Three reflections on public anthropology (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Clarifying the difference between engaged and public anthropology rests on the collaborative, confrontational, and transformative orientation of the former and the messaging concerns of the latter. Both are strengthened by a solid foundation in key theoretical concepts that distinguish the discipline's fundamental ways of knowing from other forms of social inquiry and engagement, like journalism and activism. These concepts include empiricism, translation, incommensurability, obligation, critique, subjectivity, circulation, emergence, rupture, and imagination. I also suggest an exploration of ‘ethnography‐scapes’ that trace the impact of ethnographies on readers, subjects, and most especially the connections among them.     

What's in a name? Anthrozoology,human‐animal studies,animal studies or…? (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Human interactions with other animals feature regularly in the pages of Anthropology Today, and academic research focusing on the human‐animal relationship is undergoing something of a boom in the social sciences and humanities generally. This comment, prompted by Caplan's paper ‘Death on the farm’ in the last issue of AT, considers the place of human‐animal interactions in anthropology through a discussion of the terminology and methodologies employed by scholars within this area. It is argued that such a discussion is instructive because, as the etymology of the term suggests, anthropology is ultimately concerned with ‘understanding humans’. The ways that we, as researchers, choose to distinguish between humans and other animals, and the ways that we choose to represent our informants' interactions with other animals, can provide considerable insight into how all concerned think about what it means to be human.     

Khat: Chewing on a bitter controversy (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When the slender green succulent leaves of the khat tree are chewed, a mild natural amphetamine called cathinone is gradually released, and absorbed into the bloodstream through the mouth and cheek tissues. The effects, which last for several hours, include the softening of one's temper, increased gregariousness, and a piqued sexual appetite, while at the same time inhibiting hunger, anxiety, and feelings of fatigue. In the Arabian peninsula and the Horn of Africa, where khat is autochthonous, men have been chewing it recreationally for hundreds of years. Khat chewing has recently burgeoned to a global and pointed controversy, however, featuring in academic ethnopharmacology journals, the official publications of neoliberal development organizations, and worldwide in popular news media outlets. Khat has thus received multitudinous accusations of it being: an obstacle to economic growth; a pernicious narcotic; a positive mediator of political discourse in the public sphere; a public health concern; and a barrier to national development. Of these ambiguous tensions, Klein et al. (2012: 1) say that ‘Khat provides a unique example of a herbal stimulant that is defined as an ordinary vegetable in some countries and a controlled drug in others’, fingering khat as an exemplar of a globally contested object of concern – constituting different political stakes when viewed from distinct situated perspectives – and ready prey for anthropological critique. This essay interrogates some of the divergent formulations that khat has taken across the distinct political arenas that orchestrate the ‘controversy’. Following a Latourian actor‐network approach, I argue against a universal ontology of khat, suggesting instead that khat might be more meaningfully traced and apprehended through the political work it achieves in its various contexts and situated deployments. This critical reading of khat as a ‘thing in movement’ should therefore speak to the anthropology of controversy more broadly.     

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.     

Public anthropology and the financial crisis (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

When anthropologists write about finance and the economy, their publications seldom reach audiences as wide as those of economists or journalists. Is there a space for anthropologists in public debates about our era's acute economic dilemmas? The short answer should be yes, partly because anthropologists are trained to probe social silences and make the invisible visible, and because we reject the pitfalls of Econ 101, oversimplifications that pervade public discourse. Academic anthropologists can draw lessons from what we might term ‘public economics’, as well as from the writings of Gillian Tett, an award‐winning financial columnist trained in anthropology. Perhaps we can also learn a little from tricksters – or from satirical activists who deploy irony, caricature, and paradox as sharp instruments in this age of austerity and billionaires. As we analyze finance and the economy in the aftermath of a financial meltdown whose causes and policy implications are intensely debated, our challenge still is to satisfy journalists' appetite for sound‐bite narratives without sacrificing nuance, historical contingency, and complexity.     

Towards a trickster science/fiction: complexifying boundaries with Neal Stephenson and Michel Serres

ABSTRACT

This article highlights an intersection between the science fiction of Neal Stephenson and the science philosophy of Michel Serres. As two of the most prolific contemporary advocates of the communication between literature and science, Serres and Stephenson employ permutations of the trickster figure as a potent lens on the epistemological transformations that occur when boundaries are crossed and static systems perturbed. Allegorizing the birth of science and rational consciousness as the intervention of a trickster, Stephenson finds in hackers and couriers the same generative force that Serres associates with the Greek god Hermes and the figure of the parasite. With particular attention to Stephenson’s postcyberpunk novel Snow Crash (Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. London: Penguin Books) and Serres’ Hermes series (1969–1980), the concept of the trickster will be explored as both a personification of the kinship between creation mythologies, information theory, anthropology, and modern physics, and as the template for a productive transdisciplinary mode of cultural inquiry.     

Anthropology in the world: Limits and unity (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This editorial anticipates the conference Anthropology in the World by reflecting upon the influence of anthropology, and its limits, arguing that it is only by knowing where these limits are that we can be sure where and how it can best be judged. It is too, a call for unity, suggesting that in seeking to influence the external world, anthropology should unite across its sub‐disciplines, and in doing so a mutually‐beneficial exchange of practice, ideas and methodology will emerge.     

近年来民间信仰问题研究的回顾与思考:社会史角度的考察

民间信仰问题是当前社会史研究中的一个重要领域,其研究取得一定的成绩,使得民间信仰成为了深入理解中国传统社会的一个很好的突破口。当然,研究中也存在诸多不足,最主要的问题是概念运用的随意性太大。在研究方法上,一方面受到了包括社会人类学、社会学、民俗学等诸多学科的影响,另一方面传统的史学研究方法也应得到重视。     

Rapid response ethnographies in turbulent times: Researching mass grave exhumations in contemporary Spain (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Sometimes a social process under engaged research can swiftly grow out of control, in scale and complexity. Such was the case in my ten‐year‐long study of mass grave exhumations from the Civil War (1936–1939) in contemporary Spain. In such circumstances, I argue for the deployment of a rapid response ethnography, an extreme modality of both public and/or engaged research. This type of instant engagement forces the ethnographer to constantly refashion research designs; recognize and reabsorb emerging social actors and research scenarios; reinvent ethnographic presence; face unanticipated ethical dilemmas; and reimagine how to transfer our acquired knowledge and reflection in (a) multiple non‐academic formats for a myriad of potential publics and (b), in time frames more attuned to the rhythms of fast‐moving public debates and technological transformations in communications. More importantly, rapid response ethnography takes place whenever there is swift and strong public demand for academic analysis within a broader process of social, political and media controversy. In turn, rapid response research is necessarily committed to the transformation of the social and political conditions under study.     

Advancing anthropology in schools: The accreditation of the Anthropology A‐level (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The development of an Anthropology A Level represents a major forward movement for the discipline in this country. Now that the RAI has at last succeeded in having the course accredited for teaching in schools, from this September, it is timely to try to put this achievement into a longer historical context. I here briefly review the discipline's attempts over four decades to address the role of Anthropology in educational contexts outside of the university. This process can be seen both as part of a wider public engagement (cf Eriksen, 2006) and as evidence that colleagues in this country have indeed been concerned for a long time with both anthropology in and of education (cf see Green and Bloome 1997).     

Feigning the market: Funding anthropology in England (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Impending changes to the funding of tertiary education in England (and, less directly, throughout the United Kingdom) pose particular challenges to small disciplines, like anthropology. From the perspective of students, potentially facing thirty years repaying educational debt, the new dispensation looks like ‘marketization’, with degrees conceived as private goods to be paid for at a rate that covers the costs of their provision. From the perspective of the universities, however, the same changes come with new layers of obligation, audit, assessment and regulation. The mismatch between students’ expectations and universities’ capacities is only likely to widen. These changes in undergraduate funding will take place concurrently with a reduction in all the other streams of government funding on which anthropology departments rely for the research of their staff and research students. Career paths in anthropology, involving progression through undergraduate and taught postgraduate studies, to postgraduate research and eventually a position in the academy, will become prohibitively expensive for all but a very few students. Departments of anthropology will be forced (by the logic of the new system and by their own universities) into exploiting their sources of comparative advantage; but the UK discipline as a whole will be the likely casualty of such behaviour if an already slender institutional presence is eroded further.     

Reclaiming the social body through self‐directed violence: Seeking anthropological understanding of Suicide attacks (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Suicide bombings receive tremendous attention in the media and are a central aspect of the Western public's imagination of terrorism, yet anthropology has remained relatively silent in debates around this form of violence. Drawing on constructs central to anthropology, namely embodiment and agency, I suggest that when political and structural violence threatens the body and thus the identity of both individual and group, this force can be ultimately rejected and the body can be ‘reclaimed’ through self‐directed violence. In trying to explain the horror that this act generates in the West the article introduces a new element central to anthropology ‐ namely pollution ‐ that has not previously been examined in discourse around suicide bombing. This is a theoretical piece that tries to problematize the role of the body, as a physical entity central to this ‘act’ and offers some questions and potential hypotheses for further research.     

中国史视野中的“公共领域”

通过考察从事中国史研究的学术群体对于"公共领域"理论的认知过程,展现了这一理论在一定程度上符合了中国史研究领域关注"国家与社会关系"的学术旨趣,对于"国家与社会关系"提供了更具兼容力的解说方式,并提供了许多操作性很强的研究单位。但另一方面,在将这一理论运用于实证研究时,研究者们往往难以摆脱"资产阶级公共领域"的限定性概念,此外,还存在着对于"公共"的界定不清晰,对于文化和意识形态方面的"公共性"关注不够,对于体制化的"公共领域"和现象层面的"公共领域"区分不明确等问题。对于这些问题的深刻反思,将会有助于揭示中国历史上公共领域的独特性格。     

THE EVOLUTION AND DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE

In his thought‐provoking book, Alex Mesoudi argues for an evolutionary, unifying framework for the social sciences, which is based on the principles of Darwinian theory. Mesoudi maintains that cultural change can be illuminated by using the genotype‐phenotype distinction, and that it is sufficiently similar to biological change to warrant a theory of culture‐change based on evolutionary models. He describes examples of cultural microevolution, within‐population changes, and the biologically inspired population genetics models used to study them. He also shows that some aspects of large‐scale (macro‐evolutionary) cultural transformation can be studied by using ecological models and phylogenetic comparative techniques. We argue that although Mesoudi's evolution‐based perspective offers many useful insights, his ambition—the unification of the social sciences within a Darwinian framework through the use of the methods and models he describes—suffers from a major theoretical limitation. His reductive approach leads to overlooking culture as a system with emergent processes and features. Mesoudi therefore does not engage with any of the central past and present theories in sociology and anthropology for which the systems view of culture is central, and he does not analyze the emergent, high‐level properties of human cultural‐social systems. We suggest that a systems perspective, using some analogies and metaphors from developmental biology, can complement the evolutionary approach and is more in tune with a systems view of society. Such an approach, which stresses feedback and self‐sustaining interactions within social networks, and engages with the insights of sociological and anthropological theories, can contribute to the understanding of cultural systems by highlighting the evolution of processes of social cohesion, and by making use of the mathematical approaches of complexity theory.     

The desire for relevance (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In this editorial, the authors ask how anthropology constitutes its public compared to publics in other disciplines.     

The Politics of Knowledge: Julian Steward,Leslie White,Melville Herskovits,and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza

Biographies of four important figures in the history of anthropology—Julian Steward, Leslie White, Melville Herskovits, and L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza—illustrate that current “public anthropology” has deep historic roots and that anthropology, even subfields that involve the basic sciences, like genetics, are shaped by personal and political experience as much as by intellect. All the biographical subjects discussed here had first-hand experience with racism, fascism, and bigotry, whether in their home or public lives, and resisted those forms of hegemony by fashioning anthropological theories to explain and appreciate human diversity.     

Crisis attack: Impromptu ethnography in the Greek maelstom (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Assailed by mounting debt and increasing economic distress, Greece today is also the target of media representations that emphasize violence and disorder. Michael Herzfeld – who was mugged and tear‐gassed in Athens this past July – argues that these representations are misleading and indeed are part of the problem they seek to explain. The structural violence of an insistent barrage of negative media coverage as well as that of international financial pressures undermines a previously stable and relatively crime‐free country, encouraging new forms – including police and popular racism, physical violence at demonstrations, and acts of petty crime – of what had once been a largely codified and ritualized idiom of aggression. While many Greeks do feel that debts should be paid, increasing economic desperation fuels a different view, and one that can best be interpreted in light of the social values that anthropologists have long studied in Greece: that the country's creditors are violating their own obligations toward Greece and thus deserve to face both default on the massive debt and the public hostility of the Greek people.     

Streets as new places to bring together both humans and plants: examples from Paris and Montpellier (France)

Greening public city space is a growing issue in France. With examples drawn from Paris and Montpellier, this article seeks to understand what happens when city-dwellers green the public space outside their door and when policies encourage spontaneous flora on the street. Plants were already part of ancient cities and have been a tool for urban planning since the nineteenth century leading to the development of public green spaces and street-tree planting. Urban ecology sparked an interest for spontaneous flora in the 1980s. Public policies concerning water, climate, and biodiversity have been trying to take this unbidden vegetation into consideration since the beginning of this century. Besides, the social sciences have shown that city-dwellers are interested in plants to embellish their balcony, and in city gardens and parks. We tried to find out if this vegetation can be more than just a tool to plan, to green, to bring biodiversity, and to beautify urban space. We argue that letting planted and unbidden flora colonize sidewalks and allowing people to act directly on it brings residents and plants to co-inhabit and co-domesticate the streets, and challenges the timelessness of a city by introducing a life cycle.     

Talking to strangers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The language used by politicians and its social effects have been of long‐standing interest to social anthropology. Opinion‐formers on both sides of the North Atlantic have recently argued that this language can inflame tensions and reinforce divisions. In the UK, the discussion has centred on relations between a white majority and a Muslim minority, while in the US, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona, it has focused on the risk of political language provoking violence. The antidote to inflammatory language is often assumed to be moderation, defined as a (self‐) disciplined engagement with divided publics. Drawing on the insights of Danielle Allen's Talking to strangers, here I suggest that moderation might be re‐imagined, not as a vague commitment to centrism and the ‘middle ground’, but as a powerful resource for citizens and communities to challenge the ideological excesses of politics, religion and the market in the twenty‐first century.     

History manifested: making sense of unprecedented change

An essential element usually passes unnoticed in recent discussion about how history as an academic discipline is supposed to be relevant for the shaping of our public life. It is the concept of history itself (history as both the course of events and historical writing) that underlies the whole discussion, which also configures the two currently most influential and fashionable efforts to reinstate the public relevance of history: The History Manifesto, co-authored by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, and Hayden White's The Practical Past. In advising to turn to the past in order to shape the present and the future, both books rely on the familiar developmental view that characterised nineteenth-century thinking in general, and on which the discipline of history became institutionalised in particular. The author's main contention in this essay is that turning to this notion of history is not the solution for the problem of the supposed public irrelevance of professional historical studies, but the problem itself. The developmental view, based on a presumption of a deeper continuity provided by the subject of the historical process that retains its self-identity amid all changes, certainly suited the discipline of history when it was engaged in the project of nation-building. However, it hardly fits our present concerns. These concerns, like the Anthropocene, take the shape of unprecedented change, and what they challenge is precisely the deeper continuity of the developmental view. The discipline of history can regain public relevance only insofar as it proves to be able to exhibit a thinking of its own specificity which can nevertheless explain such unprecedented changes. What such historical thinking could provide is what the developmental view can no longer: the possibility to act upon a story that we can believe.