From ANTH100 lecture 2023/2024

I want to talk a little bit about this idea of social justice and activist type anthropology. There are all kinds of different expressions that people bring to it.

So what is an activist? It’s important to keep in mind that there are many kinds of  activists. There are conservative activists, there are progressive activists, there are religious activists. There is no necessary assumption that activism implies a particular political direction. One could argue that Margaret Mead was an activist anthropologist in her work for the conservative orientation and nationalism of the United States of America when she engaged in wartime anthropology, or post World War II when she engaged in listing and naming communists and socialists who were anthropologists both in the US for the FBI. Margaret Mead was acting as an activist.

I think that probably, even though it’s not as publicly acknowledged, but clearly you can read David Price’s book called Threatening Anthropology. That probably was the defining characteristic of Margaret Mead’s style of anthropology: pro nationalist, pro American, and a kind of extreme cultural relativism.

One of the things to keep in mind about that is that there is this notion that anthropologists or social scientists should in some sense be objective. There is a whole argument around this which, by and large, critiques of the notion of a pure objectivity. The idea is not that research is done inaccurately, but there’s a recognition that researchers have a kind of structural location in the production of ideas that we are not completely free from the influences of the society and the structures of power that exist within our society.

The philosopher of science, T. S. Kuhn, way back in 1962, wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolution where he looked at the way in which paradigms shifted within the natural sciences and how that happened.  He saw it as a process more sociological than scientific in the sense that ideas emerged, people worked on them, and then these things called coalesced into paradigms -a defined body of theory that set the terms of ’normal.’

When the paradigm started to break down, it wasn’t necessarily that there was a natural transition to the new ideas despite the dominant ideology of the philosophy of science which would suggest that you test ideas, and when ideas break down, they’re replaced by the new ideas.

Khunn said, well that’s not the way it works. In fact, people become strong adherents of their paradigm and essentially it’s not the ideas that change, but rather the people in charge of scince are replaced through a kind of ’revolution’ of thought leaders.

Kuhn’s analysis of science was picked up by several social science and humanities writers to take a look at the ways in which knowledge production is implicated in structures of dominant society:  structures of Power.

The literary critic Raymond Williams wrote a book in the late 1970s called Marxism and Literature in which he looks at the way in which literature is implicated and influenced by the societies which produce it. He made a distinction between the ideas of alignment and commitment. The notion here is that all social production is in some way aligned with structures of power. That’s just the natural process, the way things work. And if you can look at the small details, the way funding gets done, the certain types of research projects become favored, others don’t. How people adapt to this, it’s kind of like the water we float within. And so that’s alignment, an unconscious process that people just move in that direction. Williams counterposed that to the notion of commitment, which was a self-conscious alignment. So rather than just being part of the natural process, people make an active commitment.  So when people talk today about doing value free research, they are actually just subconsciously aligned with the structure of powers.

Raymond Williams would say, it’s embedded within a process and so value free researchers are just not recognizing their alignment with the structures of power (or worse, they know of them but deny their existence). It’s rather like the former commissioner of the RCMP, Commissioner Lucky, saying that there is no systemic racism in the RCMP. Then she had to dial that back and say, well, actually, okay, it’s been pointed out. Now I see what you’re talking about. I didn’t understand to begin with. So she would have argued that there was a kind of neutral, value free aspect to policing and that it was individuals who had problems, individuals who violated sort of received rules. This is similar to when earlier in the course I spoke about how Margaret Thatcher said there is no society, only men and women and their families.

The underlying structure of power is one that when you take a look at the empirical data, you see that more indigenous people are incarcerated, face harm or death at the hands of RCMP at a disproportional rate to non indigenous people. That’s a structural pattern. More Indigenous people face extreme material poverty than do non Indigenous people. And then you say, well, how do we get to that? Well, you have the history of colonialism. Expropriation of land has created a context. The whole process creates a structure of power, of alignment, of operations where people then create a cultural belief that normalizes, existing conditions as results of individual actions.

Williams said that a self conscious commitment, a particular act in a direction was required to actually change dominant social powers. Now, let’s be clear. There will be people who are completely happy with the way structures of power are and that they either directly or indirectly benefit from it. And that’s fine. When I say that’s fine, they accept this as being a reasonable outcome. And there’s all kinds of ranges of movement between this. If you think of a spectrum of acceptance and disagreement with the world in which we operate in, that’s to be expected. Anthropology, likes to, in its North Americanist version, express a kind of small l liberal sentiment of value.

There’s no inherent tendency within the discipline that leads it to either progressive or conservative tendencies. There are very clear examples of anthropological practice that are socially conservative, politically conservative, economically conservative, just as there are those that are much are politically progressive, oriented towards social justice, et cetera. So there’s a range of things. And when you take a look at the methodological approach that anthropology uses, it is shared by studies in advertisement, in business management, corporate culture, studies of corporate organizations. There are parallels with tactics of espionage. One of the reasons why the human terrain systems deployed an anthropological approach is that there’s parallels there. So the method itself is also not inherently progressive or politically liberatory. At the end of the day, it comes down to the individual who actually is in those positions that are making some choices or decisions.

Anderson Lazo is an example. You have a chapter from her in the Anthropology for a Small Planet and it is a reflection upon her work as a doctoral student doing her dissertation research in Guatemala and then working after when she’s finished her postdoctorate working around issues around immigration and political action, with faith communities, with Christian churches around the American US border and talking about that experience through examining both those two moments.

As a doctoral student doing her dissertation, she had a strong belief that the work that she wanted to do should have some sort of meaning for and value in the community. She wanted to engage in participatory research. In her chapter, she describes that process where she was, in a sense, led and directed and tutored by the people she worked with where they arrived at what seemed to be useful or meaningful in that context. It’s a very honest and reflective case looking at the idea of trying to think about how to work with people rather than just work on or study on people.

When she got home, she realized this kind of classic sense of separation from that community that she was working with in Guatemala and then being back home in the US. The saw the extent to which her  ability to hold connections was weakened and she could see the displacement of that social relationship. So she’s tried to do something that she felt had meaning. It was an involvement of both her own political desire, technologies and techniques of anthropological collaborative based research, working with communities, with faith communities, as she refers to them, around the issues of immigration and immigrant rights.

As an anthropologist, she is not just being an activist, but she is also then writing about and reflecting upon these kinds of practices.

The one thing that perhaps sets the anthropologist as activists apart is the extent to which we also write about our experiences in a way that we try to at least create a sense of kind of, not an objective separation, but create a sense of self reflection and self assessment of that process. We write in both popular and professional orientations for that.

I ask you to take a look at that, to think about what constitutes the social justice aspect of that kind of research that Anderson Lazo is presenting to us. She’s not arguing for a radical transformation of American society. But she is arguing for transforming elements of the society internally.

I also want to share the paper, in which I talk about my own experience as both as a student and an academic embedding political practice in one’s work.

I was never the type of anthropologist or researcher who was really interested in the exotica or far flung cultures spread around the world. In fact, I saw that as somewhat oppressive and voyeuristic. The idea that people would want to travel over the world just to explore some other place. Let me rephrase that in a positive way. There’s value in understanding other people and other parts of the world. But it seems me if we can’t solve the problems in our own communities, understand the situations and things that need to be fixed, how can we say anything about anybody elseŁ if we can’t, as it were, keep our own backyard clean?

So part of what brought me to anthropology was the kind of excitement with the anthropological approach that focuses on how people make sense of their worlds. Not so much the interpretations that the anthropologist had derived at or the places that people went, as I mentioned, wasn’t driven by going off, say, trekking through the mountaintops of Nepal, for example, or going up into, say, the Alps in the centre of Switzerland or that kind of work. That didn’t drive my interest. My interest is what is it that constitutes meaning for people? How can we help make the world differently? What do I need to know about the way people think and construct meaning that can help us change the world so we have a better place to live in? Essentially, how to understand the conditions within which we live? What’s actually going on? What separates what the real world is from our perceptions and beliefs about what the world is and how can we come to some kind of conclusion and some action in that particular domain? The paper called Reflections on Work and Activism in the University of Excellence.

Let’s note here that the idea of excellence has become a kind of organizing principle of the late capitalist corporate entity known as a university. The paper documents a sequence of political actions that both as a student and faculty member, I was engaged in.

As an undergraduate in 1983, we had a major general strike across British Columbia. That was a struggle against the first wave of neoliberal government legislation. This is a picture from Simon Fraser University’s front page in 1983 in which we shut down the university, which was in fact not a legal picket line. But the student society had a special membership meeting of the membership, where over more than 500 people, students, members of the Simon Fraser Student Society, turned up to vote to go on strike and shut the university down. It was a very interesting moment in time in British Columbia and there’s descriptions of what’s happening, but it was the precursor to the world in which you’re living in now as students, tuition fees, which were felt to be high, were nothing compared to the fees that people are paying today, the possibility of employment was different. I had friends who were working in the retail sector making 12 to $16 an hour. I’ll repeat that in 1983, working in the retail, like Safeway or Save On Foods, for 12 to $16 an hour. I’m not sure that you’ll get that wage if you are a part time temporary worker in a large grocery retail store today. And even if you are making that same dollar value because of the change in real dollars, you will actually be making significantly less because of course, the rents at the time were significantly lower. There has been a lot of economic changes. One of the things that has changed due to neoliberalism involves restricting government interventions, reducing the taxes that individuals have to pay, and defunding of public institutions like post secondary education, hospital systems, public k to twelve education, social assistance programs.

CUNY was a graduate student in New York City were I did my phd. We took over the Graduate Center building by closing the front doors of the building itself. The paper describes a bit of that, and in an article with two of my colleagues, Christine Kovac and Catherine McCaffrey, who were also fellow student activists we say more about that action. Today Kate works at university in New Jersey. Christine’s at a university in Texas. Together we have a paper that looks in more detail at the dynamics behind what led to the CUNY strike and our role at the Graduate Center of CUNY. It was an interesting dynamic because it’s also when we started seeing the political tendency of postmodernism and critical theory with it’s anticlass rhetoric the rise of apolitical and academic philosophy that emphasizes individualism and its multiple variations focusing upon discursive play and the symbolic positioning as opposed to actual political actions. There was a move happening there theoretically, in terms of that moment in time.

The APEC thing was when I got started at UBC as a young faculty member, in the mid 1990s, the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting was held with major world leaders, and a good chunk of this campus was locked down behind a security gate with police snipers on top of the Chan center to watch as patrol. Green College was behind a fence that the students had a choice to either stay in to Green College or leave Green College, but they couldn’t move once they were there. The museum and the President’s Norman Mackenzie house were the president’s residence, were used as the headquarters for the meeting. The Anthropology Department building was in an exclusion no go zone and that led to a whole series of political protests.

There I stood as a faculty member observing it all and trying to get the department to actually take a political stance against the holding of the APEC meeting.  Turned out the department was too embedded in the dominant structures to actually agree to any kind of opposition to holding APEC. MOA had its pond paid for and could never have done it before. They could never flood it before because the ground was too insubstantial and they needed to do some heavy construction to fix it. So the APEC provided funds to fix that. The carpets in the Anthropology Sociology Building were redone and dozens and dozens of students were pepper sprayed and arrested and dragged away.  A number of students activists found themselves being recorded by undercover police agents.

This is the so called University of Excellence. I take this term from a man called Bill Reeding who passed away tragically many years ago in a plane crash in the Florida Everglades. But he was a Canadian academic who wrote a book called The University in Ruins. He described three periods of the university. If you had a kind of earlier university, the Ecclesiastical University, you had the University of Culture, which was tied to the project of the nation state, and then the University of Excellence, which was tied to the neoliberal agenda. And in comparison, to the University of Culture, which would have been the universities of the 1950s, for example, where what a person said was watched very intently and very closely and people were policed and lost their jobs when they spoke out of turn. Today it matters less little what people say. What matters most is how much they say, where they say it. I e. Your rate of productivity. How many grants do you have? How many publications do you have?

Reading goes into this analysis about the way the university becomes an accounting agency of measuring and creating metrics and measures to assess indices and thresholds-where are we in the rankings?. The rating systems become very popular and important because of course it’s tied to the corporate goal of recruiting a clientele and producing a kind of an output of product. So the clientele are you as students and the product are your certificates that you become certified with as you leave out the door. So this large scale enterprise in which reputational value and of ranking becomes more important than what people are saying. Of course, I think we’re entering a period where what people say is starting to become more important, but more important in a peculiar and perplexing way, tied to intersectional and subjective identities in which the ideology of ‘safety and comfort’ take precedence over truth and reality. What we need, for effective scholarship to prosper is a value on respecting material reality, appreciating diversity in perspective, and being willing to be discomforted by hearing view points that challenge one’s own. To step away from that into a safe space where everyone is welcome but only one set of ideas are allowed is not a university – it’s a church.

What are the values that an individual holds? What are the principles that one operates from and how does that work and apply? And so where do you apply that? You can apply it, and I would argue you apply it in the community that you live, the place that you work, and the places that you sort of network and interact with. And you start there and then you build out from. And there’s a whole range of types of activisms

We’ve spoken previously in this course about Penny Reeves Sanday. She also is an activist anthropologist. And when you read the work, you see the thorough, empirical detailed kinds of research she does. So being an activist anthropologist isn’t simply about putting forward one’s claims based upon what they believe. If you’re trying to make a change, you have to have solid empirical evidence that supports the claims that you’re making in order to move things in a particular direction.

Here is an example of activism in methodology – collaborative anthropology. Though, again, like all these kind of things, these methods and approaches can actually go in multiple directions. But this is actually coming from a journal, Collaborative Anthropologies, which is a journal published by the University of Nebraska Press. I’m currently the editor of the journal. It was begun by a man called Eric Lasseter, who has penned some of the key works on collaborative anthropology techniques, methods, approaches, both in terms of the application of it as a research technique and then as a process of writing and producing the outcomes that emerge out of this kind of process. So at the core of most collaborative processes is a desire to link the research capacity that a university researcher or community-based organization might have with a particular community need to try to bring these together so they intersect in a mutually beneficial way. Most collaborative-based anthropology tries to locate itself within community to put the priorities of community first. This is not a dominant tendency within anthropology. It’s a strong minority tend. Most anthropology still is the kind of lone researcher model where we have the kind of trope of the individual explorer that goes off alone to explore.

In the journal we will see a lot of stuff that comes out talking about the linkage between different types of disciplinary approaches working with indigenous communities. One recent paper has as one of the authors the persona of a particular body of water, a river. And then there is a community elder who’s actually speaking with and on behalf of it. It’s a very intriguing dynamic of a kind of collaboration in a different way. Or the piece that involves an artist and ethnographer and the ethnographer is pregnant and wants to have a kind of work of art done to mark her pregnancy. That paper explores the back and forward between the artist and the ethnographer over how to conceptualize or create the work of art to sort of acknowledge the birth of this child.

I think you’ll notice that Anderson Lazo mentions this comment that all research is political in that small ‘p’ sense whether a person claims it or not. How you choose your question represents a kind of politics. By politics here, I don’t mean like political party politics. I’m talking about the kind of contestations over types of resources of identity, of meaning, value, how these struggles shape. And when you continue producing, say, normal science type anthropology that is just another study about another group people,. You’re actually creating and maintaining a kind of normative edifice.

Some applied anthropologists work for the state or large government agencies and some work for the people at the base as opposed to at the top of the system. Applied anthropology is in a sense the technocratic side of anthropology. This is the kind of using anthropology as a tool to fine tune the operation of society. And so here you see the statement, I say about using anthropological approaches to solve contemporary social problems. How do we make sense of our world by studying these problems? And there’s a whole range of things from gender based violence, doctor patient relations, in education looking at gendered outcomes of studies. There’s a whole range of work both looking there and around First Nations rights and title research. This often is oriented toward issues of litigation or negotiations over strength of claim titles within the Canadian context fisheries, wildlife management, consumer studies. There’s also design anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, who we’ve mentioned before you’ve seen her work.

Bruno Moynie’ is a video ethnographer who works in the corporate sector in design anthropology. One of his works was for a large auto manufacturer. He basically tracked along with women who were driving different vehicles produced by this company and studying how they moved within them and operated them. He was commissioned to go and study and film and understand this sort of interaction with moving use of the car. In another case he worked with a major airline that was interested in how it could better work with people who had physical disabilities. So he followed this one man who had no mobility and used a wheelchair and had serious limitations with his physical limitations, with his arms and legs.

That was a kind of anthropology, an ethnographic, film based anthropology, but it also wasn’t just simply walking with one people, but putting them in those wider anthropological contexts. How do we make sure that our cars that we’re marketing toward for women in a particular demographic actually meet the needs and appeal to them? So it’s all about moving commodities, but each of these kind of applied types of work have a particular meaning or purpose.

We have talked about Penny Reeves Sandau before. Here we’re studying gender relations in order to end sexual violence. So her whole goal about this was to say not just to study this, but to end it. And so her work on this and we’ve talked about this, and she’s identified systems and cultural frames and behaviors that would work with this. And she actually works with fraternities in the US. And to set up programs within the fraternities to try to shift the internal culture away from the kind of androcentric binge drinking, hegemonic masculine kind of notion.

Some of the work that’s come out of this, it fits in a long line of kind of work in this domain. But this, again, is a type of applied anthropology. Tad McElroy is a Canadian anthropologist who works with Indigenous communities. This is a paper book about dene or they end up in the Talltan area. And this book emerged out of his doctoral dissertation, which he did at the University of New Mexico. He did a master’s degree at UBC. And I forget where his bachelor’s degree was. It may have been up here as well. And it was linked between linguistic studies and land use. Territoriality. It’s a delightful little book. It’s engaging, it’s a lot of fun. I enjoy it. And it has a kind of nice feel to it. But even before he began his doctoral study, he worked with Indigenous communities, with his partner as a consultant, looking at the documentation of territoriality Indigenous rights, looking at Indigenous place names, mapping and creating these things, something called Traditional Use and Occupancy Studies.

There’s also linked to this area a range of linguistic type anthropological studies on language revitalization, language documentation. And there’s a number of colleagues at UBC like Daisy Rosenblum, who’s a linguist who works with communities on the Upper North Vancouver Island, where the linguistic research which documenting the structure of the language is also then utilized to facilitate and complement and work with community interests and language programs in terms of language teaching for youth, for adults and these processes. A good friend and colleague, Judy Thompson of mine, who’s Taltan who’s been involved in writing about and engaged with language revitalization programs she used to be at UNBC, is currently at University of Victoria in their Faculty of Education. And here she draws from an Indigenous perspective, influenced by participatory ethnographic type work and overlapping with linguistic type approaches, to then support the kind of embedded revitalization and rebirth of language, sort of drawing from the elders who continue to speak the talltan language and bringing out so that the youth can actually master that and move into a kind of linguistic kind of fluency. A lot of this kind of work, the work, like Tad and others do, involves a kind of reflexive effort to understand the attitudes and biases that underpin consulting anthropology projects such as traditional youth study.

This next example, anthropologist Svein Jentov is a Norwegian anthropologist who is a very large figure, reputationally speaking, in maritime anthropology, in which he’s worked with ideas of local ecological knowledge, fisheries policies, small scale fisheries. This book that we’re seeing talks about the cod collapse in Norway that happened about the parallel the time the cod collapse happened over in Newfoundland in the Canadian side.

And he looks at the processes that undergirded it and then how the different responses to the state and the fishing community and what went on. Jentoff has been involved probably close to 40 years now, I think, in doing this work. And so he’s had a long career doing this, but his work has been very applied all the way along, and it’s been focused upon understanding the behaviors that people have engaged in harvesting resources like fisheries. What knowledge do the people who are actually catching the fish have? And how might we utilize the knowledge that people who are harvesting have in terms of creating better resource management programs? And so, again, this isn’t about transforming or changing the world. This is about trying to make the way things are done right now better. And each of these kinds of examples, these three examples of ethnographers that I’ve given in terms of these applied research are all looking at how to make things better within the context that were presented. So it’s a medium range kind of change that’s being worked on in terms of applied research in some jurisdictions, like in the US.

Interestingly enough, the American experience is one of the few that directly and deliberately include anthropological research in the management of fisheries and some of the people. And Jentof is actually quite closely connected with a lot of the applied anthropologists who work for NOAH and NMFS, which are the two major American institutions or agencies that deal with this. So those are the three kind of types of applied anthropology around issues of gender relations, indigenous issues, resource management. I mentioned before issues around education. So there’s studies that look at education. I haven’t talked about any here. There’s a whole journal called the Journal of Anthropology of Education journal. One might suggest that museum studies is potentially an applied field. There’s elements of museum studies that’s applied anthropology elements that are not there’s. Also, it kind of intersects with indigenous research, the applied consulting archeology, which kind of cuts over and into the area of the sociocultural side. There’s a lot of people who are consultants. In British Columbia, you can find as many archeologists as cultural anthropologists doing consulting work for First Nations on traditional rights and title. So that’s only a kind of taste of this kind of work.