Small post: Anthropology as cultural critique

July 20, 2020

Here is a really nice piece on what anthropology is doing: offering a critique of the "here and now" by looking at the "there and then".  Boas and his generation were engaged in a critique of the metaphysics of race, and white supremacy, which explicitly governed US policy, law, and cultural self-understanding, at least until World War II.  He also plays up the way this generation of anthropological theorists, many of them women, critically assessed the patriarchy and a kind of heteronormativity.  

All of that is right; what the reviewer misses (and maybe the book misses too) is the way that this generation of anthropology was severely criticized by later generations for offering a static and de-historicized understanding of the "other" cultures they employed for critical leverage against their opponents.  This was perhaps necessary, but it ended up trapping them, a bit, in a sepia-toned notion of the past.  (For a critique of this problem, see Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other.) Nowadays, the anthropologists I know have heard Fabian's critique, and are bringing these methods "home" and thinking about the familiar with an ethnographic gaze.  This is the impetus behind the "anthropology of Christianity,” and also the "anthropology of ethics”.  The latter actually seems to tread a bit on ground that philosophers have traditionally taken for their own (I think of Michelle Moody-Adams’s great book of a generation ago, Fieldwork in Familiar Places), and yet there is certainly enough space for different disciplinary approaches (no matter what the philosophers say, as they are typically a crabby bunch).  James Laidlaw, Cheryl Mattingly, Jarrett Zygon,  (There’s a nice overview of the field that I found—it may be behind a paywall, but if you can get it, I recommend it.) 

The former—the “anthropology of Christianity”—is fascinating too; in studies focused on groups in the US as well as communities elsewhere, considered to be “spoiled” by becoming Christian, there is great wisdom here—works by Susan Friend Harding (who coined the phrase “repugnant cultural other” a generation ago, as a way of describing the function of “Fundamentalists” in American academic discourse and imagination), Joel Robbins, Webb Keane, and others; there’s much here.

In any event, some good lit for those who want it.