Loving Anthropology and Living Anthropologically

Update December 2011: For related reflections, see What is Anthropology at Anthropology Report. Also see Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism.

I love anthropology for the questions it asks, the way anthropologists search for answers, and the importance of the answers to our world. Anthropology asks big questions, root questions, origin questions. Anthropologists listen, look, and explore–doing anthropology means having humility and openness to discovery. What anthropology has discovered is world-changing: that there are more possibilities than the way things are; what seems so natural and permanent is not the way it has to be.

1. Anthropology’s questions

Although I was woefully unprepared for graduate study in anthropology, I knew I had found my home when I heard the discussions. The questions anthropology asks are fundamental to the human condition: How did we get here? What are the material bases and social conditions for different ways of life? How do people make sense of their world?

For a research-based discipline, anthropology may be unique in questioning its own questions. Often the best anthropology comes not from the initial research question, but from the research that calls into question the terms of the research question. As John Comaroff recently put it, anthropology conducts a

critical estrangement of the lived world . . . thus to pose the perennial question: What is it that actually gives substance to the dominant discourses and conventional practices of that world, to its subject positions and its semiosis, its received categories and their unruly undersides, to the manner in which it is perceived and experienced, fabricated, and contested? (2010:530)

In contrast to other disciplines:

For the most part, they are not given to critical estrangement or the deconstruction of their ur-concepts. Political scientists, by and large, study political institutions and processes, conventionally understood, just as economists study economic institutions and processes. They rarely ask what politics or economics actually are. Anthropologists do, repeatedly. Unlike political scientists, we also spend a great deal of time trying to discern what taken-for-granted terms like democracy or the rule of law might mean for “natives,” both as signifiers and as species of practice, which often turns out to be anything but obvious. (2010:533, in “The End of Anthropology, Again: On the Future of an In/Discipline“)

This can certainly be a frustrating process, even resulting in some paralysis. It can lead to accusations that anthropology is too insular or has too much jargon (and I quote from the more readable parts of the Comaroff article). However, what keeps bringing us back is that

2. Anthropologists listen

Anthropologists ponder and anthropologists read, but anthropological research is about listening. As Sidney Mintz described the “traditional anthropological catechism”:

Study what you can see and hear; record everything you can, do not expect it to be entirely consistent; listen; count the ancillary blessings of discomfort. If those items in the catechism do not add up to a methodology for other, sterner disciplines, so be it. They have, I believe, nonetheless helped to reveal worlds otherwise hidden or unimagined. (1982:186 in Afterword: Peasantries and the Rural Sector–Notes on a Discovery)

Anthropology requires a basic respect for people and working with them, not just studying them. Looking for answers means being humble and open to this process. This stance of listening, studying with people, applies not just to cultural and social anthropology, but to how archaeology is attentive to artifacts, how primatologists study with non-human primates, how forensic anthropology understands the context of bone measurements, how anthropologists read historical documents to coax hidden meanings.

3. Anthropology’s answers

I found anthropology because of the questions it asks, and I appreciate how anthropologists listen and study with people, but what keeps me hopeful and loving anthropology is the empirical documentation of human possibility. This is not simply neutral documentation but a counterpoint to dominant narratives, what Michel-Rolph Trouillot terms anthropology’s “moral optimism.” In an age when neoliberal market discipline has become a religion, at a time when versions of determinism have been gaining ground:

We owe it to ourselves and to our interlocutors to say loudly that we have seen alternative visions of humankind–indeed more than any academic discipline–and that we know that this one [neoliberal capitalism] may not be the most respectful of the planet we share, nor indeed the most accurate nor the most practical. We also owe it to ourselves to say that it is not the most beautiful or the most optimistic. (2003:139, in Global Transformations)

The issue is one of making sure anthropology has a honed message, identifies who needs to hear the message, and is speaking loudly enough. I am heartened by the recent efforts to brand and provide a vision for anthropology. Although John Comaroff has a point for the internal health of the discipline that “what is most likely to assure the Future of Anthropology is that those who inhabit its Very Small Planet continue to argue with one another” (2010:533), anthropology cannot persist unless we engage with the rest of the planet. Loudly.

I love anthropology because it’s interesting, but I stick with it because it’s important.

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