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“Why does one engage in doing something that in reality never comes, and never can come, to an end? … in order to be able to orient our practical activities to the expectations that scientific experiences places at our disposal.” ~Max Weber, “On Science as Vocation”
In his exposition on science as vocation, Max Weber insisted on a practical segregation between the commitment to rigorous sociological critique and what he considered an equally compelling obligation—active participation in political process. Nonetheless, as evidenced by the quotation above, Weber’s exploration of the relationship between his “scientific” and “practical” (that is, “political”) activities acknowledges and affirms many contemporary anthropologists’ sense of indeterminacy as they navigate between the falsely dichotomized realms of “applied anthropology” and “theory.” The lives and work of Sally Falk Moore, Joan Scott and Veena Das are unique examples of how academics have struggled and, in some sense, made peace with this tension. Before delving into their particular decisions, however, I found it helpful to briefly consider two essays to help orient myself to to broader disciplinary conversations on this issue: Scheper-Hughes’ call for “a militant anthropology,” and Rylko-Bauer et al’s more recent attempt to “reclaim applied anthropology.”
Scheper-Hughes’ 1995 strident essay, “The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology,” decried anthropology’s secular soteriology of the anthropologist as “fearless spectator,” that is, “a passive act which positions the anthropologist above and outside human events as ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ (i.e., uncommitted) seeing I/eye.” (419) Drawing on the Levinasian notion of the primacy of the ethical, a pre-epistemological, pre-linguistic encountering of the Other, and on Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care, Scheper-Hughes calls instead for anthropology as “witnessing…in the active voice,” positioning the anthropologist “inside human events as a responsive, reflexive, and morally committed being, one who will ‘take sides’ and make judgments.” (419) Scheper-Hughes claims that anthropology’s “theoretical abstractions and rhetorical figures of speech” are an example of humans’ “uncanny ability to hold terror and misery at arm’s length.” (417) Scheper-Hughes imagines the next generation of “barefoot anthropologists” who position themselves as “negative workers,” that is, who work persistently against the grain of hegemony, however that is to be defined. (420) In contrast, Rylko-Bauer et al (2008) adopt a much less polemical tone, tracing a history of what they define as “applied anthropology.” Pointing to historical examples like Sol Tax’s “action anthropology” and Cornell’s Vicos, Peru project, they insist on the possibility of pursuing “the ‘mutually instrumental’ goals of advancing knowledge and of being politically and ethically effective.” (185)
Of note, Rylko-Bauer et al, as does Scheper-Hughes in a later reflection on the aforementioned essay, indicate the work of Paul Farmer as exemplary of the agenda they hope to advance. Interestingly, Rylko-Bauer et al, in their “history of the present” in contemporary anthropology, arrive at Farmer’s work as the culmination of an “applied” current that diverged from a more theoretically driven current in the early 1940s-50s. (181-182) This genealogy ignores Farmer’s claim that his dissertation and resultant ethnography, AIDS and Accusation (1993), was in fact an attempt to respond to George Marcus and Michael Fischer (1986), who called for increased attention to history and political economy within interpretive or symbolic analyses. While improving on Scheper-Hughes’ haphazard and inconsistent gestures to more rigorous reflection (e.g., referring to anthropology’s subjects as, “hungry populations of the Third World that generously provide us with our livelihoods”), Rylko-Bauer’s history and subsequent proposal, thus, contain unsubtle blindspots, including a trivialization of the “handmaiden era,” which Feuchtwang (1973) identifed as the “colonial formation of British social anthropology”; not to mention the erasure of the origins and trajectory of the Manchester School, whose members were quite attentive to global political-economic processes; and of the simultaneously occurring work of Boas and Dubois—much of which was unequivocally “applied,” insomuch as its explicit objective was to disturb and change unjust discourses, practices and policies, but also in that both Boas (Boas 1974, 1940; Stocking 1968) and Dubois (Baker, 1998: 108-126) flexibly modified the methods, theories and sites of their investigations and interventions according to the contingencies of the historical moment. Both Scheper-Hughes and the exponents of “applied anthropology” considered here, on the other hand, have a pre-determined vision of the proper priorities and imperatives of anthropology, which causes them each to elaborate a simulacrum of process and indeterminacy (through personal experience of fieldwork, and disciplinary history, respectively) within teleological arguments, essentially closing off the possibility of interrogating the ongoing processes of working out their own positions in worlds that, upon close inspection, continue to be as indeterminate as ever. I find that Sally Falk Moore, Joan Scott and Veena Das, like Weber, more fully acknowledge indeterminacy in the relationship between their scholarly existences in academic worlds and their social existences in political worlds—and the un-givenness of each, independently, as well—and we have much to learn from them as we strive to struggle along and work through these tensions ourselves.
In her memoir, “Part of the Story,” Moore describes the contingency of her decision to go into anthropology in the first place. Indeed, trained first as a lawyer, it was an ethical response to her involvement in the Nuremberg trial that resulted in her decision to study anthropology at all. Furthermore, she refers to heated debates between visiting African students while she was at USC, and the heterogeneity of post-colonial African societies that it signified, as the inciting experience that led to her notion of the “semi-autonomous social field,” which she mobilized with supporting ethnographic evidence (1973, 1992) in a powerful critique of the ignorance in post-colonial African states’ statutory law of the fields of “customary law” that governed many communities.
In “Certainties Undone” (1999), Moore makes quite explicit her approval of ethnographic work that does “depart from an earlier, narrower anthropology” to mount indictments of the global political economy. Interestingly, in our class discussion with her, Moore’s criticism of Bornemann’s book took on a much more strident tone than the aforementioned published review. She railed against the weak linkages in Bornemann’s argumentation, paying particular attention to the absence of “evidence” for his broadest claims. Coombe, on the other hand, had compiled essays from contributors who were more explicit in acknowledging the limits of their “competence” as anthropologists, foregoing grand and potentially unsubstantiated claims, in favor of gesturing towards the larger processes in which the ethnographically described cases were embedded.
Her exhortation to our class to think about “the concrete,” resonates with her trenchant attack of the Comaroffs’ sweepingly lyrical piece on post-colonial violence in South Africa (1999). While I suspect much of this difference of opinion derives from their distinct modes of writing, and while her rejoinder reflects a shared attitude of concern with the Comaroffs regarding the people and societies they describe, we must recall that Moore used her training as both a lawyer and anthropologist during significant periods of her career to correcting the work of aid and development entities. It would behoove us to note her substantial experience in effecting change through observation and critique. Regardless of how we feel personally about her Manchester school-inspired prose and about the potentially ethnocentric, universalizing notion of “the concrete,” her exhortations serve as a warning to anthropologists who wish their knowledge-production to enable and assist the poor and otherwise marginalized: we must consider the criteria that define evidence and the modes of argumentation that are acceptable to powerful entities and individuals whose action(s)—or inaction(s)—can have dire consequences in the lives of our interlocutors in the field.
Like Moore, Joan Scott acknowledges the contingency of her engagement with history. In “Finding Critical History,” Scott does not describe her academic work as a natural evolution out of her committment to political engagement and activism: “Becoming a historian was not a consolation for politics, but a companion to it. Though not an inevitable one” (3). Nonetheless, as she explains viz. her engagement with social history as a young historian, her knowledge-production was intimately intertwined with her political engagements: simultaneous with her participation in the vibrant campus activist movements of the time, she and her peers “were rewriting some of the meanings of politics in these studies, with an eye to legitimating the movements of social protest that were taking shape around us.” (11)
At the same time, with her deconstructivist turn in her academic work, a similar turn seems to have occurred in her understanding of herself as historian, academic and social actor. In fact, here she might object that the notion of, “herself,” and the multiple aspects of “herself” that I identify, are mere discursive constructs: “I was not the origin of the gender concept, even among historians, but my paper was a site where several lines of thought converged. ‘Joan Scott’ is not, from this perspective, a person, but a place holder, a representative for a collective endeavor of which I (Joan Scott) was only a part.” (2) Nonetheless, despite the sincerity and modesty of her words, her distinction between the discursive “Joan Scott” who wrote “Gender: a useful category of historical analysis,” and the I (Joan Scott) reflecting on a career, does not somehow evacuate Joan Scott—without quotation marks—of a sense of political and intellectual agency. She may have been only “a part” of a collective endeavor, but she was a part of it, nonetheless, and an active part, at that.
Moreover, as reflected in the very effort to trace her intellectual trajectory, deconstructionism does not result in a refusal to describe her existence as that of a coherent, continuous subject through time. She does, of course, apply her Foucauldian scalpel to the notions of race (2007) and experience, but, while Scheper-Hughes, Rylko-Bauer (2008) and others might want to push Scott over the edge of “the postmodern chasm,” they (and we) would be remiss in not recognizing the imaginative thought—and thoughtful strategy—that her approach enables. In the conclusion to Scott’s interrogation of “experience” (1991), we could easily substitute “anthropology” for “history,” and “anthropologist” for “historian,” when she writes: “Experience is, in this approach, not the origin of our explanation, but that which we want to explain. This kind of approach does not undercut politics by denying the existence of subjects; it instead interrogates the processes of their creation and, in so doing, refigures history and the role of the historian and opens new ways for thinking about change.” (797) Indeed, it was the turn from social history to deconstructionism that opened up the space for productive experimentation with ideas—a theoretical opportunism of sorts—that has permitted Scott’s versatile movement between political-economic, post-structural and, most recently, psychoanalytic frameworks according to the exigencies of her work at the given moment.
Again, “militant,” “applied” and even “processualist” anthropologists might counter that academia’s theorizing into existence of “new ways for thinking about change” does not necessarily translate into solidary intervention that makes concrete changes in situations marked by material poverty and physical violence. In responding to the criticism that academics engage in purposeful purposelessness, Scott replies: “Critique is not criticism, nor the proposal of alternatives. … The point of critique is to make visible those blind spots in order to open a system to change. Not to replace what is with a fully formulated, ideal plan, but to open the possibility for thinking, and so acting, differently.” Scheper-Hughes’ problem with “post-modernism,” which Scott finds so productive, is uncertainty. Scott is not threatened by uncertainty; rather, she accepts it and chooses to see contingency and indeterminacy as the conditions of change. Indeed, this is precisely what Parité and The Politics of the Veil are about—the productive use of destabilization of categories to attempt to make change.
Nonetheless, the vehemence of Scheper-Hughes’ attack on “post-modernism” and Scott’s defensiveness—evidenced in the last quotation by her reliance on a somewhat Kantian subject who can change actions according to changing thought—make me suspect that something more personal is at stake. Scheper-Hughes, horrified by the deconstruction of race and ethnicity in South African university classrooms while those same categories mark who dies and who lives in the bantustans, relegates academic discourse, at least in South Africa, to an almost violent irrelevance (417); Scott, on the other hand, sees teaching (in a classroom, no doubt) as a form of activism: “the transmission of knowledge for a purpose beyond itself, a purpose animated by caring relationships and politics (shaping the way kids thought about the world in order to make it a better place) (2). Indeed, just as Scott was able to do at various points in her career, teaching students, shaping their thinking and helping them to form charismatic communities of resistance is social action, and, at universities where today’s undergraduates will be tomorrow’s deciders, a particularly effective one at that.
We can extend Scott’s line of thinking by taking a cue from her own theoretical orientations: to what do “application,” “activism” and “theory” refer, anyway? “Application” describes even the most self-contemplating “anthropology”—the anthropologist observes and writes, or otherwise produces, maintains and applies knowledge, if not in order to fulfill some very deep and individual yearning, then to pay the bills and get funding for the next adventure. Scott has already shown us, above, that “activism” is discursively deployed and can be discursively reinterpreted. What is left of “theory,” then, if anything? Can “theory,” “explanation,” and “knowledge,” do things?
Here, I find useful the idea of “nextness” that Das (2007; 78) extrapolates from Cavell in describing another dichotomy, the relation between norm-setting legislation and transgression. Noting that Foucault reverses but nonetheless maintains that basic dichotomy in Discipline and Punish, Das proposes in its stead a “nextness”:
Thus, instead of imprisoning metaphors to capture the relations between outward criteria and inner states, one may think of these as lining each other, of having a relation in which they are next to each other but joined in the way in which legislation and transgression are joined. (78)
Cast in terms of “nextness,” the relationship between theory and application or activism takes on new meaning. Indeed, this nextness is similar to the notion Das describes of “abstract questions,” or theory, as a shadow: “concrete relations that we establish in living with others are like shadows of the more abstract questions—that is, we learn about the nature of the world in the process of such living.” (4) What if relation of theory, explanation, the act of writing, to application and activism is not a simple dichotomy? What if, in the case of anthropology, the practices of reading and writing, and the application of knowledge towards social action, are thought of rather as lining each other, next to each other but joined? In a sense, Das is suggesting that when the limits of either action or writing are transgressed, we must resort to the other.
When Das describes “witnessing” as exemplified by her interlocutors’ folding in of poisonous knowledge in the descent in the everyday, made manifest in reinhabiting the world through a gesture of mourning (78), she is also describing her own anthropological practices of “witnessing.” Indeed, Das parallels the gesture of mourning with Wittgenstein’s gesture of waiting when his spade, as indicative of a pen, is turned: “For me the love of anthropology has turned out to be an affair in which when I reach bedrock I do not break thorugh the resistance of the other, but in this gesture of waiting I allow the knowledge of the other to mark me.” (17) Writing, and theory, are the anthropologist’s descent into the everyday, the way that Das folds in the poisonous knowledge of others’ pain and suffering into her everyday lifeworld.
The metaphor of the eye, also, is a useful corrective to Scheper-Hughes’ simplistic reduction of the anthropologist to the observing I/eye. If, as interpreters of Wittgenstein posit, “the relation of the subject to the world is like that of the eye to the visual field—the eye is not itself in the visual field that it defines,” Das writes: “…the experience of being a subject is the experience of a limit. … It is Wittgenstein’s thought that the subject is the condition of experience.” (4) Simply because the observing I/eye does not behave according to Scheper-Hughes’ particular brand of anthropological militancy, the anthropologist is not reduced to a disembodied, impassionate camera. Das asks us if there might be an alternative, that is: “to not simply articulate loss through a dramatic gesture of defiance but to inhabit the world, or inhabit it again, in a gesture of mourning? It is in this context that one may identify the eye not as the organ that sees but the organ that weeps.” (62) The observing I/eye is the same I/eye that weeps. Incidentally, the I/eye is also the one that reads—just as the myth of the dispassionate observer is over-turned, the possibility that reading theory and ethnography can expand empathic vision means that the production of written texts is hardly without positive social impact.
Thus, in distinguishing her mode of anthropology from Scheper-Hughes’, Das poses an alternative “public role for anthropology” that integrates theory and practice. She writes: “To hold these [disparate] types of words together and to sense the connection of these lives has been my anthopological kind of devotion to the world.” (221) This anthropological devotion is intertwined with her social action and activism—indeed, her way of doing anthropology responds to the exigencies of her activism in a way that “militant anthropology” denies.
Anthropological practice is reading and writing, but also being-in-the-world and engaging in social action. In concluding this essay by thinking with Das, I hope to have shown that this dichotomy is a false one. Alongside what I have learnt from the works considered here and others about the relationship between theory, activism and application, I have, as Das puts it, found myself holding their words together with the wisdom—however mere, as all eleven might protest, or not—that I have been privy to in accompanying the members of “my” cohort through this year. And it is from these experiences of reading, writing, and being together that I have learned that anthropology, for many of us, is little more than an anti-heroic attempt to exist, think and act more meaningfully, more socially, and more fully, whatever form this takes in each individuated life-work.
Citations:
Baker, Lee. From Savage to Negro.
Boas, Franz. Race, Language and Culture.
Boas, Franz. "On alternating sounds."
Boas, Franz. Race, Language and Culture.
Boas, Franz. "On alternating sounds."
Comaroff, J and J Comaroff. "Occult economies and the violence of abstraction."
Das, Veena. Life and Words.
Farmer, Paul. AIDS and Accusation.
Farmer, Paul. AIDS and Accusation.
Marcus, George and Michael Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique.
Moore, Sally Falk. As noted in text.
Rylko-Bauer, et al. "Reclaiming applied anthropology."
Rylko-Bauer, et al. "Reclaiming applied anthropology."
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. As noted in text.
Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Parité. And otherwise as noted in text.
Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Parité. And otherwise as noted in text.
Stocking, George. "Franz Boas and the culture concept in historical perspective." In: Race, Culture and Evolution.
Weber, Max. From Max Weber. 