Australian Anthropologists and Public Anthropology

In 2004, the authors convened a session entitled ‘Public Anthropology’ at the Australian Anthropology Society's annual conference. The session examined the development of a specific stream of public anthropology in the USA and Britain and its articulation by writers such as Robert Borofsky in the aftermath of the Yanomami controversy and Richard Werbner in the African context. In pursuing this discussion, we identify three key characteristics that distinguish public anthropology: the broader application of ethnography to urgent and political social issues in a way that shows the profoundly relational nature of current crises to historical, political and local events and forces; a focus on this approach as a central aspect of training, particularly at the postgraduate level; and an active and accessible engagement in public discussion and debate. We present a short case study from Skidmore's research on disease, suffering and the health system in Burma to illustrate ways in which a public anthropology approach could represent the current health crisis in Burma in an effective manner. Drawing also on the work of our fellow panellists, we argue for the timeliness of the development of a public anthropology stream in Australia and for the deliberate inclusion of public anthropology in the Australian Anthropology Society's mandate.     

The Texture of Events and the Stuff of Dreams: Jean Rouch at the Heart of Film and Anthropology

Too little known in the English‐speaking world, Jean Rouch died in 2004, leaving a prolific body of work. Influenced by the surrealists, by dance, cinema and music, his ‘shared anthropology’ and filmmaking began when he was an engineer in colonial West Africa during World War II—through friendship with African public works employees and revolt over the working and living conditions of the people forced to labour. Rouch saw his engineering, anthropology and filmmaking as creating with the concrete, ‘building bridges’. He did not renounce the ‘rational’, but wanted to supplement and broaden it with other ways of searching and knowing, always concerned with the relationship of the concrete material to the spiritual, dream and fantasy—working in the imaginative place where art meets science. This article discusses Rouch's ciné‐ethnography, focusing on a few of the many films he made.     

‘Anthropologists Are Talking’: About Anthropology and Post-Apartheid South Africa

In 2010, South Africa hosted the first World Cup in soccer ever to take place on the African continent. Twenty years after the fall of Apartheid, South Africa presents a series of fractured and contradictory images to the outside world. It is, on the one hand, an economic powerhouse in sub-Saharan Africa, but on the other hand a society in which socio-economic inequalities have continued to flourish and increase. What can anthropology tell us about contemporary South Africa? As part of an ongoing series in public anthropology, Professor Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Postdoctoral Fellow Sindre Bangstad sat down for a public conversation with Professors John L. and Jean Comaroff in The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway, on 28 September 2010.     

Dropping Out of Sight: Social Anthropology Encounters Post-modernism

Notwithstanding the relatively self-assured and self-confident public image which social anthropology manages to maintain, there is little doubt that the discipline's encounter with post-modern thought has resulted in a major assessment of long-established methodological procedures. This paper provides a provisional ledger of the nature of that encounter. It is argued that not only does a critical eye need to be turned on some of the post-modernists' current proposals, notably that of polyvocality; the discipline's collective legacy in the analysis of structures of power should not be weakened by the dubious post-modern insistence on the fragmentary character of the contemporary world.     

Missing Links: A Commentary on Ward H. Goodenough's Moving Article "Anthropology in the 20th Century and Beyond"

Ward H. Goodenough's optimistic summary of anthropological knowledge during the 20th century leaves missing links around the inevitable political and processual nature of the discipline. Conflict within the discipline and response to public events also are part of the story. Effects of the Cold War highlight the relations of knowledge and power in anthropological practice. Common humanity remains the focal point of anthropology. [Keywords: U.S. anthropology, 20th century, complexity, world events, reflexivity]     

Loving recognition: a proposal for the practical efficacy of love as a public virtue

The anthropology of love has tended to focus on the romantic, and to explore its universality. In this article I ask a different kind of question of love. How might love be recruited as a moral force and deployed as a public virtue? I conceive of love not solely or principally as a private and domestic virtue but as a public and civil practice: a structuring of social interaction by means of affective appreciation of individual others. I understand love as the human capacity and the human practice of respecting the individuality of other lives. The desirous appreciation and affirmation of another ‘I’ – the loving attention – serves to surmount the customary ‘category‐thinking’ by which the world is normally apprehended: the generalizing, homogenizing, and stereotyping that characterize a culture's symbolic identification of the world. Loving recognition is such that the individuality of another life, its precious integrity and uniqueness, may be socially accommodated.     

‘Anthropologists are Talking’:About Islam,Muslims and Law in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

In contemporary Europe, Islam and Muslims are rightly or wrongly often perceived as the ‘other’. Among the central foci of concern in many Western European countries with a significant presence of Muslims, the law has featured prominently in recent years. What can anthropology tell us about the multiple ways in which European Muslims engage with liberal and secular laws and the state? Perhaps no other contemporary scholar in anthropology has written more extensively about these issues than Professor John R. Bowen. As part of an ongoing series in public anthropology, Professor Bowen engaged in a public conversation with Professor Oddbjørn Leirvik and Postdoctoral Fellow Sindre Bangstad at The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway on 27 September 2011. Due to technical failures, the conversation had to be re-recorded at the Grand Hotel in Oslo on 28 September 2011.     

The Never Ending Dance: Islamism,Kemalism and the Power of Self‐institution in Turkey

Kemalism in Turkey is often presented as an exemplary case of paternalistic and authoritarian modernisation from above, and lauded or condemned for that very reason. Represented in these terms, certain analytic and political binaries are also activated: state versus society; world‐view versus life‐world; universality versus particularity; inauthenticity versus indigeneity; homogeneity versus heterogeneity/resistance. By contrast, in this paper I seek to sidestep these organising categories to focus on Kemalism and Islamism as rival forms of the same social imaginary signification, and not as shorthand for these polarities. Using a number of representative texts, I argue that the extravagance of Islamist resistance in Turkey post‐1980 brings to light the fantastical power of Kemalism itself, exposed as a project of the triumph of the will. This being the case, what has been written in anthropology about acts of ‘self‐institution’? The work of Nigel Rapport and Cornelius Castoriadis emphasises, in different ways, the arbitrariness and gratuity of social creation out of nothing or self‐institution. Pierre Bourdieu's work, on the other hand, is radically contrary to Rapport's in its structuralist elaboration of agency as guided action. My analysis of processes of change within both the Islamist and Republican social movements in Turkey from the early 1990s to the present seeks a temporary rapprochement, at least in this case, between Rapport's methodological individualism and Bourdieu's methodological holism.     

A Mutual Interest? Ethnography in Anthropology and Cultural Studies

Anthropology and cultural studies share a concern with ethnographic method. Cultural studies increasingly uses ethnography in its analyses of popular culture as it seeks to balance earlier preoccupations with text. Where cultural studies diverges from anthropology is in its encompassment within an oppositional paradigm which embeds a political agenda deep in its ethnographic work. This paper uses the area of media to explore the ways in which ethnography has been adopted and developed in cultural studies. Ethnographic focus has shifted interest in media from the text to the reception of media products. At the same time, the oppositional legacy from cultural studies' earliest days has tended to produce rather romanticised findings of a subaltern audience using media products to resist dominant cultural and political structures. It is suggested that anthropology should pay attention to cultural studies use of ethnographic method, first taking seriously the ground of popular culture as a challenge for anthropologists' more extended use of ethnography. But second, we should pay attention to the problem silences in cultural studies' ethnographies—silences like racism in audiences—since these may well have at least part of their basis in the method itself.     

Beyond Malinowski and After Writing Culture: On the Future of Cultural Anthropology and the Predicament of Ethnography

Following out certain implications of the 1980s Writing Culture critique, this paper envisions a future for anthropology that remains focused on innovations in the ethnographic research process. A sense of change in the world, conceived in the 1980s as postmodernity and now widely discussed as globalisation, suggests the need for an alternative paradigm of ethnographic practice, different in significant ways from that which shaped social‐cultural anthropology over the previous eighty years. Based on working through the implications for the norms and forms of both fieldwork and ethnographic writing of the multi‐sited design of many current research projects, this paper outlines such an alternative paradigm. Further, the paper argues that the explicit disciplinary dynamic driving such innovation in ethnography is, in contrast to the so‐called crisis of representation of the 1980s, a more urgent crisis of reception for anthropology.     

Some Aspects of Continuity and Change Among Anthropologists in Australia or‘He‐Who‐Eats‐From‐One‐Dish‐With‐Us‐With‐One‐Spoon’

Since the future of anthropology in Australia is clouded, the address takes a look at where it has been coming from. Rather than a distinctive regional school, the discipline in Australia has been part of anthropology in the UK and the USA. In common with anthropology elsewhere, it lacks a distinctive theoretical stance, but draws on the theory current in the other social sciences. Recognising that what makes anthropology ‘special’ is the field work experience, the address reflects on the history and nature of this practice.     

Origin and Migration of Huntington's Chorea in Canada: Preliminary Report

This preliminary report is part of a fullscale investigation of Huntington''s chorea throughout the world. Data were obtained on some 820 possible cases of Huntington''s chorea in Canada, and they were of sufficient quality in 633 cases to enable pedigrees to be drawn up of 104 families. The origin of 75 of these families was traced outside Canada. It was found that 55 of these kinships originally came from the British Isles, contrary to the prevalent feeling that incriminated United States sources. Only 57 of the 633 cases had moved from their first province of residence at the time of reporting. Thus, large and frequent migrations are not the rule, in the Canadian group, as had been previously reported by other authors.     

‘He who relies on relatives and friends die poor’: class closure and stratagems of civility in peri-urban Kenya

Africanist anthropology has tended to paint social relations on the continent in a positive light, giving the impression that a pro-social relationality will provide the poor with economic assistance in moments of need. This article troubles these accounts by turning to Kenya, where a history of socioeconomic stratification has created a landscape of class closure. Rather than generously give, upwardly mobile families seek to distance themselves from potential requests for material assistance. Meanwhile, they valorize their own hard work as the source of their success, encouraging the poor to follow suit: to pursue economic independence. In this context, the article underscores the work of relation-making as poor families attempt to keep social relationships with wealthy locals open by practising ‘civility’: hiding their anticipation of material support by concealing economic distress whilst outwardly performing their own success. Taking inspiration from F.G. Bailey's classic work on ‘stratagems and spoils’, the article emphasizes the interested, conscious effort of making relations as a means of combating economic exclusion in an unequal world.     

Samoyedic Diary: Early Years of Visual Anthropology in the Soviet Arctic

This article describes Georgii and Ekaterina Prokofiev's expedition to the Bol'shezemel'skie Nenets and their experience in filming documentary chronicles. Their records form a unique part of the visual anthropology of the Samoyedic peoples. From extant archival documents it is assumed that the chronicles were filmed with funding from the cooperation agreement that was signed by Franz Boas and Vladimir Bogoras in New York in 1928. The article offers a reconstruction of Prokofiev's fieldwork experience and his accounts of the early history of collectivization. In this regard the filmed chronicles and a collection of photos taken in the field are treated as a visual conceptualization. Available studies of visual anthropology in the USSR suggest that the documentary chronicles by the Prokofievs, made in 1929–30, are the first cinematic records to be produced by ethnographers in the Soviet Arctic.     

Anthropology in Disneyworld: Rapport,Gardner, and the ‘Discipline‘ of Social Anthropology

This article examines the response by Rapport to the critique made by Gardner of his book Transcendent Individual. Rapport eschews the idea of discipline in relation to anthropology. This is connected to his distaste for any hint of social determinism, and his eulogising of the essay format as the most suitable means of conveying human contrariety. His approach necessarily leads him to embellish his accounts of what the world is like with visions of what it should be like if only everyone adopted his literary and liberal stance. A contrary ‘manifesto’ is here presented: the job of social anthropology is to explain actual historical societies, and one cannot simply appropriate the subject so that it now becomes about a kind of never‐never land. Rapport's approach, far from leading to a glorification of individuality, leads only to a monochrome vision which paints all human beings as reductively ‘aesthetic’, ignoring, and rendering impossible the explanation of all institutionalised forms of belief and practice, not least those brutal forms which, says Rapport, inspire his work.     

Melanesian Kastom and Its Transformations

Editorial Board Note: In 2006, the Discipline Group of Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia hosted a symposium, ‘Anthropology in the West: 1956–2006’, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the then Department of Anthropology by the late Ronald Berndt and his wife, Catherine, whose contributions to anthropology were a major focus of the symposium. Symposium participants also documented contributions made by UWA staff and students from Anthropology and Sociology within and beyond Australian social science. A notable theoretical focus on kastom in the work of Robert Tonkinson, who in 1984 succeeded Professor Berndt in the Departmental Chair, was the topic of Lamont Lindstrom's paper, published here in a fuller, revised and fully refereed version. We intend to publish further papers from the symposium in later issues of Anthropological Forum.

If Ronald and Catherine Berndt are ancestral spirits haunting Anthropology and Sociology at The University of Western Australia some 50 years after the founding of the Department of Anthropology, their student, Bob Tonkinson, still happily with us, is their intellectual descendant and institutional heir. As in the case of the Berndts, issues relating to social change, religion and values, and, in particular, the politics of tradition have loomed large in Tonkinson's career. I trace, in this retrospective essay, the rise to prominence of an anthropology of Melanesian tradition and, more specifically, Tonkinson's contribution, notably his analyses of tradition's ‘symbiotic’ relations with Christianity, its identity functions, its local versus its national significance, and its relations with evolving anthropological theories of culture in a shrinking world. Tonkinson's Vanuatu research, which began among Ambrym Island emigrants, has spanned, over the past forty years or so, many notable transformations: from New Hebrides to Vanuatu; from modernisation theory to world systems and globalisation; and from tradition to kastom.     

L’homme souffrant en quête de sens: du récit de soi à l’identité narrative. Une réflexion à partir de Ricœur

The question of personal identity is central to any reflection on mankind and, therefore, immediately relevant to clinical anthropology. The notion of the continuity of personal identity over time represents Ric?ur’s contribution to the question. Upheaval and continuity in life are integrated into self-narrative, enabling temporal permanence of identity, which generates reflective consciousness and its concomitant ethical dimension. But from this anthropological point of view, the subject doesn’t construct a self and world through narrative. On the contrary, it is narrative elements that construct the subject, allowing the subject to make sense of his or her subjective life in the world. Through this narrative conception of the suffering individual, Ric?ur makes a distinct contribution to discourse in clinical anthropology in positing that suffering is a part of a person’s effort to recount their lives.     

Us and them: From prejudice to racism. An original analysis of race and racism

This paper present the content of the Musée de l'Homme exhibition “Us and them: from prejudice to racism” and provides a detailed explanation of how this content has been presented to the public. In a second section of this paper we explain some of the analysis and concepts, from a biological anthropology perspective, that were the foundation of the exhibition and provides some information about the current situation in France.     

Jean Rouch's ethnographic path

This article considers the multiple influences that have shaped Jean Rouch's ethnographic gaze upon the Songhay people of Niger. Marcel Griaule, Rouch's mentor, undoubtedly influenced his student's ethnographic approach to Songhay. But Rouch was equally influenced, I am convinced, by his direct and unforgettable confrontation with the mysteries of the Songhay world. After a discussion of the methodological and theoretical orientations of the Griaule school, I analyze Rouch's major ethnographic work, La Religion et la magie Songhay, focusing upon how Griaulian epistemology and Songhay realities molded the textual presentation. I then discuss several of Rouch's major films—Les Magiciens de Wanzerbé, The Lion Hunters, Les Maîtres Fous, and Tourou et Bitti, placing them within an ethnographic and epistemological context. This analysis leads to a consideration of Rouch's unrecognized contribution to anthropology.