Saturday, October 26, 2013

Anthropology redux: a father-daughter conversation

A couple of weeks ago I put up a post about the problem of bringing one's values and assumptions to the encounter with another society (East meets West). The post wandered about rather more widely than I had planned, with some discussion of Orientalism, Edward Said, motorcycles, anthropology and so on.

A few days later my daughter - who lives in New York - put up a long and thoughtful comment, which raised a number of interesting points in its own right. I've been meaning to reply to her comment, but many days of travel and re-entry into the strange world of Portland - otherwise known as 'home' - delayed the process.

Finally, I've been able to sit down and put together a few thoughts. But, since my reply is both pretty long in its own right and closely tied to her original comments, I decided to promote the whole thing to a post of its own. So, here are her comments, followed by my reply:

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Nisha writes:

Lots of interesting stuff to ponder. I, too, have a lot of problems with anthropology. It means one thing in theory to study another culture and learn about it, but it is another in its practical application that (so far) goes in one direction--colonizers "studying" the colonized. It can often be used to racist ends as we all know.

This is not to say that the study of cultures is impossible, but I think it is important to acknowledge that there is a history of this kind of thing: Western (mostly American and European) anthropologists studying "natives" and trying to come to conclusions about their culture and also human nature. Rarely (I'm not aware of any instances) does a member of an oppressed or disadvantaged group write ethnographies about the oppressor/advantaged groups.

I completely agree with May's reaction to the picture and with what she/you said in response to it. The problem with anthropology for me, is that it can often pretend to exist inside some vacuum where it obviously doesn't. To study "Indian culture" (no such thing exists, way too big a category but just as an example) and say that the caste system is part of that culture is limiting not only because it's orientalist and the West has its own version, but because it ignores the fact that people in those countries actually have agency and should be allowed to speak for themselves/shape their history. Many indians oppose the caste system (and have for a LONG time) so it's limiting to think of the caste system as a part of indian culture--rather, it's a system imposed on indians by the economic structure/ruling elites. If we were to say that "American culture" means a gigantic gap between rich and poor (which would be a reasonable assertion if you study the country's history), what does that mean about the people in America who are on strike in the recent Fast Food Forward campaign for higher wages and unionization? The famous socialists and communists of the labor movement in the '30s? Culture is a product of a lot of things, like the economic system and the history of power relations. It is not the root of society's ills. Therefore, I believe it is sketchy business to study "culture" and not make assumptions about large groups of people.

Another example is when Harvard established a center to advise about Indians what to do after the horrible rape/killing that happened last year. Several Indian feminist organizations responded and rightfully called out this move as orientalist and also insanely hypocritical, as it happened right after the Stuebenville rape scandal. Is misogyny a problem in India? Absolutely. Is it a problem in the U.S.? Yep. Does Indian "culture" reinforce it? Maybe, but if that's true, then it is also true about pretty much every culture in the world. And beyond that, where does that leave all the women (and men) in India who are fighting for women's rights? Are they not part of "indian culture?" It's incredibly limiting to see entire groups of people through a scope like that and can easily breed racist/colonialist/orientalist assumptions.

This was less coherent than I had hoped but I really just wanted to make the point that I think anthropology (because of the way it is carried out in practice) can often take away agency from people of oppressed groups and stereotype them.

Michel writes:

Lots of interesting stuff in your comment, too. I've got a few responses I've wanted to put up here for a couple of weeks, but travel and re-entry kind of got in the way!

First off, I've been thinking about the historical development of anthropology and its connections to imperialism and colonialism. I'd say this connection tends to unfairly taint what is essentially an attempt at scientific study in a very difficult area of concern, which is, at its base, about the social expressions of human consciousness in historical contexts.

Anthropology, in this sense, is a product of scientific curiousity. Looked at this way, it is a particular expression of the scientific revolution which has, over a couple of centuries, transformed everything about our world and how we look at it. It's an accident of history that the progress of science took off and prospered the way it did in the West. Five or six centuries ago, an educated observer would almost certainly have predicted that the Islamic world would be more likely to see the rise of science, followed maybe by China....and with Europe in last place! That it happened in Europe probably has more to do with the weakening of the power of the Church than anything else, abetted by the growth of individual political and social rights. In that sense, it can be view as accidental.

Colonialism is simply a particular manifestation of imperialism and empire-building. These are not peculiarly Western in any sense. Every region and a wide variety of cultures have produced empires and imperial rule over subject populations, going back thousands of years. Most of the symptoms of colonialism are common to many empires that we don't usually think of in that context. Imperial Rome, for example, treated its subject provinces in much the same way as the European colonial powers: extracting raw materials and resources and reselling the products of manufacture to the subject populations. Rome also engaged in what it considered 'civilizing' activities: vast infrastructure projects that in some places are still in use today, urban planning (including piped water and sewage disposal), education, health care and much more. At the same time, any expression of dissent or rebellion was dealt with mercilessly.

I'm bringing this up because I think there's a tendency to forget that colonialism is not a specifically Western product. All of North Africa and much of the Levant and Europe was 'colonized' by Arabs during the expansion of Islam. That this episode of colonialism is almost never brought up when discussing colonialism and the Mideast has always puzzled me; the two things, after all, are very deeply related!

The enormous success of the scientific method which took over European metaphysics and affected every form of technology gave birth to the idea of applying it to manifestations of human consciousness itself. Thus, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, anthropology and so on. When I ask the question: is anthropolgy even possible? I mean that scientifically. Like any science, it stands or falls on its success in producing understanding and successful prediction of outcomes. Anthropology has specific problems that are inherent in the attempt to understand culture while having one's own culture stand in the way. The tendency towards a sense of superiority is a problem, but it's not a specifically Western problem. Most cultures think of themselves as superior. The Chinese and Japanese are familiar examples. So were the ancient Egyptians, the Inca and countless others. Any number of cultures have considered themselves as the only truly enlightened, 'civilized' people. One reason that anthropology didn't arise elsewhere is probably tied to this fact: what's the point of studying other people when you consider them beneath contempt? The obvious answer is that there is none, unless you live in a society where the appearance of science has made things interesting and worthy of study as a matter of principle. In that case, anthropology can develop - even though you still consider your subjects uncivilized savages!

This all adds up to the fact that it's important to distinguish between criticizing anthropology for the scientific issues and questions it provokes, and for the misuses it's been subjected to. The two are not the same.

A couple of other things: in my discussion of the clash universal values with cultural values I specifically didn't mention 'Indian culture', but rather 'Hindu culture'. Indian culture is such a wide and various thing it would be hard to make any universal assertion about it. Hinduism, however, is a much more definable thing. And its justifications for the caste system are deeply embedded in its world view, which is why I used it as an example.

Regarding American culture being used as an example, I agree it's a very slippery thing to attempt. American culture has a peculiarity that sets it apart from more traditional cultures: it's really up for grabs. Everyone gets to try to define it to suit themselves, which is not something that happens even in, say, France or China. As I've said before, in my view, most of what we think of as uniquely American actually came from Africa with slavery. Think of music, art, dance and just about other manifestation of culture: most of what distinguishes it from European culture came from African traditions and/or from the experiences of the slaves after their arrival in America. This has resulted in a very dynamic cultural environment. American culture is being continually reinvented and reinterpreted. In that sense, I agree with your reservations about trying to define it one way and ignoring everything else that might not fit. That said, my point didn't really depend on doing that. Not everybody agrees that America should be a hyper-capitalistic society, it's true. But it has been for a couple of hundred years and there's no sign of it changing soon, so clearly there's broad agreement at the moment about what consitututes a fair and appropriate way to enforce justice and distribute wealth. There's also strong and active dissent. But, for the moment, most people's view of American society, both from within and without, is that of a increasingly robber-baron society in which the losers have somehow been propagandized into supporting a system which guarantees that they will continue to be losers indefinitely!

Lastly, I want to mention something that I find worrisome: a tendency to put discussions about culture off the table entirely. One source of this comes from an attitude that's similar to Said's, only much less nuanced. Essentially it's this: you can't judge us because you aren't us. In other words, only those inside can truly understand. Everybody else is unqualified.

 Another approach that leads to the same conclusion is: cultures are too complicated to talk about without doing violence to their complexity. You alluded to this in your comments about India and the US.

I'd say the second argument holds water somewhat better than the first, but in the end I reject them both. The first is clearly false. Cultures have an internal dimension and an external dimension. It may be impossible to fully understand the internal dimension without being fully inside (even that is somewhat suspect, at least as a blanket statement), but the external manifestations are open and visible to all, and worth talking about. The second argument is true in the sense that it does do violence to any complex phenomenon when one tries to capture aspects of it in language. Even typing this sentence I'm doing violence to the complexity of my argument by my choice of words, which can never - in principle - exactly equal what I'm trying to say!

Does this mean we don't talk about culture? This assertion reminds me of the common opinion that we shouldn't talk about religion because the topic is too complex and too sensitive. Culture and religion - two of the most important forces in human society, and we can't talk about them? I take the opposite approach; we must talk about them. We might not always be right or fully understand, but it's only through talking about these enormous motivators of human history that we can ever get a grip on the process and hope to steer it to a better future!

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