Re-Creating Anthropology

Sociality, Matter, and the Imagination

David N. Gellner, Dolores P. Martinez, David N. Gellner, Dolores P. Martinez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032226620
• eBook ISBN: 9781000568974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book makes a notable contribution to discussions of what anthropology is and should be in the twenty-first century through a reconsideration, from diverse sub-disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, of the interactions between sociality, matter, and the imagination. It explores the imagination in its social contexts, how it is put to work, and how, in its embodied and material forms, it works in practice. The chapters provide detailed case studies, including film-making in Egypt; spirit-possession/exorcism in Italy; Theosophy and the production of knowledge about UFOs; the role of mistakes or glitches in public performances; humans' varying relationships to the environment; post-coloniality, time, and crisis in anthropology; and artistic creativity.

1IntroductionSocial Anthropology as Scepticism, Empathy, and Holism

David N. Gellner

DOI: 10.4324/9781003273615-1

‘Uniquely (as far as we know), of all the higher primates, humans live both within society and within their own minds: we humans can imagine social institutions that allow us to craft and realize new ways of being.’¹ Peter Pels directly challenges this statement (below, p. 19) (a) because it reinstates dualities that we should be striving to overcome and (b) because it ignores the historical and material realities that determine how actually existing imagination and sociality work. Both points are well taken (see also Sneath et al. 2009), but anthropologists still face imperatives to think creatively about the predicaments that humanity faces and to contribute somehow to the material realities that will determine our collective future. As specialists in human diversity, anthropologists are more conscious than most other commentators of the difficulties; yet they must find ways to convey their findings and analyses, including comparisons between different social situations. If they are to have any influence beyond the academy or beyond their own journals, anthropologists cannot afford to take refuge in the well-honed disciplinary reflexes, ‘It’s more complex than you think,’ ‘It all depends,’ and ‘Every situation has its own particularities’ (as Astuti also argues in Chapter 13).

Whether humans will be able to envisage and craft alternative institutions and alternative materially grounded forms of sociality sufficiently imaginatively for the human race to survive beyond the next century or two remains to be seen. It could well be that humankind will have to experience the tragic triumph of the limits of the human imagination (as illustrated by the technocratic and ‘green market’ fixes for climate change criticized by Leach in Chapter 12), combined with the propensity for humans’ social imagination to be used negatively in the service of ‘exclusion, stagnation, and hegemonic closure’ (Pels, p. 19 below). Plenty of contemporary trends can be invoked to support such a conclusion. Countervailing imaginations of mutuality and common humanity, of a shared effort to save the planet both from plagues and from climate disaster, may not be enough.

Rather than despair – desperate though conditions are in many parts of the world – in this volume we seek to examine how imagination works in context, how it is being put to work, and how it has worked in its embodied and material forms. Sociocultural anthropologists have increasingly been drawn to examining the social role of the imagination, adding ethnographic breadth to the longstanding literature on the imagination in philosophy, psychology, and literary studies.² This volume addresses the social imagination in its temporal, embodied, and material aspects, drawing together papers from one conference. All the contributors engage with questions of time, imagining the social, and the future. To the extent that one or other emphasis is dominant, we, the editors, have arranged them under these three headings, but the chapters contain far more, and speak to each other in more complex ways, than might be suggested by these labels – as explored further in Martinez’s Afterword.

Sociocultural anthropology, for all its diversity and internal quarrels, is driven by three key and, to a degree, conflicting impulses – scepticism, empathy (or at least openness), and holism: scepticism towards all totalizing schemes and especially towards regimes of thought that are taken for granted and/or dominant (the exigencies and subtleties of everyday life and practice are always messier than any a priori scheme or set of options on a census form); empathy for unrecognized, ignored, and/or marginalized points of view, wherever they are found; and a methodological holism allowing that everything is potentially connected to everything else.³ What the anthropologist concerned does with the results produced through this strange amalgam of scepticism and openness varies considerably according to their conception of knowledge and intellectual progress. The results may be used as a stick to beat the establishment, a weapon to give voice to the powerless, a counterexample to refute the pretensions of natural science or the common sense of Euro-America, or a way to extend natural science to places and topics it has not been equipped to handle before. These options are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and of course there are many other possibilities.

In this volume, 12 sociocultural anthropologists (plus one honorary anthropologist human geographer), of different generations and with very different sub-disciplinary skills, tackle themes in the anthropology of time, the imagination, embodiment, the construction of the social, comparison, and the existential challenges of health and pandemics. What they all share is the conviction that the peculiar sceptical-empathic holism of anthropological method can produce new ways of understanding and tackling contemporary problems.

Time: The Pasts in the Present and the Past in Anthropology

As a discipline, sociocultural anthropology has had and still has a very particular relationship to time. Pels, as we have seen, stresses anthropology’s deep entanglement in the colonial imaginations of the period in which it first came into existence as a discipline. In reaction to that disciplinary history, anthropologists today often find it necessary to stress to first-year students that everyone occupies the same time, that there are no living fossils. And yet, as a matter of empirical observation and personal phenomenology, different generations, and even individuals who are members of the same generation, have very different attitudes to and experiences of time.

DeSilvey (Chapter 3) shows how, embedded in landscapes, there are different kinds of ‘pastness’. These diverse temporalities can be made to coexist in the management of heritage sites. Even the UK’s National Trust, which manages so many open-air sites, has had to recognize that some places simply cannot be preserved for posterity in aspic and that the attempt to do so is self-defeating. DeSilvey notes how ‘the experience of time is at its core an imaginative act, in which the past is made present through encounter with specific materialities and worldly capacities’ (p. 36) In a similar way, Sarró (p. 64), following Rancière, suggests that different times coexist in the present: ‘everyone exists within [a]‌ multiplicity of temporal lines’.

The early anthropologists set off for remote colonial possessions often with the best of intentions, as Sarró stresses when he cites Malinowski on understanding other ways of life as a path to the generosity and tolerance that Europe so badly needed at the time (p. 58). However, anthropology was not just a moral quest, but an intellectual one that sought to explore the bounds of human possibilities and in particular treated its subjects as a kind of time machine. Anthropologists set out to study humanity’s past by immersing themselves in what they took to be the most archaic or most traditional parts of the present. Even today, the cult of salvage anthropology – documenting archaic cultures before they disappear – has its devotees (I have been one myself).⁴ It would be a pity if the sociocultural disciplinary impulse to record meticulously the practices of older generations were to die out completely – a methodology that George Marcus (2009: 111) defines unromantically as an empiricist ‘tradition committed to a documentary function and naturalist representation propelled by distanced and disciplined participation and observation in the life worlds of others as formal subjects’. That said, the discipline as a whole has unquestionably moved on. The theories that legitimated salvage anthropology have been comprehensively critiqued, both intellectually and morally, and, in most circles, overthrown (Pels, Chapter 2). Anthropology today has embraced the study of the future, of the Anthropocene, of capitalism/neoliberalism, of scientific practices, of modern art, and much more besides.

In redefining its own mission and subject matter, sociocultural anthropology has been making a virtue out of a necessity. Anthropology no longer has a protected terrain about which it can claim to be the foremost and indeed only authority, namely non-state, mostly non-literate, small-scale peoples at the margins or beyond the ken of the nation-state. We now know that the people whom the sociocultural anthropologists of the classic era wrote about were never as isolated or as ‘untouched’ as they were made out to be (Wolf 1982). Today, to one extent or another, no one is unaffected by the processes of globalization and nation-state expansion. Even when they still set out to study such marginal peoples, contemporary sociocultural anthropologists must make their way and establish their legitimacy in an intellectual marketplace crowded with other, better funded, and more powerful disciplines. Fieldwork for the majority of today’s anthropology PhDs is likely to be carried out either in the developed world or in the more prosperous enclaves of developing countries, a tendency that will no doubt be accelerated (like so much else) by the impact of Covid-19.

Detached though most anthropology may be from its former subject matter, it cannot escape its own history – nor, for the most part, do anthropologists wish to do so.⁵ It is almost a cliché to observe that knowing at least something of the history of the subject is considered essential for all who wish to consider themselves anthropologists, a qualitative difference from natural scientists, for example, or even economists. Recapping, indeed rethinking, the history of the subject is all the more necessary, if one is to avoid the mistakes of the past. Or as Sarró puts it (p. 61) while discussing the generation that created the new anthropology in the 1920s, ‘The role of the anthropologist had to be to look at the integration of the present, as well as to critically denounce the decontextualizing endeavours of earlier colleagues.’ And yet even the new anthropology was deeply marked by its continuing colonial context, including by the racial imaginations of humanity that were part and parcel of colonial structures, however much individual anthropologists may have criticized or resisted them (Pels, Chapter 2).⁶

Escaping hierarchical and progress-oriented habits of thought is not easy. Philosophers and social theorists have criticized, deconstructed, attacked, and denounced the nineteenth-century ideology of progressive time and never-ending improvement, but most of the world is still in the powerful grip of just that vision. In Rowlands’s words, ‘billions of people in the developing world are still living … developmentalist views; they and their governments are deeply invested in them’ (p. 48). This is notwithstanding the fact that for many, both in the developed and in the developing worlds, the ideal of progress has come to seem more like a dystopia. At the very least, the assumption that each generation will be better off than the one before has come to seem like a hollow and empty promise.⁷

One consequence of the progress vision is that it is not just places or practices that are categorized as more or less developed, but people and peoples. In Pels’ (2015: 789) pithy summary, ‘modern cultures have long been addicted to classifying people as either new or old.’ African examples may frequently be invoked (as by Rowlands and Sarró), but India is also a prime example of multiple times coexisting in the present. It may seem paradoxical (because it is often advertised as ‘ancient’), but India is a classic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Social Anthropology as Scepticism, Empathy, and Holism
• Part I Time
• Part II Imagination and the Social
• Part III Futures
• Index