OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY

Elitists, isolated in their ivory towers, serving out life terms in self-imposed exile. It’s a great image, if you are writing a comedic novel, or perhaps aiming to produce a take on Great Expectations applied to an academic setting, or likewise some rendition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. One can indeed think of how many of these great novels were produced in solitary conditions, but note, by individuals with a great deal of “noise” in their heads, a great many voices struggling to be heard, in conversation or argument with one another, the author caught somewhere in between the (not so) fictional, allegedly “imaginary” voices.

The truly solitary researcher, a prisoner of his own self, would in fact have no sense of Self to start with (given the absence of an Other), and could have nothing to research or theorize, let alone fancy him or herself as a researcher or theorist. Real solitude would come from being born and raised in a complete vacuum, that thing we are told nature abhors (and indeed populates with animals and plants, so that solitude in a natural setting is still rendered impossible). And yet critics of the ivory tower would have us believe that this is exactly the kind of social vacuum in which academics exist, there among hundreds of students in their classes, students in their offices, constantly knocking elbows with colleagues, in a crowd waiting to get a spot on the bus, lined up in busy cafes, mulling over the political and economic changes that are reflected within the university, incredible solitude.

I have to apologize for the times I looked critically at colleagues deep in their endless re-readings of Marx, bouncing one theoretical text off of another, mixing and matching and contrasting Derrida and Spivak, and considered the whole enterprise to be a lonely, elitist, divorced-from-reality, kind of activity. “Get out there and do some ethnography why dontcha!” It’s what gives us anthropologists a sense of self when we are forced to share a department with theoretical sociologists. It’s also fundamentally wrong.

The lone researcher is a social and intellectual impossibility, and all academic work is collaborative. The one who aims to see farther by standing on the shoulders of giants, forcing Bourdieu to “speak” with Foucault, engages in a meeting of minds, in a dialogue. It’s just not overtly noisy. But it’s still a marketplace, internally noisy, full of voices. And those voices come after a lengthy education, along with socialization, since birth. All writing that results is the product of the weaving of a web of ideas derived from, inspired by, others. No wonder then that notions of collaboration have come into play when revisiting or revising our current notions of what constitutes plagiarism (as discussed here) — it’s a recognition of the fact that all research and writing is collaborative.

So when we proclaim the need for a collaborative anthropology, which assumes a non- or less than or inadequately collaborative past, going as far as producing a journal devoted to collaborative anthropologies, or handbook on collaborative ethnography, what is it that we really think we are doing and achieving, and what are the kinds of values embedded in the projects that need to be made explicit? I hope to cover more of this material in the future, as with everything else on this blog. For now, here are some links of possible interest to readers, which include some full-text items, in no particular order:

Lassiter, Luke Eric. (2005). Collaborative ethnography and public anthropology. Current Anthropology 46 (1): 83-106 ► open access pdf (thank you Luke)

Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. The Chicago guide to collaborative ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ► excerpt in html here

Antropologi.info: Collaborative Ethnography: Luke Eric Lassiter Receives Margaret Mead Anthropology Award. 2005, October 29.

Kleinknecht, Steven. (2006). Review of Luke Eric Lassiter, The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Canadian Journal of Sociology Online. ► open access pdf (thank you CJS)

Savage Minds: Collaborating with Corporations? (John McCreery). 2006, October 8.

Walsh, Julianne and Ty Kawika Tengan. (n.d.). Public positions: Engaging anthropologists. Public Anthropology: The Graduate Journal. ► open access html (thank you PA)

Another page to add to the book of “useful” research, not much different from what has already been talked about on this blog in terms of “useful anthropology.” This item comes from the Sydney Morning Herald for 19 May, 2008, in an article by Harriet Alexander titled “Social sciences robbed of usefulness“:

THE mantra “publish or perish” is deterring academics from research that would contribute to government policy, a report from a humanities group says.

Problems such as Aboriginal welfare and housing affordability would be best tackled by a combination of specialists, but universities and government funding were arranged to discourage collaboration between different disciplines, the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences says in a paper to be released in Canberra tomorrow.

In a report titled Rigour And Relevance, John H. Howard of the Australian Council for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences states in an executive summary:

Australia needs to encourage a new form of research that contributes directly to the formulation of policy in government. Such research is initiated by the end user rather than the researcher. It is characterised by being strategically driven, problem oriented and cross-disciplinary.

It is becoming increasingly necessary to draw on knowledge from many disciplines in meeting the challenges and opportunities of the modern economy and society. Scientific or technological research, in particular, benefits from the inclusion of complementary work in the social sciences and humanities. We need to think about ways the practice of interdisciplinary research can be encouraged and facilitated.

(see also the media release)

The report notes that academic institutions hire disciplinary specialists, and states that in many institutions there is “suspicion and resentment if a specialist in one area shows interest in another specialist area.”

The Council wants to see more academics working as consultants, applying their knowledge to solve actually existing problems, instead of the current drive to research what is “new” and to seek more research grants for such purposes. In addition, it wants to see more interdisciplinary research being fostered by academic institutions.

While the President of the Council argued that academic institutions divide knowledge into disciplines, it’s important for us to note that this is not universally true, and is especially not the case of Australian anthropology, where only a tiny minority of anthropology programs actually exist as separate departments, most having been folded into “schools” that amalgamate a number of fields. In my case, I obtained a Ph.D. in a department of anthropology that no longer exists as such.

Having said that, in terms of research funding, the Council President argues, in the SMH article, that “it’s hard to get funding for projects that span disciplines.”

A variety of thoughts on the “uses” and “usefulness” of anthropology were provoked by Lorenz Khazaleh’s synopsis on African anthropology, which also contains links to online papers of the World Anthropologies Network, a source of especial importance to some of the issues I wish to cover in this blog.

Within the North American context it is not difficult to encounter opinions that academics in general, especially in the social sciences and humanities, should “get out there” and “do something useful.” In fact it is this very same type of overt anti-intellectualism that is used by so many online commentators in justifying the work of anthropologists in counterinsurgency intelligence gathering in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least two assumptions are at work in this “get out there and make yourself useful” notion.

To quote the words of a Ghanaian scholar, the late Herb Addo at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad (a former supervisor and one of my first and most important inspirations in getting me to think about Eurocentrism, developmentalist ideology, and world-systems analysis), one implicit idea is that, “all the thinking that needs to be done has already been done.” He disagreed, and faulted Marx as well for arguing along similar lines that we need to go beyond understanding the world to actually changing it, as if the thinking was the lesser practice, and as if thinking were not a practice.

The second assumption is much more basic, and involves a simple question that critics of the Ivory Tower do not ask themselves — if I were not a professor, I would probably be a convenience store clerk, at least for a while, maybe permanently, now how would that be socially more useful and a more valuable contribution than my “getting out there” and teaching? Perhaps the idea is that I teach in my natural state, even while I sleep, and that doing it is not a form of doing, and involves no getting out. I don’t doubt for a moment that some would prefer the convenience store clerk or waiter — for some, being served by someone struggling to survive gives them a perverse sense of self-fulfillment, and they do not get that fulfillment from me. For others, real work is tangible, material, physical, concrete.

Some of these biases return in the context of debates between Caribbean scholars in the early 1990s in the University of the West Indies, and reappear as well in the chapter by Paul Nchoji Nkwi that Lorenz writes about. In the Caribbean, at the onset of structural adjustment programs and austerity measures implanted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, suddenly the region was cast as one where “scarcity” was the dominant state of existence. Never mind that a few years before scarcity in petroleum rich and agriculturally fertile places was not an issue, and a few years later, that scarcity would suddenly vanish. Like African states, Caribbean states can have a great wealth of resources, and it is scarcity that is manufactured by world capitalism and fabricated by particular ideologies. Once the word “scarcity” is mentioned, it is a green light for economists to rush in and reshape the terms of discourse (after all, theirs is a science of “the management of scarce resources” as was the classical definition of economics) — humans become “human resources,” knowledge becomes “human capital,” and so forth. It is in that context that some scholars — the upholders of laws of scarcity, foreign investment, and divestment of even profitable state enterprises — attempted to mute critical thinkers such as Herb Addo. The idea at work here is that “critique” is like navel gazing, it’s now time to produce research that is relevant to policy and to specific development programs. Norman Girvan based at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and once one of the radical thinkers of the New World Group, had become one of the trumpeters of the free market, a kind of business ethnographer with interests in rural entrepreneurship in Jamaica, and a direct counterweight to Addo.

In the African context Nkwi notes that anthropology had to be either useful or be gone. Usefulness is defined here as making a contribution to health and development programs. In fact, the “making a contribution” idea, so prevalent in anthropology and academic discourse more generally, presumes that there is already some larger project in place, to which we fit in and adjust ourselves, to which we contribute. Critique is not useful, especially not in situations of scarcity — this, presumably, is what Nkwi is referring to. That is also state-led anthropology. In conditions of scarcity manufactured by oppressive regimes, fabricated by the workings of the capitalist world market, where already existing natural wealth is exported to the upper class and away to foreign capitalists, people’s health and wellbeing are challenged much more than by micro-bacteria alone. An anthropology that is critical of the state, of the workings of power and political practice, can become very useful precisely for challenging one of the biggest threats to the welfare of so many Africans: the state itself. Will the state pay for its own deconstruction? Most likely not — indeed, universities in different parts of Africa have not been spared by repressive violence.

Let’s hear from one Ugandan anthropologist, presently dividing his time between Columbia University and Kampala:

Mahmood Mamdani, former professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda:

I remember seeing him (Idi Amin) when he came to the University. It was the 50th anniversary of Makerere and he came with an entire battalion of troops, armed. He stood there and said, “I came with a full battalion so that when you raise your heads from your books, you know who has power.”

We just froze completely.

Then he went on to say: “On my way, I stopped at Mulago (the university teaching hospital), and I looked at your medical records and I saw that most of you are suffering from gonorrhoea.” Then he paused and said, “I will not tolerate you spreading political gonorrhoea in Uganda.”

That was as explicit a warning as you can get. Students knew there would be no second chance. This man was ruthless and he would strike ruthlessly.

There may have been no unanimity among African anthropologists about how to be “useful” to their societies, but perhaps there is more unanimity now? Unanimity is one of those things that like scarcity can also be manufactured and then managed.

“The choice to rely … on cultural anthropologists in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a stable and viable Iraq. … As the occupation of Iraq appears more complex by the day, where are the new Ruth Benedicts, authoritative voices who will carry weight with both Iraqis and Americans?”
—–Alexander Stille, “Experts can help rebuild a country,” The New York Times, 19 July, 2003.

(Notes and comments on:
Bunzl, Matti. (2008). The quest for anthropological relevance: Borgesian Maps and epistemological pitfalls. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 53-60.)

Reasons for Irrelevance: It’s an Inside Job

The discussion between Bunzl and Besteman-Gusterson has some rewarding points to it. Bunzl begins by observing what most of us already know to be the case that,

Put simply, many of us chafe under a perceived public irrelevance, especially when compared to the glory days when anthropological titans like Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu regularly addressed millions and had a real impact on debates in education, public policy, and beyond (2008: 53).

Specifically, Bunzl chooses to use one single text as the focus, or as the vehicle, for his critical analysis of why this is so. He thus speaks of Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, and published in 2005. He says that the authors in that volume (which I have yet to read myself) took on top public “pundits” in the U.S., from Thomas Friedman to Samuel Huntington. George Marcus, in a quote on the front cover, called it “a bold attempt … to remake the terms of public debate.”

Bunzl sees the book as failing to achieve its aims of recouping the legacy of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, of anthropologists becoming engaged as public intellectuals, noting that the book was largely ignored, for all its heroism (2008: 53).

The book failed in its aims, Bunzl argues, for a number of reasons:

“the book was issued by the University of California Press, an outfit not particularly known for its ability to reach broad audiences. As a result, Pundits was essentially an inside job. It was written by anthropologists, of course. But it also appeared in an anthropology series, although one explicitly devoted to public engagement. And yes, the blurbs cited earlier were by other anthropologists as well. Pundits may have staked a claim to the public sphere, but, as far as I can tell, few outside the world of anthropology knew, let alone cared, about that” (2008: 54).

Bunzl criticizes them for narrowing “punditry” to the workings of reactionary myth-makers who work to support the privileged, while ignoring the presence of successful left-wing pundits (eg, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein), and distancing themselves from public punditry. Bunzl asks: “if progressive punditry is in fact possible, then how do we explain the persistent failure of contemporary anthropologists, including those in Pundits, to play a more prominent role in the public sphere?” (2008: 54). He sees this gap in the book’s foundation as one that undermines the whole premise of the book.

Bunzl’s question has to do with why anthropology has largely disappeared from the public sphere. Is it due to powerful exclusionary forces, working on top of and against the discipline, from outside the discipline, or are there reasons internal to the discipline that can help to explain anthropology’s public irrelevance? (2008: 54).

Some might object that anthropology does not need to be publicly engaged, does not need mass audiences, and thus eschew the common goals of both Bunzl and Besteman-Gusterson. I disagree. Anthropology will not reside safely in peace, ensconced in the Ivory Tower, because there too it is suffering from increased marginalization, and that’s in the cases of universities that actually have an anthropology program of some sort. Moreover, any discipline whose purchase covers a wide range of publicly relevant, directly relevant, issues should say something in public. There is no point being a mute bystander as public debates rage about race, the family, violence, religion, and thus act like some dog in the manger. Even those disciplines that some might think engage in “navel gazing” — philosophy, English literature — have had, and have, scholars with a higher public profile than we do, and here I am speaking only of the North American context. If we were speaking of scholars in places such as France, even Trinidad & Tobago, then this discussion would not be as relevant, or relevant in the same ways.

Bunzl’s main argument is, “there is something about the contemporary variant of sociocultural anthropology, for which Pundits is paradigmatic, that has precipitated its increasing marginalization” (2008: 54).

Bunzl says, admitting to producing a pithy sound-bite:

“the glory days of U.S. anthropology seem to be over because today’s anthropologists are not radical enough” (2008: 54)

Generalizing, as the Bongo-Bongoists Rear their Ugly Heads in the Cayman Islands

On pages 55 and 56 Bunzl takes us through a familiar, but effectively condensed, review of the demise of positivist science in anthropology, the questioning of searches for universal laws, the emergence of ideas of anthropology as a science of meaning, based on interpreting specific discourses, and greater attention paid to how knowledge is not neutral, but is a function of power, privilege, and hierarchy. The problem, as Bunzl argues, is that in the course of these developments, anthropologists began to reject generalization. Generalizations were seen as part of a discourse of objectivity and expertise, a language of power in Lila Abu-Lughod’s view.

(We should also recognize that the critique of power in anthropology typically extends only as far as our analytical and rhetorical practices, and not our very institutionalization, i.e., that which enables to speak Abu-Lughod as a professional authority, as a professor, and the exclusions that had to occur in order for her to occupy that position.)

Generalizing assumes that the analyst can stand outside of what is being analyzed, and tends to take small cases, and diverse differences, and flatten them out, homogenizing them, producing pictures of coherence and timelessness (2008: 56).

So far so good, except that I now worry that perhaps “generalization” has been confused with “totalization” and “universalization”, which it resembles. Generalizing about what appears to be the case, for the most part, that is, by and large, does not remove the analyst (a figure in the crowd itself, who notes where most of the crowd is heading), and does not pretend that there are no differences (most of the crowd surged forward, but some of us remained behind). The opposite of generalizing is the incessant natter of what Ted Llewellyn called the Bongo-Bongoists — these are obnoxious and sometimes agitated hecklers who interrupt to say, “but in my tribe, among the people I study, among the Bongo-Bongo, no such practices exist.” I recall being taken to task for, of all things, generalizing about how deeply slavery marked the Caribbean experience and how “blackness” was still stigmatized as the most negative, socially undervalued identity. The objections? That in the Cayman Islands (a wealthy colony packed with white expatriates) … that in Montserrat … in places where pearls and turtles were the backbone of the economy, and so forth. In other words, in the tiny micro-exceptions the generalization did not work…except that it does, because it is generally accurate for most places, most people, and most times.

The other extreme, of course, is to see the Bongo-Bongo as representatives of all of humanity — the logical shortcoming here is generalizing from the single case. But that does not mean that one cannot and should not generalize from multiple, or most cases. The Cayman Islands don’t prove generalizations about the Caribbean wrong; instead, it’s that we cannot let the Cayman Islands stand in the way of such generalizations, nor, worse yet, serve as a template for understanding the rest of the Caribbean.

As Bunzl explains, the rejection of generalization leads to the rejection of the concept of culture. Culture “militates against the specificity of partial truths” and yet those renouncing culture still had an idea of culture, as “contested, temporal, and emergent” (which is surely also a generalization in its own right) (2008: 56). In Abu-Lughod’s view, “culture” also became a conceptual tool for othering.

Don’t YOU Dare to Other ME

Again, this is a problem in anthropology — when we speak of “others” we are making the mistake of bundling a whole set of very different ideas into one, as if all “othering” was “bad” and somehow evitable. Whether we choose to “other” or not, there will always be persons who are different, who stand aside, and outside. You cannot “invent” or “construct” an “other” — you might be able to invent or construct an image of an other, but not the person who is other, that person who is not me. It is ironic then, that in battling against culture, Abu-Lughod ends up right back in the trap of universalizing — without culture, there are no others, and we are all the same — or, we are all bundles of particular specifics, that defeat generalizing language…except, of course, for the term “specificity” itself which can then become a substitute for culture, difference, and otherness. (I will say a lot more about these issues in coming months, especially once I summon the energy to finally do an in-depth review of Vassos Argyrou’s Anthropology and the Will to Meaning.)

This is not deny the seduction of plunging oneself into deep specificity, into fragments of knowledge, of diverse tales and documents and persons and voices. Whether this means that exoticism has thus been defeated is still very much open to question in my view, and the fact that these wonderfully dynamic, localizing, particularistic feats of writing are almost always done in some thatched hut village in Indonesia or wherever else, except at home, leads me to think there may be no good answer. A second question has to do with the assembling of fragments and specifics: who does the assembling, the editing, the rewriting, and according to what framework? Is it purely random, escaping all of one’s prior socialization? I very much doubt it — it’s just that the framework has been silenced.

Let’s Hear from the Book Club

This leads me to pity what we do to students, pitching one approach after another, one trend after another, one ethnography after another, one theory after another, one big-name author after another, leaving so many to become confused, always running on a bibliographic treadmill, becoming professors and always on an angry and/or anxious lookout for the next big book, which we must all read, and all of us must quote. I hate that feeling, that I have been involuntarily recruited into some small town book club, where it is to be assumed that we have all read the latest Ong-and-Tsing, as if these were the only ones to read, as if they ought to be read.

Bunzl argues that ethnographies of the particular, like (guess who?) Anna Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, are still caught up in positivist epistemology (2008: 57):

Sociocultural anthropology may have rejected a scientistic variant of positivism, but it retains, even augments, a more immediate form, one that purports that all empirical phenomena are amenable to observation and description. What else, after all, is the demand to eschew false generalizations in the interest of more accurate representations of complexity?

Bunzl also observes how old abstractions and generalizations are often replaced by new abstractions and generalizations, except that these are less amenable to criticism; that “culture” might be rejected as an essentializing abstraction, but not so much “gender” and “class” as other essentializing abstractions (57).

[See my posts on anti-anti-essentialism: here, and there.]

The Devil is the Details

Bunzl, referring to Borges’ famously funny story of the quest for the ever more perfect map of the empire, which then grew to the size of the empire itself, argues:

Driven by an unselfconscious demand for “exactitude in science,” it is on a quest to find the perfect representation of human reality, one that is free of all essentialisms and generalizations. What it does not realize is that such a representation—if it could be had at all (and, of course, it could not)—would be entirely unwieldy. Even worse, it would be altogether useless, not because it would be false but because it would be true (57).

Where Pundits fails, in Bunzl’s view, is its repeated, persistent charge that America’s top pundits are “simplistic.” Indeed, how many of us who are anthropologists have heard that a book is great because it is “sophisticated” and treats “complexity” complexly, or something along these lines? Sophisticated? A sophisticated text that “explodes” that which it “interrogates”, with a fine sense of complexity — talk about a bad mixing of metaphors, almost all of which stink of elitism and domination.

Bunzl ends by calling for renewed respect for an epistemological program that existed and still exists in anthropology, in the figures of Boas, Geertz, Sahlins, and Ortner, a program that,

recognizes the limitations of anthropological generalization but is not terrified by this possibility. It knows the impossibility of finding laws in a natural scientific sense but is prepared to uncover meaningful connections through interpretive speculation. It is aware that in a philosophical sense, all empirical knowledge is provisional, partial, and subjective, but it seeks to transcend that limitation to find the truth about the world. It understands that objectivity is not fully possible but strives for it nonetheless (59).

This statement can be taken further, as it opens out onto similar goals and tendencies across the social sciences, humanities, and yes even the natural sciences. I will talk more about this when I finally review and produce some notes from Immanuel Wallerstein’s Open the Social Sciences, which I read over a decade ago.

I should note the discussion that followed the article within the pages of the American Anthropologist:

Besteman, Catherine and Hugh Gusterson. (2008). A response to Matti Bunzl: Public anthropology, pragmatism, and pundits. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 61-63.

and

Bunzl, Matti. (2008b). A reply to Besteman and Gusterson: Swinging the pendulum. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 64-65.

Responses from the Anti-Pundits

Besteman and Gusterson seem to be particularly offended with the criticisms of their book, even stating that Gusterson was “heavily criticized” — I don’t know, it seemed to me that Gusterson was criticized more in passing, and was hardly the focus of Bunzl’s piece. The more important point is that the editors of Pundits insist that their target was not punditry as such, but right-wing punditry, and not generalizations as such, but crassly inaccurate ones that justify imperialist programs. These two sets of authors, who would seem to be sympathetic to one another, seem to have passed each other in a foggy night.

Besteman and Gusterson, offer an unnecessary listing of names of people they think are examples of something different to what Bunzl claims, which also serves to define the “in group,” and to exclude Bunzl of course. Lists are always problematic in these cases, and best to avoid, not only because they are objectionable devices used to privilege certain speakers, and thus create a hierarchy, but also because in this case the list offered by the editors is so very short when compared to the thousands who constitute American Anthoroplogy alone. In other words, they make Bunzl’s points twice for him.

The editors get on to something interesting, finally, which has to do with their reasoning as to why anthropology is not publicly relevant as it once was:

It is true that today’s anthropologists are not household names in the way Margaret Mead was. But the reward structure of the contemporary neoliberal academy grants tenure, promotions, and pay raises for academic books and refereed articles and disdains those who write for a popular audience. Mead herself was forced to build a career in the interstices of academia and public life. Also, since Mead’s time, anthropology has moved away from sustained attention to some of the issues that deeply interest so many U.S. citizens: family, marriage, divorce, children, adolescence, love, romance, and parenting. Finally, anthropologists cannot afford to lose sight of the texture and nuances of the communities and issues we study. A deep knowledge born out of long-term relationships with interlocutors based on trust is our distinctive contribution to public discourse. Appreciating and translating nuance is an ethnographic project at odds with roughshod punditry. In saying this, we are not agreeing with Bunzl about a supposed anthropological aversion to generalization but are, rather, pointing to a friction between ethnography’s interest in nuance and the glibness of some punditry. We believe that a public anthropology combining the phrase-making skill of a Friedman with the nuance of a Geertz and the passion for social justice of a Paul Farmer is possible.

Oh No, Here Comes “Nuance” Again

Nuance, like sophistication, is a pretentious little term that will hopefully fall out of fashion with the fashion-minded, and hopefully sooner rather than later. Nuance is for the wincing cocktail guest who can be counted on to say, “…well, I don’t know really, I’m not so sure, it may be more complicated…because on the one hand…and then on the other hand,” as they put their erudition on display like a peacock. Mind you, I am the one who has a post on this blog that is focused on “fuck,” so perhaps a little erudition would not be amiss. I distract myself yet again.

Was this Rewarding? Well, on the one hand…and on the other hand…

I am very happy to see Besteman and Gusterson raise the issue of the “reward structure” of the “neoliberal academy” that emphasizes certain kinds of publications in certain venues (for the non-tenured mind you…the tenured have a choice, one that is usually exercised in doing everything possible to achieve greater rewards, such as full professorship, a standing in multiple editorial boards, sitting on various committees of high-powered funding bodies, and so forth). They are right to raise this issue, except that structure precedes neoliberalism, and they are part of the academy, and the academy has very conservative biases in terms of its everyday working assumptions and practices. Otherwise Besteman and Gusterson are to be applauded for going on the record.

We need to keep in mind that academics themselves serve as the guardians and police of this reward structure. They themselves frown on certain publications, even on the very teaching texts that they use for teaching, an attitude that I will never understand. They sneer at websites, and arch an eyebrow at a newspaper column. Hopefully we can start hearing academics making a lot more noise about what gets rewarded and how, and I think this is slowly starting to happen.

It is also interesting to see the editors of Pundits confess to the fact that much of what anthropologists study is simply not interesting to a wider public, a terrible self-indictment. Bunzl’s response to the response seemed to me to be a little circumspect and tranquilized, missing some golden opportunities to turn the “dialogue” into a moment opening out onto transformation. Too bad.

••••••

Of course, the big question that keeps getting ignored is: are people wearing enough hats?

A very interesting conversational interview between Tiziana Terranova and Marc Bousquet is available on the How the University Works website. I only wish to reproduce some notes and memorable quotes from this discussion, since they cover a great deal of important ground on the concept of the university as an “ivory tower”, a term that I have reproduced on this blog, and in fact appears in one of the category headings.

Let me preface their discussion by noting that the “ivory tower” term–often used in accusing sentences that depict universities as elitist–is not one that is owned by any one political ideology. One can find individuals who fit some definition of political radicalism who make this charge, as well as more conservative types. It is convenient to use the “ivory tower” label in any argument in which the university figures. Marc Bousquet also notes this in his comments on the label as it “signifies all the way around the political clock”, a “classic ideologeme – practically un-dislodgeable from any point of view”.

In the introduction to their exchange, originally published in Mute, the “ivory tower” concept is immediately targeted as somewhat of an outdated caricature that is not in line with current political economic realities:

Far removed from the clichéd image of the ‘ivory tower’, today’s universities have been opened to the harsh realities of neoliberal economics: huge volumes of students, extreme levels of performance-geared management, casualisation of employment, and the conversion of students into ‘consumers’. In the name of democratisation and equality, the university has become a cross between a supermarket and a factory whose consumers are also its hyper-exploited labour force.

In line with this thinking, Terranova characterizes the contemporary university as an “open system” that opens out onto the field of casualised labour and “underpaid socialised labour power”. (As someone working in a department where almost half the courses, and perhaps most of the students, are taught by colleagues who also suffered their way to a PhD, only to be rewarded with temporary positions and very meager salaries, I am no stranger to this process–indeed, their union is currently on strike after several years without a contract, in a long-standing conflict with a university run like a private corporation, but almost entirely on public funds.) “Networked intelligence” and “mass intellectuality” is how Terranova also envisions the current situation of knowledge production in which universities find themselves.

Marc Bousquet agrees that the university has never been sheltered from commerce or politics, and thus never really was an “ivory tower”. He notes that in the U.S. at least 60% of high school graduates have some experience with higher education, and thus one might conclude it has increasingly become a mass product, a commodity with which most are familiar consumers.

The question emerges of how the university can be transformed and directed in a process of engaged social transformation, and whose interests are served in a site where production, reproduction, and consumption converge. If tenured faculty might be classically seen as those possessing the privileges associated with the idea of the “ivory tower”, Bousquet observes that their position is somewhat more schizophrenic:

Tenured faculty schizophrenically experience themselves as both labour and management, a contradictory position reflected in US labour law. They also have another schizophrenia of seeking to produce or direct a cultural-material transformation while simultaneously serving capital (as reproductive labour) through the socialisation of a disciplined professional-managerial class.

This observation is not offered as if to somehow whitewash the political role of the tenured, for as Bousquet adds later, speaking of the high rate of unionization among the tenured in the U.S. in terms of “an old-style craft unionism, a labour aristocracy that preserves workplace hierarchy, and has been very much complicit in the perma-temping of the university workforce, preserving their own jobs while selling out the future”.

Both Terranova and Bousquet agree–and here this really resonates once again with the situation I see in my home university–increasing numbers of students are themselves temporary workers, who engage in higher education (which some conservative stalwarts characterize as a “leisure” activity) in the hopes of securing better paying jobs. Even in Quebec, with very low tuition fees compared to the Canadian average, the fact remains there is a cost of living that students have to shoulder, since most are independent and self-sustaining. Given the limited job market, or inadequate qualifications, or poor wages, it’s not surprising to discover that more and more of our students are seeking work in Montreal’s thriving pornographic industry. At this pace, it should not be surprising if students begin to sell their organs to fund their studies. Most end up saddled with debt, a situation with which I am still personally familiar, and credit card companies mount stalls everywhere on campus to seek out students who are desperate from some extra, short term cash. The tuition may be “low”, but we have an “emergency food fund” for students. Matters are quite grim now, and there is no promise that the situation will improve. That so many of these students, most I would say, maintain such a positive spirit, remain energetic and committed to their studies, produce so much high quality work and maintain such an active interest is not just a tribute to them, it defeats another set of myths: that of the “dumbing down” of students who are in university so we can “baby sit” them.

While Terranova and Bousquet both seem to agree, and repeat, that there is opportunity for transformation of the university system as a result of these changes, that massification will help to positively transform the social role of the university and open up new sites of resistance, I remain very skeptical about that. Indeed, some of the reasons for my own reticence here stem from some of the features that Terranova herself notes, especially the applicability of

Louis Althusser’s notion of education as ‘Institutional State Apparatus’….And there is no doubt, as Foucault once put it, that the university still partially ‘stands for the institutional apparatus through which society ensures its uneventful reproduction at the least cost to itself’. Sadie Plant used this quote to contest what she thinks is the ‘Platonic’ bias of many pedagogical approaches to higher education which contribute to making the university what Foucault said it was: the idea that knowledge is something that is ‘recalled’ ready made from an original source and then simply transmitted from mind to mind. This is really the uneventful reproduction of readymade knowledges for the purposes of social reproduction.

I may be mistaken, but I believe there is a theme that runs through their discussion that assumes that temporary teachers, i.e., part-time faculty, the “flex workforce” and “temps” they refer to, will be the source of the transformation of the university. As Bousquet puts it:

A big part of the academic ‘labour of reproduction’ is the production, legitimation, and policing of inequality. I think academic labour, including organised academic labour, needs to submit itself to the tutelage of more radical forms of labour self-organisation. More radical than the trade union movement, as you say. Mass intellectuality implies a revolutionary transformation in the academic consciousness, faculty especially.

◘ ◘ ◘

Let me close with little side note that may be of interest to independent scholars, it is interesting to see how the Transformative Studies Institute (home of the journal Theory in Action–see the call for papers below), offers alternative arrangements to facilitate research in a system that caters for those with university affiliations:

If you wish to pursue grants without institutional restraints and politics, you can do so as a TSI research Fellow or Associate. We recognize that the traditional hierarchical and elitist journals, colleges, and foundations often do not take adjuncts, non-tenure track professors, independent scholars, and those employed in the less prestigious academy or other organizations too seriously. TSI however believes that there is a significant contribution to be made by all scholars regardless of one’s employment situation or affiliations. This is why we offer legitimate scholars an opportunity to affiliate themselves with TSI as research Fellows and Associates. Upon acceptance, you will be able to use your affiliation with us as your home institution. We will provide you with support, institutional email, letterhead, and other materials. Furthermore, since we do not require exclusive rights to your intellectual work, you are free to disseminate your research through any outlet. Should you wish to have your work published by the TSI we will do so. The TSI will require the customary 10% of the grant funds (commonly referred to as ‘indirect costs’) for the operation of the institute. However, you retain full autonomy with TSI support.

See http://transformativestudies.org/ for more information.

I would prefer to hear the answer to this question from my converts and disciples.

–PAUSE–

Ok, since I only hear crickets chirping, let me answer the question myself.

The answer is yes, and I hope to become a better one. The answer is also no, in that unlike other evangelists I neither call for nor accept donations.

Anti-intellectualism plus anti-activism: these are proving to be the double-bind working against public anthropology, where one loses no matter what one chooses to do. But since many hate mailers have already indicated what a loser I am, it seems that I am well suited to this challenge.

Onwards and upwards, etc.

In a recent notification of new articles in Cultural Anthropology, I saw this particular item:

Cultural Anthropology 23.1 (February 2008)
IN CONVERSATION: George Marcus and Marcelo Pisarro, “The End(s) of Ethnography: Social/Cultural Anthropology’s Signature Form of Producing Knowledge in Transition”

In an extended abstract of the piece that was circulated by email, the journal editors reveal:

There are no new ideas, and none on the horizon, as well as no signs that its traditional stock of knowledge shows any sign of revitalization,” states [George Marcus] the University of California at Irvine Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology in this wide-ranging and provocative interview. One of anthropology’s most accomplished figures, Marcus acknowledges that many outside the field have turned to it for answers when examining this century’s dramatic cultural, political, and economic transformations. Yet while such new “terrains and contexts” continue to beckon, anthropologists remain wedded to traditional methods “a la Malinowski and Boas” and unable yet to bring to its center “coherent ideas” about the meaning and practice of anthropology in the contemporary world.

The assertions (or observations?) above are not new either, but they are important as a testament to the sense of disarray, dissipation, and decline within the discipline. Also not new, but not less valuable, is what Marcus sees as the future orientations of ethnography:

“We don’t need more conferences or seminars but a different style and process of training anthropologists, also a rethinking of the standard forms and functions of writing in anthropology, Marcus suggests.” At the heart of this reworked fieldwork would be the “anthropologist as collaborator,” a scholar who works not with “others” but with “counterparts,” who often share the anthropologist’s concern and inhabit the same intellectual world – a world of questions, emergences, and experiments rather than the holistic certainties of an older conception of “culture.”

Marcus then adds, according to the journal editors’ rendition of the interview:

“What’s left to do, then, is to follow events, to engage ethnographically with history unfolding in the present, or to anticipate what is emerging. The great majority of projects of anthropology are pursued in this defining kind of temporality, which, in my view, has become much more important than traditional spatial tropes of “being there” in situating ethnography in time-space.“

Now it seems that anthropology has indeed reinvented itself and there are new ideas, for as Marcus states above, “the great majority of projects” are engaged in novel pursuits.

The interview may have been provocative, but the message above does not appear to be consistent. And to be honest, if I want to know what is “new” in anthropology, then I would tend not to look to well established chairs, with established axes to grind, with their well worn routines, speaking out of the same old journals, to the same old audiences, in the same old way. For his part, Marcus describes participatory action research, which is well known and is practiced by at least some anthropologists. It’s just that he doesn’t name it as such. Perhaps, within the narrow context of the history of this discipline then, yes, such collaborative and participatory research is something new. However, arriving at that conclusion involves reinforcing one old problem: how much we stick to ourselves compared to the other disciplines. There seems, at least to me, to be a combination of fear and resentment when it comes to the other disciplines, without considering the rich possibilities for partnership.

Marcus also seems to have completely neglected new forms of doing, producing, and writing ethnography, especially with reference to cyberspace ethnography, new forms of visual ethnography on the web, anthropological blogging, and so forth. There are a number of very important lessons to be learned by these various acts of omission and the privileged way they are showcased in the discipline’s traditional sources. Let me list just a few of these possible lessons:

1. For those engaged in new forms of doing ethnography that are collaborative and in new venues, do it for the pleasure of doing so, for the rewarding experience of working with others, and for the sheer joy of being immersed in extended dialogues that reach well beyond the corridors of the professional discipline. It is important to realize that in most cases your work will not be recognized within the institutionalized discipline, and Marcus is really offering no exception here. Work that seeks such recognition from among the authority figures produced by the discipline–the way that Cultural Anthropology reproduces Marcus as an authority on what is new–will tend to be innovative within constraints, and thus as is usual now the works produced will tend to be defensive, insecure, and overly deferential to authority as evidenced by exaggeratedly long bibliographies, over referencing, and self-contradicting or indecisive paragraphs that pose as “nuanced scholarship”. Let us remember that we are in a discipline whose professionalists will have us believe that visual anthropology was founded by Margaret Mead (wasn’t everything?), and not by those disturbingly independent characters of half a century earlier, such as Edward Curtis and Robert Flaherty who innovated and conducted ethnography like no professional anthropologist of the time.

2. For those who want to explore what is “new” in ethnographic practice, it might be a good idea to avoid the closed access, traditional print journals such as Cultural Anthropology, that 20 years after Writing Culture continue with George Marcus in an interview on novelty. What is really new in anthropology is often that which is not talked about in anthropology journals. I take exception with the methods of CA, and not with all of Marcus’s message, most of which I actually agree with.

3. We see the familiar way in which authority is produced and reinforced within the discipline. Even critique is made safe and rather stuffy now. This is one of the reasons I very much enjoy using the work of Vassos Argyrou (2002). Who? Argyrou? Exactly. Check the bibliography.

4. Beyond the politics of recognition, we also see the not always subtle politics of command in this same piece in CA, indeed in almost all the established journals in anthropology. The idea here is that the celebrity, the traveler of the keynote speaker circuit, the one with an idea for an honorarium, is looked up to for direction. This authority figure then lets us know where we should all be going, what the new agenda is, and he sometimes also reminds us of how stupid we are. Indeed, everyone else is stupid too, for as Marcus states in this same interview: the culture concept is no longer viable analytically and it is has been appropriated by everyone. Everyone wants a flawed product, not because they have very different takes on what culture is, but because they are…morons? And appropriated…let’s remember to establish ultimate ownership over a concept we never owned and arguably never innovated. Let’s also remember that ideas are not what you do to them, they are what is done to you – hence avoid culture now, it doesn’t work anymore, and there is nothing you can do about it, dummy.

I don’t know if the purpose of the editors of Cultural Anthropology was to depress debate or to insult readers, but I think that in my initial reactions they had achieved both of these objectives.

•••••••

Some of the points that need to be discussed, since they are largely absent or silenced, seem to be the following:

(1) Preparing for a future when anthropology no longer exists as an institutional discipline. Most likely it will survive longest as such in the U.S., but there are already signs that it has failed to spread further, and has begun to recede in some countries. I am not a historian of the rise and fall of empires, but I suspect that trouble in the periphery shows the centre its future. It could end up being a very lonely, very American discipline.

(2) We should not necessarily want to attract greater public attention and support, if the increased enrollment or external praises are used to defer consideration of the continuing coloniality of the discipline.

(3) We should consider ways of “performing” anthropology in and among related fields, existing not necessarily as an institutional and labeled identity, but as an epistemological ideal that is realized through a variety of methods, targeted to address specific questions and problems.

•••••••

What is written above is from the personal vantage point of someone who has largely ceased to restrict his reading to anthropology texts. I have gone back to reading more widely and participating in conferences that are not organized by anthropology associations (in fact, I have never really focused on attending anthropology conferences alone). Personally, I find more value in reading from cultural studies, postcolonial studies, literary criticism, history, and political economy, than I do from reading “anthropology.” I am also biased by my background, which was multi-disciplinary, spanning the social sciences and the humanities. My switch to anthropology was not a means of burning bridges with the past, but of building new ones.

I also earned my doctorate in an anthropology department that was once dissolved (with faculty reassigned to other departments — interesting idea right there), then re-created, and now no longer exists as a department but as a division in a generic kind of school. When your PhD is from an entity that no longer exists, you can develop a different view of the “permanence” of institutions, and how little tragedy there is in their passing. You also tend to not be as smug and superior about your pedigree as others (or those who live in the shadows of the fame of their supervisors).

Finally, I have never actually worked in a department of anthropology, as such. From that vantage point, I am already among those who have had to accommodate to the reality that, in many places, anthropology has no separate institutional identity.

A book review by Margaret Taylor.

BASCH, L., L. SAUNDERS, J. SHARP & J. PEACOCK (eds). Transforming academia: challenges and opportunities for an engaged anthropology. viii, 312 pp., tables, bibliogr. Arlington, Va: American Anthropological Association, 1999.

Transforming academia is the outcome of the 1996 conference ‘Restructuring academia’, held at the New York Academy of Sciences, and of discussions on the future of anthropology originating from the general meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 1993 and 1995. The twenty-seven contributors include well-known figures such as Sydel Silverman, June Nash, and the late Eric Wolf, as well as those referred to below. Worth reading for its sharp comments and clear insights, its four main sections consist of analyses of existing trends from academics and administrators, describing effort to preserve anthropology’s standing within the social sciences and to find opportunities for applied anthropology in the outside world.

Despite its brave title, Transforming Academia will sadden all but those of an indomitably optimistic spirit. Its realistic analyses ask what place there is for anthropology in a corporate world, where anthropology’s best ideas have been stolen by other disciplines to be peddled round the educational market-place (Paredes). A few desperate suggestions appear as Pollyanna-like reframings of the inevitable. Employment within corporations as work system designers and change consultants (Ritter)? Recast ourselves as organizational analysts within NASA or other agencies (Johnsrud)? Sure! Take up a sacrificial life of service directed towards students and the community, encouraging personal growth and multiculturalism (Arvizu)? Admirable for those who are willing to do so.

Eric Wolf and others, such as James Peacock and Cris Johnsrud, point out that anthropology’s innate romanticism works against its own interests. Anthropologists are not trained to be policy-makers but to mistrust the system, and can be maladaptive outside the academic community. The rise of the Soviet Union, and the need to outstrip the Communist bloc with an educated, scientifically literate, workforce, enabled previously disregarded anthropology to flourish during the Second World War and the 1960s. Today, American hegemony no longer requires many publicly funded anthropological interpreters of other cultures, nor are there many takers for the theoretical niceties by which anthropology exposes weaknesses in arguments put forth by other disciplines.

All this may change, for this book was published in 1999, before the events of 11 September 2001 and the continuing crises in the Middle East. Even so, too many disciplines publicly contribute their understandings of other cultures for anthropologists to be heard above the babel of competing voices. Two seemingly unpalatable options remain. In Britain, as in the United States, anthropologists can choose to become public intellectuals, engaging in populist policy debates, through newspaper articles and other media outlets (Peacock, Paredes). Or they can emphasize what they prefer to keep hidden (the elitist assumptions and socio-economic backgrounds of many practitioners) and become a ‘luxury’ subject for elite institutions, helping to form the ’rounded’ product of a liberal arts education catering for a wealthy minority. None of the contributors is cold-blooded enough to suggest this, although Richard Ford hints at the model’s viability without advocating it. Such an approach would mean ignoring those clamouring for greater inclusion within higher education, such as women, ethnic minorities, and groups traditionally excluded from higher education (Brodkin), including African-Americans (Harrison, Sudarkasa).

The question is, how can anthropology preserve its mystique, while at the same time engendering enough public awareness to make it thrive as an applied and academic discipline? Anthropologists, like other academics, and some health-care workers (Tramm), find it difficult to confront the impact of Taylorism, the fragmentation and depersonalization of their research and teaching skills, particularly the implication that anyone with minimal experience can teach anything to anybody.

Instead, they foster unrealistic expectations of academic careers among their graduate students (Greaves), clinging to their professional status in the hope that this will make up for their increasing economic exploitation, insecurity, and fears of redundancy (Sharif and Lessinger). A better tactic might be for anthropologists both inside and outside the academy to forget their local differences, and institutional loyalties, so as to combine with a specific agenda. They could then fight as scholar-activists alongside unionized labour forces (Nash, Peacock, Sharff and Lessinger, Tramm), rather than let themselves be picked off piecemeal in interminable faculty wars (Saunders).

This is an American book, and it may be that it is more difficult for anthropologists to be heard within the insularities of American culture than within multicultural Europe. Nevertheless, it describes processes which are depressingly familiar to British academics and a warning of things to come.

I am thinking that the next time I get a research grant, I should get a baseball cap with a big gold dollar sign on it, and take the award letter, miniaturize it, gold plate it, and hang it from a big ass gold chain around my fat neck. Why not? I would only be conforming, while making certain crass assumptions crassly obvious.

“I gots me a big ass grant! Look at this BLING!”

(OK, Max, you had your fun. Now be serious. You know very well it’s not about the money. It’s all about the R€$€AR¢H.)

This thought came to me, reflecting with some sense of humour on an environment that sends researchers mixed signals–that researchers should “seek” funding and better yet “attract external funding”. The reason as once explained with something less than complete honesty, was that a successful grant application is evidence of positive peer review. All I can say is that if these are my peers, I am deeply embarrassed, and here I am actually talking about comments I read from reviewers for my three successful grant applications. My two failed applications so far failed primarily on the basis of nationality, with these cutting-edge, forward thinking, intellectuals that these peer reviewers are.

Then one sees these endless lists of dollar amounts, and really, in a calculating, quantitative, number-loving, society transfixed by the lustre of capital, is it really so far fetched for me to suggest that readers will tally up the amounts and come to a conclusion as to which is the (more) “valuable” research? “You show me your grant, and I’ll show you mine, then we’ll see who has the bigger one.”

So, if it is the successful “peer review” that matters so much (and not the extra 10% to 40% that the university itself gets from the granting agency for every dollar granted to the researcher), why has it become such an entrenched practice that every time a colleague gets a new grant we list the dollar amounts? Is there not something just a tad vulgar about that?

Here is a recent and prominent example from Concordia University, one in a universe of many such everyday examples, placed on the front page of the university website for several weeks now: “Concordia Receives $1 Million Grant.” The subtitle, puny and mumbled is: “to Study Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations.” Yeah nice, whatever, the real point is (and start pumping fists in the air): CHA-CHING!

Well how about that: Concordia receives…and not “a researcher gets successful peer review.” How quickly the lies vaporize when distilled by the brass basement moonshine machinery of sheer capitalist euphoria. The only thing missing from the above article is a link to an audio clip of Queen’s “We are the Champions…of the World!”

When there is competition for capital, and where capital accumulation becomes an end in itself, can we really be so straight faced in pretending that the university is not another capitalist industry? “Education,” and “critical thinking” are treated as merely secondary, accidental byproducts of the real drive for quantitatively measurable success.

The quantification and commercialization of thought even underpins the entire grading system where our teaching is concerned. Everything is reduced to numbers ultimately, with a few empty catch phrases such as “excellent” or “very good,” and students know this. Hence their hunt for the highest score, the big numbers, at all costs. Their futures count on it. This is not a site for higher order learning and self-reflection, this is about credentials, about positioning oneself for a future loaded with bling.

What we need to think about are solutions that involve critical, useful, knowledge production that circumvents capital accumulation. Otherwise, to try to decolonize anthropology in such a setting will be a futile effort.