The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology

James G. Carrier, Deborah B. Gewertz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781474283465
• eBook ISBN: 9781000181494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

he Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology presents a state of the art overview of the subject - its methodologies, current debates, history and future. It will provide the ultimate source of authoritative, critical descriptions of all the key aspects of the discipline as well as a consideration of the general state of the discipline at a time when there is notable uncertainty about its foundations, composition and direction. Divided into five core sections, the Handbook: examines the changing theoretical and analytical orientations that have led to new ways of carrying out research; presents an analysis of the traditional historical core and how the discipline has changed since 1980; considers the ethnographic regions where work has had the greatest impact on anthropology as a whole; outlines the people and institutions that are the context in which the discipline operates, covering topics from research funding to professional ethics.Bringing together leading international scholars, the Handbook provides a guide to the latest research in social and cultural anthropology. Presenting a systematic overview - and offering a wide range of examples, insights and analysis - it will be an invaluable resource for researchers and students in anthropology as well as cultural and social geography, cultural studies and sociology.

PART I Orientations

Orientations in Anthropology

GÍSLI PÁLSSON

The field appears to be a thing of shreds and patches, of individuals and small coteries pursuing disjunctive investigations and talking mainly to themselves. We do not even hear stirring arguments any more. . . . We no longer call each other names. We are no longer sure of how the sides are to be drawn up, and of where we would place ourselves if we could identify the sides. (Ortner 1984: 126–27)

This is the punch line of Ortner’s perceptive review of the state of anthropological theory. Ortner nicely captures the decline of the three schools dominant in the 1950s (structural functionalism, cultural and psychological anthropology, evolutionary anthropology), the rise of the new schools that emerged during the 1960s (symbolic anthropology, cultural ecology, structuralism), how each of them drew upon and differed from their predecessors, and how they collectively, in turn, generated new theoretical avenues during the 1970s (in particular, several kinds of Marxism). Reflecting on the landscape ahead, Ortner (1984: 127) anticipated a new emergent “key symbol of theoretical orientation,” namely practice or praxis, partly through the influence of Bourdieu (1977). Ortner was right, but only up to a point. While any convincing account of the development of anthropological theory since the 1980s is bound to give substantial weight to the shift from structure to agency and to the various ways in which practice theory has been developed and used during the subsequent decades, the claim about the fuzziness of community boundaries, the quiet and peaceful coexistence of “small coteries,” and the absence of “stirring arguments” in the early 1980s failed to foresee the rough and divided road ahead.

The same year that Ortner’s article was published, a group of scholars gathered in Santa Fe for a ground-breaking theoretical discussion that later materialized in Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Signaling the birth of a long-standing and

heated debate on the postmodern that would split the community into rather clearly demarcated camps, Writing Culture illustrated the difficulties of anticipating theoretical currents that set the stage for years to come. Another important focus of debates on anthropological theory relates to the notion of the biological and the ways in which it—somewhat arbitrarily, I argue—splits the discipline of anthropology. This introduction will briefly explore the shifting terrain of anthropological theory during the last three decades or so and how the changes involved have been informed by major events in the social and political environment in which they are embedded, mapping the outlines of what might be called the “biosocial turn,” the “the road out of Santa Fe” (James, Hockey, and Dawson 1997). At the same time, I hope to contextualize the chapters in Part I, which focus on some of the core orientations of the discipline: culture, power, postmodernism, political economy, and methodology.

EVENTS

During the 1930s, years before the concept of scientific paradigms gained currency, Fleck ([1935] 1979: 142) pointed to the idea of changing “thought styles,” of gestalt shifts in intellectual interests, in “the readiness for directed perception and appropriate assimilation of what has been perceived.” If thought styles name the world, generating perceptions that “stick,” there has to be a collaborative and receptive audience; namers and context, so to speak, co-produce those styles. What, then, have been the main forces channeling anthropological interests, shifts in perception, and persistent theoretical scrutiny? Several radical changes in intellectual culture and geopolitics have helped to shape anthropological theory. One of the key changes involved was that of the postmodern turn that would inform the discussion and framing of many key issues, including ethnographic authority, the constitution of ethnographic facts, the proper manner of writing ethnographies, and, last but not least, the decline of grand narrative.

The prime example of grand narrative in anthropology is structuralism, which also inspired theorizing in several other fields, including linguistics (Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky), the psychology of cognitive development (Jean Piaget), and biology (François Jacob). Aided by mathematical language and precision, the discovery of previously hidden structures and units (phonemes, mythemes, genes) was assumed to explain just about anything. Anthropology, then, had a powerful theory that many other disciplines could emulate and adapt for their own purposes. In recent decades, however, partly due to postmodern critique of totalizing theories, structuralism has increasingly been under attack. Structuralist perspectives, however, remain strong in some fields, in particular the gene talk of molecular biology and biomedicine, but even here the semiotic systems presupposed have increasingly been invaded by context, by challenges posed by epigenetics, microbiomes, and developmental systems theory. While the appeal of grand narratives, codes, and messages has faded, the insights of Lévi-Strauss continue to inspire research in some domains, in particular works on the cultural aspects of art and aesthetics (Wiseman 2008).

To some extent, postmodernism underlined an anthropological Mid-Atlantic Rift by the turn of the century, with its tectonic friction and divisions. It was not, in fact, a uniform thought style with the same perceptions and effects in different academic contexts on either side of that rift. Godelier (2009: 2) warns that the collective work of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze, known in the United States as “French theory,” was “a purely American invention, since France recognizes no such unified body of thought,” adding (2009: 19) that one should not put “Americans on trial,” and “that . . . conflating all those who have rallied to or are accused of having cheered ‘Postmodernism’ ” would not make sense. There were, indeed, important North American strands, including that of the interpretive anthropology of Geertz (see Vann, Chap. 1).

Postmodernism, no doubt, had useful impact in that it sensitized the anthropological community to the role of the ethnographic scribe and to conditions in the field, highlighting the need to situate accounts and, more importantly, to continue to experiment with methods and representations. Significantly, the modernist notion of ecological anthropology that was popular in the 1970s and the 1980s, which tended to separate human discourse from the systems observed, seems to have been replaced by the more open-ended label of “environmental anthropology,” emphasizing situated accounts, the perspective of dwelling, and the unity of humans and that which surrounds them (Ingold 2000). In the long run, on the other hand, the appeal of radical postmodernism began to fade. After all, it was argued, some kind of grand narrative might be unavoidable, even essential, for responsible scholarship, given the pressing global problems faced by humans. Would environmental anthropology, for instance, be of any use if it only deconstructed discourses on climate change, and would it be socially and environmentally responsible to abandon any attempt to establish the history of the so-called Anthro-pocene (a period characterized by escalating human impact) and future conditions of the biosphere and to inquire into the implications for anthropological subjects? And has postmodernism, which by now has been around for almost a century, not had a grand narrative of its own (see Lindstrom, Chap. 3), an ironic duplicity and cheerful nihilism?

At more or less the same time that postmodernism was gaining force, globalization and neoliberal politics settled in, paving the way for the new economy of Late Capitalism, an economy characterized by, among other things, venture capitalists, fluctuating markets, internet technology, knowledge production, and digital trading (Fisher and Downey 2006). These events generated theoretical interest in a series of new and renewed themes, such as cultural flows, spatial formations, property rights, and the nature of the political economy. For some analysts, virtualism represented a new political economy that conflated the domains of economy, society, and the community of economists modeling the market: “Perceiving a virtual reality becomes virtualism when people take this virtual reality to be not just a parsimonious description of what is really happening, but prescriptive of what the world ought to be: when, that is, they seek to make the world conform to their virtual vision” (Carrier 1998: 2). Not only did these developments echo both the postmodern condition and Karl Polanyi’s early work on “fictitious commodities,” they also seem pertinent for theoretical understanding of more recent dramatic changes in the world economy, the global financial crisis that began in 2008, with its marketing bubbles, collapses of banks and national economies, and associated events and phenomena.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES, PATHS NOT TAKEN, EMERGENT PERSPECTIVES

What opportunities for theoretical scrutiny may have been missed during the last two or three decades? For several scholars, a return to Marxian theory—suppressed and marginalized during the heydays of postmodernism, neoliberalism, and the Cold War—provides an important avenue for understanding power, inequalities, biopolitics, and the human condition more broadly in Late Capitalism. Patterson (2009: 159–60) suggests, for instance, that Marx would be relevant for a number of modern themes, including the historicity of human beings, capitalism, and transformations on an increasingly global scale. Keeping in mind Polanyi’s early work on the fictitious, Carrier’s notion of the virtual, and the issues of political economy highlighted by Heyman (Chap. 4), it is rather saddening to see that anthropologists generally failed to detect and disentangle the recent financial bubbles until the collapses they implied had eventually occurred. In the wake of the recent crises, it seems, virtualism needs to be dissected and exposed and placed firmly on the agenda, highlighting the importance of theorizing the transformations of capitalist economies and their implications for culture and society, locally and globally.

Market-based economies and virtualism were rapidly advanced in the capitalist world through the governments and policies of Reagan and Thatcher. At the same time, the regime of the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate and, eventually, collapse, far more quickly than most observers anticipated. The late 1980s and the 1990s saw important shifts in geopolitical language and landscape, and in academic perceptions and divisions of labor (Restrebo and Escobar 2005); glasnost, perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia—these developments call for much theoretical rethinking, as Chari and Verdery have argued. The process of “transition” in the former Soviet bloc, they suggest, “opens the workings of capital to new scrutiny, enabling us to see more clearly how phenomena such as property rights, commodification, and democratization are being constituted” (Chari and Verdery 2009: 24). At the same time, they (2009: 12) suggest, these developments provide an opportunity “to restore research connections that should never have been separated,” namely between post-socialist studies (see Rogers and Verdery, Chap. 21) and the postcolonial studies developed in the 1980s (see Das, Chap. 22), a critical approach to colonialism partly drawing upon the “literary turn.”

While the Cold War was coming to a close in the West, other important changes with far-reaching consequences were taking place elsewhere. Just to mention a few landmark events, Tiananmen Square became the site for public protests in China; the old regimes of Mexico, Chile, and Brazil broke down; Osama bin Laden took control over MAK (Maktab al-Khidamat, the precursor to al-Qaeda); and apartheid began to crack in South Africa, Nelson Mandela being freed from prison in February 1990. Finally, the World Wide Web was launched on Christmas Day 1990. Just as the collapse of the Soviet bloc was unexpected, the public demonstrations against and subsequent fall of several North African regimes in 2011 took most people by surprise. Further theorizing on all of these developments seems essential for exploring and anticipating new futures, capitalist, socialist, biosocial, environmental, North and South. Power, as Gill shows (Chap. 2), has been central in studies of large-scale geopolitical shifts and is likely to remain central in the years to come.

There are good grounds for rethinking the human condition and the Kantian question: “What are human beings?” For one thing, the post-human condition is rapidly advancing, with the growth of artificial intelligence, human prosthetics, and cognitive science. With the new genetics, moreover, what used to be called “life itself” is increasingly modified by humans through artificial means, undermining the separation of the “natural” and the “artificial.” As Rabinow (2008: 14) argues, this shift toward artificiality calls for systematic theoretical reflection and ethnographic documentation: “the logos of bios is currently in the process of rapid transformation. A central question before us today therefore is: given a changing biology, what logos is appropriate for anthropos?” Often associated with Rabinow’s notion of “biosociality,” this turn of events seems to demand new kinds of concepts. Attempting to make sense of the political economy of modern biotechnology, including the fragmenting of body parts and the labor process involved, a series of scholars (e.g., Lock and Nguyen 2010) have revisited the writings of Marx and Foucault. One of the emerging themes relates to the concepts of labor and alienation in the reproduction of bodies and body parts. Marx may not be an obvious source of insights into the modern production of human biovalue, but some of his early work may offer perceptive approaches to contemporary developments. Quite possibly, the growing awareness of the conflation of the natural and the social through studies of the post-human and contemporary biopolitics will be one of the key forces shaping anthropological theory, and much of academe, in the decades to come.

Some anthropologists have responded to the biosocial turn generated by biomedicine and the new genetics along neo-Darwinian lines, emphasizing the robustness of notions of natural selection and reproductive fitness. For some, this simply involves adding “culture” to the biological scene. Thus, Richerson and Boyd’s (2008: 194) biocultural framework suggests it is essential “to think of genes and culture as obligate mutualists, like two species that synergistically combine their specialized capacities to do things that neither one can do alone.” Somewhat similarly, coming from a rather different theoretical tradition, Ellen (2010: 399) recommends engagement with the biological through “culture” by means of a “twin-track approach”: “to treat culture simultaneously not only as non-genetic information transmitted between biological individuals and its material manifestations, but also as some complex Geertzian netw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• Introduction
• PART I: ORIENATIONS
• PART II: ELEMENTS
• PART III: ISSUES
• PART IV: REGIONS
• PART V: CONTEXT
• INDEX