Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be

Learning Anthropology's Method in a Time of Transition

Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, George E. Marcus, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, George E. Marcus

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781501700897
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Within anthropology, as elsewhere in the human sciences, there is a tendency to divide knowledge making into two separate poles: conceptual (theory) vs. empirical (ethnography). In Theory Can Be More than It Used to Be, Dominic Boyer, James D. Faubion, and George E. Marcus argue that we need to take a step back from the assumption that we know what theory is to investigate how theory—a matter of concepts, of analytic practice, of medium of value, of professional ideology—operates in anthropology and related fields today. They have assembled a distinguished group of scholars to diagnose the state of the theory-ethnography divide in anthropology today and to explore alternative modes of analytical and pedagogical practice.Continuing the methodological insights provided in Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be, the contributors to this volume find that now is an optimal time to reflect on the status of theory in relation to ethnographic research in anthropology and kindred disciplines. Together they engage with questions such as, What passes for theory in anthropology and the human sciences today and why? What is theory's relation to ethnography? How are students trained to identify and respect anthropological theorization and how do they practice theoretical work in their later career stages? What theoretical experiments, languages, and institutions are available to the human sciences? Throughout, the editors and authors consider theory in practical terms, rather than as an amorphous set of ideas, an esoteric discourse of power, a norm of intellectual life, or an infinitely contestable canon of texts. A short editorial afterword explores alternative ethics and institutions of pedagogy and training in theory.Contributors: Andrea Ballestero, Rice University; Dominic Boyer, Rice University; Lisa Breglia, George Mason University; Jessica Marie Falcone, Kansas State University; James D. Faubion, Rice University; Kim Fortun, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago; Cymene Howe, Rice University; Jamer Hunt, Parsons The New School for Design and the Institute of Design in Umea, Sweden; George E. Marcus, University of California, Irvine; Townsend Middleton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Deepa S. Reddy, University of Houston–Clear Lake; Kaushik Sunder Rajan, University of Chicago

Part I

ETHNOGRAPHY, FIELDWORK, THEORIZATION

1

PORTABLE ANALYTICS AND LATERAL THEORY

Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe

Anthropological knowledge sprawls, incorporating a dazzling variety of thematics, theoretics, and arguments. What varies less is that this knowledge is always in transit. Anthropologists compose documentations and analyses based on their field travels and then set them into communicative motion, hoping that their work will be engaged, absorbed, cited, and rerouted along invisible trajectories. Epistemic transit itself is not distinctive to anthropology. Citationality and circulation are practices of any number of intellectual professions. What differentiates anthropological knowledge is the crucial expectation that it moves along a continuum where one pole is the elite publicity of northern and western social science and the other is the intimate understanding of some other bundle of life experiences. Anthropology transacts in mobile revelation. Its epistemic movements are designed to surprise, confound, and occasionally even delight the paradigms of northern-western social science by leveraging what Lévi-Strauss once aptly termed “the other message,” the knowledge of the not-here that still, fortunately enough, speaks a northern-western language.

Two institutions have helped to cement mobile revelation as a key institution of anthropological knowledge. The first was the general acceptance of Malinowskian field research and field reporting as standards of professional legitimacy in the course of the twentieth century. This standard has proved remarkably durable into the twenty-first century despite the fact that what is understood to be fieldwork has changed significantly (Faubion and Marcus 2009). “The field” can now exist down the block; it can be accessed by a computer interface; it can unfold in surreal montage rather than in neatly bounded realist narrative. In some respects, the epistemic horizons of anthropology have never been wider. Yet what remains crucial is that one reports from an environment that is not entirely one’s own, that one mediates or translates between X and Y. Anthropologists individually and anthropology as a disciplinary field consistently delegitimate research that refuses to position itself at an analytical distance from the norms of northern-western social science. For, without distance, however slight and however precarious, there is nowhere to go, no capacity for surprise. Thus, even following the pluralization of anthropological research sites, methods, and objects since the 1970s, we continue to pride ourselves on a capacity for other-messaging, even when “the field” is the office next door and the research subject an intellectual professional very much like oneself.

The second institution is, in a way, the extroversion of the first. When one observes closely what counts as “legitimate anthropological knowledge”—that is, when one reads between the lines of peer reviews and grant-proposal feedback or listens in on departmental meetings, evaluations of job applicants, and the corridor talk of one’s colleagues—one realizes quickly that the Malinowskian field report is necessary but never in itself sufficient to guarantee anthropological legitimacy. The field report in its singularity is a case study. It can move, to be sure, but its revelatory power is inactive until it sheds the particularity of the field conditions that gave it form and becomes instead transparticular, a study that speaks with other studies, a study that operates as a cryptological key to a larger information set or that repatterns the light and shadow around some broader problem. There are various ways of describing this process of achieving transparticular import, but in the spirit and letter of this volume, we refer to it here as “theory.” Anthropological theorization, in our view, is not so much the management of a certain body of concepts as the process of wresting away from an ethnographic case study the cluster of insights that are worth mobilizing. Anthropologists have long recognized a comparative method as an essential and distinctive feature of their knowledge. Even if that method operates now in a more ad hoc fashion, the movement of insights between ethnographic cases still helps to cohere anthropology as a distinctive field of discourse. Anthropological theory thus thrives on the mobilization of transparticular ethnographic insight. When an article or grant proposal is judged to be “theoretically inadequate,” what is usually being said is that this case study is either unwilling or unable to give and receive insights of transparticular import. The offending text is not deemed to be just naïve but also, at some level, a sociopath, refusing to recognize that anthropological knowledge demands not only integrity in its case studies but also a restless desire to bridge heres and elsewheres.

Recognizing (1) that anthropological knowledge is designed to travel and (2) that a process of transparticular theorization is a crucial part of its epistemic mobilization raises the question, both analytical and ethical, as to how theory does and should travel in anthropology. In this chapter, we diagnose and discuss some common tendencies of theoretical travel in anthropology today. We take seriously the models of theoretical motion already available to us in the human sciences (especially Edward Said’s “traveling theory” and Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff’s “theory from the south”) and reflect on growing criticism of how theory (particularly grand theory of the philosophical variety and culture theory of the 1970s and 1980s anthropological variety) operates in contemporary anthropological knowledge. In our own performance of mobile revelation, we argue that the current impatience with theory is closely related to new ecologies of digital information. That is, we show how criticism of theory in anthropology today mirrors a wider contemporary disavowal of the radial (e.g., hub-spokes) model of epistemic organization typical of the mid-twentieth century and its reliance on centralized communication infrastructure. We identify in calls for more theory from below or even for the dissolution of theory the rise of a new “lateral” sensibility signaling the desirability of peer-to-peer meshes and mashes of communication that are better adapted to the epistemic potentialities of emergent digital infrastructures such as the Internet and social/mobile media (see, e.g., Golub 2011; Jackson 2012; Kelty 2012). Along the way, we develop our own model of experimental conceptual practice, portable analytics, in which analytic concepts that emerge from within specific ethnographic contexts are mobilized to help provoke new insights into the forms and forces at work in other ethnographic contexts. The stakes, we believe, are how to allow anthropological fieldsites and fieldknowledges to interilluminate each other more effectively, generating new revelatory sparks and trajectories in a thickening mesh of digital-lateral connectivity.

We begin with an example of how anthropological research on epistemic mobility can both confirm the Saidian model of “traveling theory” and also open the door to portable analysis.

Traveling Theories and Para-theoretical Mobilities

We know through ordinary experience and intuitively that ideas are modular and concepts have a transmissional life. Acts of transposition across space and time often yield new insights about the analytic process itself and, perhaps more important, provide a novel view on something that seems abundantly familiar. The Greeks used the term theMros to designate the man sent by the polis to witness ritual events in other cities. His travels always began and always ended in the same place, his home. For the Greeks, theory was “a product of displacement, comparison and a certain distance” (Clifford 1998, 1), but it was also, interestingly enough, tethered to the familiar epistemic space of home. In Edward Said’s influential 1982 essay, “Traveling Theory,” we find a parallel reflection on the routes and directions of theoretical passages. Charting an epistemic path through Europe during the first half of the twentieth century, Said’s coordinates form a theoretical topography that moves from Georg Lukács’s Hungary to Lucien Goldmann’s Paris to Raymond Williams’s London. He develops a model of knowledge transmission in which theory moves unidirectionally, between senders and targets and from one epistemic location to another. There is no recursiveness to Said’s travel tale; routes never fold back on themselves. The modes of transmission are linear, cartographically charted as they move from man to man and author to author, with each authorial actor relatively secure in the knowledge that his works will be read and, for the most part, by whom.

But perhaps the “theory effect,” as Pierre Bourdieu once put it (1989, 21), is not always exchanged through the influence of authorship. Often theories cannot be so neatly tracked by a series of citations and evolving academic discussions. Nor are they summarily unilinear in their paths. They originate somewhere, among some constellation of people, but it is their transposition that allows for analytic insights on social dynamics in places near and far. Traveling theories operate in a particular intellectual universe, largely an academic one, which has its own investments, purposes, and points of departure. What we describe next as portable analytics, in comparison, may be, at least initially, less self-consciously theoretical. Indeed, portable analytics are very often para-theoretical; that is, they may do conceptual work without being explicitly designated, by their originators or by others, as theoretical projects. They are just as likely, for instance, to have very pragmatic, political purposes or artistic and aesthetic end points. However, before elaborating on portable analytics further, let us return, briefly, to Said’s model of traveling theory, which is surely one of the most elaborated commentaries on theoretical movement available to us.

In his much-acclaimed essay, Said discerned a recurrent pattern among traveling theories and found that they shared four stages of transmission and emergence. First, he wrote, “there is a point of origin, or what seems like one, a set of initial circumstances in which the idea came to birth or entered discourse.” Second, “there is a distance transferred, a passage through the pressure of various contexts as the idea moves from an earlier point to another time and place where it will come into a new prominence.” Third, “there is a set of conditions—call them conditions of acceptance or, as an inevitable part of acceptance, resistances—which then confronts the transplanted theory or idea, making possible its introduction or toleration, however alien it might appear to be.” And fourth, “the now full (or partly) accommodated (or incorporated) idea is to some extent transformed by its new uses, its new position in a new time and place” (1982, 226–27). As an experiment in ethnographically operationalizing Said’s model, we turn to a case study: sexual rights activism in Nicaragua. The theory in motion is “sexual liberalism.” Although many other examples could be retrofitted with the diagnostic apparatus of traveling theory, in this instance we are seeking to map not only how theories travel both inside and outside anthropology, and inside and outside particular social settings, but how mobilizing theory in the north, seeing it reconfigured in the south, and then turning it north again can inform a more lateralist turn in our theory work. Put another way, in the case study we chart here we map the Saidian turns at each juncture with the objective of making a reconstituted theoretical “traveler” capable of portable analysis.

Case 1: Sexual Liberalism in Motion

Beginning with the 1979 Sandinista revolution and continuing through the 1980s, Nicaragua was recognized, for a time, as a beacon of anti-imperial resistance. But after the experiment with social and economic equality, Nicaragua instituted socially conservative policies and more profound neoliberal economic restructuring. In 1992, two years after the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, Nicaragua instituted the most repressive anti-sodomy law in the Americas. Partly in response to the draconian law, sexual politics—in particular liberal rights claims on behalf of lesbianas, gays, homosexuales, bisexuales, trasvestis, and others—became an increasingly visible element of the Nicaraguan social ecology. Because Nicaragua had a very explicit history with transnational discourses such as Marxism and liberation theology, among others, the emergence and dissemination of sexual liberalism and sexual politics is not in itself particularly novel. Rather, it is another instance in a series of routes and passages where knowledge and ideological models are appropriated, managed, and reframed. But in this process of distillation, we suggest, a set of propositions are formed that can themselves be ported to new epistemic locations provoking distinctions, juxtapositions, and parallels.

(one) “Coming to Birth/Entering Discourse” In the global north, the early days of gay and lesbian liberation were founded on principles of both social tolerance and radical transformation. In the 1950s, the homophile movements in the United States and Europe quietly and rather cautiously sought tolerance for homosexuality. This changed dramatically with protests against police repression at the Stonewall bar in New York City in 1969. Gay and lesbian rights proponents began to demand liberation in increasingly public and vocal forms. In so doing, activists employed many of the tools of the second wave of feminism, and more broadly, evoked the political openings and transformations that the civil rights era had begun to achieve. The assertion that individual rights ought to triumph over and against conservative institutions such as the nuclear family and what Adrienne Rich called “compulsory heterosexuality” (1980, 9) were fundamental aspects of the liberal narrative that animated these politics. Ultimately, claims for equality became codified under the keyword of lesbian and gay pride, a concept that continues to exert its discursive force in contemporary lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender (LGBT) politics. Indexing categories of family and acts of kinship have been an equally generative political repository in the battle for sexual rights. Like Said’s reproductive metaphor suggesting that discourse is “birthed,” the thematics of kinship have been influential in framing many of the debates around sexual rights, subjectivity, and policy demands, especially most recently in calls for marriage equality.

(two) “Passage through [to a New] Time, Place, and Prominence” Nicaragua in the 1980s was a revolutionary place, pursuing a Marxist and nationalist program that was, ideologically, deeply committed to principles of social equality even if these goals were never fully executed. In the mid-1980s, while the country was being besieged by a counterinsurgency war sponsored by the United States, a small group of lesbian and gay identified women and men founded the Nicaraguan Gay Movement. Their meetings involved discussing their lives and the limitations placed on them for their sexual difference. Partly influenced by their interactions with gays and lesbians from North America and Europe who had traveled to Nicaragua in support of the revolution, the group sought to establish new, respectable identity categories to counter the derogatory monikers of cochón (“fag”) and cochona (“dyke”). Beyond claiming a “lesbian” or “homosexual” identity personally, members of the Nicaraguan Gay Movement were also invested in locating a space for sexual rights within the political ideology of the greater Sandinista state project. The relatively quiet sexual politics of the 1980s were replaced with more overt claims for sexual justice when, following the end of the Sandinista state in 1990, the country ushered in a series of neoliberal governments and a set of reforms to the penal code that raised the penalties, and the stakes, for same-sex sexuality. The 1992 anti-sodomy law indicted not only men but women as well; the scope of the law was vast, including even those who were “promoting” or “propagandizing” (and of course practicing) same-sex sexuality. Although the law saw little enforcement, it became a rallying point for diverse activists, from feminists to disenchanted Marxists, and protest against the law galvanized the contemporary sexual rights lucha (“struggle”) in Nicaragua (Howe 2013). In Said’s terms, liberal rights had achieved, under the sign of sexuality, a new “prominence” through two different sorts of passages: one in an ideological register of rights and the other in the penal potency of law.

(three) “Acceptance, Resistance, Introduction, and Toleration” By the 1990s, Nicaraguan sexual rights activists had expanded their demands for equality. The country was being inundated with development projects of various stripes, many of them animated by human rights principles. Perhaps unsurprisingly, activism for sexual equality and tolerance gravitated toward the elusive beacon of modernity and liberal thought that human rights seemed to hold. For some Nicaraguan activists, the terms of gay and lesbian pride (orgullo lésbico-gay) offered a promising set of ideals and social principles. Clearly, this move shared more than a little discursive kinship with the political rhetoric that was, and continues to be, important in the United States. In a very public and visible way, this was a period when the concept of sexual equality, identity and rights became the subject of various forms of “acceptance, resistance, introduction, and toleration” across the Nicaraguan political milieu. This toleration was, it is important to note, not manifested in full social equality for sexual minorities. Discrimination remained within families, in the schools, and in many places of employment. Nevertheless, in a discursive and traveling theoretical mode, these logics had settled in.

(four) “The Accommodated Idea Is Transformed by Its New Uses and Position in a New Time and Place” As traveling theories of sexual liberalism became resituated in a new time and place, the struggle for sexual rights in Nicaragua became more complex. Some Nicaraguan sexual rights activists adopted discourses of Lesbian and Gay Pride and, in addition, harnessed the moral values associated with human rights. Other activists engaged a formulation that proved to be the most efficacious register for sexual rights advocacy in Nicaragua, which they called “una sexualidad libre de prejuicios” (“A Sexuality Free from Prejudice”). Sexuality Free from Prejudice makes an easily assimilable proposition, namely (and according to a document regularly circulated among activists to frame their project) that “there is sexual diversity among human beings” and “this diversity is an undeniable right.” Rather than emphasizing discrimination against sexual minorities or focusing attention on gay and lesbian subjectivity in a definitional form, many sexual rights advocates instead favored a broader appro...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part I. Ethnography, Fieldwork, Theorization
• Part II. Pedagogy, Training, Analytical Method
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index