By Daniel Lende
How can anthropologists reach a wider audience? Good debate on that question has sprung up in recent weeks at Savage Minds, Culture Matters, and Ethnografix. We’ve also written about this question here. Now it’s time for a synthesis.
Five Ideas for Reaching a Wider Audience
-Write about something specific
-Make our work relevant to readers
-Build appeal
-Move beyond critique
-Provide alternatives and how-to ideas
Write About Something Specific
Sometimes our love of anthropology as a field gets in the way. Most people are interested in specific topics, not the latest theoretical debate. They get engaged by stories and want to learn something concrete or new.
So rather than writing jargon-laden versions of “OMG anthropology is the best ever,” we should write about the topics and stories that capture people’s attention. Once we have their attention, we can also communicate why anthropology matters. We have great material, we just need to use it better.
As Ryan Anderson at Ethnografix writes:
Nobody–or very few people–are going to read books that are ABOUT the discipline of anthropology itself. And it seems to me that many of [our] general audience books are more about anthropology and its UNIQUE perspective and less about an actual subject, event, or issue…
As an analogy, this is like the difference between publishing a book that is ABOUT photography versus publishing a book that is a photographic essay. Huge difference. One will appeal mostly to photographers, and the other might have the possibility to appeal to a much different audience, depending on what it’s about.
To quote Henri Cartier-Bresson:
“Photography is nothing – it’s life that interests me.”
So what does that mean for anthropology? Maybe it means that we need less books about anthropology and more books by anthropologists about the ideas, subjects, events, issues, debates, stories, and experiences they know best.
Anthropologists share that passion with Cartier-Bresson – it is life that interest us. That is our strength. More than any other field, we embrace human life. Rather than foreground our reflexivity or the importance of this theoretical model or that, we should focus on what captures our own attention. Other people outside of anthropology also care about people’s lives, and they want to learn more – focusing on that will build a broader audience.
The proof is in the pudding, the saying goes. And here on Neuroanthropology.net, our most popular posts fit this “about something” model. Co-sleeping, barefoot running, and post-traumatic stress disorder all focus on a specific topic.
Make Our Work Relevant To Readers
Some of the recent online debate has centered on what anthropology can learn from journalism. This is an important topic, particularly for learning how to best communicate with a broad audience. But the simple fact remains – we are not journalists, we are anthropologists.
So if we are going to write about specific things, how do we still convey the richness of anthropology? Chris Kelty over at Savage Minds gives us some insight:
Anthropologists work slowly, but that can be an advantage. It means that a longer term sense of what counts as “relevant” and how to connect current problems that seem new to long-standing structural and cultural transformations is a great way to do exactly what Brian suggests. Just because our work analyzes a time and period that is now outside of the current news-cycle attention span does not mean that it cannot be made relevant to what’s going on today…
Cultural anthropology has a different temporality than journalism, even though they often cover very similar topics. So the art of “making it relevant” is also the art of seeing cultural change and significance at different scales, connecting the just-forgotten with the all-too-present. A lot of what cultural anthropology has to offer is the re-framing of persistently polarized debates. Ours is not a logic of discovery, but one of assertion and reorientation.
A similar ability to illuminate human experience is apparent in recent public anthropology books by biological anthropologists. These authors center their books on specific facets of our lives, covering topics that range from motherhood to genetics and even our very skins. Then they use their research and insights to assert new truths and re-orient the reader from their “common sense” assumptions.
Still, what we do as anthropologists is only one side of the “making it relevant” equation, for it places the focus solely on ourselves while ignoring the reader. As Merry Bruns, a science journalist, commented on Kelty’s piece, “There has to be a reason someone will want to read the story. What interests most people? Stuff that that has relevance for them. We all want to know ‘how does this affect me? My kids? My world? My mortgage?’.”
That question – how does this topic affect the reader? – is a crucial one. Our three popular posts on co-sleeping, barefoot running, and PTSD are immediately relevant to large groups of readers. Parents, runners of all sorts, and veterans and their families want to understand specific aspects of their lives. They want information and insight. We can provide both.
What we cannot do is to continue to rely on the strange and the different as our privileged form of relevance. While we have critiqued our exoticism theoretically and methodologically, we haven’t shifted much in how we appeal to the public. We often use our exotic facts and images to shock students and get a reaction from audiences, as well as to show off our own adventurous spirit. However, as John McCreery commented over at Savage Minds:
The plain fact of the matter is that what used to be shocking, titillating, or fascinating about anthropological observations has largely ceased to be so. Cable TV and the Internet have transformed the once-exotic into the numbingly familiar. For students and members of a lay public now comfortable with current programming like Robot Chicken, there is very little in what anthropologists offer to cause more than a mildly raised eyebrow…
A raised eyebrow doesn’t do much in this extreme media world. As Kelty says, we can escape the escapism by shifting scales and stepping outside present debates using our anthropological eye. This same idea is echoed in McCreery’s later point that “how we approach the topics we choose” makes anthropology different. We focus on specific things, and we build relevance through conveying anthropological understanding to the reader in a way that matters to them.
One good storyline is to insist that human variation is a fundamental human fact, not a glossy picture. Confronting fundamental human difference, that yawning chasm of mis-understanding, is still a basic anthropological mission. My medical anthropology students reacted viscerally to a video of spirit healing earlier in the semester. Showing them that was enough at that point in time. Helping them to understand that has been the work of the rest of the semester.
Storytelling often works in one of two ways – taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary, or taking the extraordinary and making it ordinary. Most of our work as anthropologists focuses on the extraordinary, and that has great appeal on its own. Making it ordinary, or understandable, to people is a way to capture the reader’s ever-present question of, How does this affect me?
Unfortunately the basic anthropological storyline does not embrace a model of taking the extraordinary and making it ordinary, of making it relevant to people. Rather, we take the extraordinary and make it complicated.
Building Appeal
A story has more elements than an interesting topic and a point that the author conveys to the reader. We can build appeal in three others ways: evoking a time and place, creating empathy, and using our personal experience.
In discussing public anthropology, Rex at Savage Minds writes that it’s the ethnography, stupid: “I imagine public anthropology to be well-written descriptions of lifeworlds that are important or interesting to a general audience, and written in such a way to bring them to life and make them seem vivid — in other words, great ethnography.” Bring a time and a place to life through apt descriptions, specific characters, and a sense of engagement will help us capture a wider audience.
Brian McKenna, writing on anthropology and journalism, stakes out a similar position:
One thing is certain. We need a new wave of writers and journalists, unafraid to do the most radical thing imaginable: simply describe reality. Their ranks will largely come from freethinkers, dissenting academics and bored mainstream journalists who rediscover what got them interested in anthropology in the first place, telling the truth.
Third Tone Devil adds another important element – our ability to develop readers’ empathy through evoking a time and place – over at Culture Matters. “Anthropology could reach the ‘public’ better if it sometimes let down its analytical ambitions and foregrounded its evocative/empathic possibilities… [Anthropology] can complicate matters for the ‘general reader’ not just by analytical deconstruction but also by creating unexpected empathies in ways that are more akin to art or fiction.”
We can evoke emotions and empathy in readers, and that is a way to create understanding as much as any idea. Indeed, the best ethnographies often do this, placing us in the struggles and dilemmas of people we do not know but care about through experiencing their life world.
Finally John McCreery emphasizes another important element to how we gain and communicate relevance – personal experience. In his work on Japanese advertising, what makes his approach distinctive is combining anthropology with “personal experience, in my case nearly three decades as an observing participant in the industry.”
Evoking a time and place, creating empathy in readers, and relying on personal experience all provide ways to convey to the reader, How does this affect me? By literally affecting them – giving them an experience of a different place and creating a connection to what is happening there – anthropologists can directly impact their audience. It doesn’t have to all be about mortgages!
Move Beyond Critique
Anthropologists often get caught in the idea that our job is to be critical. That is our way of being relevant, of critiquing others’ simplistic assumptions about the world and coming back to our main message of, “It’s complicated.” For example, when discussing development and anthropology, Maurice Bloch says that the anthropologists’ “role is one of caution. Because we have learned that easy answers don’t work. So we anthropologists will always have a negative role [in public debates] and I think that’s right.”
Jovan Maud highlights the same problem:
One of anthropology’s great strengths — the ability to use rich ethnographic data to speak from the particular and challenge received truths or all-too-neat models and theories — can also be part of the problem. In this mode, anthropological critique can become an endless repetition of the refrain that “things are more complicated than that.”
In other words, one problem with critique is exactly in what Maurice Bloch says. It casts us in a critical or negative role. And the simple fact of the matter is that people get tired of listening to critique. They tune it out, and find ways to belittle the person doing it, oh there’s the anthropologist again, whining that the world is not a better place.
A better rule might be that a little critique goes a long way, particularly if it is incorporated into the work itself rather than added on at the end. Critique is effective if it becomes part of a subject-driven focus and engages something that interests readers, as Greg amply demonstrated in his popular yet critical post on women and sex, What Do Those Enigmatic Women Want?
To sum up, critique can be one role for anthropologists, but it shouldn’t be the privileged role for building relevance. It relies too much on intellectual analysis rather than evoking empathy or addressing how our work actually matters.
Still, if you are going to do a critique, do something more than act like an academic. Have fun with it, as I did in my post on Steven Pinker and the Moral Instinct. Make it memorable, as Greg did in We Hate Memes, Pass It On… Or make it something sustained that reaches beyond the academy, as Max Forte does on a consistent basis over at Zero Anthropology.
New Alternatives and How-To Knowledge Matter to People
Last August I outlined ten ways for anthropologists to make a difference. The first of those was our default option, critique.
We can also put our skills to use in other ways through substantive investigation on behalf of community concerns, testing our ideas for making a difference to see if they actually work, and collaborating with community partners to address problems that have both theoretical and applied dimensions. As an example, complete with video, I can point to my own work using an integrative community-based approach that brings academics, students and community partners together.
Getting out of The Ivory Tower was the common theme to the ten ways to make a difference list. Falling back on critique, especially after-the-fact, simply raises the Ivory Tower higher. Tacking on a paragraph in the conclusion, highlighting our “it’s complicated” message, means we didn’t put in the work to answer the questions that matter to others. Engaging broader audiences than our peers and getting data and ideas about what is actually relevant to the public positions us to do more.
As a recent example, Nancy Scheper-Hughes has learned the value of engaging with other audiences and collaborating with journalists of problems of common interest. This work is anthropologically rich; it is also publicly rich. Once a representative of the critical school, Scheper-Hughes now even works on policy: “This is what I have tried to do for the past decade with the Organs Watch project: to make the global traffic in humans for their organs into a pressing social issue requiring a global, multilateral response,” leading to the Istanbul Declaration on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism.
In other words, Scheper-Hughes extended her academic knowledge into the real world. Like many academics, she is very much into developing knowledge, building our tower of facts and theories and descriptions of lived worlds. And the public does care about general knowledge and understandings things better. They just don’t care as much as we do!
They actually care more about what they can do with knowledge. A good example here is Michael Pollan. His book The Omnivore’s Dilemma is an excellent example of “anthropology” reaching a wide audience. Pollan placed the question of what we eat into the framework of why we eat what we do, drawing on reporting (i.e., ethnography) to trace food from its origins to our dinner table. Pollan’s book also happens to focus on one topic that is relevant to readers and that incorporates personal experience and the evocation of time and place in ways that illustrate his larger critical and theoretical points.
Michael Pollan has a new book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, where he aims to distill cultural wisdom into memorable guidelines to help people eat better. He described why he wrote this book in a recent interview:
I’ve spent 10 years looking at agriculture, food and health. I’ve done it mostly as a reporter with a lot of research and adventures and explorations. At the end of the day people want to know what to do with this information. What’s the practical import of what you’ve learned? It’s the question I always get when I’m speaking to readers…
I wanted to write a book that would reach as many people as possible. It’s a real radical distillation of everything I’ve been working on. It’s really just to help people to act. It’s about daily practice more than theory.
In other words, Pollan realized all his analysis and exposition didn’t answer readers’ basic questions. How does this work matter? And how can I convey what I have learned in the most effective package?
People do want to know about things, and we anthropologists have delivered there. They also want to know how to do things, and what to do with the insights we provide. Answering those questions, especially by drawing on research and on engagement outside academia, will help our work reach a wider audience.
Anthropologists already understand the importance of developing our own alternatives to the dominant discourses. For example, Thomas Hylland Eriksen in his book Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence looks at why meme theory is popular and then challenges anthropologists to develop something better. Similarly, Frederick Barth, as part of an overall examination of public anthropology, points us towards the importance of anthropology of imagining new possibilities.
Joana Breidenbach and Pal Nyiri, in their piece How to Write an Anthropology Book that People Will Read, make the same point:
One reason why intercultural “experts”, as well as books such as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, were so successful was that they were offering very hands-on advice, whereas we as anthropologists had just been able to deconstruct simplistic notions of cultural differences without offering alternative visions that were as clear and accessible.
Reaching That Wider Audience
Five ways we can think about reaching a broader public. Want the playback?
Write about something specific, and highlight the relevance of anthropology while telling a story. Remember that a little critique goes a long way (and a little research with an applied or community-based focus goes even further), and address readers’ desire to draw on anthropological knowledge to do things differently.
Neuroanthropology 
Daniel, to say that I am flattered is an understatement. The one correction I would suggest is where you say, “relying on personal experience.” I would say, “building on personal experience.” My thinking on this matter is influenced by Clifford Geertz, who in the introduction to Islam Observed notes that anthropological insights, while based on intimate understanding of local situations, can only demonstrate their value in larger conversations. Thus, in an unpublished essay entitled, “From Gaijin to Me: An American Self in Japan,” I began by noting that in Japan, I am a gaijin, an outsider. I stressed the “a” because the gaijin I know experience Japan in different ways. A white man with advanced degrees and a then scarce knowledge of computing who arrived in Japan in 1980, just before the bubble went up, experienced Japan in a very different way from, to pick an extreme example, a Thai or Fillipina bar hostess trafficked into Japan to work in the sex industry. Then, I wrote,
As I think about Oprah and Dr. Phil, watch news reporters descending on victims of the latest disasters to ask how this or that feels, or reflect on what every fan of murder mysteries knows, that eye-witness testimony is notoriously inaccurate, I cannot help concluding how even the most heartfelt expressions of moral indignation or rage at injustice are lost in the oceans of venting to which we are all exposed these days.
So, I conclude, we may start with personal experience. “I was there” is a good beginning. But it’s only a place to start building, not something we can rely on.
Wow, great post! My first reaction: There is only one point left: Make anthropologists believe that they have something to say. Many researchers don’t think non-anthropologist might be interested. Then there is the problem that many anthropologists / social scientists I have talked to as journalist are not able to sum up their research in an interesting way. In several interviews I asked “Well, imagine the whole front page of tomorrows newspaper will be yours to present your research. How would you design it?” I thought this would be a good question, but I was wrong. No interesting answers!
Great post, Daniel, and Lorenz makes a really interesting point: for us to reach a broader public, we have to believe we have something to say to a broader public, other than just, as you put it, ‘OMG anthropology is the best ever.’ Obviously, not EVERY anthropologist has to do this, nor will every one of us really have the opportunity; some subjects likely just do not lend themselves to public outreach in a productive way. But some of us who do have material that we think can reach a broader audience, and should, need to work on our public presentation skills and get some polished ways of presenting our work, ways that make a point without leaving us feel dirty, hollow and self-betrayed afterward.
One rule of thumb that I try to live by is: never, ever say something ‘is complicated.’ I think that the public reads this one of several ways: a) I can’t explain it, b) I can’t communicate efficiently but can only share ideas in ‘long format’, c) it’s too complicated for YOU (whomever we’re addressing), or d) I don’t know what to say but it’s safe to say, ‘it’s complicated.’ Everything is freakin’ complicated. Gravity is complicated, but that doesn’t stop Stephen Hawking from taking a crack at it for a lay reader. I heard a story about Victor Turner, that when some young freshly-minted PhD was giving a paper about his or her ethnographic researcher, the presenter insisted that some native term was just too difficult to translate, so he or she wouldn’t attempt to translate it. Apparently Turner (referred to as ‘Vic’ around UVA, where I did my undergrad anthro degree) just said, in a kind of droll, tired tone with his English accent, ‘Oh, please, do try…’
To be honest, one reason I’ve moved into sports research is specifically because of the opportunity to speak to a broader public. I’m not cut out to write a book about the history of our field — I can’t bring myself to sweat the details to a public (my colleagues) who will fastidiously examine them. (You anthropologists are scary — someday I’ll tell my story about a colloquium presenter from Cultural Studies who inadvertently walked into it when he made passing references to the Ghost Dance in a seminar room with at least two anthropologists VERY well read on the subject…)
We probably need to think strategically about where we can intervene, and actually build projects that set out to engage the public. I’m not convinced we can always repurpose materials researched for debates internal to the field. Projects like the Race — Are we so Different? effort by the AAA do this well, but Lorenz is right: many of us haven’t really thought about what we would do if we DID capture the public’s ear.
But thanks, Daniel, for putting this down. I hadn’t really stopped to think too carefully about it of late, and will likely have to reread this to really get everything you’ve shared.
Wow, anthropology blogs seem to be all abuzz over this topic. Thanks for posting this, somehow I missed many of these discussions.
Just a little shameless self-promotion – I also wrote a brief post on writing for a general audience a few weeks back. I’m glad to see that everyone else is thinking about the issue as well.
Another post with a bit of shameless self-promotion. I just started a blog called “Going Native – an anthropologist and a product manager” where my product manager counterpart and I discuss using cultural understanding in the workplace. http://aipmm.com/anthropology/
In my humble opinion, if anthropology is (in a nutshell) the study of what it means to be human, we would be hard-pressed to find a topic/discipline/region/vocation/etc where anthropology *isn’t* relevant. I agree with many of the posts above, the goal is not to talk about anthropology itself but to talk about how we can use that framework to analyze so much of the world around us.
I find it a little amusing that we, the people who study how societies categorize or frame the world, sometimes struggle to find a way to make things relevant to those very people even after we know them so well. It seems sort of like the “forest for the trees” problem.
Brilliant article. The power of the emotionally influential, business-focused story in the beginning of the design process can mean the difference between seeing innovation and the dismissal of our research. The story serves as a launching pad for teams attempting to turn qualitative data into something concrete that can in turn be productized or turned into a viable business model. Bore them or drag them down the path of disciplinary navel gazing and there is almost no chance of affecting change. Selective packaging of field data to exemplify generalized constructs is a standard practice, even though the precise empirical situations in which the field data are developed are perhaps far less coherent or obvious than the concepts they serve to illustrate. Make the research tell the story, not the craft behind it. This is doubly so when addressing the needs of business and design teams with distinct, targeted problems and limited time. Our editorial and stylistic choices make points clear in what might otherwise be murky waters.
A useful comment on popularization from British Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton,
What a great article! I’m so pleased you decided to share it.
Short-term pessimism versus long-term optimism
Abhijit Guha
Reader
Department of Anthropology
Vidyasagar University
Medinipur
West Bengal
e-mail: abhijitguhavu@rediffamil.com
Teaching anthropology for more than two decades in a rural milieu under different kinds of urbanizing influences and the transformations that have occurred within my own psyche regarding the aims and ambitions of anthropology would be the subject matter of this discussion. Let me frankly admit that this is neither a paper nor a critique of Indian anthropology and anthropologists, but a description of my experience as a teacher, researcher activist and a popular writer on anthropological matters centering on Medinipur. One more addition to my anthropological activity: I love to write on anthropology not only in a foreign language, but also in the vernacular . My personhood developed mainly as a teacher in Anthropology, because I consider myself basically as a teacher, I love teaching than any other work, I often do. I even consider my research findings or anybody’s research findings in anthropology as matters which must be disseminated to the students and the general public, because there is always somebody who wants to listen to your findings and have a right to know what you are doing out of taxpayer’s money. Every researcher has a social responsibility and that responsibility should force an anthropologist to write popular articles, books, pamphlets, give popular speeches on the streets, in various public forums and engage in popular debates. My dream teacher of anthropology in India must learn the art to become an influential public personality at the local level, through his/her writings, speeches, debates, protests and fearless disclosure of the findings of anthropological research. Is there any anthropologist, who faintly matches with the kind of personality, I have just depicted? Let us frankly admit the truth. There is hardly any personality in anthropology like the one described above. You may fully disagree with me and I warmly welcome your dissent. Why should an anthropologist be an activist, a writer in the vernacular? True, there are a number of options. One can become a serious and hardworking anthropologist; become an excellent paper writer in Current Anthropology or in the Journal of the Indian Anthropological Society. One can also become very good fieldworker, a real participant observer and an ethnographer. I know there are a good number of budding bright young Indian anthropologists in the A grade colleges, institutes and universities of India, say at Delhi School Economics, Centre for the Studies in Social Sciences, some of them might be studying abroad as well, at Chicago, Cambridge, Berkeley, Oxford, SOAS and other places. And many of these bright fellows might also have been aspiring to become prominent anthropologists working on Indian problems. I am sure they will become what they are aspiring for, because they have the talents, but I am also sure that in the process they will also detach themselves more and more from the Indian soil, its people, vernaculars, and activism and feel less and less about Indian reality. From these talented and ambitious future anthropologists, we will get ‘new directions in Indian Anthropology’ but not ‘Indian Anthropologists’ as we have found in pre-Independence India. In Pre-Independence India, we got Nirmal Kumar Bose and Tarak Chandra Das, who were closest to my ‘Ideal Personality Type’. In the end, let me remind you that this is my description of a personality of an ideal teacher in Anthropology, and I do not want to impose my views on you. Consider my description as your data, interpret with your theoretical tools and conclude. Consider me as one of your ‘informants’, as you call them. This time, a teacher in Anthropology from a rural area named Medinipur which has now become internationally famous for agitations against land acquisition, police atrocities on tribal people and human rights violations – quite difficult topics for participant observation and thick description! The only sign of hope lies in the fact that no foreign anthropologist has yet embarked on these areas to complete their Ph.D. dissertations and publish books by OUP, Cambridge or Chicago for being recommended by the UGC in the model curriculum for Indian Universities. The future still lies with us but I do not know for how long!
Reuniting humanity, disentangling difference
We still have the same kinds of feelings as our ancestors who lived many thousands of years ago: love, hate, rage, despair, endurance, hope, anxiety, forbearance, loyalty, betrayal, and so forth…….That is why old books of science and technology are useless to us except as curiosities or material for histories of science and technology whereas great literature (fiction, poetry) and great art (painting, sculpture) and even great philosophy and ethics survive the ages.
Francis, L. K. Hsu in ‘The Cultural Problem of the Cultural Anthropologist’ American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 81, No. 3 (Sep., 1979).
When doing fieldwork with the Muslim movement Muhammadiya in Indonesia, I was asked by a tribunal, “What is your religion?” I replied, “My religion is anthropology”….
James Peacock in Current Anthropology Volume 51, Supplement 2, October 2010.
The old culture concept is moribund. But in its time, it unified the discipline around a concern with basic questions about the nature of the human species, its biological and socially learned variability, and the proper ways to asses the similarities and differences. Ultimately, a discipline draws its energy from the questions it asks.
Eric Wolf (1980) ‘They Divide and Subdivide, and Call it Anthropology’. New York Times, Sunday, November 30, 1980. (P. E9).
Perpetuating Difference
Why ‘Reunite’? Were we got divided? If we were divided, then were we united earlier? Humanity throughout history were divided into tribes and chiefdoms, castes and classes, males and females, rich and poor, urban and rural, Apollonian and Dionysian, hunters and agriculturists, savage and the civilised, western and oriental, and similar endless binary categories. When the humanity was united? The Psychic Unity of Mankind and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were only attempts by human beings which dreamt of the Unity of Humankind— ideals, not practice. The recent catchword, ‘globalisation’ seems to me another fake word which hides acute differences among the nations and sub-nations within nations. What is truly global under globalisation is the cruelty of exploitation, wars, terrorism, violence, religious fanaticism, corruption, falsification and domination of one human group by another. Anthropologists, however, have loved the idea of the diversity of human groups, and they probably forgot about the demons behind diversity. They did not foresee the dangers of difference and its perpetuation among human beings. The cultural relativist programme of Franz Boas was methodologically attractive to a large number of talented anthropologists but in the long run it backfired! The rich and the powerful never wanted the poor and the weakest stand on equal footing with them, so difference was advantageous to the perpetuation of all kinds of inequality. Anthropologists as Clifford Geertz once called remained ‘Merchants of astonishment’ who rarely challenged the status quo.
Marginality of the Anthropologists
It is under this global and historically circumscribed difference that the call for reunification becomes all the more relevant. After all, we have to search for the universal as Hsu in the epigraph of this piece did in his paper on his teacher’s (Malinowski) follies and limitations as a westerner showing extremely indignant attitude (positive ethnocentrism) towards the Trobianders. The main enemies of humanity are not only ethnocentrisms of various kind but also cultural localisms as well. How then we are to unite, unless we understand and realise our commonness cutting across localities? Can Anthropology generate visions to reunite cultures and societies transcending relativism? This is a difficult question but it turns out more difficult to move beyond relativism at least for the anthropologist, because anthropologists themselves are marginalised persons accountable to two kinds of natives, one the bongos (as Mary Douglas coined) among whom the anthropologists learn how to ask for the drink and the other is the tribe of peer-reviewers/policy makers/general public among whom the anthropologists are taught about how to explain why the bongos are like the bongos, not like others. Ironically, both groups of natives may fail to understand, mistrust and marginalise the poor anthropologist as a useless fellow playing mumbo jumbo of her/his religion. Biological Anthropologists and Prehistorians are less marginalised by their informants than their sociocultural colleagues because their projects are simpler. They measure and count the living, the dead and the pot sherds, with equal accuracy, talk less, or have no chance to talk to their “informants”(you can’t talk to Neanderthals!) and process the data by a statistical package in a computer and then show their tricks to derive some “significance” in order to reject or retain the null hypothesis. The dominant power lobby at the helm of the nation’s affairs composed of economists and political scientists also ignore the Biological Anthropologists because of their small sample size and lack of theoretical generalisations. All grand theories of Biological Anthropology, like their sociocultural peers were given by non-anthropologists! (Darwin, Haeckel, Mendel, Weismann, Fischer, Haldane, Dobzhansky, Hardy and Weinberg, Crow, Wright, Tylor, Frazer, Morgan, Maine, McLennan, Bachofen, Spencer, Marx, Durkheim, Weber). No wonder the joke around Boasian Anthropology ran like this. It was said by one anonymous student of Boas that his teacher believed: “The only valid generalization in Anthropology was the valid generalization that there can be no valid generalization in Anthropology!”
The lessons derived from Prehistory remain marginal in the bigger map drawn by the historians for a shorter period of time since “more important events” occurred in the recent past than in the distant history.
Variation? Well and Good, but we are Humans
Why all these happened? Anthropology began as a nice project backed up by European Renaissance, Colonialism, Industrial Revolution and Darwinism but nearly within a span of two hundred years, the subject lost its initial steam, anthropologists got more and more subdivided (despite Eric Wolf’s clarion call in the famous New York Times article in 1980), became more marginalised by the natives they use as informants and also by the wider public in a world wrought with fanaticism(religious & secular), terrorism(pro and anti establishment), parochialism(not in the sense Mckim Marriot used the term), inequality(within and between nations) and corruption(at the highest and the lowest levels of power structure). How are we to cope with these demons of civilisation? What Anthropology can offer to save the civilisation created by human beings through the making of tools, fire, wheels and agriculture? The question of reuniting humanity is also related with the unity of anthropologists. The reunion, therefore, is not just a ritual. Let it be a rain dance to gather strength for future. Let us recite from Subhas Mukhopadhyay’s classical verse “It is autumn today/ No matter whether the flowers bloom or not.”