For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography—as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being—has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.
For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography—as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being—has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.
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Overview
For most of the twentieth century, anthropologists understood themselves as ethnographers. The art of anthropology was the fieldwork-based description of faraway others—of how social structures secretly organized the living-together of a given society, of how a people had endowed the world surrounding them with cultural meaning. While the poetics and politics of anthropology have changed dramatically over the course of a century, the basic equation of anthropology with ethnography—as well as the definition of the human as a social and cultural being—has remained so evident that the possibility of questioning it occurred to hardly anyone. In After Ethnos Tobias Rees endeavors to decouple anthropology from ethnography—and the human from society and culture—and explores the manifold possibilities of practicing a question-based rather than an answer-based anthropology that emanates from this decoupling. What emerges from Rees's provocations is a new understanding of anthropology as a philosophically and poetically inclined, fieldwork-based investigation of what it could mean to be human when the established concepts of the human on which anthropology has been built increasingly fail us.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781478002284 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Tobias Rees is Reid Hoffman Professor at the New School of Social Research, a director of the Los Angeles-based Berggruen Institute, and a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He is the coauthor of Designs for an Anthropology of the Contemporary, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
on anthropology
(free from ethnos)
What is it all about? What is anthropology?
What is anthropology's job? What's its domain?
... I don't know what anthropology ... is,
but I don't think that it is or should be defined as ethnography.
DAVID SCHNEIDER, Schneider on Schneider.
ONE
In retrospect it seems as if the ethnographic project of classical modernity came to an end at one point in the late 1990s. I write "in retrospect" because the passing away of anthropology in its form of classical modern ethnography was — awkward as this may sound — an unintended effect, an accident. As it was unintended, no one had been waiting for it, and so it could be recognized only in hindsight — in "retrospect" — and not without surprise and even sadness.
Already in the 1970s the ethnographic project as it was envisioned by Adolf Bastian and Friedrich Ratzel in Germany; by Franz Boas in the United States; by Alfred C. Haddon, William H. R. Rivers, Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Bronis?aw Malinowski in Great Britain; and by Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Paul Rivet, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in France had come under severe critique. The purpose of this critique was not to bring ethnography to an end. The goal of the various critical voices that had begun to emerge in a systematic, accumulative fashion since the late 1960s was to improve — poetically as well as politically — the ethnographic documentation of those faraway others that anthropologists had begun to systematically study at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It was meant to correct what seemed to many to be the "mistakes" of the great ethnographers of the past.
For the purpose of my argument, there is no need to retrace here the intricate ways in which the many different kinds of inner-disciplinary critique developed over time; it suffices instead to provide a sketch of the one line of critique that marked, at least from the retrospective point of view from which I write, the beginning of the (unintended) end of classical modern ethnography, the critique of the philosophy of history on which ethnographers had relied since the late eighteenth century.
* * *
"Classical modern ethnography has come to an end."
What does it take for this sentence to sound as obvious and as uncontroversial as if one were to say, "Classical modern painting has come to an end"?
Is the end of classical modern ethnography really controversial?
TWO
In Europe, the second half of the eighteenth century brought what one could refer to as the "temporalization" of the spatial differences of life forms. It was a period during which the number of travel accounts that provided reports of foreign forms of human existence — whether from the past or from elsewhere — significantly increased, leaving interested observers with the baffling question of how one could make sense of this bewildering diversity.
The philosophes of the Enlightenment approached this challenge by way of inventing a new, previously unknown genre of scholarly literature, history. Authors as diverse as Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet, Kant, Ferguson, and Herder (and many in their aftermath) began writing the first histories of "mankind" that were arranging the people of the world along a single axis that led from those others who were "still" living ab originem (the premoderns, "living fossils" as Edward Burnett Tylor would later famously call them) to those Europeans who had "already" progressed through history and hence were at home in the here and now (the moderns).
For the coming into being of anthropology, the emergence of history — and of the singular collective called humanity that was the imagined author of history — was a decisive event: the emphatic distinction between premoderns and moderns humans brought about the condition of the possibility of the field of study that late eighteenth-century authors began to refer to as "ethnography" — a field of study defined by its modern expert knowledge of those who were still living in the premodern past (for a history of the term ethnography see chapter 3).
Ethnography emerged as the "science" of the people without history, without state, without science — of those "still" living in a cosmos, with mythical structures, magic, and rituals.
The critiques of the 1970s and 1980s observed that many of the twentieth century ethnographers — even though they had long moved against the very idea of the "primitive" or the "premodern" — were ultimately still relying on the distinctions invented by eighteenth-century European philosophers: as long as they described the other with words like "cosmos," "myth," "ritual," "kinship systems," and "magic" — all markers of a past — they were ceaselessly re-inscribing the temporal distinction between "them" and "us" they had set out to critique. As long as the ethnographic project was conceived of in terms of classical modernity, there seemingly was no possibility to escape the predicament: anthropology was and continued to be contingent on the philosophy of history.
What was one to do?
The dominant response to what Johannes Fabian called the "denial of coevalness" (Fabian 1983) — the active effort, on behalf of ethnographers, to locate the friends they have found in "the field" in the past — was the effort to find ways of anthropological inquiry and ethnographic writing that would lead ethnography beyond the great divides of modernity. One important approach to this challenge was to write historical ethnographies, carefully documenting the long "world historical" involvement of other societies (thereby undermining the myth of the "timeless other").
Another significant approach designed to achieve coevalness was the effort to find ways of integrating concrete others into ethnographic texts — by way of naming friends one has found in the field, by way of giving space to their "voices," by way photography and co-authorship. Self-consciously, ethnographers began experimenting with new forms of writing ethnographies — an "experimental moment" that led to a wave of reflective, polyphonic, dialogic, and other forms of ethnographic texts.
In the shadow of these two dominant approaches — both of which, despite their critical intent, were affirming the very idea of the classical ethnographic project (they were meant as improvement) — a small group of anthropologists opted for an altogether different approach for leading anthropology beyond the temporal dilemmas so deeply inscribed in the idea of ethnography. And while this "third way" was initially hardly influential, it quickly gained a dynamic of its own — a powerful dynamic that was to lead anthropologists away from their established preoccupations and into thoroughly new terrains, empirically as well as conceptually.
For so many years, or so one could summarize the argument of this "third way" in retrospect, ethnographers have tried to convince the world that the primitive is not primitive, that the Other is not timeless, that "we" are "con- temporaries," and nobody listened. So maybe it would now make sense to go ahead and ask, "Have we ever been modern?"
In order to convey a sense of the critical ethos that informed this question in the mid-1980s, I cite a passage from Paul Rabinow's contribution to Writing Culture (Marcus and Clifford 1986): "We have to anthropologize the West. We have to show how exotic its constitution of reality has been: emphasize those domains most taken for granted as universal; make them seem as historically peculiar as possible; show how their claims to truth are linked to social practices and have hence become effective forces in the social world."
In the mid- to late 1980s there were fairly different ways of taking up this call to "anthropologize the West." Some took it to mean an ethnographically grounded critique of the hegemony and ideology of Western science and medicine; others believed it suggested that the institutions constitutive of our presumed modernity (science, technology, political economy, medicine) are as culturally peculiar, as socially constructed, as myth and ritual; and yet others embraced it as a suggestion to carefully study the "modern" as a distinct form of reasoning.
Recall Bruno Latour's Nous n'avons jamais été modern — first published in 1991 (in English in 1993) — and you see the synergetic coming together, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of anthropology, critical theory, the sociology of scientific knowledge, science studies, literary critique, feminism, cultural studies, and medical anthropology (Latour 1991, 1993).
* * *
Of course, humans existed before the late eighteenth century — but the human is a distinctive eighteenth-century formation (see chapter 2). And, of course, humans were telling histories long before the eighteenth century. The argument here is not that humans were ignorant about the differences between past and present. However, most of these histories had been — and continued to be — local stories, that is, histories of local groups and people. A universal history of humanity, of humanity as such (and humanity is a concept — a collective — that was unknown before the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century), from its earliest emergence at some point in the past to the present is a distinct product of the second half of the eighteenth century. And many of the key categories that anthropology has historically relied on to describe its object of analysis emerged alongside this universal history — culture, humanity, history, morals, body, nation, primitive, progress, race, society. Most of these concepts were unknown previously — or they assumed entirely new meanings.
THREE
Perhaps there is no need here to delve into the intricacies of inner-disciplinary developments or to trace how the first, still somewhat awkward "ethnographies of the West" gradually gave rise, via detours, to anthropology as it is practiced in today's major research departments (at least in North America). It suffices instead to note, first, that at one point in the late 1980s or early 1990s a number of anthropologists began to enter — per fieldwork — domains that were formerly believed to be beyond the scope of anthropological expertise or interest, most notably (but by no means exclusively) medicine, science, and technology. And, second, that what was at first a quite "exotic" enterprise, at least by the standards of classical ethnography, namely the anthropologist in the laboratory, soon became one of the most important and innovative fields of anthropological research — the anthropology of modernity, of science, medicine, media, the Internet, finance, technology, and much more (at home and afar).
The effect of this growth in unexpected directions has been a far-reaching — still ongoing — metamorphosis of anthropology; it led, especially on the level of a new generation of anthropologists that was no longer educated in traditional terms and no longer conducted classical fieldwork, to the emergence of a thematically new kind of anthropology, one thoroughly removed from classical modern ethnography and its interests in segmentary lineages, gift exchange, and mythic structure (all topics that, together with the study of rituals, still dominated anthropology in the 1970s and early 1980s and that are largely absent from today's journals).
A sense of just how far-reaching the metamorphosis anthropology has been undergoing is, is conveyed by the controversies that surround the attempts to revise the intellectual tool kit of the discipline that the new anthropology has brought about. These revisionisms (plural) are the direct result of the observation that "the old" concepts and tools — namely those anthropology provided to those who set out to study ethnos, its culture, its kinship structures, its economy, mode of subsistence, political systems, and religion — seemed less than useful for studying and analyzing "the new" domains anthropologists had entered.
How does one study an HIV epidemic? And how science? What is interesting about, say, adult cerebral plasticity? And what about neoliberal city planning? Or the emergence of transnational companies? Or CO bubbles in ice that were frozen for millions of years and that are now released? Or cheese making? Or Hurricane Katrina?
In the late 1990s anthropology was entering an open situation, a situation full of passionate disagreement, of regret, of polemic as well, but also of the clear sense that there was a need for innovations: new research domains brought about the need to articulate new forms of anthropological curiosity, new tools, new ways of thinking about and designing research.
Arguably, anthropologists are still experimenting with such tools, curiosities, and research designs — and amid their experimentation they recognized (some surprised, others simply sad) that the ethnographic project of classical modernity had ceased to exist.
What began as a response to the temporal dilemma built into classical modern ethnography had become a project thoroughly decoupled from precisely this classical modern ethnography.
FOUR
One of the most exciting intellectual effects of the decoupling of anthropology from classical modern ethnography has been (or so I dare say) the emergence of the possibility of a "philosophically inclined anthropology." In order to specify what I mean by this clumsy phrase — a philosophically inclined anthropology — and to clarify in what sense its becoming possible has been an effect of the decentering of the classical ethnographic project, I would like to contrast the concept of "anthropology" that it advances with the comprehension of anthropology that was built into modern ethnography (for it is precisely on the level of conceptualizing anthropology — what it is, what its challenge is — that the philosophically inclined variant has been an event).
What from the perspective of classical modern ethnography, did the term "anthropology" refer to?
If one addresses this question to the works that have shaped twentieth-century anthropology — from Rivers to Malinowski or Radcliffe Brown to Turner, from Boas and Benedict to Mead and Geertz — a perhaps surprising but consistent picture emerges: In its form of classical modern ethnography, anthropology has been much less concerned with anthropos (Greek for "the human") than with ethnos. Ethnographers, it turns out, have never really asked Was ist der Mensch? No, the question that has nourished their curiosity, that drove them to conduct research and that animated their debates was not the question concerning the human but rather the question what forms human living together could take. And the reason for this focus on ethnos rather than anthropos is that they ultimately took it for granted that the question concerning the human had long been answered: If anthropology assumed the form of ethnography then because ethnos, ultimately, was the answer to the question concerning anthropos. Most clearly this taken for grantedness comes into view when one turns to the two most prominent "answers" that have stabilized anthropology qua ethnography, "society" and "culture."
Humans, or so "social" anthropologists have argued, are "social" beings. Wherever one turns, they live in a "society" and whatever they do is embedded in and shaped by societal patterns: Nothing "human" can exist outside of things social. The challenge faced by the social anthropologist, consequently, is to travel the world and to ethnographically document, on the one hand, the various forms societies may take (ideally working toward an inventory of these forms), and to show, on the other hand, that a proper comprehension of these forms is the true key for understanding how humans live and think and exist in the world.
In a similar (and yet so different) way, "cultural" anthropologists have taken it for granted that humans are — what else? — "cultural" beings. They have taken it for granted, that is, that what distinguishes humans, what sets them apart, is their capacity (pace Marvin Harris and cultural materialism) to endow themselves and their surroundings with meaning. Indeed, as the cultural anthropologist sees it, nothing humans can do or think of exists without meaning — be it in complex rituals or in a simple experiment. Even the very idea of "society" (or so the "cultural" critique of "social" anthropology goes) is ultimately a cultural category, is meaning. It follows that the challenge faced by the cultural anthropologist — who is equipped with the certainty that whatever she will find, however bizarre, is culture — is to travel the world, to ethnographically document foreign "cultures" and show that a proper comprehension of the "web of meaning" that is constitutive of a culture is the true key for understanding how humans "are" elsewhere.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
what if . . . ix
acknowledgments xi
introduction. all of it 1
1. on anthropology (free from ethnos) 7
anthropology and philosophy (differently) 17
philosophy/Philosophy 25
thought/abstract, thought/concrete (the problem with modernism) 28
escaping (the already thought and known) 32
2. "of" the human (after "the human") 34
cataloguing 45
antihumanism 49
a disregard for theory 52
no ontology 55
3. on fieldwork (itself) 70
assemblages (or how to study difference in time?) 84
not history 93
epochal (no more) 95
4. on the actual (rather than the emergent) 97
the new/different (of movement/in terms of movement) 108
why and to what end ends (philosophy, politics, poetry) 110
5. coda (a dictionary of anthropological common places) 113
one last question 118
notes 121
bibliography 151
index 169
What People are Saying About This
“After Ethnos is full of frame-shifting insights about the relation of anthropology to its methods, of revelatory rhetorical gambits about how we might think about the field in ways different from our received histories, of gentle but powerful exposés of anthropology’s dearest disciplinary clichés, and of provocative pointers to possible intellectual and political futures for sociocultural inquiry. A book with which to agree and disagree in unexpected and always stimulating ways.”
“Fascinating, deliberately provocative, and brilliant, After Ethnos is a field changer: it is one of those rare books that can grasp and shift a discipline."