Engaged Anthropology

Views from Scandinavia

Tone Bringa, Synnøve Bendixsen, Tone Bringa, Synnøve Bendixsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319404837
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319404844
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this volume, leading public anthropologists examine paths towards public engagement and discuss their experiences with engaged anthropology in arenas such as the media, international organizations, courtrooms, and halls of government. They discuss topics ranging from migration to cultural understanding, justice, development aid, ethnic conflict, war, and climate change. Through these examples of hands-on experience, the book provides a unique account of challenges faced, opportunities taken, and lessons learned. It illustrates the potential efficacy of an anthropology that engages with critical social and political issues.

© The Author(s) 2016

Tone Bringa and Synnøve Bendixsen (eds.)Engaged AnthropologyApproaches to Social Inequality and Difference10.1007/978-3-319-40484-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Tone Bringa¹ and Synnøve K. N. Bendixsen¹

(1)

Department of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway

Keywords

Public and engaged anthropologyApplied anthropologyScandinaviaAudit culture

End Abstract

This book presents a collection of essays from social anthropologists in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark who share their experiences disseminating, communicating, and applying their anthropological insights outside an academic context. The essays reflect on the role and potential force of anthropological knowledge outside academia. In Scandinavia, anthropologists have enjoyed access to government offices and to policymakers, as well as a broad recognition as relevant knowledge producers among journalists and the general public. In this volume, the authors share their perspectives on challenges faced, opportunities taken, and lessons learned from being publicly engaged anthropologists.

Students of social and cultural anthropology, in addition to an interest in other people’s cultures, often show a passion for anthropological perspectives on social inequality and marginalizing power structures. Concern with social justice, prejudices, inequality, human rights, or cultural diversity often brings students to social and cultural anthropology. But many core anthropology courses have become so theoretically and philosophically top heavy (see also Pelkmans 2013) that it is often difficult for students to detect the content’s relevance and applicability to the critical issues of our time. Our wish for this book is to share some experiences with engaged anthropology from Scandinavia with a non-Scandinavian audience and to show students and prospective anthropologists, in particular, how anthropological insights may be relevant and applied outside of academia.

We do not wish to make a programmatic statement of what a publicly engaged anthropology is or should be. Instead, we see this volume as a contribution to an ongoing conversation about experiences and reflections related to a publicly engaged anthropology and its future prospects. The contributors to this volume exemplify the role anthropologists play in public debates where public interest issues are discussed, but also the many different ways in which anthropologists work to weigh in with their expertise. Indeed, exposure in the media is but one among several venues. Anthropologists may also be effectively communicating and disseminating anthropological insights elsewhere, out of sight.

In this introduction, we will first give an overview of various forms of engagement discussed in the anthropological literature and point to recent developments within the field of engaged anthropology. We will then discuss the position of engaged anthropology in the Scandinavian countries, its visibility, potential for outreach, and structural positions, but also its current challenges. Finally, we provide a summary of the chapter contributions.

Engaged or Public Anthropology?

The activities described in this book could have been labeled in many different ways. We have chosen to subsume them under the heading of “Engaged anthropology”. Engaged anthropology is a term that has become established during the last decade or so, as discussions about various forms of sharing anthropological knowledge outside academia are moving to the center of anthropological academic discourse. It is a somewhat peculiar term as it leaves the acting subject out and leaves unsaid what kind of engagement it refers to. In combining “engaged” with “anthropology” rather than with “anthropologists”, the term signals that the specified activities are part of the body of anthropological scholarship and are not attached to individual anthropologists themselves. Some authors prefer to add an explanatory adverb, such as politically engaged or publicly engaged. In this volume, we see engaged anthropology as shorthand for a publicly engaged anthropology, which leaves the types and sites of engagement unspecified. It means simply that the anthropologist engages his or her anthropological knowledge in debates and activities in the public sphere, away from lecture halls and the pages of academic publications.

“Public anthropology”, first coined by Robert Borofsky and Renato Rosaldo, is a term closely related to “engaged anthropology” (Borofsky 2000). While “public anthropology” can sometimes be used interchangeably with “engaged anthropology”, there are some differences in what type of activities are foregrounded in each case. Borofsky considers the aim of a public anthropology to “address broad critical concerns in ways that others beyond the discipline are able to understand what anthropologists can offer to re-framing and easing-if not necessarily always resolving- of present-day dilemmas” (2011). Public anthropology often keeps with Borofsky’s stress on anthropologists as public intellectuals, and is used to refer to anthropologists’ engagement in public debates on current issues, particularly in the media, that is, of the anthropologist as a visible social critic. In his book Engaging Anthropology: the Case for a Public Presence (2006), Thomas Hylland Eriksen, one of the contributors to this volume, has in mind this form of public engagement and media visibility and of the anthropologist as a public intellectual.

Aimee Cox (2009, 53) has a more radical position than Borofsky and sees public anthropology as “an anthropology of the public that disrupts the traditional academy-community dichotomy”. She seeks to create dialogues centered on particular social concerns and their solutions. Sam Beck (2009), however, expands his understanding of public anthropology to not only include public conversations, dialogues, or discussions on issues of public concern, but collaborative research with members of the communities where anthropologists conduct their research. He stresses that public anthropology in this wider sense should be recognized as a central component of the discipline’s professional practice and argues that a public anthropology has “implications for theory, method and methodologies” (Beck 2009, 3). Indeed, to Beck and Carla A. Maida, public anthropology is the anthropologist’s “co-construction” of knowledge with a public to address “public concerns” and redress questions of inequality and injustice through research, education, and political action based on dialogue (2015, 3). This kind of public anthropology is anchored in a conviction that anthropologists can and should critique the social inequalities of marginalized populations. They see anthropology as a force for change, and anthropologists as advocates for social justice. Their understanding of a public anthropology, then, is closer to what Catherine Besteman (below) refers to as “engaged anthropology”.

Engaged anthropology is used in a wider sense. In the USA, a common usage among anthropologists who work “at home” stresses collaborative research or “participatory research” with the people and the communities among whom anthropologists do their research (see Lassiter 2005; Beck 2009; Besteman 2013; Beck and Maida 2015). But engaged anthropology is also defined in an even wider sense to include everything from “sharing and supporting” during field research to teaching, public education, and advocacy (Low and Merry 2010). Such a wide definition implies that all anthropologists are involved in one form of engagement or another at some point. Rather than providing a definition, Karami Clark suggests that the specific meanings of engaged anthropology are shaped by the contexts in which the dilemma between sociopolitical issues and the anthropologist’s concern at a particular time and place emerge (2010, 311). Others prefer to make a clear distinction between “public” and “engaged” anthropology: Catherine Besteman, for instance, defines public anthropology as “oriented toward promoting anthropological knowledge in the public area”, while engaged anthropology efforts “do not have to be public but are collaborative projects with a moral orientation towards social transformation” (2013, 3). She notes that “following these definitions […] the United States has a great deal of engaged anthropology […], and much less public anthropology”, the latter referring to instances of anthropologists acting as public figures and being visible in the media (Besteman 2013, 3).

In recent years, lively exchanges have taken place on the pages of anthropology journals such as Anthropology Today and Current Anthropology, as well as at a number of AAA (American Anthropological Association) and EASA (European Association of Social Anthropologists) panels. In addition, several books and edited volumes in the last decade or so have been published on the topic of engaged anthropology (see, for instance, Borofsky 2005; Besteman and Gusterson 2005; Eriksen 2006; Beck and Maida 2013 and 2015; Bangstad forthcoming). In both the USA and in the UK, engaged anthropology has lately been incorporated into the way anthropology departments profile themselves on their websites and through study programs. ¹

While the need to elevate the relevance of anthropological knowledge and education is growing, the activities referred to as either public or engaged anthropology are not new to the discipline. Rather, subsumed under these larger headings, we find a series of labels for specifically engaged activities that predate the general use of these wider terms. In Scandinavia, this is the case with both “advocacy” and particularly with “applied anthropology”. Today, the literature covers a wide range of forms of engagement, but some topical clusters are evident: activism (and advocacy), the anthropologist as social critic, collaborative research, media engagement, and the anthropologist as public intellectual.

In Scandinavia, the discussion about advocacy and anthropology was popular in the late 1980s and 1990s among anthropologists working with indigenous populations (see Hastrup et al. 1990, and Henriksen 1985 and 1997). Georg Henriksen sees advocacy as an engagement that grows out of fieldwork and is both moral and practical, as it is part of a “commitment to bringing the results of one’s research back to the people we work with” (1997, 121; our translation). He suggests that advocacy and activism are different aspects or phases of the same effort. The difference, he notes, is that while advocacy is about communicating information which is meant to serve the interests of a marginalized people or group, activism is a step further when the anthropologists participates actively in political work to promote these interests. Engaging politically in this latter way has been closely tied to human rights issues and the situation for vulnerable populations (see also Low and Merry 2010, 211). However, the particular field of concern in which anthropologists engage at a particular time is not only dependent on the individual anthropologist’s personal interest but also on the political atmosphere and the social questions that seem most pressing. For instance, in Norway and Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists were involved in both advocacy and activism on behalf of the Saami population, while in recent years, advocacy and activism are typically related to the situation for immigrants in Scandinavia.“Applied anthropology” has a strongly anchored position within Scandinavian anthropology and is often used interchangeably with “development anthropology”. Centers and units for development studies with interdisciplinary applied research profiles were established as part of, or with close links to, social anthropology departments in all three countries in the 1970s and 1980s. Such centers received much of their funding from the respective government agencies committed to promoting development (i.e., to reduce poverty by strengthening education, health, economic growth, democracy, and human rights in developing countries). The scholarship developed as part of this close collaboration between theoretical anthropology and methodology, and development policy relevant research and reporting, have more recently become part of a larger research field of development, globalization, and environmental change (see also Norman 2014). A division between an applied and an academic anthropology evident in other countries (such as the USA) was much less pronounced in the Scandinavian countries and particularly so in Norway where applied anthropology from the discipline’s start in the 1960s was part of mainstream anthropology. This was above all thanks to Fredrik Barth, who promoted anthropology as “a practical, policy relevant discipline, and made it clear that anthropology had […] practical value for Norwegian policymakers” (Nilsen 2003). ² In contrast, applied anthropology has had a rather separate existence from the academic discipline in the USA as reflected among others in the establishment of the Association of Applied Anthropology in 1943. However, while “applied” is also interchangeable with “practiced” and even with “engaged”, Merrill Singer points out that “applied anthropology” which he defines as “solving human problems through the application of anthropological methods, theories, and insights” (Singer 2015, 151), is an older term than “public anthropology”, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. From the War Zone to the Courtroom: The Anthropologist as Witness
• 3. Engaging Anthropology: An Auto-Ethnographic Approach
• 4. Doing Research in a Politicized Field and Surviving It: Lessons Learned from the Field of Migration
• 5. Treading on a Minefield: Anthropology and the Debate on Honor Killings in Sweden
• 6. Social Anthropology and the Shifting Discourses about Immigrants in Norway
• 7. Gender and Universal Rights: Dilemmas and Anthropological Engagement
• 8. Europe and the Pacific: Engaging Anthropology in EU Policy-Making and Development Cooperation
• 9. Engaging Anthropology in Sudan
• Backmatter