Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology

Standard histories of American anthropology have downplayed the preponderance of Jewish intellectuals in the early years of Boasian anthropology and the Jewish identities of later anthropologists. Jewish histories, however, foreground the roles and deeds of Jews. This essay brings together these various discourses for a new generation of American anthropologists, especially those concerned with turning multiculturalist theories into agendas for activism. Although Boas's anthropology was apolitical in terms of theory, in message and purpose it was an antiracist science.     

For An Anthropology Of Ethics And Freedom

There cannot be a developed and sustained anthropology of ethics without there being also an ethnographic and theoretical interest – hitherto largely absent from anthropology – in freedom. A possible way of studying ethics and freedom comparatively and ethnographically is suggested, and illustrated using some brief comments on Jainism.     

Clark Wissler and the Development of Anthropology in the United States

Wissler receives scant notice today although he was a major figure in American anthropology. During the decades when the historical particularism of Franz Boas dominated American cultural anthropology, Wissler's theories provided a nomothetic alternative. His theories are in current use in various guises. The importance of Wissler has been obscured to some extent because he is often misclassified as a Boasian. However, he consciously worked outside of Boas's influence.     

Kinship Between Judith Butler and Anthropology? A Review Essay

This essay critically evaluates Judith Butler's recent writings on kinship. In this work, Butler challenges the universalist assumptions of psychoanalysis, hoping to lay the analytical groundwork for imagining new forms of familial relationship. Butler examines the way that anthropology and psychoanalysis have constructed the incest taboo as necessitating heteronormative forms of kinship. Butler's critique of kinship, which draws on her theories of subjection, belies her own attachment to a vision of social life occupied primarily by normative institutions, in particular the state. I suggest that new forms of kinship must be understood on their own terms, whether or not they are accorded legitimacy in law or accepted by psychoanalysis. Anthropology's ethnographic practice can emendate an account of subjection and recognition that obsessively looks to institutions and norms even as it criticizes them.     

The Passion of Franz Boas

The reputation of Franz Boas as a scientist declined in the decades after his death in 1942, but his reputation as a champion of human rights and an opponent of racism remained intact. More recently, however, some writers have questioned the sincerity, the results, and the political implications of his anthropology and his work against racism and ethnocentrism. Others have been critical of his relations with colleagues and students such as Ella Deloria and Zora Neale Hurston. In this essay I discuss some of these claims and present a more positive view. Franz Boas was passionately and consistently concerned about human rights and individual liberty, freedom of inquiry and speech, equality of opportunity, and the defeat of prejudice and chauvinism. He struggled for a lifetime to advance a science that would serve humanity, and he was as much of a humanitarian in private as he was in public. [Boas, political struggles, human relations]     

Anthropology at Home in Australia

This introductory essay takes ‘anthropology at home’ to refer to the conduct of fieldwork and other kinds of anthropological research in or about communities which Australian anthropologists regard as culturally familiar. In that sense, anthropology at home raises two interrelated questions: 1) ‘What is an appropriate anthropological object?’ and 2) ‘What are the appropriate methods for studying that object?’ I argue that anthropology remains overdetermined by its colonial heritage and that it is still overly concerned with the study of ‘the other’ through long-term fieldwork. My feeling is that we should displace the idea of ‘the other’ in favour of an anthropological object construed in terms of self-other relationships. This not only implies that anthropology at home should cease to appear as an oxymoron, but also suggests that a more comprehensive employment of various study methods should displace long-term fieldwork as metonymic of the discipline.     

Anthropology and the Dialectic of Enlightenment: A Discourse on the Definition and Ideals of a Threatened Discipline

The knowledge practices of social and cultural anthropology can be conceived as undergoing constant methodological reconsideration or reformulation as a consequence of internal critique and of institutional change effected in the larger educational and political environment. Neo‐liberal shifts affecting the institutional context may have influenced a deepening of the crisis in anthropology where the nature of its project has become less certain or has threatened a reconfiguration of such proportion that anthropology may be losing sight of its direction. This essay explores some of the Enlightenment roots of social and cultural anthropology. It is presented as very much an idea that embodies and reflects what Adorno and Horkheimer discussed as the dialectic of Enlightenment. The argument presented is less pessimistic claiming that the distinction of anthropology is in its pursuit of Enlightenment ideals that it has maintained and rehoned as a consequence of its own routine internal critique. The vital implication of the discussion is that anthropology is in a situation of serious threat in largely a post‐Enlightenment world. In such a context, the methodological ideals that emerged as integral to the spirit of anthropology are well worth maintaining rather than abandoning. The ideals that are addressed are conceived to be integral to the importance of anthropology as critique and as a knowledge practice capable of sustaining a profound contribution to the understanding of the potential that is human being.     

African Fractals

This article examines the visual essay as a special verbal/visual mode of expression that is practised both by social scientists and social documentarians, although still on a very limited scale. Examining some of their commonalities and differences sheds light on the particularities of the scientific versus the social documentary approach more generally. To conclude, a photo‐essay from a social documentary photographer is discussed, as it comes close to what could be termed a sociological approach. This borderline application allows elaboration of some of the specifics of the visual essay as a mode of visual anthropology/sociology.     

Rethinking genes

The gene is the central construct of twentieth-century biology and evolution. It is a construct because, like “culture” in anthropology, “gene” is widely used and is central to the discipline's discourse, but eludes rigorous definition. Although the gene is acknowledged as a material entity, its membership criteria are unclear and its boundaries are fuzzy—indeed, more than one can occupy the same space at the same time. The purpose of this essay is to bring to light recent refinements in our conception of the gene and their implications for its use in biological anthropology.     

Seeing Oneself Seeing Oneself: White Nihilism in Ethnography and Theory

This essay dwells on the intersection of three historical contemporaries: (1) American anthropology's ‘reflexive turn’; (2) the rise of Michel Foucault's motif of ‘the gaze’ within anthropology; and (3) the spread of the aesthetics of ‘white nihilism.’ The intersection materializes in the visual trope of self-reflexivity. White nihilism, according to one account, is a self-loathing kind of reflexive gaze, preemptive of criticism and desirous of self-possession. The paper argues that Foucault's idea of the panoptic gaze had a similar effect on anthropological self-reflexivity. The essay contrasts the American reception of Foucault with the case of Francophone anthropology – including ‘the Other Foucault’ – in which self-reflexivity involves self-loss or self-division.     

The Anthropology of Authenticity: Everyman His Own Anthropologist

Anthropology, the contributors to the recent volume Reinventing Anthropology tell us, is suffering from severe hardening of the intellectual arteries. In order for it to be revitalized, they say, the discipline must be de-professionalized and de-institutionalized, made more personal and existential. This involves a rejection of the pose of "objectivity" and "value-free" inquiry and an open admission of the inherently ideological nature of the discipline. In a word, anthropology will have to become politically and morally partisan. This essay explores some of the implications of the recommendations made by the reinventors of anthropology. The stance taken in Reinventing Anthropology, this paper contends, would not only undermine anthropology as a systematic field of inquiry but would also negate whatever "relevance" the discipline might have to the contemporary world.     

Whatever happened to economic anthropology?1

In the 1970s, economic anthropology, along with kinship and ecological anthropology, was regarded as a core discipline in the teaching of anthropology. The centrality of all these subjects was reflected in the debates of the time. For economic anthropology, understanding the articulation of modes of production was the problem; the holy trinity—tribe, peasant, capitalist—provided the key terms of the debate. These terms, and this problem, are history. The discipline of anthropology has been de‐cored over the past 30 years: economic anthropology, kinship and ecological anthropology are not even on the agenda in many universities today (ANU included). This presents us with a paradox because these academic trends are in inverse proportion to the importance of contemporary developments in the economy, the family and ecology as global problems facing humanity. This paradox must be addressed not by arguing for a rehabilitation of the core subjects of the 1970s—those days are long gone—but by taking a critical look at the implicit theories of value that inform anthropological thinking about the economy, the family and ecology today. I shall argue that, along with neoliberalism, ‘agency’ has been the key term of the new paradigm that emerged in the 1970s, that this paradigm is about to become history and that new ways of thinking about the economy will have to emerge as we all become victims of the ‘financialisation’ of Europe, the industrialisation of Asia and the desiccation of Australia.     

Some reflections on anthropological structural Marxism

The primary topic in this discussion is the brief career of anthropological structural Marxism and the possibility of its continued relevance. That issue is framed by a more general one: on what basis are explanatory theories adopted and discarded in anthropology? The discussion of structural Marxism is framed within recent debates about the desirability of socio-cultural anthropology's traditional associations with other sub-fields of anthropology, and it is argued that the isolation of sub-fields is a regressive theoretical move.     

The Predication of the Individual in Anthropological Interactionism

In Memory of Max Gluckman
Theories of strategic interaction have been offered as a cure for the failings of structural functionalism and currently enjoy considerable influence in social anthropology. Employing in illustration Barth's Models of Social Organization, this essay argues that interactionism's focus on the individual, rather than on the group, issues from the presupposition of physicalism and makes it impossible to account for values and socioculture as such. A dialectical approach is urged . [transactional analysis, theory, dialectical approach, the "individual"]     

The Camera and the Anthropologist: Reflections on Photographic Agency

How does our choice of camera impact the way we see our field sites and carry out our work within them? What kinds of seeing does a particular camera enable or foreclose? This essay draws on recent theoretical interventions in new materialism and object-oriented ontology, as well as the author’s last decade of experience producing images in the field, to argue that visual anthropology is a collaborative, co-agentive act between anthropologist and camera. Our cameras matter, we conclude, and it is time for us to begin thinking through how they matter and the kinds of material differences they make.     

Thinking Temporally or Modernizing Anthropology

Recent changes within social and cultural anthropology have made history a key issue, but in this essay I argue that the field has yet to develop the resources that are required to deal with temporality. This point is made through an extended examination of Jean and John Comaroffs work on Christianity and colonialism in southern Africa. Arguably, the Comaroffs read history backward and then present its unfolding as a kind of inexorable logic. In doing so, they homogenize missionary and Tswana "cultures" and attribute agency to abstractions rather than to people acting in particular material contexts. In contrast, I argue for a narrative approach to historical anthropological explanation. The emergent qualities of events—and the variable ways in which capitalism, hegemony, Protestantism, and vernacular modernisms relate—require narrative for explanation, narrative that encompasses within itself the narratives of social actors themselves, [historical anthropology, narrative, the modern, South Africa]     

Reflections on Teaching Social Violence in an Age of Genocide and a Time of War

This article is a reflection by a teacher and a student on "structural-violence pedagogy," the process of teaching and learning about the structures of inequality implicated in various forms of social violence, including those of everyday life, massacre, and genocide. Using a case study of an undergraduate course in anthropology, we explore the complexity and emotionally charged nature of this field, some innovative teaching strategies, and contributions of anthropology to understanding a world marked and marred by war, genocide, racialization, and structural poverty. The teacher shapes a course of study informed by critical pedagogy and theories about violence and power. The student draws on her personal experiences, her intellectual interests, and her yearning for fuller answers to deeper questions as she seeks to reciprocate what is being taught to her. Together, teacher and student explore the promise in the power of teaching for understanding the world as it does exist.     

History of anthropology

The author describes the history of biological anthropology with special reference to the period from 17th to 19th century. The most important anthropological theories and methodological developments of that time as well as their representatives are discussed in detail.     

Beyond Critique: Rethinking Roles for the Anthropology of Mental Health

The current supremacy of the ‘bio-bio-bio’ model within the discipline of psychiatry has progressively marginalized social science approaches to mental health. This situation begs the question, what role is there for the anthropology of mental health? In this essay, I contend that there are three essential roles for the anthropology of mental health in an era of biological psychiatry. These roles are to (i) provide a meaningful critique of practices, beliefs, and movements within current psychiatry; (ii) illuminate the socio-cultural, clinical, and familial context of suffering and healing regarding emotional distress/mental illness; and (iii) act as a catalyst for positive change regarding healing, services and provisions for people with emotional distress/mental illness. My argument is unified by my contention that a credible anthropology of mental health intending to make a societal contribution should offer no opposition without proposition. In other words, any critique must be counter-balanced by the detailing of solutions and proposals for change. This will ensure that the anthropology of mental health continues to contribute critical knowledge to the understanding of mental suffering, distress, and healing. Such social and cultural approaches are becoming especially important given the widespread disenchantment with an increasingly dominant biological psychiatry.