The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology

Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, Ann Kingsolver, Simon Coleman, Susan Hyatt, Ann Kingsolver, Simon Coleman, Susan B. Hyatt, Ann Kingsolver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367199685
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317590668
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is an invaluable guide and major reference source for students and scholars alike, introducing its readers to key contemporary perspectives and approaches within the field. Written by an experienced international team of contributors, with an interdisciplinary range of essays, this collection provides a powerful overview of the transformations currently affecting anthropology. The volume both addresses the concerns of the discipline and comments on its construction through texts, classroom interactions, engagements with various publics, and changing relations with other academic subjects. Persuasively demonstrating that a number of key contemporary issues can be usefully analyzed through an anthropological lens, the contributors cover important topics such as globalization, law and politics, collaborative archaeology, economics, religion, citizenship and community, health, and the environment. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology is a fascinating examination of this lively and constantly evolving discipline.

PART I
Introduction

1
INTRODUCTION TO AN ENGAGING DISCIPLINE

The challenge of creating a companion to contemporary anthropology

Simon Coleman, Susan B. Hyatt, and Ann Kingsolver

Anthropology has always been a heterogeneous discipline, engaged in a constant process of debate, self-examination and reinvention. As the study of human connections to, or disconnections from, one another, in myriad environments, it is an eclectic way of thinking by an eclectic group of global practitioners. No single volume should dare to claim that it is providing a comprehensive compendium of everything going on in anthropology today, and this book is no exception. In putting together this collection for readers who may or may not be anthropologists and who learn and work in academic or other contexts, our goal was to compile a range of articles that would speak both to the diversity of the discipline and also to its common threads—and of course to lay out what we see as the significance of its role in the contemporary world.

The term “anthropology” is now often modified by such adjectives as “engaged,” “public” and “collaborative” and these emphases are reflected in the contributions to this collection. As US archaeologist Paul Mullins (2011: 235) noted,

The question of whether or not engaged scholarship has won over anthropology has apparently been settled, with every corner of the discipline concretely confronting the politics of anthropological insight.

What Mullins describes as “the politics of anthropological insight” now shape work across all of anthropology’s sub-disciplines that, in the United States in particular, comprise departments conforming to the scholar Franz Boas’s early 20th-century vision of a “four-field anthropology” (archaeology and linguistic, biological and cultural anthropology). In this Companion, our goal was not to provide encyclopedic coverage of work in all of the various spheres of anthropological research; rather, we wanted to pull together a collection of articles that would illustrate the ways in which these current emphases on public, collaborative and engaged anthropology are playing out across a range of approaches and field sites. In that sense, we do not consider and do not intend for any one chapter to stand in as representative of any one particular subfield or site; rather, our goal was to show how shared interests in commitment and collaboration stretch across the discipline, manifesting themselves through a selection of contemporary work, by scholars located in different institutions and at different stages of their own careers.

Engaged, or committed, anthropology is one feature of contemporary work that contrasts strongly with the discipline’s historical entanglements with aspirational “objectivity” and assumed distance between the (colonial) observer and (colonized) observed. The majority of current anthropologists’ commitments are to finding paths to social justice in contrast to much of colonial anthropology’s witting or unwitting justification of oppressive regimes. Another groundbreaking contemporary dimension of the discipline is that those who identify themselves as anthropologists hail from every nation. As Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (2014: 165) points out, “thousands of anthropologists… over the course of more than a century, have woven global webs of influence.” Through individual journeys for training, research, collaboration, employment and publication in a field already focused on global diversity, anthropologists are constantly shaping a world conversation in anthropology that cannot be parsed necessarily by national tradition–although there are very different histories of anthropological programs and practice, as depicted by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, Arturo Escobar and their colleagues in the critical collection World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power (2006). Thanks to the World Anthropology Network, the World Council of Anthropological Associations, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and many other transregional anthropological organizations, there is more comparison than ever of approaches and topics and perspectives in the discipline.

Shinji Yamashita (2015: 377) encourages all anthropologists “to go beyond the dichotomy between the West and non-West, center and periphery, and native and nonnative and go toward a global anthropology balanced on equal footing.” This has been a challenge, given that, as Mwenda Ntarangwi (2010: 133) observes, “What we have are traditions born out of interactions and exchanges occurring at various levels between anthropologies and anthropologists, especially following such processes as imperialism and globalization.” Contributors to Faye Harrison’s important edited volume, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation (1991), first published over 25 years ago, argued for practical steps toward addressing the inequities in power and voice among anthropologists as part of colonial legacies, including more equitable access to conference and publication venues. Our own book is shaped by the vagaries of personal and professional networks, primarily English speaking, and does not, once again, pretend to be comprehensive through translation or geographic representation. But as editors we share in the commitment to decolonize anthropology and encourage all readers to situate the examples in this volume—drawn from several, but not all, world regions—within the global anthropological conversation that is increasingly accessible and affordable through online, open-source journals and Skype exchanges, and through taking advantage of the international milieu within which most of us now live and work.

In keeping with our commitment to seeing anthropology as an integrated—if often cacophonous—set of discussions of ideas about understanding the world around us, we have not followed what has been a convention in collections like this one to have separate chapters on such topics as racialization, economic inequalities, gender, sexuality and globalization. Instead, our intention has been for these topics to be woven throughout the text, to form the bedrock for the kinds of inquiries that are integral to the critical power of the discipline in all of its contemporary manifestations. Furthermore, we draw on Mwenda Ntarangui’s (2010: 126) fundamental question, “What is the future of anthropology in a world that is becoming increasingly connected by new forms of globalization that hinge on a neoliberal economic model?” An important dimension of anthropological thought since the 1960s has been its propensity to understand the significance of interconnectedness, while wrestling with the gross inequalities that now appear to have become almost a taken-for-granted aspect of the global landscape. The “global” has, itself, become another fundamental anchor of contemporary anthropology and that global perspective is another thread that weaves itself through many, if not all, of the chapters in this book. Our emphasis on “interconnectedness” as a theme not just of the book, but of the world itself, harkens back to an insight articulated by Eric Wolf (1982: 6) in the introduction to his key anthropological text of the 20th century, Europe and the People Without History:

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies, or cultures with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive and bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other like so many hard and round billiard balls.

Extending that insight, we have also sought not to treat concepts such as race, gender and class like billiard balls bouncing off one another, but as characteristics that overlap and are inextricably linked, and that intersect in the ways that they create and sustain systems of inequality; we have solicited and organized the chapters that make up this volume in such a way that those themes extend through the book as a whole.

Similarly, we have tried not to treat anthropology as though it were a self-contained “billiard ball,” bouncing off other disciplines. We recognize that contemporary anthropology’s conversations outside the traditional “membranes” of the discipline constitute some of the most interesting and intellectually challenging spaces for debate and discussion. In many respects, anthropology has long played a role as a “connector,” as a way of thinking about the world that speaks to, draws from, and contributes to larger visions of the way the world is, and of what could be. We do not intend this book to be read as a definitive conclusion about the state of the discipline. Rather, it is intended as one opening to a larger series of debates about how we might deploy the ideas, concepts and insights that emerge from our conversations with one another and with other scholars in other disciplines. These conversations take place in a multiplicity of places, both institutionalized and less formal; they not only reach toward better understandings and analyses of the complexities, contradictions and subjugations inherent in the politics and economics of the contemporary world, but they also have the potential to signpost the way toward political and activist responses work to denaturalize and therefore disrupt these difficult realities. In the following, we provide you with a summary of the chapters of the Companion as they appear in each section, even as we try to keep in mind our overall aim of presenting anthropology as a means of opening up ways of understanding the world precisely through juxtaposing different forms of knowledge and experience—forms that may themselves interrelate in complex ways. We hope, then, that the image of a Companion might imply more than a mere (though rather bulky) edited volume, for we see anthropology itself as a useful accompaniment to all areas of life, helping us to negotiate institutions and social situations including but also going far beyond those of the academy.

Conceptualizing the field in/of anthropology

The title of this section of our book may sound rather cerebral—conceptualizing the field—but in practice anthropologists’ understandings and conceptions of their “field” imply much more than intellectual debate or reflection. The active construction and framing of the field are central to the very constitution of the discipline. Perhaps the most obvious depiction of the field in anthropology is as the place where we do fieldwork, the site (or sites) where we gather data, usually through participant-observation. However, the term may also refer to the discipline as a whole—overlapping with but also partially distinct from other related activities such as sociology, psychology, geography and so on. In other words, anthropological labor involves a much wider array of activities than just interacting with informants. Indeed, many of the titles of the chapters of this section contain such action verbs as “engaging,” “witnessing” and “teaching,” that indicate the range of our work. In his contribution, Paul Basu notes that most practising anthropologists spend much of their time simply communicating through different media, and his comment indicates the interesting ambiguity of the word “ethnography”—an activity normally seen as central to much of what anthropologists do (though see Ingold 2008): ethnography, after all, implies both the gathering of data about people and the writing up and dissemination of such work.

These ambiguities about what is meant by “the field”—as a place of cultural encounter, or as a broader set of disciplinary practices—remind us that anthropology does not float about in abstract space but is rooted in specific institutional forms: the university, the museum, perhaps the nongovernmental organization, but also in the wider political economy of the production of “knowledge” in and about the world. Anthropology is certainly a product of human institutions (inflected by class, gender, ethnicity and so on), but at the same time it attempts to reflect on such institutions—comparatively, contextually and critically. Faye Harrison’s opening chapter on anthropological theory insists that we become aware of the multiplication of sites and networks where theorizing is currently taking place. She argues that one of the most exciting dimensions of the present moment is growth in recognition of the diversity of contexts out of which theorizing can emerge—a development that can unsettle “the megastructure of the academy.” She draws on the work of Arturo Escobar (e.g., 2008), already mentioned above, a US-based Colombian academic and thus—like many anthropologists—someone used to inhabiting more than one “home” as well as multiple “fields.” At the same time, Harrison highlights the complicated politics of representing a “world anthropology” perspective from the privileged vantage point of a North Atlantic institution.

As you read Harrison’s chapter and other chapters in this section—and in fact the book as a whole—you might be struck by how often writers draw on spatial metaphors in their descriptions and analyses: look out in this section for terms such as “locating,” “mapping,” people working in “zones” or “landscapes,” or thinking about how “Northern epistemologies” relate to those from the South and so on. Anthropology is a discipline that is decidedly “grounded,” and the metaphors and materiality of the field represent important contexts through which it actively constitutes itself in and through space and place, despite the common assumption that globalization means a kind of liberation from the constraints of locality.

Such grounding is an important part of the role anthropology can play as a discipline involving different forms of social and political engagement. As you will see throughout this section, but especially in Deborah Reed-Danahay’s chapter, there is some debate as to how “neutral” anthropologists can or should be as they participate in and observe their field sites. Her contribution contains the implied question: Must we adopt a “liminal” or threshold position (another spatial metaphor) in relation to institutions of power, and how consciously activist or partial can we permit our perspective to be while still retaining our claims to academic rigor? Reading Danahay’s piece, we might ask further whether her idea of ethnographer as witness provides a means to both mediate between and challenge conventional notions of the anthropologist as participant-observer in relation to cultural and social fields. What are, in fact, the limits to participation and how passive in reality is that activity we call “observation”? However we choose to respond to such questions, we must bear in mind that fieldwork is an activity rife with moral implications, and one that suggests ethical orientations that form a bridge between the field as place of data gathering and the wider discipline. In a powerfully argued paper called “Anthropology as a Moral Science of Possibilities,” Michael Carrithers poses a difficult but vital question that again refers to questions of engagement, neutrality and positionality: “In a world of continued and expanding empire, does sociocultural anthropology in itself offer grounds for moral and social criticism?” (2005: 433). He asks this question in the specific context of considering how anthropologists might reflect on the Iraq war that began in 2003. Carrithers’s answer is nuanced but also passionate—an awkward but characteristically anthropological stance—and he sees anthropology as possessing a “moral aesthetic” that emerges “out of our collective experience of engaging with and writing about others in very different moral climes from our own” (ibid.: 434). In his view, the conditions of anthropological production suggest a moral dimension of ethnographic practice that challenges the potential moral paralysis implied in cultural relativism by embodying forms of mutual forbearance, and implying the possibility that the relations involved in fieldwork “give sociocultural anthropologists support, based in the moral logic of the discipline itself and in its understanding of the complexity of possibilities surrounding any moral judgment, for skeptical and therapeutic criticism of rhetoric exercised in pursuit of empire” (ibid.: 433).

Carrithers emphasizes the point that the exercise of disciplinary practice has moral and ethical dimensions that are strikingly parallel to the disciplinary and collegial relations described by Rachael Kiddey in her remarkable chapter on the exercise of an apparent oxymoron: “contemporary archaeology.” The two projects she describes were based in the United Kingdom but do not involve conventional locations such as Stonehenge or a Roman villa. Rather, they work to uncover another kind of past, that of present-day homeless people’s lives, as biographical experiences—previously concealed by official discourses—are now rendered visible on the map of urban space. Homeless people actively collaborate with archaeologists in the process of uncovering and analyzing the material culture of those without conventional homes. In the best tradition of ethnographic work, Kiddey learns much from the unexpected dimensions of her practice. For instance, she comes to realize that her homeless colleagues prefer to communicate orally rather than through writing or drawing. The material processes of knowledge production, and not just the end product, become revealing, and possess their own politics (as Basu also reveals in his chapter). Furthermore, in her use of collaborative methods that are more conventionally associated with socio-cultural anthropology than with archaeology, Kiddey engages in a further, creative, disciplinary politics that involves unsettling intellectual boundaries between cultural anthropology and archaeology.

The moral and political critique explored by Carrithers suggests one public role for anthropology, as do the varied forms of disciplinary communication (written, filmed, displayed) explored by Basu and Reed-Danahay, and the collaborations discussed by Kiddey. As Elizabeth Chin points out in her contribution to the section, however, it is a mistake to overlook another kind of public—that is, students of anthropology. Chin reminds us once more of the nature of the institution in which many of us work: colleges and universities, both public and private, are increasingly run as businesses in keeping with neoliberal economic imperatives, emphasizing such values as competition, consumerism and “value for money.” Of course, teaching often results in its own form of disciplinary reproduction, as some students ultimately become faculty, themselves; but Chin points to a far wider medium for the deployment of an anthropological sensibility: that of the lives of students “as they move through the world, building anthropology into their daily lives and experiences.” Anthropology here becomes an orientation toward life and, as such, it goes far beyond the need to be written in a monograph. As is the case in Kiddey’s chapter on the archaeology of homelessness, we see here a partial loss of academic control of the means and media of production of an anthropologized world. The results, written in and through biographies, become unpredictable but not negligible.

It is not just the field, then, but also the media in and through which anthropology is constituted that we must consider in assessing the ways in which anthropology is being reconceptualized. In a discipline as grounded as anthropology, the medium and the message are intimately connected. Anna Stewart’s chapter on the relationship between anthropology and “the internet” illustrates this point beautifully. She traces the rapid process through which use of the web has become an everyday practice for many of the people whom anthropologists study. This reality poses new challenges that call upon the discipline to develop methods and analytical stances to keep up with a technology that both challenges and expands anthropological fields. Stewart indicates how anthropology invokes and reconsiders spatial metaphors as it reflects on the virtual constitution of territory and space—not only in the lives of our informants, but also in our professional practices. Such developments have implications for anthropology as a discipline that is committed to making a difference in the world. In an argument that complements Basu’s discussion of communication, Stewart refers to the possibilities of anthropology deploying the internet to contribute to civil society online while dislodging the authority once claimed by academic authors, as anthropologists and their informants engage in a process of mutual surveillance enabled by the democratization of access to academic research. Thus Stewart asks: Who is peering over whose shoulder? This question illustrates the complexity of trying to maintain an academic stance whereby we write about the world while acknowledging the multiple ways in which we are enmeshed within it.

Stewart notes that anthropologists were rather slow to respond to the ethical and methodological challenges raised by the democratic nature of the internet. One discipl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Conceptualizing the field in/of anthropology
• Part III Transforming disciplinary conversations
• Part IV Anthropology in conversation with other fields
• Index