“Anthropology will survive in a
changing world by allowing itself to perish in order to be born again under
a new guise.”
–––––– Claude Lévi-Strauss, quoted in Lewis
(1973: 586).
“[there are] the general
questions of anthropology, which exist irrespective of anthropology
departments. In fact, I would consider that all human beings are
anthropologists….It’s very possible that anthropology departments will
disappear, there’s no reason why they should continue existing.”
–––––– Maurice Bloch, 2008.
“It is not easy to escape
mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing
to live with its actual relationships.”
–––––– Albert Memmi (1967: 20).
“ANTHROPOLOGY:
A room filled with white people, talking about non-white people.”
–––––– Maximilian C. Forte (2009).
As someone
whose research in anthropology was originally focused on indigenous
peoples, and specifically contemporary indigenous peoples in the
Caribbean, coupled with a history of interest in imperialism and
colonialism, certain dimensions of anthropology and its development
became ever more apparent to me, and ever more troubling. One of
these is that since its inception as an amateur activity that
pre-dated its institutionalization in universities, anthropology has
consistently sold itself as, one, a science, and two, one premised
on the long-standing assumption that indigenous peoples would (or
should) disappear or be diminished. Self-identified anthropologists
in the mid-1800s, lusting for recognition and influence, tried to
make a name for themselves in various commercially organized freak
shows, ethnographic exhibitions, and museum displays. The desire to
sell anthropology to the powers that be, as a science of the other,
has never disappeared. And we still continue our basic practice of
mapping and dissecting others, albeit in mostly abstract terms.
Anthropology
was not just built on the backs of indigenous peoples, as if the
survival of the latter were needed to guarantee the survival of the
former. Instead, when one looks more closely and more critically, it
is a discipline that has always been premised on the expected
extinction of the indigenous, whether that extinction was conceived
in racial or cultural terms. Since neither type of extinction has come to pass, and
indeed we instead witness worldwide indigenous political and
cultural resurgence, we note that anthropological theories began to
treat these resurgences as virtual pathologies: symptoms of
capitalism, instrumental means of gaining power, with traditions
that are invented. Politically, anthropologists have frequently
found themselves set against the interests of contemporary indigenous
peoples, whether with respect to the continued possession of
indigenous remains for "scientific" purposes, or in disputing the
appropriate representations of indigenous cultures. Not
surprisingly, American Indian Studies, First Nations, and Indigenous
Studies programs have sprouted across North America, alongside
Ethnic Studies, African-American Studies, and so forth. Suddenly,
the peoples presumed to be at the heart of anthropology, began to
flee its control. In a tailspin, anthropology either pretended to
continue business as usual, or began to develop autobiographic
tendencies, or was practiced in the home society of the
anthropologist, and there it began to look more like ethnographic
sociology.
To this day,
anthropology in North America remains the whitest of all disciplines
in the social sciences, in terms of the ethnic background of the
vast majority of faculty and students. Anthropology has always been
a mode of knowledge-making chosen by Westerners as a reliable means
of consuming knowledge about the colonial world, and for producing
knowledge of that world for the authorities back home. Turned on
itself, an anthropology of anthropology becomes an interesting
journey of exploration into one of the Western world's premiere
colonial knowledge systems.
Also and still
to this day, anthropology retains the same terminology of
instruments of foreign policy, whether the diplomatic corps or
intelligence gathering agencies: time to spent with living human
beings in another society is called being "in the field," and
closely identifying with one's hosts is treated as a problem, called
"going native". The methods of "doing fieldwork" continue to be
based on a routine, accepted, and usually unquestioned duplicity:
one is to establish rapport, build trust, and negotiate access, and
purely for the purpose of extracting knowledge that was otherwise
private. One's "informants" (just as spies refer to them) were not
to receive compensation, which would be seen as buying information: they were to be satisfied with knowing they
were contributing to knowledge about humanity, presumably a good in
and of itself with certain unproven assumptions about this leading
to greater mutual understanding, respect, and peace. In return,
however, anthropologists advanced their personal careers, and not
necessarily the cause of peace since activism and advocacy were
widely frowned upon as eroding the objectivity and legitimacy of
anthropology in the eyes of the powers that be. To be sure, some
anthropologists have challenged this state of affairs vigorously and
directly, and to be sure, they remain a minority.
Zero
Anthropology is about
knowledge after anthropology, after its extinctionist,
Eurocentric, and scientific premises, an anthropology so decolonized
that it is no longer recognizable as anthropology. Interest in
learning about others never can, nor should be erased. The question
is whether one can rightfully assimilate all forms of interest in
others to what we institutionally know as the discipline of
anthropology. Clearly, one cannot. Moreover, the question arises as
to whether ethnography is the best way to get to know others, or to
record one's insights, as opposed to journalism, travel writing, or
many other less formal, unwritten modes.
This
project began by emphasizing the value of opening knowledge production to reciprocal
and collaborative engagements between academics and broader publics, while
trying to put that into practice online, and in that respect the project was
extremely successful. It was about building on ideas and
examples of ways of speaking about the human condition that looked critically
at dominant discourses and that challenge the status quo of global
capitalism. The project was therefore oriented toward contributing to
non-state, non-market, knowledges and participating in a public practice
that suited the project. Zero Anthropology was also an invitation to
critically reexamine the institutionalization of knowledge, looking for ways
to reintegrate anthropology with other knowledge systems, and other
disciplines, while criticizing the "disciplining" of the social sciences.
What was initially called, for lack of imagination perhaps, the "Open Anthropology Project,"
was explicitly about decolonizing knowledge,
combined with a pronounced anti-imperialist orientation.
The primary
forms of the project were to stress the following:
-
Research communicated openly in public,
for public audiences, within the limits of what was ethically acceptable
and what was desired by partners in the research process;
-
Experimenting with various styles and
forms of communication and expression;
-
Freely engaging with contemporary public
debates, or even creating new public debates;
-
Bringing
other knowledge systems
and other anthropologies of the non-institutional, public, and popular
kinds into the current mode of thinking and practicing
anthropology; in this regard, poetry, calypso, painting, or indigenous
cosmologies can all be seen as anthropologies, not to be explained as
objects, but that themselves offer understanding as active subjects;
-
Taking anthropology into other fields of
knowledge production and other spheres of interaction; another way of
putting this is to open anthropology to the other anthropologies
mentioned in #4 above, while at the same time "dissolving" anthropology
into other disciplines, with the hope that they also dissolve their own
disciplinariness;
-
Doing research about recognizable
anthropological topics, but with materials and communication that are
openly and freely put in public by those persons "we anthropologists"
might otherwise have interviewed in private -- this is open source
ethnography, and it can be done collaboratively, and it can freely mix
itself with popular public culture; and,
-
The anthropological study of
anthropology: having been the foremost discipline associated with
colonialism, professional anthropologists have a strong base for
recognizing, understanding, and unmasking colonialism in its many forms
and shades. Zero Anthropology, as a decolonizing effort, takes the study
of the past history and contemporary reality of professional
anthropology as a field of knowledge production in its own right.
OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY,
as this project was first called (some of its online expressions
remain still bear the title "Open Anthropology") in its most basic sense was a project of decolonization,
growing out of a discipline with a long history and a deep epistemological
connection to colonialism. The aim was to transform anthropology into
something that would be neither Eurocentric nor elitist. The inspiration behind
this effort was the New World Movement, a gathering of activist
intellectuals in the Caribbean that became
prominent especially after the worldwide insurrections of 1968. It was an
attempt to redefine the craft of anthropology into one guided and inspired
by decolonization movements and by the struggles of indigenous peoples,
Africans in the Americas, and various elements of anarchism. The preferred
medium for this effort was the Internet and a mixture of media within the
Internet.
The idea was to return anthropology to the
public from which it came, while renewing itself through this process of
re-immersion, leaving behind the fixations of institutionalism, state power,
and the commercial marketplace.
OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY arose from a dissatisfaction with the state of knowledge
in contemporary and classical anthropology, and was meant to significantly
restructure and move anthropology beyond its current confines, beyond the
constraints of professionalization and institutionalization, transcending
the very “disciplinariness” of a discipline that has often foundered on its
own shoals since its inception as “anthropology.”
OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY
was about unthinking anthropology altogether, while
pursuing certain avenues of inquiry that resemble what has been developed in
some quarters of the old discipline, freely combined with elements of
history, philosophy, the fine arts, political economy, literature,
sociology, cultural studies, media studies, communication studies, area
studies, and ethnic studies. Ultimately, and in the long term,
“anthropology” is not a fitting label for such an endeavor.
OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY
was also about opening up anthropology in two ways: by
encouraging academic engagement in social transformation beyond the walls of
the university while working on the transformation of university practices
with respect the production of knowledge; and, by opening up the discipline
to the broader, independent, non-institutional forms of anthropology that
already exist in the world. The idea was neither to attempt to “go native,”
nor to bring “the native” back home for inspection and familiarization, but
to restructure the epistemologies and practices of institutional
anthropology so that it can act as a conduit for ways of thinking, knowing,
and being that have thus far only been objects of study.
Open Anthropology
was renamed Zero Anthropology by late 2009, as the
project completed its second year. The idea was to begin counting
down to "zero hour" as the project came to a close, to take the
project down to an intellectual "ground zero" where little or
nothing that was respectably anthropological was respected any
longer. It was also fortuitous, as "open anthropology" was
appropriated by others, then redefined, and then evacuated of all
meaning until a concept name became just a name, and then just two
words that blandly and loosely referred to anthropologists being
online, as if that mere and ordinary fact were something to trumpet
as a major achievement. As
"open anthropology" became meaningless and pointless, a departure
that proved the objective of the original project -- to depart into
something else -- became more valued than ever. What the reader sees
here are the revised remains of the project, which is now being
fulfilled in other, less self-conscious forms.
Welcome. Enjoy.
