Taking Anthropology, Introduction

Really interesting post, Jason. A deftly articulated juxtaposition of two problems that are certainly worth considering together.

An orthogonal observation drawn from something I just posted to Adam Fish’s earlier post on hackers and hippies: apropos of this Bloomberg article (mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-02/no-women-on-facebook-board-shows-white-male-influence.html), and the video attached to it, it is rather interesting to me that advocating an anthropology that is not white (and male) dominated public space would be at all controversial or meet with such resistance. One would think it would be obvious that different social locations and subject positions bring (radically, and necessarily so) different perspectives to bear upon the same topic or object of anthropological analysis. 

Given this, I think one–we, as anthropologists–need to be forthcoming about the profound, and profoundly embodied, investment in power (and privilege) that is in fact the root cause of the ongoing marginalization (especially almost 40 years after the original AAA report on the state of minority anthropologists in the discipline) that Brodkin et al. discuss. Much of the intransigence is a reluctance to give up power (and privilege), especially to those who are not truly viewed as equals and whose life experiences and perspectives are not actually seen as being of equal worth and value (as opposed to of token instrumentality; something discussed at length in the Brodkin et al. article). How would we get to a place where such is not the case, especially when even white male graduates/graduate students in a top-three anthropology graduate program are willing to tell their non-white colleagues “Keep your ‘privilege’ critique at home if you want to be friends”, while lamenting how non-whites supposedly get “jobs and fellowships thrown at them”? 

If this is the level of fundamental (racist) disrespect we are dealing with (in some departments), it will be quite difficult to convince some (white) anthropologists that “the defamiliarizing insights and analyses generated from vantage points developed by anthropologists of color are better tools for diversifying departmental organization and culture (among other things) than hegemonic ones, and anthropology departments should embrace them instead of marginalizing them” and that Anthropology “needs to take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others to better understand and diversify itself as well as enhance its theoretical robustness. (2011:555)”

As with Open Access, the issue is power and control–and the deep investments those benefitting from status-quo hierarchies have in maintaining them.

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Jason, I can’t help wondering if you are feeling a big sandbagged by the upwelling of response to Rex’s post about HAU, leaving your post largely ignored. To stir things up a bit, allow me to play the aging white male troglodyte and reply to your statement that,

I want to highlight the insights from Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson ,

to which I reply, “What insights?” I have, as a precaution, read the piece in question and don’t see any particular insight at all. What I see is plausible evidence that, compared to the situation in 1973, the percentages of minority graduate students, Ph.Ds, and and junior faculty have increased; but that individuals in all of these categories continue to feel seriously put upon, especially when it comes to having extra work associated with “diversity” dumped on them. Then only suggested remedy is that those in charge of departments should pay more attention to the views of those who feel put upon. A reasonable request? Perhaps. Insight? Sorry, but no. This is pretty thin stuff.

As far as I can make out, the research design restricted sampling to members of minority groups, thus making it impossible to differentiate minority group from non-minority group members of the same rank in the academic hierarchy. From what I read on line and what I know about economic and political pressures now affecting the non-STEM academy as a whole, I would be very surprised if everyone who does not yet have a tenured position and a good share of those who do possess tenure are also feeling put upon, shifting the ground of argument from privilege and lack thereof to who is suffering most, a distinctly weaker position.

The following anecdotes may add a little perspective. In 1972, just back from Taiwan and still working on my dissertation, I was offered a one-quarter, replacement teaching position at Berkeley, standing in for Jack Potter who was going to be on leave. Shortly after arriving, I passed George Foster in the hall. George stared at me for a moment and said, “I still don’t know what the hell you are doing here.” A bit of further investigation revealed that the department was already feeling the economic pressures signaled by the approaching end of the US baby boom. In a wonderfully ironic comment, one of my collaborators remarked on how nice it was when there was so much money floating around that anyone could do whatever they wanted to do. So the people who studied baboons got along with the people who studied West African folklore or mathematical models of kinship systems. Now my collaborator said, the department was becoming like one of those “closed corporate communities” that George Foster had studied in Mexico, where, if Foster was right, the culture was dominated by “the image of the limited good.” In what had become a zero-sum game competing for shares of a shrinking pie, all of the usual nastiness that Foster predicted was popping up, treasure tales about someone who had just tapped a previously unknown source of funding, witchcraft accusations about people selling out to the powers of evil; factionalism and vendetta were rife. Saying, “If only people would listen and take seriously….” already sounded more than a little weak back then. Hearing it again more than three decades later? I don’t see that we’ve learned a lot in the interim. Insight? I just don’t see it.

What am I missing here?

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Hello to @Discuss White Privilege and @John McCreery: Thank you for your comments.

One strange thing about blogging is how while composing posts I end up keeping one eye on the developing news, and was ironically citing American Anthropologist at the time McCreery was thinking of a “citation boycott,” and then of course there already has been a bit of a comment stream already about these issues back on the Hackers, Hippies and Silicon Valley post.

I’m not sure Brodkin et al. would disagree that choosing the word insights for their conclusion may not be precisely correct, as they say it is “embarrassingly obvious.” In an ideal world, I intended to discuss further the prescriptions from both Andre Gingrich and Brodkin et al., with some thoughts about how we might make our blogs and blogrolls more transnational and inclusive. I would point out here that Brodkin et al. do have more specific recommendations, including at the department level, that “departments must hold white faculty equally responsible for improving racial diversity for it to be highly valued” (2011:554) and three recommendations for the AAA, including a staff person dedicated to diversity issues. These recommendations may still be “embarrassingly obvious” but obviously they needed to be stated.

I maintain this is a must-read article for anthropologists, both because we often assume we have already been through the autocritique, and because we claim an anti-racist heritage going back to Franz Boas. Deconstructing the race-as-biological-determinism argument is part of almost every introductory textbook, but unfortunately this has resulted in a justification of “colorblindness” in the face of what remain very unequal life opportunities shaped by race. I find myself now teaching less about deconstructing race and more about the persistent inequalities organized around racial lines, using Clarence Gravlee’s “How race becomes biology: Embodiment of social inequality” (2009, AJPA).

I certainly do hear the complexity of these issues, as many anthropologists often feel they have long been in a marginal discipline, perpetually and perhaps increasingly under funding threats. In this sense, although it was important that Brodkin et al. included the American Psychological Association as a “bright light” (2011:549) on these issues, the APA is in a much different position than the AAA.

At the same time, I’m reminded of an injunction from Andre Gingrich when he insisted that more grant applications incorporate funding for marginalized others. Gingrich recognized how funding is difficult but “one’s own funding shortages are not always a valid reason for opposing research proposals that include funding for partners in postcolonial or other marginalized contexts” (2010:557). Gingrich enjoined: “Anthropologists should not make peace with the status quo” and for anthropologists to “try harder . . . or, in some cases, to start trying period” (2010:557-558).

Similar comments apply to Brodkin et al. Our perceptions of operating in a beleagured and marginalized discipline do not justify denying and arguing against what Brodkin et al. have to say (and I am *not* targeting this comment at John McCreery, who is reading and reacting). We should not make peace with the status quo, must try harder, and in some cases–and this applies very much to me–start trying period.

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I think we need to confront in John McCreery’s comments one of the fundamental reasons that anthropology is and will remain white public space (and John McCreery, I say this with anthropological love; it is a general observation and not an individual attack): profound blindness on the part of most whites to their own racial privilege, and an inability to understand–affectively, phenomenologically, emotionally–what it is like to not be white in the world. After all, there is no getting outside the body one is in: and we need to take this seriously. Embodiment is central, including to the production of ethnographic theory. So this is no small point.

And the centrality of embodiment, of the body as the first and always social location from which anthropologists comprehend the world, is at the root of John McCreery’s comments above. He has no idea how non-white anthropologists inhabit the world, through their bodies, such that he understands the feelings of frustration and marginalization discussed in the Brodkin et al. article, and so he analogizes to another kind of frustration that is NOT in fact *structurally* equivalent.

What does this ‘impossibility of being Other/other than’ mean for anthropology? I am posing this question to foreground the following point: racial subject positions other than one’s own can never be known at something other than a distance, there is no ‘going native’–because this is not how race, as a political technology, is structured. And this means something very uncomfortable–fundamentally–for white anthropologists: they cannot in fact ever be experts on the embodied experience of racial Otherness in white-supremacist social spaces. And given that the core premise of anthropology remains, in many respects, an emic understanding of those we study such that the anthropologist can claim unchallenged authority and expertise, the embodied social fact of racial Otherness poses a substantive challenge to the authority of whites who are unused to having their authority (and racial privilege challenged). 

To be concrete, as a white person in a white supremacist world, how often does one notice the *pattern* of marginalization discussed here: Vanity Fair’s Hollywood Issue Pushes Actresses Of Color Aside (Again!). How does this negatively affect a white person’s life, structurally as well as emotionally? For white anthropologists who do not daily experience this kind of marginalization and devaluation, white public space is just not a lived experience, at the level of embodiment: and so yes, it is easy to say, “Who cares and what’s the big deal?”

And let’s not forget georaciality: whiteness is privileged *globally*, even if not in all the same ways as in the US.

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Thanks for this post Jason, I am glad to see you here on SM!

“Bad feelings and suspicion persist, and for those in adjacent disciplines, anthropology can now always be dismissed with some lines about how it is ‘at war with itself’ and ‘got rid of science.’”

This is a really important point for me, and one that was (as you also mention) brought up in the HAU intro as well. The problem here is that some of the histories or arguments from within anthropology are, at times, used to dismiss almost anything and everything that comes from the discipline. Now, there are plenty of legitimate critiques about the history of anthropology, not to mention plenty of current debates within the field, absolutely. So anthropologists have to find ways to engage with and confront these critiques, while ALSO finding ways to address polemic arguments that seek to dismiss anything and everything outright. Not easy to do, but both tasks are pretty important.

“As the 2012 U.S. election season unfolds, vitriol and vicious denials of any kind of bias or structuring along lines of race, class, and gender will undoubtedly intensify. This is no time for anthropology to turn away from these issues.”

I agree with this completely, especially considering the complex ways in which race, class, and gender get mobilized for political purposes during these election cycles. For example, many politicians still try to downplay the race-based tensions. Class is another prevalent issue that often gets panned by many pundits and politicians, who want to promote the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” myth rather than confront the idea that not everyone here in the US is getting a piece of the pie. It’s amazing, especially after the 2008-2009 crash, that these arguments are still being made, but they are.

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@Jason

Pitch-perfect response. I’m on board.

@DWP

Epic fail.

Now, why did I have these two responses?

First, Jason. To me your response hit just the right tone. You agreed that “insight” wasn’t the right word—disarming my attack. You went on to re-assert the importance of the issue. That a problem is chronic and remains unsolved is no reason to avoid it. Now I get my turn to agree. Then you point out that the article you are defending makes a specific recommendation. If departments are going to preach diversity, they shouldn’t simultaneously be turning diversity programs into new ghettoes. Diversity has to be “our” problem. Pushing it off on “them” is utterly hypocritical. Come to think of it, you are absolutely right.

Seond, DWP. Sounds a lot to me like a familiar conversation between a teenage daughter and her dad.

“Dad, you just don’t understand. You can’t understand. You’re not me!”

“Then why are we having this conversation?”

How culture is embodied is a serious issue, with all sorts of ramifications. But if it did, in fact, support the claim that I can’t understand you, wouldn’t anthropology, conceived as the project of building mutual understanding between groups of people who lead very different lives be a contradiction in terms? And, if that’s true, isn’t this whole conversation a waste of breath?

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@John McCreery, While I thought your response was an epic fail, I showed you enough respect not to say so in my previous comment. But it is interesting that this respect was not reciprocated. And, I am sorry to say, I believe this is one of the hallmarks of white privilege and white entitlement that anthropology will have to address if it is ever going to not be white public space.

It is interesting that you claim that anthropology is supposed to be “conceived as the project of building mutual understanding between groups of people who lead very different lives”, yet you did not use this definition of anthropology in assessing the merits of the Brodkin et al. article. One of the main points of this article was to allow non-white anthropologists to speak frankly about how and why they feel marginalized within the discipline–because of racism and white privilege and white entitlement, and white blindness to all of these things in the ways that the authors made a point of discussing in “Anthropology as White Public Space?”. Instead, you sidestepped this discussion so as to assert that white anthropologists feelings and experiences of non-racial marginalization are in fact the same as the racial marginalization recounted in the article. No, they are not. And this difference is one of the points that the article was trying to drive home.

Whites often really do NOT understand or see their own privilege (especially unless it is pointed out to them by non-whites who can take the same racial privilege for granted), and are not in a position–because they are white–to understand what it feels like NOT to be white in a white-dominated and white-privileging environment. And understanding a concept abstractly and academically is not the same as understanding it because it is one’s embodied experience of the world. So yes, I understand perfectly what the stakes are of making such a claim, including for anthropology as a discipline and for ethnographic theory. And this is the very reason that I linked to Tim Wises’s discussion of his own white privilege, in a previous comment in response to the hackers and hippies post. That Tim Wise post was entirely about embodiment, about an understanding of racially subjectivity that is entirely produced through embodiment. No, when your entire life is experienced through a body that is always seen as the racial norm and the racial ideal and you don’t have to think about all the ways in which your race is daily experienced as privilege, you cannot know–at the level of embodiment–what it is like to experience the world as a racial Other. I hardly see why this is such a hard concept to grasp. I cannot understand what it would be like to have been born blind because I was not born blind. Even if I were to become blind now, I would still not understand what it was like to be produced in the world–as a subject–who had been blind from birth. My entire embodied experience of the world would be different, had I been born blind. And the same is true for race. What do you lose in admitting this? Other than the ability to always claim anthropological expertise and authority, and to have to defer to a person who you see as a subordinate? This is a serious question, not a personal attack.

Let us be honest–especially about why you detest my comments so much–much of what is at stake in white anthropologists having to concede that they may not only have to listen to non-white anthropologists, but actually consider them more authorized to speak, when the latter talk about the experience of not having white privilege is the issue of unchallenged (anthropological) authority: it is the right not just to privilege, but to (continued) racial domination. (and please read Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack for a longer engagement of why I have used the term *domination*). This is why it is so hard for many who have white privilege to allow non-whites to be the experts on what white privilege looks like, because they are outside of it and so are forced to realize what cannot be taken for granted when one is not white: you/they are used not only to not thinking about or daily noticing white privilege, but you/they are also used to constantly being deferred to as authorities/superordinates (by virtue of one’s whiteness alone) and are used to constantly being in a position of racial privilege such that whites are used to being able to dismiss non-whites and their experiences (and here I refer you, again, to Peggy McIntosh’s “Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”).

You are pissed off (your term from a previous comment about the effect my comments have on you) because what I am saying is a fundamental challenge to your authority as a white man, and there really is not a way for me to sugarcoat the point I am making: for you–or any others who do not want to acknowledge the depth of white privilege in producing them in the world as subjects such that they are often blind to the very ways in which their whiteness actually shapes their **daily** experience of the world, because they just don’t have to be in a non-white body to understand how many things they are daily being allowed to take for granted. As such, it is inevitable that you will find it something other than an ‘epic fail’. Sorry.

No, you really CAN’T understand what it is not to be white if you are in a white body, because–literally–from the moment you are born you are treated differently, because of the body you have and the racial status ascribed to it. And there’s just no getting around this. Because race is an ascribed status, not an achieved one (unlike culture, though culture is also embodied). Race is NOT culture, however