Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Methods & Methodology

Dance

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 04:06:39 +0000

Girls dancing at the Celebrating Sanctuary Festival on London's South Bank in 2008. The festival celebrates the cultural diversty that migrants bring to the UK. Picture by Gary Knight.

Panas Karampampas

Durham University

Initially published 2 Dec 2025

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

Abstract:

Dance is a socially embedded, sensorially rich, and politically charged practice that transcends mere aesthetics. It can serve to tell stories and transmit knowledge within and across generations. It can also embody societal values, thereby challenging or reinforcing social hierarchies. Defined not solely by movement but also by its socially situated meanings, dance is an expressive system through which relationships, identities, and power are enacted and negotiated. This entry explores dance as both a localised embodied practice and as a globally circulating phenomenon. It begins by questioning universal definitions of dance before outlining key contributions from dance anthropology and ethno-choreology, specifically their focus on embodiment, research methods, and the limits of representation. Subsequent sections consider dance in relation to politics, and the impact of digital media in fostering global hybrid forms of dance. The final section examines staged performances and the role of UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which has further institutionalised dance by recognising it as a ‘living heritage’. Together, these sections illustrate that dance operates simultaneously as practice, symbol, and political artefact—what might be called its ‘multiple existences’—and explores why understanding these layers is essential across disciplines. As a dynamic and fluid practice, dance remains a vital subject of anthropological inquiry, revealing complex interactions between tradition, innovation, and socio-political power.

Introduction

Defining dance in anthropology is a challenge, since it does not always exist as a clear-cut category as such for the people we study. Speaking of ‘dance’ therefore risks profoundly misinterpreting the activities we try to analyse and the social contexts where they occur. For example, for the sixteenth century Mixtec people of Jamiltepec, in what is now Oaxaca, Mexico, no single term for ‘dance’ existed. Instead, the word yaa simultaneously referred to dance, games, and music, which were always performed together and not experienced as distinct or separate (Stanford 1966, 103). Likewise, in classical Greece, the term ‘ὄρχησις’ referred to the inseparable triad of music, song, and bodily movement—much as in many contemporary Greek folk dance practices. Again, ‘dance’ did not exist here as a meaningful stand-alone concept (Zografou 2003). The same point applies for the all-night yamɨn siria ceremony of Papua New Guinea’s Ambonwari people. Held in people’s private houses on celebratory occasions, it combines song and dance with storytelling and bodily decoration, elements that are closely connected to the natural environment and the spirit world. Yamɨn siria is not just a dance, but a holistic ritual that reflects an entire cosmology, reproduces the cultural memory of participants and their ancestors, provides young people with a chance to flirt, and can serve as an opportunity to settle old disputes (Telban 2017). In Arabic, several terms that describe movement and rhythmic expression also do not correspond precisely to the English notion of ‘dance’. Raqs (رَقص) broadly denotes Arabic dancing—often referred to colloquially as ‘belly dance’; dabke (دبكة) designates collective line dancing that embodies social cohesion; and samāʿ (سماع) refers to musical listening and rhythmic bodily movement within Sufi ritual (Rowe 2010, 11–3).

All that said, conceptual clarity can be useful so long as it speaks to the perspectives of the people we study. A fairly encompassing definition of dance considers it to be a practice composed of purposeful, often intentionally rhythmical, and socially patterned sequences of nonverbal body movement (Hanna 1979, 316). This movement is generally considered distinct from ordinary motor activities. It involves time, space, and effort, relies on both individual choice and social learning, and possesses inherent and aesthetic value. Specific criteria tend to determine what is appropriate in each context and what may distinguish the competency of dance practitioners as perceived by their society. Finally, such movement should be recognised as dance by its practitioners and—if an audience is present—by the audience members of the practitioner’s social group.

Understood in these terms, dance can be a powerful social instrument. Often much more than mere entertainment or artistic expression, it physically manifests identity, tradition, and a sense of belonging, while also reflecting and contesting social norms (Desmond 1997a; Kealiinohomoku 1970). Various academic disciplines, from psychology to performance studies, have explored dance from multiple angles, analysing its aesthetic, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. They have shown that politicians and media often harness dance as a symbol of national identity, and sometimes as a tool for cultural diplomacy. Anthropology brings a unique focus to the study of dance’s social implications and cultural contexts (Buckland 1999), in part because it tends to delve deeper into the meanings and power relations embedded in dance practices (Spencer 1985).

From the early twentieth century onward, dance has attracted the interest of influential anthropologists, including Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard (1928), Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Franz Boas (1927), Margaret Mead (1928) and Gregory Bateson (Mead and Bateson 1952). For these early writers, the documentation and analysis of Indigenous people’s dance was integral to understanding their social structures. As part of ritual, dance was primarily seen as contributing to social cohesion, essential for maintaining social bonds. Evans-Pritchard, for example, argued that that the gbere buda or ‘beer dance’ of the twentieth century Azande people, in what are now the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan, allowed for moderate, discreet, and therefore harmless kinds of flirting and sexual play. Thereby, Evans-Pritchard argued, the dance protected the institutions of Azande marriage and the family (1928, 458). Early anthropological studies also emphasised the importance of dance for transmitting cultural knowledge. For example, according to Mead, dance interrupted the otherwise rigorous subordination of Samoan children during the early twentieth century to the social hierarchy they grew up in. Dance allowed them greater degrees of attention and freedom than they were habitually used to. It equally permitted the expression and cultivation of children’s individuality in ‘a genuine orgy of aggressive individualistic exhibitionism’ as Mead put it (1928, 118).

Early anthropological studies were equally fascinated by the ways in which ritual dance reflects and shapes people’s spiritual lives, serving as a powerful medium through which people express their cosmologies and influence spirits. During the late nineteenth century, for example, the Kwakiutl of North America used dance to attract life-giving spirits, to tame them, and to receive gifts of supernatural powers from them. As part of the ritual known as the ‘winter ceremonial’, Kwakiutl families came together and danced wearing masks that emulated and personated different spirits, tracing their family histories back to mythical times and supernatural events (Boas and Hunt 1897).

For many Indigenous peoples, ritual dance has remained central until today, as it remains part of ceremonies marking life events, seasonal transitions, and collective identity. The nomadic Wodaabe of West Africa, for example, engage in a series of dance and performance rituals throughout the year, one of which, called the yaake, comprises a beauty contest in which women chose the most beautiful male performer. The young men stand in a long line, facing the sunset, and dance by moving especially their feet and spinal column. Accentuated movements of the face highlight the whiteness of their eyes and teeth, all while being overlooked by Wodaabe women. It has been argued that in this case this dance not only expresses male pride or allows the men and women to flirt, but that it also distinguishes the Wodaabe from the more sedentary Fulani people who live in the same region. It renders the Wodaabe recognisably ‘exotic’ to the people of Niger, and to Westerners who are only superficially aware of their life circumstances. By internalising and cultivating their reputation of being ‘exotic’, Wodaabe dancing contributes to a sense of ‘cultural archaism’, which is but one of several elements of their collective survival strategies (Bovin in Hughes-Freeland & Crain 1998).

Anthropology’s early focus on the ritual contexts of dance laid the groundwork for more systematic engagements with dance, especially from the mid-twentieth century onwards. During this time, the subfield of dance anthropology (or the ‘anthropology of dance’ as it was called in the US) emerged, establishing a dialogue between dance studies and anthropology (Kurath 1960; Kealiinohomoku 1970). As part of a new comprehensive approach to dance, anthropologists and dance scholars synthesised methodologies and theoretical approaches, and began to study dance as a social phenomenon everywhere. They drew on examples from large and small-scale populations, as well as ‘modern’ and ‘non-modern’ groups.

In this way, they challenged prevailing Eurocentric views, which had, for example, considered ballet as the pinnacle of dance forms and as distinct from folk or ethnic dances. A ground-breaking study viewed ballet through the same anthropological lens as any other dance tradition (Kealiinohomoku 1970). It questioned the perception of ballet as a universal standard against which other dance forms were to be measured. The study recognised that ballet was conventionally celebrated for its aesthetic refinement and technical precision, having evolved from court entertainment to a professionalised art form: an ethnic dance of the West, rooted in the court cultures of Renaissance Italy and France. Political power, social hierarchies, and the spread of European colonialism had all shaped what ballet was and needed to be accounted for as ballet continues to express and reinforce the values and aesthetics of its cultural origins.

Examining ballet as an ethnic dance opened the door to a more egalitarian approach to dance studies overall, which values all dance traditions equally and appreciates their cultural significance (Kealiinohomoku 1970). Such studies and approaches suggested a more inclusive understanding of dance that recognises it in all its forms as ultimately culturally and ethnically rooted, whilst also arguing for the value of often-marginalised non-European dance traditions. Importantly, these authors called for more first-hand observation and participation in dance as part of fieldwork (Kurath 1960). Furthermore, discussions emerged that focused on how dance traditions change over time through incorporating elements from different trends that migrants carried into diverse new contexts. In line with the cultural relativism that marked the second half of the nineteenth century, anthropologists began to show that dance is often hybridised, constantly changing and blurring boundaries of traditions that had previously been considered fixed. For example, Latin American tango emerged from the fusion of African rhythms, European couple dances, and local criollo musical forms, later becoming reinterpreted through global circulation (Savigliano 1995, 10–5).

Anthropology of dance and ethno-choreology

The anthropology of dance has a close relative, called ‘ethno-choreology’ (sometimes called ‘dance ethnology’). While these fields of study often overlap, they have different starting points, methods, and theories (Kaeppler 1991, 13). Dance anthropology has a tendency to be more ‘interested in socially constructed movement systems, the activities that generate them, how and by whom they are judged, and how they can assist in understanding society’ (Kaeppler 2000, 120). A prime example is the ethnography on lakalaka performances, which are danced and sung throughout the islands of the Tonga archipelago in the South Pacific. Performed at royal weddings, royal birthday celebrations, and coronation ceremonies since the late nineteenth century, the lakalaka is not merely a form of aesthetic expression but also serves to enact and legitimise social hierarchy and political authority. It involves singing poetry which, together with choreographed movements, elevates the monarch and chiefs, linking royal and chiefly power within the broader Tongan cosmology (Kaeppler 2006, 40–1). These performances illustrate the social origins of movement systems, and their role for the broader organisation of society, as they help negotiate rank, genealogy, and political power. Rather than analysing the choreography in isolation, dance anthropology situates it within the Tongan system of social stratification, showing how dance both reflects and reinforces societal structures (Kaeppler 1993). In contrast, ethno-choreologists often focus more closely on dance content, while the cultural context serves primarily to illuminate the dance itself (Grau 1993, 21). For example, Andriy Nahachewsky (2011) examines the movement vocabulary, structural patterns, and stylistic variants of Ukrainian folk dances, drawing on ethnographic context chiefly to clarify regional distinctions and historical layering.

Dance anthropology and ethno-choreology also sometimes differ in how they think about the dancers’ bodies. Dance anthropology has come to question the idea of a natural or archetypal dancer’s body, foregrounding instead the body’s culturally and socially constructed aspects (Grau 1993, 21). Ethno-choreologists, on the other hand, tend to consider the dancer’s body more as a given; an instrument moving in time and space that is largely separate from the dancer’s mind or sociocultural ideas about it. This makes ethno-choreology particularly interesting for dancers and choreographers who are constantly attempting to improve upon existing forms of dance, as well as for folklorists, interested in the preservation of existing cultural practices.

In short, dance anthropologists are ‘not simply to understand dance in its cultural context, but rather to understand society through analysing movement systems’ (Grau 1993, 21), while ethno-choreologists study the dance itself and its changes over time with its cultural context more in the background (Kaeppler 1991, 16–7). Despite these differences, the fields have increasingly converged over time, particularly since the 1990s when both embraced a more holistic view of dance. Both disciplines now recognise that dance is not just interesting as a physical movement but also that it matters as a cultural text that can convey complex meanings and serve various social functions (Rakočević 2020). This shared perspective has led to greater interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling folklorists and cultural critics to employ similar methodologies and theories with the goal of exploring the multifaceted nature of dance.

A relatively recent study of folk dance in Romania, for example, demonstrates the value of combining dance anthropological and ethno-choreological approaches (Giurchescu 2001). Anca Giurchescu examines 45 years of cultural policy in socialist Romania to show how traditional dance, such as in the century-old Romanian Căluș ritual, has changed in connection to its socio-political context. Over time, Romanian traditional dance has turned from a ritual that shapes the daily lives of participants to a more restricted and staged form of folklore, mostly organised and watched rather than practiced. While it continues to be danced on important social events, such as weddings or family gatherings, it is now mostly passively consumed. As a form of folklore, traditional dance always runs the risk of being used for political ends, as in late-stage Romanian Communism, when song and dance were employed to conceal the country’s socio-political contradictions, obscuring diversity while highlighting a singular national narrative. According to the author, studying dance requires examining the philosophical, ideological, socio-political, economic, and cultural systems of a given society, as well as the internal structure of the dance itself. Only through this holistic approach can dance, its social context, and its practice be illuminated simultaneously (Giurchescu 2001, 109).

Dance as elusive and embodied practice

The ephemeral and elusive nature of dance renders participant observation particularly difficult. Dance only fully exists in the moment of performance, making it hard to capture and document. Its transience arises from several factors. Movement notation systems, while developed in order to record dance, are complex and require demanding training. Moreover, describing sound and movement (as well as speech and song in some cases) all at once can often be challenging. Simply filming dance and focusing on its visual aspects does not capture the whole experience as it ignores too many other sensorial dimensions of dance. Dancer’s experiences are deeply kinaesthetic (i.e. relating to their bodily awareness), combining the visual, tactile, and auditory (Bull 1997, 269). Such embodied experience is hard to put into words, so dancers’ verbal accounts of their practices often differ from their actual behaviour. All these issues raise the problem that dance experiences may be sensible to the performers without also being intelligible for others (Bull 1997, 269).

These methodological difficulties raise an ever-prevalent question for ethnographic researchers of dance: Should the ethnographer have practiced or be trained in dance, or is this not a requirement for a deep understanding of it? The people we study may think that dancing is essential if one wants to truly understand it. Members of professional dance companies, for example, have been shown to hold that experience in ballet is an asset to make sense of it (Wulff 1998). In fact, classical dancers are frequently of the opinion that ‘you have to do it in order to understand what it’s like’ (Wulff 1998, 8). Given that dance is a mostly non-verbal activity that requires a high degree of precision and proficiency, having some embodied experience of it allows for insights which are challenging to acquire by other means (Wulff 1998, 10-1). Thus, dance ethnographies often achieve a remarkable level of understanding by relying on the fieldworker's body as a means to attain cultural knowledge. The researcher's immersion in sonic events and movement—their awareness of and participation in sound and dance—induces bodily responses that render fieldwork as a profoundly visceral experience. Thereby, important questions can be raised and put into perspective, such as what the role of tacit knowledge in dance may be, how feelings of unity and community are created and altered by dance, or how dancers conceive of pain and endurance (c.f. Chrysagis and Karampampas 2017, 3, 10-2).

Physical participation in dance also shows how ‘movement combines felt bodily experience and the culturally based organisation of that experience into cognitive patterns’ (Sklar 2001, 4). It teaches us that ‘ways of moving are ways of thinking’ (Sklar 2001, 4). For example, for young members of the Greek goth scene in Athens in 2010, dance was an important part of their lives. Goth clubs and goth nights allowed them to link their daily style and ways of living, which often emphasised the fleeting nature of life and the futility of human striving, to dance. Several of them thus danced in ways that involved irony, self-irony, and sarcasm. On the dance floor they recited the lyrics of songs that expressed their disappointment with humanity, expressed anger at their own illness and mortality through stomping movements, or mocked traditional Greek dances in a refutation of Greek national values (Karampampas 2017).

Even when the researcher does not have prior dance experience, it is possible to learn dance in the field, as has been done for other somatic ethnographies that focused on boxing (Wacquant 2004) or Aikido (Kohn 2001). Particularly interesting are the times that the researcher will have to dance with their interlocutors. These moments allow the researcher to demonstrate whether and how they have embodied local dances and how precisely they understand the local movement idioms (Pateraki and Karampampas 2014, 156).

The deeply embodied nature of dance also highlights its role in shaping and experiencing gender, sexuality, and identity (Cowan 1990, Foster 1996). Dance practices often reflect and reinforce gender roles and expectations, but they can also provide spaces for exploring and contesting these norms (Allen 2022, 3–7 and 140–50). For example, Elizabeth Kirtsoglou (2004) has studied a group of middle-class women who form an all-female ‘company of friends’ (parea) near a Greek provincial town that the author calls ‘Kallipolis’. Once initiated to their ‘company’, the women spend time with and support one another, and they engage in same-sex relationships. One way in which they perform gender is through dance, notably the belly-dance tsifteteli, associated with femininity and desire, and the powerful, masculine dance called zeimbekiko. Dance and flirtation enable the women to create intimate relationships, which may be interpreted by people outside of their group as merely playful heterosexual friendships (Kirtsoglou 2004). Dancing thus allows them to negotiate, reveal, and conceal their identities, challenging and reconfiguring the meanings attached to their bodies within their specific cultural context.

The embodied nature of dance also lends itself to exploring how cultural and political meanings are represented, felt, and lived through the body. White competitive Latin dancers may use a fake tan to represent Latinness in the context of the predominantly white dancing culture and sport. In another context, practitioners of Javanese court dances are held to embody an element of national identity that is actively passed on to younger generations and made visible in performances for tourists (Kringelbach & Skinner 2012, 11). Thus, dance frequently turns out to be a site of negotiation where dancers can both conform to and resist social norms (Cowan 1990; Fraleigh 2004). It has, for example, been argued that the bodies of classical ballet dancers can be read as affirming a Western marginalisation of women’s bodies in general. According to sociologist Janet Wolff, ballet dancers preserve a ‘classical body’, emphasising boyish petiteness, clear lines, weightlessness and ethereal presence, ideals that stand in clear tension with most real feminine corporeality (Wolff 1997, 95). This tension is also revealed in roles for women, who in classical dance often depict ‘a strangely disembodied female’ (Wolff 1997, 95).

Deeply embodied activity, such as dance, also lends itself to the expression and transmission of embodied collective memory. Thus, dance is frequently part of spirit possessions among the Songhay people of Nigeria and Mali. The Songhay pantheon is divided into six spirit families, each of which represents a specific historical period. Some stand in for Muslim clerics, commemorating the fifteenth century institutionalisation of Islam in the area, while others are Hausa spirits that entered the Songhay pantheon in the early twentieth century as part of a large migration of Hausa-speaking people to Songhay territory. Spirit possession, which involves dance, thus partially enacts Songhay history, including the ravages of nature, such as when the choreography involved in a possession recounts the movement of spirits ‘from water to heaven and back to Earth’ (Stoller 1994, 642).

In sum, dance is not simply a sequence of movements but is also an embodied system of cultural meanings and knowledge. The meanings of dance are not always explicit, and may be tacit, intuitive, and difficult to articulate verbally. Researchers need to be aware that their own cultural background and experiences may shape their interpretations of dance. It is important for them to be reflexive, considering their own positionality and biases, and it is frequently an asset if, as part of dance research, they dance themselves.

Politics, resistance, and dancing beyond borders

Beyond its artistic or cultural expression, dance is a potent form of political discourse and resistance. The intricate relationship between dance and politics has been extensively analysed, revealing how dance movements and performances can reflect, contest, and sometimes transform political realities (Shay 2002).

Dance frequently intersects with political power in the realm of national identity and statecraft. Dances are often promoted and institutionalised through state-sponsored performances, festivals, and education programs. They may serve to foster national unity, constitute emblematic representations of a nation’s cultural heritage that justifies national sovereignty, or simply project power both internally and on the international stage (Reed 1998). For example, in constructing and legitimising national identity in the modern Greek state, officially established in 1832, ancient Greek statues and monuments were used to associate the state with ancient Greek glory. In this process, folk traditions such as dances and songs were used to bridge the substantive gap between ancient and modern Greek identity, including serving as official ‘proofs’ of the ‘cultural continuity’ between the two (Karampampas 2021, 655). Until today, the so-called ‘Greek traditional dances’ are part of the country’s primary and secondary education curriculum, aiming to demonstrate the coherence of Greek populations by teaching a selection of dances that is meant to represent all the country’s regions (Karampampas 2021, 655). Importantly, this curriculum has excluded dances from the unrecognised Slavic-speaking Greek minority, marginalising some kinds of dance as it foregrounds others (Pateraki 2024; see also Manos 2003 on the minority politics of dance). In addition, some previously Greek dances are today danced beyond national borders and may be called ‘Albanian’ or ‘Turkish’, due to the shared past of these countries during the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, ‘Greek dances’ to music that shares melodies with that of the Cappadocia region of what is now Turkey are performed as far as in the city of Xi’an (西安), the capital of the Chinese province of Shaanxi where the Muslim minority of Hui people (回族) dances them (personal observation).

In addition to creating national identity, Jane Cowan (1990) provides us with an example of how dance can stand in for European modernity. As part of studying dance in the Northern Greek town of Sohos in the early 1980s, Cowan noticed that formal ‘evening-dances’ (horoesperidha) were regularly organised on the weekends by local civic associations such as political parties or business associations. Rather than celebrating kinship, belonging, or church affiliation, these dance events were meant to promote civic solidarity and the common good, while also fostering the wealth, reputation, and political standing of the associations that sponsored them (Cowan 1990, 134–70). To achieve these goals, the usual opportunities for competitive male dance and folklore were foreclosed, and European symbols and practices were adopted instead, including dancing ‘European dances’ like the waltz, the foxtrot, and the tango, and wearing modern apparel rather than traditional clothing. These evening-dances linked the civic associations to the West, which had long politically and culturally dominated Greece, and stood in for modernity.

National and international understandings of dance can often greatly influence one another. As mentioned above, tango, for example, originally developed in the late nineteenth century around the Río de la Plata that separates Argentina and Uruguay. It fused African rhythms, recreated by former slaves, with music of Spanish descendants born in the Americas (criollos), and with European influences brought by mostly Spanish and Italian migrants. As such, it can be seen as a dance of exiles (Savigliano 1995, xiv). However, tango soon developed into a system of seemingly ‘exotic’ Argentinian identity, considered wild, untamed, and passionate by the colonial and imperial powers of Argentina and Uruguay. As part of a global ‘political economy of passion’ that included tango records, handbooks, films, and fashion, foreigners appropriated the dance throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Paris, London, and New York, and all the way to Japan. Tango underwent an even more widespread revival in the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that it also became Argentina’s national dance can only be made sense of when considering the interplay between Europe’s former Latin American colonies and ongoing Western imperialism. Western countries were eager to consume exoticised forms of dance that ultimately legitimated their own perceived superiority. Once consumed abroad, the exoticised dance could be re-appropriated by national elites as an appropriate marker of national identity (Savigliano 1995, 138).

However, dance can also serve as a site of resistance against colonial or oppressive regimes, providing a means through which marginalised communities assert their own identity and sovereignty. The Irish dance revival in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for instance, was closely tied to broader nationalist movements seeking to affirm Irish identity in the face of British rule (O’Connor 2013; Wulff 2007). The Gaelic League and other cultural organisations promoted step dancing and céilí dancing as emblematic expressions of an authentically Irish way of life, in contrast to what they saw as British cultural dominance. Standardised competitions, codified techniques, and public performances all became tools for mobilising dance as a marker of national unity and cultural distinctiveness.

Similarly, dance has played a key role in the expression of Palestinian national identity, serving as a form of cultural resistance against European colonial imperialism as well as Israeli occupation and Islamic reform movements (Rowe 2010). Nicholas Rowe, who lived in Ramallah between 2000 and 2008 and worked with local dance groups in refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza Strip, raises the question of whether dance can be represented without highlighting the extreme political circumstances in which it takes place. He shows that Palestinian dance productions become impossible as choreographers and their family members are killed, curfews and roadblocks make movement impossible, and dance venues are vandalised and destroyed (Rowe 2010, 189). Yet even under these difficult circumstances, dance may continue, not least to express individual and collective trauma (Rowe 2010). In a similar vein, the resurgence of Indigenous dances in the Americas is not only a revival of cultural practices but also a statement of resistance against colonial erasure and a declaration of sovereignty (Prichard 2022).

Of course, the political affordances of dance go beyond traditional party or state politics. An example of this is the critical role that dance plays in creating a queer Latino/a public in the United States. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the US Latino/a population quickly gained public visibility, dance (along with other forms of performance) was crucial to enable queer Latinos/as to equally claim spaces that allowed them to live publicly. Their increase in social rights was partially enabled by queer Latino/a cultural production, which had in the 1990s permeated the mainstream American queer culture in the form of Latin rhythms and choreographies (Rivera-Servera 2012, 15). Queer Latino/as’ ability to dance eloquently to Latin rhythms helped shift the power dynamics of the dance floor of the clubs they frequented. Their dance skills can thus be understood as ‘choreographies of resistance’—as embodied practices through which minoritarian subjects claim space in social and cultural realms, such as the dance floor (Rivera-Servera 2012, 43). Studying queer Latino/a identity through dance raises the question of whether Latinidad should be thought of as a programmatic political identity in the first place, or rather ‘as a performative modality’ that establishes Latino/a cultural practice (Rivera-Servera 2012, 20).

Importantly, the role of dance in enabling oppressions or resistence is not always clear cut. Thus, dance has been a form of resistance for the Italian mafia, in mafia-patronised religious celebrations of southern Italy. These celebrations include dances on the towns’ main squares, in which prominent members of the mafia dance with local politicians and both parties engage in a symbolic fight with imaginary knives and sticks (Pipyrou 2016, 175–8). These dances imply mutual political recognition, but they also enable members of the mafia to challenge regional state hegemony. They come with ambiguous real-life consequences, as local politicians may participate as they are trying to gain local votes, while members of the mafia do the same to gain recognition and status.

The fact that dance constitutes a form of ‘embodied resistance’ distinguishes it from other forms of political activism. Dance allows individuals and communities to express dissent and critique socio-political conditions in a way that words alone cannot (Fraleigh 2004). For instance, during the apartheid era in South Africa, the gumboot dance, which includes groups of performers stomping and tapping on their rubber boots, evolved as a form of resistance among mine workers. It was a covert way to communicate and to express grievances under the guise of entertainment (Welsh-Asante 1993). Similar roots entangled with a complex and contested history can also be found in capoeira, a hybrid between a dance, a martial art, and a game. It was likely developed in Africa by enslaved people who sought to practise self-defence under the guise of dance before being transported to Brazil. Evidence shows that it has been practised in Brazil since at least 1900 by the male African-Brazilian urban underclass. For some time, the government criminalised capoeira, and practitioners were persecuted until it was legalised in 1937. After 1975, it spread to the US and Europe, and soon after to the rest of the world (Delamont and Stephens 2008, 58). Thus, what began as a form of ‘embodied resistance’ became a global practice that celebrates the hybridisation of Portuguese and African-Brazilian music, dance, and bravery. On 26 November 2014, UNESCO recognised capoeira as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The global spread of dance forms via media and migration has further complicated the dance-politics nexus, introducing issues of cultural appropriation, global inequality, and transnational identities. Street dance styles like breakdancing have been adopted by young persons across the world. This may come as a way of expressing resistance against societal norms and injustices (Koutsougera 2023; Marsh and Campbell 2020). At the same time, the global popularity of dances raises questions about cultural ownership, authenticity, and the commercialisation of cultural expressions (Ana 2017). Cuban rumba, for example, has been strategically packaged for international tourism, where performers are expected to embody ‘authentic’ Afro-Cuban identity in ways that cater to visitor expectations; yet rumberos themselves often receive minimal benefits from this commodification, and many view the state-driven ‘heritagization’ of rumba with ambivalence (Ana 2017, 163–7, 173–6, 181–3).

The global spread of dance forms also raises questions regarding their hybridisation, which is often presented as a result of globalisation (Duffy 2005). Hybrid dances emerge when elements from different dance traditions combine to create new forms, reflecting the complex interactions and exchanges facilitated by global flows of people and media. One example is the Tribal Fusion dance, in which North African and Arabic dance (colloquially known as ‘belly dance’) practitioners blend modern electronica and other various styles in creative and largely unbound ways. Dancers in this style thereby mostly do not reference the modern Middle East. As a result, their dance style may be derided by purists as derivative and degenerate compared to seemingly more ‘authentic’ forms of belly dance. At the same time, the freedom of Tribal Fusion enables the dancers to eschew accusations of cultural appropriation and to bring their very own styles to the transnational dance scene, drawing on movements from tango, flamenco, jazz, and modern dance, among others (Scheelar 2013; Sellers-Young 2016).

The digital age has further accelerated the global spread and transformation of dance practices. Social media platforms and video-sharing sites enable the rapid dissemination of dance videos, influencing global dance trends and fostering a sense of global community among dancers and enthusiasts. This has also allowed new dance styles to be created, such as industrial dance, a highly stylised goth-style dance with a well-defined repertoire of movements that is practised in similar ways in different goth scenes around the world. Its creation and development, however, took place almost entirely online. Goth YouTubers from different parts of the world began uploading videos of themselves dancing to industrial music, often inspired by cyber and rave aesthetics. These videos sparked discussion in the comment sections and across online forums, where users debated what counted as industrial dance. Through these public exchanges—offering feedback, critique, and praise—a shared set of movements and aesthetics gradually emerged. Over time, these digital interactions informally established and defined industrial dance, both morphologically and conceptually, without the need for a central authority or institutional framing (Karampampas 2016, 139–46).

A compelling example of rapid global circulation in digital times is Japanese Butoh, developed in the second half of the twentieth century and marked by grotesque imagery, playful experimentation, and slow, hyper-controlled motion. Since the 1980s, Butoh groups have emerged around the world, with many non-Japanese practitioners becoming recognised artists and teachers who establish their own schools and often develop approaches that diverge from the original lineages (Calamoneri 2008, 36–7; Candelario 2019, 245–52; van Hensbergen 2019, 276–84). The global and increasingly digital dissemination of Butoh enables unprecedented participation and innovation, while also raising questions about authorship, ownership, and the ethics of cross-cultural transmission (Garnica 2019, 325–36).

Dance as intangible cultural heritage

Dancing, particularly when it is staged, can often be read as a performance of folklore, i.e. of a traditional custom that links to the beliefs or values of a specific group. It can thus stand in tight connection with broader cultural narratives, identities, and histories. This ‘second existence’ of dance, beyond its initial performance context, matters when dance is reinterpreted, adapted, or incorporated into new spatial, temporal, or cultural settings. Keeping the folkloristic aspects of dance in mind allows anthropologists to explore the dynamic processes through which traditions are transmitted, transformed, and reimagined in response to changing cultural landscapes (Nahachewsky 2001). The second existence of dance may have a parallel life with the ‘first’, i.e. with the folk-dance performances which continue to take place in their initial social context. At other times, the initial social context may have changed, or there may be discontinuity in the transmission of knowledge, and in some cases, the second existence of dance replaces the first. The second existence of dance also encompasses how dance traditions are taught, learned, and practised beyond their original contexts. Dance workshops, festivals, and educational programs serve as important spaces for the transmission and adaptation of dance traditions, contributing to the ongoing evolution of dance forms and the formation of transnational dance communities (Karampampas 2021, 660–1; Sklar 2001).

The staging of dance can thus be seen as a site of cultural production where meanings are negotiated between performers and audiences. When dances are staged, they are often adapted or recontextualised to fit new settings, engaging with audiences unfamiliar with the original cultural context. Staging can thus be seen as a form of cultural translation, where the inherent meanings and aesthetics of a dance are interpreted and potentially transformed (Shay 2016). Moreover, the folkloristic aspects of dance on stage raise questions about its authenticity and about the safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage. Debates about authenticity highlight the tension between the desire to preserve cultural heritage and the need for artistic innovation and cultural exchange (Bendix 1997; Theodossopoulos 2013).

For example, in 2003 the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) aimed, among other things, to rethink what folklore, now referred to as ‘intangible heritage’, may be. It inaugurated the important shift from trying to record and preserve disappearing traditions to promoting their ongoing transmission. This was to be achieved by supporting both practitioners and the conditions necessary for their practices to continue (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2014, 53). While this marks a shift from older folkloristic approaches, the Convention still relies on established methods like listing, mapping, and recording (Kuutma 2012; Tauschek 2011). Notions of authenticity thus persist—albeit in redefined terms—and continue to shape public perceptions of cultural value (Bendix 2018, 6; Bortolotto 2020).

Transforming a tradition into ICH involves a process of ‘heritagisation’. This process can be deeply self-referential, as constructing heritage can itself be part of the cultural and social processes that end up constituting heritage (Smith 2006, 13). For example, when a community prepares a dance for inclusion in an ICH inventory—by defining what counts as ‘authentic’, formalising choreography, or crafting heritage narratives—these acts of preparation reshape the tradition and feed back into how it is understood. At the same time, the dance itself becomes a policy object, especially when viewed through the lens of Intangible Cultural Heritage, where safeguarding frameworks transform lived practices into administratively managed ‘heritage’ (Smith 2006, 13; Tauschek 2011). ICH may therefore be seen not merely as preserved tradition, but as a metacultural production (Tauschek 2011), a policy-oriented reimagining of tradition focused on safeguarding, transmission, and empowerment. Following this logic, ICH could be seen as a third existence (Karampampas forthcoming) of dance: no longer just a performance or culturally relevant social activity, but a policy artefact focused on cultural continuity. Through this lens, dance is framed not as a static, authentic relic, but as a living tradition that carries community values, identities, and histories. This third existence resists overly static and folkloristic views of dance and opens new directions for anthropological inquiry.

Conclusion

The study of dance offers profound insights into the human condition. It allows us to understand and rethink social dynamics and structures, as well as individual and collective identities. Dance is not merely an art form but is also a rich cultural practice that informs and is informed by the contexts in which it occurs. Its analysis reveals the many, often highly nuanced ways in which communities express themselves, negotiate social norms, and maintain traditions, making it an endlessly fascinating subject for future study. As societies continue to change, the relevance of studying dance remains undiminished. It offers a unique vantage point from which to observe the ongoing interplay between tradition and innovation, providing a mirror in which we can view the continuous reshaping of identities in response to global influences and local practices.

The ephemeral nature of dance, with its ability to adapt and morph into new forms while retaining links to the past, makes it an ideal subject for exploring broader questions of continuity and change in contemporary societies. At the same time, the rise of the internet and the turbocharged hybridisation of dance make it more exciting than ever. As a form of embodied, non-verbal communication that transcends social and linguistic barriers, dance is likely to remain crucial to understand the human condition in an increasingly interconnected world.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive feedback. I am especially grateful to the editors, Hanna Nieber and Felix Stein, whose exceptional patience and valuable suggestions have shaped this entry and supported its successful completion.

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Note on contributor

Panas Karampampas, PhD (St Andrews) is a Social Anthropologist at Durham University. He currently works on Intangible Cultural Heritage policies, bureaucracy, and global governance. His doctoral research focussed on the goth scene, digital anthropology, dance, cosmopolitanism, peripherality, and globalisation. He serves as an elected member of the Executive Board of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (2025–2027).

panas.karampampas@easaonline.org / ORCID: 0000-0001-8712-9445

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Atmospheres

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 07:40:13 +0000

"Morning rituals", 2022. Picture by Jason Boldero.

Michael Schnegg Jonas Bens

University of Hamburg

Initially published 25 Nov 2025

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

Abstract:

Introduction & social science antecedents

Every situation has an atmosphere: a general feeling, tonality, or vibe that people experience collectively and individually. When we enter a room, or any other social space, its atmosphere makes us feel something: at ease or uneasy, comfortable or uncomfortable, included or excluded. Atmospheres contribute in important ways to meanings, feelings, and behaviours. They circumscribe what we can say, how we can move, or even which behaviours we consider appropriate. But atmospheres are never quite clear to us; they feel—at least to some extent—fleeting, indeterminate, and difficult to grasp.

There is an intuitive importance of this kind of affective in-between captured in the term ‘atmosphere’. Despite this, it is remarkable how late anthropologists began to theorise atmospheres more thoroughly. Instead, they have used a series of closely related concepts in the past to make sense of them. One good starting point for understanding atmospheres is the ancient Greek etymology of the term and its early uses. The word atmosphere comes from ἀτμός (atmós), ‘vapour, steam,’ and σφαῖρα (sphaîra), describing a ‘sphere’ produced by it. In line with these meanings, scientific writings of the sixteenth century used the term in two different ways: to describe the gaseous envelope of a celestial body (e.g., the Earth) and to refer to emanations of the human body. In relation to humans, these effluvia and material airs were perceived to vary with social categories, including gender, age, race, and class. Social emanations were the forces that influenced relationships and led to attraction or repulsion between people (Corbin 1982). Even in these early uses, however, the term ‘atmosphere’ referred not only to the emanations of a particular person but also to the totality of ‘atmospheres’ created by all kinds of bodies interacting in situations and places.

These ideas entered social science debates about a century ago but were not yet named ‘atmosphere’. To clarify the relationship between experiencing and knowing, Georg Simmel (1917, 130), for example, stipulates that we know that something is alive because a living being is surrounded by an ultramateriellen Wirksamkeitsumkreis (literally ‘ultramaterial sphere of influence’) that touches us immediately. Accordingly, we grasp our environment in its entirety before we can reduce it to specific sensory impressions, such as seeing the entity’s movements, smelling its vitality, and cognitively categorising other sensory impressions as belonging to a living organism. Simmel goes on to show that in situations where multiple beings are present, they form an atmosphere that can become characteristic of a particular place, like a city or even a country, foregrounding the spatial and situational meaning of the term.

In a related manner, Émile Durkheim’s notion of a ‘collective effervescence’ captures the affective in-between a situation describes. In his theory of shared affectivities in ritual, Durkheim argues that rituals contribute significantly to the solidarity that helps maintain social order in a group (1995). While rituals are salient, he says, they are threatened by individualistic interests. Therefore, rituals must produce a shared collective feeling, which he referred to as the ‘effervescence’, something which goes beyond the sharing of meanings and categories. It gives the ritual its power and ultimately enables it to maintain social representations and thus the social order of a group (von Scheve 2012).

The study of atmospheres as a force which emanates from bodies can also be linked to the early anthropological study of gift giving, as part of which Marcel Mauss (1925) argues that gifts may have their own power that makes them circulate. Drawing on ethnographic writing on property understandings among late nineteenth and early twentieth century Māori of Polynesia, Mauss discusses the Polynesian concept of the Hau (lit. wind, soul, power) as an object-centred force said to accompany gifts and drive people to reciprocate them. The Hau aligns with the term atmosphere as a force that emanates from a person and extends to objects. Moreover, the Hau is similar to atmospheres in that it has a spatial component, being linked to the gift-giver as much to the soil and the territory where it originates (Mauss [1925] 2016, 70–1). In his methodological reflections, Mauss also refers to the situational meaning of the term atmosphere. To describe the ‘tonalité morale’ (‘moral tone’) that prevails among a group of people he uses the French term ‘atmosphere’ (Mauss [1926] 2002, 282).

In the middle of the twentieth century, concrete situations became more central to social research. Ethnographers tended to study specific ‘encounters’ in which people interact ‘face-to-face’ (Goffman 1961). Thus, several researchers focused on the ways people produce their cultural (and emotional) worlds through everyday interactions (Garfinkel 1967). In face-to-face encounters, people communicate in a variety of ways and in constellations that involve human and non-human participants (Murphy 2023). For example, people may empathise with other species that are part of their world, as Michael Schnegg and Thiemo Breyer (2024) demonstrate with Damara pastoralists in Namibia. Here, embodied empathy creates a multi-species world that incorporates the perspectives of elephants, tricksters, and livestock. This world is distinct from any world in which these perspectives are absent.

Influenced by this focus on micro-situations and their affectivity, anthropologist Clifford Geertz distinguishes ‘ethos’ from ‘moods’. He understood an ethos to be the general aesthetic or moral style of a culture (1973, 89). A people’s ethos may feel universal and objective to them, but it stems at least in part from the specific ways in which people adapt to their lives’ circumstances. Moods, on the other hand, were more temporally- and spatially-bounded phenomena: ‘Like fogs, “moods” just settle and lift; like scents, suffuse and evaporate. When present moods are totalistic: if one is sad everything and everybody seems dreary; if one is gay everything and everybody seems splendid’ (Geertz 1973, 97). Moods also distinguish themselves from an ethos, in that they are made meaningful with reference to their sources, rather than being explicable through the ends they may serve (Geertz 1973, 97).

Two important dimensions of atmospheres are already apparent in these early sets of atmosphere-adjacent concepts. First, atmospheres can describe what is ‘in the air’ at very different scales. On a smaller scale, atmospheres are relevant to concrete situations: face-to-face encounters in which all kinds of bodies, human and non-human, material and immaterial, create an atmosphere. On a larger scale, atmospheres can also characterise situations: a city, a country, a community, a generation, and so on can come with specific atmospheres. Secondly, an atmosphere is usually experienced as a totality, as a sense of a whole in which people cannot immediately identify all the individual elements that make it up.

Affect studies and phenomenology

It is only recently that anthropologists have begun to explicitly theorise atmospheres. Two major theoretical developments may be responsible for this: Affect studies—an interdisciplinary field in the social sciences and humanities which explores the fundamentally relational character of feeling and emotion—has broadened scholarly attention to include more subtle, elusive and intangible affective dynamics, such as atmosphere. Secondly, phenomenology—an approach which pays close attention to people’s experience of concrete situations—has developed a particular focus on atmospheres (Schnegg 2023).

The ‘turn to affect’ in the social sciences and humanities since the late 1990s (Clough and Halley 2007) has been part of a broader movement to rethink feeling, emotion, and subjective experience in terms of the material constellations of bodies in space, rather than as internal feelings. This approach has also gained prominence in anthropology. From an affect perspective, atmospheres are primarily ‘out there’, generated in relational arrangements of bodies, even if they are subjectively felt by individuals.

An important precursor for this understanding of atmosphere is the social science scholarship of emotions beginning in the late 1970s, strongly influenced by feminist and queer studies. These scholars explicitly challenged the assumptions of mainstream psychology, which conceptualised emotions primarily as the internal states of individuals. Instead, they argued that emotions are the result of processes of social construction in culturally specific situations and performances—through everyday interactions and encounters (Hochschild 1983; Abu-Lughod and Lutz 1990). From the 1990s, scholars began to move away from the idea that emotions should be understood merely as cognitive concepts that people construct in everyday interaction and began to explore that material bodies also play an important role in the experience of feeling (Leavitt 1996). From then on, queer-feminist scholars in anthropology and beyond began to use the term ‘affect’, which seemed to denote a stronger connection to bodies, while still arguing that affect is primarily shaped by society, culture, and history, rather than biology (Stoler 2002; Sedgwick 2003; Ahmed 2004).

Since the late 1990s, scholars began to introduce a much wider understanding of the body as a basis for the study of affect (Massumi 2002, Thrift 2007), including human and non-human, material and immaterial entities: ‘a body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (Deleuze 1988, 127). Affect, then, emerges from such a relational constellation of all kinds of bodies that form an ‘affective arrangement’ (Slaby, Mühlhoff and Wünschner 2017). These arrangements in which affect comes to the fore shape how people experience a situation.

Early phenomenologists such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger developed the term Stimmung (often translated as ‘mood’) to capture how we shape situations affectively and how they in turn shape us. Following their conceptual lead, the term ‘atmosphere’ was further developed with the aim of rethinking human emotionality (Tellenbach 1981, Schmitz 2019; Schmitz, Müllan and Slaby 2011; Schnegg 2023). Hermann Schmitz (1974), a central figure in recent phenomenological debates, argues that emotions (and feelings) have long been misconceived as something located in the individual psyche. Instead, they are not private but rather ‘out there’. In Schmitz’s reading, emotions are atmospheres, also ontologically, and largely beyond the individual’s control—something that overcomes or befalls us. The feeling body (Leib) is the medium through which we resonate with them and feel them subjectively (Eisenlohr 2024, Schnegg 2024).

In recent years, Schmitz's radical ontological approach has been further developed (and, some might say, watered down). While he theorises that atmospheres are epistemic wholes that include the subject and cannot be reduced to their parts, Gernot Böhme introduces a ‘constellationalist perspective’ (Riedel 2018, 173), claiming that atmospheres are constituted by the elements present in a situation even as they transcend these elements. As such, atmospheres can be curated and transformed by changing the elements that constitute them, including the built environment, the arrangement of objects, their material makeup, symbolic nature, light, smells, etc. Churches and public spaces in cities are prime examples that demonstrate what constitutes atmospheres and to what extent atmospheres can be constructed, manipulated, and experienced.

Both of these traditions of affect studies and phenomenology use slightly different terminologies, and scholars have debated the distinctions between the concepts of feeling, emotion, and affect. When it comes to the study of atmosphere, it is possible to understand ‘feeling’ as denoting the realm of subjective experience, like a single person or a collective feeling something in their bodies. ‘Emotion’, then, refers to culturally formed and semantically expressible subjective experiences, for which people also normally have words to describe and qualitatively differentiate them – for example love, hate, shame, or joy. The term ‘affect’ is broader and also cross-cuts these categories. In the terminology of affect studies, feeling and emotion can be described as affective phenomena. The concept of affect, however, proposes a strictly relational perspective, understanding feelings and emotions as emerging in-between bodies within a constellation rather than as properties of individual subjects. Over the past three decades, these theoretical resources from affect theory and phenomenology have increasingly been used not only in anthropology, but also in sociology, geography, and other disciplines to theorise atmospheres (Anderson 2009; Gugutzer 2020a; Trigg 2022; Stewart 2011).

Thereby, the notion of atmosphere we discuss here is only one of the several concepts used to describe shared affectivities (Thonhauser 2021). Related terms include ‘affective spaces’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009), ‘Stimmung’ (Borneman and Ghassem-Fachandi 2017), ‘attunement’ (Stewart 2011; Throop 2020; Zigon 2014), and ‘moods’ (Throop 2018; 2014; 2020). Given the range of definitions for all these terms, it is impossible to separate them neatly. It will be one of the major challenges for the larger field to work this out more clearly. However, some tendencies can be discerned. Whereas Stimmung and mood tend to focus more on internal states that frame our experience of the world while simultaneously acknowledging that we are framed by them, atmospheres are thought to be primarily out there, happening to us and thus leading to the feelings we have. In this sense, one comes to a classroom with a particular mood, which has its atmosphere, and while one changes the atmosphere by being present, it also changes one’s mood. When leaving the classroom, however, one takes the mood along while leaving the atmosphere behind. Furthermore, whereas Stimmung and affective spaces describe shared affectivities with some temporal duration, atmospheres also refer to a shorter temporal scale. Finally, compared to affective spaces and atmospheres, Stimmung and moods place less emphasis on the non-human bodies, materialities, and networks of affective relations that constitute them.

In the following, we narrow the focus to anthropological discussions of atmospheres. Building on previous work (Schroer and Schmitt 2018a), we describe what atmospheres are, what they do, and how they can be analysed ethnographically.

What atmospheres are

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation, yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. People often experience atmospheres as something that cannot be put into words easily; nevertheless, they enable or disable certain behaviours in situational and sometimes unpredictable ways. Didier Eribon’s autobiography Returning to Reims offers a vivid case. On his return and to explain what it meant for him to leave home, Eribon invokes his family’s conflictual constellation: ‘the atmosphere was a harsh one, painful on a daily basis, even unbearable. This constant climate of conjugal warfare must have counted for a lot in producing my will to flee both my family and my circumstances’ (2013, 83). Eribon thus underscores, first, that situations are suffused with atmospheres that shape how people feel; and second, that atmosphere is an affective layer that enables some actions while constraining others. In this view, atmosphere—alongside individual aspiration and structural constraint—becomes a further analytic for understanding the behaviour of persons and groups.

The anthropology of atmospheres has also suggested that atmospheres may be neither subjective nor objective. While an atmosphere may already be there when we enter a room, or any other social space, our presence changes it. At the same time, the atmosphere changes us, and as subjects, we are partly constituted by it. It is therefore difficult to describe atmosphere as either a purely objective or a subjective phenomenon. Rather, several scholars have insisted that atmospheres transcend this distinction. An example can illustrate this: During a recent fieldwork stay in Namibia, I (Michael Schnegg) went to a neighbour’s house to ask for a tool. The absence of people outside already signalled that something was amiss. Inside, the room was quiet; no one spoke. I was immediately solicited by an atmosphere of grief. On asking gently, I learned that a close relative had died in an accident only hours before. The situation’s affective intensity rendered me out of place; with limited language, I offered condolences. My presence, I sensed, altered the shared atmosphere, even as that atmosphere altered me—producing a felt mixture of sorrow, disconnection, and misfit.

Such atmospheres are synaesthetic, meaning they may stimulate various senses or cognitive pathways at the same time. It may be this multisensory experience of an atmosphere that makes us feel it as a whole before we can distinguish particular sensory impressions of sound, smell, and touch (Eisenlohr 2024, 40; Schmitz 2016, 18). For example, visitors to an art installation in Denmark complained about its strong smell although no chemical or material sources could be found in the environment. But as the overall tonality of the installation—its walls, its colours, its light—was reminiscent of a hospital floor, the arrangement was experienced synaesthetically as an atmosphere with odour (Stenslund 2018). Such findings suggest the existence of an embodied capacity to store atmospheres and their memory, which are then triggered when a similar arrangement is experienced again.

Atmospheres have also been shown to contain suggestions of movement. Being immersed in an atmosphere can literally move us in ways over which we have little control. This is most obvious with atmospheres that are largely created by sound, which we often experience as shaking and moving the body in particular ways. The musical recitation of devotional poetry (na't khwan) among Mauritian Muslims is a good example for this. Consisting of hymns and poems that are usually recited in Urdu, this form of poetry stirs feelings of religious affection and creates a desire for prayer among devout Muslims. It does this both through its meaning, but also very much through the mode and style of its vocal rendering and through the sonic nature of the voice involved in it. The latter creates an atmosphere that envelops and suffuses the body and changes its sense of being in space. It ‘grips you powerfully’, ‘makes you vibrate’, and ‘directly enters your soul’, as people put it (Eisenlohr 2018, 2024, 8). The sound and resulting movements become all the more meaningful insofar as they are part of ritual practices that incorporate the discursive and iconographic dimensions of a religious tradition (Eisenlohr 2022, 2018).

A final major aspect of atmospheres that the anthropological literature has insisted on is that they can be shaped or curated. For instance, by arranging the lighting in a way that fosters a sense of community, solitude, and ‘security’, a feeling called hygge ('feeling home') can be induced in Denmark (Bille 2020; 2015; Bille, Bjerregaard and Sørensen 2015). In a similar manner, urban spaces can be designed to make people feel particular ways, when, for example, the high ceilings in Christian churches are intended to make people feel small in the presence of God (for more examples, see Stenslund 2023). This possibility to craft and design atmospheres has also been demonstrated for experimental theatres (Gatt 2018), pharmacies (Liu 2023), churches (Gregersen 2021), commercial settings (Kolehmainen and Mäkinen 2021), courtrooms (Bens 2018), or even aquariums where enthusiasts create an atmosphere with water, air, and light (Schmitt 2018, 96).

What atmospheres do

We are only beginning to understand that in addition to individual motives and structural possibilities and constraints, atmospheres are a third layer that shape both meanings and behaviours. As such, atmospheres can create, for example, belonging. To this end, anthropological research has shown that people actively create the atmosphere in the Night Church, held in a cathedral in Copenhagen, through the arrangements of both human and non-human bodies, making it a special place for worship and belonging. To theorise this, Andreas Melson Gregersen (2021) introduces the term ‘atmosphering’ and demonstrates how this act involves creating a sense of being in a church without being in a traditional one, and how people perceive this atmosphere.

Similarly, to ‘feel at home’ in Japan means to create an atmosphere where practices that create intimacy (often referred to as ‘social heat’) such as sleeping, eating, and bathing are balanced with household members’ desire for autonomy and distance (Daniels 2015). In related ways, white, urban, upper-middle-class American women use ‘ethnic’ objects such as Malian bògòlan candles and cloth to create domestic spaces, which in their words, are full of ‘atmosphere’ and ‘life’ (Bodil Birkebæk Olesen 2010). They feel that exoticised objects can help them overcome the ‘coldness’ of other materials and bring life, and ultimately social relationships, into their homes. In certain British pubs the atmosphere immerses people in the essence of the place not only to make them feel at home, but primarily to encourage consumption (Shaw 2018).

While this sounds mostly positive and inclusive, atmospheres may just as well limit or exclude people in various ways. In Black skin, white masks (2008), Frantz Fanon analyses what it feels like to be Black in mid-century French society. In a much-quoted scene, he describes sitting at a table and contemplating reaching for matches. He feels inhibited and describes how the gazes of others (whether they are in the room or not) create an ‘atmosphere of certain uncertainty’ (Fanon 2008, 83) that hinders him. This atmosphere is not just something that imposes itself on him in the moment. Rather, it has become a ‘definitive structuring of the self and the world’, part of a dialectical relationality. Because of the oppressive and dangerous atmosphere in which Fanon lived, it is impossible for him to move freely and without fear. His analysis has inspired a vast literature on how the gaze of dominant groups of people can create atmospheres that inhibit or exclude others (Magrì and McQueen 2023).

Sara Ahmed (2007) is one of the most prominent contributors to this literature. In her analysis of whiteness, she shows how certain atmospheres can be created in such a way as to exclude non-white bodies. To explain how these atmospheres are formed, she extends Fanon’s account of living under a hostile, white gaze. Ahmed describes the limited scope of action of people of colour in a white world through the notion of ‘orientation’, understood as the different directions people can take in any given moment, which determine what is and is not within their reach (2007). Reflecting on the political dimension of atmosphere more generally, Janis Jenkins (2025) recently added that within any political ethos, the constitution of political subjectivity takes place at the nexus of and orientation and the atmosphere in which we orient.

The stifling effects of atmospheres that Fanon developed with respect to ethnic and racialised limitation and exclusion have been extended to other social categories such as gender, age, and class. Take, for example, outreach events by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in northern Uganda in the late 2010s. Here, ICC staff aimed at curating a ‘transitional justice atmosphere’ which included foreign media audiences but excluded in-person audiences in the village through linguistic and spatial regimes. The constellation of material arrangements contributed significantly to this exclusion: monitors displayed proceedings from The Hague in English, accessible to media representatives but incomprehensible to most local attendees who lacked adequate translation. The small screens and language barrier generated an atmosphere of boredom and restlessness among the physically present audience, yet this remained invisible to distant viewers. Television cameras and photographers transmitted a carefully curated visual atmosphere that suggested engaged participation, while the actual bodily experience of confusion and exclusion felt by local attendees was systematically filtered out of the mediated representation (Bens 2022, 46–71).

Recent scholarship on the political dimension of atmospheres also explores whether some emotions and feelings might not only be shaped by atmosphere but, in Schmitz’s sense, be atmospheres. In this line of theorising, Schnegg (2024) describes boredom in rural Namibia as an atmosphere that grows in a space created by a longing for a different future. At the same time, people experience the path to this future as being blocked—by the environment, by political and economic marginalisation, by their own bodies, and by others. This atmosphere grips people who describe boredom as ‘riding on their backs’. It can only be lifted if the determining structures change. Here, emotions as atmospheres are intertwined with the political processes responsible for materiality and its lack. In a similar manner, historical, material, and political processes, as well as the routines of the school day, contribute to an atmosphere of boredom in a Berlin Hauptschule (Wellgraf 2018). The particular school is attended by the less privileged children in a part of the city characterised by increasing ruin and decay. The feeling of boredom grows in this environment of high unemployment where students experience education as having no future.

Political atmospheres of violence have equally been observed in the afterlife of environmental disasters and armed conflict in Kashmir, for example. These atmospheres have developed in the militarised, ecologically fragile borderlands of Pakistan and India, shaping the lives of people in the two mountain valleys described ethnographically by Omer Aijazi (2024). At the same time, Aijazi convincingly demonstrates how people overcome these violent atmospheres through everyday micro-practices such as sharing and fostering friendships with Allah. This situation compares very well to the ways in which narco-stories within the Mexican and U.S. governments' militarised war on drugs in a Mexican prostitution zone contribute to a violent atmosphere. Here, rumours about how violent narco-criminals are contributed to an affective atmosphere of terror and vulnerability. This atmosphere in turn rendered the public more passive and ultimately led sex workers and other local residents to stop working in the area and move away (Luna 2018).

While the study of atmospheres foregrounds the importance of affect, feelings, and emotions, it also matters for rational deliberation. At the ICC judging on Uganda’s past conflicts, actors such as prosecutors, defence lawyers, victims, witnesses, and judges compete to influence the atmosphere in these ‘legal spaces’ (Bens 2022, Philoppopoulos Mihalopoulos 2015). They shape the atmosphere to establish specific historical truths about Uganda’s violent past, ‘moral truths’ about who is responsible for this violence, the plausibility of both, the guilt or innocence of individuals, and the justice and legitimacy of whole legal systems, such as international criminal law. To influence these atmospheres, actors try to rearrange bodies in an ‘affective arrangement’ (Slaby et al. 2017), for example by bringing human and non-human witnesses into the courtroom (Bens 2022, 92–110). These atmospheres inside and outside the courtroom serve as ‘affective frames’ for assessing the plausibility of narratives about the past, present, and future (Bens 2022, 71–91).

Beyond rationality, atmospheres help us create meaning. A comparative analysis of museum exhibitions has revealed how atmospheres make things appear to the visitor, as in the case of the exhibition Villa Sovietica which ran from 2009-2010 at the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva and focused on Soviet objects of everyday life. These objects can never simply be seen. Instead, they require movement of the perceiving body to reach them. This arrangement dissolves the Soviet nature of these objects and opens up other perspectives on them, focusing for example on their materiality, which is similar to that of other objects in the room (Bjerregaard 2015). Similary, it has been argued that the special atmosphere of live recordings of ritual mourning taking place in a Pakistan neighbourhood emanate the mahaul, a moral atmosphere of the ritual. When the consumers of Shia Islamic media listen to these live recordings, they contribute to the atmosphere of the public spaces in which they are played (Cooper 2022; 2024). Mahaul, here, is the Urdu articulation of atmosphere, a category of knowledge and experience, with interesting ethnographic stakes. Importantly, Mahaul is not only the affective background that gives meaning to things, but also a ‘container’ that holds and frames a situation, as well as the human and non-human entities within it (Cooper 2024).

Studying this interplay of atmosphere, rationality, and meaning-making shows that atmospheres are powerful social forces that shape collective and individual behaviour (Bille and Schwabe 2023). This is evident in the atmosphere created during the temple festival in a Badaga community in southern India (Heidemann 2021). The rituals manifest and reproduce the social order and the positions of groups within it—not unlike in Durkheim’s effervescence, mentioned above. They are also experienced as a tremendous relief by devotees and visitors. In a similar manner, unmarked religiosity has been shown to exist in secular Ukrainian society before the war. Theorising this form of religiosity as an atmosphere allows us to show how, in moments of crisis, the religious atmosphere becomes an important resource for political projects, such as the popular uprising of 2013–14 (Wanner 2020).

Sporting events are prime example of how atmospheres connect, but studies can also show the ambiguous dynamics of such connections. The ‘atmosphere’ of the 2012 London Olympics, for example, embraced and fostered a nationalism that made it difficult, and at times impossible, to express a critical perspective, for example by pointing out that the Olympics were the most expensive security operation in recent British history (Stephens 2016, 183). The impact of atmospheres was particularly evident when, during the Covid-19 pandemic, fans were not allowed into football stadiums and the 22 players played in front of up to 80,000 empty seats. This atmosphere clearly affected the players’ vitality. While many lacked motivation, some reported feeling more secure and relaxed (Gugutzer 2020b, Edensor 2015). These findings point to an open challenge in atmospheric studies: explaining how an atmosphere can affect different people in different ways.

While many studies of atmospheres focus on the relationships between humans and their built environments, non-human beings can become part of the atmosphere as well. Pigdogging—an Australian form of recreational hunting—relies on close collaboration between people and dogs to locate and catch wild pigs. Hunting with dogs extends human perception into the animals’ extraordinary olfactory range. In this partnership, scent appears not as a mere trace but as atmosphere: an enveloping field that signals where pigs have moved, rested, or turned. The hunt also transforms the landscape’s atmosphere: Human, canine, machine, and terrain become frictionally enmeshed in an embodied, unfolding practice that makes—and remakes—the landscape through a multisensory chase (Keil 2021, Schroer and Schmitt 2018b).

In a related manner, recent scholarship mobilises the idea that atmospheres are an underlying dimension of our connection to all entities we find in this world. Currently, climate and environmental changes are drastically altering these entities. As a result, the soil dries out, and the grasses and eventually the livestock die, which changes the overall environmental atmosphere (Schnegg 2025). To describe this atmosphere, Damara pastoralists in Namibia use the term ǃŪke-ai, which translates as ‘collective loneliness’. Similarly, in the Pontine Marshes in Italy, an atmosphere emerges from everyday agricultural practices, like burning reeds, and becomes part of the environment itself (Gruppuso 2018). The marshes are both extremely productive and a breeding ground for mosquitoes and malaria, the Italian contraction for mal’aria (aria cattiva, or ‘bad air’). As such, the atmosphere connects to the environment (here also meteorologically), with breathing playing an important role in the process. Exploring the atmospheric links we create to other species and to post-humanist mixtures of life and technology remains a major research gap for the years to come.

How atmospheres can be analysed and studied

Given that atmospheres, by their very nature, defy precise description, they pose significant challenges for anthropological analysis. One of the first systematic attempts to address the methodological challenges that atmospheres raise came with the productive distinction between ‘knowing in atmospheres’, ‘knowing about atmospheres’, and ‘knowing through atmospheres’ (Sumartojo and Pink 2019). Thereby, ‘knowing in atmospheres’ names the researcher’s in-situ attunement as an atmosphere unfolds: staying with its contingencies, rhythms, and micro-shifts through go-alongs, recordings, and sensory notes. ‘Knowing about atmospheres’ is a reconstructive, after-the-fact account that draws on interviews, elicitation, and traces to parse how spaces, media, bodies, and histories configured what was felt. Finally, ‘knowing through atmospheres’ treats concrete episodes as engines for concept-building, connecting atmospheric experience to broader social and material formations.

Understanding people’s feelings as lying ‘in the air’ makes them more accessible (and less deterministic) than placing them in the inner psyche and the minds of our interlocutors. However, it poses another salient challenge: how can we explain that individuals can sometimes experience the ‘same’ atmospheres quite differently? Some describe feeling in one way, while others feel differently. Some seem to be completely immersed in an atmosphere, while others merely notice it. Fully understanding and theorising this is still an outstanding theoretical challenge (Seyfert 2012, 29). Recently, the notion of ‘resonance’ has been proposed to explain such individual variation (Schnegg 2025). In this view, people have different ways of resonating with an atmosphere. At least two dimensions may influence how people experience or resonate with a given atmosphere: affective dispositions and symbols.

Affective dispositions can be defined as ‘an individual’s repository of affective traces of past relationships, events, and encounters. These function in the present as potentials to affect and be affected’ (Mühlhoff 2019, 119). Experiencing atmospheres, like other experiences, leaves traces in the subject. Having experienced the exuberance of a festival, the collective excitement of a sports team’s victory, or the wind before the long-awaited rain become part of an individual’s disposition that can be triggered in certain situations. These dispositions are likely to shape how to (re)experience an atmosphere. However, other, even more personal experiences can become part of one’s affective disposition and influence how the atmosphere is felt. Someone will respond differently to the atmosphere of a funeral if they have recently experienced death. Similarly, a herdsman who depends on cattle and rain will resonate differently with an atmosphere that announces rain than a teacher who does not depend on rain at all.

The study of symbols is equally important to understand whether and how atmospheres resonate with us. Atmospheres are, to a certain extent, pre-reflective, but they still require the interpretation of symbols which contribute to them. Consider walking past a group of noisy football fans, which might feel uncomfortable to some but perfectly normal to people who are used to it. At the same time, it may feel different again to those who can read the symbols on their skin and clothing, which in Germany, for example, sometimes refer to extreme right-wing movements. The symbols may thereby co-create an atmosphere, and they take on meaning through it (Bens 2022, 71–90).

How seriously one takes the role of affective dispositions and symbols in the study of atmospheres depends on the degree to which one believes that experiencing atmospheres is pre-reflective. The ethnographic record seems to show that atmospheres can not only be consciously curated, but also that people can ‘learn’ or ‘be socialised’ to resonate with particular atmospheres by becoming familiar with their symbols (Schnegg 2024, 2025).

Methodologically speaking, atmospheres can, first, be successfully studied through participant observation. This enables an ethnographic description of the situations and affective arrangements in which atmospheres emerge. It allows us to grasp in detail how human and non-human bodies relate to each other—what sounds, smells, lights, and other diverse components form the building blocks of a given situation. To explore their saliency, ethnographers can ask themselves which components of an arrangement cannot be omitted without significantly changing the atmosphere: this could be a person, a landscape, a view, a smell, a story, and so on. They can also ask about the specific sequence of events that brought an atmosphere about, as people often only become aware of them when people, landscapes, views, smells, stories, or anything else shifted (Riedel 2019, Bens 2019).

These observations usually trigger atmospheric experiences that the readers themselves have had: affective dispositions evoke a feeling in which similar atmospheric experiences were embedded. Of course, there are several methodological problems with this, including the presumption that the audience of an ethnography has experienced similar atmospheres in order to imagine and reexperience them. For this reason, atmospheric descriptions should be complemented by interviews with participants in the field as well as by autoethnographic reflection.

A second promising method to study atmospheres are phenomenological interviews that explore how our research participants understand and feel in certain situations. Phenomenological interviews ask people to re-experience a particular situation (Schnegg 2023). They begin by eliciting a moment in which an atmosphere, such as eeriness, was felt. In a second step, the interviewees are asked to describe the situation in which something happened as precisely as possible and to mentally reposition themselves in this experience. In the final step, the ethnographer asks the interlocutor to recall the atmosphere and, to some extent, to re-experience it and describe how it felt, without using categories that are too abstract. This elicits an experiential description (Levy and Hollan 1998). In such interviews, ethnographers avoid naming and categorising the atmosphere in advance. Sometimes atmospheres may have names that are not easily translated into English, in which case interviewees can be invited to use non-English terms for them. While phenomenological interviews are typically conducted for moments that the anthropologist has not experienced, they can also be used to describe atmospheres that are known to all participants in the conversation, allowing the data to be triangulated with the descriptions made as described above.

A third method is autoethnography, i.e. describing how an individual themself has experienced a certain situation. Imagine the boredom of waiting with people for a bus, the sadness of a funeral, the excitement of a wedding. Researchers are affected by these atmospheres to varying degrees, and reflecting on these experiences can become a powerful methodological tool, as, for example, Fanon’s work demonstrates. It makes the ethnographer’s own affects and emotions a starting point and an ‘epistemic resource’ for analysis (Stodulka et al. 2018). Ethnographers may also experience liminal moments of change, when constellations in the situation change and atmospheres shift. These affective dissonances in the atmosphere can be an important starting point for ethnographic analysis. All three of these methods—participant observation, phenomenological interviews, and autoethnography—broadly align with approaches generally subsumed within sensory ethnography (Vannini 2024).

Conclusion

Atmospheres are the overall feeling of a situation that people experience individually and collectively. They are created by the affective relationships between the human and non-human, material and immaterial bodies that comprise a situation, yet an atmosphere is at the same time more than the sum of its parts. Anthropologists have begun to conceptualise this affective in-between. Most of them agree that atmospheres are situational, that they are formed by the affective forces emanating from bodies present, and that they encompass the sensory impressions left by these bodies, including appearances, smells, views, touches, sounds, lighting, and more. This entry has shown how atmospheres shape how things are perceived, how they become meaningful, how we feel, and what behaviours are appropriate and likely to happen next. As such, atmospheres have significant explanatory power that anthropology should continue to explore.

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Note on contributors

Michael Schnegg, PhD, is an anthropologist at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Mexico and Namibia. His current research explores what it feels like to live a rural life in an increasingly urbanised and warming world. To this end, he is contributing to the development of a phenomenological anthropology that brings together philosophers and anthropologists to work towards an empirically grounded theorisation of pressing issues, including climate change. His work has been published in a wide range of journals in anthropology, sociology, economics, communication studies, geography, and theoretical physics.

Michael Schnegg, Universität Hamburg, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, D-20146 Hamburg, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9240-8836

Jonas Bens is Heisenberg Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hamburg. His research focuses on how people navigate conflicts within plural normative orders, combining long-term ethnographic studies with analyses of various legal systems, including state law and indigenous normative orders. From this perspective, he explores central legal and political concepts such as sovereignty, justice, property, value, and punishment. His most recent monograph is The sentimental court: The affective life of international criminal justice (2020, Cambridge University Press).

Jonas Bens, Universität Hamburg, Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1, D-20146 Hamburg, https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3485-0436

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Infrastructure

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:58:08 +0000

Rehabilitation of the L train tunnel in New York, 2019. Photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York

Hannah Knox Evelina Gambino

University College London, University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Mar 2023

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

Abstract:

Infrastructures are the arteries of our contemporary world: roads, railways, airports, ports, pipelines, fibre optics cables, data, and logistics centres. Built above and below ground, they connect, channel, and, at times, halt the movement of humans, commodities, and resources that populate the earth. Infrastructures can also be immaterial: software, flows of data, and capital and the systems that organise them. A most basic definition can be gleaned from the term itself: the prefix ‘infra-’ means ‘below’, which highlights infrastructure’s role as the ‘underlying structure’ that allows a system to function. Infrastructures are not traditional ethnographic sites, yet in recent years a growing number of anthropologists and other social scientists have started to analyse them. Ethnographies of infrastructure have shown how these overlooked objects and networks offer exciting insights into the processes that make up social life. These studies have often highlighted the paradoxical quality of infrastructures, showing how they underwrite mundane daily interactions at the same time as being sites where dreams of alternative worlds are played out. Infrastructures remind us of the past and shape ideas of the future. They are both concrete things, and also structures that enable other things to move and be brought into relation with one another. For all of these reasons infrastructures are needed, coveted, and fought for. They channel new forms of power and act as catalysts for political struggle. This entry traces a growing body of work on infrastructures and their social implications. It shows how following infrastructures has allowed ethnographers to extend their analyses across multiple scales, shedding new light on practices of statecraft, ideas of the environment, political possibilities, and conceptions of time and space. Attention to infrastructures helps us analyse past and present societies and push for a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that the future might take.

Introduction

Rarely a day passes without infrastructure being mentioned in the news, with recent crises making their importance ever clearer. Climate change raises questions over the sustainability of fossil-fuel-based energy infrastructure; the COVID-19 pandemic showed the fragility of infrastructures of health care, equipment supply chains, and the emergence of new infrastructures of care and surveillance; and the war in Ukraine and its effects on both energy and food has demonstrated the contingency and importance of the networks that enable the systems of production, extraction, and accumulation on which much of contemporary life is dependent. Pipelines, roads, railways, airports, and ports are at once fragile and ubiquitous, mundane and political, extending far beyond any one human society whilst they (re)organise the humans and objects out of which such societies are made.

In spite of the intensity of contemporary concern over infrastructure, until recently, it was not a category or class of objects that anthropologists were particularly known for studying. As a material substrate (‘infra’ meaning ‘below’) for social life proper, infrastructures tended to remain in the background as mundane, unremarkable, and technical objects rather than controversial, vibrant, and cultural forms. However, in recent years all this has changed. What would once have been seen as a niche topic for anthropological study has blossomed into a lively comparative field which brings together political and economic anthropology, material culture studies, science and technology studies (STS), and the anthropology of the state to interrogate, in a huge range of places and contexts, what infrastructures are, how they come to be, and the role that they are playing in contemporary social life. This entry provides an orientation to this developing field, exploring why this turn to infrastructure has taken place, and what the payoff of studying infrastructures might be.

Anthropologies of infrastructure

The anthropological study of infrastructure has emerged in part from a long-running question facing anthropologists about how to study the large-scale systems within which we are all entangled (Larkin 2013, Troillot 2003). Anthropology is a discipline which specialises in understanding local experience and forms of social life that take place in particular communities. However, anthropologists are also aware that any experience in place is shaped by things and processes happening elsewhere. Understanding things like capitalism, globalisation, colonialism, and the state have been long-running concerns within the discipline, leading to the creation of key concepts such as ‘scapes’ (Appadurai 1990), ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005), ‘structural violence’ (Farmer 1996), and ‘socio-technical networks’ (Latour 1991).

Anthropologists have found infrastructures promising in this regard for they are both concrete material forms which can be studied ethnographically in particular places, but they also function as infrastructures precisely because they traverse and transgress space and place (Harvey et al. 2017). Whilst the method of ethnography may have been developed in small-scale social settings, it is nowadays invariably conducted in relation to issues like globalisation, economic exchange, global religion, media, and migration which exceed the boundaries of any one research project in any particular place (Eriksson 1995, Anand et al. 2018; Anand 2011; see also Amin and Thrift 2014). By turning their attention to infrastructures, anthropologists have shown how their systemic qualities are created through tangible activities that take place in offices, in laboratories, in communities and neighbourhoods, in debating chambers, on websites, social media platforms, and in images and documents which circulate through social networks online and offline. Many social scientists understand infrastructural systems in terms of technological progress, the pursuit of seamless connectivity, and the materialisation of geopolitical relations (cf Harvey 1989; Therbon 2007; Levinson 2006; Easterling 2014; Cowen 2014). Within the anthropology of infrastructure, the emphasis has been on how these ideas (of technological progress, seamlessness, and geopolitical importance) come to be attached to infrastructure. Paying attention to infrastructures allows us to account for the everyday work that goes into making, breaking, and living with systems of power, control, possibility, and inequality (see also Megoran 2006).

Another reason why anthropologists have been drawn to infrastructure is that more and more state projects that they encounter in their field sites are now classified under this term. Things like roads and energy systems have not always been grouped together as ‘infrastructure’. As Ashley Carse shows, the term has a particular history, emerging initially in English to describe the substrate that underlay railroads, rather than the railroads themselves. Over time, infrastructures have gradually come to be conceptualised as a class of things in their own right—as ‘hard technical artefacts or systems, rather than processes’ (Carse 2014, 11), allowing engineers and anthropologists alike to think about diverse material systems all as forms of ‘infrastructure’. This is not just a matter of terminology. With the term we have seen the emergence of a much broader set of concerns about the appropriate techniques and practice of governmentality that infrastructures demand. This has particularly been the case when it comes to the relationship between infrastructures and the governance of risk.

For Stephen Collier and Andrew Lakoff (2020), the identification of infrastructure as a class of object that entails particular kinds of risks and possibilities has shaped the kinds of projects that states invest in. Specifically, Collier and Lakoff link state-led infrastructure projects to processes of securitisation, showing through a historical analysis of twentieth century military organisation how infrastructures emerged as a material response to challenges of international security. In an analysis of the emergence of the concept of ‘critical security infrastructure’, they trace how the problem of infrastructure for the US Army emerged first as a logistical problem of how to move troops and their resources across land, a challenge which stimulated socio-material inventions, from floating pontoon bridges to the very idea of supply chains. Over time the concern with building infrastructures to support military incursions shifted into a concern with how to protect them from attack, thus opening the way to thinking of infrastructures of production and circulation as critical sites of risk. This state preoccupation with infrastructures as subject to and technologies of risk management has stimulated investment in both national and international megaprojects, whose structural complexity and social impacts have come to shape anthropologists’ field sites in profound and unavoidable ways. As a result anthropologists have found themselves exploring such issues as the place of speculation, futures, and markets in the making and reshaping of people’s lives, the exclusionary quality of infrastructure megaprojects that disconnect some people even as they connect others, and the ongoing legacies of power and colonialism that are made evident when new infrastructures appear.

If infrastructures have emerged empirically as sites of contestation, politics, and social change within anthropological field sites, they have also become available as topics for study. This was the result of shifts in theoretical discussions and debates within the social sciences and humanities. Infrastructure studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field which traverses geography, science and technology studies (STS), political sciences, history, sociology, and urban studies. Across these disciplinary boundaries, scholars are held together by a range of shared theoretical approaches that foreground questions about the role of materiality, object agency, process, and form in processes of social and political change. Key influences in this broader interdisciplinary discussion include actor network theory (ANT) (Latour 2005, Law 1999), and in particular the work of Bruno Latour and his early studies of the production of scientific knowledge and the workings of infrastructure, such as the collected essays in Pandora’s hope (1999), and his parable about a speculative rapid transport system, Aramis: or the love of technology (1996). ANT helped draw attention to the active role that seemingly inert objects play in social life, and to the way that knowledge and understanding of the world is the outcome of material practices of ordering, translating, and transforming signs and matter.

One of the most well-known definitions of infrastructure is ‘matter that moves matter’ (Larkin 2013, 238). Infrastructures like roads and railways are tangible material forms that exist in particular places and that people use in their everyday lives. Yet infrastructures are not just material forms that exist in one location, but function precisely because they hold together a range of things—rail tracks, standards, ideas, policies, labour practices. It is this ability to connect that enables things and people to move, and societies to function. Brian Larkin therefore argues that infrastructures are not only things ‘but also the relations between things’ (2013, 239). Those who have sought to understand the more explicitly political implications of these mutable socio-material relations have built on the work of scholars like Langdon Winner, whose pioneering publications in the social studies of technology illustrated how artefacts can come to act violently and reproduce or rework social inequality (Winner 1986). This is most clearly articulated in Winner’s discussion of the bridges built by the planner Robert Moses over the Long Island Expressway. These bridges were too low for public buses to pass under, with the effect that they kept low-income citizens away from the beaches of Long Island. Extending this attention to infrastructural power, scholars have also drawn on the work of scholars such as Susan Leigh Star, Geoffrey Bowker, and Paul Edwards who have shown how the standards, classifications, and knowledge systems that frame and shape infrastructures are both informed by, and in turn inform, relations of inclusion and exclusion (Star and Bowker 1999, Lampland and Star 2009, Star and Ruhleder 1996, Edwards 2003).

Pushing this critical attention to the political life of materials further, infrastructure studies have also been deeply influenced by the feminist STS scholars like Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Karen Barad, whose work has sought to recover the political possibilities inherent in the hybrid, categorically transgressive, and messy work of making knowledge and making worlds (Barad 2007, Haraway 1991, Stengers 2005). In the 2010s, much of this conversation about materiality and object-agency coalesced into a field of study known as the ‘new materialisms’, which brought together these materialist approaches with political science to advocate for a more explicit attention to the affective properties of lively matter in shaping political relationships (Coole and Frost 2010, Braun and Whatmore 2011). Proponents of this school argued we should pay attention to the specific chemical properties of materials such as oil, gas, coal to learn about how different forms of political consciousness take shape. For example, Timothy Mitchell has demonstrated that the specific composition of coal, its heaviness, location, and the methods necessary for its extraction have played a crucial role in shaping workers’ ability to make democratic claims. This is because, unlike oil, coal extraction is predicated on the concentration of large groups of workers in one place (2011).

Although there are tensions between these different intellectual threads, what they share is an openness to understanding human worlds as inherently entangled with material processes and properties, and a curiosity as to the implications of this entanglement in domains ranging from science to politics, religion, health, technology, and, of course, infrastructure.

As we can see, there is no single anthropology of infrastructure, nor a unique definition of what infrastructures are. Instead, the way anthropologists have come across infrastructures and sought to incorporate them into their analysis has created practical and conceptual challenges that have in turn reshaped wider debates within the discipline. The sections below outline how an attention to infrastructures have produced new perspectives on: the state, the environment, conceptualisations of space/time, and, finally, how these elusive networks have helped anthropologists to develop new understandings of politics.

Infrastructures and the state

With ethnographic studies of infrastructure frequently taking anthropologists into the offices, field laboratories, and spaces of protest associated with infrastructure projects, it is perhaps unsurprising that their study has often also been the study of the state (Harvey and Knox 2015, Von Schnizler 2010, Collier 2011). As large-scale public works projects, infrastructures are dependent on states to finance or underwrite their investment. They are also tied to states through standards, regulations, legal regimes, planning systems, and political decision-making processes (Collier et al. 2016). Arguably, large-scale infrastructures like roads, electricity networks, and railways would not be possible without the existence of modern nation states, and thereby offer a promising way into studying the everyday life of the state itself (Sharma and Gupta 2006, Gupta 2012).

One of the issues that has faced anthropologists of the state has been the challenge of actually studying the state ethnographically (Mitchell 1999). ‘The state’ is a concept that points to political institutions such as councils, governments, military, and the courts, but it also includes a wider range of people—tax payers, citizens, businesses, charities—objects and processes, such as forms, elections, referendums, consultations, policies, and standards, through which norms of appropriate behaviour and conditions of belonging are worked out (Taussig 1997, Coronil 1999). Anthropologists have found in state infrastructure a promising object through which the subjects and objects which generate ‘state effects’ can be traced and followed in practice (Harvey 2005).

If infrastructures are not possible without the state, then the opposite is also true: namely, that the state is not possible without infrastructure. Infrastructures can thus be thought of as key technologies through which states enact, perform, and reproduce themselves. Ethnographies from South America to Central Asia to Europe have shown how roads, railway borders, and other structures are the crucial threads through which the limits of nation states are stitched and, indeed, unstitched (Harvey and Knox 2015, Mukerji 1997, Reeves 2014). In this sense, infrastructures have been central technologies of colonisation and machines of colonial and racial violence (Zeiderman 2020; Viatori and Scheuring 2020). The recent history of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway exemplifies this infrastructural (un)stitching. In the aftermath of the first Nagorno Karabakh War in 1993, the railway was rerouted away from Armenia, creating a corridor connecting Azerbaijan with Turkey, through Georgia. This effectively and willingly materialised a logistical border to Armenia’s participation in regional and international trade. Furthermore, as Tekla Aslanishvili and Evelina Gambino explore in their ethnographic film, A state in a state (2022), this geopolitical function and the funding structure of the train gave life to a series of borders of different kinds, exacerbating forms of marginalisation along ethnic lines and generating new insecurities amongst the populations affected by this infrastructure (Aslanishvili 2022; Gambino 2022, 2019).

Anthropologists have pointed to the frequently inherent coloniality of infrastructures, showing how rather than being just a means to an end, they have shaped the logic through which colonisation has been enacted (Cupers and Meier 2020, Vaughn 2021). Sarah Vaughn’s research on water infrastructure and climate adaptation in Guyana, for example, has shown how contemporary attempts to manage the watery coastline of Guyana rests on infrastructural histories of dam construction that involved colonisation, slavery, plantation agriculture, and racial politics. Contemporary infrastructure projects demand a reckoning with these embedded histories, even as they seek at times to depart from them. In other contexts, infrastructures have enacted a politics of colonisation by enabling peripheries and frontiers to be tamed and tied into state systems of bureaucratic oversight and governmental control. They have shown how roads and supply chains, for example, link sites of extraction and allow novel forms of circulation, exchange, and profit (Tsing 2005, Scott 1998). Not content with seeing this as just a matter of domination, however, anthropologists have sought to tell more complex stories about these incursions, showing how large-scale projects of domination are domesticated and embodied by those who inhabit these infrastructural worlds. Laura Bear, for example, who studies the Indian railways, has shown how as railways travelled to corners of the subcontinent never connected before, a myriad of new relations emerged that would permanently reconfigure not just the institutional but also the intimate lives of Indian citizens (Bear 2007).

If some infrastructure projects have been a way of inserting state power over territories, people, and the environment, others have been part of a process of state transformation as state forms become obsolete, splinter, or are replaced over time. Stephen Collier’s ethnography (2011) of the attempted neoliberalisation of Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union charts how infrastructure becomes a means through which such change is pursued and also thwarted. Collier’s ethnography looks at the attempted privatisation of heating systems across the territories left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union, demonstrating how communal heating systems emerged problematically as material instantiations of the Soviet political system. The author explores what happens to such infrastructures in the face of political change. Focusing on the transition from socialism to neoliberalism, Collier follows pipes and flows of heat to show how the establishment of the free market in a former Soviet town took the shape of a battle against the infrastructures of Socialist urbanism. Here, the pipes heating the USSR operated according to centralised estimates of the city’s needs and could not be controlled by individual households. Similarly, Antina von Schnitzler has shown how water meters became political in the South African context of post-apartheid politics. When these meters were installed in South African townships in the 2000s, this seemingly benign technology operated as a tool of governance that sought to counter an anti-apartheid era of payment boycotts and usher in an era of neoliberal citizenship. Through the implementation of water metering, township residents were asked to become ‘calculating subjects’, whose civic contract with the state entailed an entrepreneurial ethos (von Schnitzler 2008). Here the water meter was a technology that helped bring into being a new form of governmentality.

If the material work of grappling with pipes and meters is one way that states transform their modes of governance, another is through the knowledge infrastructures of paperwork, bureaucracy, standards, regulations, and law. Ethnographers have shown how contracts (Appel 2019, 137–204; Tsing 2005, 69), forms of expertise (Ong 2005; Mitchell 2002, 2011; Harvey and Knox 2015; Gunel 2019) or the calculations that sustain global financial flows (Appel and Kumar 2015; Ho 2009) operate as powerful knowledge infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. Ethnographies show that infrastructures of information—such as documents—operate very similarly to the more obviously material infrastructures we can observe around us. Hannah Appel’s ethnography looks at the place of contracts in establishing petro-capitalism in Equatorial Guinea. Like bridges and roads, contracts work by connecting some entities (i.e. the state and private enterprises), and, like territorial borders, they disconnect others. As juridical tools, contracts come to fix the relationship between corporations and the state, with the latter guaranteeing profits for the former. This fixing has infrastructural qualities. Hannah Knox and Penny Harvey highlight how ‘a finished road makes invisible or seemingly unimportant the conditions of its construction’ (2012, 529). ‘There are several ways in which things can become un-noticed’, says Hannah Appel, ‘there are things that you don’t notice because you rarely come across them, and there are the things you don’t notice because you come across them so frequently’ (2019, 137). In its mundane, modular form, a signed contract provides a legal coat under which the terms, parties, and negotiations brought together by a specific deal can remain unseen and therefore unquestioned (Appel 2019, 137–61; Tsing 2005, 69). As scarcely visible substrates, contracts are shown to have powerful infrastructural effects, enabling legal practices such as offshoring and sanctioning the distribution of underground oil deposits between private corporations. As such, they effectively function as key infrastructures of this particular kind of extractive capitalism, organising its economic and social impacts.

Whether depicting infrastructures as public works, splintered networks, arteries of domination, or invisible substrates, they provide us with a greater understanding of state processes by allowing us to study the state in a concrete manner. In this way, ethnographies of infrastructure propose new ways to understand how state power is formed and maintained, and the shapes states take within different historical moments.

Infrastructures and space/time

Infrastructures also enable social scientists to reconsider the importance of time and temporality in social life. Time is a foundational topic for anthropologists, both in terms of understanding how time is constructed, measured, and valued in different social worlds, and in terms of an on-going reflexive critique of the temporal assumptions embedded in the socio-cultural study of society (Wolf 1982, Fabian 1983, Gell 1992, Pels 2015). Many of the questions that animated these debates about time in anthropology have been reinvigorated in recent years by studies of infrastructures.

Attention to infrastructures has revealed how shared conceptions of time are codified (Bear 2016), opened up questions about the relation between space, place, and time (Gupta 2015, 2018), and allowed an interrogation of how different ideas of time are enlisted into projects of accumulation, exploitation, and, indeed, revolution (Bear 2014, Appel 2015, Pedersen and Nielsen 2015). Crucially, anthropologists have found that infrastructures actively ‘work on time’ (Mitchell 2020). That is, they change and modulate basic assumptions about how societies are temporally ordered and they do so in often unexpected ways. One good example of this is the temporal effects of the introduction of the railways in the nineteenth century. Railroads revolutionised the relation between space and time, shrinking the time that travel took in ways that created not just shorter journeys but also a whole new concept of space. The arrival of trains quite literally informed a new understanding of time and landscape: the necessity to synchronise train schedules across a national territory pushed for the unification of national time under a single time zone; the speed of travel separated people from the land through which they travelled; and new railways into frontier zones materialised a sense of progress into the future (Schivelbusch 1986).

The spectacle of new infrastructures often manifests as a kind of technological sublime (Nye 1996), with infrastructure megaprojects presented as indices of progress and the presence of concrete, steel, and glass symbolising the appearance of modernity (Anand et al. 2018, Barker 2005, Laszczkowski, 2011, Schwenkel 2015). Anthropological studies of infrastructure have long been replete with examples of this, particularly in urban settings (Rabinow 1989, Graham and Marvin 2001, Joyce 2003). Today as in the past, infrastructures continue to have a powerful capacity to enact the future in the present (Mrazek 2002; Mitchell 2020). They do this in various ways. First, infrastructures provide durable structures upon which investors can secure a revenue of capital into the near future. In this sense, they provide a concrete anchor for the promises of development made by states and international institutions alike (Abourhame and Salamanca 2016). Second, in order to attract investment, infrastructures are presented by states and corporations as promissory, enchanting, and at times almost magical tools through which politicians, speculators, and other institutional and non-institutional actors can claim to be able to secure a better future (Anand et al. 2018, Abram and Weszkalnys 2011). Yet ideas of modernity materialised by infrastructures also coexist and are entangled with other very different conceptions of time.

This is the case of the Soviet-era electrification programme in Mongolia described by David Sneath (2009). Electricity was of utmost importance to the Soviet modernising mission; Lenin famously described communism as ‘Soviet power and the electrification of the whole country’ (Lenin [1920] 1965). The establishment of cables and transmission lines and the extraction of hydropower and fossil fuels were key technologies through which the Politiburo (the main policymaking committee of the Communist Party) sought to tame the peripheries of the Soviet Union. A new rational and modern ‘cult of light’ was set to permanently eradicate the unmodern imaginaries that populated the margins of the USSR. However, rather than displacing the imaginative registers of traditional practices, as Sneath describes, electricity became domesticated by local publics and started to coexist next to the very beliefs it was set to displace. As divination remains widely practiced to this day, in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, one might visit a diviner famous for using ‘modern technical devices’ such as a pocket calculator to tell fortunes, all the while experiencing ‘Lenin’s light’ as the glow of modernity (Sneath 2009, 88). In this case the infrastructures of electrification in Mongolia did not establish a new modern subject; instead, they contributed to a new mixed world made of imbroglios between the technical and the magical, the scientific and the prophetic.

As well as ushering in modernity, infrastructures also intervene in temporality through their promise of creating speed (Harvey and Knox 2008). The technological ideal of overcoming ever-greater distance in increasingly less time remains at the heart of contemporary ideas of progress (cf Marx [1857] 1993, Virilio 1986). Following Marx, the geographer David Harvey has famously termed this this tension ‘space/time compression’ (1989), which he places at the core of contemporary capitalism. Indeed in our daily lives this compressed space/time seems to be everywhere: commodities we buy arrive on our doorstep in less than 24 hours, the fruits and vegetables we eat have travelled thousands of kilometres before even becoming ripe, and fibre optics cable allows communications in seemingly ‘real time’ (Riles 2004). The most remote corners of our planet are interconnected through seemingly continuous flows, so that when a giant container ship became stuck in the Suez Canal in the spring of 2021, impacts were felt across markets all over the world. The complex logistical choreographies of this constant circulation and compression have been at the heart of lively debates in the social sciences about the relationship between infrastructure and time, in particular in relation to shipping, trade, and commodity flows (Cowen 2014; Khalili 2021; Chua et al. 2018, Mezzadra and Neilson 2019).

Anthropology’s original contribution to these interdisciplinary debates can be found in its unique ability to account for the frictions that populate the world of logistics (Tsing 2004, 2009; Lee and Li Puma 2002; Rofel and Yanagisako 2018; Bear et al. 2015; see also Katz 2001). Paying attention to actually-existing logistics from specific places, anthropologists have criticised the idea of space/time compression as the dominant condition of contemporary capitalism. Nicole Starosielski shows this well in her study of the cables that make possible the real-time communications sustaining financial markets and global trade (Starosielski 2015). She shows that ‘thinking of time-space compression through infrastructure paradoxically draws attention to the slowness of the process of speeding up’ (Anand et al. 2018, 15), the time it takes for cables to arrive in communities and the slow speeds that result once they are there. She describes how our ‘wireless world’ is made possible by a resolutely material undersea network of cables. These cables, made up of resources extracted from a variety of places, are laid by armies of workers and disrupt already existing environments populated by animals and people, and which are sometimes deemed as sacred by local populations. Starosielski’s ethnography sheds light onto the actual temporalities of infrastructure, as well as considering what, and indeed, who, is left out from collective imaginations of the high-speed internet. The space/time compression that we experience when speaking in real time with a distant friend through the internet, thus, exists not separate from but in accretion with a host of other logics of time and space (Anand 2018).

Here, anthropological inquiry works once again ‘against the grain of paradigm setting’ (Navaro-Yashin 2007, 16). Ethnographic attention to the infrastructures of logistics has produced thick descriptions of the time/spaces that populate global flows, allowing anthropologists to develop a ‘polyglot language’ (Tsing 2009) that is capable of showing how diverse times and spaces are made by contemporary forms of circulation.

Infrastructure and the environment

If the anthropology of infrastructure cut its teeth on the study of national and global networks such as canals, fibre-optic cables, or electricity networks, the focus on infrastructure ‘proper’ has expanded since to include things that might not at first glance look very ‘infrastructural’. Indeed, as we saw in the introduction, the field is not defined by studying a particular class of things generally called ‘infrastructure’ but it studies the relationships whereby some things take on the quality of being ‘infrastructural’. For example, for a driver in a car travelling along a highway, we might say that the highway is ‘infrastructure’ in that it enables driving to happen. However, for the road maintenance worker, the road appears less as infrastructure and more as an object of repair. As Susan Leigh Star and Karen Ruhleder famously put it, we should not be asking ‘what’ is an infrastructure, but rather ‘when’ is an infrastructure (1996). Understanding infrastructures in this relational way has meant that the term has been opened up by recent scholarship. If ‘infrastructure’ is merely something that enables something else to happen, a ‘system of substrates’ that support other forms of life (Larkin 2013), then it may make just as much sense to say that soil, or air, water, or carbon, are infrastructures as much as bridges, electricity networks, or shipping routes.

In the face of climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss, the infrastructuring qualities of environmental forms have become increasingly evident. This has linked environmental anthropology and the anthropology of infrastructure in a range of insightful studies, seeking to bring into view the role that non-human life forms play in sustaining human lifeworlds. Their broad understanding of infrastructure encompasses insects, forests, sand, and waves. Leading discussions about the entanglement of humans and non-humans in the face of environmental destruction, Anna Tsing, in her monograph Mushroom at the end of the world (2015) and multimedia project Feral atlas (2021), attends to the ways that labour, cultural practice, and the material agency of things swirl together to create world-shaping and world-breaking forms. Tackling the role of natural forms in sustaining infrastructure, a recent study of the Panama Canal draws attention to the way that engineered infrastructures always also entail a reckoning between ‘nature’ and technology (Carse 2014). In this case, Carse describes how the flow of water that feeds the Panama Canal is regulated by forests and their hydrological properties. Deforestation by farmers and loggers in the region not only threatens local ecosystems but also poses a threat to the infrastructure of the canal itself—thus linking local environmental dynamics to a key infrastructure of global trade. Plants, states, and citizens can also become co-implicated in environmental destruction, as a recent study of soya bean farming in Paraguay shows (Hetherington 2013). Here, attempts by monocrop agribusinesses to manage their environmental harms demonstrate the limits of government as a tool to tackle socio-natural destruction. Instead of a simple story of power (of agribusinesses) and resistance (by local people), what we find here is a more complex tale of how swathes of land in Paraguay came to be given over to soya bean farming, and how this form of agriculture persists through the everyday interactions of regulators, growers, peasant activists, migrants, and non-humans such as pesticides and the beans themselves. What these studies show is the complex imbrication of engineered infrastructures with ecological systems which become co-implicated in attempts to bring about social change (see also Knox 2020, Dewan 2022).

All of these studies of infrastructure and the environment tend to build on a tradition of research that has fundamentally dismantled the idea that nature is an inert substrate upon which human affairs are conducted (Latour 1993). Instead, by positing an infrastructural approach to the environment, they demonstrate the inherently political status of ‘nature’ as a space of extraction, enclosure, conservation, labour relations, and state making. Those studying environment/infrastructure have shown how landscape, environment, and matter are being imagined and created as infrastructures of consumerism and capitalism. They also draw attention to the environmental effects of engineered infrastructures from dams to data centres, including the social and material conditions of mineral extraction, pollution, disposal, repair, and contamination (Parikka 2011). In doing so, such studies have brought discussions of infrastructure squarely into debates about the human experience of living in ‘the Anthropocene’, a term that denotes the entanglement of people, technology, and matter in the contemporary era. Indeed, the historical emergence of the Anthropocene epoch, particularly during the twentieth century, coincides with the spread of engineered infrastructures. Whilst the Anthropocene has been a somewhat contested concept within anthropology (Moore 2016), the issues that it raises are well served by the work that has already been conducted under the umbrella of the anthropology of infrastructure.

At the same time as the environment has become understood as inherently infrastructural, so too infrastructures have undergone their own shift to become themselves more ‘environmental’, in the sense that they are becoming active and responsive parts of the milieux in which people live (Gabrys 2018). This has manifested particularly through the digitalisation of infrastructure whereby existing infrastructures have undergone a transformation, with materials becoming augmented or ‘informed’ through the use of continuous monitoring or sensing (Barry 2005, Fortun 2004). We see this with things like urban dashboards (Mattern 2015), networks of sensors in the ocean or on trees (Helmreich 2019, Myers 2018), driverless cars (Tennant and Stilgoe 2021), and anything designated with the adjective ‘smart’ (Halpern et al. 2017). These studies show how, as infrastructures become augmented with sensors, digital communication, and AI, they take on cybernetic qualities. That is to say, infrastructures are no longer simply stable forms, inserted into social worlds, but are now expected to respond to and ‘learn’ from their milieu (think of the ‘smart motorway’, iteratively changing speed limits in relation to road conditions). This has led some to argue that infrastructures are in this sense becoming ‘environmental’ in that they are both substrate and agent, thus dismantling the figure-ground relationship upon which the very concept of infrastructure has until recently rested (Knox 2022, Gabrys 2018).

Counter-political infrastructures

A final area to highlight is the recent ethnographic attention to dynamics of resistance, repurposing, and reappropriation of infrastructures by both local and international communities of citizens and activists. One risk with the anthropology of infrastructure is that it draws too much attention to the capacity of top-down imposed socio-material change. A powerful counter to this is the extensive work that now exists on bottom-up, often counter-political forms of infrastructure development. These have emerged either as alternatives to dominant infrastructural systems, or in the gaps left by failing or crumbling infrastructure (Dalakoglou 2016, Corsín Jiménez 2014, Simone 2004, Barry and Gambino 2019, Gambino 2022). Ethnographies of squatters, activists, programmers, laborers, and migrants have explored how the centralising, exclusionary, and extractive logics of dominant infrastructural forms are being countered by alternative principles of open source, collaborative, and collective design based on principles of sharing, participation, and care (Kelty et al. 2010, Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). The ethnographic sites for this work are diverse. Chris Kelty and Gabriella Coleman, for example, have taken as their focus the high-tech world of the free and open source software communities, community hacker spaces, and open hardware movements (Kelty 2010). Others have focused on the infrastructural work done by activist groups like the Occupy movement, 15M in Spain, and the solidarity movement in Greece (Postill 2020, Chan 2015, Corsin-Jimenez and Estalella 2017, Juris 2008, Dalokoglou 2016). This has drawn attention to much longer-running forms and methods of bottom-up civic action, bringing into the study of infrastructure an appreciation of the importance of community-based networks of social support. Here people and their social relations of exchange and mutual support are created by groups like migrants, inhabitants of informal settlements, or racially marginalised communities that are either excluded from or subjected to the violence of state-sanctioned infrastructural systems (Holston 2009, Simone 2004).

The key contribution of these studies of alternative, distributed, and bottom-up ways of making and doing infrastructure is to offer a reconfiguration of anthropological understandings of how power and politics work. AbdouMaliq Simone, for example, asks how collective will is enacted. For over three decades, Simone has observed the way in which informal urban networks come to be assembled in cities of the Global South. His work demonstrates how an attention to infrastructures refigures politics as ‘a choreography of experimentation’ (Simone in Bear et al. 2018, 49; Simone 2004) that binds together designs, materials, pipes, places, and relationships between urban dwellers as they seek to intervene in the worlds in which they live. It is from this makeshift (infra)structure that forms of resistance materialise. Anthropological work on these bottom-up infrastructural forms has served to counter techno-determinist analyses of infrastructures and their effects. Instead, they have shown how infrastructures are sites of political struggle, on-going negotiation, and social and cultural creativity. There is often an activist register to these studies. They illustrate how even in the face of seemingly immovable material structures put in place by states and corporations, people find ways of tinkering, reworking, and altering infrastructures to forge not only new material arrangements but also, perhaps even more importantly, alternative anticolonial trajectories of imagining possible futures. These studies deploy ethnographic description to the ends of a collective re-imagination of the possible forms that society might take (Estalella and Criado 2019, Pink et al. 2018).

Conclusion

Infrastructure has emerged as an alluring topic of study for anthropologists, but it has not been without its critics. The 2015 meeting of the UK based Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory discussed the motion: ‘Attention to infrastructure offers a welcome reconfiguration of anthropological approaches to the political’ (Bear et al. 2018). The discussion pivoted around the tendency of infrastructure scholars to extend the category to a bewildering array of things and topics, including affects, values, languages, ethics, temporalities, exchanges, and culture. Those in opposition to the motion argued that this risks depoliticising and generalising the specific historical and cultural saliency of engineered infrastructures as built forms (Lazar in Bear et al. 2018). They also held that extending the category risks forcing incommensurable ‘ontologies’ or world-views, such as those upheld by the Indigenous communities that are so often affected by infrastructural developments, into a universalising, Western techno-political lens (Rival in Bear et al. 2018). In substance, infrastructure was criticised for being at once too vague and too narrow, risking erasing diverse ways of seeing the world as well as becoming too diluted to have any analytical purchase (Harvey in Bear et al. 2018, 4).

While the motion did not pass, many anthropologists remain committed to exploring human and non-human worlds through an attention to infrastructure. Expanding the definition of infrastructure further, some argue that it is best understood as ‘the movement or patterning of social form […] the living mediation of what organises life: the lifeworld of structure’ (Berlan 2016, 393). Others highlight infrastructures’ character as the ‘enablers’ of different systems and encourage seeing the infrastructural turn in the human sciences as a sign ‘that we are conceptually re-arming ourselves for the struggle against the Anthropocene and the modernity that made it’ (Boyer 2017, 226). However, rather than proliferating an endless list of things to categorise under the heading ‘infrastructure’, ethnographic accounts speak more importantly to the ability to detect when and how the infrastructural quality of things comes to matter, and to map the different kinds systems they underwrite (Star 1999).

Finally, as the study of infrastructure has become consolidated as a subfield of anthropology, it has begun to explore what role scholars might play in making and imagining future infrastructural systems and shaping people’s entanglement with them (Bryant and Knight 2019, Pink 2022). This work involves awkward but necessary collaborations between anthropologists and a range of other scholars and practitioners (Aslanishvili and Gambino 2022; Knox 2022, Khandekar et al. 2021, Bremer et al. 2020, Ogden 2021). These kinds of interdisciplinary collaborations are already underway, with studies such as the Feral atlas (2021) coming into being at the intersection of different forms of knowledge, including history, art, architecture, engineering, and natural science. As the anthropology of infrastructure comes of age, it has thus begun to extend beyond the discipline, seeking out collaborations with local communities, artists, programmers, architects, and infrastructures themselves. Its goal of tracing and creating alternative ways of seeing, being, and organising life is all the more important in the face of challenges to come.

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Note on contributors

Hannah Knox is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. Her work explores the relationship between technology, environment and the state with a particular interest in communications and data infrastructures. Her books include: Roads: An anthropology of infrastructure and expertise (2015, Cornell University Press); Ethnography for data saturated world (2018, Manchester University Press); Digital anthropology (2012, Berg) and her most recent monograph, Thinking like a climate: Governing a city in times of environmental change (2020, Duke University Press).

Hannah Knox, Department of Anthropology, UCL, Room 241, 14 Taviton Street

London, WC1H 0BW. h.knox@ucl.ac.uk

Evelina Gambino is the Margaret Tyler Research Fellow in Geography at Girton College, University of Cambridge. Her research applies a feminist-materialist lens to the study of large infrastructural projects and developmental horizons in the South Caucasus. She is one of the editors of the volume Gendering logistics: Feminist approaches for the analysis of supply chain capitalism (2021, Bologna University Press), co-author of the experimental film A state in a state (2022), directed by Tekla Aslanishvili, and is currently completing a monograph on infrastructural failure and practices of future-making.

Evelina Gambino, Girton College, University of Cambridge Huntingdon Rd, Girton, Cambridge CB3 0JG. eg666@cam.ac.uk

Silence

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 19:22:35 +0000

Photo: VidaXL

Ana Dragojlovic Annemarie Samuels

University of Melbourne, Leiden University

Initially published 27 Feb 2023

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

Abstract:

Silence is a common occurrence in everyday social interactions, yet anthropological research, like most research in the social sciences and humanities, has mostly focused on what people say and do. Over the last couple of decades, however, there has been an increased attention to how the unsaid, the unspeakable, and the invisible shape social, political, and subjective worlds. In particular, anthropologists have theorised silence as more than just the opposite of speech. They have started to think of silence as a complex moral, affective, and social force. Anthropological rethinking of silence and voice has been particularly prominent in feminist traditions, in the study of care, and in decolonial scholarship that often studies silence as refusal and resistance. Attending to histories of silence and silencing has a potential to provide insights into different forms of structural oppression under which individual and collective strategies of survival might be falsely interpreted as mere compliance. Silence has also been important in research on ritual activity, where it is a prerequisite for communicating with ancestors, spirits, ghosts, and other apparitions. Here, silence can co-create a sense of hauntings as a response to repressed past and present forms of violence and harm. By attending closely to the unspoken and unspeakable aspects of language and art, anthropologists increasingly find new ways to include silences in their research and modes of representation. In these and other ways, the study of silence can greatly enrich our understanding of the social world.

Introduction

Like most research in the social sciences and humanities, anthropological research often focuses on what people say and do. Much less obvious are the unsaid, unspeakable, or invisible, and how these silences shape social, political, and subjective worlds. Nonetheless, explicit ethnographic attention to and theorisation of silence has been growing over the last decades, strongly influenced by feminist and decolonial scholarship and advances in narrative analysis—i.e. in the study of how stories, storytelling, and their silences and absences shape everyday life. Attention to silence has moreover been incited by anthropology’s reflexive turn, which since the 1980s has caused scholars to increasingly reflect on their own role in the production of knowledge and their decisions about what to write about and what to leave unspoken. Ruth Behar was one of the authors who developed experimental, self-reflective, and collaborative forms of writing that criticised prevalent silences about gendered and racialised dynamics in mainstream anthropology (Behar 1996, Behar and Gordon 1995).

A key tenet of anthropological work on silence is that it is often a presence in social life, rather than a mere absence of sound and voice. It can be a culturally specific form of experience (Basso 1970; Hastrup 1990). As a social, affective, and sensorial presence, silence can even become a moral and an active relational force. It enables or limits people’s ability to relate to each other in particular ways. When, for example, marginalisation and stigma loom, silence can be a vital strategy to create liveable lifeworlds. The non-disclosure of information can be crucial for people living with HIV, for instance, as in the face of severe discrimination their secrecy may allow them to keep leading their lives as much as possible as they did prior to their diagnosis (Black 2015; Moyer 2012; Samuels 2021). Similarly, sex workers may resolutely decide to not speak at all when state and non-state surveillance bodies question them about their past in interviews that, due to anti-trafficking measures, might foreclose their only possible source of income (Dasgupta 2014). People with a cancer diagnosis also sometimes use subtle, yet vital forms of concealment as they navigate imposing social and psychological demands. They may live ‘as if’ there were no diagnosis in order to continue to endure the already precarious conditions of everyday life for as long as possible (Banerjee 2020). Alternatively, silence may protect those who want to ‘elude’ a biomedical diagnosis, as may be the case for some people with symptoms of eating disorders (Shohet 2018).

Silence can also be shelter for those who want to avoid being absorbed into discourses of the state. Israeli youth who evade military service, for example, may not just do so by public refusal. Instead, they may resort to a ‘calculated passivity’ that allows them to altogether stay away from the public discussion on normative Israeli citizenship (Weiss 2016). Silence can also be suffocating, violent, and painful (Aretxaga 1997; Dragojlovic 2011; Warren 1993). At the same time, the silences that enable rhythm and ritual can be crucial ways of dealing with traumatic loss, as they entangle and evoke the entirely unspeakable or unspoken stories of longing that underlie such loss (Weller 2021). What all of these examples show is that silence is not a mere residue or background to supposedly real social action. Instead, it is an affective and relational activity (or the result thereof) that fundamentally shapes social worlds. Studying silence thus offers tremendous potential for critical engagement with people’s histories, the social structures that shape their lives, and with their personal experiences of inequality and exclusion (Dragojlovic 2021).

Within the burgeoning literature on silence, three themes are highlighted in this entry: the opposition of silence and voice; the haunting nature and effect of silence; and the importance of silence for narrative and representation. These topics stand out for their inspiring legacies and promising potential of contemporary anthropology of silence. Other themes in the anthropology of silence are equally important, yet not considered in depth in this entry due to limited space. Noteworthy, for example, is the extensive literature in the anthropology of music and sound studies on the relationship between silence and sound (or noise) (see, for example, Novak and Sakakeeny 2015; Robinson 2020; Voegelin 2010). Similarly, modern art has been assessed as having become a pursuit of the ‘aesthetics of silence’, driven to focus on negation, emptiness, and undoing yet continuously finding that the production of such silence itself entails a form of speech (Sontag [1967] 1969).

Silence and voice

Silence has long been theorised in relation to ‘voice’. The two terms are frequently opposed by arguing that voice actively ‘fills’ silence, while silence is a mere absence of voice. Anthropology has problematised this opposition by rethinking silence as a complex moral, affective, and social force. Ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants, for example, have shown that silent embodied practices can make the Holocaust present in everyday life so as to sustain its memory. This questions a simplistic opposition of silence and voice (see, for example, Kidron 2021). Three domains in which this rethinking of silence and voice is particularly prominent are Western feminist traditions, anthropologies of care, and decolonial approaches to silence as refusal and resistance.

Feminist traditions

The contention between ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ has a long and complex history in feminist traditions. Feminist academics, public intellectuals, and activists have continually argued that speech is the foremost means of achieving equality and empowerment (Ahmed 2017). Particularly significant for feminist discussions about ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ has been intersectional feminism, which understands individual identities as combinations of different modes of discrimination and privilege. The term ‘intersectionality’ was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), an American civil rights advocate and critical race theorist who developed the term in the context of unjust legal treatment of African American women. US antidiscrimination laws tended to look at gender and race separately, meaning that a person could only be discriminated against based on either gender or race. Consequently, the law did not capture overlapping forms of discrimination that African-American women and other women of colour experienced. Given that these women were left with no adequate justice, Crenshaw developed a theory of intersectionality to show that different axes of inequality, discrimination, and privilege inform individual identities. These axes might be, but are not limited to, gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, ability, and nationality.

This notion of intersectionality fundamentally influenced feminist discussions on silence. For example, scholars who speak of the ‘racialization of silence’ (Ferrari 2020) challenge the assumption that ‘silence’ is associated with patriarchal domination. This assumption reflects the common experience of white middle class women, who led the second wave feminist movement in Euro-American contexts. However, it also falsely normalises their experience as that of all women. Against it, African American feminists have argued that African American women do in fact have a prominent voice in communal spaces such as church and the home (Lorde 1978; hooks 1989). They thereby highlight that the notions of ‘having a voice’, of ‘breaking the silence’, or of ‘speaking up’ may be insufficient as instruments of liberation. This leads them to call for a more nuanced analysis of multiplicity of silences (Ferrari 2020). We need to be aware that more often than not ‘the “voice,” “speech,” or “languages” of the colonized do not conform to Eurocentered, capitalist, colonial modern criteria’ in which ‘speaking up’ is associated with liberatory movements (Ferrari 2020, 134). Most people are simply not heard or recognised as being able to have a voice in the first place. Their forms of expression are reduced to the modes or voice of the colonised, and their ways of communicating ideas are misrecognised as nonsense. This misrecognition of voice is part of stripping racialised people of their humanity and dignity, to what Frantz Fanon has called ‘a zone of non-being’ ([1952] 2012, xii).

Other feminist scholars have similarly drawn attention to multiplicities, paradoxes, and possibilities of silence. The demand to speak up against oppression tends to place the burden of action on those least empowered. African-American women, or First Nations or gender diverse people are asked to make major interventions into their conditions of oppression. Here the liberatory idea of ‘speaking up’ obscures the labour needed for social change, placing expectations on those that historically have been marginalised (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013). Furthermore, the idea of ‘voice’ as the only way of liberation might in fact overly ‘abstract from the concrete situations and lived experiences of those who inhabit silences’ (Ferrari 2020, 124). Take as an example the memoir of writer and academic Ernesto Martínez, in which he speaks of the childhood sexual assault committed against him by his cousin. Martínez’s immediate response to this act of violence was silence and stillness. Under these circumstances, feminist philosopher Martina Ferrari (2020) argues that his response cannot and should not be understood as compliance to oppression. Martínez remembers his silence not as plain passivity, but rather as an expression of what he calls ‘joto passivity’, that is, ‘the seeming nonresponsiveness of queer Chicanos in the face of violence, which contra (colonial) common sense, was also felt as resistant behaviour’ (124). This silence may have been an act of ‘radical meaning making from which Martínez could envision and bring about radically different gendered practices of resistance’ (Ferrari 2020, 125). For Martínez, ‘speaking up’ as a liberatory solution was not an option under the circumstances in which he lived. Instead, adopting ‘joto passivity’ as an embodied negotiation of appropriate modes of resistance allowed him to navigate his circumstances.

Thus, rather than insisting on a sharp division between ‘silence’ and ‘voice’, feminist scholars have been investigating conditions under which movement between speech and silences occur. They broaden our possibilities for a reconfiguring of the ‘silence’ versus ‘voice’ binary, arguing that both ‘silence’ and ‘voice’ can be part of complex strategies of engaging with structures of power (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013; Ferrari 2020; Dragojlovic 2021). In this vein, contributors to the recent edited volume Silence, feminism, power: Reflections at the edges of sound (2013) argue that silence may constitute a deeper form of communication than sound: ‘Silence allows us space to breathe. It allows us the freedom of not having to exist constantly in reaction to what is said…’ (Malhotra and Carillo Rowe 2013, 2). Thereby they stress the liberatory possibilities of inhabiting silence—resisting, in Western discourse, ‘speaking up’ as a go-to form of liberatory practice.

Care

Anthropologists studying care have similarly theorised the complexity of silence, moving away from any clear dichotomy between silence and voice. This work often reveals how silence is a response to the moral and social demands of everyday life. For example, in her family-centred ethnography of social relations in post-war and post-socialist Vietnam, Merav Shohet (2021) points out how everyday sacrifices, such as foregoing one’s own wishes and aspirations in order to take care of family members, are socially valued. Yet in order to be valued, those who sacrifice—often women—should not draw attention to their predicaments, bearing their suffering in silence, even though this may be challenging and painful. In these everyday family contexts, muted forms of sacrifice for one another often count as moral care.

In the face of suffering, the effortful work of silence may also help sustain precarious social relations. For some, silence may be the most virtuous—yet incredibly effortful—way of enduring pain and loss (see, for example, Buch Segal 2016; Livingston 2012; Smørholm 2016). Even where narrative utterances like ‘you endure’ help to constitute enduring pain as virtuous, people may remain silent about some experiences simply because they are impossible to put into words (Throop 2010). Silence may also be a respectful response to suffering, as it may honour the privacy of suffering and thereby enable rather than obstruct healing after extreme violence (Jackson 2004). It can be part of muted practices of everyday support, for example when neighbours who know about one another’s economic hardship bring food without commenting on their reasons for doing so (Han 2012). Or, silence may constitute a deliberate effort to steer away from negative thoughts and emotions, as when people in Thailand make an effort to not discuss terminal illness and rather raise more cheerful topics to lighten up the mood of their interlocutors (Aulino 2019; see also Stonington 2020).

These moral and social dimensions of silence need not be seen apart from the sensorial experience of stillness. Indeed, silences can powerfully index the present absence of both voice and sound. People living with dementia in the Netherlands have described that while they could break the unsettling silence of their homes by ‘making some noise’ in the sense of making actual sounds, it is only going out for a walk that really helps them to overcome the vicissitudes of ‘still’ moments that negatively affect their lives (Vermeulen 2020, 200). For them, the sensorial silence that might be broken by making noise is not independent from the silence of solitude, the absence of sociality and care. Or take the ethnographic description of people living and dying in the misery and abandonment of Vita, an asylum for homeless, mentally ill, and dying persons in Porto Alegre, Brazil:

These individuals wandered around in their dusty lots, rolled on the ground, crouched over or under their beds – when there were beds. Each one was alone; most were silent. There was a stillness, a kind of relinquishment that comes with waiting, waiting for the nothingness, a nothingness that is stronger than death. (Biehl 2005, 35)

João Biehl describes this asylum as a ‘zone of social abandonment’, a place where ‘voice can no longer become action’ (2005, 11). Here, the silencing of people’s social and political voice can be sensed in stillness. While sensorial aspects of silence are here part and parcel of adjusting to an unchangeable and dehumanising status quo, it can fulfil other functions. Care as well as socio-political change may come from such experiences of silence. The stillness of Thai meditation practices, for example, shows how the practice of silence as the deliberate absence of speech enables a shift of sensory focus toward non-verbal expression, and thereby changes one’s embodied experience of the world (Cassaniti forthcoming). As Julia Cassaniti argues, by effecting a new embodied attunement to the world and opening up new interpersonal spaces, silence may have powerful personal and intersubjective effects, leading people to change social relations with the world and others.

Refusal and resistance

Feminist and decolonial anthropologists have for a long time been studying multiple forms of silence and secrecy as a kind of refusal and resistance (Visweswaran 1994). Anthropologist Kamala Visweswaran charts multiple and contradictory uses of silence and secrecy as forms of resistance among activist women in Southern India. In her encounter with a woman she calls ‘M’, Visweswaran charts M’s frequent detours into silence, highlighting the importance of anthropological writing about silence, and how anthropologists give meaning to silences they encounter. Visweswaran also makes a reflexive point about ethnographic writing, as she stresses that, ‘the story I give you is not exactly about this woman … it is rather more about how I negotiate and understand the construction of a silence, how I seek to be accountable to it’ (1994, 60). Visweswaran does not only focus on comprehending multiple levels of silence in the contexts she is writing about. Instead, she as an anthropologist takes responsibility and accountability for how her own writing might be implicated in silences of those she is writing about. Anthropological knowledge produced through such careful attention to silences can be considered ‘situational knowledge’ (Visweswaran 1994, 49). This term emphasises the conviction that all knowledge comes from specific positional perspectives (Haraway 1988). In this case, these perspectives are not just shaped by what is said, but also by what people are silent about.

Understanding the origins, nature, and effects of silence is also crucial to make sense of histories of anthropological representations of Indigenous people. For a long time, ‘anthropology has imagined itself to be a voice, and in some disciplinary iterations, the voice of the colonized’ (Simpson 2007, 67; also 2014). "This framework had characterised much of earlier anthropological work ‘on’ Indigenous people (2007, 67-8), and it accorded with Europe’s imperialist and colonialist projects. Anthropologist Audra Simpson, a citizen of the Kahnawà:ke Mohawk Nation, therefore set to study the Mohawks of Kahnawake in Canada and the United States by developing a critical new take on this tradition. Her goal was to pay attention to what mattered to her interlocutors, rather than focusing on how they were ‘different’ to anthropologists. What emerged was an ‘ethnography of refusal’, which focused on the ways in which Kahnawakero:non (i.e. the people of Kahnawake) had refused the authority of the state ‘at almost every turn’ of their history (2007, 73). Simpson’s work demonstrates the methodological and the theoretical productivity of focusing on collaborators’ refusals, in order to acknowledge and embrace what has been marginalised, excluded, and silenced previously. When she tries to address histories of subjugation and dispossession with one interviewee, for example, the person tells her repeatedly that they do not know the answers to her questions. She interprets their silence as a desire not to make a difficult past verbally explicit, given that both she and the interlocutor know what happened and know that each other knows. Silence as refusal of ‘speaking outwardly’ should therefore not be seen as the absence of agency, but as an act of sabotage or ‘an overlooked component of ethico-political thought’ (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017).

Various forms of silence and refusal can be part of reinventing our ways of living and relating (i.e. ‘commoning’) in times of the Anthropocene, as suspending assertions on how the world is, or how it should be, can have productive potential (Kanngieser and Beuret 2017, 364). If we approach the Anthropocene as the outcome of centuries of colonial and neo-colonial capitalist dispossession, silence can constitute an attractive or necessary refusal to participate in the forms of governance that got us into our current situation (including speech-based activism of the contemporary Left).

Haunting silences

Silence and silencing are often associated with experiences of personal or interpersonal violence, and collective experiences of violence and various forms of structural oppression (Dragojlovic 2020). This has been shown by various disciplines, from the mid-twentieth century onwards, including psychoanalysis (Abraham and Torok 1994), philosophy (Derrida 1986; 1993), sociology (Gordon 1997; Cho 2008), gender studies (Rwe and Malhora 2013; Dragojlovic 2018; Ferrari 2020), history (Trouillot 1995), and anthropology (Good 2019; Kwon 2006; Kidron 2009; Argenti and Schramm 2009). For example, the historian and anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) has explored the complex relationship between historical violence and silence in the history of Haiti. He argues that the interrelated nature between social memory and official historical narratives always produce a ‘bundle of silences’ (1995: 27). Trouillot’s pioneering work demonstrated that the recording of historical events is not a mere collection of details about events, but a process through which some events are completely or partially silenced, either deliberately or unconsciously. This is particularly important when it comes to silencing resistance to oppression, such as with the Haitian Revolution, which Trouillot demonstrates was one of the most successful and historically relevant slave revolts in history. The importance of silence in the aftermath of historical violence has been studied across different socio-cultural settings. Silence has been transmitted across generations from Holocaust survivors and survivors of Cambodian genocide, to memories of slavery, and the transmission of traumatic loss in Taiwan (Argenti and Schramm 2009). Following the Vietnam War, domestic life in Southern Vietnamese villages was marked by silence in the aftermath of massacres of unarmed civilians. At the same time, villagers kept engaging in intimate—but muted—ritual actions (Kwon 2006). Ghosts, spirits, apparitions, and hauntings have often been associated with silence and silencing as a response to violence (Dragojlovic 2018, 2020).

Work with the children of Holocaust survivors has led scholars to develop a psychoanalytic theory of intergenerational phantoms (Abraham and Torok 1994). Such phantoms are produced by the ignorance of family secrets, falsifications of the truth, and sheer disregard for the past that create conditions for producing hauntings across generations (1994, 169). Building on a Freudian approach to the unconscious, which treats the unconscious as a repository of unacceptable ideas, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok argued that family secrets can be wrapped in silences and buried in a metaphorical, psychological ‘crypt’. Such secrets are not only stored within those that directly experienced trauma, but also transmitted across subsequent generations: ‘What haunts us are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others … the burial of an unspeakable fact … like a stranger within’ (Abraham and Torok 1994, 3). Crucially, they argued that such traumatic intergenerational transmissions can be healed once secrets and silences are unpacked and revealed. French philosopher Jacques Derrida brought these psychoanalytic insights to the attention of a wider audience (Davis 2013, 54) and subsequently developed his own theory of ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 1993). He coined the influential term ‘spectrality’ to speak of a persistent return of a range of ideas from the cultural and social past in the manner of a ghost. As he put it,

Spectrality does not involve the conviction that ghosts exist or that the past (and maybe even the future they offer to prophesy) is still very much alive and at work, within the living present: all it says, if it can be thought to speak, is that the living present is scarcely as self-sufficient as it claims to be; that we would do well not to count on its density and solidity, which might under exceptional circumstances betray us (cited in Davis 2013, 53-4).

Influenced by Derrida’s idea that the past is incomplete, sociologist Avery Gordon (2008) argues that hauntings are important sociological phenomena that deserve substantive scholarly attention. Making a direct link between various forms of historical injustice—from slavery to the disappeared in Argentina, and from the recent ‘war on terror’ to torture and deportation—Gordon argues that those who were seemingly forgotten can illuminate the injustices they suffered through the act of haunting. For Gordon (2008, xvi), haunting is an animated state through which unresolved and repressed social violence makes itself known in often unexpected ways, such as through ghostly appearances. In her take on hauntings as social phenomenon, a ghost is not just a person who is missing or dead, but a social figure who is deeply implicated in the social life of the living and is crucial for the continued production of subjectivities and histories (Gordon 2008, x). Gordon’s sociological approach to hauntology has been immensely influential across the humanities and social sciences, in particular for scholars working on histories of epistemic injustice and enforced forgetting. Particularly significant has been a study of the systemic erasure of memory about the yanggongju, Korean women who acted as sex workers for US servicemen during the Korean War, many of whom subsequently became war brides and eventually pioneered Korean migration to the United States (Cho 2008). Grace Cho’s careful analysis reveals how the enforced forgetting of the yanggongju permeates the consciousness of Koreans. They are now ghostly figures that are at the same time present and absent, who ‘[move] in and out of visibility’ (Cho 2008, 14).

Intergenerational experiences of silence under ongoing conditions of structural inequalities can manifest as acts of ‘haunted speakability’ (Dragojlovic 2021). For example, in a performing arts event in the Netherlands that engages families’ complex intergenerational, interracial genealogies, aspirations to make visible past injustices are challenged by the artists’ family’s embeddedness in long histories of structural violence. These histories do not only inform what can be made visible through speech, but also often reproduce the structures of the very inequalities they aspire to dismantle (Dragojlovic 2021). Haunted speakability, then, reflects people’s feeling of urgency to instigate social justice and points to the limitations of speech as a means of achieving equality (Dragojlovic 2021). The idea of haunted speakability urges further questions about recovery and care, not only for those who themselves directly experience violence, but also for those for whom the affective afterlives of violence might resonate intergenerationally, under ongoing conditions of inequality (Dragojlovic 2021). The scholarship on haunting silences further contributes to rethinking and theorising silence as a complex relationship between narrative articulation and unspoken, embodied ways of inhabiting the world.

Narrative and representation

Much like as an awareness of haunting requires attunement to the social world rather than a turn away from it, attending to the unspoken in narrative and discourse warrants a close examination of language. It relies on a careful listening to the stories people do and do not tell; the slightly longer pauses, hesitating beginnings, whispers, rumours, gossip, and embodied narration (see Shohet and Samuels forthcoming). Who tells stories to whom, and whose stories are heard, and by whom? The analysis of women’s testimonies for South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has shown that on the surface, women’s narratives speak mostly of violence against men (Ross 2001). Yet, the anthropologist Fiona Ross (2001) contends, if we listen differently, we hear how by telling these stories, women actually also speak about their own experiences. Women tell about physical violence experienced by men from their own vantage point, in passing referring to police harassment of their families, the shattering of kin over geographical distances, the absence of men, and the silence and secrecy in their politically active families. They hint at even more silent experiences of women’s suffering. Similarly, women’s stories of the violence of the Partition of India in 1947 are enveloped in a ‘zone of silence’ (Das 2007). This does not mean that nothing was said about this period, but rather ‘that the words had a frozen-slide quality to them, which showed their burned and numbed relation to life’ (Das 2007, 11). These narratives suffused by silences destabilise the certainty that language may seem to bring. Silence, then, is only at the far end of a continuum of uninterpretability of which speech and narrative are similarly part (Weller 2017).

Close attention to those stories at or beyond the edges of public recognition, moreover, reveals how silences undergird dominant discourses. Experiences hitherto unspoken may still transpire in whispers, gossip, rumour, song, spirit possession, images, a raised eyebrow, or an offhand remark. What is silenced in public discourse may be invoked in what Merav Shohet (2021) calls ‘sideshadowing narratives’: nonlinear and often ambiguous stories told through gossip and in other more private, sometimes whispered, conversations. Unlike the theological unilinearity and normativity of ‘backshadowing’ and ‘foreshadowing’, these narratives embrace indeterminacy and contradiction, invoking possibilities without providing resolution. In her account of a Vietnamese family caring for their comatose grandmother, Shohet shows how all family members take part in the caregiving, keeping up the image of a harmonious family. Yet, on a private occasion, two relatives tell in ‘sideshadowing’ whispers about their grudges against the near-dying matriarch and her husband, resulting from—in their eyes—moral missteps from the past that may now have caused her pitiful condition as a form of karmic retribution (Shohet 2021, 140-56).

Often, it is not only the story told, but also the context, the unspoken range of experiences and structures that surround narratives, that shape the (im)possibilities of articulation. A striking example can be found in the ethnographic study of children living with HIV in Brazil, whose narratives about their illness include the experiences of non-illness. Their silence, nonverbal communication, and multivocal narratives of social worlds shape the children’s stories at least as much as verbal articulation does (Abadía-Barrero 2011). The subjunctive mode of narrative is particularly important here. It allows people to think in multiple ‘what if’ scenarios of the future and the past. It helps them think through multiple possible trajectories of what might happen or might have happened, which they do particularly often at troublesome moments in their lives, such as when struggling with illness (Good and Good 1994). At such moments, the subjunctive mode may similarly allow for not fully thinking through all of these possibilities, sustaining the silent futures or pasts that are barely thinkable, for example because they might include scenarios of death or social exclusion (Samuels 2018, see also Mattingly 2014).

Aesthetic forms and visual practices may also articulate that which resists articulation in language. Images, performances, and works of art can affect people in a way that exceeds discourse. To understand how visual expressions communicate the unspeakable affectively, we need to stop contrasting silence to voice or speech. Voice, speech, silence, and visual expression intersect in different modes of articulation and non-articulation in that visual expressions may speak in ways that words cannot; for example, in the ways people living with HIV invest in healthy appearances and even makeup to distract from gossip (Samuels 2021). Art can tell stories without words. The discursive framing of art, meanwhile, may amount to new forms of silencing, as in the case of Syrian refugee artists who stop with their artistic work to escape from humanitarian projects of ‘refugee art’ that seek to aestheticise experiences of loss and displacement (Chatzipanagiotidou and Murphy 2021). Such humanitarian projects commission ‘refugee art’ as a commercially attractive genre, while artists feel their placement in a particular category with limited room for selecting their own topic is silencing their artistic creativity. The silence of those refugee artists who decide to withdraw from art for this reason may be seen as a ‘tactic of agentive creativity’ (Chatzipanagiotidou and Murphy 2021, 15).

The potential violence of verbal representation that Audra Simpson (2007) highlights in her work on refusal always raises dilemmas in anthropological writing, and perhaps particularly in writing about silences. For example, a poignant dilemma for ethnographers analysing life stories concerns the ethics of analysing what people may have chosen to leave unsaid. Addressing this question, Kirin Narayan (2004) proposes the juxtaposition of multiple life stories, as listening to one story may help to recognise the meaningful silences in others. Thereby, ethnographers may find patterns of meaningful silence without necessarily having to interpret all silences of one individual’s narrative. At the same time, Narayan cautions that life stories, including silences, are produced in interpersonal processes of which the anthropologist is a part and that as writers we may also want to leave uninterpreted. Struggling with a similar dilemma, Merav Shohet (forthcoming) argues for combining person-centred ethnography with historical contextualisation, striking a delicate balance between respecting a person’s self-chosen silences and avoiding reiterating historical injustice through continuous omissions. As both Narayan and Shohet show, navigating the tension between respecting silence and critically analysing its socio-historical conditions is an integral part of ethnographic engagement with silence.

Anthropological representations take greater liberties than most social sciences. In trying to reflect the concepts and concerns of the people they study, anthropologists may embrace unknowability and present stories from multiple perspectives, without resolution, realising that it may be impossible to construct a univocal narrative. A powerful example is Sarah Pinto’s writing and rewriting of the narratives about Lata, a young woman treated in the psychiatric unit of a government hospital in northern India (2012, 2014). In her narration of the many stories told by and about Lata, Pinto includes silences, gaps, and contradictions, concluding that there may simply not be one comprehensive and linear narrative of Lata’s illness. Proposing a ‘hermeneutic of missing it’, she argues for ethnographic writing with the multiple unresolved contradictions in layers of stories, creating an understanding that is ‘less illuminating in the strength of its coherence than revealing in the gaps between incompatible ways of telling’ (Pinto 2014, 224).

Like visual art, poetry can communicate the unspoken without discursively putting it in place. Several powerful poems by anthropologists have directly addressed the topic of silence, including Nandini Gunawardena’s ‘Silenced’ (2004), which describes the violence in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s, and Renato Rosaldo’s ‘Silence’ (2014), in which he invokes the moment he receives the news of his wife Michelle Rosaldo’s death, a moment when suddenly all the ordinary sounds of the Philippine village he stays in seem to abruptly come to an end. Many anthropologists illuminate the unspoken affectively by using poetry in representation and articulation, especially where prose falls short of making space for silence. Anthropological engagement with silence therefore encourages the expansion of our ethnographic tool kit, for example by using ‘poetry, disordered speech, embodiment, lamentation, dreams and other elliptical communication’ (Varma 2020, 31). At the same time, it means embracing the limits of knowability and our collaborators’ refusals to be known. Writing with silences, then, may entail multiple ways of staying with gaps, contradictions, and unintelligibility.

Conclusion

Silence is a ubiquitous presence in our social world. Sometimes barely noticeable, sometimes strongly sensed, what silence means and does in subjective and social life is not always easy to discern or interpret. An anthropological approach to silence leaves room for uncertainty, unknowability, and multivocality. At the same time, if offers ways to attend to what silence does, as a form of oppression, a refuge, an act of care or refusal, a haunting ghost or an untold story in the shadow of public discourse. A careful look at silence shows that silence and voice are not necessarily clear opposites, and neither is voice—or sound—necessarily ‘filling’ silence. Practices of ‘giving’ voice may result in other silences. Questioning who and what we see and don’t see, who and what is heard and who and what is unheard, unspoken, or unspeakable is vital to critical work on structural and historical inequalities, and rethinking anthropological practices of research and representation. Even if often opaque, silences demand our attention and analysis as much as speech and sound do. What has been silenced, by whom, and for what reason has much to tell us about social relationships, moral orders, relations of care, and the complex ways through which people navigate structural forms of oppression, endeavouring to make their lives liveable under multiple forms of social inequalities.

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Note on contributors

Ana Dragojlovic is Associate Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She works at the intersection of feminist, queer, postcolonial, and affect theory and is the author of Beyond Bali: Subaltern citizens and post-colonial intimacy (2016, Amsterdam University Press), co-author of Bodies and suffering: Emotions and relations of care (2018, Routledge, with Alex Broom), co-editor of Gender, violence and power in Indonesia across time and space (2020, Routledge, with Kate McGregor and Hannah Loney) and co-editor of a special issue, Tracing silences, in History and Anthropology with Annemarie Samuels.

Ana Dragojlovic, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia. ana.dragojlovic@unimelb.edu.au.

Annemarie Samuels is Associate Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her current research focuses on narratives and silences of end-of-life care. Her published work focuses on care, disaster, narrative, silence, and HIV/AIDS in Indonesia, and includes the monograph After the tsunami: Disaster narratives and the remaking of everyday life in Aceh (2019, University of Hawaii Press) and a special issue in History and Anthropology called Tracing Silences, co-edited with Ana Dragojlovic.

Annemarie Samuels, Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333AK Leiden, The Netherlands. a.samuels@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Intellectual disability

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 08:18:16 +0000

The Splash Jockey SwimABLE programme in Hong Kong enables children with special needs to have fun in the water. Photo: The Hong Kong Jockey Club

Patrick McKearney Tyler Zoanni

Initially published 14 Feb 2023

http://doi.org/10.29164/22intellectualdisability

Abstract:

‘Intellectual disability’ is a widely used psychiatric category that conceives of certain minds as impaired in their development. By approaching intellectual disability from a cross-cultural perspective, anthropology demonstrates how the condition is culturally variable. It shows, in particular, how intellectual disability is produced by different social expectations of ‘normal’ mental development and different ways of responding to adults who do not meet those expectations. Anthropology thus offers a way to analyse this seemingly biological deviation from a universal path of mental development as a growing lack of fit between culturally specific expectations for maturation and a person’s own life course through society. Anthropology also provides innovative research methods that enable a closer understanding of the experiences, lives, and self-narrations of people categorised as having intellectual disabilities themselves—in particular, demonstrating how they develop and exercise agency in spite of considerable constraints. In this way, anthropology gives us a deeper insight into how people become and remain classified as having an intellectual disability, what it is like to live under such categorisations, as well as what such classifications leave out about them as people.

Introduction

This entry does not discuss all potential forms of disability that might relate to cognition (i.e. dementia, autism, brain injury, or mental illness) but focuses on the specific clinical category of ‘intellectual disability’ that was originally formulated within Euro-American psychiatry (McKearney & Zoanni 2018)^{^[1]}. The entry explores how work on the cross-cultural variation of this condition complements biomedical and professional understandings of it, filling in the blind spots of those perspectives and challenging their assumptions.

The widespread use of ‘intellectual disability’ in many contemporary states—in biomedicine, psychology, welfare distribution, and legal proceedings—naturalises a distinctive way of categorising certain minds as impaired and gives the impression that people diagnosed as intellectually disabled ‘have’ a biological condition (Levinson 2010; Altermark 2018). The term has been most precisely defined within psychiatry, where it can refer both to the cause and to the outcome of mental impairment. The former use gives the misleading impression that people permanently ‘have’ this condition in the way they might have a genetic condition or temporarily have an infectious disease. Contemporary psychiatry more precisely defines intellectual disability as a state, the aetiologies of which are diverse and often unknown (Mackenzie 2010). The prognosis is not always certain either, making it possible for a person to cease to be intellectually disabled in the future. For this reason, it is preferable to use the term ‘intellectual disability’ to refer to the outcome of mental impairment.

The most recent edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-V) recommends someone be diagnosed as having an intellectual disability if they: 1) have deficits in intellectual functions that can be measured by psychometric tests; 2) have deficits in adaptive functioning that result in a failure to meet developmental and sociocultural standards for personal independence and social responsibility; and 3) if these deficits began during the developmental period of life—i.e. before the age of eighteen rather than, for example, as the result of a later accident (APA, 2013).

Anthropological work demonstrates that there is significant variation in the ‘social-cultural standards for personal independence and social responsibility’ which the DSM-V refers to and how they expect people to develop the mental capacity to reach them. These standards are especially likely to be different beyond the professional and institutional contexts in which the category of intellectual disability originated and is used, by professionals and lay-people. What people must ‘adapt’ to, furthermore, varies depending on how people in a society communicate, organise relationships, and manage to live independently—if, indeed, living independently is required at all.

So the DSM’s seemingly straightforward definition of intellectual disability, in fact, raises a series of empirical questions that are not sufficiently answered by medical and psychological science. What kind of diversity exists among those who end up categorised as intellectually disabled? What are the different causes of this categorisation, including those that are non-biological? Is it coherent to demarcate intellectual disability as separate from physical disability, mental illness, or a putative ‘normal’ cognitive functioning? If what is considered ‘normal’ cognitive functioning and development varies socially and culturally, is intellectual disability and its development also variable?

Anthropology has yet to fully answer such questions. While there is a robust body of anthropological literature on cross-cultural variation within mental health, and an emerging one on physical disability and sensory conditions like Blindness and Deafness, there is not such an elaborated tradition in relation to intellectual disability (Edgerton 1970). This dearth echoes a wider social and scholarly marginalisation of intellectual disability (Kulick and Rydstöm 2015). The result is that anthropology has not yet fully developed a cross-cultural conversation about intellectual disability that would enrich and challenge a psychiatric understanding of it.

One reason for this neglect is internal to anthropology as a science of social and cultural difference. Anthropologists work on the assumption that seemingly puzzling behaviours do not issue from a lack of intelligence, but rather require deeper ethnographic understanding (Geertz 1975; Shore 2000). This premise of mental equality has enabled them to demonstrate the coherency, intelligence, and sophistication of different forms of life, and thus to undermine arguments about ‘natural’ differences in intellect between human groups (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1976; Levi-Strauss 2021). But this same standpoint has unintentionally thwarted investigation into potential differences at the level of the mind itself (McKearney and Zoanni 2018; McKearney and Zogas 2021).

Overcoming this trend, there is a small but important strand of anthropological work on intellectual disability that began in the latter half of the twentieth century. The first major engagement with the subject in the discipline was a collaborative and longitudinal research project in California, which remains the largest conducted to date. An additional research tradition in North America and Europe emerges out of feminist concerns with reproduction, care, and dependence. A third body of literature we discuss includes arguments about how intellectual disability is socially produced and how studies from outside of Euro-America enhance our understanding of its cultural variation.

Anthropological work on intellectual disability reveals just how particular are the social and cultural conditions that support the psychiatric framing of intellectual disability. It also shows the limits of describing people’s lives solely or primarily in terms of this category, regardless of context and circumstance. Anthropology has innovated methodologically to get closer to the experiences, lives, and self-narrations of people themselves. This enables us to gain a fuller understanding of what it is like to live as someone classified as intellectually disabled, as well as what such classifications leave out about them as people. In doing so, anthropology contributes significant missing pieces to the puzzle of just how people become intellectually disabled, as well as how and why that might vary socially and culturally. Anthropology offers a way to analyse what psychiatry treats as a pathological deviation from a universal path of mental development as, instead, a growing lack of fit between culturally specific expectations for maturation and a person’s own particular life course through society.

Early studies and methodological innovation

Anthropology’s first engagement with intellectual disability emerged in the 1960s alongside other critical social scientific studies of the professional treatment of those classed as having mental conditions in medicine, psychology, social services, and charities within North Atlantic welfare states. Robert Edgerton’s monograph The cloak of competence (1967) presents extensive data on the lives of disabled people in urban California who had been discharged from a residential institution. Edgerton demonstrates the incredible efforts these people undertake to confront ‘the shattering stigma’ of being regarded as ‘retarded’ by working to conceal, through a ‘cloak of competence’, their difficulties navigating life outside of institutions (1967, 205). This, in turn, entails confronting the psychological scars of humiliation, loss, and fear resulting from their former confinement. It includes also finding ways to navigate the poverty they typically face. This often happens through constructing ad hoc relationships of support, including with friends and especially romantic partners. At the same time, however, many people in Edgerton’s study were forcibly sterilised and feel permanently and irrevocably undermined by their inability to have children.

Edgerton treats ‘mental retardation’ as not just a biological condition but also a social status that has stigmatising effects on people quite apart from their own mental capacities. His study also aims to ‘see people through their own eyes and to hear them through their own words’ by exploring their thoughts, actions, and feelings (Edgerton 1967, 6). The same approach characterises the subsequent works produced by the large research group Edgerton headed at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The team conducted a series of thorough and detailed longitudinal ethnographic studies by tracking many of Edgerton’s original cohort of informants, and others besides, across diverse settings and into their older years (see Edgerton 1984b; Edgerton and Gaston 1991).

L. L. Langness and Harold Levine’s Culture and retardation (1988a) is significant among this work for its systematic focus on life history as a methodology for studying intellectual disability. It departs from standard parentally-focused life-histories that present a person with disabilities as ‘aspects of a man who might have been’ (Langness and Levine 1988b, 1-3). The book’s detailed portraits of the complexity of disabled people’s lives shows them to be protagonists with agency, individuality, and richness. It challenges the clinical reduction of disabled people to their mental impairments, and thus to ‘a single homogenous group best characterized as an I.Q. range’ (Langness and Levine 1988a, xiv).

This volume demonstrates how difficult it is for those with intellectual disabilities to access the contexts in which others learn social roles. It argues that they are, instead, actively socialised into ‘incompetence’. For instance, they are confined to atypical social contexts in which they cannot access the kinds of social learning through which others of a similar age and gender transition to adulthood (Langness and Turner 1988; Kernan, Hubbard and Kennan 1988; see also Mitchell-Kernan and Tucker 1984, 186). Acquired incompetence is even worse for those who have only ever lived in institutions:

Once one has lived as retarded, been systematically denied information about the everyday world, provided with false information, his or her chances for subsequent normal development are slim (Langness and Levine 1988a, xiii).

Demonstrating the effects of socialisation reveals how problematic it is to take a person’s capacities at a given moment as a read-out of their innate abilities. A long-term perspective on their development over the life course is required (Langness and Levine 1988b, 8).

This demonstrates the necessary role ethnography plays in looking beyond simple casual relationships between single factors in people’s lives and facile quantitative measures of ‘success’ for people with intellectual disabilities. Standard professional measurements of the causes and effects of disability on people’s lives are not only narrow but attempt to stabilise a picture that is constantly ‘in process’ (Edgerton 1984a, 2). Ethnography allows researchers to become embedded in the wider context of people’s lives, rather than operating in contrived experimental situations or clinical and psychometric assessments. Ethnographic research is essential if we are to avoid simplistic pictures of intellectual disability.

A subsequent tradition of ethnographic inquiry further developed new ways of ethnographically and analytically centring the lives, perspectives, and voices of intellectually disabled people themselves. One landmark study focused on two individuals in the US, Ed Murphy and Patty Burt, who had previously been labelled ‘retarded’ and institutionalised (Bogdan and Taylor 1982). The book relates several extensive and wide-ranging interviews in which Ed and Patty articulately and thoughtfully narrate how they moved through various kinds of institutions and independent-living arrangements over their life courses. This perspective challenges the professional and research perspectives that dominated understandings of ‘mental retardation’ at the time. Ed, for instance, remarks that to understand people like himself ‘you need experts’. ‘Experts,’ he goes on to say, ‘are people who have lived it’ (Bogdan and Taylor 1982, 30; see also Hartblay 2019). Indeed, Robert Bogdan and Steven Taylor are critical of the very category of ‘mental retardation’, which they take to be a construct that is not only scientifically vague but also has devastating effects on people’s lives.

Ed and Patty’s lives are, like Edgerton’s narratives, ‘stories of lost opportunity brought about by institutional confinement’ (Bogdan and Taylor 1982, 219). But the book also shows them as multidimensional human beings that are constantly exceeding their categorisation as cognitively incapable (Bogdan and Taylor 1982, 210-14). Bogdan and Taylor end with a strong concluding plea to abandon stigmatising labels and to ask what is wrong with society, rather than disabled people, by focusing on what can be done to make it more accommodating and, indeed, dignifying for these individuals (Bogdan and Taylor 1982, 224-5; see also 1992; Edgerton 1993, 228).

Michael Angrosino similarly sought ways to narrate the lives of people with intellectual disabilities in the US from their own perspective by asking, ‘what does it feel like to be mentally disabled and to make one’s way in the world with that condition?’ (1998, 8). Against commonplace aspirations to objectivity, he aims to facilitate people with intellectual disabilities telling their stories in their own ways (Angrosino 1994, 26). For example, he describes a bus trip with Vonnie Lee, a resident of a group home Angrosino was working at. He reads Lee’s seemingly incoherent and insignificant comments on the trip as a way of assembling and narrating significant emotions, values, places, and relationships. Angrosino treats the bus as a legitimate context in which to tell one’s life history. By accompanying Lee as he travels across the urban landscape, the memories incidentally evoked become a coherent form of narration—and it turns out there is nothing ‘disordered’ or trivial about what Lee says (Angrosino 1994, 26-7). In subsequent work, Angrosino (1998) goes further by writing ethnographically-based semi-fictional narratives. The characters are fictionalised composites of people he met volunteering at a nonprofit residential community for people diagnosed with an intellectual disability (1998, 25-6).

Angrosino contends that anthropology’s resourcefulness at deciphering seemingly ‘exotic’ symbols ought to be applied to understand forms of disabled activity that might otherwise seem meaningless (Angrosino 1994, 26). He explores the self-presentations of people with intellectual disabilities as strategies for managing their dependency upon others (Angrosino 1999). People’s way of presenting themselves, he argues, are neither innocent facts nor efforts to cover up who they really are (1998, 269). They are ‘extended metaphors of the self’, produced by feeling, thinking, and interacting agents (Angrosino 1994, 24). People with ‘mental conditions’ hold these as much as anyone else, to the point that we ought to question the position from which we are attributing intellectual disability to anyone in the first place.

Developing an ethnographic mode of attending to the lives of people diagnosed with intellectual disability is one of the most important contributions of this research tradition (see also Cascio and Racine 2019). By combining scrutiny of official categories with detailed empirical work with the people themselves, this work reveals the complexity and challenging nature of the social worlds these people must navigate, as well as how many seemingly ‘pathological’ or ‘disabled’ forms of action are frequently strategies for negotiating those worlds (e.g. Koegel 1988a; Whittemore 1988; Goode 1992; Todis 1992; Levinson 2010).

The social production of intellectual disability

Alongside a tradition of historical scholarship on intellectual disability (Wright and Digby 1996; Thomson 1998; Goodey 2016), scattered anthropological works on the Global North show how particular economic, political, and institutional arrangements make the category appear as something that seems natural, stable, and objective.

Educational institutions play a central role in naturalising intellectual disability, as they differentiate between intellectual capacities and stratify people based on the kinds of minds they have. Could it even be that the educational system does not find these differences but instead creates them (McDermott 1993; Gleason 1989; Mercieca 2013; Avery 2020; Rapp and Ginsburg 2011b)? Classroom tasks and, most of all, tests can make people appear as disabled, given that they foreground and stigmatise ‘differential rates of learning’ (McDermott 1993, 272; see also Avery 2020; McDermott and Varenne 1995; McDermott et al. 2006). If it is not simply different learning speeds that cause the diagnosis, but rather the diagnostic system that causes something called ‘disability’ to appear as notable, different, and defective in the first place, then educational settings may well produce ‘intellectual disability’ as a seemingly natural fact.

State institutions continue to shape the lives of people with intellectual disabilities after leaving school, primarily through the care system. This system typically prioritises their basic needs over the facilitation of their lives more broadly, making it nearly impossible for these people to achieve culturally valued forms of adulthood (Mietola and Vehmas 2019; Vehmas and Mietola 2021). Staff who care for people with intellectual disabilities, especially in institutions, often view ‘pathological’ forms of behaviour as the direct result of these disabled people’s defective psyches (Johnson 1998; Goffman 1968; Bogdan and Taylor 1992). The cruel irony is that this behaviour is rarely innate but often the response to the inexpert, even abusive, ways in which the care itself is managed. Anger and violence, for example, are frequently a protest against confinement, neglect, and coercion (Johnson 1998; McKearney 2021a, 2022). When residents are exposed to these conditions (and to the resulting aggressive behaviour of other residents), it ought to be no surprise they too may become aggressive. Put simply, it is often the care itself that transforms people into the, at times, violent beings that they are expected to be in these contexts.

Across these contemporary state institutions, there are tensions between contrasting ways of governing people with intellectual disabilities that pull them and their carers in opposing directions (Redley 2018). On the one hand, intellectual disability marks out particularly dependent people as legitimate recipients of state welfare. On the other, it identifies them as subjects whose rights are in danger of being overridden. Even if it might be possible to resolve this tension in theory (see Redley and Weinberg 2007), anthropologists demonstrate that the two aspirations of receiving welfare and having rights can lead carers and people with disabilities themselves into conflicts they cannot resolve (Todis 1992; McKearney 2021a, 2022; Davies 2002, 1999; Levinson 2010).

Dependence in Euro-America: Beyond the institution

Anthropologists ask whether a person’s incapacity to be productive and independent only leads to social exclusion in certain contexts. Might intellectual disability manifest differently, or at all, outside of these state institutions? Could intellectual disability be the product of the way in which capitalist societies organise labour markets, and deal with those who are judged to be unproductive? A body of work draws on feminist scholarship to analyse alternative forms of care, principally within the family, as lessening the necessity of and the value placed on autonomy, capacity, and independence. By focusing on relationships of care, it asks: what becomes of intellectual disability in contexts more accommodating of dependence?

Take as an example the transformations that parenting an intellectually disabled child brings (e.g. Hubert 1991; Rapp 1999; Rapp and Ginsburg 2011a, 2018; Landsman 2009; Mattingly 2010; Jackson 2021). Within the United States, everyday expectations about childhood development and the frequently assumed ‘worthlessness’ of an intellectually disabled life can devalue children with intellectual impairments. These expectations can also stigmatise parents, particularly mothers. In the face of this, mothers of disabled children have been shown to rethink their own life and that of their children, imagining new familial futures with integrity, meaning, and value. In practice, they develop new social networks with other parents of disabled children and develop daily care practices that can stretch over a lifetime, rather than ending with a child becoming an adult (Landsman 2009; Rapp 1999). Similarly, the families of intellectually disabled children often become forces for ‘cultural innovation’ that build new models of and for kinship, education, and citizenship. For example, parents actively work to support scientific work on the conditions their children have (Rapp 2011), advocate for more inclusive school programs (Rapp and Ginsburg 2011b), and produce new forms of media that foster greater disability awareness (Rapp and Ginsburg 2011a).

Creating hopeful possibilities can even take shape in professional caring relationships beyond the kinship group (Vehmas and Mietola 2021). Professional carers in the Netherlands are meant to pursue an ideal of autonomy in their work, presuming that those with intellectual disabilities are able to ‘govern their own lives’ (Pols, Althoff and Bransen 2017, 781). But, in practice, when, for example, people with intellectual disabilities engage in substance abuse, carers may think their choices are ‘not good for their own well-being’ (Pols, Althoff and Bransen 2017, 777; McKearney 2020). In these instances, the ideal of autonomy risks guiding carers towards neglect. Therefore, carers attempt to persuade care-recipients away from bad decisions towards better ones. Such care breaks with ideals of independence in liberal societies, and assumes that minds are predominantly relational rather than self-sufficient, not closed systems but open to ‘influence’ (Pols, Althoff, and Bransen 2017, 781; see also McKearney 2021a).

Sexuality is another arena in which the form care takes makes an enormous difference to the possibilities of people with intellectual disabilities. In Denmark, caregivers facilitate sexual intimacy for physically and mentally disabled adults in need of long-term support. This is made possible by an expansive welfare state and progressive disability legislation, enabling kin, professional carers, and sex workers to render sexual encounters possible for people with intellectual disabilities. The case of Denmark sits in striking contrast to its neighbour, Sweden, which likewise has a robust welfare state but nonetheless supresses rather than facilitates the sexual lives of disabled adults in care settings (Kulick and Rydstöm 2015; see also Vehmas and Mietola 2021).

The contrast between Denmark and Sweden suggests that more research is needed to understand how various social, political, and legal conditions support or constrain the sexual, romantic, and reproductive lives of disabled people. Yet research suggests a wide trend of suppressing, ignoring, or trivialising the sexuality of people understood to have intellectual disabilities across a variety of very different countries, to which Denmark is an exception proving the rule. This is evident even in countries with very different histories (e.g. Soniya 2022). In Brazil, for example, there was not the widespread institutionalisation which took place in North America and much of Europe, yet no less than in Europe and North America did Brazilian educators and caregivers discourage and even actively prevent the sex lives of people considered to have intellectual disabilities (Block 2002; see also Ramawati and Block 2020).

Another domain where the kinds of support and care people receive make a big difference is communication and language. Insofar as intellectual disability may mean that people do not speak or communicate in typical ways, educators, parents, and disabled people themselves have experimented with assistive technologies to foster alternatives means of communication, ranging from simple books with pictures and phrases to complex computer programs. Such efforts are controversial, with critics raising doubts about who is actually communicating in the practice of ‘facilitated communication’. Anthropological studies of these assistive technologies demonstrate the ways in which all communication is facilitated, for disabled and non-disabled people alike, while showing how particular communicative technologies can help build disabled personhood and enable meaningful interactions, exchanges, and relationships (Rutherford 2021; Wolf-Meyer 2020a, 2020b).

This leads to broader questions about the kind of social relations that people with intellectual disabilities can enter into, particularly outside of the context of the large-scale institutions which have fallen out of favour in many Euro-American contexts since the mid-twentieth century. The expansion of relational possibilities is a prominent theme in ethnographic work on L’Arche communities. L’Arche originated as a Roman-Catholic venture in France and has become a federation of ecumenical, interfaith, small-scale residential communities across the world in which those with and without intellectual disabilities share life together (Cushing and Lewis 2002; McKearney 2017, 2018, 2019a; Angrosino 2003; Zoanni 2019). Contemporary social policy in Euro-America typically imagines social life as happening only outside of the caring relationship, and thus in a sphere which government-funded care by definition cannot directly influence (McKearney 2017; Mietola and Vehmas 2019; Vehmas and Mietola 2021). By contrast, in L’Arche homes in the UK, the dependence of those with intellectual disabilities is transformed from a barrier to intimacy, belonging, and interaction into the foundation of it (McKearney 2017; 2018; 2019a). People with intellectual disabilities in L’Arche live together with their carers, who are trained to treat the dependence of others as enriching rather than burdensome. The underlying idea is that all people have vulnerabilities and dependencies, and thus all people need care. In such settings, care homes are no longer stigmatised places outside of society that residents need to leave in order to socialise, but sites of vibrant social interaction in their own right (McKearney 2021b; see also Vehmas and Mietola 2021, 87-111). In this way, institutional settings may serve as ‘institutional utopias’ that foster communal forms of support (Block 2007; see also Siebers 2007; R. Jackson 2011).

This work raises the question as to whether there might be whole societies, and not just minority communities, institutions, or individual caring relationships, where intellectual disability is considered less of a problem and perhaps even socially and emotionally productive. Anthropology has long attended to the possibility that other societies might enact relationality and dependence quite differently from the West (e.g. Wagner 1975; Dumont 1980, 1986; Strathern 1990; Mahmood 2012; J. Ferguson 2013; see also Robbins 2013). Might people with intellectual disabilities struggle not only on certain psychometric tests, but also with a specific kind of Euro-American adult life that requires a high degree of individual autonomy?

Cross-cultural research on intellectual disability

In thinking about the lives of people with intellectual disabilities outside Euro-American settings, two contrasting and very generalising assumptions exist, assumptions which are not yet particularly informed by empirical research. The first, a staple of humanitarian and developmental projects, is that the lives of such people are invariably worse, due to lack of resources, ‘backward’ attitudes, pervasive stigma, and the like (Rohwerder 2018; see also Ingstad 1995).

The second assumption is that the lives of those who would be grouped under ‘intellectual disability’ in Euro-American contexts must be much better elsewhere, and perhaps not even recognised as being deficient at all. This assumption grows out of a particular critical social scientific way of thinking about intellectual disability. Social scientists have claimed in a range of different ways that ‘intellectual disability’ does not refer to anything other than a way in which certain Euro-American institutions apprehend people (Goodley 2001; Rapley 2004). At the most general level, scholars have argued that disability in general, and intellectual disability in particular, is simply the product of the demands of modern industrial capitalism, while positing that in other cultures and in ‘pre-modern’ Europe, people with cognitive impairments led relatively normal lives (e.g. Ginzberg 1965; Oliver 1989). More specifically, other scholars argued that labelling someone as having an ‘intellectual disability’ is a performative act that does not so much describe a neutral biological condition, but rather socially makes someone ‘intellectually disabled’ (Dexter 1964; Goode 1992; Rapley 2004; Lungren 1999; P. M. Ferguson, Ferguson and Taylor 1992, 296). The fact that IQ is a conspicuously ‘invented entity’ only deepens this critique’s force (Douglas 1980). In particular, and in line with wider developments in social theory, critiques of institutions argue that the classification of people according to ‘intelligence’ was more than anything a disciplinary project that served to reproduce asylums and the forms of medical expertise and governance they entailed (see Edgerton 1970, 524-7).

Yet there is evidence that something analogous to intellectual disability persists even outside of the formal situations in which it is conspicuous and labelled (e.g. Edgerton 1988). Young adults in one study in California were regarded as impaired outside of school, for instance, when people noticed their incapacity to tell the time, to count money, or to comprehend the stakes of their decisions (Kogel and Edgerton 1984; see also Kernan and Sharon 1984). This raises the possibility that intellectual disability is not entirely a social construction, but reflects a condition of impairment that is ‘the product of an interaction between environmental and biological factors’ (Edgerton 1993, xiv). In any case, extant cross-cultural ethnographic research by no means demonstrates that intellectual disability is always inconspicuous, better accommodated, or less stigmatised outside of the institutions of the industrialised West (Edgerton 1970; see also Groce 1992).

Cross-cultural research on intellectual disability has only occasionally been gathered together in comparative fashion (Jenkins 1999; McKearney and Zoanni 2018; McKearney and Zogas 2021). But what has been done starts to build a picture of the diversity and complexity of ways that intellectual impairment is responded to outside of the West or the Global North. In the absence of significant state support, care is often organised at the margins of existing kinship structures. In Jordan, Brazil, and India, mothers who are primarily responsible for their children’s care are desperately worried about who, after they die, will look after their offspring (Fietz 2019, 2020; Soniya 2022; Mehrotra and Vaidya 2008; Sargent 2019, 2020, 2021). Although this is also a common worry in the Global North, there is little state welfare in Jordan, Brazil, or India to provide residence or on-going care, thus raising the existential stakes. Even for those families that have the resources, paying for private residential care to be provided by non-kin is a ‘relatively uncommon and unpopular option’; indeed, it is one that is often highly stigmatised (Sargent 2021, 1-2; Fietz 2020). Mothers are further uncertain about whether their other children or the child’s potential spouses will take on such a responsibility.

In some cases, people work towards the creation of new forms of voluntary institutions for care beyond parents’ lives (Aydos and Fietz 2017; Fietz 2020). In stark contrast to societies in which care is expected to be separated from romance and sexuality, marriage is often practised as a way of creating new relationships of dependence with the spouse or their parents (Sargent 2021; Manor-Binyami 2018; see also Craft and Craft 1980; Kulick and Rydström 2015). Indeed, in a context in which everyone remains within hierarchical kinship relations and frequently in complex webs of dependence within the home, people with intellectual disabilities rarely become conspicuous solely for the fact of being unable to operate totally autonomously.

A small body of work on sub-Saharan Africa explores how intellectual disability manifests in interactions between non-typical minds and the wider fabric of social life. Within Uganda, for example, though people in rural areas may not have been exposed to understandings of intellectual disability from the Global North, they still articulate a highly elaborated and often stigmatising set of categories and terms for perceived cognitive impairment (Whyte 1998). In contemporary urban Uganda, understandings of intellectual disability are forged at the intersection of local models of the mind, longstanding patterns of kinship care, and newer forms of Christian charity (Zoanni 2018; 2021). A person may only stand out as ‘disabled’ when they break particular social expectations about key features of personhood, such as by lacking the ability to speak or the capacity to be socially and biologically reproductive. This leads to different arrangements of care in which, for example, a person with cerebral palsy (which generally entails no intellectual impairment) is offered care in a group home, while someone with Down Syndrome may work as a taxi driver (Zoanni 2021). Outside kinship relations, dedicated care for people with intellectual disabilities is only available within a handful of primarily Christian institutions, which in turn reproduce models of highly paternalistic care that renders the cared-for as ‘children’. At the same time, the category of the ‘child’ provides a socially legible status that affirms disabled people as deserving of care and resources (Zoanni 2019).

Things unfold differently in other African countries. In Botswana, people with a number of severe impairments, including developmental and cognitive ones, are sometimes grouped under the overarching category mopakwane (Livingston 2006; Ingstand 1995; see also Ingstad and Whyte 1995, 2007). Mopakwane are typically cared for by their families, and their arrival thus involves a significant rearrangement of expectations for the life course and the kinship group. Parents will likely be blamed for the child’s condition, but typically try to move responsibility away from themselves by claiming that it is something that naturally happens, that it was the result of witchcraft, or that mopakwane are, in fact, a gift from God (Ingstad 1995).

In these circumstances, the specific way of parsing intelligence behind the psychiatric framing of ‘intellectual disability’ gives way to alternative categories for comprehending differences, such as people’s capacity to care for children, to marry, to do certain kinds of work, to speak, or to comport themselves properly (McKearney and Zogas 2021). Research on Africa further suggests something parallel to the emergence of the notion of intellectual disability in the Global North. Colonial and postcolonial demands for the creation of school systems, new expectations of literacy, and new regimes of testing created conditions that rendered children markedly disabled in a way that was not true for earlier circumstances, especially in rural settings (Whyte 1998; Livingston 2006; Zoanni 2020). This research also demonstrates that alternative forms of social organisation can create opportunities for those with intellectual disabilities: to be less conspicuous, to remain within relations of care, and to access relationships in which they are recognised as full persons.

None of this ethnographic work confirms hopes that different arrangements of social life and alternative expectations about personhood resolve all potential difficulties. The reliance of people with intellectual disabilities upon others troubles expectations about work in Jordan, Uganda, and India. Even supposedly ‘manual’ or ‘menial’ work can involve complex demands that not everyone in a society is capable of (Groce 1992; Edgerton 1970). Intellectual disability troubles the kinship systems for organising care in these contexts, and thus the expectations about personhood that they rely on. Even if such societies expect people to be dependent, they tend also to expect changes over the life course in how that dependence manifests and interacts with that of others. In none of these societies, for instance, are others any less concerned than they are in Euro-America about the possibility of those with intellectual disabilities raising children (Craft and Craft 1980; Booth and Booth 1999). In addition, the sense that intellectual disability is a significant enough problem that people need to account for its cause or origins and to distribute responsibility for it is a surprising continuity across many ethnographies within and beyond Euro-America (Mehrotra and Vaidya 2008; Gammeltoft 2014; Sargent 2020; Mattingly 2010; Landsman 2009).

For reasons like these, the various responses to dependence in these ethnographies are not best parsed in terms of whether a society accepts or rejects it. Instead, they more particularly relate to how care is socially organised over the life course. In much of Euro-America, welfare states support kinship care of disabled children during early years through medical and educational institutions. The transition to adulthood produces a distinct rupture as young adults are expected to move beyond their domestic support (Rapp and Ginsburg 2018; Mietola & Vehmas 2019). People with intellectual disabilities struggle to access further education or work, and to develop the skills for independent living that would lay the ground for such a transition. But the forms of residential care outside the family home, which might replicate independent forms of adulthood and replace kinship care, can only be accessed through an entirely different set of social services.

By contrast, in India, Uganda, Brazil, and Jordan leaving school is rarely correlated with expectations about independent living. Parents struggle to find forms of support beyond the education system, but the more significant crisis is normally the death of the parents. People with intellectual disabilities in Euro-America who do not rely on professional care can often be in similar positions. But there are many, by this stage in the life cycle, who will have already moved to a stable residence and care provision beyond the parental home. In countries without state welfare systems, by contrast, this moment will almost always necessitate finding and relocating to a new form of residence and care. Here, parents, families, and the disabled people themselves rarely have established patterns, structures, and ideas about what that might involve.

Carrying this research forward requires seriously engaging with the way that the psychiatric category of intellectual disability has become globalised, which is likely to be partial and patchy (Zoanni 2021). It is a significant limitation not only of psychology and medicine, but also of the social sciences and history, that we have so little work beyond Euro-American contexts on which to base better comparisons. But if anthropology has not yet furnished us with a wealth of empirical examples, its tradition of research in this area has nevertheless left us with ways we can investigate intellectual disability in a properly cross-cultural ethnographic perspective.

Conclusion: Towards an anthropology of competence

Anthropology offers a way to put into social perspective the individualised concept of mental development that underwrites psychiatric approaches to intellectual disability. The DSM-V defines intellectual disability in terms of a lack of progress towards expected milestones, and the failure to attain full mental ‘maturity’. In doing so, it gives passing mention to the fact that such expectations will vary cross-culturally. Anthropological work is well positioned to explore this issue and demonstrate its centrality. Likewise, insofar as many anthropological approaches to intellectual disability emphasise the life course (Langness and Levine 1988a; Mietola and Vehmas 2019), they sketch a path for moving beyond understanding intellectual disability as a biologically-caused deviation of an individual from a universal path of mental development. Rather, they demand analysing intellectual disability in terms of an increasing lack of ‘fit’ between particular expectations for maturation and a person in all their particularity (Garland-Thomson 2011).

In this way, anthropological approaches challenge us to think more broadly than DSM categories alone. On this front, Edgerton’s concept of ‘competence’ may be helpful. Existing cross-cultural studies of competence in relation to intellectual disability shift the emphasis from theoretical debates about the condition’s social and cultural construction into an empirical investigation (Jenkins 1999). The concept foregrounds people’s capacities, rather than limitations, opens up the definitional gaps of the DSM-V, and raises the question of whether individual responsibility and independence are in fact prerequisites of a meaningful life. The concept also focuses our attention on the concrete cultural expectations, political-economic demands, histories of classification, and environmental and material conditions in particular places. All of these factors play a central, yet not easily predictable, role in the way intellectual disability manifests, is experienced, and plays out in practice.

A focus on competence is one way in which anthropology avoids reducing intellectual disability either to a biological pathology residing in an individual brain, or to nothing but a social fiction that is wholly a product of language and categories. Anthropology requires us to investigate ethnographically the normative features of any given setting, the forms of learning that enable people to follow them, and how precisely people end up departing from them. Ethnography allows us to view persons deemed intellectually disabled over time, to attend to what pulls them away from expected developmental paths, and to track how those departures come to be imagined, classified, and responded to. It thereby foregrounds the significance and the complexity of the relational lives of people with intellectual disabilities.

In all of these respects, anthropological research reveals dimensions of the social and cultural life of intellectual disability that biomedical and professional research rarely enquires into, let alone comprehends. An anthropology that developed and expanded its own still-nascent tradition of detailed cross-cultural research in this area would enable us to answer crucial unanswered questions about how the condition is differently constructed, responded to, and lived across the world.

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Note on contributors

Patrick McKearney is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the lives of adults with intellectual disabilities in India, Italy, and the UK. His published work focuses on the relationship between care, intimacy, and ethics and he has co-edited two special issues on the anthropology of cognitive disability. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8988-0101

Patrick McKearney, University of Amsterdam, Department of Anthropology, Postbus 15509, 1001 NA Amsterdam. p.t.mckearney@uva.nl

Tyler Zoanni is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bremen. He is finishing a book on intellectual disability and personhood in Uganda, and he has co-edited two special issues focused on cognitive disability and disability in the Global South. His research interests more generally include politics, health, religion, kinship, aesthetics, and subjectivity, especially in East/Central and Indian Ocean Africa. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2519-107X

Tyler Zoanni. Universität Bremen,Institut für Ethnologie und Kulturwissenschaft, Fachbereich 9,Postfach 330 440,28334 Bremen. zoanni@uni-bremen.de

[1] Past versions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM) referred to ‘mental retardation’. The 2013 DSM-5 changes nomenclature to ‘intellectual disability’, in line with accepted international academic usage as well as a 2010 US federal statute outlawing the use of the previous term (Wills 2014). This entry uses the term ‘intellectual disability’ except when referring to historical or academic contexts in which a different term was used.

Photography

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:48:03 +0000

Hanoi, Vietnam 2018. Young men line up for school pictures at the Temple of Literature. Photo: Brent Luvaas.

Brent Luvaas

Drexel University

Initially published 22 Dec 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22photography

Abstract:

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. They surround us in public spaces, and populate the numerous screens we access in our daily lives. Anthropologists are working to understand the social and cultural ramifications of this ubiquitous photography on societies throughout the globe. This entry examines the work anthropologists have done on, and with, photography. It surveys the conclusions anthropologists have reached about the social and cultural impacts of photography and discusses the multimodal experiments that define the use of photography in anthropology today. Photography, anthropologists argue, is never an impartial representation of the world around us. It is part and parcel of making the world what it is. It is an active medium through which human beings define and re-define themselves and their societies.

Introduction

Human beings have never encountered as many photographs as we do today. ‘Every two minutes’, writes media theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘Americans alone take more photographs than were made in the entire nineteenth century’ (2016, 4). In 2021, some 350 million photos were shared per day via the social media app Snapchat, another 350 million via Facebook, and around 95 million through Instagram. We see photographs in books, on billboards, in storefronts and on television screens, and nearly every time we pull our phones from our pockets, which for much of the world’s population is well over a hundred times per day.

Photography, then, is more and more pervasive in our daily lives. Anthropologists, along with other social scientists, are working to understand the implications of that pervasiveness. Photography, their research shows, is continually expanding its social utility, cultural salience, and political relevance. It has become a tool of power and persuasion (Sekula 1992; Edwards 2001; Azoulay 2008), of memory and connection (Wright 2013; Campbell 2014; Miyarrka Media 2019). It operates as a kind of language (Miller 2015; Jurgenson 2019) through which we communicate our moods and our thoughts, and a social currency through which we imagine, construct, and add value to our public identities (Abidin 2018).

This does not mean, however, that everyone everywhere uses photography in the same way. Anthropologists, through long-term, in-depth studies of specific communities in diverse regions around the globe, have uncovered a range of meanings and uses associated with photography. For some, photography is a tool for capturing reality ‘as it really is’: its indisputable objective nature (Edwards 1992), or its spiritual essence (MacDougall 1992). For others, photography is a medium for self-invention, a way of depicting what could or should be (Pinney 1998; Bajorek 2020). For still others, it is a method of deception, of distorting or manipulating reality, or of convincing others that reality is different than they had imagined it. In many cases, photography is all of these things at once (Strassler 2021).

Anthropology is not unique among the social sciences and humanities in giving photography this sort of critical attention. What sets it apart from other disciplines is its emphasis on lived experience. For anthropologists, photography is felt and embodied, not simply encountered or consumed. Photography is part of how we understand our selves and the world around us. As such, anthropologists often study photography by immersing themselves in other peoples’ photographic practices: experiencing, to the extent that it is possible, what it is like to consume and create photographs from the vantage point of one particular population at one particular moment in time. They also recognise the value of photography in communicating anthropological ideas and have been on the forefront of efforts to use photography to enhance, expand, and complicate social scientific work. In a world where the image is rapidly supplanting text as the primary means through which we communicate, we increasingly see photography as a rich alternative mode of anthropological representation.

This entry shows how photography has been both a subject and medium of anthropological work. It surveys many of the observations and conclusions anthropologists working among diverse populations have made about photography. It also explores experiments to use photography to document, communicate, and expand the audience of anthropological work.

Part 1: Photography as research subject

‘When writing about photography’, Rosalind Morris notes, ‘one often feels that almost everything has been said before’ (Morris 2009, 13). The same arguments and insights are recycled again and again. In part, this stems from the simple functionality of a camera. You press a shutter release button, and light passes through a lens. That light either leaves a physical trace on film or a plate through reacting with some sort of chemical agent (silver nitrate, most commonly) or is stored as data on a memory card. What could be more straightforward and easier to interpret than that?

The recycling of insights on photography also stems from the tendency of theorists of photography, including anthropologists, to cite a rather small, and predictable, body of theory in support of their work, with Susan Sontag’s On photography, Roland Barthes’ Camera lucida, and Walter Benjamin’s A short history of photography foremost among them. Photography, in this canon of thought, has specific, observable effects. The technology itself always, to some extent, determines the outcome. The medium is the message (McLuhan 1964). Photography acts as a mode of capture, reinforcing colonial conquest and the male gaze (Sontag 1976); it triggers reflections on death (Barthes 1981); and it opens pathways to the ‘optical unconscious’ (Benjamin 1931). Where anthropologists have complicated this canon of thought is in their insistence on placing acts of photographic production and consumption within particular cultural and historical contexts. For anthropologists, photography is always part of a larger assemblage. It is always ‘entangled’ in different social and political systems (Pinney 1997, 10). It cannot, then, be understood in isolation nor as a purely mechanical process with predetermined results.

Nonetheless, anthropologists too have often reiterated the same general arguments about photography, even if they word them differently. One of those arguments is that photography is never merely a way of representing the world around us; it is also itself a world-making practice, a means by which we transform the social, political, and material conditions of our lives. Photography, in other words, makes things imaginable and thinkable by changing the sensual apparatuses through which we encounter, understand, relate to, and act towards the things and beings around us. Photographs, anthropologist Terrence Wright explains, ‘intrude on, and become part of, everyday perception’ (Wright 1992, 28). ‘We do not simply “see” what is there before us’, elaborates Deborah Poole. ‘Rather, the specific ways in which we see (and represent) the world determine how we act upon the world and, in doing so, create what the world is’ (Poole 1997, 7).

Indeed, photography significantly impacts how anthropologists do, and think through, their own work. As is often noted , anthropology and photography developed in tandem as two mid-nineteenth century efforts to capture the elusive nature of the world around us (see Edwards 1992; Edwards 2001; Pinney 2011). Early anthropologists, just like early photographic innovators William Henry Fox Talbot and Louis-Jacques Mandé Daguerre, saw photography as a direct translation of what was out there ‘in the world’ onto a photographic plate. As such, photographs, for nineteenth century anthropologists, served as data or evidence of human cultural and morphological diversity. Photographs could chronicle the precise details of a subject with far greater precision than drawings or textual descriptions. Before ethnographic fieldwork was an established part of anthropological practice, anthropologists depended upon photographs from explorers and missionaries for key details about the populations they studied. Photography was the perfect medium for documenting dress, architecture, and artefacts. It also became a tool for documenting difference, a means by which European and American anthropologists visually reinforced their own peoples’ perceived superiority to others. In the most extreme form, this amounted to anatomical studies, where native populations were forced to stand naked before a grid, their bodily proportions and facial features subjected to the scrutinising gaze of ‘racial science’ (Edwards 2011; Pinney 2011). Here, photography was an instrument of colonialism, working side by side with an incipient anthropology to categorise and classify human beings around the world in ways that served the interests of European imperial powers.

By the early part of the twentieth century, however, anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski recognised the unique capacity of photography to present human populations with greater nuance and complexity ‘than any written commentary’ (Young 1998, 26) could. Though anthropology remained largely a discipline of words (Mead 1974), its ideas communicated through written articles and monographs, scholars like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, used photography to capture ‘the intangible relationships among different types of culturally standardized behavior’ (Bateson and Mead 1942, xii), or to ‘record visual impressions’ that could later be ‘carried into the laboratory for refined analysis’ (Collier 1957, 846). Photographs, after all, contain a superabundance of information. They capture errant and ‘quotidian details’ (Young 1998, 1) that often exceed the intentions of the persons who take them or who chose to include them within a text (Taylor 1996). Sometimes they even contradict the intentions of an anthropologist, revealing greater complexity than their own argument could allow. In such cases, photography is not merely a passive or neutral recorder of personal observations but rather exists alongside those observations, expanding upon and complicating them. In short, photography exerts a kind of agency over anthropological practice. It helps shape the field of anthropology rather than merely serving its ends.

Multiple forms of agency

Another argument that anthropologists make repeatedly is that photography does not just do things to us; we do things with it. Photography is always entangled with other kinds of agencies, other agendas, other social projects. It never simply serves one end. In the case of the colonial photography of early anthropology, for instance, the photographed also exerted some agency over the images produced. ‘Rather than seeing photography purely as a tool of the colonial project’, writes Jane Lydon, of her work on archival images of Aboriginal Australians, ‘a closer look at the production and consumption of the photographic images under scrutiny here reveals a dynamic and performative relationship between photographer and Aboriginal subject’ (Lydon 2005, xiii). While colonisers use photography to demonstrate their difference from the colonised, the colonised use photography to present a more complicated picture: of their own modernity and sophistication, their own syncretic and hybrid identity, their fluidity and continuity in the face of imperial powers. Photography does not just act upon colonial subjects: it can also act with them.

A similar point has been made about the Peruvian Andes. Anthropologist Deborah Poole argues that the ‘image world’ of the Andes, constructed through a range of photographs taken by colonists and others, shapes the world experienced by the people in the Andes themselves. However, it is never simply a top-down world imposed from on high by colonial powers. Image worlds instead are negotiated through millions of small acts of image-production, circulation, and curation, an ‘intricate and sometimes contradictory layering of relationships, attitudes, sentiments, and ambitions, through which European and Andean peoples have invested images with meaning and value’ (Poole 1997, 7-8). The meaning production connected with photography, in other words, is a continually unfinished process engaged in by multiple parties with different stakes in the outcome. Some of those parties may have disproportionate power to shape the meanings invested in photographs, but that doesn’t mean other parties have no power. The colonised too participate in meaning-making. They too help shape the image world photography constructs around us.

Recognising that photography can serve different ends in different contexts, anthropologists studying photography have committed themselves to looking beyond the Western world, chronicling the multiple, intertwined histories of the practice and displacing a Eurocentric perspective (Pinney 2003; Behrend 2013). In doing so, they again and again note the agentive practices of photographers and the subjects of their photographs. In the Indian city of Nagda, for instance, photography is employed for various projects of state and self-making (Pinney 1998). While the Indian government continues colonial-era practices of using photography to document, define, and track the whereabouts of its citizens, citizens themselves often use photography to thwart or undermine these ends. While the state invests in a ‘naturalist’ or ‘realist’ paradigm of photography, in which what is depicted is simply an accurate representation of what ‘is’, Indian citizens frequently use photography to project a kind of dream version of self and place, exploring the potential of photography to enact, through elaborate staging and post-production practices, particular kinds of fantasies and desires. Here, photography is more about imagination than representation.

The line between the two, however, is not always clear. In Mussoorie, a resort town in the foothills of the Himalayas, domestic Indian tourists dress themselves up as ‘idealized peasants, bandits, Arab sheiks, and pop stars’ (MacDougall 1992, 103) to get their portraits taken in photography studios. They do this, claims anthropologist and filmmaker David MacDougall, not simply to play act or mess around, but to represent a deeper, spiritual self, a self not necessarily visible to onlookers. Photography, here, becomes a form of self-actualisation, bringing the private self into alignment with the public self. MacDougall’s film on photographic practices in Mussoorie, Photo wallahs, allows us to observe this practice from multiple vantage points, itself demonstrating the irreducibility of visual (or audio-visual) content. In Chinese-owned photo studios in Dutch-colonial Java, similarly, customers got their photos taken before elaborate backdrops of foreign lands. These portraits, argues Karen Strassler, serve as ‘a form of virtual travel beyond the horizons of the everyday’ (2010, 77). Photography here is more about what ‘could be’ than what currently ‘is’. It works ‘to expand the horizons of the actual’ (Strassler 2010, 79).

Such photographic horizons are often inseparable from political ones. The people of Senegal, for instance, have used photography ‘both to document a time of radical social and political change and to effect these changes’ (Bajorek 2020, 5). Sometimes this takes on the seemingly innocuous form of the fantastical studio portraits described by Strassler, MacDougall, and Pinney, or as documented in Ghana by Tobias Wendl in his film Future remembrance (1998). Sometimes it depicts explicitly political events, like presidential rallies and protests. In either case, photography is not neutral. By representing themselves supported by crowds, politicians reinforce their power (Bajorek 2020). By documenting the masses drawn to their protests, movements of resistance gain momentum. Even studio portraits retain a certain transformative political potential. By depicting themselves as cosmopolitans and sophisticates, surrounded by consumer goods or in front of private jets, West African people work to transform their social and economic status (Bajorek 2020).

The political potential of photography, however, is not limited to what is depicted in images. What is left out, omitted, and censored also has importance, helping shape social and political realities. In Kenya, Heike Behrend argues, choosing not to depict oneself, or appearing only in veiled or altered form, has taken on a deep political significance for the Islamic minority (2013). The Kenyan government, like nearly all governments in the contemporary world, makes heavy use of photography in surveilling and accounting for its population. Official identification headshots, required for state-issued IDs and other bureaucratic endeavours, are one example. Kenyan Muslim women, who often choose to veil for both religious and personal reasons, are frequently required to remove their veils for official photographs, subjecting them to the scrutinising eyes of the state. It should come as little surprise, then, that many Kenyan Muslims are suspicious of being photographed, whether for state purposes, advertisements, or tourist images. Behrend refers to the efforts of Kenyan Muslims to go without photographic depiction, and to conceal, mask, and disguise their images when they do appear in photographs, as ‘the aesthetics of withdrawal’ (Behrend 2013, 20).

After all, once our images are ‘out there’, circulating by hand or through media, they are often outside of our control. They take on a life of their own when they are defaced, reproduced, or taken out of context, for example. They can generate parody images, be cut and pasted into collages and montages, or become street art or Internet memes. Karen Strassler, discussing the tendency of images to multiply and circulate in the media environment of contemporary Indonesia, refers to occurrences where photographs get mixed up in larger public debates and political discourses as ‘image-events’ (Strassler 2021). An image-event, she writes,

is a political process that crystallizes otherwise inchoate and dispersed imaginings within a discrete and mobile visible form that becomes available for scrutiny, debate, and play as it circulates in public (Strassler 2021, 13).

Image-events can take many forms: a picture of a celebrity in a men’s magazine that may or may not be nude, an image of a killed political activist photocopied and pasted onto walls, a caught-in-the-act shot of a politician engaging in unseemly or outright illegal behaviour. Photographs get intertwined with larger social processes, a fact, claims Strassler, that should lead us to abandon the conception of photographs as static depictions of particular moments. It may be worthwhile to think of ‘all images as “events” of varying intensity, duration, and scale’ (Strassler 2021, 13).

Photography’s multiple meanings

That does not mean that images are fully available to the academic gaze, or that we can come to any complete understanding of what a photograph does or means as it circulates in public. Photographs retain something of a stubborn opacity. Images in colonial-era Java, claims John Pemberton, reveal ‘unintended traces of a ghostliness within the machinery of the modern’ (Pemberton 2009, 49). There are presences within images that can’t always be accounted for, details that fail to conform to our understanding of events. What is that shadow in the corner of the image, that smirk creeping up the side of a face? Photographs don’t only show us what we want them to show but they can also reveal elements otherwise hidden and contradictions not easily contained.

Photography can move through different modes and functions even within a single cultural context. In his study of photographic practices in the Roviana Lagoon of the western Solomon Islands, Christopher Wright describes the ‘entanglement’ of Roviana people with photography in various ways: ‘through being the subjects of colonial photography, through their own uses and expectations of the medium, and through the role photography can play in their ideas of history’ (Wright 2013, 2). In Roviana, as in Nagda or Java, there is no single, simple explanation of what photography is or does. There are only singular instances in which the Roviana use photography towards various ends. Roviana people are both the subjects and objects of photography. While colonists used photography to capture and categorise the Roviana, the Roviana used photography to tell their own oral histories, forge their own understanding of the past, and even to re-imagine, and rework, the colonial encounter.

Given photography’s frequently multiple meanings, the conclusions anthropologists reach about a particular body of photography are not necessarily shared by their interlocutors. In his work on the interpretation of colonial-era photography in The Gambia, Liam Buckley shows how citizens of postcolonial countries often interpret photographs in ways that are unpredictable, sometimes even contrary to the political and theoretical ends of the anthropologist herself (Buckley 2014). Gambians, he explains, denied him the sorts of ‘subaltern narratives’ he was hoping for in their interpretations of colonial photographs, focusing instead on aesthetic details: their age, their flatness, their amateurishness (Buckley 2014, 721). In essence, they rendered them largely meaningless, incapable of inflicting the kind of social or psychological harm anthropologists, and other experts, might imagine of them.

The same can be said of Yolngu practices of smart phone photography in contemporary Australia. As anthropologist Jennifer Deger has written in her collaborative account of the practice, ‘my Yolngu friends and family use mobile phones as a technology with which to tap into—and amplify—the push and pull of life’ (Miyarrka Media 2019, 9). Through fancifully edited photographs, mobile-phone-wielding Yolngu people use photography to connect with each other, their sense of identity, and their memories of past events. Photography doesn’t impose a singular view on Yolngu people. It gets mixed up in larger Yolngu projects of individual and collective becoming, projects that will never be finished.

‘All photographs’, writes Craig Campbell ‘are actually agitating; even the most mundane and seemingly transparent images…have the capacity to agitate against or undo our meaning making endeavors’ (2014, xiv). The inherent indeterminacy and instability of photographic meaning enables different populations to interpret photographs differently, employing them towards diverse, and often explicitly political, ends. Even photographic archives, Campbell shows, retain a dynamic capability, continually repurposed and reimagined for the concerns of the present. During the Soviet era, for instance, Russian communists used images of Indigenous Siberians to cast them as part of a larger national narrative, in which a continuity existed between Indigenous social structures and experiments in communist utopia. Today, Indigenous Siberians, and anthropologists like Campbell, use the same images to find gaps in this narrative, and to tell a messier, more complicated story about Indigenous survival under colonisation. Once again, as Strassler (2021) argues, not even still photographs are static.

A useful way to make sense of this semantic multiplicity of photographs is to ask how they appear and circulate in particular ‘visual economies’ (Poole 1997). Some participants in this economy will have more influence than others on how an image will be received and understood, as well as the kinds of stories it will be made to tell. One such disproportionate power resides with those that Zeynep Devrim Gürsel refers to as ‘image brokers’, the photography commissioners and editors for newspapers, websites, and other media resources where we encounter photographs. Image brokers choose which images to include with articles, and which images to use to illustrate a particular point, to represent a particular people or place, or to break up the text in visually arresting ways. ‘Image brokers’, writes Gürsel, ‘act as intermediaries for images through acts such as commissioning, evaluating, licensing, selling, editing, and negotiating’ (2016, 2). Their power, of course, is not unlimited. They too are subject to significant constraints: the authority of editors and advertisers, the perceived interests of their readership, and the fluctuations of the news market. Nonetheless, image brokers play a significant role in determining how audiences see and perceive the world around them. ‘Professional image making’, writes Gürsel, echoing by now a familiar sentiment, ‘is central to processes of worldmaking’ (2016, 13), as it shapes how we understand and act towards the world around us. Americans learn to regard other countries in particular ways in large part due to how they perceive them based on the images of them they have encountered. How would Americans conceive of Russia, Afghanistan, or other countries distant from them without the work of image brokers operating behind the scenes? Image brokers, then, hold an enormous sway over American, or any other, foreign policy. They are one set of power players in world politics who go largely unnoticed, their work too often mistaken for reality as it is.

While anthropologists have spent considerable energy uncovering the political potential and limitations of photography, it is important to note that not all photography is political in any explicit sense. In his open-access publication on uses of photography on social media apps like SnapChat and Instagram, Daniel Miller claims that photography is employed for all sorts of quotidian tasks. In these tasks, it operates like a language, expressing any variety of ephemeral moods and thoughts in ways not meant to have a lasting impact or be taken in an overly serious manner (Miller 2015). Nathan Jurgenson (2019) refers to this as photography’s ‘phatic’ function. Photography can be said to be functioning in a ‘phatic’ manner when it serves to create or maintain social connection, rather than communicate something meaningful.

Singaporean social media influencers may similarly reject many of the high and mighty purposes academics might want young people online to engage in through online photography (Abidin 2016). Photography on social media, instead, is for making silly faces in acts of self-deprecation, for amusing oneself and one’s friends, for expressing opinions without having to take the time to compose one’s thoughts into words (Miller 2015). Crystal Abidin describes this variety of phatic photography as ‘subversive frivolity’ (2016). In any case, with most photos now taken on smart phones, photography, Miller claims, has been thoroughly democratised. It is no longer the domain of elite image-makers. It is a medium for all of us, and as we make use of photography in more and more domains of our lives, we are continually expanding the boundaries of what photography can say and do.

Part 2: Photography as research medium

It should come as no surprise, then, that anthropologists are exploring what photography can say and do within their own work. Where previous generations of anthropologists used photographs largely to illustrate or support points made through text (Taylor 1996, 66; Strassler 2021, 27), anthropologists today are increasingly exploring ways to make photographs speak alongside their texts, telling a different, more open-ended, kind of story in a uniquely visual language.

One thing photography is understood to do is provide a medium through which diverse vantage points can be expressed. In photography, what is in the frame and outside of it, in focus and out, determines what we see and how. What we see is not the whole truth, but the selective and edited truth of one person, occupying one position at one moment in time. Recognising this feature of photography and looking to include their interlocutors as active participants in the production of knowledge, anthropologists have frequently provided cameras and other tools of visual representation to their interlocutors to do with as they will. To chronicle their harrowing journey across the Sonoran desert, for instance, Jason DeLeon (2015) supplied undocumented migrants with disposable cameras. To gain inside access into what it feels like for Somali refugees to await asylum in Delhi, India, Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan (2015) gave cameras to the young men with whom he was shooting a documentary film. The method, known as ‘photovoice’, purports to give the marginalised, and often unrepresented, a ‘voice’ to depict themselves. It is often part of a larger project of ‘decolonising’ anthropology, challenging the power relationships that have constituted, in fact that continue to constitute, the discipline. Yet typically it is the anthropologist who selects from among the photos taken for inclusion within their work, and it is the anthropologist who provides context and interpretation for them. ‘Although these projects push against imbalances of power inherent in the act of photographic representation’, writes Alexander Fattal of photovoice, ‘echoes of those very imbalances inevitably resound in their implementation’ (2020, 153). Nonetheless, photovoice projects, like Fattal’s own among youth in drug-war-torn Colombia, can provide moving, evocative, and unsettling representations from outside the academy.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the interventions of photovoice will retain their relevance in the era of near-ubiquitous photography. ‘These days’, writes Paul Gurrumuruwuy as part of the Miyarrka Media collective, ‘every Yolngu has a phone’ (Miyarrka Media 2019, 1), and nearly every phone has a camera. Photographs are more present in the lives of the people anthropologists study than they ever have been. They are also more prosaic. There are, of course, still people in the world without regular access to cameras, such as the youth Fattal worked with, but their numbers are diminishing quickly, and with numerous social media platforms at their disposal, their dependence on anthropologists to present their work is less pronounced. The idea that anthropologists might play some crucial, interventionist role in providing their interlocutors with a means of documenting their own lives seems increasingly outdated. In most cases, anthropologists are simply not needed for that. Instead, liberated from a sort of salvage visual anthropology, they are exploring other, more experimental roles photography might play within their work.

‘The way to restore photography to a concrete contribution within the discipline’, wrote Elizabeth Edwards at the beginning of the digital era, ‘is to harness those qualities peculiar to the medium of still photography’ (1997, 53). Those qualities, she explains, are the open-endedness of photography, its inherent ambiguity, its incompleteness, and its inability to include everything within a frame. These are attributes that can be harnessed towards ethnographic ends, made to evoke rather than illustrate, and present non-reductive, multidimensional representations that enable us to ‘see through different eyes from beyond the Boundary’ (Edwards 1997, 54) that separates one cultural world from another. Anthropologists in the last two decades have found diverse ways to do just that.

Seeking to capture the affective landscape of a Brazilian sanatorium, Joao Biehl, for his book Vita: Life in a zone of social abandonment (2005), partnered with photographer Torben Eskerod. The resulting black and white images are less illustrative than evocative, immersing readers in the feeling of the place, rather than revealing details or reinforcing arguments. The images here work alongside the text, neither one subordinate to the other. The same is true in Righteous dopefiend (2009), an emotionally wrenching depiction of life on the streets of San Francisco for unhoused heroin addicts that Philippe Bourgois wrote in partnership with photographer, and then anthropological graduate student, Jeff Schoenberg. The book’s images provide emotional texture in addition to expository information, doing different, but no less important, work than the text.

The epistemic and emotional work that photography does depends on its ability to capture, without explicit commentary, a viewpoint that is both expansive and particular. To harness that dual potential, anthropologist Filip De Boeck partnered with photographer Marie-Françoise Plissart, and later Sammy Baloji, for the books Kinshasa: Tales of the invisible city (2004) and Suturing the city: Living together in Congo’s urban worlds (2016). Both books attempt to depict the irreducible complexities and contradictions of life in a contemporary Congolese city. Here too, the images add another dimension to the work. Rather than being a mere visual accompaniment, they make their own sort of ‘sensory argument’. The visual depicts what words cannot: a city lived and experienced, rather than theorised or explained.

While some anthropologists have partnered with photographers to create a more immersive sensory component to their work, others have taken their own photographs and made them central to the act of ethnographic communication. Throughout his book Monrovia modern: Urban form and political imagination in Liberia (2017), former photojournalist Danny Hoffman employs full-colour photographs to show how Monrovians inhabit, manipulate, and move through the deteriorating built environment of their city. Shot with wide lenses and available light, with human subjects often blurred or as tiny figures in the background, the images are both architectural and emotive, capturing something of the lived feeling of making do with a collapsing infrastructure and crumbling economy. Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Benjamin Fogarty-Valenzuela’s co-authored book Art of captivity (2020) also uses photography to demonstrate the way people occupy and make use of space. Focusing their lenses on Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres in Guatemala, their richly coloured photographs of small, dank spaces capture the claustrophobia of captivity, human figures collapsed like plastic tarps in the corner of their cells. For both Hoffman, and O’Neill and Fogarty-Valenzuela, photography is a tool for depicting affect, those pre-articulate moods and sensations that animate the atmospheres around us (see Seigworth and Gregg 2010), even when we are unable to define what they are or mean. Their photos are complex and ambiguous, opening up multiple interpretations rather than presenting a specific argument. Borrowing from a street photography tradition that emphasises the ambiguity, complexity, and irreducibility of the image, my own photo-ethnographic essays on the streets of Indonesia (Luvaas 2022) and in the confines of my own home during the coronavirus pandemic (Luvaas 2021) mimic the opacity of lived experience, and expose the inability of theory to account for the complexity and multidimensionality of everyday life. It is up to us, Thera Majaaland (2017) explains in regards to her own photographic work that shows the facades of houses in Denmark, South Africa, and elsewhere, to fill in the gaps of what is not shown in an image. Photographic images tend to provide no closure.

In enabling such open-ended modes of representation, photography has become one part of a larger move towards what have been called ‘multimodal anthropologies’, a range of experiments in non-textual, or at least more-than-textual, sensory media with the intention of expanding the parameters of what counts as anthropological work and who is included within its practice (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017). Here, photography can be used as a way of collaborating with the natural environment, for example, whether by literally using plants to make images (developing film with stinging nettle or mashed up rose) or re-creating archival photographs of national parks in order to come to a better understanding of how those spaces have changed over time (Smith 2007). Even researchers’ family photographs have been used for both personal and political analyses, demonstrating, for example, how the ‘entanglement of subject and nation formation emerges in the images that comprise [a] family’s archive’ (Dattatreyan 2018).

Multimodality of this sort is understood as a way of interrogating existing power relationships within anthropology and its representations, even if it is not able to overcome them entirely. While ‘there is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology’, they can nonetheless help us attend to ‘that unsettled feeling that we get in our gut’ that something in our practice is reinforcing power differentials (Takaragawa et al. 2019, 520). Multimodal forms of research and representation can help open up potential avenues to make anthropology more inclusive, more expansive, and more subversive of dominant narratives. While photography has been and continues to be a tool of domination and control, it also continues to be a tool, however imperfect, for participating in and supporting social justice movements, allowing us to work ‘as politically engaged makers and scholars’ (Alvarez Astacio, Dattatreyan, and Shankar 2021, 426).

Conclusion

Photography has never been a passive medium, a simple capturing of light that reflects a complete picture of what is ‘out there’ in the ‘real world’. It is, and has always been, a series of choices, made by situated social subjects under particular conditions of power, about how to depict their world and how to use those depictions to make substantive changes to it. People use photography to gain knowledge and mastery over their environments and the people around them. They use photography to push back against accepted social realities, to re-invent themselves and transform their social identities. They also use photography to just have fun, playfully reinterpreting their lives in ways that may read as frivolous or superficial to outside observers.

Studying the uses of photography by different populations in specific places and specific moments in time, anthropologists have long taken photography seriously, not just as a popular practice, but also as a social and political project with real-world consequences. Photography, anthropologists’ work shows, reframes and reshapes reality as we understand and experience it. It is a practice of world-making, not just world-representing. Moreover, it is a practice that different populations around the world use differently, for their own personal and political ends. Photography thus always has to be understood within a specific social, historical, and political context.

This does not mean, however, that photography is always available for understanding. If we recognise the inherent ambiguity of photographs, we become attuned to the fact that they depict more than what their producers purport them to show. Instead, they provide a complex, contradictory, and irreducible vantage point on reality. Anthropologists increasingly recognise this aspect of photography to be an asset in their own work, and they are exploring ways to use photography to create a more open-ended, inclusive, and collaborative vision of their discipline.

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Note on contributor

Brent Luvaas is Associate Professor of Global Studies at Drexel University. A visual anthropologist and avid photographer, his work explores how digital technologies shape the way we see and experience the world around us. He is the author of Street style: An ethnography of fashion blogging (2016, Bloomsbury) and DIY style: Fashion, music, and global digital cultures (2012, Berg).

Brent Luvaas, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, US. luvaas@drexel.edu

Art

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 22 Sep 2022 01:17:38 +0000

South African artist Ester Mahlangu signing a painting. Photo: LubabaloD

Roger Sansi

Universitat de Barcelona

Initially published 22 Sep 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22art

Abstract:

The definition of ‘art’ is extremely complicated. Its meaning has shifted radically, in particular in the last century. Originally, in Latin, it meant ‘craft’, but then for the last few centuries, the fine arts (such as painting, sculpture, or poetry) were defined in contraposition to craft. In the last century, the rejection of conventional artistic standards has resulted in the paradoxical definition of contemporary art as ‘anti-art’. These changing definitions have been difficult to track for anthropologists. In the nineteenth century, art was not a central focus for anthropology, since it was identified with the fine arts of Western civilisation, and the task of anthropology was to study supposedly ‘primitive peoples’. In the twentieth century, anthropologists rejected evolutionary theory and the idea that only Western civilisation had art, and some anthropological studies of art in non-Western cultures emerged. These studies showed how art objects revealed the complexity of the symbolic worlds of non-Western cultures. In the last few decades, a growing interest in material culture and in experimental research and writing led anthropologists to engage more closely with contemporary art. This work has reflected upon how art work can be seen as a form of social research, and how social research can be transformed by artistic practice and theory.

Introduction

The definition of ‘art’ has changed radically in the last few centuries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘art’, and particularly the ‘fine arts’ of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, dance, and poetry, were often hailed as the highest achievements of Western civilisation. For the French philosopher Voltaire, all other peoples but Europeans were barbarians and children in terms of fine arts (Voltaire [1756] 2013). In the European narrative of progress and evolution, the peoples of earth were classified in a single line from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’, and the fine arts were one of the essential markers of Europe’s higher civilisation. Anthropology was born in the nineteenth century, as the social science that studied assumedly ‘primitive’ peoples, i.e. those who, by definition, would not have fine arts. In consequence, ‘art’ was not the central focus of anthropological research at its origins.

However, in the twentieth century, the definition of art changed radically. The revolutionary artist movement, the avant-gardes, questioned the elitism of the fine arts, proposing instead to reunite art and everyday life. Marcel Duchamp and Dadaism proposed that any object of everyday life could be seen as an art object. Modern anthropology also went through a radical upheaval at the beginning of the twentieth century. Rejecting the evolutionism and racism of the previous century, a new generation of anthropologists defended that different cultures were not more or less evolved, ‘high’ or ‘low’. Instead, anthropology showed that all cultures have their own forms of art, even if they don’t take the form of Western fine arts (Boas 1955, Coote and Shelton 1992, Forge 1972, Lévi-Strauss 1982). It could be argued that both art and anthropology in the twentieth century engaged in a cultural critique of Western civilisation (Marcus and Myers 1995, 94), as both did not take the West’s normative and societal standards at face value anymore. However, the relation between these two forms of cultural critique has been quite complicated, and art was still quite marginal as an object of study in anthropology for most of the twentieth century. Only in the last few decades have anthropologists developed a growing relationship with contemporary art practice and theory. This shift is the result of two combined factors: on the one hand, a renewed interest in material culture: objects, artefacts, technologies, and art. On the other hand, the call for a renewed, experimental anthropology. Both interests inevitably drive anthropology to contemporary art practice and theory, which is by definition experimental, and has had a long-standing critical interest in objects. This emerging body of work has highlighted the potential of art practice as a form of social research, as well as proposed experimental ways of rethinking anthropology through art (Garcia Canclini 2014, Elhaik 2016, Ingold 2013, Sansi 2014, Ssorin- Chaikov 2013, Strohm 2012).

Changing definitions of Western art

Knowing how Western definitions of art have changed helps us understand anthropology’s initially complicated relation with it. The Latin word ars, in the plural, means crafts. The crafts were manual labour, and hence markers of a lower social status in ancient Greek and Roman societies. However, in the Middle Ages, Europe’s ‘liberal arts’, the arts of language, music, and mathematics, were defined in clear distinction to the utilitarian crafts of artisans. Such liberal arts were the skills essential precisely to be a free man, not an artisan bound to manual work. Today’s notion of obtaining a Bachelor or Master’s degree in ‘Arts’ is founded in this idea of liberal arts (Shiner 2001).

In the Italian Renaissance, some crafts were re-defined as arts of drawing (arti del disegno) (Blunt 1940): painting, sculpture, and architecture were revaluated as intellectual endeavours, like poetry, with higher status than manual work. By the Enlightenment, the ‘fine arts’ were clearly separated from the crafts (Shiner 2001). The fine arts combined technical skill with humanistic Western culture, and they were taught in academies. They were often arts of representation, imitating nature. Western thinkers considered them to be exclusive of Western civilisation, and to be one of the institutions that marked the West’s global superiority.

An interesting counterpoint to this Western-centric history is Chinese art, not least because China has historically also been a major imperial force. The Chinese had institutions and theories that can be considered equivalent to European fine arts, notably a tradition of scholar or literati painting that favoured subjective expression. Early modern Chinese art critics therefore concluded that European painting was not really fine art, as it lacked expressive depth. Instead they considered European painting to be just very skilful illustration, or craft (Lynn 2017). At the same time, Chinese arts, in particular porcelains and silks, had been highly valuable luxury imports in Europe, where a taste for chinoiserie, i.e. for Chinese-looking art objects, had developed in the eighteenth century. Europeans also did not consider Chinese art to be fine art, but rather mere ‘decorative art’, a very skilful and beautiful craft. For Europeans, Chinese painting had not achieved the level of realism of European painting, which imitated reality almost to fool the eye (Lynn 2017).

In the nineteenth century, Western ideals of the artist would move even further away from craftsmanship. Artistic practice was free and self-motivated rather than commissioned: artists made art because they wanted to, because they need to express themselves. They were not artists simply because it was their job; they were not just skilful producers of fine objects for sale. Art was not just technique. The notion of artist as genius, a unique self-driven individual above the others, emerged in the Renaissance, but was consolidated in Romanticism.

But if art was different from technique and craft, it risked the reverse accusation from being menial work: that of not being useful, of being superficial and redundant. In the nineteenth century, as bourgeois values came to prominence in the West, aristocratic ideals of the fine arts were met with ‘philistinism’, the rejection of fine art in favour of utility, which was particularly popular in the English-speaking world (Arnold 1993). At the same time, in reaction to philistinism, the anti-utilitarian ideals of art were radicalised in theories of art for arts' sake, and the emergence of the bohemian, anti-bourgeois artist. For example, Baudelaire’s ‘painter of the modern life’ was not a professional producer of paintings working in his studio, but an idler who immersed himself in the city crowd walking, sitting in cafés, and wasting his time, in direct contraposition to the ethics of the bourgeoisie, which valued hard work and saving time (Baudelaire 1995). Modern art would not be a specialised form of work, or a profession, but a nonconformist, utopian form of life. The big work of art of the bohemian artist was now his own life. As contemporary French curator Nicolas Bourriaud put it, ‘Modern art rejects to separate the finished product from existence […] The act of creation is to create oneself’ (Bourriaud 1999, 13). This ideal of the modern artist is deeply connected to revolutionary ideals: in the German ideology, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels proposed that work and life, production and creation, should be one thing: in opposition to capitalist alienation, the communist mode of production would be based on the identity of work and art, as a unified form of life (1970). Paradoxically, elitist ideals of fine art, originally meant to grant a better social position to the fine artist above the craftsman, were now, in their radicalisation, throwing the new bohemian artist to the margin of bourgeois society. This margin itself was also paradoxical in various ways: it raised questions as to whether artists were impostors or prophets, decadent or revolutionary, idlers or merely self-absorbed. Not to mention that the figure of the bohemian ‘artist’ was, by definition, a man: women in the nineteenth century could not afford to behave as bohemians as, like in previous centuries, they were not recognised as professionals.

The utopian drive of modern art was radicalised even further by early twentieth century avant-gardes. Dadaism did not simply reject academic styles of artistic production to propose new styles, but rejected fine art altogether, and the ‘civilisation’ that sustained it. Dadaist art was meant to be an ‘anti-art’ (Richter 1965) that simply rejected art as skill, technique, and academic profession, and replaced careful production with encounter, chance, appropriation, performance, research, and experimentation. Dadaism meant to abolish the separation between art and everyday life, and the anti-artist actively unlearned the fine arts by encountering and experimenting with what the art world had previously despised: industry and technology, so-called ‘primitive’ colonial cultures, and marginal, outsider forms of art practice (Foster 2004). Undoing art also meant undoing artists as agents of production, either as geniuses or skilled artisans, and as an empowered subject; anti-artists are rather mediators that withdraw their agency (Kester 2011) and they are driven by chance and experimentation. Just like the utopian objective of the avant-garde was to dissolve art in everyday life, so did ‘anti-artists’ have to disappear into common people and the claim that everybody should be an artist.

Contemporary art since the second-half of the twentieth century has preserved the ideas and practices of anti-art but has changed its utopian horizon. It tends to focus on modest ‘micro-utopias’ achievable today rather than in the future (Bourriaud 2002, Sansi 2014, Blanes et al. 2016). Contemporary art practices have become more site-specific, collaborative, and participatory, delegating agency to local communities. In contemporary anti-art practices, artists are much more than mere producers of art objects. They often act as something else: as activists, historians, even anthropologists (Garcia Canclini 2014). They may serve as mediators in general terms, as those that help mobilise a multitude of agents around a particular project. However, this new role for artists poses a clear contradiction: differently from the utopian avant-garde, contemporary artists do not withdraw from art as a profession and institution but instead stick to it. The projects they mediate, even if they are participatory, experimental, and utopian, are still art projects, financed by art institutions, and projected by artists. The fine arts, an institution defined by museums, academies, galleries, artists, thus still exist today, even if contemporary art practice is not constrained to traditional techniques like painting or sculpture. The extent to which it is even possible to be an artist doing anti-art has been the subject of heated discussions for many decades (Sansi 2014) and conditions the relation between art and anthropology, as we will see.

Art and anthropology

What is art, then, for anthropology? Craft? Fine arts? Anti-art? The radical changes in the definition, theory, and practice of art have been difficult to track for anthropologists. In the nineteenth century, anthropology was mostly practiced in museums of arts and technologies, where the frame of reference was evolutionary theory: anthropologists collected and compared axes, sails, pots, and idols, and established the position of their corresponding culture in the pyramid of human progress. More advanced arts and technologies were held to be proof of superior civilisation. But the arts that anthropology museums collected were classified as crafts: useful, practical artefacts. Even if they were figurative and symbolic, ethnographic artefacts were defined as having specific uses, for example, ‘magico-religious’ ones (Morphy and Perkins 2009). The fine arts—art for arts’ sake—barely figured in most of these museums, because they were seen as an exclusively Western institution.

In the twentieth century, however, new schools of anthropology rejected evolutionism, and the idea that some cultures were more civilised than others. Art was not an exclusive property of Western civilisation; when looking closely, all cultures turned out to have art. Anthropologist Franz Boas, for example, drawing mostly on his fieldwork amongst Native Americans, applied the methods and theories of art history to study the symbolism and style of totem poles, baskets, and masks as works of art (Boas 1955). Boas argues that artistic creation is part of a universal pursuit of aesthetic values, one that leads artists in different parts of the world to develop specific standards of beauty by developing artistic technique. Boas’ case for the universality of art discredits racist ideas of immutable ethnic difference, by showing that the mental processes of all peoples are fundamentally the same.

However, Boas’ interest in art didn’t have many followers, in part because of anthropology’s changing methods and focus. The collection of objects for museums of arts and technologies gave way to direct field research. The task of the anthropologist became to describe cultures in their whole complexity, through written ethnographies. Thereby, ethnographers often focused on the immaterial aspects of the cultures they studied, like their kinship systems, social structure, or mythology, rather than their material culture. This is in part because the material culture and technology of many of the peoples initially studied by anthropologists seemed poor, or at least less ostentatious than that of modern industrial civilisation. The default belief in technological evolution was not fully discarded for most of the twentieth century, and ‘art’ was likely still associated with Western fine arts for most anthropologists. Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins (2006, 8) argued, quite convincingly, that the uneasiness with art in anthropology is the result of a ‘professional philistinism’, a rejection of art because of prejudices regarding the perceived elitism of the fine arts in the West.

This professional philistinism was probably more accentuated in Anglo-American academia than in continental Europe (Clifford 1988). In France, the new discipline of ethnology had very close links to the artistic avant-gardes in the 1920s and 1930s, notably surrealism. Surrealist writers like Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille studied with anthropologist Marcel Mauss, and together with another anthropologist Marcel Giraule published the journal Documents. What brought them together? If the task of the anthropologist was to describe the ‘exotic’, (or today the ‘strange’) as familiar, then the objective of the surrealist was in many ways the diametrical opposite: to render evident how Western culture can be incredibly strange (Clifford 1988). This inversion of positions, from the strange to the familiar and the familiar to the strange, makes both processes complementary. In fact, the ultimate aim of anthropology, like surrealism, was not just to describe other cultures, but also to put them in comparison with Western culture. Both tried to develop a critical attitude towards what Western culture takes for granted, making Westerners aware that what they take as ‘natural’, like the family or the market economy, may not be so ‘natural’ after all.

We can find an excellent example thereof in a short article by Griaule, entitled ‘Gunshot’ (in Bataille 1995). The article was based on a picture of an African drum with a carving representing a man with a gun. This representation was shocking to a European public looking for ‘authentic’ African art. But Griaule argued that for many Africans, European guns were what African masks were for Europeans: exotic and interesting objects.

If a black [man] cannot without debasing himself use an exotic element, namely a European one familiar to him, what is one to make of our blind borrowings from an exotic world one of colour about which we must in self-defence declare to know nothing? (Griaule in Bataille 1995, 65).

Griaule was proposing to take the inverse position: to look at things from an African perspective, as if the French were exotic themselves.

The open exchange between surrealism and ethnology had an enduring influence on the next generation of anthropologists, like Jean Rouch and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Jean Rouch was inspired by surrealist experimental cinema in his ethnographic films, for example, Les maitres fous (Henley 2020). Lévi-Strauss integrated surrealist ideas of ‘objective chance’ into his theory of the ‘savage mind’, or more properly, the ‘everyday mind’: for Lévi-Strauss, our understanding of the world is constantly being transformed by events that are the result of chance; but, we give them meaning by putting them in relation to previous events (1966). Lévi-Strauss worked on art, partially reprising the work of Boas, in the book The way of the masks (1982). He compared the masks of different Native American peoples, showing how they not only reflected their mythologies, but also how these mythologies were related and had meaning in relation to each other. The masks were studied as a vehicle of meaning, complementing Lévi-Strauss’ main interest, which were mythologies. Lévi- Strauss’s approach was massively influential in anthropology, and studies of art that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s often followed his perspective, investigating the meaning of works of art (see for example, Forge 1973).

For the performative arts, Victor Turner’s work on ritual was very influential in the 1960s and 1970s as well. Turner was interested in the symbolism of rituals, rather than myths. In a broadly comparative analysis of symbolic action across time and place, he suggested that ritual myth, tragedy, and comedy had become mostly conservative art forms in industrialised societies. Modern arts and sciences, on the other hand, had the potential to change social relationships, as they largely developed apart from mainstream society (Turner 1973). Turner’s work emphasised human creativity in symbolic expression, arguing that social change is not path dependent on social structure. His work resulted in a growing interest and interconnection with studies of performance and theatre.

Renewed interest in material culture

In the 1980s, the relation between art and anthropology changed radically. This was driven by two important factors, namely anthropologists’ renewed interest in objects and material culture, and by calls for a new experimental ethnography.

The new interest in material culture was partially the result of debates about appropriation and institutional critique in art. Landmark exhibitions like MOMA’s ‘Primitivism in 20^th century art (1984)’ improved the cultural status of ‘primitive’ ethnographic artefacts in the public eye by arguing that some of these artefacts were in fact fine art and should be displayed as such (Rubin 1984). This argument has been very influential in the following decades, with the reorganisation of ethnographic collections into fine art collections, in new museums like Paris’ Quai Branly. Nevertheless, it was also extremely polemical, since it enshrined a classical European concept of fine art that had played down the cultural specificity of these artifacts and their historical provenance: mostly, they were colonial plunder. Anthropologists have since debated the contextual and institutional values that transform objects into art (Price 1988, Myers 2001), produced ethnographies about the trade and circulation of ‘primitive’ and ‘tourist’ arts (Steiner 1994, Phillips & Steiner 1999), and investigated the transformation, circulation, and traffic in art and culture in general (Marcus and Myers 1995, Thomas 1991), including the emergence of contemporary art worlds in postcolonial settings (Myers 2002, Fillitz 2018). The debate on colonial collections has intensified in the last decade, with calls for decolonisation and the restitution of colonial collections (Hicks 2020, Oswald & Tinius 2020).

These debates resulted in wider discussion on the power of art. One central contribution was made by Alfred Gell (1998). He argued that material things such as traps or artworks are best understood with reference to their potential social and material effects, rather than their meaning. Gell highlighted that human agency does not end with the human body, but that it is in fact distributed via people’s material culture. Art would be a paradigmatic example of such ‘distributed agency’, since it is purposefully imbued with the agency of the artist. Gell’s notion of art was substantially different to what had been discussed in anthropology up to then, for Gell did not approach art objects first and foremost as vehicles of meaning, like Boas, Lévi-Strauss or Turner did. As such, Gell’s approach to art was finally catching up to modern and contemporary art, where works of art are not necessarily a means of conveying meaning or ‘representing’ something else. Instead, modern and contemporary art can simply be agents performing actions on those who engage with them. Thus, Gell gave anthropology a theory to engage with contemporary art and he questioned the division between art and artefact in non-modern societies. His theory considers art to be as ‘useful’ as artefacts are and it questions the very notion of ‘utility’, and of useful ‘work’ (as opposed to useless play or art) upon which much bourgeois philistinism and modern utopian thought had been premised (Sansi 2014). As mentioned before, the utopian ideal of Europe’s early twentieth century art avant-gardes was to dissolve art and the artist into everyday life. This dissolution of the artist as an agent in art goes much further for them than Gell’s still quite human-centric notion of distributed agency presupposes. Ultimately, however, Gell’s focus on distributed agency makes it easier to question the notion of the artist as an individual genius, unique author, and uniquely powerful agent.

Experimental ethnography

A second key factor that transformed the relation between art and anthropology in the 1980s was the growing interest in experimental ethnography. The ‘writing culture’ movement (Clifford & Marcus 1986) gave equal relevance to the form in which ethnography was presented to its content: Ethnography was not only a scientific task but also an art form, in the most classical sense, a technique that uses rhetoric to seduce and convince. In anthropology as elsewhere there was no politics without poetics, and claims for an ‘experimental’ ethnography emerged. Such calls for experimental writing met many detractors who levelled criticisms not very dissimilar to the attacks on ‘art for art's sake’ in the nineteenth century (Scholte 1987). In the long run, the claim to rethink the ‘poetics and politics’ of ethnography seems to have emphasised the second rather than the first term; the need to justify the ‘politics’ of anthropological practice is still a central concern today, while the need to justify the discipline’s poetics seems less relevant for most anthropologists. One question that still needs to be assessed is if one can really distinguish one from the other.

Fighting back against this reluctance of ‘poetics’, new proposals of experimental ethnography emerged, introducing ethnographic methods ‘beyond text’ (Cox, Irving and Wright 2016). ‘Visual anthropology’ proposes an anthropology not only with images, but also of images, inspired by the growing interdisciplinary field of visual studies (Mitchell 2005, Belting 2011, Pinney 2011). Besides film, and photography, other forms of practice, like sound walks and art installations, have also been used as methods of experimental ethnography. These developments show that anthropology’s dual goal of describing the world and rethinking it may well be achieved with the help of art. The ‘ethnographic turn’ in late twentieth century art (Foster 1995), in which many artists were interested in working with anthropology, has been reciprocal, and some anthropologists have actively engaged with artistic practice. Arnd Schneider and Christopher Wright have offered several examples of this growing field of exchanges (2005, 2010, 2013), focusing on the collaboration between artists and anthropologists at the level of practice, and confronting artistic and anthropological methodologies. One example would be George Marcus’s collaboration with artists Fernando Calzadilla and Abdel Herández, that made a scenography or mise-en-scène of a Venezuelan market at Rice University in Texas, entitled The market from here (1997). This scenography, for Marcus, offers possibilities of study that go beyond conventional ethnographic description in a text. It recreates an ethnographic scene and forces us to reflect on its constitutive parts, turning a social setting into an artifact and enactment (Marcus in Schneider and Wright 2005). In these terms, artistic installations and performances can be seen as devices through which a field of study is recreated (Sansi 2014, Estalella and Sanchez Criado 2018).

In the last few years, the multiplication of new digital media has promoted a shift from ‘visual anthropology’ to ‘multimodal anthropology’, which uses various different media like photography, design, sound, games, etc. (Collins, Durington and Gill 2017; Dattatreyan and Marrerro 2019). One fundamental question that these experimental approaches raise is that of authorship. Changing the form and method of ethnography changes the agency of the ethnographer. The ‘writing culture’ movement, and the ‘crisis of representation’ that it signified (Marcus and Fischer 1986), asked what authority anthropologists have to represent another culture and what agency other voices should have in anthropological narratives. It was a crisis in authority and authorship. Artistic avant-gardes had already proposed to question the agency of the artist as an author in much more radical ways. Experimental art in the twentieth century starts from the withdrawal of agency, and unlearning technique, not simply from the experimentation with new media. At its best, then, experimental and multimodal ethnography can learn from artistic practice to further question ethnographic authority, rather than simply propose new media for the expression of the ‘creative’ anthropologist as author. Art and anthropology still have more to teach to one another about authority and agency.

Rethinking art and anthropology

The on-going crisis of ethnographic authority is central to contemporary anthropology (Rabinow et al. 2008). George Marcus (2000) identified fundamental shifts in the conditions of contemporary ethnographic practice: the radical difference in background and hierarchy between anthropologists and 'natives' of colonial ethnography has given way to studying people of the same or superior social status than the anthropologists themselves. Sometimes these people are ‘experts’ in neighbouring fields whom the anthropologist cannot simply work on, but whom she must work with. Moreover, ethnography is no longer an arcane method owned by anthropologists, but an experimental elaboration of everyday experience that has been used not only by anthropologists, but also by other social scientists, artists, and designers, for example. Lastly, the sites of anthropological research have become plural in a globalised world: the connection between ‘native’ and site is not a given, as any informant or collaborator may also be from somewhere else. Field sites become a particular configuration or assemblage of collaborators with different backgrounds and origins, a sometimes-virtual working space; what Marcus names a ‘para-site’, a laboratory for collective work and experimentation where the anthropologist is no longer an individual author (2000). In this contemporary situation, fieldwork can simply mean creating new assemblages of knowledge and practice, a practice in which anthropologists and artists can collaborate more than ever before. Art occupies a particular space in this contemporary world. Collaboration, participation, and relation have become central to artistic practice in the last decades and the debates around the possibilities and limitations thereof have been intense (Bourriaud 2002, Bishop 2012, Kester 2011). It seems both art and anthropology can now be rethought of in light of one another.

A number of authors have looked at these questions from different perspectives. Tarek Elhaik (2016) has proposed that art curation can offer an alternative approach to classical ethnographic methods. In contrast to the classical ethnographic method, understood as a direct representation of a single ‘field’, curation as an assemblage of differences can be seen as a method that corresponds to the new kinds of sites that anthropologists work with, characterised by multiplicity, excess, and ambiguity between the object and the subject of representation and collaboration. The anthropologist as curator would have the role of mediator in these assemblages. For example, Rafael Schacter (Schacter 2018, Sansi 2019) has worked as a curator of grafitti and street art, bringing together not just artists from radically different backgrounds in a single exhibition space, but also confronting the radical difference between conventional art exhibition spaces and street art that by definition is outside of a gallery space. His experience as a curator has also been constitutive of his understanding of this field in its transformations as an anthropologist.

Tim Ingold has proposed that artists, similar to anthropologists, study the world, which is marked by flux and constant change. Anthropology can learn from contemporary art practices as both sets of activities are embodied processes geared at awakening our senses so as to better correspond with the world around us (2013). Ingold thus suggests that engaging with artistic practice, such as drawing, basket weaving, or pottery, can teach students to become better anthropologists.

Analysing past collaborations between anthropologists and artists, Kiven Strohm (2012) picks up Schneider and Wright’s arguments that both art and anthropology deal in representation. Yet, contemporary art, Strohm argues, celebrates ambiguity and free play between text, image, discourse, and figure and much of it is open-ended and inherently incomplete. ‘Collaboration’ between art and anthropology, he argues, should start from an acknowledgement of basic equality between anthropologist and research subject. This equality questions the division of labour between different ‘experts’ in collaborative work and requires us to unlearn our own points of view.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov (2013) equally highlights similarities between art and anthropology. He holds that artistic practice is an appropriate anthropological research tool, and that anthropology itself can be considered an artistic method. Ssorin-Chaikov specifically draws on conceptual art, which he argues is concerned less with aesthetics and beauty, and more with analysing and manufacturing social realities and concepts. He holds conceptual art and anthropology to be similar in that both construct the realities that they study, both are largely conceptual in nature, and both highlight what is unknown in the world. This view of anthropological and artistic practice is a far cry from merely trying to represent a given reality. For example, Felix Ringel, doing fieldwork in Hoyerswerda, a German city in an accelerated process of urban decay, organised an ‘Anthrocamp’ for the local youth, in which they were encouraged to explore their hometown and generate images and artwork. The results were displayed in an ephemeral installation in an abandoned block that was going to be demolished (Ringel 2013). These practices, partially borrowed from collaborative art, do not just provide data to ethnographers but also highlight their performative role in intervening and transforming their field of study.

For all these authors, contemporary art appears as a model for unlearning anthropology, its practices and institutions. And yet, it is a contradictory model, because as we have seen, in spite of all the utopian and revolutionary ideas and practices of art in the last century, the institutions of classical fine arts, the museum, the art work, the artist, the curator, etc. are still very much in place. Modern and contemporary art has led the way into a revolutionary, utopian form of life, but the outcomes of this revolution have been mixed so far. The current dissatisfaction of many anthropologists is not just grounded on the limitations of existing methods and theories, but more generally in their working conditions, the increasing bureaucratisation of academic life, and the productivity requirements that render academic work increasingly difficult. They share this alienated feeling with work in contemporary capitalism more broadly. In this sense, rather than seeking inspiration in art and artists to become more creative and inventive, anthropologists may consider artists, art workers, and other members of the culture and knowledge sector as possible allies with whom to rethink, and perhaps undo, their institutions (Sansi and Strathern 2016).

Conclusion: The complicated object of art

The relation between art and anthropology is complicated. This is partially because ‘art’ can mean very different things: from craft to fine art to anti-art. In consequence, an anthropology of art can address different kinds of objects and ask radically different questions, studying artistic technique and style, its symbolism and meaning and learning about its agency. Moreover, the radically different definitions of art are not mutually exclusive, although we have described them in a historical sequence and different definitions co-exist. After a century of anti-art theories and practices, the dominant institutions and in fact, the dominant form of art in many contemporary societies, are still the fine arts, while true anti-art mostly remains a utopia. Perhaps the complicated nature of art is also what makes art so ‘good to think with’. More than merely an object of study, art can be a model of how to rethink, experiment, and undo anthropological practice itself. Rather than merely representing individual cultures or features of social life, art may inspire us to define our own utopian horizons.

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Note on contributor

Roger Sansi is a professor in Social Anthropology at Universitat de Barcelona. He has worked on Afro-Brazilian art and contemporary art in Barcelona. He is the author of Fetishes and monuments (2007, Berghahn), Art, anthropology and the gift (2014, Routledge), and editor of The Anthropologist as curator (2020, Routledge).

Dr Roger Sansi, Department of Social Anthropology, Facultat de Geografia i Història, Universitat de Barcelona, Carrer Montalegre 6-8, Barcelona 08001, SPAIN.

Phenomenology

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 25 Aug 2021 13:05:18 +0000

Jarrett Zigon Jason Throop

University of California, Los Angeles, University of Virginia

Initially published 25 Aug 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21phenomenology

Abstract:

Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century and has significantly shaped contemporary anthropological and social theory. This entry shows the various ways in which phenomenology has contributed to contemporary anthropology. In so doing, it also shows that a better understanding of the phenomenological tradition and what it offers social and historical analysis could further contribute to the development of anthropology as a discipline increasingly concerned with the relational interconnection between humans, nonhumans, and the worlds they variously share. This is done by focusing on phenomenology’s emphasis on ‘conditions of experience’, and how such conditions shape what and how it is to be human in any situated context. In particular, the entry emphasises the conditions of being-in-the-world, embodiment, and radical otherness, and shows how each of these have been utilised by phenomenological anthropologists in their analyses of socio-cultural life. Furthermore, the entry stresses that phenomenology has always been a critical endeavour. Historically, this was so in terms of the rethinking of some of the most fundamental concepts of the so-called 'Western tradition'. More recently, this critical aspect has focused on the ways in which such conditions of experience as race, class, and gender, among others, significantly shape the range of possibilities for any experience whatsoever.

Introduction

Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical traditions of the twentieth century. Founded at the turn of the century by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology developed over the course of the century in ways that both adhered to and diverted significantly from this foundation. Perhaps most significantly, phenomenology has critically engaged the radical distinction between human subjects and nonhuman objects, which used to constitute a dominant mode of thinking within the so-called Western tradition. In doing so, phenomenology set the stage for rethinking the very foundation of human existence as one that is above all relational, temporal, embodied, and situated. That much of this is now taken for granted within anthropology and social theory shows just how influential the phenomenological tradition has been in this critical endeavour.

Indeed, phenomenology’s impact on contemporary anthropology has been substantial. Several theoretical approaches that have shaped contemporary anthropology have been built on—sometimes critically but always productively—many of the central philosophical and conceptual foundations of phenomenology. From post-structuralism (and most especially the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze) to practice theory, critical feminism to queer theory, from affect to actor-network theory: each of these are indebted to the work of classical phenomenology. Anthropological theory, in other words, would likely not exist as it does today without the foundational influence of phenomenology (see Desjarlais & Throop 2011; Zigon 2018).

Phenomenology has contributed to anthropological theory by providing anthropologists with conceptual resources to think and write about the ways in which humans are always relationally intertwined—with one another, with various entities that make up their worlds, and with their worlds as such. A shorthand for phenomenology’s focus or study and for this range of conceptual resources is ‘experience’. Phenomenology offers multiple generative resources for analysing and coming to understand the complexity of human and, some would argue, even non-human experience. Thereby, phenomenology complements other theoretical and methodological approaches within sociocultural anthropology.

Some anthropologists, have been critical of phenomenology for having, so they argue, a singular focus on individuals capable of narrating their experience, and for having little concern for how such social facts as culture or power shape experience (e.g, Holbraad; Pedersen 2017; cf. Pedersen 2020). Others argue that experience inherently exceeds such a narrow conceptual framing and that it does in fact account for culture or power (see Mattingly 1998; Throop 2003; Willen & Seeman 2012; Zigon 2011). For example, the phenomenological anthropologist Robert Desjarlais has been critical of social scientists naively using experience in a common sense and ordinary manner to indicate something like the coherent and narrativised flow of one’s life trajectory. To better articulate the lives of homeless persons in Boston, he has instead offered the culturally and historically specific concept he calls ‘struggling along’. For the residents of a Boston homeless shelter with whom Desjarlais spent time during the 1990s, ‘struggling along’ implied daily strenuous efforts against an often-hostile world, with little opportunity for inward reflection or for planning the future (Desjarlais 1997). Similarly, the study of moral experience, i.e. experience qualified, delimited, demarcated, and organised in moral terms, shows that such experience only emerges at the situated and relational intertwining of persons and their worlds, which necessarily entails that such experiences are always saturated with socio-historic meaning and differentiation (Zigon & Throop 2014). For example, Cheryl Mattingly has written extensively of the moral experience of African-American mothers caring for their children at the relational intertwining of race, class, and the American healthcare system (e.g., Mattingly 2014).

What, then, do phenomenologists mean by experience, and how has it been taken up by phenomenological anthropologists? When phenomenologists and phenomenological anthropologists write about experience, they are primarily concerned with describing the essential conditions of experience. Therefore, rather than simply providing a description of a series of events and activities that accumulate over time and shape a person’s life, phenomenologists investigate and describe the potentialities and relationships that make experience possible in the first place. Rather than merely describing that a homeless person in Boston may be ‘struggling along’, phenomenological anthropologists will also investigate which conditions led to this predicament in the first place and offer a way for understanding how these conditions shape lives. As this entry hopes to show, these conditions of experience constitute what it is to be human in all of its vast socio-historic diversity. In other words, in contrast to a notion of human nature that might emphasise, for example, that humans are rational animals or animals with language, phenomenologists write about conditions of experience that above all indicate that humans are essentially relational beings that become who they are because of the relations with which they are always intertwined (Zigon 2014).

Experience

There is no doubt many reasons why it is that phenomenological anthropology has come to be so closely connected to the personal, subjective, and individual. As noted above, one of the most notable culprits is arguably the prevalent reliance upon the concept of experience (see Desjarlais 1997; Mattingly 1998; Throop 2003; Willen & Seeman 2012; Zigon 2009). What has been stressed by several anthropologists, however, is that while experience in a radically expanded rendering is central to all forms of phenomenological philosophy, a narrower view of experience as an exclusively personalised, isolated, and individuated phenomena is not. Still, this narrower view of experience should not be dismissed. For by focusing upon experience’s dynamic and varying aspectual, partial, perspectival, situated, affective, and embodied modes, anthropologists gain much understanding of what it is like to live any particular kind of human life (Crapanzano 2004). Experience understood in this narrower way marks our singular, irreplaceable, and unique vantage point onto our worlds. It highlights our fragility, precarity, vulnerability, and finitude. It delimits regions of possibility and constraint, of acting and suffering, that coalesce, transform, and dissipate in the shifting moments that are undergone in the arc of any given particular life. One classic example of this approach to phenomenological anthropology is the work of Michael Jackson (e.g., 1977; 1982), whose work with Kuranko communities in Sierra Leone shows the singular power of phenomenology for articulating the complex dynamics—the limits and possibilities—of living any particular life. Following phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jackson aimed to join the study of lived experience and that of objective analysis by presenting an anthropological account that starts with Kuranko conceptions of the world and relates those to the rules and activities of their society. Similarly, Cheryl Mattingly’s ethnographies of African-American families’ struggles with the American healthcare system (2010; 2014) and Paul Stoller’s career-long engagement with Sonhay communities in West Africa and the broader diaspora (2008) are exceptional examples of phenomenological anthropology’s focus on experience in this narrower understanding.

In phenomenology, much like in William James’ (1996 [1912]) radical empirical philosophy, however, experience is taken in a much more expansive way than simply lived or subjective. Experience is, in this view, much closer to what James termed a ‘bare relation of withness’. Experience from a phenomenological stance is thus neither exclusively of the self nor of the world, of subject nor object. As we will clarify below, this is the great contribution of Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in-the-world’, and particularly what he called Mitsein, or ‘being-with’. By this, Heidegger simply meant that to be human is always and without exception to be with others (human and non-human alike), such that the very idea of an individuated human being is impossible. Experience may then include the existential ‘betweenness’ that arises between subjects, and between those subjects, their worlds, and the various non-human entities that populate these worlds (see also Nancy 2000; Zigon 2021).

To this extent, Edmund Husserl’s famous call to return ‘back to the things themselves!’ (zurück zu den Sachen selbst!) was a commitment to examine any and all phenomena as they show themselves. Indeed, what so many of his contemporaries found so powerful about Husserl’s call was its rejection of the subjectivism of the neo-Kantian philosophy that was dominant at the time—a philosophy, it should be mentioned, that was central to the founding of the discipline of anthropology and remains so still today. Neo-Kantians such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Wilhelm Von Humboldt sought to rethink Kant’s a priori categories of understanding as constituted by a given community’s localised linguistic and cultural forms—a line of thinking that anthropologists Franz Boas and Emile Durkheim, as well as their many students, took as a taken-for-granted starting point for their analysis of social and cultural realities. With fundamental categories of thought (causation, time, space, identity, number, etc.) constituted by linguistic structures and cultural assumptions, worldly events and happenings were reduced to culturally mediated forms of subjective experience. Husserl’s phenomenology, in contrast, offered a philosophical method for considering worldly phenomena from the way that such phenomena disclose themselves through intentionality. Intentionality, as an orientation toward object(s) and world, thus radically opened and destabilised a self-sufficing view of subjectivity. Accordingly, Husserl viewed phenomenology as a worldly philosophy that could inform ethically grounded forms of social critique and renewal (Gubser 2014).

Phenomenology is thus, Husserl maintained, not a philosophy of individual subjectivity but an eidetic philosophy, a philosophy that reveals essential structures of experience in its myriad forms, fluctuations, and dynamics. Importantly, these essential structures of experience are revealed through the close analysis of the relation between—or the withness of—particular humans and other existents of the world, human and nonhuman alike. That our embodied mode of being reveals both a physical and existentially lived body, that there is a background horizon encircling whatever may be foregrounded in experience, that a thing gives itself in an indeterminate fashion only ever revealing itself partially through time in varying sides, profiles, and aspects and ‘never giving itself absolutely’ (Husserl 1931: 138), are all essential aspects of experience in Husserl’s analysis.

In perhaps the foundational text of classic phenomenology, Logical investigations (1970), Husserl wrote that phenomenology ‘has, as its exclusive concern, experiences intuitively seizable and analyzable in their pure essential generality, not experiences empirically perceived and treated as real facts’ (249). By this Husserl meant that phenomenology’s concern is with the essences of experience, and not this or that particular and empirically describable experience (see Moran 2000: 108). At first pass this may seem anathema to anthropology. But some anthropologists contend that the description of such essences are precisely what anthropology has always been interested in exploring (e.g. Csordas 1994). From culture to kinship to ritual, from political economy to biopower to affect, all of these concepts can be considered shorthands for positing the essential conditions for any particular experience. Therefore, when phenomenologists write of, for example, intersubjectivity or being-in-the-world, they can be understood as using these concepts in a manner resonate with the ways in which anthropologist have always utilised those listed above. A critical difference, however, lies in phenomenology’s foundational stress on potentiality, possibility, and indeterminacy as necessary aspects of essences of experience. The work of Jarrett Zigon, for example, has emphasised how phenomenological analysis stresses potentiality and possibility; from showing how ethical life is a matter of situated and responsive interpretation that gives way to new ways of living a life, to his analysis of drug user political activism as an example of how marginalised persons can offer potential new ways of organising social life in a more caring and inclusive manner (Zigon 2007; 2018; 2019). What phenomenology offers is thus a way to conceptualise a non-essentialised essence; an essence that is dynamically generative of possibility and not ossified into an unchanging stabilised form. That is, essence understood phenomenologically describes the essential conditions of possibilities for any experience whatsoever.

Conditions of experience

Human existence is, as Hannah Arendt famously argued, ‘conditioned existence’ (1958: 9). Human beings are beings whose mode of existence is necessarily tethered to our worldliness. In having and being open to a world—responsive and susceptible to it—our mode of human being is one that is also conditioned by exposure to those various others who inhabit the same world. We derive our language, interpersonal skills, notions of morality, clothing, and food from others, for example. Indeed, as worldly beings, we find ourselves always-already living with, among, and alongside a plurality of others; others who preceded us, are our contemporaries and consociates, and are, as successors, still yet to be (see Schutz 1967). And yet to say, as Arendt does, that the modes of being that characterise human existence are conditioned by finitude, plurality, and worldliness is not to say that we are simply defined by such conditions without remainder. Arendt observes:

the conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never ‘explain’ what we are or answer the question of who we are for the simple reason that they never condition us absolutely (1958: 11).

To suggest that the ‘conditions of human existence. . . never condition absolutely’ is, thus, to recognise the always incomplete, excessive, and uneven ways that we are attuned to each other and the worlds we inhabit with one another. For this reason, such conditions not only ‘enable or hinder or provide limits for possible ways of being, becoming, acting, doing, thinking, saying, and so on’, but also always entail potentialities to become transfigured and made otherwise (Zigon 2018: 8). In the next few subsections, this entry will consider three conditions of experience, which were originally described by phenomenologists, and have been central to the development of phenomenological anthropology.

Being-in-the-world

One of the most influential ways this phenomenological concern with the conditions of experience has been taken up in phenomenological anthropology is through Martin Heidegger’s notion of ‘being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1996). As part of his rethinking of basic philosophical concepts, Heidegger rarely used the word ‘human’ but instead used the word ‘Dasein’, which is the German word for ‘existence’ but is literally translated as ‘there-being’ (Da-sein), or perhaps better as ‘being-there’. He did this in order to differentiate his view of the human—as Dasein—as an always-situated and relational being from the then-dominant approach in philosophy that considered the human as a being that is fundamentally separated from any specific context and, as such, defined a priori by such things as rationality or will.

In contrast, Heidegger conceived the human as fundamentally constituted by its there-ness: as always already relationally situated in a context—or what he called a world—in a mode of being-with. To exist as a human—to be Dasein—is always to be in relation with others (both human and non-human). To many anthropologists today, this sounds extremely familiar. But when Heidegger first developed and wrote about being-in-the-world, being-with, and Dasein in the 1920s, this was a conception of the human that was still unique. Indeed, few other intellectuals beyond phenomenology, including those in anthropology who still considered the human as a neo-Kantian subject, were thinking and writing about people in such a way.

The way in which Heidegger was particularly distinctive—and different from his anthropological contemporaries—is in his articulation of Dasein as an essentially relational being. The hyphenation of being-in-the-world is significant, for it indicates the relational inseparability of Dasein and world. The world is not a container that holds different content, one of which is the being we call human. Rather, the ‘in’ of being-in-the-world indicates an essential relational intertwining, a being-with, such that humans as a form of existence—Dasein—cannot be without the world, just as the world cannot exist without Dasein. Importantly, a world is also constituted by any number of other beings, such as non-human animals, tools, other humans, trees, buildings, spirits, gods, and so forth, and, therefore, is always unfolding in a process of the arising and receding of the presence and absence of these diverse beings as they relationally intertwine with one another.

Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world has been central to the development of phenomenological anthropology. From Jackson’s earliest texts on existential anthropology (1977, 1982, 1983) to James Weiner’s Heideggerian intervention in Melanesian anthropology (1992, 1993, 2003) to Tim Ingold’s work on perception, dwelling, and enskilment (1993a, 1993b), straight through to almost all contemporary works, phenomenological anthropology simply would not be what it is today without having taken up and developed the concept of being-in-the-world (Desjarlais & Throop 2011).

Arguably one of the better-known examples of this would be the work of Jarrett Zigon in the anthropology of ethics (e.g. 2007, 2014, 2018, 2021). Through an engagement with his fieldwork in Russia, the United States, and elsewhere, and most particularly in considering moments of what he calls moral breakdown, betweenness, dwelling, and attunement, Zigon has attempted to rethink the very idea of ethics in terms of relationality and situatedness, as opposed to dominant moral theories that begin with individual humans endowed with some a priori capacities such as the moral law or will. For example, in his work on drug addiction and the ‘War on Drugs’, Zigon has shown how the ethical concept of ‘attunement’, or the situational response to the unique and singular person here now, better describes the kind of care offered by drug user activists than does a notion of responsibility or humanitarian care that is already defined prior to any particular situation (Zigon 2019).

Similarly, being-in-the-world in one way or another has been central to various other phenomenological anthropological approaches to the anthropology of ethics, for example, those of Jackson (1982, 1998, 2013) and Mattingly (2014, 2017, 2019), as well as Jason Throop (2009, 2017, 2018), and Sarah Willen (2014, 2019). In each case, what is stressed in these works are the excessive ways in which lives are intertwined with others, events, objects, and worlds such that it is never simply an individual’s experience simplistically rendered as a series of events that is examined, but the various modes of betweenness, relationality, and connection that are.

Embodiment

Building directly upon Edmund Husserl’s pioneering work on intersubjectivity and embodiment, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty developed further the relationality of being-in-the-world with his emphasis on the body. In one of his clearest articulations of the relational body as the essential condition of being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty wrote:

Insofar as I have “sense organs,” a “body,” and “psychical functions” comparable to those of others, each moment of my experience ceases to be an integrated or rigorously unique totality . . . and I become the place where a multitude of “causalities” intertwine. Insofar as I inhabit a “physical world,” where consistent “stimuli” and typical situations are discovered . . . my life is made up of rhythms that do not have their reason in what I have chosen to be, but rather have their condition in the banal milieu that surrounds me (2014: 86, italics in original).

Because, for Merleau-Ponty, the very condition of experience is the intertwining of our relational body with our world, experience is, therefore, essentially embodied and habituated.

The influence of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body throughout anthropology is likely most prevalent through the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of habitus (1977; Throop & Murphy 2002). Situating social theory in the concrete day-to-day embodied practices of individuals and communities, Bourdieu’s social theory understood social life as generatively arising from sedimented habitual dispositions to perceive, appreciate, judge, will, feel, and desire in particular ways—what he termed ‘habitus’. A close comparative reading, along with an understanding of mid-twentieth century French intellectual history, strongly indicates that practice theory, and particularly the notion of habitus, is a sociological rendering of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology.

Thomas Csordas has explicitly taken up Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body and developed a notion of embodiment that has been widely influential within anthropology at large. Importantly, he argued that the body should not be first and foremost an object to be studied in relation to culture, but that it is the existential ground, or subject for culture (Csordas 1990, see also 1994a, 1994b, 2002). This notion of embodiment has, to a great extent, come to be one of the foundational concepts for understanding experience among anthropologists engaged with phenomenological work. This can be seen in anthropological explorations of a wide range of human experiences, from religious practices (e.g., Corwin 2012; Csordas 1994b, 2008; Desjarlais 2003, 2016; Stephan 2015; Stoller 1994, 1997; Throop 2015) to the experience of pain, suffering, illness, and disability (e.g., Aciksoz 2019; Engelke 2013; Flaherty; Throop 2018a; McCoy 2018; Scheper-Hughes 1993; Seale-Feldman 2019; Throop 2010), from morality and ethics (e.g., Mattingly 2014; Throop 2010, 2014; Willen 2019; Zigon 2007, 2010, 2019) to socialisation, play, skillful coping, and perception (e.g., Desjarlais 2011; Duranti 2009, 2010; Humphrey 2016; Ingold 2000). What phenomenological anthropologists have tended to foreground in their writings are the ways that bodily experiences are differentially responsive to the experiences of other embodied beings and the worlds that they mutually inhabit.

As a case in point, Csordas has developed the analytic of ‘somatic mode of attention’ as a means to underscore the multiple ‘culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body in surroundings that include the embodied presence of others’ (1993: 138). In the context of his early work with Charismatic Christians, particular sensations of weakness, dizziness, or pain are taken up as embodied evidence of a spirit’s presence. Such somatic modes of attention arise spontaneously from previous culturally and personally sedimented attunements to, with, and through the body to a world in which spirits and humans have complex and varied modes of relationality. In such a view, the body is not a fleshy container within which experience is held but instead is always already in a world, ecstatically pitched toward and entangled in events, situations, objects, and others (including spirits). It is, in other words, the dynamics of intercorporeality and seldom simply individuated (and isolated) forms of corporeality that defines this body of work.

Radical Otherness

Anthropology has always been interested in radical otherness; so too has phenomenology. But unlike anthropologists, who travel far and wide to discover such otherness as a collective otherness most commonly articulated as another culture, many phenomenologists posit that each human is radically singular in their being. For Husserl, this is manifest in his view that the other is always inaccessible to us, and yet directly disclosed to us as forever excessively beyond our grasp (see Throop & Zahavi 2020). The other is ‘Other’, as Emmanuel Levinas (1969) puts it (the inaccessible excessiveness of the Other is indicated here with the capitalisation). You are radically other to me, as I am to you. This is a commonly argued ‘principle’ of phenomenology articulated by any number of phenomenologists as a way to understand the condition of our experiences. Hannah Arendt (1958), for example, described this in terms of the uniqueness of each of us, the consequence of natality; and Bernhard Waldenfels (2011) has described this condition of experience in terms of how alien we are to one another, as well as to ourselves. Radical otherness being one of the conditions of human experience, an important question asked by many phenomenological anthropologists has been: how is it that sociality is possible?

In his phenomenological explorations of ethics, Zigon has, for example, explored what he calls ‘situations’ as the conditions that create the possibilities for sharedness and similarity among otherwise singular beings (Zigon 2015, 2018, 2019), and has articulated the concept of attunement to describe how it is that these singular beings adjust their relationality to that which is radically other (Zigon 2014, 2019, 2021). Furthermore, Zigon (2018) has also shown how this concept of attunement is useful for understanding how, for example, political activists design and rebuild a neighborhood to respond to the singularly unique concern of drug addiction that situationally characterises it. Similarly, Jason Throop has written extensively on existential asymmetries in the dynamics of empathic attunement (Throop 2010a, 2010b, 2017, forthcoming; see also Hollan & Throop 2008; Throop &Zahavi 2020; Mack & Throop forthcoming). Building off of Husserl and Edith Stein’s work on empathy as the essential relationality between humans (Husserl 1989; Stein 1989), Throop has explored the dynamics of empathic attunement in terms of pain, ethics, and climate change. For example, Throop has examined how local manipulative medical and bonesetting practices on Yap, an island in the Federated States of Micronesia, practices which are founded upon tactile modes of empathic access to a sufferer’s experience of pain, also always pathically discloses the asymmetrical excessiveness of the patient’s pain to the healer (Throop 2017). The concept of pathic ‘responsivity’ first developed by Bernhard Waldenfels, furthermore, has recently become central to the work of several anthropologists who are interested in the relationality of difference in the context of, for example, ethics, care, and historical consciousness (Dyring 2018; Grøn 2017; Leistle 2015, 2016; Mattingly 2018; Stewart 2012; Wentzer 2018). A central concern in much of this work is to challenge simplistic views of empathy as a form of shared experience or mutual understanding. Instead, what is foregrounded are the myriad ways in which on-going asymmetrical intersubjective experiences can occur. Focusing upon the phenomenon of ‘contagion' in the context of what has been termed the ‘obesity epidemic’, Lone Grøn (2017) has, for instance, shown how what on the surface may appear to be shared intergenerational experiences of obesity, weight gain, and weight loss in Danish families also disclose significant moments of alienness and difference that are never simply reducible to mutually shared experiences in even the most intimate forms of kinship connection.

The conditions of experience that we have focused upon here—being-in-the-world, embodiment, and radical otherness—do not exhaust the ways in which phenomenological anthropology has contributed to the understanding of such conditions. Thus, for example, phenomenological anthropologists have also done important studies on emotion, affect, and mood (e.g., Desjarlais 1992; Dyring 2015; Ram 2015; Throop 2012, 2014, 2017, 2018b; Zigon 2013) temporality, and most particularly, anticipation, hope, and memory (e.g., Hage 2009; Lucht 2011; Mattingly 2012; Tidey 2019; Vigh 2009; Zigon 2009c), intentionality, gesture, language, and narrative (e.g., Duranti 2009, 2010; Goodwin 2017; Mattingly & Garro 2000; Ochs 2012; Throop 2010; Zigon 2012), and more recently, climate change (e.g., Dyring 2020; Throop 2020, Zigon 2018). Accordingly, phenomenological anthropologists have set out to examine the worldly conditions that shape, limit, and open the dynamics of lived experience because of the very fact that we are always being-in-the-world, inextricably intertwined with these conditions.

Critical phenomenology

As we have seen thus far, phenomenology from its very beginning has always been critical, in the sense of reconceiving the foundational concepts of the Western philosophical tradition for thinking human existence. Recently, however, contemporary phenomenology has taken an even more critical turn. Thus, critical phenomenologists have come to recognise that human experience is not only conditioned by those conditions of experience shared by all humans across time and space (e.g., being-in-the-world, relationality, wordliness, responsivity, embodiment, etc), but also by contingent historical and social structures, many of which are quite familiar to anthropologists. For example, Guenther (2014) has explored the ways in which solitary confinement – structured by a history of incarceration that is both classed and racialised – unhinges subjectivity. Prisoners kept in solitary confinement do not just suffer from boredom and isolation, but they also lose the capacity to make sense of the world and of their body, they become incapable of following a train of thought and lose the ability to distinguish between reality and illusion. Similarly, Gayle Salomon (2010) has explored transgender violence, Alia Al-Saji (2014) has considered the affects and effects of racialised perception, and Jill Stauffer (2015) has taken up the very possibility of whether or not victims of violence can be heard by others. This work and others would resonate with the sensibilities of many anthropological readers who seek a critical engagement with the inequalities and violence of our contemporary worlds (e.g., Martinez 2000; Ortega 2016).

To the best of our knowledge, however, it was anthropologists who first articulated the necessity of, and then actually did, a critical phenomenology. Byron Good, for one, first began developing an anthropologically-based critical phenomenology in the late-1980s and early 1990s in his critical studies of biomedicine (Good 1994), in which he deconstructs the universal pretensions of biomedical knowledge and shows that the latter is primarily grounded in the lifeworlds of practioners. Furthermore, Robert Desjarlais argued that ‘we need a critical phenomenology that can help us not only to describe what people feel, think, or experience but also to grasp how the processes of feeling or experiencing come about through multiple, interlocking interactions’ (Desjarlais 1997: 25, emphasis in original). He goes on to argue that this critical phenomenology will allow us ‘to inquire, for instance, into what we mean by feeling, how it comes about, what it implies, and what broader cultural and political forces are involved’ (Desjarlais 1997: 25). Critical phenomenology, in other words, allows us to account for the link—or the intertwining—between the cultural, social, and political, on the one hand, and the embodied, unequal, and sometimes violent and unjust experience of living in worlds partially conditioned by these.

For example, Sarah Willen (2007; 2019) has been engaged in a long-term critical phenomenological project on violence and undocumented workers in Israel. Cheryl Mattingly (2014; 2019) has written on the moral experiments of African-American women in response to the racialised conditions of their children’s health and suffering. And the work of Jarrett Zigon has been focused on the intertwining of ethics and politics with experiences of addiction and the violence of the war on drugs (2010; 2018; 2019). Each of these works has sought to show the ways in which power, and economic, gendered, and racialised inequality not only condition experience, but shape and limit the very possibilities for being human.

Conclusion

Phenomenology and phenomenological anthropology offer a conceptual apparatus and analytic approach that can critically address a number of central concerns of social scientists today. Phenomenology goes beyond empirically describing narrativised subjectivity. Instead, it has been grounded in an analysis of the conditions that make experience itself possible; that is: the essential modes of being that constitute the ways in which we and the world variously attune and gather.

Furthermore, both anthropology and phenomenology share an essential methodological strategy—the holding in abeyance of the researcher’s own situated knowledge, beliefs, norms, and expectations when describing the lives of others. In anthropology this is what we might simply call ‘ethnographic analysis’; in phenomenology this is called ‘bracketing’ or ‘utilizing the epoché’ (Throop 2010, 2012, 2018). Our hope is that a recognition and acknowledgment of the expanse of phenomenological concern will encourage social scientists at large to rethink the significance of phenomenology for their work. They might benefit greatly from it.

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Note on contributors

Jarrett Zigon is the Porterfield Chair of Bioethics and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Virginia. His research interests include the anthropology of ethics, problematics of being human, the political, ontological relationality, and thinking anthropology with philosophy. These interests are taken up from a perspective strongly influenced by post-Heideggerian continental philosophy and critical theory, and are explored in his most recent books Disappointment: Toward a Critical Hermeneutics of Worldbuilding and A War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of Community.

Jarrett Zigon, Department of Anthropology, Brooks Hall, P.O. Box 400120, Charlottesville, VA 22904, jz8h@virginia.edu

Jason Throop is Professor and Chair at the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles where he specializes in the fields of medical, psychological, and phenomenological anthropology. Having written extensively on the topics of ethics, mood, empathy, pain, and suffering, his published works include his book Suffering and Sentiment (2010, UC Press), as well as two co-edited volumes, Toward an Anthropology of the Will (2010, Stanford University Press) and The Anthropology of Empathy (2011, Berghahn Books).

Jason Throop, Department of Anthropology, 388 Haines Hall, University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951553, Los Angeles, CA 90095, jthroop@ucla.edu

Visual anthropology

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:16:08 +0000

Jenny Chio

University of Southern California

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21visual

Abstract:

Visual anthropology encompasses two parallel aims: the production of anthropological media (including ethnographic film, video, photography, drawing, interactive media, etc.) as well as the anthropological analyses of media (including films, videos, photography, drawings, etc.). Conceptually, visual anthropology draws on theoretical and methodological connections between human perception and imagination, the use and production of audiovisual media, and ethnography. This entry explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. It also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise critically important questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture that bear on the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others. The production of audiovisual materials in anthropological research is often overlooked. Yet technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities to incorporate filmmaking into ethnographic and cross-cultural research. Since the 1980s, the establishment of visual anthropology programs within some academic departments, combined with the increased accessibility of video and digital media technologies globally, prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use. It also helped develop new approaches to understanding visual experiences as a cultural practice. Four central concerns of visual anthropology at present are ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, the study of visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Taken together, this entry shows how visual anthropology has contested, expanded, and transformed understandings of power, authority, and meaning in media-making practices.

Introduction

Visual anthropology includes both producing anthropological media, such as ethnographic films, exhibitions, and photography, as well as analysing existing media as part of anthropological enquiry. Conceptually, visual anthropology lies at the intersection of the study of human perception and imagination, audiovisual media, and ethnography.^[1] The production of ethnographic films, loosely defined as films based upon ethnographic fieldwork, has been the most well-studied aspect of the subfield, although the research and scholarship of visual anthropologists extend well beyond filmmaking.^[2] This entry primarily explores how the work of visual anthropologists has contested, expanded, and transformed the discipline of anthropology. However, it also illustrates how the methods and debates in visual anthropology raise essential questions about authorship, power, and the representation of culture, making the subfield relevant for the work of artists, filmmakers, photographers, curators, and journalists, among many others.

Four themes and areas comprise the central concerns of visual anthropology in the present moment: ethnographic filmmaking and theory, Indigenous and activist media, visual culture, and multimodal anthropology. Even with the wide scope of contemporary visual anthropology that ranges from ethnographic media-making to ethnographies of media, a few common denominators within the subfield exist. First, and most significantly, scholars in this field emphasise that audiovisual recordings and/or visual practices are tools of analysis, rather than merely illustrating text-based analyses. Instead of considering photographs, sound recordings, drawings, or video as supplementary to writing, many visual anthropologists emphasise the complementarity of text and image, where each in turn amplifies the other. For example, some visual anthropologists argue that text need not be the primary mode of communicating ethnographic knowledge for a given project, as is the case for the anthropological biography films of Anna Grimshaw that are focused on the lives of select individuals in a small fishing town in Maine (Grimshaw 2013, 2016). Others show how text and media can work together to amplify anthropological analysis, as in Descending with angels (Suhr 2019) which consists of an ethnographic film as well as a written monograph on Islamic exorscim and psychiatry in Denmark.

A second shared approach defining visual anthropological scholarship is a concern with ethnographic methods and reflexivity; or, in other words, how attention to visual materials and visual practices can make for a more insightful, and more ethical, ethnography. This includes efforts to ‘give back the camera’ and create collaborative modes of filmmaking (see Elder 1995, Moore 1996, Turner 1992, Weiner 1997; also discussed further in the section on Indigenous and activist media) and projects that return historical and fieldwork photographs and films to research communities (see, for example, Strathern 2018 and the film Some Na ceremonies 2015). In these cases, the visual in visual anthropology has afforded anthropologists the opportunity and the responsibility to share research materials and acknowledge the cultural conditions of visual experience. Image-making has also been added to the ethnographer’s toolkit not just for research purposes, but also as a means of giving back to the individuals and communities whose lives and experiences constitute the ‘data’ that makes anthropology possible (Jackson 2004, Lozada 2006). Since anthropological research takes place within global hierarchies of knowledge production, such efforts attempt to ‘question hegemonic Euro/American-centric anthropological and audio-visual aesthetics and epistemologies’ (Flores & Torresan 2018).

Finally, visual anthropology has called into question the limitations of visual representation. The materiality of photographs, the sounds and audioscapes of film and video, the immersive environments of exhibitions, and the interactive possibilities of online platforms push visual anthropologists to look beyond what is obviously visible. Behind this is the recognition that the field of visual anthropology has always included other senses and experiences and that different anthropological questions and different ethnographic contexts may demand, or at least benefit from, different modes of engagement and production. Sensations such as sound and hearing, taste, feel (tactility/hapticity), as well as emotion and affect are all integral to the ways in which human life is experienced, made meaningful, and represented. In 2017, the journal American Anthropologist renamed its long-running ‘Visual Anthropology’ section as ‘Multimodal Anthropologies’ in order to reflect the mixed practices and modes which anthropological scholarship might take. In turn, there have also been numerous initiatives and efforts to change established scholarly practices. Increasing numbers of anthropology programs now accept non-text-based scholarship as part of degree requirements, and more and more discussions have emerged on the evaluation of non-textual scholarship within the discipline (Chio 2017a).

These current concerns about visual analysis, an ethical ethnographic practice, and mixed modes of anthropological knowledge production, are not new. The history of visual anthropology, discussed below, illustrates how technologies and strategies of visual representation are deeply intertwined with the discipline, its theoretical foundations, and its methodological innovations.

Anthropology has always been visual

The history of visual anthropology, and in particular the development of ethnographic filmmaking, is well-studied and illuminates one fundamental truth: anthropology, as a discipline that documents and studies socio-cultural life, has always been invested in the visual (e.g. Banks & Ruby 2011, Grimshaw 2001, El Guindi 2004, Jacknis 2016, Loizos 1995, Ruby 2000).^[3] The production of visual material as a part of anthropological research has occurred since the beginning of the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century. Arguably, the relationship between visual representation and what became known as anthropology emerged with advances in photography from the mid-1800s onwards. Photography was employed extensively in studies of ‘racial types’ within the nascent fields of physical anthropology, which studied the biological evolution and variabilities of humans, and eugenics, a racist pseudo-science that advocated for the selective breeding of human populations. Colonial governments and administrations, in particular, were deeply invested in using photography to classify and categorise colonised populations by racial and ethnic ‘types’ based upon visible, physical characteristics as a means of asserting their authority to rule, govern, and control populations deemed less ‘developed’ than white Anglo-Europeans (Edwards 1994, Pinney 2011). Indeed, state-sponsored practices of using photographs as evidence of racialised differences lasted well into the twentieth century, with grave and violent consequences (see Morris-Reich 2016).

Early anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon, Franz Boas, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard recognised the scholarly significance of audiovisual documentation as a part of ethnographic fieldwork both as a memory aid but also as means of amplifying their research findings. They produced audio recordings, drawings, and photographs during their field research and also included numerous images in their publications (see also Bunn-Marcuse forthcoming, Joseph 2015). A few decades later, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson experimented with the possibilities of film and photography as a means of anthropological analysis as a part of their fieldwork in Bali (Bateson & Mead 1942, Jacknis 1988). For Mead and Bateson, film and photography allowed for the repeat, more systematic study of human non-verbal behavior and bodily movement through the use of photographic sequences and edited short films, featuring voice-over commentary and analysis.

Technological advances in film and audio recording in the mid-twentieth century afforded anthropologists and filmmakers increasing opportunities for film and photography to play a more central role in ethnographic and cross-cultural research because the actual recording technology was lighter, cheaper, and easier to learn than its predecessors (see Hockings 2003, Collier & Collier 1967). This is exemplified in films like The hunters (1957) and Dead birds (1964) which were produced as part of research expeditions sponsored by Harvard University/Peabody Museum, the films of the Turkana conversations trilogy of David and Judith MacDougall and the Yanomami series of Timothy Asch, as well as the collaborative, shared anthropological films of Jean Rouch, such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) (see also Rouch 2003). Despite the proliferation of ethnographic film during this period, or perhaps precisely because of it, the capacity of film and visual images to communicate anthropological knowledge (or ‘facts’ more generally) emerged as a point of suspicion and anxiety within the discipline. The ‘iconophobia’ of mainstream anthropologists resulted in the marginalisation of the subfield (Taylor 1996; Mead 2003). Whereas text was capable of theory and analysis, the meaning of images was considered less easily controlled and thus more likely to be misunderstood or misinterpreted (MacDougall 1999).

Nevertheless, alongside the rise in global commercial travel and the introduction of more affordable video recording technologies in the 1970s, visual anthropology programs, labs, and centres have been established within a number of academic anthropology departments (see Ruby 2000, 2001). These programs offer more formal research and training opportunities in ethnographic film production, media analysis, and the anthropology of visual culture, although visual anthropology classes are also widely taught in departments without such institutionalised programs. Combined with the ‘writing culture’ debates around power imbalances and representational authority in ethnographic description and analysis, scholarship in visual anthropology has prompted important critiques of anthropological image-making and image use, as well as new anthropological approaches to understanding visual experience as a cultural practice.

Nowadays, it is nearly impossible to imagine conducting ethnographic fieldwork without a camera of some kind, and digital technologies make it possible for nearly every camera to operate in a still or video mode. The global reach of media technologies has also expanded the horizons of visual anthropology, which increasingly overlaps with the subfields of digital anthropology, media anthropology, and sensory anthropology. Furthermore, while the number of visual anthropology degree programs has continued to grow, many more university departments and institutions have laboratory spaces or research groups dedicated to exploring new and re-newed theoretical and methodological potentials of visual and/or media-based scholarship in anthropology. This growth reflects the continued relevance and appeal of visual and other non-text based forms of anthropological work. The revival of interest in the photo-essay, and more broadly the critical use of photographs in anthropological scholarship, is one such recent development in visual anthropology.^[4] Nonetheless, ethnographic film continues to be the most recognisable ‘product’ of the field.

Ethnographic film in practice and as theory

The prominence of ethnographic film in the history of visual anthropology cannot be overstated, despite the fact that photography and sound recordings were also fundamental parts of early ethnographic fieldwork. The history and development of ethnographic film over the twentieth century has also been extensively studied (see, for example, Henley 2020, Loizos 1993), including the connections between ethnographic film and early cinema (especially travelogues) (see Griffiths 2002, Groo 2019), and the parallel development of ethnographic film and documentary film practices and theory (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Rony 1996). Films made by anthropologists or as part of ethnographic research projects quite literally make visible and more accessible the work of anthropology, from the process of fieldwork to the analysis of cultural values, beliefs, and behaviours. Moreover, with its combination of sound and moving image, the film medium can be regarded as more akin to lived experience, more immediately apprehensible, and more capable of communicating anthropological insights to a broader public.

Comprehensive accounts by and analyses of various influential ethnographic filmmakers have been published (Grimshaw 2001, MacDonald 2013, MacDougall 1999 and 2006, Rouch 2003, Ruby 2000). Among the many oft-cited ethnographic filmmakers includes Margaret Mead, who sought to harness the pedagogical, scientific, and public-facing possibilities of the film medium. For Mead, film was a way to show and analyze human cultural lives in ways that text could not, although her films relied heavily upon intertitles and didactic voice-overs to interpret the filmed materials for viewers (see Trance and dance in Bali [1952]). Later, Jean Rouch, working in France and postcolonial West Africa, upended the expectation that an ethnographic film necessarily had to record ‘real life’ in front of the camera in favor of what he called a ‘shared anthropology’ (Rouch 2003). In films such as Jaguar (1967) and Moi, un Noir (1958) which explored migrant youth experiences and masculinity, Rouch worked collaboratively with long-term friends and interlocutors, producing ‘ethno-fictional’ films composed of pre-planned scenes coupled with voice-over narrations added during post-production. The resulting films are both fictional, in that they are not direct recordings of an event or experience, and ethnographic, in that they explore and reflect socio-cultural lives, belief systems, and values.

Other key figures in ethnographic film history include John Marshall for his films on the lives and experiences of Ju/'hoansi of southern Africa (present-day Namibia), beginning with The hunters (1957) and up to the five-part A Kalahari family series (2002). Marshall’s many films on Ju/’hoansi began as part of research programs intended to ‘document’ a hunter-gatherer society that was presumed to be ‘disappearing’ in the modern era, and led to his continued advocacy with Ju/’hoansi and !Kung for the next half-century (see Anderson & Benson 1993). The films of Robert Gardner, whose early work was also conducted as part of research expeditions, reflect and challenge the capacity of film to communicate anthropological arguments (Gardner 2008). Dead birds (1964) utilised many formal elements associated with anthropological filmmaking at the time (explanatory voice-over and a focus on a so-called ‘primitive’ society), although the film addressed the more universal subject of human warfare and violence. However, by the time Gardner made Forest of bliss in 1986, he plunged viewers into the Indian city of Benares and local patterns of worship and religious experience without any explanatory text or narration, thus leaving the ‘meaning’ of the film ostensibly open to viewer interpretation (though of course the film was deliberately and carefully edited).

The stylistic and formal differences between Gardner’s Dead birds and Forest of bliss represent a broader formal development in ethnographic film in the second half of the twentieth century. While many ethnographic films from the 1950s through to the 1970s tended to rely upon voice-over narration to explain or describe film sequences, an observational mode of ethnographic filmmaking gradually came to dominate the aesthetic and formal style of ethnographic film today (see Grimshaw & Ravetz 2009, Henley 2020). Known as ‘observational cinema’, it reflects a perspective on social and cultural lives, emphasising an ‘unprivileged camera style’ (MacDougall 1982), where the filmmaker and the camera’s presence are a part of (but not dominant in) the filmed encounter. What is presented should, to the best extent possible, reflect what one could actually experience in a particular socio-cultural context.^[5]Formally, this meant eschewing voice-over narrations and montage editing, and relying on long takes that reflect the pace of life and conversation as it unfolds. David and Judith MacDougall were among the first ethnographic filmmakers to utilise subtitles in their films and thus ‘give voice’ directly to the film’s characters (see MacDougall 1995); their Turkana conversations trilogy films from the 1970s are widely regarded as embodying the concept and practice of observational cinema.

The approach and aesthetic of observational cinema continues to largely define ethnographic filmmaking at present, albeit with slight differences in styles and techniques. This formal ‘style’ of ethnographic film, the ways in which ethnographic observation can be represented in and through film, and the power dynamics alternately revealed and obscured by formal choices in filmmaking continue to constitute central issues in ethnographic film theory (MacDougall 1999, Grimshaw 2001 and 2009, Suhr & Willerslev 2012). Since the early 2000s, some of the most widely discussed films within and beyond anthropology have been produced by scholars and students affiliated with the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University.^[6] An attention to sound (spoken and ambient), sequence and temporality (especially the long take), and image composition characterise these films (see Nakamura 2013, Lee 2019). Films such as Leviathan (2012), Manakamana (2014), and Demolition/Chaiqian (2008) have prompted much-needed discussions within anthropology on the question of aesthetics, ethics, and representations of other lives (human and non-human) (on Leviathan, see the special issue of Visual Anthropology Review 31(1); also Spray 2020 and Sniadecki 2014). Taken together, what can be called the contemporary ‘observational-sensory’ convention of ethnographic film-making reveals an unease with the limits and possibilities of ethnographic film to both convey cultural experiences and to respect (and reflect) cultural differences (Chio 2020).

Even more important for the future of visual anthropology, increasing numbers of anthropologists now engage in filmmaking as a means of presenting knowledge to broader publics, including to research communities. They push the possibilities of film as a mode of ethnographic inquiry while also offering a much-needed expansion and diversification of the ethnographic film ‘canon’. Anthropologist-filmmakers such as Harjant Gill, Anna Grimshaw, Lina Fruzzetti and Ákös Öster, Hu Tai-Li, Karen Nakamura, and Deborah Thomas and John Jackson, Jr., among many others, have produced ethnographic films that formally range from the more ‘purely’ observational (Seed and earth [1995], At low tide [2016]) to more interview-driven (Mardistan [2014], Bad friday [2011]). One commonality across many recent ethnographic films is the self-conscious filmmaker, whose presence or absence is posited as a deliberate and meaningful choice to yield the cinematic space to the film’s subjects and their experiences/expertise (see Grimshaw’s four-part series, Mr. Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine woods [2013]) or to emphasise the role of the anthropologist in unraveling and motivating the encounters thusly filmed (see Death by myth [2002], the final film in Marshall’s A Kalahari family series; Coffee futures [2009]). Frequently, the anthropologist-filmmaker is positioned somewhere in between these poles – acknowledging her/his place within the film through carefully chosen moments of direct address (see 农家乐 Peasant family happiness [2013]).

In addition to internal debates over ethnography and the use-value of film, advances in relatively more affordable video technologies and a growing interest from mainstream media networks in cross-cultural issues and documentary film (see Grimshaw 2001, Henley 2020) mean that the ethics, power dynamics, and reception of ethnographic films have been increasingly questioned. Experimental filmmakers such as Chick Strand, Maya Deren, and Trinh T. Minh-ha revisited documentary assumptions, ethnographic film aesthetics, and anthropological authority in their works. Their films pose searing critiques of cross-cultural representation and the ways in which documentary filmmaking has reinforced oppressive hierarchies of power and knowledge (see Ramey 2011, Rony 1996, Russell 1999, and Suhr & Willerslev 2013). Another key factor that has shaped visual anthropology since the 1980s has been the widespread movement to engage in more collaborative research and analysis. As discussed in the following section, the rise and recognition of Indigenous and activist media productions around the globe have prompted new research directions and new forms of critique, collaboration, and reflexivity.

The parallax effect: Indigenous and activist media

Concerns between ethnographic film and media practices by Indigenous, minoritised, and other cultural activist communities tend to converge, though not necessarily in agreement, around questions of power, cultural identity, and colonial/post-colonial conditions. This has been succinctly described by Faye Ginsburg (1995) in her influential concept of the ‘parallax effect’. For Ginsburg, the parallax effect suggests that while both ethnographic film and Indigenous media are cinematic representations of culture, Indigenous media offers ‘slightly different angles of vision’. Namely, while the ostensible subject of the films may be the same (Indigenous or other non-majority cultural lives), the perspectives offered diverge, often dramatically, between what can be simplified as an ‘outside’ (or etic) approach by ethnographers and an ‘inside’ (emic) view from the community or an individual within the community thusly represented. When considered together, Ginsburg argues, the effect can be a ‘fuller comprehension of the complexity of the social phenomenon we call culture and those media representations that self-consciously engage with it’ (1995: 65). The concept of a ‘parallax effect’ is grounded in earlier debates on the ‘crisis of representation’ in anthropology broadly, as well as calls for ethnographic film and filmmakers to acknowledge and yield authorial power to the voices of those who are more typically the subjects of film, rather than the creators (see Chen 1992, Ginsburg 1994, Nichols 1994, Weinberger 1994, Weiner 1997).

Indigenous media in particular has pushed scholarship in visual anthropology to confront the imbalance of power between the filmmaker and the ‘filmed’ and to concede some authorial control over the creation and content of media. It includes any and all ‘forms of media expression conceptualized, produced, and circulated by Indigenous peoples around the globe as vehicles for communication’ (Wilson, Hearn, Córdova & Thorner 2014). Projects to ‘give the camera back,’ including Through Navajo eyes (Worth & Adair 1972), Video nas Aldeias (Carelli 1988), and the Kayapo video project (Turner 1992), provide equipment and basic training to Indigenous individuals without delineating a particular product or goal beyond what participants themselves deem important or significant. Such earlier efforts were subject to critique, however, because regardless of good intentions, questions of power, authority, and control permeate throughout any media-making endeavor, beginning with the provision of resources (cameras, editing suites, microphones, and time to participate in training) to the distribution of the productions (networking with television stations and film festivals, storage requirements, and so on) (see Moore 1996).^[7]

Nowadays, Indigenous media ranges from national television broadcast programs to radio, experimental arts, documentaries, and narrative film. They are united by a commitment to representing the experiences, perspectives, and values of Indigenous communities from their points of view, rather than from that of dominant, mainstream society. Assertions of political self-determination, sovereignty, and cultural preservation tend to be at the forefront of much Indigenous media (e.g. Angry Inuk [2016]), although these are by no means prescriptive or absolute limits on the possible diversity of themes and topics that they can and do address (Aufderheide 2008, Ginsburg 2016, Wilson & Stewart 2008). Visual anthropologists, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, have been involved and engaged with Indigenous media ethnographically by studying Indigenous media productions, from visual arts (Mithlo 2009, Myers 2002, Hennessy, Smith & Hogue 2018) to radio (Fisher & Bessire 2012) to film (Dowell 2017), but also professionally, for example as consultants for television programming (Deger 2006, Michaels 1991 and 1993) and as curators (see, for example, Mithlo's curatorial work at the Venice Biennale). Recent collaborations between anthropologists and Indigenous media makers, such as Miyarrka Media (2019), the Karrabing Film Collective (Lea & Povinelli 2018), and a forthcoming digital publication that reassesses Kwakiutl films and audio recordings made with Franz Boas (Bunn-Marcuse), emphasise a more equal foundation for media-making in an increasingly media-saturated world.

Activist media by minoritised, oppressed, and marginalised communities have further amplified the need to confront the often unquestioned, or under-addressed, ‘authority’ of mainstream media practioners, scholars, artists, and global political elites to depict and represent ‘other’ cultural lives. Scholarship on activist media, in turn, offers a much-needed challenge to reconsider and reshape media practice by confronting, head on, how media representations are a means of political control and potential resistance (see Osman 2019 on the interpellation of African Americans, Muslims, and Muslim Americans in US media in the post-9/11 era). Autoethnography, which adopts a deliberately self-concious and personal perspective on social conditions, has been an especially powerful mode of activist media-making (for example, see Russell 1999 on autoethnographic queer films and queer filmmaker networks in the United States). Autoethnographic films by anthropologists, such as Postcards from Tora Bora (Dolak & Osman 2007) about a young Afghan-American woman’s return to her childhood home two decades after fleeing Afghanistan with her family, and In my mother’s house (Fruzzetti & Östör 2017), tracing a personal journey through a matrix of Eritrean, Italian, and American colonial and post-colonial kin relations, further demonstrate the possibilities of a self-reflexively active, if not explicitly activist, approach. Taken together, Indigenous and activist media have freed visual anthropology, and ethnographic film in particular, from the confines of representing a fixed, or observable, cultural ‘reality’ in favor of exploring the possibilities of film and media practice for understanding and questioning social, cultural, and political conditions.

An anthropology of the visual

The analytical approaches taken by visual anthropologists towards Indigenous and activist media make clear the doubled ambitions of the subfield: to communicate anthropological knowledge through visual and other non-textual media as well as to engage in anthropological analyses of the visual world, including bodily gestures, visual practices, and different forms of media (for example, see Banks & Morphy 1997). The anthropology of the visual shares broad concerns with the emergence of visual culture studies and the ‘visual turn’ in the humanities (Jay 2002, Mitchell 2005). These emphasise how visual practices and visual media circulate and create meaning within culturally specific contexts.

As noted earlier, the deeply intertwined relationship between photography and the development of anthropology from the late 1800s to the present has been one of the most significant ‘cultural contexts’ studied. The history of photography in anthropology illuminates the critical theoretical work of visual anthropologists in understanding photography, and how the specific qualities of the photographic medium as still images with a specific materiality, and distinct photographic genres such as portraiture, convey meaning. At the same time, photographs have shaped the discipline and its core assumptions and concepts (Edwards 1994 and 2001, Pinney 2011). They have served as evidence of anthropological insights and concepts, as in Mead and Bateson’s Balinese character (1942) discussed earlier; likewise, photography functioned as a medium of power and a means of questioning power relations in anthropology (Edwards 2011). Both photo-elicitation and participatory photography are methodological interventions that have been adopted by visual anthropologists in order to address historical and existing power dynamics within the ethnographic encounter and also to explore the processes through which individuals make meaning out of and from visual representations (see Bowles 2017, Fattal 2020).

Ethnographies of photography situate photographs within specific histories and conditions of image production and circulation. Significant, for visual anthropology, is the close attention to the visual image as a material object in the world that leads to specific material practices. Insofar as photographs exist on paper, on hand-held screens, or otherwise they are not just as ‘representations of’ an assumedly more real reality elsewhere (Pinney 2011, Pinney & Peterson 2003, Wright 2013). Methodologically, the ethnography of photography requires the work of ‘visual detection’ (Gürsel 2018) and a practical as well as theoretical perspective on how particular kinds of photographs are made. For example, Brent Luvaas (2016 and 2019) ethnographically analyzes the production, aesthetisation, and creation of ‘street style’ fashion photography both on the ground as a photographic practice and online as genre of (commercially valuable) social media. Zeynep Gürsel, exploring how editorial newsrooms select news photographs, has called this process ‘formative fictions’ because the editorial process itself is where social meaning is created and communicated (2016). Similarly, Rebecca Carter (2019) analyzed the news circulation of a photograph of her family’s home as it was burning in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Studies of studio portraiture especially have revealed how photography has been valued and productively deployed in imagining social status and belonging (see Banfill 2020, Sprague 1978a and 1978b). Portraiture, whether photographic or painted, commissioned or literally taken in the case of early anthropometric photography, provides a wide arena for reconsidering representation and the power of the image in assertions of agency (see Buggenhagen 2017 on post-colonial portraits by Senegalese artist Omar Victor Diop).

Although photography occupies a significant place within the anthropology of the visual, visual images as they exist and are seen in the world today surpass it. Focusing on these images in general addresses the image-saturated condition of the contemporary moment and the nature of ‘image-events’ (Strassler 2020). As a political process, Karen Strassler posits, image-events acknowledge how images can become central to political and social contestations in public and across different publics. Images of all kinds are active agents in shaping society and social expectations, as Arlene Dávila (2012 and 2020) has shown in her studies of Latinx marketing, media, and art. This focus on visuality, or taking the visual as an analytic, allows for an anthropology of the visual that can look beyond the making of representations and towards the ways in which representations in turn shape lived experiences (see, for example, Chio 2014 and 2017b on the visual expediencies of rural ethnic tourism in China).

The theoretical and thematic overlaps between scholarship in the anthropology of the visual, media anthropology, and visual culture are indicative of how multi-layered visual media really are. Any single image, whether a photograph, a drawing, a film still, or a digital rendering, can now be relatively easily printed, stored, digitised, animated, shared, and so on, making it ever more difficult and important to critically examine disciplinary assumptions about what images mean and whether and how the medium itself may be the message (following McLuhan 1994 [1964]). The anthropology of the visual also underpins and buttresses calls within visual anthropology to take medium specificity more seriously and to consider the wide array of possible media for the communication of anthropological and ethnographic knowledge.

From visual to multimodal?

In recent years, the term ‘multimodal anthropology’ has emerged alongside the term visual anthropology. The argument for ‘multimodal anthropology’ is to reflect changes in the media ecology and to acknowledge the diversity of media long employed by anthropologists (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 142). One central impetus for the wider adoption of ‘multimodal’ to describe non-text scholarship by anthropologists is the fact that ‘visual’ as a term is limiting and not entirely accurate when describing the vast scope of genres and media utilised by anthropologists. Films and videos, most obviously, incorporate careful and deliberate soundtracks, whether spoken, musical, or ambient; photographs are images and material objects; sound and sonic experiences themselves constitute particular ways of encountering and understanding (see Feld 2012, Phillips & Vidali 2017); performance, from dance to theatre to improvisational, have all been utilised and theorised by anthropologists as a scholarly form of knowledge communication (Kondo 2018). The term ‘sensory ethnography’ has also been used to capture some of these dynamics, whether through film and sound work (as in the Sensory Ethnography Lab) or through ethnographies of sensory experience (Howes 2019, Pink 2015). Multimodal anthropology, more broadly, asserts the possibility to reinvent anthropology itself, by foregrounding the ‘multiple ways of doing anthropology that create different ways of knowing and learning together’ (Dattatreyan & Marrero-Guillamón 2019: 220).

This recent attention to multimodality in anthropology can, in part, be traced to the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art practice (Foster 1995, Grimshaw & Ravetz 2015, Rutten, van Diederen & Soetaert 2013, Takaragawa & Halloran 2017). In fact, artists share many of the concerns of anthropologists over the politics, ethics, and poetics involved in multiple media. For example, Ethnographic Terminalia, a curatorial collective that organised annual exhibition programs alongside the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association from 2009-2019, staged installations that deliberately combined works from anthropologists and artists to interrogate key conceptual and theoretical intersections. Annual themes included communities of practice (2011), memory and the archive (2014), and the past and future of the photo-essay (2016). WakandaAAA University, a project aiming to build ‘an ethno-future space beyond whiteness that challenges anthropology from the ground up’, appeared for the second time in 2019 as a part of the final Ethnographic Terminalia. Featuring open spaces and scheduled events, including a 'cyborg sandbox', a virtual reality gallery, and a silent rave, the project advocated for, in its own words, ‘Down with heroes and their narratives. Up with genre-busting and serious play’.^[8]

The effect of the move towards multimodal anthropology has not only been the acknowledgement and creation of different forms of anthropological scholarship. More importantly, anthropologists are challenged to imagine a multitude of possible anthropologies, to experiment with the methods and practice of ethnography, and to look beyond other anthropologists for inspiration and direction.^[9]Of course, this is not to say that multimodal anthropology, as a concept, is without its own blinders and assumptions. Just as visual anthropology has often been equated with the production of ethnographic film, multimodal anthropology is frequently associated with the use of digital media as a supposedly more accessible and democratic mode of engagement. But ‘[t]here is nothing inherently liberatory about multimodal approaches in anthropology’ (Takaragawa et al. 2019: 517). After all, earlier research showed clearly that ethnographic films often reinforced stereotypes among audiences, instead of challenging or dismantling them (Martinez 1995). Likewise, the uptake of digital or multimedia technologies is not, in itself, transformative. Rather, as Stephanie Takaragawa et al. argue:

as our discipline(s) increasingly advocates for the multimodal in the service of anthropology, there is a need for deep engagement with the multimodal’s position as an expression of technoscientific praxis, which is complicit in the reproduction of power hierarchies in the context of global capitalism, 'capital accumulation' (Collins, Durington & Gill 2017: 144), and other forms of oppression (2019: 517).

The conversation around multimodal anthropology has continued to press anthropology, writ large, to take account of and interrogate its own structures of status, hierarchy, and privilege in what ‘counts’ as scholarship. More importantly and more widely, multimodal anthropology has the potential to expand the tools and theories at hand for engaging in cross-cultural research, analysis, and representational projects. This discussion is rooted in the very nature of the work of visual anthropology, which from its very beginnings has been committed to the search for more compelling means of communicating the insights of ethnography.

Conclusion: visual experiences and visual experiments

In a way, visual anthropology as a separate subfield is arguably no longer needed. The number of ethnographic film festivals globally continues to increase, not decrease. Related subfields of media anthropology, digital anthropology, and multimodal anthropology seem to encompass much of what used to be considered the analytical terrain of the visual. If anything, however, these developments underpin the ongoing influence and importance of visual anthropology. From early efforts in ethnographic filmmaking to the self-critique brought about by Indigenous media to the desire to work differently embodied in the calls for multimodality, visual anthropology has always been concerned with the ethics and epistemology of ethnography and theory building.

The proliferation of image-making and image-sharing technologies in the world today thus circles back to a fundamental question: how might all of these different ways of doing research and analysis make for better anthropology? And who gets to decide what is better, or what needs improving, in the first place? Clearly there are no firm or final answers to these broad questions, which by necessity should return time and time again. What visual anthropology has done and must continue to do is to carve out space for scholars, artists, and activists to learn from the visual experiences of others and to open themselves to visual experiments of their own.

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——— 2001. The professionalization of visual anthropology in the United States: the 1960s and 1970s. Visual Anthropology Review 17(2), 5-12.

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——— 1978b. How I see the Yoruba see themselves. Studies in Visual Communication 5(1), 9-29.

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——— (eds) 2013. Transcultural montage. London: Berghahn.

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Films and Videos Cited

Archei, O., T. Blumenfield & R. Duoji 2015. Some Na ceremonies. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 31 minutes, digital video.

Arnaquq-Baril, A. 2016. Angry Inuk. National Film Board of Canada, 85 minutes, digital video.

Asch, T. 1968-1976. Yanomami series (22 films). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 428 minutes, film.

Castaing-Taylor, L. & V. Páravel 2013. Leviathan. New York: Cinema Guild, 87 minutes, digital video.

Chio, J. 2013. 农家乐 Peasant family happiness. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 71 minutes, digital video.

Dolak, K. & W. Osman 2007. Postcards from Tora Bora. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources, 82 minutes, digital video.

Fattal, A. 2009. Trees Tropiques. Berkeley: Berkeley Media, 30 minutes, digital video.

Fruzzetti, L. & Á. Öster 1995. Seed and earth. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 36 minutes, film.

——— 2016. In my mother’s house: tracing a family history from Italy to Eritrea. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Education Resources. 82 minutes, digital video.

Gardner, R. 1986. Forest of bliss. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 90 minutes, film.

——— 1964. Dead birds. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 83 minutes, film.

Gill, H. 2014. Mardistan (Macholand). Washington D.C.: Tilotama Productions, 30 minutes, digital video. (available online: https://vimeo.com/120182667, accessed 31 August 2020).

Grimshaw, A. 2016. George’s place: the cellar. 83 minutes, digital video.

——— 2016. At low tide. London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 63 minutes, digital video.

——— 2013. Mr Coperthwaite: a life in the Maine Woods (including Spring in Dickinson’s Reach [83 mins), A summer task [47 mins], Autumn’s work [47 mins]; Winter days [59 mins]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media and London: Royal Anthropological Institute, digital video.

Gürsel, Z.D. 2009. Coffee futures. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 22 minutes, digital video.

MacDougall, D. & J. MacDougall. Turkana conversations trilogy (including Lorang’s way [1980, 70 minutes], The wedding camels [1980, 108 minutes], and A wife among wives [1982, 72 minutes]). Berkeley: Berkeley Media, film.

Marshall, J. (dir.) 1957. The hunters. Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 72 minutes, film.

——— 2002. A Kalahari family (!Kung series). Watertown, Mass.: Documentary Educational Resources, 360 minutes, film and video.

Mead, M. (dir.) 1952. Trance and dance in Bali. Library of Congress, 22 minutes, film (available on-line: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8YC0dnj4Jw). Accessed 31 August 2020.

Rouch, J. 1958. Moi, un Noir. New York: Icarus Films, 70 minutes, film.

——— 1967. Jaguar. New York: Icarus Films, 88 minutes, film.

Sniadecki, J.P. 2008. Demolition/Chaiqian. New York: Cinema Guild, 62 minutes, digital video.

Spray, S. & P. Velez 2014. Manakamana. New York: Cinema Guild, 118 minutes, film.

Thomas, D., J. Jackson Jr. & J.G. Wedderburn 2011. Bad friday: Rastafari after Coral Gardens. New York: Third World Newsreel, 63 minutes, video.

Note on contributor

Jenny Chio is Associate Professor at the University of Southern California. Her ethnographic film, 农家乐Peasant family happiness (2013), examines ethnic tourism in rural China. She has served as co-editor of the journal Visual Anthropology Review and co-director of the Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival.

Jenny Chio, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, 3501 Trousdale Pkwy, Taper Hall 356, University of Southern California, Los Angeles CA 90089-0357. jchio@usc.edu

Image credit

Nuosu college students pose in vintage clothing, creating a retro aesthetic. Chengdu, China. See also Banfill 2020. Photo by Kaitlin Banfill, 2018. Used with permission.

[1] Visual anthropology encompasses more than just the visual, as this entry will elaborate, and when referring to films and video it is more precise to use the term ‘audiovisual’. For consistency, in this entry I mostly use the more widely employed moniker of 'visual anthropology'.

[2] ‘Ethnographic film’ as a genre has been notoriously difficult to define because it has been used to describe both films by anthropologists and ethnographers as well as films about topics and concepts central to anthropology; see Chio 2020, Durrington 2013, Friedman 2017, Vannini 2020, Crawford & Turton 1993, Barbash & Taylor 1996.

[3] Anthropological research and writing has also depended upon other senses, especially listening/hearing. However, visual representations, in the form of photographs or museum exhibitions/object displays, have been more widely discussed and theorised.

[4] Publishing initiatives, such as The Page in Visual Anthropology Review and Writing with Light in Cultural Anthropology, aimed to foster contemporary critical conversations around the photo-essay as a mode of anthropological inquiry.

[5] The phrase ‘observational cinema’ is attributed to the filmmaker Colin Young, who established the Ethnographic Film Unit at the University of California Los Angeles in the 1960s and trained a generation of anthropological filmmakers, including David and Judith MacDougall whose films and publications are widely considered exemplars of this mode of filmmaking (see Henley 2018).

[6] Many other well-known programs train students in ethnographic filmmaking, including the long-running Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Southern California, the Culture + Media program at New York University, and the Granada Center for Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester.

[7] David MacDougall offered his reflections on a participatory media project he was a part of in Aboriginal Australia, stating ‘... in a sense it was a kind of idealisation, perhaps, of a notion of solidarity between Aboriginal people and sympathetic Whites. My view of it now is that it was a kind of film-making that rather confused the issues. In those films one never really knows quite who’s speaking for whom, and whose interests are being expressed. It is not clear what in the film is coming from us and what is coming from them ... it’s a slightly uncomfortable marriage of interests that masks a lot of issues’ (quoted in Grimshaw & Papastergiadis 1995: 44-5).

[8] WakandaAAA University (available online: https://wakandaaaa.home.blog/, accessed 29 August 2020).

[9] See, for example, the research, teaching, and events of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.

Writing anthropology

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 18:16:29 +0000

Helena Wulff

Stockholm University

Initially published 26 Feb 2021

http://doi.org/10.29164/21writing

Abstract:

Writing is key in anthropology, as one of its main modes of communication. Teaching, research, publications, and outreach all build on, or consist of, writing. This entry traces how anthropological writing styles have evolved over time according to changing politics in the discipline. It starts out in the late nineteenth century, showing how early writings in the discipline aimed to be objective. While writing anthropology in a literary mode goes a long way back, it was not until the 1970s that writing began to be collectively acknowledged as a craft to be cultivated in the discipline. This led to a boom of experimental ethnographic writing from the 1980s, as part of the ‘writing culture’ debate. The idea behind experimental narratives was that they might convey social life more accurately than conventional academic writing. Today, literary production and culture continue to be a source of inspiration for anthropologists, as well as a topic of study. Anthropological writing ranges from creative nonfiction to memoirs, journalism, and travel writing. Writing in such non-academic genres can be a way to make anthropological approaches and findings more widely known, and can inspire academic writing to become more accessible. Recent developments in anthropological writings include collaborative text production with interlocutors and artists. However, the tendency for experimentation is also held in check, as publishing in academic publication formats and featuring in citation indices is crucial for anthropologists’ careers. Still, as our writing moves increasingly online, there is a growth of flexible formats for publishing, including online books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals.

Introduction

Writing is essential in anthropology. As a major way of communication, teaching, research, and outreach all draw on, or result in writing. But it was not until long after anthropology emerged in the late nineteenth century that writing was first recognised as a crucial craft that required careful training. This entry spans the changing politics of writing anthropology from the late nineteenth century, when Victorian natural science notions about texts as objective was the model for scholarship, to the 1970s, when a sensitivity to style was identified, developing into a movement in the 1980s around the idea of experimental ethnographic writing as initiated by the 'writing culture’ debate (Clifford & Marcus 1986). The protagonists of that debate argued in favour of more detailed accounts of research processes, including the role of the fieldworker in the composition of anthropological writing. Moving on to the twenty-first century, this entry suggests that the understanding that anthropologists are also writers has brought a new emphasis on writing in the discipline. It includes both writing accessible academic anthropology and writing in different genres, ranging from creative nonfiction to memoir, anthropological journalism, and travel writing. Anthropology has existed in a literary mode for quite some time, but as it underwent a ‘literary turn’ (Scholte 1987), literature has become an even stronger resource for the discipline: certainly as an influence to enhance writing styles, but also as a topic for research into literary production and culture. This is made obvious by increasing requests for writing workshops for students and young scholars. Yet, writing remains constrained insofar as publishing is a must when making an anthropological career. Here it is governed by academic publication formats, readership, and citation indices. This entry is organised chronologically, discussing the changing politics of writing academic anthropology over time in terms of styles, publishing, and careers, including the impact of the ‘literary turn’, which leads to a consideration of anthropological writing genres and more recent writings for digital channels.

Changing politics of writing anthropology

Classic anthropological monographs, written as the discipline was getting established, were influenced by lingering natural scientific notions of objectivity. These monographs generally left the anthropologist outside the text, at least when it came to personal experiences and feelings, such as revelations, which were assumed to inhibit their scientific value. This applies to the works by founding anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski and Franz Boas. Malinowski’s academic work stands in particularly stark contrast to his controversial private diaries from fieldwork in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands in 1914-1915 and 1917-1918 (Malinowski 1967). Published posthumously by his widow, the diaries revealed his personal prejudice against interlocutors as well as other problematic attitudes.

But it was the ideal of objectivity, with what would be regarded as its constrained style, that eventually provoked anthropologists to find freer forms of writing, hoping to provide more precise reflections of the richness and complexity of fieldwork. This entailed a shift to taking writing seriously, as identified in the introduction to the volume The anthropologist as writer (Wulff 2016: 1). Prefigured by the interest in narratives of Victor Turner and Edward Bruner in the 1950s and 1960s, a careful consideration of writing became a major feature of anthropology in the 1970s with Clifford Geertz’s work, especially The interpretation of cultures (1973). It was Geertz who developed the concept of ‘thick description’ for a detailed and engaging mode of writing that provides an understanding of human action in a wider context. Geertz’s seminal essay on this topic describes a cockfight in Bali and opens as follows: ‘Early in April of 1958, my wife and I arrived, malarial and diffident, in a Balinese village we intended, as anthropologists, to study’. In this uneasy stage, as newcomers among people who did not acknowledge their presence, they learn after about ten days that ‘a large cockfight was held in the public square’. Geertz goes on to note that cockfights are mostly illegal in Bali:

In this case, however, perhaps because they were raising money for a school that the government was unable to give them, perhaps because raids had been few recently, perhaps, as I gathered from subsequent discussion, there was a notion that necessary bribes had been paid, they thought they could take a chance on the central square and draw a larger and more enthusiastic crowd without attracting the attention of the law. They were wrong...A truck full of policemen armed with machine guns roared up (Geertz 1973b: 412-15).

The policemen ‘began to swing their guns around like gangsters in a motion picture, though not going so far as to actually fire them’. People ran, and so did the Geertzes, who found themselves hiding from the police in a courtyard with a local couple, which was what made them accepted by the villagers. It is most likely the captivating style, built with suspense and surprise, that explains why this essay has become classic, and the way the Geertzes are included in the story as protagonists who are experiencing potential danger together with locals, but then are rescued by a local couple. This turned out to be an efficient way of conveying how an ethnographic event such as an illegal cockfight could be analysed as a kind of play that mirrored major power struggles in the village.

In the 1980s, a debate known as the ‘writing culture’ debate arose, which argued for more detailed accounts of the research process, including the role of the fieldworker, in anthropological writings than what had previously been the case (Clifford & Marcus 1986). There was an expectation that the fieldwork process should include great and intimate details, including the fieldworker’s feelings and relationships, as that promised to produce a more exact account of fieldwork. A critique levelled against ‘writing culture’ was that its proponents focused too much on the activities of fieldworkers rather than on the people the research is about. The legacy of that debate is a heightened awareness of the intellectual impact of writing style, the politics of representation, and the partial truth of any account. Connected to the ‘writing culture’ debate was the idea of anthropological writing as ‘cultural critique’. It suggested that anthropology should identify alternative ways of considering what is often taken for granted in society. Anthropological writing should be part of ‘a strategy for discovering diversity in what appears to be an ever more homogenous world’ and ‘making visible to others the critical perspectives and possibilities for alternatives that exist’ (Marcus & Fischer 1987: 133). Some of those alternatives concerned the role of women in social life – insisting, for instance, that women should be given opportunities for education and careers that had of course not always been regarded as a matter of importance. Supported by the second wave of feminism, the book Women writing culture (Behar & Gordon 1995) explored issues of identity and difference in relation to sexual politics, racial history, and moral predicaments of anthropology. But its mission was a direct critique of the claim by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (1986), that feminist anthropologists had not written in interesting and experimental ways. The volume challenged the male dominance in the discipline at the time (see also Abu-Lughod 1993).

What proponents of experimental forms of writing share is that a sensitivity to style and an openness to other writing genres may produce more than just a pleasant turn of phrase. ‘Narrative and related writing genres may actually offer more accurate – hence, more scientific – means for us as scholars to convey the full range of the human experience’ (Gottlieb 2015: 742) than conventional academic writing. A defining feature of experimental writings today is their argument for accessibility, even though this was not necessarily a characteristic of all different stages of this movement. There is a growing understanding that even anthropological texts about complicated issues can preferably be phrased in a lucid way, as exemplified by Ulf Hannerz (1992) and Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2018), among many others. This goes against the traditional academic norm to write in a convoluted style which can still be regarded as a marker of prestige, more so than being straight-forward. While some very complicated issues do require a more complex writing style and specialised vocabulary, many academic topics do not. This insight is gaining ground, but it also leads to the need for (re)training academics to write in a more transparent manner. Clarity and captivating narratives are more useful both in teaching and research than the writing style of some traditional ethnographies that have been referred to as ‘boring’ and ‘virtually unreadable’ (MacClancy 1996: 237). The desire for being not only clear but also more engaging has opened up space for experimental writing, such as the early In sorcery’s shadow (1987), a memoir of an apprenticeship among the Songhay people who live in Niger and Mali in West Africa. Written by Paul Stoller and Cheryl Olkes as a literary essay informed by theory, it did not include explicit academic references: there is no bibliography. The memoir has been appreciated for its well-crafted narrative that also includes methodological points as Stoller learnt about and understood a way of life which was at first alien to him. The different stages of his training to become an apprentice sorcerer are carefully conveyed.

With the growth of global connections came the insight that interlocutors might, and indeed should, be able to read anthropological work about themselves without the risk of being harmed personally or politically. Such ethical issues are considered in When they read what we write (Brettell 1993), which mainly focuses on how this can impact the anthropologist and the writings. There is, for instance, the devastating experience of having one’s published work contested by those it is about. Such experiences can be unexpected, which makes them even more painful. In addition, they might impact negatively the possibility for future research in the community for other colleagues, who might have had nothing to do with this work. Newspaper accounts of anthropological writings add complexity to this problem, especially when they misrepresent findings and if interlocutors read the newspapers but not the actual text. Highly politicised contexts such as conflicts over national language and between ethnic groups may feed into resulting dilemmas. While awareness of the difficulty of doing justice to divided communities is important, the necessity of including the studied people as a potential audience, and not only academics, remains a primary concern in contemporary anthropological writing. Existing concerns are fuelled by the rise of digital online journals and e-books, which can reach a vast and worldwide audience in an instant, particularly when they are Open Access.

All of this raises questions regarding publication outlets in relation to making an academic career, and negotiations over whether a monograph or journal article ranks the most highly (Wulff 2019; Boyer 2016). This has been a concern since the natural sciences, where journal articles are the prime publication format, became the model for citation indices and research assessments. As part of ‘new public management’ of European universities since the 1980s (Shore & Wright 2017), ranking systems have been in place for publishers, their books, and journals. They attempt to emulate private sector management models and business-like approaches to improve research efficiency and results. At some universities, publishing with highly ranked publishers can thus impact positively a department’s funding, as well as the anthropologist’s salary. It certainly impacts hiring practices. Rankings have also reinforced the notion of ‘publish or perish’, meaning that, even in order to keep a job, academics sometimes have to publish a certain number of high-ranking publications per year, for if not, their careers may be in jeopardy. In spite of these measures, the politics of academic publishing remain elusive as criteria keep changing, not least because what one cohort of anthropologists was trained for is bound to be different once they are exposed to assessment. There is a debate over the extent to which the quality of academic writing is and should be tailored to research assessments and evaluation formats, and what the intellectual consequences of this might be (Strathern 2000).

Anthropological writing is increasingly influenced by these managerial trends. In our discipline, journal articles continue to be important, but there is an enduring notion that long-term fieldwork can best be justified in the space of a full-length monograph. While a number of substantial journal articles might work almost as well, it may be more cumbersome to find those articles rather than reading a book where the material and analysis are all in one place. As books, edited volumes, and book chapters are less prominent in the natural sciences and thus on the ranking lists, they become less prestigious on the citation indices where anthropology is included. Moreover, the amount of work it takes to write a monograph is not rewarded, as it is often treated as just another ‘item’. What is more, appreciative references are not distinguished in the citation indices from negative ones.^[1] Anthropology, in so far as it is a critical science, can also not be captured by numerical metrics (Stein 2018). The logic of such ranking lists is not in accordance either with how certain edited volumes or at least notable introductions to volumes that were published before citation indices were set up keep having a major influence on anthropology. This aspect is obviously not indicated in citation indices or as impact factors, as they only take account of recent work that is available online. Fredrik Barth’s introduction to his edited Ethnic groups and boundaries (1969) is a case in point as it keeps being a standard reference in anthropology (see also Appadurai 1986) but was published too early to be included in indices. As to the fate of books, printed or electronic, fiction or nonfiction, John Thompson, in his sociological research of the publishing business, predicts that as long as it is attractive enough to readers, the book will ‘continue to play an important role as a means of expression and communication in our cultural and public life for the foreseeable future’ (2011: 399-400).

Writing anthropology in relation to literature

Though anthropology’s literary mode is nothing new, the ‘writing culture’ debate intensified the presence of literature in anthropology, which has been identified in terms of a ‘literary turn’ because of literature’s impact on anthropological writing (Scholte 1987). This was in line with the growing awareness of the writing process. As a part of the move away from the detached textual style, as well as when it came to narrative structure, anthropologists took inspiration from fiction. Geertz (1988) even identified the ‘anthropologist as author’.^[2] An anthropology of writing and writers emerged. Local literary work from a field was read as ethnography and might be included in anthropological accounts. With his background as a student of literature at University College London, Victor Turner later connected African ritual and Western literature as ‘mutually elucidating’ (1976: 77-8). Jane Austen was identified by Richard Handler and Daniel Segal (1990) as an ethnographer of marriage, kinship, and class in early eighteenth century England. In the 1990s, Nigel Rapport (1994) organised his fieldwork in the village of Wanet in England in relation to the writer E.M. Forster as an imagined fellow fieldworker. Rapport’s technique was to ‘zigzag’ between the work of Forster and his own field experience. A similar way of combining anthropology and literature, of writing anthropology together with a literary companion, is Kirin Narayan’s Alive in the writing (2012). Narayan juxtaposes her experience of ethnographic writing with that of Anton Chekhov, the renowned playwright and short story writer, as he researched and wrote about Sakhalin Island, the Russian penal colony. Recognising Chekhov as her ethnographic muse releases Narayan’s writing creativity. Inspired by Chekhov’s letter about his journey to Sakhalin, his reflections on his research, and writing process, Narayan feels an affinity with him as she finds topics and texts to include in her book. Incidentally, Chekhov’s work on Sakhalin is nonfiction, and as Naryan gets to know his literary oeuvre, she learns that he is a literary writer with an ethnographic sensibility.^[3]Included in Alive in the writing, at the end of the chapters, are writing exercises, and the book concludes with a postscript with advice for different stages of the writing process, ranging from getting started and moving forward to moving past writer’s block, and revising and finishing. In response to the upsurge of non-academic writing workshops and university programs in creative writing in Euro-America during the last decades, there is a plethora of writing manuals, also by fiction writers (cf. Wulff 2017). The daughter of Alfred Kroeber, and his writer-wife Theodora, Ursula Le Guin (2015: ix, xiii, xii) was not an anthropologist herself, but there are anthropological aspects in her fiction, referred to as science fiction or fantasy. Anthropologists appear in her writings, and the ‘other worlds’ she imagined resonate with an anthropological endeavour to study very different ways of living. Le Guin also wrote a ‘handbook for storytellers – writers of narrative prose’ to go with the writing workshops she taught. Her declaration that her ‘book is not for beginners’ attests to an awareness that writing is a skill that is never fully learnt, but ideally one to keep developing. Observing that some people have a gift for writing, she points out that writing is a skill to be learnt and mastered even for those who are gifted (cf. Wulff 2018). Le Guin emphasises that reading one’s own work also requires training. This would be what Brian Moeran refers to as ‘self-editing’, the process of making choices about style, grammar, organization, and of what to include and exclude (2016: 60-5). ‘Editing’, Moeran goes on, ‘is not writing but rewriting’ and this entails being ‘tough with yourself’ (2016: 60-5). Before submitting a text to an editor at a publishing house, Moeran’s advice is to get a sympathetic colleague’s stern comments on it.

Writing about connections between anthropology, ethnographic writing, and literature, Caroline Brettell observes that:

The experiments with forms of ethnographic writing that might enliven the ethnographic text represent just one dimension of the way in which anthropology has engaged with literature…Some anthropologists have drawn directly on works of literature as inspiration; others have subjected these literary works to an anthropological analytical and theoretical lens (2015: 73).

Yet others, she goes on to say, ‘have found the ethnographer or the autoethnographer in the novelist’. Anthropological interest in literary production certainly exists, such as in the ethnographic study of writing as craft and career in Ireland. Taking the question ‘How come the Irish are such great writers?’ as a point of departure, I have argued that this goes back to the oral storytelling tradition in Ireland, and a culture that cultivates this practice at social gatherings, also by teaching it to younger generations. Then, there is extensive training in creative writing at schools, as well as writing competitions, and an abundance of writing workshops for adults at literary festivals and other literary events. All this fosters a habit and an urge to write (Wulff 2017: ix). Ethnographies of writing are not limited to textual analysis. They can be based on live literature events and public readings of fiction at literary festivals. Drawing on a study of one of the major literary festivals in the UK called the Hay Festival and the small Polari Salon, an LGBT literary festival at the South Bank Centre in London, Ellen Wiles conveys the value of experiential literary ethnography not only to the academic world, but also to arts practitioners, curators, and producers (2021). It was through participant observation at literary festivals that Wiles learnt that, even in our digitalising world, such live events draw big audiences, not least because they provide appreciated opportunities for face-to-face connections between authors and readers.

Another take on how literature can relate to ethnography is the conceptualisation of fiction as a written text along with songs, poetry, essays, drama, and even newspapers and letters that are produced in a society under study (Archetti 1994a). This can reveal, on one level, interpersonal relationships and, on another level, cultural and social contexts such as history and the nation. It has been suggested that there are three types of fiction: ‘The realistic historical novel that attempts to ”reconstruct” a given period in a given society; the totally imagined story set in a historical period; and the essays devoted to an interpretation of a nation, its characteristics and creed’. In addition, ‘some kind of historical and sociological knowledge is important in fiction’, which makes it similar to writing anthropology. In line with much anthropology, in this volume fiction is treated as ‘ethnographic raw material, not . . . authoritative statements about, or interpretations of, a particular society’ (Archetti 1994b: 16-17).

Many anthropologists have expressed a sense of being confined by the rigidity of the academic style, which has led them to seek refuge in fiction writing. This has been a way to complement what has been found to be unsatisfactory with producing dissertations or other academic writing (Stankiewicz 2012). Reflecting on fiction versus anthropology, there is a common notion that ‘anthropology is unique in its specification of dimensions for comparison and its standards for ethnographic descriptions. Are such dimensions and standards straitjackets? If one thinks so, one might turn to fiction for consolation’ (Eriksen 1994: 192; see also Narayan 1999). This advice seems to be both about reading fiction, also from one’s field, and writing fiction by drawing on fieldwork, such as In an antique land (Ghosh 1992). It turns out that ethnographic novels abound. They were (and are) written by authors who were trained in anthropology, and in some cases pursued an academic career while others went into writing fiction full time. An early ethnographic novel is The delight makers (Bandelier 1890), making use of many years of fieldwork with Pueblo Indians. Their eyes were watching God (Hurston 1937) also has an anthropological perspective. In 1954, the bestseller Return to laughter was published by Laura Bohannan under the pseudonym Elenore Smith Bowen. This is a fictionalised story about Bohannan’s fieldwork in Africa, including aspects of tribal life such as the impact of witchcraft. The novel has been widely read not only by students and scholars, but also by a general audience. It is a testimony to the efficacy of conveying anthropological insights through fiction. It is common that social scientists and anthropologists, including those who drive their disciplines, appreciate fiction writers’ ‘capacity to depict the real and unveil truths’ (Fassin 2014: 52). It is even the case that ‘distinguished anthropologists and sociologists have admitted that they find, in the works of these authors, more compelling, more accurate, and more profound accounts of the social worlds they explore than in those proposed by the scholars who study them’ (Fassin 2014: 52; see also McLean 2017). In this spirit, a new brand of ethnographic writing has emerged, one that experiments with various literary styles, not just as embellishment, but also as a way of writing anthropology through creative writing and thereby conveying otherwise unconveyable truths. The volume Crumpled paper boat (Pandian & McLean 2017: 1-2), for example, is composed of ethnographic writing in the form of poetry, fiction, memoir, and scriptwriting, among others. The title is a line from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud and refers in the volume to ethnographic writing as a journey, ‘a transformative passage’ indicated by ‘a little lost boat’ and ‘the frustrations that lead writers to crumple and scrap the slips of paper on which they work’ until their texts will ‘float… to unforeseeable destinations’ (Pandian & McLean 2017: 1-2). Here, writing is about transformations of the author and saying the unsayable, rather merely conveying what social life is like.

Anthropological writing genres

It is obvious that academic scholarly writing is the major genre for anthropologists, and that it is supported by the art of writing field notes (Sanjek 1990, 2015; Andersen et al. 2020). Still, anthropologists do much writing in other genres, not only literary fiction, as discussed above, but also poetry (Rosaldo 2013, among many others). An anthropological career inevitably includes writing academic administrative texts such as a variety of reports and evaluations, but also writing grant proposals, yet another genre (Brenneis 2009; Finnström 2016). Contrary to many fiction writers, anthropologists tend to learn a certain writing style marked by academic strictness and cues such as aim, argument, engagement with debates and/or earlier research, theory, ethnography, method, conclusions, and bibliography. Anthropologists then tend to keep that style, rather than developing in new directions. Some of them, though, see an opportunity for changing track and tone as they move on to new research topics. Others switch between different genres, bringing back stylistic features from creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, travel writing, journalism, and even fiction, poetry, and crime novel writing to their academic writing (Wulff 2016; Barton & Papen 2010).

Creative nonfiction, which tells stories about real events with fiction techniques, has been especially popular among anthropologists in the United States. This genre can be understood as ‘making the reading experience vivid, emotionally compelling, and enjoyable while sticking to the facts’ (Cheney 2001: 2). Originating in the 1960s New Journalism, this writing genre is often connected with the highly successful In cold blood (Capote 1965), a true crime story about the murder of a family on a farm in Kansas in the United States. The book builds on interviews with local people and police investigators, newspaper articles, and observation of the court case. Creative nonfiction has, since it was formulated, ‘gained momentum in subsequent years to inform assorted kinds of writing’ (Narayan 2007a: 130). The movement has come to include a variety of genres and is now established through ‘courses, grants, writing degree tracks, and journals’ (Narayan 2007a: 130). So what can ethnographers learn from creative nonfiction? One point is to strike a balance of writing about social life in an absorbing way without making things up. Another is to think of how to include and deal with situation, story, character, scenes, summaries, and so called ‘expository lumps’ (i.e. dense and heavy background information) when writing up their work (Narayan 2007a: 136-139). The advice to deal with the latter is to ‘break it up, spread it out, slip it into conversation’ (Le Guin 1998: 114).

Following up on writing anthropology in relation to literature, and in different genres, finding publishing outlets for work that is not strictly academic may be an issue. Yet some specialised journals for this exist, such as Anthropology & Humanism, the journal of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, which publishes traditional academic articles as well as other anthropological writing genres: poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction essays in every issue.^[4] These essays often take ethnographic or personal experiences as points of departure and move into more or less imagined realms. The vulnerable observer (Behar 1996), for example, is the story of how a Cuban-American anthropologist was away doing fieldwork on funeral practices in Spain, when her own grandfather died back in Miami. This experience made her argue for the emotional, subjective nature of fieldwork: the ethnographer cannot be detached, nor fully objective, in relation to their field. Spanning different genres, this book is also a kind of memoir, which has itself become a substantial genre in anthropology, primarily recalling events from the field but often going back to the personal life of the anthropologist (Jackson 2006; Narayan 2007b; Stoller 2008; Collins & Gallinat 2010). While memoirs can be expected to be written by older people who have lived long and eventful lives, it turns out that many anthropological memoirs are composed by writers who are still relatively young, or at least middle aged in their 40s or 50s, such as The power of the between (Stoller 2008: 4), triggered by the turmoil of a cancer diagnosis, which entailed a space ‘in-between’ life and death.

My father’s wars (Waterston 2014) is a daughter’s account about her father’s fate as told to her mainly by him, but also by her mother. This was a life course that was driven by dramatic historical events: Alisse Waterston's father had to flee the Holocaust in Poland with his family to Cuba. Eventually he joins the US Army, meets and marries an American woman, and finds himself commuting between Havana and New York, until Castro’s revolution forces the family to leave Cuba for Puerto Rico. This memoir exemplifies how an eventful personal story defined by dangers can convey major political events. Another kind of memoir is My life as a spy (Verdery 2018). When the secret police files in Eastern Europe became available after 1989, Katherine Verdery, an American anthropologist who had spent frequent long research stints studying political economy of social inequality, ethnic relations, and nationalism in communist Romania, discovered in her file that she had been surveilled by the secret police, the Securitate, and accused of being a spy. In this case, the memoir was a way to correct and contextualise a faulty local image of an anthropologist. At the same time, it is an important piece of information about how Romania operated during communism.

Travel writing is yet another form of memoir, as heralded in the classic Tristes tropiques (Lévi-Strauss 1992 [1955]) which documents travels and fieldwork in Brazil. Its proximity to travel writing was later problematised, when travel accounts about the colonies were critiqued for conveying a Western imperial perspective (Pratt 1992). Even though early travel writing relied too much on exoticisation, this is now changing (Nyqvist 2018). Yet travel writing continues to be a way to explore the world on behalf of people ‘at home’, to tell them about places elsewhere, often far away, thereby mediating the world. In addition to describing places and people, as well as the travel itself, travel writing also tends to address the conditions of travel.

Related to anthropological memoir as a genre is the notion of ‘autoethnography’, defined as ‘referring either to the ethnography of one’s own group or to autobiographical writing that has ethnographic interest’ – indeed, the two types can be related (Reed-Danahay 1997: 2). An autoethnography of borders is ‘Illegal’ traveller, which combines fieldwork on undocumented immigrants with descriptions of the personal experience of having to flee Iran during dangerous circumstances. The preface, dated 1987, begins:

One cold night in late February, in a barren land surrounded by huge rugged mountains, I stood on a gravel road, like any other road in this rural area. Midnight passed; the whole landscape was wrapped in silence. The road separated Iran from Afghanistan. It was the border. Shrouded in a deadly stillness was the road, one of the most sanguinary roads in the world laid in wait for its next prey. It was a moonless night. “Good! The darkness shelters us,” said my smuggler… “If I take this step, I will be an ‘illegal’ person and the world will never be the same again.” That night I took that step and my odyssey of “illegality” began (Khosravi 2010: ix).

There are, again, overlaps between memoirs and autoethnography, yet an anthropological autoethnography is usually distinguished by an explicit and systematic theoretical structure which is intended to explain how a personal story that acknowledges power and inequality has a general ethnographic interest. This has been referred to as critical autoethnography (Reed-Danahay 2019). The experiences in the quote above, and subsequent ones about what it is like to be a refugee in Stockholm, also go into opinion pieces for newspapers such as The Guardian and The New York Times (Khosravi 2020). Contrary to writing anthropology, writing journalism always requires an accessible style, short sentences, and a key point introduced early in the text. If anthropological ideas are used, they have to be explained to a general audience. More often than not, journalistic articles connect to an urgent event in the news. They tend to be much shorter and limited in scope than most academic ones. In addition, editors often decide on the headline, which is drastically different from what academics are used to. Again, the boundaries with anthropological writing are blurred, as some anthropologists who keep writing influential journalistic comments on current affairs become public intellectuals, thereby potentially enhancing their academic reputation. This is at times called public anthropology, considered by many to be crucial for an understanding of public life but requiring a refinement of the art of narrative as well as a relinquishing of dry analysis (Eriksen 2005). Moreover, anthropologists who write journalism can be seen to bring back stylistic traits such as lucidity to their anthropological writing. Journalism in anthropology is – as is so often the case – a twofold topic, comprising both anthropologists writing journalism, and the anthropological study of worlds of journalism and journalistic writing (Boyer 2005, 2013; Hannerz 2004; Boyer & Hannerz 2006). Writing future worlds (Hannerz 2016) investigates the new genre of speculative future scenarios, such as the idea of ‘the clash of civilizations’, having impact on global debate and understandings. As to ethnographies of journalism, there is, for instance, a study of former East German journalists and their attempts at explaining life in post-unification Germany which raises complicated issues about the nation and modernity (Boyer 2005). Still in Germany, another study focuses on news organizations, and how digital information and communication technologies have transformed how journalists work there (as elsewhere): they find themselves in a quickly changing landscape where social media is a major actor and contributes to the fact that their authority, expertise, and skills are challenged (Boyer 2013). More in line with travel writers, foreign correspondents, in a study conducted mainly in Jerusalem, Tokyo, and Johannesburg, report from one part of the world to another. It turns out that unique story lines emerge in different correspondent ‘beats’, yet what they write is also shaped by their home country and personal interest. One insight of this study is that both anthropologists and foreign correspondents have a lot to learn from each other when it comes to illuminating the general public about events and peoples in faraway places (Hannerz 2004).

The frequent blurring of writing genres has attracted a lot of attention. In fact ‘there has been an enormous amount of genre mixing in social science, as in intellectual life generally, and such blurring of kinds is continuing apace’ (Geertz 1980: 1659). One type of genre mixing is the monograph Lost in transition (Ghodsee 2011), on the downfall of communism in Bulgaria, where ethnographic chapters take turns with chapters written as ethnographic fiction. More often, genre mixing in anthropology takes the form of single texts, identified as combinations of ethnography and creative nonfiction, memoir and opinion pieces. Genre mixing has been pivotal for anthropology’s development both intellectually and methodologically. It fosters creativity, and suggests a language to approximate saying the unsayable as well as generating new approaches and ideas for research, even if that is often overlooked on academic ranking lists and citation indices.

Conclusions and looking ahead

As a discipline, anthropology builds on academic writing. Yet a focus on the craft of writing is relatively recent in the discipline’s history. Anthropologists continue to accentuate their identity as writers, drawing on literature, as well as different anthropological writing genres such as creative nonfiction, memoir, autoethnography, travel writing, and journalism. Our on-going sharpening of writing as a skill improves the knowledge that we are able to produce and convey, sometimes even providing more accurate accounts of social life than conventional academic work. Collaborative writing has increased both with the people we study, as an attempt to empower them and to draw on their expertise, and with colleagues from other disciplines, partly in response to requests from research funding agencies. There is also a growing interest in working with visual artists, especially graphic artists, as exemplified by Light in dark times (Waterston & Hollands 2020). Publication formats have equally become more flexible: featuring small books, essays on current affairs, and conversations in journals among many other types of outlets. The rise of digital publishing increases this flexibility, as anthropological discussions are now had on Twitter, and blogs such as AnthroDendum.^[5] There is an upswing in honest accounts of how anthropological texts are actually composed that describe the role of personal creativity, academic training, and biography in the way arguments are formulated, as well as the impact of writing routines. They combine writing with a personal touch in combination with a scholarly responsibility, while calling for accessible styles (Nielsen & Rapport 2018; McGranahan 2020). With more diversity in anthropological writing styles, formats, and outlets in the future, questions of how to assess quality will be even more accentuated and debated. Importantly, there is a quickly-expanding realization that writing can and should be a driving force in the process of decolonising anthropology (Pandian 2017; Ulysse 2020; Tapsell 2020), indicating that this is a defining moment for reconsidering writing styles.

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Note on Contributor

Helena Wulff is Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. Her current research engages with migrant writing in Sweden. She is editor of The anthropologist as writer: genres and contexts in the twenty-first century (2016, Berghahn) and author of Rhythms of writing: an anthropology of Irish Literature (2017, Bloomsbury).

Professor Helena Wulff, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, SE-10691 Stockholm, Sweden. helena.wulff@socant.su.se

[1] Tichenor, M. 2020. Metrics. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (eds) F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch (available on-line: http://doi.org/10.29164/20metrics).

[2] Clifford Geertz (1988) considered especially Bronislaw Malinowski, Ruth Benedict, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and Claude Lévi-Strauss as authors.

[3] A number of volumes combine anthropology with literature such as Dennis & Aycock 1989, Benson 1993, Daniel & Peck 1996, De Angelis 2002, and Cohen 2013.

[4] The Society for Humanistic Anthropology is a section of the American Anthropological Association. See also the online magazine, Otherwise (https://www.otherwisemag.com/).

[5] https://anthrodendum.org/