The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019
Corresponding Author
Ryan Cecil Jobson
Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 60637 USA
Correspondence Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Ryan Cecil Jobson
Department of Anthropology, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 60637 USA
Correspondence Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorABSTRACT
enThis essay principally meditates on the scholarship published by sociocultural anthropologists in 2019. In 2019, the field of anthropology confronted anthropogenic climate change and authoritarian governance both as objects of scholarly inquiry and as existential threats to the reproduction of the discipline. Taking the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting in San Jose as a point of departure, this essay posits the California wildfires as an immanent challenge to anthropological practice. Pace Mike Davis, the case for letting anthropology burn entails a call to abandon its liberal suppositions. As a discourse of moral perfectibility founded in histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, liberal humanism and its anthropological register of ethnographic sentimentalism proved insufficient to confront the existential threats of climate catastrophe and authoritarian retrenchment in 2019. The case for letting anthropology burn is fortified by efforts to unsettle the conceptual and methodological preoccupations of the discipline in service of political projects of repatriation, repair, and abolition. By abandoning the universal liberal subject as a stable foil for a renewed project of cultural critique, the field of anthropology cannot presume a coherent human subject as its point of departure but must adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon. [sociocultural anthropology, settler colonialism, afterlives of slavery, climate change, the human]
RESUMEN
esEste ensayo reflexiona principalmente sobre la investigación publicada por antropólogos socioculturales en 2019. En 2019, el campo de la antropología confrontó el cambio climático antropogénico, y la gobernanza autoritaria tanto como objetos de investigación académica como amenazas existenciales a la reproducción de la disciplina. Tomando la reunión de la Asociación Americana de Antropología de 2018 en San José, como un punto de partida, este ensayo plantea los incendios forestales de California como un reto inmanente a la práctica antropológica. Contrario a la opinión de Mike Davis, el caso de dejar quemar la antropología implica una llamada a abandonar sus suposiciones liberales. Como un discurso de perfectibilidad moral fundado en historias de colonialismo de poblamiento y esclavitud tradicional, humanismo liberal y su registro antropológico de sentimentalismo etnográfico probó ser insuficiente para confrontar las amenazas existenciales de la catástrofe climática y la fortificación autoritaria en 2019. El caso para dejar que la antropología arda está fortalecido por esfuerzos para desestabilizar las preocupaciones conceptuales y metodológicas de la disciplina en servicio de los proyectos políticos de repatriación, reparación y abolición. Al abandonar el sujeto liberal universal como una envoltura estable para un proyecto renovado de crítica cultural, el campo de la antropología no puede presumir un sujeto humano coherente como su punto de partida, pero debe adoptar un humanismo radical como su horizonte político. [antropología sociocultural, colonialismo de poblamiento, vidas posteriores de la esclavitud, cambio climático, el ser humano]
REFERENCES CITED
- Ahmann, Chloe. 2019. “Waste to Energy: Garbage Prospects and Subjunctive Politics in Late-Industrial Baltimore.” American Ethnologist 46 (3): 328–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12792.
- Alexander, M. Jacqui. 1994. “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas.” Feminist Review 48: 5–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/1395166.
- Allen, Jafari Sinclaire, and Ryan Cecil Jobson. 2016. “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties.” Current Anthropology 57 (2): 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/685502.
- Andaya, Elise. 2019. “‘I'm Building a Wall around My Uterus’: Abortion Politics and the Politics of Othering in Trump's America.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (1): 10–17. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.03.
- Anderson, Mark. 2019. From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
10.1515/9781503607880 Google Scholar
- Anderson, Samuel Mark. 2019. “A Disarmament Program for Witches: The Prospective Politics of Antiwitchcraft, Postwarcraft, and Rebrandcraft in Sierra Leone.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (2): 240–71. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.04.
- Appel, Hannah. 2019. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478004578 Google Scholar
- Baker, Lee D. 1998. From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954. Berkeley: University of California Press.
10.1525/9780520920194 Google Scholar
- Bastani, Aaron. 2017. “ Fully Automated Green Communism.” Novara Media. Accessed November 17, 2019. https://novaramedia.com/2017/11/19/fully-automated-green-communism/.
- Beckett, Greg. 2019. There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Oakland: University of California Press.
10.2307/j.ctvd1c72d Google Scholar
- Bejarano, Carolina Alonso, Lucia López Juárez, Mirian A Mijangos García, and Daniel M. Goldstein. 2019. Decolonizing Ethnography: Undocumented Immigrants and New Directions in Social Science. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.2307/j.ctv11smmv5 Google Scholar
- Boas, Franz. (1969). Race and Democratic Society. New York: Biblio & Tannen.
- Bolles, Lynn. 2013. “Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Intellectual Thought in Anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 21 (1): 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12000.
10.1111/traa.12000 Google Scholar
- Boyer, Dominic. 2019. Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478004394 Google Scholar
- Brodkin, Karen, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. “Anthropology as White Public Space?” American Anthropologist 113 (4): 545–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01368.x.
- Brown, Kate. 2019. “Learning to Read the Great Chernobyl Acceleration: Literacy in the More-than-Human Landscapes.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S198–208. https://doi.org/10.1086/702901.
- Cantero, Lucia E. 2017. “Sociocultural Anthropology in 2016: In Dark Times: Hauntologies and Other Ghosts of Production.” American Anthropologist 119 (2): 308–18. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.12882.
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. https://doi.org/10.1086/596640.
- Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2019. “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category.” Critical Inquiry 46 (1): 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/705298.
- Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2019. Affective Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Pan-Africanist Pushback. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478007388 Google Scholar
- Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 1990. “Goodly Beasts, Beastly Goods: Cattle and Commodities in a South African Context.” American Ethnologist 17 (2): 195–216. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1990.17.2.02a00010.
- Cromer, Risa. 2019. “Jane Doe.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (1): 18–25. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.04.
- Cross, Jamie. 2019. “The Solar Good: Energy Ethics in Poor Markets.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13014.
- D'Amico-Samuels, Deborah. 1997. “ Undoing Fieldwork: Personal, Political, Theoretical and Methodological Implications.” In Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation, edited by Faye V. Harrison, second edition, 68–87. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
- Davis, Dána-Ain. 2019. “Trump, Race, and Reproduction in the Afterlife of Slavery.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (1): 26–33. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.05.
- Davis, Mike. 1999. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage.
- Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression.” Diacritics 25 (2): 9–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/465144.
- Doherty, Jacob. 2019. “Filthy Flourishing: Para-Sites, Animal Infrastructure, and the Waste Frontier in Kampala.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S321–32. https://doi.org/10.1086/702868.
- Dove, Michael R. 2019. “Plants, Politics, and the Imagination over the Past 500 Years in the Indo-Malay Region.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S309–20. https://doi.org/10.1086/702877.
- Dua, Jatin. 2019. Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean. Oakland: University of California Press.
10.2307/j.ctvp2n2sr Google Scholar
- Engelke, Matthew. 2018. How to Think Like an Anthropologist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Escallón, Maria Fernanda. 2019. “Rights, Inequality, and Afro-Descendant Heritage in Brazil.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (3): 359–87. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.3.03.
- Ficek, Rosa E. 2019. “Cattle, Capital, Colonization: Tracking Creatures of the Anthropocene In and Out of Human Projects.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S260–71. https://doi.org/10.1086/702788.
- Folch, Christine. 2019. Hydropolitics: The Itaipu Dam, Sovereignty, and the Engineering of Modern South America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- Franklin, Sarah. 2019. “Nostalgic Nationalism: How a Discourse of Sacrificial Reproduction Helped Fuel Brexit Britain.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (1): 41–52. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.07.
- Franklin, Sarah, and Faye Ginsburg. 2019. “Reproductive Politics in the Age of Trump and Brexit.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (1): 3–9. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.02.
- Garth, Hanna. 2019. “Consumption, Temporality, and Celebration in Contemporary Santiago de Cuba.” American Anthropologist 121 (4): 801–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13270.
- Ghosh, Sahana. 2019. “‘Everything Must Match’: Detection, Deception, and Migrant Illegality in the India–Bangladesh Borderlands.” American Anthropologist 121 (4): 870–83. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13313.
- Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
10.3998/mpub.10257 Google Scholar
- Gordon, Edmund T. 1997. “ Anthropology and Liberation.” In Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation, edited by Faye V. Harrison, second edition, 150–69. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
- Graeber, David. 2015. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House.
- Günay, Onur. 2019. “In War and Peace: Shifting Narratives of Violence in Kurdish Istanbul.” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 554–67. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13244.
- Günel, Gökçe. 2019. Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478002406 Google Scholar
- Hadfield, Michael G., and Donna J. Haraway. 2019. “The Tree Snail Manifesto.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S209–35. https://doi.org/10.1086/703377.
- Harrison, Faye V. (1991) 1997. “ Anthropology as an Agent of Transformation: Introductory Comments and Queries.” In Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation, edited by Faye V. Harrison, second edition, 1–15. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
- Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
- High, Mette M., and Jessica M. Smith. 2019. “Introduction: The Ethical Constitution of Energy Dilemmas.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): S9–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13012.
- Howe, Cymene. 2019. Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478004400 Google Scholar
- Kahn, Jeffrey S. 2019. “Smugglers, Migrants, and Demons.” American Ethnologist 46 (4): 470–81. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12831.
- Kawa, Nicholas C., José A. Clavijo Michelangeli, Jessica L. Clark, Daniel Ginsberg, and Christopher McCarty. 2019. “The Social Network of US Academic Anthropology and Its Inequalities.” American Anthropologist 121 (1): 14–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13158.
- Keck, Frédéric. 2019. “Livestock Revolution and Ghostly Apparitions: South China as a Sentinel Territory for Influenza Pandemics.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S251–59. https://doi.org/10.1086/702857.
- Khan, Naveeda. 2019. “At Play with the Giants: Between the Patchy Anthropocene and Romantic Geology.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S333–41. https://doi.org/10.1086/702756.
- King, Charles. 2019. Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century. New York: Doubleday.
- Kurtović, Larisa. 2019. “Interpellating the State.” American Ethnologist 46 (4): 444–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12838.
- Li, Darryl. 2019. The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
10.1515/9781503610880 Google Scholar
- Liu, Roseann, and Savannah Shange. 2018. “Toward Thick Solidarity: Theorizing Empathy in Social Justice Movements.” Radical History Review 131: 189–98. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-4355341.
- Mains, Daniel. 2019. Under Construction: Technologies of Development in Urban Ethiopia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478007043 Google Scholar
- Masco, Joseph. 2016. “The Crisis in Crisis.” Current Anthropology 58 (S15): S65–76. https://doi.org/10.1086/688695.
- Mazzarella, William. 2019. “The Anthropology of Populism: Beyond the Liberal Settlement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011412.
- Meneley, Anne. 2019. “Walk this Way: Fitbit and Other Kinds of Walking in Palestine.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (1): 130–54. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.11.
- Messeri, Lisa. 2016. Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9780822373919 Google Scholar
- Mintz, Sidney W. 1977. “The So-Called World System: Local Initiative and Local Response.” Dialectical Anthropology 2 (4): 253–70.
- Monterescu, Daniel, and Ariel Handel. 2019. “Liquid Indigeneity.” American Ethnologist 46 (3): 313–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12827.
- Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso.
- Morita, Atsuro, and Wakana Suzuki. 2019. “Being Affected by Sinking Deltas: Changing Landscapes, Resilience, and Complex Adaptive Systems in the Scientific Story of the Anthropocene.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S286–95. https://doi.org/10.1086/702735.
- Morris, Meghan L. 2019. “Speculative Fields: Property in the Shadow of Post-Conflict Colombia.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (4): 580–606. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.4.05.
- Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore. 2017. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Oakland: University of California Press.
10.1525/9780520966376 Google Scholar
- Perfecto, Ivette, M. Estelí Jiménez-Soto, and John Vandermeer. 2019. “Coffee Landscapes Shaping the Anthropocene: Forced Simplification on a Complex Agroecological Landscape.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S236–50. https://doi.org/10.1086/703413.
- Piot, Charles, with Kodjo Nicolas Batema. 2019. The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
- Samet, Robert. 2019a. Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
10.7208/chicago/9780226633879.001.0001 Google Scholar
- Samet, Robert. 2019b. “The Subject of Wrongs: Crime, Populism, and Venezuela's Punitive Turn.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (2): 272–98. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.2.05.
- Sanchez, Shaundel. 2019. “Protecting the Passport: Defending US Borders Built in the United Arab Emirates.” American Anthropologist 121 (1): 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13156.
- Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 2013. “Un modelo para la etnografía de interés público: La conjunción de teoría, práctica, acción y cambio en un mundo globalizado” [A model for public interest ethnography: The conjunction of theory, practice, action, and change in a globalizing world]. Revista de Antropología Social 22: 199–232. https://doi.org/10.5209/rev_RASO.2013.v22.43189.
- Scott, David. 2000. “The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” Small Axe 8: 119–207.
- Seo, Bo Kyeong. 2019. “Populist Becoming: The Red Shirt Movement and Political Affliction in Thailand.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (4): 555–79. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.4.04.
- Shange, Savannah. 2019a. “Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography.” Transforming Anthropology 27 (1): 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12143.
- Shange, Savannah. 2019b. Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478007401 Google Scholar
- Shange, Savannah, and Roseann Liu. 2019. “Solidarity-as-Debt: Fugitive Publics and the Ethics of Multiracial Coalition.” Cultural Anthropology website, July 31. Accessed November 17, 2019. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/solidarity-as-debt-fugitive-publics-and-the-ethics-of-multiracial-coalition.
- Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9780822373452 Google Scholar
- Shea, Christopher. 2014. “Academic Inequality and the Star System.” Chronicle of Higher Education website, April 14. Accessed November 15, 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/article/Academic-Inequalitythe/145843.
- Sheridan, Derek. 2019. “Weak Passports and Bad Behavior:” American Ethnologist 46 (2): 137–49. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12757.
- Smith, Jessica M. 2019. “Boom to Bust, Ashes to (Coal) Dust: The Contested Ethics of Energy Exchanges in a Declining US Coal Market.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 25 (S1): S91–107. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13016.
- Sufrin, Carolyn. 2019. “When the Punishment Is Pregnancy: Carceral Restriction of Abortion in the United States.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (1): 34–40. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.1.06.
- Swanson, Heather Anne. 2019. “An Unexpected Politics of Population: Salmon Counting, Science, and Advocacy in the Columbia River Basin.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S272–85. https://doi.org/10.1086/703392.
- Taylor, Christopher. 2018. Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9780822371748 Google Scholar
- Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2019. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
10.5149/northcarolina/9781469653662.001.0001 Google Scholar
- Thomas, Deborah A. 2019a. “Crisis, Epochal Shifts, and Conceptual Disenchantment.” American Anthropologist 121 (3): 549–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13311.
- Thomas, Deborah A. 2019b. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10.1215/9781478007449 Google Scholar
- Todd, Zoe. 2018. “The Decolonial Turn 2.0: The Reckoning.” Anthro{dendum} website, June 15. Accessed January 30, 2020. https://anthrodendum.org/2018/06/15/the-decolonial-turn-2-0-the-reckoning/.
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1982. “Motion in the System: Coffee, Color, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Saint-Domingue.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 5 (3): 331–88.
- Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
10.1007/978-1-137-04144-9 Google Scholar
- Tsai, Yen-Ling. 2019. “Farming Odd Kin in Patchy Anthropocenes.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S342–53. https://doi.org/10.1086/703414.
- Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Andrew S. Mathews, and Nils Bubandt. 2019. “Patchy Anthropocene: Landscape Structure, Multispecies History, and the Retooling of Anthropology: An Introduction to Supplement 20.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S186–97. https://doi.org/10.1086/703391.
- Tyson, Charlie. 2019. “Apocalypse Chic.” Chronicle of Higher Education website, August 22. Accessed November 16, 2019. https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190823-tyson-fatalism.
- Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2019. “On Models and Examples: Engineers and Bricoleurs in the Anthropocene.” Current Anthropology 60 (S20): S296–308. https://doi.org/10.1086/702787.
- Weichselbraun, Anna. 2019. “Of Broken Seals and Broken Promises: Attributing Intention at the IAEA.” Cultural Anthropology 34 (4): 503–28. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.4.02.
- Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.