Theorizing the City: Recent Research in Urban Anthropology

Half of the world's population now lives in cities. This number is expected to grow to two-thirds in the next fifty years. And yet, it is only recently that anthropologists have begun to take urban contexts seriously as fieldwork sites. In this article, I analyze three recent volumes on urban anthropology which each propose a distinctive theoretical and methodological approach to the study of the city. I suggest that there is a fine line to be drawn between urban determinism—the suggestion that the city is the pivotal force in shaping individual lives, a perspective that ignores both human agencies and the complexities of causality—and anthropology which relegates the city to mere context, ethnographies that, almost by chance take place in urban contexts but say little about the realities of city life. The texts examined share two features in common: firstly, they are most effective when they, through close ethnographic or archival engagement, show the complexity and variation in urban contexts; and secondly, each text displays an absolute commitment to ethnographic fieldwork as a powerful tool to understand the lived experience of the urban. As a commitment to long-term participant observation is the sine qua non of our discipline, my central question is whether “urban anthropology,” is not just anthropology after all?     

Anthropology, ‘Native Schooling’ and Maori: the Politics of ‘Cultural Adaptation’ Policies

This paper examines three policies of ‘cultural adaptation’ formulated in colonial contexts in the 1920s and 1930s — that of the British Colonial Office for education in Africa, that of the New Zealand Native Schools and that of Maori leaders. While clearly inter-related, these policies were developed and promoted by their respective proponents to serve widely different political goals. Particularly significant is the role played by anthropology in that context. Proponents of all three policies looked to anthropologists for insights and scientific validation of their political agendas. Anthropologists, in turn, not only accepted this role but, particularly in the case of the British Colonial education policy, actively claimed it, involving themselves in the processes of colonial control.     

试论历史人类学与中国近代史研究中的几个问题

兴起于20世纪80年代中后期的历史人类学,尽管从学术传承上分属于两个不同的学科,但它的出现为消融历史学与人类学的边界,促成两个学科的交叉与融合,起到了不可低估的作用。在历史学内,“历史人类学”的形成亦经历了一个从社会史、社会文化史到历史人类学的演变过程。而在中国近代史领域,历史人类学已经展开一些研究实践,但是尚需进一步提倡。这种提倡表现在三个方面:底层视角、区域经验、文本与田野互动。历史人类学会对中国近代史研究产生有益的影响,会成为一种介于宏大叙事与经验性实证研究的“中层理论”。从历史学科的本位出发,历史人类学对人类学的吸收借鉴颇多,但是不能轻易放弃历史学科本位。     

Anthropology at the End of the World

At this critical juncture in human history, when technological, political, demographic, and climatological forces promise to reshape the world in fundamental ways, anthropology stands in a uniquely privileged position to understand and perhaps cope with these forces and the resulting changes. By virtue of three key features—holism, scalability, and a tradition of political engagement—anthropology has an important role to play in the 21st century.     

Anthropology as jester

Disciplines from sociology to economics have claimed to be the queen of the social sciences. Lévi‐Strauss asserted the same for anthropology. Instead of competing for a royal position, we might better describe ourselves as the court jester who mocks and mimics accepted behaviour.     

A College Student's Rural Journey: Early Sociology and Anthropology in China Seen through Fieldwork on Sichuan's Secret Society

This paper focuses on the investigators of rural society in the Republican period,specifically research made through fieldwork on the Gowned Brothers (or,Paoge) in 1940s Sichuan.It takes up one such investigator,Shen Baoyuan—a student at Yenching University;her youthful work never became published or recognized.The present study reveals how the pioneers of Chinese sociology and anthropology,who called themselves "rural activists," tried to understand rural China.It argues that the developments in those fields in China of the 1920s and 1940s made it possible for us today to have a better understanding of the contemporary rural problems.The investigators played an important role in the Rural Construction and Rural Education Movements in Republican China.They show us how Western sociology and anthropology were localized in order to answer "Chinese questions" and to solve "Chinese problems." As source material,these investigations have given us rich records,which in turn have become precious sources and historical memories of rural China's past.     

Anthropology in the news? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

It is part of our informal culture of anthropology to complain about the way the media portray us, and yet there has been little systematic analysis of media representations of anthropology. I look at stories about anthropologists, stories that quote anthropologists and opinion pieces by anthropologists over a six‐month period in The New York Times. I conclude that biological anthropology and archaeology are over‐represented in these stories, and that the media portrays anthropologists primarily as authorities on exotic others abroad, or ritual behaviour at home. Anthropologists who write about neoliberalism and militarism have had difficulty getting into the high‐end mainstream media, where it is economists rather than anthropologists who are seen as experts on general human nature.     

Life-Philosophical Anthropology as the Missing Third: On Peter Gordon's Continental Divide

Summary

Though Peter Gordon mentioned philosophical anthropology in his book Continental Divide, he has not yet realized how it works independently from Cassirer's and Heidegger's prejudices. The whole argument between them before, in and after Davos (1929) raged around the status of philosophical anthropology: How do the spiritualisation of life and the enlivening of the spirit come about? This was not just the central question for philosophical anthropology founded by Max Scheler, but also in Wilhelm Dilthey's life philosophy, which was systematized by Georg Misch. Cassirer and Heidegger shared three shortcomings with respect to the Life-philosophical Anthropology. Neither had a philosophy of nature or a philosophy of sociaty or a philosophy of history. The insight into the unfathomability of humans (Misch) is given a political edge in Helmuth Plessner's book Power and Human Nature (1931). Elevating it to the principle of democratic equality with respect to the worth of all cultures one opens up the potential for a form of civil competition that might supersede ethnocentric wars.     

A hobby no more: Anxieties of engaged anthropology: at the heart of empire (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Previous calls for an engaged anthropology were met by scholars who rose to the challenge successfully. But the current conservative political climate witnesses a regression of ‘academic standards’ to the traditional publish‐or‐perish model in many institutions, which themselves claim as mission not ivory‐tower academics but contribution to world affairs. Anthropologists may have to place themselves at the forefront of institutional reform if the ‘engaged anthropology’ moment is to be more than a passing fashion.     

THE EMPIRE OF THE FUTURE

This rich collection analyzes science in the archives over the past several thousand years. The chapters work together to tell stories of ambitious attempts to provide timeless data for science, which will be used for generations to come—ranging from ancient astronomy to geology to life‐logging and the development of web search. They also demonstrate convincingly that archives are powerful forces across the sciences—every science discussed has an archival base—which partly determine what kind of general knowledge claims can be made by future generations: it is hard to read an archive askance. The collection works best as a series of individual chapters, though some work is done to indicate where they speak to one another. It is a pity that there was not more input from archivists themselves in the project: their noninclusion means that some archival issues (especially what goes on with data after it gets into the archive—how it gets cleaned up, changed, reorganized) are treated somewhat lightly. The collection does provide a very useful set of tools for thinking about scientific archives. It is also an excellent introduction to the peculiarities of scientific archives—one that reflects back on the use of archives in history in general.     

Anthropologists,Education, and Autoethnography

Autoethnographies place personal experience within social and cultural contexts and raise provocative questions about social agency and socio-cultural constraints. Several authors are discussed who write about educational settings that are quite familiar to them, thereby positioning themselves as insiders to the milieus studied. At the same time, each book considered here poses dilemmas for the construction of an insider/outsider divide, leading to questions about how to evaluate an insider perspective. For the wider discipline of anthropology, these texts remind us that our scholarly production takes place in the context of particular social fields within which we negotiate as social actors.     

Assessing the Effects of the Grundrisse in Anglophone Geography and Anthropology

Abstract: Selections of the Grundrisse were translated into English beginning in 1964; a full translation did not appear until 1973. Anglophone Marxian social science has changed dramatically since then; this article attempts to assess the role of the Grundrisse in these changes, focusing specifically on anthropology and geography. In geography the effects are most apparent in the work of David Harvey, who was among the earliest Anglophone social scientists to undertake a full reinterpretation of Marx in the light of the Grundrisse. I identify four insights that can be seen in Harvey's writings and elsewhere in recent human geography, but whose relation to the Grundrisse is not often acknowledged. In anthropology, the effects of the Grundrisse are perhaps even more pronounced but also more complex and obscure; nonetheless, a similar, and similarly under‐acknowledged, influence can be discerned, especially in historical anthropology and recent studies of value. I suggest that the Grundrisse's translation into English has facilitated a convergence of anthropology and geography, and that critical ethnography in this vein is needed to grapple with the financialization of everything, in which commodification is only a preliminary step.     

Anthropology of the far right: What if we like the ‘unlikeable’ others?

Drawing on her own experience of studying the far right, the author discusses the recent tendency to establish far-right activists and supporters as anthropology’s new ‘exotic others’. Three main tools of ‘exoticization’ and ‘othering’ are described, which the author deems to be co-responsible for the peculiar status of the subject of the far right within the discipline. She relates these tools to three research steps: ‘naming’, ‘locating’ and ‘explaining’. In providing her own reflections on these problems and relating them to the literature on the subject, the author attempts to shed some light on the growing presence of various far-right extremisms and to show the ways in which the study of the far right reflects some broader problems that anthropology and anthropologists have been addressing in recent years.     

Introduction: Anthropology,Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.     

Arrival: Anthropology in Hollywood

The recent Hollywood science fiction film Arrival features as its main character a linguist who explicitly references the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis and linguistic relativism. Unusually for a mainstream film, Arrival presents the insights of linguistic anthropology as a key to the human‐alien encounter and combines these concerns with other key anthropological insights, particularly in relation to notions of time and the embodied nature of writing/drawing. In this article, the author argues that the film can be useful in thinking about anthropological debates on ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of Sapir‐Whorf and suggests that a careful parsing of the anthropological concepts drawn on in the film provides food for thought about the possible usefulness of popular fictional concoctions for thinking through contemporary issues in anthropology and conveying them to a wider audience.     

A Very Remote Storage Box Indeed: The Importance of Doing Archaeology with Old Museum Collections

Although our practice has come to be defined by a focus on excavation as the trademark of archaeological research, research on archaeological collections lies at the scientific heart of the discipline. We demonstrate through two very different case studies how a return to primary sources (in this case, boxes of artifacts) can upend our understanding of the objects themselves and create new narratives of social and technological change. At the same time, access to museum collections is becoming increasingly difficult as institutions struggle with the growing pressure to enhance public outreach and modernize data management, while simultaneously contending with persistent budget cuts. As archaeologists who work closely with museum curators and museum collections, we offer suggestions for how researchers can work with museums to ensure that future generations of researchers and the general public can learn from the ancient materials preserved within their collections.     

Anthropology and 1968: Openings and closures

It is now 50 years since 1968 and in this article we look back at the 1960s and the way that anthropology was shaped in those years. We find a period of rupture, generational upheaval, youthful exploration against authority and spiritual breaks with rationality and causality thinking, but also violent counter‐insurgency and inventions of new authoritarian state forms. Our purpose is to look back at that period and reframe how those years were formative for anthropology and neighbouring disciplines. We believe that anthropology experienced a liminal period, with Carlos Castaneda and Victor Turner as leading figures, and that the closures and denials of that sense of anti‐structure have marked the discipline after 1968. We draw on Deleuze and Guattari and their account of May 1968 as an event of ‘suffocation’ and a ‘return to the intolerable’.     

Uncommon Ground: Holism and the Future of Anthropology

Anthropology has long been a contested field with roots in both scientific and humanistic discourse. The “four-field” approach in American anthropology has been used by some as a means of suppressing conflict and enforcing a false sense of unity. While critiques of the four-field approach are warranted, in fact holism represents anthropology's greatest strength. Anthropology gains a competitive advantage over other disciplines in its ability to combine biological and cultural approaches. Moreover, the four-field model, while historically contingent, is well suited to the institutional and political realities of the American academy, especially the public research university.     

Anthropology at the bottom of the pyramid

This article explores what anthropology has to say about contemporary business strategies for market expansion among poor consumers in Africa and Asia. Focusing on the activities of global consumer goods company Unilever in India, we show how anthropology can provide valuable insights into the hidden work and power relations involved in transforming an everyday commodity like soap into a composite object, what we call a 'social good', that is capable of simultaneously combating disease, tackling poverty and realizing value for shareholders.