A Crisis in Anthropology

This week, I have been tasked to wrestle with centuries-long anthropological debates about the way humans have made order out of entropy, the patterns of people and their exceptions, the ways we live comfortably in our distortions, and how ethnography captures the thick of it but never a complete story. I was asked if I could think of different ways to understand all phenomena more holistically, and if so, to please share with the class. What a massive question. I have been a machine who is fed massive amounts of research, critiques, analysis, opinion, case-studies, and raw material who is then charged with stretching apart the gaps and crawling into the crevices, to make a home in the ideas of people who have come before me without getting too comfortable: after all, I am here to synthesize. It is so loud here.

I came to this place because someone believed I could add something valuable to this obstreperous calamity.

Do I believe it myself? If you asked me today, I’d chew on my lip and go quiet. 

There is so much that has been said. As I type this, I sit in a library that has a copy of every book ever published in the United Kingdom and Ireland since 1710. Over 130 miles of shelving carry over ten million books that have been catalogued and laid to rest here. I am haunted by the faraway corners of the world that float above my head. There is no shortage of people who have said something, here. There are thousands who make up this little city, who believe what they have to say is worth saying, now. I pace between aisles for long stretches of the afternoon, alone except for the dim buzz of fluorescent lighting that accompanies my slow steps. I stroke the spines of these conceptual centaurs and wonder who these ideas belong to. Has anyone touched them in the last decade? I realize that I have most definitely passed over someone’s magnum opus and am overcome by the irrational urge to track down each author to say, “This work mattered to you, and it matters to me, too.” Disciplines be damned, we all care about something. 

Anthropologists find something or someone or some moment worth understanding and then do their best to observe, analyze, interpret, and then represent this thing that supposedly links us together or sets us apart. This process of rationalization is not unique to anthropology; every discipline is caught and hung up in an arena of assumptions where all investigation, enquiry, and research is a search for rationalization, for meaning, for some order in the anarchy that churns around us. The difference between disciplines therein lies in our assumptions that we rationalize with, and the context in which the phenomenon arises. Biological assumptions and contexts lead to biological rationalizations of meaning; anthropological assumptions studied in their contexts lead to anthropological rationalizations of meaning.  

A biologist might say that sexual reproduction and a genealogical grid serves as the primary determinant of relatedness, whereas the anthropologist might claim that families are built across culturally & socially situated structures of kinship. What we believe about what is true is based on the way we frame the question. Where the assumption and context collide is where the researcher’s voice rings out above the cacophony. How do we arrive at an answer?  We claim our assumptions and inhabit our contexts – we notice and then represent what we notice. Who has access to the truth?

Every person I’ve spoken with here believes that the disciplinary vehicle they drive, the map they selected, and the route they’ve chosen will get them closest to the coordinates of enlightenment. I am no different. In this sense, we are at odds with each other, in different vehicles using alternate maps. But in another more complete sense, we are all attempting to arrive at the same destination. We want to understand things more completely. How different could we really be?  

I chose anthropology because of its focus on the thick, rich narrative of people, of storytelling, of questioning what we have taken for granted and investigating how things might be better understood instead. Anthropology bridges the gaps in social understanding of things, considering why things fail in certain places and succeed in others, and posits the lived experience of people as a valid form of knowledge production. The patterns of people, and the exceptions of those patterns, form the shape of anthropological arguments. A few reductionist examples: This thing is this way here, but not this way there. That relationship is significant here because of this, but insignificant there – why? Life is structured this way here, can that be said for this place over there?

Anthropologists tend to question what others accept as universal. This is what I love about it, its relentless and undying commitment to complexity; our fierce protection of the notion that knowledge is not neutrally constructed. At our best, anthropologists are creative masterminds who challenge dominant norms, construct alternative explanations for how things could be, and propose intimate avenues forward that reorder the world as we know it. At our worst, anthropologists are surveillance agents of global capitalism, entering places they were not invited, and misrepresenting lived experiences to advance their own (traditionally) Western agenda. I could argue that historical British anthropologists went around the world and investigated what the Global West and its iron-grip on colonization did to everyone and then wrote about it for public fetishization of the Other. However, the discipline has been redefining itself since the late 20th century (although much later than it should have, but I digress) and I consider myself lucky to play a small role in its reclamation of the anthropology of the good and a renewed commitment to decolonization of historicity. 

Insofar as my personal relationship with anthropology, I have been thinking about what this discipline will mean for me in my life, as I search for meaning and truth, in this intellectual nucleus of Cambridge University. 

To this end, I’ve been thinking about self-interest. To what extent am I driven by it? Who is the ‘self’ that governs my interest – and what if my interest is not bounded up it? I’ve also been thinking about personhood – how is my ‘personhood’ made? Who does my body belong to? Who do my choices serve? How do I use my body in the context of my social and emotional embeddedness in the world? Who do I live my life for? More broadly, who do our lives belong to? All of these are existential questions that I’m not even sure how to approach, let alone answer. But I’ll give it a shot in the name of learning more about myself than I knew yesterday.

I find that, at least in the United States and other Western contexts, we often presuppose that an individual craves agency and autonomy because it is within our individual freedom that we become who we are. In this context, personal choice is an inalienable right that we are entitled to, act upon, and seek out as an avenue to our ultimate liberation. However. What does this mean for me? When I think about my life, I have operated out of interest but not necessarily self-interest; my actions have been and continue to be much more relationally bound. My choices are tied up in the people I am surrounded by. I have wants and desires but to pursue them is an entirely different story; I think of myself often as a sister or a daughter or a partner (when I am one) and have to wrestle to bring my ‘I’  to the forefront because the ‘I’ makes choices that hurt other people. Not always intentionally, and never maliciously, but it is a matter of fact that our own interests are not always the interests of the people who love us.

With this in mind, I am relearning how to be a woman who belongs to herself first and foremost, to be full of myself and forsake ‘selflessness’ as the model to which I should strive for to be loved, to be worthy, to be accepted by virtue of living in the avenues of my own silence. Suffering silently will keep me safe but it will not keep me alive, and I am tired of living dead. I am learning to consider the consequences of my own decisions and back myself enough to stand by them anyways - just because there are consequences do not mean it is not the right decision to make. Even when it will let someone down. Especially when it will let someone down. Coming here to Cambridge was one of those decisions, one that put me at the forefront of my own life. Getting here was the first (and arguably, easiest) bit, but now I must continue the pattern. A one-off is not a redefinition – perhaps speaking up in a seminar is one small way I can claim myself as my own. We’ll see.

But I’ll bring this back to anthropology as a discipline, which is where I began and where I think all this existentialism arose this week. A colleague of mine in the department said to me yesterday, “I think I’ve arrived at a place where I feel comfortable with entropy. Why do things have to fall into patterns? Sometimes people are just weird. Can’t we just say that?” At this, I burst into laughter because thank God, somebody also said it. Academics love patterns: love understanding them, and then critiquing them, and measuring ourselves and also others against them. But sometimes people are just weird. All the authors in this massive library, all the researchers, students, and faculty in my department, every intellectual in this city, including me, are seeking to represent something unrepresentable. We are shoving ideas into order and data into conclusions, rationalizing the irrational and identifying the unidentifiable. Who are we? Who are we not? I ask, who are we to say?

Instead of being overwhelmed in the face of the futility of these questions, I’m going to be excited about the impossibility of their answers. What a marvelous adventure this will be!