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The Five Major Challenges for Anthropology

Published on March 28, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, books, Europe, indigenous people / minorities, journal articles / papers, migration, persons and theories, Us and Them

17.12.2017: This is a very popular post. Therefore I have updated all links.

In her new book Plausible Prejudice: Everyday Experiences and Social Images of Nation, Culture and Race, Norwegian social anthropologist Marianne Gullestad identifies five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology. To understand the problems of the world today, we need to “decolonize anthropological knowledge”, she writes.

Anthropological knowledge is needed more than ever as steoreotypes and lack of knowledge flourish about people from other countries. But on the other hand, Gullestad stresses, anthropology is still influenced by its colonial past.

Here are the five major challenges for the discipline of anthropology according to Marianne Gullestad (page 346-347):

1st CHALLENGE: To regard understanding and confronting racism as worthwhile academic and political concerns, and not as a conflict that was resolved long ago.

2nd CHALLENGE: To look historically and ethnographically at race thinking in relation to colonialism and imperialism, political decolonization, economic globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the new role of the United States as successor to the European empires that were defeated in the 20th century.
Traditional nationally oriented historiography and locally oriented anthropology overlook many processes across continents which represent a store of unexpected connections and complex interpretative resources that will no doubt contribute substantially to the understanding of how the imperial and colonial past continues to shape present-day social categories, boundaries and practices.
This framing or research will often involve carrying out multi-sited and transcontinental fieldwork.

3rd CHALLENGE: To examine not only the ideas and practices of self-professed racists (…), but also the conventional wisdom sourrounding racial thinking and its various forms of institutionalization. Racial categories and negative stereotypes are often both intensely familiar and also vigorously denied and forgotten as expressions of racism. They exist as pernicious symbolic resources which in given situations might potentially be employed more or less by anyone, regardless of gender, age, class, and skin color. (…)

4th CHALLENGE: To take seriously the complexity and variability of race thinking, and how it feeds into and is nourished by everyday life. (…) In this respect, my research has shown that ancestry and descent are particularly central. In fact, I argue that the racial coding of the new focus on ‘culture’ is based on ideas about descent as a form of imagined kinship.

5th CHALLENGE: To do more ‘anthropology of anthropology’ by locating themes, peoples and perspectives that have largely been ignored as anthropologically uninteresting, such as the social life-worlds of majority populations in Europe and the United States, the experiences of formerly colonized peoples with Europeans (as colonizers, administrators, settlers, missionaries, developmental experts, tourists etc.), and the ideas and strategies of political and economic elites, regardless of their location in the world and their physical features.

UPDATE:

A very good comment by Bryan McKay (link updated). He writes, these five challenges should not be specific for anthropology:

“Substitute sexism, heterosexism, classism, et cetera for racism (and sex, sexuality/gender, class, et cetera for race) in the above challenges and you have a decent manifesto for any realm of critical cultural studies.”

Kambiz Kamrani at anthropology.net writes that he agrees with Gullestad, but:

Anthropology will never succeed until it clearly defines culture. That’s right, it hasn’t. Anthropology has completely failed the public in not being able to define culture.

>> read the whole post on anthropology.net (link updated, original post no longer available)

Erkan Saka disagrees:

This emphasis on definition is against all I know about social sciences. Not that I am for an all relativistic social science with no substance. But what I know is that an act of defining is part of a power struggle.

>> read his whole post (link updated)

Her book is a kind of “best-of”: It consists of a “remix” of ten previously published papers and three new texts, including the post-script that I’ve quoted from.

Some of these papers are available to download in full-text:

Marianne Gullestad: Blind Slaves of our Prejudices: Debating ‘Culture’ and ‘Race’ in Norway

Marianne Gullestad: Normalising racial boundaries. The Norwegian dispute about the term ‘neger’

Marianne Gullestad: Mohammed Atta and I. Identification, discrimination and the formation of sleepers

Marianne Gullestad: Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, nationalism and racism

Links updated 2017-12-17

(I might come back with more posts on this book. I’ve just returned from the book launch)

17.12.2017: This is a very popular post. Therefore I have updated all links.

Anthropologist observes native academics in their natural habitat

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, fieldwork / methods, interdisciplinary, University / Academia

Anthropologists seem to get more interested in academic culture. Not long ago we heard about anthropologists studying students. Now, anthropologist Rena Lederman is doing fieldwork among her her fellow academics. She is writing a book called “Anthropology Among the Disciplines,” which will examine the distinctions among several academic fields and explore how and when those borders become important, according to News at Princeton.

In an era when academia is emphasizing interdisciplinarity, Lederman sees significant differences in how anthropologists, sociologists, historians and social psychologists approach their fields, she says:

“My topic is not conventional perhaps, but my approach is classic participant observation: I attend closely to how disciplinary distinctions come up in everyday conversations. I pay attention to how scholars in one field talk about other fields or how they might defend their own if they feel it’s being challenged.”

“She’s one of a handful of people who’s taking the opportunity to reflect ethnographically on the kinds of institutional lives that academics live,” said Don Brenneis, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. “It’s complicated for different reasons when you’re working with your own tribe.

>> read the whole story in News at Princeton

To provide better services at the library: Another anthropologist is studying college students

Chronicles Women’s Social Movements in India

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, Asia, development empowerment, gender, globalisation

The small groups of rural women in India fighting for change is something the rest of the world needs to take note of, says Mangala Subramaniam, an assistant professor of sociology and women’s studies. Since the late 1990s, Subramaniam has studied social movements in India, particularly the women’s movement in India and the dalit – poor, rural low-caste women in India – as they organized in their small villages.

Her book The Power of Women’s Organizing: Gender, Caste and Class in India will be published this month.

In a press release she says:

“Unfortunately, many people in America and Europe are not aware of or know about the vibrancy of women’s movements in Asian countries, such as India. And many people especially do not think about rural women in India organizing to fight for rights such as educational opportunities as well as to challenge discrimination based on social inequities of class, caste and gender. Studies of women’s social movements outside of the west – America and Europe – are necessary in this increasingly globalizing world.”

>> read the whole story at OneWorld.net

>> Review of The Power of Women’s Informal Networks: Lessons in Social Change from South Asia and West Africa. Bandana Purkayastha and Mangala Subramaniam

>> Information about her dissertation: Translating participation in informal organizations into empowerment: Women in rural India
Mangala Subramaniam

The World Social Forum is a place where social movements meet. Two years ago, it was held in Mumbai, India. I’ve written a summary: Inspiration from India: Hindus and Muslims eat breakfast together; Christian nuns join Tibetan monks in a chant. See also “Just like apartheid”: The dalits are engaged in a fierce struggle to stop the ancient discrimination.

Too engaged anthropology? The Lumpenproletariat on the US-Mexican Border

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, applied anthropology, books, ethics, migration, Northern America, poverty, Us and Them

“The most important information, which we can get out of this study, is how and what kind of action one can take.”

How much should anthropologists get involved in changing the lives of their informants? Johannes Wilm didn’t limit his research to presenting his findings about the daily life in in Douglas, an US-mexican border town. In his conclusion of his book On the Margins: US Americans in a bordertown to Mexico, he considers several forms for action.

The challenge: More than half of the 14000 inhabitants in Douglas are unemployed, 53% of the under 18 years old are officially living under the poverty line. The main source of income for the town: Smuggling of people and drugs. He proposes among others:

Constantly high unemployment figures can tell us, that an organization of the lumpenproletariat is neccessary in the planning of a world revolution or some more localized struggle for a democratic and economically just society.

It becomes obvious that Wilm works within a Marxist framework. He is an peace and media activist and has been socialized through the globalisation from below movement.

People in bordertowns are especially skilled, he found:

Also, in a border town, knowledge is spread according to a much more heterogeneous pattern, and a group of people cooperating across the various barriers will therefore be likely to build up a great amount of knowledge of how to circumvent the power apparatus of either of the involved states. Just for this, in the planning of a cross-national or global change, towns like Douglas should not be ignored.

In bordertowns, we find more ethnic diversity than in other areas. This might be a hinder? Wilm denies:

While ethnic diversity often has been seen as a hinder to organisation, it seems that combined with unemployment, its force is not as negative. In cases where people are forced to live close together and each person only has access to a part of the things seen as desirable (…), it even integrates rather than segregates.

The inhabitants with Mexican background are often “the better Americans”:

And while lots of Hispanics with strong personal ties to Mexico in Douglas seem to believe in the “American way of life”, it is Anglos that are the first ones to actively break out of the hegemonic space once they have the chance. (…) It is Anglos that represent resistance and not Hispanics.

He quotes an Hispanic father who has returned from the war in Iraq:

“Seen to many dead children”, he explains, while he almost seems to start to cry. However, he finds time commenting on the amount of Anglos in the military. “I guess white people don’t like serving their country that much” as he puts it.

Generally, he found, that ethnicity / race or class don’t play a role in the daily life in Douglas. That’s due to the economic crisis in his view:

Even though Douglas has had a history of segregation based on ethnicity, the complete lack of any kind of job for vast proportions of the population, and consequently the prevalence of the lumpenproletariat, has also done away with the ethnic model of stratification. None of my Anglo informants are in any position of power due to their ethnic background.

(…)

Had I been in Douglas during the good days of American capitalism, while Phelps Dodge still was there, they would have been strictly segregated according to race in the earlier period, or according to income layer in the latter period. Keoki, Art and Tim, all with somewhat more of an intellectual background also find themselves in this classless society in which everyone is part of the lumpenproletariat.

While I agree that advocacy is one of anthropologists’ jobs, we should, I think, be cautious about presenting final solutions as he does when he describes the problems connected with organizing people:

(…) A fourth problem (…), the amount of Marxist or anarchist literature read by the members of the lumpenproletariat seems quite low, and is often replaced by the Bible, Adam Smith or, in the case of the cultural elite, various critics who are looking at single issues. This means that agitation has to start from the very beginning.
(…) What has to be done, is to develop a generic psychologic strategy to win over people with background from “serving the nation”.

>> more information on the book

>> download the whole book (pdf, 30 MB )

"The most important information, which we can get out of this study, is how and what kind of action one can take."

How much should anthropologists get involved in changing the lives of their informants? Johannes Wilm didn't limit his research…

How To Present A Paper – or Can Anthropologists Talk?

Published on March 24, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology (general), anthropology in the news, notes

My wishlist:

1. Tell us your main points and findings before you start (“I will show that the Earth is flat” or so) and sum up your paper at the end.

2. Tell us why we should listen to you. Yes, it’s interesting that you have studied childhood in India. But why can your research be interesting or relevant for us who are not specialists in your field? What new insights does your paper give regarding general theories in anthropology and being a human?

3. 20 minutes are 20 minutes. Stop talking when your time is over. Check the length of your presentation a few days before the conference, so that you avoid struggling with the introduction few minutes before your time is over.

4. Don’t read from your paper. Talk to and with your audience! By reading from your paper you show disrespect to your audience. This is the most important point and can’t be stressed enough. Many speakers at conferences and seminars don’t bother presenting their papers in a way that is understandable for us who came to listen. We have discussed anthropological writing. Maybe we should also talk about anthropological talking. Anthropologists can’t write. Maybe they can’t talk either.

UPDATE 1:

Steve Portigal, a customer research consultant using ethnography, has written a brilliant post about his experiences at academic conferences, among others about a conference with both anthropologists and designers.

Meanwhile, the theory presentations emerged. And here we saw the academic tradition, I believe, where instead of a presentation or a talk, a paper was delivered. Several people in a row stood in, some without any visual aids, and read. For forty-five minutes. They read. At least one person had the ability to jump in and out of his text, make eye contact, and spontaneously offer up a clarification or a hand gesture. But others simply read. It was horrifying. The density of prose was (as with the 7-minute DUX example above) way beyond my ability to parse and it was boring and not engaging.

(…)

But back to the reading. What the hell? Is this standard? How is this a way to convey information or start a dialog? I got a lot of grumbling from my colleagues about this; some would have rather read the paper on their own time, rather than coming a great distance to watch someone else read it. Others just stopped coming into the sessions.

A common experience: The speakers go over time. Five minutes before their offical time is over, they still struggle with their introduction. I always wondered why they haven’t checked the length of their presentations before.

Steve Portigal writes:

(…)
a read paper could not be modified when time ran out, and so facilitators inched closer to presenters in the hopes of having them wrap things up, but no, darn it, I’ve written these 20000 words and I’m going to spit them at you regardless of what time it is. The emphasis was not on making connections between people and other people and ideas. It was really a drag.

>> read the whole post by Steve Portigal

UPDATE 2:

Denise Carter comments:

Reading How To Present A Paper – or Can Anthropologists Talk? had me nodding along in agreement at the wishlist.
(…)
I’ve had some experience of conference presentations in various parts of the world with poor presentations that had left me bored and fidgety. Hence I have already decided NOT to write a paper, but instead, to write a presentation around my topic ‘Order and Disorder in the Virtual City’. My intention is that a fruitful and enlightening dialogue will emerge that will clarify some of my ideas – resulting in a more rounded and polished paper that will address some important issues.

>> read the whole post

UPDATE 3:

Links updated 17.9.2021

My wishlist:

1. Tell us your main points and findings before you start ("I will show that the Earth is flat" or so) and sum up your paper at the end.

2. Tell us why we should listen to you. Yes, it's…