OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY

Back in 1989, Edmund Carpenter joined in a particularly visceral polemic occasioned by the release of Robert Gardner’s film, Forest of Bliss. I will not recapitulate that debate here, which in part centered on Gardner’s art versus anthropological science, on Gardner’s visual poetry versus anthropological theory, on Gardner’s evocative imagery/imagination versus steady narration…I will just say that Carpenter endorsed Gardner’s film and was responding to a particularly heinous set of attacks, in print, from Jay Ruby. This is what Carpenter (1989: 12) said:

“Professor Ruby speaks of the need to ‘make films as a means to [sic] exploring important ideas in anthropology.’ The difference between ‘important ideas’ and ideas important in anthropology is often considerable. Don’t blame Gardner for choosing the former.”

Among the many, innumerable, statements we came across in that Visual Anthropology course, perhaps few other statements made the students pause for so long, and quietly, as if they were being faced with an uncomfortable “truth” in an unlikely setting, coming at them unpredictably.

What makes certain ideas “important” in anthropology?

In 1999, while doing “fieldwork” in Arima, Trinidad.

I am taking a smoke break alone, and a four year old child from the Carib Community comes to keep me company.

He asks: “What work do you do?”

I answer him, kindly: “This is the work that I do.”

He asks again, now with a confused smile: “This is your job? Taking photo, filming, asking question?

You does get paid for this?”

I answer, I must admit with more irritation now: “Yes, I get paid, why not. This is work you know.”

He gets the last word: “Nah man! This ain’t work, this is no job, this is vacation, boy!” And he runs away laughing and laughing, with a big bandit grin on his already mischievous face.

I have to wonder now: what spirit sent him to tell me that? How could a small child hit the nail right on the head like that?

How could this be a “profession”? What kind of job, indeed, is this? The way we go to other societies, staring at people, poking at them, recording them, asking them questions that have little or no importance for them, trying to evade their questions about us, a glorified form of canine ass sniffing, or what another anthropologist brutally and reductively called (and perhaps this is taken out of context): “Other fucking”. Are we not ashamed? Where do we find the nerve to undertake this bizarre combination of leisure and espionage?

What kind of world do we think we are living in where we think we need to travel to other people’s homes, to scrutinize strangers? Who do we think we are in doing that?

George Packer, “Knowing the Enemy: Can Social Scientists Redefine the ‘War on Terror’?” The New Yorker: the writer of this piece seems to be enchanted with the promise of David Kilcullen.

Evan R. Goldstein, “Professors on the Battlefield: Where the Warfare is More than Just Academic,” The Wall Street Journal: Marcus Griffin is not a soldier. But now that he cuts his hair “high and tight” like a drill sergeant’s, he understands why he is being mistaken for one. Mr. Griffin is actually a professor of anthropology at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Va. His austere grooming habits stem from his enrollment in a new Pentagon initiative, the Human Terrain System. It embeds social scientists with brigades in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they serve as cultural advisers to brigade commanders. Mr. Griffin, a bespectacled 39-year-old who speaks in a methodical monotone, believes that by shedding some light on the local culture– thereby diminishing the risk that U.S. forces unwittingly offend Iraqi sensibilities–he can improve Iraqi and American lives. On the phone from Fort Benning, two weeks shy of boarding a plane bound for Baghdad, he describes his mission as “using knowledge in the service of human freedom.”

Montogomery McFate, “Anthropology and Counterinsurgency: The Strange Story of their Curious Relationship,” Military Review, March-April 2005: “SOMETHING MYSTERIOUS is going on inside the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Over the past 2 years, senior leaders have been calling for something unusual and unexpected-cultural knowledge of the adversary. In July 2004, retired Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., wrote an article for the Naval War College’s Proceedings magazine that opposed the commonly held view within the U.S. military that success in war is best achieved by overwhelming technological advantage. Scales argues that the type of conflict we are now witnessing in Iraq requires “an exceptional ability to understand people, their culture, and their motivation….”

Montogomery McFate, “The Military Utility of Understanding Adversary Culture,” Joint Force Quarterly: “Cultural knowledge and warfare are inextricably bound. Knowledge of one’s adversary as a means to improve military prowess has been sought since Herodotus studied his opponents’ conduct during the Persian Wars….”

I have been considering the diverse ways in which a relationship exists between anthropology and colonialism, sketching some very rough ideas on this blog (as usual, I feel the need to apologize). In part this comes out of some productive engagements with essays written in ANTH 601 at Concordia University, to which I owe many thanks. Students expressed a concern with the “decolonizing anthropology” literature that seemed to suggest to them that colonialism was monolithic, and that the vast diversity of anthropological subject positions and research engagements went unaccounted for or were severely reduced to a caricature of the discipline. I am thinking of ways of rendering colonialism less monolithic with reference to anthropological knowledge production, by adopting/importing a series of models that I learned as a student of the history of Caribbean political economy, developed in part by the likes of independent scholars/public intellectuals as the late Lloyd Best in Trinidad, in part using the work of historian Lowell Joseph Ragatz. Let’s see how this can work.

Three different types of colonial situations have been posited in the past. Colonies were divided up into different types:

(1) Colonies of settlement: cases where large numbers of people from the colonizing country moved to, settled in, and directly produced a surplus (for example, Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand) –- this is essentially a Europe Part 2;

(2) Colonies of conquest: surplus is produced by a resident, indigenous population, and extracted by a small stratum of colonialists in the form of soldiers (conquistadores) and administrators, who reside in the colony, and who reside permanently in cases, but in small numbers; and,

(3) Colonies of exploitation: surplus is produced from the importation of an enslaved population and extracted by a tiny elite that originates from the colonizing state. Absentee landlords and rotating colonial officials dominate such colonies.

In this sense, colonialism indeed was not monolithic. So how might one discuss the coloniality of anthropology without producing a monolithic caricature? I will adapt some of the terminology from the above to create three possible models:

(A) Settlement: the reconstruction of other social entities (nations, villages, “tribes,” groups of persons) as “fields”, where the anthropologist moves to the field and occupies them during “fieldwork” (not an original idea, by the way, and the reference will come later); the anthropologist is the sole producer of knowledge, acquiring the “native point of view” because s/he will be the sole authority for (re)presenting the native view–Malinowskian ethnography; on a social level, the anthropologist may also be part of the settler population; settling the native’s landscape by displacing the native: classic evolutionary anthropology (polygenetic and monogenetic forms), where the native was either biologically inferior or culturally backward, and either way doomed to extinction; anthropological endorsements for colonization, extermination, domination over natives, especially circa the 1850s;

(B) Conquest: (this is where direct application of the types listed above begins to experience turbulence, where direct application becomes difficult) –- the key informant who in fact writes the texts that are then retooled by the anthropologist –- Boasian ethnography; early forms of superficial coproduction where the anthropologist ultimately takes the reins over production of knowledge in published form; on an epistemological level, “native categories” are treated as “folk concepts,” emic views, indigenous ways of “unknowing” the world that can only be made sense of, and explained, by the anthropologist as an authority of cross-cultural comparison, the one who possesses a more global view, who devises scientific concepts.

(C) Exploitation: predatory relations, where persons are reduced to objects, and not just that, the objects of experimentation –- Chagnonian ethnography; counterinsurgent ethnography, where domination over the Other, in real political and military terms, is the objective –- ethnography à la McFate; old physical anthropology–phrenology, anthropometry, natives as mere bodies on which were mapped ideas of race; the ethnological exhibition; the museum; writing behind people’s backs; acquiring public funding to produce private research; the scientific journal–exploitation conjures up so many possibilities that it could easily overshadow (A) and (B) above.

Even as a preliminary attempt, this is a rough scheme. The intent is to show the “diversity” of anthropological/colonial possibilities, which neither produces a monolithic view, nor does it minimize the coloniality of anthropology.