A review of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, Paul Rabinow and George E. Marcus with James D. Faubion and Tobias Rees, Duke University Press, 2008.
I am interested in the history of anthropology. But there is a great disconnect in the way this history gets told. It stops at the point when it really should start. Anthropology is rich with disciplinary ancestors and founding fathers. Bronisław Malinowski and Franz Boas laid solid foundations for the discipline, teaching their contemporaries that no society, including their own, was the end point of human social evolution. The discipline has a few founding queens as well: Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, who both studied under Boas, contributed to a fundamental reimagining of human diversity that allowed for the turn toward greater tolerance and inclusion in postwar America. History books go in great detail in discussing their contribution to the field and how a few great debates shaped the discipline. They highlight a Golden Age of anthropology in which the discipline was relevant, not only for other academic specialties, but for addressing the pressing concerns of the day. As of today, an anthropology major will give prospective students a valuable perspective on matters like diversity and multiculturalism, race and gender, globalization and political conflict, religions and secular beliefs, and much more. But history books all stop when the party gets started. They never mention the controversies and paradigm shifts that form the bedrock of contemporary research. The references they quote are absolutely of no use in writing current anthropology. Bibliographies of recently published articles rarely, if ever, mention publications antedating the 1990s. It seems as if the discipline reinvented itself at some point and discarded its former self.
Writing Culture
This point can be dated with some precision: it corresponds to the publication in 1986 of the collection of essays Writing Culture. There was a before and an after Writing Culture. This is not to say that this edited volume was a scientific breakthrough: it consists of ill-written essays that, read retrospectively, obfuscate debates and are most noticeable for what they missed—gender and feminism, race and ethnicity, and what will be known as the politics of identity are conspicuously absent from the texts. But the book published by the University of California Press achieved mythic status. As Tobias Rees recalls, studying anthropology in Germany in the mid-1990s, “We read the history of anthropology up to Writing Culture and… and there is nothing afterwards.” It is still mandatory reading in graduate courses taught at American anthropology departments. Writing Culture operated a linguistic turn by reducing ethnography to the status of a text, separated from the reality it was supposed to study and even from a scientific project of truth-making. It opened what was at times the rather dry prose of ethnographic writing to literary freedom. It led to a proliferation of personal confessions, literary essays, and subjective renderings of fieldwork that confirmed the status of the anthropologist as author but made very little contribution to the knowledge of societies they were supposed to study. Both Paul Rabinow and George Marcus were protagonists in this movement. Marcus coedited the volume (with Jame Clifford) and began a lifelong reflection on ethnographic writing and pedagogy. Rabinow entered an essay in Writing Culture in which he grappled with philosophical issues of modernity and postmodernity. Their testimony was collected by Tobias Rees, a young assistant professor, in a series of intellectual exchanges that form the basis of this volume, published in 2008.
In retrospect, Writing Culture appears more as a logical end point than as a new departure. It seemed to bring the history of anthropology to an end, putting the whole undertaking, its methods, its concepts, even its object, radically into question. While the early academic descendants of Boas and Malinowski had a clear sense of purpose, by the 1980s the discipline had become more fragmented. Anthropologists were haunted with a sense of embarrassment about the discipline’s colonial legacy and keen to refute it (even more so today.) They had realized that true “participant observation” was hard to achieve, since the mere presence of the researcher in a society tends to change what is being studied. They had also become uncertain about where the boundaries of their discipline should lie. A new and intense sensitivity to matters of power and conflict took hold of American anthropologists. Tobias Rees lists these political factors in his introduction: “the worldwide struggles against colonialism, the rise of the civil rights movements, the coming of affirmative action, the anti-war movement, the Chicago riots, new-nation building, minority movements, etc.” It has often been said that in the 1970s and early 1980s, anthropology in the United States turned left, standing on the side of the exploited and marginalized people, while the other social sciences turned right, espousing paradigms of scientific rigor and quantification. Anthropologists also increasingly turned their lens to Western society. But studying Western cultures left them entering territory dominated by economists, geographers, political scientists, and sociologists. So should they compete with these disciplines? Collaborate? As anthropology groped for answers, the discipline spawned numerous subfields: economic anthropology, feminist anthropology, medical anthropology, legal anthropology, science and technology studies, and so on.
Clifford Geertz’s influence
Writing Culture was written in the shadow of Clifford Geertz. Geertz’s formulation of an interpretative program for anthropology marked an important turning point in the history of the discipline. Conceptually, he proposed to understand culture as text. To be more precise, Geertz defined culture as a semiotic web of meaning that is open for interpretation and rereadings. “The challenge of fieldwork was, as he famously remarked, to look over the shoulder of an informant and to read the script that guides the native’s life.” As a result of this philological turn, ethnographies were increasingly understood as texts and thus as literary documents. Clifford Geertz was Paul Rabinow’s PhD advisor at the university of Chicago and sent him to do his doctoral fieldwork in Séfrou, a Moroccan town that Geertz had selected as the camp base to conduct an extensive survey of life conditions in Third World nations. The tone of some remarks made by Paul Rabinow in his conversation with Tobias Rees confirms there was bad blood between the two. Geertz famously criticized the tendency towards “I-witnessing” that manifested itself in Rabinow’s recollection from the field, Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. But he was careful to specify that he was speaking of him and his like-minded colleagues only as they function inside their pages, not as “real persons.” In return, Rabinow made ad hominem attacks on his former professor in an essay, “Chicken or Glass,” in which he claimed Geertz was unable to read even a simple situation and could not tell whether a certain ritual was performed in relation to “chicken” or “glass,” as the only word he understood from an informant’s answer could have meant both. Part of their opposition was political: Geertz kept his political opinions to himself but he did not make a stand against the war in Vietnam, while Rabinow mentions that partly out of protest he started learning Vietnamese, “though the only course in English available then was a U.S. Army course.” In these conversations, Rabinow does not dwell on his grudge against Geertz, expressing regret that he and Marshall Sahlins did not engage the issues raised by Writing Culture in a constructive fashion: “by their despising the present, they essentially foreclosed their own futures. This was a loss to the discipline.”
Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary reads like a graduate seminar discussion—which it is, in a way: Tobias Rees brought Paul Rabinow and George Marcus in a conversation across generations about some of the directions anthropology took after 1986. Places, namely university affiliations, play an important role in the way the history of the discipline gets taught and research traditions are transmitted from one generation to the next. The foundation of anthropology in the United States has been construed as an opposition between Columbia, where Franz Boas and his students operated, and Harvard, where grand theory building took precedence over the careful gathering of data from the field. In the postwar period, Rabinow and Marcus describe a similar tension through the opposition between Chicago and Harvard. Marcus arrived at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations to witness its crumbling: “Talcott Parsons was still there, giving abstract lectures reminiscent of some heyday, but mostly to foreign students (…) such as Niklas Luhmann.” According to Rabinow, Geertz’s focus on culture goes back to Harvard, where he was trained by Talcott Parsons before joining the Committee for the Comparative Study of New Nations at the University of Chicago in 1962. Chicago had a broader view of anthropology, nurtured by interdisciplinary exchanges and the influence of the Chicago school of sociology. Meanwhile, anthropology at Columbia University turned more radical, with a generation of scientists such as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, and Morton Fried falling under the influence of Marxism. Rabinow recalls that an entire cohort of students from the University of Chicago were chased out of New York: “They despised Geertz and Lévi-Strauss and they just saw it as some kind of, I don’t know what, right-wing thinking of some sort or other.” The history of anthropology at the time of Writing Culture and after was a story of an expansion of the discipline beyond these hallowed grounds. George Marcus moved to Rice University, where he chaired the anthropology department for twenty-five years before passing the baton to Michael Fischer. Paul Rabinowitz arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in 1978 and scored a big hit early on by writing the first book and anthology devoted to the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
The globalization of anthropology
Anthropology was a modest family affair back in the early days of Franz Boas and his students. By contrast, anthropology expanded rapidly in American higher education’s post-World War II boom. Nowadays nearly all American research universities, and many liberal arts colleges, harbor an anthropology department. Nor is teaching anthropology limited to the United States: European research institutions in the United Kingdom, in France and in Germany pursued distinct disciplinary traditions, while anthropology spread out worldwide and enriched itself along the way. This makes charting contemporary anthropology and delineating the new directions the discipline is taking a difficult enterprise. The profile of anthropology students and researchers also diversified: there are more women and more “halfies,” people whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education, or parentage. Rabinow noticed other changes at Berkeley: “We’re seeing an entry into anthropology graduate schools of many people who have been through NGOs and have, in a bigger way, run through the crisis of the Peace Corps that we saw earlier.” People still choose anthropology as a major for existential reasons both personal and political. As Rabinow recalls, “I became an anthropologist in many ways because I felt, and continue to feel, profoundly alienated from the United States.” Despite all the talk on diversity, the idea of a right-wing or conservative anthropologist runs counter, if not to logics, then to the sociological reality of a discipline that has always taken the side of the excluded, the marginal, the downtrodden. Cultural relativism is embedded in the DNA of the discipline. If anthropologists are less ready to claim the moral and political high ground, they are still committed to an agenda of radical change and social justice. As Marcus notes, “anthropology encourages these sorts of strong feelings about public issues and the world.”
Despite anthropologists’ emphasis on an epistemological break before and after Writing Culture, there has been more continuity that they are ready to acknowledge. The 1980s generation wanted to get rid of the key concepts of the discipline—culture, fieldwork, participant observation, the native point of view—and invent new modes of sharing results away from the journal article or ethnographic monograph. But publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and submitting a book to a university press, remain the gold standard for hiring and promotion. Geertz’s dilemma—“How to get an I-witnessing author into a they-picturing story”—continues to challenge writers who face new obligations of ethical best practices and accountability. The premise that fieldwork is the discipline’s distinguishing bedrock remains as powerful today as it was before Writing Culture. Ethnography is not an endangered genre: young researchers continue to go to far-away places and immerse themselves for an extended period in the daily activities of local communities in order to get a better grasp of what makes them tick. Learning the local language is still a requisite, and having some knowledge of French is always a plus: if judged by the number of references to Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour, American anthropologists remain in the thrall of French Theory. The concept of culture has been discarded, but a renewed focus on identity and on the self has kept intact the preoccupation with symbolic expression, collective modes of being, and construction of the subject. There has been productive exchanges with adjacent disciplines: feminism, media studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies, to name a few. But anthropology has not disappeared with the blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the disappearance of its traditional object. It has found a new lease of life “after ethnos” (to take the title of a 2018 book by Tobias Rees, which I reviewed here.)
The future of the discipline
Almost twenty years after these conversations that took place at Rice University in 2004, it seems to me that the evolution of the discipline has not validated the claims made by the two aging professors. People don’t turn to anthropology to know more about “the contemporary”: there are other disciplines that may be better equipped for understanding science and technology developments, emergent forms of life, or social precariousness. If anthropology can contribute to contemporary debates, it is mostly by cultivating its distinctive concepts, methods, ad research traditions. Anthropology has turned to the study of the “here and now,” rather than the “far away’”and “timeless,” but it has kept its attachment to localized communities and out-of-joint temporalities. Marcus and Rabinow made the remark that “anthropologists are increasingly studying timely phenomena with tools developed to study people out of time.” But anthropologists and the people they study have always been in and of their times. For most researchers, taking time out to do extended fieldwork remains the distinctive mark of the profession, its rite of passage and its rejuvenating spring. Marcus’ idea of multi-sited ethnography has not really taken hold, except when the research topic is itself on the move or dispersed in several locations. And Rabinow’s vision of so-called third spaces like studios, labinars, archives, and installations, many of them enabled by new technologies, hasn’t really replaced the traditional university environment. If anything, anthropologists are now more numerous in non-academic employment. Faced with the dearth of stable tenure-track positions, freshly-minted anthropologists have found job opportunities with corporations wanting better information about how to design and sell their products, and, controversially, an American military seeking to learn more about the “human terrain” where it fights. The US government and Microsoft are now reportedly the two biggest employers of anthropologists. Reports of anthropology’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.
The Duke Reader 