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.
The Duke Reader 