Asian Anthropology

Jan Van Bremen, Eyal Ben-Ari, Syed Farid Alatas, Jan Van Bremen, Eyal Ben-Ari, Syed Farid Alatas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134271009
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Asian Anthropology raises important questions regarding the nature of anthropology and particularly the production and consumption of anthropological knowledge in Asia. Instead of assuming a universal standard or trajectory for the development of anthropology in Asia, the contributors to this volume begin with the appropriate premise that anthropologies in different Asian countries have developed and continue to develop according to their own internal dynamics. With chapters written by an international group of experts in the field, Asian Anthropology will be a useful teaching tool and a valuable resource for scholars working in Asian anthropology.

Part I: Introduction

1 Asian anthropologies and anthropologies in Asia: An introductory essay

Eyal Ben-Ari and Jan van Bremen

The University of Notre Dame Department of Anthropology invites applications for a tenure-track position in the socio-cultural anthropology of South or Southeast Asia at the assistant professor level. A PhD qualification is required. We strongly encourage applications by scholars from this region and from other traditionally under-represented groups. Topical and thematic interests should include development, ecological, economic, environmental, or legal anthropology. The ideal candidate will have an active research program and be an excellent undergraduate teacher for our all-undergraduate program. Publications and teaching experience are highly desirable. The ideal candidate will share the department’s commitment to a four-field approach in both teaching and collegial interactions. We will be especially interested in candidates who can involve undergraduates in research programs. The Department faculty are energetic and congenial and take research and teaching equally seriously. The University of Notre Dame is generous in its support for research. The position begins in August 2005; the teaching load is two courses per semester.

(http://www.aaanet.org/careers.htm)

Social/cultural anthropology of South Asia: The Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, is conducting a search to fill a faculty position in the social/cultural anthropology of South Asia at the level of Assistant or untenured Associate Professor. The topical and theoretical specializations are open, but the program seeks a faculty member whose research and teaching are complementary to the interests of the current faculty. The themes of interest include: gender and sexuality; the culture of the state; religion and nationalism; media, language, and the public sphere; science and technology; consumption and markets; the environment; the dynamics of diasporas; and sectarianism, violence, and politics. Candidates should have already conducted ethnographic fieldwork in one or more South Asian regions (broadly conceived, and including India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Nepal, and/or diasporic communities). Candidates should demonstrate a promise of excellence in both research and teaching and should expect to have completed the requirements for the PhD prior to their appointment. Their teaching duties will include offering courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. The appointment will begin on 1 July 2005.

(http://www.aaanet.org/careers.htm)

Published in centers of academic life around the world, such employment notices regularly appear both in the professional anthropological newsletters and those of area studies. Such notices refer to university positions in which anthropological knowledge about Asia is created for consumption in our “professional community” and conveyed to students. But what kind of institutional arrangements and practices are entailed by such positions? What kind of ideals of professional conduct and career moves do such advertisements represent? What kind of knowledge do professional readers bring to bear on such announcements, so that they are made sense of?

In an essay devoted to the transformation of anthropology into an academic discipline, James Clifford, a central commentator on contemporary issues, candidly and carefully notes:

My discussion here is largely limited to Euro-American trends. I join Gupta and Ferguson (chapter 1 of this book) in admitting my “sanctioned ignorance” (Spivak 1988; John 1989) of many non-Western anthropological contexts and practices. And even within the contested but powerful disciplinary “center,” my discussion is primarily focused on North America and, to some extent, England.

(1997: 219, n.1)

What kind of international order does Clifford assume in limiting his focus to the “center”? While his comments obviously reveal the structure of his personal and intellectual network, does his admission also convey the message that “real,” “serious” anthropological work is done mostly in America and Britain? Can we learn anything from the fact that Clifford’s confession of “ignorance” of anthropology elsewhere is placed in a marginal textual location, in a footnote?

This volume represents attempts at answering such questions. It examines the contexts within which anthropological knowledge in general, and such knowledge about Asia in particular, is produced and disseminated. In this introductory chapter we place our volume in the context of the ethnology of ethnologists (Scholte 1980) or the sociology of anthropological knowledge: an analysis of the social and cultural processes by which anthropological knowledge (of the social and cultural variety) about Asian societies is created. We follow Swidler and Arditi (1994: 317) to propose that academic knowledge be examined like other kinds of social knowledge around two analytical foci. First, we uncover how the production of knowledge about Asia is related to authoritative texts, career advancement, professional conduct and institutional locations. Here, we see knowledge as a set of skills and habits socially constructed and individually utilized to achieve strategic ends. Our second focus is on how anthropological practices and knowledge created by the anthropologists serve to produce and reproduce the larger system of social distinctions and social hierarchies within which anthropologists actively maneuver (Swidler and Arditi 1994: 317). In other words, we examine the question of how our professionalization replicates national, cultural, and international peculiarities.

Our model of anthropological work thus emphasizes how the moves of individual anthropologists serve, at one and the same time, to replicate and to reinforce and to shift such matters as relations between academic centers and peripheries, national academic boundaries, or notions of proper fieldwork.

Our contention along these lines is that it is impossible to focus only on the anthropology of Asia. We argue that an understanding of “things Asian” must take account of what has been variously termed the “international community” of anthropologists (Stocking 1982), a “World Anthropologies Network” (World Anthropologies Network 2003), or the “world system of anthropology” (Kuwayama 1997: 52). Our model underscores how the production of anthropological knowledge is situated in certain social, historical, and global contexts. Thus, a complementary aim of this introductory chapter is to show how an investigation of Asian anthropologies (anthropology by Asians, and the anthropology of Asian societies) may in itself proffer insights for understanding anthropology in our contemporary world.

After briefly justifying the focus on Asia, we set out the broad parameters of what may be termed the professional “folk model” which anthropologists hold. We then sketch out a number of key analytical metaphors or guiding images that best capture the diverse and changing nature of contemporary anthropology: centers and peripheries, the workings of the nation-state, an academic division of labor that produces “area studies,” linguistic communities, the micro-politics of career moves, and a model of change and its limits.

Why Asia?

The reasons for examining anthropology in Asia have to do with historical and contemporary developments in Asian societies and with their varied anthropological traditions. First, this area includes a number of sites where anthropological traditions (formulated, for example, as folklore, ethnology, or “local” studies) have developed over a long period of time. Accordingly, Asia provides a number of cases which facilitate an inquiry into the distinctive traditions of “anthropological” scholarship (theories and methodological tools) created in societies outside the “West” (primarily, India, China, and Japan). Yet given our “global” focus, these diverse Asian cases also allow us to explore how local traditions of anthropology have interacted over the past two-hundred years or so with the discipline as it emerged in Western countries (Alatas, Chapter 11, in this volume).

Second, at the empirical level, Asia has rather dense concentrations of anthropologists that consistently produce and consume professional knowledge. Japan and China, to provide two examples, have the second and the third largest number of active anthropologists after the United States (Eades, Chapter 4, Pieke, Chapter 3, in this volume). In addition, the funds awarded for anthropological work by the Asian governments in the past decades have been complemented by the growing numbers of national and especially international conferences, symposia, and seminars held in (and about) the Asian societies. These emerging nuclei of anthropological work offer cases through which to explore what are perhaps the potential alternatives for producing anthropological knowledge.

Third, the sheer economic and political strength of countries in many parts of Asia is an issue which raises for anthropologists (as for other social scientists) problems related both to the place of resources in fostering the creation of anthropological knowledge and for understanding such postulated ideals as “East” and “West” or emergent thoughts about “Asian” identity. The economic success of many contemporary Asian societies forces Westerners (like the authors of this introduction) to face questions related to modernity (and post-modernity) in ways that African and (arguably) Latin American societies do not.

Fourth, the relative strength of the state in many Asian countries raises questions about the very nature of anthropology as a discipline that takes a critical or (conversely) a “contributory” attitude to authority. The actions and the activities of anthropologists in such societies aid us in clarifying the notions of professional autonomy, the political implications of anthropological work, and the manner by which anthropologists are committed to, and participate in, projects of social betterment or change.

A model profession

In attempting to understand how anthropological knowledge within and about Asia is produced, it is not enough to examine how the anthropological theories and the concepts have been developed in relation to the “Asian” issues (“caste society,” “shame culture,” or the “rice economies,” for instance). No less important are questions about what may be termed a “professional folk model” of and the set of institutional and organizational practices through which this model is actualized. These questions center on how anthropological knowledge is produced within the professional communities to which anthropologists belong, and from which they derive their identity, receive rewards and sanctions for the use of certain tools and theories, and which govern what are defined as appropriate (and prestigious) sites and subjects of study.

Minimally, a profession is a body of persons engaged in a calling or an occupation which requires and produces a certain kind of knowledge. In anthropology, professionalism archetypically involves three central clusters of activities: doing research (fieldwork, field methods), writing texts (ethnographies, monographs), and “careering” in academic institutions (universities, associations, research centers, museums). To formulate the ideal of professionalism somewhat crudely, the image is one of a lone anthropologist (usually white-middle-class, frequently male) from a university in a “Western” (American, British, or French) center; he crosses national geo-political borders and the cultural boundaries to do an extended piece of fieldwork (usually a year or two) among another group; he returns to his university to “write-up” his research in a textual form called an ethnography; and it is this text (and accompanying articles published in journals) that is published and used as a means to advance a university career.

It is a “folk” model because it encompasses the assumptions and images that lie at the base of mundane or common sense knowledge we use in our anthropological world and has the unquestioned knowledge that “all” anthropologists know. It is a “professional” model because it provides the basic points of reference for “what we are” and “what we are trying to do” through which our specialist reality is constructed. To formulate this point by way of examples, anthropologists use this model to do such things as to describe and prescribe proper behavior in the field, to mark entrance via fieldwork into our community, and to give advice and support to new members trying to further their careers. While relatively simple, this model – and the clusters of activities it encompasses – is actually based on a complex array of practices, and arrangements.

By far the most discussed aspect of anthropological activity has been, and still is, fieldwork (Freilich 1977: 14). As a host of commentators have noted, although fieldwork is not only the “definer” of the peculiarity of our discipline, it is still considered the prime rite-of-passage into the profession (Agar 1980: 2; Langham 1981: xv; Gerholm and Hannerz 1982: 28; Wengle 1988; Srinivas 1996: 209). In a characteristic formulation, Messerschmidt (1989: 3) notes that

In the past, it was considered a requisite and proper rite of passage for fledgling anthropologists … to leave the comfortable nest of our own social upbringing and brave the trials and tribulations of study in other lands, or at least among people other than our own. Research elsewhere, preferably abroad, was … an established tradition of the profession.

Based on the ideal of Malinowski’s research in the Trobriands (Stocking 1983; Vincent 1991), fieldwork in our professional folk model entails the following components: a prolonged phase in a society other than one’s own, hardships encountered upon entering the field, collecting information on the basis of participation and observation, and beginning to examine this data in the light of current theoretical formulations. This formulation also provides criteria for appraising such things as how much prestige should be awarded to a particular stint of fieldwork (one mark being the amount of time spent in the field), or the “authenticity” of research (the distance between the culture studied and the anthropologist’s “home” culture). It is on the basis of these criteria, for instance, that fieldwork projects are arrayed on a continuum, ranging from the more distant (and therefore more prestigious) to “anthropology at home” (Coleman and Simpson 2004: 28–30), which is sometimes labeled as fieldwork by default.

If fieldwork has been intensively discussed since Malinowski’s time, the anthropological texts have been at the forefront of debates since the early 1980s. Our folk model dictates that on the basis of fieldwork, an ethnography – a book length monograph about a group and its life ways – should be published as a first major step on the way to a professional career. Despite current deliberations about experimental ethnographies (Marcus and Cushman 1982; Marcus and Fischer 1986), the basic criteria for appraising the “productivity” of anthropologists have not changed much in the past four or five decades. While it is true that anthropologists no longer look at whole cultures (Moore 1987: 735), they still build their careers on the basis of singular “whole” texts: such ethnographies are treated as “whole” social facts (Handelman 1994: 362). New ethnographies and experimental texts are still appraised and examined in the same way that older, “modernist” ethnographies have been scrutinized.

In other words, while many contemporary ethnographies may be written in experimental modes, they are still constitutive of modernist practices: they are written in the framework of universities, supervised and guided by mentors with resources, graded by internal and external readers, and funded by different research councils and fellowship bodies. Moreover, these texts often figure in professional evaluations that are central to academic practices such as employment promotion, conferring research funds, and assuring participation at the professional fora (Morris 1995).

For all of the stress on reflection among anthropologists during the past few decades, the least discussed aspect of careering has been the micro-politics of academic institutions (Nöbauer 2002). What Scholte (1980: 63) called the dearth of studies on the sociology of ethnological knowledge still persists. Pels and Salemink (1995) suggest that the central criterion for the allocation of prestige – and, we would add, power – in anthropology is place of work: within the academy (in central or marginal institutions)¹ doing practical or applied jobs (in NGOs, state frameworks or private companies); and at the periphery, the “no-longer” anthropologists. Despite critiques of this situation focussing on the strictures of academic budgets or the “industrial discipline” to be found in university departments (Fox 1991: 9; Gudeman 1998), this ideal ranking is still very much alive: for the vast majority of anthropologists an academic post is still preferable to employment as an applied researcher.

In positing this professional folk model and the practices by which it is put into effect, we are not arguing that there have been no alternative patterns that have emerged from it. For example, while Gupta and Ferguson (1997) review historical examples of alternative fieldwork styles, other scholars have suggested various possibilities for ethnographic writing (Van Maanen 1988; Behar and Gordon 1995). What we argue is that this model is the hegemonic one. The use of the term “hegemony” is not just a matter of using a fashionable expression. We maintain that this conceptualization goes beyond one predicated on notions of mainstream or normative representations or arrangements. The term hegemonic encompasses (at one and the same time) ideas about a socially legitimated and maintained hierarchy between alternative arrangements, and the centrality of the centers of anthropology in controlling not only material resources, but also dominating the very conceptual categories through which we anthropologists think about the professional reality within which we pursue our careers. As the system of domination and inequality becomes so lodged in cultural belief, it comes to appear natural and inviolate (Williams 1977). It is in this light that Gupta and Ferguson’s (1997: 11) characterization of the “natural” choices which anthropologists face when choosing a field should be seen:

[F]ield sites appear simply as a natural array of choices facing graduate students … The question becomes one of choosing an appropriate site … Just as the culturally sanctioned discourse of “hard work” and “enterprise” enables the structurally patterned outcomes of career choice in competitive capitalism to disappear from view, so do the repeated narratives of discovering...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Asian Anthropology
• Anthropology of Asia series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Asia
• Part III: East Asia
• Part IV: South Asia
• Part V: South-East Asia
• Part VI: Afterword