A review of Anthropological Futures, Michael M. J. Fischer, Duke University Press, 2009.
Kant is seldom claimed as an ancestor by anthropologists. That he wrote an “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” is considered irrelevant for the history or epistemology of the discipline: the “study of man” that the philosopher from Königsberg had in mind was very different from the detailed ethnographic observations by the fieldworkers of the twentieth century. For modern scholars trained in the anthropology discipline, philosophy was considered a waste of time, mainly irrelevant and sometimes dangerous. Ethnography was about facts, not speculation.
Arguably, the main advances in the discipline are associated with anthropologists who were theoretically inclined, and philosophy formed the background of their intellectual constructions. But other philosophical references tended to outweigh Kant’s transcendental idealism. Hegel and Comte exerted a lasting influence on the social sciences, as well as Marx, Durkheim and Weber, whom sociology claims as founding fathers. More recently, anthropologists well versed in theory have turned to Heidegger as well as to French modern philosophers also popular in cultural studies departments: references to Foucault fill the pages of social science journals, and one also finds discussions on Derrida’s deconstructionism, Deleuze’s contribution to media studies, Levinas’ ethics of the Other, or Lacan’s brand of psychoanalysis. Most of the time, however, the philosophical underpinnings of ethnographic studies remain implicit, and social scientists who claim fieldwork as the foundational pillar of their discipline remain wary of theories that are not empirically grounded. Theoretical musings remain the preserve of elder scholars, who can claim the benefit of accumulated experience, have cultivated a taste for literary prowess, and are too old to go to the field anyway.
Claiming Kant as an ancestor of modern anthropology
The return to Kant proposed by Michael Fischer in Anthropological Futures is therefore intriguing. True, as he confesses, the author has always dabbled in philosophy. Along his training in anthropology, he kept philosophy as a minor in his curriculum, and he complemented his formal training with personal readings. His defining moment was when he attended a conference entitled The Structuralism Controversy held at John Hopkins University in 1966, with the cream of French theorists in attendance, from Lévi-Strauss to Derrida and Lacan: it was there that the word “poststructuralism” was apparently coined, and Fischer was, as he claims, present at the creation. Later at the University of Chicago, he was fortunate enough to attend lectures and seminars by Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, Mircea Eliade, and two former students of Ludwig Wittgenstein. But as his references show, he was always more inclined to pick ideas and metaphors from the latest postmodern critics and French luminaries than to meditate over the abstract metaphysics and stern moral imperatives of eighteenth century’s Immanuel Kant.
Returning to Kant is however justified on several grounds. First, as Fischer notes, particularly for French theory in the late twentieth century Kant remains an important intertext: for Bourdieu, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Levinas, and others. Second, although it is not clearly stated, one gets the feeling that our world requires a moral compass and a pragmatic agenda that postmodern critics have been unable to provide. Rereading Kant, along with Hannah Arendt and other moralists, provide our contemporaries with such perspective. It is highly revealing that when Iranian intellectuals connected to Fischer and opposed to the clerical regime want to find references in modern philosophy, they turn to Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, Richard Rorty, and John Rawls, not Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and the like. The return to Kant is a return to the spirit of the Enlightenment. Countering interpretations by the Frankfurt School (who underscored the “dark side” of the Enlightenment) and by Lacan (who read Kant along with Sade), Fischer notes that “the Enlightenment was not so ethnocentric and parochial as some detractors suggest.”
In addition, one discovers in Kant an attention to detail, a recognition of the “plurality of the human condition” (to use Arendt’s words), and a focus on “the unsociable sociability of man” (Kant’s own expression) that prefigures modern anthropology. Kant apparently was an avid reader of travelers’ reports, explorers’ journals, and news from other countries. He considered his teaching of Anthropology as well as Geography as essential part in the upbringing of citizens of the world. While one should not expect from Kant’s writings anything approaching the thick description or comparative standards of modern ethnography, it nonetheless provides a logical prolegomenon to much of that project. As a last point, cosmopolitanism, conceived as not only knowing but participating in the world, again constitutes our political horizon. Despite its shortcomings, the European Union is the closest approximation to the federation of republics that Kant envisaged in his philosophical sketch for a perpetual peace.
Anthropology as a philosophical mode of enquiry
Fischer’s discussion on Kant is based on the premise that anthropology should return to fundamental moral and cultural issues and become what some precursors envisaged for it: a philosophical mode of enquiry, grounded in theory as well as observation, and bridging various disciplines into an integrated whole. Anthropology stands at the crossroad of the many academic disciplines that have developed over the years around literature departments and social science faculties. Indeed, just as Auguste Comte claimed sociology as the queen of all disciplines, Fischer envisages for anthropology a pivotal role, dethroning cultural studies in its ability to generate interdisciplinary work between the humanities and social sciences. In the end, such discipline should be capable of restoring the human being to a free condition. It should “not just ask what man is, but what one can expect of him.”
Fischer sees particular potential in his own branch of inquiry, the anthropology of science, whose ultimate objective is to reconnect the procedures of the natural sciences with the goals of the human sciences. In comparison with other social studies of science–the field seems to be replete with acronyms, from STS to SSK, SCOT and ANT–, anthropology can bring attention to other terrains beyond the traditional focus on Europe and America. This is what the author does, in short vignettes presenting research labs in emerging countries, with a focus that goes beyond the conventional claims of postcolonial studies or the center/periphery duality. As he notes in a short manifesto concluding a survey on the interface between nature and society, “An anthropology to come will need to be collaborative and intercultural, not only across traditional cultures, but across cultures of specialization, and it will need not only to incorporate the lively languages of the new technosciences, but also reread, decipher, and redeploy the palimpsests of traditional knowledges.”
Borrowing metaphors from the hard sciences
In his attempt to substitute anthropology to cultural studies at the pinnacle of the humanities, Fischer adopts many tics and proclivities of his colleagues in cultural studies departments. The book’s chapters are usually built around a basic notion (culture, science, nature, the body) that is “unpacked” into several loosely-connected dimensions, with various illustration from the arts and the social science literature. Bibliographical references are brought in more as a show of scholarship and for the halo of scientificity that they bring than for close readings or detailed criticism. Footnotes are prolific and develop a narrative of their own, sometimes orthogonal to the main body of the text. Like scholars in critical theory, Fischer likes to bring key words and metaphors from the hard sciences, often used out of context. Such categories include haplotype groups, experimental systems, recombinant science, graphemic spaces, object-oriented languages, emergent forms of life, and material-semiotic operators. Lastly, his writing lacks both the rigorous accuracy of science and the metaphorical literality of the humanities, leaving the reader with convoluted sentences that sometimes require second or third readings. These theoretical musings are far from the models of style and precision that authors such as Clifford Geertz have set forth for the discipline.
Carl Schmidt defined sovereignty as ultimately the power to call a state of exception to the normalized condition of the law. Drawing on the German philosopher, Giorgio Agamben uses the exception as a fundamental principle of state rule that is predicated on the division between citizen in a judicial order and outsiders stripped of juridical and political protections. Aihwa Ong, a Berkeley anthropologist, offers a milder version of the state of exception: the sovereign exception she is interested in “is not the negative exception that suspends civil rights for some but rather positive kinds of exception that create opportunities, usually for a minority, who enjoy political accommodations and conditions not granted to the rest of the population.”
In Flexible Citizenship, Aihwa Ong describes how industrializing states in Southeast Asia and border-crossing citizens of Chinese descent respond differently to the challenge of globalization. Borrowing from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, she uses the term “regime” to refer to knowledge/power schemes that seek to normalize power relations. The three regimes that are considered are the regime of Chinese kinship and family, the regime of the nation-state, and the regime of the marketplace. These regimes and their associated logics of subject-making, of governmentality, and of capital accumulation, are characterized by the twin forces of flexibility and transnationality. The book explores the phenomena that are shaped by these two forces: mobile capital, business networks, migrations, media publics, zones of graduated sovereignty, and triumphant Asian discourses.
The thesis of this book is quite simple. Korea in the 1980s and the 1990s was a post-traumatic society. The figure of the father had been shattered by its authoritarian leaders, who ended in a grotesque finale (see The President’s Last Bang, 2005, about the assassination of Park Chung-hee) or, in the case of Chun Doo-hwan, lacked hair (The President’s Barber, 2004). The double trauma of colonization by Japan and fratricide murder during the Korean War had deprived the Korean people of its identity. The sins of the fathers were visited upon the sons, and the Memories of Murder (2003) still lingered. The ritual murder of the father could not unite the community of brothers as they stood divided between North and South (Taegukgi: The Brotherhood of War, 2004), between sons of patriots and sons of collaborationists (Thomas Ahn Jung-geun, 2004). The films quoted above, all produced in the 2000s, could resolve the tensions and dilemma of overcoming trauma by representing them on screen. By contrast, films produced in the 1980s and 1990s could only repress the representation of the primal scene, generating frustration and anger. In psychoanalytic terms, this is the difference between “working through”, the positive engagement with trauma that can lead to its ultimate resolution, and “acting out” or compulsively repeating the past.
orty years ago, Japanese psychiatrist Takeo Doi wrote The Anatomy of Dependence (or Amae no Kôzô, literally: “The Structure of Amae“). In this book, as in everyday Japanese language, amae refers to the feelings that all infants at the breast harbor for their mother–dependence, the desire to be passively loved, the unwillingness to be separated from the object of desire and cast into a world of “objective” reality. Takeo Doi’s basic premise was that Japanese men nurture these feelings well into their adult life, much more so than men raised in the West. For him, the concept of amae goes a long way in explaining the basic mentality of individuals and the organization of society in Japan.
Two Bits is a failed anthropology project. It does not make it a bad book: it is well-written and informative, and I learned a lot about Free Software and Open Source by reading it. But it does not meet academic standards that one is to expect from a book published in an anthropology series. These standards, as I see them, pertain to the position of the anthropologist; the importance of fieldwork; the role of theory; the interpretation of facts; and the style of ethnographic writing. Let me elaborate on these five points.
There are two types of anthropologists: those who have done fieldwork and those who haven’t. Only the former can fully bear the title of anthropologist. They have been ordained through the same rites of passage: they have been there, seen places, and have come back with the field notes and observations they can subsequently transform into a book. This marks their full entry into the profession: they will no longer have to return to the field for extended periods, as they can revisit the same material from a distance or through occasional visits. Bearing the talisman of their ordination, they can bar entry to the profession to those who haven’t been through the same ordeal. It doesn’t matter that these outsiders may have acquired an extensive knowledge of the anthropology literature or mastered the ropes and codes of the discipline: they are kept outside the tent, and forced to find other disciplinary affiliations. Many find refuge in literature departments, or under the broad canvas of cultural studies. There they may pursue their work in relatively unhindered ways, developing a critical dialogue with other, more patrolled disciplines in the social sciences. They may borrow from the toolbox and writing techniques of anthropologists to develop a view from afar, which they often turn to their own environment and surroundings in a kind of reflexive engagement. For all practical purposes, they are anthropologists in all but name.
There was a change in the perception of literature’s social role in Japan between the Taishô and the Shôwa periods. According to Maruyama Masao, Japan’s foremost postwar critic, the average parent and teacher at the end of the Taishô era thought that “a middle school student who spent all his time reading novels was doing one of two things: avoiding his studies or corrupting his morals.” Progressively however, reading literature became a more respectable cultural pursuit, tolerated and even encouraged by schools and families. The social status of writers and the novel improved markedly: they became embodiments of the national spirit, and symbols of Japan’s entry into modernity. The possession of a national literature became a point of pride for citizens who wanted to see Japan ranked among the greatest nations of the world. A mass market for literary productions turned writing from an insecure occupation into a potential source of wealth, and transformed select authors into celebrities.
Biopolitics is a notion propounded by Michel Foucault whereby “life becomes the explicit center of political calculation.” The increasing use of this notion in the social sciences underscores a fundamental evolution. In the twenty-first century, as anticipated by Foucault, power over the biological lives of individuals and peoples has become a decisive component of political power, and control over one’s biology is becoming a central focus for political action. Used by the late Foucault in his lectures at the Collège de France, biopolitics and its associated concept, governmentality (“the conduct of conducts”), are now in the phase of constituting a whole new paradigm, a way to define what we are and what we do. Biopolitics and governmentality are now declined by many scholars who have proposed associated notions: “bare life” and the “state of exception” (Giorgio Agamben), “multitude” and “empire” (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri), “biological citizenship” and “the politics of life itself” (Nikolas Rose), “biopolitical assemblages” and “graduated sovereignty” (Aihwa Ong), “cyborg” and “posthumanities” (Donna Haraway), etc. This flowering of conceptualizations is often associated with a critique of neoliberalism as the dominant form of globalized governmentality, and to a renewal of Marxist studies that revisit classical notions (surplus value, commodity fetishism, alienation of labor…) in light of new developments.
Cultures from the South Pacific have provided anthropologists with a rich array of words and concepts: “mana” (power, charisma), “hau” (life’s energy), “tapu” (taboo) and its antonym “noa”, “hara” (a violation of tapu) and “wairua” (spirit) all originate in the languages of Polynesian cultures. These terms first came to the attention of western anthropologists through the reports of missionaries in the Pacific islands. Armchair theorists like James Frazer or Marcel Mauss used the observations of the first ethnographers to lay the foundation of their discipline. Their theories were built on the idea that it is possible to isolate cultural traits from their social context and bundle them together to draw comparisons and infer anthropological laws. Surveying the practice of gift-giving, Marcel Mauss famously came to the conclusion that it involved belief in a force binding the receiver and giver, which he labeled “hau” after the word used by the Māori. Such concepts derive their theoretical potential precisely from the lack of equivalence in common language. But as Claude Levi-Strauss later argued, the indiscriminate use of indigenous categories hampers the analysis of symbolic systems, which he proposed to process through the description of unconscious structures. Anthropological words have nonetheless entered common language, from totem to taboo and to tattoo, while anthropologists still use words like mana and hau as specialized vocabulary in their profession.
