Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Cultural Relativism

Queer anthropology

Felix Stein — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 17:09:29 +0000

Duke University

Initially published 31 Jul 2019

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.

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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.

Ethnography

Felix Stein — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:05:31 +0000

Signe Howell

University of Oslo

Initially published 18 Feb 2018

http://doi.org/10.29164/18ethno

Abstract:

Ethnographic fieldwork, carried out according to the method of long-term participant-observation, is what defines social anthropology. The method is inductive and open-ended. As such, the method directs the anthropologist to study that which is of significance to the community studied rather than test a number of hypotheses formulated in advance of the fieldwork. Anthropology is a comparative discipline, seeking to unravel the complexity and variety of human understanding and human social and cultural life. For this reason, anthropologists have sought out societies that seemed to be very different from their own and, during the first half of the twentieth century, most went to undertake their fieldwork in small - often minority - communities in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. While this is still the case to a large extent, today many anthropologists have directed their ethnographic gaze toward communities closer to home. Thus the method of participant-observation is found to be useful by those who, for example, study life in a large bank, or the gay community in an American urban setting, as much as in a settlement in the Malaysian rain forest. The method is based on the paradoxical activity of participating fully in peoples’ lives, while simultaneously observing it from a distance. To base one’s study on the ‘native’s point of view’, and to disentangle what really goes on rather than what people say goes on, is one central advantage of the method. This forces the researcher to allow herself to be open to the unexpected event or utterance. The ethnographer always engages with contemporary anthropological theory in her interpretations. Ethnographic fieldwork is thus performed in active relationship with anthropological theory.

Introduction: ethnography and anthropology

Ethnographic fieldwork is the method that defines social anthropology. The key word here is fieldwork. Anthropology is an academic discipline that constructs its intellectual imaginings upon empirical-based knowledge about human worlds. Ethnography is the practice developed in order to bring about that knowledge according to certain methodological principles, the most important of which is participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork. Current understandings of both anthropology and ethnography are the result of years of debate and practice. While anthropologists are endlessly debating the premises for their understanding of different societies, they mostly agree that anthropology has nothing to offer the world without ethnographic fieldwork. At the same time, ethnography is just an empty practice without a concern for the disciplinary debates in anthropology departments and publications. It is therefore wrong to separate them; they are part and parcel of each other. Anthropology and ethnography are so intertwined that together they have become a basic premise for the anthropological epistemology.^[1] This is how anthropologists understand the world. This is the premise for how they perform their fieldwork – wherever that may be – and this is the basis for their writings.

The following is a useful definition of ethnography: ‘the recording and analysis of a culture or society, usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, place or institution’ (Simpson & Coleman 2017). Having said that, the empirical focus for ethnographic research is in flux. For example, in recent years, some anthropologists have moved away from face-to-face participant observation to studying alternative constructions of cultural life, such as emergent online virtual worlds (e.g. Boellstorff 2012). Ethnography is today used for both the actual fieldwork during which the anthropologist collects material, and the subsequent text – an ethnography. Here, ethnography will be used in the former sense, and this entry will seek to unravel the complexities that are hidden in the seemingly simple definition.

Participant-observation

The ethnographic method is called participant-observation. It is undertaken as open-ended inductive long-term living with and among the people to be studied, the sole purpose of which is to achieve an understanding of local knowledge, values, and practices ‘from the “native’s point of view”’.^[2] The task of the ethnographer is to contextualise insight of local values and practices within wider local significations, and to render them probable; to show how theirs is a meaningful alternative as a way of life. That is the be-all and end-all of anthropology and, as such, central to disciplinary identity.

Regardless of where the fieldwork is undertaken, the ethnographer must first have obtained a thorough grounding in the basic principles of the discipline of anthropology. The main overarching issues to keep in mind are: what are the persistent questions – the essential perplexities (Needham 1978) – about human life to be investigated and how are these handled in each case? Which are the central theoretical concepts to be addressed? What are the ‘gate-post’ issues from a particular region – those that previous ethnographers have identified as significant there and that need to be addressed? Through addressing these issues, the anthropologist hopes to contribute to fundamental intellectual quandaries about the nature of social institutions and social life.

The choice of where to go is often dictated by two considerations: a place that the anthropologist thinks would be congenial to her taste, perhaps a place she has heard of or read about and which appealed to her imagination and sense of adventure; and a place that she thinks might help her to answer some theoretical issues that, through readings and lectures, have aroused her intellectual curiosity. Together these two concerns add up to a general desire to explore the unknown^[3]: whether geographically, socially, culturally, or intellectually. Through rigorous and persistent study of the various institutions, ideas, and practices that are encountered, an anthropologist seeks to provide an ethnographic study of the community that is informed and anthropologically relevant. However, increasingly anthropologists are eager to investigate places or people closer to their own experience. The so-called ‘anthropology at home’ trend has shown that a place for investigation may nevertheless be as unfamiliar as life in distant places. A pioneering work, and subsequent classic, was the study of young Italian men in a poor part of Boston carried out by the Harvard academic W.F. Whyte (1943). This has been followed by studies on a wide variety of local institutions and social groups in the anthropologist’s own country (see endnote v). It is particularly common for anthropologists from the Global South to undertake their ethnographic research in their own country.

Anthropologists insist that what they do, and that which distinguishes their research from that of other academic disciplines, is participant–observation. At first glance that seems straightforward. The anthropologist goes to the selected group of people that she wants to study and settles down in their midst. She seeks to participate in daily and ceremonial life, preferably as a contributor as she becomes affiliated to a household or some other local group, and all the while she will observe, ask questions, and take notes. She may also use a number of other methods, such as formal and informal interviews, focus groups, and use audio/visual recordings. However, while such methods are shared by other disciplines, anthropologists argue that they gain a different and more holistic and profound understanding when they engage in a participant-observation regime. An ethnographic study seeks to come to grips with the complex socio-cultural institutions and practices that are more or less taken for granted by the people themselves. Through a holistic investigation in which patterns of behavior, utterances, and actions are contextualised and placed in relation to each other, a world view^[4] may be detected: ideas about human nature, gender, family, economy, politics and religion become discernible.

What those who undertake some form of ‘qualitative research’ often fail to appreciate, is that what people say they do is often very different from what they actually do. Such paradoxes become apparent only through long-term fieldwork. The anthropologist’s antennas must be at work all the time in order to pick up the unstated and the taken-for-granted, as well as tensions and conflicts, all of which must be brought to bear on the analysis of the bigger whole.

Only through familiarity with local values and practices will the magic of serendipity come into play. Serendipity, in contrast to what many believe, is not just a chance event. It is the ability to make discoveries, by accidents and wisdom, of things which one was not in quest of.^[5] Wisdom required for serendipitous discoveries is obtained through the day-to-day participant observation that develops a particular way of being and seeing – a way that springs out of anthropological concerns.

Participant-observation is far from a straightforward or generally agreed upon project. But every anthropologist, whether a graduate student or professor, writes in their research proposal that participant-observation will be the major method to be pursued. Participant-observation is not a clearly defined practice. It is better regarded as a methodological ‘onion,’ with no firm centre. The method is based on the paradox of participating fully in peoples’ lives, while simultaneously observing them from a distance. Nevertheless, it is the method that identifies the discipline. Full participation may be a fantasy. Nevertheless, most anthropologists would agree that it is an ambition which is central to the future identity of the discipline. Regardless of whether the fieldwork is in an Indonesian village or a large company in a European city, that is what anthropologists strive to achieve. According to the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, participant-observation can never become more than a fiction, or an illusion (1968: 154). However close one gets to the people one studies, the anthropologist and the people know that she is not a real member of the group and that she will leave after one or two years; that her world is very different from theirs. But it is an illusion that is necessary in order to achieve the insights that are sought. It is only through this that ‘thick description’ becomes possible. That is why language is important; anthropologists try not to work with interpreters.

One often hears that ‘the alien gaze’ is a necessary component of ethnographic fieldwork because it is difficult to identify the significance of one’s own practices. It is noticing the unfamiliar and the unexpected, however mundane, that sharpens the attention and renders everything to be of potential interest. This is one reason for undertaking fieldwork outside one’s own socio-cultural domain. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that participant-observations presuppose a central premise, namely that any ethnographic experience must be preceded by an examination of ones’ own ‘pre-understanding’ – to be reflexive about the understanding that is brought from home. To cultivate a reflexive alien gaze is particularly important when undertaking one’s ethnographic research close to ‘home’. Many will argue that such research is best carried out after having had the experience of fieldwork elsewhere – this was my experience^[6] – while others claim that a conceptual boundary between home and away is artificial.

A brief history of ethnographic research in anthropology

Although anthropology can be said to have started as a distinct academic discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, ethnographic fieldwork was not a necessary part of it. Rather, in Britain a group of men subsequently termed ‘armchair anthropologists’ laid the groundwork for the comparative study of human society and culture. That was a time when intellectual life was heavily influenced by the theories of evolution developed by Charles Darwin (1970 [1859]). Herbert Spencer, Sir Edward B. Tylor, and Sir James Frazer were the most prominent contributors to the debate. Their research was undertaken in their offices in British universities - not out in the bush - where they developed their theories of the evolution of culture. They based their analyses upon the many texts that were available on life in ‘primitive, uncivilized and undeveloped’ parts of the world, from material collected by missionaries, traders, scientists, and travelers. Although in many cases these provided well-observed details about local practices and ideas, they were, nevertheless, randomly collected from a biased western, Christian position without a theoretical model beyond the evolutionary one. The evolutionary school of thought maintained that humans had gone through a number of stages in order to achieve the assumed pinnacle of their own time. Religion, kinship, and marriage practices as well as technology were the chief criteria for allocating a particular social group a place on the evolutionary ladder. Both Tylor’s Primitive culture (1871) and Frazer’s The golden bough (1890) became bestsellers and were printed in many editions. It was not until the arrival on the British anthropological scene of the Polish intellectual Bronislaw Malinowski (see below) at the end of World War I, whose path-breaking studies of the Trobriand Islanders were based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, that participant-observation became integral to the discipline of social anthropology.

A similar situation pertained in France where the sociologist Émile Durkheim established his influential group of armchair anthropologist-philosophers called the Année Sociologique. Again, ‘savage and exotic’ beliefs and practices were the focus for their studies, but they were analyzed in sociological terms, unlike the British and Americans (see below) who tended to look to the individual actor. The British and the French armchair anthropologists were extremely well-read about ‘primitive’ customs and beliefs, but they had never visited, let alone lived in, one of the ‘exotic’ social groups that they claimed to study. The situation in the United States developed in a somewhat different fashion. The lawyer-ethnographer L.H. Morgan took a serious interest in the Iroquois people who lived close to him in Rochester, New York. He visited them over a long period of time – from the 1850s until his death in 1881 – and learned to speak their language. Morgan undertook a systematic study of their kinship system. His discovery, that patterns of kinship terminology in other, even unrelated, American Indian cultures were very similar to those of the Iroquois, launched a systematic survey of kinship nomenclature that provided a template for modern studies of kinship in anthropology. His major work, Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family (1871) was widely read and highly influential; amongst its readers were Marx and also Engels, whose work, The origins of the family, private property and the state (1902 [1884]) drew directly upon Morgan’s work. However, American anthropology got a powerful kick in a new direction – a direction in which ethnographic fieldwork became an essential part – when the German anthropologist Franz Boas established an anthropology department at Columbia University in New York in 1899. Boas argued that in-depth long-term field research was essential for an understanding of alien cultures and went to study the Kwakiutl society on the Pacific Northwest coast (1966) over a period of more than twenty years during the first part of the twentieth century. Boas trained a number of talented students, all of whom undertook their own field studies – mainly of various American Indian groups. Perhaps the most famous of his students was Margaret Mead, whose ethnography based on participant-observation study of teenage girls on Samoa (1928) created a lot of attention and debate in America.

Boas and his students were firm cultural relativists. That is, they argued that each culture should be studied according to its own beliefs and values, that there is nothing essentially human that transcends culture. This gave rise to the so-called nature or nurture debate that, in some form or other, is still with us today. Today, however, the extreme form of cultural relativism is contested, not least through the experience of ethnographic fieldwork that refutes the notion of many humanities. Anthropologists argue for a psychic and cognitive unity of mankind. The job of the anthropologist is to demonstrate the many ways that humans imaginatively create socio-cultural worlds.

Malinowski and the birth of British social anthropology

In Britain, anthropology developed in a somewhat different direction following the groundbreaking ethnographic studies written by the Polish intellectual Bronislaw Malinowski, who went to the Trobriand Island off Papua New Guinea in 1918. Malinowski subsequently became a professor of social anthropology at the London School of Economics where he inspired a number of students, many of whom became central figures in the anthropology departments in British universities. Malinowski argued strongly for fieldwork and he did so from a clearly-argued theoretical position.

His chapter on methods in the book The Argonauts of Western Pacific became the ‘bible’ for British ethnographers/anthropologists of his own and subsequent generations:

The field ethnographer has seriously and soberly to cover the full extent of the phenomena in each aspect of tribal culture studied, making no difference between what is commonplace, or drab, or ordinary and what strikes him as astonishing and out-of-the way (1922: 11).

And, according to Malinowski, the final goal is ‘to grasp the native’s point of view, his relations to life, to realise his vision of his world’ (1922: 25, original emphasis). The principles that Malinowski identified apply today as much as then. They apply not just to those undertaking ‘exotic’ fieldwork in small communities far away, but equally to those studying groups or institutions in their own country. As noted above, in order to perform good ethnographic fieldwork in ‘modern’ settings, it can be an advantage to have undertaken fieldwork in an alien small-scale society first (see endnote v). Either way, fieldwork is informed throughout by anthropological concerns. Ethnographic fieldwork used to be more open-ended than it is today, when increasingly anthropologists go to the field with a particular research question in mind. This may be due to difficulties in obtaining funding and high university fees, as well as a trend towards more policy-oriented research, often as part of a multi-disciplinary research group. However, the ideals of the participant-observation method guide all interaction in the field, and ethnographic field research continues to be inductive.

American cultural anthropology focused on identifying cultural values and ethos embedded in individual actors, and their field-research revealed much about religious understandings, mythology, and notions of personhood. British, French, and Scandinavian social anthropology was preoccupied with social structure and institutions. Ethnographers from these countries sought to map this primarily through the study of kinship systems. While American anthropologists were largely studying American Indians in their own country and in Central America, European anthropologists went to Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. The British and French tended to undertake their field research in their own colonies, and continued to go to the same countries after they became independent. Ethnographic fieldwork demonstrated beyond doubt that there was no basis for maintaining the evolutionary model of human mentality. Formally speaking, a psychic and cognitive unity of mankind was accepted and the scientific interest lay in exploring the variations of socio-cultural modes that human imagination gave rise to.

Representation and the Writing culture debates

Fieldwork has been debated over and over. Anthropologists have always engaged in soul-searching regarding their disciplinary practices. Debates about methods, the status of findings, and the profoundly personal and idiosyncratic nature of fieldwork have all been hotly discussed – in and out of print – since the famous London School of Economics seminars under Malinowski. However, in this anthropologists may be their own worst enemies. Indeed, they could be in danger of debating away ethnographic fieldwork as they did culture through the ‘writing culture’ debate at the end of the twentieth century, leaving the ground open for other disciplines to claim it for their own. The effect of the Writing culture critics (Marcus & Fisher 1986) rendered fieldwork, especially in ‘exotic’ places in the South, politically incorrect in many university departments. The thrust of this postmodernist critique was directed at the kind of texts that had resulted from ethnographic fieldwork. These were, it was argued, pretending to provide an objective picture of the communities studied, on par with scientific research, whereas fieldwork is highly personal and idiosyncratic and findings are coloured by the training and personality of the anthropologist. Furthermore, anthropology was claimed to be an extension of colonial practice. Not only was there a concern that comparison simply extends the colonial gaze, but also it became politically problematic and morally unacceptable to study supposedly powerless small communities in former colonial domains, to make them, the argument went, into the reified ‘Other’ (e.g. Dresch 1992). As a result of these two aspects of the critique, many chose instead to do historical archival studies or studies ‘at home’ or so-called ‘dialogical studies’ (Borneman & Hammoudi 2009). However, many were critical of Writing culture’s assertions. Questioning who had replaced the ‘other’ as a result of this critique, Robbins suggested that the ‘suffering other’ at home had become the legitimate subject for anthropological ethnographic investigation (Robbins 2013). He further considers ‘how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology without taking on its weaknesses (Robbins 2013: 447). Many would agree and argue that for this to be achieved, the comparative ambition of anthropology must be cherished.

Two more points are worth making in regard to the postmodern critique of ethnographic practice in the South. First, most who have carried out fieldwork in rural areas of Asia, Africa, or Latin America do not agree that they ‘study down’ in any post-colonial sense. As they settle in unfamiliar and often uncomfortable circumstances, the relationship may be an unequal power relationship, but not in the sense the critics argued. More often anthropologists are at the mercy of the communities they study, struggling to gain acceptance, coping with unfamiliar language and trying to understand what goes on around them. They are rarely in a position to influence anything, even should they wish to do so. At the same time, as the people studied become literate and highly educated, they increasingly become active partners in the anthropological enterprise, thereby enhancing the understanding and knowledge of the field-worker and, simultaneously, giving themselves a new window through which they can view their own society in a changing world.

To many inside and outside anthropology, policy-oriented research may today seem more ideologically correct, more useful and relevant in a rapidly changing world, than simply setting off for the Highlands of New Guinea. However, it is worth bearing in mind that much innovative theoretical insight of general import was gained from the early studies of small-scale societies in the Pacific, Amazonia, and Africa, and that these have shaped the anthropology of development and applied anthropology as much as they have academic anthropology. In recent years, equally high-quality ethnographic fieldwork continues to be undertaken in New Guinea and Oceania, not least inspired by the work of Marilyn Strathern (1989), as well as in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which has impacted contemporary theory. Gender studies have been revitalised, a new-found interest in indigenous ontologies and concepts of personhood has inspired much exciting theorising, and novel interpretations of exchange and classification owe their sources to both old and new ethnographic fieldwork from these places.

Not everybody goes to the jungles of South America or Southeast Asia, the villages of sub-Saharan Africa, India or the Middle East, the islands of the Pacific or far-flung Arctic settlements. Some go to urban areas on the same continents, others find places or topics in the Global North. However, regardless of where or what, most would argue that they perform a micro-study of some kind and that the same methodological criteria are adhered to. Many are part of a large, multidisciplinary team where the anthropological contribution is highly valued, while others carve out their own micro-field in a globalised world.

While the cutting edge in the discipline may be the most recent theoretical concepts, they often soon lose their attraction, whereas the old anthropological texts based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork rarely lose their salience. Ethnographic texts from two or three generations ago do not become outdated in the same way as fanciful theoretical treatises. While many may disagree with the early interpretations, they value and draw on the empirical observations of what may no longer be observed. Anthropologists return to them in seeking to enhance the understanding of their own material. Malinowski’s studies from the Trobriand Islands is a prime example. Among the many others, one finds Schapera’s work on the Khoisan people of South Africa (1935), Audrey Richards illuminating study on Bemba (Zambia) girls’ initiation rites (1956), and Boas’ work on the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest coast (1966). These, like all good ethnographies, are scrupulous in their attention to detail.

Multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork

In recent years two new approaches have appeared in anthropological methodology: multi-sited and multi-temporal fieldwork. Both are advocated as a means towards a fuller and more complex understanding. Multi-sited ethnography (Marcus 1995) is a method of data collection where the ethnographer, rather than staying in the same community over time, follows a group, a material object, a particular topic, or social issue through different field sites geographically and/or socially. Multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork arose as a response to new topics for anthropological investigation, such as the study of reproduction and reproductive technologies, new modes of electronic communication such as internet and mobile telephones, transnational adoption, and local mobility and migration.

Multi-temporal fieldwork (Howell & Talle 2012) involves a continued relationship with the site of one’s original fieldwork. The anthropologist returns again and again at relatively frequent intervals, thus deepening the relationship with the people and widening the scope of anthropological practice in subtle ways. The British anthropologist Raymond Firth, famous for his studies of the Polynesian Tikopia community, made the point that there are two kinds of re-study: the dual-synchronic – a comparison of then and now after number of years, and the diachronic study – a continuous study of people and events over time (Firth 1959). Today, the latter is the more common, due largely to the ease of modern means of travel. Multi-temporal fieldwork enables the ethnographer to follow the community through times of change, and to record their reactions to outside influences – economic, technological, and social – that challenge old values and practices.

With the rapid spread of mobile telephones and internet, communication may be maintained with many field sites after the ethnographer has returned home. This renders ethnographic research more dynamic than was previously possible.

Ethnography and fieldwork in other disciplines

It is first and foremost the fieldwork method of participant-observation and the kinds of anthropological questions, debates, and analyses that spring out of it as these are embedded in an holistic analysis – questions about social production, and the cultural meaning of, for example: kinship, sociality, labour, money, exchange, social stratification, conflict, authority, gender etc. – that gives anthropology its special identity and that which distinguishes it from the other social sciences.

Due to a decrease in funding and pressure on publishing, PhD students as well as academic staff are having to change their research practice. A shorter period of fieldwork is becoming common and more topic-focused research questions are increasingly demanded. This raises the question of what insights anthropologists can provide that a clever investigative journalist cannot, or someone from Cultural Studies armed with an exciting theoretical concept (Howell 1997). Anthropologists will still claim that only the very nature of their ethnographic method of long-term participant observation can provide a unique contribution to knowledge about other life-worlds.

Recently, a number of other disciplines have taken to use ‘ethnography’ or ‘ethnographic fieldwork’ in the methods section of their books, papers, and research applications. Most anthropologists would be very skeptical of the kind of methodology that is proposed under that rubric. ‘Qualitative research’ is not the same as ethnography. Open-ended interviews and focus groups do not replace the insights obtained from twenty-four hour / twenty months of informed ‘hanging around’. This challenges anthropologists to make clear what they mean by ethnographic fieldwork and what is so special about it. It is important to clarify this for the future of the discipline; otherwise, ‘…our protest will be of no avail unless we can explain what we mean by ethnography in terms of what is cogent and intellectually defensible’ (Ingold 2016). If anyone may ‘do’ anthropology, or ethnography, then what is so special about our contribution? Marilyn Strathern is reported to have said that anthropologists study social relationships by making social relationships. Perhaps that is the answer?

In his response to criticisms from the Writing culture debate, Spencer wrote, ‘Anthropologists…[do not just write, they] wade into paddy fields, get sick and read bad novels rather than confront another day of mounting misapprehensions; they also take photographs, make films and tape recordings […] the fact that they mainly do it by themselves in strange places is another oddity…’(Spencer 1989: 160). The main point is that not only do anthropologists undertake long-term deep immersion fieldwork regardless of the geographical location of their ‘field’, but they insist that ethnography and anthropology are two sides of the same coin. Others seem not to appreciate the epistemological consequences from such a unity. In his epilogue, ‘Notes on the future of anthropology’, to the volume of the same title edited by Ahmed and Shore (1995), the sociologist Anthony Giddens argues that anthropology has nothing unique to offer, that with the ‘disappearance of the exotic’ and the fall of colonialism, the distinctiveness of anthropology is under threat. He goes on to state that:

[a] discipline which deals with an evaporating subject matter, staking claim to a method which it shares with the rest of the social sciences anyway, and deficient in theoretical traditions […] does not exactly add up to defensible identity of anthropology today (Giddens 1995: 274).

The continued practice of participant-observation ethnography and the resulting theoretical development of the discipline of anthropology since that time clearly refute Giddens’ claim. Further, to assert as Giddens did, that there are no more ‘exotic’ places to study, is equally uninformed. Anyone who has travelled in Central or Southeast Asia, Melanesia, or the African continent knows that there is no shortage of potentially interesting localities in which to settle in order to conduct in-depth anthropological fieldwork. They may not be isolated empty blobs on the map, but people live in an ever-changing world and they cope with new ideas and practices in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the notion of ‘exotic’ is being challenged as anthropologists study a range of urban communities in the Global North as well as in the Global South. Religious, gay, youth, poor, immigrant, bankers, hospital wards, and many more communities in the vicinity may be as ‘remote’ from their previous experience and as ‘exotic’ as any community in the Global South. Anthropology as a discipline without participant-observation fieldwork would have very little to offer the academic world, or the general public. The aim of ethnography is to continuously expand our knowledge about the richness of human imagination and the ways that humans organise their lives. In order to achieve that, the comparative ambition of anthropology must be maintained. A substantial proportion of new recruits must continue to undertake long-term fieldwork in places far-away from their home: places where they have to learn to communicate in a previously-unknown language. This is the key to render alternative solutions to the organization of social and cultural life meaningful and understandable to the outsiders. When all is said and done, some form of cultural relativism remains the discipline’s trade mark. This is how anthropology differs from the other social sciences. There may simply be no future for the armchair (or even desktop) anthropologist.

In conclusion

Social anthropology developed from Malinowski and Boas through Firth, Evans-Pritchard, Mead, Leach, Douglas, Needham, Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Geertz, Sahlins, Strathern, and many, many others. Despite their important theoretical differences, they had one thing in common: a commitment, through ethnographic fieldwork, to explore social, cultural, cognitive, and moral forms of life in places far from home – geographically and culturally. The aim was, and is, to use that knowledge to address overarching theoretical questions concerning the variety and similarity of human life as this is manifested through kinship, religion, classification, economic, and political life.

Anthropology is a discipline of amazement; knowledge of other peoples’ lives obtained during ethnographic fieldwork never ceases to astonish, even stupefy the ethnographer. Studies that throw light upon alien practices and values often lead to self-examination. They make one acknowledge that so much of what is taken for granted, what is considered to be ‘natural’ and right, is very far from the case. At the same time, the ethnographer discovers that so much is also common across space and lived culture. This results in an appreciation of both difference and sameness. These ethnographic experiences render invalid claims of radical alterity or of human incommensurability.

References

Ahmed, A. S. & C. Shore (eds) 1995. The future of anthropology: its relevance to the contemporary world. London: Athlone.

Boas, F. 1966. Kwakiutl ethnography (ed. & abridged H. Codere). Chicago: University Press.

Bellstorff, T. 2012. Ethnography and virtual worlds: a handbook of methods. Princeton: University Press.

Borneman, J. & A. Hammoudi (eds) 2009. Being there: the fieldwork encounter and the making of truth. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clifford, J. & G. E. Marcus (eds) 1986. Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Darwin, C. 1972 [1859]. On the origin of species by means of natural selection. London: Dent.

Dresch, P. 1992. Ethnography and general theory or people versus humankind. Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 23(1), 17-36.

Engels, F. 1902 [1884]. The origins of the family, private property and the state. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co.

Firth, R. 1959. Social change in Tikopia: restudy of a Polynesian community after a generation. London: Allen & Unwin.

Frazer, J. 1890. The golden bough: a study in comparative religion. London: Macmillan & Co.

Geertz, C. 1968. Thinking as a moral act: ethical implications of anthropological fieldwork in the new states. Antioch Review 28, 139-58.

Giddens, A. 1995. Epilogue: notes on the future of anthropology. In The future of anthropology: its relevance to the contemporary world (eds) A.S. Ahmed & C. Shore, 272-7. London: Athlone.

Howell, S. 1997. Cultural studies and social anthropology: contesting or complementary discourses? In Anthropology and cultural studies (eds) S. Nugent & C. Shore, 103-125. London: Pluto Press.

——— 2006. The kinning of foreigners: transnational adoption in a global perspective. Oxford: Berghahn Books.

——— & A. Talle (eds) 2012. Returns to the field: multitemporal research and contemporary anthropology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ingold, T. 2016. That’s enough about ethnography. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4(1), 338-95.

Lewin, E. & W.L. Leap (eds) 1996. Out in the field: reflection of lesbian and gay anthropologists. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

Little, W., H. W. Fowler & J. Coulson. 1964. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. On Historical Principles. 3rd edition. Oxford: University Press.

Malinowski, B. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Marcus, G. 1995. Ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited fieldwork. Annual Review of Anthropology 24, 95-117.

——— & M.J. Fisher 1986. Anthropology as cultural critique: an experimental moment in human sciences. Chicago: University Press.

Mead, M. 1928. Coming of age in Samoa. New York: William Morrow & Co.

Morgan, L.H. 1871. Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Contribution to Knowledge.

Okely, J. 1996. Participatory and embodied knowledge. In Anthropology and autobiography (ASA Monograph 29) (eds) J. Okely & H. Callaway. London: Routledge.

Needham, R. 1978. Essential perplexities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Richards, A. 1956. Chisungu: a girl’s initiation ceremony among the Bemba of Zambia. London: Faber.

Robbins, J. 2013. Beyond the suffering subject: towards an anthropology of the good. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, 447-67

Schapera, I. 1930. The Khoisan peoples of South Africa. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Simpson, B. & S. Coleman 2017. Ethnography. Glossary of Terms. Royal Anthropological Institute (available on-line: www.discoveranthropology.org.uk).

Spencer, J. 1989. Anthropology as a kind of writing. Man (N.S.) 24, 145-64.

Strathern, M. 1988. The gender of the gift: problems with women and problems with socieity in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Tylor, E.B. 1871. Primitive culture. 2 vols. London: John Murray.

Note on contributor

Signe Howell is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. Her D.Phil was obtained at the University of Oxford and was based on 18 months of fieldwork with the Chewong – a hunter-gatherer community in the Malaysian rainforest. She has subsequently undertaken fieldwork in eastern Indonesia and she has performed a major study on values and practices of transnational adoption in Norway. She has published widely based on her three fieldworks.

Prof. Signe Howell, Postboks 1091, Blindern 0317 Oslo, Norway. s.l.howell@sai.uio.no

[1] This potential confusion of the two terms is most commonly found in Anglo-Saxon anthropology. In France one talks of ethnologie or anthropologie sociale and in Germany it used to be Völkerkunde.

[2] The expression ‘the native’s point of view’ is as applicable to the study of middle-class managers in a German town as it is to a South Sea island community. It is a methodological term independent of place.

[3] The desire to untangle the ‘unknown’ is not always the driving force behind an ethnographic venture. Some may be more interested in untangling the underlying sociality of their own world (see, e.g., Okely & Callaway 1996, Lewin & Leap 1996).

[4] The expression ‘world view’ is theoretically contentious in anthropology. However, rather than entering the debate, here I use the term in its simple form as expressed by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘a particular philosophy of life or conception of the world’.

[5] Definition adapted from 'Serendipity' (Little, Fowler & Coulson 1964: 1946).

[6] Having undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in two societies that correspond to the traditional perception of small-scale communities far away from my own home (the hunting and gathering community in the Malaysian rainforest [Chewong], and an agricultural community in the highlands of an island in Eastern Indonesia [Lio]), I turned my anthropological gaze homewards. I undertook a study of the practice of transnational adoption in Norway. Not only did I live in Norway at the time, but I had also adopted a daughter from Nepal. This made the research challenging in several ways and raised ethical questions on how far to delve into people’s most private and personal lives. The practical business of doing participant-observation fieldwork here was very different from the previous two. It was also methodologically more challenging. As there was no community to settle in, I had to find alternative methods to come to grips with the kinds of ideas, values, and practices that constituted the diffuse world of transnational adoption. I interviewed a range of social workers and bureaucrats handling adoption applications, politicians who formed legislation, the NGOs that actually provided the supply of children, prospective parents and parents with adopted children, and adoptees themselves. I read historical documents that dealt with adoption and I became interested in changes in adoption laws in Norway, other Western countries, and in the countries that sent children abroad in adoption; I studied international treaties and conventions on children and childrens’ rights and on the control of international adoption. The project took on global perspectives. In addition, I joined a group of adoptive families with children from Korea on a two-week ‘return – or motherland – visit’ to Korea, and a group of prospective parents on their mind-blowing journey to collect their children in Ethiopia. I supervised students doing fieldwork in Colombia and Brazil and in orphanages in China and in India. Through all these activities, and several more, I hoped to build up a holistic understanding of the complex picture of the practice of transnational adoption from the point of view of the many actors involved (Howell 2006). I am convinced that had I not had the experience of doing fieldwork twice previously, I would not have been able to complete my research on transnational adoption in Norway. I was less anxious about intruding into people’ lives. My eyes had been trained to look in seemingly irrelevant places, my mind was open to notice the seemingly insignificant moments and make use of the unexpected.

Human rights

Felix Stein — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Harri Englund

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

http://doi.org/10.29164/16rights

Abstract:

Human rights, as described in documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are a set of moral and legal principles that apply to all human beings irrespective of their age, sex, religion, nationality, and other such characteristics. Yet they can only ever be claimed and applied in specific historical and cultural circumstances. It is from recognising this basic paradox between a universal principle and its practical application that the anthropological study of human rights arises. It allows anthropologists to confront some of the fundamental questions in their discipline, while also contributing a distinct perspective to actual human rights controversies. How wedded is the discipline to cultural and moral relativism? What can be learned from those anthropological studies of justice and morality that were written before the current interest in human rights began in the 1980s? What form of human rights activism can anthropological knowledge foster, or is anthropological analysis a necessarily separate type of pursuit from activism?

This essay addresses these and other questions by considering anthropologists’ varied responses to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and their efforts to harness anthropological knowledge in the service of human rights advocacy. Critical perspectives on actually existing human rights administrations are also discussed. While some anthropologists identify problems in activists’ and governments’ efforts in order to make human rights more acceptable locally, others demonstrate the extent to which the emphasis by human rights activists on liberties rather than socio-economic rights has been compatible with the continuing influence of political and business elites, in particular postcolonial contexts. Anthropological work has also asserted its separation from the human rights agenda by exploring what other means ordinary people have at their disposal to make their claims and grievances heard. The essay concludes by considering the future of human rights in the light of the penetration of human rights law into ever more intimate spheres of life, such as sexuality and gender relations. Anthropology’s particular strengths are also apparent here: kinship, the body, and personhood are classic themes that can provide unique perspectives on controversies over intimate human rights.

Introduction

For many of its practitioners, socio-cultural anthropology has come a long way since the period when cultural relativism seemed to undermine its contribution to understanding and advocating human rights. The 1999 Declaration on Anthropology and Human Rights by the American Anthropological Association (AAA), the largest professional association of anthropologists, made the case for a positive contribution in no uncertain terms.^[1] It swore ‘a commitment to human rights consistent with international principles’, for which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was said to provide ‘the base line’. The specifically anthropological contribution was to insist on human diversity and to argue that ‘human rights is not a static concept’. ‘Our understanding of human rights’, the AAA Declaration concluded, ‘is constantly evolving as we come to know more about the human condition’.

It is this insistence on the provisional, historically contingent nature of the human condition that distinguishes anthropology from many other academic and practical approaches to human rights. At the same time, particularly over the past three decades when the end of the Cold War has given the human rights agenda a new lease of life, anthropologists’ personal commitments to that agenda have varied greatly. Some anthropologists have given less emphasis than others to the provisional nature of human rights, fully embracing the cause by serving as expert witnesses or advocates on behalf of the people they have studied (Sanford 2003; Speed 2006; Tate 2007). Other anthropologists, while not necessarily any less committed to social justice, have maintained a measure of scepticism about the extent to which human rights provide the most cogent framework for analysis as well as activism (Englund 2013; Jean-Klein & Riles 2005). These critical studies of human rights include further differences according to the ways in which scholars envisage the role of anthropology overall. While some are keen to locate progressive alternatives to the human rights agenda, others pose the question of what, if any, consequence is the topic of human rights to anthropological knowledge – what, in other words, does this topic contribute to anthropology rather than the other way around?

This essay starts by going back further in time than 1999 in order to take anthropology back to the future of human rights. The AAA issued its first statement on human rights in 1947 as a response to the invitation by the United Nations to comment on the possibility of an official declaration of universal human rights. This statement has subsequently (and only subsequently, as we will see) been much debated by anthropologists for its alleged cultural relativism, a position that the 1999 declaration was supposed to dislodge. Although cultural relativism has been seen as a particular trait of American cultural anthropology, as opposed to the comparative and even generalising thrust of much British and French social anthropology, the 1947 statement deserves renewed attention for its view on the historical and political conditions of universalist idealism. Some of its lessons bear revisiting as a framework within which to explore activism and critique as the two main prongs of anthropological work on human rights since the 1990s.

Anti anti-relativism

The author of the 1947 statement was Melville Herskovits, a member of the AAA’s executive board, who condensed his contribution into the following question: ‘How can the proposed Declaration be applicable to all human beings, and not be a statement of rights conceived only in terms of the values prevalent in the countries of Western Europe and America?’ (AAA 1947: 539). Subsequently, once human rights had made a comeback in the arena of international diplomacy and transnational advocacy, from the 1980s onwards, anthropologists also confronted their disciplinary biases that may have advised scepticism about the possibility of universal human rights. However, their silence on this question in the intervening years after the 1947 statement amounted to a rejection of that possibility and was characterised less by their embarrassment (Engle 2001) than their neglect of the topic itself (Goodale 2009b: 18-39). When the time came for the AAA to formulate a new policy on human rights, the actual views taken by the 1947 statement received less attention than the fact that it had been written by one person only and published as an AAA statement without a vote having taken place among its membership.

The rejection of universalist idealism came to be seen as disengagement, an ill-advised act of withdrawal from a process that was steaming ahead, whether or not anthropologists wished to take part in it. Yet this reading of Herskovits's reflections misses the point he made about history. Far from assuming a static, unbridgeable difference in cultural terms between the West and the Rest, he emphasised a long history of contact and mutual influence, a history that had, more often than not, taken the form of occupation rather than accommodation. At issue was a ‘process of demoralization begun by economic exploitation and the loss of political autonomy’ (AAA 1947: 541). As a consequence, ‘professions of love of democracy, of devotion to freedom have come with something less than conviction to those who are themselves denied the right to lead their lives as seems proper to them’. Herskovits acknowledged the ‘noble’ intent of earlier documents, now seen as precursors to the Universal Declaration, such as the American Bill of Rights, only to note their origin in the writings by men who were themselves slave owners. Here was Herskovits's challenge to the process of drafting a Universal Declaration of Human Rights: after a history of unequal exchange, it was a very tall order indeed to expect ‘the Indonesian, the African, the Indian, the Chinese’ (AAA 1947: 543) to become signatories to a document upholding the standards developed in the recently dominant part of the world.

The subsequent refusals to own the Universal Declaration, typically by the new political and military elites in Asia and Africa, made Herskovits’s statement nothing short of prescient. Much trouble may have been averted had the authors of the Declaration attended to his concerns. Be that as it may, the lesson for anthropology is to recognise how such reflections on the historically contingent nature of so-called universal declarations do not necessarily amount to cultural and moral relativism (Dembour 2001; Goodale 2009b: 40-64). As an anthropologist associated with the teachings of Franz Boas, an advocate of ‘cultural particularism’ in American anthropology, Herskovits is too easily given the epithet ‘relativist’ (Simpson 1973). Would a relativist point out that cultural differences actually became a means of governing colonised people, so much so that ‘the hard core of similarities between cultures [were] consistently overlooked’ (AAA 1947: 540, original emphasis)? This acknowledgement that similarities across obvious differences carried subversive potential hardly warrants a reputation for relativism. Rather, the question posed by these early disciplinary reflections on human rights is what anthropology’s sensibility to human diversity and historical contingency amounts to when it is not dismissed as cultural and moral relativism.

Clifford Geertz, while not addressing the topic of human rights as such, provided one answer to this question with his thesis about anti anti-relativism. It was ‘an effort to counter a view rather than to defend the view it claims to be counter to’ (Geertz 1984: 263). By defying ‘the law of the double negative’, Geertz proposed to reject anti-relativism without thereby committing himself to what it opposes, namely cultural and moral relativism. Anti-relativists, especially when they trade in absolutes, are no more palatable interlocutors than relativists. Here is, in fact, one indication of the extent to which human rights can help to clarify anthropology’s particular claims to knowledge. A debate between a relativist and an anti anti-relativist from the period when human rights were not at the forefront of anthropologists’ thoughts can serve as an example. Staged within the sub-discipline of legal anthropology and revolving around the translation of concepts such as ‘justice’, it nevertheless seems highly pertinent to the issue of human rights.

The debate between Max Gluckman (1965, 1969) and Paul Bohannan (1957, 1969) continues to intrigue, because while working in different parts of the African continent, they both discovered that local idioms for ‘debt’ played an important role in the ways in which justice was pursued. At the same time, working in the same continent and sharing similar analytical interests did not guarantee consensus on the nature and purpose of anthropological knowledge (see Englund & Yarrow 2013). Gluckman could hope for greater precision about the meaning of debt through a comparative analysis involving material not only from his own Barotse study in present-day Zambia but also from other ethnographies of ‘tribal law’ as well as from studies of Roman and early English law. ‘What is the difference between debt in these contexts’, he asked, ‘and the fact that any obligation establishes a state of indebtedness, in another sense of the word, while clearly obligation is basic to any system of law?’ (1965: 245). The question was skewed neither towards particularity nor generality as such but sought to elicit specificity through a comparative exercise. By contrast, Gluckman felt frustrated with the cultural particularism of Bohannan’s ethnography. Bohannan (1957) also emphasised the importance of debt to the idea of justice among the Tiv of Nigeria, but he insisted that the uniqueness of their system meant that it could not be examined in terms of the concepts of Western jurisprudence. The anthropologist could do no better than leave a number of vernacular idioms untranslated, so unique was the ‘folk-system’ ensconced within a particular culture (Bohannan 1957: 69). ‘The insistence on uniqueness constantly obscures problems’, Gluckman (1965: 255) complained in response, pointing out the many not-so-unique features of Tiv language on justice and debt.

It was the ‘lack of perspective’ in cultural relativism that troubled Gluckman (1965: 251), the inability to identify ‘similarities within differences’ (1965: 254) that would permit a more precise understanding of what was specific about the case in hand. To mark his intellectual debts, Gluckman dedicated his book to ‘the jurists of Barotseland and of the Yale Law School’, thus deviating from the established hierarchy between informants in the field and colleagues in academia (see Fabian 1983). A close ethnographic study of a particular judicial system was, in other words, more than the result of intensive fieldwork in Zambia. Gluckman understood universals to be specific in their historical scope and, therefore, the results of careful comparative work. In certain respects, his understanding prefigured anthropologists’ interest in ‘situated universals’ in the twenty-first century, not least in the study of various activisms in the wake of human rights claims (see Tsing 2005). Whether, on the other hand, he prefigured anti anti-relativism in Geertz's sense is a moot point. To the extent that Geertz came to be identified with cultural particularism in his interpretative approach to anthropological knowledge (Keesing 1987), Gluckman was perhaps more consistently an anti anti-relativist than Geertz himself was. When Edmund Leach (e.g. 1976) had developed an interest in structuralism as a matter of decoding the ‘grammar’ of cultures, Gluckman saw a troubling parallel to the division of humanity into so many mutually exclusive cultures in South Africa, the country of his birth. Memorably, he remarked that it was ‘possible in the cloistered seclusion of King’s College, Cambridge, to put the main emphasis on the obstinate differences: it was not possible for “liberal” South Africans confronted with the policy of segregation within a nation into which “the others” had been brought, and treated as different – and inferior’ (1975: 29).

What the foregoing indicates is the rich disciplinary legacy which the anthropology of human rights can draw on. On the one hand, anthropology’s alleged attraction to cultural relativism is not dispelled simply by swearing allegiance to the cause of universal human rights. At the same time, the comparative project, rendered impossible by the more extreme forms of cultural relativism, remains critical to any anthropological engagement with the possibility of human universals. Moreover, the substantial issues that sparked debate between Bohannan and Gluckman also serve to remind us that despite their silence on human rights, anthropologists had all along maintained a keen interest in the study of justice, obligation, and social order. In this regard, much could be gained by revisiting studies that addressed such issues before they were all subsumed under the compass of human rights (Englund 2008). An evolving notion of relational rights, from Henry Maine (1913 [1861]) to Bronislaw Malinowski (1926), is one example of intellectual resources obscured by a dogged insistence on the autonomous individual as the bearer of human rights. The location of rights in social relations, in the contentious practices of membership as well as obligation, suggests a perspective on situated universals rather than on an absolute universal which, with its roots in possessive individualism, may be little more than a principle adopted from one particular tradition.

Enter the activists

These intellectual resources in the discipline largely fell by the wayside when anthropologists embraced the human rights agenda in earnest. They did so, as mentioned, from the 1980s onwards, if only in response to the shifting political languages in the world they shared with the subjects of their research. While criticising the status quo had until then often involved identification with some aspects of Marxism in the Western world, the human rights agenda lost its politically naïve associations among these critics in the post-Cold War era. Conor Gearty (2006), a legal scholar, has commented on the way left-leaning intellectuals shifted from seeing human rights law as a reactionary force to advocating its enforcement. He has pointed out how progressives might have lost their confidence to persuade voters to embrace social and economic reform and have, instead, come to see value in what he calls ‘the attractions of a short-cut via judicially enforceable social and economic rights’ (2006: 80). Anthropologists would naturally emphasise the recursive effect of their fieldwork situations on their research and activism. Indeed, the skills and knowledge that the anthropologist was able to profess could become the basis of activism in their own right.

Victoria Sanford’s work in Guatemala and Paul Farmer’s work in Haiti are among the most prominent examples of anthropology as a kind of human rights activism. Sanford (2003) worked as a forensic anthropologist in Guatemala in the wake of its civil war. By documenting the exhumation of secret mass graves, she was able to participate in debates about genocide, truth and reconciliation, with a voice that combined anthropology with activism. Farmer’s (2003) influential work, extending from Haiti to a powerful argument about global inequalities, concerned health as a human right. Here anthropology combined with medical practice to issue a challenge to the way in which human rights had come to be regarded in the post-Cold War world. Farmer saw the health effects of displacement caused by political and economic violence and drew upon a long-standing controversy within the human rights movement by asserting social and economic rights as human rights on a par with the so-called first generation rights of expression, assembly and worship. Just as the documenting and witnessing involved in Sanford’s forensic anthropology enabled her to contribute to activist agendas, so too was it a short step from Farmer’s engagement in medical practice to an engaged anthropology. In both cases, simply by practising anthropology, they were practising activists.

The engaged anthropology of human rights has taken other forms too, notably advocacy within the movement for indigenous rights (see e.g. Speed 2006; Turner 1997). But activists – and more broadly the bureaucracies that human rights advocacy has spawned – have also become subjects of ethnographic research in their own right. It is this development within the anthropology of human rights that has often veered more towards critique than activism, although significant differences of emphasis exist within this literature. Sally Engle Merry (2005) provided a valuable perspective into the local and transnational aspects of human rights activism around the issue of gender-based violence in five countries. Her key interest was to examine how certain recurrent institutional and legal provisions – such as training programs, domestic laws, shelters and counselling services for battered women – got translated, as global activists helped them to travel across the globe. Common to activists was the notion that poor communities did not generally understand the principles of human rights, but Merry’s focus was on what might make advocacy succeed in historically and culturally diverse contexts. She proposed a perspective on ‘vernacularization’, in which activists’ knowledge of, and respect for, local cultural codes was essential to any success in their transformative work. By focusing on a single country emerging from authoritarian rule, Harri Englund (2006), on the other hand, described a situation in which human rights activism became entangled in long-established habits of elitism, by which the Malawian ‘grassroots’ had often been seen to lack any positive moral or intellectual resources of their own. Among other examples, translation, not in Merry’s metaphorical sense but in the linguistic sense of rendering human rights accessible in Malawian languages, was a top-down process in which condescension displaced consultation. By emphasising civil and political liberties rather than social and economic rights, Malawian activists also entered an unlikely alliance with the political and business elites, including their foreign creditors. As a result, the very concept of human rights acquired negative connotations among the country’s impoverished majority.

These studies begin to give some idea of the range of positions – from co-construction to denunciation – that anthropologists have taken towards human rights activism (see Jean-Klein & Riles 2005). On one hand, human rights activism in its many forms is prominent enough in the contemporary world to warrant a series of ethnographic studies, dedicated to investigating it from a comparative and analytical point of view. As with any ethnographic project, the researcher has to be mindful of how their own convictions may prejudice them in the research process. On the other hand, it is also necessary to ask whether the anthropology of human rights, beyond its varied involvement with activism, can enrich the discipline as a whole. One way of addressing this dilemma is to suggest that anthropologists also attend to the question of what can constitute a productive subject for the anthropology of human rights, apart from transnational activism and outright human rights violations. We can discover a set of neglected topics in anthropology overall, such as when the apparent liberal roots of the human rights agenda compel the anthropologist to examine the diverse ways in which such grand ideas as freedom (Englund 2006) and equality (Englund 2011) have actually been deployed and experienced in particular ethnographic settings. The anthropology of human rights may thereby begin to appear much less as another sub-discipline and more like a continuing conversation about anthropology’s core concepts, including, as mentioned, justice, debt, obligation, and so on.

Intimate human rights

While welcoming an expansive view on what human rights are, and what subjects they suggest for anthropological research, it is easy to forget that their origin, as far as the Universal Declaration is concerned, lies in an effort to prevent states from inflicting again on human beings any of the horrors of the Second World War. Human rights law, as opposed to the more diffuse human rights talk, continues to be at the core of many activists’ and scholars’ understanding of human rights. Among anthropologists, Richard Wilson has taken the view that the proliferation of disputes expressed in terms of human rights has been facilitated by the ignorance (or at least neglect) of the legal character of human rights. With some despair, he has noted how ‘human rights have gone from a general list of what governments should not do to their citizens in the 1940s to a full blown moral-theological-political vision of the good life’ (2007: 349). The issues covered can be as diverse as the treatment of prisoners in US military jails, access to anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, and instruction in one’s mother tongue in schools. ‘New rights are added all the time’, Wilson has remarked, ‘thus expanding the rights framework into areas for which it was not originally designed or intended’ (2007: 350).

Such expansion cannot be attributed only to the near-hegemonic hold of human rights talk in many contemporary settings. Human rights law itself appears to permeate ever more intimate spheres of life. Sexual orientations, disabilities, children, gender relations, and old age are all domains that lawyers and activists are increasingly determined to bring within the reach of human rights legislation. The prospects for anthropological engagement are again bright. Just as indigenous rights, for example, may seem particularly congenial to anthropological comments, so too do many of the intimate human rights evoke fields of relationships long studied by anthropologists. One striking instance is the way in which kinship may become relegated to tradition in human rights campaigns. When a court in Papua New Guinea declared that using a young woman in a compensation payment between quarrelling clans contradicted the modern national constitution, it put all obligations entailed by having kin on the side of tradition (Strathern 2004: 208). Lost from view were the many competing values and practices that compelled people to meet their obligations. By lumping them all together as unconstitutional ‘bad custom’, the human rights-inspired court also asserted a divide between tradition and modernity, as though the two belonged to different historical epochs.

Likewise in Tanzania, feminist and non-governmental human rights organizations have condemned and even criminalised Maasai for one specific cultural practice – female genital modification (Hodgson 2011). Their zeal contrasts with rural Maasai women’s broader set of priorities in their quest for survival in an increasingly hostile world. Over the past century, government policies targeting men as political leaders, household heads and livestock owners have eroded women’s moral authority and spiritual significance. At the same time as men have found pastoralism economically less viable than before, they have left in increasing numbers to work in mines and towns, leaving women responsible for feeding and caring for their children and animals. For activists to enter the scene at this point, with their focus on one very intimate practice, is to turn a deaf ear to what Maasai women might really be saying about the circumstances in which they try to survive. Their desire to access quality education and health services may not receive enough attention when they are seen as the traditionalist and ignorant perpetrators of a harmful cultural practice.

What makes intimate human rights an issue of particular interest to anthropologists is not only the tendency to insert concepts of culture and tradition into these campaigns. Apart from providing opportunities to draw upon the rich legacies of anthropological work on kinship, the body and personhood, these campaigns call for further nuance in the study of human rights activism. Much as activists and lawyers may present themselves as fighting entirely modern causes, their preferred methods and meanings in making claims are likely to have been preceded by, and to co-exist with, other ways to frame and make claims. In India, for example, legal activists’ efforts to promote women’s reproductive rights – in their ability to determine their fertility, body, and childbearing – use different modes of speech depending on who is being addressed (Heitmeyer & Unnithan 2015). While universal reproductive rights may be the language to use in claims aimed at the state, familial and religious contexts demand other strategies to make the claims audible. The comparative questions here include how this plurality of claims-making fares in countries where civic activism has weaker roots than in India and where, as in Malawi and Tanzania, campaigners may regard the communities on whose behalf they supposedly work with thinly veiled condescension. It is incumbent on the anthropologists in such situations to follow the ethnographic imagination where it leads him or her, possibly even entirely away from the worlds of transnational human rights activism to popular media such as the radio (Englund 2011).

This final point bears some elaboration by way of a conclusion. For it is not just the human rights violators, victims, and activists that are the subjects of the anthropology of human rights. If the human rights concept is forever evolving, as the AAA's statement suggested, then what lies outside of it now may well have something to contribute to its development in the future. The outside of the human rights concept may be located, as suggested, in earlier anthropological works on justice and morality. Or it may emerge ethnographically in fieldwork that is suitably open-minded about what constitutes its subjects. Either way, whether the human rights concept can absorb that which lies outside of it is perhaps less important than what humanity will learn about itself.

References

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——— 1969. Ethnography and comparison in legal anthropology. In Law in culture and society (ed.) L. Nader, 401-18. Chicago: Aldine.

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Englund, H. 2006. Prisoners of freedom: human rights and the African poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2008. Extreme poverty and existential obligations: beyond morality in the anthropology of Africa? Social Analysis 52(3), 33-50.

——— 2011. Human rights and African airwaves: mediating equality on the Chichewa radio. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

——— 2013. Cutting human rights down to size. In Human rights at the crossroads (ed.) M. Goodale, 198-209. Oxford: University Press.

——— & T. Yarrow 2013. The place of theory: rights, networks, and ethnographic comparison. Social Analysis 57(3), 132-49.

Fabian, J. 1983. Time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Gluckman, M. 1965. The ideas in Barotse jurisprudence. Manchester: University Press.

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——— 2009b. Surrendering to utopia: an anthropology of human rights. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Heitmeyer, C. & M. Unnithan 2015. Bodily rights and collective claims: the work of legal activists in interpreting reproductive and maternal rights in India. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21, 374-90.

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Keesing, R. 1987. Anthropology as interpretive quest. Current Anthropology 28, 161-76.

Leach, E. 1976. Culture and communication: the logic by which symbols are connected. Cambridge: University Press.

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Note on contributor

Harri Englund is a Professor in Social Anthropology. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Southern and East Africa, primarily in Malawi but also in Mozambique and Zambia. His research interests range from the anthropology of law, human rights and morality to the study of religion and popular culture. His initial fieldwork was among refugees who had fled Mozambique’s civil war. He became interested in the impact of large-scale political and economic developments on the relationships and livelihoods of African peasants. This interest has involved further work on the political culture of emerging democracies, the relation between urbanisation and rural poverty, and the appeal of charismatic Christianity among the urban poor. His most recent projects have examined vernacular broadcast and print media in Malawi, Zambia and Finland.

Prof. Harri Englund, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. hme25@cam.ac.uk

[1] This declaration, and the 1947 statement discussed below, have also been published in Goodale (2009a).