World Anthropologies in Practice

Situated Perspectives, Global Knowledge

John Gledhill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781474252607
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000190076
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Social Sciences

In a post-colonial world, the contributions of anthropologists living outside North America and Western Europe can no longer be treated as marginal. World Anthropologies in Practice demonstrates how global dialogues enable us to draw on local knowledge as well as differences of perspective to help overcome anthropology's eternal struggle against ethnocentrism and to strengthen the subject's relevance to the contemporary world.Based on contributions to the ASA-sponsored IUAES World Anthropology Congress in Manchester, UK, this truly global book brings together a wide range of international scholars who might otherwise not talk to each other. Featuring articles from leading figures in the field such as Yolanda Moses, Winnie Lem, Carmen Rial, Miriam Grossi, and Cristina Amescua, the volume covers topics as diverse as the mobility of Brazilian football players, toilets in South Africa, trade unions in Nepal and South Africa, peace-building in southern Thailand, museological approaches in China, the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, immigration and race in the United States, and many more. Edited by John Gledhill, the text offers a much-needed insight into the way in which anthropology is developing worldwide and makes a tremendous contribution to the discussion of 'world anthropologies'. An important, timely work for students and researchers.

1 Introduction: A Global Community at Work

John Gledhill

… every time we speak of the ‘anthropology of the South’, we are talking, in fact, in the plural: the anthropologies of the South are as manifold as the different ‘schools’ or ‘currents’ which are acknowledged within the anthropology of the North, or even more so. However, just like the latter, they share certain characteristics. These are not very clear yet, but naturally they have to do with the situation of having been traditionally the place of the ‘object’ of the original anthropology and with the principal worldwide inter-civilizational conflict that in our day divides the planet into two different and in certain sense opposing spheres: the North and the South.

Esteban Krotz (1997: 247–8)

The chapters in this book are based on papers presented at the Seventeenth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES), held in Manchester in August 2013. Although the very first of these meetings was in London in 1934, the UK anthropological community had not hosted another since then, and the ASA generously postponed its own decennial conference to ensure that all our national energies were focused on ensuring its success. This volume extends the ASA’s commitment, as an association now welcoming members from all countries, to strengthening communication and mutual understanding within a global community of anthropologists.

The congress has a separate historical origin to the organization that now sponsors it, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), which was founded in 1948 as part of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO’s) drive to create international scientific networks that would transcend not only cultural and language barriers also the Cold War divide. The two organizations did not merge definitively until ICAES was held in Tokyo in 1968, and what became five-yearly congresses supple mented by smaller inter-congresses are not the only activities that IUAES sponsors. Besides giving anthropology a voice in multidisciplinary international forums such as the International Council for Science (ICSU) and International Social Science Council (ISSC), IUAES promotes international collaboration between anthropologists working on particular issues through networks called commissions. IUAES commissions are often very lively international organizations in their own right, organizing their own conferences, and some papers in this book were presented in commission-sponsored panels at the World Congress.

It is ironic that the IUAES does not have a high profile among UK anthropologists today, given that its secretary-general from 1978 to 1998 was the distinguished biological anthropologist Eric Sunderland, who was a professor and later Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Durham University before he returned to his native Wales to become Vice-Chancellor of Bangor University and play a central role in the creation of devolved government through the Welsh Assembly. The relative marginality of IUAES might be simply a consequence of the dominance of social anthropologists in British anthropology and relatively small number of departments pursuing the four-field approach including biological anthropology, archaeology and linguistics that IUAES embodies. I suspect, however, that it reflects something else. Although much of the initial impetus to create IUAES came from Europeans and from North American scholars such as Sol Tax, founder of the journal Current Anthropology, and organizer of the 1973 congress in Chicago, IUAES-sponsored congresses became less important for Europeans and North Americans and especially important for anthropologists from countries in East and South Asia, Latin America, Russia and eastern Europe. A Mexican friend once told me that he always went to IUAES meetings precisely because anthropologists from the US and western Europe did not dominate them.

This speaks to one part of what is now a well-established debate, to which I return in the next section, about what it should mean to talk about ‘world anthropology’ in the twenty-first century, and whether we should speak of ‘world anthropology’ in the singular or ‘world anthropologies’ in the plural. The ICAES and IUAES were created to advance a project of building international relations between anthropologists that many contributors to the new debates of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century would consider rather naïve, because they have focused our attention on inequality and exclusion within the so-called ‘world community’ of anthropologists and on the strong institutionalization of the dominance of ‘hegemonic anthropologies’ located in the North Atlantic world, especially the anthropology of the United States. The lessons learned from these debates were very much at the forefront of the thinking of the organizers of the 2013 congress and of the many participants in it who have occupied senior positions in the anthropological associations of the countries and regions considered ‘hegemonic’ in these critiques, as well as those who represented the anthropological communities of ‘non-hegemonic’ countries and regions.

Bringing this congress back to the UK was one of a number of actions that reflected coordinated attempts by a recent generation of professional leaders to take concrete steps to act on these lessons, many of them promoted through the work of the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA), which also sponsored several panels and a plenary session at the Manchester congress. Given the recent emphasis on ‘hegemony’ and a more questionable tendency to locate hegemony in particular countries as distinct from transnational power networks, there is a potential difference in meaning between an ‘international congress’ and ‘world congress’ that aims to promote a more plural and inclusive global community of anthropologists. We therefore decided to abandon the old (and without knowledge of the history, rather confusing) ICAES name and call the 2013 event the Seventeenth World Congress of the IUAES.

With delegates from more than sixty countries representing all the regions of the world, the Manchester congress was a truly global event in terms of participation. I also hope that all delegates felt that they enjoyed equality of voice during the congress. But, although plenty of younger scholars from many different countries participated as well as more senior colleagues, I cannot feel totally satisfied with what we achieved in terms of inclusiveness. We succeeded in keeping registration and accommodation costs very low for a UK-hosted event, but, despite the generous support of the Wenner-Gren Foundation, we could not begin to compete with the level of subsidization of participation that funding from the Chinese government had made possible at the previous congress in Kunming, held in 2009. To my shame as chair of the organizing committee, British immigration officials refused entry visas to a small but significant number of delegates, despite my efforts, supported the British Academy and my local Member of Parliament at the time, John Leech, to get what in every case seemed both unreasonable and discriminatory decisions reversed. Cost constraints in the UK’s semi-privatized public universities also made it impractical to provide simultaneous translation, so, although a few panels were conducted in other languages, the only official congress language was that which was the second language of the greatest number of delegates: English. Yet, despite these constraints, we did succeed in hosting a genuinely ‘global’ event. The presentations reflected the existence of different and conflicting paradigms in the discipline both globally and within different countries, and a wide range of stimulating work was presented across the full range of anthropology’s sub-fields.

A single book can only include a tiny sample of the 1,283 individual papers presented at the congress, a figure that excludes the contributions to plenary debates and distinguished lectures, which are published separately, as are some of the panels. Because this book is an ASA monograph as well as an IUAES book, the contributions chosen are from social and cultural anthropologists, and, because it is a record of a world congress, I have had to ensure that regional representativeness complements the ASA’s usual norms of achieving gender balance and including younger as well as more senior scholars. Some colleagues suggested that I attempt a kind of ‘best of IUAES 2013’ selection. But this kind of logic is much easier to apply to collections of reissued pop songs than an academic publication of record, especially given the now lively debate about how anthropologists based in the global North decide on what is ‘good’ or not (Mathews 2010). So, given that it is impossible to represent the full range of issues debated at the congress and acknowledging the certainty that my choices reflect personal and probably structural biases, I have selected a group of papers likely to interest most anthropologists living and working in different countries at the present time, which reflect particular concerns and vantage points but also address some cross-cutting themes and engage with contemporary issues. Although many other papers presented at the congress would have been equally worthy of inclusion, each of those that I have chosen offers a stimulating contribution in its own right, and together they provide as good a reflection of what made the event worthwhile as any other selection that I might have made.¹

This book is not, therefore, another programmatic contribution about the principles that should shape the future of world anthropology/world anthropologies. It aims instead to provide a snapshot of some of the things that anthropologists in different countries are concerned about in the second decade of the twenty-first century. It exemplifies what anthropologists working in different global locations have to say about important issues, drawing on accumulated disciplinary knowledge and new ideas and inspirations. Given the amount of debate on principles that has already been published, more attention to exactly what anthropologists are actually doing and saying now seems essential to advancing the project of the world anthropology/anthropologies movement in practice. It is, however, clear that major political questions still need to be addressed, collectively, in relation to the promotion (and defence) of anthropology in different national settings, and in relation to more global issues. These include the role of the market in academic production, and the challenges of financing the global mobility necessary for anthropologists to enjoy face-to-face dialogues on equal terms. Another mobility-related point that has emerged in the course of the debates about how material inequalities within our communities might affect its intellectual achievements is how it might be possible for more anthropologists from the global South to do research on the societies of the global North without being restricted to an ‘ethnic ghetto’ or inevitably sucked into a ‘brain drain’. There are also significant epistemological issues to be considered in thinking about whether world anthropology should be singular or plural, whether or not, as Paul Rabinow (1986) argued, epistemology is another peculiar flower of European history. Before I go on to introduce the contents of the book, I will therefore devote a little more space to discussing the case for welcoming the pluralism in building a global anthropological community that is implicit in the book’s title.

World Anthropology or World Anthropologies?

The IUAES was in the business of building a world community of practicing anthropologists long before the late twentieth and early twenty-first century developments that produced the multi-lingual World Anthropologies Network, with its online journal and other publications, and the Wenner-Gren International Symposium that gave birth to the edited book World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations Within Systems of Power (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). The Wenner-Gren Foundation has provided consistent support for both earlier and later efforts to construct a world community of anthropologists, as Leslie Aiello illustrated in her opening address to the Manchester congress.² It is worth revisiting the earlier vision promoted by major IUAES figures such as Sol Tax and Cyril Belshaw (who succeeded Tax as editor Current Anthropology and was also an IUAES President).

As Greg Acciaioli (2011) points out, much of what Sol Tax stood for anticipated more recent efforts to create a decolonized and engaged anthropology that is serious about dialogue between people with different conceptions, including our own research subjects. The book publication programme associated with the Ninth ICAES in Chicago in 1973 sought to encapsulate the current state of anthropological knowledge on a world scale. Although that proved over-ambitious in the sense that the project bankrupted the Dutch publishing company Mouton, it did demonstrate a strong desire to let a hundred flowers bloom. Tax’s vision of world anthropology was undeniably that of a political liberal in the US sense and his approach to ‘decolonizing’ anthropology populist, as even sympathetic critics have pointed out. One of them, Douglas Foley (1999) used the pages of the journal that Tax founded, Current Anthropology, to re-appraise his ‘action anthropology’ paradigm, which used ‘clinical science’ as a metaphor for its proposed fusing of academic and applied anthropology in efforts to solve the practical problems of residents of a Native American community while simultaneously contributing to the development of anthropological theory. Foley’s research on a project carried out in the region where he himself was raised showed that most of the community projects of Tax’s team of students had little lasting impact; their interventions and efforts to broker relations with whites probably hindered rather than helped the Mesquaki become independent political actors. Foley also argues that although Tax’s populist stance did break with past styles of applied anthropology, the Mesquakis themselves rejected the idea that the white men could ‘save’ them by using their science to ‘cure’ a ‘culture’ that had become ‘dysfunctional’. He concludes that although Tax did question the then dominant paradigm of ‘acculturation’ to a degree, his ‘action anthropology’ did not produce a profound theoretical questioning of his era’s conceptions of ‘science’ and ‘culture’ because it did not institute a process in which the researchers could actually learn from their research subjects and understand what they thought was important for perpetuating their culture (ibid.: 183).

Nevertheless, Foley also emphasized that Tax was a very open scholar, who was self-reflexive about his achievements. As Acciaioli points out, the Current Anthropology (CA) format of articles with published commentaries and author’s response that is another of Tax’s legacies represented a crucial move towards a critical anthropological practice based on dialogue. Tax’s efforts to ‘decolonize’ the fieldwork situation may not have been successful, but his journal provided ‘an interdiscursive space that Tax never limited due to his own reticence to intervene as editor to limit speakable perspectives’ (Acciaioli 2011: 39). His contributions to the development of the IUAES furthered a conception of anthropology as ‘group of intercommunicating scholars’ as distinct from ‘an integrated knowledge system’. Acciaioli argues that this anticipated the kind of ‘decentering’ of dominant metropolitan paradigms called for by Ribeiro and Escobar (2006) in their introduction to the World Anthropologies edited volume, and by Restrepo and Escobar (2005) in an article published in the journal Critique of Anthropology that was also subjected to a CA-style discussion by a series of other anthropologists.

One of the anthropologists that Critique invited to respond to the Restrepo and Escobar article, João de Pina-Cabral, was strongly critical of the idea of world anthropologies in the plural (Pina-Cabral 2005, 2006). Writing as a Portuguese social anthropologist trained in Johannesburg and Oxford, who has made his career in both Portugal and the UK, has done field research in Macau and Brazil as well as his native country, and played a central role in the development of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), Pina-Cabral finds Restrepo and Escobar’s discussion US-centric. He even asks if there might not be a contradiction in making the argument using the conceptual tools currently fashionable in a ‘dominant ant hropology’ that he finds excessively given to discourse analysis (Pina-Cabral 2006: 467–8). Neither Restrepo and Escobar nor Ribeiro and Escobar are unduly discomforted by the latter kind of charges. They cite Bengali historian and postcolonial theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty: transcending European modernity by ‘provincializing Europe’ cannot be based on ‘an out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, totalizing explanations, and so on’, since without Enlightenment universals, in Chakrabarty’s words, ‘there would be no social science that addresses issues of modern social justice’ (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006: 4). European obsessions about how we know what we think we know seem to be the very basis of critical movements that rest on a reflexive approach to social science. It is also difficult not to welcome such recent practical developments within the supposedly globally ‘hegemonic’ anthropology of our day as the AAA’s creation of a Permanent Committee on World Anthropologies, along with a regular special section of American Anthropologist dedicated to reflexive articles written by colleagues working in ‘subalternized’ academic communities such as Irish or French-Canadian anthropology (Saillant 2015).

Nevertheless, Pina-Cabral offers other arguments against insisting on the plurality of anthropology. One is the danger of reifying ‘national traditions’ that often express sharp internal paradigm clashes, and generally have their own internal academic hierarchies and ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’. In responding to Pina-Cabral, Restrepo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• ASA Foreword
• IUAES Foreword
• 1. Introduction: A Global Community at Work
• Part One: Anthropology in an Age of Crises
• Part Two: Extending Perspectives on a Mobile World
• Part Three: The Politics of Culture, Gender, Religion and Place
• Part Four: Navigating Engagement with Public Issues
• Index