03/27/11

What is Anthropology?

An Anthropology Student’s Response to Familial Interrogation

by Deanna Ikari

Last weekend I went to my aunt’s birthday party. I don’t often go to family gatherings, and as a consequence of my frequent absences, my family – aunts, uncles, cousins, all older – felt entitled to the standardized interrogation regarding my current and future plans, naturally beginning with what I’m studying in school. I told my relatives that I’m majoring in anthropology.

“What’s anthropology?” was, unsurprisingly, the first response.

“Is it the study of bones?” was the second, equally expected query.

Speaking with fellow anthropology classmates, I have found that my family’s ignorance is not atypical. It is from a desire to alleviate this ignorance, perhaps an anthropological pursuit in itself that this article stems.

Anthropology as defined by American anthropologist Franz Boas, consists of four main subfields: archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and cultural anthropology. Archaeology concerns the material remains of human cultures. Physical anthropology or biological anthropology as it is also known, looks at human evolution and is perhaps the reason for my relative’s question about bones. Linguistics seeks insight into culture by examining language structure, and cultural anthropology, arguably the largest field, takes a holistic view of the myriad of human activities and beliefs subsumed under the heading “culture.”

Cultural anthropology began as a discipline almost exclusively concerned with studying peoples who were then referred to as “primitive” and were largely located in the colonies of European countries. Colonies in Africa, Asia and South Asia and indigenous groups in North America were seen as ideal field sites for participant observation, a characteristic technique of anthropology and the primary means for cultural anthropologists to gather their information. Participant observation involves the anthropologist living among the group being studied. In doing so, he or she participates in activities and observes what is taking place while thinking critically about the interconnections between the various activities.

Many anthropologists have voiced the opinion that by learning about other cultures, we, the anthropological community that was until recently primarily situated in the West, can use our knowledge to critique our own habits and culture. This notion is expressed by Marcus and Fischer in their book, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Perhaps the most famous anthropologist to advocate such practice was Margaret Mead whose work on adolescence in Samoa is entitled Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization. Margaret Mead’s ethnography was published at time when the nature versus nurture debate was a major topic of academics, and Mead’s work placed her firmly in the “nature” camp. In Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead explains how Samoan girls experience adolescence as far less antagonistic than Westerners, and consequently that the turbulence of adolescence was not a biological phenomenon but a cultural one. Her findings influenced Benjamin Spock, a well known paediatrician.

In the past, groups residing in the colonies, such as the Ju/’hoansi in the Kalahari Desert were seen as pristine, untouched by Western civilization. For that reason they were considered to be prime candidates for ethnographic research. Today anthropologists take a very different view. Anthropologists now recognize the interconnections that exist between all cultures, and have become especially keen in exploring the effects that colonialism, the practice that initially facilitated their research. Here anthropology can be interdisciplinary, explicating practices that outsiders such as political scientists or aid agencies might not fully comprehend. Consequently, anthropologists are often seen working in tandem with such policy makers in former colonies such as Africa. For example, in South Africa it has been suggested that the spread of HIV/AIDS is related to the relative lack of agency that women possess to refuse sexual advances. A number of anthropologists have explored this relationship and its historical and cultural qualifiers. Their work demonstrates why a simple solution, such as making condoms more readily available, is not in itself sufficient.

Anthropology began as the study of what were then perceived as strange and primitive peoples, and as some have argued, aided and abetted the implementation of colonialism. Since then, anthropology has broadened its horizons of research, and in doing so has encountered and correlated efforts with other disciplines such as sociology and political science. Whether with application to the anthropologist’s country of origin or that of the people being studied, anthropological insight can be used to knowledgeably determine public policy. When my family asked me what anthropology was, my own response was somewhat less than eloquent; my definition was vague at best. Having taken time to carefully consider what exactly I am studying and to what end, I believe in the future I will be much more prepared to answer the inevitable question, “What is anthropology?”

02/22/11

Innocent Anthropology?

Gerald Sider is well known for his critical commentary on both the failure of anthropological practice and the simultaneous possibility that an anthropological eye has for noting the potential for progressive engagement through critique. The blog, Zero Anthropology, picks up a recent article by Sider and presents a critically supportive reading of Sider’s attack on naive anthropology.

My thanks to the new magazine, AnthroNow, for placing the article by Gerald M. Sider online in its current issue (vol. 1, no. 1, April 2009), titled: “Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent“. This turned out to be quite a valuable and relevant article for me, in helping me to reconfigure what ethnography can mean, and what it might look like, in the shadow of the national security state and the so-called “long war against extremism” (which, of course, exculpates American state extremism). My sole function below is to produce a list of the sections I extracted that strike me in particular as most important to my own work, with occasional commentary. Sider’s words are in block quotes, and all bolding is mine unless otherwise noted.

Read the full post from Zero Anthropology Blog here.

02/12/11

Review: An Island Called Home (2)

A review by Kelsy Timler.  Written for ANTH 300 (Feb. 2011).

Sitting in a small cafe I completely lost track of time, surprising myself as I turned the page to find the bibliography. I had read it all in one sitting. Behar’s journey through history, memory, and identity is engaging, and the entire experience, rather than being complimented by Mayol’s works, seems instead to be triggered by the collection of black and white photographs.

Behar traces her personal connection with Jewish Cuba, a place she left at a young age, and returned to years later, her anthropologically inquisitive mind and personal memories driving her to find those that remained after the mass exodus of Jewish people from Cuba that was ignited by Fidel Castro’s rise to power.

Her dialogue with the Jewish communities residing in Cuba today, as well as the images she provides for us alongside her text have a definitively nostalgic feel to them. She explains in the beginning pages how her faded photographs of her birthplace acted as a replacement for the Cuban soil that she didn’t exactly remember, yet could not forget. Through her travels to and from Cuba she creates an ongoing remembering of that past, and it’s connections with the present day Jewish identity of her motherland.

Flipping through and gazing at the predominantly solemn faces of the Jewish Cubans she interviewed over the course of her studies there, the distant memory of Roland Barthe’s Camera Lucida (1980) began to echo in my mind, his use of the photograph in that book, as well as his explanation of how the photograph, in itself, represents death.

With the click of a shutter the image is captured, arrested in time. Forever static. That moment will never again exist, it is deceased, the still image the only existing evidence that it ever occurred. Memory is subjective, fickle even, and from the death of any given moment springs the evolution of that story, the hyperbolizing and alteration of that past action, continually created, and recreated over time. But the photograph traps that moment, there is no room for the subjective self to grow, it is caged in it’s reality, it’s absoluteness eternalized.

Each photograph Behar offers was captured, like a moth pinned to the entomologist’s board, because of her melancholic longing for a past, and a future which she  left at a young age. I find it eloquently fitting that the sense of loss she felt, the need to discover the lost moments, began in cemeteries as she searched for stories of the buried Jews of Cuba. Were they visited by their kin, or had their families fled, adding themselves into the human diaspora? From the real estate of the dead to the living Jewish communities spread throughout Cuba, Behar seeks to recover something lost, a sense of place and time, while Mayol’s photographs promise the preservation of specific moments of her voyage.

The irony of her use of the photograph to try and create a living connection is not lost on Behar, who calls them “the album of [her] return to a forbidden home.” Her despondent reminiscing of Cuba, the upheaval and loss of the context with which she left, all are cumulative to the sense of emotional drainage Behar’s writings inspire. She even refers to the photographic murder feared by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead. Yet it is with a deep understanding of memory and possession that Behar enters into her photo journey. Her connection with the place and the people allows her to stop time, to take the photograph, the possessed subject, and recreate a dialogue around it. There is no sense of trespassing or using the peoples forever trapped between the covers of her book. She doesn’t enter into homes, leaving nothing behind and stealing away with the still life images, the captive people in Mayol’s negatives. She relates their conversations, their personalities, their family relations and works within the community. She eats with the Jewish people that Mayol photographs, she brings them commodities from the United States, she enters into a contract. This contract is safe from contamination because of how bound she is to the images, for in printing the photographs, she ensnares these moments in time, but they are not merely for the sake of adding another published work beneath her name.  They are, in her words, a memoryscape. Any misuse of the photographic deaths she presents to the world would not only tarnish the black and white faces of those represented, but also her memories. It was with the utmost respect for the power of the still image that she entered this project.