On the Future of Anthropology

Almost three and a half years ago I wrote an entry on this very blog describing my thoughts on the value of anthropology in the future. This entry, On the Future and Anthropology, is one of the biggest sources of traffic to my blog. Evidently many people around the world search for the terms future and anthropology.

Since then the character of the blog has changed nearly as much as the thoughts and experiences inside me. And I feel obligated to offer some updates with regards to the role and future of anthropology.

My feelings on the state of the world and the values that anthropology has to offer have not changed significantly. Anthropology has precisely the nuanced, worldly perspectives which can give important meaning and insight into contentious issues of human rights, violent conflict, capitalist ethics and the like. The future and anthropology are almost certainly well suited for each other.

However, the future of anthropology is far less certain. I've now been a student of anthropology for nearly six academic years and this past year has made something abundantly clear to me: anthropology spends its days around the world learning things, but sleeps with its head in its ass.

Since the original post I've entered a graduate program and anthropology and I am undergoing the academic and professional training of its future practitioners. I have found that as graduate students we are not taught how to write, how to teach, how to engage, how to listen or even how to speak. We are instead taught how to become effective and tactical academics, working to succeed in an academic system that almost any professor will say is broken.

As students, we learn to write for publication and not for an audience. We learn that presentations are venues to place information in front of an audience, instead of presenting it to them. We learn that teaching is a form of employment and a hassle conflicting with what our truer academic goals should be. And we take these lessons and apply them in classrooms full of young undergraduate students. And we take these lessons and apply them to our own classrooms full of our peers. And we take these lessons to anyone we know who might, for a minute, entertain a masturbatory exposition on the theoretical context of our research.

This is only one experience and it is not intended to reflect on the abilities and motives of my colleagues, professors or mentors. It is also likely that other departments better emphasize the possibilities of contribution in anthropology, or at the very least, the encouragement of innovation. However, I must at once place blame on the individuals as well as the structures. We are agents, each day making decisions to contribute, create or re-create.

Professional anthropologists complain of the stigma attached to writing for popular audiences, but do not confront it. They sit bored to tears in graduate seminars listening to bright students drone on illustrating an astounding ability to retain and comprehend (without contributing to knowledge), but they do not change the format. They endlessly pour over poorly written term papers, but do not teach writing.

They complain and wait for tenure honestly, I think, expecting to change the system when they have the clout. But to change the system whilst sitting atop its structure would place careers and standings in jeopardy. Change will not come from the top, it will not come in time.

There are glimmers of hope, those individuals who would demand that we find a voice before all else. And it is precisely a voice that anthropology needs to find. Not a unified voice necessarily, but one that is spoken clearly. Not an applied voice necessarily, but one that engages. Not a popular voice necessarily, but one that appreciates an audience.

As a musician, an artist and, perhaps, a scholar, I have come to recognize the role that performance plays in every day of life. Writing a term paper is a performance. Writing a journal article is a performance. Presenting a paper is a performance. Teaching is a performance. Celebrating with colleagues is a performance.

Performances do not need to be perfect. In fact, it is the imperfections which make them lively and real. Their value lies in creating a shared space of communication, translation, listening and reflection; what have I heard and seen, what have I learned and taught, what have I created and how have I shared it?

Anthropology needs to learn to perform instead of present. To create instead of write. To engage instead of teach. As students we should demand a change in vocabulary and expectations to follow. If anthropology can do these things, if we can do these things, then the discipline will have a bright future. If we cannot, then anthropology might as well stay where it is.

A Cartoonish History of Race

In one of my anthropology classes we referenced this cartoon. We had been looking at a cartoon that depicted two ape-like figures balancing on a scale. As to which one was more ape-like, we went undecided. Beneath one figure was something like, "Black," and on the other, "Irish." Through this cartoon we were able to observe the confusing and amorphous boundary between concepts we know as Race and Ethnicity.

It was fairly easy to see the blatant racism/ethnocentrism at the heart of this matter, for the scale was prefectly balanced. Then, our professor foreshadowed what was to come and said that she had hoped we would be past such things. The next slide was the cartoon depicted above. It has been at the center of much controversy and just today, Rupert Murdock publicly apologized for its appearance.

Our professor said something truly intriguing in conclusion. She said that she could not say anything about intentions. No judgements can be made there. She could however, say something about our reactions. Again, this is not a matter of judging but rather of taking social note. The artists intentions are pointless, what is of more depressing note is the great deal of anxiety that such precarious depictions generate within the United States.

I will say something more of this. The concept of race or nationality or ethnicity has been entwined with notions of belonging and difference. Such a concept would not be so threatening were it not for the nature of power. That is, when a group comes to control resources, suddenly the ability to belong (or condition of being excluded) becomes a matter of life and death.

As the 19th Century turned to the 20th, the importance of race became so critical that those in power went to one of the highest sources of legitimization: Science. Here we come across anthropology's dark side. Social Darwinism, eugenics and race science exploded on the scene. Anthropologists are greatly culpable for creating categories of race and "scientific" means with which to identify them. The result was the presumption that biological causes played into the definition of race.

More contemporary debate has complicated this view. The American Anthropological Association has adopted statements that demean, if not reject, the importance of biology in race. Along with this is the position that race is a social construction, indeed, an "experience". A more relativist claim (as anthropologists are won't to make) suggests that race is not so pure, that is at once derived from an inseparable conception of biology and social experience/expectations.

I propose something different. I think that race is a box in which we arbitrarily store perceptions of slight human variation. That said, the basis for race is indeed purely biological; the biological condition being classification as Homo sapiens. To be human subjects one to the slight variations of our bodily entities, as well as a capacity to interpret them. Such capacity is a result of our shared brain chemistry and preempts social experience.

Think of our biology (that is, our common human condition) as a series of dots. Not unlike this cartoon above, we are presented with an array of dots (this might have implications of recognizing a creator/designer, a view that I do not condone). The intention of the one who arranged these dots is, for all intensive purposes, absent and unknowable. It is the manner in which we arrange these dots into meaningful patterns of words and figures which is knowable. Surely, some parts of our recognition are beyond our control, but many aren't. Ultimately, this interpretation is subject to change, and changes more often that we recognize it. Race, in any sort of reality, is simply an arrangement of dots (one that does not vary considerably). Our interpretation of these dots is what we know popularly as race, and ironically, we perceive it to vary drastically.

Translate this to the cartoon above. We are presented with a series of lines the origins of which we cannot and should not begin to guess. It is not the fact that the artist may have portrayed Obama in a 19th century manner which is saddening. It is the brutal reality that we are still able to see in this series of dots something comprising a dead, bleeding chimp which represents our president. We need not accept this interpretation (of the ape being Obama) for us to play into the current discourse of racism, we simply need recognize the possibility.

As we grasp hold of a postmodern conception of race, we can begin to move beyond deeply embedded historical artifacts which characterize our social experience of race in the United States. It is by recognizing and embracing our subjective and agentative role in the interpretation of biological monoliths that we will move passed this anxiety. We should not be sponges simply absorbing social ideas, but rather something with a more guarded permeability. Not something closed, but something inherently critical and understanding.

The National Sole

I made the mistake of watching one of the cable news channels this morning for, say, 10 minutes. In that short time I saw this video some 20 or 30 times. The president, despite regaining a pinch of respect for his puma-like reflexes, nevertheless made a fool of himself once again. He quite literally shrugged off the incident, said he couldn't understand why it would happen, but that it was the sign of a free society.

Even the attention-whores of the media caught on that this act was more than protest, but outright disrespect. It seems that the sole of the shoe especially is considered quite unclean and profane by some Muslims.

Still, its not every day that dignitaries like the US president have articles of clothing hurled in their direction. Or is it? I think the reaction today was more chuckles and less sock, I mean, shock. Apologies. I suppose I would expect no less at this point in history. It's fairly obvious these days that our president and the national image he represents are far from the reknowned reputations of yore.

Perhaps this discussion is moot, for a lame-duck can only expect a reputation as such. But, I think this is some baggage that the next administration will have to deal with. Obama will not start with a new slate, but rather some sort of corroding, eroded, malformed semblence of a slate. Obama is no Christ either, he cannot conjure up some heroic and instantaneous reconstruction.

It's going to take a while to leave the shoes of Bush behind and clear a new path.

Acting Out

Hope and change has been the slogan of this political year. Unfortunately, politics has inspired little hope and has instead planted seeds of despondency that the United States is on a one way path to epic failure. All aboard the fail boat!

The immigration debate has inspired such despondency within me of late. It was highlighted by a small news story that slipped under the radar recently. Absolut Vodka ran an ad campaign in Mexico in which (in an attempt to celebrate Mexican heritage) it ran the slogan “In an Absolut World” over an image of 19^th century North American, where all the territory west of the Rocky Mountains was Mexico. Outrage arose, not from within Mexico, but rather from several conservative groups and journalists in the United States that called for a boycott of the brand. Absolut apologized for its campaign and stopped running the ads; A politically correct, profit minded and truly “American” response.

This reaction is representative of the deteriorating status of Mexicans and US/Mexico relations in light of the immigration debate. All politicians are dealing with the influx of illegal immigrants into this country, but the kind of rhetoric and ideas that are being thrown around reveal a dehumanizing of Mexicans.

In this debate Mexicans and Hispanic immigrants coming from the south are referred to as problems and often as “illegals.” Some might argue that terminology is harmless, but I think otherwise. Referring to fellow human beings in such negative ways creates immediate prejudice and devaluing. As a result the identity we project on Hispanic immigrants is one centered on notions of rejection, objectification and immorality. We refer to them, not as people, but rather as amorphous entities that exist in the realm of illegality and encroachment.

The discourse of solution is not a positive one. Illegal immigration (and the millions are human beings associated with it) is referred to as a problem that needs to be rectified. Immigrants are objectified and treated as commodities as we decide their worth in our economy and culture, or as we decide which ones to ship back and how to do so. There is not talk of moving forward, only of creating stasis by cutting off the routes and purging our country of these dirty, illegal and problematic bodies that are corrupting true American values.

Stephen Colbert joked with Mike Huckabee about building a catapult along the border to fire illegals back into Mexico. The idea seems ridiculous, but his satire is not far off. It highlights the dehumanization of Hispanic immigrants. Not only are their identities essentialized to that of “Mexican” but they are considered inherently illegitimate. Whether we agree with it or not, the immigration debate has stolen the status of equality from Hispanic immigrants. We are living in a world where “freedom and justice for all” is a farce and instead, human status is determined by economic worth and genealogy.

To be Freudian for a moment, can we examine the illegal immigration debate, and responses like those to the Absolut ad, as an acting-out of some deep seated problem? I think we can. The crisis we are facing here is not one of population, jobs, culture or globalization. No, what we are facing is an identity crisis of a national sort.

We are facing many problems as a nation, namely our economy and our political reputation. As the European Union and China grow stronger our role as super-power is being contested. We are accused of anti-intellectualism. Culturally we are divided over gay marriage, abortion, religion and wealth. Every day I see hopeless efforts to establish and secure the idea of “America” and a greater number of individuals and ideas that contest such an identity at fundamental levels.

The role of the United States and our future is uncertain and possibly quite bleak. As a result we are acting out and building fences on our borders to keep out those seeking better lives. As we become ever so deeply involved in contentious conflict in the Middle East, we are troubled and take our frustration out on those illegals that indisputably have broken the law and assailed our “American” values.

This debate is not about immigrants, they will continue to come and there’s nothing we can do about it. If we were a healthy nation, we would have confidence that our economics and culture would adjust accordingly. What I see through examples like that of the Absolut campaign, is that these crises we face are more likely unhealthy and counterproductive projections of our own cultural and identity crises.

We are freefalling downward into a pit of cultural crisis and shutdown. We are so insecure with who we are a nation that we are threatened by the Spanish language. Eventually, we will end our descent and hit rock bottom. We will be confronted with tumultuous and violent conflict as we run out things to cover our problems. Shall we focus of catapulting illegals back to Mexico? Shall we continue to obsess ourselves with the lives of celebrities? Shall we fill the voids of our political lives with debates over tiny and insignificant questions and comment? Or, shall we being to look deeper and find those bugs and irks deep within our cultural being and face our problems and the world’s problems head on?

I have not yet completely resigned myself to the bleak outlook I have defined here. I still have confidence that what we need is simple change on our own parts. Instead of breeding dogma, we need to breed understanding. I hope that one day we will be known as the generation of understanding that rose to the great challenges we are facing now and moved forward.

"There is no true America."

Is anyone else terrified that potential presidents are competing as to who is the most and truest conservative? I didn't know you could get a prize for being openly willing to persecute those who don't read the same books as you. To be willing to hunt down and murder men. To be uncompromising in the fight to preserve "America" whatever the hell that means.

What is "America." I problematize that word because America is a continent, and a rather big, on which lies many countries, with many people, many traditions and many languages. I continue to problematize the word because it really isn't anything concrete to being with. America is little more than a collective (and an exclusive collective at that) idea that doesn't reflect a certain truth or history, but rather reflects our modern world. Nationalism, dear friends, is not something inherent; it is not a logical modern outcome of history. There is no true America.

I hear a lot of talk about the Founding Fathers. I almost laugh out loud due to the absurdity that the, arguably, misguided men who founded this nation had a long term vision and idea of what "America" was, should be and will be. It is absurd the belief that the Constitution somehow holds sacred knowledge and fact about what America was and is. Our very recollection and recognition of the past is purely a creation of ourselves and a rationalizing of who we are and where we are today. Any idea of the past is informed by numerous parties, schools of though, personal motives, etc.

Sure the United States exists and has existed in the past. This is obvious. I'll go further, there are trends in action and image that link together different points in time. But this is not because there is some true "America" that keeps us from descending into anarchy, communism and Islam. Trends are simply durations of similar problems which elicit similar responses by similar people. These are subject to change and have changed and always will change. Can something really be considered "UN-American?" Is there some true America to conserve? Won't conservatives simply incite more change by purposely setting and altering America's great march through history?

Shouldn't we look for a leader who has the best ideas of how to help the dismal downward spiraling situation that we call America? I've asked a lot of questions so far. For an answer I'll say this: Adhering to (and believing it to be certain truth) a notion that we must conserve and protect an idea of America (that is as much at the whims of political climate as a leaf is to the wind) is not the way.

Genocide, National Responsibility and Revisionists.

Discussion in my course on museum studies in the past several weeks has made me ashamed to live in the United States. We get an interesting perspective in the course from time because we have a student from Germany who occasionally makes insightful comments about US museum and ways they differ from the ones in her home country. She mentioned, in an off hand manner perhaps, about her surprise that US history or cultural museums never mentioned the "genocide." Anthropologists don't like this term because it has such harsh and evil connotations that it creates one-side support in situations that are far more complex. The US genocide this student refers to is, of course, what we could call "the discovery of the Americas" or "the foundation of our country;" something celebrated. Yet the fact that this continent was "discovered" long before Europeans arrived and the fact that the foundation of success of the United States relied heavily on the eradication of the indigenous inhabitants is indeed often left out of our national conscience.

Another topic that invoke similar feelings, which I will soon explain, was about the proposed Smithsonian exhibit on WWII and the atomic bombing of Japan that featured the Enola Gaye. This exhibit was eventually abandoned because of outcries from all angles of the spectrum. Veterans, peace-niks and the Japanese wanted to see a critical eye turned towards atomic weapons in this exhibit. Just as many veterans and US politicians however didn't want to see such an iconic artifact of US history belittled and shown as a bringer of evil. They accused the museum of being "revisionists," liberal scholars who wish to sully the good name of "America" (Need I mention again the foundation of the nation?). With the controversy flying left and right around the exhibit and a great fear of the Smithsonian losing federal money, the exhibit was abandoned.

Here are two examples of how the United States has managed to weasel its way out of taking responsibility for questionable periods in its history. National museums, notably in Germany (which hasn't hidden from the Holocaust legacy), create museums and exhibits devoted to things like "genocide." Meanwhile the US, which walks around with its head held high singing its own praises about being the protector of liberty, freedom an democracy, seems to live in a state of blissful ignorance of its own past. This nation has enjoyed so much power and influence (and lack of regulation) that it hasn't had to own up to its past. If either of the topics discussed above had made it into museums in their rawest forms, the controversy would be incredible but it would force the nation to deal with these topics. We may not like what happened in the past. We may want to respect that many young people have loved this nation so much that they fight for it, but we cannot forget that in fighting not only our US lives lost, but so are millions of others, many hundreds of thousands in mere seconds even. War is an interesting occurrence that at once calls for celebration and criticism. And it is not right to give one preference over the other for fear of getting "America" down. We don't have to visit the museums or feel good about them being there, but they should exist as reminders so that we no longer walk unaware and jaded in a world where we are so quick to judge other cultures and nations of their deeds.

There are many parallels between acts of violence throughout the history. The "American Genocide," September 11th, The Holocaust, The Crusades, Pearl Harbor, Japanese internment, the dropping of the Atomic Bomb, they're all on the same level as far as I'm concerned. Horrendous acts of violence that, despite their contested neccessity, unprovoked-ness, or senselessness, resulted in massive loss of life. Just note, for a second, that the Holocaust, The Crusades, Pearl Harbor and September 11th have all resulted in the perpetrator/s to be "dealt with" or at least to take responsibility for and commit such acts to national memory. Shouldn't we?