Forget Anthropology

Marcelo Pisarro

Forget Anthropology

Marcelo Pisarro

2025, Anthropologies

Abstract

Anthropologies. Plural. Because to imagine a single anthropology is to misunderstand it entirely.

The modern project of anthropology took shape in the 1860s. A protean field, responsive to the politics of empire and postimperialism and susceptible to the seduction of intellectual fashions, anthropology has adopted a variety of research programs. There are also marked differences between national traditions of anthropology. Yet, for much of the history of the discipline, anthropologists never quite gave up on a great, shared ambition: to identify the common features of the human species and to chart and explain the range of variation in human biology, social organization, language, beliefs, and values. Anthropology is the only academic field that addresses the whole range of human variation, but in practice it developed specialist tracks, the "four fields" as they were often termed-cultural and social anthropology, biological anthropology, "prehistoric" archaeology, and linguistics. In Europe the subdisciplines separated in the early twentieth century, while American anthropology departments tried to sustain a conversation between the four fields but with diminishing success. Each track developed distinctive research programs and turned for inspiration to other disciplines. Biological anthropologists were natural scientists. Social anthropologists were social scientists. Cultural anthropologists felt more at home in the humanities and tended to borrow ideas from philosophy, literary theory, and history. Linguistics and, though less completely, archaeology, became autonomous disciplines. For the most part, specialists in these different fields ignored each other, more or less politely, but in the late twentieth century a biological party and a cultural party engaged in rancorous competition for control of the intellectual agenda. Origins The word "anthropology" has been traced back to the sixteenth century. Ethnologie and Völkerkunde were eighteenth-century German coinages (Vermeulen 2015). These terms were sometimes treated as synonyms, but by the middle of the nineteenth century "anthropology" usually referred to racial studies. Indeed, the definition of human "races" was a foundational move of the emergent field of inquiry. Ethnology was associated rather with studies of Kultur (another eighteenth-century German neologism). Between 1839 and 1869 learned societies dedicated to anthropology or ethnology were established in Paris, London, Berlin, and New York. European museums of natural history developed specialized ethnographic sections. In 1879 the US Congress established the Bureau of Ethnology (later the Bureau of American Ethnology), which assembled The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.

This special issue of Anthropology in Action collects essays arising from the 4th Postgraduate Conference of the Royal Anthropological Institute, held at Brunel University (London) on 3-4 September 2014. The event aimed to explore a variety of perspectives concerning the production and the ownership of anthropological knowledge, including issues of authority and ethical responsibility. We also welcomed reflections on the opening of new interstitial fieldsites in between the structured components of anthropological research. Our interest focused on the dilemmas arising from the definition of the field itself, in the guise of the epistemological delimitation of its boundaries and how these affect the relational world within it. We focused on the co-dependence between these factors and on the influence of increasing interconnectedness through advanced and progressively widespread communication technologies (cf. Kelty 2009). The scholarship on fieldwork that could inspire our work is vast. In drafting our call for paper, however, we were influenced by Edmund Leach's Reith Lectures, A Runaway World (1967), through which he argued the importance of a scientific awareness of 'the evolving system as a whole' against epistemological reductionism (Leach 1967; cf. also Tambiah 2002). As Grimshaw observed, the title carried within itself a 'mixture of optimism and fear', highlighting how Leach's 'interest was in movement, not stasis; […] he articulated the problem as one of disjunction, of reconciling the reality of change with conventional notions and cultural categories which guaranteed order' (1990: 77). Leach 'warned against withdrawal […] masqueraded as scientific objectivity', which translated in a sense of estrangement of the man from the 'world out there' (ibid.: 77-8). Significantly, his last lecture was titled after Forster's poem 'Only Connect ...' (1999), giving Leach the frame to his conclusive invitation to 'live in fragments no longer'. Leach was concerned with the expansion and progressive discontinuity in the experience and production of knowledge, its compartmentalisation and, thus, about the inclination of the discipline towards it. The concern over the dialectics between the general and the particular in the discipline had surfaced in a time of crisis and redefinition of anthropology, and has done so recursively since this time of introspection and reassessment (cf. Appadurai 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; GDAT in Rapport 2009; Wolf 1980). As graduate students recently back from quite diverse fieldwork settings, we felt that the production of anthropological knowledge as a result of interaction as something else altogether compared to its single components-had often been glossed over in its most recent developments. We noted the tendency for ethnography to privilege the 'heroic' anthropologists and their quest for understanding, often framing research through its successes and minimising its failures, and thus making fieldwork appear as a journey from personal ignorance to personal enlightenment and revelation. Quite apart from their fetishisation of 'success' within the fieldwork process, such accounts are inclined to minimise the role of those other than the anthropologist, their understandings and their knowledge production. Interconnectedness, we had begun to realise, had had a considerable impact on how we conducted research and surfaced as an additional dimension of the research process. Our different experiences had led us to rethink several classificatory terms and concepts that were meant to define (in its etymological meaning of reaching completion through the establishment of finis, of boundaries) our experiences: from the mere location of the field, whether 'at home' or far away, to the idea of 'far away' itself-how 'far' is 'away'? In a moment of technological (r)evolution, of migration beyond

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