Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Identity

Anti-Blackness

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:11:24 +0000

Anti Ku Klux Klan protesters marched in Philadelphia on 5 November, 1988, after white supremacist groups agreed to call off a rally that would have been held the same day. Picture by Lori Schaull

Sebastian Jackson

University of Virginia

Initially published 4 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25antiblackness

Abstract:

‘Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it manifests in structural inequalities and in the everyday experiences of communities shaped by the afterlives of slavery.

Anthropology has historically been complicit in producing and legitimising anti-Black ideologies—constructing Blackness as inferior or subhuman while centring a fictive white ideal. Yet, anti-racist anthropologists have long challenged these paradigms, exposing their role in sustaining racial hierarchies. Today, anti-Blackness continues to shape disparities in healthcare, housing, education, incarceration, and cultural representation. At the same time, anthropology’s theories and methods—especially ethnography—offer tools to document, analyse, and challenge anti-Blackness in everyday life. This entry traces the discipline’s entanglement with anti-Blackness, emphasising both its role in reinforcing racial domination and its potential as a critical site for resistance, repair, and reimagining justice.

Introduction

Anti-Blackness is a global structure of domination that positions Blackness as a threat, a problem, or a deficit. It operates through and encompasses a wide range of practices and systems—including violence, exclusion, exploitation, and neglect—that have targeted people of African and Australasian descent across time and place. Though often discussed under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation: it has been foundational to the development of colonial empires, modern capitalism, and liberal democratic institutions (Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2018; Allen and Jobson 2016). Anti-Blackness shapes policing practices, incarceration, and economic deprivation, but also standards of beauty, moral hierarchies, and social relations in everyday life. From the commodification of enslaved people to the surveillance of Black life, anti-Blackness remains central to the organisation of the modern world.

Anthropology has played a contradictory role in relation to anti-Blackness. As a discipline, it has contributed to racial classification, legitimised colonial domination, and excluded Black scholars from its intellectual traditions (Harrison 1992; Mullings 2005). Yet anthropology’s core methods—especially participant observation and ethnographic attention to lived experience—also offer tools for understanding how anti-Black structures are produced, contested, and navigated in everyday life. This entry explores that tension. It traces how anthropology has both reinforced and challenged anti-Black ideas, drawing from Black feminist theory, critical race studies, and decolonial ethnography to highlight how Black communities generate practices of endurance, resistance, care, and worldmaking.

Within white supremacist thought, African and Australasian Blackness has long symbolised radical alterity—a condition imagined as incompatible with civilisation, reason, or beauty (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Smedley 1993). In this racial schema, Black people were often cast as subhuman, or as existing outside the category of the human altogether (Douglass 1854; Fanon 1952; Jung and Vargas 2021; Weheliye 2014; Wilderson 2020). These ideas were not merely ideological—they were embedded in laws, institutions, languages, and cultural norms around the world (Hall 1997; Morgan 2002; Spears 2021).^[1]

Consider, for example, Jim Crow segregation laws in the United States. This body of legislation, introduced between roughly 1877 and 1967 and predominantly across the US South, restricted the access of Black Americans to all major institutions of public life. It disenfranchised Black people politically, limited their economic possibilities, reduced their access to education, and supported a climate of anti-Black terror sustained by state officials and white militias. Anthropologists have argued that, under these laws,‘“Blackness” is the master-symbol of derogation in the society, and the “typical” Negro characteristics of dark skin color and of woolly or kinky hair are considered badges of subordinate status (Davis et al. [1941] 2022, 16). Such forms of anti-Blackness continue to shape institutions, economies, hierarchies, languages, desires, and intimacies in everyday life, even today.

This entry examines anti-Blackness in historical and contemporary perspective, showing how anthropologists and ethnographers have both enabled and challenged the racial orders that sustain white supremacy (Mullings 2005a; Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Pierre 2020). Contemporary anthropologists draw on the Black radical tradition and interdisciplinary literatures on Black ontology (i.e. the study of what it means to exist as a Black person) and Afropessimism (i.e. the study of fundamental structural aspects of society that perpetuate anti-Black racism) to examine how anti-Black violence and stigma organise modern life and death (Fanon 1952; Sexton 2008; Vargas 2018; Wilderson 2020). While the social construction of race has been examined across disciplines, anthropology’s ethnographic methods allow for sustained attention to how anti-Blackness is lived, embodied, and resisted in everyday life.

Slavery and anti-Blackness

Slavery was not always synonymous with Blackness (Patterson 1983; Smedley 1998; West 2002). In antiquity and the medieval period, Blackness was often associated with symbolic or spiritual meaning, rather than biological inferiority. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described Ethiopians as beautiful and noble; the fourteenth century Maghrebi intellectual Ibn Battuta praised the justice of West African Muslims; and medieval Europe venerated Black saints such as the Egyptian St. Maurice and the Black Madonna (Bindman and Gates 2010; Snowden 1970). Even when Blackness carried negative connotations, it was not yet biologically overdetermined and pathologised. The association of Blackness with heritable enslavement developed gradually through European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, as slavery became racialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Smedley 1998; Gates and Curran 2022).

By the nineteenth century, after centuries of institutionalised chattel slavery, i.e. a form of slavery where slaves are considered to be the ‘property’ of their ‘owners’, Blackness had become a symbol of perpetual bondage and degradation. To be Black in most Euro-colonial societies meant being marked by ‘social death’—alienated from kin, honour, history, and futurity (Patterson 1983; Trouillot 1995; Wilderson 2020). Early anthropologists and ethnologists—especially those associated with the ‘American School’, led by Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz—helped naturalise this association by grounding it in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference, transforming a historically contingent condition into an allegedly immutable ‘truth’ (Gould 1981; Painter 2010; Smedley 1993).

In the wake of slavery, Black life continues to be evaluated through a white supremacist gaze—simultaneously feared and exploited, always in relation to its utility for colonial-capitalist accumulation (Du Bois 1903; Robinson 1983; Sharpe 2016). This was the case in the late nineteenth century when recently freed American slaves and their offspring were kept in highly exploitative working conditions, constituting ‘a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges’ (Du Bois 1935, 32). It continued in the twentieth century, when Black Americans served as a capitalist underclass both in the American industrial and service economies, but also in the privatised for-profit prison economy that relies disproportionately on Black labour (Gibson-Light 2023; Oshinsky 1996). And it persists today, as Black lives around the world continue to be considered largely disposable, whether they are Haitian emigrants seeking a better life or disadvantaged Black children in the favelas of Brazil being subjected to police abuse (Joseph and Louis 2022; Smith 2016). Anti-Blackness developed as a system of racial domination shaped by intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity—privileging whiteness, and especially white men, above all (Baldwin and Mead 1971; Mullings 2005a; Shange 2019).

In the post-slavery world, Black bodies were recast as a ‘social problem’, requiring political and scientific intervention (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1898, 1903; Harrison 1992). In the US, this became the so-called ‘negro problem’; in the British Empire, the ‘native problem’. Both framed Black and Indigenous populations as inherently disorderly and unfit for self-rule—justifying ongoing racial domination. Anthropology was complicit in this global racial order. Emerging alongside imperial conquest, it helped classify, study, and govern the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ subject (Baker 1998; Blakey 2010; Smedley 1998; Trouillot 1991). As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, ‘the savage was the alter ego the West constructed for itself… the raison d’être of anthropology’ (1991, 28, 40).

Yet anthropology also became a space for critique and resistance. Black, Indigenous, and other minoritised scholars have used ethnographic tools to expose structures of racial domination and articulate alternative visions for humanity (Mullings 2005a; Harrison et al. 2018). Understanding anti-Blackness through anthropological and historical frameworks is vital to building an anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial anthropology (Bolles 2001; Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001; Perry 2016).

Anti-Blackness and the colonial foundations of anthropology

To understand contemporary expressions of anti-Blackness, we must first trace its genealogy through European ‘Enlightenment’ thought. Central to Enlightenment philosophy was the presumption that Black and Indigenous peoples existed ‘without history’, outside the temporal and moral horizons of Western modernity (Fabian 1983; Fanon 1952; Hegel 1894; Trouillot 1995; West 2002; Wolf 1982). Racial difference was increasingly cast not only in cultural or religious terms but as a biological fact, justifying colonial conquest as a civilising mission. Anthropological knowledge, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became an instrument for racial surveillance and control. Black and Indigenous bodies were rendered as objects of study, classification, and debate, often in the service of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocide. Thus, anthropology helped to uphold the normative distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ people and situated it along the colour line. In its studies of Black and Indigenous people, anthropology all too often ignored white rule and allowed anthropologists to serve as diplomats and public relations experts for white rule (Willis 1972; see also Baker 1998; Anderson 2019).

The modern scientific racism to which early anthropology contributed emerged alongside Enlightenment rationalism. Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (10th ed., 1758) classified humans into continentally-bounded ‘varieties’. He described Africans as ‘Black, phlegmatic, lazy… sly, sluggish, neglectful’, and contrasted them with idealised Europeans, ‘governed by rites’. Relying on dubious colonial travel accounts, Linnaeus also claimed African women had ‘elongated labia’ and ‘breasts lactating profusely’.^[2]These dehumanising descriptors shaped later anatomical and racial science, grounding anti-Blackness in the language of empirical objectivity and universal classification (West 2002; Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

European theories of Black inferiority found fertile ground in the antebellum (1815-1861) United States. Thomas Jefferson—Founding Father, slaveholder, and third US president—substantially shaped American racial thought. In Notes on the state of Virginia (1781), he notoriously speculated: ‘I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks… are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind’ (222). This conjecture framed racial hierarchy as reasoned observation rather than prejudice, lending intellectual legitimacy to chattel slavery and segregation (Walker 1830; Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014).^[3] Jefferson’s views were not merely abstract. He enslaved over 700 people and exploited the reproductive capacities of African-descended women. His long-term relationship with Sally Hemings—an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry—produced several children, all of whom inherited enslaved status through their mother (Cohen 1969; Woodson 1918; Finkelman 2014).^[4] This dynamic of sexual domination, denial of paternity, and commodification of Black life exemplified the intimate operations of anti-Blackness at the heart of American democracy.

Jefferson’s influence extended beyond the Monticello plantation in Virginia, which he owned, and even beyond the plantation system that dominated the economic development of the American South from the seventeenth until the twentieth century. As president, he severed trade relations with the newly independent Black republic of Haiti, fearing its revolutionary example would inspire slave uprisings across the Americas, and especially in the US South (James 1938; Scott 2004, 2014; Trouillot 1995). His statesmanship and racist writings laid the groundwork for the so-called ‘American School of Anthropology’ which codified pseudo-scientific racial theories and enshrined anti-Blackness in American science, law, and education (Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014, 198).

While Jefferson laid the ideological foundation, the ‘American School’ formalised these ideas. Central was ‘polygenism’—the theory that racial groups like ‘Negroes’ and ‘Caucasians’ were biologically distinct species with immutable traits (Gould 1981; Keel 2013; Painter 2010). Polygenists claimed that Black people were naturally inferior and biologically suited for subjugation. Samuel G. Morton, often called the ‘father’ of American physical anthropology, used manipulated skull measurements to ‘prove’ that Africans ranked lowest in the human hierarchy (Stocking 1968; Smedley 1993; Blakey 2020). These claims helped justify slavery and segregation as the natural order (Morton 1839; Ralph 2012).

Closely linked was the theory of ‘hybrid sterility’, which pathologised racial mixing, and popularised the belief that ‘mulattoes’ were biologically unfit hybrids (Nott 1843). For example, an 1843 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, claimed: ‘[T]he mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between whites and blacks… they are less capable of endurance and are shorter lived… the women are bad breeders and bad nurses… the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific’ (Nott 1843, 29–30). From such claims, it was concluded that interracial reproduction should be prohibited. These arguments later informed eugenics (i.e. ideas about improving the biological makeup of humans through selective breeding) and anti-miscegenation laws, embedding anti-Blackness in US legal and scientific infrastructure (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Nobles 2000; Pascoe 2010).

Yet these theories were never uncontested. Black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass (1854; 1881) and Anténor Firmin (1885) repudiated scientific racism and established and defended the rights of Black people. Rather than accept white supremacist race science, they argued that differences among racialised groups stemmed from historical and environmental conditions—not biology (Allen and Jobson 2016; Drake and Baber 1990; Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Similarly, theories of polygenism and hybrid sterility were attacked as fallacious by noted scholars who condemned white anthropologists for being ‘blinded by passion’ and relying on false ‘audacious paradoxes’ (Firmin 1885, 68). Against the myth of hybrid sterility, Firmin wrote: ‘The fecundity of mulattoes is a fact so well known… that one can only be surprised that a scientist… can question it’ (68). Despite these rebuttals, obsession with Black bodies and racial mixture continued to dominate anthropological debates into the twentieth century (Anderson 2019; Baker 2020). Nevertheless, the early vindicationists, as they were known, laid foundations for an anti-racist and decolonial anthropology—one that exposed race science as spurious ideology serving domination.

Although polygenism lost credibility by the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionary theories did not end scientific racism. Racial hierarchies were rearticulated through social Darwinism and eugenics (Stocking 1968; Gould 1981; Dennis 1995). Darwin’s theory of common ancestry debunked polygenism but recast human difference as evolutionary hierarchy. In The descent of man, Charles Darwin wrote:

At some future period… the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races… The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider… between man in a more civilized state… and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aboriginal] and the gorilla (1871, 156).

Such comparisons gave scientific credence to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous tropes, framing colonial violence as evolutionary progress. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer used these ideas to justify imperialism and capitalist inequality as inevitable (Dennis 1995; Magubane 2003). The rise of eugenics, a term and theory coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, reinforced this logic. Eugenicists envisioned humanity as a grand evolutionary tree, with elite Europeans at the top and Black and Indigenous peoples as stunted lower branches. These arboreal metaphors ‘naturalised’ racial hierarchies in society (Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

In Europe, anthropologists also illustrated ‘morphological’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘intellectual’ trees to represent and legitimise these imagined racial hierarchies (Mantegazza 1881; see Fig 1). In these hierarchies, ‘Hottentots’, ‘Bushmen’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Caffres’, ‘Papuans’, ‘Australians’, and ‘Negritos’ are placed at the bottom, and ‘Aryans’—white Europeans—at the top (Taylor and Marino 2019, 116–7). In short, social Darwinism replaced polygenism but not racism—it simply gave anti-Blackness new scientific language.

racist_tree_diagram.png

(Fig 1). Paulo Mantegazza’s “Morphological, aesthetic, and intellectual hierarchies of the human race.” (1881).

The Black body

Building on the racial typologies of polygenism and the biological determinism of social Darwinism, physical anthropologists and early social scientists increasingly turned their attention to the Black body as an object of empirical study and political concern. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Black body became a central site through which scientific racism was naturalised and institutionalised. Rather than treating race solely as a taxonomic abstraction, anthropologists and state officials began to treat the bodies of Black people as repositories of deviance—biological, moral, and civilisational (Baker 1998). These discourses were not merely academic; they helped legitimise the structural realities of post-emancipation Black life, including structural poverty, segregation, political exclusion, and the ever-present threat of rebellion. Within this context, the Black body was framed not just as different, but as existentially dangerous—a problem to be studied, managed, and contained.

In post-Emancipation America (1865–1955), this racialised scrutiny took the form of what policymakers and social scientists called the ‘negro problem’ (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1903; 1935). The presence of millions of recently emancipated people in a supposedly democratic society raised an urgent socio-political question: What to do with the Blacks? Integration? Segregation? Expulsion to Africa? In response, segregationist laws known as ‘Black codes’, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism reinforced racial domination through legal, social, and extra-legal means—perpetuating exclusion from education, labour, property, and political life (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Du Bois 1935; Woodward 1955).

The so-called ‘negro problem’ was thus a cultural trope shaped by deep-rooted ‘negrophobia’—the psychic and social condition in which Black bodies become projections of white fear, guilt, and fantasy, and the enduring legacies of slavery and settler colonialism (Butler 1993; Du Bois 1903; Fanon 1952; Ralph and Chance 2014). Black bodies became overdetermined by contradictory myths and stereotypes: biologically inferior yet physically threatening, hypersexual yet degenerate, human yet animal. They were objectified as specimens for medical and anthropological study and symbolically constructed as social threats to white civility and national order. As Frantz Fanon (1952) and Winthrop Jordan (1968) note, Black people were positioned somewhere between human and beast—feared, surveilled, and exploited.

American popular and scientific literatures alike portrayed Black men as ‘savages’ with uncontrollable lust for white women (Baker 1998; Fanon 1952). The myth of the Black rapist served to justify lynchings and other extrajudicial forms of racial terror (Wells 1909; Davis 1981). The Black male body was pathologised as criminal, immoral, and uncivilised (Muhammad 2010). These narratives were reinforced by legal mechanisms such as ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws, which limited Black people’s rights to get married, the ‘one-drop rule’, which asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor should also be racialised as Black, and the criminalisation of poverty through vagrancy and loitering statutes—all of which enabled the de facto re-enslavement of Black people through the convict leasing system, through which prisons could lease the forced labour of mostly Black prisoners to wealthy individuals and corporations (Blackmon 2008; Oshinsky 1996).

The trope of the Black criminal normalised systemic anti-Blackness and legitimated mass incarceration as a form of racial governance (Jordan 2014; Muhammad 2010). Structural racism, predicated on anti-Blackness, displaced responsibility for Black suffering onto Black people themselves. Structural racism refers to the ways that institutions, policies, and social arrangements collectively produce and reproduce racial inequality. Eugenicists, for example, used demographic data on Black mortality to predict the supposed ‘extinction of the Negro’ by the twentieth century (Brandt 1978; Ralph 2012; Muhammad 2010). These morbid fantasies ignored the systemic conditions of racialised death and pathologised Black existence that persist until today (Dennis 1995; Mbembe 2019). For example, young Black and Latinx men in East Harlem, confronting systemic unemployment, are made to navigate illicit economies —such as the street-level drug trade and other informal survival strategies that emerge in response to exclusion from the formal labor market—while their bodies are surveilled, punished, or absorbed into carceral systems designed for profit maximization (Bourgois 2003).

The commodification of Black bodies has long underwritten the global capitalist economy, from the extraction of labour under slavery to contemporary racialised markets in entertainment, sports, surveillance, and incarceration. Numerous ethnographic studies have examined how Black bodies are treated as fungible assets—valued for their productivity, aesthetic, or capacity for violence, yet systematically devalued as persons. In the US, for instance, Black bodies are hyper-visible in popular media yet constrained by controlling images that reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies (Gray 1995; Jackson Jr. 2005). In popular culture, recurring stereotypes such as the ‘mammy’—the loyal, self-sacrificing domestic servant—and the ‘welfare queen’—depicted as lazy, hyper-fertile, and parasitic—serve to naturalise Black women's social subordination and rationalise structural inequality through familiar visual tropes (Collins 2000).

Even in the American healthcare system, Black patients are often treated as less-than-human within clinical settings, where capitalist logics and anti-Black racism intersect to devalue Black patients’ pain, experiences, and lives (Rouse 2009). These racialised medical encounters are shaped by ‘ethical variability’, whereby clinicians justify unequal care by invoking culturally biased notions of responsibility, credibility, and worthiness.

Afrophobia

‘Afrophobia’ refers to a deep-seated hatred and fear of anything associated with Blackness or Africanness. The concept is closely related to ‘negrophobia’, both emerging from long-standing European traditions of imagining African peoples as inferior, dangerous, disorderly, or contaminating. Its discursive roots trace to Greco-Roman and medieval European portrayals of Africans as monstrous and uncivilised (Stewart 2005, 43; Cantave 2024, 863). In the modern world, Afrophobia encompasses not only aesthetic prejudice but also a globalised fear of African peoples, cultural traditions, and their capacity to unsettle white supremacy and Euro-American hegemony. In Latin America, this manifests in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of African-derived spiritual traditions such as Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Haitian Vodou (Beliso-De Jesús 2015). These traditions—born in the crucible of slavery and colonial violence—are not simply forms of worship but cultural systems of Black survival, resistance, and world-making (Boaz 2021; Stewart 2005; Cantave 2024).

Historically, anthropology was complicit in shaping Afrophobic knowledge regimes. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers often depicted African spiritual practices as primitive ‘superstitions’, aligning with colonial regimes that sought to eradicate them. Classic ethnographies in French and Iberian colonies portrayed Vodou and Candomblé as irrational or pathological—reinforcing racist state policies. Early anthropological writing rarely took these belief systems seriously as coherent cosmologies, instead treating them as exotic curiosities or proof of Black primitivism (Brown 2003).

Yet anthropology has also helped challenge these frameworks. Contemporary Afro-diasporic ethnographers and critical anthropologists have reclaimed the study of African-derived religions as a site of political and epistemological contestation. In this vein, scholars have foregrounded how practitioners understand their own rituals as ethical, affective, and intellectual forms of life-making. They also show how gender, sexuality, and embodiment are transformed through spiritual practice (Pérez 2016; Daniel 2005; Tinsley 2008).

In the Dominican Republic, Afrophobia is materially enacted in everyday life—especially through racialised anxieties about beauty, hygiene, and spiritual purity (Candelario 2007). Dominican beauty salons serve as intimate spaces where Afro-Haitian features and aesthetics are policed and effaced. Here, Haitian migrants are stigmatised not only for their Blackness but for presumed associations with Vodou, often framed publicly as satanic or uncivilised. These anxieties are entangled with fears of national degeneration and cultural contamination. Ethnographic observations such as these show how the body becomes a moral frontier where race, nation, and spirit converge—and where Afrophobic violence is inscribed onto skin, hair, and comportment.

In this context, anthropological studies that centre the lived experiences of Afro-religious practitioners offer critical tools to decolonise knowledge and confront Afrophobia. They reveal African diasporic religions not as threats to national order but as vital repositories of historical memory, resilience, and political possibility. At their best, ethnographic methods can expose the micro-practices of racial domination while amplifying Black cultural life on its own terms.

Misogynoir and Black feminist anthropology

‘Misogynoir’ refers to the specific forms of violence and dehumanisation that Black women experience at the intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny (Bailey 2021). Historically, Black women’s bodies were subjected to scientific, sexual, and symbolic violation. A paradigmatic example is Saartjie Baartman (c.1789–1815), a Khoi woman from South Africa exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (Gilman 1985; Magubane 2001; Strother 1999). Her semi-nude body was displayed to curious European audiences, and after her death, her remains were dissected by French anatomist Georges Cuvier and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974. Baartman’s treatment exemplified how the Black female body was racialised, sexualised, and rendered a scientific object—central to the development of comparative anatomy and early anthropological inquiry.

Contemporary Black feminist anthropologists have shown how this colonial gaze continues to shape representations of Black women. They point out that Black women’s bodies have historically been ‘disciplined’ through contradictory social discourses—from Christian morality and motherhood to racist stereotypes of hypersexuality and labour, and that white and Black women are constructed in opposition to each other: white women as symbols of domestic virtue and Black women as oversexualised ‘workhorses’ (Shaw 2001). Consequently, Black women in postcolonial Zimbabwe, as well as the post–civil rights era in the United States, navigate persistent gendered-racial expectations, often by asserting alternative moral, religious, and familial frameworks to reclaim bodily autonomy and dignity (Shaw 2001).

Other ethnographic studies also reveal the complex ways Black women resist, negotiate, or internalise these intersecting oppressions. For instance, Afro-Caribbean girls in New York are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in public space—fetishised as style icons and simultaneously policed as disruptive. Their creative expressions through fashion, music, and dance are often criminalised, yet also serve as strategies of survival and identity (LaBennett 2011). Similarly, young Black women in a transitional housing shelter in Detroit use performance and expressive culture to resist the stigmatisation of Black girlhood (Cox 2015). These ethnographies illuminate the lived experience of misogynoir and demonstrate how Black women mobilise care, kinship, and creativity in the face of structural violence.

Importantly, Black feminist scholars have also highlighted the intra-racial dimensions of misogyny. Black women are often expected to subordinate their experiences of gendered violence to broader racial struggles, leading to silences around the harm they endure from Black men (Collins 2000; Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 2014; Davis 1981; Lorde 1984). Anthropologists have argued that ethnography is particularly well-suited to expose these overlapping systems of oppression by attending to the quotidian textures of abuse, labour, survival, and joy in Black women’s lives (Mullings 2005b; McClaurin 2001). Black feminist anthropologists aim to make Black women’s lives ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21), a political and methodological project that resists both invisibility as well as hyper-surveillance. Gertrude Fraser’s (1998) ethnographic research on Black midwifery and the racial politics of reproductive health exemplifies this approach. She shows how Black women’s bodies and labour are routinely devalued in clinical and institutional settings. Attending to the embodied and generational knowledge of Black women healthcare workers illuminates how racism, sexism, and professional hierarchies intersect to marginalise Black women’s authority and care work. By centring Black women’s voices, labour, and intellectual production, Black feminist anthropology challenges the discipline to reckon with its own racial and gendered hierarchies—and to imagine new possibilities for more ethical, inclusive, and liberatory knowledge-making (McClaurin 2001). Yet, despite these contributions, Black women anthropologists have historically been marginalised within the academy. Their scholarship remains under-cited and undervalued in disciplinary canons (Harrison et al. 2018; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic exclusion reflects broader patterns of anti-Blackness and sexism that pervade the discipline of anthropology itself.

Racial capitalism

‘Racial capitalism’ refers to the process by which capitalist economies have always been structured by and dependent upon racial hierarchies and the exploitation of Black labour. First developed by Cedric Robinson (1983), the concept critiques the idea that capitalism is a racially neutral economic system only later corrupted by racism. Robinson argues that capitalism emerged from European feudal orders that already encoded racial difference, and that Black people have been subjected to a distinct form of economic subjugation central to the global capitalist order. In this view, anti-Blackness is not a by-product of capitalism but foundational to its formation and endurance (Du Bois 1935; Williams 1940; Robinson 1983; Matlon 2016).

Anthropologists have documented how Black life is shaped by systems of racialised accumulation and dispossession, from plantation slavery to contemporary neoliberalism. Insurance policies on enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century US South illustrate the fusion of racial logics and financial speculation (Ralph 2012). Enslaved people were rendered fungible labour and abstract instruments of credit and actuarial calculation. Their value derived not from their humanity but from their capacity to generate returns for owners and insurers. Slave insurance reveals how Black life was financialised in ways that shaped modern capitalism, including the development of life insurance, risk management, and governance of future value.

Historian Destin Jenkins (2021) builds on this understanding with a historical analysis of how municipal debt became a tool of racial governance in twentieth century San Francisco—a framework that offers important insights for anthropological approaches to racial capitalism. Drawing on archival research, Jenkins shows how bond markets and credit-rating agencies influenced public infrastructure decisions, disinvesting from Black neighbourhoods while underwriting white wealth accumulation. Racial capitalism thus operates not only through exploitation but through financial infrastructures that dictate whose futures are investable.

In the Caribbean, economic policies associated with globalisation, tourism, and austerity have likewise entrenched anti-Black hierarchies (Slocun 2006; Thomas 2019, 2021). In urban Jamaica, Black youth are simultaneously criminalised and commodified—as symbols of urban danger for tourists and as security laborers in the very industries that exclude them. In this way, Blackness is linked to economic disposability while also being monetised within global security regimes (Jaffe 2015).

Similarly, labour struggles in Guadeloupe are shaped by colonial legacies and racialised inequality, as Black workers mobilise both class and race to challenge French imperial domination (Bonilla 2021). Ethnographic research with rural St. Lucian women in the banana export industry also reveals the racialised and gendered dimensions of global capitalism (Slocum 2006). Here, Black women navigate the intersecting pressures of neoliberal trade regimes, postcolonial marginalisation, and local class hierarchies, and underscore how global capitalism reproduces racial and gendered inequalities. For example, many women farmers must absorb the risks of volatile export prices, perform the unpaid labour required to meet stringent quality standards, and contend with male intermediaries who control access to markets and resources, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable within global commodity chains.

Anthropologists working in the tradition of structural violence—a concept popularised by Paul Farmer (2004)—have shown how racialised violence is embedded in political and economic systems, not just individual attitudes. Structural violence refers to the historically produced social arrangements—such as poverty, segregation, and unequal access to healthcare—that systematically harm marginalised populations by constraining their life chances and exposing them to preventable suffering. While structural racism is a specific form of this violence, rooted in racial hierarchy and anti-Blackness, structural violence more broadly encompasses the multiple social forces that produce patterns of inequality and harm. Farmer’s work in Haiti traced how colonialism and neoliberalism shape health outcomes through institutional neglect and economic exploitation. Building on this, Adia Benton’s (2015) ethnography of Sierra Leone’s HIV response reveals how global health regimes reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies, exposing whose lives are deemed valuable or not.

The Harlem Birth Right Project, led by Leith Mullings (2001; 2005b), further developed this approach in the US context, analysing how race, gender, and class intersect to produce structural vulnerability. Their research linked high rates of infant mortality among Black women in Harlem to housing insecurity, over-policing, and barriers to quality prenatal care. Other ethnographers have likewise shown how structural racism is embodied through cyclical poverty, over-policing, and healthcare inequality (Bourgois 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Together, these studies reveal how anti-Blackness is infrastructural—woven into the built environment, labour markets, and social services—and how racial capitalism renders Black life both exploitable and expendable.

‘Colour-blindness’ and colourism

Anti-Blackness is a fact of everyday life across the postcolonial world (Fanon 1952; Essed and Goldberg 2002; Keaton 2023). Yet for much of the twentieth century, anthropology’s ability to study racism seriously was constrained by post-Boasian liberalism and its doctrinal commitments to anti-essentialism and ‘colour-blindness’ (Allen and Jobson 2016; Anderson 2019; Baker 1998; Mullings 2005a; Shanklin 1998). These liberal frameworks, dominant since the 1960s, often dismissed structural racism as a serious object of anthropological inquiry. As scholars have argued, late twentieth-century racial ideologies increasingly took the form of ‘colour-blind racism’ or ‘racism without races’—systems of inequality that deny the significance of race while reproducing its effects through ostensibly race-neutral institutions, discourses, and practices (Bangstad and Fuentes 2023; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Omi and Winant 1986). With the rise of Black Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the inclusion of more Black and Indigenous anthropologists, critical ethnographic research has increasingly foregrounded the structures and lived conditions of anti-Blackness—reshaping academic knowledge and the local-global politics of race.

Contemporary anthropology is especially well positioned to examine the overlapping and divergent manifestations of anti-Blackness worldwide. While unified by a global racialised formation, the expressions of anti-Blackness in Ghana, Brazil, the US, Haiti, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Europe vary significantly, shaped by distinct colonial histories, nationalist projects, and local racial regimes (Jung and Vargas 2021, 2022; Mills 2021). Jamaica, for example, enjoys sovereignty without emancipation from US imperialism (Thomas 2019), while African Americans have experienced emancipation from slavery without sovereignty (Shange 2019, 8). These divergent trajectories shape distinct yet interconnected experiences of anti-Blackness which emerge from the afterlives of empire, revealing how racial domination is reproduced across multiple global sites (Thomas and Clarke 2013).

Anti-Blackness manifests through surveillance, discipline, and the differential valuation of Black life. Black people are routinely seen as threatening, unruly, or out of place (Browne 2015; Butler 1993; Sharpe 2016). These racialised perceptions give rise to punitive structures—both spectacular and mundane—that discipline Black bodies. In eighteenth century New York, for instance, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race individuals were legally required to carry lanterns after dark to illuminate their faces (Browne 2015). Today, such logics persist in policing, education, and carceral systems. For example, in her study of a San Francisco school, Savannah Shange (2019) describes how Black and Latinx youth are disciplined through ‘carceral progressivism’, i.e. the use of multicultural rhetoric that claims to lament structural racism, but still insists on zero-tolerance and police-based approaches to disciplining Black people and justify racial control. In Australia, Aboriginal youth are incarcerated at 20 times the rate of their white peers, revealing how settler colonialism continues to target Black and Indigenous life under the banner of multiculturalism (Holland et al. 2024; Hage 2000; Povinelli 2002; Wolfe 2016).

Ethnographies in the Caribbean and Latin America show how anti-Blackness animates postcolonial statecraft and global capitalism. In Jamaica, American militarism and neoliberalism have shaped violent policing regimes (Thomas 2019) while in Brazil, anthropologists have documented how militarised policing specifically targets Black favelas (Alves 2018; Smith 2016; Gillam 2022). Perhaps the most striking example comes from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a place that is marketed as an ‘Afro-paradise’—a transnational fantasy that celebrates Afro-Brazilian culture for tourism and national identity—even as the state continues to subject Black communities to pervasive violence and surveillance. Indeed, Black communities have long been sites of routinised, yet spectacular, racialised violence (Smith 2016). Here, Afro-Brazilians resist anti-Blackness through protest and performance practices—particularly bloco afro processions, Carnival-based counter-performances, and community mobilisations against police violence—in everyday life.

In the US, Laurence Ralph (2020) shows how the Chicago Police Department systematised torture against Black men from the 1970s to 1990s. In Detroit, Aimee Cox (2016) details how unhoused Black girls choreograph strategic movements through hostile urban spaces to claim dignity and survival. These ‘choreographies’ are not only acts of endurance but also everyday refusals of disposability. Together, these ethnographies show that anti-Blackness is not limited to spectacular violence but is embedded in quotidian institutions that constrain and surveil Black life. Anthropology, when critically engaged, offers tools to document these dynamics and to amplify Black knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking.

‘Colourism’ is another important facet of anti-Blackness. It refers to prejudice and discrimination based on skin tone, often within Black and Brown communities (Glenn 2009; Jablonski 2021). Coined by Alice Walker (1983), ‘colourism’ names the global preference for lighter skin in proximity to whiteness (Bajwa et al. 2023). People experience it daily: in family life, dating, beauty, housing, healthcare, education, media, and policing (Caldwell 2007; Anekwe 2014; Monk 2015; Spears 2020). Though the term is modern, colourism is centuries old, shaped by slavery, colonialism, and racial science. In colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), French jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1796) identified eleven gradations of racial mixture, praising the ‘mulatto’ as the ideal hybrid. He wrote:

Of all the combination of white and nègre it is the mulatto who brings together all of the physical advantages; of all of these crossings of race he is the one who has the strongest constitution, the most appropriate to Saint-Domingue's climate. To the sobriety and the strength of the nègre he joins the physical grace and the intelligence of the white (1798; Garrigus 2006).

Such fantasies fused early scientific racism with erotic desire, projecting European superiority onto the bodies of the enslaved. As many scholars have argued, early racial science was animated by anxieties over miscegenation, bodily purity, and racial control (Fanon 1954; Jordan 1968; Stoler 2002; Wolfe 2016). Moreover, ‘racially hierarchical social orders, which are rooted in the control and exploitation of (racially identified) peoples and places […] generate complex dynamics of hate and love, fear and fascination, contempt and admiration […] that seems to have a specifically sexual dimension’ (Wade 2009, 2).

Colourism is historically and geographically contingent. In the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ collapsed racial ambiguity into a rigid Black-white binary (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Jordan 2014). Yet lighter-skinned Black people—particularly women—have often been granted greater social capital and proximity to whiteness (Larsen 1929; Walker 1983). In South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, ‘pigmentocracies’ used gradations of skin tone to structure social life (Bacelar da Silva 2022; Jackson 2024; Sheriff 2001; Telles 2014). Terms like ‘coloured’, ‘milat’, ‘mulato’, and ‘mestizo’ mark intermediate racial categories, creating buffer classes that were closer to whiteness but denied its full privileges (Glenn 2009). This stratification fostered internalised racism and horizontal antagonisms (Spears 2020; Walker 1983).

Ethnographic research shows that in Latin America, racial identities are often expressed through skin tone rather than fixed categories, and are shaped by context, class position, and local understandings of ancestry. As Peter Wade (2009) notes, racial classification in the region is fluid, relational, and embedded in broader national ideologies of mestizaje that link colour, class, and sexuality. In many settings, individuals may be identified differently depending on region, social status, or interpersonal interactions. In Mexico, descriptors like ‘moreno’ or ‘güero’ serve as racial signifiers that shift with context (Sue 2013). In Brazil, ideologies of ‘racial democracy’ have long obscured structural inequalities perpetuated by anti-Blackness and colourism (Hordge-Freeman 2015; Sheriff 2001; Twine 1998). In the Dominican Republic, anti-Haitianism reinforces the association of Blackness with cultural and national undesirability (Aber and Small 2013; Candelario 2007).

Skin bleaching is a global phenomenon, not confined to Black Atlantic societies. In India, the Philippines, South Korea, Peru, and Ghana, lighter skin is linked with beauty and modernity (Glenn 2009; Jha 2015; Mishra 2015; Pierre 2015). Many products contain mercury, hydroquinone, or potent topical steroids, causing severe dermatological damage—including chemical burns, skin thinning, and ochronosis—as well as systemic risks such as kidney failure, hypertension, and neurological toxicity. Despite these severe health risks, the global skin-lightening industry exceeds $8 billion annually and is expected to continue growing.

Colourism reveals that anti-Blackness cuts across national borders and ‘people of colour’ (‘POC’) categories. Although the term ‘POC’ is often mobilised to foster cross-ethnic alliances and highlight shared experiences of marginalisation, the term can also flatten important differences by subsuming distinct racial histories under a single label. In particular, it can obscure the structural and quotidian nature of anti-Blackness, diluting attention to the specific forms of violence, exclusion, and state surveillance directed at Black communities.

This points to the fact that anti-Blackness is not just a legacy of colonialism—it is a structuring logic of the modern racial order (Vargas 2018). Everyday manifestations of anti-Blackness, whether through skin tone, surveillance, or institutional neglect, underscore the systemic nature of racial violence. Anthropology, at its best, offers the methodological tools to document and disrupt these patterns.

Conclusion

Anthropology has long been complicit in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, at times functioning as a tool of racial domination and colonial conquest (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Gupta and Stoolman 2021; Mullings 2005a). Yet anthropology also holds liberatory potential, precisely because it seeks to understand how social structures and relations, political hierarchies, and hegemonic cultures are experienced by people themselves (Harrison 1991; Cox et al. 2022; Mullings 2005a). By engaging with theories of anti-Blackness—especially those developed beyond the discipline—anthropology can interrogate its own historical complicity while contributing to contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide.

The Movement for Black Lives—a global social movement against the ongoing structural devaluation of Black life and the resurgence of white nationalist politics—underscores the urgency of this task (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Jung and Vargas 2021; Williams 2015). From anti-police violence protests in the US to anti-racist demonstrations abroad, this movement highlights both the persistence of racial violence and the resilience of Black communities.^[5] Anthropological perspectives are essential here—not only to bear witness to how Black people experience and endure anti-Blackness, but also to illuminate how they resist and reimagine these structures in everyday life.

Black feminist anthropologists have long shown that centring Black humanity requires analysing intersecting oppressions and committing to politically engaged scholarship in Black communities themselves (Bolles 2001; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001). Despite this, Black women anthropologists have themselves been marginalised or excluded from the discipline’s canon, and their work remains undervalued (Harrison et al. 2018; McClaurin 2001; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic erasure not only marginalises scholars but also silences the communities they represent. It exposes how dominant notions of merit and rigor remain shaped by Eurocentric, anti-Black, and sexist assumptions (McClaurin 2001). In response, Black feminist anthropologists continue to counter this devaluation by making Black women’s lives and voices ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21).

Calls for abolitionist anthropology, informed by the Movement for Black Lives, remind us that the discipline must embrace more liberatory frameworks for representing human experience (Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991). Black practices of fugitivity, marronage—historically, the flight of enslaved people who formed autonomous communities in resistance to colonial domination—storytelling, witness-bearing, and radical ‘freedom dreams’ envision life beyond the ubiquitous ‘weather’ of anti-Blackness. These visions are grounded in the lived realities and cultural imaginaries of Black people (Allen and Jobson 2016; Kelley 2002; Sharpe 2016). To remain relevant to the critical study of the human condition, anthropology must treat anti-Blackness not as peripheral, but as foundational to understanding the modern world (Jung and Vargas 2021; Wilderson 2003). In this way, anthropology can not only interrogate its own colonial legacies, but also serve as a tool for amplifying the voices, experiences, and aspirations of Black communities globally, contributing to the broader struggle for racial justice.

References

Allen, Jafari S., and Ryan C. Jobson. 2016. “The decolonizing generation: (Race and) theory in anthropology since the eighties.” Current Anthropology 104, no. 3: 783–90.

Alves, Jaime A. 2018. The anti-Black city: Police terror and Black urban life in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Anderson, Mark. 2019. From Boas to Black Power: Racism, liberalism, and American anthropology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Anjari, Simran. 2022. “From Black consciousness to Black Lives Matter: Confronting the colonial legacy of colourism in South Africa.” Agenda: Empowering Women in Gender Equity 36, no. 4: 158–69.

Bacelar da Silva, Antonio J. 2022. Between Brown and Black: Anti-racist activism in Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bailey, Moya. 2021. Misogynoir transformed: Black women’s digital resistance. New York: NYU Press.

Bajwa, Marium, Imke von Maur, and Achim Stephan. 2023. “Colorism in the Indian Subcontinent: Insights through situated affectivity.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (online). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09901-6

Baker, Lee D. 1998. From savage to Negro: Anthropology and the construction of race, 1896-1954. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

–––––––. 2020. “The racist anti-racism of American anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 290, no. 2: 127–42.

Baldwin, James, and Margaret Mead. 1971. A rap on race. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott.

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha. 2015. Electric santería: Racial and sexual assemblages of transnational religion. New York: Columbia University Press.

Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha, Jemima Pierre, and Junaid Rana. 2025. The anthropology of white supremacy: A reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Benton, Adia. 2015. HIV exceptionalism: Development through disease in Sierra Leone. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bindman, David, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds. 2010. The image of the Black in Western art, vol. 2: From the early Christian era to the "Age of Discovery." Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Blackmon, Douglas A. 2008. Slavery by another name: The re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. London: Icon Books.

Blakey, Michael L. 2010. “Man and nature, white and other.” In Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward an anthropology of liberation. Third edition. Edited by Faye Harrison, 16–24. Arlington: American Anthropological Association.

–––––––. 2020. “Archaeology under the blinding light of race.” Current Anthropology 61, no. 22: S183–97.

Blumenbach, Johann F. 1865. The anthropological treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. Edited and translated by Thomas Bendyshe. London: The Anthropological Society.

Boaz, Danielle N. 2021. Banning the Black gods: Law and religions of the African diaspora. University Park: The Pennsylvania University State Press.

Bolles, Lynn A. 2001. “Theorizing a Black feminist self in anthropology: Toward an autobiographic approach.” In Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Bonilla, Yarimar. 2015. Non-sovereign futures: French Caribbean politics in the wake of disenchantment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2015. “The structure of racism in color-blind, ‘post-racial’ America.” American Behavioral Scientist 59, no. 11: 1358–76.

Bourgois, Philippe. 1995. In search of respect: Selling crack in El Barrio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brandt, Allan. 1978. “Racism and research: The case of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.” The Hastings Center Report 8, no. 6: 21–9.

Brodkin, Karen, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson. 2011. “Anthropology as white public space?” American Anthropologist 113, no. 4: 545–56.

Brown, Jaqueline Nassy. 1998. “Black Liverpool, Black America, and the gendering of diasporic space.” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3: 291–325.

Browne, Simone. 2015. Dark matters: On the surveillance of Blackness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Butler, Judith. 1993. “Endangered/endangering: Schematic racism and white paranoia.” In Reading Rodney King/Reading urban uprising, edited by Robert Gooding-Williams, 16–23. New York: Routledge.

Candelario, Ginetta E.B. 2007. Black behind the ears: Dominican racial identity from museums to beauty shops. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Cantave, Rachel. 2024. “Pursuing racial order and social progress: Violence, Afrophobia and ‘religious racism’ in Brazil.” Latin American Research Review 59, no. 4: 858–71.

Chamberlain, Alexander. 1907. “Thomas Jefferson’s ethnological opinions and activities.” American Anthropologist 9, no. 3: 499–509.

Cohen, William. 1969. “Thomas Jefferson and the problem of slavery.” Journal of American History 56, no. 1: 503–26.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Second edition. New York: Routledge.

Combahee River Collective. (1977) 2017. “The Combahee River Collective Statement.” In How we get free: In Black feminism and the Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, 15–27. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Cox, Aimee M. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black girls and the choreography of citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Cox, Aimee, Savannah Shange, Christen Smith, and Deborah Thomas. “An anthropology of abolition/liberation with Aimee M. Cox and panelists.” Yale University. April 6, 2022. YouTube video, 28:51. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BTMpj9KYI&t=1731s.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2014. On intersectionality: Essential writings. New York: The New Press.

Davis, Allison, Burleigh Gardner, and Mary Gardner. (1941) 2022. Deep South: A social anthropological study of caste and class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Davis, Angela. 1981. Women, race and class. New York: Random House.

Dennis, Rutledge. 1995. “Social Darwinism, scientific racism, and the metaphysics of race.” The Journal of Negro Education 64, no. 3: 243–52.

Drake, St. Clair, and Willie Baber. 1990. “Further reflections on anthropology and the Black experience.” Transforming Anthropology 1, no. 2: 1–14.

Douglass, Frederick. (1881) 2022. “The color line.” In Douglass: Speeches and writings. New York: Library of America.

–––––––. 1854. The claims of the Negro, ethnologically considered. Rochester, N.Y.: Lee, Mann & Co.

Drake, St. Clair, and Horace R. Cayton. 1945. Black metropolis: A study of Negro life in a northern city. New York: Harper & Row.

Du Bois, W.E.B. (1903) 1996. The souls of Black folk. New York: Penguin Books.

–––––––. (1935) 1998. Black reconstruction in America, 1860-1880. New York: The Free Press.

DuVernay, Ava. 2016. 13^th. Netflix. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8.

Essed, Philomena. 1991. Understanding everyday racism: An interdisciplinary theory. London: Sage Press.

Essed, Philomena, and David T. Goldberg, eds. 2002. Race critical theories: Text and context. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell.

Eze, Emmanuel C. 1997. Race and the Enlightenment: A reader. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fabian, Johannes. (1983) 2014. Time and the other: How anthropology makes its objects. New York: Columbia University Press.

Fanon, Frantz. (1952) 2008. Black skin, white masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press.

Farmer, Paul. 2004. "An anthropology of structural violence." Current Anthropology 45, no. 3: 305–25.

Finkelman, Paul. 2014. Slavery and the founders: Race and liberty in the age of Jefferson. Third edition. London: Routledge.

Firmin, Anténor. (1885) 2000. The equality of the human races (positivist anthropology). Translated by Asselin Charles. New York: Garland Publishing Inc.

Fleur-Lobban, Carolyn. 2000. “Anténor Firmin: Haitian pioneer of anthropology.” American Anthropologist 102, no. 3: 449–66.

Franklin, John Hope. 1989. Race and history: Selected essays, 1938-1988. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

Fraser, Gertrude J. 1998. African American midwifery in the South: Dialogues of birth, race, and memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Garraway, Doris. 2005. “Race, reproduction and family romance in Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description […] de la partie française de l’Isle Saint-Domingue.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 2: 227–46.

Garrigus, John D. 2006. Before Haiti: Race and citizenship in French Saint-Domingue. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., and Andrew Curran, eds. 2022. Who’s Black and why? A hidden chapter from the eighteenth-century invention of race. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press.

Gibson-Light, Michael. 2023. Orange-collar labour: Work and inequality in prison. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gillam, Reighan. 2022. Visualizing Black lives: Ownership and control in Afro-Brazilian media. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Gilman, Sander. 1985. “Black bodies, white bodies: Toward an iconography of female sexuality in late nineteenth-century art, medicine, and literature. Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1: 204–42.

Gilroy, Paul. 1987. ‘There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack’: The cultural politics of race and nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

–––––––. 1993. The Black Atlantic modernity and double consciousness. London: Verso.

Glenn, Evelyn Nakano, ed. 2009. Shades of difference: Why skin color matters. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Gray, Herman. 1995. Watching race: Television and the struggle for "Blackness". Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gupta, Akhil, and Jesie Stoolman. 2022. “Decolonizing US anthropology.” American Anthropologist 124: 778–99.

Hage, Ghassan. 2000. White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart. (1997) 2013. “The spectacle of the ‘other.’” In Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. Second edition. Edited by Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean Nixon, 215–87. London: SAGE.

Harrison, Faye V. 1992. “The Du Boisian legacy in anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 12, no. 3: 239–60.

–––––––. ed. (1991) 2010. Decolonizing anthropology: Moving further toward an anthropology for liberation. Third edition. Arlington: American Anthropological Association.

Harrison, Ira E., Deborah Johnson-Simon, and Erica Lorraine Williams, eds. 2018. The second generation of African American pioneers in anthropology. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in the nineteenth-century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Heath, Elizabeth. 2010. “Berlin Conference of 1884-1885.” In Encyclopedia of Africa, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195337709.001.0001/acref-9780195337709-e-0467.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1837) 1894. Lectures on the history of philosophy. Translated by J. Sibree. London: George Bell & Sons.

Hochschild, Adam. 1998. King Leopold’s ghost: A story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Hochschild, Jennifer L., and Brenna M. Powell. 2008. “Racial reorganization and the United States Census 1850-1930: Mulattoes, half-breeds, mixed parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican race.” Studies in American Political Development 22: 59–96.

Holland, Lorelle, Claudia Lee, Maree Toombs, Andrew Smirnov, and Natasha Reid. 2024. First Nations Health and Wellbeing – The Lowitja Journal 2: 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fnhli.2024.100023

Hordge-Freeman, Elizabeth. 2015. The color of love: Racial features, stigma, and the socialization in Black Brazilian families. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Hume, David. (1748) 1997. “Of national characters.” In Race and the Enlightenment: A reader, edited by Emmanuel C. Eze, 30–3. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hurston, Zora Neale. 1928. “How it feels to be colored me.” The World Tomorrow 11, no. 5: 215–6.

–––––––. 2018. Barracoon: The story of the last “Black cargo.” New York: HarperCollins.

Jablonski, Nina. 2021. “Skin color and race.” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 175, no. 2: 437–47.

Jackson, John L., Jr. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in racial sincerity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jackson, Sebastian. 2024. “Miscegenation madness: Interracial intimacy and the politics of ‘purity’ in twentieth century South Africa.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research in Race 21, no. 2: 223–49.

Jaffe, Rivke. 2013. “The hybrid state: Crime and citizenship in urban Jamaica.” American Ethnologist 40, no. 4: 734–48.

James, C.L.R. 1938. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. London: Secker & Warburg.

–––––––. (1781) 2022. Notes on the state of Virginia. Edited by Robert Pierce Forbes. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jenkins, Destin. 2021. The bonds of inequality: Debt and the making of the American city. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jha, Meeta. 2015. The global beauty industry: Colorism, racism, and the national body. First edition. New York: Routledge.

Johnson, Marguerite, and Alistair Rolls. 2023. “Georges Cuvier’s autopsy report on Sara Baartman: A translation and commentary.” Terrae Incognitae 55, no. 2: 170–95.

Jones, Delmos. 1970. “Towards a Native anthropology.” Human Organization 29, no. 4: 251–9.

Jordan, Winthrop. 1968. White over Black: American attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

–––––––. 2014. “Historical origins of the one-drop racial rule in the United States.” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies 1, no.1: 98–132.

Joseph, Daniel, and Bertin M. Louis Jr. 2022. “Anti-Haitianism and statelessness in the Caribbean.” The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 27, no. 3: 386-407.

Jung, Moon-Kie ,and João H. Costa Vargas, eds. 2021. Antiblackness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. (1764) 1997. “On national characteristics, so far as they depend upon the distinct feeling of the beautiful and sublime.” In Race and the Enlightenment: A reader, edited by Emmanuel C. Eze, 49–57. Oxford: Blackwell.

Keaton, Trica. 2023. #You know you’re Black in France when…: The fact of everyday antiblackness. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.

Keel, Terence. 2013. “From Africans to Negroes: Anthropology and the politics of racial science in the nineteenth century.” History of the Human Sciences 26, no. 1: 3–32

Larsen, Nella. 1929. Passing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Lewis, Diane. 1973. “Anthropology and colonialism.” Current Anthropology 14, no. 5: 581–602.

Lindfors, Bernth, ed. 1999. Africans on stage: Studies in ethnological show business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

von Linnaeus, Carl. (1735) 1997. “The God-given order of nature.” In Race and the Enlightenment: A reader, edited by Emmanuel C. Eze, 10–14. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lorde, Audre. 1984. Sister outsider. Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press.

Magubane, Zine. 2001. “Which bodies matter? Feminism, poststructuralism, race and the curious theoretical odyssey of the ‘Hottentot Venus’.” Gender and Society 15, no. 6: 816–34.

–––––––. 2003. “Simians, savages, skulls, and sex: Science and colonial militarism in nineteenth-century South Africa.” In Race, nature and the politics of difference, edited by Donald Moore, Jake Kosek, and Anand Pandian, 99–121. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Matlon, Jordanna. 2016. “Racial capitalism and the crisis of Black masculinity.” American Sociological Review 81, no. 5: 1014–38.

Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

McClaurin, Irma, ed. 2001. Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Mills, Charles W. 2021. “The illumination of Blackness.” In Antiblackness, edited by Moon-Kie Jung and João Costa Vargas, 17–36. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mishra, N. 2015. “India and colorism: The finer nuances.” Washington University Global Studies Law Review 4, no. 14: 725–50.

Mondesire, Zachary. 2022. “A Black exit interview from anthropology.” American Anthropologist 124, no.3: 613–6. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13755

Monk, Ellis P., Jr. 2015. “The cost of color: Skin color, discrimination, and health among African Americans.” American Journal of Sociology 121, no.2: 396–444.

Moreau de Saint-Méry, M.L.E. 1798. Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de L'Isle Saint-Domingue, vol. 1 (Paris: Dupont). https://archive.org/details/descriptiontopog00more/page/n9/mode/2up

Morgan, Marcyliena. 2002. Language, discourse and power in African American culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morton, Samuel George. 1839. Crania Americana; or, a comparative view of the skulls of various Aboriginal Nations of North and South America: To which is prefixed an essay on the varieties of the human species. Philadelphia: J. Dobson.

Moton, Fred. 2008. “The case of Blackness.” Criticism 50, no. 2: 177–218.

Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. 2010. The condemnation of Blackness: Race, crime, and the making of modern urban America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mullings, Leith. 2005a. “Interrogating racism: Toward an antiracist anthropology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 667–93.

–––––––. 2005b. “Resistance and resilience: The Sojourner syndrome and the legacy of Black women’s health issues in the United States.” In Health and social justice: Politics, ideology, and inequity in the distribution of disease, edited by Richard Hofrichter, 345–68. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Mullings, Leith, Alaka Wali, Diane McLean, Janet Mitchell, Sabiyha Prince, Deborah Thomas, and Patricia Tovar. 2001. “Qualitative methodologies and community participation in examining reproductive experiences: The Harlem Birth Right Project.” Maternal and Child Health Journal 5, no. 1: 85–93.

Nobles, Melissa. 2000. Shades of citizenship: Race and the census in modern politics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nott, Josiah C. 1843. “The mulatto a hybrid – probable extermination of the two races if the Whites and Blacks are allowed to intermarry.” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 29, no. 2: 29–32.

Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1986. Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Oshinsky, David M. 1996. “Worse than slavery”: Parchman Farm and the ordeal of Jim Crow justice. New York: Free Press.

Painter, Nell I. 2010. The history of white people. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Pascoe, Peggy. 2009. What comes naturally: Miscegenation law and the making of race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Perkins, Rachel, and Marcia Langton. 2008. First Australians: An illustrated history. Melbourne: Miegunyah Press.

Perry, Keisha-Khan Y. 2013. Black women against the land grab: The fight for racial justice in Brazil. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pierre, Jemima. 2013. The predicament of Blackness: Postcolonial Ghana and the politics of race. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

–––––––. 2020. “Slavery, anthropological knowledge, and the racialization of Africans.” Current Anthropology 21, no.22: s220–31.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Ralph, Laurence. 2020. The torture letters: Reckoning with police violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ralph, Laurence, and Kerry Chance. 2014. “Legacies of fear: From Rodney King’s beating to Trayvon Martin’s death.” Transition 133: 137–43.

Ralph, Michael. 2012. “‘Life…in the midst of death: ‘Notes on the relationship between slave insurance, life insurance and disability.” Disability Studies Quarterly 32, no. 3. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v32i3.3267

Robinson, Cedric. 1983. Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. London: Zedd Press.

Rodney, Walter. (1972) 2018. How Europe underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso.

Rodriguez, Cheryl. 2001. “A homegirl goes home: Black feminism and the lure of native anthropology.” In Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin, 233–58. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Rouse, Carolyn. 2009. Uncertain suffering: Racial health care disparities and sickle cell disease. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of modernity: The tragedy of colonial Enlightenment. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

–––––––. 2014. “The theory of Haiti: The Black Jacobins and the poetics of universal history. Small Axe 18, no. 3: 35–51.

Sexton, Jared. 2008. Amalgamation schemes: Antiblackness and the critique of multiculturalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive dystopia: Abolition, antiblackness, and schooling in San Francisco. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shanklin, Eugenia. 1999. “The profession of the color blind: sociocultural anthropology and racism in the 21^st century.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3: 669–79.

Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the wake: On Blackness and being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shaw, Carolyn M. 2001. “Disciplining the Black female body: Learning feminism in Africa and the United States.” In Black feminist anthropology: Theory, politics, praxis, and poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin, 102–25. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Sheriff, Robin, E. 2001. Dreaming equality: Color, race, and racism in urban Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Slocum, Karla. 2006. Free trade and freedom: Neoliberalism, place, and nation in the Caribbean. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Smedley, Audrey. 1998. “‘Race’ and the construction of human identity.” American Anthropologist 100, no. 3: 690–702.

–––––––. (1993) 2007. Race in North America: Origin and evolution of a worldview. Third edition. Boulder, Co: Westview Press.

Smith, Christen A. 2016. Afro-paradise: Blackness, violence, and performance in Brazil. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

–––––––. 2021. “An introduction to Cite Black Women.” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1: 6–9.

Snowden, Frank. 1970. Blacks in antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Spears, Arthur. 2020. “Racism, colorism, and language within their macro contexts.” In The Oxford handbook of language and race, edited by H.S. Alim, A. Reyes, and P. Kroskrity, 47–76. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

–––––––. 2021. “White supremacy and antiblackness: Theory and lived experience.” Linguistic Anthropology 31, no.2: 157–79.

Stewart, Dianne M. 2005. Three eyes for the journey: African dimensions of the Jamaican religious experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 2006. Haunted by empire: Geographies of intimacy in North American history. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Strother, Z.S. 1999. “Display of the body Hottentot.” In Africans on stage: Studies in ethnological show business, edited by Bernth Lindfors, 1–61. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sue, Christina A. 2013. Land of the cosmic race: Race mixture, racism, and Blackness in Mexico. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Taylor, Paul M., and Cesare Marino. 2019. “Paolo Mantegazza’s vision: The science of man behind the world’s first museum of anthropology (Florence, Italy, 1869).” Museum Anthropology 42, no. 2: 109–24.

Telles, Edward, ed. 2014. Pigmentocracies: Ethnicity, race, and color in Latin America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2019. Political life in the wake of the plantation: Sovereignty, witnessing, repair. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Thomas, Deborah, and M. Kamari Clarke. 2013. “Globalization and race: Structures of inequality, new sovereignties, and citizenship in a neoliberal era.” Annual Review of Anthropology 41: 305–25.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1991. “Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness.” In Recapturing anthropology: Working in the present, edited by Richard G. Fox, 17–44. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press.

–––––––. 1995. Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Boston: Beacon Press.

Twine, France Winddance. 1998. Racism in a racial democracy: The maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Vargas, João H. Costa. 2018. The denial of antiblackness: Multiracial redemption and Black suffering. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Wade, Peter. 2009. Race and sex in Latin America. New York: Pluto Press.

Walker, Alice. 1983. In search of our mother’s gardens: Womanist prose. San Diego: Harcourt.

Walker, David. 1830. David Walker’s appeal, in four articles; Together with a preamble, to the colored citizens of the world. Boston: D. Walker.

Weheliye, Alexander G. 2014. Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and Black feminist theories of the human. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Wekker, Gloria. 2016. White innocence: Paradoxes of colonialism and race. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

West, Cornel. 2002. “A genealogy of modern racism.” In Race critical theories, edited by Philomena Essed and David Theo Goldberg, ____. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.

Wilderson, Frank., III. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright.

Williams, Bianca C. 2015. “Introduction: #BlackLivesMatter.” Fieldsights: Theorizing the Contemporary, June 29. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-black-lives-matter.

Williams, Eric. (1944) 1994. Capitalism and slavery. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Williams, Erica L. 2021. “Black girl abroad: An autoethnography of travel and the need to cite Black women in anthropology.” Feminist Anthropology 2, no. 1: 143–54.

Willis, William S., Jr. 1972. “Skeletons in the anthropological closet.” In Reinventing anthropology, edited by Dell Hymes, 121–52. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wolf, Eric. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of history: Elementary structures of race. London: Verso.

Woodson, Carter G. 1918. “The beginnings of the miscegenation of the whites and Blacks.” The Journal of Negro History 3, no. 4: 335–53.

Woodward, C. Vann. (1955) 2002. The strange career of Jim Crow. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Toward the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3: 257–337.

Note on contributor

Sebastian Jackson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research examines race, intimacy, and the afterlives of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid in South Africa, the United States, and the broader Black Atlantic world. He has published on racism, white supremacist ideology, and postcolonial kinship in academic and public-facing venues.

[1] Rouse, Carolyn. 2021. “Capital crimes: ‘Language is a moving target.’” Princeton Alumni Weekly, November 20. https://paw.princeton.edu/article/capital-crimes.

[2] Charmantier, Isabelle. 2020. “Linneaus and race.” The Linnean Society of London, September 3. https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race

[3] Jefferson, Thomas. 1814. “Thomas Jefferson to John Manners, 22 February 1814.” The National Archives Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0132.

[4] Scharff, Virginia. 2020. “Sally Hemings (1773 – 1835).” Encyclopedia Virginia, December 7. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/hemings-sally-1773-1835/#:~:text=Sally%20Hemings%20was%20an%20enslaved,was%20likely%20Hemings's%20half%2Dsister.

[5] 2020. “Vision for Black lives.” Movement for Black Lives. https://m4bl.org/v4bl/.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Dreams

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 03:17:37 +0000

Scene from a 2018 mural depicting dream creatures and the women who paint them, by Guatemalen artist María Elena Curruchiche. Picture by UN Women/Ryan Brown

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney

Initially published 8 Aug 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24dreams

Abstract:

Dreams are commonly defined as involuntary, sporadic events that occur to individuals during their sleep and that encompass visual images, cognitive activity, as well as a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. Situated at the interstices of the real and the imagined, the meaningful and meaningless, the conscious and subconscious, and the sleeping and waking worlds, they have often been approached—if not always formally recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, social relationships, psychological landscapes, and cultural worlds of those who experience them. This entry examines three prominent themes in the anthropological study of dreams as experience and dreaming as process. The first section considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of selfhood and identity. The second section considers dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section considers dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining in particular dreams’ morality and function as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion considers the methodological opportunities and challenges that arise in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis in light of the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological approach of ‘participant-observation’.

Introduction

There is perhaps no activity more private, individual, or interior than dreaming. Dreams tend to occur as involuntary, sporadic events during slumber, encompassing visual images, cognitive activity, and a range of emotions, reactions, and sensations. They are often remembered and recounted in scattered fragments or fleeting impressions rather than coherent or structured events. Their significance can seem glaringly evident, or thoroughly opaque. Some we deem meaningful, others trivial. Some dreams we are happy to share, others we would rather not reveal. Dreams, as such, sit somewhere at the interstices of the experienced and narrated, real and imagined, meaningful and meaningless, conscious and subconscious, and disclosed and concealed. Yet despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their nebulous nature, dreams have often been approached—if not always recognised—as sources of interpretive insight into the everyday lives, relationships, affects, and environments of those who experience them.^[1]

Dreams were long considered the primary terrain of psychoanalytic theory, which centres the role of unconscious mental processes in shaping human behavioural and mental states. Anthropological approaches have shed vital light on the socially and historically shaped ways that different communities understand the origins, causes, contents, contexts, and meanings of dreams, both as individual psychic experiences and as culturally situated practices, and in ways that do not necessarily correspond to scientific definitions (Lohmann 2007). The earliest reference to dreams within anthropology can be traced to the late nineteenth century scholar Edward Burnett Tylor (1871), who argued that dreaming, as a universally experienced state of reality-transcending and altered consciousness, enabled the emergence of human mythologies, cosmological frameworks, and religious beliefs worldwide. For Tylor, dreams in many non-modern societies were held to put people in touch with objectively existing souls or ghosts, while modern societies understood souls and ghosts to be the result of psychology and biology ([1871] 1920). His theories reflected a broader understanding among Victorian anthropologists that belief in the reality of dreams characterised earlier stages in the development of human society, within a three-part evolution of culture from ‘savage’ to ‘barbarian’ to ‘civilised’.

Early twentieth century dreaming studies, conducted primarily in non-Western settings and often tied to psychiatric interventions, tended to focus on the collection, classification, and comparison of similarities and differences in dream contents, or what was known as ‘dream data reports’ (e.g. Lincoln 1935).^[2]However, post-war scholars in psychological anthropology, and particularly those affiliated with the US-borne ‘Culture and Personality School’—an influential current concerned with how psychological and cultural forces shape human experience—were critical of the abstraction of dreams from their specific lived and interpretive contexts. They posited that dreams should instead be approached as expressions of collectively shaped personality traits and emotive dispositions shared by particular social groups (e.g. Eggan 1952).

It was primarily in the late 1980s and early 1990s that dreams came to figure more prominently as objects of ethnographic inquiry and cross-cultural comparison in their own right within the work of social anthropologists, some of whom bring their social scientific analyses into conversation with neuropsychology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive science (e.g. Nordin 2011; Laughlin 2011). Sometimes referred to as the ‘new anthropology of dreaming’ (Tedlock 1991), albeit not thoroughly systematised or integrated, this current recognises dreams as communicative events and legitimate modes of interpreting, inhabiting, and effecting change in the world. It draws attention to dreams as both interiorly experienced and culturally contextual social facts, often requiring multi-disciplinary analysis and attention to local psychodynamics. It also considers dreaming as a fruitful way to conduct research. Dreams can help build relations between field interlocutors and fieldworkers as dreamers themselves, allowing them to connect across different sociocultural worlds.^[3]

Drawing on ethnographic examples from diverse regions, this entry considers dreams as manifestations of the subconscious and interior dimensions of individuals through the lens of ethnopsychology and attendant constructs of self, personhood, and identity. It then approaches dreams as cultural artefacts and practices through the lens of their ritualised or expert-led interpretation. The third section examines dreams through their relationship to religiosity, spirituality, and the transcendent, examining dreams’ functions as sources of knowledge, divination, and power. The conclusion assesses the opportunities and challenges entailed in taking dreams seriously as objects of ethnographic analysis, particularly given their often-opaque nature and the limits they appear to pose to the classical anthropological method of ‘participant-observation’.

Self, identity, and psyche

Dreams play a central role within anthropological investigations into constructions of the self, identity, and psyche across individuals, collectives, and cultures, or what is referred to alternately as the field of ‘ethnopsychology’ (White 2012) or ‘cultural psychodynamics’ (Mageo 2015). Freudian psychoanalysis was instrumental in rehabilitating dreams as objects of legitimate scholarly inquiry and therapeutic intervention in the West and had a profound influence on early anthropologies of dreaming. Its influence manifests, for instance, in analyses of dreams as the disguised fulfilments of repressed wishes and as expressions of trauma, anxiety, and guilt. It also surfaces in the distinction identified by researchers between dreams’ manifest or conscious content and their latent or subconscious content, and an attention to the multiple symbolic valences of recurring dream motifs or patterns.

Exemplary of this approach is an ethnographic study conducted in the 1980s that centred on the dreams of Jovenil, a recently bereaved father among the Kagwahiv people of the Brazilian Amazon (Kracke 1981). In these dreams, Jovenil witnesses the engorged penis of a man that is snapped off as punishment for the man having slept with his own sister. Jovenil also dreams of suffering the wrath of his wife for inadvertently hunting and killing a monkey and of overturning a canoe that drowns his son, Alonzo. These events, according to anthropologist Waud Kracke, manifest Jovenil’s curiosity in the large penis of a fellow villager he beheld as a child and for which he was later castigated by his mother, resulting in sexual trauma. They also show his repressed guilt for engaging in taboo incestuous relations with a parallel cousin earlier in life, and the blame he places upon himself for the consequent death of his children as a form of punishment. In a society that prescribes that the dead must be forgotten and all memories of them eradicated, it was through the subconscious experience of dreams that Jovenil was able to work through the emotional process of mourning the loss of his children, facing his guilty conscience, and acknowledge his complicity in the tragedy.

If the example above centres on a single individuals’ multiple dreams, other early studies of an ethnopsychological bent took as their primary data a wider array of subjects and dreams to identify basic personality traits and worldviews that are shared by particular social groups, or what was then called ‘culture patterns’ (Eggan 1952, 478). For instance, ‘dream charts’ were deployed to analyse the manifest content of 334 dreams collected from men and women aged 6 to 75 years in Tzintzuntzan, Mexico (Foster 1973). Recurring symbols within these dreams, and particularly among men, include a threatening environment, impotence and loneliness, fear of embarrassment, and unpredictable futures. These repeated motifs point to anxiety over what people will say, or of being found out, as central dimensions of Tzintzuntzan cultural and gendered norms. They suggest that Tzintzuntzan people’s adherence to principles of good behaviour in waking life is driven less by their sense of guilt than by their conformity to what anthropologist George Foster calls a ‘shame culture’. Importantly, dreams’ manifest content directs attention not only to the basic tenets of ‘shame culture’ as a shared disposition among Tzintzuntzan people, but also to the disharmony or tensions that exist between this cultural ideal on the one hand, and the repression of desires that sustaining this ideal demands (Eggan 1952, 478).

More recent ethnopsychological scholarship has distanced itself from Freudian and Culture and Personality approaches to studying dreams. It recognised that such approaches risked being ethnocentric, i.e. that they often misinterpreted dreams because they stuck too closely to the cultural understandings of the analysts. Previous approaches had also assumed that cultures were largely static and that insights from one culture were widely generalisable. Working against these assumptions, contemporary ethnopsychological studies consider how cultural transformation, including processes of globalisation, colonisation, and modernisation, reconfigures the ability of individuals and collectives to reorganise their sense of self. They study, for example, how dreams that reflect back to the dreamer how their organisation of self relates to them, their body, and other beings and entities in the world (so-called ‘selfscape dreams’) relate to people’s interpretive frameworks (Hollan 2004). While such dreams may be universal in their basic orienting functions, their content varies within and across both cultures and individuals, conjuring cultural contexts that are more-than-local in their scope, sites, and subjects (e.g. Lattas 1993; Hollan 2005).

In American Samoa, for example, the dreams of young students, and their own reflections on these dreams’ significance, express their efforts to situate their selves in the context of imposed cultural shifts over a century of Christian conversion and Americanisation (Mageo 2004). In one such dream, a female Samoan’s muteness, compounded with her inability or refusal to speak either English or Samoan and her appearance as a White, blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old, point to communication problems, existential confusions, and forms of cultural resistance linked to Samoan girls’ shifting sexuality and gender roles. They reflect enduring traditional hierarchies on the one hand and notions of social equality and racial categories introduced by colonialism on the other. In another dream, the violent silencing and injury suffered by a male dreamer’s girlfriend embodies the challenge of reconciling the customary authority of higher-status Samoan males with the values of romantic engagement, care, and sincerity introduced by Christian missionaries, and American soldiers in WWI. In both instances, dreams and their interpretation by dreamers themselves come to constitute experiences that are creative rather than purely passive, conscious rather than purely unconscious, and generative rather than purely reflective. It is through these experiences that Samoans engage emotionally and discursively in the effects and affects of socio-cultural change and attendant forms of meaning-making.

Cultural artefacts, ritual acts, and interpretive practices

The sociocultural dimensions of dreams accrue particular prominence when dream ritualisation, communication, and interpretation form part of an established local knowledge system. Such insider or local knowledge systems offer valuable insights into how dream experiences are defined, classified, and valued across different communities as significant or mundane, empowering or perilous, or pragmatic or supernatural. They showcase how and when dreams should be communicated to others, or not, and who has the authority to elucidate their meanings. They also shed light on the diverse functions and causes of dreams, including as momentary and revelatory journeys deep into parts of the self or beyond (Mittermaier 2015; Groark 2009); as products of the intentions of the dreamer or unsolicited visitations by outside entities (George 1995; Heneise 2017); as pathways to or predicaments of past and future events (Stewart 2017; Basso 1987); as deliberately induced expressions of creative imagination or unwilled forms of external control (Herdt and Stephen 1989; Chao 2022); as guides to behaviour or reflections thereof (Ingold 2013; Pandya 2004); as experiences of diagnostic, therapeutic, anxiogenic, or punitive valences (Devereux 2023; Traphagan 2003); as expressions of resilience or rupture in the face of change (Graham 1995; Glaskin 2005); and as continuous extensions of, or radical breaks from, waking thoughts (Kracke 1981; Rubenstein 2012).

Ethnographic studies of dreams among the Yolmo of north-central Nepal illustrate the value of attending to local understandings of dreams’ sociocultural significance as categories of experience and modes of practice (Desjarlais 1991). According to one study, conducted in the late 1980s, dreams do not exist for Yolmo as a unitary entity, but rather in three distinctive forms—auspicious, inauspicious, and seemingly insignificant—that manifest in particular dream events. While villagers can articulate these basic distinctions, it is primarily Buddhist spiritual leaders and priests, such as lamas and shamans, who have the authority and expertise to determine what particular dreams signify and to heal those who experience them. They do so by drawing on a ‘dictionary of dream symbols’ (Desjarlais 1991, 215) that identifies and indexes a wide, complex, yet finite range of dream images and meanings that are collectively recognised but also vary in significance depending on the dreamer in question.

In contrast to the notion of dreams as reflective of the individual’s self, psyche, and past, many Yolmo believe that dreams predict events that will impact those around the dreamer in the course of their future waking life. For instance, a tree falling in one person’s dream indicates that one of their close relatives will imminently die (Desjarlais 1991, 216). Another key facet of Yolmo dream knowledge systems pertains to the sustained enculturation in editing, remembering, communicating, and thus in some ways creating dream stories that begin in the early stages of life. Throughout this process, Yolmo not only come to terms with the distresses expressed in their dreams, but also actively ‘make their dreams mean what they want them to mean’ (Desjarlais 1991, 221). What this study offers is an approach to dreams anchored first and foremost in the knowledge systems of dreamers themselves—one that uncovers dreams’ divinatory functions as well as their positioning with local structures of expertise, processes of skill acquisition, and understandings of meaning-making as a concomitantly symbolic and strategic endeavour.

Other ethnographic accounts attend the embodied and ritualised dimensions and protocols of dreams and dream-sharing as collective—rather than individuated—practices that serve to guide everyday social activities. One such case centres on dreaming among the Ongee people of Little Andaman Island and its role in determining communal hunting and gathering practices in daily life (Pandya 2004). Within these dreams, shared sensations of smells help to inform conscious and practical decisions by Ongee groups around what plants or animals should be sought out in the forest, where, and when.^[4]This olfactory dimension stems from the Ongee perception of dreams as moments where individuals’ internal bodies (enteeah) collect the smells left behind or imprinted upon their external bodies (mateeah) in waking life, in a process known as dane korale, which translates literally as ‘a spider making its web’ and is also the Ongee term for ‘dreaming’ (Pandya 2004, 143).

Ongee practice a ritualised form of dream-sharing by participating in lengthy and highly stylised discussions and singing before falling asleep on concentric and mutually facing platforms, in which they describe what they did in the day and what they dreamt of the previous night. Olfactory references identified across different individuals’ dreams, such as the smell of ripe jackfruit, bring these individuals to form groups and look for jackfruit in the forest together. The discovery of ripe jackfruit validates the dreams shared, producing what Ongee call ‘dream success’ (eneyemaga-tegebe) (Pandya 2004, 140). The collective, rather than individuated, nature of dream images and smells thus works hand in hand with Ongee’s collective interpretation of these dreams’ meanings and their implications for shared daily activities. While Ongee have since experienced a transition from circular open campgrounds to private enclosed quarters, and from forest-based subsistence to plantation labour, this ritualised, sensory, and collective ethos persists. People no longer dream or discuss the familiar scents of plants and animals. Instead, their collective dream-sharing rituals speak to experiences of, and guidance found in, the novel smells of plantation foremen and buzzing helicopters.

If symbolism and sensoriality play an important role within some cultural understandings of dreaming, other anthropological approaches invite a more radical appraisal of the primacy of acts and processes of interpretation. They focus less on the instances and categories of imagery and meaning and more on the activities involved in determining and consolidating dreams’ social significance. One example of this are the new dreams of ‘being eaten by oil palm’ (dimakan sawit) experienced by the Marind people of West Papua, Indonesia (Chao 2022, 183–200), wherein sleeping individuals become violently possessed by an introduced cash crop that is rapidly taking over their lands and forests in waking life. These dreams act as cultural critiques of the plantation as a newly established mode of economic production in the region, and they resonate with the new sensory experiences of Ongee community members.

Rather than focusing their discourses on the contents or events of these dreams, or attributing a therapeutic or cathartic value to dream experiences, Marind affirm it is primarily through the oral transmission of dream narratives to and with others that collective healing takes place. For instance, knowledge of kith and kin who have recently been ‘eaten by oil palm’ brings people to travel the landscape to their encounter. Shared dream experiences prompt villagers who are in conflictual relations over land rights to reconcile with one another, or enable starcrossed lovers whose marriage is proscribed by customary law to sustain a different kind of intimate relationship through dream story-telling. In contrast to traditional dreams, whose significance was arbitrated by medicine-men (messav) (Chao 2022, 188–9), new dreams of being eaten by oil palm are open to each and everyone’s interpretation, creating an egalitarian ethos that in turn allows for the participation of women, children, youth, and elders across rural and urban divides. What dream experiences mean, in other words, matters less than what dream sharing does as an exercise in mutual trust-building and as an acknowledgement of shared vulnerability to the attritive forces of plantation capitalism across waking and sleeping worlds.

Another example of how dream interpretation processes come to produce meaning, identity, and consciousness derives from studies of ‘dreamwork groups’ in the United Kingdom (Edgar 1999). These are groups in which six to twelve people share and interpret their dreams in a structured manner. Studying these groups showed that the ways in which dreams are discussed, embellished, and censored depend heavily on social and interactional group dynamics, such as their members’ degree of mutual familiarity, friendship, and shared values.

These dynamics produce dream interpretations that, over the course of conversations initiated by the dreamer but primarily shaped by the group’s questions, suggestions, reservations, and encouragements, become vastly different from the originally recounted experience of the dream and also mutate when dreamwork groups’ composition changes over time. It is through this situated and collective ‘cultural reworking’ of dreams (Edgar 1999, 39), involving the consciousness of both the dreamer and group, that new kinds of mental and affective connectedness are generated and the grounds for individual self-realisation actualised.

Transcendent encounters, spiritual power, and beyond-human knowledge

A third prevalent motif in the anthropology of dreaming pertains to its relationship to religiosity and the transcendent, notably as a source of cosmological knowledge, divination, and power across time. In some contexts, dream experiences and their revelations are intrinsically connected to spiritual understandings of consciousness, cognition, and salvation (e.g. Young 1999). In other contexts, dreams are seen as tied to prophetic figures and events in the past that in turn motivate religious and political movements in the present (e.g. Edgar 2011; Mittermaier 2011). Religious authority can be premised on the ability of select individuals to travel in time in the pursuit of sacred knowledge or to access extra-human powers and entities including spirits, gods, ancestors, and the deceased (e.g. Alatas 2019). Dreams may act as informal yet powerful ‘technologies of governmentality’ that self-regulate individuals’ conscience and conduct in everyday life (Eves 2011). They may also constitute sources of ‘liturgical novelty’ when creatively and contextually interpreted and acted upon by recognised experts (McGee 2012). While revelatory dreams may come to chosen humans through the agency of more-than-human beings, they can also be intentionally sought out and cultivated by human dreamers, including in the form of volitional or lucid dreaming, and through rituals, prayer, and trance- or vision-inducing substances, notably hallucinogenic plants (e.g. Hurd and Bulkeley 2014; Brown 1985).

One example of the cosmological and temporal dimensions of dreams is found among the Bardi Aboriginal people of the northwest Kimberley region of Western Australia (Glaskin 2005). As with many Indigenous Australian Peoples, the Bardi identify the creative period in the past during which ancestral beings gave shape to the world (or ‘Country’), as ‘the Dreaming’. Local terms for this period include buwarra, which translates as ‘dream’. While ‘ordinary’ dreams are experienced by ‘ordinary people’, particular individuals in the community, known as jarlngungurr (Glaskin 2005, 303), can communicate with ancestral figures, as well as the spirit beings and the deceased from the Dreaming. They do so through dreams that are initiated by these other-than-human beings and through which knowledges are revealed to the human dreamer. While these knowledges have existed since time immemorial, they inform contemporary ritual and ceremonial life in novel ways, including in the form of new songs, dances, designs, and more, pointing to the integration of tradition and innovation, and past and present, in both the dream form and its real-world ramifications. It is also through the knowledges acquired through dreams from spirits, ancestors, and the deceased that jarlngungurr are able to perform healing, divination, shape-shifting, and time-travel. Dreams thereby help the Bardi anticipate future calamities, notably where respect for Country has been violated and must be remedied or redressed.

As the example above demonstrates, dreams and their authority in producing truths play an important role in enabling the transmission of cultural and spiritual knowledge across times and generations. In other contexts, dreams have played a seminal part in encouraging societal transformation, notably in the form of religious enculturation and spiritual self-reinvention. This is the case among the Asabano of highland Papua New Guinea, for whom dreams (aluma) have always acted as portals to the dead, forest beings, or place spirits, and as experiential evidence through which people describe, explain, and rationalise their religious beliefs (Lohmann 2000). When Baptist missionaries sought to convert them in the late 1970s, many Asabano continued to practice their customary religion. It was only following a series of prophetic dreams experienced by villagers, in which they encountered God, the Holy Spirit, Jesus, angels, apocalyptic deluges, and the fires of Hell, that Christian beliefs were truly absorbed and internalised. Christian figures that appear in villagers’ dreams to this day testify to these beings’ reality and power and remind people of the behaviours they must sustain in order to secure an afterlife in paradise, whereas traditional and familiar dream-entities like evil nature spirits and cannibal witches are now interpreted as minions of Satan. As such, while the ability of dreams to convey information has not changed for Asabano, the kinds of information being received, and associated dictates of moral conduct, have significantly transformed, with dreams playing an important—potentially even determinant—role in enhancing villagers’ receptivity to the precepts of introduced Christianity.

Dreams, as such, can be instrumental in validating, inspiring, and sustaining belief among members of religious communities. Their evocative valences can also be harnessed beyond the scope of those individuals who adhere to particular religious groups, as illustrated by Amira Mittermaier’s (2015) reflective account of dream-stories among Egyptian adherents to the mystic body of Islamic religious practice known as Sufism. During her fieldwork, Mittermaier was granted permission by her interlocutor, ‘Umar, to consult and select accounts from the Book of Visions, containing the records of dreams and waking visions of followers of Shaykh Qusi, a renowned inheritor and transmitter of the prophet Muhammad’s teachings. This permission, she later found out, itself stemmed from an order that had come to ‘Umar by way of a dream. However, while Mittermaier originally chose dream-visions for her research with the aim of achieving a representative sample from diverse sources and encompassing diverse themes, ‘Umar replaced these selections with a collection of accounts that, to Mittermaier’s initial disappointment, were all relatively similar in content. What drove ‘Umar’s choices was not the pursuit of neutrality or representationality, but rather the effectiveness of these particular dreams in achieving the key aims of Sufi dream-visions—namely, to communicate the shaykh’s aura, to create a sense of awe, and to buttress the shaykh’s spiritual authority. Just as anthropologists selectively deploy ethnographic examples to convince and draw in their readers, so too Sufis approach dream-stories as invitations to their audiences that enable them to communicate and connect with the Prophet, his descendants, and the dead. Dreams allow us to catch a glimpse of the inaccessible, invisible, and unknown, and to be moved both spiritually and imaginatively. And just as prophetic dreams in Sufi communities are at once highly valued and contested, so too decisions around which dreams to include and exclude in Mittermaier’s ethnographic account were never neutral, but shaped as much by anthropological considerations as by the evocative use of dreams as examples by Sufis themselves.

Conclusions

Dreams are universal as experiences yet specific in their contents, interpretations, and performances. As such, they constitute powerful resources for engaging with long-standing questions around the construction of, and relationship between, self and society, mind and body, and continuity and change, and the meaningful slippages that arise across the realms of the known and speculated, lived and narrated, practical and spiritual, and agentive and reflective. Dreams express cultural creativity, social conflict, potentialities for self-exploratory, self-transcendence or hazardous vulnerabilities. They alternately reflect, resolve, or reinforce individual and collective anxieties and desires, as people move in and across different worlds, knowledges, and relations.

Importantly, attending to dreams anthropologically challenges the notion of a single ‘reality’ and its correlative relationship to the ‘imagination’ as the ‘broader range of meanings that encompass a variety of spaces, modes of perception and conceptualizations of the real’ (Mittermaier 2011, 3). Instead, it invites us to think of dreams as a form of ‘emergent reality’ (Tedlock 1987b, 4)—or as ‘real in a different way’, as Vincent Crapanzano’s Moroccan informant, Tuhami, says when speaking about his nightly visitations by a she-demon (1980, 15). Dreams are multiply meaningful precisely in light of their inherent ambiguity and in-betweenness, or what Jeannette Mageo calls their ‘mimetic incompleteness’ (2004, 151). They also draw attention to the political, affective, and social force of the imagination as a culturally molded yet never entirely graspable or intelligible dimension of human existence (Stephen 1995; Stevenson 2014). And just as not all dreams bear the same hermeneutic weight or consensual meaning for those who experience them, so too it is critical to consider whose dream interpretations are foregrounded within anthropological accounts across insider-outsider and subjective-objective divides.

Since its inception, the anthropology of dreaming has continued to develop in new and exciting directions. It is no longer confined to particular ‘culture complexes’ or world-regions. Instead, comparative studies of dreams across Global North and South divides push against the romanticisation or essentialisation of non-Western dream cultures (Domhoff 1990). These studies identify recurring motifs in the dreams of American and Japanese citizens (Griffith, Miyagi, and Tago 1958), the role of conflict in the dreams of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children (Levine 1991), and the manifest content of dreams experienced by US-based college women of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American heritage (Kane 1994).^[5]

Alongside a burgeoning of multi-disciplinary approaches that combine anthropological methods and theories with cutting-edge findings in neuroscience and evolutionary biology, some scholars are practicing ‘studying up’ by examining how Western-trained psychotherapists understand their own dream experiences alongside their relationship to both their patients and their profession (Dombeck 1991). Other researchers practice ‘studying in’ by harnessing auto-ethnographic methods to consider how dream-related knowledge systems learned in the field come to bear new meanings in light of their own personal, physical, and psychological traumas back home (Richman 2000). The role of animals as participants in and producers of dreams (Hallowell 1960) has seen renewed attention in emerging multispecies approaches that consider, for instance, dogs’ dreams as expressions of more-than-human perspectival agency (Kohn 2007) or the haunting apparition in dreams of wrongfully killed cows as expressions of more-than-human retributive justice (Govindrajan 2022).

At the same time, dreams continue to pose certain challenges to the classical methods of anthropology. ‘Dream-narratives’ are always fragmentary and often socially or individually motivated accounts of ‘dream-experiences’ (Kirtsoglou 2010) that themselves cannot be empirically verified and lie beyond the reach of participant-observation. The personal nature of dreams, as well as their at-times spiritual, sacred, or supernatural dimensions, can make them a sensitive topic of discussion, often requiring a strong level of rapport between the researcher and her interlocutors. Taking dreams seriously as objects of analysis is also not devoid of risk for anthropologists themselves, whose professionalism and objectivity may consequently come under question—notably when it comes to writing and imparting their own dream experiences (George 1995, 17–8).

And yet, attending to dreams can also open meaningful spaces for conversations around the different yet interconnected worlds of researchers and their informants. Participating in dream-experiences and sharing dream-narratives can drive intersubjective dynamics of fieldwork, and create mutual trust, critical self-reflection, and openness to ambiguity.^[6]As a form of affective and discursive ‘involvement in the cosmology of the Other’ (Sprenger 2010, 61), delving into dreams—both one’s own and others’—can push back on the ‘anthropological taboo against going native’ (Ewing 1994, 574) and attendant assumptions around the nature of cultural belief versus empirical reality (Luhrmann 1989; Favret-Saada 1980). Rather than dismissing dreams as fictive constructs or ethnographic objects alone, it is perhaps in anthropologists’ willingness to become vulnerable to dreams’ intersubjective thrust that dreams’ agentive force as ‘wild possibilities’ (George 1995, 17) might relationally and imaginatively gain ground and grow.

References

Alatas, Ismail F. 2019. “Dreaming saints: Exploratory authority and Islamic praxes of history in central Java.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, no. 1: 67–85.

Basso, Ellen B. 1987. “The implications of a progressive theory of dreaming.” In Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations, edited by Barbara Tedlock, 86–104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brightman, Robert. 2002. Grateful prey: Rock Cree human-animal relationships. Regina: University of Regina Press.

Brown, Michael F. 1985. Tsewa’s gift: Magic and meaning in an Amazonian society. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press.

Bulkeley, Kelly. 1994. The wilderness of dreams: Exploring the religious meaning of dreams in modern Western culture. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

———. 2008. Dreaming in the world’s religions: A comparative history. New York: New York University Press.

———, ed. 2001. Dreams: A reader on religious, cultural and psychological dimensions of dreaming. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chao, Sophie. 2022. In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Crapanzano, Vincent. 1980. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Desjarlais, Robert R. 1991. “Dreams, divination, and Yolmo ways of knowing.” Dreaming 1, no. 3: 211–24.

Devereux, George. 2023. “Pathogenic dreams in non-Western societies.” In The dream and human societies, edited by Gustave E. von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois, 213–28. Oakland: University of California Press.

Dombeck, Mary. 1991. Dreams and professional personhood: The contexts of dream telling and dream interpretation among American psychotherapists. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

Domhoff, G. William. 1990. The mystique of dreams: A search for utopia through Senoi dream theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Edgar, Iain. 1999. “Dream fact and real fiction: The realization of the imagined self.” Anthropology of Consciousness 10, no. 1: 1–70.

———. 2011. The dream in Islam: From Qur’anic tradition to jihadist inspiration. New York: Berghahn.

Eggan, Dorothy. 1952. “The manifest content of dreams: A challenge to social science.” American Anthropologist 54: 469–85.

Eves, Richard. 2011. “Pentecostal dreaming and technologies of governmentality in a Melanesian society.” American Ethnologist 38, no. 4: 758–73.

Ewing, Katherine. 1994. “Dreams from a saint: Anthropological atheism and the temptation to believe.” American Anthropologist 96, no. 3: 571–83.

Favret-Saada, Jeanne. 1980. Deadly words: Witchcraft in the Bocage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foster, George M. 1973. “Dreams, character, and cognitive orientation in Tzintzuntzan.” Ethos 1: 106–21.

George, Marianne. 1995. “Dreams, reality, and the desire and intent of dreamers as experienced by a fieldworker.” Anthropology of Consciousness 6, no. 3: 17–33.

Glaskin, K. 2005. “Innovation and ancestral revelation: The case of dreams.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 297–314.

Govindrajan, Radhika. 2022. “Spectral justice.” In The promise of multispecies justice, edited by Sophie Chao, Karin Bolender, and Eben S. Kirksey, 33–52. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Graham, Laura R. 1995. Performing dreams: Discourses of immortality among the Xavante of central Brazil. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Griffith, Richard M., Otoya Miyagi, and Akira Tago. 1958. “The universality of typical dreams: Japanese vs. Americans.” American Anthropologist 60, no. 6: 1173–79.

Groark, Kevin. 2009. “Discourses of the soul: The negotiation of personal agency in Tzotzil Maya dream narrative.” American Ethnologist 36, no. 4: 705–21.

Hallowell, Irving. 1960. “Ojibwa ontology, behavior, and world view.” In Readings on Indigenous religions, edited by Graham Harvey, 18–49. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Heijnen, Adriënne. 2010. “Relating through dreams: Names, genes and shared substance.” History and Anthropology 21, no. 3: 307–19.

Heijnen, Adriënne and Iain Edgar. 2010. “Special issue: Imprints of dreaming.” History and Anthropology 21, no. 3: 217–26.

Heneise, M. 2017. “Making dreams, making relations: Dreaming in Angami Naga society.” The South Asianist 5, no. 1: 66–82.

Herdt, Gilbert and Michele Stephen, eds. 1989. The religious imagination in New Guinea. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Hollan, Douglas W. 2004. “The anthropology of dreaming: Selfscape dreams.” Dreaming 14, nos. 2–3: 170–82.

———. 2005. “Dreaming in a global world.” In A companion to psychological anthropology: Modernity and psychocultural change, edited by Conerly C. Casey and Robert B. Edgerton, 90–102. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing.

Hurd, Ryan and Kelly Bulkeley, eds. 2014. Lucid dreaming: New perspectives on consciousness in sleep. Volumes 1 and 2. London: Bloomsbury.

Ingold, Tim. 2013. “Dreaming of dragons: On the imagination of real life.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 734–52.

Jȩdrej, M. C. and Rosalind Shaw, eds. 1992. Dreaming, religion and society in Africa. Leiden: Brill.

Kane, Connie M. 1994. “Differences in the manifest dream content of Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American college women.” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 22, no. 4: 203–9.

Kirtsoglou, Elisabeth. 2010. “Dreaming the self: A unified approach towards dreams, subjectivity and the radical imagination.” History and Anthropology 21, no. 3: 321–35.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. “How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement.” American Ethnologist 34, no. 1: 3–24.

Kracke, Waud H. 1981. “Kagwahiv mourning: Dreams of a bereaved father.” Ethos 9: 258–75.

Kuper, Adam. 1979. “A structural approach to dreams.” Man 14: 645–62.

Lambek, Michael. 2018. Island in the stream: An ethnographic history of Mayotte. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lattas, Andrew. 1993. “Sorcery and colonialism: Illness, dreams, and death as political languages in West New Britain.” Man 28, no. 1: 51–77.

Laughlin, Charles D. 2011. “Communing with the gods: The dreaming brain in cross-cultural perspective.” Time and Mind 4: 155–88.

Levine, Julia B. 1991. “The role of culture in the representation of conflict in dreams: A comparison of Bedouin, Irish, and Israeli children.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 22, no. 4: 472–90.

Lincoln, Jackson S. 1935. The dream in Native American and other primitive cultures. London: Cresset.

Lohmann, Roger I. 2019. “Culture and dreams.” In Cross-cultural psychology: Contemporary themes and perspectives, edited by Kenneth D. Keith, 327–41. 2nd edition. Newark, N.J.: Wiley.

———. 2000. “The role of dreams in religious enculturation among the Asabano of Papua New Guinea.” Ethos 28, no. 1: 75–102.

———. 2007. “Dreams and ethnography.” In The new science of dreaming, edited by Deirdre Barrett and Patrick McNamara, 35–69. Volume 3. Westport, Conn.: Praeger.

———, ed. 2003. Dream travelers: Sleep experiences and culture in the Western Pacific. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Luhrmann, Tanya M. 1989. Persuasions of the witch’s craft: Ritual magic in contemporary England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mageo, Jeannette M., ed. 2003. Dreaming and the self: New perspectives on subjectivity, identity, and emotion. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press.

———. 2004. “Toward a holographic theory of dreaming.” Dreaming 14: 151–69.

———. 2015. “Cultural psychodynamics: The audit, the mirror, and the American dream.” Current Anthropology 56, no. 6: 883–900.

Mageo, Jeannette M. and Robin E. Sheriff, eds. 2021. New directions in the anthropology of dreaming. London: Routledge.

McGee, Adam. 2012. “Dreaming in Haitian Vodou: Vouchsafe, guide, and source of liturgical novelty.” Dreaming 22: 83–100.

Mittermaier, Amira. 2011. Dreams that matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2015. “How to do things with examples: Sufis, dreams, and anthropology.” Special issue, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, no. 1: 129–43.

Newsom, Matthew D. 2021. “Identity and memory in Germany: The defensive role of dreams.” In New directions in the anthropology of dreaming, edited by Jeannette Mageo and Robin E. Sheriff, 72–92. London: Routledge.

Nordin, Andreas. 2011. “Dreaming in religion and pilgrimage: Cognitive, evolutionary and cultural perspectives.” Religion 41: 225–49.

Pandya, Vishvajit. 2004. “Forest smells and spider webs: Ritualized dream interpretation among Andaman Islanders.” Dreaming 14: 136–50.

Parman, Susan. 1991. Dream and culture: An anthropological study of the Western intellectual tradition. New York: Praeger.

Pick, Daniel and Lyndal Roper, eds. 2004. Dreams and history: The interpretation of dreams from Ancient Greece to modern psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

Price-Williams, Douglass and Lydia Nakashima Degarrod. 1989. “Communication, context, and use of dreams in Amerindian societies.” Journal of Latin American Lore 15, no. 2: 195–209.

Richman, Joel. 2000. “Coming out of intensive care crazy: Dreams of affliction.” Qualitative Health Research 10, no. 1: 84–102.

Rushforth, Scott. 1992. “The legitimation of beliefs in a hunter-gatherer society: Bearlake Athapaskan knowledge and authority.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 3: 483–500.

Sheriff, Robin. 2017. “Dreaming of the Kardashians: Media content in the dreams of US college students.” Ethos 45, no. 4: 532–54.

Shulman, David and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds. 1999. Dream cultures: Explorations in the comparative history of dreaming. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sprenger, Guido. 2010. “Sharing dreams: Involvement in the other’s cosmology.” In Mutuality and empathy: Self and other in the ethnographic encounter, edited by Anne S. Grønseth and Dona L. Davis, 49–68. Oxford: Sean Kingston Publishing.

Stephen, Michele. 1995. A’aisa’s gifts: A study of magic and the self. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life beside itself: Imagining care in the Canadian Arctic. Oakland: University of California Press.

Stewart, Charles. 2004. “Special issue: Anthropological approaches to dreaming.” Dreaming 14, nos. 2–3.

———. 2017. Dreaming and historical consciousness in Island Greece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Tedlock, Barbara, ed. 1987a. Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1987b. “Dreaming and dream research.” In Dreaming: Anthropological and psychological interpretations, edited by Barbara Tedlock, 1–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1991. “The new anthropology of dreaming.” Dreaming 1: 161–78.

Traphagan, John W. 2003. “Older women as caregivers and ancestral protection in rural Japan.” Ethnology 42: 127–39.

Tylor, Edward B. (1871) 1920. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, language, art and custom. London: John Murray. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.42334

White, Geoffrey M. 2012. “Ethnopsychology.” In New directions in psychological anthropology, edited by Theodore Schwartz, Geoffrey M. White, and Catherine A. Lutz, 21–46. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Young, Serinity. 1999. Dreaming in the lotus: Buddhist dream narrative, imagery, and practice. Boston: Wisdom.

Note on contributor

Sophie Chao is Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sydney. Her research investigates the intersections of Indigeneity, ecology, capitalism, health, and justice in the Pacific. Chao is author of In the shadow of the palms: More-than-human becomings in West Papua (2022, Duke University Press) and co-editor of The promise of multispecies justice (2022, Duke University Press).

[1] On the significance of dreams and dreaming in Western history from Ancient Greece to modern times, see Pick and Roper (2004); Parman (1991). On the role of dreams in medieval world religions, including in Europe, early Asia, and Latin America, see Shulman and Stroumsa (1999); Bulkeley (2008).

[2] These studies found echo in later approaches that were concerned with identifying constant and recurring motifs underlying diverse myths across different cultural settings (e.g. Kuper 1979).

[3] For state-of-the-field syntheses of the anthropology of dreaming, see Laughlin (2011); Lohmann (2019); the edited volumes by Tedlock (1987a); Bulkeley (2001); Mageo (2003); Mageo and Sheriff (2021); and the special issues edited by Stewart (2004) and Heijnen and Edgar (2010). For region-specific anthologies of dreaming, see Lohmann (2003) on the West Pacific; Jȩdrej and Shaw (1992) on Africa; Bulkeley (1994) on the West; Price-Williams and Degarrod (1989) on South America.

[4] On the function of dreams as techniques for solving everyday practical matters, including in the contexts of hunting, curing, craftsmanship, and artistic production, see Brightman 2002; Rushforth 1992.

[5] On anthropologies of dreaming in the Global North, see Hollan 2005; Newsom 2021; Heijnen 2010; Sheriff 2017.

[6] On dreams as an intersubjective research method in the field, see Chao 2023; Lambek 2018.

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Jean Price-Mars

Felix Stein — Tue, 09 May 2023 10:09:14 +0000

Photo: Haïti Inter: Quand Price Mars racontait Haïti

Jhon Picard Byron

Initially published 9 May 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/23pricemars

Abstract:

L’anthropologue Jean Price-Mars est une figure importante de l’Atlantique noir. Diplomate, écrivain, homme politique et anthropologue, l’auteur a exercé une influence qui va au-delà d’Haïti et de la Caraïbe. Cette entrée rend compte des contributions clefs de Price-Mars à l’histoire intellectuelle des XIXe et XXe siècles en Haïti, dans les Caraïbes et au-delà. S’illustrant en tant qu’un des principaux fondateurs de « l’école haïtienne d’ethnologie », il a développé les narrations de la nation haïtienne jouant un rôle déterminant dans l’appropriation des héritages africains en Haïti, du vodou en particulier, ainsi que dans la formation du discours de la diversité culturelle dans les Amériques noires. Reconnu comme un précurseur de la Négritude, mouvement culturel et politique anticolonialiste qui se fonde sur l’appropriation et la valorisation de l’héritage Africain, il a repensé les concepts de race, de culture, et d’identité noire en Amérique anticipant, ce faisant, les grands débats des dernières décennies des cultural et des postcolonial studies. Comme pour beaucoup d’autres figures du monde atlantique, en particulier de l’Africain-Américain aux racines haïtiennes W. E. B. Dubois, ses voyages et ses études en Europe ont joué un rôle déterminant dans l’élaboration de la pensée de Price-Mars. Pourtant, en Europe, en dehors de certains cercles littéraires et de spécialistes d’Haïti, il n’est que peu connu. Il faut dire que, pendant longtemps, les anthropologues–à la différence des spécialistes d’études littéraires–ne se sont que très peu intéressés à l’anthropologie haïtienne ; ce n’est, en effet, que depuis 2005, qu’une nouvelle génération de chercheurs procède à l’analyse des œuvres que les figures de l’anthropologie haïtienne ont laissées à la postérité.

Introduction

2019 a marqué à la fois le cinquantenaire de la disparition de Jean Price-Mars (1969), auteur important de l’Atlantique Noir^{^[1]}, et le centenaire de la première publication de son ouvrage La vocation de l’élite (1919). L’auteur, qui a représenté, dans les années 1950 et 1960, le patrimoine spirituel le plus célèbre d’Haïti, jouit encore aujourd’hui d’une grande notoriété dans son pays, non seulement parmi les gens d’un certain âge, mais aussi parmi les jeunes. Au gré des circonstances, son nom est évoqué par nombre d’Haïtiens, universitaires ou politiques, qui le célèbrent comme le « chantre de la culture haïtienne ».

Cette grande reconnaissance locale de Price-Mars contraste avec son oubli voire son effacement de la scène universitaire mondiale. L’auteur y est relégué au second plan alors que ses contemporains Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon et Léopold Sédar Senghor jouissent d’une forte exposition. Pourtant, ce dernier a reconnu les apports substantiels de Price-Mars à la Négritude (Fouchard 1956, 3), ce mouvement intellectuel né dans les années 1930 parmi des étudiants africains et antillais majoritairement francophones dont les visées politiques, foncièrement anti-coloniales, avaient un double caractère anticapitaliste et identitaire, cherchant à découvrir et à promouvoir des valeurs universelles fondées sur des valeurs propres aux populations noires (il était alors fait référence à un nouvel humanisme dit « humanisme nègre »). Les pensées de plusieurs de ces protagonistes sont appropriées par les postcolonial studies et les théories décoloniales depuis les décennies 1980 et 1990.

Price-Mars, qui a pourtant beaucoup inspiré les figures mentionnées plus haut comme un penseur clé de l’émancipation du joug colonial, demeure un grand oublié (Célius 2018). L’aura qui entoura sa participation au 1^er et au 2^e Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs (1956 et 1959) est la preuve^{^[2]}, s’il en fallait une, de son influence à la fin des années 1950. Une des thématiques centrales de ces congrès a été anticipée et développée par l’auteur dans son chef-d'œuvre Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928) que la plupart des participants ont dû lire avant de prendre part à ces événements. Nadia Yala Kisukidi relève, à grand renfort de références aux Actes, que les orientations générales du Congrès visaient « à promouvoir une “politique de la culture” contre le préjugé nocif de “peuple sans culture” porté par le processus colonial et la ruine psychique qu'il a entraînée chez les peuples colonisés » (Kisukidi 2014, 61).

Un penseur anticolonial comme Price-Mars ne devrait pas être maintenu dans l’oubli. Parce qu’il peut être considéré comme une figure de proue de la Négritude et au regard de sa contribution au mouvement intellectuel tendant à faire de la culture un enjeu primordial des luttes pour l'émancipation des peuples noirs - ce qui sera préjudiciable à la prééminence du marxisme -, il a lieu d’étudier la genèse de sa pensée, d’en exposer ses grandes lignes et souligner ce qui la distingue de celles de certains intellectuels et politiques qui s’en réclament.

Price-Mars dans la pensée anthropologique haïtienne

On ne saurait évoquer Price-Mars sans parler de l’anthropologie haïtienne. En Haïti, pour paraphraser une formule utilisée pour définir la géographie, « [l’anthropologie], ça sert, d’abord, à faire [la politique] » (cf. Lacoste [1976] 2012 ; Argyriadis et al. 2020). De fait, la politique a joué un rôle de premier plan dans le développement de la discipline anthropologique dans ce pays. Les premiers anthropologues haïtiens tels que Anténor Firmin, Louis-Joseph Janvier ont occupés des fonctions politiques. Leurs préoccupations principales n’étaient, de prime abord, ni d’ordre professionnel ni d’ordre scientifique : le vocabulaire anthropologique leur servait avant tout à traduire et à créer des narrations stratégiques d’identifications culturelles (cf. Bhabha [1994] 2007, 224–225), issues du monde politique et social. Du contexte haïtien, nation mise au ban après la révolution d’esclaves en 1804, découlent des narrations sociales et littéraires qui se sont vues réappropriées et reformulées par les anthropologues haïtiens à la fin du XIXe siècle.

David Nicholls, chanoine anglais, historien et spécialiste d’Haïti, a saisi les contours de ces narrations nationales comme un « racialisme de non-blancs » [« The racialism or racial consciousness of the non-whites »] (Nicholls 1996, 1-2). Selon lui, les intellectuels haïtiens ont participé à forger une conscience raciale contre l’idéologie coloniale et esclavagiste en mettant en évidence trois aspects : « (1) l’idée d’ancêtres communs biologiques associée à celle qui pose que ce fait biologique est secondaire ; (2) l’idée d’égalité des différentes races humaines ; (3) l’idée que les noirs sont capables de civiliser leur communauté, de contribuer au progrès de l’humanité » (Nicholls 1996, 1–2 ; Byron 2018).

Cet ensemble d’idées, source d’une véritable conscience collective comme le pensait Nicholls, constitue pour ainsi dire les éléments de base de l'idéologie nationale haïtienne. Il s’agit donc d’un discours politique et stratégique des élites dirigeantes visant à tenir ensemble une population plutôt hétérogène pour composer avec (ou affronter) les puissances coloniales. Ce discours trouve sa première formulation dans la constitution haïtienne de 1805, édictée par Jean-Jacques Dessalines, qui, en son article 14, dispose que tous les haïtiens sont « noirs » tout en interdisant l’usage de « toute acception de couleur ». Cet énoncé paradoxal remet en cause le racisme colonial qui plaçait le noir au bas de l’échelle sociale et traduit une tendance quasi impériale des Haïtiens du XIXe siècle à se positionner comme leaders de la lutte pour le progrès et l’émancipation des Africains.

En dépit du fait que le principe contenu dans l’énoncé de cet article 14 n’ait pas été respecté, il a constitué pendant des décennies le fondement idéologique de l’unité nationale haïtienne sous l’hégémonie des élites composées de deux groupes concurrents, voire hostiles, à savoir les noirs et les mulâtres. Il reste qu’en dépit de ces contradictions, le discours unitaire de la nation a fonctionné tant bien que mal. Il a permis au XIXe siècle à cette bourgeoisie naissante de revendiquer sa place dans le capitalisme mondial en s’appuyant sur une cohésion sociale interne en mesure de contenir les tumultes et les mouvements revendicatifs des masses paysannes. D’aucun pourrait tirer la conclusion que ces catégories populaires majoritaires - et en majorité noires -, tout comme certaines franges des élites dominantes, se sont retrouvées bon gré mal gré dans cette nation noire.

Au début du XXe siècle, ce discours se désarticule et, concomitamment, la cohésion nationale qu’il sous-tend s’estompe. Avant cela, tout au long du XIXe siècle, ce discours servira de creuset aux travaux des historiens et des anthropologues tels que Anténor Firmin et Louis-Joseph Janvier. Il s’agit, pour les historiens comme pour les anthropologues, d’illustrer un « universalisme noir », fondé sur l’appartenance des noirs à la communauté humaine et sur l’aptitude spécifique du noir haïtien, comme tous les autres, à se civiliser, et ce, dans un geste intellectuel et patriotique visant la défense de la nation.

Jean Price-Mars, qui a pris le relais des anthropologues politiques, n’a pas fait exception à cette règle. Il poursuit dans un premier temps l’exercice de traduction avant de recomposer et élargir ces narrations à partir des années 1920, ce qui coïncide avec l’entrée dans un contexte de crise et de déstructuration du modèle social haïtien hérité de la colonisation. Le système socio-politique haïtien d’avant crise découlait d’une certaine alliance de classes entre la masse d’anciens esclaves et les élites (noires et mulâtres). Si ce nouvel ordre signait la fin de l’esclavage, il se caractérisait aussi par le maintien des cultivateurs (anciens esclaves) dans des rapports sociaux d’exploitation et de domination marqués par la violence nue et des pratiques de prédations qui, organisées par l’État et les classes dominantes, s’accentuent vers la fin du XIXe siècle. L’analyse de ce modèle social par Price-Mars lui permet de déceler l’exploitation et la domination de la masse par l’élite ; ce qui l'entraînera, tout à la fois, vers la réforme de l’ordre social et l’élaboration de nouvelles narrations.

Entre 1915 et 1930, Price-Mars est conscient des limites des narrations nationales conçues dès les premiers moments de l’indépendance nationale. Déjà, au début du XXe siècle, ces narrations ne permettent plus de limiter l’érosion de l’unité nationale. Il considère l’union du pays haïtien comme une fiction, qui ne pourra nullement perdurer dès que la domination sociale d’après l’indépendance deviendra féroce au point de ressembler à la domination coloniale (Byron 2018).

L’œuvre de Price-Mars demeure partie prenante de la mouvance intellectuelle de la « contre-écriture » (Clifford 1980, 205; Byron 2016) dans sa forme proprement haïtienne de la fin du XIXe siècle. Les intellectuels, les historiens en particulier, ont proposé des discours et récits allant à l’encontre de ceux véhiculés en Occident sur Haïti. Price-Mars représente l’une des figures de cette dynamique dans le domaine de l’anthropologie. Leur démarche, empreinte de cosmopolitisme, visait à la reconnaissance d’Haïti comme une nation à part entière du monde occidental. Elle s’accordait aussi avec celle des classes dominantes qui revendiquaient une reconnaissance au sein du capitalisme mondial. Price-Mars, tout en poursuivant cette démarche, convoque des représentations d’Haïti mettant l’accent sur les différences, sur la particularité du pays, sur sa diversité interne et, in fine, sur son identité. Sa vision du pays cherche à prendre en compte les « incomptés » de la nation, contrairement à la plupart de ses collègues du XIXe siècle. En d’autres termes, Price Mars s’est évertué, durant les années 1920, à illustrer l’identité culturelle haïtienne afin qu’elle serve, d’une part, de ferment à l’exigence d’accession des couches populaires à une citoyenneté pleine et entière, d’autre part, de liant entre les diverses composantes de la nation.

C’est dans cette perspective qui articule politique et culture que Price-Mars s’intéressera au folklore. Il en fera l’objet de « la discipline de l’ethnographie traditionnelle » (Price-Mars 1928), de son anthropologie politiquement motivée. Au travers de son analyse et sa valorisation des cultures haïtiennes, il s’attelle à intégrer dans la nation politique toutes les composantes de la société (Byron et al. 2020, 279 ; Célius 2005b).

L’œuvre de Price Mars s’est formée à partir de ses voyages et de ses rencontres avec des figures intellectuelles de la Caraïbe, tel que Fernando Ortiz. Les années 1920 pendant lesquels il voyage, principalement en Europe, sont marquées par « un courant intellectuel » très largement dominé par le « primitivisme » qui célèbre l’homme non-blanc en tant que représentant de notre « état naturel », « l’Art nègre » fondé sur les arts africains, et le mouvement de la « Renaissance de Harlem », mouvement culturel qui s’étend des noirs de New York à travers les Amériques (Byron et al. 2020, 279). C’est au cours de cette même décennie que l’ethnographie africaniste, développée en France dès 1878, commence à transformer le regard porté sur l’Afrique, en Europe comme dans les Amériques (Sibeud 2002). Les théories de l’évolutionnisme social selon lesquelles les sociétés dites « primitives » étaient censées s’orienter vers le modèle Européen étaient alors remises en question par l’émergence des courants « diffusionnistes » qui associent l’homme à sa culture et non à sa race (Laurière 2015, 19) et qui postulaient un changement culturel moins linéaire (Byron et al. 2020, 279–280).

L’œuvre de Price-Mars s’inspire de ces développements et prend une importance capitale dans les transformations épistémologiques de l’anthropologie au XXe siècle. L’auteur participe à la légitimation des « religions afro-américaines » comme propre objet d’études, en rupture avec l’anthropologie évolutionniste. A ce titre, son œuvre s’inscrit dans « l’âge classique des études afro-américaines » des années 1930 aux années 1950 (Aubrée et Dianteill 2002, 8), tendant à une revalorisation des racines africaines de la diaspora africaine en Europe et aux Amériques. Des anthropologues de nationalités française, brésilienne, haïtienne, américaine, suisse et cubaine, tels qu’entre autres, Roger Bastide, Melville J. Herskovits, Alfred Métraux, Rómulo Lachatañeré et Fernando Ortiz se sont investis dans ce travail. En symbiose avec ce réseau, Price-Mars participe à la co-construction de nouveaux concepts comme « l’acculturation, la transculturation, et l’interpénétration des civilisations » qui tendent à expliquer les changements culturels de l’époque, sans pour autant répéter les racismes et l’Eurocentrisme d’auparavant (Aubrée et Dianteill 2002 ; Magloire et Yelvington 2005).

Bien mieux, Price-Mars a eu une grande influence dans les débats sur la question noire du milieu panafricaniste, qui souhaite unir les peuples africains et ses diasporas. Dans son ouvrage Ainsi parla l’oncle (1928), Price-Mars souligne l’intérêt des tenants du système colonial et néocolonial de présenter les nègres comme des êtres dépourvus de culture, sans histoire, sans morale et sans religion (Byron et al. 2020, 305 ; Célius 1998). Selon lui, la culture constituait un enjeu de la construction nationale en Haïti et dans la lutte anticoloniale, menée entre autres par ses contemporains Césaire, Fanon (en particulier [1959] 2012) et Senghor. Les œuvres de ces penseurs, écrivains et politiques autant que celle de Price-Mars visaient à promouvoir une « politique de la culture » à l’encontre du préjugé colonialiste selon lequel les noirs étaient un « peuple sans culture » (Kisukidi 2014). Price-Mars peut donc être vu comme un penseur clef du mouvement anticolonialiste.

Jeunesse et vie d’homme politique

Jean Mars, dit Jean Price-Mars^{^[3]}, né en 1876, à la Grande-Rivière-du-Nord, commune et chef-lieu d’arrondissement du Département du Nord d’Haïti, fait partie d’une de ces familles de l’oligarchie du Nord du pays qui avaient à la fois une forte emprise sur la paysannerie et une grande influence dans les sphères du pouvoir politique régional et national. Jean Eléomont Mars, son père, intégrait la chambre des représentants des communes, comme député de la Grande Rivière du Nord au moment où naissait son fils en 1876 (Antoine 1981, 9). À cette époque, il était agriculteur, exportateur de café, d’acajou et de bois dur et il construisait sa carrière sur sa réputation individuelle et familiale (Antoine 1981, 11).

La famille de Price-Mars comptait de grands propriétaires terriens, des généraux et des commandants d’arrondissements (Etienne 2007, 135). Price-Mars était donc le produit et, en quelque sorte, héritier d’une forme d’« organisation politico-administrative de l’État post-colonial haïtien » (Etienne 2007). En effet, peu de temps avant que Price-Mars entre à Port-au-Prince, vers 1894 ou 1895, pour finir ses études secondaires, Tirésias Simon Sam, l’un de ses grands cousins, est devenu Président d’Haïti (1896–1902). Un autre de ses cousins, Vilbrun Guillaume, dit Sam, qui lui facilitera ses séjours d’études à Port-au-Prince, a quant à lui, occupé les fonctions de député, avant de devenir ministre de l’Intérieur puis finalement Président d’Haïti, de mars 1915 à juillet 1915. Grâce à sa proximité avec ces deux dirigeants politiques traditionnels haïtiens, il fait, très jeune, son entrée dans la diplomatie haïtienne (Trouillot 1993).

Price-Mars est encore étudiant en médecine lorsqu’ il commence sa carrière dans la diplomatie haïtienne qui ne prendra fin qu’en 1960. Si Price-Mars a dû attendre jusqu’en 1923 pour acquérir son diplôme de médecin en Haïti, il a profité de ses différents séjours diplomatiques en France, en Allemagne et à Washington, entre 1900 et 1917, pour se former dans les sciences de l’homme (Damas 1960). Les questionnements qui occuperont par la suite son œuvre se sont formés durant ces années.

L’homme politique que Price-Mars devient au tout début du siècle était naturellement destiné à être au service de l’oligarchie qui l’a vu naître et qui lui a prédéfini la voie qu’il devrait suivre dans l’espace politique. Cependant, les idées progressistes tirées de ses voyages n’ont jamais quitté son esprit. Price-Mars arrive en France au cœur d’une période d’effervescence idéologique coïncidant avec l’affaire Dreyfus, pendant laquelle l’innocent capitaine Alfred Dreyfus fut accusé d’espionnage à cause de ses racines juives. Price-Mars se trouve ainsi exposé aux divers courants du monde politique français de l’époque : du socialisme de Jean Jaurès au « socialisme nationaliste » de Maurice Barrès en passant par le républicanisme de Georges Clémenceau. Dans le milieu scientifique, les idées de l’anthropologie raciale sont battues en brèche par Émile Durkheim et ses disciples. Il découvre également les idées de solidarité sociale des durkheimiens lesquelles seront traduites dans ses premiers écrits (Byron 2012, 181–225). Cependant, c’est le choc de l’Occupation Américaine d’Haïti de 1915 à 1934 qui le conduira à radicalement changer son orientation politique. Se défaisant de sa position de notable, défenseur de sa classe et de sa famille, il deviendra le porteur d’idéaux d’une réforme de l’État (Owens 2015). Auparavant, et ce jusqu’en 1915, il ne se démarquait guère de « l’idéologie des élites traditionnelles » (Byron 2014, 55–58) et il a ainsi accompagné l’autocrate Vilbrun Guillaume au pouvoir (Byron 2014, 53). Cependant, alors même que Price-Mars ait évolué en rupture avec les idéaux de l’oligarchie, il demeurera toute sa vie loyal à ses proches, en témoigne sa publication tardive intitulée Vilbrun Guillaume-Sam ce méconnu (1961) écrite en hommage à ce dernier.

L’intellectuel engagé

L’engagement de Price-Mars se révèle en réaction à l’occupation américaine. Il est en France au moment où le Président Vilbrun Guillaume est assassiné par une foule en colère (Antoine 1981). Price-Mars restera en poste à Paris encore une année et ne reviendra au pays que vers la fin de l’année 1916. Les Américains débarquent dans le pays avec pour mission officielle d’arrêter « l’effondrement de l’État haïtien » (Etienne 2007, 157). Il est vrai que le chaos y règne, ainsi qu’en témoigne la série de présidents éphémères qui se sont succédé au pouvoir depuis 1911. Toutefois les Américains avaient aussi une autre motivation, celle de contrer la mainmise germanique et française sur le pays et d’établir leur propre hégémonie dans la région (Etienne 2007). Leur occupation est aussi le prolongement de la crise du « modèle social » haïtien qui remonte à la fin du XIXe siècle (Célius 1997). En analysant l’occupation américaine comme une conséquence du « délitement de la nation » (Price-Mars 1919), Price-Mars a été bien au fait de cet ébranlement du modèle social haïtien. Il laisse également entendre dans des conférences données dans les premiers moments de l’occupation, entre 1917 et 1919, que le nationalisme traditionnel est manifestement dépassé. Son recueil d’essais intitulé La vocation de l’élite (1919) lui permet d’acter, à la fois, la chute du modèle social et la désuétude de l’idéologie nationaliste élitiste laquelle participe de la domination féroce des élites économiques et politiques sur les classes subalternes, et ne sert qu’à garder la mainmise des élites sur le territoire haïtien face aux puissances étrangères (notamment la France, l’Allemagne et les États-Unis). À partir d’une esquisse-critique du système de prédation des classes dominantes et de celle du régime politique marqué par la violence nue (voir le chapitre II de La vocation de l'élite sur « La domination économique et politique de l'élite »), Price-Mars (1919, 49–84) propose une vision intégrative de la nation qui permet aux classes défavorisées d’avoir accès aux ressources du pays et d’être des citoyens à part entière, et non plus de second rang. Il pose donc l’existence d’une nation unie antérieurement à son délitement (Price-Mars 1919, 15). Finalement, Price-Mars devient le chantre de la reconnaissance de l’héritage africain dans la culture haïtienne. En cela il se distingue d’autres anthropologues du XIXe siècle, y compris Joseph Anténor Firmin (1850–1911), ce dernier, plus cosmopolite, laisse peu de place dans sa pensée à l’Afrique (Byron 2021).

Les quasi vingt années d’occupation d’Haïti (1915–1934) ont été assez paradoxalement un moment d’effervescence intellectuelle du pays. Le choc qu’a été cette invasion pour les élites, particulièrement pour les franges de celles-ci qui avaient souhaité la présence des Américains, en est probablement la cause. Le racisme des Américains à l’égard de toutes les couches de la société haïtiennes a également révulsé les élites et est rapidement devenu un « facteur d’unité » dans le pays (Nicholls 1996, 142). Citons parmi les actes racistes des Américains le rétablissement de la corvée pour la construction des routes. Le nationalisme haïtien trouve là un terrain favorable pour se renouveler et s’enrichir. Ainsi, avant l’Occupation Américaine, les spécialistes d’histoire des idées ne trouvent guère de trace en Haïti d’une idéologie qui aurait prétendu que les hommes noirs seraient différents des Européens ou que le peuple haïtien devrait s’orienter vers l’Afrique comme un modèle socioculturel à suivre (Nicholls 1996, 11–12) et ce, jusqu’à ce que l’occupation ouvre la voie à une possible transformation. Le nationalisme intègre alors progressivement un discours plutôt favorable à l’Afrique.

Le lieu par excellence de cette effervescence culturelle et intellectuelle a été les cercles mondains. Lieux de culture, de sociabilité, de débats politiques et de résistance, ces cercles tels que le Cercle Bellevue et le Cercle Port-au-Princien, réunissaient des membres de la bourgeoisie et des classes moyennes (Lucien 2015, 64–73 ; Corvington 1984, 17–20). Des penseurs haïtiens, notamment les auteurs et éducateurs Jean Chrysostome Dorsainvil et Arthur Holly, sont les premiers à diriger leurs regards sur l’Afrique et ses héritages dans la culture haïtienne. Dorsainvil insiste, dès 1912 et 1913, sur l’intérêt d’étudier l’Afrique pour bien saisir la mentalité du peuple haïtien dans ses articles publiés dans le journal Haïti médicale, et plus tard dans son livre Vodou et névrose (Dorsainvil 1931).

Même s’il devance Price-Mars s’agissant de son intérêt pour le vodou, Dorsainvil est loin de considérer le vodou sur le même plan que les autres religions (Byron 2012, 120). Traitant de la possession dans le vodou, Dorsainvil affirme que « dans les cultes déjà évolués, elle n’est qu’une survivance de l’animisme primitif, frappant surtout les types les moins cultivés. Le progrès intellectuel tend à diminuer ou à faire disparaître les cas de possession » (1931, 17). Arthur C. Holly tenait des propos où il revendique sans ambages les idées mystiques des ancêtres des haïtiens. Il prônait dès 1921, un retour à l’Afrique par le vodou qu’il considère comme une religion africaine (voir Nicholls 1996, 151).

Price-Mars a fait évoluer les termes du débat sur la nation. Dans La vocation de l’élite, il évoque un grand débat entre « anglo-saxonnistes » et « latinistes », c’est-à-dire entre « l’esprit américain » et « l’esprit français » (Manigat 1967, 335). Les premiers, selon Price-Mars, pensent l’État « comme une très haute abstraction [quasiment divine] ». Les derniers voient l’État comme simple outil « qui réfrène et limite l’action du pouvoir en des conditions et en des domaines déterminés », afin de permettre à l’individu de s’épanouir. Selon Price-Mars, l’intervention américaine amène à une confrontation des deux doctrines (Price-Mars 1919, II).

L’auteur refuse de s’associer à l’un ou l’autre de ces courants. Il rejette à la fois le nationalisme qui s’appuie sur une idéologie pro-américaine (ou anglo-saxonne) et celui des francophiles qui prêtent allégeance à l’idéologie française (latiniste). La vocation de l’élite implique une troisième voie, fondée sur l’établissement de nouvelles relations entre les deux grandes catégories de la société haïtienne, c’est-à-dire « l’élite » et « la masse ». Selon lui, ces deux classes doivent former une nouvelle alliance, soucieuse des conditions socio-économiques des catégories défavorisées, et au sein de laquelle les membres de cette catégorie défavorisée seraient considérées comme sujets à part entière. Price-Mars appelle l’élite à jouer son rôle dans la reconstitution de la nation, en menant des actions sociales en direction de « la masse » et en reconnaissant leurs droits à la citoyenneté. Il relève le poids historique de « la masse » - qui est plutôt paysanne - dans la constitution de la nation et dans la production agricole qui permet de nourrir le pays et d’augmenter l’assiette fiscale de l’État (1919). Il remonte aussi aux « va-nu-pieds de 1804 », c’est à dire aux anciens esclaves, engagés dans la lutte pour l’indépendance, devenus cultivateurs ou paysans après 1804.

Dans le courant des années 1920, soit quelques temps après le début de l’occupation, Price-Mars lancera ses conférences sur le folklore qui seront insérées dans l’ouvrage Ainsi parla l’oncle publié en 1928^{^[4]}. Il y valorise la culture des paysans haïtiens qui, jusque-là, était connotée négativement et associée à des formes de vulgarité ou de barbarie. Force est de constater que le choc de l’occupation l’a amené à saisir cette culture de façon plus positive. C’est ainsi que Price-Mars va notamment insister sur le vodou comme religion à part entière et non comme de la sorcellerie. Il explique que le vodou est aussi porteur d’héritages africains conservés dans les couches populaires, ce qui rend les paysans, longtemps considérés comme des citoyens de seconde zone par les classes dirigeantes, dignes d’un intérêt culturel qui se double d’un intérêt pour l’Afrique ou de ses survivances en Haïti (Shannon 1989, 129 ; Césaire 2005a). Dans ses conférences, Price-Mars met aussi en valeur d’autres aspects de la culture de la majorité des Haïtiens, tels que les contes, la musique et la danse populaires. Il montre que les paysans haïtiens sont des sujets historiques qui portent et renouvellent la culture du pays. Cela implique la reconnaissance pleine et entière de leur citoyenneté et la reconstitution d’un sujet politique collectif, le peuple-nation. Price-Mars n’est donc pas dans une démarche de « folklorisation » de la culture populaire qui consisterait en la fétichisation des objets et la dissimulation des sujets-porteurs.

Au moment des conférences sur le folklore, Price-Mars enseignait au Lycée National (l’actuel Lycée Alexandre Pétion) et avait repris ses études médicales, qu’il a achevées en 1923, tout en se livrant à l’observation dans les campagnes. Parallèlement à ces activités, Price-Mars, fortement impliqué dans l’Union Patriotique, une association de notables militant contre l’occupation américaine, multiplie les « interventions politiques » lors de conférences publiques (Shannon 1989, 116). Il insiste sur les méfaits de la présence militaire américaine en Haïti et subit, en riposte, la révocation de son poste d’enseignant au Lycée Alexandre Pétion (qu’il réintégrera, un an plus tard, quand son ami Louis Borno accèdera à la Présidence de la République) (Shannon 1989, 116).

Price-Mars développe sa critique des classes dominantes à partir de la notion de « bovarysme » en s’inspirant du philosophe français Jules de Gaultier (1892). Ce concept se définit comme « la faculté que s’attribue une société de se concevoir autre qu’elle n’est » (Price-Mars 2009, 8). Dans le cas d’Haïti cela se traduit dans le comportement des élites, qui, par leur rejet des pratiques culturelles populaires, endossent l’idéologie coloniale qui nie l’existence de cultures propres aux peuples dominés. Dans la perspective de Price-Mars, la critique du « bovarysme » est une phase déterminante de la sortie du joug colonial. L’auteur l’appréhende comme une « démarche singulièrement dangereuse » faite d’« imitations plates et serviles » des colons (Idem). La dangerosité du « bovarysme collectif » tient au fait que les dominés ne sauraient se concevoir comme sujet de leur émancipation sans une identité culturelle propre. Price-Mars reconnait toutefois que cette attitude peut être « étrangement féconde » en permettant à la société de profiter des « ressorts d’une activité créatrice qui la hausse au-dessus d’elle-même » (Price-Mars 2009).

La critique du « bovarysme collectif » invite implicitement les nationalistes sous l’occupation Américaine à revoir leur stratégie. De l’avis de Price-Mars, la résistance aux Américains n’aura pas connu de succès si elle se limitait à opposer aux envahisseurs une partie de leur propre culture ou de la culture occidentale, étant entendu que les Américains sont en majorité d’origine européenne. Revendiquer la « latinité » contre la « culture anglo-saxonne » par exemple, ne fonctionnerait pas car cela ne saurait permettre de fédérer « l’élite » et la « masse » de la société haïtienne face aux occupants. La critique de Price-Mars porte aussi la marque de la radicalisation du nationalisme haïtien, elle consiste en une volonté de se soustraire définitivement à la domination coloniale et néocoloniale. Porter « la défroque de la civilisation occidentale » revient à adhérer à l’idée des colons que les esclavisés noirs (les victimes de la traite atlantique) et leurs descendants sont incultes et, de ce fait, des sous-hommes ; c’est accepter, en fin de compte, la reconduction de la domination coloniale (Price-Mars 1928, II).

Ce genre de réflexions va occuper le monde au cours de la période d’après-guerre (1945–1970), et les esprits de penseurs du XXe siècle le plus souvent associés à la négritude. Certains d’entre eux ont reconnu leurs emprunts aux théories de Price-Mars (Senghor 1956), mais il reste à faire un travail d’inventaire pour déterminer, parmi ces penseurs, les lecteurs price-marsiens les plus assidus, comme Fanon ([1952] 2011 et [1959] 2012).

L’usage de l’œuvre price-marsienne

La réception de Ainsi parla l’oncle n’a pas su saisir les enjeux politiques de l’ouvrage. L’œuvre n’a, de prime abord, été lue que sous le prisme de considérations strictement culturelles. L’antériorité du culturel par rapport au politique dans ce livre est apparente. De l’authenticité proclamée de la culture de « la masse », mobilisée dans la définition de la nation, découle la reconnaissance politique de cette catégorie relativement à son poids historique et social. Cette authenticité se répand sur l’ensemble du complexe socio-historique et culturel haïtien. Par « l’acculturation » qui permet à la culture de « la masse » d’incorporer des éléments issus de celle de « l’élite », la nation se mue en une culture partagée, ouverte à tout le peuple-nation.

Afin de construire ces arguments en faveur de la culture populaire (en particulier du vodou) et de ses racines africaines, Price-Mars mobilise l’histoire qu’il présente comme une « ethnographie comparative » en s’inspirant grandement des administrateurs coloniaux français qui ont pratiqué en Afrique un travail ethnographique au service de l’empire. Ces « ethnographes coloniaux », en dépit de leur statut et de la finalité coloniale de leurs travaux, ont contribué à remettre en cause les préjugés selon lesquels l’Afrique serait formée de peuples incultes (Sibeud 2002).

Comme d’autres auteurs du monde noir, Price-Mars a eu conscience que l’affirmation de l’inexistence d’une culture nègre par le colon s’accompagne d’une volonté expresse de bannir les pratiques culturelles des esclavisés. C’est ainsi que le catholicisme leur sera imposé comme religion dès leur arrivée dans la colonie dans un « processus d’acculturation sous l’esclavage et après » (Magloire et Yelvington 2005). Cette méthode de domestication de la culture nègre est analysée par Price-Mars comme une acculturation. Mais, la résistance des noirs est comprise, elle aussi, sous cette même notion d’acculturation. Price-Mars anticipe les travaux sur la thématique de l’acculturation qui seront développés plus tard par d’autres anthropologues tels que Herskovits et Bastide (Magloire et Yelvington 2005). Price-Mars considère le désir des dirigeants haïtiens (et autres) de rejeter leur culture en vue d’adopter celle de la civilisation occidentale comme absurde. Adopter la culture des anciens colons revient, selon l’auteur, à accepter leur domination. L’« acculturation » forcée se transforme alors en une forme d’acculturation voulue.

Quelques penseurs contemporains n’hésitent pas à inscrire l’œuvre de Price-Mars dans la continuité de celle de Firmin (Fluehr-Lobban 2005). Cela reste une question ouverte. Certes, le point de vue anti-raciste (« anti-racist scholarship ») de Firmin a été déterminant pour Price-Mars, mais ce dernier a tracé sa propre voie à partir de préoccupations qui ne recoupent pas nécessairement celles de son prédécesseur, entre autres celle de l'intégration des citoyens-paysans dans la nation (Bonniol 2005). L’érudition anti-raciste du XIXe siècle par Firmin (1884) présente une ambivalence : son point fort est la revendication de l’appartenance de l’homme haïtien à l’universalité humaine, cependant, dans le même temps, elle rend possible le « bovarysme culturel » selon Price-Mars, car elle ne part pas de la spécificité de la culture haïtienne ou de la culture noire mais d’une pensée plus occidentale. En insistant sur les particularités de la culture haïtienne, Price-Mars remet en cause la fascination des penseurs du XIXe siècle haïtien pour la culture occidentale. Il dénonce aussi leur incapacité à mettre en doute les promesses contenues dans l’humanisme et le cosmopolitisme, courants dominants de la pensée européenne de l'époque, ainsi que leur inaptitude à saisir l’héritage africain, et leur mépris à l’égard de la paysannerie et de toutes les catégories de la société haïtienne dépositaires de cet héritage.

La postérité de Price-Mars tient à étudier le complexe processus de formation d’une « culture haïtienne distincte ». Les traditions concurrentes africaines aussi bien qu’européennes auxquelles il fait référence sont destinées à se fondre dans le moule de l’identité culturelle nationale. Les objets appartenant à ces deux traditions ne doivent subsister ou se rattacher à cette identité nationale haïtienne qu’à l’état de « survivance ». Il est vrai que la part africaine a été mise en avant par Price-Mars, et par les Haïtiens d’aujourd’hui. La notion d’« afro-haïtianité » reste peu utilisée dans la pensée haïtienne courante car l’héritage culturel africain est considéré comme part de l’Haïtianité ; toutefois , l’idéal d'authenticité que promeut Price-Mars ne confine pas exclusivement aux héritages africains. L’haïtianité price-marsienne implique une grande diversité d’objets et de pratiques culturels qui sont aussi souvent européens. Ce qui rend authentique ou légitime un objet culturel au regard de Price-Mars c’est sa présence à la fois dans les classes populaires et dans les classes dominantes. Cette vision d’une culture nationale présente une certaine similitude avec le melting pot américain.

L’anti-essentialisme price-marsien

L’usage par Price-Mars de la notion de « bovarysme » a été critiqué. L’auteur a, en effet, pu être appréhendé comme le promoteur « d’un idéal d’authenticité culturelle » (Dash 2012). Plutôt que de l’analyser comme simple renvoi à une essence, la revendication de la particularité de la culture haïtienne chez Price-Mars peut être perçue comme rejet de l’idéologie coloniale appropriée par les classes dominantes haïtiennes après l'indépendance. Price-Mars forge une identité haïtienne marquée par sa puissance fédérative ou d’agglomération en tant que vision partagée du monde. Cette nouvelle identité reste intégrative, toujours empreinte d’une logique d’assimilation ou d’acculturation entre classes sociales et entre origines européennes et africaines. S’il faut admettre qu’il existe une logique d'authenticité chez Price-Mars, elle ne découle pas de la revendication d’une quelconque pureté des objets et des pratiques culturels attribués à la communauté haïtienne. L'authenticité promue par Price-Mars résulte de ce « métissage » qui fait que « nous ne sommes ni les "français colorés" dont se gargarisent les attardés d’un colonialisme suranné, ni les africains dont se réclament des racistes à rebours » (Price-Mars 1971).

Malheureusement, cet aspect intégratif fut souvent oublié ou ignoré par « les disciples » de Price-Mars, notamment pendant la première moitié du siècle passé. Dès la fin des années 1920, pendant les années 1930 et 1940, certains d’entre les membres du groupe de la Revue Indigène (dont Jacques Roumain est le chef de file) et de la Revue des Griots commençaient déjà à interpréter sa pensée comme un essentialisme. Price-Mars a eu même à rectifier au moins une interprétation de ses premiers écrits faite par Lorimer Denis et François Duvalier dans la Revue Les Griots. À partir des années 1960 les duvaliéristes, c'est-à-dire les supporteurs des deux dictatures de la famille Duvalier, avaient récupéré la pensée de Price-Mars se revendiquant comme les seuls héritiers de son œuvre. Les idéologues duvaliéristes ont mis en avant les idées de Price-Mars pour légitimer un régime populiste et dictatorial qui commettait les pires atrocités que des pouvoirs d’État haïtiens n’avaient jamais commises auparavant. Pourtant, une lecture approfondie et soutenue de Price-Mars engage sans nul doute à ne pas l’associer à un tel régime. Les agissements des duvaliéristes n’avaient rien à voir avec sa pensée. Bien mieux, les rares réactions du gouvernement et de ses partisans, enregistrées à la sortie du pamphlet de Price-Mars contre Piquion en 1967 témoignent de la rupture claire et nette, du fait de leurs visions idéologiques différentes, entre l’auteur et son ancien élève, François Duvalier (Nicholls 1996, 230). Le fameux Morille P. Figaro doit son poste de ministre de l'intérieur à ses attaques contre les idées de Price-Mars qu'il traita sans ménagement de « vieillard sur le déclin » (idem). Un discours de campagne électorale de François Duvalier daté de 1957 réimprimé en 1967, l’année de la polémique avec Piquion, sera purgé d'une référence élogieuse à Price-Mars (Idem).

Finalement, il est intéressant de relever que chez Price-Mars l’identité culturelle ne préexiste pas complètement au sujet. Sa vision historique l’oblige à garder la plus grande prudence et à exprimer ses réserves par rapport à l’usage de certaines expressions très courantes telles que : « âme nègre [ou noire] », « race noire » ou « race noire d’Afrique » (Price-Mars 1928). Dans sa perception, le sujet reste fondamentalement créateur de sa propre histoire et de sa propre culture. Price-Mars ne voile pas sa tendance constructiviste, et, avec elle, sa reconnaissance de notre profonde liberté.

Conclusion

Price-Mars est un auteur majeur de l’anthropologie haïtienne dont la force réside en son articulation avec la naissance de la nation et avec son histoire politique. Les anthropologues haïtiens se sont souvent approprié les concepts de l’anthropologie pour développer ou reformuler des discours politiques. Price-Mars en a tiré la possibilité de repenser les fondements de ce qui fait une société moderne. Il a valorisé la culture paysanne haïtienne, établi le vodou comme religion à part entière, et développé une nouvelle vision du nationalisme haïtien qui a marqué les Caraïbes et, à travers les postcolonial studies, le monde entier. Sa pensée reste humaniste et marquée par la foi dans la dignité et la liberté des hommes. Elle reste loin de la pensée des Duvalier ainsi que des essentialismes et racismes qui ont trop souvent marqué l’histoire du XXe et du XXIe siècle.

La recherche contemporaine en Haïti poursuit une démarche de récupération de la pensée anthropologique en puisant dans l’œuvre de Price-Mars. Ce processus est loin d’être terminé. Il existe effectivement chez Price-Mars un essentialisme stratégique que les duvaliéristes en ont pu ériger en une sorte de racisme à rebours, ce qu’il aura l’occasion de dénoncer vers la fin de sa vie. Nul doute que Price-Mars trouve sa place dans le champ des études postcoloniales et décoloniales. La relecture de ses œuvres nous promet de découvrir des nuances et subtilités dont l’époque actuelle semble avoir tant besoin.

Bibliographie

Antoine, Jacques Carmeleau. 1981. Jean Price-Mars and Haiti. Washington DC: Three Continents Press.

d’Ans, André-Marcel. 2003. « Jacques Roumain et la fascination de l’ethnologie ». Dans Jacques Roumain, Œuvres complètes, édité par Léon-François Hoffmann, 1378–1428. Madrid : Allca XX Unesco.

Argyriadis, Kali, Emma Gobin, Maud Laëthier, Niurka Núñez González et Jhon Picard Byron. 2020. Cuba-Haïti : Engager l’anthropologie. Anthologie critique et histoire comparée (1884–1959). Montréal : Editions du CIDIHCA.

Aubrée, Marion et Erwan Dianteill, « Misères et splendeurs de l’afro-américanisme une introduction ». Archives de sciences sociales des religions 117, n. 47 : 5–15.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) 2007. Les lieux de la culture. Une théorie postcoloniale. Paris : Payot.

Bonniol, Jean-Luc. 2005. « Entretien avec René Depestre ». Gradhiva 1 : 31–45. https://doi.org/10.4000/gradhiva.261

Byron, Jhon Picard. 2012. L’engagement ethnologique de Jean Price-Mars et son engagement politique. Thèse de doctorat. Québec : Université de Laval.

———. 2014. « La pensée de Jean Price-Mars. Entre construction politique de la nation et affirmation de l’identité culturelle haïtienne ». Dans Production du savoir et construction sociale. L’ethnologie en Haïti, édité par Jhon Picard Byron, 47–80. Québec/Port-au-Prince : Presses de l’Université Laval et Éditions de l’Université d’État d’Haïti.

———. 2016. « Transforming Ethnology: Understanding the Stakes and Challenges of Price-Mars in the Development of Anthropology in Haiti ». Dans The Haiti Exception: Anthropology and the Predicament of Narrative, édité par Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken, Kaiama L. Glover, Mark Schuller et Jhon Picard Byron, 33–51. Liverpool : University Press. https://doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781781382998.003.0003

———. 2018. « ...les identités nationales se sont toujours construites en miroir dans le cadre du système-monde ». Legs et Littérature 11 : 207–214.

———. 2021. « Représentations de l’Afrique dans l’imaginaire haïtien au vingtième siècle ». Small Axe 25, n. 3 : 199–209. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583572

Byron, John Picard, María del Rosario Díaz et Niurka Núñez González. 2020. « Vers une ethnologie nationale : folklore, science et politique dans l’œuvre de Jean Price-mars et de Fernando Ortiz ». Dans Engager l’anthropologie. Anthologie critique et histoire comparée (1884–1959), édité par Kali Argyriadis, Emma Gobin, Maud Laëthier, Niurka Núñez González et Jhon Picard Byron, Cuba-Haïti 241–313. Montréal : CIDIHCA.

Célius, Carlo Avierl. 1997. « Le modèle social haïtien : Hypothèses, arguments et méthodes ». Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe n. spécial. https://doi.org/10.4000/plc.738

———. 1998. « Le contrat social haïtien ». Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe 10 : 27–70. https://journals.openedition.org/plc/542

———. 2005a. « Cheminement anthropologique en Haïti ». Gradhiva 1 : 47–55. https://doi.org/10.4000/gradhiva.263

———. 2005b. « La création plastique et le tournant ethnologique en Haïti ». Gradhiva 1 : 71–94. https://doi.org/10.4000/gradhiva.301

———. 2018. « Histoire et ethnologie en Haïti ». Cahiers critiques de philosophie 20 : 65–92.

Clifford, James. 1980. « Orientalism by Edward W. Said [Book Review] ». History and Theory 19 n. 2 : 204–223.

Corvington, Georges. 1984. Port-au-Prince au cours des ans : La capitale d'Haïti sous l'Occupation, 1915-1922. Port-au-Prince : Henri Deschamps.

Dash, Michael. 2012. « Ni français, ni sénégalais : identité haïtienne et bovarysme ». Fabula-LhT 9. https://doi.org/10.58282/lht.377

Damas, Léon G. 1960 « Price-Mars, le père du haitianisme ». Présence Africaine 32/33 : 166–178.

Depestre, René. 1968. « Jean Price-Mars et le mythe de l’Orphée noir ou les aventures de la négritude ». L’Homme et la société n. 7 : 171–181.

Dorsainvil, Justin Chrysostome. 1931. Vodou et névrose. Port-au-Prince : La Presse.

Fanon, Frantz (1952) 2011. Peau noire, masques blancs. Dans Frantz Fanon. Œuvres. Paris : La Découverte.

———. (1959) 2012. « Fondement réciproque de la culture nationale et des luttes de libération ». Présence Africaine 185-186 : 209–217 https://doi.org/10.3917/presa.185.0209

Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn. 2005. « Anténor Firmin and Haiti’s contribution to anthropology ». Gradhiva 1 : 95–108. https://doi.org/10.4000/gradhiva.302

Etienne, Sauveur Pierre. 2007. L’énigme haïtienne. Échec de l’Etat moderne en Haïti. Montréal : Mémoire d’encrier.

Fouchard, Jean. 1956. « L’école nationaliste Price-Mars ». Dans Témoignages sur la vie et l’œuvre du Dr. Jean Price-Mars :1876-1959, édité par Jean Fouchard et Emmanuel C. Paul. 177–181. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie de L’Etat.

de Gaultier, Jules. 1892. Le bovarysme : La psychologie dans l’œuvre de Flaubert. Paris : Librairie Léopold Cerf.

Gilroy, Paul. (1993) 2017. L’Atlantique noir : Modernité et double conscience. Paris : Editions Amsterdam.

Kisukidi, Nadia Yala. 2014. « Vie éthique et pensée de de la libération. Lecture critiques des usages senghoriens de Marx à partir de Fanon ». Actuel Marx 55 : 60–82.

Lacoste, Yves. (1976) 2012. La géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre. Paris : La Découverte.

Laurière, Christine. 2015. « 1913 La recomposition de la science de l’Homme. Introduction ». Dans 1913 La recomposition de la science de l’Homme, édité par Christine Laurière 13–38. Paris : Les Carnets de Bérose.

Lucien, Georges Eddy. 2015. « Vies mondaines et sociabilité en période d’occupation ». dEmanbrE n. spécial (janvier) : 64–73.

Magloire, Gérarde & Yelvington, Kevin. 2005. « Haiti and the anthropological imagination ». Gradhiva 1 : 127–152. https://doi.org/10.4000/gradhiva.335

Magloire, Gérarde (2003) 2019. « Jean Price-Mars ». De île en île. http://ile-en-ile.org/price-mars/

Manigat, Leslie François. 1967. « La substitution de la prépondérance américaine à la prépondérance française au début du XXe siècle : la conjoncture 1910-1911 ». In Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 14.4 : 321–355.

Nicholls, David. (1979) 1996. From Dessalines to Duvalier : Race, Colour and National Independence. New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press.

Owens, Imani D. 2015. « Beyond Authenticity: The US Occupation of Haiti and the Politics of Folk Culture ». Journal of Haitian Studies 21 n. 2 : 350–370.

Price-Mars, Jean. 1919. La vocation de l’élite. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie Edmond Chenet.

———. 1925. « Le sentiment et le phénomène religieux chez les nègres de St. Domingue ». Bulletin de La Société d’Histoire et de Géographie d’Haïti 1 n.1 : 35–55.

———. 1928. Ainsi parla l’oncle : Essai d’ethnographie. Paris : Imprimerie de Compiègne.

———. 1929. Une étape de l’évolution haïtienne. Études de psycho-sociologie. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie La Presse.

———. 1939. « Pour servir à l’histoire de l’évolution de la pensée haïtienne : une mise au point ». Les Griots. La revue scientifique et littéraire d’Haïti 3 n. 3 : 441–442.

———. 1939. Formation ethnique, folklore et culture du peuple haïtien. Port-au-Prince : Virgile Valcin.

———. 1961. Vilbrun Guillaume-Sam, ce méconnu. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie de l’Etat

———. 1967. Lettre ouverte au Dr. René Piquion, directeur de l'École normale supérieure, sur son "Manuel de la négritude" : Le préjugé́ de couleur est-il la question sociale ? Port-au-Prince : Editions des Antilles.

———. 1971. « Discours prononcé par le Dr. Jean Price Mars». Conjonction : Revue Franco- Haïtienne, 115 : 54–61.

———. 2009. Ainsi parla l’oncle suivi de Revisiter l’oncle. Montréal : Mémoire d’Encrier.

Senghor, Leopold Sédar. 1956. « Hommage à l’Oncle ». Dans Témoignages sur la vie et l’œuvre du Dr. Jean Price-Mars 1876-1956, édité par Emmanuel C. Paul et Jean Fouchard, 3-12. Port-au-Prince : Imprimerie de l’État.

———. 1959. « Éléments constructifs d’une civilisation d’inspiration negro-africaine ». Nouvelle série, n. 24/25, Deuxième Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs (Rome : 26 mars-1er avril 1959) : 249–279.

Shannon, Magdaline Wilhemine. 1989. Dr Jean Price-Mars and the Haitian elite, 1876–1935. Ph.D. Thesis. Ann Arbor: University of Iowa.

Sibeud, Emmanuelle. 2002. Une science impériale pour l’Afrique ? La construction des savoirs africanistes en France, 1878-1930. Paris : Editions de l’EHESS.

Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1993. « Jeux de Mots, Jeux de Classe : Les Mouvances de L’Indigénisme ». Conjonction : Revue Franco- Haïtienne, 197 : 29–41.

Auteur

Jhon Picard Byron, Professeur à l’Université d’État d’Haïti, est membre permanent et directeur du laboratoire LAngages DIscours REPrésentations (LADIREP), Unité de recherche de Université d'Etat d'Haïti, rattachée à la Faculté d’Ethnologie. Il développe ses recherches sur la construction culturelle et citoyenne en Haïti à partir de l’œuvre de Jean Price-Mars. Il travaille sur des écritures anticoloniales et contre-historiques, sur la construction nationale et l’identité culturelle, la mémoire de l’esclavage, ainsi que sur les instrumentalisations politiques de l’ethnologie. Il a entre autres dirigé avec Kali Argyriadis, Emma Gobin, Maud Laëthier et Niurka Núñez González (2020), la publication Cuba-Haïti : Engager l’anthropologie. Anthologie critique et histoire comparée (1884–1959).

Jhon Picard Byron PhD, Université d’Etat d’Haïti (UEH), 21 Rue Rivière, Canapé-vert, HT–6115 Port-au-Prince, Haïti. jhon_picard.byron@ueh.edu.ht

[1] L’Atlantique noir est une formation culturelle s’étendant sur les rives de l’Atlantique, composée d’éléments divers de l’Afrique et de l’Occident, marquée par les luttes communes pour l’émancipation et le sentiment de faire partie d’une diaspora (Gilroy [1993] 2017).

[2] A la séance d’ouverture du 1er Congrès Mondial des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs en 1956 Price Mars, « le doyen des intellectuels haïtiens », est désigné à l'unanimité « Président» par la voix d’Alioune Diop et est placé bien au centre des participants du congrès au moment de prendre la photo officielle de l'événement.

[3] L’auteur ajoutera Price à son patronyme au moment de rencontrer Booker T. Washington en 1904 (Magloire [2003] 2019 qui cite Antoine). Ti-Price était le sobriquet que son père lui avait donné en guise d’admiration pour son collègue député et compère Hannibal Price (Antoine 1981, 11 et 46 ; voir également Byron 2012, 175)

[4] Ainsi parla l’oncle a été réédité à plusieurs reprises (1928, 1954, 1973, 1996). La dernière réédition date de 2009 aux Éditions Mémoire d’Encrier.

Farming

Felix Stein — Thu, 23 Jan 2020 11:23:31 +0000

Andrew Ofstehage

Cornell University

Initially published 23 Jan 2020

http://doi.org/10.29164/20farming

Abstract:

Farming has become increasingly visible in recent years, following a growing public interest in how food is produced. Anthropologists have been studying farming since the founding of the discipline. This entry summarises the origins of farming and agricultural intensification before analysing three themes of the social anthropology of farming. First, farming is dependent on relations of power and capital. Second, farming is deeply engaged with social relations of value, race, and gender. Third, farming has a deep engagement with the physical environment in ways that are generative and relational. New themes in the anthropology of farming include a focus on farm workers and the question of how farming fits into three theories of epochal planetary change in which the dominant influences on the environment and climate are human activity, capital, and plantation agriculture.

Introduction

Food and agriculture are a central and sustaining element of human life both physiologically and socially. Agriculture has also had a major environmental impact. It has transformed much of the U.S. Great Plains and Brazilian Cerrado into fields of grain, and is at least partially to blame for wildfires that threaten the Amazon rainforest and West Papuan forests. It follows that farming has maintained a place of focus within socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology. The root of the term ‘farmer’ is ‘one who collects taxes’ and other duties, and ‘farm’ originally referred to a total rent payment (Donald 1867), but farming is broadly defined as the process of doing agriculture and animal husbandry. It includes the cultivation of plants and the raising of livestock for food, feed, fibre, and sometimes fuel. Academics make sense of farming in different ways. Agronomists often study conservation and how to maximise food production. Economists frequently ask themselves how farmers respond to markets, incentives, and costs. Rural sociologists and anthropologists tend to focus on the meanings and relationships of farming. Historically, anthropologists have focused on non-Western, pre-industrial societies, and sociologists on Western, industrial settings, though scholars from both disciplines have blurred these lines. Anthropologists continue to centre on meaning and relationships, but also ask holistically how markets and capital, the physical environment, and social meaning all come together.

Agricultural cultivation is a co-dependent process that involves humans, plants, soils, and animals. It drives and complements systems of exchange, whether through market exchange at farmers markets, large-scale commodity sales and barter, or reciprocal gift exchange between neighbours and within communities. It depends on social relationships with business partners, kin, farm workers, and neighbours. Even seemingly anonymous global soy markets, involving large-scale farmers and multinational agribusinesses, often depend on the trust-based exchange of commodities for agricultural inputs (Wesz Jr. 2014). Farming also modifies plants and animals through domestication and transforms landscapes and soils. It is done both at the scale of local ecologies and communities and at the scale of national agricultural policies and global markets. For reasons of simplicity, this entry divides this multiplicity of the anthropology of farming into three categories of study – the politics and economics of farming (including questions around power, work, and capital), its meaning and social values, and the socio-biological and socio-environmental aspects of farming and food.

Anthropology has always engaged with agrarian people. Proponents of agricultural anthropology, i.e. the comparative, holistic, and cross-temporal study of human interactions with technology, ecologies, and society through agriculture, write that ‘[v]irtually every manifestation of agriculture ranging from shifting cultivation to modern industrial farming has been subject to anthropological study’ (Rhoades & Rhoades 1980: 10). Anthropologists tend not to study agriculture in isolation. Even the most technologically-advanced and capital-intensive farming systems are situated in environments of soil, water, and light as well as in social relationships. Thus, anthropologists tend to build on a holistic view of farming, which allows them to understand farmers and farm communities in a way that highlights their relations with plants and soil, markets and reciprocal exchange networks, and society and state.

Today, fewer and fewer people are directly involved in agriculture. In the United States, economic output from agriculture as a sector leads only educational services and arts, entertainment, and recreation.^[1]lThe global economic transition from farm work to industrial wage labour is driven by the global integration of markets and migration networks (Nash 1994) as well as rising agricultural productivity and mechanization that increase labour productivity and reduce labour demand for farming (Janssen 2018). Yet we still see references to farming everywhere we look today. Talk show hosts and journalists tell us which ‘superfoods’ to eat and which kinds of food are exacerbating hunger in peasant communities (McDonell 2015); trips to the grocery store may include biographies and portraits of the farmers who grew the kumquats on display; popular television programs embed critiques of capitalist and industrial agriculture in their plots (Specht 2013); and we are invited to ‘vote with our money’ to transform broken food systems (Pollan 2006). As the author and activist Michael Pollan brought to the attention of many Western consumers, the foods we eat are increasingly abstracted from place, people, and even plants. A disconnect between consumers and farmers and a growing interest in how food is grown may thus go hand in hand. This distance has brought distrust, and thus consumers want to know if animals were mistreated, crops were genetically modified, or if their shopping list will threaten Indigenous communities or distant rainforests. This growing awareness and concern for food and farming have drawn renewed interest in the anthropological study of food and agriculture. Fortunately, the origins, expansion, and impacts of agriculture have been hotly debated by anthropologists since the founding of the discipline.

Origins of agriculture

With the first agricultural revolution around 12,000 years ago, humans began cultivating and raising their food. This period was also associated with sedentary lifestyles, an increasingly complex division of labour, and the development of art. Early studies of the origins and expansion of agriculture focused on the factors that led humans to shift livelihood strategies, in particular from a nomadic to more sedentary life. These studies focused on environmental factors, population pressure, and co-dependent plant, animal, and human interactions. Marginal Zone theory, for example, proposes that humans turned to agriculture when optimal zones for hunting and gathering could no longer support growing human populations (Binford 1968). Groups of people may have migrated to less abundant zones, where hunting and gathering were insufficient for their survival, and adopted agricultural production. Early animal husbandry may have begun when communities enclosed and fed animals that foraged in gardens (Linares 1976). Marginal Zone theory also suggests a mutual process of domestication that rendered humans and animals interdependent. Evolutionary models of agriculture similarly describe the co-dependency and co-evolution of people and plants as a relationship in which people gain a source of food and plants (Rindos 1984). Critics of Marginal Zone theory claim that it is environmentally deterministic and does not account for cultural and social factors such as power, leadership, or social institutions (Bender 1978; Hayden 1990). A ‘feasting model’ of domestication credits technological advancement (i.e. new fishing technologies, mass seed-collecting techniques, and practices of food processing and storage) for the origins of agriculture. These techniques may have enabled individuals to create a food surplus and then distribute the food strategically through feasts to gain prestige and power (Hayden 1990).

Anthropologists also ask how agriculture became intensive. Intensive agriculture tends to involve shorter fallow periods between crops, an increased use of labour (by humans or machines), and a more intensive use of other inputs such as seeds, fertilisers, or irrigation (Netting 1993). Some writers relate the intensification of agricultural production and animal domestication to a social evolutionary frame of human history. They may, for example, argue that the intensification of human-managed ecologies is a sign of cultural and technological progress (Childe & Daniel 1951). However, a more common approach in anthropology today is to ask how and why agriculture became intensive, without necessarily relating this to normative notions of societal progress. Agricultural communities may, for example, adapt intensive agricultural production strategies to feed growing populations, avoid famines, or respond to ecological constrains (Bruno 2014). Moreover, markets and state coercion have often induced farmers to intensify production, obliging them to shift towards cash crop production to improve household wellbeing (Finnis 2008) or to meet coercive state tribute or tax demands (Godoy 1984). Farmers’ capacity to increase production yields means that anthropologists have been sceptical of Malthusian theories postulating that overpopulation leads to famine (Boserup 1965).

Later work showed that agricultural intensification also depended on certain agro-ecological conditions (Stone & Downum 1999). For example, a region with low or highly variable precipitation or infertile soils may not merit intensification or agricultural production at all. Communities do not necessarily respond to food shortages by intensifying production when the local ecology cannot support intensive agriculture. Instead, they may respond through political action, such as limiting land access to specific ethnic or kin groups (Stone & Downum 1999). Neither is intensification of farming directly correlated with yield increases. In the late 1970s, Clifford Geertz developed the term ‘agricultural involution’ to describe the growing social complexity and intensification of human agricultural labour that comes under outside pressure. The term places social change at the intersection of agricultural change and political and economic environments (Geertz 1970). Geertz showed that, along with population growth, it was three centuries of Dutch colonialism (from the seventeenth century) and the introduction of new crops and technologies (i.e. transplanting, land preparation, and double cropping) which increased overall agricultural production in Indonesia. Yet, production continued to be labour-intensive and labour productivity remained stagnant. The notion of agricultural involution considers population density, colonialism, and technology together. Thereby it holistically describes the social and physical causes of agricultural intensification.

Regardless of the relative merits and pitfalls of intensification, farming communities may decline to pursue agricultural intensification. Swidden farmers in Indonesia, for example, carefully balance land, labour, and time as they apply their ‘unique knowledge of their environment and how to exploit it’ (Dove 1985: 384). Similarly, British colonial farming practices were not rejected by West African farmers out of ignorance, but out of a preference for their own agronomically-derived and tested practices (Richards 1985). Risk management, market incentives or lack thereof, and political and social structures all co-determine if families will pursue agricultural intensification (Stone 2001). State and colonial governments, for example, have pushed intensification through both the violent enforcement of colonial demands and semi-voluntary enrolment in green revolution agriculture, which began worldwide in the 1960s and consolidated in the 1970s (Franke 1974).

Relatedly, agriculture may seem to sit at the end of an evolution from hunting and gathering to pastoralism to farming, but people may choose to avoid agriculture and sedentism in favour of mobility and flexibility. Hunting and gathering communities can enjoy greater amounts of leisure time than farming communities (Sahlins 1972). Marshall Sahlins’ theory of the ‘original affluent society’ proposes that hunter-gatherers can satisfy their everyday needs without agriculture. They may eschew the benefits of intensive farming in favour of the lower labour demands that come with hunting and gathering. While the caloric output per person tends to be greater in farming communities, this involves trade-offs. Agricultural production requires more work, necessitates sedentary lifestyles, and often reduces nutritional diversity. Life without agriculture can demand less work per person and it can provide access to a diverse and nutritious diet (Lee 2017). Alternatives to sedentary agriculture also provide political benefits. Populations of farmers in the Highlands of Southeast Asia pursue mobile forms of farming to avoid state control (Scott 2010). The members of these mobile communities plant crops that require little care and can be left in the ground for long periods of time. They cultivate land that is difficult to access, but easy to find cover in. Using this style of ‘escape agriculture’, farmers may adapt their crops, labour, and fields to escape the state surveillance and control that settled, sedentary agricultural farming communities cannot avoid.

Agriculture is closely linked to the development of states and societies. In the Southern Moche State in the arid Moche Valley of Peru, agriculture depended heavily on irrigation systems – the control of which afforded a centralised, expansive state (Billman 2002). Extensification (or, the expansion of farmland area under cultivation) and intensification of agriculture in the Alps of Europe in 1000 AD required clearing forest to extend arable land and reducing the fallow period to intensify production. Both processes were directed by land-controlling elites who used the profits of increased production to consolidate their control of territory and people (Wolf 2010). Sociologists have similarly argued that agriculture reflects and guides the power of state systems in the present day (Friedman & McMichael 1989). Agriculture can increase the amount of calories produced per person and make sedentary life more viable, yet it also enables the control of society by states (Scott 2017).

The origins of agriculture, causes of intensification, and the relation between the rise of agriculture and the rise of states and societies are important milestones in human history. They tell us how we as a human race became who we are today. The way anthropologists debate and find evidence for these milestones also says a lot about the discipline as a whole. Anthropologists trace the comparative origins of agriculture to human processes of population growth and migration in industrial and agrarian societies, but also to non-human processes in which plants and animals developed co-dependence with humans. Agricultural intensification is a response to population pressure but also to political pressure, and it always remains dependent on political developments as well as considerations of risk, value, and agro-ecologies. The following sections discuss three ways in which anthropologists engage with agriculture today: political economy, meaning-making in agriculture, and engagements with natural environments.

Political economy: power and capital

A key anthropological contribution to the study of farming is placing that activity within relations of power and capital. We see the importance of power in the origins and implications of agricultural intensification as well as in the everyday realities of farming today. Debates on the nature of agrarian change under capitalism, or the ‘agrarian question’, begin with Marx’s Capital (Marx & Engels 1967) and continue through the development of Marxist thought (see Kautsky 1988; Lenin 1964; Chayanov 1966). The agrarian question asks what happens to peasants and farmers in a capitalist economy. Karl Marx proposed two pathways for the peasantry: that they will eventually become wage labourers, or that they will become a collective political unit (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The first pathway is largely a transition from peasantry into wage labour with a few landowners rising to a new ‘rural middle class’ and ‘completing the transition to a fully capitalist mode of production’ (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). The second pathway would be a gradual coalescence of peasants into a collective political unit of agricultural production on a national scale (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010a). Today the agrarian question tackles similar questions of how peasants and small farmers engage with and resist capital, but with greater attention to how these struggles intersect with other criteria such as gender and ecology (Akram-Lodhi & Kay 2010b).

Power and capital operate on different scales, from local communities to global commodity flows. Farming communities, for example, are shaped by the scale and type of agriculture practiced nearby. Large-scale, industrial farming has at times been associated with less vibrant forms of community life, centralised economic activity, and greater dependency on large capital providers and the political power of the state. Communities associated with small-scale, less capital-intensive farming tend to attract more diverse small businesses and may develop a richer community life (Goldschmidt 1978). That said, farming communities can also reinforce capitalist values of farming. During the 1980s US farm crisis, in which falling commodity prices and farm debt led to widespread farm foreclosures, neighbours blamed each other for falling into debt and losing their farms (Dudley 2002). Elsewhere during the same crisis, farmers often eschewed ‘traditional’ values of farming, such as land stewardship, deeply-held religious beliefs, and family-centred decision making, in favour of individualism and profitmaking (Barlett 1993). At a global scale, sugar creates relations of power and capital, linking Caribbean sugar plantations and the rise of industrial work in Europe. The early use of slave labour on sugar plantations and later exploitation of Caribbean farmworkers created cheap sugar, which in turn sustained a growing industrial working class in Great Britain (Mintz 1985). Importantly, while this entry focuses on farming, Sidney Mintz’ work shows the importance of considering food consumption and farming together.

We also see the impact and power of capital in terms of the essential means of agricultural production: seeds, labour, soil, and other inputs. Plant breeding in the Americas has culminated in a mostly undemocratic seed economy. Traditions of local plant breeding, seed saving, and seed exchange have here become dominated by state-supported breeding centres which focused on productivity and market demands. The seed economy has subsequently become governed by multinational seed companies that restrict seed saving or exchange, selling seeds as technological packages along with pesticides and other agro-chemicals (Kloppenburg 2005). Multi-national agribusinesses have often privatised seeds and plant genetics, restricting not only access to seeds but also the ability for farmers to replant them. Further, technological innovations such as genetically engineered seeds and pesticides tend to create treadmills of dependency in which farmers become increasingly reliant on agribusinesses for inputs and expertise (Stone & Flachs 2018). Alternatively, rural communities have reversed this trend by creating seed saver networks to develop, preserve, and share seeds that are suitable to local agro-ecoystems and diets. These networks often support garden landscapes over monocultures, reciprocal exchange over market exchange, and low-input agriculture over high-input agriculture (Nazarea 2005).

While the corporate control of seeds shows the imposition of corporate power, anthropologists also consider how such power is resisted by activists and farmers (Fitting 2010). Participatory, democratic seed exchanges may have the potential to slow and even reverse the active dispossession of farmers and create new forms of ‘seed sovereignty’ (Kloppenburg 2010). At the same time, participatory plant breeding programs may harbour the potential to not only create access to seeds, but to also breed seeds specifically suited for farmers’ agro-ecologies (Almekinders, Thiele & Danial 2007). Seed saving among Tharaka farmers in Kenya, for example, contributes to crop diversity, but depends on strong social organisation for seed exchange (Laberyrie et al. 2014).

Agrochemicals such as soil fertilisers or products that kill plant weeds (herbicides), insect pests (insecticides), and fungal diseases (fungicides), have become a seemingly unavoidable part of the farming landscape. Yet the impacts of their production and use are longstanding and far-reaching, as shown by the pesticide plant disaster in Bhopal, India in 1984. The plant’s explosion, which resulted from lax safety design, poisoned the air of Bhopal and killed thousands, while leaving long-term health risks for the survivors (Fortun 2001).

Alternative markets (e.g. fair trade, organic, and bird-friendly farming) break the binary distinction between corporate vs. non-corporate agriculture. Here, commercial production practices may replace pesticides and synthetic fertilisers with integrated pest management and soil conservation practices. Anthropologists have filled a critical role in understanding these markets by asking who benefits from them, what effect they have on environmental health and economic sustainability, and whether these markets tame or deepen market forces. Farmers markets in the United States have expanded as farmers seek out reliable local markets and consumers hope to support local farming and know where their food comes from. However, like conventional markets, direct trade often involves a host of middlemen, such as processers and inspectors, and coalitions of busy farmers and distracted consumers face a difficult task in challenging conventional food systems (Janssen 2017). Some anthropologists warn that if alternative markets do not create new political possibilities, then they may only be another way of commodifying social and environmental life (Guthman 2007). The ethnographic study of fair trade thus challenges the potential of labelling initiatives for empowering farmers. Labelling tends to come with strict standards for farmers and little oversight for food companies who sell fair trade goods (Lyon & Moberg 2010). Origin labels for such goods as tequila and mezcal (Bowen 2015) or Darjeeling tea (Besky 2013) distinguish products from generic commodities, but fail to address many of the underlying historical and sociopolitical structures that affect farmers and farmworkers. Lastly, organic farming can today be part of industrialised farming, with only some minor differences from conventional agriculture (Guthman 2004). Ethnographic studies thus demonstrate the challenges of disrupting commodified flows of capital. Thinking holistically about how alternative markets work in the context of government policies, historical trajectories, and on-the-ground farming practices lends nuance and depth to how we understand them.

In recent years, land has come into focus for academics, as the threat of a global ‘land grab’ grows (Borras et al. 2012; White et al. 2012). The term ‘land grab’ refers to the large-scale purchase of land, often by foreign corporations, in countries of the Global South. This is a concern for land accessibility as well as national sovereignty. The land grab often dispossesses farming communities of land, sometimes through violent means, and it frequently leads to deforestation, as tracts of forest are converted to agricultural land. Anthropologists may themselves be financially entangled in these processes. For example, TIAA, a pension fund that manages retirement accounts for most U.S.-affiliated anthropologists, has become a major landowner in Brazil, whilst being denounced for environmental destruction and human rights violations (Farthing 2017).^[2]Even here, resistance is possible. Groups such as the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement foment both civil society political action and direct land transfers to support local farming and resist land dispossession (Wolford 2010).

Finally, farming knowledge has come into focus as a form of power as well. Agricultural extension agents have long used money and political influence as tools of imposing industrialised and modern farming practices (Arce & Long 1992). They continue to frame scientific Western agricultural knowledge as expertise and Indigenous knowledge as a form of ignorance (Mitchell 2002). State agencies for agricultural research and extension, and private corporations’ research and development departments, invest in knowledge production and dissemination and tend to focus on cash crops and exportable goods. Anthropologists often work to de-centre this knowledge by studying alternative ways of doing and knowing agriculture. They frequently advocate for the incorporation of and respect for Indigenous knowledge in rural development (Sillitoe 2006) and on many occasions they work to recognise non-industrial farming practices and knowledge as legitimate (e.g. González 2001).

Culture: meaning and identity

Farming is always imbued with cultural and social connections, a fact that is increasingly recognised in the study of food production. Agronomists can explain how much nitrogen is necessary to grow a high yield of corn, but anthropologists show that, for example, farmers may use ideas of hot and cold to inform their use of manure (González 2001). Economists can show that cultivating crops without using any kind of tillage saves farmers time and money, but anthropologists may find that, for farmers, tillage practices demonstrate their hard work, skill, and masculinity. In agriculture, as in other industries, meaning and collective identities are connected to work and practice (Holland et al. 2001). Gender, race, and class also structure how farmers perform agriculture and how they access land, credit, and agricultural knowledge. Anthropologists thus often foreground the importance of meaning-making, identity, and the value of agriculture to people.

For example, notions of what constitutes ‘good farming’ connect farm work to a farmer’s reputation and standing in a community. Being considered a good farmer can be used to control in-group colleagues and also assert authority and legitimacy against other groups. Industrial farmers attribute social value to industrial practices and landscapes – claiming a certain rationality and cultural value as well as a concrete benefit of ‘feeding the world’ (Burton 2004). White farmers in Zimbabwe may claim to be good farmers to legitimise their calls for land access. They argue that their stewardship of the land and farming skills (expressed in technical know-how and yield maximization) give them more legitimate claims to the land and to the identity of being farmers than Indigenous or Black farmers may have (Suzuki 2018). Holdeman Mennonites in Brazil also connect moral frames of being good farmers, good family members, and good community members by limiting land holdings within their communities to better distribute land and by limiting the use of GPS-guided precision farming technology and large machinery (Ofstehage 2019).

Racism, sexism, and nationalism also affect farming life. They may exclude people from farming by limiting land access, access to credit, and land extension. For example, Black farmers in the United States still fight for land and basic inclusion (Grim 1995) while Black farmers’ cooperatives and unions have in the past struggled for the rights of southern tenant farmers and supported alternative agricultural visions and practices (White 2017). Black farmers thereby not only fight for the right to farm: they also work for recognition of their farming expertise and experience, paralleling and contributing to the struggle for civil rights (McCutcheon 2019). American Indian farmers equally fight for the right to farm on their own terms while often facing condescension and pressure to adopt white farmer attitudes and practices (Biolsi 2018). In Latin America, farmer-to-farmer exchanges support and enrich alternative ways of farming, resisting dominant trends of modernising agriculture and supporting collective identities of campesino (peasant) agriculture (Holt-Giménez 2006).

Gender, masculinity, and femininity equally structure farming and are structured by it. Farming masculinities may be moulded to fit concepts of modern agriculture. For example, in the United States farm labour has become increasingly centred on men as family farms have transformed from dispersed family labour and decision-making to production dominated by single individuals (Barlett 1993). Peggy Barlett argues that as agriculture has become more of a business-centred activity focused on profit, men in heterosexual farm families have excluded women from both farm work and decision-making. More recently, the image of farming masculinity has shifted away from productivist markers like straight crop rows, weed-free fields, and high yields, to financial markers such as profitability, total acreage, and media presence (Bell et al. 2015; Ofstehage 2018a). Farmers who do not conform to this vision of agriculture can be subject to ridicule or dismissed as hobby farmers. Women farmers are particularly under pressure to demonstrate their business savvy, leading them to understate concerns for the environment, community, and family (Ofstehage 2018a). An alternative to agrarian and industrial masculinities, driven by the sustainable agriculture movement, values cooperation, avoids discourses of ‘toughness’, and readily experiments with new farming technology and practices (Barlett & Conger 2004).

Conceptions of gender linked to agriculture change over time. For example, historically in Andean agriculture, men were often tasked with field-based agriculture and women with pastoral work. As Andean agriculture became more intensive and commercial, soil degradation increased and crop fields cultivated by men encroached upon pastures and common spaces tended by women (Paulson 2003). The changes in Andean agriculture show how economic, ecological, and gender changes are connected and shape each other. Women farmers in the United States face significant institutional, interactional, and symbolic barriers to becoming independent (Keller 2014). US women dairy farmers, for example, have faced barriers when applying for farm credit, in everyday interactions with other (often male) farmers, and even in claiming an identity as a farmer and not as someone’s wife, as a gardener, nor as a hobby farmer. They work to deconstruct the heteronormative figures of the farmer as man and farm-wife as woman in a family unit of gendered labour. They also build new femininities around alternative agricultures of stewardship, community, and work (Shisler & Sbicca 2019). Since concepts such as ‘farmer’, ‘good farmer’ or ‘farming masculinity’ are collectively defined, they remain open to the creation and defense of alternative understandings of gender.

More recent studies suggest that, beyond agricultural practices and attitudes, different ontologies of agriculture may exist. Oil palm cultivation in West Papua is commonly framed in Western worldviews as a conflict between local Indigenous groups and agribusiness. However, to local Marind people the palm itself is a malevolent, anti-social person that haunts dreams (Chao 2018). To take a second example, settler colonialism can be rightly viewed as a conflict over land, belonging, and property. Yet this interpretation may betray fundamental differences in how white settlers and Indigenous communities relate to land (Burow, Brock & Dove 2018). Indigenous communities simultaneously fight for the right to access land and against anyone owning land as property. Thus, conflicts and differences in land use, land ownership, conservation, and degradation can extend beyond struggles over resources or values. Ontological struggles over land ownership and resource use question whether land can be owned at all, or if life can be defined through resources. They speak to broader conflicts between different ways of being in the world, speculative futures, and on-going experiences.

Environment: animals, climate, and soil

The anthropological study of farming has roots in human ecology: that is, in the study of the relationships between people’s political and economic lives and their natural environment. In earlier years, this meant the study of relatively closed agricultural systems and a focus on how culture impacted ecologies. A classic environmental ethnography about the Tsembaga Maring of New Guinea, for example, described a complex socio-ecological system of swidden (or slash and burn) agriculture which balanced fallow periods, pig population, acreage, and food calorie production. This complex system was managed by an intricate ritual cycle that connected spirits to the physical realities of the environment (Rappaport 1967).

Recent trends in anthropology emphasise plant and animal relationships, relationships with a changing climate, the idea that there is a two-way connection between ecologies and humans, and the possibility that their interplay may be generative of altogether new realities. In general, this can be seen as a shift from understanding linear relationships of action and ‘feedback’ to describing more complex relationships. It may also be a shift from the impact of humans on humans in food and agriculture to the impact of humans on non-human actors, worthy of study in their own right.

Taking such a more-than-human approach to ecologies that foregrounds non-human agency decentres people in order to better understand how humans and non-humans affect each other and change together. The Carolina Piedmont pig, for example, is a breed of pig that fetches a high market value, and is considered much more than a mere economic or natural resource. They are descended from hogs native to the Canary Islands and brought to North America by Spanish explorers, later to be abandoned on Ossabaw Island off the coast of the state of Georgia, where they became feral. Later, these pigs were driven from this island for threatening loggerhead turtles, and some ended up in farms in the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Today they are prized for their flavour, ‘authenticity’, and ability to thrive on marginal land (Weiss 2016). These pigs are the product of the Spanish conquest, their own biological adaptations to living in a marginal environment, government policies enacted to protect an endangered species, and the work of small farmers in North Carolina. This raises a methodological issue: while participant observation and ethnographic interviews with human subjects are incredibly valuable tools, an adequate description of the ecological complexities of agriculture may require ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010; Ogden, Hall, & Tanita 2013). Seeking to understand how humans and non-humans act collectively may entail studying the lifecycle of farm animals that co-exist with human populations, or studying the interaction of fungi and plants that make crops grow well. This focus on change, emergence, and multispecies agency has inspired anthropologists to consider plants and animals as agents within production systems rather than as resources. They are changed by human action, but also change human action and thought.

Climate change is an unavoidable component of understanding how farmers engage in plant and animal production. Comparative and social studies of human adaptation and mitigation of climate change takes into account human adaptability to climate changes, but also humans’ attempts to reverse or slow them (Orlove 2005). Anthropologists document agricultural adaptations to climate change (such as seeking cooler fields at higher elevations, changing planting dates, or planting different crops) as well as cultural impacts of climate change. In Peru, for example, highland farmers are cultivating fields at higher elevations and selecting different seeds to adapt. Cultural institutions like the reciprocal work arrangements known as ayni, as well as seed sharing, support this transition (Sayre, Stenner & Argumedo 2019). Anthropologists may be positioned to facilitate adaptation to climate change, but their interventions are limited by local crop preferences, power dynamics, and ecological conditions other than climate change (Siregar & Crane 2011). In any case, they must understand the importance of sociocultural systems in climate change engagement, tensions between normative positions and adaptation, and how climate modeling interacts with everyday aspects of livelihoods (Crane 2010).

In moving toward an understanding of agriculture as a generative and relational process, anthropologists focus on more than just animals. Take the example of soil. Soil structures farmers’ lives and is structured by them (Kawa 2016). It is also subject to care or lack thereof, and soil care has material consequences, such as degradation or conservation (de la Bellacasa 2015). Soils are, in a very real way, generated by human activity, not just degraded or affected. For example, the soils of the Brazilian Cerrado are some of the oldest in the world, and humans played at least a partial role in creating them through repeated wildfires. Today, industrial farmers in the region fertilise these soils intensively. Large-scale farmers describe the land as wasteland and consider themselves experts who can convert a barren desert to a fertile breadbasket (Ofstehage 2018b). Yet the soil also induces farmers to change farming practices. In the Cerrado case, large-scale farmers adopt conservation tillage to reduce soil moisture loss in arid areas and learn to apply calcium carbonate to increase the soil pH. The farmers in this case use this encounter with the soil to create narratives of progress and expertise, claiming a role in improving the land and becoming expert farmers themselves. Land is generated out of biological and material ecosystems as well as forces of the state and capital in ways that shape how well-capitalised and technologically-advanced famers engage with it (Li 2014). Such relational aspects are reflected in studies that ask how alternatives to industrial agriculture can promote new interactions with soil, plants, and animals.

Looking forward

Two important trends in the literature on farming are studies of migrant farm workers and the situation of agriculture in times of epochal planetary change. Anthropologists have a rich history of studying farm labour on which recent scholarship builds. Seth Holmes followed migrant workers who fled Oaxaca due to violence and lack of jobs to labour camps on a Washington berry farm (Holmes 2013). His work connects the everyday lives of farmworkers to health, commodity markets, racism, and work. Similarly, in Brazil’s Northeast, landless farmers are recruited by intermediaries with kin and community relations to work on sugar cane plantations under dangerous conditions for little pay (de Menezes, da Silva & Cover 2012). Migrant sheepherders in Wyoming also work in a precarious and dangerous position as often undocumented workers. On top of that, they need to re-learn to shepherd under capitalist, business-oriented conditions and in a new natural environment (Krögel 2010). In India, the privatization of former commons has pushed landless farmers to migrate within the country and become farmworkers; their internal migration places greater pressure on local landless farmers (Breman 1985). In each of these cases, landlessness and market conditions drive migrants out of rural farming communities and into wage labour. They may at times own land or support communal ties in their original rural communities. Migrant farmworkers in the United States, for example, may work to support coffee farms in Veracruz (Núñez‐Madrazo 2007).

Anthropologists working with agricultural labourers increasingly decentre the farm site as they follow the flow and lives of mobile workers. Rural Indian farm workers are not only living in the countryside, but in moving in and out of agrarian and industrial work, they often get fired and hired with little notice (Breman 1996). The movement of farmworkers from Mexico to the United States is more of a circuit than a migration. Migrants from small agricultural communities of Veracruz, Mexico choose to migrate North in response to worsening coffee incomes back home and a scarcity of workers to harvest the coffee in the US (Griffith et al. 2017). Their incomes from precarious work in the United States then subsidise coffee farms in their home of Veracruz and, having few long-term permanent contracts and facing unfriendly immigration policies, their work in the United States remains temporary.

Studies of farming and agriculture in anthropology are also placing farming within the context of epochal planetary change characterised differently as the ‘Plantationocene’, ‘Capitalocene’, and ‘Anthropocene’. Donna Haraway (2015) suggests that world agriculture is becoming abstracted from place as plants, workers, and land are abstracted from local contexts and brought together again in contemporary plantations. She and other feminist political ecologists call our era the ‘Plantationocene’, to describe this abstraction and mobility of people and plants as well as the racialised work on plantations and farms (Haraway et al. 2016). Similar work shows that plantation farms are characterised by relationships of fixity in which labourers create enduring relationships with each other and the land (Besky 2017) and flexibility in which farm owners commodify land, work, and plants (Ofstehage 2018b). Jason Moore characterises the current era as the ‘Capitalocene’, as he finds it’s driven not by human activity in general, but capitalist human activity. Building on the theory that capitalism may lead to environmental collapse (also known as ‘metabolic rift’), he suggests that the on-going destruction of land and other means of production is not critical for capital, but rather increases the commodification of life and expands capital further (Moore 2012). Socio-ecological crisis in the Capitalocene may expand commodity frontiers as farmers look for cheaper land and labour. The ‘Anthropocene’, or the global era defined by human activity, is also made manifest in farming. This happens differently across distinctive farming landscapes as farmers everywhere have specific encounters and interactions with landscapes. Everywhere, they leave the land and themselves changed (Mathews 2018). As this recent work demonstrates, studies of farming can be informative of far more than food production – we learn about markets, work, environment, value, race, and gender in the way farming is and is not done.

References

Akram-Lodhi, A.H. & C. Kay 2010. Surveying the agrarian question (part 1): unearthing foundations, exploring diversity. The Journal of Peasant Studies 37(1), 177-202.

Almekinders, C.J.M., G. Thiele & D.L. Danial 2007. Can cultivars from participatory plant breeding improve seed provision to small-scale farmers? Euphytica 153(3), 363-72.

Arce, A. & N. Long 1992. The dynamics of knowledge: interfaces between bureaucrats and peasants. In Battlefields of knowledge: the interlocking of theory and practice in social research and development (eds) N. Long & A. Long, 211-46. London: Routledge.

Barlett, P.F. 1993. American dreams, rural realities: family farms in crisis. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

——— & K.J. Conger 2004. Three visions of masculine success on American farms. Men and Masculinities 7(2), 205-27.

Bell, S.E., A. Hullinger & L. Brislen 2015. Manipulated masculinities: agribusiness, deskilling, and the rise of the businessman-farmer in the United States. Rural Sociology 80(3), 285-313.

de la Bellacasa, M.P. 2015. Making time for soil: technoscientific futurity and the pace of care. Social Studies of Science 45(5), 691-716.

Bender, B. 1978. Gatherer‐hunter to farmer: a social perspective. World Archaeology 10(2), 204-22.

Besky, S. 2013. The Darjeeling distinction: labor and justice on fair-trade tea plantations in India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2017. Fixity: on the inheritance and maintenance of tea plantation houses in Darjeeling, India. American Ethnologist 44(4), 617-31.

Billman, B.R. 2002. Irrigation and the origins of the southern Moche state on the north coast of Peru. Latin American Antiquity 13(4), 371-400.

Binford, L.R. 1968. Post-pleistocene adaptations. In New perspectives in archaeology (eds) L.R. Binford & S.R. Binford, 313-41. Chicago: Aldine.

Biolsi, T. 2018. Power and progress on the prairie. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bolt, M. 2015. Zimbabwe’s migrants and South Africa’s border farms: the roots of impermanence. Cambridge: University Press.

Borras, S.M., Franco, J.C., Gómez, S., Kay, C., & M. Spoor 2012. Land grabbing in Latin America and the Caribbean. Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3-4), 845-72.

Boserup, E. 1965.The condition of agricultural growth: the economics of agrarian change under population pressure. London: Allan and Urwin.

Bowen, S. 2015. Divided spirits: tequila, mezcal, and the politics of production. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Breman, J. 1985. Of peasants, migrants, and paupers: rural labour circulation and capitalist production in West India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

——— 1996. Footloose labour. Cambridge: University Press.

Bruno, M.C. 2014. Beyond raised fields: exploring farming practices and processes of agricultural change in the ancient Lake Titicaca Basin of the Andes. American Anthropologist 116(1), 130-45.

Burow, P.B., Brock, S. & M.R. Dove 2018. Unsettling the land: indigeneity, ontology, and hybridity in settler colonialism. Environment and Society 9(1), 57-74.

Burton, R. 2004. Seeing through the “good farmer’s” eyes: towards developing an understanding of the social symbolic value of “productivist” behaviour. Sociologia Ruralis 44(2), 195-215.

Chao, S. 2018. In the shadow of the palm: dispersed ontologies among Marind, West Papua. Cultural Anthropology 33(4), 621-49.

Chayanov, A.V. 1966. The theory of peasant economy. Homewood, Ill.: Richard Irwin.

Childe, V.G., & G.E. Daniel 1951. Man makes himself. New York: New American Library.

Crane, T.A. 2010. Of models and meanings: cultural resilience in social–ecological. Ecology and Society 15(4), 19 (available online: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art19/).

Donald, J. (ed.) 1867. Chambers's etymological dictionary of the English language. London: W & R Chambers.

Douglas, M. 2003. Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. New York: Routledge.

Dove, M.R. 1985. Swidden agriculture in Indonesia: the subsistence strategies of the Kalimantan Kant. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Dudley, K.M. 2002. Debt and dispossession: farm loss in America’s heartland. Chicago: University Press.

Finnis, E. 2006. Why grow cash crops? Subsistence farming and crop commercialization in the Kolli Hills, South India. American Anthropologist 108(2), 363-9.

Fitting, E. 2010.The struggle for maize: campesinos, workers, and transgenic corn in the Mexican countryside. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Fortun, K. 2001. Advocacy after Bhopal: environmentalism, disaster, new global orders. Chicago: University Press.

Friedman, H. & P. McMichael 1989. Agriculture and the state system: the rise and decline of national agricultures, 1870 to the present. Sociologia ruralis 29(2), 93-117.

Geertz, C. 1970. Agricultural involution: the process of ecological change in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Godoy, R.A. 1984. Ecological degradation and agricultural intensification in the Andean highlands. Human Ecology 12(4), 359-83.

Goldschmidt, W. 1978. As you sow: three studies in the social consequences of agribusiness. Montclair, N.J.: Allanheld, Osmun & Co.

González, R.J. 2001. Zapotec science: farming and food in the Northern Sierra of Oaxaca. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Gray, M. 2013. Labor and the locavore: the making of a comprehensive food ethic. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Griffith, D., P. Zamudio Grave, R. Cores Viveros & J. Cabrera 2017. Losing labor: coffee, migration, and economic change in Veracruz, Mexico. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 39(1), 35-42.

Grim, V. 1995. The politics of inclusion: black farmers and the quest for agribusiness participation, 1945-1990s. Agricultural History 69(2), 257-71.

Guthman, J. 2004. Agrarian dreams: the paradox of organic farming in California. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2007. The Polanyian way? Voluntary food labels as neoliberal governance. Antipode 39(3), 456-78.

Haraway, D. 2015. Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin. Environmental Humanities 6(1), 159-65.

———, N. Ishikawa, S.F. Gilbert, K. Olwig, A.L. Tsing & N. Bubandt 2016. Anthropologists are talking–about the Anthropocene. Ethnos 81(3), 535-64.

Hayden, B. 1990. Nimrods, piscators, pluckers, and planters: the emergence of food production. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 9(1), 31-69.

Holland, D. C., W. Lachicotte Jr., D. Skinner & C. Cain 2001. Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Holmes, S. 2013. Fresh fruit, broken bodies: migrant farmworkers in the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Holt-Giménez, E. 2006. Campesino a campesino: voices from Latin America’s farmer to farmer movement for sustainable agriculture. Oakland: Food First Books.

Janssen, B. 2017. Making local food work: the challenges and opportunities of today’s small farmers. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

——— 2018. Small farms, big plans: mechanization and specialization as measures of ‘the middle.’ Culture, Agriculture, Food, and Environment 40(2), 96-104.

Kautsky, K. 1988 [1899]. The agrarian question, 2 volumes. London: Zwan Publications.

Kawa, N.C. 2016. Amazonia in the Anthropocene: people, soils, plants, forests. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Kay, C. 2008. Reflections on Latin American rural studies in the neoliberal globalization period: a new rurality? Development and Change 39(6), 915-43.

Keller, J.C. 2014. “I wanna have my own damn dairy farm!”: women farmers, legibility, and femininities in rural Wisconsin, U.S. Journal of Rural Social Sciences 29(1), 75.

Kirch, P.V. 1994. The wet and the dry: irrigation and agricultural intensification in Polynesia. Chicago: University Press.

Kirksey, S.E. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25(4), 545-76.

Kloppenburg, J.R. 2005. First the seed: the political economy of plant biotechnology. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

——— 2010. Impeding dispossession, enabling repossession: biological open source and the recovery of seed sovereignty. Journal of Agrarian Change 10(3), 367-88.

Krögel, A. 2010. Quechua sheepherders on the mountain plains of Wyoming: the (in)hospitality of U.S. guest worker programs. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 15(2), 261-88.

Labeyrie, V., R. Bernard & C. Leclerc 2014. How social organization shapes crop diversity: an ecological anthropology approach among Tharaka farmers of Mount Kenya. Agriculture and Human Values 31(1), 97-107.

Lee, R.B. 2017. What hunters do for a living, or, how to make out on scarce resources. In Man the hunter (eds) R.B. Lee & I. DeVore, 30-48. New York: Routledge.

Lenin, V.I. 1964 [1899]. The development of capitalism in Russia. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Li, T.M. 2014. Land’s end: capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Linares, O.F. 1976. “Garden hunting” in the American tropics. Human Ecology 4(4), 331-49.

Lyon, S., & M. Moberg (eds) 2010. Fair trade and social justice: global ethnographies. New York: NYU Press.

Marx, K. & F. Engels 1967. Capital: a critique of political economy. New York: International Publishers.

Mathews, A. 2018. Landscapes and throughscapes in Italian forest worlds: thinking dramatically about the Anthropocene. Cultural Anthropology 33(3), 386-414.

McCutcheon, P. 2019. Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farms and black agrarian geographies. Antipode 51(1), 207-24.

McDonell, E. 2015. Miracle foods: quinoa, curative metaphors, and the depoliticization of global hunger politics. Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 15(4), 70-85.

Mintz, S. 1985. Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. New York: Penguin Books.

Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Moore, J. 2012. Cheap food & bad money: food, frontiers, and financialization in the rise and demise of neoliberalism. Review: A Journal of the Fernand Braudel Center 33(2-3), 225-61.

Nash, J. 1994. Global integration and subsistence insecurity. American Anthropologist 96(1), 7-30.

Nazarea, V. 2005. Heirloom seeds and their keepers: marginality and memory in the conservation of biological diversity. Tucson:University of Arizona Press.

Netting, R. 1993. Smallholders, householders: farm families and the ecology of intensive sustainable agriculture. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Núñez-Madrazo, M.C. 2007. Living ‘here and there’: new migration of translocal workers from Veracruz to the Southeastern United States. Anthropology of Work Review 28(3), 1-6.

Ofstehage, A. 2018a. Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado. Economic Anthropology 5(2), 274-85.

——— 2018b. Farming out of place: transnational family farmers, flexible farming, and the rupture of rural life in Bahia, Brazil. American Ethnologist 45(3), 317-29.

——— 2019. Transmission of the Brazil model of industrial soybean production: a comparative study of two migrant farming communities in the Brazilian Cerrado. In In defense of farmers: the future of agriculture in the shadow of corporate power (eds) J. Gibson & S. Alexander, 289-324. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Ogden, L.A., B. Hall & K. Tanita 2013. Animals, plants, people, and things: a review of multispecies ethnography. Environment andSociety 4(1), 5-24.

Orlove, B. 2005. Human adaptation to climate change: a review of three historical cases and some general perspectives. Environmental Science and Policy 8(6), 589-600.

Paulson, S. 2003. Gendered practices and landscapes in the Andes: the shape of asymmetrical exchanges.Human Organization 62(3), 242-54.

Pollan, M. 2006. The omnivore’s dilemma: A natural history of four meals. London: Bloomsbury Press.

Rappaport, R.A. 1967. Ritual regulation of environmental relations among a New Guinea People. Ethnology 6(1), 17-30.

Price, T.D. & A.B. Gebaue 1995. Last hunters, first farmers: new perspectives on the prehistoric transition to agriculture. Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research.

Rhoades, R. & V. Rhoades 1980. Agricultural anthropology: a call for the establishment of a new professional specialty. Practicing Anthropology 2(4), 10-12.

Richard, W.F. 1974. Miracle seeds and shattered dreams in Java. Challenge 17(3), 41-7.

Richards, P. 1985. Indigenous agricultural revolution: ecology and food production in West Africa. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Rindos, D. 1984. The origins of agriculture: an evolutionary perspective. San Diego: Academic Press.

Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone age economics. Chicago: Aldine, Atherton.

Sayre, M., T. Stenner & A. Argumedo 2017. You can't grow potatoes in the sky: building resilience in the face of climate change in the Potato Park of Cuzco, Peru. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 39(2), 100-8.

Scott, J.C. 2010.The art of not being governed: an anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.

——— 2017. Against the grain: a deep history of the earliest states. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Shisler, R.C. & J. Sbicca 2019. Agriculture as carework: the contradictions of performing femininity in a male-dominated occupation. Society & Natural Resources 32(8), 875-92.

Sillitoe, P. 2006. Local science vs. global science: approaches to indigenous knowledge in international development. New York: Berghahn Books.

Siregar, P.R. & T.A. Crane 2011. Climate information and agricultural practice in adaptation to climate variability: the case of climate field schools in Indramayu, Indonesia. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 33(2), 55-69.

Specht, A.R. 2013. Killer corn and capitalist pigs: forensic noir and television portrayals of modern agricultural technology. Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment 35(2), 152-61.

Stone, G.D. 2001. Theory of the square chicken: advances in agricultural intensification theory. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 42(2-3), 163-80.

——— & C.E. Downum 1999. Non-Boserupian ecology and agricultural risk: ethnic politics and land control in the arid Southwest. American Anthropologist 101(1), 113-28.

——— & A. Flachs 2018. The ox fall down: path-breaking and technology treadmills in Indian cotton agriculture. The Journal of Peasant Studies 45(7), 1272-96.

Suzuki, Y. 2018. The good farmer: morality, expertise, and articulations of whiteness in Zimbabwe. Anthropological Forum 28(1), 74-88.

Weiss, B. 2016. Real pigs: shifting values in the field of local pork. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Wesz Jr., V.J. 2014. O mercado da soja e as relações de troca entre produtores rurais e empresas no Sudeste de Mato Grosso (Brasil). Ph.D thesis, Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro.

White, B., S.M. Borras Jr., R. Hall, I. Scoones & W. Wolford 2012. The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals. Journal of Peasant Studies 39(3-4), 619-47.

White, M.M. 2017. “A pig and a garden”: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Freedom Farms Cooperative. Food and Foodways 25(1), 20-39.

Wolf, E. 2010. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolford, W. 2010.This land is ours now: social mobilization and the meanings of land in Brazil. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Note on contributor

Dr. Andrew Ofstehage grew up on a small corn and soybean farm in South Dakota. He earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his work on land, labour, and value among transnational soy farmers in Brazil. He holds a Master of Science from Wageningen University for his ethnographic work with quinoa famers and middlewomen in Bolivia and a Bachelor of Science in Agronomy from South Dakota State University. He is now a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University.

Andrew Ofstehage, 240D Warren Hall, Development Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14850, United States. alo52@cornell.edu.alofstehage@gmail.com.

[1]News release (19 April 2019). United States Bureau of Economic Analysis(available online: https://www.bea.gov/system/files/2019-04/gdpind418_0.pdf, accessed 31 October 2019).

[2]Farthing, L. How TIAA funds environmental disaster in Latin America (6 Jan 2017). NACLA (available online: https://nacla.org/news/2017/01/06/how-tiaa-funds-environmental-disaster-latin-america).

Autism

Felix Stein — Sat, 07 Sep 2019 10:21:03 +0000

Ben Belek

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Initially published 7 Sep 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19aut

Abstract:

The concept of autism is historically contingent. It did not exist, in any proper sense, before it was invoked by medical and mental health professionals in the twentieth century. This entry aims to shed light on this relatively recent concept. First, it contextualises autism within the broader social, epistemological, and political circumstances of its emergence and ongoing negotiation, showing autism to be a dynamic concept, whose meaning is constantly in flux. Second, it revisits some of the more insightful or influential analyses that autism has received over the years in anthropology and adjacent disciplines. And third, it illustrates that anthropologists have been particularly attuned to everyday experiences of autism, comparing it to other forms of human difference while occupying an ambivalent stance towards biomedical approaches to it. A discussion on how autism might matter for the discipline of anthropology features very briefly in the conclusion.

Disciplinary landscapes

Research into autism tends to cluster around two main analytic poles (see Solomon 2010). The epistemic gap between these analytic poles is considerable, and is sometimes discussed as a barrier to the advantageous progression of autism research at large (e.g. Orsini & Smith 2010, Raz et al. 2017, Yergeau 2010). On one end of the spectrum of autism research are the biomedical disciplines, which typically construe the condition as a neurodevelopmental disorder, and focus on those aspects of autism which they perceive as cognitive and social deficits. Research in these areas tends to address questions relating to the causality of autism, its underlying mechanisms, its symptoms, and its prevalence. Consequently, it promotes interventions of different kinds, working towards the development of better standardised diagnostic procedures for autism, technologies for early detection, methods of behaviour therapy, and in some instances, pharmacological treatment.

On the other analytic pole, there are those disciplines which include anthropology, sociology, history, rhetoric, geography, communication, gender studies, and disability studies. Scholars working in this tradition tend to view autism as a socio-political category, and a central component of individual experience and of social interaction. Studies produced within these disciplines thus focus on such spheres as language and sociality, identity and subjectivity, care work and expertise, knowledge-making and meaning-making, while others go about challenging literature in the biomedically-inclined disciplines.^[1]Moreover, within this analytic pole, autism self-advocacy occupies a crucial position, whereby autistic authors employ their experiential expertise, as well as social and literary theory and an oftentimes keen sense of social and cultural critique, to produce valuable scholarship.

The anthropological study of autism can be grounded in the broader field of the anthropology of disability. The anthropology of disability has been slow to include cognitive disabilities within its purview (with the notable exception of Edgerton 1967). This may be the case because attempting to theorise cognitive difference anthropologically requires challenging one of the discipline's rarely disputed assumptions: that human beings all share similar cognitive capacities (McKearney & Zoanni 2018). Nevertheless, a body of literature has emerged over the past decades that focuses on such topics as dementia, intellectual disability, and mental illness, thereby accepting the challenge of envisioning collective life without assuming psychic unity. Anthropological studies of autism, in particular, can be said to constitute a cornerstone in this emerging anthropology of cognitive disability (McKearney & Zoanni 2018). They have also contributed to broader conversations in such subfields as psychological anthropology (e.g. Mattingly 2017), medical anthropology (e.g. Kaufman 2010), linguistic anthropology (e.g. Ochs & Solomon 2008), as well as social and cultural anthropology more broadly (e.g. Grinker 2007).

In what follows, anthropological insights on autism will be joined with important insights from other disciplines. While anthropological engagements with autism are not necessarily unique in their underlying assumptions or styles of argumentation, they do share some distinct analytical and epistemological commitments. First among those is a systematic engagement with the narratives, experiences, and everyday actions of autistic people, as well as with the distinct social worlds they inhabit. Anthropology's insistence on ethnography carves an important analytical space that acknowledges the role of agency, controversy, and creativity in the category's enactment and negotiation. Also typical in the anthropology of autism are frequent reflections over the type of difference that the category of autism represents, and its comparability to other forms of difference – mainly, culture – with which the discipline has traditionally engaged. Thirdly, anthropologists working on autism have usually remained ambivalent towards the claims of the biomedical disciplines. Their general reluctance to either wholly reject these disciplines' expertise or to uncritically accept it has afforded anthropologists a privileged position from which to attend to the epistemological dynamics surrounding autism.

The emergence of autism

The shifting meanings of autism – as a concept with which to make sense of certain atypical tendencies, a label with which to characterise those who hold such tendencies, and a category into which those so labelled are typically classified – derive from the historical processes of its emergence and subsequent negotiations. The history of autism therefore illustrates its fluid and dynamic nature and highlights the centrality of socio-cultural processes to the category's emergence.

Though a detailed social-historical account of autism remains outside the scope of this entry (but see Evans 2017, Eyal et al. 2010, Feinstein 2010, Nadesan 2005, Silberman 2015, Silverman 2012, Waltz 2013), a brief outline seems warranted. The concept of ‘autism’ had made its first appearance in medical literature in 1911 in the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, when it was construed as a symptom of childhood schizophrenia. The concept had mostly retained this meaning until 1943, when the Austrian-born American psychiatrist Leo Kanner published his article ‘Autistic disturbances of affective contact’. This was the very first publication in which autism (then ‘infantile autism’) was described as a distinct disorder, preceding by a single year a publication by Hans Asperger, a German psychiatrist, in which he described a quite similar condition which he termed ‘autistic psychopathy’.

In the 1960s and 1970s, studies into the 'new' syndrome were becoming increasingly common, yet there was still much confusion. Many researchers and clinicians still interpreted it as a type of schizophrenia, while diagnosticians often associated autistic traits with brain dysfunction, mental retardation, or child psychosis. The 1980s saw an increase in systematic research into autism, as researchers began to demonstrate a clear biological factor to the condition, refuting previous assertions about its supposed psychogenesis. By the 1990s, more rigorous evaluation criteria were being devised, and it became increasingly recognised that autism may be a life-long condition. Subsequently, the condition re-emerged as a neurological developmental disorder – the framing that governs much of the academic discourse today.

An often-told fact about autism is the steep rise of its prevalence rates over the past three decades. It is this rise which has helped fuel false claims about the cause of the condition, including those concerning an alleged link between autism and vaccines (for critical accounts of such claims see Kaufman 2010, Offit 2008, Orsini & Smith 2010, Sobo 2015). Gil Eyal et al. (2010), however, convincingly attribute this rise to the widening of the diagnostic criteria for autism, as well as to improved access to diagnostic services. The authors provide a focused review of the entries for autism in the Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, demonstrating that its diagnostic criteria were becoming more inclusive with every new edition (see also Eyal 2013). It is through these broadening criteria that autism was increasingly being stretched into a 'spectrum', an idea originally coined by Lorna Wing & Judith Gould (1979) that has since become almost synonymous with the condition itself.^[2]

Autism's ontological status

Currently, the term 'autism spectrum conditions' has indeed come to represent a broad range of cognitive and behavioural atypicalities. Though it is generally accepted that the traits associated with the category of autism are shaped by genetic factors (e.g. Geschwind 2009), a focus on biological processes is fundamentally unsatisfactory in fully accounting for the phenomenon. The understanding, representation, and framing of autism significantly depend on variations in any society's hegemonic values, conceptions of normality, dominant norms of social interaction, and organising structures of knowledge and classification. Autism, therefore, is an emergent product of interrelated social as well as biological processes (e.g. Eyal et al. 2010, Grinker 2007, Nadesan 2005, Silverman 2012).

A popular way of making sense of the interplay between the natural and the socially constructed nature of autism is Ian Hacking's (1999) ‘looping effect’. Hacking conceives of people as ‘interactive kinds’ in the sense that they react to the categories, concepts or ideas which relate to them, and change as a result. Consequently, these categories and concepts need to be adjusted to these changes, in a continuous circle. Elsewhere, Hacking (2009a) has demonstrated a mechanism through which autism is thusly constantly reconstituted. This occurs as autobiographies by autistic authors affect the ways their autistic readers come to understand their own experiences as autistic.^[3] Eyal et al. (2014) further acknowledge that the looping effect of autism goes beyond shaping its meaning formalistically through classification and description. Rather, the practical meaning of the label is constantly negotiated as shifting understandings of autism shape – and are then in turn shaped by – autistic people's experiences of their bodies, for example, their styles of interactions, and their daily habits.

Another way to think about autism while considering both its biological and social-structural components is proposed by Elizabeth Fein (2015a). Fein holds that the condition we refer to as autism is at least in part shaped at the interface between a person’s natural tendencies and their social environments. She suggests that in many of today’s Western societies, where social relationships are based on choice rather than obligation, social difficulties at an early age might lead to exclusion and loneliness, as a child’s peers deny her their friendship. This social isolation leads to the exacerbation of the sometimes-subtle tendencies people may have already experienced, and so they are ultimately more likely to fall within the autism category. Damian Milton (2012) similarly focuses on the role of relationality in determining what constitutes autism. He reflects on the fact that both autistic and non-autistic people lack insight into the perceptions of the other, a disjuncture in reciprocity to which he refers as the 'double empathy problem'. Yet despite this being a problem of reciprocity, the power imbalance between the groups enables one group to deem themselves normal, while the other group is reframed as indicating a social deficit.^[4]

Self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement

Contrary to the view of autism common in the biomedical and psychological disciplines, which considers it a deficit or impairment, approaches based on neurodiversity consider autism to be a natural expression of human diversity (see Bagatell 2007, Chamak 2008, Grinker 2007, Lawson 2008, Savarese 2013, Waltz et al. 2015). This view partly stems from the social model of disability (Ginsburg & Rapp 2013, Oliver 1996, Shakespeare 2006), which acknowledges the crucial role of society and culture in shaping, if not constructing, the category and experience of disability. Neurodiversity advocates further suggest that much as there exists a diversity of gender or ethnicity, so there exists a diversity of cognitive structures; that is, of ways of being (see Arnold 2017, Baggs 2010, Limburg 2016, Milton 2012, Ne'eman 2010, Prince 2010, Yergeau 2010, 2013, 2017). Autism, therefore, according to such claims, should be accepted, even celebrated.^[5]

While the neurodiversity paradigm and its accompanying discourses are varied and nuanced, several of its generally-accepted principles bear mentioning. First, neurodiversity proponents maintain that autism is an inseparable and integral part of the autistic person. It is in light of this view that many autistic authors express their explicit preference for identity-first language (i.e., autistic person), over person-first language (i.e., person with autism) (e.g. Lawson 2008, Milton & Lyte 2012). Moreover, imaginaries of a potential cure for autism, or of technologies of its prevention, are seen to constitute a form of intolerance and oppression. Another common attitude in neurodiversity discourse is a rejection of functioning labels with regards to autism. Advocates maintain that the binary distinction between high-functioning and low-functioning autism is not only simplistic, but that it may be wholly misleading (e.g. Milton & Lyte 2012, Murray 2009, Savarese & Savarese 2010, Yergeau 2010). ‘Functioning’, in the end, is contingent on societal expectation, access to support services, available assistive technology, and changing levels of comfort. Functioning may therefore not be a property of an individual, but a relational category (e.g. Williams 2006). Importantly, neurodiversity advocates further assert that autistic people ought to be included in all public discussions about the condition, from scientific inquiry, through media representation, to legislation and policy making: as per the central idiom in many disability rights movements, 'nothing about us without us'.

Identity, community, and subjectivity

The idea of autism as a form of alterity lends itself to questions of identity, subjectivity, citizenship, activism, and community, which have indeed stood as the basis of numerous anthropological studies. A major paradigm from which autistic people draw their self-definition is the neuroscientific discourse; for example, in adopting the view that autism implies an atypical wiring of the brain. According to Francisco Ortega (2009: 426), this preference reflects a diffusion of neuroscientific claims that extends beyond the laboratory and into various social domains. This cerebralised self-definition of autistic people may constitute the very basis of popular claims for ‘neurodiversity’ (see also Ortega 2013, Ortega & Choudhury 2011).^[6] Yet alongside the neurodiversity discourse, which values taking pride in one’s difference, there also exists the biomedical discourse, which values sameness, normalcy, and efforts to conform. Nancy Bagatell (2007) has thus pointed out that what best characterises the process of identity construction among autistic people is the active and difficult orchestrating of these mostly opposing voices. In other words, assuming an autistic identity is ultimately an active process driven by personal agency and choice.

Such biology-based discourses on autism might also serve as a powerful source of resistance. In assuming an identity constructed around neuroscience, members of the neurodiversity movement question the notion that impairment is objective or absolute (Brownlow & O’Dell 2013). Activists thus appropriate whatever biological basis autism may have – precisely that which according to a deficit model would be considered the cause of disability – and negotiate its meaning, turning it into a positive. Biological essentialism here serves to claim a natural difference between themselves and the hegemonic majority. Citizenship, the authors claim – neurobiological citizenship, in this case – is reflected by people asserting the freedom to negotiate a governing regime, and alternately reject it, accept it or withdraw from it entirely.^[7]

The distinctive possibilities for sociality supported by digital media have offered people with disabilities new opportunities for self-expression and self-determination. Such collective creations play a role in producing social spaces that are inclusive of the fact of disability, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means for people with disabilities to be human (Ginsburg 2012). Autistic people’s shared experiential backgrounds, along with a shared identity as autistic, are thus conductive of a collective voice (Davidson 2008). It is significant that these processes occur online; a social landscape where the communication difficulties associated with autism become less emphasised. Online media, moreover, has allowed autistic people to communicate freely without ‘betraying their autism’ (Antze 2010: 317) by obliging themselves to make eye-contact, for example, or suppressing their atypical body language; without, that is, pretending to be ‘normal’. Under the mostly discursive, predictable, and asimultaneous conditions of online communication, autism need not be an obstacle to communicating successfully, nor to forming relationships or establishing communities.^[8]

Yet while the role of the internet in affording the emergence of autistic communities should not be downplayed, such community building is not restricted to online spaces. Notable examples of actual spaces designed by autistic adults in order to accommodate the preferences and tendencies of those on the autism spectrum – conducive of what might be called an autistic culture (Dekker 1999, Sinclair 2010) – include Autreat (see Sinclair 2005), and its British counterpart, Autscape.^[9] A fascinating example of one such social spaces is a summer camp for autistic youth dedicated to live-action roleplaying games, which was explored ethnographically by Fein (2015b). A ‘folk healing system’, as she deems it, the camp, with its games and accompanying mythologies, offers a rich assemblage of cultural resources: characters, themes, and narratives. Players draw from these sources to metaphorically conceptualise and express their turbulent experiences. Fein further notes that this sociocultural ecology of the camp – with its predictable structures and relational commitments – allows campers to reformulate the challenges associated with autism, transforming them from sources of estrangement into opportunities for mutual recognition and shared enjoyment.

More insight on subjectivity and citizenship in the context of autism comes from authors who engage with the autism rights movement from a gender perspective. Kristin Bumiller (2008) considers the implications of the attempted normalization of autistic people – which among other things includes attempts to eliminate supposedly ‘wrong’ gender behaviour – and analyses autistic activists’ rejection thereof. She argues that the neurodiversity movement offers a unique contribution to the democratic political system, in illustrating that notions of citizenship need not be based on sameness (as it is sometimes imagined) nor on difference (as notions of diversity in other contexts often imply). This is because both sameness and difference imply a ‘norm’ against which people’s individual value is measured. Instead, autistic people's 'quirky' citizenship is to be based on inclusion, acceptance, and individual roles and contributions to civic life.^[10]

Language and sociality

Autism is characterised by an equivocal relationship with typical, i.e. symbolic and conventionalised, language. For both Dawn Prince (2010), an autistic anthropologist and Amanda Baggs (2010), an autistic self-advocate, conventional language is neither natural nor intuitive but partial and constraining. In their respective works, the authors articulate their preference for unconventional linguistic structures: modes of non-symbolic connection to the world that nevertheless capture its beauty and the richness of worldly experience. In light of these different linguistic styles commonly found among autistic people, they often experience difficulties in their attempts to make sense of social etiquette. And although many autistic people work continuously to uncover the underlying principles of social rules, they frequently remain unsuccessful in putting this knowledge into practice. As a result, they turn to shaping their social environments in an attempt to redefine the terms under which the appropriateness of their actions is evaluated. Failure to abide by etiquette should therefore be taken not as mere lack of success, but at least in part as deliberate action and contemplative craft (Belek 2018).

Elinor Ochs et al. (2004) have also discussed their autistic interlocutors' difficulties pertaining to 'social function'. They note that the skills required to converse successfully with each other exceed knowledge of interpersonal communication, to also involve the 'socio-cultural knowledge' necessary for appropriately inferring indexical signs. Autistic people's reduced ability to make sense of some utterances or events, and to react in a conventionally appropriate manner, is to a large extent due to their difficulty in drawing upon knowledge of social context. Such social misconduct, and how autistic children account for it, is the focus of a study by Karen Sirota (2004), who demonstrates the ways in which parents use various expressions of accountability (such as justifications, apologies, or excuses) when instructing their children on how to navigate breaches of etiquette. Yet seeing as accountability is a highly context-specific practice, its effectiveness as a remedy depends on understanding the particular conditions of its use. In the context of autism and the frequent unpredictability that accompanies it, the success of this strategy is limited (see also Ochs & Solomon 2008).

Some autistic authors articulate their arguably unique connection with animals (e.g. Grandin & Johnson 2009, Prince-Hughes 2004). Interactions with horses, for example, are said to enable various types of social behaviours and "open-up" autistic children to interactions they would otherwise typically avoid (Malcolm et al. 2018). Equine therapy thus facilitates a form of multi-species intersubjectivity, leading the way to novel possibilities for dynamic attunements between autistic and non-autistic people.^[11] Recently, the increasingly popular imaginaries of social robots as appropriate companions for autistic children has also been attended to. This notion is grounded in the persistent view of human sociality – especially where autistic people are concerned – as somehow mechanistic (see also Milton 2014). Yet others (e.g. Richardson 2018) contend that human to human attachment is in fact crucial to happiness and wellbeing. A successful therapeutic relationship depends on mutual trust, compassion, and empathy, and is therefore not replaceable by the ontologically divergent interactions between human and machine.

Body and senses

Various bodily attributions are common in autism: sensory sensitivity; a tendency towards repetitive movement, sometimes referred to as self-stimulating behaviours or ‘stimming’; and an atypical gait or posture, to name just a few examples. Autistic children have been shown in some cases to assume a laborious role when attempting to coordinate their (often atypical) bodily actions with societal expectations (Solomon 2011). Analysing video footage of a 9-year-old autistic girl interacting with classmates in the playground, Ochs (2015) has noted this minimally verbal child's continually alternating bodily responses to the social situations developing around and towards her. This constant awareness of one's own body – as an experiencing subject as well as an object exposed to the gaze of others – is what Ochs refers to as a form of corporeal reflexivity. In a similar engagement with corporal reflexivity in autism, it has been shown that autistic adults work to produce distinctions between bodily experiences of distress that they previously experienced as undistinguishable (Belek 2019a). Through a process of bodily cultivation, autistic adults come to design a specialised vocabulary – which includes such terms as trigger, overload, meltdown and shutdown – through which to attune more precisely and concretely to their atypical somatic sensations.

Autism around the world

Until quite recently, the anthropology of autism has focused primarily on the sociocultural conditions and implications of the category in Anglophone settings. This regional bias can be said to have set the tone for the discipline's engagement with the topic at large, further evidenced by scholars' frequent lack of acknowledgement that such a regional bias does in fact exist. Majia Nadesan (2005), among others, accentuates the crucial role that specific sociocultural, political, and epistemological developments in twentieth century Europe and North America had played in the emergence of autism. These include major shifts in psychiatric paradigms, as well as changing formulations of the category of childhood and the resulting alterations of the perceived goals of early education. ‘Autism’, she thus argues, ‘could not have emerged in the nineteenth century … because within the diagnostic categories of nineteenth century (and earlier) thought, autism was unthinkable’ (2005: 3). Although Nadesan does not press this point, her historical narratives indicate that the statement holds equally true concerning not only the temporal, but also the geographical and geopolitical locations of the category's emergence. However, over the past two generations, autism diagnoses have become increasingly common throughout the world (e.g. Elsabbagh et al. 2012).

Consequently, several anthropological studies have set about to explore the particular enactments of autism in more diverse geographic, cultural, and political contexts.^[12] Ariel Cascio (2015a) is one example, as she analyses the use of the concept of rigidity by Italian professionals involved in providing therapy for autistic children. These practitioners frequently describe their clients as rigid, and consider rigidity a potential pitfall in their own work in autism service provision. By creating this semantic overlap between the experiences of people on the autism spectrum and their own, professionals open up a space of similarity between neurotypicals and autistic people, a rhetorical strategy which allows them to reflect more closely upon their work, while working to bridge the gap between the two groups.

In South Korea, local connotations and interpretations of autism lead mothers to resist thinking about their children as autistic (Grinker & Cho 2013). These South Korean mothers frequently attempt to battle exclusion and mitigate stigma in a society that values conformity, while also having to excuse their children’s difficulties in school in an environment that reveres academic excellence. Owing to their understandable reluctance, under such circumstances, to accept the label of autism, a local lay diagnostic concept has emerged; that of ‘border children’. Inconsistent with Western diagnostic classification, this emerging label has proven powerful in allowing mothers to reconcile their ambivalence to the label of autism with its implications of permanence and certainty, framing the condition instead as uncertain, contingent, and temporary.

This rejection of the label of ‘autism’ has also been described in an American context. Challenging the ethnic bias in the anthropology of autism, Cheryl Mattingly (2017) focuses on a family forced to deal with both race and disability: an African-American mother and her autistic child. Here, racial stereotyping, joined with a narrow view of autism, confines the child's conceivable future possibilities; thus teaching the child, in his mother's view, to internalise the fearful potentiality of his ‘becoming nothing’. Structurally visible threats associated with race and class are thus shown by Mattingly to play a central role in the opportunities presented to an autistic child as they enter adulthood.^[13] In light of this, it is claimed that refusing to accept an autism diagnosis might be the most logical means of protection from the pernicious threat posed by the entwinement of race and disability in certain social settings.

Conclusion

Anthropologists studying autism approach their object of study as they do other forms of human difference. They have employed such common heuristic frameworks as phenomenology, ethnomethodology, interpretivism, and critical theory to explore autistic subjectivities, experiences, bodies, and narratives, as well as the motivations and significations of other actors involved in shaping the condition. Yet one aspect of the phenomenon we call autism seems to call for a specialised interpretive framework: namely, its existence as both a historically contingent social construct, and as a name and category for underlying biological, neurological, and genetic conditions. It is predominantly this tension, never quite resolvable, that has led scholars to characterise autism as an uncertain entity (Hollin 2017b), a disability of context (Prince 2010), a disease and an epidemic of signification (Kaufman 2010, David & Orsini 2013) and an epidemic of discovery (Grinker 2007).^[14] Indeed, Ian Hacking may not have exaggerated when proposing, in reference to autism, that ‘we are participating in a living experiment in concept formation of a sort that does not come more than once in a dozen lifetimes’ (2009b: 506).

The anthropological literature recounted above constitutes a crucial step towards our better understanding of autism and of the people to whom this concept is said to apply. Yet the notion of neurodiversity might suggest that anthropologists should go further. They may want to incorporate their emerging understanding of autism into a broader analytical perspective in which the category of autism is no longer thematically and theoretically isolated. What may be needed is not only an anthropology of autism, but an anthropology with autism. As it was put by Richard Grinker,

We need to focus attention on the anthropological study of a form of difference that has previously been conceived of as lying outside the realm of the social. The concept of "diversity," with all its positive connotations of acceptance and celebration of difference, need not only apply to gender, race, ethnicity, and religion. We can also begin to celebrate a diversity of minds (2010: 177).

Acknowledgements

I thank the entry's editor and reviewers for improving greatly on this text. Especially, I am grateful for their pointing out to me the discipline's bias to studying autism predominantly in Western English-speaking settings.

References

Arnold, L. 2017. A brief history of ‘Neurodiversity’ as a concept and perhaps a movement. Autonomy 1(5), online (available at: http://www.larry-arnold.net/Autonomy/index.php/autonomy/article/view/AR23/html).

Angell, A.M. & O. Solomon 2017. ‘If I was a different ethnicity, would she treat me the same?’: Latino parents’ experiences obtaining autism services. Disability & Society 32(8), 1142-64.

Antze, P. 2010. On the pragmatics of empathy in the neurodiversity movement. In Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language, and action (ed.) M. Lambek, 310-27. New York: Fordham University Press.

Asperger, H. 1991. 'Autistic psychopathy' in childhood (trans. U. Frith). In Autism and Asperger syndrome (ed.) U. Frith, 37-92. Cambridge: University Press.

Badone, E., D. Nicholas, W. Roberts & P. Kien 2016. Asperger’s syndrome, subjectivity and the senses. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 40(3), 475-506.

Bagatell, N. 2007. Orchestrating voices: autism, identity and the power of discourse. Disability & Society 22(4), 413-26.

——— 2010. From cure to community: transforming notions of autism. Ethos 38(1), 33-55.

Baggs, A. 2010. Cultural commentary: up in the clouds and down in the valley: my richness and yours. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1052/1238)

Belek, B. 2013. I believe it can change the way things are. Identity constructions among video-bloggers with Asperger’s syndrome on YouTube. Diemen: AMB Publishers.

——— 2017. I feel, therefore I matter: emotional rhetoric and autism self-advocacy. Anthropology Now 9(2), 57-69.

——— 2018. Autism and the proficiency of social ineptitude:probing the rules of ‘appropriate’ behavior. Ethos 46(2), 161-79.

——— 2019a. Articulating sensory sensitivity: from bodies with autism to autistic bodies. Medical Anthropology 38(1), 30-43.

——— 2019b (forthcoming). Autism from an anthropological perspective. Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology.

Bettelheim, B. 1967. The empty fortress: infantile autism and the birth of the self. New York: Free Press.

Bilu, Y. & Y.C. Goodman 1997. What does the soul say?: metaphysical uses of facilitated communication in the Jewish ultraorthodox community. Ethos 25(4), 375-407.

Brezis, R.S., T.S. Weisner, T.C. Daley, N. Singhal, M. Barua & S.P. Chollera 2015. Parenting a child with autism in India: narratives before and after a parent–child intervention program. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 277-98.

Brownlow, C. 2010. Re-presenting autism: the construction of ‘NT syndrome’. Journal of Medical Humanities 31(3), 243-55.

——— & L. O'Dell 2006. Constructing an autistic identity: AS voices online. Mental Retardation 44(5), 315-21.

——— & L. O'Dell 2013. Autism as a form of biological citizenship. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 97-114. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bumiller, K. 2008. Quirky citizens - autism, gender, and reimagining disability. Signs 33(4), 967-91.

——— 2009. The geneticization of autism: from new reproductive technologies to the conception of genetic normalcy. Signs 34(4), 875-99.

Cascio, M.A. 2015a. Rigid therapies, rigid minds: Italian professionals’ perspectives on autism interventions. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 235-53.

——— 2015b. Cross-cultural autism studies, neurodiversity, and conceptualizations of autism.Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 207-12.

Chamak, B. 2008. Autism and social movements: French parents’ associations and international autistic individuals’ organisations. Sociology of Health & Illness 30(1), 76-96.

Cheslack-Postava, K. & R.M. Jordan-Young 2012. Autism spectrum disorders: toward a gendered embodiment model. Social Science & Medicine 74, 1667-74.

Clarke, J. & G. van Amerom 2007. 'Surplus suffering’: differences between organizational understandings of Asperger’s syndrome and those people who claim the ‘disorder'. Disability & Society 22(7), 761-76.

Daley, T.C., T. Weisner & N. Singhal 2014. Adults with autism in India: a mixed-method approach to make meaning of daily routines. Social Science & Medicine 116, 142-9.

Davidson, J. 2007. ‘In a world of her own…’: re-presenting alienation and emotion in the lives and writings of women with autism. Gender, Place and Culture 14(6), 659-77.

——— 2008. Autistic culture online: virtual communication and cultural expression on the spectrum. Social & Cultural Geography 9(7), 791-806.

——— & V.L. Henderson 2010. ‘Coming out’ on the spectrum: autism, identity and disclosure. Social & Cultural Geography 11(2), 155-70.

——— & M. Orsini 2013. Introduction: critical autism studies: notes on an emerging field. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 1-29. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— & M. Smith 2009. Autistic autobiographies and more-than-human emotional geographies. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27(5), 898-916.

——— & S. Tamas 2016. Autism and the ghost of gender. Emotion, Space and Society 19, 59-65.

Dekker, M. 1999. On our own terms: emerging autistic culture. In Conferencia en línea (available on-line: http://www.autscape.org/2015/programme/handouts/Autistic-Culture-07-Oct-1999.pdf). Accessed 9 December 2018.

Draaisma, D. 2009. Stereotypes of autism. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 364(1522), 1475-80.

Edgerton, R.B. 1967. The cloak of competence: stigma in the lives of the mentally retarded. Berkley: University of California Press.

Elsabbagh, M., G. Divan, Y. Koh, Y.S. Kim, S. Kauchali, C. Marcín, C. Montiel-Nava, V. Patel, C.S. Paula, C. Wang, M.T. Yasamy, & E. Fombonne 2012. Global epidemiology of autism. Autism Research 5, 160-79.

Evans, B. 2017. The metamorphosis of autism: a history of child development in Britain. Manchester: University Press.

Eyal, G. 2013. For a sociology of expertise: the social origins of the autism epidemic. American Journal of Sociology 118(4), 863-907.

———, B. Hart, E. Onculer, N. Oren & N. Rossi 2010. The autism matrix: the social origins of the autism epidemic. Cambridge: Polity Press.

———, D. Fitzgerald, E. Gillis-Buck, B. Hart, M. D. Lappé, D. Navon & S.S. Richardson 2014. New modes of understanding and acting on human difference in autism research, advocacy and care: introduction to a special issue of BioSocieties. BioSocieties 9(3), 233-40.

Fein, E. 2011. Innocent machines: Asperger's syndrome and the neurostructural self. In Sociological reflections on the neurosciences (eds) M. Pickersgill & I. Van Keulen, 27-49. Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

——— 2015a. 'No one has to be your friend': Asperger's syndrome and the vicious cycle of social disorder in late modern identity markets.Ethos 43(1), 82-107.

——— 2015b. Making meaningful worlds: role-playing subcultures and the autism spectrum. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 299-321.

Feinstein, A. 2011. A history of autism: conversations with the pioneers. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Fitzgerald, D. 2013. The affective labour of autism neuroscience: entangling emotions, thoughts and feelings in a scientific research practice. Subjectivity 6(2), 131-52.

——— 2014. The trouble with brain imaging: hope, uncertainty and ambivalence in the neuroscience of autism. BioSocieties 9(3), 241-61.

——— 2017. Tracing autism: uncertainty, ambiguity, and the affective labor of neuroscience. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Foucault, M. 1998. The will to knowledge: the history of sexuality vol. I. London: Penguin.

Geschwind, D.H. 2009. Advances in autism. Annual Review of Medicine 60, 367-80.

Giles, D.C. 2014. ‘DSM-V is taking away our identity’: the reaction of the online community to the proposed changes in the diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder. Health 18(2), 179-95.

Gillis-Buck, E.M. & S.S. Richardson 2014. Autism as a biomedical platform for sex differences research. BioSocieties 9(3), 262-83.

Ginsburg F. 2012. Disability in the digital age. In Digital anthropology (eds) D. Miller & H. Horst, 101-26. London: Berg.

——— & R. Rapp 2013. Disability worlds. Annual Review of Anthropology 42, 53-68.

Goldman, S. 2013. Opinion: sex, gender and the diagnosis of autism—a biosocial view of the male preponderance. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders 7(6), 675-9.

Grandin, T. & C. Johnson 2009. Animals in translation: using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior. Albany: SUNY Press.

Grinker, R.R. 2007. Unstrange minds: remapping the world of autism. New York: Basic Books.

——— 2010. Commentary: on being autistic, and social. Ethos 38(1), 172-8.

——— & K. Cho 2013. Border children: interpreting autism spectrum disorder in South Korea. Ethos 41(1), 46-74.

Hacking, I. 1999. The social construction of what? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

——— 2009a. Autistic autobiography. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 364(1522), 1467-73.

——— 2009b. How we have been learning to talk about autism: a role for stories. Metaphilosophy 40, 499-516.

——— 2009c. Humans, aliens & autism. Daedalus 138(3), 44-59.

Hart, B. 2014. Autism parents & neurodiversity: radical translation, joint embodiment and the prosthetic environment. BioSocieties 9(3), 284-303.

Hollin, G. 2014. Constructing a social subject: autism and human sociality in the 1980s. History of the Human Sciences 27(4), 98-115.

——— 2016. Social studies of autism. eLS (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470015902.a0026603).

——— 2017a. Failing, hacking, passing: autism, entanglement, and the ethics of transformation. BioSocieties 12(4), 611-33.

——— 2017b. Autistic heterogeneity: linking uncertainties and indeterminacies. Science as culture 26(2), 209-31.

——— & A. Pilnick 2015. Infancy, autism, and the emergence of a socially disordered body. Social Science & Medicine 143, 279-86.

Jack, J. 2011. "The extreme male brain?" Incrementum and the rhetorical gendering of autism. Disability Studies Quarterly 31(3), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1672/1599).

——— 2014. Autism and gender: from refrigerator mothers to computer geeks. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Kanner, L. 1943. Autistic disturbances of affective contact. Nervous child 2(3), 217-50.

Kaufman, S.R. 2010. Regarding the rise in autism: vaccine safety doubt, conditions of inquiry, and the shape of freedom. Ethos 38(1), 8-32.

Kim, H.U. 2012. Autism across cultures: rethinking autism. Disability & Society 27(4), 535-45.

Krahn, T.M. & A. Fenton 2012. The extreme male brain theory of autism and the potential adverse effects for boys and girls with autism. The Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9, 93-103.

Lappé, M.D. 2014. Taking care: anticipation, extraction and the politics of temporality in autism science. BioSocieties 9(3), 304-28.

Lawlor, M.C. & O. Solomon 2017. A phenomenological approach to the cultivation of expertise: emergent understandings of autism. Ethos 45(2), 232-49.

Lawson, W. 2008. Concepts of normality: the autistic and typical spectrum. London: Jessica Kingsley.

Limburg, J. 2016. ‘But that’s just what you can’t do’: personal reflections on the construction and management of identity following a late diagnosis of Asperger syndrome. Life Writing 13(1), 141-50.

Malcolm, R., S. Ecks & M. Pickersgill 2018. ‘It just opens up their world’: autism, empathy, and the therapeutic effects of equine interactions. Anthropology & medicine 25(2), 220-34.

Mattingly, C. 2017. Autism and the ethics of care: a phenomenological investigation into the contagion of nothing. Ethos 45(2), 250-70.

McDonagh, P. 2013. Autism in an age of empathy: a cautionary critique. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 31-52. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

McKearney, P. & T. Zoanni 2018. Introduction: for an anthropology of cognitive disability. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 36(1), 1-22.

Milton, D.E. 2012. On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society 27(6), 883-7.

——— 2014. Autistic expertise: a critical reflection on the production of knowledge in autism studies. Autism 18(7), 794-802.

——— & Lyte 2012. The normalisation agenda and the psycho-emotional disablement of autistic people. Autonomy 1(1), online (available at: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/62638/).

Molloy, H. & L. Vasil 2002. The social construction of Asperger syndrome: the pathologising of difference? Disability & Society 17(6), 659-69.

Murray, S. 2008. Representing autism: culture, narrative, fascination. Oxford: University Press.

——— 2009. Autism functions/the function of autism. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1048/1229).

Nadesan, M. 2005. Constructing autism: unravelling the “truth” and understanding the social. Abingdon: Routledge.

——— 2013. Autism and genetics: profit, risk, and bare life. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 117-42. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Navon, D. & G. Eyal 2014. The trading zone of autism genetics: examining the intersection of genomic and psychiatric classification. BioSocieties 9(3), 329-52.

——— 2016. Looping genomes: diagnostic change and the genetic makeup of the autism population. American Journal of Sociology 121(5), 1416-71.

Ne'eman, A. 2010. The future (and the past) of autism advocacy, or why the ASA’s magazine,The Advocate, wouldn't publish this piece. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1059/1244).

Ochs, E. 2015. Corporeal reflexivity and autism. Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 49(2), 275-87.

———, T. Kremer-Sadlik, K. Gainer Sirota & O. Solomon 2004. Autism and the social world: an anthropological perspective. Discourse studies 6(2), 147-83.

——— & O. Solomon 2008. Practical logic and autism. In A companion to psychological anthropology: modernity and psychocultural change (eds) C. Casey & R.B. Edgerton, 140-67. Malden: Blackwell.

——— 2010. Autistic sociality. Ethos 38(1), 69-92.

O’Dell, L., H. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, F. Ortega, C. Brownlow & M. Orsini 2016. Critical autism studies: exploring epistemic dialogues and intersections, challenging dominant understandings of autism. Disability & Society 31(2), 166-79.

Offit, P.A. 2008. Autism's false prophets: bad science, risky medicine, and the search for a cure. New York: Columbia University Press.

Oliver, M. 1996. Understanding disability: from theory to practice. London: Palgrave.

Ortega, F. 2009. The cerebral subject and the challenge of neurodiversity. BioSocieties 4(4), 425-45.

——— 2013. Cerebralizing autism within the neurodiversity movement. In Worlds of autism: across the spectrum of neurological difference (eds) J. Davidson & M. Orsini, 73-96. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

——— & S. Choudhury 2011. ‘Wired up differently’: autism, adolescence and the politics of neurological identities. Subjectivity 4(3), 323-45.

Orsini, M. & M. Smith 2010. Social movements, knowledge and public policy: the case of autism activism in Canada and the US. Critical Policy Studies 4, 38-57.

Osteen, M. (ed.) 2010. Autism and representation. Abingdon: Routledge.

Pinchevski, A. & J.D. Peters 2016. Autism and new media: disability between technology and society. New Media & Society 18(11), 2507-23.

Prince, D. 2010. The silence between: an autoethnographic examination of the language prejudice and its impact on the assessment of autistic and animal intelligence. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1055).

Prince-Hughes, D. 2004. Songs of the gorilla nation: my journey through autism. New York: Crown.

Raz, A., K.R. Jongsma, N. Rimon-Zarfaty, E. Späth, B. Bar-Nadav, E. Vaintropov & S. Schicktanz 2018. Representing autism: challenges of collective representation in German and Israeli associations for and of autistic people. Social Science & Medicine 200, 65-72.

Richardson, K. 2018. Challenging sociality: an anthropology of robots, autism, and attachment. New York: Springer.

Rios, C. & B.C. Andrada 2015. The changing face of autism in Brazil. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 213-34.

Runswick-Cole, K., R. Mallett & S. Timimi (eds) 2016. Re-thinking autism: diagnosis, identity and equality. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Sarrett, J.C. 2015. Custodial homes, therapeutic homes, and parental acceptance: parental experiences of autism in Kerala, India and Atlanta, GA, USA. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 254-76.

Savarese, E.T. & R.J. Savarese 2010. ‘The superior half of speaking’ - an Introduction. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1062/1230).

Savarese, R.J. 2013. From neurodiversity to neurocosmopolitanism: beyond mere acceptance and inclusion. In Ethics and neurodiversity (eds) C.D. Herrera & A. Perry, 191-205. Cambridge: Scholars Publishing.

Shaked, M. 2005. The social trajectory of illness: autism in the ultraorthodox community in Israel. Social Science & Medicine 61(10), 2190-200.

——— & Y. Bilu 2006. Grappling with affliction: autism in the Jewish ultraorthodox community in Israel. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 30(1), 1-27.

Shakespeare, T. 2006. The social model of disability. In The disability studies reader (ed.) L.J. Davis, 197-204. Abingdon: Routledge.

Silberman, S. 2015. Neurotribes: the legacy of autism and the future of neurodiversity. London: Penguin.

Silverman, C. 2008. Fieldwork on another planet: social science perspectives on the autism spectrum. BioSocieties 3(3), 325-41.

——— 2012. Understanding autism: parents, doctors, and the history of a disorder.Princeton: University Press.

Sinclair, J. 2005. Autism Network International: the development of a community and its culture (available on-line: http://www.autreat.com/History_of_ANI.html). Accessed 5 May 2018.

——— 2010. Being autistic together. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1075/1248).

Sirota, K.G. 2004. Positive politeness as discourse process: politeness practices of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome. Discourse Studies 6(2), 229-51.

Sobo, E.J. 2015. Social cultivation of vaccine refusal and delay among Waldorf (Steiner) school parents. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 29(3), 381-99.

Solomon, O. 2010. Sense and the senses: anthropology and the study of autism. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 241-59.

——— 2011. Body in autism: a view from social interaction. In Language, body, and health (eds) P. McPherron & V. Ramanathan, 105-42. Berlin: De Gruyter.

——— 2012. Doing, being and becoming: the sociality of children with autism in activities with therapy dogs and other people. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 30(1), 109-26.

——— 2015. "But - he’ll fall!”: children with autism, interspecies intersubjectivity, and the problem of ‘being social'. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 39(2), 323-44.

——— & M.C. Lawlor 2013. “And I look down and he is gone”: narrating autism, elopement and wandering in Los Angeles. Social science & medicine 94, 106-14.

Treichler, P.A. 1987. AIDS, homophobia and biomedical discourse: an epidemic of signification. Cultural studies 1(3), 263-305.

Waltz, M. 2005. Reading case studies of people with autistic spectrum disorders: a cultural studies approach to issues of disability representation. Disability & Society 20(4), 421-35.

——— 2012. Images and narratives of autism within charity discourses. Disability & Society 27(2), 219-33.

——— 2013. Autism: a social and medical history. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

———, K. van den Bosch, H. Ebben, L. van Hal & A. Schippers 2015. Autism self-advocacy in the Netherlands: past, present and future. Disability & Society 30(8), 1174-91.

Ward, M.J. & R.N. Meyer 1999. Self-determination for people with developmental disabilities and autism: two self-advocates’ perspectives. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities 14(3), 133-9.

Williams, D. 2006. The jumbled jigsaw: an insider's approach to the treatment of autistic spectrum 'fruit salads'. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Williams, E. 2004. Who really needs a ‘theory’ of mind? An interpretative phenomenological analysis of the autobiographical writings of ten high-functioning individuals with an autism spectrum disorder. Theory & psychology 14(5), 704-24.

Wing, L. & J. Gould 1979. Severe impairments of social interaction and associated abnormalities in children: epidemiology and classification. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 9(1), 11-29.

Woods R., D. Milton, L. Arnold & S. Graby 2018. Redefining critical autism studies: a more inclusive interpretation. Disability & Society 33(6), 974-79.

Yergeau, M. 2010. Circle wars - reshaping the typical autism essay. Disability Studies Quarterly 30(1), online (available at: http://www.dsq-sds.org/article/view/1063/1222).

——— 2013. Clinically significant disturbance: on theorists who theorize theory of mind. Disability Studies Quarterly 33(4), online (available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3876/3405).

——— 2017. Authoring autism: on rhetoric and neurological queerness. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Note on contributor

Ben Belek is a research fellow in social and medical anthropology at the Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His previous project focused on the ontological status of neurological diversity among autistic adults in the UK. In his current project, he explores the shifting values of blood constituents in the Israeli blood economy.

Ben Belek, The Martin Buber Society of Fellows in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel 9190501.

[1] Examples of the critical strand of literature include Eyal et al. (2010) Fitzgerald (2013, 2014, 2017), Gillis-Buck & Richardson (2014), Hollin (2014, 2017a), Hollin & Pilnick (2015), Lappé (2014), Nadesan (2005, 2013), Navon & Eyal (2014, 2016), and Silverman (2012). For a review, see Hollin (2016). Other studies aim their critique at popular theories in cognitive neuroscience. These include Hacking (2009), Jack (2011), Krahn & Fenton (2012), McDonagh (2013), Milton (2012), Milton & Lyte (2012), Williams (2004), and Yergeau (2013, 2017).

[2] Grinker (2010: 173) has discussed the benefits of imagining autism as a spectrum, whereby the old image of the nonverbal, mentally underdeveloped, and unaffectionate male child has given way to the understanding that autism constitutes a broad range of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and sensitivities. However, the use of the spectrum metaphor does have several disadvantages, as noted by Hacking: ‘To the mind of a physicist or a logician … spectra are linear and autism is not. Autism is a many-dimensional manifold of abilities and limitations.’ (2009b: 503)

[3] Other studies focusing on the representation of autism in various media and its impact on understandings of the condition include Davidson (2007), Davidson & Smith (2009), Draaisma (2009), Hacking (2009b, 2009c), Murray (2008), and Waltz (2005, 2012); as well as the studies featured in an edited volume by Osteen (2008).

[4] The relationality inherent in the notion and category of autism, and its opposition to socially contingent understandings of that which is 'normal' has been similarly addressed by Belek (2019b), Bagatell (2007), Eyal et al. (2010), Grinker (2013), Lawson (2008), Milton & Lyte (2012), Molloy & Vasil (2002) and Nadesan (2005), among others.

[5] Studies which explicitly take this stance on autism as their starting point, are occasionally grouped together under the umbrella of "critical autism studies" (CAS) (O'Dell et al. 2016, Davidson & Orsini 2013, Runswick-Cole, Mallett & Timimi 2016, Woods et al. 2018).

[6] For a comparable analysis of autistic subjectivities as representing a ‘neurostructural self’, see Fein (2011). For autism as neuroqueerness, see Yergeau (2017).

[7] Other studies emphasising the active and often creative nature of constructing positive identities in autism include Badone et al. (2016), Bagatell (2010), Brownlow (2010), Davidson & Henderson (2010), and Fein (2015b).

[8] The affordances of digitally mediated environments in the context of autism were also explored by Belek (2013, 2017) Brownlow & O’Dell (2006), Clarke & Van-Amerom (2007), Giles (2013), Pinchevski & Peters (2016), and Ward & Meyer (1999), to name a few.

[9] See www.autscape.org

[10] Other notable studies focusing on gender in the context of autism include Cheslack-Postava & Jordan-Young (2012), Davidson (2007), Davidson & Tamas (2016), Goldman (2013), and Jack (2014).

[11] Solomon (2010, 2012, 2015) has similarly explored the ways sociality in some autistic children is facilitated and realised through social interactions with animals.

[12] Other examples of studies which engage with autism in various geographical contexts include Brezis et al. (2015), and Daley et al.'s (2014) work in New Delhi, India; Sarrett (2015), comparing ethnographic data from Kerala, India and Atlanta, US; Kim (2012) comparing Canada, Nicaragua and Korea; Rios & Andrada (2015) in Brazil; and Bilu & Goodman (1997) Shaked (2005), and Shaked & Bilu (2006) writing on autism in ultraorthodox Jewish communities in Israel. For a review, see Cascio (2015b).

[13] The intertwinement of parenting, autism and ethnicity from a phenomenological perspective has also been addressed by Angell & Solomon (2017), Lawlor & Solomon (2017), and Solomon & Lawlor (2013).

[14] The latter two drawing on Treichler (1987).

Queer anthropology

Felix Stein — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 17:09:29 +0000

Ara Wilson

Duke University

Initially published 31 Jul 2019

http://doi.org/10.29164/19queer

Abstract:

Once a slur, the term ‘queer’ now is used to critique restrictive, dominant norms of respectable conduct and to recast sexual and gender variations in positive terms. With roots in twentieth-century anthropological studies of sex and gender, queer anthropology is also part of interdisciplinary scholarship on queer existence that defines sex and gender as key axes for the distribution of status, resources, membership, and value in a society. The aim is not to describe gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (LGBTQ) life in universal terms. Rather, ethnographies emphasise the different forms that queer existence takes. Queer anthropology explains the conditions that shape queer life, such as cultural understandings of sexuality, legacies of colonial regimes, or global flows of popular culture. This entry explores four foci that characterise queer anthropology: language, especially categories of identity; varying forms of transgender roles; a geographic emphasis on the United States; and the relation of local sex/gender diversity to the global expanse of Western forms of lesbian and gay identity.

Introduction

Queer anthropology studies variations in the expression of sexuality and gender, and the ways that societies treat such differences. Queer anthropology adopts an anti-homophobic approach predicated on critiquing the denigration of sex/gender variation and empathising with the subjects of that denigration; that is, those we call queer.

Twentieth-century anthropology publicised the existence of accepted homosexual behaviour and integrated transgender people in societies around the world. From earlier anthropological work, we are now aware that societies’ varying codes for sexuality and gender relate to their overall value systems, and that such codes deeply socialise how people evaluate their experiences and express their desires (see, for example, Mead 1935; Vance 1991). Queer anthropology takes this already-familiar anthropological sensibility in a new direction by identifying social-cultural forces as forms of power that distribute rewards and punishments in unequal ways. It is based on the insight that, as an axis for organising social life, sexuality is not a separate domain but is always intertwined with systems of meaning and structures of relations among people.

This entry first considers what twentieth-century anthropology said about sexuality and gender variance, a legacy that was explicitly rejected, subtly continued, and largely ignored in the new school of queer anthropology. It then discusses what queer anthropology (including lesbian and gay anthropology) tells us about this sex/gender variation, particularly about categories and forms of identities, with special focus on two areas rich in queer ethnographic research: Southeast Asia and the United States. Although it is ahistorical to do so, the term ‘queer anthropology’ will here serve as a convenient umbrella term for other incarnations of the anthropology of homosexuality, lesbian and gay (LGBTQ) anthropology, or transgender anthropology.

History

During its expansion around the world, Europe’s colonial agents, missionaries, and explorers encountered what they considered shocking sexual attitudes elsewhere in the world: peoples that accepted open sex play among children, pre-marital sex, sex between men, acknowledgement of masturbation, and more. In some societies, Europeans saw people with anatomically male bodies living out women’s roles, who were not only tolerated, but in some places valorised, such as in some Native American tribes (those with female bodies living as men were rarer, but also noted). In other words, Europeans confronted an embrace of sexual conduct or gender expression that their own societies rejected. They used such deviance from their norms to rationalise colonial domination, in a logic that continues to echo today (Morgensen 2011).

This entry focuses on anthropology’s intellectual accounting for diversity, rather than the ways that ethnographic knowledge played into colonial or white supremacist rule. What were the rubrics for making sense of this difference? The Christian world evaluated sexuality through its theology of sin, which underwrote the long-lasting criminalisation of certain sex or gender conduct – as in the form of sodomy laws – in Europe and its colonies. In the nineteenth century, following Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, an alternative explanation for social differences around sexuality came to the fore. The discipline of anthropology emerged by providing a scientific, rather than religious, explanation for different social practices and cultural forms. Sexuality was important to this emergence of anthropological thought — so much so that anthropology became associated with photographs of bare-breasted women and titillating details about other cultures’ sexual habits (Lyons & Lyons 2004) — the erotic equivalent to the ‘flora and fauna’ accounts of natural history (Weston 1993) — to the embarrassment of the discipline’s leaders.

Darwin’s evolutionary theories identified sexual reproduction as crucial to species evolution and survival. Much about maleness, femaleness, and sexuality then, was attributed to nature. Anthropologists described people as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ according to binary categories of sex differences based on anatomy, even when the society in question gave reality to alternate gender identities. Until very recently, ethnographies referred to someone living out a feminine role but with a body considered male with the masculine pronoun ‘he’. The earlier literature referred to them as ‘effeminate men’, ‘homosexuals’, ‘transvestites’, or other terms. Western researchers typically conflated phenomena that we now, in the twenty-first century, separate: same-sex sexual encounters or desires, named sexual identity, intersexuality, gender norms, gender expression, and psychic gender identity (to be fair, many of the societies studied also conflated anatomical sex with sexuality and gender identity). Homosexuality was viewed as gender crossing because a homosexual had the sexual orientation that properly belonged to the opposite sex.

In the wake of Darwin, the first wave of anthropology proposed a model for the evolution of human institutions that emulated the natural evolution of species. Nineteenth-century scholars studying reports of other cultures concluded that different forms of marriage, kinship, and sexual behaviour must reflect different stages in the evolution of human society. In this imagined evolution, humans began in an animal-like phase of ‘promiscuous hordes’ mating indiscriminately. We then evolved family systems, progressing from lower to higher forms of barbarism and savagery (including a debated matriarchal period) until culminating in civilization’s most evolved stage, that of the paternally-led nuclear family. Societies that did not centre on the nuclear family were assumed to belong to more primitive stages of human development, savagery or barbarianism. As the pinnacle of human development, white Christians were justified — even obligated! — to attempt to force couples to adopt appropriate sexual relations – hence the ‘missionary position’ – and the civilised form of the family organised around the heterosexual conjugal pair.

Entering the twentieth century, anthropologists radically changed their interpretation of cross-cultural variations in sexual codes. This new anthropology no longer described family systems as more or less primitive: evolutionary ranking was rejected. Instead, anthropologists asked why expressions considered deviant according to Western norms — homosexuality, pre-marital sex, or transgender identities — were accepted in other societies. The 1920s to 1930s were a heyday of anthropological research on sexuality and sex, or what we now call gender. One example is William Willard Hill’s ‘The status of the hermaphrodite and transvestite in Navaho culture’. Hill’s title used the English words of the period for intersex and transgender to translate the Navajo term nádleehi (also nadle^[1]). Navajo society, Hill found, treated the nádleehi differently from the way US society treated comparable people. A Navajo family who had an intersex baby or a transgender youth ‘was considered by themselves and everyone else as very fortunate’:

The success and wealth of such a family was believed to be assured. Special care was taken in the raising of such children and they were afforded favoritism not shown to other children of the family. As they grew older and assumed the character of nadle, this solicitude and respect increased, not only on the part of their families but from the community as a whole (Hill 1935: 274).

Hill bracketed his social schema in order to explicate the logic of the Navajo: the Navajo valued people (and animals) who did not fit into binary categories of male/female. His discussion of the nádleehi shows how a culture’s category for sex/gender identity connects to broader cultural values, concerning binaries, nature, resources, and kinship. By developing this kind of analysis, that interprets codes for sex or gender as a piece of the larger social system, anthropology developed both its intellectual method (cultural relativism) and its concept of culture (as holistic, integrated assemblage of values and habits). Sex/gender norms that diverged from Western orthodoxy offered key opportunities for illustrating this method and analysis.

Even as they were developing cultural relativist approaches to sex/gender variations, modern anthropologists fumbled for words that could translate specific cultural categories into a universal vocabulary of science, in ways that reproduced their own cultural attitudes. Not sounding particularly objective, Edward Westermarck wrote that in some societies, ‘[t]he gratification of the sexual instinct assumes forms which fall out the ordinary pale of nature’ (Westermarck 1926: 456).^[2]The main form that concerned him was men’s sex with other men, probably anal sex. Sex that was not undertaken by a heterosexual pair, hence not connected to reproduction, was beyond ‘the pale of nature’. Given the importance of reproduction to the species and the family, why would any society allow it? To answer this Darwinian puzzle of non-heterosexual sex, anthropologists turned mainly to psychological or functionalist frameworks. Functionalism said that cultural practices that seemed odd to the Western observer, as the acceptance of non-heterosexual sexuality, in fact serve a rational, if not conscious, purpose by handling basic challenges that confront human societies in ways that mesh with their overall social system. Psychoanalytic diagnoses of homosexuality as perversion, inversion, or neuroses provided a persuasive expert theory for interpreting, say, men’s sex with men or females wearing male clothing. These psychological terms were clinical yet not neutral, as the following example reveals.

Shamanism in Korea, Siberia, Southeast Asia, and other locations offered Western readers exotic examples of cross-dressing, transvestitism, the third-gender, or transgender expression. When shamans are possessed by a spirit that is not of their own birth-sex, they don the clothes and behaviours of the spirit’s sex. Here is how an anthropologist, Melvin Spiro, described Burmese female shamans in 1967:

[M]any are highly masculine in manner, and many others are married to weak, inconsequential males. If the female shaman does in fact have homosexual needs, they may be satisfied by identification with her nat [spirit] husband… At the very least, therefore, the shamanistic role enables a latent lesbian, one with a strong masculine component, to act out her masculine impulses (1967: 220).

Spiro analysed Burmese society through a psychoanalytical framework that considered sexual orientation to be related to gender identity — attraction to women was masculine, and vice versa — and to be a deeply seated, core element of a person. Psychoanalytical categories — ‘latent’ lesbian or homosexual men — placed the cross-dressing shaman into a presumed universal framework. Judging the husbands of ‘highly masculine’ women as ‘weak’ and ‘inconsequential’,^[3]Spiro’s reveals his society’s attitudes about proper heterosexual arrangements, rather than 1960s Burmese categories. At the time, such judgmental language passed as social science.

Like many anthropologists discussing sexuality, Spiro also drew on a functionalist interpretation. In works such as Sex and repression in savage society (1927), Bronislaw Malinowski put forth one of the best-known formulations of functionalism.^[4] It says that social arrangements manage basic human needs in ways that prevent dangerous disruptions, thereby allowing social forms to endure. Societies provided outlets for problematic queer desires; for example, through constructive roles for those who expressed alternative genders and sexualities, like shamanism. For the Navajo, Hill similarly explained the social valorization of intersex/transgender members as a way to ‘capitalize on an irregularity’ (1935: 273) — it made an aberration socially meaningful.

Margaret Mead’s pathbreaking book, Sex and temperament in three primitive societies (1935), deeply transformed thinking about sex roles. It challenged the idea that biological sex caused male and female personality differences. Socialization, Mead insisted, not biology, caused personality traits: it was cultures that linked qualities like aggression or nurturance to sex. Mead’s argument that societies shaped temperaments anticipated the later differentiation between biological sex and gender. (Gender is a relatively new term that became common from its use in sexology and 1970s feminism.) Mead was especially influential because she brought these ideas to a wide audience. As one sign of her significance, one of the anthropologists who launched queer anthropology, Esther Newton, titled her memoir, Margaret Mead made me gay (Newton 2000).

Twentieth-century anthropology shaped how we think about queer life today. It explained the power of norms and the social mechanisms that created men and women in their image while also demonstrating that some societies, like the Navajo or Burmese, did not reject, but positively valued people who Westerners considered psychologically abnormal. The fact that some societies integrated sex/gender variance showed that there were alternatives to enduring punitive Victorian codes governing women’s sexual behaviour, homosexuality, masturbation, or gender non-conformity. These cross-cultural examples were eagerly taken up by Euro-American efforts to make life more hospitable for those who did not conform to these strict norms of personal life.

Queer anthropology

In the 1960s and 1970s, a few bold anthropologists asked for more attention to homosexuality, which had been neglected for decades after the 1930s (Sonenschein 1966; Fitzgerald 1977). This led to a small subfield of the anthropology of homosexuality, which begat lesbian and gay anthropology, which later emerged as queer and transgender anthropology. This scholarship both extended and departed from earlier twentieth century scholarship on sex. Anthropologists used old-school ethnography to understand lifeways that defied sex/gender, albeit in novel sites, like lesbian bars or drag shows. Yet this new lesbian and gay anthropology also articulated distinct views of non-heterosexual sexuality.

Seismic changes from new social movements led scholars to examine conflict and inequality more than they had. Lesbian and gay anthropologists were explicitly committed to an anti-homophobic approach. In 1972, Esther Newton’s prescient study of drag queens, street faeries, and camp sensibility showed how this queer US world disaggregated elements of gender, how they were internally differentiated, and how they understood relations to dominant homophobic society; for example, through the wry stylistic of camp (Newton 1972). Gayle Rubin created a cultural map of US sexual norms as a concentric set of circles around a ‘charmed circle’ of the most valued mode of sexuality (married, heterosexual, ‘vanilla’) to outer rings of increasing stigmatization. Rubin, in particular, helped anthropologists to see sexuality as a ‘vector of oppression’ in societies (Rubin 1975). Their work, often ignored in mainstream anthropology, helped launch what became Queer Anthropology.

In the Anglophone world, older gays and lesbians painfully recall ‘queer’ as a hostile epithet that crystallised the alienation of being treated as abnormal. At the same time, communities excluded from mainstream society often use humour as a survival strategy, and many queers also used ‘queer’ sardonically in an insider way. Come the late 1980s, a younger generation reclaimed the epithet queer as a way to embrace, rather than suffer, this outsider status. They embraced violating sexual and gender norms: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’ went the chant. This appropriation of the slur turned ‘queer’ into a critique of normativity that showed how norms excluded people from resources, valorization, and social belonging while also targeting them for violence and harassment. Politically, taking up ‘queer’ defies the logic that only those who are ‘normal’ are entitled to the full expression of humanity (Rubin 1984). The categories of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ came to be seen by some as too restrictive to capture the scope of (consensual) erotic experiences that mainstream desire considered perverse. Instead of continuing to represent different identity categories in an expanding LGBTQ acronym, many adopted queer as an encompassing shorthand. The radical turn to queer also reflected concern that gays and lesbians were assimilating into mainstream society.^[5] As some gays and lesbians became seen as ‘normal’, their membership in mainstream society could now reinforce the very boundaries that had kept them out, and that still excluded other sorts of queer sexuality, particularly those in Black, immigrant, poor, or transgender communities.

Queer theory is an academic response to this activism. Coined in 1989, queer theory is less focused on naming identities than identifying a political relationship of subjects to dominant modes of power, usually understood as resistance, whether intentional or not. One major queer theorist described queer capaciously as resistance ‘to regimes of the normal’ (Warner 1993: xxvi). The Western regime of the normal posits a biological sex binary, male and female, that shapes masculine or feminine gender identity and results in heterosexual sexual orientation and nominally monogamous relationships. These norms extend beyond evaluating individuals, because the heterosexual pair is viewed as the hub of the family, above other forms of intimate relationships, especially sex between men, women, and trans people. Queer theory shows how those whose sexuality and gender are considered deviant can be seen as freaks or monsters — not fully human (Weiss 2016a). To demonstrate that norms are forms of ideology, rather than natural or universal, Queer scholars highlight phenomena that show ‘mismatches between sex, gender and desire’ (Jagose 2002: 3).

Anthropologists draw selectively on strands of queer theory; for example, referring to normative discourses instead of a general concept of culture. In anthropology, Weston proposes that queer ‘defines itself by its difference from hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality’ (Weston 1993: 348). The European Network for Queer Anthropology (ENQA)^[6]adopts this meaning by situating itself against ‘the continued marginalization of sexuality and gender perspectives beyond those that are embedded in conjugal reproductive heterosexuality in contemporary anthropology’. The anthropologist Margot Weiss, who has written a great deal about what queer anthropology means, says that queer is meant to ‘signify transgression of, resistance to, or exclusion from normativity, especially but not exclusively heteronormativity’ (Weiss 2016a).^[7]With the phrase ‘not exclusively’, Weiss stresses the intersectional nature of queer perspectives, meaning that prevailing sex/gender norms are not isolated axes of social systems, but intertwine with class dynamics and histories of colonisation and slavery.

Anthropologists draw on queer theory’s concept of gender as performative (which itself derives from linguistics), seeing, for example, femininity as created continually through people’s conduct and speech, rather than resulting from biological female sex (Morris 1993). Based in the humanities, and rooted in critical theory or continental philosophy, queer theoretical writing relies mainly on the analysis of texts, mostly from European or US sources. Queer anthropology adds ethnographic methods that place sexuality in richer contexts beyond simply discourse, showing how, for example, capitalism (Rofel 2007; Weiss 2011b; Wilson 2004), religious meanings (Ramberg 2014; Allen 2011), or immigrant status (Manalansan 2003) contour people’s expression of sexual desires or self-definitions. A number of review essays provide different takes on anthropology’s relations to queer theory.^[8]This brief entry emphasises queer anthropological studies of sexuality and gender in relation to classic disciplinary concerns with social classifications and social and geographic contexts as well as anthropology’s more recent attention to global dynamics.

From homosexual to Tom: language, categories, meanings

By the 1980s, most anthropologists avoided using the word ‘homosexual’ to describe persons. Gay and lesbian activists had rejected an externally imposed, clinical label that linked non-heterosexual orientations with pathology (Tuvin 1991; Weston 1993; Rubin 1997). Moreover, defining people, rather than sexual acts, as homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual relies on a particular psychological model of selfhood in which some enduring, core essence of a person’s inner being is determined by whether their desired sexual partners are of the same or opposite sex.

Queer anthropology often studies sexual expressions that differ from prevailing Euro-American notions of homosexuality, biological sex, or are subject to different social judgements. Feminist anthropologists, for example, recognised that Western vocabulary, like the term ‘lesbian’, did not adequately translate the self-concepts and cultural connotations of women’s erotic relations with other females. The newly-reclaimed Western term ‘lesbian’ was not even shared by communities of women in same-sex relations within the West, such as urban American working-class women who organised their self-concept around an erotically gendered persona, as ‘butch’ or ‘femme’, rather than emphasising the sameness in same-sex desire (Kennedy & Davis 1993). Yet specific gendered vocabulary for what we could call female masculinity – butch lesbian, gender non-conforming female, or trans man – is common in other parts of the world. In the twenty-first century Persian Gulf, boya (plural boyāt)^[9]refers to a female with masculine appearance. Boyāt’s short hair and male clothing become visible when they are not wearing the abaya, meaning in women-only spaces in malls, girls’ schools, or women’s beaches (Le Renard 2014; Nigst & Garcia 2010). As the Arabic boya represents a borrowing from the English word ‘boy’, Asian societies use tomboy or such derivatives as Tom,T, or Tibo (Blackwood 2010; Newton 2016). We still do not know how or when the word tomboy entered Asian lexicons.

Queer theory has argued for analysing sexuality as autonomous from gender (Rubin 1985). Yet anthropologists mostly find that sexuality is deeply embedded in gender schema. For example, males are often accorded different mobility in public spaces and standards for sexual activity from girls and women (Blackwood 2010). Femininity and masculinity are also commonly associated with particular sexual roles (Padilla 2008; Sinnott 2004). Tomboy or boya are gender terms, not necessarily equivalent to transgender, that suggest a more or less implicit sexuality. That is, in many sex/gender lexicons, labels for non-normative gender expression also codes same-sex sexuality. In my research in Thailand, I found that many women through the 1990s rejected the word ‘lesbian’ because of its overt sexual meanings, enhanced by the use of the word in heterosexual pornography and sex-shows for foreign men. Identifications that merge sexuality with a gendered term seem to be common. Bailey too finds that the participants in Black American drag balls use gendered terms, such as ‘butch queen up in drag’, ‘femme queen’, or ‘women’ (Bailey 2013; see also Johnson 2011).

Societies outside of the West also draw on the more sexual word ‘lesbian’. Nais Dave (2012) found rural Indian women outside of major cities described themselves as lesbians, to the surprise of urban organisers. Some language communities use diminutives of lesbian such as lesbi (Indonesia), les (Vietnam [Newton 2016]), or la-la (Greater China). Even when the term is derived from the English, it is conceptually inflected with local meanings. Writing about Indonesia, for example, anthropologists show how terms like lesbi (Blackwood 2010) or gay (Boellstorff 2005) function as Indonesian words, rather than being entirely commensurate with English meanings.

Communities of gay men, men who have sex with men (MSM), and trans women often develop their own community slang, or argot (Boellstorff 2005; Leap & Boellstorff 2004). E. Patrick Johnson provides a glossary for US Black queer slang in his book Sweet tea: black gay men of the South. There is a name for the argot of queers in the Philippines and its diaspora: Swardspeak, derived from a Cebuano word for the pejorative term, ‘sissy’. Swardspeak mixes dominant Filipino, American, and Spanish codes in a constantly evolving slang that unmistakably marks the speaker as bakla, a queer man or trans woman of the Philippines (Manalansan 2003: 46-7).

The point of this documentation of indigenous terminology for queer life is not to chronicle gay life around the world, but to alter conventional thinking about gender and sexuality. The variety of modes of queer existence belies the idea that sexuality takes the universal forms of heterosexuality and homosexuality. It shows that the connection between sexual activity to identity takes culturally specific forms that are inflected by sex, gender, class, race, and other social markers. The terms a person uses to describe herself are also situational, and change in different contexts (Valentine 2007; Gray 2009).^[10]Not all queer terms describe individuals, either. In mainland China, la-la was first used as an adjective for sites associated with what we name lesbian and queer women rather than as a noun naming a person’s identity (Engebretsen 2013). Gloria Wekker (2007) explains that in Suriname, the understanding of female same-sex erotic relations, called matiwroko (mati work or ‘friends’ work’), differs from the concept of lesbian. The Surinamese understand these sexual relations as activity rather than identity: a woman often would be heterosexually partnered and engage in mati work without contradiction. Non-Western queer life can involve radically different conceptions of the self. Being a bakla, Manalansan tells us, ‘is seen to be not a product of something inside of person, but rather as a product of an outside force or forces’ (Manalansan 2003: 43). Queerness in various societies is seen as divine fate, as akin to possession, or as the result of karma (Boellstorff 2005; Manalansan 2003; Sinnott 2004).

Queer anthropology has shown that applying Western categories for sexuality universally across cultural contexts limits our understanding of people’s self-concepts, and in turn, their motivations, choices, and behaviours. For one concrete illustration, in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic: because conventional epidemiological methods did not provide an understanding of gay men’s sexual cultures, medical researchers did not understand the patterns of HIV transmission. Ethnographic work explained the contexts for plural sex partners in this community. It also explained that health programs relying on the word ‘gay’ were failing to reach the many men who may on occasion enjoy intercourse with another male but do not feel gay, but as ‘normal’ (Boellstorff 2011; Vance 1991). ‘Using bisexual as a noun’ for men who have sex with men in Mexico, Carrier says, ‘obscures the diversity of their lifestyles, motivations, and sexual behaviors’ (Carrier 1995: 199). ‘Normal’, married men routinely having sex with male-bodied people challenges normative Western beliefs that having sex with a body with a penis establishes a man as homosexual, not heterosexual: more generally, that the sex of a partner defines one’s core sexual orientation and, hence, identity.

The transgender turn

As the work of Hill on the Navajo or Spiro on Burmese shamans noted above suggests, the discipline of anthropology described transgender lives as part of its analysis of cultural patterns and social function. These accounts displayed deeply ethnocentric judgements that changed as a response to transsexual and transgender advocacy. Taking hold in the US through the 1990s, the concept of ‘transgender’, coined by transgender people themselves, more or less supplanted the words ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’, for similar reasons to the move away from ‘homosexual’. (Some people still identify in English as ‘cross-dressers’ or ‘transsexuals’ and comparable terms in other languages.) Language has been one of the most vital arenas for transgender struggles (Zimman 2017). Trans advocacy defines gender according to individual subjective experience — how people identify their gender — rather than according to legal identity, psychiatric diagnosis, social perception, or sex assigned at birth.^[11]Their political efforts have transformed language adopted in scholarship, medical literature, psychological care, and by international networks, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs).^[12]While queer and transgender anthropology follows these recommendations, they also have alternative cross-cultural versions of transgender identity (Dutta & Roy 2014) and are equally exploring the historically specific construction of the American, and globalising, trans identity (Plemmons 2017; Zimman 2017).

The revealing subtitle of David Valentine’s Imagining transgender is ‘an ethnography of a category’, which flags his approach to the (then) new category of transgender as a cultural classification; in this case, in the context of gender-non-conforming communities in New York City (Valentine 2007). As with the Detroit drag ball participants (Bailey 2013), these queer New Yorkers described themselves with an array of terms, including ‘gay’. Cross-cultural terms often conceptualise personhood and gender according to different logics from the Western sense of the autonomous, interior self. For example, a Filipina baklais called ‘doll of god’, suggesting that the physical self is the plaything of the divine (Manalansan 2013). Sahar Sadjadi (2019) notices that the concept of the self from her cultural background differs from that expressed in US trans medicine. She explains that ‘my ethnographic gaze originates from a context where narratives of the self are not anchored in a deep inner core but are relational and situational’ (Sadjadi 2019: 104). Discussions in a paediatric trans clinic revealed ‘the hegemony of the interior origins of authentic self and identity and the rejection of possible external, including social, origins of identity’ (Sadjadi 2019: 104). Lal Zimman’s (2017) linguistic analysis of US trans discourse finds a similar emphasis on individual autonomy in trans emphasis on self-identification, which meshes with a US political economic context stressing individualism (neoliberalism). Despite their political emphasis on self-definition, Zimman notes, trans people are nonetheless conscious that gender identity is very much established dialogically: that is, in relation to others.

Queer, American style

In India, the hijra is a well-known figure: born as males, living a feminine identity in community with other hijras, they have attracted the attention of many scholars and are a staple of anthropological discussions of gender.^[13] Southeast Asian trans feminine identities (Thai kathoey, Filipino bakla, Indonesian waria) are also well known to tourists and researchers, as are South America’s travesti. Yet the queer life that anthropologists know the most about is in the United States. From the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists have conducted participant observation within queer American subcultures, such as drag queens (Newton 1973), working class lesbian life (Kennedy & Davis 1993), or BDSM communities (Weiss 2011b). They show that queer communities, like others, are structured by shared codes, patterned behaviour, and the effects of urban policies, capitalist markets, and other encompassing systems.

We are most familiar with queer life in cities: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Generally, the American countryside is considered harsh, if not impossible, for lesbian, gay, or transgender living. Mary L. Gray’s ethnography Out in the country (2009) and E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet tea (2011) provide close portraits of queer US Southerners, showing how they form their identity and sustain lives in the absence of metropolitan resources. Johnson’s personal narratives show how in Black Southern communities, queer life is simultaneously above and below the radar, as well as the centrality of both the church and drag to many Black gay men’s experience. Both white and Black Southerners face a different prospect of being out in their small communities (Gray2009).^[14]

The anthropology of queer American life counters the codified images of married white gays and lesbians or the staple images of American gay life found in TV shows like Modern family or The L-word. Those who fall outside the charmed circle of sex/gender norms, despite being subject to violence and poverty, build sustaining social lives – vibrant communities, with their own argot and symbolism – and create possibilities for pleasure, sexual and otherwise, which is part of survival and resistance (Bailey 2013; Gray 2009; Johnson 2011; Kennedy and Davis 1993; Manalansan 2003). Having long been excluded from full inclusion into kinship organised around conjugal heterosexuality, queer people established their own bonds of kinship, such as chosen families or houses (Bailey 2013; Lewin 2009; Weston 1997). They draw on, yet reformulate, heterosexual customs of family, weddings, marriage, child-rearing.

Studying a country shaped by the decimation of Indigenous peoples, chattel slavery of Africans, imperialism in Latin America, and racism towards non-white immigrants, Americanist Queer Anthropology has confronted these legacies for sexuality and gender. Their intersectional analysis sees sexuality as an axis of social differentiation that is interwoven with the residual structures of colonial and plantation societies (Morgensen 2011).

Is gay global?

Queer life is affected by social contexts that scale from the family to the transnational. In the 1990s, Dennis Altman argued that ‘gay’ was becoming a globalised identity, erupting in the Global South along paths of capitalist development (Altman 1996). He pointed to the way that gay bars, rainbow flags, and clothing styles could look so alike in cities like Rio, Bangkok, or Berlin as the manifestation of this global gay culture. Altman was not celebrating this development or arguing that there is a universal, essentialist gay identity. Altman proposed that this merging international gay culture resulted from global capitalism. His analysis raised important questions about how gay, queer, and trans life in the Global South or non-West, including post-socialist settings created after the breakup of the Soviet Union, relate to gay cultures of the Global North. Are gay, lesbian, queer, and transgender identities elsewhere part of the West’s expanse across the world? Is queer life in the non-West a derivative of Western forms, a borrowing from New York, San Francisco, or Sydney gay life?

Queer anthropology does not view transnational queer culture as a wholesale export of modern Western culture to the rest of the world. It also does not position the West as ‘ahead’ or more enlightened about LGBTQ rights than other regions: doing so would replicate the old evolutionary, civilizational claims used to rationalise colonialism. Instead, anthropologists of queer life tend to recast the nexus of West/global and non-West/local in three general ways. First, they show how local communities integrate transnational phenomena, often resulting in hybrid or syncretistic forms, such as the Filipino argot, Swardspeak. Second, they see where transnational dynamics are affecting queer life; for example, through geopolitics, communication technologies, or tourism. Third, queer anthropology identifies alternate geographic forms of queer life than the West-to-non-West flow.

Societies do not generally import sex/gender schema wholesale: local versions mix with the international circulation of gay, lesbian, and trans culture, in varying ways. Tom Boellstorff (2005) proposes that the Indonesian gay identity is one of the few truly national identities in a country shaped by insular cultural distinctions. When conservative voices in former colonies in the Global South decry homosexuality as foreign to their ‘tradition’, that tradition is often an outgrowth of imperialism.

Queer life anywhere is affected by intensifying flows of people, culture, and capital across national borders, or globalization. The concepts of gay, lesbian, and transgender are now global, transmitted through the communication technologies, NGOs, migration, and tourism. Gay male tourists have brought their concept of gay identity and its associated styles to sites considered appealing to gay men (Mitchell 2015; Padilla 2008; Stout 2014). In the twenty-first century, the Internet, social media, and digital applications (apps) are stages for sexual encounters as well as resources for information about marginalized identities. (Boellstorff 2010, 2014; McGlotten 2013). Information about hormones, surgery, and other modifications also travel (Ochoa 2014; Plemmons 2017; Zimman 2017). To a marked degree, transgender people are forming their self-understanding through digital communities formed on the Internet. These mediated dialogues have produced new, shared vocabulary for body zones, such as trans men’s replacement of the word vagina with ‘front hole’ or ‘boy cunt’ (Zimman 2017). Thais who formerly identified as kathoey and ladyboy (to foreigners) now also describe themselves as ‘transwomen’ in online communities like dating apps (Käng 2012).

Institutions of international civil society, notably NGOs, have also been a conduit for concepts around sexuality and gender (Gray 2009) as well as providing spaces for homosocial encounters (Wilson 2010). HIV/AIDS projects became sites for the gathering of men and trans women who have sex with men. These organizations dispersed authorised vocabularies about sexuality. At the time of Valentine’s research, those New Yorkers most connected with non-profit organizations were also most likely to name themselves as transgender (Valentine 2007). How does the term transgender relate to local concepts?

Many queers are influenced by flows within their region. In Asia, Korean cultural forms, like K-pop or bodily aesthetics (facial surgeries), are taken up by queer cultures elsewhere in the region (Käng 2014). Chinese language (Sinophone) queer materials flow between China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, and across the Chinese-speaking diaspora. In Hong Kong, people repurposed the word ‘comrade’, tongzhi, to describe queer solidarity or LGBTQ identities, a historically resonant usage that then spread to Mainland China. Queer community extends transnationally along migrant routes, for example, from the US to Latin America, or from the Philippines, which has one of the highest rates of emigration. Filipina/o queer men and trans women, while establishing connections to American gay worlds and navigating obligations to family and Filipino Catholicism, look to Manila to stay up to date on additions to Swardspeak (Manalansan 2003).

Geopolitical changes affect possibilities for queer community and LGBTQ rights. In the former Soviet Union, for example, rising authoritarian nationalism casts LGBTQ people as symbols of social decline (Renkin 2009; Shirinian 2018). In Latin America, queer communities under post-dictatorship governments find openings for more visibility and queer-friendly policies while also facing intensified stratification resulting from neoliberal economic policies (Amar 2013; Ochoa 2014; Stout 2014). Lesbians and gays in the hemisphere have also faced contradictory struggles for rights under socialist governments, such as in post-revolutionary Nicaragua (Babb 2003; Howe 2013), or under new capitalist developments in Cuba (Allen 2011; Stout 2013).

Conclusion

Anthropology transformed Western understandings of sexuality and gender from evaluations based on sin, racial evolution, or psychopathology to understandings that cultural values varied and that societies shaped the sex and gender expressions within them. Queer anthropology shows that societies makes sexual, gendered people and organizes their relationships, in varying ways. In turn, the plethora of gender expressions and sexual cultures that exist around the world reveals binary formulations like heterosexual and homosexual or male and female to be a culturally specific logic rather than universal reality. Being queer is a profoundly social position, inescapably embedded within a larger, often oppressive, culture, and also producing shared worlds inhabited by a society’s divergent subjects.

References

Allen, J.S. 2011 ¡Venceremos?: the erotics of black self-making in Cuba. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— 2013. Race/sex theory: ‘Toward a new and more possible meeting’. Cultural Anthropology 28(3), 552-5.

Altman, D. 1996. Rupture or continuity?: the internationalization of gay identities. Social Text 48, 77-94.

Amar, P. 2013. The security archipelago: human-security states, sexuality politics, and the end of neoliberalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Babb, F.E. 2003. Out in Nicaragua: local and transnational desires after the revolution. Cultural Anthropology 18(3), 304-28.

Bailey, M.M. 2013. Butch queens up in pumps: gender, performance, and ballroom culture in Detroit. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Blackwood, E. 2010. Falling into the lesbi world: desire and difference in Indonesia. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.

——— & M. Johnson 2012. Queer Asian subjects: transgressive sexualities and heteronormative meanings. Asian Studies Review 36(4), 441-51.

Boellstorff, T. 2005. The gay archipelago: sexuality and the nation in Indonesia. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2007. Queer studies in the house of anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 36, 17-35.

——— 2011. BUT DO NOT IDENTIFY AS GAY: a proleptic genealogy of the MSM category. Cultural Anthropology 26(2), 287-312.

——— & N.N. Dave 2015. Introduction: the production and reproduction of queer anthropology. Fieldsights: theorizing the contemporary.Cultural Anthropology Online (available on-line: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-the-production-and-reproduction-of-queer-anthropology).

Boyce, P. 2007. 'Conceiving kothis': men who have sex with men in India and the cultural subject of HIV prevention. Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 26(2), 175-203.

———, E.L. Engebretsen & S. Posocco 2018. Introduction: anthropology’s queer sensibilities.Sexualities 2(1), 843-52.

Carrier, J. 1995. De los otros: intimacy and homosexuality among Mexican men. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cohen, L. 1995. The pleasures of castration: the postoperative status of hijras, jankhas and academics. In Sexual nature, sexual culture (eds) P.R. Abramson & S.D. Pinkerton, 276-304. Chicago: University Press.

Dave, N.N. 2012. Queer activism in India: a story in the anthropology of ethics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012.

Dutta, A. & R. Roy 2014. Decolonizing transgender in India: some reflections. TSQ 1(3), 320-37.

Engebretsen, E.L. 2013. Queer women in urban China: an ethnography. Abingdon: Routledge.

Fajardo, K.B. 2011. Filipino crosscurrents: oceanographies of seafaring, masculinities, and globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fitzgerald, T.K. 1977. A critique of anthropological research on homosexuality. Journal of Homosexuality 2(4), 385-97.

Gaudio, R.P. 2011. Allah made us: sexual outlaws in an Islamic African city. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Graham, M. et al. 2016. Anthropologists are talking about queer anthropology." Ethnos 81(2), 364-77.

Gray, M.L. 2009. Out in the country: youth, media, and queer visibility in rural America. New York: University Press.

Hill, W.W. 1935. The status of the hermaphrodite and transvestite in Navaho culture. American Anthropologist 37(2), 273-79.

Howe, C. 2013. Intimate activism: the struggle for sexual rights in postrevolutionary Nicaragua. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Jagose, A. 1996. Queer theory: an introduction. New York: University Press.

Johnson, E.P. 2011. Sweet tea: black gay men of the South. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

Käng, D.B. 2012. Kathoey ‘in trend’: emergent genderscapes, national anxieties and the re-signification of male-bodied effeminacy in Thailand. Asian Studies Review 36(4), 475-94.

——— 2014. Idols of development: transnational transgender performance in Thai K-Pop cover dance. Transgender Studies Quarterly 1(4), 559-71.

Kennedy, E.L. & M.D. Davis 1993. Boots of leather, slippers of gold: the history of a lesbian community. Abingdon: Routledge,

Le Renard, A. 2014. A society of young women: opportunities of place, power, and reform in Saudi Arabia. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Leap, W. & T. Boellstorff (eds) 2004. Speaking in queer tongues: globalization and gay language. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Lewin, E. 2009. Gay fatherhood: narratives of family and citizenship in America. Chicago: University Press.

Lyons, A.P. & H. Lyons 2004. Irregular connections: a history of anthropology and sexuality. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Manalansan IV, M.F. 2003. Global divas: Filipino gay men in the diaspora. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

McGlotten, S. 2013. Virtual intimacies: media, affect, and queer sociality. Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press.

Mead, M. 1935. Sex and temperament in three primitive societies. New York: Morrow.

Mitchell, G. 2015. Tourist attractions: performing race and masculinity in Brazil's sexual economy. Chicago: University Press.

Morgensen, S.L. 2011. Spaces between us: queer settler colonialism and indigenous decolonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Morris, R.C. 1994. Three sexes and four sexualities: redressing the discourses on gender and sexuality in contemporary Thailand. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 2(1), 15-43.

——— 1995. All made up: performance theory and the new anthropology of sex and gender. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 567-92.

Newton, E. 1972. Mother camp: female impersonators in America. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2000. Margaret Mead made me gay. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Newton, N. 2016. Contingent invisibility: space, community, and invisibility for Les in Saigon. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22(1), 109-36.

Nguyen, V.-K. 2010. The republic of therapy: triage and sovereignty in West Africa’s time of AIDS. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Nigst, L. & J.S. García 2010. Boyāt in the Gulf: identity, contestation, and social control. Middle East Critique 19(1), 5-34.

Ochoa, M. 2014. Queen for a day: transformistas, beauty queens, and the performance of femininity in Venezuela. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Padilla, M. 2008. Caribbean pleasure industry: tourism, sexuality, and AIDS in the Dominican Republic. Chicago: University Press.

Plemons, E. 2017. The look of a woman: facial feminization surgery and the aims of trans-medicine. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Povinelli, E.A. 2006. The empire of love: toward a theory of intimacy, genealogy, and carnality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Ramberg, L. 2014. Given to the goddess: South Indian devadasis and the sexuality of religion. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Reddy, G. 2005. With respect to sex: negotiating hijra identity in South India. Chicago: University Press.

Reid, G. 2013. How to be a real gay: gay identities in small town South Africa. Scottsville, South Africa: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press.

Rofel, L. 2007. Desiring China: experiments in neoliberalism, sexuality, and public culture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rubin, G. 1984. Thinking sex: notes for a radical theory on the politics of sexuality. In Pleasure and danger: exploring female sexuality (ed.) C. Vance, 267-319. Boston: Routledge.

——— 2011. Deviations: a Gayle Rubin reader. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Sadjadi, S. 2019. Deep in the brain: identity and authenticity in pediatric gender transition. Cultural Anthropology 34(1), 103-29.

Shirinian, T. 2018. The nation‐family: intimate encounters and genealogical perversion in Armenia. American Ethnologist 45(1), 48-59.

Sinnott, M. 2004. Toms and dees: transgender identity and female same-sex relationships in Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

——— 2010. Borders, diaspora and regional connections: trends in Asian ‘queer’ studies. Journal of Asian Studies 69(1), 17-31.

Sonenschein, D. 1966. Homosexuality as a subject of anthropological inquiry. Anthropological Quarterly 39(2), 73-82.

Spiro, M.E. 1967. Burmese supernaturalism. An explanation on suffering reduction. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall.

Stoler, A.L. 1995. Race and the education of desire: Foucault's history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Stout, N.M. 2014. After love: queer intimacy and erotic economies in post-Soviet Cuba. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Tuzin, D. 1991. Sex, culture and the anthropologist. Social Science & Medicine 33(8), 867-74.

Valentine, D. 2007. Imagining transgender: an ethnography of a category. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Vance, C.S. 1991. Anthropology rediscovers sexuality: a theoretical comment. Social Science & Medicine 33(8), 875-84.

Warner, M. (ed.) 1993. Fear of a queer planet: queer politics and social theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Weiss, M. 2011a. The epistemology of ethnography: method in queer anthropology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 17(4), 649-64.

——— 2011b. Techniques of pleasure: BDSM and the circuits of sexuality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— 2016a. Discipline and desire: feminist politics, queer studies, and new queer anthropology. In Mapping feminist anthropology in the twenty-first century (eds.) E. Lewin & L.M. Silverstein, 168-87. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

——— 2016b. Always after: desiring queer studies, desiring anthropology. Cultural Anthropology 31(4), 627-38.

Wekker, G. 2006. The politics of passion: women's sexual culture in the Afro-Surinamese diaspora. New York: Columbia University Press.

Weston, K. 1993. Lesbian/gay studies in the house of anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 22(1), 339-67.

——— 1997. Families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship. New York: Columbia University Press.

——— 1998. Long slow burn: sexuality and social science. Routledge: New York.

Wieringa, S., E. Blackwood & A. Bhaiya (eds) 2007. Women's sexualities and masculinities in a globalizing Asia. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Wilson, A. 2004. The intimate economies of Bangkok: tomboys, tycoons, and Avon ladies in the global city. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2006. Queering Asia. Intersections 14(available on-line: http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue14/wilson.html).

——— 2010. NGOs as erotic sites. In Development, sexual rights and global governance (ed.) A.Lind, 104-16. London; New York: Routledge.

Zimman, L. 2017. Trans people's linguistic self-determination and the dialogic nature of identity. In Representing trans: linguistic, legal and everyday perspectives, (eds) E. Hazeberg & M. Meyerhoff, 226-248. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press.

Note on contributor

Ara Wilson is Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies Program and the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University, and is former chair of the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA). Wilson is the author of The intimate economies of Bangkok: tomboys, tycoons, and Avon ladies in the global city (2004, University of California Press) and has published interpretations of significant concepts for queer social analysis, such as infrastructure, intimacy, and gender. https://scholars.duke.edu/person/ara.wilson.

Ara Wilson, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies Program, Duke University, 117 East Duke Building, Durham, N.C. 27701, United States. ara.wilson@duke.edu.

[1] For more information on this term, see: Epple, C. 1998. Coming to terms with Navajo ‘nádleehí’: a critique of ‘berdache’, ‘Gay,’ ‘Alternate Gender,’ and ‘Two-Spirit’. American Ethnologist 25(2), 267-90.

[2] In his chapter on ‘Homosexual love’ in his 1926 book, The origin and development of the moral ideas, Westermarck works hard to prove that homophobic disgust is universal. His own evidence challenged the conclusion he desired.

[3] Strong women paired with weak men was a trope of mid-century, Cold War discourse. Powerful wives and mothers were deemed to cause less-manly husbands and homosexual men: in general, men not powerful enough to fight against communism.

[4] Malinowski intended functionalism to be an alternative theory of sexuality to psychoanalysis, which he criticized.

[5] American lesbian and gays were achieving fuller membership in society through markers of normativity: marriage, advertising images, military service. Such membership decentered a gay male culture that enabled sex with multiple partners, at times in public spaces.

[6] European Network for Queer Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.easaonline.org/networks/enqa/). Accessed 5 February 2018.

[7] Those considered outside a ‘charmed circle’ of sexuality (Rubin 1984) include sex between men and women (technically speaking, heterosexual), such as female sex workers or kink practices, like BDSM (Weiss 2011b).

[8] Review essays explaining the queer dimension of Queer Anthropology include Allen 2013; Boellstorff 2005; Boellstorff & Dave 2015; Boyce, Engebretsen & Possoco 2018; Graham et al.2016; Weiss 2016a, 2016b.

[9] Le Renard (2014) spells this as ‘buya’.

[10] In the US, where anthropological linguistics is its own subfield, gay, lesbian, transgender and queer language research sustains a regular conference called Lavender Languages, which beganin 1993. For more information, visit: https://lavenderlanguages.wordpress.com/information-about-lavender-languages-and-linguistics/

[11] Other US terms affiliated with transgender are ‘gender non-binary’ and ‘gender non-conforming’. A person’s earliest biographical information is conveyed by describing them as ‘assigned female/male at birth’, or ‘AFAB’, ‘AMAB’ for short. The term ‘cis’, an antonym to trans in chemistry, is used to refer to those who live out the gender connected with their assigned sex, e.g., men who identify as male.

[12] Transgender nomenclature is in flux. The shortened version ‘trans*’, which adopted the asterisk from the late 20th -century database search code to produce inclusive results, is less commonly used. Some replace the asterisk with a hyphen, as in, ‘Trans-’. Many now just use ‘Trans’. Phrases preferred by advocates have evolved so rapidly that words used commonly a decade ago (or less) – like ‘transgendered’, ‘transgenderism’, ‘male-bodied’, ‘born-female’ – are now subject to critique.⁠This makes older works, including path-breaking studies in Queer Anthropology (e.g., Newton 1973), feel outdated, and, therefore, politically problematic.

[13] Queer scholarship on hijra includes Boyce 2007; Cohen 1995; Reddy 2005; Dutta & Roy 2014.

[14] The prevalent model of LGBT rights relies on the ocular trope of coming out and promoting visibility. In addition to the anthropologies of the US South, other anthropologists have argued that this mode of politics is not feasible or salient for some queer communities, such as immigrants (particularly undocumented) and poor queers of color.

Islam

Felix Stein — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 19:57:06 +0000

Samuli Schielke

Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient

Initially published 30 Oct 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18islam

Abstract:

Islam is not an anthropological concept in the way, for example, culture, or even religion, are. People have thought about and discussed Islam long before anthropologists started thinking about it, and those discussions therefore inform anthropological ones. Fieldwork encounters have been important for a textured understanding in context of what it means for specific people in concrete situations to have a relationship with the God of the Qur'an and His revelation to Muhammad. Such contextual nuance is especially important vis-à-vis the highly politicised context of the demand for social scientific knowledge ‘about Islam’.

Basics

The Arabic word islām describes human recognition, submission, and worship towards the One God of the Qur'an. It has connotations of completeness, health, peace, surrender, and handing over. In its archaic meaning, which prevails in the Qur'an and also remains relevant today, Islam is first and foremost an act humans commit towards God.

Over the following millennium and a half, the word Islam has gained a wider range of meanings, including: the creed and practice established by the divine revelation to Muhammad and the tradition (sunna) of Muhammad and his companions; the historical era that began with Muhammad's revelation; the lives and acts of those who associate themselves with Muhammad's revelation, and their traditions of interpreting and living by the revelation; knowledge, cultural production, and social life related to the revelation in one way or another; and the identity of people and peoples associated individually or collectively with that revelation.

Evocations of ‘Islam’ are often normative: they are somebody's claims about what that creed, practice, history, tradition, knowledge, cultural and social life, and identity really should be, as opposed to the mistaken understandings or misguided practices by others. Followers of different branches of Islam – such as the majority Sunni tradition and the minority Shia tradition, both of which encompass numerous more or less distinct traditions and movements within them – have many different views and practices. And yet Muslims generally recognise each other as such even in disagreement. Muslims don't generally brand other Muslims as part or not part of the same faith on account of their practice or non-practice of Islamic doctrines and norms; and debate and disagreement about how to follow these doctrines and norms correctly are a constant part of the history of Islam. Some Muslims, among them many contemporary Sunni Jihadists, claim that some people following other interpretations of Islam are infidels. Such exclusionist views have gained currency recently but remain a minority position. What is widely considered a bare minimum of shared faith is remarkably basic: that there is only one God, and that Muhammad is His messenger.

There are widely shared basics of faith and practice that one is likely to encounter in almost any Muslim community. The Qur'an is the central text of Islam, and is generally understood to be the direct speech of God to humans. Muhammad is understood to be the ultimate prophet in a series of revelations involving (among others) Adam, Moses/Musa, David/Dawud, and Jesus/'Isa. Groups of Muslims like the Ahmadiyya, who believe to have received a later, additional prophecy, are often rejected – even not considered Muslims at all – by followers of mainstream traditions. Prophesy is a cornerstone of Islamic faith, with various dimensions. In the mystic tradition (Sufism), the Prophet Muhammad is elevated to an almost super-human medium of divine love and help, whereas in the tradition of normative reasoning, he is the perfect example of proper human conduct. Along with the Qur'an, his acts and sayings (hadiths) provide a main source of shari'a, the teaching of normative action.

The Shari'a is often translated as Islamic law, which is misleading. It includes norms that are legal in a contemporary sense (such as marriage, inheritance, contractual procedures, some crimes and punishments), along with norms concerning polite greetings and interaction, and the proper form of worship and ritual. The tables of contents of classical works of fiqh, or Islamic jurisprudence, such as the Muwatta' of Malik ibn Anas (711-795) give a good sense of these many dimensions. There is no code of ‘Islamic law’, but various traditions (madhhabs) of fiqh that provide ways to find judgment or advise.

For example, the so-called ‘five pillars’ of Islam are all matters of Shari'a: the declaration of faith in God and Muhammad as His prophet; fasting from food, drink, and sex during the daytime in the month of Ramadan (Möller 2005); pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime (Mols & Buitelaar 2015); ritual prayer; and almsgiving.^[1] While marriage and divorce, contractual procedures, crime and punishment, polite greetings, and decent clothing are acts between humans (mu'amalat), the ‘five pillars’ are acts of worship ('ibadat) directed to God.

When followers of contemporary Islamist movements demand ‘the application of the Shari'a’; when modern states codify Shari'a norms on marriage and divorce, prohibitions and punishments; and when these codes are considered at courts: then Shari'a can become Islamic law (Dupret 2006). But a great number of Muslims who may or may not agree with Shari'a-based state law also do live by the Shari'a, in the sense that they practice worship and consider right and wrong in their actions based on Islamic traditions of normative reasoning. Yet others may express a strong Islamic faith but give less concern to living by Shari'a.

Human worship of the God of the Qur'an raises questions about truth and falsehood, right and wrong, and salvation and punishment after Resurrection Day. Anthropologists, however, have usually not seen it as their task to tell what or how Islam should really be. Instead, they have in various ways recorded and tried to understand how humans around the world live in relation to Muhammad's revelation.

Is there an anthropology of Islam?

There is a long-standing debate among anthropologists about how to define Islam as an object of study. I cannot give a full account of that debate here (for overviews, see Bowen 2012; Kreinath 2012). Instead, I will highlight three proposals that are helpful to understand what anthropologists may mean when they claim to study Islam.

Responding to an emerging conversation about how to understand the simultaneous unity and plurality of Islamic faith and practice, Abdul Hamid El-Zein (1977) argued that, anthropologically speaking, Islam could only be understood in context and not be taken for an analytical category. Telling what Islam truly is is the job of theologians, not of anthropologists. El-Zein did not argue to study locally specific ‘Islams’; he was skeptical of such qualifiers as ‘local’ or ‘Moroccan Islam’. Instead, El-Zein proposed to take specific articulations of Islam seriously in their own right, without assuming or establishing a hierarchy between them. El-Zein's proposal is helpful to understand how people may live Islam in ways that do not foreground debates about orthodoxy (Marsden & Retsikas 2013). But how can one account anthropologically for those debates? After all, they are an important part of becoming and being a Muslim.

In an influential essay, Talal Asad proposed to study Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’ that ‘consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regarding correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history’ (1986: 14). Previously, anthropologists had tried to explain Islam's plurality as a socially embedded practice vis-à-vis its unity as a revelation. For Asad, in contrast, plurality is a hallmark of the Islamic tradition, and therefore requires no explanation. Instead, an anthropology of Islam should have as its topic the ongoing attempts by Muslims to maintain coherence and establish correct practice.

Tradition, in Asad's sense, means being grounded in an authoritative past that provides one with values, practices, and concerns to cultivate in the now and towards the future. The historical formation and scope of the Islamic tradition are not in focus. Asad does not suggest that anthropologists should tell what is correct practice and what not. Rather, he suggests studying how Muslims debate about and establish orthodoxy – that is, the power to successfully claim one's interpretation of the tradition as the correct one. Those who are able to claim orthodoxy and those who appear heretic according to them are all part of the conversation. However, some of Asad's readers have distinguished between ‘Islam as a long-standing tradition and [the term's] various contemporary uses’ (Hirschkind 1996: 475), thereby excluding heretic views^[2] from the discursive tradition.

Asad's proposal has been very productive, because it directs attention to a key concern of contemporary movements of Islamic revival and reform: how does one follow correctly the commandments of God and the example of the Prophet?^[3] However, people also engage with God's message to Muhammad in ways that are not about living by the Shari'a or about establishing coherence. Is it possible to understand them together, without excluding one or the other?

In light of the many overlapping dimensions of Islam, Shahab Ahmed's (2016) book, What is Islam? proposes a theory that tries to understand them all at once:

A meaningful conceptualization of 'Islam' as theoretical object and analytical category must come to terms with – indeed, be coherent with – the capaciousness, complexity, and often, outright contradiction that obtains within the historical phenomenon that has proceeded from the human engagement with the idea and reality of Divine Communication to Muhammad, the Messenger of God (6, emphases in original).

Ahmed, a scholar of Islamic studies, proposes understanding Islam as the historical totality of different hermeneutical engagements – that is, ways to make sense of, understand, and perhaps also to misunderstand – with the ‘text’ of God's revelation to Muhammad, the ‘pre-text’ of an overarching understanding of a God-centric world in which a revelation is understood, and the ‘con-text’ of all other hermeneutical engagements with the text and pre-text of the revelation (Ahmed 2016: 346; 356; 405). According to Ahmed, learning to live by the Shari'a is Islamic, and so are seemingly counter-intuitive aspects such as classical Persian poems about wine and seductive boys.^[4] Thinking with Ahmed, when Islamophobic European or Hindu nationalists circulate fearful stereotypes of Islam, and when Muslims and others try to counter those stereotypes, this is also Islamic.

The choice for the best theoretical approach does not need to be decided on the level of abstract conceptual debate. Personally, I rather agree with Abdellah Hammoudi's (2009) suggestion that fieldwork should not be a surrogate for theory, but instead an open-ended and often surprising encounter through which anthropologists may learn how God's revelation to Muhammad matters for some human beings in specific situations.

Where is Islam?

Where might such encounters take place? Muslims often understand themselves as being part of a global community (umma) – a very large and diverse one, currently counting some 1.8 billion people; that is, close to a quarter of the world's human population. And yet Muslim faith is usually inseparable from the social worlds in which people grow up and live, and goes hand in hand with ethnic, cultural, doctrinal, and ideological traditions and divisions. Some people are very committed to practicing their faith, others less so. Local and political contexts make for different articulations and experiences of Muslim faith and lives. It is a different experience to be Muslim in, say, Pakistan than in Belgium - in the first, one is part of the dominant category that defines a multi-ethnic nation (Khan 2012); in the second, one faces the stigma of an exceptionalised ‘Other’ (Fadil 2009). A similar gender ideology of female modesty and shyness (haya', see Mahmood 2005; Sehlikoğlu 2018) is taught in mosques and reading groups in the Middle East and Indonesia alike, but in much of the Middle East it is linked with an ecumenical ethos of male honour through control over female kin (Joseph 1999: 135-39), while in many parts of Indonesia it is not (Srimulyani 2010).

To what degree does it make sense to speak about the lifeworlds, lives, and strivings of different people around the world as Islamic? Certainly it makes sense when they explicitly engage in acts of worship, or try to craft their lives according to what they see as Islamic teachings. But Islamic faith and norms can also inform the ways in which more or less pious people eat their lunch (Tayob 2017) or interpret their dreams (Mittermaier 2011). Where should one draw the line? Should one draw a line?

Anthropologies of Islam in a narrow sense have focused on practices of worship, religious discourses and movements, and ways of becoming a God-fearing person. Dedicated religious groups and institutions therefore offer accessible starting points for fieldwork, especially in urban contexts where a ‘community’ for anthropologists to study is not easily found. In such contexts, God-oriented strivings and activities are also most pronounced.

Good ethnographies of Islamic practice in the narrow sense always also tell about the wider societal and political context. Marloes Janson (2013) conducted fieldwork in the Gambia among followers of Tablighi Jamaat, a global proselytising movement originally based in South Asia. Members of the movement travel near and far to call other Muslims to follow the proper teachings of their faith, which they understand in a conservative and purity-oriented way, but with a conscious avoidance of politics. In the Gambia, members of the movement can enter conflicts with their families when they reject communal traditions of life-cycle celebrations and ostentatious gift-giving. In turn, they may be seen as behaving in weird and improper ways, for example, when Tablighi men share in household duties that are considered women’s business in order to give their wives time to spread the call. Studies of religious movements often provide good accounts of urban living, be it in the milieu of Hizbollah's^[5] supporters who search for spiritual and material progress at once in the southern suburbs of Beirut (Deeb 2006), or members of a Muslim youth organization for whom their religious commitment is linked with striving for successful living in Berlin (Bendixsen 2013).

However, one can also encounter Islam in a rural community where faith and ritual practice are inseparable from communal life (Marsden 2005; Kloos 2017), or in a restaurant where people come to eat halal food^[6](Tayob 2017). In such places, anthropologists are also more likely to meet some of those people who do not frequent organised religious groups. The list could be continued endlessly, for in a wider sense, most good ethnographies among people of Muslim faith also tell something about Islam, but it is often impossible to isolate Islam as a separate topic.

Thus, in many parts of the world, the God of the Qur'an is a third party in most transactions and polite speech that is often indistinguishable from prayers. The polite answer to ‘how are you?’ in Arabic is ‘praise to God’, meaning that God is to be praised for good and bad times alike. Running a small business in Egypt means that one must equally consider supply and demand, Chinese imports and currency exchange rates, Islamic understandings of legitimate income and mutual trust, and political and family networks of patronage (Ismail 2013). Maintaining peace among neighbours in Pakistan involves mutual care, cultivation of emotions, female modesty, and male provider roles – all of which are also Islamic values, and may be at the same time articulated by neighbours as markers of their social class or ethnic group (Ring 2006). Nightlife in a small town in northern Ivory Coast is structured by the way Islamic norms of public interaction dominate the daytime, confining drinking to the discretion of night (Chappatte 2017).

The twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are marked by a global demographic shift from villages to cities. Among many Muslims, this move has been accompanied by a shift of theological dominance: since the late-twentieth century, localised traditions, Sufi movements, and also secular lifestyles of old urban populations have become contested, influenced, and sometimes replaced by a worldwide ‘Islamic revival’, i.e. the proliferation of strivings to make lives and societies more in line with a ritually purified and morally disciplined understanding of Islamic scripture. Rural-urban migrants and urban middle classes have been at the forefront of revivalist movements, and consequently are also at the focus of most contemporary anthropologies of Islam.

Everyday ethics and exceptional politics

At the height of the Islamic revival in Egypt in the 1990s, an increasing number of women attended study circles at mosques. They were something of a puzzle for Egyptian and foreign researchers of feminist inclination. Were they unable to resist the pressure of a patriarchal religious movement? Or were they perhaps subverting that rule from inside by reinterpreting Islamic teachings? Saba Mahmood (2005) conducted fieldwork with women in lecture circles in Cairo, and found neither to be true. She encountered women who wanted to be better at submitting to the will of God. This was not easy and required active learning. These women clearly had agency. But they did not resist the divine or male authorities they faced.

Mahmood argues that Cairene women's ‘pedagogies of piety’ needed to be understood in the framework of a discursive tradition (see above) that provided models and techniques towards becoming a ‘docile subject’. Such ethical self-making – that is, a reflective work on oneself to become a certain kind of person – is a key concern of Islamist political movements that aim to change society and state, as well as pietist movements that encourage more and better worship.

Part of a wider anthropological turn towards ethics in ordinary life (e.g. Lambek 2010), Mahmood's intervention has inspired a wave of studies foregrounding Muslim women's pious, ethical strivings (e.g. Huq 2009; Masquelier 2009; Hafez 2011; Jouili 2015; Liberatore 2016), and has established piety and ethics as key concepts through which anthropologists try to understand Muslim lives.

Within that same turn, some anthropologists have highlighted the cultivation of a complex set of skills. Magnus Marsden (2005) describes how young Sunni and Ismaili men in Chitral, northwestern Pakistan, learn to skillfully balance and shift between different forms of cultivation, including religious debates, the pleasures of music and poetry, and careful considerations about when to act in what way, which feelings to show and which to conceal and when. In my own research in Egypt (Schielke 2015), I have argued that strivings for perfection and purity are inherently fragile. The intense ethical work described by Mahmood may be of short duration, and ethical strivings may more likely take the shape of temporal ‘islands of certainty’ that allow one to be committed to God in one moment, and follow other moral aims (and also amoral ones) at other moments.

In reply, Nadia Fadil and Mayanthi Fernando (2015) have critiqued approaches that, according to them, mistakenly treat religion and everyday life as separate entities, and normalise a liberal-secular ideal of resistance to religious norms, while possibly pathologising followers of Salafi and other revivalist movements. In a direct reply to that debate, Lara Deeb (2015) has suggested to ‘think together’ the power of normative discourses to structure everyday life on the one hand, and the open-ended productivity of everyday life that complicates normative discourses and shapes life trajectories, on the other. A good example of how they can be thought together is a book by Daan Beekers and David Kloos (2018) that shows how experiences of moral failure can also motivate and enforce pious strivings.^[7]

There is a deeper, political layer to this debate that is not easily resolved, however. Fadil's and Fernando's critique is explicitly directed at the ongoing scandalization and problematization of Muslims in Europe, and the associated political search to tell ‘good Muslims’ from ‘bad’ ones. A European nationalist discourse demands Muslims to ‘act normal’ (in the words of the Dutch Prime Minister Rutte). In places like Pakistan and Egypt, in contrast, the same revivalist movements that are scandalised in Europe have successfully established themselves as mainstream, normal models for Islamic religiosity. They have partly marginalised ways of life, theologies, and practices that until recently had been normal, even dominant. In some countries – notably Saudi Arabia – they provide the religious ideology of the ruling elite. Just like Egypt and Pakistan can't provide a model of what it's like to be a Muslim in Europe, so also France and Belgium may not help to understand Muslim living in the Middle East and South Asia.

The way Islam is exceptionalised in European and Northern American contexts requires special attention, because it is the political backdrop of the current interest in knowledge ‘about Islam’. The global ‘war on terror’ has generated a strategic interest for security-relevant knowledge (Deeb & Winegar 2016). Social conflicts related to migration in Western Europe have become addressed increasingly in terms of religion instead of ethnicity or nationality (Spielhaus 2013). Fear and hatred towards Muslims – known as Islamophobia – has proliferated (Bangstad 2014). In such a highly politicised atmosphere, it is the task of anthropologists and other social scientists to also ask critical questions about the political desire to know and ‘domesticate’ Muslims and Islam (Sunier 2014; Amir-Moazami 2018).

For example, anti-radicalization programmes and radicalization studies have recently proliferated to counter the ‘radicalization’ of young Muslims (that of European nationalists appears to cause somewhat less concern). But what is radicalization? It remains unclear. Based on ethnographic research in Belgium and the Netherlands, Nadia Fadil, Martijn de Koning, and Francesco Ragazzi (2018) argue that the concept of radicalization has no content and explains nothing – but it compels political institutions and social actors to do something about it. And by doing something about it, they generate societal realities. Sometimes this can be helpful for the families of youths who have joined Jihadist militia, but often it does not contribute towards an understanding of and solution for violent conflicts. In the worst case, it can structure and justify a generalised suspicion of Muslims without offering productive solutions. Some anti-radicalization programmes deal with ‘radicalization’ as if it were a sort of virus – which renders invisible the political, societal, and personal conflicts that make it reasonable from some people's point of view to enter the path of violent struggle to promote their political, religious, or other causes.

Frightening as such militant movements are, one can understand them better by asking open-ended questions. Anthropologists working with people who may sympathise with or join militant movements have found out that militancy is but one possible path among others in the difficult struggle for radical moral purity (de Koning 2018), and that while some people recently moved to Syria to join the Jihadist war, others may have gone there to lead a God-fearing married life (Navest et al. 2016). European nationalist media and politicians have sometimes mistaken such research for endorsement of terrorists, and some researchers have faced media outrage and political pressure as a result of their work (Moors forthcoming).

Humans and God

In addition to His disciplining role as the Commander about right and wrong, the God of the Qur'an is also the Creator, Protector, Provider, Healer, and the one who decides about life and death. Everyday use of invocations as greetings is a way to call upon God to be a third party in relations of trust, a helper in need, a healer of the sick, and an ally against enemies – not only enemies of Islam, but also one's intimate enemies among neighbours and family. Migrants and refugees who leave their homelands search for their God-given share of worldly income (rizq) (Gaibazzi 2015). They and others take risks or endure, trusting in their God who has written everyone a destiny which they do not know, but will actively fulfill (Hamdy 2009; Elliot 2016; Menin & Elliot 2018). These and other dimensions of faith include ethical, normative aspects but cannot be reduced to them.

This capaciousness is evident also in core Islamic acts of worship. Ritual prayer (salat) consists of a sequence of prostrations towards God that one should undertake in a state of ritual purity five times a day, either alone or in congregation with others. It can be an individualised communication with God (Haeri 2013), part of an ethical project of pious becoming (Mahmood 2005), or a way to address – but not necessarily to solve – the moral tensions of life (Simon 2009). Prayer can also be a powerful gathering of a community under God, a ‘fixed point of Islamic tradition’ (Henkel 2005) that can mobilise political projects but also transcends them. Also, for those who don't pray or don't do so regularly, the expectation that one should pray (if not now, then at a later stage in life) can structure their life trajectories (Debevec 2018; Kloos 2017).

Based on an obligation to give a part of one's income (ca. 2 per cent annually) as alms (zakat) to the poor and needy, Islamic charity stands in an interesting contrast to humanitarianism. Although alms are given to other humans, they are an act of worship ('ibada) towards God. Giving alms does not require (but can involve) compassion or attempts to overcome social inequality. As an ethical practice, Islamic charity is thus not only about acting towards others and being a certain kind of person: it has its main focus on God and one's own reward in life after death (Schaeublin 2016; Mittermaier 2014; 2019).

Prayer and alms are material, visible practices, although alms are usually given discreetly. However, the invisible realm (ghayb) also is an important part of Islamic faith and lives. God is omnipresent yet invisible, which is further underlined by the taboo on images of God. Instead, the Arabic word for God, Allah, is very present as calligraphy (see Starrett 1995). The reality of angels and spirits (jinn) is considered an orthodox doctrine across Islamic traditions, but there is no agreement about whether and how humans can be in contact with them (Drieskens 2008; Doostdar 2018).

Dreams are the most important way of contact with the invisible. The appearance of the Prophet Muhammad in a dream vision is understood as a true message from elsewhere, and not just an expression of the human subconscious. In her work on dream interpretation in Cairo, Amira Mittermaier (2011) argues that such dream visions point beyond both the liberal fiction of the autonomous subject as well as the religious ideal of the disciplined pious subject, and instead highlight the dialogical dimension of ethics as an encounter – often a puzzling one that can also unsettle anthropologists' professional certainties (Ewing 1994; Willerslew & Suhr 2018).

Followers of Sufism often understand the Shari'a as the visible (zahir) surface of Islam, accompanied by a hidden (batin) truth (haqiqa) that followers of the mystical path strive to access. In Sufi ‘paths’ (tariqa, often translated as ‘orders’ or ‘brotherhoods’) the ‘friends of God’ or saints take an intermediary position between humans and God (Werbner & Basu 1998; Mayeur-Jaouen 2005; Soares 2005). Among Sunni Muslims, this has resulted in a disagreement between those who see the friends of God as a legitimate part of Islamic devotion, and those who consider their veneration a heresy that borders on polytheism (shirk). Sufi pilgrimages generate a space and time of celebration markedly different from everyday life, which can be seen as backward and un-Islamic by those who equate modernity and Islamic faith with order and discipline (Schielke 2012). And yet, the idea of learning to ‘taste’ (a Sufi metaphor for knowledge that is not mediated by language) the invisible layers of Islam remains compelling and productive also in an age of reformist revivals (Abenante & Vicini 2017). Rather than being a binary alternative to a Shari'a-based life, Sufism and other metaphysical pursuits offer themselves as an additional dimension, an invitation to explore invisible realms (Doostdar 2018).

The search for the invisible is an embodied practice, just like learning to live by the Shari'a is. For example, embodied vocal performance is central to dhikr (remembrance of God), a Sufi meditation based on rhythmic movement, speaking out names of God, and devotional poetry (Abenante 2013). This has made Sufism a rich ground of devotional music (Frishkopf 2001). Music is a crucial part of Muslim popular cultures and devotional practices around the world, but is also considered illicit by many (van Nieuwkerk et al. 2016). While music remains controversial, voice is central to core practices of worship. Recitation of the Qur'an is an indispensable part of ritual prayer, and a highly valued religious art that can take elaborate melodic forms (Frischkopf 2009). Preaching and the call to prayer rely on the aesthetics of the voice as much as they do on the message (Hirschkind 2006; Tamimi Arab 2017).

The body is also the site of another very important relation that humans have with God: sickness and healing. Be it with traditional techniques of healing and divination (Sündermann 2006; Graw 2006) or among professionals and patients in contemporary biomedical and psychiatric therapies, sickness raises pragmatic questions about what works, and ethical questions about good living. It can be a compelling reminder of God's power over human destinies. Unlike in political conflicts, where Islamic and secular visions of life can be pitted against each other, the search for healing tends to be integrative. In Egypt today, it can relate to molecular and microbiological factors, Islamic ontologies of body, self and spirit, the will of God, witchcraft and envy, politics, and ethical conduct alike. These aspects typically come in combination, and one of them seldom excludes the others (Hamdy 2012; Tabishat 2014).

Sickness and healing thereby remind us that Islam is not so much a separate object or practice that can be understood on its own, but is rather an inseparable part or dimension of many different ways to be in the world, importantly including ways to expect life after death. As a part or dimension of life, Islam constantly intertwines with other parts and dimensions, shapes them and is shaped by them – sometimes in inspiration, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes in modes that are not easy to name but are simply good to live with.

Women and men

In her book Veiled sentiments, Lila Abu-Lughod (1986) tells about Bedouins from the Awlad Ali tribe in Egypt's sparsely populated Mediterranean coast. The Egyptian government was busy turning them from nomads to permanent settlers, in part so as to control them better. But they remained staunchly and proudly people of their own kind. Bedouin men, they asserted, were real men who had a sense of honour unlike the people of the Nile valley whom they considered effeminate. Honour provided a gendered language that described how men would not show their emotions, and would protect and control their womenfolk. But it was not the only language in circulation. The women with whom Abu-Lughod spent much time took pride in their husbands' honour – which was always dependent on the acts of their female kin. Yet, they also composed and sang poetry that told about passion, suffering, and other emotions that might not be quite as honourable. Abu-Lughod argues that honour and poetry both provide partially true accounts that depend on each other, yet cannot be reduced to one another.

Neither honour nor poetry are Islamic in a narrow sense. They weave together Islamic values, Bedouin custom, and wider Middle Eastern and Mediterranean traditions, as well as conditions of livelihood in such a way that it is difficult (and perhaps also not helpful) to tell them apart. Abu-Lughod's book paved the way for an understanding of gender relations that is not reduced to a binary of oppression and liberation, and that brings together intimate relations and social hierarchies in equal measure (for an overview, see Sehlikoğlu 2018).

Today, relations between men and women are among the most important concerns advanced by movements of Islamic revival. The same is true of those who are critical or fearful of the Islamic faith and norms, and also those who hope to rethink Islamic teachings along emancipatory lines (such as Islamic feminists, see Mir-Hosseini 2006). The position, behaviour, and appearance of women in particular raises emotions on different sides.^[8]

In Saba Mahmood's aforementioned work, women's striving to be God-fearing unsettled the liberal assumption that ‘everybody wants to be free’. In European debates on Islam, Muslim women who willingly follow a conservative moral discipline cause puzzlement, because they fit neither the role of the helpless victim, nor that of the freedom-striving emancipated woman (Fadil 2018). Conversely, the Islamic revival has encouraged women to act as responsible moral agents in their own right, rather than as extensions of their families (Karlsson Minganti 2007). This is a form of authority and assertive action that, in turn, does not fit either to the role of the committed and obedient Muslim daughter or wife, nor to that of the sinful improper woman.

In her more recent work, Lila Abu-Lughod (2013) has argued that the Western desire to ‘save’ Muslim women is more likely to serve imperial political aims than to actually help oppressed women. I taught her book in Egypt to an audience of young, highly educated people, more than half of them female. Some of them very much agreed with her argument. Others disagreed, and argued that her proposal did not help them in their feminist struggle either. One participant took no sides, and instead told that Abu-Lughod inspired her to reflect about how being a Muslim structures her way of being a woman.

Such questions go beyond issues having to do with agency and resistance. Some examples: when women's covering dress (hijab, literally ‘veil’, usually taken to mean a covering of the body except of the face, hands, and feet) was reintroduced in urban milieus in the late-twentieth century, it was initially a form of anti-fashion, promoting female modesty and invisibility. With its popularization, however, the hijab has become a form of Islamic fashion, which includes the commerce, desire, and vanity that characterise the industry (Jones 2010; Tarlo & Moors 2013). A religious life can also mean that one seeks to have pleasure and desire in a halal way. Turkish women's recent interest in sports is a way to pursue personal wellbeing without openly challenging female roles (Sehlikoğlu 2015). Thriving Islamic cafeterias and restaurants in southern Beirut invite conservative Shia Muslim families and youth to participate in leisure activities (Deeb & Harb 2013). Different ways of talking about sex and desire exist in Egypt, but new sexuality counselling services (some of them provided by Islam-inspired groups) tell that there is a need to ‘break the silence’, which actually means learning to speak about desire in a therapeutic framework (Kreil 2016). Young men and women in Morocco, who seek to marry a partner they love, imagine a better world ruled by affection and care. But they are also acutely aware that God's predestination may set another path for them, and that love stories are often unhappy ones (Menin 2015).

Reform and critique

Recently, some secularists, critical of values promoted by conservative and revivalist Islamic currents, have called for a ‘reformation’ of Islam. This demand is problematic for two reasons. First, another historical movement of reformation, the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth century, initially resulted in a century of devastating wars – something hardly worth imitating. Second, most Islamic currents against whom secularist critics address their demand are in fact the outcome of a successful Islamic reform that began in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For modern Muslims, as among Christians since the sixteenth century, reform more often than not means a purer, stricter, more encompassing practice of faith. Powerful reformist theologies today include the Sunni Deobandi school of theology in South Asia, and various Sunni currents such as Salafis and Wahhabis (not all followers of these latter movements accept these labels) that strive to live as exactly as possible by what they understand to be the example of the Prophet and his companions (Meijer 2009). Reformist theologies have inspired political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab world and Jamaat-i Islami in South Asia, and also militant groups like the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, and the so-called Islamic State. Reformist theologies are not inherently militant, however, just as conservative and mystical theologies are not inherently peaceful. More often than not, though, they offer compelling ways to live an ‘enchanted modern’ life (Deeb 2006).

School education and upward social mobility have proven to be powerful allies of the Islamic revival (Eickelman 1992; Starrett 1998). Islamic schools that combine traditions of religious learning with contemporary national curricula promise a spiritual moral education and knowledge towards social advancement (Hefner & Qasim Zaman 2007). Religious movements of various colourings have proven very media-savvy – some by appropriating commercial formats, others by creating parallel ‘counterpublics’ (Meyer & Moors 2006; Hirschkind 2006; Moll 2018). Southeast Asia is a forerunner region in the Islamization of neoliberal capitalism – and neoliberalization of Islam (Hefner 2012). Fashionable styles of conservative religiosity fuse with global consumer cultures to promote a godly life in style (Jones 2010; Hew 2018). A thriving sector of interest-free Islamic finance offers halal profits (Rudnyckyj 2018). Training programs for company employees promote both capitalist profit-maximising as well as a pious care for salvation (Rudnickyj 2009). In the Arab Gulf states, migrant workers often find appeal in the combination of cosmopolitan mobility, flashy consumerism, the prospect of ascent in social class, and revivalist theologies of ethical self-discipline that are opposed to localised communal traditions (Osella & Osella 2007; Stephan-Emmrich & Mirzoev 2016).

Secularism in Muslim lands has usually not meant a decline of religion, but more often its subordination to political imperatives (Asad 2003). Egypt, for example, is not secular in the sense that religion would be rendered private, but it can be seen as secular in the sense that the nation state is the primary instance of power (Agrama 2012; Mahmood 2016). In Western Europe, by contrast, where Islam is a minority faith, secularism vis-à-vis Islam has often entailed the attempt to ‘domesticate’ Muslims and Islam towards an imagined European norm (Bowen 2007; Fernando 2014; Sunier 2014).

Islam and government are interlinked in many ways, only some of them secular. Many states, amongst which we also find some western ones, enforce and standardise what they and their constituencies understand to be correct Islamic practice (Müller 2017; Dahlgren 2013). State institutions take over key religious responsibilities such as determining the beginning and end of Ramadan based on the sighting of the new moon (Long 2017). Reflecting the neoliberal shift of power from governments to international standards, halal food has become subject to bureaucratised international certification procedures (Tayob 2017).

A key insight of Asad's discursive tradition concept (see above) is that debate and disagreement are the Islamic tradition. Islam as a lived practice involves ongoing reflection, discussion, and critique (Kresse 2007; Khan 2012; Aishima 2016; Ahmad 2017). Given the tremendous amount of sophisticated cultural production and knowledge by Muslim intellectuals for over a millennium, this should not come as a surprise. Critical thinking and debate are not inherently secular - but they are also not necessarily emancipatory. Whether religious or secular, grounded in Islamic or other faiths, they hinge upon structures of power and ethical premises. They open avenues to question some things, and pose others as unquestionable.

Sometimes, religion can be explicitly marked as outside of debate. Matthew Carey (2012) describes how Amazigh (Berber) villagers in a mountaneous region of Morocco entertain pluralistic and often heated debates about local issues – and carefully avoid linking them with their faith. For them, Islam is a site of absolute truth. Evoking it could put an end to pluralistic disagreement.

Furthermore, not all debates are as consequential as others. When men in eastern Africa gather to chew qat (a mild stimulant) in the afternoons, they often become involved in debates that have the intrinsic pleasure of debating itself as their main purpose (Desplat 2016).

Islam as a critical engagement has inspired many anthropologists to think against the grain of secular, religious, and other assumptions. Anthropological theories about Islam have always carried acknowledged or unacknowledged theological and political sympathies and antipathies, and anthropological debates may echo theological ones (Moll 2018). But there is more space for dialogue today than there was in the past. Even if unsolved problems remain, it has also become easier to combine Muslim faith and mainstream academic research. While it indeed is not the anthropologists' job to give a normative account of Islam, they may nevertheless have some constructive critiques to offer.

Acknowledgements

I'm indebted to Hatsuki Aishima, Sindre Bangstad, Martin van Bruinessen, Nadia Fadil, Aymon Kreil, Annelies Moors, Dominik Müller, Ali Nobil, Jonas Otterbeck, Sertaç Sehlikoğlu, Felix Stein, Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Fabio Vicini, and the anonymous reviewers of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology for their suggestions, help, and feedback.

References

Publications that may be found especially helpful for introductory reading are indicated with a *.

Abenante, P. 2013. Inner and outer ways: Sufism and subjectivity in Egypt and beyond. Ethnos 78(4), 490-514.

——— & F. Vicini (eds) 2017. Interiority unbound: Sufi and modern articulations of the self. Special issue. Culture and Religion 18(2), 57-190.

*Abu-Lughod, L. 1986. Veiled sentiments: honour and poetry in a Bedouin society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2013. Do Muslim women need saving? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Abu Zayd, N.H. 1991. Mafhum al-nass: Dirasa fi 'ulum al-Qur'an (The Concept of the Text: A Study of the Qur'anic Sciences, in Arabic). Beirut and Cairo: Al-Markaz al-thaqafi al-'arabi (available on-line https://archive.org/details/MafhomAlnass).

Agrama, H.A. 2012. Questioning secularism: Islam, sovereignty, and the rule of law in modern Egypt. Chicago: University Press.

Ahmad, I. 2017. Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from Mecca to the marketplace. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

*Ahmed, S. 2016. What is Islam? The importance of being Islamic. Princeton: University Press.

Aishima, H. 2016. Public culture and Islam in modern Egypt: media, intellectuals and society. London: I.B. Tauris.

Amir-Moazami, S. (ed.) 2018. Der inspizierte Muslim: Zur Politisierung der Islamforschung in Europa. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

*Asad, T. 1986. The idea of an anthropology of Islam. Occasional Papers Series. Washington, DC: Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University.

——— 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Bangstad, S. 2014. Anders Breivik and the rise of Islamophobia. London: Zed Books.

*Beekers, D. & D. Kloos (eds) 2018. Straying from the straight path: how senses of failure invigorate lived religion. New York: Berghahn.

Bendixsen, S. 2013. The religious identity of young Muslim women in Berlin: an ethnographic study. Leiden: Brill.

Bowen, J. 2007. Why the French don't like headscarves: Islam, the state, and public space. Princeton: University Press.

*——— 2012. A new anthropology of Islam. Cambridge: University Press.

Carey, M. 2013. Apolitical ‘Islamisation’? On the limits of religiosity in Montane Morocco. In Articulating Islam: anthropological approaches to Muslim worlds (eds) M. Marsden & K. Retsikas, 193-208. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

Chappatte, A. 2017. ‘Texas’: An off-centre district at the heart of nightlife in Odienné. In Understanding the city through its margins: pluridisciplinary perspectives from case studies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East (eds) A. Chappatte, U. Freitag & N. Lafi, 109-28. London: Routledge.

Dahlgren, S. 2013. Shari'a in the diaspora: displacement, exclusion, and the anthropology of the traveling Middle East. In Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium (eds) S. Hafez & S. Slyomovics, 223-38. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Debevec, L. 2012. Postponing piety in urban Burkina Faso: discussing ideas of when to start acting as a pious Muslim. In Ordinary lives and grand schemes: an anthropology of everyday religion (eds) S. Schielke & L. Debevec, 33-47. New York: Berghahn.

*Deeb, L. 2006. An enchanted modern: gender and public piety in Shi‘i Lebanon. Princeton: University Press.

——— & M. Harb 2013. Leisurely Islam: negotiating geography and morality in Shi'ite South Beirut. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2015. Thinking piety and the everyday together: a response to Fadil and Fernando. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2), 59-88.

——— & J. Winegar 2016. Anthropology's politics: disciplining the Middle East. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

de Koning, M. 2013. The moral maze: Dutch Salafis and the construction of a moral community of the faithful. Contemporary Islam 7(1), 71-83.

Desplat, P. 2016. 'Heard about the Good-Deed-Sayers?' Islam and everyday conversations on religious difference in Harar, Ethiopia.” Journal for Islamic Studies 35(1), 11-42.

Doostdar, A. 2018. The Iranian metaphysicals: explorations in science, Islam, and the uncanny. Princeton: University Press.

Drieskens, B. 2008. Living with jinns: understanding and dealing with the invisible in Cairo. London: Saqi.

Dupret, B. 2006. Le Judgement en action: ethnométhodologie du droit, de la moral et de la justice en Egypte. Genève: Librairie DROJ.

———,T. Pierret, P.G. Pinto & K. Spellman-Poots (eds) 2012. Volume 3: Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual performances and everyday practices (Exploring Muslim Contexts). Edinburgh: University Press (available on-line: https://ecommons.aku.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=uk_ismc_series_emc).

Eickelman, D. 1992. Mass higher education and the religious imagination in contemporary Arab societies. American Ethnologist 9(4), 643-55.

Elliot, A. 2016. The makeup of destiny: predestination and the labor of hope in a Moroccan emigrant town. American Ethnologist 43(3), 488-99.

*El-Zein, A.H. 1977. Beyond ideology and theology: the search for the anthropology of Islam. Annual Review of Anthropology 6, 227-54.

Ewing, K.P. 1994. Dreams from a saint: anthropological atheism and the temptation to believe. American Anthropologist 96(3), 571-83.

Fadil, N. 2009. Managing affects and sensibilities: the case of not-handshaking and not-fasting. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 17(4), 439-54.

——— & M. Fernando 2015. Rediscovering the ‘everyday’ Muslim: notes on an anthropological divide. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5(2), 59-88.

——— 2018. Taming the Muslim woman. TheImmanent Frame, 24 May (available on-line: https://tif.ssrc.org/2018/05/24/taming-the-muslim-woman/).

———, M. de Koning, & F. Ragazzi (eds) 2019. Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands: critical perspectives on violence and security. London: I.B. Tauris.

Fernando, M. 2014. The republic unsettled: Muslim French and the contradictions of secularism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Frishkopf, M. 2001. Tarab in the mystic Sufi chant of Egypt. In Colors of enchantment: visual and performing arts of the Middle East (ed.) S. Zuhur, 233-69. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

——— 2009. Mediated Qur’anic recitation and the contestation of Islam in contemporary Egypt. In Music and the play of power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (ed.) L. Nooshin, 75-114. Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate.

Gaibazzi, P. 2015. The quest for luck: fate, fortune, work and the unexpected among Gambian Soninke hustlers. Critical African Studies 7(3), 227-42.

*Ghannam, F. 2013. Live and die like a man: gender dynamics in urban Egypt. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Graw, K. 2006. Locating Nganiyo: divination as intentional space. Journal of Religion in Africa 36(1), 78-119.

Haeri, N. 2013. The private performance of salat prayers: repetition, time, and meaning. Anthropological Quarterly 86(1), 5-34.

Hafez, S. 2011. An Islam of her own: reconsidering religion and secularism in women’s Islamic movements. New York: University Press.

Hamdy, S. 2009. Islam, fatalism, and medical intervention: lessons from Egypt on the cultivation of forbearance (Sabr) and reliance on God (Tawakkul). Anthropological Quarterly 82, 173-96.

——— 2012. Our bodies belong to God: organ transplants, Islam, and the struggle for human dignity in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hammoudi, A. 2009. Textualism and anthropology: on the ethnographic encounter, or an experience in the hajj. In Being there: the fieldwork encounter and the making of truth (eds) J. Borneman & A. Hammoudi, 25-54. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hefner, R.W. & M.Q. Zaman (eds) 2007. Schooling Islam: the culture and politics of modern Muslim education. Princeton: University Press.

Hefner, R.W. 2012. Islam, economic globalization, and the blended ethics of self. Bustan: The Middle East Book Review 3(2), 91-108.

Henkel, H. 2005. ‘Between belief and unbelief lies the performance of salat’: meaning and efficacy of a Muslim ritual. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11(3), 487-507.

Hew, W.W. 2018. ‘Islamic ways of modern living’: middle-class Muslim aspirations and gated communities in peri-urban Jakarta. In Jakarta: claiming spaces and rights in the city (eds) J. Hellman, M. Thynell, & R. van Voorst, 195-213. London: Routledge.

Hirschkind, C. 1996. Heresy or hermeneutics: the case of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd. American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 12(4), 463-77.

——— 2006. The ethical soundscape: cassette sermons and Islamic counter-publics. New York: Columbia University Press.

Huq, M. 2009. Talking jihad and piety: reformist exertions among Islamist women in Bangladesh. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15(s1), 163-82.

Ismail, S. 2013. Piety, profit and the market in Cairo: a political economy of Islamisation. Contemporary Islam 7, 107-28.

Janson, M. 2013. Islam, youth, and modernity in the Gambia: the Tablighi Jama'at. Cambridge: University Press.

Jones, C. 2010. Materializing piety: gendered anxieties about faithful consumption in contemporary urban Indonesia. American Ethnologist 38(1), 58-72.

Joseph, S. (ed.) 1999. Intimate selving in Arab families: gender, self and identity. Syracuse: University Press.

Jouili, J.S. 2015. Pious practice and secular constraints: women in the Islamic revival in Europe. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Kapchan, D. 2016. Listening acts, secular and sacred: sound knowledge among Sufi Muslims in secular France. In Islam and Popular Culture (eds) K. van Nieuwkerk, M. LeVine, & M. Stokes, 23-40. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Karlsson Minganti, P. 2007. Muslima: Islamisk väckelse och unga kvinnors förhandlingar om genus i det samtida Sverige. PhD thesis, Stockholms Universitet, Stockholm.

Khan, N. 2012. Muslim becoming: aspiration and skepticism in Pakistan. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Kloos, D. 2017. Becoming better Muslims: religious authority and ethical improvement in Aceh, Indonesia. Princeton: University Press.

Kreil, A. 2016. Territories of desire: a geography of competing intimacies in Cairo. Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 12, 166-80.

Kresse, K. 2007. Philosophising in Mombasa: knowledge, Islam and intellectual practice on the Swahili coast. Edinburgh: University Press.

*Kreinath, J. (ed.) 2012. The anthropology of Islam reader. London: Routledge

Lambek, M. (ed.) 2010. Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language, and action. New York: Fordham University Press.

Liberatore, G. 2016. Imagining an ideal husband: marriage as a site of aspiration among pious Somali women in London. Anthropological Quarterly 89(3), 781-812.

*Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of piety: the Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2016. Religious difference in a secular age: a minority report. Princeton: University Press.

Malik ibn Anas. 1985 [711-795]. Al-Muwatta' (ed.) M. Fu’ad ‘Abd al-Baqi. Beirut: Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-'Arabi (available on-line: https://archive.org/details/waq5776_906/page/n0).

——— n.d. Translation of Malik’s Muwatta (trans. A. Abdarahman at-Tarjumana & Y. Johnson) (available on-line: https://archive.org/details/the-muwatta-of-imam-malik/page/n0).

*Marsden, M. 2005. Living Islam: Muslim religious experience in Pakistan’s north-west frontier. Cambridge: University Press.

——— & K. Retsikas (eds) 2013. Articulating Islam: anthropological approaches to Muslim worlds. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

Masquelier, A. 2009. Women and Islamic revival in a West African town. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mayeur-Jaouen, C. 2005. Pèlerinages d'Égypte: histoire de la piété copte et musulmane (XVe-XXe siècles). Paris: Éditions de l'EHESS.

Meijer, R. (ed.) 2009. Global Salafism: Islam's new religious movement. London: Hurst.

Menin, L. 2015. The impasse of modernity: personal agency, divine destiny, and the unpredictability of intimate relationships in Morocco. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(4), 892-910.

Menin, L. & A. Elliot 2018. Anthropologies of destiny: action, temporality, freedom. Special section. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, 292-346.

Meyer, B. & A. Moors (eds) 2006. Religion, media, and the public sphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mir‐Hosseini, Z. 2006. Muslim women’s quest for equality: between Islamic law and feminism. Critical Inquiry 32, 629-45.

*Mittermaier, A. 2011. Dreams that matter: Egyptian landscapes of the imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2014. Trading with God: Islam, calculation, excess. In A companion to the anthropology of religion (eds) J. Boddy & M. Lambek, 274-94. Oxford: Blackwell.

*——— 2019. Giving to God: Islamic charity in (post)revolutionary Egypt. Oakland: University of California Press.

Moll, Y. 2018. Television is not radio: theologies of mediation in the Egyptian Islamic revival. Cultural Anthropology 33, 2.

Möller, A. 2005. Ramadan in Java: the joy and jihad of ritual fasting. Lund: Department of History and Anthropology of Religions, Lund University.

Mols, L. & M. Buitelaar (eds) 2015. Hajj: global interactions through pilgrimage. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Moors, A. forthcoming. No escape: the force of the security frame in academia and beyond. In Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands: critical perspectives on violence and security, London: I.B.Tauris.

——— & E. Tarlo (eds) 2007. Muslim fashions. Special double issue. Fashion Theory 11(2/3), 133-346.

Müller, D.M. 2017. Working paper 187: the bureaucratization of Islam and its socio-legal dimensions in Southeast Asia: conceptual contours of a research project. Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology Working Papers. Munich: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

Navest, A., M. de Koning, & A. Moors 2016. Chatting about marriage with female migrants to Syria. Anthropology Today 32(2), 22-5.

Osella, F. & C. Osella 2007. ‘I am Gulf’: the production of cosmopolitanism among the Koyas of Kozhikode, Kerala. In Struggling with history: Islam and cosmopolitanism in the Western Indian Ocean (eds) E. Simpson & K. Kresse, 323-55. London: Hurst.

Ring, L. 2006. Zenana: everyday peace in a Karachi apartment building. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Rudnickyj, D. 2009. Spiritual economies: Islam and neoliberalism in contemporary Indonesia. Cultural Anthropology 24(1) 104-41.

Rudnyckyj, D. 2018. Beyond debt: Islamic experiments in global finance. Chicago: University Press.

Schaeublin, E. 2016. Zakat in Nablus (Palestine): change and continuity in Islamic almsgiving. PhD thesis, University of Oxford.

Schielke, S. 2012. The perils of joy: contesting Mulid festivals in contemporary Egypt. Syracuse: University Press.

——— 2015. Egypt in the future tense: hope, frustration and ambivalence, before and after 2011. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sehlikoğlu, S. 2015. Female bodies and state power: women-only sport centers in Istanbul. In Women's sport as politics in Muslim contexts (ed.) H. Hoofdar, 102-35. London: WLUML Publications.

*——— 2018. Revisited: Muslim women's agency and feminist anthropology of the Middle East.Contemporary Islam 12, 73-92.

Simon, G. 2009. The soul freed of cares? Islamic prayer, subjectivity, and the contradictions of moral selfhood in Minangkabau, Indonesia. American Ethnologist 36(2), 258-75.

Soares, B.F. 2005. Islam and the prayer economy: history and authority in a Malian town. Edinburgh: University Press.

Srimulyani, E. 2010. Islam, adat, and the state: matrifocality in Aceh revisited. Al-Jami‘ah: Journal of Islamic Studies 48(2), 321-42.

Starrett, G. 1995. Signposts along the road: monumental public writing in Egypt. Anthropology Today 11(4), 8-13.

——— 1998. Putting Islam to work: education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stephan-Emmrich, M. & A. Mirzoev 2016. The manufacturing of Islamic lifestyles in Tajikistan through the prism of Dushanbe's bazars. Central Asian Survey 35(2), 157-77.

Sündermann, K. 2006. Spirituele Heiler im modernen Syrien: Berufsbild und Selbstverständnis – Wissen und Praxis. Berlin: Hans Schiler.

Sunier, T. 2014. Domesticating Islam: exploring academic knowledge production on Islam and Muslims in European societies. Ethnic and Racial Studies 37(6), 1138-55.

Tabishat, M. 2014. The moral discourse of health in modern Cairo. Lanham, U.K.: Lexington Books.

Tamimi Arab, P. 2017. Amplifying Islam in the European soundscape: religious pluralism and secularism in the Netherlands. London: Bloomsbury.

Tayob, S. 2017. Islam as a lived tradition: ethical constellations of Muslim food practice in Mumbai. PhD thesis, Universiteit Utrecht (available on-line: https://dspace.library.uu.nl/bitstream/handle/1874/350128/Tayob.pdf).

Van Nieuwkerk, K., M. LeVine, & M. Stokes (eds) 2016. Islam and popular culture. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Werbner, P. & H. Basu (eds) 1998. Embodying charisma: modernity, locality and the performance of emotion in Sufi cults. London: Routledge.

Willerslew, R. & C. Suhr 2018. Is there a place for faith in anthropology? Religion, reason, and the ethnographer’s divine revelation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8, 65-78.

Note on contributor

Samuli Schielke is a social and cultural anthropologist working on contemporary Egypt. He is a research fellow at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), associate primary investigator at Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, and visiting fellow at the ERC project Comparative Anthropologies of Revolutionary Politics at University College London.

Samuli Schielke, Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Kirchweg 33, 14129 Berlin, Germany. Samuli.Schielke@zmo.de

[1] More on prayer and alms comes later in the section, ‘Humans and God’.

[2] Hirschkind takes issue in particular with the liberal hermeneutics of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd (1943-2010), see, e.g. Abu Zayd 1991.

[3] More on this question below.

[4] They are commonly interpreted as allegories of a mystical union with God, and they thrive on the ambiguity of two possible readings.

[5] A Shia Islamist party and a main power-holder in Lebanon.

[6] Food is considered halal, i.e. permissible, when it contains no blood, pork meat, or alcohol, and when the meat comes from animals that are slaughtered by cutting their throat with a knife.

[7] For other examples, see, e.g., Dupret et al. 2012.

[8] Men and masculinities have received attention more recently, e.g. Ghannam 2013.

Colonialism / postcolonialism

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Susan Bayly

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16colonialism

Abstract:

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on modern anthropology. Anthropologists have been innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and key contributors to its challenging accounts of past and contemporary global life and experience. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in the framing of anthropology's central research questions has greatly extended the field's range and scope, including its distinctive approaches to the issue of whether it is colonialism that should be seen as modernity's most important progenitor, and the source of its most toxic forms of subjugation and disempowerment. This entry notes the sophistication with which anthropology has both embraced and challenged the forms of cultural and social analysis through which the epistemic and material transformations of global empire and its afterlife have been documented and theorised. And it argues that studies of colonialism and postcolonialism still have a strong and productive future in a world now widely thought to require the multidimensional framings provided by today's high-profile theorists of globalisation and cosmopolitanism.

Introduction

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on virtually every academic field in the humanities and social sciences. Anthropologists have been particularly innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and have responded with vigour and creativity when accused by practitioners of its deconstructive critiques of being ‘handmaidens’ of colonial power and heirs to the subjugating knowledge strategies that underpinned imperial rule (Asad 1973). There have been major changes in anthropology’s aims and claims arising from theorists’ insistence that the enduring forms of subjugation and ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1985) engendered by modern empires must be recognised as distinctive pathologies of the contemporary world. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in framing virtually all analytical accounts and research questions has greatly extended anthropology’s range and scope. It has led to the use of tools from both within and beyond the discipline, including poststructuralist understandings of power and subjectivity, and the contingency and open-endedness of historical change. These perspectives have fed debate on a wide range of topics: anticolonial nationalism; religious conversion; capitalist market transformations; gender relations and domestic intimacies; urban experience and historicity; citizenship and migration, as well as resistance and hegemonic power effects.

Colonialism

Within and beyond anthropology, ‘colonial’ is now mainly used for the transformations wrought by high modern empire, i.e. for contexts of Western conquest and rule in the age of globally expansive commercial and industrial capitalism. Some 80 to 90 percent of the global landmass and a majority of the world’s population had come under direct or indirect colonial rule by the processes initially set in train during the so-called early modern Age of Discovery, though greatly accelerated in their range and impact by the early twentieth century.^[1] It is equally important for the study of colonialism and postcolonialism to acknowledge the massive violence and displacement marking these phenomena. These include, for example, an estimated 1 million deaths in Algeria’s 1954–62 liberation war, and as many as 500,000 deaths and 14 million people displaced in the catastrophic process known as the Partition of India.^[2]

There is much dispute about the extent to which the colonised can be seen as active agents in these dislocations and displacements. But it is widely agreed that modern empire produced unprecedented change and novelty, including massive and profoundly destructive material transformations, and the constitution of a new kind of person: a colonial subject with a ‘colonized mind’, painfully if never fully subordinated by the coercions and ‘othering’ effects of the coloniser’s power-knowledge. These processes have been documented in many settings, including the modern colonial metropolis and other sites of ‘panoptic’ surveillance and self-subjugation.^[3]

Despite their ancient origins, the terms colonial and colonialism are not widely used for pre-modern and non-Western empires.^[4] The rule of Rome, the Ottomans and China’s Qing (Manchus) are commonly defined as imperial, while the term colonial is commonly used for such cases as the rule of the British in India, the French in Algeria, and the Dutch in insular Southeast Asia. These, together with sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Islamic Middle East, have been the main contexts for studies of colonial and postcolonial projects and practices, frequently in terms deeply critical of the strategies of historians, political sociologists, and anthropologists. The works thus targeted include classic ethnographies condemned for their purported failure to problematise Enlightenment epistemologies as the critical grounding of their work.^[5]

Some critics regard binary models of coloniser-colonised relations as too narrow to capture the full dynamics of imperial and post-imperial modernity. What has been seen as the open-ended or ‘rhizomatic’ qualities of empire has generated rich ethnographic work on such people as the ‘mobile cosmopolitans’ whose far-flung trading and religious networks challenged the boundedness of all the imperial systems that sought to contain them (Ho 2004).^[6] But for theorists including Barlow (1997) and Chakrabarty (2012), colonialism is modernity’s most important progenitor and the source of its most toxic forms and penetrations. These include its corrosive powers of individuation and commodification, and its routinization of state violence through the practices of bureaucratised truth-seeking: ranging from the legalistic witch-hunts of Spanish-ruled Peru to the treaties and constitution-making of more recent colonial regimes (Benton 2002; Comaroff 2001; Silverblatt 2004).

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism has become an equally pervasive term, especially in studies of the enduring after-effects of colonial rule and the oppressive ‘necropolitics’ of post-independence states and elites (Chakrabarty 1992; Mbembe 2001; Sarkar 1985). Poststructuralist identity and language theory have been key resources for this work, initially through the concept of colonial discourse: the use of signifying regimens that delegitimate the knowledge practices of the colonised and install as authoritative truths the conqueror’s narratives of superior rationality and ‘civilizing mission’ (Chafer 1992). Foucault’s early work on governmentality and the biopolitical sources of modern power were the initial grounding for these perspectives, together with Said’s critique of the self-glorifying cultural essentialism engendered by European Orientalists (Said 1995). Those embracing these understandings of the colonisers’ power used them to illuminate the psychic and cultural dislocations of colonial rule, exposing as instruments of subjugation and disempowerment the compilation of scholar-officials’ dictionaries, maps and legal codes, their manipulation of foreign scripts and vernaculars, and their fabrication of subordinating ‘languages of command’ (Cohn 1996; Errington 2008; Raheja 1996).^[7]

The deconstructive analysis of imperial texts and representational strategies has generated much debate about whether colonial encounters were invariably collisions of radically divergent epistemes (Marglin & Marglin 1990). Cohn’s accounts of the Census of India and imperial darbar (ruler’s audience) (1987, 1996) treated the representational strategies of British rule as disruptively alien, its regimes of enumeration and visuality a break with the far more fluid relations and identities of the pre-conquest period. The idea of novel reality production under colonial rule has been contested from many perspectives, including those identifying India’s expansive Mughal dynasts and their successors as knowledge-gatherers in their own right, thus as creators of novel enumerating and classification strategies that anticipated and set the model for those of the British Raj (Peabody 2001).^[8]

Some historians have challenged the value of all deconstructive critique, dismissing the study of knowledge politics and colonial subjectivities and calling instead for continued attempts to understand the processes underlying such key transformations as the immiseration of peasantries and the spread of intercommunal blood-letting in colonised societies (O’Hanlon & Washbrook 1992; cf. Prakash 1992, 1993). What has been called for by anthropologists is not so much a change of research questions, as a search for better tools with which to study colonialism’s conceptual power and effects. For Kelly and Kaplan (2001), Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogics and heteroglossia make visible a process of ‘communicative traffic’ between colonisers and the colonised in British-ruled Fiji, hence ‘co-production’ rather than top-down imposition of authorising power-knowledge in the turbulent interactions which they explore.

Despite these challenges, the concerns of the early landmark studies still interest scholars debating the sources and effects of imperial power.^[9] So too does the radical feminist critique of Spivak (e.g. Spivak 1996), often united with Derrida’s treatment of writing as the inscription of difference as both source and manifestation of the will to power, with an emphasis on the inherent violence of such inscriptions, and the ‘deferrals’ of meaning inherent in their constitutive texts and narratives. A related reference point has been Lacanian psychology’s understanding of desiring selfhood and the decentred nature of subjectivity (Bhabha 2004; Khanna 2004). The treatment of colonial rule as agonising ‘psychodrama’ produced in the ‘play of power within colonial discourse’ (Bhabha 1996: 92) has drawn further inspiration from Fanon’s accounts of the crippling identity effects of empire, entangling colonisers and the colonised in a mesh of mutual desires and delusions.^[10]

Transforming events and resistance

Colonialism became a major scholarly concern in the late 1970s, while postcolonialism came to prominence in the 1980s. Both singly and together, their embrace signalled an attack on perspectives deemed outmoded and inadequate for an understanding of the global world order. A particular target for such challenges has been the concept of imperialism, formerly the dominant idiom in Marxist and related ‘world systems’ accounts of the global expansion of capitalist modernity (Frank 1978; Wallerstein 1974). In the study of imperialism, scholars’ key concerns were with motivations and actions initiated from colonisers’ metropoles: the economic logic of empires; how they were structured and expanded. Their treatment of what would now be characterised as ‘experience’ within the colonised world related largely to structural transformations in the material sphere. The most notable of these were massive social and environmental changes wrought by novel land control systems, including coercive cash-cropping schemes and the widespread destruction of forests and grasslands, and the forcible creation of new production and labour systems to meet the commodifying needs of Western capitalist economies.^[11]

With anthropologists’ turn to globally framed historical perspectives in the 1980s, the implications of empire and world systems theory were addressed by some of the discipline’s leading innovators. Taussig’s (1980) study of the economics of empire in Bolivia focused on Amerindian tin miners’ narratives of the Devil as presiding agent of the commoditization of their labour under Spanish rule. And in Sahlins’s celebrated account of the death of the English explorer-navigator James Cook at the hands of Hawaiians in 1779, the killing was a transformative event, interpretable through the concept of ‘mythopraxis’: in the islanders’ perceptions, an occurrence taking place in mythic rather than linear time (1985; see Weiner 2006). Sahlins claimed that this was not an account of a fixed Hawaiian cultural framing counterpoised to an equally static Western ‘trade and empire’ worldview. Instead, mythopraxis allowed for a notion of dialectical conjuncture between two dynamic historicities, thus a forging of something new in the context of this early moment of imperial ‘fatal impact’ (Moorehead 2000).^[12]

1. Relating the economic and the cultural

Though much contested, such studies created provocative links between anthropologists’ concerns with the economic and the cultural, as in Comaroff’s treatment (1985) of the southern African Zion Church faith as symbolic bricolage: an expression of ‘cultural resistance’ to the forced integration of adherents into the alienating structures of capitalist commodity production. In other studies too, resistance to colonial power is discerned not so much in confrontation or counter-hegemonic ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1990), but in poetics, i.e. the expressiveness and play of the creative mind, as in the imagining of alternative spiritual realities in millenarian ‘cargo cults’.^[13] Related works on colonial contexts have discerned historicity in the form of invention or co-fabrication in what had previously been seen as timeless ethnographic givens, including ‘tribe’ in Africa and caste and ethno-religious community in India. This raised the contentious question of whether even grossly disadvantaged subjects were active agents in the making of their new epistemic and material realities, rather than mere recipients of whatever the coloniser constructed and imposed (Bayly 1999; Godelier 1975; Spear 2003; Wolf 1982).

Debate about how to relate the economic and the cultural in colonial contexts has been further nourished by anthropologists’ studies of the creation of new economies through the mass recruitment of enslaved or indentured labour. In another of Kelly’s works dealing with plantation-based sugar production in Fiji (1992), concepts once thought of as universals in economic anthropology are found to be the subjects of highly divergent moral narratives about trade, value, and production. These were not just a matter of disparities in the thinking of whites as opposed to non-whites, or even opposition in the thinking of the island’s massive influx of Indian indentured labourers as compared to native Fijians. What is striking in his account is that it was the two key groups of Indian incomers – field workers and trader-shopkeepers – who were sharply divided in their ideas about the morality of trade, value, and labour. Moreover, Kelly finds a way to account for this which productively rethinks and elasticises both the Marxist legacy as deployed in colonial political economy studies, and the theories of culture which have been embraced as their alternative.^[14]

Despite the sophistication of such ethnographically grounded political economy perspectives, many scholars reject them, even when insisting that they too see the world historically, i.e. marked and shaped by the predatory power of colonisers and their collaborators.^[15] The legacy of Marxism in the study of empire has been widely dismissed for its perceived evolutionism: identifying the effects of Western rule as bloody and disruptive for colonised societies, yet still a prelude to progress and emancipation in their transformative structural effects.^[16]

2. Typologies of colonialism

But what has become a very deep scholarly dividing line is the point at which anthropologists have turned their skills of ethnographic specificity to the forging of typologies, distinguishing, as many historians have done, between the effects of different varieties of imperial rule and power. A revealing case is the contrast drawn by Wolfe (2006) between two radically different forms or modes of colonial rule. The first of these was administrative/extractive colonialism, as in British India. Wolfe sees this as based on a framing logic that was dehumanising but not genocidal. It included the idea of the ‘native’ as a dangerous but desirable asset, making profit for empire through cash-cropping and other precarious forms of land use. Despite its many immiserating effects on indigenous peoples, this for Wolfe was still very different from colonialism in its other conceptual mode: mass-migration or settler colonialism. The critical premise in this case was that of ‘terra nullius’ (unclaimed terrain). It defined Aboriginal people as lacking the capacity to understand land as an asset with use-value, which determined for British colonisers who was and was not to be placed within the pale of productive humankind. The result was unabashedly exterminatory: portraying indigenous Australians as a nullity to be expunged, whether by direct violence or eugenicist child-seizure aimed at the ‘breeding out’ of non-white ‘racial stock’.^[17]

But rather than hailing this as an exercise in right-minded deconstructive critique, there are critics who see the thinking behind any typologising of colonialism’s variants as in itself colonial, a defining of difference which replicates the coloniser’s defining and thus silencing of the colonised subject, through the structural violence of ‘naming power’ (Krautwurst 2003). Studies framed like Wolfe’s have thus been condemned as a back-door whitewashing of empire, at odds with the mission of postcolonial criticism to expose and destabilise Eurocentric master narratives and ‘discourses of domination’ through ‘radical re-thinking and re-formulation of the forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination’ (Prakash 1992: 8).^[18]

3. The value of ethnography

Yet there are influential works in which the turning of an ethnographer’s eye to the specificities of context have been applauded for providing in-depth accounts of colonial and postcolonial settings, rather than broad-brush accounts of the colonial and postcolonial as generic states or qualities. Notable examples include treatments of colonial or formerly colonised sites as spaces of distinctive constructions of reality, through the operations of myth, narrative, and other processes of imagination and embodied practice (Ariel de Vidas 2002; Gow 2001; Graham 1998; Stoller 1995). Such works have greatly enriched the ways in which culture itself is understood within and beyond anthropology, revealing the great breadth of its manifestations as experience and reference point in different political and social contexts, for example:

as an indeterminate meeting ground between alien worldviews and meaning systems;
as the construction of essences and boundaries defining subjects’ ethnic or moral otherness;
and as a tool of resistance and assertive nationhood (Gupta & Ferguson 1992).

There has also been work on colonial cultural processes in which the concerns of classic land and labour studies have been productively reframed. Authors noting empire’s role as solvent of established forms of sovereignty and community and destroyer of livelihoods and environments such as those of pastoralists and hunter/gatherers have enriched these concerns through interest in colonialism’s dislocations of identity and selfhood. Key reference points in these explorations of fractured subjectivities and psychic trauma have been such concepts as mimesis, hybridity, and creolization to capture the blendings and assimilations as well as the traumatising disjunctures of the colonial encounter.

Thus another study by Taussig focusing on the extreme violence of colonial rule in the Amazonian Putumayo (1987) makes the region’s ruthlessly labour-hungry mode of rubber production central to his account. But Taussig’s claim is that the cruelty displayed towards the Amerindian plantation workers was not a tool used with the cold rationality of means-and-ends ‘trade and empire’ logic to solve a central problem of colonial political economy: how to control a workforce indifferent to money, clock-time, and the market. What he finds instead is a ‘culture of terror’ trapping coloniser and colonised in a state of mutual psychic dysfunction. Colonialism’s corrosive self/other identity effects are thus a pathology, to be understood in terms drawn from Benjamin and the Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Horkheimer on the processes of mimesis in the perceiving mind: that is, the compulsive force of one’s destabilising identifications with those to whom we are ‘other’. The colonisers’ horrific acts are therefore to be seen as a projection of their own fears and aggressions. In the alienation and insecurity of colonial existence, the coloniser’s disordered mind strives nightmarishly through its mimetic image-making faculties to vest the colonised with an imagined subhuman otherness, in the unattainable hope of expunging or deflecting the savage urges they find within themselves.^[19]

Psychic dysfunctionality has been a major reference point in many works identifying the ambiguities of desire and sexuality in colonial settings as central to the ‘tensions of empire’ (Cooper & Stoler 1997).^[20] Stoler united disparate strands of Foucault’s work concerned with issues of gender, race, and sexuality to explore the destabilising biopolitical intimacies of interracial households and affective attachments in colonial Southeast Asian contexts (1995; 2002). Much use has also been made of the political psychologist Ashis Nandy’s notion of hypermasculinity as a critical dysfunction of the coloniser’s condition. Here the male coloniser is to be seen as perpetually unsure of his power, hence compulsively driven to inflate the expressions of his maleness through the fetishising of manly prowess and comradeship in pursuits such as hunting and team sport (Nandy 1989).

A striking exploration of dysfunctional hypermasculinity in the relations of colonisers and their subjects is provided in Banerjee’s account of the sexualised humiliations perpetrated by British officers against prisoners from one of India’s most remarkable anti-colonial nationalist groups: the Red Shirts, composed of Muslim Pathans (Pukhthuns) based in what is now the North West Frontier of Pakistan (2000). What Banerjee sees as the source of this abuse is that the Red Shirts were from a group classed by the British as a ‘martial race’ who had become keen adherents of Gandhi’s doctrine of pacifist non-violent resistance.^[21] This meant that they were no longer willing to play the game of manly conflict expected of them in the form of the raids and counter-raids which had nourished the white soldiers’ fragile male selfhood. This, Banerjee argues, is what generated the sense of psychic challenge to which they responded with eerily Abu Ghraib-like acts of violence.

Psycho-sexual dysfunction is also a central theme in Luhrmann’s account of fieldwork with western India’s distinctive Parsi community (1996). Under British rule this small urban group was disproportionately influential as a commercial and professional elite, much praised for their modernity: prosperous and Western-educated, both their men and women highly visible in the arenas and pursuits of the colonial public sphere.^[22] But in postcolonial India, she found them to have become strikingly akin to what Nandy found for the colonial period: a community enmeshed in the painful psychic life of ‘intimate enemies’. In their case, strikingly, this involved entangled relations with other Indians rather than the colonising ‘other’. Luhrmann found her informants much afflicted with anxieties about their place in a society where they had lost their former ‘collaborator’ niche, with these tensions playing out in the form of abiding fears about male Parsis’ masculine potency and procreative abilities.

4. Resistance

What then of the possibility of resistance in conditions of colonial subjugation and rule? The works of the historians and culture theorists whose initial inspiration was Gramsci’s neo-Marxist concept of the subaltern (from subalterno: the subordinated) identified the workings of an anti-hegemonic ‘subaltern consciousness’ in such events as India’s pre-Independence forest uprisings and peasant millenarian movements. Contributors saw these as expressions of a non-elite insurgent value system, wrongly treated as mindless disorder or criminality, both by Marxist historians and triumphalist ‘bourgeois nationalist’ narratives of the Indian freedom struggle (Guha 1999; see Chaturvedi 2000). Key contributors to this subaltern studies project saw only Gandhi as an exception to their view of organised nationalist movements and leaders as purveyors of ‘derivative discourse’, i.e. premised on alien concepts of the bourgeois liberal individual, and producing elitist and perniciously gendered scriptings of nationhood (Chatterjee 1986, 2012). Subsequent contributors lost interest in the study of rebellions and popular violence and merged their concerns with those of emerging theorists of colonial discourse and governmentality. Yet the possibility of resistance to the coloniser’s power was still a tantalising presence in some of this work. Bhabha’s celebrated reading of a key text of colonial discourse, the scholar-official T.B. Macaulay’s notorious 1835 Minute on education, raised the provocative possibility that even the most apparently one-sided exercises in authoritative power-knowledge may open up spaces for ‘sly subversion’ of the coloniser’s truth regimes. Thus despite the Minute’s unblushing dismissal of India’s entire cultural heritage, Bhabha’s claim was that the class of ‘almost white but not-quite’ Western-educated Indians – imagined by Macaulay as compliant props of colonial rule – were actually skilled parodists, using the arts of mimetic burlesque to destabilise the colonisers’ sense of confidence and superiority.^[23]

Colonialism and postcolonialism today

So do studies of colonialism and postcolonialism have a future in a world now widely said to require the multidimensional framings provided by today’s high-profile theorists of globalization and cosmopolitanism? One sign of the rich potential still offered by the colonialism/postcolonialism field’s tools and perspectives is its elasticity, as in the ways its insights have been merged and synthesised with those of other history-conscious areas of research and debate. This includes the work of scholars of socialism and postsocialism who have addressed the transformations and problematic vernacularizations of modernity in their own complex research contexts by reflecting productively on the ways in which key themes from the study of colonialism and postcolonialism can be engaged and expanded on (Bayly 2007; Kandiyoti 2002; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003).

Furthermore, as Ania Loomba has shown, many variants of contemporary globalization studies have absorbed rather than overridden the key elements of colonial and postcolonial studies (2005). Their use has provided a powerful means of avoiding the end-of-history triumphalism and ahistorical thinness with which many commentators have defined, celebrated or demonised the conditions of globalised cultural and economic life in today’s world of flexible citizenship and fractured sovereignties. Consciousness of empire and a continuing engagement with the rich and varied literature on its impacts and afterlife thus has the potential to nuance and ground the many ways in which scholars now seek to grasp all that is local, translocal and global in the world today.

References

Alavi, S. 1993. The Company army and rural society: the invalid thanah 1780–1830. Modern Asian Studies 27, 147-78.

Alter, J.S. 2000. Gandhi’s body: sex, diet and the politics of nationalism. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ariel de Vidas, A. 2002. A dog’s life among the Teenek Indians (Mexico): animals’ participation in the classification of self and other. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, 531-50.

Arnold, D. 2000. The new Cambridge history of India: science, technology and medicine in colonial India. Cambridge: University Press.

Asad, T. 1973. Anthropology & the colonial encounter. London: Ithaca Press.

Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths & H. Tiffin 1995. The post-colonial studies reader. London: Routledge.

Banerjee, M. 2000. The Pathan unarmed: opposition & memory in the north west frontier. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Barlow, T.E. 1997. Formations of colonial modernity in East Asia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Bayly, S. 1999. Caste, society and politics in India from the eighteenth century to the modern age. Cambridge: University Press.

——— 2007. Asian voices in a postcolonial age: Vietnam, India, and beyond. Cambridge: University Press.

Beinart, W. 2008. The rise of conservation in South Africa: settlers, livestock, and the environment 1770–1950. Oxford: University Press.

Benton, L. 2002. Law and colonial cultures: legal regimes in world history, 1400–1900. Cambridge: University Press.

Bhabha, H. 1996. The other question: difference, discrimination, and the discourse of colonialism. In Black British cultural studies: a reader (eds) H.A. Baker Jr., M. Diawara & R.H. Lindeborg, 87-107. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2004 [1994]. Of mimicry and man: the ambivalence of colonial discourse. In The location of culture (ed.) H. Bhabha, 121-32. New York: Routledge.

Boehmer, E. 2006. Postcolonialism. In Literary theory and criticism (ed.) P. Waugh, 340-61. Oxford: University Press.

Burton, 2005. Gender, sexuality and colonial modernities. London and New York: Routledge.

Carrier, J. 1992. Occidentalism: the world turned upside-down. American Ethnologist 19, 195-212.

Çelik, Z. 1997. Urban forms and colonial confrontation: Algiers under French rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chafer, A. 1992. France's mission civilisatrice in Africa: French culture not for export? In Popular culture and mass communication in twentieth century France (eds) R. Chapman & N. Hewitt, 142-64. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press.

Chakrabarty, D. 1992. Postcoloniality and the artifice of history: who speaks for ‘Indian’ pasts? Representations 37, 1-26.

——— 2000. Provincializing Europe. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2012. From civilization to globalization: the ‘West’ as a shifting signifier in Indian modernity. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 13, 138-52.

Chatterjee, P. 1986. Nationalist thought and the colonial world: a derivative discourse. London: Zed Books.

——— 2012. The black hole of empire: history of a global practice of power. Princeton: University Press.

Chaturvedi, V. 2000. Mapping subaltern studies and the postcolonial. London: Verso.

Chiriyankandath, J. 2007. Colonialism and post-colonial development. In Politics in the developing world (eds) P. Burnell, L. Rakner & V. Randall, 29-44. Oxford: University Press.

Cohn, B.S. 1987. An anthropologist among the historians. Oxford: University Press.

——— 1996. Colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the British in India. Princeton: University Press.

Comaroff, J. 1985. Body of power, spirit of resistance: the culture and history of a South African people. Chicago: University Press.

Comaroff, J.L. 2001. Colonialism, culture, and the law: a foreword. Law & Social Inquiry 26, 305-14.

——— & J. Comaroff. 1991. Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University Press.

Cooper, F. 2005. Colonialism in question: theory, knowledge, history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— & A. Stoler (eds) 1997. Tensions of empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Coronil, F. 1996. Beyond occidentalism: toward nonimperial geohistorical categories. Cultural Anthropology 11, 51-87.

Devji, F.F. 1991. Gender and the politics of space: the movement for women’s reform in Muslim India, 1857–1900. South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 14, 141-53.

Dirlik, A. 1994. The postcolonial aura: third world criticism in the age of global capitalism. Critical Inquiry 20, 328-56.

Dwyer, E. 2001. Imperial bedlam: institutions of madness in colonial southwest Nigeria. American Ethnologist 28, 210-11.

Eaton, N. 2013. Mimesis across empires: artworks and networks in India, 1765–1860. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Engelke, M. 2015. Secular shadows: African, immanent, post-colonial. Critical Research on Religion 3, 86-100.

Errington, J. 2008. Linguistics in a colonial world: a story of language, meaning, and power. Oxford: Blackwell.

Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.

Fanon, F. 1967. Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.

Fausto, C. 2002. The bones affair: indigenous knowledge practices in contact situations seen from an Amazonian case. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, 669-90.

Fox, R.G. 1989. Gandhian utopia: experiments with culture. Boston: Beacon Press.

Frank, A.G. 1978. Dependent accumulation and underdevelopment. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Friedman, J. 1994. Cultural identity and global process. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage.

Glover, W.J. 2007. Making Lahore modern: constructing & imagining a colonial city. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Godelier, M. 1975. Toward a Marxist anthropology of religion. Dialectical Anthropology 1, 81-98.

Gow, P. 2001. An Amazonian myth and its history. Oxford: University Press.

Graham 1998 Performing dreams: discourses of immortality among the Xavante of Central Brazil. Texas: University Press.

Grove, R.H. 1997. Ecology, climate and empire: colonialism and global environmental history, 1400–1940. Cambridge: White Horse Press.

Guha, R. 1999. Elementary aspects of peasant insurgency in colonial India. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press

Gupta, A. & J. Ferguson 1992. Beyond ‘culture’: space, identity, and the politics of difference. Cultural Anthropology 7, 6-23.

Hardt, M. & A. Negri 2000. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Hermann, E. 1992. The Yali movement in retrospect: rewriting history, redefining ‘cargo cult’. Oceania 63, 55-71.

Ho, E. 2004. Empire through diasporic eyes: a view from the other boat. Comparative Studies in Society and History 46, 210-46.

Hobsbawm, E. 1987. The age of empire. New York: Vintage Books.

Inden, R. 1986. Orientalist constructions of India. Modern Asian Studies 20, 401-46.

Jasanoff, S. 2004. States of knowledge: the co-production of science and social order. New York: Routledge.

Kaiwar, V. 2014. The postcolonial Orient: the politics of difference and the project of provincialising Europe. Leiden: Brill.

Kandiyoti, D. 2002. How far do analyses of postsocialism travel? The case of Central Asia. In Postsocialism: ideals, ideologies and practices in Eurasia (ed.) C.M. Hann, 238-57. London: Routledge.

Kaplan, M. 1995. Neither cargo nor cult: ritual politics and the colonial imagination in Fiji. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Kelly, J.D. 1992. Fiji Indians and ‘commoditization of labor’. American Ethnologist 1, 97-120.

——— & M. Kaplan 2001. Represented communities: Fiji and world decolonization. Chicago: University Press.

Khanna, R. 2004. Dark continents: psychoanalysis and colonialism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Krautwurst, U. 2003. What is settler colonialism? An anthropological meditation on Frantz Fanon’s ‘concerning violence’. History and Anthropology 14, 55-72.

Landau P. & D.D. Kaspin (eds) 2002. Images & empires: visuality in colonial & postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lindstrom, L. 1993. Cargo cult: strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Lockhart, J. 1994. Sightings. Initial Nahua reactions to Spanish culture. In Implicit understandings: observing, reporting, reflecting on encounters between Europeans & other peoples in the early modern era (ed.) S. Schwartz, 218-48. Cambridge: University Press.

Loomba, A. 2005. Postcolonial studies and beyond. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Luhrmann, T.M. 1996. The good Parsi: the fate of a colonial elite in a postcolonial society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Macaulay, T.B. 1862. Minutes on education in India: written in the years 1835, 1836 and 1837. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press.

Mamdani, M. 2001. When victims become killers. Princeton: University Press.

Mani, L. 1989. Contentious traditions. The debate on sati in colonial India. In Recasting women: essays in colonial history (eds) K. Sangari & S. Vaid, 88-126. New Delhi: Kali.

Marglin, F.A. & S.A. Marglin 1990. Dominating knowledge: development, culture, and resistance. Oxford: University Press.

Mazzarella, W. 2010. Branding the Mahatma: the untimely provocation of Gandhian publicity. Cultural Anthropology 25, 1-39.

Mbembe, A. 2001. On the postcolony: studies on the history of society and culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McClintock, A. 1995. Imperial leather. New York: Routledge.

Mignolo, W.D. 1993. Colonial and postcolonial discourse: cultural critique or academic colonialism. Latin American Research Review 28, 120-34.

Mills, J.H. 2000. Madness, cannabis and colonialism: the ‘native only’ lunatic asylums of British India, 1857–1900. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Mintz, S.W. 1985. Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Mitchell, T. 1991. Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Moore, D.S., J. Kosek & A. Pandian 2003. Race, nature, and the politics of difference. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Moorehead, A. 2000. The fatal impact: An account of the invasion of the South Pacific, 1767–1840. London: Penguin.

Nandy, A. 1989. The intimate enemy: loss and recovery of self under colonialism. Oxford: University Press.

Obeyesekere, G. 1992. The apotheosis of Captain Cook. European mythmaking in the Pacific. Princeton: University Press.

O’Hanlon, R. & D. Washbrook 1992. After orientalism: culture, criticism, and politics in the Third World. Comparative Studies in Society and History 34, 141-67.

Parry B. 1987. Problems in current theories of colonial discourse. Oxford Literary Review 9, 27-58.

Peabody, N. 2001. Cents, sense, census: human inventories in late precolonial and early colonial India. Comparative Studies in Society and History 43, 819-50.

Prakash, G. 1990. Writing post-Orientalist histories of the Third World: perspectives from Indian historiography. Comparative studies in Society and History 32, 383-408.

——— 1992. Postcolonial criticism and Indian historiography. Social Text. 31/32, 8-19.

——— 1993. Terms of servitude: the colonial discourse on slavery and bondage in India. In Breaking the chains (ed.) M. Klein, 131-149. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

——— 1999. Another reason: science and the imagination of modern India. Princeton: University Press.

Rabinow, P. 1989. French modern: norms and forms of the social environment. Chicago: University Press.

Rafael, V.L. 1993 [1988]. Contracting colonialism: translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog society under early Spanish rule. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Raheja, G.G. 1996. Caste, colonialism, and the speech of the colonized: entextualization and disciplinary control in India. American Ethnologist 23, 494-513.

Reyna, S. 2002. Review article: Empire: A dazzling performance according to a simpleton. A review of Empire by M. Hardt and A. Negri. Anthropological Theory 2, 489-97.

Sahlins, M. 1985. Islands of history. Chicago: University Press.

——— 1995. How natives think. About Captain Cook for example. Chicago: University Press.

Said, E. 1995 [1978]. Orientalism. London: Penguin.

Sarkar, T. 1985. Bondage in colonial context. In Chains of servitude: bondage and slavery in India (eds) U. Patnaik & M. Dingwaney, 114-22. Madras: Sangam Books.

Scott, J.C. 1990. Domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Silverblatt, I. 2004. Modern inquisitions: Peru and the colonial origins of the civilized world. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— 2006. Colonial conspiracies. Ethnohistory 53, 259-80.

Sivaramakrishnan, K. 1999. Modern forests: statemaking and environmental change in colonial eastern India. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Sivasundaram, S. 2005. Trading knowledge: The East India Company’s elephants in India and Britain. The Historical Journal 48, 27-63.

Smith, R.C. 1973. Fanon and the concept of colonial violence. Black World XXII, 23-33.

Spear, T. 2003. Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British colonial Africa. The Journal of African History 44, 3-27.

Spivak, G.C. 1985. Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism. Critical Inquiry 12, 243-61.

——— 1996. Diasporas old and new: women in the transnational world. Textual Practice 10, 245-69.

Ssorin-Chaikov, N. 2003. The social life of the state in subarctic Siberia. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Stoler, A.L. 1995. Race and the education of desire: Foucault’s history of sexuality and the colonial order of things. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

——— 2002. Carnal knowledge and imperial power: race and the intimate in colonial rule. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stoller, P. 1995. Embodying colonial memories: spirit possession, power, and the Hauka in West Africa. New York: Routledge.

Strathern, M. 1992. The decomposition of an event. Cultural Anthropology 7, 244-54.

Taussig, M. 1980. The devil and commodity fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.

——— 1987. Shamanism, colonialism, and the wild man: a study in terror and healing. Chicago: University Press.

Wallerstein, I. 1974. The modern world-system: capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press.

Weiner, J.F. 2006. Eliciting customary law. The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology 7, 15-25.

Williams, P. & L. Chrisman (eds) 1993. Colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf.

Wolf, E. 1982. Europe and the people without history. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wolfe, P. 2006. Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research 8, 387-409.

Zinoman, P. 2001. The colonial Bastille: a history of imprisonment in Vietnam 1862–1940. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Note on contributor

Susan Bayly is Professor of Historical Anthropology in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia’s former French and British colonies. She regularly conducts ethnographic research in Vietnam as part of a larger comparative project on empire and post-colonial transformations in a variety of periods and settings. She also retains a long-standing research interest in India, where she has focused on caste, religious conversion and a variety of translocal social and cultural movements. She is a former editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and has theoretical interests in the study of modernity, globalization, theories of historical change, and the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology. Her publications include Asian voices in a postcolonial age: Vietnam, India and beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She has also published studies of the Indian caste system and of Indian religion in its historical and anthropological contexts.

Professor Susan Bayly, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sbb10@cam.ac.uk

[1] Chiriyankandath (2007: 36). This includes the lands occupied or controlled by European colonial powers and also by Japan – a great competing modern expansionist imperial power. Britain alone ruled a quarter of the world’s population by 1914. It has been estimated that in 1880 the wealth of the industrialised colonising West was twice that of the colonised regions of the world and by 1913 the West was three times richer than its colonies and dependencies (Hobsbawm 1987).

[2] Plus the upheavals in Indochina, Kenya, Palestine, Burma, Rhodesia and other key sites of bloody twentieth-century decolonisation. Equally significant in the balance sheet of empire: the genocidal impact of colonial conquest and mass European migration to both the New World and Australia; the impact and enduring legacy of the Atlantic slave trade; the massive population transfers reconstituting the populations of Fiji and other Pacific societies. On the massive environmental transformations produced in colonial contexts, see Beinart (2008), Grove (1997), and Sivaramakrishnan (1999).

[3] The sites in which these processes have been documented include hospitals and mental asylums (Arnold 2000; Dwyer 2001; Mills 2000); schools, plantations, and prisons; and museums and other public exhibition spaces (Çelik 1997; Cohn 1996; Cooper 2005; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Glover 2007; Landau & Kaspin 2002; Mitchell 1991; Rabinow 1989; Silverblatt 2006; Zinoman 2001).

[4] In Roman Britain, coloniae were land grants made to demobilised veterans to stabilise imperial authority in difficult frontier regions; the English East India Company tried to do the same with its locally recruited sepoy soldiers. (Alavi 1993)

[5] Although classics such as Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer and Azande studies are still being productively engaged in important debates, e.g. about the nature of the secular in ‘late modernity’ (Engelke 2015).

[6] Hardt and Negri’s (2000) concept of ‘rhizomic’ (or rhizomatic) empire as an account of the world’s endlessly radiating and amorphous flows of power has been widely debated; see Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (1995), Boehmer (2006), and Reyna (2002).

[7] Critiques of the Orientalist paradigm include Carrier (1992) and Coronil (1996).

[8] Studies exploring colonial science as a co-productive enterprise of mutual interaction and appropriation include Jasanoff (2004) and Sivasundaram (2005); compare Prakash (1999). On the extent to which translation and interaction are ever possible in colonial contexts, see Rafael (1993); Lockhart (1994).

[9] For example, Cohn (1996), Cooper and Stoler (1997), Inden (1986), Mani (1989), Mignolo (1993), Mitchell (1991), Parry (1987), Prakash (1990), Raheja (1996), and Williams and Chrisman (1993).

[10] ‘The central despair of the Black psyche, the fact that Black men and women are constrained to live in a world deliberately constructed to reduce and sicken them, and that as a consequence there is no such thing as normal Black people in the colonial world. They are all pathological cases, the main difference being between those who can see through the white mask and those who wear the mask as if it were real.’ (Smith 1973: 26; see also Fanon 1967)

[11] For Lenin, imperialism was the invasive and unstoppable force of capitalism. Its use as a basis for the analysis of actual global empires was a subsequent development in Marxist thought, initially inspired by the work of Rosa Luxembourg.

[12] See Sahlins (1985), Obeyesekere’s attack (1992) and Sahlins’s riposte (1995). See also Fabian (1983) and Mintz (1985). Sahlins also explored the transformative effects of Hawaiians’ subsequent ‘consumption craze’ for foreign goods in the context of the islands’ entry into worldwide trading networks as exporters of high-value local sandalwood (1985; see also Friedman 1994). There is in addition a rich literature using colonial ‘first contact’ case studies for reflections on the meaning and nature of ‘events’ and history as experienced in diverse cultural contexts: for example, Fausto (2002) and Strathern (1992).

[13] For example, in imagining Jesus as black or female (Hermann 1992; Kaplan 1995; Lindstrom 1993). Compare Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) and Silverblatt (2006). In African spirit possession too, there is the possibility that the conjuring of supernatural beings who appear to practitioners as parodic white men is a play on colonisers’ fears, or an enduring memory and appropriation of their aura and power (Stoller 1995).

[14] The commoditisation of labour in Fiji is thus not an experience bringing pain and alienation to those it objectifies, as in classic Marxism, nor is it a source of class struggle. The path of virtue is wage labour in a spirit of virtuous service for the ex-indentured labourers, and an ethic of sober, unaquisitive money-making for the Indian trader-shopkeepers (Kelly 1992).

[15] This is a contested term in colonial studies (see Mamdani 2001).

[16] Key works of postcolonial theory, notably Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), have been both praised and dismissed (Kaiwar 2014) as attempted renewals of Marxism.

[17] On race theory in India, see Moore, Kosek & Pandian (2003).

[18] See critical discussion in Dirlik (1994).

[19] More recent accounts of the mimetic in colonial contexts include Eaton (2013).

[20] See also Burton (2005), McClintock (1995), and Spivak (1996).

[21] For anthropological explorations of Gandhi’s distinctiveness as political activist and anticolonial moralist prescribing highly innovative understandings of emancipated selfhood (swaraj: self-rule) for both coloniser and colonised, see e.g. Fox (1989), Alter (2000), and Mazzarella (2010).

[22] Among highly critical deconstructive accounts of the notions of modernised male and female selfhood in the arenas of ‘home and the world’ of the colonial public sphere is Devji (1991).

[23] ‘ ... a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia … [Through anglicized education, we ...] must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ (Macaulay 1862).

Landscape

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Paola Filippucci

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16landscape

Abstract:

When we think about landscape, we tend to think of natural scenery, empty of people; of a view, spread in front of our eyes; or of a backdrop, a stage for people’s movements and activities. The anthropology of landscape challenges all of these ideas. By sharing and observing local lives through ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists have realised that landscapes matter deeply to people: they care about the landscapes they inhabit, materially shaping them and attaching meaning to them. Anthropologists have come to argue that people do not only live in landscapes but also through them: landscape is an intrinsic part of, or even actor in human social and cultural lives, constructed by them both physically and symbolically and, reciprocally, helping to make and unmake relationships and identities.

Landscape in the social sciences

The importance of landscape in human affairs was, perhaps predictably, recognised and studied by cultural geographers and archaeologists before anthropologists. Geography is of course centrally concerned with space, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s a number of studies focused on the experiential, subjective, phenomenological aspects of space and place (e.g. Buttimer & Seamon 1980; Tuan 1977); and on the symbolic meanings attached to landscape in the European tradition (e.g. Cosgrove 1985; Daniels & Cosgrove 1988). In particular, Cosgrove and others noted that the English term ‘landscape’ comes from the term of Dutch origin landschap, referring to a painted view of (usually rural) surroundings. As Hirsch notes (1995: 2), this means that the concept of landscape, if used unproblematically and uncritically, carries with it a range of culturally specific assumptions: that it is a visual phenomenon, implying a viewer and a view and so a disconnection between people and space; that it has aesthetic value, embodying a pleasing or ‘picturesque’ form; and that it is rural or to do with ‘nature’ and land rather than with people and urbanised surroundings. We will see below how Hirsch rethought the concept in a bid to produce a more culturally sensitive notion of ‘landscape’.

The other discipline that historically has had a close interest in landscape is archaeology. Particularly in Britain, landscape became a central focus of archaeological attention in the inter-war period. The journal Antiquity, founded in this period, introduced the potential of aerial photography, developed during the Great War, in making visible archaeological remains buried in the British countryside, and encouraged archaeologists to view and interpret sites and remains as part of structured, evolving ‘landscapes’, inaugurating the notion of ‘landscape archaeology’ as a way to grasp and understand ancient ways of life. In a fascinating analysis of these developments, Hauser (2007) suggests that this was in part a response to the sight of the devastation of the Great War in France and Belgium in particular, which led artists and others (including archaeologists) to reimagine and cherish Britain as an antique land, with a landscape that embodied its history and heritage and could and should be protected against the new technologies of war and destruction.

More recently archaeologists have discussed the heritage value of landscape in Britain and beyond: in particular, Bender (1993) introduced the idea, central to understanding the role of landscape anthropologically, that groups of people attribute different values to the same landscape; for this reason, landscapes are a focus, and indeed a means, of political contestation and of the formation of different and competing identities. For instance, Bender showed that the landscape of Stonehenge was in the late 1990s (and remains today) the focus of competing interpretations and claims by heritage agencies acting on behalf of the British government and also by ‘pagans’ and others such as tourists, each looking for rather different meanings and value within the same surroundings. This volume also introduced the idea that landscapes are not simply passive screens onto which people project values, but they can be actors in social and political conflict. Focusing on Belfast during the ‘Troubles’, anthropologist Neil Jarman (1993) shows that ideological divisions became embodied in the physical surroundings of the city, creating a feedback loop between space and people: boundaries between the warring groups were not only reinforced by erecting barricades and setting fire to homes, but barriers also became focal points for violent action and so fostered the cycle of violence and division (1993: 111-2). Landscape is not just a backdrop but exerts a sort of ‘agency’ in the unfolding of violent politics: because of its symbolic associations as well as its physical qualities (e.g. in creating barriers, regulating movement, etc.), space contributes to the production and reproduction of violent relations, and insight that helps to analyse many current conflicts, such as that in Israel and the Palestinian territories (see, e.g., Weizman 2007).

So, what anthropologists and other social scientists mean by ‘landscape’ is the human interpretation and manipulation of the physical surroundings in which our individual and collective lives unfold. A ‘landscape’ is something constructed by humans in the course of their daily lives and interactions, both physically and also symbolically, by being invested with meaning, memory, and value. But moreover, anthropologists argue that the two – investing with meaning and shaping physically – go hand in hand and cannot really be separated. One way to conceptualise this is the notion of ‘dwelling’ introduced by Ingold (1995). With this term, borrowed and adapted from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Ingold sought to challenge a separation between the cognitive organization of space (e.g. the creation of mental plans or designs) and its physical shaping through building. Ingold argues that humans ‘dwell’ in the world, i.e. produce and reproduce human lives and relations through practically engaging with their physical surroundings. So for Ingold, ‘building’ – humanly modifying space – is an integral aspect of ‘dwelling’: the physical outcome of the thoughtful, but necessarily embodied and emplaced business of social living, rather than an activity led by a disembodied intellect surveying its ‘environment’ as an object (see also Ingold 2000). This perspective invites us to view humans and physical surroundings as part of the same system: as Ingold puts it, the dwelling perspective treats humans as ‘animals in their environment’ rather than self-contained individuals engaging with the physical world as an object; dissolving ‘the orthodox dichotomies between evolution and history, and between biology and culture’ (1995: 77).

Ingold’s approach has been used productively especially by archaeologists as well as anthropologists working with nomadic hunter-gatherer populations (e.g. Ingold & Mazzullo 2008), perhaps because it seems to imply a sort of seamless harmony between people and their surroundings that is difficult to envisage in the case of urbanised and/or larger-scale populations (but cf. McFarlane 2011). However, the idea that ‘landscape’ should not be understood as a thing independent of people, or even as a thing made by people, but as the outcome of the physical and symbolic implication of people with their surroundings, informs other anthropological approaches of wider applicability. In particular, anthropologists’ comparative perspective and the encounter with non-European cultures leads them to question the very notion of ‘space’ as ethnocentric and to rethink what ‘landscape’ might be in even more radical ways.

Anthropological beginnings: ‘space’

The basis for anthropology’s refusal to take ‘space’ for granted as an objective reality external to humans’ activities and perceptions can be traced back to Durkheim’s seminal discussion of the social origin of the categories of human thought in his Elementary forms of the religious life (1912). In this text Durkheim addressed space as one of the fundamental ‘categories of understanding’, alongside time, number, cause, substance, and personality: these are ‘the solid frames that enclose all thought’ because without them no thought is possible (2001 [1912]: 11). Unlike Kant and other philosophers, however, Durkheim did not consider these categories to be innate, but rather ‘social things’, products of social life, and, in origin, of religious life and thought (2001 [1912]: 11). In the case of space, Durkheim argued that it is only perceptible as such insofar as it is divided and differentiated – into left and right, inside and outside, above and below, and so on: ‘inherently, there is no right or left, above or below, north or south and so on’ (2001 [1912]: 13). These divisions for him arise as people give an ‘affective colour’ to regions, adding that members of the same society hold in common these divisions, implying ‘that they are social in origin’ (2001 [1912]: 13). So the organization of space in each society is modelled on social organization ‘and replicates it’, not vice-versa; spatial divisions like left and right are not innate but originate from social and indeed religious thought. Indeed, for Durkheim the ‘sacred’ at the centre of religious thought is a form of spatial classification, insofar as he defines it as that which is ‘set apart’, separated conceptually but also, often, spatially, from the ‘profane’ (2001 [1912]: 36).

Durkheim’s ideas inspired some classic early studies of socio-spatial organization, such as Mauss’s ‘Essai sur les variations saisonnières des societés Eskimos’ (1904–1905) and, within British social anthropology, Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer (1940). While neither refers to ‘landscape’, both suggest that the way people inhabit their physical surroundings is an important aspect of their society, but not as a determining factor: soil configuration and climate, writes Mauss, do not determine people’s decision to live dispersed or instead in groups: this is determined by social factors such as their technological skills (which control how they exploit natural resources) and their ‘moral, juridical and religious organisation’, which determines whether they can form groups, of what size and so on (Mauss 1983 [1904–1905]: 393, author’s translation). In his study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan, Evans-Pritchard writes about their ‘oecological space’, which he describes as the relationship between the ‘character of the country’ and ‘the biological requirements’ of the members of local groups: e.g. availability of water, the presence or absence of tsetse flies or of rivers and so on make the distance between local groups more or less impassable and so expands or shrinks ‘mere physical distance’ (1969 [1940]: 109). However, Nuer additionally give their spatial distributions ‘certain values which compose their political structure’. In particular Nuer lives are governed by ‘structural distance’, ‘the distance between groups of persons in a social system, expressed in terms of values’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Such values determine more centrally than physical factors the closeness or otherwise of villages from one another: ‘A Nuer village may be equidistant from two other villages, but if one of these belongs to a different tribe and the other to the same tribe it may be said to be structurally more distant from the first than from the second’ (Evans-Pritchard 1969 [1940]: 110). Social and political affiliations override spatial and territorial ones.

Evans-Pritchard’s ethnography of the Nuer is not entirely consistent on this point. For instance in some of his other works, it appears that physical proximity and cohabitation are important bases of social unity and solidarity in this society, so that physical space does matter to the Nuer as they structure their society, and is even constitutive of their ‘kinship’ structure (1950: 364; cf. 1951; cf. Kuper 2005: 205). However, whether or not it corresponds with ethnographic reality (cf. Kuper 1983: 95), the discussion of ‘time and space’ in The Nuer introduces the intriguing idea that anthropologically speaking ‘space’ need not be linked with physical surroundings at all, but could be a dimension of human life and identity defined and charted by values and relations, in this case those associated with kinship (more specifically descent from common ancestors) and political organization. So, in order to describe and analyse the Nuer’s culturally specific conception and perception of their world, Evans-Pritchard formulated a non-literal concept of ‘space’, abstracted from territorial factors and linked instead with personhood, itself an abstract and culturally variable social construct (cf. Carrithers, Collins & Lukes 1985; Mauss 1983 [1938]).

Although Durkheim’s notion of the social origin of knowledge was later criticised (see Bloch 1977), arguably a long-lasting contribution of these early studies for the study of ‘landscape’ is to suggest not only that people interpret physical space in different ways, but also that anthropologists need to problematise the very concept of ‘space’, treating it as a social construct with a culturally variable content. This insight is central to more recent anthropological studies of landscape.

Rethinking ‘landscape’

The division between sacred and profane space (and time) introduced by Durkheim is at the heart of William Christian’s study of a religion in a Spanish valley, published in 1972 (1972: xv). The book focuses on shrines and on the ‘supernatural rationale’ for their location in the landscape, presenting them as ‘control points at which the people attempt to influence the penetration of foreign material into their countryside’ (Christian 1972: xv). Christian inverts the earlier anthropological convention of landscape as an inert backdrop to the people studied by piecing together the social and cultural world of the population of a northern Spanish valley starting from their landscape. In this study, the environmental setting is understood as an integral element of the society, a ground for it in the most profound sense of providing the means of articulating physically, conceptually, and imaginatively the relationships among persons and also, centrally, between ‘person and God’ (referred to in the title of the book), people and the powers that preside over their world, be they ‘sacred’ or ‘profane’.

For instance, in a setting in which people move seasonally between village and uplands, changes of scenery are said to correspond to changing ‘moods’ among the population: in the upper pastures in spring and autumn, the mood is ‘airy, open and honest’ as people, ‘free from the village’, share food and tools, work together, often breaking into song (Christian 1972: 2). Back in the village, especially in winter, when the young are away on seasonal jobs and people live at close quarters, life ‘is more difficult’, the mood is of ‘competition’, ‘there are people with whom, for one reason or another, one does not speak’ (Christian 1972: 3). The landscape also articulates the villagers’ identity and positioning in the wider world. The villagers have a ‘series of identities’ including the house and family, the village and parish, the valley, the region and the nation-state (Christian 1972: 42). These correspond to the ‘matrix of human relations’ on the ground, formed of ‘what brings people together and what marks them off from each other’, visible in how people behave and communicate, name and create physical and symbolic boundaries (Christian 1972: 11).

For Christian, this also, importantly, helps us to understand people’s relations with the divine: the matrix of their relations ‘provides the context into which relations with the divine must fit’ (1972: 11). So, corresponding to the geographical levels of the inhabitants’ life and identity are specific divine figures (saints, or advocations of the Virgin Mary) to whom they pray, ‘implanted’ in the landscape through shrines: to levels of identity, correspond, in a memorable phrase, ‘territories of grace’ (Christian 1972: 44-5). Christian makes clear that, especially in the case of devotions that are unique to this valley and its population (as opposed to the ‘generalised’, national-level devotions) the shrines are one with the landscape: the images and their powers are immovable, people must go to them: the shrines are ‘transaction points in the landscape between the human group, the land, and the powers that influence the success of the group’s enterprises’ (1972: 45). In practice, the saints are approached as ‘patrons’, intermediaries towards God but also more broadly foreign, external powers, ‘above and below’ the here and now of the village, an aspect for Christian alluded to by the location of many shrines at ‘critical points in the ecosystem’ such as mountain peaks, springs, and caves (1972: 181). Also, like living patrons, saints are applied to individually and from different levels of identity, so that the heterogeneity (both physical and spiritual) of the landscape is one with the heterogeneity of local society. Overall, this study resonates with Durkheimian approaches but also, in its attention to the landscape (physical and spiritual) as a principle and means of heterogeneity rather than unity, it anticipates themes found in the ‘anthropology of landscape’ that started in the 1990s (for another, more recent study that directly rethinks space in relation to the Durkheimian ‘sacred/profane’ dichotomy, see Munn 2003).

The anthropology of landscape

In the mid-1990s, two edited collections (Feld & Basso 1996; Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995) and a reader (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003) mark the self-conscious bid to develop a distinctively anthropological approach to landscape. Their central aim is to ‘unpack Western concepts’ of landscape, place, and space (Feld & Basso 1996: 6; cf. Hirsch 1995: 2) and make theoretically visible ‘spatial dimensions of culture’ (Low & Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003: 1). The most concerted (and complex) effort to do this is found in Hirsch and O’Hanlon’s volume in which Hirsch argues that the notion of ‘landscape’ as physical surroundings is culturally specific to the modern West (1995: 5). In order to develop a cross-culturally valid notion, he proposes an ego-centred approach in which ‘landscape’ is not a relationship with physical surroundings, but the relationship between two ‘poles of experience’ through which people negotiate everyday social life and practice (1995: 4-5, 22).

Specifically Hirsch defines ‘landscape’ as the ongoing ‘cultural process’ (1995: 5) by which we mentally and imaginatively locate ourselves in the world, through envisaging a ‘background’ and a ‘foreground’ to our existence at each moment, and their dynamic and changeable interplay. This can be understood spatially: being ‘here’ (at a specific location) is understood and experienced at each moment in relation to one or more ‘there’, which form its horizon in terms of my own experience (e.g. in my daily routine the ‘horizon’ for being ‘here’ at the office is being ‘there’ at home; in terms of my movements this month, the horizon for being ‘here’ in Cambridge is being ‘there’ in Italy and so on). However, for Hirsch moving away from a Western understanding of landscape means that we must take into account that people understand persons and their location in the world in culturally specific ways. This helps us to see that the familiar Western ‘place’ and ‘space’ are culturally specific metaphors for mutually constituted vantage points that do not need to involve land, objectively and physically understood, at all. Instead, cultures have specific ways of envisaging the dialectical tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’, understood as the more and less immediate reaches of human agency and personhood, practice and ideal, everyday experience and the ‘background’ to it. For instance, the ‘distant horizon’ for the here and now, which in Western understanding is objectified as ‘space’ and understood through the text-based metaphor of the ‘map’, can in other cultural settings be objectified and understood as a horizon made, for instance, by the stories, memories, and traces of the activities of ancestors (in Amazonia: Gow 1995; in Australia: Layton 1995; Morphy 1995), or by cosmic non-human energies accessed and harnessed via chiefly or shamanic powers (in Mongolia: Humphrey 1995). This approach also helps to denaturalise and relativise the Western notion of ‘landscape’. This seems literal and culturally unmediated (e.g. as a subject’s view of an object, ‘land’, which is given independently of culture and is immediately available to the senses, particularly sight). However, if we adopt Hirsch’s perspective, we can argue that what we call ‘landscape’ is not so much a thing ‘out there’ as the tension between the here and now of the viewer and ‘imagined worlds of being and potential’: for instance Green’s chapter in the volume by Hirsch and O’Hanlon shows that in nineteenth century France the emergence of the idea of ‘paysage’, identified with the countryside and as a space for ‘nature’, was part of how people rethought their position in society, formed a consciousness of class in an urban and urbanising context (Green 1995).

Gell’s contribution to the same volume introduces another way in which ‘landscape’ can be relativised. In an account of Umeda, Papua New Guinea, Gell argues that the actual physical environment which Umeda inhabit shapes the way in which spatial distance and proximity can be experienced. Umeda live in small clearings in thick forest and this ‘imposes a reorganisation of their sensibility’ (1995: 235), which makes hearing (and smell) a much more reliable means of sensing distance and proximity than sight. For instance, it was said that the first group of Umeda ever to visit the coast could not perceive the sea as a receding space, but instead perceived it as a vertical wall of water (1995: 235). Because of this, for Gell the Umeda landscape is first and foremost a ‘soundscape’ arising from the interplay between ambient sound and the body through different qualities of word-sounds which encode the experiences of ‘ambient sound’ and the body as a ‘sounding cavity’ (1995: 240). This is ‘mapped’, i.e. represented, not through visual means (such as maps or other visual images) but by sound ‘images’, specifically through verbal sounds in the local language that iconically render via the culturally specific connotations of consonant sounds the physical extremes of proximity and distance, of the village clearing, and the encircling forest and mountain escarpments. For instance, the sound ‘s’ found in sis for 'mountain' carries connotations of sharpness, danger, etc., making ‘audible’ the mountain, depicting through sounds the physicality of the sharp, tall ridges that constitute the ‘distant horizon’ of Umeda villages (1995: 242). Gell does not, like Hirsch, relativise ‘landscape’ by abstracting the concept from people’s embodied location in the world: instead, he roots culturally constituted landscape in the interplay between the sensing body and its particular surroundings (1995: 252; cf. also Feld 1996).

The interplay between body and surroundings is also explored in Feld and Basso’s volume (1996), which focuses on the idea of ‘place’ and on how from a subjective point of view, people transform ‘sheer physical terrain’ into an ‘existential space’ through their imagination and memory (Casey 1996: 14). In other words, the sensing, attentive subject and the geographical object come together. This crucially occurs through the body, as the vehicle for what could be termed the thoughtful sensing of the environing world (cf. Ingold 2000). For Basso, in culturally diverse ways people attend to their surroundings and in practice certain locations can trigger strong emotions or thoughts ‘of a richly caring kind’ (Basso 1996: 54). So he argues that the relationship with places, like all relationships, is reciprocal: ‘as places animate the ideas and feelings of persons who attend to them, these same ideas and feelings animate the places on which attention has been bestowed […] when places are actively sensed, the physical landscape becomes wedded to the landscape of the mind’ (1996: 55). Through this, ‘places come to generate their own fields of meaning’ (1996: 56). Basso illustrates this by showing the central role of places in how Western Apache develop ‘wisdom’. Apache define ‘wisdom’ as a heightened mental capacity that enables people to avoid harmful events by detecting hidden threats. It is developed by thinking about stories that instruct about wise and unwise ways of behaving, judging situations, etc. These stories for Apache ‘sit’ in places: that is, they feature and are associated with named places, which people visit bodily or in the mind in order to access and recall the narratives on their way to wisdom (1996: 73). Visiting, observing, and learning the names of places is the means to develop wisdom, so that for Basso the Apache’s ‘interior landscape’ – their sense of self and moral imagination (1996: 86) – is crucially constructed in constant interaction with the exterior one.

‘Landscape’ in a changing world

The case study above takes us back to the idea, introduced in an earlier section, that landscapes can be seen as actors in human individual and social life, directly involved with the making and unmaking of relationships and identities. We can see that not only do people use and interpret their surroundings as part of living and inhabiting, but land and surroundings help us ‘interpret ourselves’, so to speak: they feature in narratives we make about ourselves, help us tell ourselves ‘who’ we are individually or collectively. We can talk about being ‘attached’ emotionally to places and landscapes, but it’s almost more as if they were ‘attached’ to us, ‘ours’. There is a dialectic of recognition between familiar surroundings and those for whom they are familiar – the land comes to ‘resemble’ us as we inhabit it, it becomes charged with value insofar as it embodies an image of ourselves. While this may perhaps seem confined to populations, such as Apache, who live both physically and spiritually ‘close’ to the land, this is not the case:

Now that the heat of battle is extinguished, this chaos of soil and stones under a sky so gloomy seems absurd. Thought no longer finds ar elationship between that, which resembles nothing, and we, who have lived so many things in the course of our lives. (Pézard 1974 [1918], author’s translation).

These words, written by an army officer about the devastation in rural Eastern France during the Great War, show that even in this least ‘traditional’ of contexts, landscape is a ground for meaning and identity, so that its destruction causes shock, disorientation, and profound estrangement. So, too, it is in our industrialised, ‘modern’ societies that ‘place annihilation’ (Hewitt 1983) has become one of the most lethal weapons in contemporary warfare, which since World War I includes among its aims the eradication of whole enemy cultures and ways of life (Kramer 2007). It could also be argued, following Pierre Nora (1989), that catastrophic experiences of rupture and dislocation in modernity make people more, not less conscious of ‘places’ (both physical sites, and sites of the imagination) as repositories for belonging and meaning (cf. Filippucci 2010). This includes the conditions of contemporary modernity in which individual and collective experiences of, and relationships with, space are said to be transformed and unsettled by increasingly powerful technologies of speed, virtual connection, and destruction, leading peoples and identities to be displaced and delocalised or even acquire ‘a slippery, nonlocalized quality’ (Appadurai 1996: 48; cf. Connerton 2009; Gupta & Ferguson 1997; Harvey 1989).

So, in conclusion, the study of ‘landscape’ is shown to be anthropologically fertile, a ground for theoretical innovation, and for disclosing core aspects of the human social and cultural experience in a changing world.

References

Appadurai, A. 1996. Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Basso, K.H. 1996. Wisdom sits in places: notes on a Western Apache landscape. In Senses of place (eds) S. Feld & K.H. Basso, 53-90. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Bender, B. 1993. Landscape: politics and perspectives. Oxford: Berg.

Bloch, M. 1977. The past and the present in the present. Man 12, 278-92.

Buttimer, A. & D. Seamon 1980. The human experience of space and place. London: Croom Helm.

Carrithers, M., S. Collins & S. Lukes 1985. The category of the person: anthropology, philosophy, history. Cambridge: University Press.

Casey, E.S. 1996. How to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological prolegomena. In Senses of place (eds) S. Feld & K.H. Basso, 13-52. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Christian, W.A. 1972. Person and God in a Spanish valley. Princeton: University Press.

Connerton, P. 2009. How modernity forgets. Cambridge: University Press.

Cosgrove, D. 1985. Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10, 45-62.

Daniels, S. & D. Cosgrove 1988. The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments. Cambridge: University Press.

Durkheim, É. 2001 [1912]. The elementary forms of religious life. Oxford: University Press.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1950. Kinship and the local community among the Nuer. In African systems of kinship and marriage (eds) A.R. Radcliffe Brown & D. Forde, 360-91. London: Oxford University Press.

——— 1951. Kinship and marriage among the Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

——— 1969 [1940]. The Nuer: a description of the modes of livelihood and political institutions of a Nilotic people. Oxford: University Press.

Feld, S. 1996. Waterfalls of song: an acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In Senses of place (eds) S. Feld & K.H. Basso, 91-135. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

——— & K.H. Basso 1996. Senses of place. Santa Fe, N.M.: School of American Research Press.

Filippucci, P. 2010. In a ruined country: place and the memory of war destruction in Argonne (France). In Remembering violence: anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission (eds) N. Argenti & K. Schramm, 165-89. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Gell, A. 1995. The language of the forest: landscape and phonological iconism in Umeda. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O'Hanlon, 232-54. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gow, P. 1995. Land, people and paper in Western Amazonia. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O'Hanlon, 43-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Green, N. 1995. Looking at the landscape: class formation and the visual. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 31-42. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Gupta, A. & J. Ferguson 1997. Culture, power and place: explorations in critical anthropology. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Harvey, D. 1989. The conditions of post-modernity: an inquiry into the conditions of social change. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Hauser, K. 2007. Shadow sites: photography, archaeology and the British landscape, 1927–1955. Oxford: University Press.

Hewitt, K. 1983. Place annihilation: area bombing and the fate of urban places. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 73, 257-84.

Hirsch, E. 1995. Landscape: between place and space. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 1-30. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

——— & M. O’Hanlon 1995. Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Humphrey, C. 1995. Chiefly and Shamanist landscapes in Mongolia. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 135-62. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Ingold, T. 1995. Building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world. In Shifting Contexts: transformations in anthropological knowledge (ed.) M. Strathern, 57-80. New York: Routledge.

——— 2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. New York: Routledge.

——— & N. Mazzullo 2008. Being along: place, time and movement among Sami people. In Mobility and place: enacting Northern European peripheries (eds) B. Granås & J.O. Baerenholt, 27-38. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Jarman, N. 1993. Intersecting Belfast. In Landscape: politics and perspectives (ed.) B. Bender, 107-38. Oxford: Berg.

Kramer, A. 2007. Dynamic of destruction: culture and mass killing in the First World War. Oxford: University Press.

Kuper, A. 1983. Anthropology and anthropologists: the modern British School. New York: Routledge.

——— 2005. The reinvention of primitive society: transformations of a myth. New York: Routledge.

Layton, R. 1995. Relating to country in the Western Desert. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 210–31. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Low, S.M. & D. Lawrence-Zuñiga 2003. The anthropology of space and place: locating culture. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mauss, M. 1983 [1904–1905]. Essai sur le variations saisonnières des sociétés Eskimos: Étude de morphologie sociale. In Sociologie et anthropologie, 389-477. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France.

——— 1983 [1938]. Une catégorie de l'esprit humain: la notion de personne et celle de ‘moi’. In Sociologie et anthropologie, 331-62. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France.

McFarlane, C. 2011. The city as assemblage: dwelling and urban space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, 649-71.

Morphy, H. 1995. Landscape and the reproduction of the ancestral past. In Anthropological studies of landscape: perspectives on space and place (eds) E. Hirsch & M. O’Hanlon, 184-209. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Munn, N.D. 2003. Excluded spaces: the figure in the Australian aboriginal landscape. In The anthropology of space and place: locating culture (eds) S.M. Low & D. Lawrence-Zuñiga, 92-109. Oxford: Blackwell.

Nora, P. 1989. Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire. Representations 26, 7-25.

Pézard, A. 1974 [1918]. Nous autres à Vauquois. Aurillac: Imprimerie Moderne.

Tuan, Y.-F. 1977. Space and place: the perspective of experience. London: Edward Arnold.

Weizman, E. 2007. Hollow Land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. London: Verso.

Note on contributor

Dr Paola Filippucci is a Fellow and Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge. She studies war memory and commemoration in Europe, focusing on the First World War and its material legacy on the former Western Front. The impact of armed conflict on landscape is a central theme.

Dr Paola Filippucci, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. pf107@cam.ac.uk

Gambling

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Anthony Pickles

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16gambling

Abstract:

Gambling occurs when a person commits one or more valuable items (a ‘stake’) to an event or series of events packaged together, and where the result determines a loss or win at a rate agreed before the final stake is committed. The practice is or was not present everywhere and is often marginal in a given society, and some gambling variations escape the boundaries of this definition. Some include financial speculation within the phenomenon of gambling, but I do not cover that literature here. Anthropology has made valuable but often overlooked contributions to the study of gambling based on both comparative examples drawn from small-scale societies and marginalised peoples and by engaging critically with the gambling industry and concepts drawn from policy-oriented disciplines such as psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, statistics, and the health sciences. In this entry four pioneering anthropological studies of gambling are summarised and compared. I then review current regional and thematic trends in the anthropology of gambling. Thereafter I review the anthropology of the gambling industry itself and the relationship of both to other disciplinary perspectives on gambling. I delineate some causes for the two-decade-long surge in the anthropology of gambling, and lastly suggest that the field has become rich enough to support new and original syntheses that would significantly enhance ‘gambling studies’.

Introduction

Gambling is not a universal human activity. Betting is restricted to a subsection of any given population, and there are some areas of the world, most notably the Pacific Islands and Inuit communities, where gambling was once unknown. Many intentional communities, religious orders, and nation states ban gambling or discourage it, and most states impose variously effective regulations and prescriptions on the legitimate forms of gambling, the contexts where it is permitted, who may play, the odds that may be offered and the proportion of revenue to be appropriated by states, independent bodies, and charities. The dominant discussions in the study of gambling are therefore who gambles and on what, why they gamble, and why some people (ethnic and/or cultural groups, genders, income brackets, etc.) gamble more frequently and/or with higher stakes. Ancillary debates centre on the relationship between games and gambling, the perceived causes of wins and losses, the correlation of gambling to other activities perceived as ‘risky’, and the role of gambling in redistributing valuables within and across societies. Anthropology has played a key role in moving beyond a problem-oriented approach to gambling by virtue of its attention to the context and symbolism of gambling within cultures. Oftentimes the ethnography itself challenges broadly held assumptions such as the idea that gambling addiction is to be understood as an individual failing, and the notion that humans calculate risk like (not very proficient) economists. As the anthropology of the Global North has matured, and the gambling industry has become more corporate than mob-run, there is now a growing body of literature that tackles gambling ‘at home’ ethnographically. These have generated excellent ethnographic insight into the mutual construction of gamblers as ‘addicted’ or ‘compulsive’.

Pioneering anthropological studies

Studies by three twentieth-century anthropologists loom large over contemporary anthropological studies of gambling. These are Clifford Geertz (1973), James Woodburn (1982), and Gregory Bateson (1973). The first two are primarily ethnographic accounts in which gambling plays an illustrative role in demonstrating and enacting broader social dynamics, while Bateson provides a theoretical framework for the study of play as a field that encompasses gambling. Another, almost completely forgotten antecedent which is of at least equal value, is Alexander Lesser’s pioneering account of Pawnee (Native American) hand games (1969 [1933]).

Geertz analyses cockfighting in Bali and the two forms of gambling that surround it. Once two cocks have been matched as evenly as possible, in the centre a large even bet is assembled by two coalitions built around the two cocks. These people appear subdued. In contrast, small individual bets are then made around the periphery at odds that are shouted boisterously across the arena. Drawing on the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, Geertz argues that the stakes are so high among the central group that the benefit of winning (marginal utility) is less than the cost of losing (marginal disutility), which can be devastating, and that therefore gambling is a display of fixed status performed through a deliberately even playing field that instead of benefitting any one party simply excludes those who lack the wealth to participate. Peripheral, low-status gamblers are the itinerant class. The fixed status of people in Bali is therefore reinforced, and the game plays out their rigid hierarchy as ‘a story they tell themselves about themselves’ (Geerts 1973: 448). The fame of Geertz’s account is such that most later literature cites it simply to refer to the fact that gambling practices can be a microcosm for cultures as a whole, whatever form the later argument takes.

Woodburn is concerned with the maintenance of egalitarian societies in Africa, and how gambling on a low-skill game can have redistributive effects that even out accumulations of wealth. The Hadza are nomadic hunter-gatherers. Woodburn observed that Hadza men spend most of their time in camp gambling with valuables such as metal-headed arrows whose origins are geographically restricted. By tossing bark discs against a tree and reading which way up they fall, men circulate a range of items that are unevenly distributed. By a combination of keeping the items one wins and wants and staking what one doesn’t, and by pressuring winners into playing again until they lose, desirable items slowly become distributed evenly. Woodburn’s research has had a lasting influence on anthropological studies of small-scale societies that gamble; it has become emblematic of gambling as a mechanism for enforcing egalitarianism.

Bateson’s theory is of a different order. From observing monkeys playing, he derives that play is bounded up by ‘metacommunicative’ signals. Each player communicates to other players that what is happening when they play does not have the same consequences that it would were they not playing. Threat is another example of ‘metacommunicative’ action: the person doing the threatening implies that their threat might become reality if the threatened does not comply. For Bateson, gambling is to be understood as a combination of threat and play (1973: 154). The point is unelaborated, but we may take it to mean that when stakes are introduced to forms of play in which there are winners and losers, the imperative to pay up after a loss is backed by an implicit threat of violence. Despite its un-anthropological origins and level of abstraction, Bateson’s theory is often invoked in a manner similar to Geertz’s, to suggest that gambling is a site of special ‘meta-’significance. An advantage of Bateson’s formulation over Woodburn’s and Geertz’s is that it preserves the thrill of the game, which, after all, is why people say they play, and why gambling appears preferable to more sober forms of ritual or redistribution. As a form of play/threat, gambling is set apart from everyday life, thereby introducing a theoretical space in which one can comprehend the excitement of gambling.

Alexander Lesser, a student of Franz Boas, made a truly remarkable (but very much overlooked) longitudinal study of an indigenous gambling game among the Pawnee of the Great Plains (1969 [1933]). Pawnee ‘hand games’ were complicated games of chance revolving around teams of players who hid counters in their hands and actively deceived opponents who tried to guess which hands contained the counters. What sets Lesser’s account apart from the simple descriptions of games that often appear in early anthropology is his attention to the historical transformation, or ‘temporal career’, of this particular cultural trait over forty years (1969 [1933]: 334). Hand games before 1890 were used by Pawnee for recreational gambling, but through a tumultuous period of US domination, the games fell into disuse only to be resuscitated as an integral part of the Pawnee version of the revivalist Ghost Dance religion^[1] that swept through Native American communities in the subsequent years. The hand games were, in the process, transformed from gambling game to ritual performance. Then, when the Ghost Dance religion gave way to Christianity, the hand games became mundane Pawnee equivalents of the domestic card games favoured by whites in the US. Lesser’s book offers the first and still the most comprehensive account of how the games that support gambling shift roles and forms in order to adapt to contemporary concerns.^[2]

Contemporary regional foci

A surge in anthropological accounts of gambling in the last two decades has forged new ground by highlighting the sheer variety of games in their myriad social contexts. Because the field was initially narrow, many anthropologists studying gambling address themselves more to regional cultural concerns than the topic of gambling per se. Inevitably, therefore, the problematics are to some extent a product of the regions where they conduct fieldwork. I have picked three regions as examples: the Mediterranean, East Asia, and Oceania, but what follows is by no means a comprehensive overview.

Mediterranean-based anthropological studies of gambling are few but influential. The main examples stem from Greece (Herzfeld 1991; Malaby 2003; Papataxiarchis 1999), and all situate gambling as a form of valorised resistance. For Herzfeld, aggressive masculinity is demonstrated through nonchalantly submitting one’s wealth to mocking chance at illegal coffeehouse gambling. Players boast of their losses rather than their wins. They walk a knife edge between a devil-may-care attitude towards money and perceived irresponsibility to one’s wife and family. If they lose too badly or too often, men experience a collapse in male status as they are forced to surrender financial power to the woman of the house. Papataxiarchis similarly foregrounds bravado in his description of gambling on the island of Lesbos, but locates it instead in the antagonism between local society and encompassing orders that are embodied in people’s dependence on state-issued currency. Gambling allows for disinterested sharing and the public renunciation of money as a symbol of external state domination. Malaby’s book-length ethnographic monograph on Cretan gambling continues this masculine tenor. He describes the local repertoire of gambling games (backgammon, dice, poker, and lotteries) and the way these games situate gamblers, non-gamblers, and the state in relation to each other, and how gambling allows people to construct the self around a stance to the various manifestations of contingency. A recent contribution by Scott (2013) complicates the issue of valorising resistance through her research on Cyprus, a contested island divided between Greece and Turkey. Scott evaluates the role of casino gambling in Turkish-controlled territory as a space where Greek and Turkish Cypriots construct stereotypes of each other. The stereotypes are literally played out through the kinds of choices each group is thought to make during hands of blackjack in what appears a relational elaboration on the idea of gambling as resistance.

Gambling in Asia is a vast, temporally deep, and socially salient topic. History reveals attempts to ban gambling in China as early as the fourth century B.C., and gambling is mentioned in the Hindu epic Mahabharata. There is some evidence that cards were brought to Europe from China. What comes across from contemporary literature on East Asia is a diverse and thriving gambling scene which I cannot do justice to here, and which requires much more research. East Asia boasts a lively and localised repertoire of card games used for both high and low stakes gambling, together with a range of legal and illegal lotteries and casino and horse race gambling meccas in Hong Kong, Singapore and especially Macau, which has taken over from Las Vegas the designation as the global centre of gambling. Bosco, Liu, and West review the rural and peri-urban phenomenon of an illegal lottery that became wildly popular in China during the late 1990s, and has links to neighbouring Taiwan (2009). Employing accepted social-scientific reasoning, they cast lottery gambling as a form of symbolic resistance to economic paternalism. Again based in rural China, Steinmüller writes against this narrative, claiming that (among other games) zha Jinhua, a game similar to poker, connects to the widespread equation of social exuberance with ‘heat’, foregrounding a mid-level, regional preoccupation with hotness and coolness (2011). By situating his analysis at this scale, Steinmüller gains greater explanatory purchase than an appeal to abstract terms like ‘resistance’ in China, where it seems not to hold anything like the same cultural cachet as in the Mediterranean.

Overseas Chinese communities figure prominently in anthropological accounts of the way gambling contributes to minority communities’ collective self-definition. This is perhaps unsurprising given their fame as gamblers, their role as migrant labourers and traders in various colonial regimes, and the prevalence of Chinatowns in metropolitan centres (Basu 1991; Loussouarn 2010; Papineau 2005). Loussouarn is emblematic of the wider literature in challenging the consensus that because (in her case, Chinese) minorities gamble more they are irrational, instead providing a cultural analysis of peoples who value confrontations with contingency in a context of risky migration choices and minority status.

For all these specifics, Mahjong remains the most famous and probably the most played of East Asian gambling games, both at home and abroad, though it has not received proportional attention (Festa 2006). Four players use a set of 144 tiles and each player attempts to gain a winning set of four melds and a pair. The discourse emerging from China centres on the transition from socialism to capitalism and the transmogrification of traditional attitudes to hospitality and efficacy through gambling practice. The explosion in popularity of the mechanical game pachinko in Japan after the Second World War also cries out for anthropological treatment (Schwartz 2006); superficially the game resembles pinball but with potentially hundreds of balls in play at any one time. The aim is to get as many small metal balls as possible, which may be exchanged for prizes.

To the indigenous peoples of Oceania (including New Zealand and the best part of Australia), gambling was a novel practice; in Australia it arrived 300 years ago, but in parts of Papua New Guinea people learnt of gambling as late as the 1960s. As such, gambling had to be placed within a repertoire of imports such as Christianity, money, wage labour, and a swathe of new technologies and commodities. Initial guiding concerns for anthropologists were the role of gambling in integrating new practices, especially as modes of redistribution, and the association of gambling with young men who were rebelling against patriarchal control (Zimmer 1987). Given the novelty of gambling, the Pacific literature also contains a trove of freshly invented and constantly transforming games and a fresh exploration of gambling’s possibilities (see Laycock 1966; Pickles 2014a). Elsewhere I have described how in Highland Papua New Guinea, the games that were initially introduced bifurcated into two streams of card games, one fast and one slow, and have since been supplemented by slot machines and betting on Australian horse racing at a bookies (Pickles 2013; 2014a). These latter forms of gambling have introduced a ‘house edge’, meaning the house always wins in the long run, a feature that was otherwise absent in games that didn’t have a ‘house’. Given that a proportion of house revenues are given to the state through taxation, it is worth noting that it is only these games that are legal. Recent studies concentrate on the capacity of unseen forces and the gambling games in which they operate as ways in which Pacific people explore a wide range of ideas about efficacy (Mosko 2014; Pickles 2014b). In a context where gifting and demand sharing play a pivotal role in social life, gambling has also served as a means to explore the potential of state-issued currency, another introduction (Pickles forthcoming).

Gamblers playing a card game called bom in Simbu Province, Papua New Guinea

The gambling industry and the wider field

Anthropological studies of the gambling industry represent an area of proven analytic potency and considerable growth. They are not restricted to one region, but they are conceptually united because they deal with: (1) technologies and mathematics that are often very similar or the same; (2) international consortia; (3) shared legal frameworks; and (4) parallel interest from other academic disciplines that can be glossed under ‘gambling studies’.^[3]

As a commercial industry that relies heavily on permissive state regulation, the gambling industry funds a significant amount of social science research, exercising soft power over the theoretical paradigms within which academics operate. Tied as they are to evidence-based policy, the gambling field is consequently dominated by psychology, criminology, sociology, microeconomics, and the health sciences. With some commendable exceptions (Cassidy 2014a; Schüll 2012), anthropological writings and the works they reference sometimes choose to circumvent this literature, pointing out the historically and geographically contingent development of the concepts involved (Hacking 1990; Reith 1999). One of the most valuable attributes of anthropological studies of the gambling industry is the ethnographic necessity for critical engagement with the same concepts that are used by the industry, by related academic fields, and in the lives of gamblers themselves (e.g. ‘leisure’, ‘addiction’, ‘responsible gambling’, ‘problem gambling’, ‘compulsive gambling’, and ‘pathological gambling’).^[4] Critical appraisals of social science approaches to gambling stemming from anthropology and sociology represent a potent counter narrative, but these accounts are rarely taken seriously in the more instrumental, policy-oriented ‘gambling studies’ literature (McGowan 2004).

The most prominent case of socio-cultural anthropology actively resisting industry-promoted concepts and trends is Natasha Dow Schüll’s outstanding Addiction by design (2012), an ethnography of the machine gambling (slot machine) industry in Las Vegas. Schüll uncovers the thin margin between gambling machine and person, riffing on the interstitial space that constitutes them both as models for each other within a machine-formatted head-space that is known as ‘the zone’. Schüll follows the affective link from players to machines and through to the architects of escape, those who make the machines, process the data, and engineer the casino floors. And it is escape that is offered; not something for nothing, but nothing as something. Schüll’s informant-players are beyond the desire for a win; they wish to kindle a space where ‘you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with’ (2012: 2). There is no escape, for addiction and its treatments are shown to be couched in the same language of actuarial self-management as gambling. Schüll refuses to shy away from exposing industry-affiliated research; she reveals the means by which the gambling industry manipulates opportunities for funding so that research is forced to concentrate on individuals’ propensities to addiction and to steer clear of the interplay of machine and person. She argues that the lack of an obvious intra-bodily aspect in this ‘behavioural’ kind of addiction has either led or enabled researchers to put their focus on the biological make-up of individuals, and drawn attention away from the substantive manipulation of people by gambling machines. What results from the analysis is a nuanced theorization of a society-wide cognitive dissonance between self-regulation and addiction.

A flourishing subdiscipline

From sluggish beginnings, the anthropological literature on gambling is surging. Part of this phenomenon must be put down to the expansion and maturation of anthropology as a discipline, but a more important factor is the increasing visibility and public acceptance of gambling within the Global North, where the vast majority of anthropologists receive their training. Set against this background, anthropology’s response to a global gambling phenomenon appears belated, and the centre ground of gambling analysis has been effectively co-opted by problem-oriented disciplines that generate quickly digestible instrumental outcomes. The flourish of anthropological publications in the last two decades has its roots in ethnographic particularism and regional concerns, but the result has been a wealth of cases that, if harnessed, speak to a single identifiable phenomenon. Of this they are on the cusp. It remains to be seen whether anthropologists will be able to make good on their unrivalled breadth of experience and produce the paradigm-changing analyses that are required in order to account for the diversity in gambling practices and perceptions seen across the world.

As things stand, anthropologists tend to produce qualitative analyses centred on the gambling experience and the relationship of gambling to the broader socio-cultural context, emphasising that what we know about gambling is irreducibly tied to how we come to know about it (see Cassidy, Pisac & Loussouarn 2013). These contributions are important but undervalued. Ethnographic particulars have yielded excellent data that has been used to plot the presence of gambling against other social phenomena, the best cross-cultural correlation for gambling being presence of state-issued currency and high levels of inequality (see Binde 2005; Pryor 1977). This data is intriguing, but insufficient. Above all, anthropological studies of gambling have shown that the local meanings, uses, strategies, efficacies, symbolism, and effects of gambling can be so manipulated and transformed as to destabilise consensus on what gambling represents as a sociological phenomenon. What emerges instead is gambling as a space of socio-cultural introspection, an underdetermined ritual which privileges form in order to interrogate possibility. It is above all this insight which must figure in broader syntheses. By beginning from an anthropological perspective, broad statistical correlations offer just the merest (but nevertheless profoundly enticing) glimpse into the real boundaries of cultural difference.

References

Altman, J. 1985. Gambling as a mode of redistributing and accumulating cash among Aborigines: a case study from Arnhem Land. In Gambling in Australia (eds) G. Caldwell, B. Haig, M. Dickerson & L. Sylvan, 50-67. Sydney: Croom Helm.

Basu, E.O. 1991. Profit, loss, and fate: the entrepreneurial ethic and the practice of gambling in an overseas Chinese community. Modern China 17, 227-59.

Bateson, G. 1973. Steps to an ecology of mind: collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology. New York: Paladin Books.

Benjamin, W. 2006. Notes on a theory of gambling. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) J.F. Cosgrave, 211-4. New York: Routledge.

Binde, P. 2005. Gambling across cultures: Mapping worldwide occurrence and learning from ethnographic comparison. International Gambling Studies 5, 1-27.

Bosco, J., L.H-M. Liu & M. West 2009. Underground lotteries in China: the occult economy and capitalist culture. Research in Economic Anthropology 29, 31-62.

Brady, M. 2004. Regulating social problems: The pokies, the Productivity Commission and an Aboriginal community. Discussion paper submitted to the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, National Australian University, Canberra, Australia.

Caillois, R. 1961. Man, play, and games (trans. M. Barash). London: Thames & Hudson.

Cassidy, R. 2002. The sport of kings: kinship, class, and thoroughbred breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: University Press.

———, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn 2013. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Fair game? Producing and publishing gambling research. International Gambling Studies 14, 345-53.

——— 2014b. Afterword: Manufacturing gambling. Oceania 84, 306-14.

Dostoyevsky, F. 1996 [1866]. The gambler (trans. C.J. Hogarth). New York: Dover Thrift.

Festa, P.E. 2006. Mahjong politics in contemporary China: civility, Chineseness, and mass culture. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 14, 7-35.

Gariban, G., S.F. Kingma & N. Zhorowska 2014. Never a dull day: exploring the material organization of virtual gambling. Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 107-21. London: Routledge.

Geertz, C. 1973. The interpretation of cultures: selected essays. New York: Basic Books.

Goffman, E. 2006 [1969]. Where the action is. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) A.F. Collins, 225-54. New York: Routledge.

Goodale, J.C. 1987. Gambling is hard work: card playing in Tiwi society. Oceania 58, 6-21.

Hacking, I. 1990. The taming of chance. Cambridge: University Press.

Herzfeld, M. 1991. A place in history: social and monumental time in a Cretan town. Princeton: University Press.

Huizinga, J. 1970 [1949]. Homo ludens: a study of the play-element in culture. London: Paladin.

Laycock, D.C. 1966. Three native card games of New Guinea and their European ancestors. Oceania 37, 49-53.

Lesser, A. 1969 [1933]. The Pawnee ghost dance hand game: ghost dance revival and ethnic identity. New York: AMS Press.

Loussouarn, C. 2010. ‘Buying moments of happiness’: luck, time and agency among Chinese casino players in London. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Social Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Malaby, T.M. 2003. Gambling life: dealing in contingency in a Greek city. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

McGowan, V. (ed.) 2004. How do we know what we know: epistemic tensions in social and cultural research on gambling, 1980–2000. Journal of Gambling Issues 11.

Mosko, M.S. 2014. Cards on Kiriwina: magic, cosmology, and the ‘divine dividual’ in Trobriand gambling. Oceania 84, 239-55.

Papataxiarchis, E. 1999. A contest with money: gambling and the politics of disinterested sociality in Aegean Greece. In Lilies of the field: marginal people who live for the moment (eds) S. Day, E. Papataxiarchis & M. Stewart, 158-75. Boulder, Colo.: Westview.

Papineau, E. 2005. Pathological gambling in Montreal’s Chinese community: an anthropological perspective. Journal of Gambling Studies 21, 157-78.

Pickles, A.J. 2013. ‘One-man one-man’: how slot-machines facilitate Papua New Guineans' shifting relations to each other. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 171-84. London: Routledge.

——— 2014a. Introduction: gambling as analytic in Melanesia. Oceania 84, 207-21.

——— 2014b. ‘Bom bombed Kwin’: how two card games model kula, moka, and Goroka. Oceania 84, 272-88.

——— forthcoming. The other face of money: gambling, transfers and the economic frontier, Papua New Guinea. Unpublished book manuscript.

Pina-Cabral, J. de 2002. Between China and Europe: person, culture, and emotion in Macao. Oxford: Berg.

Pisac, A. 2013. Croupiers’ sleight of mind. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 59-73. London: Routledge.

Pryor, F.L. 1977. The origins of the economy: a comparative study of distribution in primitive and peasant economies. New York: Academic Press.

Reith, G. 1999. The age of chance: gambling and western culture. New York: Routledge.

Rizzo, J. 2004. Compulsive gambling, diagrammatic reasoning, and spacing out. Public Culture 16, 265-88.

Sallaz, J. 2009. The labor of luck: casino capitalism in the United States and South Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Schüll, N.D. 2012. Addiction by design: machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: University Press.

Schwartz, D.G. 2006. Roll the bones: the history of gambling. New York: Gotham Books.

Scott, J. 2013. ‘Playing properly’: casinos, blackjack and cultural intimacy. In Qualitative research in gambling: exploring the production and consumption of risk (eds) R. Cassidy, A. Pisac & C. Loussouarn, 125-39. London: Routledge.

Simmel, G. 2006 [1911]. The adventurer: 1911. In The sociology of risk and gambling reader (ed.) J.F. Cosgrave, 215-42. New York: Routledge.

Steinmüller, H. 2011. The moving boundaries of social heat: gambling in rural China. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17, 263-80.

Veblen, T. 2007. The theory of the leisure class. Oxford: University Press.

Woodburn, J. 1982. Egalitarian societies. Man 17, 431-51.

Van Wyk, I. 2012. ‘Tata ma chance’: on contingency and the lottery in post-apartheid South Africa. Africa 82, 41-68.

Zimmer, L.J. 1987. Gambling with cards in Melanesia and Australia: an introduction. Oceania 58, 1-5.

Note on contributor

Anthony J. Pickles is a social anthropologist and Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His forthcoming monograph is entitled The other face of money: gambling in Papua New Guinea. Other publications include a special issue of Oceania on gambling in Melanesia (2014).

Dr Anthony J. Pickles, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. ajp225@cam.ac.uk

[1] In dire times, the Ghost Dance movement synthesised new religious strictures with existing beliefs and above all emphasised the power of formal dances (long considered socially efficacious) to bring about a utopic transformation of Native American circumstances, generating prosperity and unity across Native American communities and release from colonial oppression.

[2] Other important influences include the following: anthropologists were late on the scene when it came to gambling, and often therefore trace their intellectual heritage from the philosophers Walter Benjamin (2006), Johan Huizinga (1970 [1949]) and Georg Simmel (2006 [1911]), the works of sociologists and cultural theorists such as Thorstein Veblen (2007) and Roger Caillois (1961), as well as Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The gambler (1996 [1866]). With the exception of Roger Caillois, these thinkers were concerned with the development of European and American gambling under the capitalist system or the proclivities towards gambling of a universal human subject modelled on European cosmologies. They therefore figure more prominently in anthropological studies of gambling in the context of capitalism and in the Global North.

The sociologist Erving Goffman is that discipline’s first point of reference on gambling, and his influence has been important to anthropology as well (2006 [1969]). Based on research in the US, he generalises about gamblers everywhere. Goffman begins by distinguishing between the objective mathematical risk of a given bet and the subjective risk experienced by players, and as a sociologist he is primarily concerned with the latter. Unlike anthropological accounts of gambling, which would by and large dismiss the relevance of statistical risk at this point, Goffman retains this mathematical framing for the problem of subjectively understood risk. His primary insight stems from this combination of statistical probability and perception. For Goffman, the ‘expected utility’ of a pot (i.e. the usefulness accorded to the money one might win by a player weighted by the probability of their winning it) is shot through with other subjective factors. These include the excitement of gambling and the ability of a pot to make a consequential difference to the player’s life after the game is concluded. Goffman defines the thrill of risk as ‘action’, and describes sociological reasons why people are attracted to ‘action’ in whatever form it can be found. The approach is a natural ally to Bateson’s in that the thrill of gambling is seen as a necessary, nigh fundamental part of the analysis of gambling.

Roger Caillois was an anthropologically informed French intellectual and critic, and a colleague of Marcel Mauss. Unlike Goffman, who begins with the assumption of conceptual hegemony during cognitive processes that are on the surface perceived differently by different actors, Caillois takes human diversity and divergent cultural history as the starting point for the development of approaches to games. His open-ended approach in making a global typology of games in Man, play, and games (1961) is in some respects still innovative today. For Caillois, all human play begins with paidia, which he defined as ‘spontaneous manifestations of the play instinct’ (1961: 28), from the Greek, but this is the extent of human similitude. Paidia is disciplined to various extents by a concept from Latin, ludus, the ‘pleasure experienced in solving a problem arbitrarily designed’ (Caillois 1961: 29). The resultant game takes a form that lies within a matrix of four tropes: directed contest, chance, mimesis, and disorientation. Caillois was also at pains to point out that ludus is not the only conceivable metamorphosis of paidia into social forms of prescription, and he takes the closest Chinese-language equivalent to paidia, wan, as his example. Wan is ‘oriented not toward process, calculation, or triumph over difficulties [as ludus is] but toward calm, patience, and idle speculation’ (1961: 33). For Caillois this was evidence of how China wisely worked out a contrasting philosophical destiny for itself, and that cultures’ destinies could be read from their games. Though dated, Man, play, and games remains the most ambitious attempt yet to model games across all cultures.

[3] Quantitative and instrumental accounts of gambling have a functional policy role backed by state and industry funding in wealthy nations of the Global North. It has been left largely to anthropologists to study small-scale societies’ gambling practices within their own social contexts, as well as gambling in nations which do not have the financial resources to support their own research. There are three notable points of intersection between these poles, the first being the wholesale adoption of gambling policy designed in the Global North by nations in the Global South (Cassidy 2014b). These are often driven by commercial interests and good-governance drives, and are a field ripe for anthropological study. The second is the development of gambling enclaves that attempt to entice gamblers from wealthy states to spend money offshore (Pina-Cabral 2002). Thirdly, the study of minority communities in settler states (particularly in the United States and Australia) are often tackled using quantitative and instrumental techniques, but have also been the subject of anthropological analyses (Altman 1985; Goodale 1987), and the results often represent stark and problematic contrasts (e.g. Brady 2004).

[4] Exemplars of such studies include horse racing in the UK (Cassidy 2002), croupiers in a Slovenian casino (Pisac 2013), casino gambling in the United States and South Africa (Rizzo 2004; Sallaz 2009), and participation in the South African lottery (Van Wyk 2012). The emerging field of online gambling is as yet somewhat of a blind spot (but see Gariban, Kingma & Zhorowska 2013).