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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

Ladakh: Emmigration is threatening sacred weaving traditions

Published on March 26, 2006 by lorenz Posted in anthropology in the news, Asia, books, culture traditions, technology

Weaving is a tradition dear to the Rupshupa of Ladakh. But the craft is at the crossroads because many youngsters are leaving in search of a better lifestyle, says anthropologist Monisha Ahmed in The Hindu. “There are very few ethnic communities in the world where both men and women weave, and that’s what makes the Rupshupa special,” she says. She was so intrigued by their weaving tradition that in 1992 she decided to do her doctoral dissertation on the Rupshupa:

In the years since, Ahmed has spent a lot of time roaming and camping in their stark Changthang highlands with the Rupshupa, studying the fabric of their life. She has seen them moving 10 times a year, observed them herding and shearing their livestock, weaving their hair and fleece, playing traditional games, celebrating marriages, mourning the dead and offering worship at their monasteries in Thugje and Korzok, the tiny towns where they have their storehouses.

She has learned their songs and understood their prayers. Her first book, Living Fabric: Weaving among the Nomads of Ladakh, Himalaya, won the Textile Society of America’s Shep Award in 2003 for best book in the field of ethnic textile studies.

>> read the whole story in The Hindu

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…