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 amĂ©ricains). 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.

7 comments:

John said...

David, your use of the eye-glasses to frame your account is marvelous. Being forced to look here instead of there or just let oneself go and immerse oneself in whatever is going on is a beautiful description of the ethnographer's dilemma. That said, could you say a bit more about that "I guess I cannot get rid of it anymore," with which you end?

David said...

If you write a text, you can easily modify it, change elements, or simply delete it. If you accidentally delete it, you even have an "undo" function in the word processor, and can bring it back to life. While we - who spend days and days writing texts - may have gotten used to those functions and may even have incorporated them into the way we think, in real life, all these functions are not directly available. I cannot undo the training as anthropologist, the detachment of the world, the social autism, also the relations and memory I share with fellow anthropologists. The ways I have lived my life over the past 15 years has created a certain person that cannot be erased or changed with a mouse-click. I guess that is what I meant with this last sentence ("I can't get rid of it anymore').

Anonymous said...

I realize this isn't conventional writing, but as I tell my undergrads every year, use paragraphs! Hard on the eyes...

AQ said...

Well-written, frank and interesting. I enjoyed how your experiences with photography and wearing glasses influenced your experiences and studies.

It has taken me thirty-five years of learning the "technical jargon" of my own culture enough to begin to understand its interpretation of why and how to be human, and I have only begun to scratch the surface. The anthropologist's goal of studying what it is to be human beyond the boundaries of any one culture is a laudable and mountainous one. If art - in this case, photography - involves capturing and communicating emotion, truth and beauty, surely it's a valuable tool for the anthropologist; I think most people, if asked, would hope their ways of life revolve around pursuing those ideas (Maslow's hierarchy permitting).

Anyway, as a lay person, I'm inclined to consider the ideas of someone who is curious how others' experiences can provide insight into their own experience to be more credible than the ideas of those who have an active contempt for the social structures they are studying. I look forward to reading more of your work.

Running Sneaks said...

I am a current undergraduate student majoring in anthropology. I kind of fell into an anthropology class by accident and was immediately drawn to thinking about the world in an anthropological way. You seem to describe your entry into anthropology a subsequent event of getting glasses--that separation being first physical and then mental, leading to "social hermitage." Your experience resonates with me, but somewhat in a backwards manner--I've always felt that separation and have always questioned cultural behaviors around me, but it wasn't until I began taking anthropology courses that I was able to express those thoughts.
Just wanted to let you know--your article is very meaningful to me.

David said...

thanks for the nice reply. I guess you always invent stories for yourself to make contradictions more liveable. The glasses story is one of these, to make sense of the struggle between desires of being close and being far, staying another year, or leaving, having a stable life or continuing the adventure.. Well I am in Mauritius right now and be in Madagascar for the next couple of months; anyone up for drinks in Tana next week?


PS a frind sent the link below as a comment, an interview of Wim Wenders who talks about frames and framing (after 1:45)

David said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFIHnl4rmd0&feature=related