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!

I enjoy popularisation and I think I’m reasonably good at it. I also think it’s a duty. It’s just so pedagogically stupid to forget how difficult one found these ideas oneself to begin with. And I think it’s dismaying how small a patch there is for public intellectuals – particularly public intellectuals of the left. I value journalistic platforms as a way of extending beyond academia. You’ve got to have a sense of different audiences. I’m a kind of performer manqué – I come from a long line of failed actors!

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.

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.