"Anthropologists are people who study lives they have no intention of leading."

[John McCreery]

Someone who used to post on Anthro-L used this statement (or one very much like it) as his signature line. It struck me then, and strikes me now, as both profoundly true and deeply unsettling. It may also explain the current preoccupation with cultural difference instead of shared humanity that disturbs Keith Hart so much.

While such ancient and now discarded perspectives as unilineal evolution, convergent modernization, or universal principles governing social structure all suffered from various flaws, one good thing they had in common was that we and "the other" were both part of the same human story. The notion that the West, from which anthropologists set out to explore the "primitive" or "traditional" was not only superior but the culmination of human progress was, of course, insufferably smug and the barbarisms done in its name are, indeed, abominable. But the notion that "they" were part of our story, just as we were part of theirs, opened the way to imagining ourselves as them, creating ground for empathy. The sacralization of cultural difference, which reduces the other to cartoons that stress that we are not the same, has precisely the opposite effect. It places the other "over there," somewhere on the other side of the water, the TV screen, the computer display—at a safe emotional distance. Rape, murder, torture, riots and revolutions—just them being them—glad I'm not there.

These remarks are not, I hasten to say, an indictment of anyone here. It is, instead, a critique of a scholarly stance that, as similar stances have always done, separates the thinker from the human feeling, the raw emotional connection, that drives us to respond to the people whose lives we share and study as (dare we say it?) fellow human beings, whose pain, confusion, prejudices—and, sometimes, amazing insights—penetrate the defenses that a focus on cultural difference erects.

Neither am I saying that cultural difference doesn't exist. It surely does, and the search for common ground, in politics, scholarship, or everyday life must come to grips with this fact. But analysis that excludes our shared humanity to focus exclusively on what divides us is, at the end of the day, like Wiley Coyote chasing Road Runner off the edge of a cliff, standing for a moment on thin air before falling splat to the ground far below.

Note: This post has been moved from the blogs to the Forum in response to an administrator suggestion.

[Keith Hart]

If ethnographers divide their lives between fieldwork and writing up, the question of who or what an anthropologist is moves between these poles. (I don't even speak of the other disciplines that claim to be branches of anthropology). The first is necessarily interactive while the second generally is not.This is why I find it hard to claim that what I do is study people. Most of what I have learned comes from interacting with them and writing with a view to altering the conditions for myself and possibly others to interact with society. Anthropology has become a way of life for me, where all my experience goes into the project of understanding society better with a view to furthering my own purposes there. In old age this takes the principal form of writing, but social engagement still drives that practice and before teaching and adminstration performed the same role. I can't identify anthropology with scholarship because it got me out of a real scholarly career as a classicist, for which I am eternally grateful.

Here is an excerpt from a memoir about fieldwork long ago which represents the personal/human pole of my experience as an anthrpopologist in contrast with the impersonal/intellectual pole that grew in strength later. It refers to fieldwork in Accra during the 1960s and emphasizes social interaction as method.

Compared with most of the slum's inhabitants, I was rich, white, educated and powerful. But I had never been further than the Mediterranean, I was young (22 years old), alone, culturally inept and desperately lacking human warmth, which my new neighbours had in abundance. Without quite realizing it, I began to exchange what I had for what they had. I wrote letters, intervened with bureaucracy, gave them rides to hospital and they took me in, gave me meals and conversation, let me play their games badly. I didn't ask them to explain their culture to me, but argued with them about why they did what they did. I sought common ground for our shared humanity, since if our overt differences prevailed, I was lost.

Above all, I entered new economic relationships that were puzzling to me. I became an employer, a tenant, a customer; people asked me for gifts and loans. As soon as I arrived in Ghana, an American professor asked if I had any hard currency, since he could get me 50% more than the official rate. I made inquiries and found that the black market rate was three times the official one. I was shocked that an academic would try to bilk a graduate student. In this and similar ways, Ghana began to assault my ivory tower sensibilities and to reinforce the Manchester liberalism that lay underneath.

Nima was a tough place. The first night I slept there, a corpse was found hanging from a tree outside my window. It was not suicide. And my presence interested the authorities. The Special Branch was on my case. Their leader once asked me, “Do you understand what is meant by code, Mr. Hart?” I nodded. “We have to know six languages to get into the Special Branch and none of us knows the one you are learning. So we think you want to send messages in code to the opposition in exile.”

People I interviewed were often harassed afterwards. At one stage, it got so bad that I feared being deported. I went to see the head of the sociology department at the University of Ghana and asked for a letter saying that I was not a CIA spy. “How do I know you are not?” was his reasonable reply. Later he told me he had seen my name on a deportation list and decided I was beyond redemption. I could see my research career going up in smoke, but I was saved by the February coup against Kwame Nkrumah’s government.

In this and many other ways, what I later found out was formed by my political insertion into this social milieu. This shapes what we achieve a lot more than theoretical and methodological training, I think. So my conclusion is that anthropologists usually lead highly idiosyncratic lives and get to know the world in very distinctive ways. I have a friend who keeps snakes, flies planes, worked with cocaine gangsters and had his book on Amazonian ritual praised by Levi-Strauss. Anthropology is a holding compamny for people to do what they like and call it anthropology. It is not a guild discipline, which is lucky since the academic guild system is going belly up right now. Unluckily for those who seek academic careers as anthropologists, however, the corporate university is moving in the opposite direction and anthropology is being squeezed by bureaucratic imperatives. It may revert to being the amateur pursuit it was before the 20th century university rose and fell. We need to understand the historicity of anthropology in order to move on effectively.

I am aware that this may seem self-serving, given my record of academic achievement, but I was never complacent about relying on an academic career for a life path and living through these precarious times brings home the value of that attitude. I regret to say that much of the talk about finding a new public role for anthropology speaks of nostalgia for a guild system that is already past. I really do believe that the OAC can help some of us find another way. Not the only way, but one of them to complement the others.

[Huon Wardle]

There are plenty of cases of anthropologists leading their lives according to the principles of the people they set out to study. Paul Stoller had talked about using Songhay concepts to cope with cancer for instance. Edith Turner describes her experience of spirits in an African context.

I wonder what it would mean to fulfil this idea? How could an anthropologist fully lead the same lives as their informants? There seem many reasons why this can't be so, none of which diminish the activities involved in ethnographic work. I agree, I think, with both you and Keith: there isn't any justification for an inflated claims to have discovered or to appreciate 'cultural difference'. Sadly, there isn't very grand scope for claims about human universals either - merely a sort of possibilism; the potential that people can construe their own experince of the world in universalising terms..

[John McCreery]

Come on, Huon. You say that there are plenty of cases but cite only two, Paul Stoller and Edith Turner, who are famous precisely because they are outliers so very unlike most of us. I will add a whole category, native anthropologists who study their own cultures (common in East Asia where a typical pattern is graduate school in North America, working with professors who are specialists in the cultures of their students' native lands, and being encouraged to return home for research). One might also add the long-termers, people like several of my fellow members of AJJ (Anthropology of Japan in Japan), foreigners who have come to Japan for research and found both academic employment and significant others here. I might even throw in myself; this is year thirty-one in Yokohama. But even we native, long-termer and hanger-on anthropologists do what we do because we wanted to be different from the people we grew up with; and while we may study fishermen or factory workers, we rarely aspire to join their ranks. Entertainers may be an interesting exception; just last week I met a young Australian anthropologist who is now a licensed geisha and is looking for a "younger sister" to train up in her art. Still, put us all together and we are exceptions to the rule. Would you say that I'm wrong about this?

[John McCreery]

Huon, that last reply was dashed off over breakfast, and I don't want to leave it at the tit-for-tat stage at which, it seems to me, I left it. My personal solution to the problem is to remember something that Clyde Kluckhohn wrote a very long time ago (sorry, the exact source is long forgotten). Kluckhohn says that the anthropologist who adopts a holistic perspective on the people whose lives he studies should remember three things: (1) in some respects all human beings are alike; (2) in other respects they are like some other human beings—these are the ways that we call culture; and (3) in still other respects they are each uniquely themselves. Seen in this light, I am like my Japanese neighbors or the Daoist masters with whom I worked in Taiwan, a human being, with the usual  number of arms and legs, fingers and toes, a head mounted on top of my spine, and the usual needs for for food, sex, shelter, etc. I am also like them in respects shared by only some other human beings. I live, for example, in an apartment with a genkan, a bit of entrance hall, set lower than the floor to which I step up after removing my shoes, and a furo, a Japanese bathtub in which I soak myself only after washing and rinsing before I get in. I carry business cards and exchange them with people I meet. I probably know more than most other people, including most Taiwanese or other Chinese, about the symbolism of Daoist ritual; the masters with whom I studied are, like lawyers or doctors, experts to whom other people turn because they lack their esoteric knowledge. And, finally, of course, I am myself. I know of no one else who grew up in Virginia, went to college in Michigan, graduate school in New York, did research in Taiwan, and wound up living in Japan, who has a degree in anthropology, has several decades of experience working in and around the Japanese advertising industry, and is currently infatuated with social network analysis. Nor is there anyone else who is married to my ever so sagacious spouse, bedazzled by his amazing daughter....I have, like everyone I know, led a life that is both typical in some respects of the social position in which I now find myself and absolutely uniquely my own. 

 

My life confirms for me the wisdom of what I learned by reading Kluckhohn and then, as I have mentioned elsewhere,by  observing Victor Turner deal with everyone he met as a peer with something interesting to say, from whom something might be learned. Of course, for analytical purposes, we have to isolate the topics we study and focus on whatever it is, social structure, popular culture, or cosmology, that we have decided to study. But, I would argue that, as anthropologists we can never legitimately "other" the other to the point that we forget our common humanity or the possibility that, being uniquely themselves, the people whose lives we share, may not entirely agree with what their culture tells them to do. Then, meeting them as peers, we can learn a lot from each other.

 

That's my two yen.

[Huon Wardle]

Perhaps I haven't understood you well, John. At one level it sounds like you are leading a life relatively close to the way you perceive your informants of friends or whatever to lead theirs. The broader point I suppose is that when two people do the same thing it is not 'the same thing' because they are not the same person. Apart from anything else, finding something out cannot be reduced to copying whatever we are looking at. Ethnography is part description, part abstraction. I don't see much room in the package for what Evans-Pritchard called the 'if I were a horse' approach; even if ethnography implies participation. However, on the other one, I could probably produce a quite a long list of ayahuasca snuffling anthropologist-shamans but it might be indiscreet.

[John McCreery]

Huon, you seem to understand me pretty well. But perhaps I have been too personal. To me the point of the anecdotes is the sort of theoretical issue that, for example, Geertz raises about Evans-Pritchard in "African Transparencies." The old-fashioned way of writing ethnography in which the anthropologist wrote confidently, "The X say Y" has been pretty much discredited by critics asking, "Who is X?" and "What are your grounds for translating Y' (a term or phrase in the native's language) as Y (the anthropologists gloss on what the native said)?" But where does that leave us?

 

My answer is, "No worse off than our colleagues in history, who frequently work with fragments of incomplete texts." We, too, can learn the classical tools of the critical reader of historical interpretations, which include such questions as "Who is X?" and "What are your grounds for translating Y' as Y?" Those of us who work in places like East Asia can humbly work on our languages and consult what our colleagues in neighboring disciplines as well as a host of native writers have written and try to be sure that our generalizations are at least consistent with the evidence that they have assembled. Then, taking our home field advantage as anthropologists, we can talk with living consultants, some of whom we bump into on the street while others are eminent professors of this or that, to see what they have to say about our ideas. We can bring a lived experience to our contributions to our conversations that those who spend their time exclusively in libraries miss.

 

But without a clear recognition of our common humanity as well as our cultural differences, those conversations couldn't even begin. That's the hobby horse I'm riding.

[ryan anderson]

"But analysis that excludes our shared humanity to focus exclusively on what divides us is, at the end of the day, like Wiley Coyote chasing Road Runner off the edge of a cliff, standing for a moment on thin air before falling splat to the ground far below."

This Wile E. Coyote ref has been popping up a lot in the last two weeks.  Slavoj Zizek used it when he was talking about the events in Egypt, and now here.  Beautiful.

As for your post, John, I agree with you that only focusing on difference or divisions isn't the way to go.  I think, to a certain extent, making anthropology all about difference kind of traps the possibilities of the field.  I definitely think there is a need for an emphasis on shared humanity as well--and also an emphasis on the fact that "anthropology" does not just apply to OTHERS somewhere OUT THERE, but also in our own living rooms and kitchens.  It's not necessarily a difference thing, or a distance thing, but a way of looking at the world around us.

[John McCreery]

Thanks, Ryan. I really like, "the fact that 'anthropology' does not just apply to OTHERS somewhere OUT THERE, but also in our own living rooms and kitchens." Reminds me of a piece of ad industry folklore: A famous person (might have been Carl Alley) said that when he had a copy idea the first question he asked himself was if he could say the line with a straight face to his wife across the breakfast table. You have nicely landed on a similar piece of advice for the anthropological theorist: That idea that fascinates you? Ask yourself if it applies to you (or you in a similar situation to the people you are writing about). If the answer is no, you still have work to do.

[heesun hwang]

This post and comments bring up several questions to me.

 

From the post

... the current preoccupation with cultural difference instead of shared humanity ...

What is "sharing"? Does that mean people have the same ground characteristics? And if it is so, how is this fact significant? There are people with different number of fingers but I guess this doesn't necessarily have to be significant. Instead, I'd like to ask what it means to have the universal characters like having ten fingers. My question is, even if we can assume that there are such characteristics shared by all humans, if they can be significant, and if they are so, how they are significant. To borrow one philosopher's thoughts, if there were such universal characters, they would probably be rather useless due to its meager nature - abstraction of the sameness will eventually erase out many of the valuable characters.

It places the other "over there," somewhere on the other side of the water, the TV screen, the computer display—at a safe emotional distance. Rape, murder, torture, riots and revolutions—just them being them—glad I'm not there.

Then could we say that the real problem might be the figure of the "other" is, say, "in miserable shapes", rather than there are other aspects in the existence of the "others"? And how could one avoid to fall into mystification or idealization of the "postive" aspects of the "others", if one was to focus on different aspects of "them"?

But the notion that "they" were part of our story, just as we were part of theirs, opened the way to imagining ourselves as them, creating ground for empathy.

Why do we need "a ground" for empathy? If there was a ground, could it be an effective cause in bringing up empathy? Can't be empathy grown from something else than a ground? Was it really a shared ground that made one feel a fellow (human) being? Isn't there any possibility that this is rather a feeling-interpreted-later within a frame of universality? What are the side-effects of this assumption of universality?

But analysis that excludes our shared humanity to focus exclusively on what divides us is ...

Why does a difference divde us, rather than connect us? In reverse, doesn't a shared humanity become a source of devide?

I guess these are part of the reasons that make me feel rather hesitant before arguing for any form of "universality". I am having trouble in answering these questions. : )

 

From the comments

Anthropology has become a way of life for me, where all my experience goes into the project of understanding society better with a view to furthering my own purposes there.

I love the phrase "way of life". I also wonder if there were changes within anthropology as a way of life.

... "anthropology" does not just apply to OTHERS somewhere OUT THERE, but also in our own living rooms and kitchens.

I too love this phrase. And I think I've been meditating about this by myself. But there's a question still lingers on my mind; a story of my life probably won't be published by the others, if I were not to publish it by myself or if I met an anthropologist interested in my way of life. The discrepancy in power doesn't easily wane out I guess...

[John McCreery]

@Heesun Hwang
Great questions! Let's hope the answers can be as good.

What do all human beings share? Anatomy, physiology, DNA. We are all Homo Sapiens, and, as we learn when we study human evolution and human biology, that has consequences, among them our cultural diversity. We are, as animals go, born in a remarkably immature state and have a lot to learn to survive. We are born with extraordinary learning capabilities (see this TED talk on how babies learn languages, for example), and because we have so much to learn we are highly sociable animals as well. From birth to death we depend on others for food, shelter, comfort and love. Even the most alienated dumpster diver or survivalist won't last long in a world with no other human beings.

 

Is this significant? At a deep level it gives us all what (borrowing a useful term from sociologist C. Wright Mills) I will call a shared vocabulary of motives. And, as Mills, points out, without it our interactions would be reduced to fight or flight. One might imagine anonymous crowds whose members steadfastly ignore each other; but even the ability to ignore each other depends on mutual understanding that we wish to be left alone. Competition for scarce resources, be it food, sex, prestige or a seat on a crowded commuter train ensures that we won't be—some minimal level of interaction will always be necessary. 

 

Does this mean that linguistic and cultural differences are mere epiphenomena and can safely be ignored because, deep down we are all identical? No. If you've looked at that TED talk I linked to above, you will know that the extreme plasticity that makes human babies extraordinary learners doesn't last very long. As we age, we take on cognitive baggage that is, increasingly, hard to change. To use a modern metaphor, we may not be completely hardwired, but the firmware becomes increasingly difficult to reprogram. And, as our long and bloody history has demonstrated repeatedly, we can and do kill each other over our disagreements. That is why those who long for a fairer, more peaceful world must be constantly looking for, if not common ground, at least some way to bridge our differences. 

 

But, yes, I do realize that you and I are philosophers. These sorts of considerations do not completely answer our question "How is common ground significant? If significance is, at it appears to be, an artifact of difference, a contrast and not a shared attribute, how can common ground have any meaning at all?" One, literally "flip" but nonetheless profound answer is that, when you are focused on difference, the common ground is the biggest difference of all, what people now sometimes call the elephant in the room. Without it, the other differences collapse like a house of cards. I think, by way of illustration, of Terry Eagleton's wonderful quip that "If we are discussing patriarchy, by which you mean a system of social domination in which men are superior to women and by which I mean a small town in upstate New York, we are not having a political discussion." Indeed, we are not having an intelligible discussion at all. We are, instead, like inmates in an insane asylum, each trapped in our own, disconnected worlds.

 

Another, more substantial and to me more interesting proposition is the one advanced by George Lakoff in Philosophy in the Flesh, i.e., that what we take to be our most fundamental concepts are, in fact, metaphors grounded in the anatomy and physiology we share. Thus, even cultural differences operate within a limited range of possibilities. One of my favorite examples is the bow, the common gesture of deference, which ranges from the British aristocrat's slight lowering of the chin to full prostration, face down on the ground. The degree of the bow can be calibrated to express differences in status; but all bows are within this range and share a common mammalian heritage easily observed when two dogs fight and the loser lowers its head and slinks away. 

 

The important thing for me is to remember Kluckhohn's advice and to remember that it is an AND statement: All human beings are (1) in some respects like all other human beings AND (2) in some respects like some other human beings AND (3) also uniquely themselves. The issue for the anthropologist is not the EITHER-OR that asserts that only one of these considerations is important, but the realization that they all are and the joy of trying to figure out how they relate to each other.

 

Cheers.

[Adrian Andreescu]

I think you might find interesting this recent article written by MARK A. SCHROLL :

The Future of a Discipline: Considering the ontological/methodological future of the anthropology of consciousness, Part I† -Toward a New Kind of Science and its Methods of Inquiry

Anthropology of Consciousness, Volume 21, Issue 1, pages 1–29, Spring 2010

 

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1556-3537.2010.01018.x...

 

[John McCreery]

Adrian, thank you for the reference; but could I ask you to spell out what you like about this? I don't know about others here; but as an independent scholar without access to a research library, I would have to pay for this article, which is hidden behind a pay wall. The claim that there are realms of knowledge that can only be reached through religious disciplines, mystical experiences, or taking the right kind of drugs has a very long history. Can you give us a clue to what this author tell us that has not already been expressed in "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (Hamlet, Act 1, Scene V)?