The Future of Anthropological Knowledge

Henrietta Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134841011
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Future of Anthropological Knowledge the chapters explore the question of the nature of social knowledge from a variety of perspectives and locations such as China, Africa, the USA and elsewhere. By examining the changing nature of anthropological knowledge and of the production of that knowledge, this book challenges the notion that only western societies have produced social theories of modernity and of global scope. Knowledge of society can no longer be restricted to a knowledge of face-to-face social relations but must encompass the effect of technology, global consumption patterns and changing geo-political configurations. The Future of Anthropological Knowledge will be of interest to anthropologists and students of culture and society.

Chapter 1

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The changing nature of anthropological knowledge

An introduction

Henrietta L.Moore

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What role can anthropology play in the multipolar, globalized, post-colonial world we all now inhabit? How should anthropology respond to the shifting political determinations of representation and knowledge production? Anthropology is no longer a singular discipline, if it ever was, but rather a multiplicity of practices engaged in a wide variety of social contexts. A whole series of new questions has been posed by the sustained challenge which third world, black and feminist scholars have provided to the established agenda of the social sciences and humanities in recent years. The world of the academy has begun to tilt on its axis and to revolve in a slightly different manner. Such changes have been paralleled by significant shifts in the geopolitics of the world economy. It is in this context that the nature and purpose of social knowledge, and in particular anthropological knowledge, comes into particular focus.

The question 'what is social knowledge for?' cannot be answered; at least, not in the singular or the definitive. In any event, such a question is not intended to provoke an answer, but rather a series of interrogations. From the moment the process of interrogation gets under way, the terms themselves begin to present problems: whose knowledge; what sort of knowledge; what constitutes the social? These problems are emblematic rather than representative of a series of particularly pressing intellectual and political difficulties, all of which bear in some way or other on the highly charged relationships between knowledge, identity and power. The chapters in this volume work over the question of the nature of social knowledge from a variety of perspectives, and they examine the manner in which anthropological knowledge is changing and will be reformulated further in the future. In raising questions about who produces knowledge and theory, they map out an innovative set of understandings about the nature and politics of the anthropology of the twenty-first century. In this introduction, I examine some of the main themes raised in the rest of the book and provide my own suggestions for the future of anthropology.

WHO ARE THE PRODUCERS OF KNOWLEDGE?

We have all been aware in the social sciences of the impact of the critique of the Cartesian cogito and the unravelling of grand narratives and totalizing theories, variously labelled post-modernism, post-structuralism and/ or deconstructionism. The debates sparked by these critiques have led to a revision of the role of the academic and/or the expert practitioner. One consequence has been a call for a revaluation of the actor's or community's point of view, as part of a more general call to specificity, to the local. The clear demand is that the politics of positionality and location should be recognized and addressed.

The anthropological response to this move has been ambiguous and driven by uncertainty. The call to the local and the specific was hardly radical. Anthropologists have long prided themselves on their valorization of the 'actor's point of view' and on their grasp of local circumstance and local perspectives. What was new was the questioning of the interpretative authority of the anthropologist and the focus on writing rather than fieldwork as the domain of knowledge production. Paradoxically, some hostile critics felt that what was being threatened was not only the anthropologist's experience of personal interaction and her collection of systematic data, but also the emphasis on local specificities. While supporters held that the post-modern turn revealed the dialogic and shared nature of cross-cultural interpretation and representation, detractors argued that anthropological texts were now more about the anthropologists than the people they were studying. In other words, both sides claimed the more authentic connection with local people and their specificities. At its most uninteresting, the debate collapsed into an unenlightened scuffle between the self-declared supporters of empiricism on the one hand and interpretation on the other. What is strange is that all this discord should have left so many important questions untouched.

For one thing, the anthropological definition of knowledge remained curiously divided. Anthropologists had always been happy to see local people as producers of local knowledge about for example, agricultural experimentation, cosmological theories, and medical cures, but there was very little question of such knowledge being valorized outside the local domain. This was true both for supporters and detractors of the so-called post-modernist turn. In other words, local people produce local theories and such theories are, almost by definition, not comparative ones. The implicit assumption was therefore that the theories of non-western peoples have no scope outside their context.

This unwitting parochialization of all theories other than those produced by western science and social science was paradoxically reinforced by the deconstructive/post-modernist turn which makes all theories partial and local. It thus never seemed to occur to the anthropological supporters of this move that it might be necessary to consider the comparative pretensions of local theories as part of the process of reanalysing knowledge production rather than simply revealing the partial nature of anthropological truths.

Deconstructionism argues, of course, that all theories are partial, and there is thus no distinction between the local theories of anthropologists masquerading as comparative social science and those of the people being studied. However, this position occludes the point about the production of knowledge and of how that production is valorized. Anthropologists, for all their concern with local understandings and specificities, do not habitually view the people they work with as producers of social science theory as opposed to producers of local knowledge.

This assumption is connected to the lack of politicization of knowledge production within the discipline of anthropology as a whole (see Ong, Chapter 4, this volume). The major issue here is one about how anthropologists treat each other and about how that treatment is predicated on the geopolitics of resource allocation (see Karim, Chapter 6, this volume). This problem is not confined to anthropology, but is rather a feature of the dominance of western theorizing in a variety of disciplines and of the structuring of the academy along the fracture lines of centre-periphery politico—economic relations. Anthropologists from the developing world, for example, may produce theoretically innovative work, but if they claim that it draws on theoretical traditions outside mainstream western social science, they are likely to find that it will be denigrated as partial and/or localized. If they are critical of western social science, they may find that they are sidelined. Western social science consistently repositions itself as the originary point of comparative and generalizing theory.

THE GENEALOGY OF DISCOURSE

It is in the context of the post-modernist debate in the social sciences and the humanities, and the resulting theoretical elaboration of notions of difference, that we can see this point amplified most clearly. Black and third world scholars, post-colonial theorists and feminists have pointed out how the analogical figure 'same-as'/'different-from' which underpins western philosophical thinking works in a pervasive and discriminatory manner to structure forms of representation and knowledge in specific contexts.¹ Several black and third world scholars in a variety of disciplines have developed specific theories of signifying, and methods for reworking the relationship between the same, the other and the analogue that function outside the Cartesian model of the knowing subject. I am thinking here of the work of various African philosophers and theologians, including Jean Kinyongo, Oleko Nkombe, Vincent Mulago, John Mbiti, Alexis Kagame of Henry Louis Gates and Gerald Vizenor, amongst others (Masolo 1994;

Mudimbe 1988: chapters 2 and 3; 1991: Chapter 2; Gates 1988; Vizenor 1988, 1989). These theories, while dependent for their current intelligibility within western academia on the rise of post-modernism, are not post-modernist and are not derived from or intellectually dependent on post-modernism. This is not an attempt to develop an origins theory, but simply to point out that post-modernism shares some characterisitics with ways of philosophizing or thinking that have existed in other times and other places.² This point should not need making, but there is a purpose in the politics of the moment in emphasizing that the critique of the Cartesian cogito, like Picasso's modernism, did not simply originate in Paris. The mutually informing nature of critical frameworks and analytical categories developed in apparently diverse intellectual milieux and geographical locations is only one of the reasons why claiming the originary nature of western philosophy and theory is misleading.

The critique of the subject—object relations based on the Cartesian cogito is one way of trying to rethink alterity, and by extension subjectivity and collectivity. Africa has a long history as the defining trope of an alterity which grounds western subjectivity, reason and identity. It is not surprising then that various African scholars should have sought to transcend this dualism and to establish alternative frameworks for the relationship between subject and object. The fact that these efforts began in the 1930s and were explicitly linked to the political projects of liberation and nationalism is something barely known about and almost completely unrecognized by the vast majority of social scientists and humanities scholars. The revaluation of some of this work, and the sudden mainstream respectability of black scholars like Henry Louis Gates and Gerald Vizenor, is the consequence of the modishness of post-modernism in the duck pond of western theory. In other words, their intellectual perspectives have suddenly become valorized by the development of post-modernist thought in the West with its clearly parallel concerns, giving rise to a relatively comfortable situation where they can be safely understood as derivative. Feminist theory has experienced a similar problem, moving from being 'overstated' to being an 'offshoot' of post-modernism/deconstructionism. What this all amounts to is a testament to the continuing failure to recognize some groups of people in the world as producers of knowledge.

In seeking to link together a number of critiques of alterity, I am not suggesting that African, native American and Afro-American scholars are all making exactly the same kinds of argument. This would be crass, and besides, I am not interested in erecting an alternative totalizing theory. The more general point is really one about exclusion and about the genealogy of discourses. For example, one of the reasons for the general neglect of African philosophy by the western academy is that in the period since the 1950s a good many African philosophers have been writing on the borderline, or rather in the borderlands, between theology and anthropology (Mudimbe 1988,1991; Masolo 1994). Their distinctive contribution has been in trying to link African religious beliefs to Christian theology. It is this very engagement with faith, both on the practical and the intellectual level—many of these scholars are actually Catholic priests and not practising anthropologists—which has permitted their reclassification and relocation as theologians rather than as secular scientists of culture. The scope of their enterprise, while located in specifics, is both comparative and global, just as it was for those African scholars writing about negritude.

The discourses of African philosophy cannot be understood outside the contexts of anthropology as a generalizing science and colonialism as a specific historical and political project. This is a point made most forcefully by African scholars from a variety of perspectives. There are those who make a claim for a specifically African philosophy based on African concepts and beliefs, sometimes known as ethno-philosophers, for example, Kagame (1956), Mbiti (1969) and Nkombe (1977), and their work seeks to revalorize African philosophy in the face of a colonial dialectic which consistently refigures what is African as the inferior of what is European. Other African scholars, for example, Towa (1979), Hountondji (1983) and Bodunrin (1984), are extremely critical of the ethno-philosophers whose work they see as a form of descriptive ethnography which fails to escape the terms of alterity dictated by a colonized and colonial mentality. Both sets of positions are thus underpinned, albeit in very different ways, by a recognition of the historical and political project of philosophy in Africa. This point is ignored to a significant degree by many non-African scholars, including anthropologists, who consistently fail to realize that the search for identity and authenticity which is essential to this work is part of a project of modernity; that is, a project for the future, and it is in this sense that the aspirations of the work are global. There are supporters and detractors for a complex array of ideas about subjectivity, nationalist identity, regional autonomy and Africanization within the communities of African scholars involved, but one dominant trend which Mudimbe (1988: Chapter 5) identifies involves a critical rereading of African and western theories and interpretations in order to expand the possibilities for knowledge production in the future. The relationships between knowledge and power remain very much bound up with questions of individual subjectivity and collective identity, as it does for the rest of the world. However, it would be a mistake to imagine that a privileging of the local and the specific, as well as a repudiation of certain kinds of totalizing theory, must necessarily entail a prohibition on comparative thinking, if not the end of knowledge itself.

When it comes to looking at the practices of western academic anthropology, it is often an incomplete and rather inchoate set of anxieties about comparison, authenticity and identity which seem to have served to rule much anthropology written by African scholars out of court. If we read Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer, why do we not read Francis Deng on the Dinka; and if we refer to Evans-Pritchard on the Luo, why do we not defer to Ogot; why do we not in fact use any of the major anthropology texts written by African scholars in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s as teaching texts? One response is that these authors are not anthropologists, they are theologians or historians. Another response is that these texts are not anthropological because they are culturally specific and partisan. This is the kind of criticism regularly levelled, for example, at Jomo Kenyatta's book on the Kikuyu. 'Culturally specific, partisan', why should that be grounds for disqualification? Such characteristics do not, after all, necessarily distinguish these texts from any other anthropology text. The argument is surely one about who can be said to produce true knowledge.

There is a particular danger in discussing situated knowledges: in acknowledging the importance of alterity and diffraction in their constitution and conceptualization, one slips too easily into an unthought dialectic of opposition which is the negativity of difference. Mudimbe has said that one of the failings of anthropology is that it begins by measuring the distance from the same to the other (1988:81). What has to be avoided is any tendency to construct African knowledge(s), for example, as simple reversals of Euro-American ones. Processes of radical othering are merely methods of exclusion and hierarchization by another route. Indigenization of knowledge(s), while potentially powerfully creative for individuals and collectivities within specific contexts, runs the risk of defining certain kinds of knowledge as absolutely local, without comparative scope or wider application. It is imperative that anthropology should recognize that local knowledge, including local technical knowledge, can be part of a set of knowledges properly pertaining to political economy and the social sciences, and can thus be comparative in scope, as well as international in outlook (Richards, Chapter 7, this volume). What is sometimes implied in anthropological writing about local knowledges is that they constitute closed systems, in the sense that they are incapable of self-reflection and auto-critique. Indeed, this has long been thought to be one of the criteria which distinguishes traditional societies from modern ones. In the debate over whether African philosophy can be properly said to be a philosophy, one of the disputes has been about the existence or non-existence of an ongoing auto-critique of concepts, notions and forms of argument. It is reflexivity which is thought to be characteristic both of philosophy and of modern knowledge; without such auto-critique there is no knowledge, merely belief.

THE TECHNOLOGIZATION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE

This point raises the question of what constitutes knowledge. So far, I have been using the term knowledge(s) to encompass the theoretical in the broadest sense: philosophy, political economy, the social sciences, the humanities. I have not been speaking in the strict sense of those most modern forms of knowledge: science and technology. I want to turn now to the way in which science and technology are transforming anthropological knowledge through a transformation of its objects of enquiry.

The idea of the world as a very small pond linked together by the massive power of communication media and international capitalism is one of the background principles informing a great deal of intellectual endeavour, commercial activity, and techniques of government at the present time. One of the things that technology has really revolutionized is the scale or scales at which social relations operate. Face-to-face interaction, as many scholars have pointed out, is no longer the only basis for society, and this point alone revolutionizes anthropology's object of study. The shift that has taken place, and one which has been reflected in the language in which we teach and write, has been between social relations and sociality. The concept of sociality tries to embrace human/human an...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor's Preface
• 1 - The Changing Nature of Anthropological Knowledge: An Introduction
• 2 - Interpreting Electron Micrographs
• 3 - Globalization and Localization: New Challenges to Rural Research
• 4 - Anthropology, China and Modernities: the Geopolitics of Cultural Knowledge
• 5 - Tradition, Travelling Theory, Anthropology and the Discourse of Modernity in China
• 6 - Anthropology Without Tears: How a 'Local' Sees the 'Local' and the 'Global'
• 7 - Chimpanzees, Diamonds and War: The Discourses of Global Environmental Change and Local Violence on the Liberia-Sierra Leone Border
• Afterword - Affirmative Theory: Voice and Counter-Voice at the Oxford Decennial
• Name Index
• Subject Index