Making anthropology make sense

Anthropology is on the edge of a new turn.

This is a discipline which renews itself every 20 years or so by creating new paradigms.

It formed on the sharp edge of colonialism as 'explorers' that accompanied exploiters and missionaries into territories argued for the 'savages' as they were called then. Anthropologists, as they became, spent time alongside people in colonial areas, getting to know their customs and practices. They then argued with the colonials, asserting that these people were not savages but communities with their own way of understanding the world.

Anthropologists were so successful with their argument that, to their horror, colonial subjugators used the insights generated to further infiltrate and split up the communities. Tribe 'leaders' were identified and negotiated with, land 'bought' from them and the bill of sale used as validation for further control and devastation.

In the early 20th century, anthropological research into the different physical characteristics of ethnic groups (including white) was used by others again to reinforce racial stereotyping and to substantiate eugenics. Again, the curiosity and arguments of anthropologists interested in the nuance of difference were exploited and misused by others.

Anthropology retreated further into a community of people who talked largely to each other in relatively obscure language, protection perhaps from the misuse of their research insights.

As the century progressed, anthropologists fanned out across the world taking in all the continents, Africa, Australiasia, Asia, South America, North America and Europe, exploring the rich and diverse cultural differences in communities.

In the 1970s, a new turn was stimulated by feminist scholars who challenged ethnographic accounts which represented 'communities' as having particular rituals or practices. They argued for distinguishing by gender - anthropologists were largely men at the time and these men spent most of their time with other men in tribal communities. So their insights were not borne from 'the community' but from the men in that community.

A new era of anthropological research led to much closer attention to power dynamics in communities and how gender impacted upon these insights (both of the researcher and the researched). This approach stimulated a stronger sense of 'reflexivity' - understanding who you are in the picture as well as what you see.

The reflexive turn was further embedded when attention turned to the anthropologists' mode of communication itself. The way the research was written up, the language used, the style, the nature of quoting or representation, the situation and circumstances of the researcher themselves - these all needed to be accounted for and considered as part of the analytical process.

Meanwhile the ongoing onslaught of capitalist totalitarianism which embedded itself deeper and wider across the world, led to the rapid transformation of many traditional ways of living. Anthropologists whose geographical site of research would endure over decades bore witness to these transformations and could not help but be saddened by the subjugation of independent and differently thinking communities into wage labour.

Some anthropologists advocated for 'activism' using their knowledge, insight and privileged access to both indigenous communities and Western centres of power. However many were concerned by misuse of their insights, mindful of how early anthropologists had inadvertently aided the colonial project. Many anthropologists informally support the people they spend time with and advocate in particular spaces, when requested. In Australia, anthropologists were particularly helpful in supporting indigenous land claims which have led to substantial areas of the country owned by Australian aboriginal communities.

The new anthropological turn sees anthropologists arguing for the rights of non-human species. This is a largely political project borne partly from the frustration of arguing for the rights on non-Western communities. Arguments such as 'mushrooms have social lives' (Tsing) can be usefully situated as a metaphorical position. What if mushrooms have a social life - would this affect their consumption, their treatment?

This new turn takes the argument about whether some people's lives should be respected over others to another level. By focusing on the issue at a species level, it allows for an abstraction which may facilitate and refresh over 100 years of arguing for respect of the other.

Here's hoping.

Marilyn Strathern

There are some anthropological papers that really encapsulate the essence of the discipline. They have exactly the right combination of theoretical analysis and ethnographic contextualisation. A critical component of good anthropology is that the insight comes, is borne from, the fieldwork and so any good paper needs to bring the reader on that same journey.

All good papers need an 'Ah Ha' moment when the reader 'clicks' and understands the argument or rationale being outlined.

Strathern is particularly gifted at providing a good Ah Ha moment. While her texts can be turgid and highly complex with arguments within arguments, you stay reading to the end to see how she is going to get out of this little conundrum this time. She is also very good at reframing and providing pithy quotes that encapsulate arguments. Here she takes Sahlins' analysis of Cook's death at the hands of the Hawaiians and extends his argument that the Hawaiians acted logically within their own cultural understanding of Cook's return to the island with a broken mast: "A cultural event is thus perpetually created out of a natural happening" (1990:160).  Things occur; people make sense of them. Sahlins provided the first Ah Ha and then Strathern extended it. Anthropological fun...

Anthropologists of the moment

New research fields, new themes, interdisciplinary research partners and the digitisation of everything requires a radical rethinking of academic cogitation. Furthermore 20th century theorists writing for pre-digital, pre-feminist, pre-globalised, pre-austerity societies can be cannabilised for insight but they are no longer worth engaging in any kind of extensive way (well maybe a few favourites, but not many).

It is time to update our theoretical frameworks for the contemporary world. With this in mind, let's discover who is alive now and providing conceptual understandings of social dynamics that provide useful framings to think through and with.

So who are the leading contemporary thinkers in social sciences esp anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, human geography and urban studies?  Can they be identified by

- number of citations

- number of times paper downloaded from web

- number of publications / in key/ highly rated journals

- Professorships

- ESRC grant awards

Or shall we just name some favourites (in no particular order).

Marilyn Strathern (obviously)

Alberto Corsin Jiminez

Jeanette Edwards

Sarah Green

Gillian Evans

David Graeber

Soumhya Venkatesan

Cori Hayden

Michel Foucault

Alfred Gell

Karen Sykes
Bruno Latour
Penny Harvey
Hannah Knox
Sharon Macdonald
Georgina Born
Tim Ingold
Michael Taussig

Why?

I swear I saw this

Michael Taussig is an anthropologist who writes beautifully. His research has focused on tin mines and the cocaine trade in South America. He writes about, and evokes through his writing, the combined sense of hopelessness and grit that keeps people keeping on even though their lives are incoherently dominated by capitalist forces out of their control.

He writes
"This is a drawing in my notebook of some people I saw lying down at the entrance to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in July 2006. There were even people lying in the pitchblack tunnel. It was 1:30 in the afternoon.
  The sides of the freeway before you enter the tunnel are high there, like a canyon, and there is not much room between the cars and the clifflike walls. "Why do they choose this place?" I asked the driver. "Because it's warm in the tunnel" he replied. Medellin is the city of eternal spring, famous for its annual flower festival and entrepreneurial energy.
  I saw a man and woman. At least I think she was a woman and he was a man. And she was sewing the man into a white nylon bag, the sort of bag peasants use to hold potatoes or corn, tied over the back of a burro making its way doggedly to market. Craning my neck I saw all this in the three seconds or less it took my taxi to speed past. I made a note in my notebook. Underneath in red pencil I later wrote:

I SWEAR I SAW THIS

 

See Taussig talk at the Tate here

 

Anthropologists have so much to share.

How is anthropology relevant to story-making

Stories are the processes through which society (open-ended, ongoing activity) becomes culture (activity contextualised to specific circumstances). Stories are meaningful selections - deliberate or subconscious choices by people who construct and share their worldview by connecting certain elements in specific ways.

As accounts of experiences both real and imagined, stories are repeated and represented in different formats to help people make sense. Anthropologists tell and use stories to help make sense of how people in communities make sense.

The anthropology of storytelling recognises how all this sense-making through narrative is both an implement in the anthropologist’s toolbox and a practice employed by people in communities across the world.

Anthropological contribution to discussions about the 'future of storytelling' would help contextualise how stories are shaped, how they come deeply rooted in specific cultural contexts. It is critical to make these roots explicit // picture squealing, squirming story creature with long tentacles pulled out of writing mass below //

Ontological

What does Ontological mean?

on·to·log·i·cal (nt-lj-kl)
adj.
1. Of or relating to ontology.
2. Of or relating to essence or the nature of being.
3. Of or relating to the argument for the existence of God holding that the existence of the concept of God entails the existence of God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

n the classical sense, anthropology can be taken as a subset of ontology. Ontology is the study of being as such. It asks the question, "What sorts of things are there?" Anthropology is the study of the human being. It asks the question, "What sort of thing is man?"
http://www.monachos.net/forum/showthread.php?7692-Ontology-and-anthropology

Capitalism embraces anthropology

What do we think about capitalists using the ethnographic approach to develop products and services. It's hard to say. On the one hand, it is good that people know about the field, it increases the potential for anthropology to have an influence. On the other, anthropology has a long history of being used for nefarious means, starting with the colonial project and maybe we quite liked being under the radar for a few decades...