with a blurred prehistory and an uncertain future. If I believed that there was only one viable culture concept in the academic toolbox, then I would fear for the future of an anthropology that has simply replaced the dictatorial smugness of theology or humanistic philosophy. We would be blind to the elephant in the room, if such a gentle beast is an apt metaphor for the kit of culture concepts, if we think the part we grab hold of for our own study stands for the whole.
A century and a quarter ago, the arch-prophet of impending modernity Friedrich Nietzsche announced what to him was obvious: God was dead. In this nihilistic view both the vengeful Jehovah and the triune remake of Western Christianity, Catholic and Protestant, had been reduced to church icons and literally trashed. The Anglican-shaped God that Darwin toyed with when writing On the Origin of Species had expired in this great scientist’s mind by the time his The Descent of Man was finalized. Now that humanity was known to be evolving, there appeared to be no need for the gods of the past. After all, as Marx had already noted and Durkheim seconded, man makes his own gods, not the other way around. “With the death of God,” argues Bryan Turner, “we are necessarily committed to perspectives, which we may regard as a form of value pluralism ruling out absolute ethical standards.”75 But the idea of God, of multiple gods, is far from dead in the reality of human thought and practice. To the extent our world today could be considered postmodern, the premodern and modern have hardly disappeared. Similarly, those who wish to write culture out of anthropological research or claim that the surviving culture concepts are near death’s door are due to be disappointed. The idea of culture may shed its skin with each perennial wave of critique, but the reality it is meant to understand will only die out if we misuse our cultural heritage to destroy the entire species.
Barrett (1984:211).
Herzfeld (2000:5).
Although sociology and anthropology evolved as distinct disciplines in the university, they share methods and theoretical approaches. There is room in the world of scholarship for both disciplines to continue. As Bernard (2002:3) explains, “In fact, the differences within anthropology and sociology with regard to methods are more important than the difference between those disciplines.”
The story of Kroeber’s ethnographic remake of Ishi is told in a widely read text by Theodora Kroeber (2002), originally published in 1961.
Harrison (2000:xxvii).
Malinowski (1922:xv).
Lowie (1917:6).
See Lewis (2014:11–12) for more details on these studies.
Speaking more of European than American scholars, Borneman and Hammoudi (2009:3) write that “research on themes and topics such as power, politics, violence, resource use, production, and consumption, to cite only a few examples, has a long, uninterrupted history, exhibiting continuity as the same objects were reelaborated in light of changes brought about by processes of decolonization.”
Giddens (1995:275).
The website url is
Moses (2015:43).
Hill (2008:31). Among the examples provided is a detailed analysis of a controversial statement by then Senate majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi about Strom Thurmond’s presidential bid in 1948 as a staunch segregationist (Hill 2008:99–118).
Marcus and Fischer (1986:113).
Asad (2003:17). I disagree with Asad’s characterization of fieldwork as a “pseudoscientific notion.” For criticism of the textual turn of Asad, see Hammoudi (2009).
For a summary of my research see Varisco (1983).
The diffusion model had been presented by Thomas Glick (1970); my critique is provided in Varisco (1982:24–32).
Huntington (1993:26). The phrase “clash of civilizations” was borrowed from a 1990 article by Bernard Lewis in the Atlantic Monthly.
These include Brown (2005:43), Gusterson (2005), Hannerz (1997), Herzfeld (1997). This criticism of a reified civilization or culture had been given by anthropologists decades before Huntington proposed his clash thesis. Referring to a book on African cultures, the British social anthropologist Godfrey Lienhardt (1962:154) noted: “Misleading therefore are such expressions as the ‘clash of cultures’ or ‘cultural barriers’ when they disguise what are really strong divergences of political, economic, moral, and aesthetic views between different communities or sections of a community.”
Gusterson (2005:25).
Brown (2005:50).
Brown (2005:59).
Ortner (2016:65).
In only a few months into the presidency of Donald Trump, the American Ethnologist published a forum on both the 2016 Brexit referendum and Trump election. As the editors note, “detailed ethnographic examples in this Forum help us question, contradict, and expand” on the tensions and debates over both issues (Edwards, Haugerud, Parikh 2017:197).
Details on this project are provided in Varisco (1995). This was funded by the German development group gtz.
For an earlier history of applied anthropology, see Gwynn (2004). Ferraro and Andreatta (2017) offer an introduction to cultural anthropology with a focus on applied work. The reader by Podolefsky, Brown and Lacy (2012) provides articles on all aspects of applied or practicing anthropology.
Kirsch (2018:7).
Fabian (2012:440).
Jackson (1989:183).
Reyna (1994:576). Reyna compares the criticism in the Writing Culture authors to the bombast of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide.
Latour (1993).
Berman (1988:6). For Berman, this “implies an open and expansive way of understanding culture; very different from the curatorial approach that breaks up human activity into fragments and locks the fragments into separate cases, labeled by time, place, language, genre and academic discipline.”
Berman (1988:123, 345).
Asad (2003:13).
See, for example, the ethnographic studies of Comaroff and Comaroff (2011), Ferguson (2006), Hodgson (2011), Kelly (2008).
James C. Scott (1998:4). He notes (pp. 89–90): “At its center was a supreme self-confidence about continued linear progress, the development of scientific and technical knowledge, the expansion of production, the rational design of social order, the growing satisfaction of human needs, and, not least, an increasing control over nature (including human nature) commensurate with scientific understanding of natural laws.”
Rabinow (2007:2).
Comaroff and Comaroff (1993:xi).
The literature of postmodernism is prolific. The ur-texts include Jean-François Lyotard’s La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (1979), translated into English in 1984, and Fredrik Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). A bitter critique of the influence of postmodern criticism on anthropology was given by Gellner (1992), whose ideas are critically addressed by Turner (1994:15–18). See also Kuznar (2009:69–123) and Patterson (2001:152–156).
Eagleton (2016:34).
Soares and Osella (2009:S5) note, with good reason, that “Anthropologists have sidestepped hubristic debates about whether ‘modernity’ is single or multiple, when it started and possibly ended, and whether it has existed at all.”
This term is from Cerroni-Long (1999:1).
Jebens and Kohl (2011). This volume includes a reprint of Comaroff’s article. As Kirsten Hastrup (1995:10) notes, the angst of anthropology’s critics “bears witness to a temporary theoretical shortcoming of anthropology rather than its imminent death.”
Howell (2011:141).
Fox (1994:375). He goes on to say “When I hear the word postmodern I reach for my gun” (p. 377). My criticism is pacifist, knowing that in the long run the pen is mightier than sword or gun. Consider the pen of Marshall Sahlins (2002:48): “One of the more poignant aspects of the current postmodernist mood is the way it seems to lobotomize some of our best graduate students, to stifle their creativity for fear of making some interesting structural connection, some relationship between cultural practices, or a comparative generalization. The only safe essentialism left to them is that there is no order to culture.” Or that of Herb Lewis (2014:207): “Few of today’s practitioners of anthropology seem to realize what they have lost; on the contrary, many think of the earlier days of their discipline as the dark ages, marked by the sins of the fathers, and sometimes the mothers.” There are also some who are as extreme as those they criticize; a case in point is the indiscriminate bundling of just about every recent approach in American anthropology as the trifecta of “Postmodernism, Anti-Science and Anti-Reason” by Homayun Sidky (2003:243).
I acknowledge the point made by Brumann (1999:S23) and still valid that the influence of “postmodern” criticism on anthropology has been far less overseas than in the United States, although it appears to be making inroads in Southeast Asia. It is important to note that critique of postmodern rejection of anthropology as a science does not mean that issues of bias in representation are being ignored. Annette Weiner (1995:15) wisely notes: “To reject postmodernism out of hand as if all its positions are antithetical (or heretical) is to return to an anthropology of the past that only can alienate us from the major Western and non-Western discourses of this and future decades.”
MacClancy (2002), Besteman and Gusterson (2005) and Gusterson and Besteman (2010). Issues of anthropology’s flagship journals, especially the American Anthropologist, provide cutting-edge cultural critique.
Crate and Nutall (2016).
Benson (2014:386). Despite the danger of over moralizing as activists, Starn (2015:21) argues that many anthropologists “continue searching for their own ways to cultivate human kindness and social justice in their writing, teaching, and researching.”
Salazar, Pink, Irving, Sjöberg (2017:2). This ten-point manifesto was the result of a 2014 conference of the European Association of Social Anthropologists.
Williams (2010:232–233).
Ferguson (2012) analyzes the kind of cultural information the U.S. Department of Defense is interested in. For a review of the human terrain system involving anthropologists, see Forte (2011). Several anthropologists discuss drones, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, martyrdom and war as a global problem in Stroeken (2012).
Fassin (2013:622).
Fassin (2013:632).
Herzfeld (2005:11).
Herzfeld (2005:77).
Comaroff (2010: 534). In one of his last books, Geertz (2000: x) also believed that “The end is not nigh,” although with characteristic wit, he adds: “But aimlessness, a baffled wandering in search of direction and rationale, is.” Similarly, in an assessment of the influence of earlier writing against ethnography, Orin Starn (2015:10) concludes that ethnography “in short, is not an endangered genre” despite the proliferation of new forms of communication.
Asad (2006:277). A similar view is expressed by Bessire and Bond (2014:442): “Anthropology is exciting today because its prior ways of knowing – outmoded as they may be – are ontologically unruly: They loop back into the fabric of communities, institutions, and subjectivities in ways that wildly exceed our disciplinary debates.”
Vincent (1991:47).
Fischer (2007:43).
Brumann (1999:S21).
D’Andrade (1999:102).
Starrett (2008:255).
Sahlins (2002:20).
Steiner (2013:2).
Jackson (1989:1).
Fabian (2001:99).
D’Andrade (1999:86). He adds: “Culture is a good place to look to understand a good deal about what people are doing, but not such a good place to look to understand why people started to do something in the first place, or even why they continue to do it” (p. 95).
Kroeber (1952:118).
Rabinow (2003:6).
Commenting on the accumulated experience of ethnography, Michael Carrithers (1997:101) concludes that “the notion of culture is, in everyday practice if not in theory, a resounding and heroic success.”
For a defense of the value of “cultural relativism” for cultural critique, see Ulin (2007).
Wolf (2000:61–62).
Rees (2011:360).
Turner (1994:123).