What is Anthropology?
March 2011
March 2011
~ Contents ~
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
This Issue: Anthropology?
Ideas never materialize out of thin air, that's for sure. That's definitely the case with this site, which was little more than a Sunday afternoon plan that came together after reading some of the latest posts about the dissemination of anthropology by Daniel Lende and Greg Downey over at Neuroanthropology. But there are lots of others whose work and ideas have really made me think (and rethink) about how and why anthropologists create and disseminate media (since that's what anthropologists are, at least in part, producers of very specific kinds of media). This project derives from lots of other work out there, there's no doubt about that.
This includes the work of the folks who created the site Open Access Anthropology, the whole crew at Savage Minds, the always prolific Max Forte at Zero Anthropology, Keith Hart, Francine Barone, and everyone else involved with the Open Anthropology Cooperative, Colleen Morgan at Middle Savagery (whose creativity is seemingly boundless), Johan Normark at Archaeological Haecceities, and numerous others. All of these folks have been contributing to the creation of an online cadre of anthropologists that is, at least in my opinion, getting better by the day. There's a lot of great work out there, and it'll be fascinating to see how this changes the ways in which we think about, write about, and communicate anthropology. And that's what this site is all about. We'll see where it goes.
This first issue of "anthropologies" explores the seemingly simple but deceptively impossible question: What is anthropology? Stacie Gilmore, David Picard, Keith Hart, Alyson O'Daniel, Megan Maurer, and yours truly take a preliminary stab at this massive question through a set of reflective essays. Of course, there really isn't one clear answer to that question anyway, and that's part of the reason for the pluralistic name of this site in the first place. We all have our versions. Definitions, after all, are a continual process. This issue also has a few photographs that I took several years ago when I first started studying anthropology. That was when I was in the middle of my transition from photography to anthropology--and things never looked the same again, that's for sure. Zoos included. Lastly, there is also an Open Thread in which any of you can chime in on your thoughts about anthropology--feel free to jump on in and tell us all how it *really* is. One thing that I am most interested in is hearing a diversity of voices on this site--whether in the main articles, the Open Thread, or in the comments sections. I want to thank everyone who took the time out of their busy schedules to submit their thoughts and ideas to contribute to this new project. I didn't give them much of a heads up, and I really appreciate their efforts. Thanks for helping me get this started!
-R.A.
PS: If you're interested in participating in an upcoming issue, email me: ethnografix at gmail dot com. Also, I am planning on having a visual anthropology component to each issue, so if you are one of those visually-inclined anthropological folks, contact me as well at the same address!
Anthropology is not Geography - Megan Maurer
What is anthropology? Funny you should ask. The writing of this essay couldn’t come at a better time, as I find myself struggling with this very question - or really a variation of it. What makes my work anthropology? I’m sure we’ve all asked ourselves that question at one time or another, but it comes with particular urgency for me at the moment. I’m writing my dissertation proposal, and given my topic, urban agriculture as an alternative economic development practice in Detroit, I read a lot of economic geography - things on Fordist crises and the alterity of alternative economies. It’s wonderful stuff, thought provoking, stimulating, challenging, relevant. But after a two to three day bender with it, I find myself, well, lost. Not lost as in “I don’t know what this stuff means,” (though that does happen). But lost as in existential crisis lost. Is this where my intellectual project lies? Is this the academic conversation I’m going to contribute to? “No,” I whisper to myself, “I really hope not.”
Thursday, March 10, 2011
What is anthropology? - David Picard
Anthropology is being there and being detached from there at the same time. It is a modern absurdity whose sense I will try to grasp here. I believe it is essentially related to the function of bad eyesight among humans, and its future survival will depend on whether or not laser eye treatments will become more accessible. When I was in my mid 20s, my eyesight started to worsen. After two or so years, I accepted that I would need to see an eye doctor. I had to have glasses. That changed everything in my life until last year. I had been doing professional photography and then studied for a degree in economics. University revealed itself to me as the essence of socially instituted boredom and mass-organised life outside life. I had moved to an Indian Ocean island to be close to the beach and explore my limits. I met French anthropology students there dressed up in funny Indian, African and South American batik cloth, playing African drums at their parties and dancing in strange manners. They smoked a lot of pot and talked about social exclusion and all the bad that came from the ‘Americans’ (les américains). I found them terribly sectarian. They made me think about German sociology students with their asymmetrical I-am-different haircuts. During a conversation with the only professor of anthropology at the university there, who was actually a philosopher, I shared my fascination about the big moral concepts of beauty and innocence. He encouraged me to graduate in anthropology (called ethnologie in France). In the classroom, I met the batik people again. It was at that period that I had started to wear glasses. It was terrible. I was no longer free to see the world as a whole, but through two little frames. I had to move my head if I wanted to see beyond these frames. They remained there. I was no longer entirely in the world. Luckily the graduate program did not involve too much classroom teaching and I could avoid the funnily dressed people. I investigated beauty which led me to study what people thought about nature, their own nature, and eventually their own death. The study was in itself uncanny and self-revealing to me. I realised that I used other people’s experience and emotions essentially to study my own fears and understandings of the world. The glasses played here a crucial role. They separated me from the world and allowed me to analyze what happened out there, through the scopic vision provided by my little frames. At the same time, my body was evidently still in the world. The only suspension of this anthropological mode of schizophrenic existence occurred when I took my glasses off – in the shower, in the lagoon, during sex, when I slept. My girlfriend started to comment on the act of taking off my glasses with loud ironic exclamations about the possible fully unframed bodily involvement to come. I went on to do a PhD. Most of the batik folks left or took off their exotic attires. I am bemused by my own sarcasm here, as we all were there to test our boundaries and play with possible identities – while claiming that our study work was really important to understand society. Later, when I worked at a university in England, I met contemporary artists. It was hard to understand what they were doing, and why some of their works became publicly considered as important, while others not. Through the frames of my now professionally trained eyes, I could see parallels with anthropology. I started to frame the actual frame through which I critically framed reality. I saw how my students tested the limits of the ontological and moral order that described their worlds. Like generations of former students, including my self and the batik people in the Indian Ocean, they went to see what happened in the margins of their worlds. They studied gypsies, fishermen, farmers, merchants, prostitutes, scientists, migrants, tourists. After their fieldwork they usually returned as different persons. Most were wearing eyeglasses (some already before). The results of their research, like my own, often stated the obvious. Migrants have worse health conditions, prostitutes feel socially excluded, the rich dominate the poor, the poor fascinate the rich, scientists claim truth, gypsy life is a lot about music and dancing, but not only, tourists go on holiday to recharge their ‘batteries’. The knowledge thus created was published in articles and books, usually with an extremely limited circulation. It was mainly about recognition among peers and getting a permanent job. Like with contemporary art, it was not really clear why and how anthropology managed to perpetuate itself as a social institution. Contemporary art at least is carried into the public, creating debates and emotions among newspaper critics, art folks and the mundane visitors who silently work their way through museums and galleries. But anthropology remains invisible. It is not practical for the development of policies or to sell stuff (as is sociology) because it uses emic categories to explain social reality ‘from within’. Furthermore, ideologically, many of the former batik people who are now professors pursue political agendas far off from the pragmatism and mainstream of current policy. After the Lehman Brother’s bankruptcy and ensuing banking crisis two years ago, for instance, I saw many declaring, with enthusiastic eyes, that ‘finally!’, the end of capitalism had arrived, a new era – of what? – to come. Following discussions at the Open Anthropology Cooperative, I got more and more convinced that anthropology is above all about anthropology. It has not much to do with the world out there, yet remains intimately inside this world out there. It has become a sacred realm hidden from, yet within the world, only liminally surfacing in times of crisis, through messianic messages about the end of whatever, propagating its ‘secret’ knowledge about common knowledge (that usually remains badly understood by the public), its moral position above public moral. I came to the conclusion that anthropology is like a nun who stays inside the cloister to experiment (with) God. The process of becoming an anthropologist requires years of self-decentring and social hermitage. It is not astonishing that the discipline provides aura to its graduates. They know something about life most others do not know. There is even a sacrificial aspect involved here. Through the social isolation that is part of their training (to become self-aware), anthropologists suffer (joyfully I do hope) a form of social Zöllibat. However, unlike priests or nuns, they don’t embrace God, but they marry their fieldwork subjects (sometimes quite literally). They create links – symbolical, carnal, and magical ones – between the here and now, and the worlds out, or in, there. Through their knowledge and also through their bodies, they keep the fragments of the world together. Beautiful. I got my eyes laser-corrected last year and no longer need glasses. It was one of the greatest reliefs I've experienced in my life. I no longer need to take off my glasses before jumping in the sea or having sex. I can freely move my eyes to see all that, which had remained previously outside the frame. I do no longer have to move my head to follow a bird in the sky. My neck pain also got better, while I started to have stiff fingers when I wake up in the morning. But that may have different reasons. I am back in the world and wonder if I still need anthropology. I guess I cannot get rid of it anymore.
David Picard
Lisbon, Portugal.
Lisbon, Portugal.
Should I Pursue Anthropology?: Only if You Can Deal with the Elephant Under the Rug and the Skeletons in the Closet - Stacie Gilmore
The enthusiasm with which the American Anthropological Association touts the value of anthropology is unfortunate. I got my B.A. in anthropology in 2008, have worked non-profit community jobs ever since, and am now pursuing K-12 teaching. What drove me to the field of cultural anthropology was its down-to-earth focus on everyday life and the life of a community, and I don’t think I’m alone (see, for example, “The Scientific Curmudgeon”). More specifically, I wanted to get actively involved and hoped that applied anthropology was the key. Now I realize that anthropology, in its current form, is not the answer, for a variety of reasons.
Anthropology, via the AAA, markets itself as one of the few fields that gives you critical “global information and thinking skills” (link), but lots of fields have the same or better global (and domestic) applicability, from engineering to healthcare, education, journalism, etc. By comparison, cultural anthropology, in its general form, offers few skills aside from "participant observation" and "ethnography,” and those are extremely limited in value.
Kant, anthropology and the new human universal - Keith Hart
The distinctive feature of our age
is that mankind as a whole is on the way
to becoming fully conscious of itself.
(C.L.R. James)
is that mankind as a whole is on the way
to becoming fully conscious of itself.
(C.L.R. James)
By “anthropology” I refer to a human teleology in James’s sense. We must improve our self-knowledge as individuals and as a species, especially the relationship between the two. This is mediated by a bewildering variety of associations and identities which have been the prime focus of anthropology conceived of as a social science. What interests me, and I believe the vast bulk of humanity, is how each of us relates to the whole and only secondarily how social connections mediate that relationship.
Immanuel Kant summarized “philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense of the word” as four questions:
What can I know?What should I do?What may I hope for?What is a human being?
The first question is answered in metaphysics, the second in morals, the third in religion and the fourth in anthropology.
Anthropology as Collaboration - Alyson O'Daniel
I sat with my sister as we sipped coffee and flipped through the endless pile of catalogues she receives on a monthly basis. When I am home to visit, our usual routine upon wakening is to have our coffee while we sort through the catalogues in search of furnishings to fill a shared imaginary dream home. This routine allows us to collaborate on a project of sorts that is incapable of being jeopardized by time, distance, and hectic daily life schedules. The actual project is far less important than the brief moments of collaboration and connection. On this morning, however, I casually mentioned that I would like to have a job that paid me to sip the coffee I was drinking and critique the wares my sister and I were examining. She looked at me and said, “Well, what do you do? I mean, really.” I laughed thinking she was joking around. She wasn’t laughing. With pursed lips and a questioning look my sister had asked the dreaded question, “What is anthropology?” I honestly didn’t know in that moment how to answer her in a meaningful way. “The study of humans across time and space,” although perhaps technically correct, says little of what I do and why. I answered instead that I try to understand life through experiences not my own. “Huh,” she replied. That was the end of that conversation.
Anthropologies exist in everyday details - Ryan Anderson
I am convinced that Margaret Mead is one of the few anthropologists that anyone outside of academia has ever heard of, but I am not completely sure why this is the case. Is it because she wrote for Redbook, or because she wrote about teen sex? I have no idea, but I can tell you that most of my family and friends don't really know what it is that this anthropology thing is all about. And who can blame them? Anthropology isn't exactly the most visible of academic disciplines, now is it? While the economists have folks like Paul Krugman, and the cultural theorists get plenty of mileage out of Slavoj Zizek, who is the number one anthropologist in the public eye? It's Mead, I'm telling you, and, considering the fact that she is no longer among the living, this is something us contemporary anthropologists have to do something about. Nothing against Margaret Mead, but it would probably be a good thing if we were known for more recent--and breathing--practitioners. Ya, I like her famous quote about the power of small groups of people too, but seriously, it's time to move on.
Open Thread: So what's this anthropology thing all about anyway?
This is where you can add your own 2 cents (or more) about what anthropology is all about. Since this is an open thread, go for it. Tell us why you're doing anthropology, where you want to go with it, and what it means to you. Talk about how it's the most amazing discipline ever, or tell us why you finally kicked anthropology to the curb to pursue the study of neoclassical economic theory. Hey, it happens. In order to figure out what anthropology is all about we need to hear numerous voices. Anyway, let it roll...
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