When I first dipped my toe into cultural anthropology in 2018, I felt as if I’d dressed for a party and walked into a funeral. I came face-to-face with a discipline recovering from a colonialist hangover in the middle of a widely publicised scandal involving one of its most prominent academic journals. This new world was strangely familiar to the one I had left behind. Who knew that such things occurred in other disciplines, and other industries, in other countries?
Pandemics reveal those elements of culture we normally turn a blind eye to when sailing in more predictable seas. From homelessness, to unemployment, domestic violence to political corruption. As we swing violently from one outrage to the next it can be difficult to focus on anything. And therein lies the challenge: the ability to reveal the invisible webs of interrelations underpinning the larger forces at play. Anthropology is well placed as a discipline to do this. But as with most change, it starts in the home. Anthropology must examine itself first.
‘… cultural anthropologists were the first to point out that the world does not divide into the pious and the superstitious ... we have, with no little success, sought to keep the world off balance: pulling out rugs, upsetting tea tables, setting off firecrackers. It has been the office of others to reassure; ours to unsettle.’ Clifford Geertz
Trigger asks ‘is there a view that academic anthropology operates or belongs in a “sacred” space that is distinguishable from applied research occupying a less pure, intellectually inferior, and more morally profane domain?’ This question takes us into the bifurcated world of ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ anthropology — a world in which two ways of being in one discipline sit awkwardly at the same tea table.
Pink speaks to this separating out of the ‘pure’ from the ‘applied’ as:
‘… a characteristic preoccupation with the purity of academic boundaries, where “purity” is associated with academic theory, neutrality, and detachment’, thus maiming applied work ‘not only’ “untheoretical”, but also “impure”, even “parasitical” and “polluting” to the discipline.’
Applied anthropologists are theoretically informed. They also create new knowledge. To this end, the tension between the ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ schools of thought may be best described as a folly; a folly that seeks to reinforce an imagined dualism the likes of which most anthropologists would themselves feel compelled to interrogate. To suggest that ‘pure’ anthropologists never venture into what we like to call ‘the real world’, and ‘applied’ types don’t create new knowledge, is to talk nonsense — or possibly to retell a myth that is somehow important to (and revealing of) the culture of anthropology itself. There are, in fact, many anthropologists that straddle both the ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ ways of being — ‘applied’ anthropologists in academia, and ‘pure’ anthropologists in industry. Both hiding in plain sight.
Enter the ‘business anthropologist’. A (not so) new creature who I am told by the purist is ‘selling themselves out’ to the very institutions of power anthropology should be interrogating.’
Adopting ethnographic methods in the consumer research space, two researchers stumbled across an email chain between anthropology students inviting them to participate in the collection of consumer data. The subject line read: ‘selling yourself to the devil for a day’. This seemingly flippant statement demonstrates just how deeply entrenched these beliefs are in academies, from the early stages of indoctrination to formal entry into the professional habitus. It also lies in stark contrast to recent social media posts of anthropologists celebrating their ‘escape’ from academia to work in industry. The grass is greener, it seems — particularly in tech, market research, and UX design.
As seller’s of educational products, Universities are themselves caught in webs of capitalism. The increase in industry research partnerships is evidence of this. An analysis of the positives and negatives of these partnerships is beyond the scope of this post (and there are both positives and negatives). So too is an analysis of the management of Universities. What is clear, however, is that to suggest the academy is somehow immune to neoliberalist ways is to peddle a fiction — a romantic one at that.
As with ‘pure v applied’, so too with ‘desk v field’. The terms ‘desk anthropology’ and ‘cabinet anthropology’ refer to the study of culture through the reading of texts. This is often positioned in contrast to the practical work conducted by researchers in what is termed a ‘natural environment’, or field. Pandian argues that ‘the distinction between field and study is an old one in anthropology’, with King et al. suggesting an enchantment with fieldwork remains a rite of passage into the professional habitus. While the essence of anthropology is steeped in the empirical, arguments in support of what constitute ‘proper’ anthropological method tend to be as unbending as those supporting the division of the ‘pure’ and ‘applied’. This enduring enchantment with fieldwork in faraway lands is all the more puzzling given two of the discipline’s pith hat giants (Lévi-Strauss and Mauss) preferred a field of texts. Evans-Pritchard wrote in his introduction to The Gift:
‘Mauss demonstrated that, given enough well-documented material, he could [study social life from the inside and outside] without leaving his flat in Paris’.
Having just completed research during a series of lockdowns, I can attest to this being possible. But unlike Mauss, in addition to reading texts, I used digital tools to bring ‘the field’ to my small Californian Bungalow in Melbourne’s western suburbs (a flat in Paris sounds so much better).
Pandian writes quite extensively about the power of poetry, art, and fiction in anthropological research, referring to ‘the growth of multi-modal forms of presentation in anthropology, such as films, podcasts, and art installations.’ He stresses however, that texts, as fields in themselves, remain an ‘essential way to record and convey the lessons of the discipline’. One thing I know is that I want more painting, poetry, filmmaking, dancing, and pottery at the research table. I also want more writing like this:
‘‘I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands’ Zora Neale Hurston, Anthropologist, Artist, Filmmaker
As threshold dwellers, ‘masters of the dark arts’ and all things liminal, anthropologists are most at home in unfamiliar places. One such unfamiliar place may well need to be the threshold between the ‘applied’ and the ‘pure’. Metis Scholar, Zoe Todd, spoke to this beautifully when Pandian asked: ‘What would make anthropology more habitable, more hospitable?’:
‘The possibility of it being more collaborative … a space to break down walls, that’s willing to play. We’re in the middle of what could be a very serious ending, the end of what we know as human existence. If there’s ever been a time for us to play, to be fearless, it’s now’.
The road to a breakdown and the road to a breakthrough can look remarkably similar. Now is the perfect time for pulling out rugs, upsetting tea tables, and setting off firecrackers.
Image: Sinitta Leunen