Anthropology of Our Times: An Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology

Edited by

SINDRE

BANGSTAD

Anthropology

of Our Times

An Edited Anthology

in Public Anthropology

Anthropology of Our Times

House of Literature, Oslo. Photo courtesy of Andreas Liebe Delsett

Sindre Bangstad

Editor

Anthropology of Our

Times

An Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology

Foreword by

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Editor

Sindre Bangstad

KIFO, Institute For Church,

Religion and Worldview Research

Vinderen, Norway

ISBN 978-1-137-53848-2 ISBN 978-1-137-53849-9 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53849-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936702

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For Thomas, whose work taught me what public anthropology could be.

For Marianne G. for lessons in personal and professional integrity.

vii

Foreword

In this Foreword, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oslo

Thomas Hylland Eriksen refects on the ebbs and fows of the relation￾ship of anthropology to the wider public sphere since the last turn of

the century. Starting with Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Franz

Boas and Margaret Mead, Eriksen argues that public anthropology is not

something new, and that there has not been any straightforward move￾ment from openness to closure with increasing professionalisation of

anthropology as an academic discipline.

The relationship of anthropology to the wider public sphere has gone

through a series of ebbs and fows. In the nineteenth century, anthro￾pology scarcely existed as an independent intellectual endeavour, but

was largely a gentlemanly pursuit or an unintended, but not unwelcome

side-effect of exploration and colonisation. Those who contributed to

the emergence of anthropology as a distinctive feld of scientifc knowl￾edge, from Lewis Henry Morgan in the USA to Henry Maine and E.B.

Tylor in England, positioned themselves in a broader ecology of ideas

and the pursuit of knowledge. The professionalisation of anthropology as

an academic discipline began in earnest around the last turn of the cen￾tury, enabling later practitioners to withdraw increasingly from political

concerns and other scientifc approaches to human culture and society.

While many nineteenth-century anthropologists were not public anthro￾pologists in the contemporary sense, they communicated with a broader

viii Foreword

public in their writings—from lay readers to policy-makers—than most

academic anthropologists of the early twenty-frst century.

In addition, many early anthropologists, especially in the USA,

were involved in what would today be called radical advocacy or action

anthropology. Luke Lassiter notes that

[l]ong before Bronislaw Malinowski insisted that anthropologists move

‘off the verandah’ and into the everyday lives of the natives … many BAE

[Bureau of American Ethnology] ethnologists had moved into Native

communities and were participating in people’s everyday lives, doing

feldwork in collaboration with Indian informants, and, in some cases,

following in the tradition of Morgan, acting on behalf of their ‘subjects’.

(Lassiter 2005: 86)

The increasing institutionalisation of anthropology as an academic dis￾cipline in the twentieth century enabled many anthropologists to effec￾tively withdraw from the surrounding society (Eriksen 2006, Low and

Merry 2010). Concerns voiced by some, such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown,

to make anthropology a ‘real science’ modelled on physics and biology,

encouraged this kind of retreat into the ivory tower, and as the internal

demographics of anthropology soared after the Second World War, the

professional community grew large enough to begin to spin a cocoon

around itself. Like a growing empire, it increasingly became self-con￾tained, self-reproducing and self-suffcient, until the sheer demographic

growth, decades later, again led to porous boundaries and defections.

There has been no straightforward movement from openness to clo￾sure. Important anthropologists who contributed to the institutionalisa￾tion of the subject were engaged in broader societal issues, and Franz

Boas himself was an important public critic of racist pseudoscience.

Among his students, Margaret Mead, the author of forty-four books

and more than a thousand articles, keeping the steam up until her death

in 1978, was the public anthropologist par excellence in the twenti￾eth century. There were also many others whose work was read outside

the academy, and who engaged in various ways with the world at large.

Bronislaw Malinowski gave lectures on primitive economics to anyone

who would care to listen; Marcel Mauss was engaged in French politics

as a moderate socialist; and one could go on.

Moreover, applied anthropology has been a subfeld—often unjustly

disparaged by those involved in ‘pure research’—since well before the

Foreword ix

war. As noted by David Mills (2006: 56–57), anthropologists had, since

the early twentieth century, tried to ‘convince the Imperial govern￾ment that anthropology served a useful purpose and deserved funding’.

Although applied research was funded by the Colonial Social Science

Research Council until 1961 (Pink 2006), little basic anthropological

research received such funding (Goody 1995). Anthropological meth￾ods and anthropological knowledge have nevertheless, at various times,

been deemed useful by governments and business leaders, most recently

in the Human Terrain System of the US military forces in Iraq and

Afghanistan, where practitioners from anthropology (and other subjects)

were drawn upon to enhance knowledge of local circumstances in war

areas. Deeply controversial among American anthropologists, studied

and criticised thoroughly by one of the anthropologists interviewed by

Sindre Bangstad in this book (Price 2011), the HTS was denounced in a

statement issued by the American Anthropological Association in 2007.

The fundamental ethics of anthropological research is not compatible

with legitimation of wars, nor are the ethics of feldwork compatible with

spying.

In a sense, anthropologists have always engaged with publics outside

of anthropology. Sometimes, this has led to their academic marginalisa￾tion—one could easily be written off as intellectually lightweight if one

got involved in advocacy or applied work, say, for development agen￾cies—and there has, as noted by many (e.g. Pels and Salemink 1999,

Borofsky 2011), been a clear, and arguably unproductive, tendency to

rank pure research above applied research. Similarly, the hierarchy rank￾ing tough academic writing for people in the know above lucid writing

for the general public, is also debatable. Most of the anthropologists

who are widely read by students may have put most of their intellec￾tual energy into basic research and theory, but they have coexisted with

other, no less important anthropologists, who either went out of their

way to establish a broader dialogue about the human condition, or who

actively sought to mitigate suffering and contribute to social change.

Public anthropology as such is, in other words, not something new.

Nevertheless, the problematisation of distinctions that were formerly

taken for granted, notably between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ work, and the

development of a refexive and critical discourse about the ways in which

anthropology can be made relevant outside the academy, has been on the

rise in recent years. This development cannot be attributed to isolated

initiatives such as Borofsky’s Public Anthropology project, but must

x Foreword

be understood as a broader structural tendency. Already in the 1980s,

anthropologists working in the Global South noted that many of the

people they came into contact with had highly articulated and refex￾ive views of their own history, culture and identity. They certainly did

not feel the need for anthropologists to identify who they were; in many

parts of the world, local intellectuals had indeed read some anthropology

and were familiar with its concepts. They were able to identify themselves

and use some of the tools offered by anthropology to develop their own

existential and political agendas, and did not see why they should need

foreigners to do the job for them.

In our world of multiple transnational networks and global fows, the

fction of ‘us, the knowers’ and ‘they, the objects of study’, which was

always objectionable, has now become untenable, and anthropologists

now venture into felds, and delineate their topics of inquiry, in ways

that were unheard of only a generation ago (see MacClancy 2002 for a

sample). As Sam Beck and Carl Maida (2013) put it, the contemporary

world is in every sense borderless. The consequences of the destabilisation

of boundaries for the anthropological endeavour are many, and some of

the most important consequences become evident in the debates around

public anthropology: Who can legitimately say what, and on whose behalf

can they say it? What are the benchmark criteria for good ethnography?

What can anthropologists offer to the societies they study? And—in a very

general sense—what is the exact relationship between anthropological

research and the social and cultural worlds under study? These questions,

which were always relevant, have become inevitable, and increasingly dif￾fcult to answer, in the borderless world of the twenty-frst century.

This is not a time for complacency. Anthropology has, in the past, suc￾ceeded spectacularly in combating racial prejudices and biological deter￾minism, accounting for—and, at least in the case of Margaret Mead,

contributing to—cultural change, and throwing unexpected analogies

and thought-provoking contrasts into the world, sometimes succeed￾ing in ‘making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic’. Our failure

to defne a single public agenda over the last decades—and I am using

the word public loosely, to include the media, politics, students and gen￾eral intellectual debate—is actually quite serious. It does not mean that

anthropologists are, generally, working with useless and irrelevant top￾ics, that they are engaged in a self-enclosed activity of high sophistication

akin to the ‘glass bead game’ described in Herman Hesse’s last and most

important novel, Das Glasperlenspiel, translated into English variously

Foreword xi

as The Glass Bead Game and as Magister Ludi. The glass bead game has

no ulterior point beyond that of allowing its players to display their daz￾zling skill and intellectual dexterity, and as the novel shows so clearly, the

single-minded commitment to the game demanded of its players make

them unft for living in the world. Among other things, Hesse’s novel

was clearly a comment on self-enclosed, self-congratulatory academic

pursuits with little relevance beyond the academy. Novelists and poets

have been known to regard literary studies, not least in their poststruc￾turalist versions, in such terms. But anthropology? Well, clearly no. What

attracted many of us to anthropology in the frst place—the possibility to

raise fundamental philosophical questions while simultaneously engaging

with the world of real existing people—is still there.

It is on this background that Sindre Bangstad’s public conversations

with renowned anthropologists, which are presented in this volume, rep￾resent such an important intervention. The people encountered in this

book, all of them highly regarded for their purely academic production,

have in common an explicit existential engagement, something which

is at stake beyond knowledge production for its own sake. Perhaps it is

true that all good research has an existential dimension; in the case of the

contributors to Bangstad’s book, it is not only driven by curiosity, but by

a wish to use knowledge to make the world a slightly better place. When

Eric Wolf famously, but ambiguously, spoke of anthropology ‘as the most

humanistic of the sciences and the most scientifc of the humanities’, he

may well have had this aspect of the anthropological endeavour in mind.

The nature of ethnographic research presupposes an attitude in the

researcher which goes beyond scientifc curiosity, but rather entails and

indeed requires personal investment into and moral commitment to the

lives of the people with whom the ethnographer engages. It is this moral

dimension, usually understated in published work, that provides anthro￾pology with its privileged position as a tool for interpreting and acting

upon the injustices of the world. This book demonstrates the breadth

and depth of moral engagement in anthropology, but in doing so, it also

shows that the value of views and opinions is rather limited unless backed

by knowledge, and that the kind of high-octane knowledge anthropol￾ogy offers at its best, is unbeatable when coupled with a strong humanis￾tic moral engagement.

Oslo, Norway Thomas Hylland Eriksen

xii Foreword

References

Beck, Sam, and Carl A. Maida, (eds.). 2013. Toward Engaged Anthropology.

New York: Berghahn.

Borofsky, Robert. 2011. Why a Public Anthropology? Kindle Book, Center for

Public Anthropology.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public

Presence. Oxford: Berg.

Goody, Jack. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa

1918–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology.

Current Anthropology 46 (1): 83–116.

Low, Setha, and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and

Dilemmas. Current Anthropology 51(2): 203–226.

MacClancy, Jeremy (ed.). 2002. Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mills, David. 2006. Dinner at Claridges? Anthropology and the ‘Captains

of Industry’, 1947–1955. In Applications of Anthropology: Professional

Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sarah Pink, 55–72. Oxford:

Berghahn.

Pels, Peter, and Oscar Salemink (eds.). 1999. Colonial Subjects: Essays on the

Practice of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Pink, Sarah. 2006. Introduction: Applications of Anthropology. In Applications

of Anthropology: Professional Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century, ed.

Sarah Pink, 3–26. Oxford: Berghahn.

Price, David. 2011. Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the

Militarized State. Oakland: AK Press.

xiii

Acknowledgements

This anthology is the result of extensive collaboration between a wide

range of scholars from various felds and disciplines based at a great num￾ber of institutions and departments in Norway and affliated with vari￾ous civil society organisations. Among these institutions are the Centre

For Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities (the HL-Centre)

in Oslo, the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of

Oslo (SAI), the Department of Social Anthropology at the University

of Bergen, the Fafo Institute For Applied Social Research in Oslo, the

Norwegian Centre For Human Rights in Oslo, the Faculty of Theology

at the University of Oslo, the Norwegian Institute For International

Affairs (NUPI), the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the Centre

For Development and The Environment (SUM) at the University of

Oslo and Oslo and Akershus University College (HiOA), Minotenk,

NorLarNet (Norwegian Latin-American Research Network), the

Norwegian Council For Africa and the Norwegian Centre Against

Racism (ARS). My frst thanks go to former senior editor Mireille Yanow

at Palgrave MacMillan New York for taking this monograph on in the

frst place, and for her successor Alexis Nelson for steering the ship

towards completion. The Fritt Ord Foundation, which provided the core

funding for the series in public anthropology on which this anthology

is based from 2009 through to 2014, deserves to be acknowledged, as

does the House of Literature in Oslo, which hosted the series. It was

Thomas Hylland Eriksen—or rather the energetic public image of

Thomas Hylland Eriksen on Norwegian television—who spurred my

xiv Acknowledgements

interest in pursuing a career in anthropology. He deserves to be singled

out for special praise for not only providing an excellent preface to this

edited volume on short notice, but also for providing an untiring and

unsparing embodiment of and commitment to public anthropology not

only in Norway but also internationally over the years. Like so many

other Norwegian social anthropologists, I owe a tremendous debt of

gratitude to Thomas for providing a bright, original and playful example

of what public anthropology can be over many years.

In developing this series as well as the resulting anthology, I have had

the immense privilege of working with a tremendously dedicated and

distinguished group of scholars. My thanks go to Matti Bunzl, John L.

and Jean Comaroff, Magnus Marsden, Salwa Ismail, John R. Bowen,

Arzoo Osanloo, Richard Ashby Wilson, Claudio Lomnitz, David H.

Price, Didier Fassin, Ruben Andersson, Angelique Haugerud and Parvis

Ghassem-Fachandi.

I am also extremely grateful to Didier Fassin, Ruben Andersson,

Angelique Haugerud and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi for agreeing to the

time-consuming work of responding to my extensive questions on e-mail

on relatively short notice.

Among my co-operating ‘partners in crime’ in Norway have been,

Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Kristian Berg Harpviken, Oddbjørn Leirvik,

Sevda Clarke, Knut G. Nustad, Marit M. Melhuus, Benedicte Bull, Bjørn

E. Bertelsen, Paul Wenzel Geissler and Karin Kapadia.

For their extensive co-operation and support, I also wish to thank

Cora Alexa Døving, Rune Flikke, Linda Noor, the late Amin El Farri,

Michael R. Seltzer, Bjørn Olav Utvik, Morten Bøås and Halvor Berggrav.

Special thanks are due to Cato Fossum and Eric McKinley for diligent

work on transcripts.

Last but not least, thanks to my wife and daughters for light and

laughter in dark times.

Due to copyright issues, three articles in these series meant to have

been included in this volume had to be left out. These were published as:

Sindre Bangstad and Matti Bunzl (2010) ‘Anthropologists Are

Talking About Islamophobia and Antisemitism in the New Europe’,

Ethnos 75 (2): 213–228;

Sindre Bangstad, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, John L. and Jean

Comaroff (2012) ‘Anthropologists Are Talking About Anthropology

and Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Ethnos 77 (1): 115–36;

Acknowledgements xv

Sindre Bangstad, Oddbjørn Leirvik and John R. Bowen (2013)

‘Anthropologists Are Talking About Islam, Muslims and Law in

Contemporary Europe’, Ethnos 79 (1): 138–157.

In addition, this series created the impetus for an interview published as:

Sindre Bangstad and Lila Abu-Lughod (2016) ‘Ten questions about

anthropology, feminism, Middle East politics, and publics’, American

Ethnologist (Online), Nov 22, 2016. Available as: http://americaneth￾nologist.org/2016/lila-abu-lughod-interview/.