Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Culture

Democracy

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 08:44:39 +0000

A delegate from Somaliland votes in Mogadishu, Somalia, on December 25, 2016. Photo by Ilyas Ahmed

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Initially published 15 Dec 2025

Abstract:

Democracy is a system of governance and a value with a widespread presence worldwide. However, anthropological literature has shown that the transition to democracy articulates practices, institutions, and additional values that depend on previous political experience that is often locally specific. This results in distinct meanings of democracy, as people may not adhere to the principles of Euro-American democracy, which tends to be secular, liberal and representative. Ethnography has cast light on how kinship, religion, gender, morals, and the economy (among others) are entangled in people’s political allegiances and decisions and thereby shape democratic governmental actions. Anthropology focuses not only on who is defined as ‘the people’, and included or excluded from positions of power, but also on how power dynamics organise democratic values, practices, and institutions.

After conveying these established propositions on the anthropology of democracy, this entry will address three important discussions in the discipline: Firstly, it shows that two core Euro-American assumptions—that democracy is necessarily secular and liberal—are disputed worldwide, including in consolidated democracies, where religious movements and populist and authoritarian leaders are flourishing. Second, it discusses the configuration of citizenship, and the citizen’s active role in fighting for rights and in producing oneself as part of a moral collective. It highlights the power relations and political rationalities involved in these processes. The third section addresses the notion of being represented and of participating directly in a democratic government, by looking at the study of elections, the meanings attributed to voting, and at protests and social movements. The entry concludes by arguing that anthropologists’ particular contribution to the study of democracy is twofold: it highlights the cultural, social, and moral aspects in the everyday experiences of democracy among ordinary citizens; and it discovers unexpected power dynamics that shift not only what people fight for in a democracy but also how they do it.

Introduction

What ‘democracy’ is, or ought to be, is not easy to grasp. It is often identified with Euro-American and modern nation-states and seen as rooted in ancient Greek cities. Yet, definitions of democracy and the ideas associated with it have been the subject of extensive debate (Dunn 2019). A simple definition is that democracy corresponds to the ‘rule of the people’ (from the etymological basis of demos and kratia, literally meaning the ‘force of the people’). Modern and contemporary democracy is usually associated with a set of elements such as the rule of law, equality among its members, fair elections of representatives, and freedom of expression, to name only a few. Still, anthropological studies complicate these assumptions by discussing who counts as ‘the people’, how their political will comes to matter, and whether we should distinguish between democracy as ‘a form of governance (i.e. a mode of communal self-organization) or a form of government (i.e. one particular way of organizing a state apparatus)’ (Graeber 2007, 329). What is striking about democracy is that it has increasingly become a core value worldwide over the last one hundred years.

Anthropologists have been studying politics for a long time among people under colonial rule or otherwise dominated within a national context (e.g. Evans-Pritchard 1940; Gluckman 1940; Leach 1954). Hence, they were well-positioned to pay attention during fieldwork to transitions of societies recently liberated from colonial rule or dictatorships towards more democratic forms of governance. Since the 1970s, numerous countries around the world have transitioned to democratic regimes. In these contexts, anthropologists have shown that what democracy turns out to be in practice can be quite different from assumed universal understandings of it. In distinction to other disciplines, which focus on institution-building or the rule of law necessary for the fair election procedures among elites (cf. Mainwaring 1989), anthropological fieldwork has focused on concrete expectations for and lived experiences of democracy as well as the power dynamics at play, which in some cases prolonged the effects of previous political regimes or hindered desired political transformations. Ethnographic fieldwork also enables anthropologists to reject analyses which reinforce normative standards of what democracy should be, and which consider their understanding of democracy as an end goal for history and part of a single road to progress. Such normative analyses all too often continue a colonial mentality that defines non-Euro-American countries as perpetually backwards (Coronil 2019, 238-40).

Anthropological work also brings forth the points of view of local and ordinary people, instead of restricting the study of democracy to formal discourses and state institutions. Thereby, it casts light on how kinship, religion, morals, gender, and the economy (among others) are historically entangled in people’s political allegiances and decisions. Ethnographic research, for example, shows that democratic citizenship is not just a legal status but a form of belonging and behaving that is rooted in particular social experiences, and that people may manifest their interests and political demands in indirect and sometimes even hidden ways. Thus, anthropologists often study democracy in the same way as one would research other intimate domains, such as religion and kinship, allowing them to observe a ‘vernacularisation’ of democracy, i.e. an embedding and reshaping of democratic practices, in people's daily lives (Michelutti 2007).

For example, in northern India, the Yadavs, milk producers and members of a caste that claims ancestral ties to the Hindu god Krishna, draw upon this mythical-religious relationship to shape their political demands. They argue that democracy is a primordial phenomenon passed on from the blood of Krishna to contemporary Yadavs, and that they therefore deserve greater political influence (Michelutti 2007). Such discourse blends religion and governance in ways that contravene democracy’s purported separation between religion and state. Political support for the Yadav also reaches far beyond mere politics of interest or recognition, relying instead on links of caste, ethnicity, and kinship. It produces highly specific dynamics of political inclusion and exclusion, pitting for example Hindus and Muslims against one another, and it changes the meanings of voting from creating flimsy contractual relations to affirming existing ties of status, prestige, or power (Michelutti 2019, 204). The broader insight—that democracy articulates specific sets of practices, institutions, and values that often continue pre-existing political contexts—has been confirmed in various other settings as well (e.g. Caldeira 2000; Paley 2008; Banerjee 2014; Hickel 2015).

The ‘turn to democracy’ worldwide, and in particular in the Global South since the 1970s (Heller 2022), has raised essential questions, such as if there are ‘alternative configurations of democracy and different ways of reaching it, or if claims of difference are merely excuses for undemocratic practices’ (Caldeira and Holston 1999, 727). In other words, scholars of democracy have asked if there can be a minimal transnational and transhistorical definition of ‘democracy’. The difficulty in offering that kind of definition has often led anthropologists to discuss and distinguish between democratic practices, institutions, and values, since similar institutions and practices can have completely distinct meanings as they take root in local contexts following different values.

The remainder of this entry discusses cases of democratic transition, asking how democracy acquires locally produced meanings that are entangled with pre-existing histories and values. It then presents three major aspects that anthropologists have focused on in their work on democracy. Firstly, it shows that anthropological studies have challenged two core Euro-American assumptions about democracy: its secular and its liberal nature. Anthropological work makes clear that even consolidated democracies do not generally adhere to dominant normative assumptions about democracy. In the United States, for example, Christian, authoritarian, and populist practices are flourishing. The entry then discusses different configurations of citizenship with democracy, including the power relations between the state and civil society. Citizens in democratic systems are held to play an active role in fighting for rights and in participating in politics more broadly. Studying these processes has highlighted how citizens produce themselves as ethically bounded subjects with corresponding democratic sensibilities. Finally, the entry examines the representative nature of democracy and how the will of the people can be expressed. This includes discussions on the nature and meaning of participating in electoral and other political processes, such as voting, community organising, and participating in demonstrations and other forms of popular protest.

In discussing these issues, anthropologists have tended to ask: Which sections of society are excluded from positions of power, and how do they fight to improve their participation and rights? How does the government create, promote, and limit ways for people to participate in the exercise of power? What is an election, which meanings are attributed to voting, and is voting the proper or the main form of political participation? And, which beliefs and values are compatible with the democratic decision process, and which may be a hindrance?

Transitions to democracy and local meanings

Given that anthropologists have directly observed various kinds of societies transition to democracy, their studies demonstrated early on that democracy needs to be understood in its local context and with reference to how democratic institutions have been introduced there. Many have pointed out that democratic institutions tend to get ‘selectively assimilated to an existing political cosmology, while also transforming that cosmology in important respects’ (Karlström 1996, 485). They have paid close attention to the underlying values and concepts that guide political decisions, whereby they add a significant layer to the analysis of political actions (Piliavski and Scheele 2022).

For example, local meanings of democracy can incorporate notions of freedom from oppression without thereby corresponding to Euro-American ideals of liberty and equality. This is the case among the Wolof speakers of Senegal studied during the 1990s (Schaffer 1997), where the idea of demokaraasi was derived from the French coloniser's démocratie, and had incorporated local Islamic metaphors as part of being introduced by ruling Muslim elites. Demokaraasi had three interrelated meanings and ideals: treating people fairly, sharing responsibility for one another's well-being, and achieving agreement. This understanding of democracy, which focuses on ‘cooperative caretaking’ and social peace, challenged more agonistic conceptions of democracy which centre on fighting for your candidate or party (Schaffer 1997, 42, 47; cf. Mouffe 2005). Interpreting democracy along Senegalese Islamic lines also came with unforeseen consequences, such as the idea that given that Senegalese mosques may have several muezzins, a democratic Senegalese government might accommodate several presidents at the same time (Schaffer 1997, 45).

Similarly, research in Uganda during the early 1990s shows that democracy (eddembe ery’obuntu in Luganda) was closely associated with freedom from oppression. Yet oppression was locally understood as ‘the consequence of a disordered state, of authority which has lost its anchor’. Democracy was also firmly linked to ideas of liberty, understood as ‘a rightly ordered polity oriented around a properly and firmly installed ruler’ (Karlström 1996, 487). Here, local democratic ideals of democracy did not match either Euro-American counterparts. Ugandans did value freedom of speech; justice and equity; and civility and hierarchy, yet the meanings of these democratic values were profoundly shaped by local context. Freedom of speech is the possibility to speak freely to their ruler, that is, speech in a context of legitimate unitary authority, and reliant on the willingness of power-holders to listen to their subjects. Similarly, justice and equity did not imply that people were fundamentally or ontologically equal, but only that they were situationally equal as subjects before their ruler, who has to treat all of them with fairness. Finally, to act with civility often meant abiding by existing hierarchies (Karlström 1996, 488, 491). Hence, when democratic ideals are re-interpreted locally, they frequently challenge Euro-American definitions of democracy.

The value of equality, which is frequently presumed to be the very essence of democracy, has been questioned in other instances as well. In rural India, for example, the fast adoption of democracy had as a crucial vehicle the value of hierarchy (Piliavski 2023, 583). Indian ideas of hierarchy come with expectations of responsibility, notably the responsibility of superiors to their subordinates. Politicians are patrons who are expected to take full responsibility for the well-being of ‘their people’, while voting is not so much an enactment of equality as it is an expression of loyalty and a way to create alliances with these political leaders (Piliavski 2020). Put differently, hierarchy is valued as a ‘relational logic of mutual expectation […] structured by differences of rank and role’ (2023, 584), and does not hinder but drives the spread of democracy.

The meanings of democracy are not just influenced by pre-existing local political concepts; they also change over time. This may be because different stakeholders attempt to secure a particular definition of democracy that serves their interests. In the 1990s in Chile, for example, campaigns for democracy against military rule attributed to the military dictatorship all that was wrong in the country (pain, misery, torture, exile, low salaries, and poor health clinics) and to a coming democracy what could be achieved (to express one’s opinions, elections, health and education, social benefits, community leaders, family houses) (Paley 2004). After Chile became a democracy, however, these meanings shifted. Social movements maintained a definition of democracy as entangled with social equality, free speech, and citizen's rights, as they demanded to ‘be taken into account’ in political decisions. Yet, government officials and elected representatives mostly ‘equated democracy with electoral procedures generating representative political institutions’ (2004, 504). They considered pressure by social movements in health policy as being on the verge of treason ‘because disagreement is considered unhealthy for democracy’ and ‘could potentially destabilize’ it (2004, 503, 505). Thus, the Chilean experience shows that democratic institutions can retain continuities of dictatorial political and economic practices, and that definitions of democracy can be part of intense power-oriented disputes over meanings and values (Paley 2004). It also foregrounds the ongoing processes through which specific notions of democracy are generated and come to predominate (Paley 2008, 5).

Local inflections of democracy are often linked to the nature of a previous government or governance system. In the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, colonial rule initially shaped democratic challenges to power, following the end of apartheid in 1994 (Hickel 2015). There, rural working-class migrants rejected liberal democracy as a threat to their most fundamental values—they could not reconcile their existing forms of personhood and social life with the idea that all individuals were supposed to be ontologically equal and autonomous. Kinship, gender, and household organisation were conceived of in hierarchical terms, and progressive policy was understood as destroying families and causing misfortune. This hierarchical moral order of rural Zulus was not an essential and unalterable traditional culture in opposition to modernity. Instead, it resulted from modern colonialism, which had long administered the population very differently, ‘relying on indirect rule in rural areas and deploying direct rule in urban areas’, fostering egalitarianism in urban settings compared to social hierarchies in rural ones (Hickel 2015, 15).

Democracy has also been shown as standing in close relation to and often in tension with existing moral economies. In Switzerland, for example, an emphasis on direct democracy and communal participation has historically favoured consensus over partisanship. However, there is an increasing tension between egalitarian and hierarchical values, made visible by the growing power of corporations and extreme right-wing positions in Swiss political life. This raises questions about the ‘compatibility of democracy with corporate formations’, suggesting that the original Swiss egalitarian bottom-up practice is changing. Positions are on the rise that harness hierarchical tendencies, ‘contributing to the subversion of the democratic process’ by relocating decision-making power from the ordinary citizens of a Swiss canton to a central federal government and multinational corporations (Gold 2019, 24, 27).

Similarly, in Argentina, Peronism had long shaped a national ideal of democracy as valuing trade unions, lifelong support from the welfare state, and state intervention in economic affairs (del Nido 2022, 14). At the same time, the post-Peronist impoverishment of the middle class and the rise of social media served as fertile grounds for the arrival of the multinational transportation corporation Uber in Buenos Aires in the spring of 2016. This prompted a political conflict between the state-managed taxi industry and middle-class citizens who demanded the end of the taxi monopoly. It positioned taxis as symbols of Argentina and its capital against Uber rides as symbols of entrepreneurship and individual choice. Middle-class citizens were quick to embrace and enact a new moral economy of ‘choice, efficiency, empowerment, opportunism, innovation, competition and freedom’ (del Nido 2022, 3) to pressure the government to liberalise its economy and legalise the Uber app.

What unites the examples in this section is the insight that one should not take the core values of democratic life for granted. It is this detailed focus on values and local meanings of democracy that can explain a series of questions about democracy, such as what the American working class may be striving for when it is said that they are voting ‘against their economic interests’ (Graeber 2011). Yet, the focus on values also raises the question: Are there any essential values, practices or institutions that every political configuration should enact in order to qualify as a democracy?

Secularism and liberalism

Anthropologists have spent considerable effort discussing secularism and liberalism, two values that are assumed to be integral to democracy and that transitions to democratic governance are expected to engender and promote. They have thereby questioned the assumed universality and homogeneity of these values.

Secularism

The term ‘secularism’ tends to refer to a separation between institutionalised religion and the state in matters of governance. France’s conception of secularism (laicité), which has often been upheld as an ideal to be pursued by other nation-states, encompasses individualisation and privatisation of religious beliefs, along with their separation from public, political, and institutional life (cf. Gauchet 1998; Bauberot, Millot and Portier 2014). However, maintaining the secular ideal of democracy poses the question of how to consider religious subjects as democratic citizens. Should they express their demands according to their religious beliefs and values, or should they translate and adapt their ideas into a secular (i.e. non-religious) and supposedly naturally shared understanding of politics (Habermas 2008, 114ss)?

It also raises the question of whether any truly secular system of politics exists in the first place. Anthropologists have critically noted that Christianity has served as the default setting against which today’s secular frameworks of democracy have been formed (Asad 2003). Consequently, a recurring political question has been whether (and how) nation-states with a non-Christian population can become truly secular and, hence, democratic. To answer this question, anthropologists have expanded their research beyond the North Atlantic to non-Christian states, arguing that secularism can emerge according to distinct trajectories and different sets of ontological premises (Mahmood 2010; Luehrmann 2011; Agrama 2012; Bubandt and van Beek 2012; Veer 2014; Furani 2015).

Since the last decades of the twentieth century, religion has become increasingly present in public debate. In some cases, historically secular citizens have reacted with furore and anxiety whenever fellow citizens, candidates, or democratically elected representatives have expressed their religious affiliations and concerns (e.g. Navaro-Yashin 2002). And yet, as anthropological research has demonstrated, from the point of view of many ordinary citizens, there is no necessary distinction between an expression of religious morality and political demands. However, religious actions can affirm a particular (and minority) position, causing conflict. For example, in Brazil, many Evangelical Christians understand that they have a ‘duty to position themselves politically, to stop the advance of groups considered to be threats to the moral balance of society’ (Maurício Jr. 2019, 101). They demand changes to national legislation on sexual rights and public education that conform to their religious beliefs. In a religiously plural society, pushing forth such particular religious values can be challenging, as it may bring to the table unnegotiable principles and a moral crusade against those who sustain divergent positions. An alternative set of religious values in Brazil is that of Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé. Grounded in a fight against racism and religious intolerance, it values respect for elders, secrecy, and initiation. Proponents of Candomblé suggest at times that a return ‘to a more traditional social order […] grounded in Afro-Brazilian religious values and social practices’ could be a solution to the ‘social disorder’ the country is facing (Hartikainen 2018, 96), making explicit its connection to the religious value of hierarchy.

Religious practices can even become political techniques in a democracy. In Guatemala, Christianity and democracy are enmeshed to the point that religious actions like praying, fasting, and examining one’s conscience are considered political actions that aim at the moral strengthening of the nation (O'Neill 2010). In North Maluku, Indonesia, democracy and traditional beliefs and practices of sorcery are equally closely entangled (Bubandt 2006; 2012). Along with juridical manoeuvres and corruption, including bribery and vote-buying, politicians can use sorcery to attack their adversaries or to protect themselves before running in an election. Sorcery and corruption are here perceived as ‘an immoral but inescapable way of conducting democratic politics’ (Bubandt 2006, 426). By focusing on these occult and non-transparent aspects, including by incorporating various spirits and spiritualities, anthropologists have witnessed new ways in which modern politics and democracy are being conducted (Bubandt 2012, 196, 204).

Debates around religion and democracy often come back to a widely held perception that Islam and Muslims' religious practices that make claims on public life threaten democracy’s secular foundation (Hirschkind 2008, 126–7). Yet, studying diverse Muslim contexts such as Turkey (Navaro-Yashin 2002), Indonesia (Bubandt 2012), and Egypt (Agrama 2012), shows how many Muslims include non-Muslims minorities into their polities. In modern Egypt, freedom of religious belief is a right that marks which legal framework will be used to judge family disputes under the law (Agrama 2012). These works question the assumptions underlying the normative definition of secularism to demonstrate how the state regulates religion. Muslim religious and political doctrine does not equate submitting to traditional authorities and discourses, but tends to be much more complex, multifaceted, and open to internal criticism and disputes than popular media and political depictions would suggest (cf. Asad 2003; Mahmood 2005).

Overall, religious beliefs and values tend to remain relevant to citizens' political interests and public life. They are deeply entangled with and sometimes indistinguishable from democratic political life.

Liberalism

As with secularism, Euro-American contemporary democracy was also developed within the framework of ‘liberalism’ (cf. Ryan 2012). Liberal democracy contends that individual rights should be protected, in particular freedom of conscience and expression, as well as private property. The protection of such civil liberties has a strong collective dimension, as it relies on checks and balances on the ruling party and the protection of minorities to avoid democracy from descending into a ‘tyranny of the majority’. And yet, liberal democracy can fit oddly with or turn into authoritarian practices and positions of power that aim to impose or silence parts of the polity. Anthropological research on the global increase of populist and authoritarian leaders and movements, in particular the upsurge in far-right politics, shows the many different ways in which core liberal values and institutions can come under threat (e.g. Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016; Balthazar 2017; Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2018; Mazzarella 2019; Hatzikidi and Dullo 2021; Pasieka 2024).

One important concept in these debates is the idea of populism, i.e. a ‘political logic’ or form of rhetoric that operates by antagonizing ‘the people’ from an external or internal ‘enemy’. Populism poses a particularly complicated challenge to liberal democracy because both consider ‘the people’ to be the foundation of political legitimacy and national sovereignty. Yet, populism frequently undermines the institutions and procedures aimed to safeguard civil rights, to the point of engendering ‘an illiberal rejection of consensus-seeking politics or deliberative democracy’. Anthropology’s major contribution to debates over the similarity and difference between populism and democracy has been to ask who defines ‘the people’ and how this is done. It shows that ‘the people’ is a discursive and performative political entity that often excludes a significant part of the population who are treated as ‘non-people’ in that they are not valued, and in some cases even accused of being ‘anti-people’ and domestic enemies (e.g. Sanchez 2020; Hatzikidi 2023a).

A particularly creative way of studying populism is to focus on its aesthetics, styles, and performances. The way in which populist politics appear in the media has changed from traditional media like television to the more recent rise of social media (Cesarino 2024). In these spaces, populist leaders do not necessarily reach out to or are popular among their supporters for socioeconomic similarities or shared ideological values. Rather, because ‘late capitalism values style over content’ (Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016, 72), populist leaders can grab people’s attention with their words, gestures, and positions that are filled with comedy and spectacle (2016, 75). Donald Trump is a good example of this trend. In the context of hyper-mediatised American culture, Trump’s rise as a political figure mirrors his success as a TV entertainer and social media influencer, constantly seizing people's attention, and keeping everyone, including adversaries, attuned to his actions and speeches. While Trump as a billionaire has few socioeconomic similarities with the common citizen he represents, he has mobilised his widespread media presence to posit himself as somehow anti-establishment, thereby charting a common ground with the average American citizen, many of whom constitute his base. This strategy, which has been adopted by several populist leaders beyond Trump, constitutes a logical step in a hyper-mediatised politics ‘that lacks content, sells itself as entertainment, and incorporates comedic stylistics so as to immunize itself from critique’ (Hall, Goldstein and Ingran 2016, 93). Even after being shot at during a speech in his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump managed to perform strength by posing for pictures with blood on his face and the American flag in the background.

Research on democracy in the contexts of populism, far-right politics, and authoritarianism has also raised methodological issues: how should researchers interact affectively and epistemically with those with whom they have profound political and moral disagreements? And what should researchers do if they develop personal affection or friendship for some of the politically ‘unlikable’ others? (Pasieka 2019). Discomfort with studying some aspects of democratic life today may stem from anthropology’s own ‘populist stance, habitually aligning with the common sense of the common people’ (Mazzarella 2019, 46). Anthropologists have often mobilised ordinary people’s perceptions to critique democratic liberalism. Yet, the rise of an illiberal and often far-right populism creates a disconcerting overlap between anthropological critiques of liberalism and those of the far right. Reflecting on this issue, anthropologists have explored how ordinary far-right citizens are usually situated by their political opponents, including researchers. They may be exoticised and ‘othered’ as somehow deplorable because they hold the wrong values; they may be located outside of a progressive political space; or, their political proclivities may be explained away as a mere backlash to decades of neoliberalism (Pasieka 2019).

Given that researchers may disagree with the people they study, it is relevant to ask if they hold unequal epistemological positions for distinct subjects encountered in the field (Dullo 2016). One important response may be to emphasise an anthropological core value: the search for nuance and complexity in social life (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2021). In increasingly polarised times, such nuance, combined with a basic fundamental appreciation of other human beings regardless of their political convictions, may establish an increasingly rare and powerful political discourse. It allows anthropologists to portray complex life narratives of those who move from ‘hope’ (and a left-wing position) to ‘hate’ (and a right-wing authoritarian position) (Pinheiro-Machado and Scalco 2020). At the same time, such a refined approach to studying anti-democratic ‘others’ also makes scholars vulnerable to accusations of not doing enough against authoritarianism and fascism. They may even find themselves accused of being complicit with the far-right by humanising it.

This is all the more serious as populist politics also threaten critical voices from academia, such as politically engaged anthropologists, who are all too easily subsumed under the category of ‘enemies of the people’. Fights against critical scholarship take all kinds of forms, from forbidding certain theoretical approaches and research topics, to cutting research funding across the board, to directly threatening researchers and their families. Scholars from the Global South (Gonçalves and Lasco 2023) have suggested that anthropologists have a responsibility to respond to the increasingly authoritarian and illiberal contexts in which research is conducted today. Instead of criticising liberal democracy due to its inability to prevent exclusionary practices, researchers should pay attention to how its enforcement of the rule of law and freedom of expression and association are the conditions of possibility for pursuing critical scholarship, even against those exclusionary practices. This includes distinguishing liberal democracy from neoliberalism as a governmental rationality that thrives under authoritarian and illiberal democracy, where it deepens its inherent exclusionary logics and widens inequality gaps.

Citizenship and governmentality

Two fruitful ways of studying democracy focus on citizenship and governmentality, i.e. on the techniques and rationalities that aim to direct how people conduct themselves in democratic settings (Foucault 1991; Li 2007). Democracy, like many other systems of governance, co-creates the subjects that live under it, inciting people to adhere to specific conceptions of personhood, often shaped around the idea of a bounded generic individual who is in an equal relationship with fellow citizens. Anthropologists have shown how this production of democratic subjects, or ‘subjectification’, is influenced by all kinds of factors, including disputes over civil, political, social, and human rights; people’s relationships with the state; and exclusionary practices and boundaries that comprise a political community, including gender, race and ethnicity, and class differentiation (e.g. Caldeira 2000; Postero 2007; Lazar 2008; O'Neill 2010; Muehlenbach 2012).

Focusing on citizenship, anthropologists have argued that democratic institutions that do not address inequalities and socio-economic injustice may fail to consolidate democracy (Caldeira 2000; Caldeira and Holston 1999). When Brazil transitioned to a democracy in the 1980s, for example, inequality and criminality developed together, producing new forms of urban segregation that aimed to protect the rich and legitimised state violence against the poor. Disrespect for individual civil and human rights resulted in conceiving of citizens' bodies as 'unbounded', i.e. as open to violent intervention. This idea of the body resulted from Brazil's history as first a colony and then as part of the periphery of global capitalism. Given Brazil's stark inequalities, the country became a 'disjunctive democracy' (Caldeira 2000, 371-5), institutionally democratic but without protecting people's rights in their everyday lives. In the twenty-first century, poor and Black citizens responded to this situation by taking political action and resisting becoming passive subjects of state violence. Fighting for their rights included, for example, trying to acquire legal property rights to their home and land. Such 'insurgent' forms of citizenship were crucial to the consolidation of Brazilian democracy (Holston 2008).

Since the 1990s, anthropologists noticed a widespread embrace of democracy, evident in the multiplication of social movements and new citizenship claims among previously excluded groups (Postero and Elinoff 2019, 4). However, this occurred together with the increased impact of neoliberalism as a dominant form of governmentality in which citizens are mostly considered consumers and dominant values include economic productivity, socio-economic empowerment, and entrepreneurship. The conjunction of new claims to citizenship and neoliberal rationality operated ‘by educating desires and configuring habits, aspirations and beliefs’ (Li 2007, 275). This is to show that it is not just the state that shapes the techniques and rationalities that structure our behaviour, but a whole set of agents including companies, missionaries, scientists, activists, and NGOs (Li 2007, 276).

In an ideal world, functional democracies govern citizens who participate actively in decision-making and political life. However, anthropologists have debated what participation actually means, which actions are valued, and which ones are ignored (O’Neill 2010). Research in contemporary Italy showed that the neoliberal dismantling of the welfare system was met with a growing promotion of voluntarism and non-paid relational labour, such as care for the elderly (Muehlenbach 2012). Here democratic participation is moralised, and people were made to feel compassion and responsibility to care for others, while also covering gaps left by the withdrawal of state policies. This ‘ethical citizenship’ has citizens imagining themselves as bound together by moral and affective—rather than social and political—ties, leading to asymmetrical relations between caretaker and receiver. They are primarily driven by considerations of duty rather than by claiming their rights (Muelenbach 2012, 43).

Focusing on the different techniques of government has been fundamental to discussing democracy not only as a particular political arrangement but also as a manner of governing a population of citizens by altering ‘how bodies are oriented, how lives are lived, and how subjects are formed’ (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, 984). Through it, anthropologists revisited the theoretical divide between the state and civil society (e.g. Appadurai 2001). It shows that the state is not a monolith but may use a myriad of different techniques, logics, and arguments, including bureaucracy, to shape who we are as citizens and how we conceive of political participation. This raises the question of how the state should be imagined. Does it stand above society and encompass it? Is the state best understood as the effect of spontaneous action by politicians and citizens in support of it? Or is the state largely manipulative and can manufacture even spontaneous-seeming action by citizens via governmental techniques (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 130–54)?

Consider the example of democracy in 1990s Turkey. Here, a dispute between a secularist social organisation and an Islamic party for a ‘better democracy’ led each side to establish their positions as reflecting the demands of the people. Yet, both sides did not just reflect but actively attempted to produce a corresponding ‘people’ that would sustain their agendas (Navaro-Yashin 2002, 144–52). The secularists tried to convince potential voters that secularism had a long history in Turkey, reprinting history books that fit their convictions and creating educational centres in various shantytowns around Istanbul, where women would be taught practical and professional skills, like childcare and sewing, while also learning about the principles of Turkish secularism (Ataturkism). In 1994, the governor of Istanbul even organised celebrations for ‘Republic Day’ in the heart of the capital, a seemingly traditional holiday that celebrated secularism, even if it had never been a day of celebration before. People started actively participating, providing seemingly spontaneous support for one side of the political dispute.

In sum, anthropologists have shown that active democratic citizenship can take unexpected and new directions, and that it is pertinent to consider not just the values that orient people’s actions but also the frequently subtle and pervasive power relations that shape how we think of and engage with state institutions and a ‘spontaneous’ civil society.

Representation and participation

Democracy relies on knowing the will of the people. Frequently, this will is expressed through individual votes for a representative, who will act on their behalf and govern them. Elections, which are crucial for liberal definitions of democracy and which have been studied critically by anthropologists (e.g. Heredia and Palmeira 2006; Spencer 2007; Banerjee 2014), have been a major focus in the study of democracy. Yet, the will of the people also finds other outlets, such as opinion polls, protests, and demonstrations (Paley 2001; Razsa and Kurnir 2012; Kunreuther 2018; Dullo 2022) or debates, memes, and propaganda spread on social media (Juris 2012; Cesarino 2022). The anthropological study of democracy has therefore questioned how citizens express their will and has asked what the limits of representation may be, or rather what may be ‘hidden from view when one figure speaks for another’ (Lee 2011, 937).

Elections and votes have long been analysed as specific kinds of ritual, creating a distinct temporality from everyday life, and with deep social and symbolic effects on how people relate to one another. For instance, in a small village of predominantly Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, the introduction of elections was perceived as producing conflict in an otherwise calm, polite, and peaceful village. To vote and position oneself according to one or another party was a way of distinguishing between good and bad community members, differentiating oneself morally from others while also following one’s self-interest. This upset the existing moral order in the village previously organised around ideas of unity, gentleness, and restraint in public life (Spencer 2007, 72–95). Here, elections did not just reflect the people’s will, but they generated meaning, plunging public life into a state of moral disorder where naked self-interest was not just displayed but increasingly produced. Electoral disputes’ conflictive relations generate gossip and performative adhesion to a side. They can even promote a split within a community, down to the granular level of homes, families, and friends, but they may also produce hope and faith in a better future (Mayblin and Clough 2014; Mayblin 2025).

Thinking of elections as ritual also highlights some of the constructive ways in which they make meaning. Elections mean a great deal to Indian voters, for example, where voter turnout has been high for decades. Here, voting expresses and enacts values of citizenship, accountability, and civility (Banerjee 2014, 3). It allows people to challenge for one day the inequalities of wealth and status that usually dominate their daily lives, akin to a carnival that turns social hierarchies on their head for a short period of time (Banerjee 2014, 10–1). Surprisingly, the spread of neoliberalism does not so much undermine Indian elections but indeed strengthens them, as voting is one of the few outlets for poor, subaltern, and rural Indians to have a say in an otherwise neoliberal world.

All that said, elections are much more than just ritual. They can be thought of as ‘a set of practices and artifacts’, which may lead to an alternative conceptualisation of democracy (Coles 2004). By focusing on the practical implementation involved in organising elections, such as the production of documents, people’s physical displays and movements inside polling stations, and the filling of forms and registers, it becomes obvious that elections are not just symbolic events that foster or challenge social hierarchy, but also technical artifacts that not only elicit but make real the will of the people. For example, in the democratisation following the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the turn of the twenty-first century, various measures were taken to ensure people would only be able to cast a single personal vote. First, voters’ fingers were marked with a special fluorescent ink, visible under an ultraviolet light, then voter registries and identification documents guaranteed that votes could be properly registered (Coles 2004). A polling station can thus be thought of as akin to a scientific laboratory, in that it produces ‘facts, knowledge and order’ (Coles 2004, 553).

Given the power that voting techniques and procedures have, it is unsurprising that they are often the subject of heated debate. This was the case in the 2022 presidential campaigns in Brazil, when the incumbent candidate Jair Bolsonaro questioned the security of electronic voting machines and demanded the return of printed ballots. Discrediting the voting system and promoting conspiracy theories about the fairness of a ballot count (Hatzikidi 2023b) can be a political strategy that highlights the importance of elections and their procedures to establish a fair decision. That is why anthropologists nowadays include fake news and digital influencers in their analyses of the technical processes of campaigns (e.g. Cesarino 2022). The latter also reminds us that elections do not exist in a vacuum. While the concrete electoral procedures may try to uphold and instantiate egalitarian ideas such as ‘one person one vote’, electoral campaigns also reproduce structural inequalities when it comes to campaign financing, access to media outlets, and the existing social stigma of ethnic groups running for office (Collins 2021).

Studying democracy ethnographically also attunes us to the unintended effects and internal paradoxes that it can bring. Take, for example, the experience of the rural Mueda people of Northern Mozambique, studied in the 1990s (West 2008). Here, democratic reformers sought to promote local leaders to political office rather than sending authorities from the capital to govern Mueda communities. These changes in the dynamics of authority and local power were perceived locally as an abandonment by the central administration, as the loss of local voices at the federal level. Instead of empowering the Mueda, efforts of bringing about local leadership as part of a greater democratic participation made them less integrated with the decision-making centres in the capital and thus politically weaker. This case raises the question of whether choosing one’s representative is sufficient as a democratic practice, or whether democracy also requires having freedom of speech and the power to be taken into account.

Understanding how elections are made sense of locally is as important for understanding rural Mozambique as it is for grasping the political dynamics in the capital of the United Kingdom. Here, the Brexit referendum in 2016 was not so much an expression of ‘culture wars’ between cosmopolitan liberals and nationalist conservatives; rather, it was an expression of dissatisfaction with the government and with elections more generally, which were seen as having no tangible effect on people's lives (Koch 2017). Once again, democratic elections presented us with a paradox: namely, that the Brexit referendum had a high voter turnout, in part to communicate via voting that electoral politics do not make a difference. It was an opportunity to reject British government, police monitoring, and Kafkaesque welfare bureaucracy. Thus, people took an opportunity to insert their own moralities and expectations into how electoral politics are run (Koch 2017, 228).

The aforementioned works show that in order to analyse elections as both extraordinary rituals and epistemic and political laboratories it is necessary to understand ordinary life. Elections and ordinary life can also hang together, sometimes inextricably so. In Brazil, for example, left-wing demonstrations took millions to the streets across the country in June 2013 over a continued dissatisfaction with the government, public services, and living conditions against the context of a booming economy. This in turn produced a rise in right-wing demonstrations and a polarised presidential campaign in 2014, with a narrow victory for the governing Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores). Conservative demonstrations during the following years demanded and eventually succeeded to remove the president via impeachment in 2016. This was again followed by mass demonstrations from both political sides until the presidential election of 2018. Against such a politically explosive series of events, the elections of 2018 cannot be studied in isolation. They need to be understood as part and parcel of a longer period of political turmoil, which changed the parameters of collective action and the self-perception of the nation (Dullo 2022).

The permeability of election periods highlights that democracy-making is an open-ended process. It also emphasizes the importance of other forms of expressing political will and claiming their demands, such as protests. Self-organised communities can be created via discussions and semi-formal procedures that enable collective decision-making (Razsa and Kurnik 2012; Juris 2012; Greenberg 2014; Kunreuther 2018). In Jakarta, Indonesia, for example, young activists were fundamental to the decline of Suharto’s dictatorship in 1998 and for the establishment of democracy. As part thereof, these activists also positioned themselves as the sole voice of the people, excluding other citizens from demonstrations who did not share their masculine, young, and middle-class identities and styles. Despite their biases and limitations, they claimed to be universal and national citizens, raising the question of ‘who constitutes the fringes as well as the centre of democratic discourse’ (Lee 2011, 934). Protests are thus also sites of exclusion, frequently loaded with power relations among those who constitute the core of a political movement and those who do not. Anthropologists have analysed internal disagreements and ways of reaching consensus, sometimes across generational divergent expectations of what is achievable and how to pursue it (Flynn 2021). One of the most long-lasting social movements, the Landless Workers' Movement in Brazil, reached forty years of existence in 2024 and has produced leaders across generations, allowing researchers to ask how political demands and strategies transform over time (Flynn 2024).

But democratic protest is also a site of creativity and prefigurative politics. In social movements around the globe, participants frequently organise according to more horizontal and egalitarian relationships, illustrating as much as claiming what a proper understanding of democracy should be. In Occupy Slovenia, for example, protesters engaged in direct democracy, without trying to embody a popular majority or stand in for the voice of the nation. Instead, they emphasised democratic ways of finding agreement, organising small workshops, the decisions of which were later taken to a common assembly. In this case, it was the form of political decision-making that empowered minorities and unleashed political energies (2012, 244).

Conclusion

Anthropologists’ unique contributions to studying democracy hinge on an empirically grounded understanding of the cultural, social, and moral aspects of the everyday experiences of democracy among ordinary citizens. This distinguishes the discipline’s contributions from other approaches that focus on institutional governance and formal definitions. Instead of adhering to liberal, secular, and representative definitions of democracy, anthropologists have questioned the assumptions underlying these normative concepts. They have shown that local understandings of democracy are much more varied and complex, entangled with history and culture, blurring the boundaries between politics, economics, religion, and ethnicity, and stretching across diverse notions of citizenship, participation, or elections.

Democracy was frequently promoted in the second half of the twentieth century as a remedy for dictatorship or colonial rule, transforming the political regime into one where ‘the people’ are in charge. Yet, anthropologists have demonstrated that asymmetrical power relations are embedded in definitions of democracy, including who counts as ‘the people’ and when. Therefore, anthropologists have concentrated on uncovering the power dynamics and political rationalities that uphold existing democracies and their inequalities, highlighting the gap between their promises and actual realities. In a global landscape marked by rising populism and authoritarianism, anthropologists are also examining the effects of a democratic decline not only on the citizens affected but also on anthropology itself. Rather than formulating a single, universal definition of democracy, many anthropologists focus on democratic practices, institutions, and values. They have concluded that democracy does not always function identically everywhere and that unexpected power dynamics can transform both the concept of democracy and the ways in which people strive to promote or challenge it.

Acknowledgements

The writing of this entry benefited from great input and exchange from my students at the Anthropology of Democracy seminar; colleagues - in particular Corinna Howland and Katerina Hatzikidi -; and the anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at the OEA, Riddhi Bhandari, Felix Stein, and Rebecca Tishler.

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Note on contributor

Eduardo Dullo is an associate professor of anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil. His historical and ethnographical research focused on the disputes between governmental and religious projects to produce citizens with specific ethical subjectivities leading to the formation of Brazilian secularity and democracy.

Dr. Eduardo Dullo, Department of Anthropology, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil. eduardo.dullo@ufrgs.br ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3793-7406

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

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

Time

Felix Stein — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 18:25:09 +0000

Bronze cast by Hugo Wolfgang Rheinhold, c. 1893, depicting multiple temporalities in tension. Picture by Wikimedia.

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov

Initially published 10 Jun 2025

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

Abstract:

Time, from an anthropological perspective, is culturally specific and inseparable from our understanding of the world and our place in it. Anthropology charts how and to what extent time is culturally constituted, and how, increasingly, these cultural constructs coexist, come into conflict, and colonise each other. This entry introduces time as a field of anthropological inquiry, including its emergence in philosophy and evolutionary thought, and the dialogue between physics’ relativity theory and anthropology’s cultural relativist approach to time. The anthropology of time has asked whether it is a multiple cultural and social construct, and how its multiplicity may be explored ethnographically, be it within a given society, in contexts of socio-cultural contact, or in the context of globalisation. Being attuned to temporal multiplicities enables anthropologists to improve how social and cultural research is conducted and to ask under which circumstances temporal multiplicities can be productive for anthropological theory and practice. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Introduction

Time is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. Ancient and contemporary philosophers have not come to a consensus as to whether time exists independent from the entities and activities within it (Bardon 2024). Physicists of the twentieth century, notably Albert Einstein, made waves by reaffirming that time was not independent of the world, but was in fact conditioned by matter and movement. Their ideas soon reached the humanities, notably philosophy (Bergson 1924; Cassirer 1922) and anthropology. For example, Russian anthropologist Vladimir Bogoraz took Einstein’s famous insight that time is not absolute but depends on the observer, to theorize indigenous accounts of time like those of the Chukchi people in the Russian Far East, whom Bogoraz had studied in the late 19th and early 20th century (1923, 57). He recounts the following story:

A shaman went to distant lands, half-legendary or even entirely fairylands. After a year or two he returns. He is at full strength, in the full bloom of his health, but his home village has completely changed. His dwelling collapsed. His wife and young son disappeared. On the road he meets an old man with a grey beard and asks him about his son. It turns out that this old man is his own son. The shaman came back younger than his son. The two years of traveling … have passed like a whole human life. (1923,19)

In providing these and other stories, Bogoraz was in dialogue with physics’ relativity theory as well as with the work of US-based anthropologist Franz Boas. Boas had argued as early as 1887 that ‘civilisation is not something absolute, but… relative, and that our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilisation goes’ (1974, 64). Such ‘cultural relativism’ and physics' relativity theory inspired emerging anthropological interest in how people around the world conceive of time. It also inspired comparative literary theory such as Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1975) who borrowed the concept of the space-time or ‘chronotope’ from Einstein to postulate that space and time are inseparable from our understandings of the world and our place in it.

What this scholarship adds to physics is that time depends not just on the position of the observer but also on the observer's categories of thought, and their society and culture. The view of time as largely socially constructed was formulated systematically by the early twentieth century French sociologist Emile Durkheim ([1912] 1995). He acknowledged that time—along with other ‘principal categories of thought’ such as space, cause, and group (‘species’)—was so fundamental to human lives that it seemed almost inseparable from the functioning of human intellect. Given that human societies were ultimately part of nature and nature has some ‘objective value’, so too do the principal categories of thought, such as time, that humans have developed. However, Durkheim insisted that time was still largely a product of collective thought, as the ways we understand time are strongly determined by our social and cultural methods of dividing, measuring, and expressing it. Our division of time into days, weeks, months, and years corresponds to the regular recurrence of rites and ceremonies, which are ultimately social. As Durkheim put it, ‘it is not my time that is organized in this way; it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civilization’ ([1912] 1995, 10). For Durkheim, time thus had a mostly social origin even if it was never completely arbitrary.

Durkheim’s argument—that time is a largely social category that, once constructed, exerts power over society—still holds for many anthropologists today. Together with insights from Einstein’s relativity theory and Boas’ ‘cultural relativism’, it allowed scholars to investigate how people around the world make sense of time and to illustrate that seemingly common-sense understandings of it have many viable alternatives. This entry shows that alternative views of time ‘co-evolve’ with Western concepts of it (Fabian 1983) such as the global scale of universal time that underpins world capitalist economies. For anthropology, time is not one but many. This entry charts how this temporal multiplicity has been understood in a changing landscape of anthropological approaches to time, including current work on two forms of relations within such temporal multiplicities: the first consists of relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and assertions of change can be made against it. The second concerns relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other. The entry concludes with laying out the importance of anthropology to understand time in the age of the Anthropocene.

Evolutionism, diffusionism, and fieldwork

Even before time became one of the key topics of anthropological research, it already defined the discipline as it was emerging in the nineteenth century. Anthropology aimed to shed light on human history, as explored in Ancient Society (Morgan 1878), that which predated the emergence of the state and industrialised modernity (see also Maine 1861 and Tyler 1871). Yet, unlike archaeology, anthropology was interested in cultures and societies that were contemporary to it and accessible through ethnographic study. These contemporaries, such as Australian Aborigines, were assumed to illustrate ‘early’ stages of social and cultural evolution. The Native American Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) were held to illuminate the ‘Heroic age’ of Ancient Greece (Morgan 1851, 120–40). Interested in the ‘lines of human progress’ (Morgan 1878), anthropologists conceived of themselves as located at its forefront, understood to be in Europe. From there, ‘sailing to the ends of the earth’, a scholar was deemed to be ‘in fact travelling [back] in time; he is exploring the past; every step he makes is the passage of an age’ (Degérando [1800] 1969, 63). Such a temporal ordering of other people’s lives reflected Western intellectual culture, where evolutionary stages were based on oversimplified dichotomies of the ‘primitive’ versus ‘civilised’, ‘backward’ versus ‘modern’, and ‘undeveloped’ versus ‘advanced’.

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, such temporal distinctions were increasingly contested on political grounds, since the subjugation and colonisation of others were frequently justified by postulating others’ ‘backwardness’ (Asad 1973). But on conceptual grounds, this temporal classification had already been contested since the late nineteenth century. The Victorian polymath and originator of eugenics Francis Galton famously argued that evolutionism, which classified human groups along temporal stages with Western cultures as the final stage, overlooked how cultures and societies influenced each other. For example, the line of socio-cultural progress may not stem from ‘simpler’ origins in the remote past to greater complexity in more recent times, but rather from recently ‘civilized’ or colonised originals to equally recent ‘duplicate copies of the same original’ that were nonetheless more ‘primitive’ (Galton 1889).

This was not to say that all insights by evolutionist scholars were wrong. One of the central contributions of evolutionary anthropology’s temporal classification was the discovery of matrilineal kinship and the political prominence of women in many societies. Far from being ‘natural’, patrilineal kinship and rule by men (‘patriarchy’) was shown to be a result of relatively recent accumulation of wealth and development of private property (Morgan 1878; Engels [1884] 1990). Galton’s objection drew anthropological attention to how often this change from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ was not a matter of evolution but that of influence by dominant neighbouring cultures (Rivers 1914, volume II: 90–149). Tracing these lines of influence—the geographical spread of cultures from assumed ‘cradles of civilization’ to their imitative peripheries—came to be called ‘diffusionism’. Diffusionism reinforced the idea that space was enmeshed with time:

Since all historical events occur in space, we must be able to measure the time they needed to spread by the distances that were covered or a reading of time on the clock of the globe (Ratzel 1904, 521, cited in Fabian 1983, 19).

In the twentieth century, time remains a key research tool but in a different sense than in evolutionism or diffusionism. Anthropology develops a temporally distinct understanding of research as being based in ‘fieldwork’, holding that ‘time in the field’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016) should take ‘a year or more’ (Rivers 1913, 7). Initially, field research was often much longer—frequently due to political circumstances that were as a rule un- or under-stated in academic publications. Bronislaw Malinowski’s famous ethnography Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)—a study of early twentieth century travel and exchange off the eastern coast of New Guinea—became a manifesto for the method of ‘participant observation’ requiring that researchers not simply interview the people they study but participate in their lives. In creating this method, it was not frequently acknowledged that Malinowski’s fieldwork had only taken this long because he was not allowed to return to Europe during the First World War. As an Austrian citizen, Malinowski was considered an ‘enemy subject’ working on British colonial territory (Young 1984; Baker 1987). Bogoraz’s ethnography mentioned above took place under similarly prolonged circumstances, as it was conducted while he was in political exile in 1889-1899 for socialist activism in imperial Russia (Ssorin-Chaikov 2008).

Temporal multiplicity

Ethnographic fieldwork for ‘a year or more’ made time a research question rather than an answer. Instead of disassembling cultures into multiple layers of human evolution with cultural ‘survivals’ reflecting stages that were ‘once in existence’ (Engels [1884] 1990, 37), or tracking cultural traits over geographical space to measure their diffusion, anthropologists began to explore societies and cultures as largely coherent and self-referential units. This was done by following their internal logic, including when it comes to time.

For instance, kinship had previously been conceived through the lens of either an evolutionary timeline from ‘matriarchy’ to ‘patriarchy’ (Morgan 1878) or lines of diffusion on ‘the clock of the globe’ (Ratzel 1904). Now that anthropologists studied groups of people ethnographically, kinship became key to understanding their culturally distinct forms of temporal organisation. A classic example of this is the study of the Nuer of Southern Sudan by British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard (1940). Evans-Pritchard argued that the early twentieth century Nuer largely measured time in terms of socially relevant activities, determined by ecological change, such as where they reside during the dry and the rainy seasons of the year. However, the Nuer also conceived of time in a structural way, thinking of it as largely static. In this conception of time it formed an ‘unalterable’ distance ‘between two points, the first and last persons in a line of agnatic [father-based] descent’ (Evans-Pritchard 1940, 108) and an equally ‘unalterable’ distance between the mythical beginnings of the world and the present—so that the ‘tree under which mankind came into being was still standing in Western Nuerland a few years ago’ (1940, 108). Evans-Prichard’s work shows that time is frequently multiple—differently understood and structured not just from culture to culture but also within cultures, e.g. ecological and structural time.

Similar findings were made elsewhere. In the late 1950s, American anthropologist Clifford Geertz charted ideas of timelessness in Bali which, according to him, underpinned the Balinese calendar. Geertz examined a complex calendar which did not add up to a directional duration of years, as Western calendars would do. Instead, it featured timelessness comprising static cycles, important for religious rituals (Geertz [1966] 1973, 384). However, Geertz noted that Balinese timelessness did not prevent this predominantly Hinduist society from simultaneously noting chronological time such as exact dates, everyday occurrences, or recent historical events. Ritual timeliness coexisted with chronological or linear notions of time. Yet according to Geertz, this chronological time was of ‘distinctly secondary importance’ ([1966] 1973, 391, ft29) to the people he studied. It had emerged not ‘from within’ Balinese society but ‘from without’; that is, from a developing national state ‘whose centre of gravity lay in the cities of Java and Sumatra, where modern notions of time went hand in hand with ideas of a new nation and of youth culture’ (409–10).

Ethnographic studies of time-reckoning in 1930s Sudan and 1950s Bali showcased the many ways in which groups of people can make sense of time. This led to a debate in anthropology on whether time, particularly in its practical, everyday dimensions, is universal or culturally specific (Bloch 1977; Leach 1961; Howe 1981; Gell 1992). As part of these debates, anthropologists’ own temporal assumptions would eventually come under critique.

Temporal othering and global processes

By the 1980s, the relative autonomy of ‘field sites’ that many classical anthropological studies relied on came under question. Much anthropological work had constituted its subjects as ‘the temporal Other’ (Fabian 1983) to modernity. Ethnographies had explicitly or implicitly contrasted the lives of ‘non-modern’ peoples to that of the assumedly modern readers of anthropological work. Our lives responded to history books, calendars, and clocks, while ‘their’ lives were marked by timelessness and the falsely assumed absence of history (Wolf 1982). To remain ‘objective’— true to the reality anthropology charted—scholarship had required distance as evidence that the subjects of study were ‘independently constituted’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2) from the people who studied them. Now, Anthropology had to rethink its own temporal assumptions. Anthropologist became acutely aware that history in fact included the impact of societies where they were coming from on societies that anthropologists explored. Emerging scholarship now had to account for existing relationships of power between anthropologists and the people they explored, which altered the social situations where anthropologists were present as participant observers. This evinced a ‘critical ambivalence’ of the discipline’s desire for objectivity as anthropology faced itself as having been already a part of its own subjects of study’ (Marcus and Myers 1995, 2).

Several concrete solutions were developed to minimise temporal biases in anthropological research. Firstly, ‘fieldwork locations’ (Gupta and Ferguson 1997) were no longer thought of as being unaffected by modernity, Western cultures, or capitalist economies. They were no longer deemed to be ‘frozen in time’ or profoundly temporally distinct from Western, modern time. Places where anthropologists conduct fieldwork now appeared not as relation-neutral dots on the map or locally-specific cultural settings but rather as themselves historically produced within broader relations such as capitalist demands for resources: from gold and fur to rubber and oil, from sugar and land to workers or slaves (Mintz 1985; Wolf 1982). Following this insight, ethnography became increasingly ‘multi-sited’ (Marcus 1995), stressing that anthropology in a globalised world is about always-already interconnected spaces between what takes place ‘at home’ (of anthropologists) and in ‘the field’, i.e. the home of their research subjects. This new stance came about through research such as anthropological histories of working-class diets in Britain, which explored how British diets were linked via the North Atlantic Triangle to the changing social organisation of labour in Caribbean plantations, where sugar was produced, and to West Africa, where slaves were traded in exchange for European weapons and other goods (Mintz 1985).

A second remedy to anthropology's temporal biases was the idea of ‘multi-temporal ethnography’ (Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016), a research approach that considers the multiple temporalities of research on the one hand and the multiple temporalities of people that are being researched on the other. Ton Otto’s (2016) ethnography on the Baluan Island in Papua New Guinea in the late 1980s gives a clear example of this. Otto was invited to a funeral, after which he decided to walk back to the cemetery to take photos of the grave. For him, time for the photos was part of the ethnographic chronicle of that day. For his hosts, however, returning to the grave so soon after the funeral was dangerous, as the spirits of the dead might return to the funeral site too. The shared time between the ‘ethnographic present’ (research temporalities, including fieldwork photography) overlaps with other forms of presence—such as Baluan temporalities of kinship renewal. Otto describes how his return made his research subjects suspicious of his ritual powers to deal with the haunting pasts of the spirits of the dead. This made Otto not just an observer but also a participant in the Baluan time that he observed.

Global processes affect the shared time between the anthropologists and the people they study. Fieldwork time was institutionalised as part of annual academic rhythms, with a year in the field becoming a norm within the PhD in anthropology. Current work pressures and neoliberal employment insecurity generate more fast-paced research, as well as ‘patchwork ethnography’ (Günel, Varma, and Watanabe 2020) where shorter fieldwork periods are spread over longer, ‘punctuated’ (Guyer 2007) academic time (Faubion and Marcus 2009; Marcus and Okely 2007). PhD fieldwork stops being a period of academic isolation between anthropology student and supervisor. Instead, it is broken up by continuous email exchanges, proposal writing, and joint ‘improvising theory’ (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). At the same time, this happens amid ‘profound temporal turbulences’ in social and cultural settings that anthropologists explore—when (and because) anthropologists ‘can no longer make assumptions about what is necessary for their method to produce rich ethnographic data—a temporally stable scene and subject of study’ (Rees 2008, 7; Rabinow 2008). The anthropological field study also happens in the context of ‘the unbearable slowness of being an anthropologist now’ (Marcus 2003). One of Marcus’ examples is the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy caused by a chemical accident which attracted ethnographic research in the area from 1988, yet resulting in a book publication only in 2001 (Fortun 2001).

Globalised capitalism and temporal multiplicities within groups

As a part of global capitalism, the temporalities of people’s bodies, social lives, and consumption are increasingly subsumed to the rhythms of the markets. The globalisation of sushi, for example, shows the market value of tuna depending on how quickly it can be flown to Japanese and global high-end consumers (Bestor 2008). Despite the appearance of sushi and sashimi as traditional Japanese cuisine, it is a mass capitalist invention made possible by international jumbo jets and, within Japan, trucks with highly efficient commercial refrigeration. This research into ‘just in time production’ (Harvey 1989) and more broadly the anthropology of globalisation confirms Karl Marx’s insight that globalised capital and the market-driven industrial division of labour ‘annihilates space by time’ ([1857-1859] 1973, 535). Locations of production and consumption become increasingly closer to one another by sped-up travel.

Ethnographies such as Theodore Bestor’s reveal homogenised timetabling on a global scale, which anthropologists and historians of science research as ‘empires of time’ (Aventi 1990; Galison 2004). In 1883, the adoption of Standard Railway Time for North America meant that the residents of Cornwall, Ontario, had to set their clocks back five minutes and forty-five seconds to achieve synchronicity with the rest of the rail network (Stein 2001). That same year, a convention of railroad executives in Chicago standardised five time zones for North America on the basis of British Greenwich Mean Time. This was a precursor to the International Meridian Conference in 1884 in Washington, DC, where the global scale of universal time was agreed upon to consist of 24 time zones, counted from the initial meridian for longitude passing through the Greenwich Royal Observatory, with a universal calendar based on a 24-hour day beginning at midnight in Greenwich (Stephens 1983; Ogle 2015; Kern 2003).

As such, a calendar is homogenised globally; it comes with the homogenisation of ‘the money economy’ which was demonstrated to come hand in hand with ‘the universal diffusion of pocket watches’ (Simmel [1903] 1950, 412), alongside the equally homogeneous and clear-cut boundaries between work and rest, busyness and idleness—including culturally new experiences of boredom, as in the case of Australian Aboriginal Walpiri after clock time was introduced to them (Musharbash 2007). Ethnographies have shown how quantitative time creates qualitative temporal relations. For instance, Karen Davies (1994) illustrates the tension between clock or linear time, which takes its cues from economic principles (wage labour, punctuality), and what she calls ‘process time’ or temporal relations oriented on respect, empathy, and affection for care-receivers in Swedish day nurseries. Michael Crawley explores Ethiopian long-distance runners who use digital self-tracking devices and identify themselves not as individuals competing in natural time but as parts of groups who expend energy synchronously and suffer together ‘on the part of the self … [and] on behalf of others’ as Ethiopian Orthodox Christians (2021, 662).

Standardised forms of reckoning time were imposed on different cultures and societies at different times (Aventi 1990; Stern 2012, 2021) and locations (Shresta 2015). Current research on this harkens back to the classical point made by sociologist Pitirim Sorokin that while temporal standards take the form of quantitative time, they coexist with ‘full-blooded’ sociocultural time within different social groups consisting of their own rhythms, pulsations, and conventions, including calendars. For example, the Harvard University calendar is quite different from the Boston working-class calendar ‘in regard to holidays, beginning and the end of the “school” and factory year’ (Sorokin 1943, 197).

Temporal hierarchies

The temporal multiplicities that we see playing out on a global scale filter down into people’s daily lives as hierarchies. For example, in late August 1994, I was traveling in Central Siberia with Evenki hunters and reindeer herders to the Katonga village on a tributary of the Yenisei River that divides Western and Eastern Siberia. My co-travellers were to bring their children to boarding school by September 1 for the beginning of the school year (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 26). The trip lasted two days and began in the ecological time of hunting and herding, which was imprecise from the perspective of the school calendar. Travel itself, with the hunters, herders, and their children riding reindeer, depended on how difficult it was to cross rivers, and how far we were before it got dark. We ended up being several hours late for the start of school.

September 1 designates a ‘day of knowledge’ in the Russian national calendar. It marks the beginning of the school year that has quantitative dimensions marking hours and minutes for lessons, breaks between them, fixed times for meals—all that being very different from both the activities and daily schedule in reindeer herding and hunting camps. The ‘day of knowledge’ celebration involved a pupils’ parade and calling out all new students by name, upon which they were to step forward from their line and loudly reply, ‘Here!’ When a pupil is absent, the head teacher would say, ‘Ah, [he or she is still] in the forest’, marking a hierarchical difference between the time of the state and that of people’s ordinary lives. Hierarchy can be used to structure all aspects of temporal multiplicity, be it what goes after what (‘sequencing’), exactly when things are done (‘timing’), and through what visions of the past, present, and future activities should be interpreted (Munn 1992, 116).

Hierarchy can even govern more subtle temporal multiplicities. Anthropologist Nancy Munn, who studied the ritual trade of kula shells on the eastern coast of New Guinea during the second half of the twentieth century, showed that gift-giving generates its own time. As an ‘action system’, it produces temporal circles of cyclical obligations to give and reciprocate, and the line-like time of movement of canoes between islands. Munn argues that this inter-island movement and the circulation of shells among people ‘was not in or through time and space, but that they form (structure) and constitute (create) the spacetime manifold in which they “go on”’ (1983, 280). Hierarchy plays a role here, as both obligations and canoe movements can be ‘relatively slow’ and difficult or, conversely, ‘speedy’ and easy. They depend on people’s navigational skills, correlating the social skills and power (‘fame’) of people who give and receive gifts.

In the Evenki case, moving from the forest to the village school was conceived during the Soviet era as symbolising ‘the great removal’ up another line-like process: the evolution from ‘primitive’ to ‘scientific’ communism (Bloch 2004; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003, 140–69). There are also two cyclical times at play here: that of the school calendar and that of the annual ecological movement in Siberian reindeer herding. Being punctual or not in quantitative time makes visible hierarchical arrangements of the disciplined and the undisciplined, village versus forest lifestyles, educated teachers versus ‘ignorant’ children—and ultimately the school teachers’ temporal distinctions of modern and non-modern.

When the movement is ‘relatively slow’ and difficult (we were late), school teachers were to wait for the children that were travelling with us. In this example, the teachers, i.e. people in power, were made to wait. Yet, according to recent ethnographies of waiting, waiting is usually something that people in more vulnerable structural positions must do, such as waiting in line for medical or social services or staying at a refugee camp as ‘a waiting zone’ outside of society (Auyero 2012; Janeja and Bandak 2018, 7; Jacobsen, Karlsen and Khosravi 2021). Ethnographies of time reveal waiting as a technology of governance where power is exercised through claims on other people’s time (Bourdieu 2000, 227–30). Under state socialism, making people queue became ubiquitous of not just chronic shortages of goods and ‘distributive power’ of sellers and the apparatchik (Verdery 1991), but of the ‘etatization of time' (Verdery 1996: 39-58), i.e. the increase of state control over it. However, in this Evenki case, power is exercised over people of authority such as teachers and state bureaucrats. Waiting for the Evenki to be on time is part of a longer waiting for them to move up developmental time—waiting for history to be made.

These examples highlight the hierarchical relations between different understandings of time. One kind of time, such as ecological time or waiting time, works to affirm or challenge or indeed frustrate other kinds of temporal organisation, such as calendar school time or the time of progress. Current anthropological work focuses on relations within temporal multiplicities, which are at least two: relations of change in which one kind of time is taken to be true and in doing so falsifying or replacing others, and relations of exchange, where temporal differences work as resources for each other.

Change and exchange

One notorious example for how one conception of time replaces another is the conflict between Christianity and Western science. Christian and Western scientific understandings of time are not completely opposed. The concept of singular, natural, linear time has one of its points of origin in Christianity, as a projection of Christ’s biography onto generational biblical time from Adam to Abraham (McCarthy 1997). Christian teachings also underpin the term ‘temporality’ that refers to the condition of existing within a time that is itself temporary. ‘Temporality’ originally meant worldly or secular possessions or revenues of the church or clergy as opposed to God who is ‘eternal’, that is, timeless. The term ‘temporality’ became useful in anthropology to refer to the notions of time that themselves change historically and across cultures, highlighting time-related specificity (Guyer 2007; Dalsgaard and Nielsen 2016).

Today, natural time tends to claim truth over Christian time with regard to our understanding of when the world originated and of where time might lead. Natural time also states what is timeless, namely, the laws of nature. Changing from Christian to natural time is often conceived of as part of ‘progress’, as opposing these two conceptions of time is associated with broader intellectual and political questions of what constitutes scientific truth. The time of ‘predestination’ (Weber [1905] 1992) and of religiously sanctioned hierarchies (Kantorowicz 1997), differs from the Darwinist survival of the fittest. Conflicts between conceptions of time have been reflected in state ideologies and popular culture, including fiction (Beer 1980) and material artefacts. For example, the statue in picture 1 is a famous 1893 bronze cast made by German sculptor Hugo Rheinhold, entitled 'Ape with skull', about 30 centimetres high. On it, the biblical quote 'eritis sicut deus' (‘you will be as gods’) warns us against eating from the Tree of Knowledge. It restates the temporality of the fall from Eden as that of ascent of Man. The inscription features in the open book of a pile of the works of Darwin, atop of which sits an ape contemplating a human skull and holding a drawing compass with one of its feet. The statue illustrates different conceptions of time in competition with one another.

Picture 1: Ape with skull, source: Wikipedia.

ape.jpeg

Moreover, it demonstrates how meanings of time are created by where such artefacts are placed. Copies of this bronze cast are on public display at institutions of biology and medicine such as the Boston Medical Library, the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Evolutionary Biology, the Medical Library of Queen’s University, Canada, etc. Yet, the original holds pride of place in the Kremlin Museum's collection of Vladimir Lenin's belongings. The political leader of Soviet Russia had received it as a gift from a young American businessman, Armand Hammer, who visited him in 1921. As a gift, the figurine received an unintended yet well-fitting Marxist meaning: ‘You will be as gods’ was taken to refer to building a new and radically different society. The Museum catalogue highlights this gift as a sign of international ‘affection and respect… of the world’s first socialist state’ (emphasis added; Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 2; 48)—a gift of gratitude following the gift of revolution.

Even secular conceptions of time are frequently opposed. Marxist perspectives of time have been challenged by capitalist understandings of it. Eastern European socialism lost out to capitalism, in part because it constituted a different temporal logic. Socialism placed frequent focus on longer, even historic temporal scales, while capitalism placed a great premium on turnover times when producing goods, and remains obsessed with the constant compression of decision-making and other productive activities (Verdery 1996, 35). Socialism and capitalism also constituted different “chronotopes” i.e. unities of time and space specific to a particular narrative of who is ahead and who is history (Sosnina and Ssorin-Chaikov 2009). While capitalism always moves ‘forward’ in time towards neoliberalism, postsocialism can in some locations be seen to remain at least partially stuck in times of Soviet or imperial rule (Hann 2002; Müller 2019).

Thinking of time in terms of exchange highlights additional temporal aspects. Timing makes all the difference in exchange, not least when exchanging across different temporalities. Consider the following example where two kinds of time—those of the market and of gifts—work together. In 1921, the Volga River region and the Ural Mountains of Soviet Russia experienced a massive famine. Armand Hammer (mentioned above), an American graduate of Columbia Medical School, visited the country, bringing medical supplies for the relief of a typhus epidemic that accompanied the famine. In the Urals he was surprised to see stockpiles of various commodities such as fur and precious stones, which could be used to purchase grain internationally and alleviate hunger. Hammer was told that the time that it would take to trade these commodities would make the delivery of grain too late to save lives. He solved this by telegraphing the US to ask for credit to purchase grain and ship it to Russia. In addition to obtaining credit, Hammer conducted his trade at a time when the US market price for grain was at its lowest. Grain, a commodity for which he ultimately received payment from the Soviet authorities, immediately circulated as humanitarian aid. It became a gift given by the Soviet state with the help of US credit to alleviate starvation. In this example, time can be considered Hammer’s main gift. He provided timely grain, obtained timely credit, and purchased grain at the best possible market time. As he arranged this gift of grain, the temporalities of markets and gifts complemented each other, and ultimately became intermeshed. Market and gift temporalities existed in parallel and were used as resources for one another. After Hammer arranged this, Lenin invited him for a visit, making him an offer to start American commercial operations in Soviet Russia, while Hammer gave him the above sculpture in return (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017, 39–42).

Exchange across temporalities also occurs in other contexts. Studying container ship navigation on the Hooghly river in India, Laura Bear (2014) charts how multiple temporalities of global capitalism and river ecology converge. Navigating container ships means dealing simultaneously with the ecological time of the highly unstable Hooghly river, with temporal demands of the international shipping trade, with the rhythms of bureaucratic decision making, and with the temporal affordances of predictive shipping technology. The mastery of ship navigation mediates between them, as river pilots attempt to reconcile ultimately incommensurable temporal rhythms through a slowly acquired art of navigation. Doing so is increasingly difficult in times of a cost-cutting public sector, which raises the risk of accidents. If a ship runs ashore, the accident may be understood in terms of the pilot’s lack of experience, and result in individual punishment and stigma. Yet, navigation is much more than an individual act. It is an attempt to balance the heterogenous times of capitalism (Bear 2016) with the temporalities of bureaucracy, infrastructure, and the natural world.

Other examples of the fruitful interplay of temporal multiplicities comes from studies of highly financialised environments where stockbrokers draw on global time differences between stock exchanges in, for example, Tokyo, Chicago, and London (Miyazaki 2003; Zaloom 2006). The same commodity—such as grain and its futures —may have its prices fluctuating differently in these different stock exchanges. Commodity futures can themselves be seen as different temporal states, the trade of which can drive markets up or lead to market crises (Stout 2016). Benjamin Franklin’s dictum that ‘time is money’ (Weber [1905] 1992, 14-16) applies, as some ethnographies demonstrate, even to the temporal difference between offices within the same global company. When headquarters in the West go to work, regional offices in an Eastern time zone may face pressure, and hierarchical exchange relations between them may mean that work time in the East spills over to ‘private’ home time (Karasyeva and Momzikova 2019). Within many financialised companies, the speed of work becomes a commodity in and of itself, both in face-to-face exchange, in screen-based trade (Zaloom 2006), and in the work of management consultants, frequently hired to speed up corporate activity (Stein 2017; 2018). In these contexts, work speed drives upward mobility and constitutes the social capital of ‘go-getters’ in banks and other corporations (Chelcea 2015; Ho 2009).

Conclusion: Time and the Anthropocene

The anthropology of time has provided us with rich insight into the different ways in which humans make sense of time, into how temporal multiplicities coexist and compete with one another, and into how anthropological research must be aware of its own temporal assumptions. One of the futures of the anthropology of time is in addressing the ecological insecurities of the Anthropocene. For instance, Lukas Ley’s recent ethnography charts rising ocean levels that affect the urban landscape in Semarang, central Java, where housing and urban infrastructure are being built on ‘borrowed time’ (Ley 2021). A similarly temporal sense of urgency to ‘think like a climate’ explores new motivations to use energy efficient housing which may shield its inhabitants from a climate-insecure future (Knox 2020). The Anthropocene compels us to think from the point of view of ‘deep time’ (Irvine 2020) that refers to long-term temporality of Earth as a planet. We need to compare conflicting temporal scales of geological time and the temporal dangers of capitalist extraction, production, and consumption (Chakrabarty 2018; Povinelli 2016). Capitalist time frequently works through the ‘evacuation of the near future’ (Guyer 2007) which includes creating incentives to consume now and to generate new forms of debt that one might repay later, but which one might also try to refinance and defer perpetually. The risks of human impact on the climate signal that this ‘evacuation of the near future’ may itself be evacuated. The Anthropocene invites ‘critical thinking … across some of the divisions that existed before’ (Haraway at al. 2016, 541; Moore 2016; Mathews 2020; Chakrabarty 2018). However, it also foregrounds its own secular and singular and true meaning of time over other temporal multiplicities if they are used to deny the risks of ongoing climate change. The possibility of human decline challenges us to consider not just the time of our lifespans but also the greater finality of human life and human time, no matter how it is culturally conceived.

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Young, Michael W. 1984. “The intensive study of a restricted area, or, why did Malinowski go to the Trobriand Islands.” Oceania 55, no. 1: 1–26.

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Note on contributor

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg. His publications include books: The social life of the state in Subarctic Siberia (2003, Stanford University Press) and Two Lenins: A brief anthropology of time (2017, HAU Malinowski Monographs), and articles: “Rethinking performativity: Ethnographic conceptualism” (2020, Journal of Cultural Economy); “Reassembling history and anthropology in Russian anthropology” (2019, Social Anthropology); “Hybrid peace: Ethnographies of war” (2018, Annual Review of Anthropology). He edited the exhibition catalogue Gifts to Soviet leaders (2006, Kremlin Museum) and a “Forum on the New Far Right” (2021, Social Anthropology).

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Affect

Rebecca Tishler — Wed, 26 Feb 2025 09:28:00 +0000

Detail of "The fallen Angel" (1847) by Alex Andre Cabanel, depicting the devil after being expelled from heaven. Picture by Wikipedia.

Daniel White Andrea De Antoni

University of Cambridge, Kyoto University

Initially published 26 Feb 2025

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

Abstract:

Affect refers to sensations and physiological shifts in intensity that may or may not formalise into conceptually distinct and collectively recognized feelings. Compared to emotions, which anthropologists see as feelings embedded in sociolinguistic concepts like love, anger, jealousy, han (Korean for sadness-grief), song (Ifaluk for justified anger), or hygge (Danish and Norwegian for cosiness), affects are conceived as more fluid. Although registered through biological and bodily sensation, affects are also culturally conditioned and can, in turn, strongly influence sociocultural dynamics. Anthropologists have long explored the varieties of emotional experience across cultures, from the analysis of different patterns of emotional behaviour in the early twentieth century to the linguistic comparison of different emotional expressions through the 1970s and 80s. Since around the 1990s, however, anthropologists began to shift their focus to the diverse ways that emotions also involve less linguistically determined but nevertheless socially conditioned bodily experiences they called ‘affect’. This entry documents early psychological and philosophical genealogies of affect; the relation of affect to anthropological studies of emotion; critiques of and counterpoints to the affect concept; and enduring themes in ethnographic studies of affect.

Introduction

An uneasy tingling of your skin when you pass through an unknown patch of forest; a sigh of comforting relief when you taste a familiar home-cooked dish after months away; the joyous energy of singing along with friends—word-for-word—the lyrics of a hit song; the high-intensity movements of a shamanic ritual; the low-intensity stillness of meditation; a dampness in the spleen; a longing in the heart; an ache. Many experiences are sensed but are not easily identified with a familiar emotion word like ‘fear’, ‘nostalgia’, ‘joy’, ‘transcendence’, ‘equanimity’, ‘worry’, ‘heartache’, or even ‘pain’. Moreover, feelings can often be surprising, arising at unexpected moments and carrying with them little indication of their origin or cause.

Although anthropologists have long been interested in these types of felt experiences, they have traditionally focused more explicitly on the public expression and symbolic display of feeling, which they called ‘emotion’. Since the 1990s, however, anthropologists in partnership with many others in allied social science and humanities disciplines began to explicitly emphasise the value of describing feelings that were sensed within and between bodies but did not always take linguistic or conceptual form. They called these ‘affect’.

Affect refers to a variety of bodily experiences, sensations, or simply perceived shifts in atmospheric intensities that, although conditioned through sociocultural environments, may not take form through culture-specific conventions and meanings. Despite their conceptual ambiguity, affects can feel sensorially distinct. They can feel strong, sharp, or subdued. Alternatively, they can also not feel like much at all, seemingly falling outside a person’s conscious perceptions. As an analytical concept, affect offers new ways to investigate what anthropologists have in the past variously referred to as ‘collective effervescence’, ‘sentiment’, ‘emotion’, ‘feelings’, ‘sensations’, and ‘the senses’. The broad semantic spectrum of these terms suggests not only that emotional experiences are diverse but so too are the conditions that shape them. The adoption of affect as a key conceptual tool was driven in part by a desire to address dimensions of experiences that eluded clearly circumscribed cultural frameworks and linguistic structures of meaning.

Affect theory brings together perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and several other fields such as gender studies, ethnic studies, and literature to explore the bodily and relational aspects of feeling. The following sections outline the development of the affect concept in anthropological theory. The first section traces influential genealogical roots for affect found within psychology and philosophy. The second highlights the relation between affect and earlier anthropological work on emotion. Section three evaluates critiques of and counterpoints to affect, given that the term is highly contested and debated within the emerging field of affect theory. The fourth section features distinctive features of the affect concept, and the conclusion considers enduring themes of affect studies, including implications for ethnographic method and disciplinary critique.

Psychological and philosophical forerunners to affect

Literature on affect in anthropology can be theoretical, abstract, and contested (see introductions to affect such as De Antoni 2019; Liljeström 2016; Rutherford 2016; White 2017). Therefore, it is helpful to outline key theoretical discussions in the past, which have traditionally emphasised Western traditions and that inform contemporary anthropological debates on affect. Two genealogies of this concept are particularly prominent, one psychological and the other philosophical. Each contributes distinct but complementary perspectives to shed light on how affect operates as an embodied and relational phenomenon. A common theme of this literature is a concern with how to relate somatic, or bodily, aspects of emotional processes (the ‘affective’) with its symbolic, conceptual, and representational components (the ‘emotional’).

Early psychological debates on affect adopted the worldview of Western science, which understood emotional energies as grounded in bodies and inherited through processes of evolution. As part of a natural continuum that humans share with non-human animals, according to Charles Darwin, emotional capacities could be identified through expressional behaviours, such as tendencies to bear one’s teeth when angry (Darwin [1872] 2018). This evolutionary view remained apparent in an early debate on the definition of emotion, which centred around a famous anecdote that questioned, for instance, whether fear is a condition that triggers one to run upon encountering a bear in the woods or is rather the post-hoc ascription of fear to an aroused body. Psychologist William James’ (1884) idea is that the ‘subjective experience [of sensations like] fear or disgust is the result of a process that unfolds after the alerting change in core affect’ (Beatty 2019, 202). In other words, although the common view sees emotion as a sensation that comes after one is ‘afraid’ (one sees a bear, becomes afraid, and runs away), James argued the reverse: that one is ‘afraid’ because of the physical experience of bodily sensations (one sees a bear, runs away, and finds oneself afraid).

These early debates on emotion became even more contested with the arrival of Freudian theory and the globalisation of discourses on instincts, Id, and the unconscious (W. Anderson, Jenson, and Keller 2011). With the spread of Freud’s idea that one’s psyche could be split between conscious and subconscious elements, scholars began to more commonly distinguish between feelings as containing both emotionally conscious and affectively un- or non-conscious components. Psychologist Silvan Tomkins (1962a; 1962b) expanded on these ideas, proposing a taxonomy of core affective instincts, such as interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, or anger-rage. His work posited that while these states are universally shared, their expressions vary across cultural contexts. Early innovative essays in critical theory that began using the word ‘affect’ (Sedgwick and Frank 1995a; 1995b) revisited Tomkins’ theories, paving the way for a culturally oriented affect theory. For affect theorists today, this psychological lineage has inspired a set of questions focused on whether affect is universal or culturally distinct, to what degree it is grounded in bodies, minds, or both, and whether affect emerges before, simultaneously with, or after a conscious recognition of an experience of emotion.

Western philosophers also demonstrated an early interest in the relation between the somatic and ideological components of emotion. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza ([1677] 1994) defined affect (or what he called affectus) as the capacity to ‘affect and be affected’, a common phrase that many anthropologists would later cite. Spinoza described affect as ‘affections of the body by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained, and at the same time, the ideas of these affections’ ([1677] 1994, 70, emphasis added). Spinoza’s view was that affect (bodily capacities) and emotion (‘the ideas of these affections’) are two dimensions of an inseparable single process, an argument which reflects his opposition to the mind-body dualism of his time.

Spinoza continues to inspire contemporary affect theorists who highlight the enduring open-ended, processual, and mutable qualities of the affective body as it exists in relation to different social and material environments. His ideas were rekindled in the widely read materialist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and popularised most prominently by the philosopher Brian Massumi (1995; 2002). From Massumi’s point of view, affect indicates pre-conscious modulations of ‘intensity’ moving through and between bodies (Massumi 1995; 2002). Emotion, on the other hand, is ‘qualified intensity’, its conceptual ‘capture’ in meaning, or the ‘socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal’ (Massumi 1995, 88). From this perspective, affect could be understood as a kind of physiological flux of sensation that is registered in bodies and travels between them; emotion, on the other hand, is the conceptualisation of that sensation in a culturally shared and often linguistically coded meaning.

Within contemporary debates on affect, the philosophical idea that ‘arrangements’ (Slaby, Mühlhoff, and Wüschner 2017) of humans and non-human objects shape and are shaped by affect prior to affect’s capture in meaning became a popular and highly contested idea. Many contemporary scholars in the humanities and social sciences cite this particular philosophical genealogy of affect as influential, even if they are also critical of it (Ahmed 2004b; Berlant 2011; Berlant and Stewart 2019; Seigworth and Gregg 2010; Seigworth and Pedwell 2023). For example, some scholars argue that the terms ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ identify qualitatively distinct experiences that follow ‘different logics’ and ‘pertain to different orders’ (Massumi 2002, 27). Other scholars see emotion and affect as existing along a continuum (Ngai 2005). Still others have proposed that the perception of an ‘affect-emotion gap’ is itself the product of particular discursive knowledge regimes, and varies based on different cultural, political, and socioeconomic applications of affect and emotion as technical terms (White 2017; 2022).

As a result of these debates, affect became a helpful conceptual lens through which ethnographers could focus attention on nuanced felt experiences that could exceed or precede cognition and language. It also provided a more fine-grained way to approach the contagious involvement and coordination of bodies that can be witnessed during rituals, political rallies, festivals, or in stadiums. In this regard, affect offered anthropologists more diverse and detailed perspectives on classic sociological theories of sentiment, such as Émile Durkheim’s notion of ‘collective effervescence’ (Durkheim [1912] 2008), which conveys a homogenisation of affects into one single group experience.

For example, ethnographic research on contemporary militarism in Pakistan demonstrates how the state can mobilise affect to sustain its authority over other political groups in society (Rashid 2020). Through a study of mourning rituals orchestrated by military personnel, anthropologists have shown how the military transforms grief into a resource for national solidarity. Ritual activities like public commemorations of martyred soldiers and state-sponsored funerals create ‘affective subjects’ who embody both personal loss and collective loyalty. Such examples show how affect operates not only as a homogenous collective force that can emerge through large-scale rituals but also as a constellation of complex feelings that can be specifically cultivated by certain social groups and selectively fostered or resisted by others.

Anthropologies of emotion

Anthropological work on affect builds closely on anthropological studies of emotions. These studies looked primarily to non-Western case studies of emotional experiences to examine how emotions varied from one context to another, providing evidence that challenged universal perspectives assumed by early research. Prominent works on this theme from the early twentieth century approached emotion as a marker of cultural difference. These works were influenced by psychological approaches and were later categorised under the label ‘culture and personality studies’. Representative studies depicted cultures as comparable through their dominant ‘patterns’ of dispositions, attitudes, beliefs, and personalities that make up a specific cultural entity (Benedict [1934] 2005). One influential study of the Japanese by Ruth Benedict, for example, juxtaposed individualistic ‘Americans’ motivated by emotional matrices of guilt and free expression with a more group-oriented ‘Japanese’, who were portrayed as motivated by shame, interdependence, and an obligation to different in-groups (Benedict [1946] 1974). In the case of interpersonal transgression, for example, ‘instead of accusing a man of being unjust, as an American would’, says Benedict, Japanese ‘specify the circle of behavior he has not lived up to’, and pointing to the particular ‘province’ or ‘code’ that was violated (195). Therefore, in cases of socially perceived bad behaviour, an American ‘may suffer from guilt’, whereas for ‘the Japanese’ ‘a failure to follow their explicit signposts of good behavior…is a shame’ (223–4).

In the 1970s and 80s, anthropologists reformulated these ideas of cultural difference imagined through constructs of emotion-based patterns and personality types, critiquing them as too rigid, culture-bound, and resistant to change. Instead, they focused on analysing emotional differences that could be observed through linguistic discourses and ‘emotional lexicons’ (Frevert et al. 2014). These anthropologists of emotion focused on cultural differences primarily by scrutinising emotion words in the languages of those they studied that did not neatly translate into English. This method offered insights into a broad human spectrum of emotional experiences existing both across and within different cultural groups.

For example, in a prominent 1980s study of the Ifaluk in Micronesia, based on fieldwork carried out in the late 1970s, anthropologists highlighted local words such as fago (loneliness/sadness) and song (justified anger) to build a critique of the ‘unnatural’ gendered division between reason and emotion in Western cultures (Lutz 1982; 1988). Other anthropologists working among the Pintupi of Australia examined emotions such as rarru (anger), which arose from threats to ‘shared identity or kinship’ (walytja) with others. These studies suggested that emotions emerge as semiotic—or meaning-making—practices rooted ‘in social life and its relationship to other signs’ (Myers 1988, 607). Among the Ilongot in the northern Philippines, strong feelings like liget resembled sentiments of anger and grief but did not have exact equivalents in Anglophone cultures, and appeared highly nuanced, complex, and variable (M. Rosaldo 1980, 1983, 143; R. Rosaldo 1989, 3; Spiegel 2017). These works demonstrated that emotions go beyond discrete bio-psychological categories and are embedded in social processes of language, meaning-making, and ethics (Lutz 1982; 1988; 2017).

Despite their innovative and nuanced approaches to emotion, some anthropologists perceived limits in what they saw as an increasingly outdated and culture-bound model of comparison. These critiques came in the wake of globalising processes that rendered the cultural boundaries of emotional words less distinct. Additionally, a theoretical turn in the 1980s emphasised a reflexive analysis of the Western literary conventions of anthropological writing, and challenged an ‘us-them’ model of culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986). In light of their focus on culturally specific language and public symbols, previous studies of emotion were also criticised for overlooking aspects of bodily intensity that could exceed and confound language, potentially impacting bodies beyond conscious reflection.

These critiques grew throughout the 2000s, extending to disciplines beyond anthropology, and resulted in a theoretical shift away from the discursive dynamics of emotion toward sensations that did not neatly map onto emotional lexicons. Some scholars referred to this shift as the ‘affective turn’ (Clough 2007). Authors associated with this ‘turn’ sought to address more explicitly what language-centred analyses in the 1980s and 90s had partly and implicitly left out. Thus, affect theory provided alternatives to certain critiques made of the anthropology of emotion. Yet, it also became the target of new critiques, which argued that affect approaches overlook aspects of sociality in favour of describing bodily sensations, physiology, and abstract energetic processes of cultural dynamics.

Critiques of affect and counterpoints

With the rise of theoretical literature on affect, the term became increasingly targeted for critique and reformulation. For example, some critics took issue with an idea of affect as a field of ‘direct feeling’ that is supposedly distinct from the ‘conscious recognition’ of emotion (Ahmed 2004b, 39). They worried this approach risked universalising affect as a natural phenomenon disconnected from the socio-political forces that shape it. Related critiques argued that such a distinction even resembles a form of biological essentialism and reductionism, in which affect is treated as autonomous from ideology (e.g., Leys 2011, 2017).

Despite these on-going critiques of affect theory, some early studies of emotional and affective processes had specifically sought to show how social dynamics could shape physiological processes that were usually identified as purely biological or psychological phenomena. For instance, while a sensation such as pain may be commonly seen as an objective measure of a body’s biological response to a harmful stimulus, it can also be understood as operating through implicit value judgements of gender, ethnicity, and racial difference that ‘code’ pain in ways that register differently in the surfaces of skin. A study of an Australian government report on testimony of the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander children from their families in Australia, for example, shows how historical narratives and contemporary legal practices can result in different effects upon the surfaces of bodies. While the report includes Aboriginal testimonies that read painfully to Indigenous communities, its suggestion that white Australians should acknowledge ‘national shame’ but not necessarily feel ‘personal guilt’ could be read as producing different affective results for readers with different skin colours: ‘Indigenous Australians tell their personal stories, but white readers are allowed to disappear from this history, having no part in what was done’ (Ahmed 2004a, 34–5). From this point of view, pain emerges as an immediate sensation, shaped through histories that read and feel differently for different people. Such studies show that ‘sensations are mediated, however immediately they seem to impress upon us’ (Ahmed 2004a, 30).

Although some studies like the above had directly addressed how bodily sensations could surface through social categories, other scholars still worried that broader trends in affect theory ignored how gender (Boler and Zembylas 2016; Thien 2005), ethnicity (Ramos-Zayas 2011), and racialisation (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015) shape and socialise affect. In adopting this perspective, affect theorists were entering territory covered by scholars of feminism, ethnic studies, and critical race theory. Some called for ‘critical examinations of “whiteness”’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 654) and sought to point out explicit examples from historical studies and queer theory that analyse the affective dimensions of racial dynamics. For example, historical studies of Latin American and Caribbean migrants in the United States have shown how certain depressive states were described by predominantly white mental health professionals through culture-bound taxonomies, such as familismo, fatalismo, or the ‘Puerto Rican syndrome’ (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Muñoz 2006). Certain painful feelings tied to migration experiences, surfacing as uncontrollable screaming, trembling, or aggression in young women, were labelled as ‘abnormal’ and characterised through ethnic categorisations (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660). Conversely, as other historical studies have shown, the perception of schizophrenia changed significantly in the 1960s from being seen as a ‘harmless’ condition primarily affecting white people to being viewed as a dangerous disorder characterised by anger and linked with the civil rights and Black Power movements (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015, 660; see also Metzl 2009). These studies show how institutional practices and ways of talking about race can condition negative affective states through racial frames.

Other critics argued that many affect studies ignored the role of history and place in conditioning affective responses, and offered compelling ethnographic examples as counterpoints. For instance, in a study on the ‘affective geographies’ of post-war Cyprus, after a 1974 partition of the island’s residents into a distinct northern Turkish-Cypriot and southern Greek-Cypriot territory, residents told stories of the melancholic feelings they encountered within ruined landscapes. Turkish Cypriots living in the abandoned homes of Greek Cypriots in the north faced an ‘atmosphere’ that ‘discharged a feeling of the uncanny, a strange feeling’ that was derived for some ‘out of a sense of impropriety, haunting, or an act of violation’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 11). Such studies raise the question of whether the feelings encountered in these landscapes are subjective, coming from the individual’s perception of a historically storied space, or the material environment itself, filled with abandoned objects and unkempt fields. Ethnographic evidence suggests that ‘neither the ruin…nor the people who live around it are affective on their own […] but both produce and transmit affect relationally’ (Navaro-Yashin 2009, 14). Detailed ethnographic studies of these socio-historical qualities of environments and space can help anthropologists unpack the multilayered impacts that some geographers have called ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson 2009).

Still other critics worried that philosophical oriented theorists of affect too heavily emphasise a ‘gap’ between the ‘signifying order’ and ‘affective order’; that is, between that which can be articulated and that which escapes linguistic expression (Martin 2013, S155; Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Navaro 2017; Navaro-Yashin 2009). They wondered whether such a distinction was needed between emotion and affect at all. To this question, some of today’s affect theorists respond that neither early formative philosophical works on affect nor much of the affect literature that followed it subscribed to as hard of a break between affect and emotion as was characterised in some critiques of affect. As noted by Massumi in his popular work on affect, ‘The approach suggested here does not accept any categorical separation between the social and the presocial, between culture and some kind of “raw” nature or experience… The field of emergence is not presocial. It is open-endedly social’ (Massumi 2002, 9). Choosing to avoid this debate altogether, some scholars have advocated using the terms ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ interchangeably (see Lutz 2017) or argued for ‘modal’ approaches that posit affect and emotion on a continuum, ‘whereby affects acquire the semantic density and narrative complexity of emotions, and emotions conversely denature into affects’ (Ngai 2005, 27).

Anthropologists of ‘embodiment’ have also contributed to discussions of how emotional and affective practices can exist along a continuum. These scholars argue that a focus on embodiment helps situate affect not as distinct from meaning-making processes, suggestive of body-mind dichotomies, but as something through which ‘dualities such as subject and object or meaning and the material world (evoking mind/body) can be collapsed’ (McDonald 2018, 187; also see Csordas 1990; 1993). For example, studies of exorcism rituals in Italy show how feelings and affects situated in embodied practices like prayer and touch constitute the basis for the experiential emergence of spiritual entities such as the devil. These felt experiences of the possessed person and the participants in exorcisms, in turn, contribute to the reality and the ‘capturing’ of particular entities into historicised, cultural structures of meaning—namely one demon or angel rather than another (De Antoni 2022). This ethnographically grounded approach to bodily feelings showcases what a focus on affect can offer anthropology.

Finally, some critics raised a methodological concern about philosophical descriptions of affect as an ‘escape’ from ‘perception’ (Massumi 2002, 36) or, in other words, as something that was difficult to articulate or ‘capture’ in language (see also Stodulka et al., 2019). For some ethnographers accustomed to describing their interlocutors through narratives, thinking of affect as that which always escapes its articulation has led to practical and methodological frustrations. It has also invited evocative experimental forms of writing about affect, such as works on everyday American life that attempt to capture the somatic contours of daily routines and ‘ordinary affects’ in poetic language that does not correspond to common analytical concepts (Stewart 2007, 1; also see Berlant and Stewart 2019). Many anthropological works on affect can be both highly theoretical and/or poetic in their approaches, and thus offer powerful insights through virtuosity in prose. At the same time, they can appear to some as overly abstracted from ethnographic contexts (Beatty 2019, 210–6). Thus, writing against the aforementioned critiques, many recent ethnographies analyse affect as situated in historical and cultural contexts (Ahmed 2004b; Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016; Muehlebach 2011; Muñoz 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2009; 2012; Newell 2018; Ngai 2005). Such works emphasise the simultaneously material, historical, social, somatic, and semiotic aspects of affect, and how these components relationally feed back into one another through dynamic ‘affective-discursive loops’ (Wetherell 2012, 7).

Indeed, some recent studies of affect have addressed the challenging question of how socio-material arrangements take on a force that is felt before it is conceived by revisiting classic arguments in social theory, such as in the popular discussion around mana (Mazzarella 2017a). Mana is a concept found throughout Polynesia that refers to a transhuman ‘force or efficacy’ that was ascribed to certain people or places that expressed palpable power and ‘vital energetics’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1). Sociologist Émile Durkheim described mana as ‘at once a physical force and a moral power’ (Mazzarella 2017a, 1), resembling contemporary anthropologists’ interest in the relation between the emotional-conceptual and affective-somatic aspects of social processes. Such innovate reinterpretations of social theory show that what anthropologists today call ‘affect’ can be used to shed light on classic anthropological debates, resulting in a series of productive connections between anthropological studies of affect, emotions, mana, collective effervescence, and the ‘senses’ (Howes 2005; Pink 2009).

Advancing distinctive contributions of affect

Despite the many critiques of affect, including constructive suggestions to consider the overlapping territory between affect and emotion, there remain strong arguments for maintaining the distinctiveness of the term. For example, given that human acts of sensing or ‘feeling with the world’ (De Antoni and Dumouchel 2017) incorporate complex, fluid dimensions of both somatic and semiotic phenomenon, the word ‘affect’ can help disambiguate multiple processes. It can help anthropologists discern somatic processes that seem to function in part outside or below discourse more discretely, catalogue them more comprehensively, and add to ethnographic descriptions’ clarity, granularity, and sensitivity. This can sometimes require the modulation of the ethnographer’s own senses, which broadens previous conceptions of what makes for good ethnographic training.

For example, a case study of the French perfume industry demonstrates how affective capacities can develop through pedagogies of training, sensory exercises, and objects like an odour kit (Teil 1998). An odour kit is ‘made of a series of sharply distinct pure fragrances arranged in such a way that one can go from sharpest to the smallest contrasts. To register those contrasts one needs to be trained’ (Latour 2004, 207). In so doing, a perfumer, or an ethnographer studying perfume, must learn to ‘have a nose’ that allows one to inhabit a (richly differentiated odoriferous) world’ (207). New bodily capacities develop alongside encounters with objects that also operate affectively on the body. The result is that one develops a new, more discrete sensory capacity that at the same time unveils a more sensory-rich world particular to the modern French perfume industry.

Affect as a conceptual tool can also point to the experience of feelings that, while conditioned by cultural contexts, often misalign with or even challenge established cultural values. It can also help anthropologists articulate what happens in spaces of intimacy, whether of private homes or of selves, that do not fit—or fit only in queer relation—with established social values. In the Sindh Province of Pakistan, fakirs (meaning ‘beggars’ in Urdu and, in some cases, ‘transgenders’ in Sindhi) refer to persons who voluntarily take up poverty as a practice of ascetic devotion to Islamic saints, often motivated by ‘prophetic dreams and personal callings’ (Kasmani 2022, 8). Through devotional practices and mystical encounters with saints, some fakirs describe experiences of closeness and intimacy with saints that serve both as compelling testimonies of desirable affect for other ascetics and morally troubling stories for religious and political authorities. Thus, affects of ‘private feelings’ and ‘intimate relations with saints carry ramifications for broader regimes and critiques of power’ (10).

Another helpful approach to affect is a reflexive one, which subjects conceptualisations of affect, such as ‘the affect-emotion gap’ described above, to ethnographic observation. When doing so, it becomes clear how anthropologists’ practices of theorising affect can resemble those of their interlocutors. In national branding campaigns in Japan, for example, anthropologists noted how something like an ‘affect-emotion gap’ was also conceptualised by bureaucrats and national cultural policy makers. These officials observed an affective excitement among global consumers of pop-culture commodities produced in Japan and sought to convert it into an emotionally charged affinity for Japan itself. For example, through government-funded events promoting cultures of manga, to which many readers are attracted for its minor and counter-cultural themes, officials attempted to mainstream manga as a national cultural property of Japan. In this way, an increasingly global cultural commodity could be transformed into a potential national resource of soft power (Galbraith 2019; Leheny 2018; White 2022).

A similar process of gapping or splitting emotional processes can be observed within the global technological world of modelling affection, preference, and taste. For example, computer scientists at academic labs and corporate offices in the US who build taste recommendation algorithms for social media feeds presume that an affective appeal for a certain music style can be coded into numbers (Seaver 2022). Such a perspective splits a feeling of affection into the affective dimensions of personal experience and the emotional dimensions of ‘preference’ that can be computed. Similarly, engineers and computer scientists operating in the field of ‘affective computing’ (Picard 1997) at prominent labs at MIT and Cambridge rely on models that understand ‘affect’ as physiological changes in the body and ‘emotion’ as something codable in a machine system and translatable to humans interpreting those systems. Adapting work on affective computing to East Asian contexts, some robot engineers in Japan have experimented with building ‘affective engines’ into emotionally intelligent technologies, which could theoretically discern the affective states of people by reading the signal of an emotion, such as ‘happiness’, through the facial-expression recognition of a smile (see Fujita and Kitano 1998; White and Katsuno 2021; 2023). These examples illustrate how many specialists in the hard sciences are currently operationalising their own theories of affect to much greater impact than anthropologists. In fieldwork within rapidly changing technological worlds, the term ‘affect’ can therefore help anthropologists track significant transformations in the meanings, applications, and experiences of both human and more-than-human emotion.

Conclusions

As the above theoretical debates and ethnographic examples illustrate, studies of affect are diverse and contested. Nevertheless, enduring themes remain. Three are prominent. The first is the proposition that affect can point to feelings experienced beyond language or cognition—although not necessarily unaffected by them. Affect is indeed something more than just meaning. Rather, affect holds promise to add dimensionality to meaning, showing that meaning incorporates dynamic aspects of exchange between bodily experience and signification (Slaby and Röttger-Rössler 2018; Newell 2018; and Mazzarella 2009; 2017b). Affect points to somatic worlds in a way that is shared among others and consequentially entangled with semiotic concepts and conditioning. Bringing affect and semiotics together in this way can offer ‘improved understanding of both as the intertwined core of sociality itself’ (Newell 2018, 2).

A second enduring theme of affect is relationality. Although human bodies can be understood as individual sense-making and sense-registering entities, they are far from being merely an individuated product of established discourse. Rather, bodies can function as nodes that register, exchange, mediate, reciprocate, co-participate, and change in relation with other bodies or simply bodily parts—human or otherwise, living or inanimate (Navaro-Yashin 2009; Bennett 2010). This relationality of affect points directly to affect’s political dimensions and power dynamics, which incorporate aspects of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and several other theoretical concepts commonly used in socio-cultural anthropology (Berg and Ramos-Zayas 2015; Boler and Zembylas 2016).

Third, although affects may be distinguished by their uneasy alignment with conventional cultural categories, this by no means implies that affects are socially unconditioned. This point suggests that studies of affect hold potential to not only enrich previous anthropological studies of emotion but also to expand anthropologists’ understanding of the ‘culture’ concept on which the discipline still heavily depends. Through its ability to point anthropologists to the dynamic relation between public symbols and private feeling, the affect lens can unearth experiential dimensions of culture that have not been fully explored until recently.

Finally, beyond these enduring themes, affect may hold the greatest potential not in its theory-heavy analytics, which can draw disproportionately from the Western and philosophical traditions outlined above, but rather in its ethnographic applications in fieldwork. A growing collection of richly detailed ethnographies of religious practices, digital media, and human-nature interactions—many of non-Western contexts—show that affective practices exist in diverse and dynamic forms that don’t accommodate easily to established analytical theorising. For example, the deep cultivation of balanced states of feeling through Buddhist meditation in Thailand (Cook 2010); the pursuit of ‘queer companionship’ between Islamic saints and ascetics (Kasmani 2022); the mediation of the paranormal in Chile (Espírito Santo 2023); or the making of intimate and sometimes indifferent relationships with non-human others such as palms (Chao 2022), orangutans (Chua 2018; Parreñas 2012, 2018), mushrooms (Tsing 2021), and microbes (Benezra 2023): these innovative studies of affective themes diversify anthropology’s traditional understandings of culture; expand who speaks for and feels ethnographic knowledge; and offer reflexive resources for productively undoing and remaking the affective modes through which anthropological work is undertaken.

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Note on contributors

Daniel White is a research affiliate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His research examines emotion, politics, and emerging media technologies, with a geographic concentration on Japan and the Asia-Pacific. His recent book is Administering affect: Pop-Culture Japan and the politics of anxiety (2022, Stanford).

Daniel White, Associate Fellow, Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. Level 1, 16 Mill Lane, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, CB2 1SB, United Kingdom. Orcid ID: 0000-0003-2866-6587

Andrea De Antoni is associate professor in cultural anthropology at Kyoto University and Research Coordinator of the Italian School of East Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Kyoto. He specializes in anthropology of religion, experiences with spirits, spiritual healing in contemporary Japan and Italy, the anthropology of the body, affect, and emotions. He has published extensively about these topics in English and Japanese.

Andrea De Antoni, Associate Professor, Kyoto University, Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Yoshida Nihonmatsu-cho, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan. ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6480-0790

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Dreams

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

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

Sophie Chao

University of Sydney

Initially published 8 Aug 2024

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Self, identity, and psyche

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural artefacts, ritual acts, and interpretive practices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transcendent encounters, spiritual power, and beyond-human knowledge

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Jean Price-Mars

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

Photo: Haïti Inter: Quand Price Mars racontait Haïti

Jhon Picard Byron

Initially published 9 May 2023

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Price-Mars dans la pensée anthropologique haïtienne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeunesse et vie d’homme politique

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

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

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

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

L’intellectuel engagé

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L’usage de l’œuvre price-marsienne

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

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

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

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

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

L’anti-essentialisme price-marsien

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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Auteur

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mental Health

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 04 Apr 2023 15:25:29 +0000

"Be happy and live". Photo taken in 2021 by photographer and mental health activist Damilare Adeyemi.

Mikkel Kenni Bruun

King's College London

Initially published 4 Apr 2023

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

Abstract:

When we talk about mental health, we could seem to be talking about some self-evident reality. However, the very notion of mental health can be seen to both assume and require a specific vision of human interiority. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’—or the ‘psy' disciplines—were particularly formative in defining this perceived interior selfhood through various scientific and therapeutic practices of inspection and introspection, through new constitutions, articulations, and regulations of what it means to be human. Mental health could be seen to be fundamental to our collective and individual ability as humans to think, feel, relate, interact with each other, sustain ourselves, and enjoy life. This entry explores some key theoretical and ethnographic interests, and their alignments and tensions, through which different anthropologies of mental health have taken shape. For example, social studies of mental health have been shaped by various engagements of ‘culture’ as a form of both contextualisation and critique. More recently, scholars have examined the political, ethical, and therapeutic processes by which people come to constitute themselves and others—for instance, through everyday practices of self-care or clinical diagnosis and treatment—as particular subjects of mental health. Anthropologists have described how people’s experiences of mental health and its associated afflictions are constituted relationally, in different ways, and with different social consequences around the world. The entry ends with a brief discussion of some current topics in anthropological studies of mental health, from the proliferation of mental disorders and the prevalence of neurobiological understandings of human distress to the increasing digitalisation of mental health. As these and other efforts imply, mental health is becoming a prominent field of enquiry in contemporary anthropology and one with renewed ethnographic salience for everyone involved.

Introduction: Situating mental health

The concept of mental health has drawn together a range of ideas and practices that have come to define, and intervene on, what it means to be human. In contemporary English-speaking societies, it is a concept which is often used to express a concern for human well-being in psychological terms. However, what counts as ‘mental health’ is a question of varied social significance as we move historically and ethnographically across time and space. Increasingly, mental health figures as a universal feature in conceptualising humans, and, conversely, mental ill-health is understood to affect humans globally, with an estimate of 970 million (or 1 in 8) people around the world considered to be living with a ‘mental disorder’.^{^[1]}

Some anthropologists have argued that mental illness is recognised in every culture, even if the ways in which people experience, treat, and make sense of psychological distress might differ considerably (see e.g. Luhrmann and Marrow 2016). Others have been sceptical of the very language of ‘mental health’ and ‘mental illness’, particularly where it has been deployed to pathologise or criminalise incongruent desires and bodies, as in the case of homosexuality for instance (Foucault [1961] 1988a), and to uphold systems of colonialism and racialisation (Fanon 1963). At the same time, the concept of mental health construed as a shared human condition of what it means to be psychologically well has been deemed important and needed; indeed, mental health has in recent decades come to be regarded as a ‘human right’ by the World Health Organisation (WHO).^{^[2]} Increasingly across different social worlds, from local healing practices and national health systems to everyday affairs of care and kinship, global health discourses, and beyond, mental health has emerged as something that ‘everyone has’. It is something that, for better or worse, warrants attention and action.

This entry provides a brief exploration of some theoretical and ethnographic interests that have been particularly instructive in anthropological studies of mental health. Before turning to anthropology, however, the entry suggests a way of situating mental health. This can only be done in very general terms here. One important point is that, despite its contemporary ubiquity and salience, mental health is a relatively recent concept that emerged in particular historical (and historiographical) circumstances, shaped by new psychological practices and institutions, through which new constitutions, articulations, and regulations of a ‘healthy mind’ were effected. Modern psychology now generally considers people to have something called mental health located in the putatively subjective interiority of the individual person, a human interiority which has become aligned with particular notions of ‘the mind’ or ‘the brain’ (Martin 2021; Rose and Abi-Rached 2013).

The concept of mental health reveals a complex historiography of social transformations over the past two hundred years, from the era of the asylums to the psychiatric hospitals and mental health services with which we are familiar today (Foucault [1961] 1988a; Unsworth 1993; Shorter 2007). It is a concept shaped particularly by two world wars and the emergence of welfare states with the monitoring of publics and populations (Fraser 1984; Busfield 1998; Marks 2017). Importantly, ideas of mental illness have also emerged in contexts of colonisation and decolonisation (Reyes-Foster 2018; Calabrese 2013; see also Fanon 1963). The historical precursor to the concept of mental health has been traced back to the efforts of the ‘mental hygiene movement’ that took shape in Europe and America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Bertolote 2008; Novella and Campos 2017). The idea of ‘mental hygiene’ gained traction in the second half of the nineteenth century and is often credited to the work of William Sweetser (1797–1875), who defined it as the science of preserving a healthy mind (Sweetser 1850). The mental hygiene movement sought to establish public health measures and interventions in the prevention and treatment of mental disorders. In the aftermath of the Second World War, however, the term ‘mental health’ gradually replaced the language of mental hygiene because the latter had become increasingly associated with Nazi eugenics.

When we move to present-day contexts of the cognitive sciences, mental health figures as a wide-ranging field of research, with several scientific and clinical definitions currently in circulation. The WHO offers the following:

Mental health is a state of well-being in which an individual realizes his or her own abilities, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.^{^[3]}

The WHO states further that ‘mental health is more than just the absence of mental disorders’. Conversely, according to this definition, mental ill-health implies that a person lies at a ‘negative’ end of a health continuum. For instance, mental health professionals might speak of ‘caseness’, of being ‘a clinical case’ (see e.g. Susko 1994), which means that a person who reports distress considered as pathologically significant is deemed to be suffering from mental ill-health. We see here that the very conception of mental health hinges on one of the key problems in psychiatry, namely the epistemic resolution of the ‘normal’ and the ‘pathological’—including that distinction itself (Canguilhem [1966] 1989; Foucault [1963] 1973). The various ‘psy’ sciences (Rose 1985) that emerged over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries established themselves by claiming their ability to deal with a range of mental and behavioural phenomena deemed dysfunctional or abnormal. The concept of mental health was thus historically constructed around notions of pathology and the differentiation between normal and non-normal conduct.

Anthropological trajectories

Contemporary worlds of mental health can be seen to constitute a multitude of sciences, technologies, and professions, as well as involve a wide range of therapeutics and care practices within and beyond clinical settings. In the following sections, we are going to look at some key anthropological trajectories in relation to what has been collectively termed the ‘psy disciplines’, that is, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. Anthropologists have increasingly come to treat mental health as an ethnographic topic of central rather than tangential interest. This entry suggests that we might think of different anthropologies of mental health, some of which have developed within specific subfields of social and cultural anthropology, such as medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, and cross-cultural or transcultural psychiatry. Since the early twentieth century, anthropologists have developed diverse ways of studying issues that we might, for the moment, summarise as concerning ‘mental health’. However, this term—and other related terms such as ‘well-being’—came generally much later in anthropology.^{^[4]}

Anthropological research on mental health has often focused on traversing or reconciling the disciplinary fields of anthropology and psychiatry. One key aim was to render anthropological knowledge applicable to clinical problems. To some, this meant accounting for ‘culture’ in psychiatry, particularly in terms of ‘cultural difference’ in the perception and experience of illness, and in the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of people (Kleinman 1980; Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997). Within anthropology, it is largely medical anthropologists who have been at the forefront of dealing with these issues in the context of psychiatry—a discipline that has tended to dominate anthropological studies of mental health both ethnographically and analytically (see, e.g., Sapir 1932; Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976; Kleinman 1988; Luhrmann 2000; Littlewood 2002; Brodwin 2013; Jenkins 2018; Pinto 2020).

Ethnographic fieldwork encourages us to take seriously the experiential realities of those we study. Anthropologists might not always find it appropriate, therefore, to assume a particular definition of mental health but tend instead to be more interested in how the people they study are establishing and enacting their own definitions and self-defining worlds: for example, how people might understand, use, resist, and live ‘mental health’, and the consequences. As such, rather than taking mental health for granted as pre-given or self-evident, we can think of it as something that emerges relationally. This entry suggests that mental health comes to figure in multiple ethnographic senses: as a presumed universal feature of the human mind; a sense of self; a psychological state that can be intervened upon and taken care of; a measure for populations, groups, or individuals; an object of therapeutic enquiry; a matter of concern for those classified as patients; and so on. We could talk here of different 'definitional realities' of mental health that constitute its meaning (see Ardener 1982; Hastrup 1995; McDonald 2020). For instance, clinical evaluations of mental health are inevitably dependent on the conceptual definitions offered of that reality. Analytically, this means that ‘mental health’ does not figure as an a priori phenomenon anterior to its relations and articulations, but as a category in action. Some social scientists might want to talk here about the ontological multiplicity of mental health; for example, how it is enacted and coordinated as a matter of concern—similar to the ‘doing’ of disease in medical practice (Mol 2002).

The ‘social’ and the ‘psy’

The question of mental health has been shaped by various attempts to either separate or reconcile the social and the psychological. Such attempts were particularly influenced by anthropological studies of the so-called ‘primitive mind’, the 'personality of culture', and the nature of human cognition. Anthropology addressed mental health as an object of study, in an important sense, via the scientific ambitions of the early psy disciplines, notably late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century psychoanalysis and experimental psychology. Yet mental health was often only implicitly dealt with, eclipsed by prevailing ambitions at the time to ascertain a universal human psychology—‘the generalised mind’—inspired in part by the German experimental psychologist William Wundt’s (1832–1920) ‘introspective’ methods, as well as by subsequent anthropological investigations into what was then seen as the ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ mind (Martin 2021, 26–51; see also Rieber 1980; Mandler 2011). Influenced by Darwinian evolutionism and its underbelly of Victorian scientific racism, a widespread theory of human psychology claimed that so-called ‘primitive’ people lacked higher mental functions while they surpassed ‘civilised’ people in physical performance, because more energy was seen to remain devoted to their physicality as opposed to their mentality (Martin 2021, 37). This theory was put to test, and eventually challenged, by the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (Haddon 1901; Herle and Rouse 1998; Sullivan 2012), which also sought more generally to investigate psychological ‘introspection’, namely the inspection of one’s own internal mental processes. The expedition was influential in shaping both modern anthropology, and in bringing together psychology and anthropology with a common interest in what we might now want to see as an early version of mental health research.

However, the relationship between anthropology and psychology as exemplified by the Cambridge Expedition did not end in a happy marriage. On the contrary, in Britain and elsewhere, the social and cultural were in many ways further delineated in contradistinction to the psychological. During the early twentieth century, new disciplinary identities emerged as practitioners marked out social science (including anthropology) distinct from psychology and natural science. For example, the British anthropologist Edmund Leach treated psychology as a discipline against which social scientists are ranged. He asserted that ‘[the anthropologist] will be well advised to leave psychological matters to psychologists and stick firmly to the public sociological facets of the case’ (1958, 148). This was a disciplinary division of labour according to which the world was also divided into a presumed separation of the public and private, the collective and individual, the external and internal. One of the pioneers of British social anthropology, Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) effected his own disciplinary boundary-making by way of critically engaging with psychoanalysis. In Sex and repression in savage society (1927), Malinowski famously examined the Freudian ‘Oedipus complex’ in the context of Trobriand kin relations and child development, which led him to dismiss any notion of Oedipal universality claimed by psychoanalysts of the day. While Malinowski remained a critic of psychoanalysis and its ‘exorbitant claims’ throughout his career, he also contended that its ‘open treatment of sex […] is of the greatest value to science’ (Malinowski 1927, vii–viii). Although Malinowski and Leach, and, before them, Émile Durkheim ([1912] 2008), had long moved the ‘social’ away from the ‘psy’, the question of human interiority—for some the seat of cognition, emotion, and subjectivity, complete with an individuated mind or consciousness (indeed, what many today might think of as pertaining to mental health)—never completely disappeared from anthropology.

Influenced by the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942), another famous anthropological pioneer, developments in American cultural anthropology during the first half of the twentieth century offered a rather different engagement of psychological theories. The most prominent development came from the ‘culture and personality’ movement during the 1920s and 30s instigated by the work of Edward Sapir, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead (all former students of Boas) and which subsequently fed into the American-bred field of psychological anthropology (Ingham 1996; LeVine 2010; see also Mead 1928; Sapir 1932; Benedict 1934). Applying their own critical reading of Freudian psychoanalysis, they argued that human behaviour is ‘culturally patterned’, just like speech is patterned by a particular language. The cultural patterns of childhood experience were thus considered to be the cause of adult personality characteristics, which in turn gave rise to culture-specific patterns of mental health and forms of psychopathology. The aim was for some to develop a generalised cultural description of mental health through ethnographic research on individual personalities and, by extension, the personality of cultures. For other anthropologists, however, such an ambition simply confirmed what they had previously suspected, that a psychologised version of anthropology was susceptible to reductionism and overgeneralisation (LeVine 2001).

It was only much later with the ‘cognitive revolution’ of the 1970s, that ‘psy’ gradually came to occupy another conceptual space among anthropologists as they began to move from the mythic and symbolic universe of structuralism (owed to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and those who read him, see e.g. 1963) to the laboratory of cognitive science. New evolutionary theories equipped anthropologists with novel rethinkings of ‘cognition’ (e.g. Bateson 1972) that shaped the emerging subfield of cognitive anthropology (Blount 2011). Importantly, some anthropologists challenged what to them appeared to be their discipline’s ignorance of a properly scientific study of human mental life. Cognitive anthropology sought to put an end to the Durkheimian separation of the social from the psy that had informed so much of anthropology. However, mental health was still largely a taken-for-granted object in cognitive anthropology, which has tended instead to examine the transmission of cultural representations, Theory of Mind (ToM), innate modularity, and cognate ideas (see Whitehouse 2001; Bloch 2012; Irvine 2018). In all such endeavours, and in those that have come after, the concept of culture looms large.

Culture and mental health

Anthropological studies of mental health in the second half of the twentieth century have been driven by efforts to account for ‘culture’ and ‘cultural differences’ that came out of interdisciplinary borderlands between psychiatry and anthropology, sometimes referred to as ‘cross-cultural’ and ‘transcultural’ studies (cf. Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976). Culture was also taken up as a language of anthropological critique. For example, the psychiatrist-cum-anthropologist Roland Littlewood has argued that the concept of culture remains ambiguous for psychiatry as it has tended to perceive it as secondary to a biomedical reality. He argued that psychopathology is inherently ‘local’, and that the discipline of psychiatry has its own tacit ‘culture’ (Littlewood 1996). Earlier work had already introduced the idea of ‘the cultural construction of clinical reality’ and encouraged ‘a clinical social science capable of translating concepts from cultural anthropology into clinical language for practical application’ (Kleinman, Eisenberg and Goods 1978, 140). Its authors urged a distinction between ‘disease’ and ‘illness’, as well as the concept of ‘explanatory models’ that sought to include and elicit the ‘patient’s experience’ of disease and treatment: how do people understand and live with mental illness? How is disease perceived in cultural terms? What or who caused it, and how? This work seemed in many ways novel and important, but it still took for granted many of the old dichotomies of medicine. For instance, Kleinman and his colleagues presented a scenario of doctors with scientific ‘knowledge’ and patients with culturally determined ‘beliefs’; with ‘disease’ (medical reality) on the one hand, and ‘illness’ (cultural experience) on the other.

The disease versus illness distinction has informed much research in the intersecting fields of anthropology and psychiatry, as well as beyond: it is now a common component of clinical education programmes where it features as a way of reinserting ‘the cultural context’ where such is deemed lacking or to acknowledge ‘the patient perspective’. Yet this conceptual binary can also imply a problematic separation of the physical versus the mental whereby the former is seen as underlying (biological) causation and the latter as mere (cultural) representation. This has tended to presuppose that neurobiology—as a seemingly culture-free reality—is the ontological foundation of mental health upon which perceptions and experiences of it are culturally or socially constructed. We can trace many contemporary versions of this type of social and cultural constructionism in anthropologies of mental health and related fields.^{^[5]}

The earlier work of Kleinman (1980; 1988) along with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1970s (e.g. Szasz 1974) nevertheless had a significant impact in confronting psychiatry with ‘culture’, although their reasons for doing so differed greatly: anthropologists generally sought to improve psychiatry rather than dismantle it. Even so, anthropologists now seemed equipped to take apart the cultural preconceptions built into psychiatric diagnoses and treatments in a manner that exposed psychiatric conceptions of mental disorder as inherently ethnocentric, revealing underpinning cultural biases and assumptions (Littlewood and Lipsedge 1997). Anthropologies of mental health and illness have since been routinely embedded in constructs of ‘cultural difference’ or ‘different cultures’ (e.g. Littlewood and Dein 2000; Luhrmann et al. 2015; Onchev 2019). The language of culture has also been considered a worthwhile mode of contextualisation in a field of research that still tends to be dominated by biological determinism (e.g. Sargent and Larchanché 2009). Some anthropologists have found it compelling to talk of ‘the culture’ of the mental health clinic (Luhrmann 2000, 119–57); of differences in professional and therapeutic cultures, with diagnosis, treatment, and patients recontextualised. More recently, new interdisciplinary engagements between anthropology and psychology have described how different cultures ‘invite’ people to relate to their mind in particular ways, which in turn affects the kinds of mental experiences people have and how they make sense of them (Luhrmann 2020; Weisman et al. 2021). Understanding mental health here means grasping shifting cultural models of mind.

Historically, anthropologists have thus been largely responsible for introducing the concept of culture to the study of mental health (cf. Mead 1953; Opler 1959; Westermeyer 1976), although it did not always bring about the anthropological insights that occasioned it. For example, ‘cultural competency’ now regularly features as an important educational component of many mental health training programmes and services (e.g. Carpenter-Song, Schwallie and Longhofer 2007). But cultural competency efforts, despite their best intentions, can appear to treat culture simply as a variable to be accounted for. Different differences—what might be seen as pertaining to nationality, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality—are often brought together under a single denominator of the ‘cultural’, thereby eliding a range of experiences altogether.^{^[6]}

The concept of culture has in many ways effected its own problems. Introducing ‘culture’ in studies of mental health, as suggested above, meant introducing ‘context’ and then ‘meaning’. Yet, in these instances, culture is easily reified in ways that some anthropologists might find rather problematic (Strathern 1995; Fox and King 2002; McDonald 2012). For example, speaking about different cultures of mental health might imply an unhelpful normativity that requires further anthropological validation, and evoking culture as a mode of contextualisation and critique does not always differ significantly from people’s own self-understanding. Whitney Duncan (2017) explores this latter point in her ethnography of psychoeducation (psicoeducación) in Oaxaca, Mexico. Working with psychologists and patients in and around a psychiatric hospital, she describes how mental health practitioners come to understand culture as a barrier to mental healthcare. They strive to further ‘psy-globalisation’—the transnational flow of ideologies and practices around mental health. Practitioners see themselves as involved in a global and modernising movement to promote mental health but express frustration about how difficult this project is in Oaxaca, where ‘local culture’ prevents their efforts (Duncan 2017, 37). Mental health practice thus emerges as a project of what she terms ‘psychological modernisation’, a movement that is defined against its own perception of local culture (consisting of ‘traditional medicine’, ‘beliefs’, and ‘magical thinking’). It considers local culture to be incommensurable with global notions of mental health and a source of resistance to mental healthcare and its de-stigmatisation. Not only does psychoeducation in Oaxaca provide a means of self-understanding among professionals and patients alike in the context of modernity, Duncan argues, but it also actively seeks to produce the psychological conditions for modernity.

From governmentality to self-cultivation

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) has arguably been one of the most influential scholars in social studies of mental health and illness. It was the earlier body of his work on the history of madness and the birth of the clinic (Foucault [1961] 1988a; [1963] 1973) which initially inspired critical examinations of the psy disciplines—speaking of a ‘great confinement’ of the mad into asylums and new scientific ambitions that effected the authority of a ‘medical gaze’ (e.g. Hacking 1998; Rose 1989; Danziger 1998). These accounts have traced how, over the course of the twentieth century, psychological knowledge regimes have effected new forms of self-governance—what Foucault called ‘governmentality’—and political relations. The insight that whole populations and ‘life itself’ have become problematised as objects of management and regulation gave rise to the terms ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ (Foucault et al. 1991; Rose 2006).^{^[7]} In the formation of (neo)liberal democracy, Nikolas Rose (1996) has shown that diverse psychological knowledge practices require that we ‘invent our selves’ or constitute ourselves as if we were selves. The crux of the arguments that run through much of this and related Foucauldian scholarship is the contention that, in the name of expertise and well-being, the psy disciplines—their institutions, professions, technologies, and interventions—conceal and instil specific moral and political ideologies that shape the ways we come to know, relate to, and act upon ourselves and others. Constituted through discourses of individual autonomy, people are rendered responsible for their mental health—for instance, in everyday articulations and requirements ‘to take care of yourself’—in the name of their own freedom.

Anthropologists of mental health have also drawn from Foucault’s work on ‘subjectification’ (assujettissement) in examining the different modes and processes by which human beings are made into subjects. Subjectification refers not only to a mode of having power and control exercised over oneself (‘political subjection’) but also to modes of acting upon oneself and others that constitute one as a particular kind of subject (Foucault 1997). When applying this analytical lens to mental health, it can elucidate, for instance, the effects of people subjected to practices of diagnosis and treatment by which they are classified as distinct clinical cases (e.g. ‘a patient with anxiety disorder’), at the same time as they are required to take up particular subject positions (see Hacking 1985, on ‘making up people’). Consider as example the construction of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD). Based on Vietnam War veterans’ reports of war-related trauma, PTSD was officially accepted in 1980 as a universal disorder, when it was included in the third edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM-III). This followed a political struggle by psychiatric workers on behalf of the large number of veterans who were seen to suffer from the psychological effects of traumatic memory (Young 1995). Contrary to the depiction of the disorder in psychiatric classification practices, PTSD may thus not be timeless, nor does it possess an intrinsic unity:

Rather, it is glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, treated, and represented and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments that mobilised these efforts and resources’ (1995, 5).

Young shows how clinicians in the US applied the diagnostic criteria to include people that they felt ought to be seen as mentally ill and shows the way patients in turn began to present themselves in such a way as to fit into the diagnostic categories of PTSD.

Moreover, some scholars have argued that psychiatry’s capacity to define the ‘mentally ill’ has been achieved partly through the making and remaking of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association 2013)^{^[8]} and through historical processes of institutional colonialism, market capitalism, and a medicalisation of human suffering (see e.g. Healy 1997; Kirk and Kutchins 1997; Borch-Jacobsen 2012; J. Davies 2021). This literature targets modern psychiatry and pharmaceutical industries in particular, and has echoes of earlier critiques that came out of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 70s (e.g. Fanon 1963; Szasz 1974). This was a movement influenced by Foucault’s genealogy of madness, which appeared to expose psychiatry in many ways as a structural oppressor. Foucault’s scholarship thus had a significant impact on intellectual anti-psychiatry critics, many of whom held academic positions in psychiatry, although he often distanced himself from the direction in which they took his work.

Since the 1980s and 90s, then, social scientists have been ready to contextualise and deconstruct mental health within an analytical frame of ‘politics’. Neoliberalism—with its associated ideals of autonomy and individual responsibility (Ganti 2014)—has often been evoked as one such political frame within which to locate and critique mental health. Social scientists have pointed to the impact of neoliberal attitudes on social and economic stressors such as unemployment in relation to the rapid increase in ‘mental health problems’. Neoliberalism especially shapes depression and the growing ‘happiness’ industry (W. Davies 2015). At the same time, even putatively ‘neoliberal’ mental health initiatives might be seen to move beyond political agendas and logics with unexpected consequences. For example, some anthropologists argue that the self-governing practices of individuals required to ‘work on’ their mental health—and any process of subjectification this might entail—are not always sustaining any straightforward or self-explanatory neoliberalism (Cook 2016; Bell and Green 2016). It has also been common in social science studies of mental healthcare for ‘politics’ (neoliberalism or capitalism, for instance) to be seen and cited as a domain that gets in the way. By the same token, one common way of criticising care has thus been to situate it in the service of politics.

T.M. Luhrmann’s (2000) ethnography of American psychiatrists can be read as an objection to the kind of critical studies of the psy disciplines discussed above. Luhrmann refrained from situating her study of American psychiatry in terms of Foucauldian governmentality, deeming such social science perspectives a naive romanticism that does little justice to the suffering subjects:

Foucault did presume that madness had always existed, but he romanticised it in a way that, despite all his insights, did a terrible disservice to its pain. […] Madness is real, and it is an act of moral cowardice to treat it as a romantic freedom. (2000, 11–2).

Instead, Luhrmann identified two competing paradigms in psychiatry: the psychotherapeutic model (informed by psychoanalysis and psychotherapy) and the biomedical model (informed by neuroscience and pharmacology). Her ethnography provides a remarkable account of the epistemological conflicts between ‘talk therapy’ and ‘drug therapy’, and the medico-moral consequences of losing the former to the latter.

More recently, it is Foucault’s later writings on ethics and care (see e.g. [1978] 1988b; 1997) that have inspired anthropological perspectives on mental health. People who undergo mental healthcare, for example, can be understood as participating in active processes of self-cultivation through an ethical practice of ‘reflective thought’ (Laidlaw 2018). Here, one’s mental health is constituted as an object of reflection in order to change it, or one's relation to it. Practitioners of ‘mindfulness-based cognitive therapy’ develop a particular ‘distanced perspective’ as they are learning to cultivate a detached relation to thoughts and feelings: ‘I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts’ (Cook 2015, 223–9). This seeming capacity for introspection, to take one’s ‘self’ as an object of inspection and reflection, is at once assumed and required in psychological therapies as practised in the UK and elsewhere (Bruun 2023). In the face of the promise of postsocialist democracy, the work of post-Soviet Russia’s psychotherapists can be understood as an ethical practice of freedom, but one that ultimately hinges on ‘an ongoing struggle between different assumptions about freedom […] that plays out through precarious care’ (Matza 2018, 241). The freedoms sought in post-Soviet Russia are less individualised and based instead on collective forms of ‘self-work’. Psychotherapists seek to cultivate mental health for themselves and their clients but are caught between psychology’s ambiguous care for the lives of two distinct groups of people—those who accumulated wealth and those who did not—following the collapse of the Soviet Union. There is no easy way out of biopolitics here, but the logics of psychotherapeutic care also enable new ethical orientations, new modes of caring for self and others.

Foucauldian notions of both governmentality and self-cultivation have encouraged anthropologists and mental health practitioners alike: not only have they provided important conceptual frameworks within which anthropologists might contextualise and critique psychological realities, but they have also informed mental health practitioners’ own critical assessments of their professional worlds.

Psyches, minds, bodies, and brains

Within the historiographical context of the sciences, mental health emerged in mutual distinction and self-definition: physiology dealt with ‘the body’; psychology with ‘the mind’ or ‘psyche’. The so-called ‘sciences of the soul’ were particularly formative in defining a perceived human interiority through different practices of inspection and introspection (Coon 1993; Danziger 1998; Vidal 2011). The modern disciplines of the clinic thus helped divide the human into the mental and the physical, the psychological and the physiological. We have largely inherited this and other dichotomies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries where also ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ emerged in contradistinction (Daston and Galison 2007). New psycho-technologies and scientific methods of introspection helped constitute ‘the human mind’ as an object of both scientific observation and intervention (Rieber 1980; Green 2010; Martin 2021). Reified as empirical objects, ‘the mind’ and ‘the body’ established in turn universalising ideals about ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ health, including their demarcation and distinct disciplinary subdivisions and specialisms.

With the rise of neuroscience in the twenty-first century, some feel that mental health has finally been anchored in the physical reality of the brain (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). Consequently, a biologically orientated psychiatry now tends to see the distressed mind as a result of a biologically dysfunctional brain. Focusing on the persuasive power of brain images as experienced by people suffering from mental ill-health, Joseph Dumit’s (2003) ethnography shows how neuronal connectivities and chemistries, such as neurotransmitters, come to be seen as the aetiology of distress. Through encounters with neuroscientific causation models where brain images (such as PET scans) play a key role, people come to understand themselves as having chemical imbalances in their brain that cause mental illness such as depression. Neuroscientific facts cast the afflicted person as a dysfunctional brain by which they acquire a sense that they are their brain. The persuasive idea here is that ‘the mind is what the brain does’. But this understanding of mental health, in which the person experiences distress because of their brain, also comes to sit in tension with people’s sense of an agentive self and a capacity for self-determination: ‘is it me or my brain?’ (Dumit 2003).

Neurobiological theories that envisage the brain as a chemical laboratory of mental health have, for a long time now, equipped mental healthcare systems with scientific rationales for the use of psychopharmaceuticals in the treatment and management of people who experience distress (Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006; Jenkins 2010; Oldani 2014). Biomedical models of mental health can thus appear to locate responsibility and agency elsewhere, namely in the biochemical constitution of brains. Conversely, anthropologists have also described how psychotherapists have tended to locate moral responsibility on the part of the afflicted person (Kirsner 1998; J. Davies 2009). Littlewood (2002) has construed this tension as ‘naturalistic’ versus ‘personalistic’ explanations of mental ill-health. For the biomedically-trained psychiatrist, however, mental illness was no longer anyone’s fault: people were instead suffering from discrete ‘disorders’ that could be detected neurologically and treated with drugs (Luhrmann 2012). By the 1980s, neuro- and cognitive scientists were throwing out the psyche and Freud had become a footnote in psychology textbooks as psychoanalytic theories and methods were largely discredited. Psychological scientists have since strived hard to situate mental health research in the scientific principles and measures of ‘real science’ on an equal footing with biomedicine, contending that their discipline could otherwise be lost to ‘pseudoscience’ (cf. Lilienfeld, Lynn and Lohr 2004).

Notions of the biochemical and genetic brain remain instructive in contemporary understandings of mental ill-health and its treatments (Rose and Abi-Rached 2013). It is partly through the persuasive notion of a universal human physiology that the concept of mental health has acquired its own universality. But it has also brought with it a biological understanding of minds and maladies. For some anthropologists, this entails a problematic reductionism which has caused a ‘psychiatric drug epidemic’ by way of pathologising human distress (J. Davies 2017). Over the past forty years, numbers of mental disorders have grown exponentially in the publications of international diagnostic manuals, resulting in a proliferation of psychopathologies and market-driven pharmaceutical treatments (Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006). In an age of psychopharmacology, the ‘pharmaceutical self’ (Jenkins 2010) continues to shape experiences of mental health with vast social, ethical, and economic effects.

Anthropology encourages us to treat the division of health into the ‘mental’ and ‘physical’ as a matter of ethnographic interest. It is, in other words, worthy of study to anthropologists that some people conceptualise health in terms of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, and that these divisions in turn mark out different realities deemed ‘psychological’ and ‘physiological’. More recently, the ‘biopsychosocial’ model, invented by the American psychiatrist George L. Engel (1977), has been an attempt to bring together different disciplines (biology, psychology, social science) alongside their associated realities (body, mind, society). Rather than treating these as separate phenomena, this model claims to further a more holistic and scientifically rigorous understanding of humans as biopsychosocial beings. In the context of mental healthcare, such an understanding has in turn encouraged a perspective on treatment in which it is no longer sufficient for interventions to consider only biological or psychological factors. Instead, treatment must include ‘the social’ in the sense of environment, context, and culture (see e.g. Álvarez, Pagani and Meucci 2012; Gask 2018). According to this model, mental health is not only a case of a biological body (a case of ‘brain chemistry’, for instance) existing anterior to its psyche, social relations, or environment, but of a whole body-mind-subject—biologically, psychologically, and socially constituted—in a particular cultural world. However, the anthropologist might wonder at the separations and connections that are sought here. We might ask, for example, if the tripartite differentiation put forward in the ‘biopsychosocial’ is still suggestive of a problem rather than offering a novel reconciliation.

The proliferation of mental health

Following the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, an upsurge in mental ill-health around the world and its associated medical, social, and economic impacts, including an exacerbation of existing health inequalities, have been widely reported on in scientific journals (e.g. Moreno et al. 2020; Wu et al. 2021). The Covid-19 pandemic has reinvigorated mental health as a matter of concern, from local and national levels of concern—pertaining to ‘individuals’ and ‘populations’—onto a cosmopolitan scale as part of ‘global mental health’ efforts. Mental health perceived as a global phenomenon, which might require equally global intervention, seems now a well-established reality that has received further experiential confirmation by reports of a worldwide mental health crisis of depression and anxiety disorders caused by the pandemic (e.g. Santomauro et al. 2021). Anthropological investigations of mental healthcare in times of ‘crisis’ seem therefore both pertinent and needed (see e.g. Wright 2022).

An important trajectory of anthropological research in the field of mental health has focused on the production of neuroscientific facts (Cohn 2008, 2010; Dumit 2004), the effects of pharmaceuticals (Dumit 2012; Jenkins 2010; Petryna, Lakoff and Kleinman 2006), and the construction of ‘disorders’, such as bipolar disorder (Martin 2007), autism, depression (Kitanaka 2012), and schizophrenia (Luhrmann and Marrow 2016). Furthermore, the expansion of ‘evidence-based psychological therapies’, especially cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness, and a proliferation of mental health initiatives and psy professions around the world have been a recent focus of ethnography by which new accountabilities, healing modalities, and configurations of care and politics have been examined (Brenman 2021; Bruun 2023; Cook and Cassaniti 2022; Duncan 2018; Huang 2018; Long 2018; Matza 2018; Pickersgill 2019b; Vogel 2017; Vorhölter 2021; Zhang 2020). These studies deal diversely with issues of precarity and access to mental healthcare, the transformation of therapeutic practices within and beyond their particular cultural or clinical environments, and the social and ethical consequences of particular scientific, economic, and political framings of mental health.

Another recent direction of research explores the digitalisation of mental health. The proliferation of digital monitoring technologies and AI-assisted interfaces—such as computerised therapeutics, online clinical platforms, smartphone apps, and wearable self-tracking devices—has constituted new fields of digitised mental healthcare (see e.g. Birk and Samuel 2020; Brandt and Stark 2018; Fullagar et al. 2017; Minozzo 2022; Pickersgill 2019a; Trnka 2022). Self-monitoring of ‘mental well-being’ is now part of many people’s daily health regimen as everyday activities of eating, sleeping, work, and recreation have become digitalised objects of observation shaped by ambitions to ‘encode wellness’ and promote personalised forms of health surveillance (Cearns forthcoming; Bruun forthcoming). This move towards ‘digital psy’ presents us with ‘disparate subjects, practices, places and temporalities of sensing, predicting, diagnosing, or treating mental health’ (Bemme, Brenman and Semel 2020). New therapeutic socialities and relationalities have unfolded.

Conclusion

The anthropology of mental health has come a long way. This entry has shown how ‘mental health’ can figure both as an analytical category in anthropology and an object of ethnography. Ethnographies of mental health can help us grasp not only the structural features of healthcare systems but also the modalities of healing and care in and beyond the clinic (e.g. Meyers 2013; Patton 2010), the medical and moral complexity of psychological distress (e.g. Luhrmann 2000; Zhang 2020), and the experiential realities that take shape around these issues. Where issues of authority and mental illness come together, anthropologists have demonstrated how people might resist, reinvent, or transform the therapeutic worlds in which they live (e.g. Brodwin 2013; Calabrese 2013; Myers 2015). Ethnography also teaches us that people’s experiences of mental health are situated in their own and others’ classifications and understandings of it (Bruun and Hutten forthcoming). Mental health thus entails particular kinds of theories that people have about themselves and others and the world in which they live. Anthropology can help us better understand why and how people experience mental distress but also what well-being and happiness might mean and look like.

Mental health might be seen to have acquired a hard-won universality. While some find this universality compelling and needed, others are critical of the ubiquity of mental health as an organising concept with the capacity to both normalise and pathologise. Kleinman, among others, contends that the expansion of the category of mental health ‘seems to simultaneously trivialize the most serious medical conditions and to medicalize social problems’ (2012, 118). He suggests that ‘fifty years from now this category will have been abandoned’ (Kleinman 2012, 118). Meanwhile, the realities of people’s experiences of mental health are unlikely to go away any time soon. In many parts of the world, mental health is now something that ‘everyone has’. To have mental health everywhere brings home its ethnographic salience.

Note

The writing of this article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon Programme for research and innovation (project no. 947867).

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Note on contributor

Mikkel Kenni Bruun is a Research Associate at King’s College London, where he currently works on the ERC SAMCOM project (https://samcom.uk). He also teaches anthropology at Cambridge University and is co-editing a volume on the anthropology of psychology. He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Dr Mikkel Kenni Bruun, Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom. kenni.bruun@kcl.ac.uk

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[2] World Health Organization. 2022. “Mental health.” June 17. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-health-strengthening-our-response. Accessed 1 October 2022.

[3] World Health Organization. “Health and well-being.” https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/major-themes/health-and-well-being.

[4] Some early anthropological work that sought to study mental health explicitly is collected in the volume Culture and mental health, edited by Marvin Opler (1959). Many of its contributors were also professional psychiatrists.

[5] For a critique of cognitivist and cultural models in anthropology and psychology, see Toren 2012.

[6] A related issue concerns ‘structural competency’ efforts in the training of healthcare practitioners (Hansen and Metzl 2019). The ‘structural’ refers here to an analytical shift away from the level of the individual to examine institutional structures (clinical, educational, judicial, etc.) that underlie social determinants of health problems and access to care.

[7] It is important to note that Foucault was dealing mostly with the historiography of the ‘western’ subject. There are other histories and formations, of course. Recent anthropological writing on the relationship between the emergence of the psy sciences and colonialism has considered how we might think about presenting this history (Reyes-Foster 2018; see also Fanon 1963, on the ‘psycho-affective’ effects of colonisation). I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this work.

[8] The DSM is currently in its fifth edition (DSM-5), published in 2013. It replaced the DSM-IV which appeared in 1994. For a critical review of the DSM-5, see Hacking (2013).

Editor:

Hanna Nieber

Resilience

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 31 Mar 2023 17:20:11 +0000

Person during a 2009 flood in Vietnam. Photo: Rob

Kathrin Eitel

University of Zurich

Initially published 31 Mar 2023

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

Abstract:

'Resilience’ is becoming a new policy buzzword. The term describes the ability to recover from expected and unexpected situations, stresses, or threats in order to sustain, thrive, and to move on. As a concept and as an approach, it guides people’s adaptation, persistence, and response strategies to sustainably cope with challenges of all kinds, such as pandemics, political oppression, or extreme weather events related to climate change. This entry highlights anthropological insights into and theoretical antecedents of resilience. Anthropologists have studied resilience in highly diverse contexts, ranging from cybernetics and systems theory, to the study of disaster, human psychology, science and technology studies, and multispecies research. The notion of resilience keeps being expanded and remains diverse. Theoretically, anthropologists have foregrounded the importance of viewing resilience as a practice and as being situated. They also emphasise the complexity of interactions and processes involved in coping with adversities and they often foreground a relational rather than an individualistic understanding of resilience. Importantly, resilience always includes more-than-human actors such as plants, animals, and technologies. How exactly people are able to become resilient is often determined by structural inequalities, (post-)colonisation and prevailing understandings of how the world ought to be. Anthropological research on resilience is much needed in times of adversity, as technological fixes to planetary threats are insufficient to ensure future wellbeing.

Introduction

Today, the term ‘resilience’ is on everyone's lips. As a policy strategy, it aims to ‘prepare’ communities, cities, regions, and even entire nations to cope with threats such as climate change, financial crises, or pandemics. As a new development buzzword, resilience has slowly replaced the long-cherished term of ‘sustainability’ that had taken over the world of politics and academia in previous decades. But what sorts of ideas are associated with resilience? How is the concept used and what have anthropologists found out when studying it? Looking at the literature, one learns that theories of resilience have been developed in very different research traditions, from ecology to psychology, economics, development studies, international relations, and climate policy. It is mostly through work in climate policy that resilience has become known beyond academic discourse since the 1990s (Wakefield, Grove and Chandler 2020). As a practical and situated feature of sociocultural life, resilience has also gained interest in anthropological research. That said, it has not replaced the adjacent concept of ‘adaptation’, which is an antecedent of resilience and has remained at the centre of much anthropological study. The genealogy presented in this entry blends together thoughts, concepts, and personal experiences related to resilience. It traces one path of the development of the concept, without, however, claiming that it is ‘the only’ path of its genesis.

At its most basic, resilience describes the ability to recover quickly from unexpected shocks and crises through, for example, adaptation, resistance, or robustness. One can think of it both as a process and an action, deriving partly from the Latin word resilire (re–salire) which means to recoil, to leap back.^{^[1]} Resilire, thus, describes the action of rebounding or swinging back to a stable status quo of existence. The underlying idea of responding to outside influence via ‘feedback’ harkens back to early cybernetics, a field of research that studied ‘control and communication’ of complex systems, be they biological, ecological, technological, or social (Wiener [1961] 2019). In the field of ecology, the concept of resilience developed prominently in the 1970s. The Canadian ecologist Crawford S. Holling (1973) hallmarked resilience as bound to environmental change. He emphasised the inherent capacities of ecological systems to absorb change, that is, to remain in their original state of functioning despite unexpected threats (Gunderson, Allen and Holling 2010). The concept of ‘social-ecological resilience’ then understands complex systems as adaptive, persistent, or transformable to their environment. That means that resilience includes adaptability, given that entities are expected to ‘bounce back’, as well as transformability, when they ‘bounce forward’ to create a ‘fundamentally new social-ecological system’ (Folke 2006, 262; Gibson-Graham et al. 2016).

Outside of academia, resilience is especially well known as a policy term that seeks to address the impacts of climate change globally. This is true for resilience programmes of the United Nations Human Settlement Programme, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and of governments and development organisations around the world. Resilience as a policy tool and concept has been often criticised for being overly technocratic and ultimately detached from the socio-cultural specificities of peoples’ lives. That said, there have also been resilience interventions in the realm of disaster management and post-conflict settings that paint a less negative picture. Resilience-oriented policies have helped foster the integration of situated knowledge and complex situations into governance and have provided an opportunity to govern complexity locally (Chandler and Reid 2019; Chandler 2018; Chandler 2014a). An example of ‘best practice’ here is the policy endeavours of international organisations such as the Stockholm Environment Institute^{^[2]} that explicitly aim to integrate local knowledge into resilience strategies. The concept can thus make governance more responsive to people’s needs, as it foregrounds adaptation and learning from past interventions. It may even serve an ‘affirmative biopolitics of adaptation’ (Grove 2014, 198) that goes beyond programmes that only superficially help the vulnerable or that even perpetuate neoliberalism and social insecurity.

However, as ways of fostering resilience come often in the form of non-participatory policy interventions, technological fixes, and ‘authoritative examinations’ (Eriksen 2021), they risk being based on forms of knowledge and visions of the world that are tacitly imbued with deep-rooted power hierarchies and social inequalities. Resilience-oriented policies can thus have their roots in (post-)colonial thought and practice. They often enough maintain prevailing views from countries of the Global North, and they tend to postulate resilience as inherently positive (e.g. Ferguson [1994] 2009; Escobar 1995; Bollig 2014), thus risking perpetuating existing inequalities (e.g. Oliver-Smith 2017; Barrios 2016; Hastrup 2009a). This raises the question of who actually gets to participate in the definition, management, and governance of resilience. Given that even in governance theory and practice neither the concept nor its application are unified, the aim to foster communities’ capacity to deal with disaster risks often opposes divergent worldviews and ways to realise them (Schuller 2016; Barrios 2017a; Faas 2016).

For example, resilience-based policies presuppose knowledge of the nature of disasters and the likelihood of future shocks. They perpetuate claims of knowing how to ‘best’ to deal with disasters that are used to exercise power over communities, countries, and regions by framing them as insecure and unable to tackle adversities in their own ways (e.g. Evans and Reid 2014; Eitel 2022b). Given that resilience policies usually adhere to the Sustainable Development Goals, they often foster the well-known and long-entrenched hegemony of existing power systems. They seem to shift responsibilities to subjects ‘equally’, but in fact disregard their structural oppression and exploitation. Critiques of resilience policies—similar to those of ‘sustainability’— note that the regulation of the subject via resilience policies does not come only from the top down (from government to citizens), but that climate responsibilities are distributed in many different ways, for example along aid initiatives or global movements (e.g. Eitel 2022a). Resilience-based policies may also enable the production of a suffering ‘other’, putting responsibility on the shoulders of those who are not the main producers of climate disasters, for example (cf. Todd 2014).

While anthropological interest in resilience as a policy or an analytic concept is relatively recent, the discipline has long been concerned with the question of human adaptation as a driver of social change (e.g. Barth 1967; Ervin 2015). How societies adapt to their environment, and whether they are thereby capable of dealing with adversity, has been a focus of anthropological research for a long time. Social adaptation theories can thus be seen as the antecedent of today’s thinking around resilience. At the same time, adaptation is today understood as an essential feature of resilience.

In anthropology, resilience has developed through three research streams since the 1950s: first, cybernetics created the basis upon which complex systems, be they technical, ecological, social, or psychological, were understood. Cybernetics argued that it was important to think of a circular relationship between units and their ‘outer’ disturbances. Secondly, research on resilience has drawn from the interdisciplinary study of disasters, which scrutinises human responses to ‘catastrophic’ events, from research on psychological responses to shocks, and from Indigenous and local practices of resilience. Lastly, as anthropology begins to study the relations between humans and other species, it illustrates that we must pay greater attention to how human and non-human forms of agency intersect.

This history of anthropological research on resilience shows that we may need to widen our scope when it comes to studying the ‘subjects’ of resilience. Studies of urban resilience that focus on the strategies of entire cities to cope with climate shocks run side-by-side with research on multispecies resilience and studies of small-scale and rural communities. Simultaneously, the field of resilience remains interdisciplinary, drawing mainly on ecology (e.g. Folke 2016); human geography (e.g. Coaffee and Lee 2016; Keck and Sakdapolrak 2013; Sakakibara 2017); and international relations (e.g. Chandler 2014a; 2014b; Chandler and Reid 2019). Although the focus of this entry lies with the achievements of anthropological scholarship, these are frequently subject to interdisciplinary influence and contemporary discourse. Ethnographic research, which relies on participant observation, is particularly well placed to uncover situated knowledge and practices of resilience in different times and places. The situated nature of resilience is not just determined by social groups but also derives from specific social and historical contexts and an interplay of human and non-human actors (cf. Haraway 1988).

It is worth mentioning that the study of resilience is more than a theoretical exercise. It is part of ‘bringing about [a] transformative epoch via [anthropology’s] unique capacity to identify, track, describe, interpret, and communicate the human predicament’ (Crate 2011, 188). Studying resilience does not just show that different biologically-, socially-, and culturally-informed practices of adapting and responding to disturbances exist. It also tries to ensure that future social change occurs as a result of a reflective and decolonised way of collaborating across different lifeworlds. In doing so, it systematically takes power asymmetries and their roots into account.

Cybernetic studies of adaptation

Resilience as a concept was strongly influenced by cybernetic thinking, which views the world as a set of interlocking systems that are responsive, adaptive, and related to their environments. Cybernetics, which began to develop in the 1950s as a precursor of systems theory, saw itself as an interdisciplinary effort to capture the complexity of the world through a single ‘metalanguage’. Its goal was to create a universal canon of terms and concepts throughout all academic disciplines, aiming to support greater dialogue between them. Cybernetics thus studied technological, ecological, psychological and social systems by using the same terms. Realised as the research field of control and communication theory, cybernetics emphasised the importance of ‘feedback mechanisms’ (Wiener [1961] 2019, 18). Feedback ensures that any complex system maintains itself by adapting to its environment. ‘Systems’ were understood to comprise a diversity of ‘elements’, or components, which together enacted a functional unit that could either be ‘simple’ and predictable or ‘complex’ and thus self-organised and unpredictable. Systems were always held to stay in equilibrium, despite ’outer’ disturbances. What was astonishingly new and compelling about cybernetics were its attempts to understand such mechanisms of technological, environmental, psychological, and human organisation as non-linear and as being important beyond the individual.

Cybernetics included people from all disciplines, especially from physics, mathematics, biology, medicine, sociology, psychology, and economics as well as anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Clyde Kluckhohn, and Roy Rappaport. Cybernetically-informed anthropological theories of adaptation differed from older adaptation theories rooted in the social Darwinian notion of ‘survival of the fittest’, whose evolutionary conception declared societies successful—in the sense of survival—when they practised the best rational management of resources. Here, adaptation was often considered to be a form of advancement on an evolutionary ladder (e.g. Herzfeld 2006) and the development of cultural practices, such as subsistence activities and rituals, was interpreted as a response to the environment. Cybernetics, on the other hand, focuses on relations between culture and environment as self-regulating and self-maintaining complex systems. In this regard, cybernetics-informed anthropologists were more interested in the ways that systemic adaptation takes place, through acts of communication, under changing environmental conditions. They were less interested in evolutionary hierarchies or single adaptation processes.

Cybernetic thinking was criticised early on for failing to capture ‘social reality [which] could never be simulated in all its complexity’ (Rodin et al. 1978, 747) and for being too focused on adaptation and ‘elements’ rather than flesh and blood humans (Geertz [1963] 2000). Yet, many anthropologists were intrigued by the thought of social phenomena as systems, regulated by circular interactions. An awkward example from these times, which also exemplified cybernetics’ mathematical and mechanical underpinnings, was the example of a thermostat that regulates itself according to its surroundings. The term ‘system’ derives from Greek systēma, meaning a whole composed of several different members or parts (Liddell and Scott 1940). This fit quite well with the predominant understanding of cultures during the mid-twentieth century, which were deemed to be relatively isolated entities. Margaret Mead’s and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetics-related work had a tremendous influence on communication science, psychology, and subsequent research on psychological trauma (e.g., Wesley-Esquimax 2007, 2009; Kim et al. 2019). For example, Bateson showed how people suffering from schizophrenia were confronted by the dilemma of a double bind—a phenomenon in which people receive conflicting and paradoxical messages or signals and do not know how to respond to them.

During the sixties, a student of Bateson called Ray A. Rappaport was the first to conduct an encompassing field study of adaptation mechanisms among the Tsembaga Maring, an Indigenous subgroup of Maring-speakers living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Rappaport held that cultures were instrumental for the satisfaction of people’s needs, be it through religious, economic, or kinship practices. He therefore argued that Tsembaga rituals were not merely expressive, but helped regulate the group’s population and their relation to the environment (Rappaport 1968, 1971). His argument was backed by the fact that the Tsembaga engaged in the regular ritualistic slaughter of large parts of their pig populations to offer them to the spirits of their ancestors. Such pig sacrifice was associated with the absence of war and with overcoming illness and injury. It was also regulated by ecological factors such as the availability of pig fodder and the given number of pigs. Ecological factors, Rappaport argued, were thus driving ritual activity, which in turn governed peace, war, and human populations.

Consequently, cultures could be seen as systems that self-regulate and adapt to ecological stresses via long-term ritual cycles. In this way, rituals actively reduced the number of possibilities for the system (culture), by limiting the number of fights between different Maring-speaking groups, while ensuring the distribution of surplus pig meat (1971, 60; 1968). In this context, Rappaport defined adaptation as a process ‘by which organisms or groups of organisms, through responsive changes in their own states, structures, or compositions, maintain homeostasis in and among themselves’ (1971, 60). Adaptation took place through ‘enormously complex sets of interlocking feedback loops’ (Rappaport 1971, 75, footnote 9). Yet, ritualistic homeostasis (or balance) was absent in increasingly technological societies and feedback loops were eventually in need of being accurately recognised, monitored, or redirected in order to avoid maladaptation. This is not unusual, as a system is always embedded in its wider socio-ecological context, which can either promote or constrain effective coping (Torry 1979).

Rappaport’s work raised the question of how exactly adaptation to the environment became part and parcel of people’s culture (Steward 1972, 328). Julian Steward demonstrated that cultural change is not just dependent on adaptation practices that emerge, for example, through ritual activity, but also on knowledge and technologies that social groups acquire over time. Thus, Steward, who is also known as the founder of the field of ‘cultural ecology’, argued that arid climates and a need for irrigation tended to lead to increased social stratification and, eventually to the development of the state. Environmental adaptation, according to Steward, ultimately resulted in stable ‘core features’ of different cultures. What Rappaport and Stewart share with much early anthropological work on adaptation is the argument that humans adapted to ecological adversities in highly complex and recursive ways, ultimately to ensure the survival of the community as a whole. Second, cybernetically-informed theories of adaptation focused on how people maintain or reverse states of equilibrium that give different cultures their unique ‘core’ characteristics.

Eventually, the early cybernetics-informed adaptation studies were mainly criticised for assuming a stable state of equilibrium to which complex systems automatically bounce back after environmental disturbances. Holling (1973), for example, pointed out that socio-ecological stability is rather dynamic as it maintains the different properties of systems that enable survival. These properties, including stability, variability, persistence, or resistance, may change in different ways and times to maintain other properties. One such property that is of special interest is resilience, a ‘measure of persistence’ and the ‘ability to absorb change and disturbance’ (Holling 1973, 14). Interestingly, resilience can be very high because of the instability of an overall system. For example, the budworm, i.e. a common pest on all kinds of crops, was so persistent in Canada because its population was able to dissolve into smaller parts during disturbances, before re-building in even more adaptive ways than previously. Contrary to Rappaport, who saw homeostatic stability as a desired aim of adaptation after disturbances, Holling understood stability and resilience as distinct from each other and adaptation as one part of resilience. Anthropological insights that communities tend to change dynamically over time further contradicted the assumption of a prior state of stability to which communities are thought to leap back after an environmental shock. The obvious pitfall in considering the ‘adaptive capacities’ of communities is thus to assume from the start that their change serves a certain purpose.

Cybernetics scholarship was also criticised for perceiving cultures as systems that automatically remove marginalised groups from history. Indeed, analysts themselves may contribute to such processes as ‘the actual consequences of their own politics of representation’ (Blaser 2009, 881). Cybernetics often seemed one-dimensional and apolitical because it represented the interests of only one, usually dominant, group and did not take cultural diversity sufficiently into account (e.g. Mandler 2009; Fabian [1983] 2002). Its endeavour to work with a metalanguage and the idea of ‘mechanisms’ that could be found everywhere eventually failed as its findings were hard to generalise. Comparing the organisation and communication of ants with that of Indigenous communities or mechanical-electrical system, for example, meant radically reducing the complexity of humans, non-human life forms, and objects under study. Mathematical models that were frequently used to measure and analyse situations could neither sufficiently illustrate nor anticipate how environmental and social processes interacted (Vayda and McCay 1975).

On the upside, cybernetics was one of the first truly interdisciplinary research fields, pre-figuring contemporary game theory, new materialism, systems theory, and much psychological and cognitive work (e.g., Maturana and Varela 1987). However, its failures may be why cybernetically-informed anthropological studies have been largely neglected, even though they contributed significantly to the further development of environmental and ecological anthropology (Hagner, Hörl and Pias 2008). Its approaches to adaptation and resilience assumed a relatively stark dichotomy between systems and their environment, as was common in much of the twentieth century, and one of its main controversies lay in whether nature or culture determined socio-cultural behaviour. As anthropologists learned that cultures were less and less ‘closed entities’ (if ever they had been), they shifted their focus from the question of ‘how’ adaptation works in a scheme of sequential cultural development toward the question of ‘to/for what’ and ‘for whom’ it works. Such questions were investigated in great depth in the interdisciplinary research field of disaster studies that began to develop in particular during the 1970s.

Resilience and disaster studies

Contemporary work on resilience is greatly inspired by the interdisciplinary research on disasters. Here disasters, risks, and catastrophes tend to be understood as part of larger social and historical processes that reveal certain groups to be more vulnerable than others (e.g. Faas 2016). The anthropologist Roberto E. Barrios, for example, defines catastrophes as

the end result of historical processes by which human practices enhance the materially destructive and socially disruptive capacities of geophysical phenomena, technological malfunctions, and communicable diseases and inequitably distribute disaster risk according to lines of gender, race, class, and ethnicity (2017b, 151).

In this sense, disasters are not isolated events but socio-material phenomena that result from larger and longer processes such as the Industrial Revolution, the rise of capitalism, neoliberalism, or (post-)colonialism (e.g. Barrios 2016; Oliver-Smith 2016, 2017; Schuller and Button 2020; Hsu, Howitt and Miller 2015). Anthropological research on disaster response thus focuses on how vulnerability is produced in the first place, and how this vulnerability interacts with disaster risk reduction, response, recovery, and relief (Oliver-Smith and Hoffman [1999] 2020; Hoffman 2017). It has shown that top-down resilience measures can reify a moral canon that defines what and who is worthy to be considered to survive in the Anthropocene. During post-earthquake reconstruction in Haiti, for instance, the NGO-run humanitarian aid system was based on a (post-)colonial politics of vulnerability that portrays people and entire nations as victims in order to legitimise a ‘lack of resilience’ that requires action (Schuller 2016, see also Evans and Reid 2014).

Resilience and vulnerability thus often work together, as vulnerability refers to ‘the characteristics of a person or group and their situation that influence their capacity to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard’ (Wisner et al. 2004, 11). When China's Sichuan province was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2008, for example, government recovery plans for the Qiang Indigenous community helped perpetuate their political subordination, turning people into ‘passive gift recipients’ (Zhang 2016, 92). The management of disasters by government agencies and recovery experts can thus reinforce vulnerabilities and even create new ones. Moreover, as US government neglect in the recovery of New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina has shown, communities also need to adapt emotionally to catastrophes and recovery programmes. Feelings are critical to people's experiences of both disaster and recovery, but are all too often left out of planned recovery and post-disaster programs (Barrios 2015, 4), which thereby, again, risks increasing vulnerability.

Neoliberalism plays an important role in co-constructing vulnerability through disaster management. Environmental managers and government actors in a climate vulnerable coastal area in Maryland, for example, considered inhabitants of the Deal Island Peninsula communities to be ‘liabilities’ rather than people maintaining livelihoods in their historic homeland (Johnson et al. 2017; Johnson 2016). As a result of ‘disaster capitalism’, in which environmental crises are used to serve the interests of capital (Faas 2018, 32; Klein 2007), these ‘liabilities’ are subject to programmes that promote entrepreneurship as successful disaster response (Faas 2018). The production of capitalist subjects in the form of entrepreneurs, or ‘petit capitalists’, exposes the limits of much contemporary institutional thinking, which remains unable to go beyond neoliberal disaster response. Capitalist subjects are here produced along with disaster capitalism through an initiation into business management that is intended to contribute to regional recovery. Ultimately, dominant interests provoke visions of the future and ambitions that appear to be local but are imbued with the goals of the neoliberal state. Resilience policies can thus reinforce and perpetuate the vulnerability of groups whilst simultaneously maintaining the very same capitalist dynamics that are responsible for anthropogenic climate change and socio-ecological disasters (cf. Wakefield, Grove and Chandler 2020)

Studying the concrete impacts that resilience policies have on particular sites draws attention to the questions: ‘When is resilience achieved for whom?’ and ‘To what extent is it achieved?’ Ethnographic studies have answered these questions by providing insights into lived experiences, strategies, and narratives that circulate ‘on the ground’ and are used, changed, and adapted in relation to environmental changes that require a response (Davidson-Hunt and Berkes 2006, 69; Ingold 2011). Analysing local responses offers fruitful and complementary perspectives to prevailing normative and development-informed visions of resilience (e.g., Rival 2009; Hastrup 2009b; Vium 2009). In the Pacific, for example, people’s political resistance has been shown to be a form of resilience as well as a way of contesting state-led resilience strategies (Dousset and Nayral 2019). Ethnographic research in two East African communities has further identified response diversity as a key driver of resilience. The Ngisonyoka, nomadic herders in Africa’s Great Rift Valley, for example, respond to social and environmental threats through a variety of mechanisms, including group mobility, livestock diversification, and the creation of broad social networks. This variety of activities drives response efficacy, allows social groups to persist, and enables them to limit their impact on the environment (Leslie and McCabe 2013, 128). Lived resilience thus seems to require respect for a variety of practices and voices of people living in climate-prone areas (Barrios 2016).

Resilience, therefore, is not static but is rather a result of social learning from previous crises that may become integral to patterns of cultural knowledge. Coping with an individual hazard or disaster, on the other hand, implies short-term decisions in (relatively) new situations. These may or may not be adopted into a cultural canon and manifested in long-term adaptation strategies (Smith 2017; Bennett 1995). Adapting to something or somebody is tangible both in daily practice and in the space in which it is embedded, for example when regions face severe droughts and dwellers alter their practices of wayfinding through these changed landscapes (Vium 2009). Adapting for something or somebody can imply a mode of care for another future, and care for individual or collective well-being today. Let us now turn toward the small field of anthropological research on psychological resilience.

Psychological resilience

How people cope with disasters and crises at a psychological level is a subject of study in interdisciplinary research on psychological resilience, often with roots in Gregory Bateson’s ideas of the mind ([1972] 2000; [1979] 2002), and in development psychology (e.g., Garmezy 1971, 1991). Psychologists deal with resilience as a personal defence mechanism that can be strengthened and enhanced. The relatively small field of the anthropology of psychological resilience evolved^{^[3]}, concentrating on people’s individual life trajectories and on the way communities cultivate resilience as a means to respond more or less successfully to adversities (Wexler 2014, Wexler et al. 2014; Zraly et al. 2011; Obrist and Büchi 2008). These studies often include a focus on political and economic forces of oppression and violence (e.g. Cox 2015; Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010; Zraly and Nyirazinyoye 2010).

Anthropological scholarship has unveiled, moreover, the insight that resilience in daily life is often reliant upon broader collective memories and histories (e.g. Ungar 2008; Foxen 2010; Lewis 2013, 2018, 2019; Kirmayer et al. 2011; Mullings and Wali 2001). For example, comparative work on trauma diagnosis and treatment among survivors of the 2006 July War in Lebanon and that of Syrian refugees post-2011 shows that suffering is more than just an internalised psychic condition. Instead, suffering can be understood as a constantly shifting subject position in a social context like Lebanon, where violence and aid economies continuously change its nature. Here, the local concept sumud, which can be translated as psycho-political steadfastness, patience, and resistance, reflects the social contingency of suffering and resilience, as sumud is subject to constant politically-inflected re-interpretation. Indeed, sumud can be interpreted as both a form of psychological resilience and ‘a postcolonial tool of resistance, a political movement and an everyday embodied practice’ (Moghnieh 2021, 6). In Afghanistan, resilience is also collectively enacted, and in this case bound to values of living an honourable life. Cultural values such as kinship and family honour are essential to maintain ‘a sense of order, hope, and meaning to life’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 442; Eggerman and Panter-Brick 2010). Anthropological studies have thus shown that resilience, tied to wellbeing and health, is undergirded by processes that are far-reaching, harking back to long-gone periods of oppression, such as colonialism, whilst also taking current power structures into account.

In this way, resilience can even be grounded in toxic entanglements between people and chronic economic and political instability. Residents of Mexico City’s working class neighbourhood Colonia Periférico, for example, have been shown to be particularly resilient and maintain power as they decide what ‘outer’ disturbance gets ‘inside’ the body and the mind (Roberts 2017). They may decide to consume sugary and highly processed sodas, some of them traffic drugs and consume marijuana and a glue solvent called activo, and all of them live with the stench of the neighbourhood’s air pollution. Health workers consider the local consumption of toxic substances to signal the absence of resilience. To them, resilience is grounded in the impermeability of the body. Yet, Elizabeth Roberts (2017) provides an alternative interpretation, showing that people's toxic entanglements with their environment provides them with moments of social pleasure and care whilst keeping health workers and the police at bay. The neighbourhood’s reliance on toxic consumption may thus be the source of its resilience.

The link between trauma and resilience has been of particular interest to anthropologists. The study of people in post-apartheid Cape Town and in Brazilian favelas has shown that people are capable of much higher degrees of resilience than citizens of the affluent parts of the Global North may imagine (Scheper-Hughes 2008). People are capable of resisting even chronic ‘states of emergency’ and the resulting traumas through survival strategies that include developing values such as strength, toughness, asceticism, stoicism, and even the postponement of motherly love until children are likely to survive (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 25). Our psychological response to too much death and loss may be that of ‘patient resignation’, subduing both outrage and deep sorrow over human tragedy. In this way, human frailty is compounded by a ‘possibly even bio-evolutionarily derived, certainly historically situated, and culturally elaborated capacity for resilience’ (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 52). It seems that those who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and who live through constant crises and terror may normalise suffering as part of building resilience (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 52).

Laying a cornerstone for an understanding of resilience as a feature of daily life based on cultural values and long histories of suffering, many ethnographic studies shifted the attention toward structural inequalities that determine who ‘is required to survive and even thrive’ (Scheper-Hughes 2008, 37) in times of catastrophic events. The idea that resilience is manifold is also demonstrated by a recent study of cancer patients in Soweto, South Africa. The study focuses on ‘idioms of resilience’, understood as the ‘means of experiencing and expressing positive adaptation and well-being in the midst of adversity’ (Kim et al. 2019, 1). It reveals that idioms of resilience in crisis-ridden Soweto may result in different forms of acceptance (or ukwamukela in isiZulu). Such acceptance allows people to shift their attention away from their own problems to focus on family, neighbours, and religious life (Kim et al. 2019).

In many of the examples above, resilience is more than a result of historical contingencies. It needs to be understood as a capacity to continue life (Wesley-Esquimaux 2007, 2009). In studying First Nations people in the Americas, the First Nation woman Cynthia Wesley-Equimaux notes that colonisation, discrimination, and marginalisation resulted in the ‘intergenerational transmission of historic trauma’ (Wesley-Esquimaux and Smolewski 2004, iii). These traumatic recollections entered people’s collective memory and were enacted through cultural symbols, rituals, and habits, for example through stories about terror. Eventually, the traumatic experiences became culturally embedded, resulting in repressed feelings of emptiness, depression, and numbness, which in turn led to a gradual dissolution of people’s collective identity. First Nation women in particular struggle with these negative, intergenerational experiences as they still strive to do good for their families and communities.

Local knowledge that reflects social realities and historical contingencies provide a more positive angle of viewing resilience as empowerment. Rather than resilience, Wesley-Equimaux (2009, 26) calls for an emphasis on resiliency, meaning to ‘rebound from challenges one encounters in daily life’. Resiliency refers here to a form of flexibility that enables the reframing of trauma and life narratives by situating them in sociocultural contexts so as to make them ‘re-readable’. Emphasising the positive forces of the term, resiliency avoids seeing people only as ‘suffering subjects’ and as related to deficits but rather as potentially empowering. This approach chimes with what the Māori scholar Mason Durie (2006, 8) claims to be a form of ‘Indigenous resilience’, that is, ‘a reflection of an innate determination by Indigenous peoples to succeed’. His take on resilience provides a viewpoint that does not depict Indigenous people as suffering ‘others’ or negating their historic disadvantages, but that ‘allows the Indigenous challenge to be reconfigured as a search for success rather than an explanation of failure’ (2006, 8). Here and in Wesley-Equimaux’s example, resilience and resiliency have positive connotations, focusing on success, strengths, and empowerment that enable social transformations toward healthier and better futures.

In sum, anthropological research has shown that the ordinariness of suffering cannot be adequately understood without taking into account associated cognitive processes, collective experiences, and traumatic embodiments (cf. Kim et al. 2019). Studying resilience can foreground suffering, but it may also illustrate how humans create ‘well-being rather than survival, salutogenesis rather than pathology, and the promotion of human dignity rather than mere alleviation of human misery’ (Panter-Brick 2014, 438). Because psychological resilience is a necessary precondition for groups to cope well with disturbances, stresses, and violent contingencies such as trauma, it fruitfully ties in with other forms of resilience research (cf. Bollig 2014). However, looking at human responses and adaptation processes is only one way to understand how people and communities respond to threats. A more removed anthropological approach to resilience, which sees communities neither moving ‘back’ nor ‘forward’ to a state of stability, focuses on how prevailing normative notions of resilience themselves are brought about and circulate (e.g. Rose and Lentzos 2017).

More-than-human resilience

The divide between nature and culture played a crucial role in the development of early anthropological theories of adaptation. Cybernetic thinking about enclosed elements and systems that were held to be distinct from their outer environments frequently opposed cultures to outside nature. Yet, recent scholarship has demonstrated that the environment is also produced, shaped, and enacted by culture (e.g., Scoones 1999; Ingold 1990; Escobar 1999). Culture and the environment always reproduce each other, for example when biotechnology enables the creation of ‘new’ versions of nature that in turn impact sociocultural processes (Scoones 1999). Given that authors such as Bruno Latour (1993) and Donna J. Haraway (1987) have established that nature and culture are always intertwined as ‘naturecultures’, anthropology has had to rethink the notion of resilience by asking for whom nature exists (Haraway 1987) and through which worldviews it is enacted (Blaser 2013; Jensen 2015).

By focusing on the production of knowledge and technology, the interdisciplinary research field of science and technology studies (STS) questions, for example, how knowledge about flood resilience results from the interplay of many kinds of human and non-human actors, such as mangroves and satellite images. This connectedness of actors across boundaries of nature and culture means that multispecies studies of resilience have become more important. Ethnographic research now focuses on humans as much as animals, plants, and technologies and their interferences with each other to understand how resilience is enacted (e.g., Chao 2022; Willerslev 2009). The indigenous Yanyuwa of Northern Australia, for example, remain resilient in the face of postcolonial and other forms of violence by building a myriad of relationships. They ‘keep company’ with the land, with non-human species, and with their ancestors to deal with adversity (Kearney 2022). They create resilience by practising ‘a multidimensional art of relating’, despite postcolonial and on-going violence. The Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska are also able to survive in a difficult environment marked by climate change through resiliency that is grounded in deep knowledge about entities and species on land, in water, and in the sky (Sakakibara 2020). They have developed an intimate, spiritual, and intense relationship with bowhead whales, mythical creatures that have a decisive impact on their social lives. Storytelling, dancing, drumming, and political engagement linked to the whales all help the Iñupiat foster notions of reciprocity and respect and respond to climate change in a constructive manner (see also Herman 2016).

Focusing on ontologies is particularly fruitful when studying resilience, whether these are culturally specific and relational, as in the Yanyuwa and the Iñupiat examples above, or more practical in nature (Gad, Jensen and Winthereik 2015; Jensen 2021). The practical ontologies of floods, for instance, uncovers different worldviews by different actors at stake in flood protection: policy actors may perceive flood protection as an opportunity to form urban space and implement technological mega-projects; fish may identify it as a danger given that submerging the sediment that causes floods reduces their living space; while dwellers of the affected region may consider it as a mundane situation, and nothing to get stressed about.

STS-inspired anthropological scholarship has illuminated that technologies based on a ‘modern’ ontology marked by a belief in progress and the human domination of nature play a significant role in how resilience is imagined and implemented. This ontology lies at the heart of technological fixes as the single solution to combat climate change. In south-west Bangladesh, for example, climate-smart houses are meant to protect inhabitants against cyclones and flooding while supporting an efficient use of water and energy (Cons 2018). While such techno-fixes turn out to be inherently exclusionary for most of the population, they tend to gain praise in policy circles around the world. In this instance, resilience policies produce new patterns of exploitation and expropriation by holding locals in climate-insecure places (Cons 2021).

Conceiving of resilience as a more-than-human endeavour, and paying close attention to spatially and temporally wide-ranging relationships, enables researchers to see the concept in a new light, without thereby losing sight of important existing inequalities and discriminations along the lines of class and ethnic groups. At the same time, anthropological scholarship demonstrates ‘alternative’ ways of dealing with crises that are either based on long-established relationships to the environment, histories of oppression and suffering, or on approved methods for coping with crises. The question of whether a community ‘possesses’ or ‘obtains the capacity’ for resilience often gives way to deciphering multiple existing modes of resiliency. Given that the impacts of climate change, even if not locally caused, are unfolding locally, more-than-human resilience must be also considered in relation to land, heritage, and experiences of oppression and discrimination.

Conclusion

Contemporary resilience research is rooted in the fields of cybernetics, disaster studies, and psychology as well as in STS and multispecies research. Anthropologists understand resilience primarily relationally as a practice and as historically and culturally situated. Much ethnographic work on resilience shows that it is dynamic in character and multiple in form, as well as being shaped by constantly shifting socio-material circumstances and multiple power constellations.

Studies of resilience based on anthropological research have provided significant insights for understanding socio-ecological phenomena and human-environment relationships. They show that people’s everyday coping practices can transform into adaptive strategies developed in relation to highly specific environmental situations. They also foreground the diversity of thoughts, worldviews, rituals, relations, and practical skills required by communities to deal with hazards, creeping environmental change, and psychological disasters. Ethnographic studies of lived resilience tend to challenge prevailing notions of how to deal with adversities by including alternative, situated definitions to the vocabulary of anthropogenic disaster. Examining lived resilience should be as much the focus of future study as examining prevailing knowledge formations that emerge through resilience policies or prevention and recovery programs.

Anthropology’s critical stance vis-à-vis state- and market-friendly resilience policies and programs stems from the insight that local resilience practices emerge as much in reaction to shocks and ‘slow disasters’, as they do in response to political and socioeconomic interventions along hegemonic and postcolonial lines. Everyday resilience reveals systematic subjugation and discrimination, for example through disaster aid programs that perpetuate vulnerability. It points to imposed politics of vulnerability, disaster capitalism, and invisible violence that run along demarcation lines of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. In this way, everyday resilience frequently includes and creates more-than-human lifeworlds that span across multiple timeframes, spaces, and sociocultural areas.

One question for future research may then be not what resilience is, but when and how it is socioculturally produced. To what does it refer—as a way of dealing with historical legacies, current adversities, and future uncertainties–and for what is it used? Is resilience built to deal with unexpected shocks (e.g., earthquakes), expected situations (e.g., droughts or floods), or also potential futures (e.g., hurricanes or pandemics)? Is resilience capable of coping with perfectly unexpected disasters that might ‘break in’? These are questions that need to be further explored, accompanied by an interest in practices of care and relationality that benefit not only human beings but also their companion species and wider environments. Anthropology shows that resilience is not inherently grounded in deficits and suffering but that it also illustrates an astounding degree of agency and creativity that humans and nonhumans who strive to remain resilient display in the process. As such, the study of resilience has the potential to unpack multiple forms of responses to adversity. Something we can all learn from.

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Note on contributor

Kathrin Eitel is a cultural anthropologist and feminist STS scholar whose ethnographic research is pivoting around environmental disasters such as the exuberant occurrence of synthetic waste in urban Cambodia and the recurrences of floods in lower Vietnam. She is interested in situated resilience practices and the impact of worldviews that circulate along deeply rooted infrastructures of power, materialising in development policies and technological fixes. Eitel is the author of Recycling infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, waste, and urban life in Phnom Penh (2022, Routledge).

Kathrin Eitel, Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Email: kathrin.eitel@posteo.de, Website: www.kathrineitel.com, ORCID: 0000-0001-8200-9495.

[1] Oxford English Dictionary. 2022. “resilience, n.”. https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/163619?redirectedFrom=resilience.

^{^[2]} Stockholm Environment Institute. “About.” https://www.sei.org/about-sei/

^{^[3]} For an extensive overview, see Panter-Brick (2014).

Transhumanism

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 02:55:58 +0000

A brain-computer interface. Photo: Nicolas Ferrando, Lois Lammerhuber, 2009

Abou Farman

The New School for Social Research

Initially published 8 Sep 2022

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

Abstract:

The social and intellectual movement known as transhumanism questions the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. As part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’ it is frequently associated with technological enhancements that redefine human bodies and their limits. However, the core argument of transhumanism has to do with the human mind or consciousness. Transhumanists suggest that the human mind is reducible not only to its biochemical substrate but also to something more fundamental called information that characterises all existence in the universe. Since silicon-based computation is the basis of informatic processes today, transhumanists argue that machine intelligence can become conscious, eventually making fleshy humans obsolete. This process of technological advancement towards a super-intelligent computational civilisation is regarded as part of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe, a universal telos of existence of which humans are only one instance. Thus, human intelligence is set to yield to a nonhuman destiny. This entry traces the formation of transhumanism, reviews some of the anthropological studies, and concludes by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of post-humanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.

Introduction

Transhumanism is a recent set of common ideals, or ideology, with the stated aim of transcending the current physical and mental limitations of the human by technological means. It has primarily taken shape as an American secular scientific project, albeit with growing international reach. Proponents of transhumanism explicitly state that the current form of our species is not its final one, and that a technologically enhanced computational form—transcending the human—will emerge through what they see as the inevitable and exponential acceleration of technoscience, especially in the areas of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and the informatic and cognitive sciences (NBIC).

Because of its unwavering espousal of these technologies as the only and ideal route to transcending human limits, transhumanism has grown in reach, appeal, and power alongside the twenty-first century rise of Silicon Valley and the digital tech and biotech sectors more generally. Many of the tech sector’s power players at companies such as Google, Paypal, and Space X are associated with transhumanism. What’s more, ideas that have circulated amongst transhumanists have entered a broader social milieu: for instance, as anthropologist and media scholar Tamara Kneese (forthcoming) has documented, digital and cybernetic immortality (the maintenance of avatars, profiles, and conversations after death) are now part of the discourse and concerns of many tech companies and start-ups.

Transhumanism is part of a broader ‘posthuman turn’, a series of ideas and social and technological developments that have put under question the figure of the ‘human’ at the centre of humanism and modern political formations. Scholars trace humanism’s roots to currents in Greek and Roman thought, and later to the European Renaissance where writers and thinkers began to focus their concerns on human affairs, human thought, and the human condition, rather than on theological (pertaining to a transcendent God) or parochial (pertaining only to their own group delimited by religion, ethnicity, or geography) concerns. But as a specific intellectual tradition and social ideology bearing the name, humanism took form starting in the early nineteenth century. The central tenets held that humans, unlike other parts of nature, are endowed with reason and the capacity for thought and self-awareness; that humans are undetermined and free to make their own laws, and shape their own environment with tools and imagination; and that there is no pre-determined future, fixed destiny, or a transcendent and otherworldly destination, meaning that humans were entirely responsible for making their own history and hence their own future in this earthly world (Janicaud 2005; Sartre [1946] 2007 Chakrabarty 1997; Taylor 2005). This set of claims outlined at once the nature of humanity as a whole and built an idea of humans in contrast to other beings to which the same attributes did not apply and hence the same set of political and legal rights did not extend.

Critics of humanism have pointed out that the supposedly universal figure of the human was at the same time an exclusionary device, erasing or even explicitly justifying the on-going exploitations of non-European people through slavery and colonialism. Along with colonial expansion, the rise of scientific thought, and the gradual advance of secularism, a supposedly universal humanism was marshalled to exclude a vast range of non-European peoples from full participation in modern politics and power. Thus, for example, women were barred from political participation because they were said to not be as fully endowed with reason as men. People of African descent, as well as Indigenous, Aboriginal, and tribal people, were not included in the Euro-American image of humanity (Wynter 2003) and were rendered morally and legally subject to enslavement, extermination, and exploitation.

In another vein, there has been a critique of humanism as a form of unwarranted and destructive exceptionalism. That is, by imagining human thought and action as categorically different from the way the rest of the universe operates (the universe being biologically or physically determined, without thought or self-awareness), humanism rendered the human an exception to nature, with tragic consequences. For example, this exceptionalism has led to the over-exploitation of nature and the hubristic use of technology to harness unlimited but destructive power beyond the control of humans such as with nuclear bombs or the use of fossil fuels, causing climate change.

These critiques gave rise to a range of posthumanist positions, such as new materialism (Coole and Frost 2010), vitalist materialism (Braidotti 2013), multispecies ethnographies (Helmreich and Kirksey 2010), new animism (Harvey 2006) and animacies (Chen 2012), cyborg studies (Downey and Dumit 2006) and critical posthumanism (Roden 2015). These attempt to dissolve the figure of the exceptional human into a broader context wherein the human is neither master of its environment nor maker of its own future; rather, the human appears as part of (indeed, as an effect of) a wide array of forces, agents, and relations over which it cannot have proper and predictable control.

On one level, transhumanism has emerged as one of the many symptoms of the exhaustion of humanism, breaking down and transcending ideas of human exceptionalism in the way that other posthumanisms purport to, for example by merging humans with the technology that they have created. Some analysts, however, describe transhumanism as simply humanism on steroids (Wolfe 2010, Fuller and Lipinska 2015); that is, as a set of goals and practices that merely extend Enlightenment notions of a human essence set apart from the world by language, reason, culture, emotions, and so on (Pickering 2011).

Transhumanist arguments and narratives themselves often claim both: on the one hand, they claim humanism and the Enlightenment as their true heritage (Bostrom 2005, Hughes 2012) and argue that humans have always used tools and have co-evolved with their technologies, so that contemporary versions such as cyborgs or other human-machine hybrids are not new but only a more complex and more intelligent aspect of this history (Bostrom 2014); on the other, they project a radical break from humanity and human history, such that superior forms of machine intelligence will take over and be an independent force in the universe, transcending the human condition, including the evolutionary inheritance of a biological body, and making humans obsolete (Kurzweil 2005; Bostrom 2014). What’s more, this process of technological advancement towards a superintelligent computational civilisation, started off by human projects of mind uploading, is regarded as part of a universal telos (or ultimate purpose) of existence beyond the human, where the emergence of humans is only an instance of a larger unfolding of intelligence in the universe. Thus, human intelligence, which results in control over and the modification of nature via science and technology, becomes part of a nonhuman destiny. In these instances, transhumanism breaks with its humanist roots.

If transhumanism’s speculative ideology of posthuman intelligence and destiny is often disregarded by anthropologists and other social theorists, it may be due in part to the focus on more immediate social concerns regarding the body, technological enhancement, and genetic manipulation. It also may be due in part to the fact that transhumanism’s projection of nonhuman intelligence and destiny in the universe are difficult to place within a recognisable political philosophy or genealogy. This division between the enhancement projects of transhumanism, which may well fit the limits of a secular humanism, and the speculative focus on mind, consciousness, and eventually superintelligence, is sometimes characterised as carbon-based versus silicon-based transhumanism (Sorgner 2021). Regardless, given the centrality of the figure of the human (anthropos) for anthropology, these debates coincide with long-standing core concerns in the discipline on the nature of human nature. Ironically, transhumanism’s position that there is nothing either fixed or sacred about human nature overlaps with a strong trend in anthropology that challenges unitary theories of the human (Fuentes et al. 2010).

This entry first traces the formation of transhumanism in relation to relevant histories of humanism. It then highlights people and ideas that speculate on and project futures reflective of transhumanism’s specific stripe of posthumanism. It will review some of the anthropological studies of transhumanism and conclude by questioning transhumanism’s narrow social and metaphysical visions of posthumanity in which both intelligence and biology end up being delimited around particular (civilisational, racialised) forms of life and thought.

The emergence of transhumanism

The term ‘transhumanism’ was coined in 1957 by Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist with eugenicist visions of a future scientific utopia honed through a strange mid-twentieth century marriage of socialism and evolutionary biology, of social equality and eugenicist reform. By the time he published the now-famous essay titled plainly ‘Transhumanism’, Huxley had already written on humanism, biology, and evolution, including a seminal text on the modern evolutionary synthesis. He was an atheist and, in his own terms, a ‘scientific humanist’, serving as the first president of the British Humanist Association (Weindling 2012), and later as first director of UNESCO. Importantly, Huxley begins the essay not with humans but with the cosmos and specifically ‘cosmic self-awareness’. That is, he begins by applying evolutionary schemas not just to biology on earth, but to consciousness in the universe: ‘As a result of a thousand million years of evolution, the universe is becoming conscious of itself’. The emergence of self-awareness, he continues, ‘is being realized in one tiny fragment of the universe - in a few of us human beings’. (2015, 12) The formulation is striking as much for its teleological vision (some latent potential is being realised in the cosmos) as for the odd place it assigns humans in that realisation. For humans appear at once as central actors and incidental vectors: ‘man’s responsibility and destiny’, Huxley writes, is to ‘be an agent for the rest of the world in the job of realizing its inherent potentialities as fully as possible’. Humans are appointed to take charge in this new version of evolution, driving the universe towards its self-awareness, yet they are mere vehicles for the fulfilment of a destiny beyond the human. Later, transhumanists would push this logic to its end in imagining a future yielded by humanity to superior computational forms of intelligence.

It is noteworthy that Huxley, along with a cohort of fellow scientists and eugenicists such as J.B.S. Haldane, was very much engaged in technological prediction, speculating on space travel, reproductive technologies, and mechanical and industrial prowess (Farman 2015), and yet his essay on transhumanism does not mention any of that. Rather, its vision is centred on ‘the most ultimate satisfaction’ which he describes as the ‘depth and wholeness of the inner life’ for which we need ‘techniques of spiritual development’. In proper pursuit of this dimension,

The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself—not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity (2015, 15).

Two main tensions in these passages remain coiled in transhumanism’s practical, ideological, and anthropological features. The first is the tension between a humanist (i.e. non-theistic) sense of responsibility for humanity’s own future and the fulfilment of a larger non-human potential: a notion of a human destiny beyond the human that characterises the strongest posthumanist vision in transhumanism. The second is the tension between a scientific, materialist notion of consciousness and a non-reductive one, often glossed as spiritual.

The focus on consciousness and an awakening universe would be taken up by later transhumanists, notably Ray Kurzweil and Martine Rothblatt, but the first re-uptake of the term ‘transhuman’ comes via the ‘father of cryonics’ (that is, the low temperature freezing and storage of human bodies), Robert Ettinger. A physics teacher, Ettinger began ruminations on death and the power of science in hospital beds after being wounded in World War II, publishing his own science fiction story about freezing and immortality in 1948. He shifted to non-fiction, describing the technical possibility of storing humans in cold freeze. Initially self-published, his first book, The prospect of immortality (1965), was eventually distributed by the publishing company Doubleday after the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave Ettinger a thumbs up. The idea garnered some attention in the United States at the time, with Ettinger securing an appearance on the Johnny Carson show and the book getting translated into 11 languages. But none of that translated into a large following or a proper movement nor into volunteers who wanted to get frozen.

Cryonics attracted a small, motley crew of dedicated people who wanted to push the limits and utopian possibilities of science in remaking humans and society. With a set of actual practices (storing bodies for the future), and the prospect of defeating death—the hardest of human and humanist limits—cryonics became transhumanism’s catchment site (Farman 2020), attracting space enthusiasts, biologists, cryobiologists, physicists, writers, sci-fi enthusiasts, and, crucially, computer scientists. This assemblage, navigating the space between science and science fiction, a space that later came to be known as futurism, became the core of the transhumanist movement, though it did not yet bear that name.

The term ‘transhuman’ does not appear in The prospect of immortality, but the book does set out to explore the key notion of non-human intelligence:

Modes and standards of conduct and intercourse may have to be developed with respect to intelligent creatures other than human. The three outstanding possibilities seem to concern the dolphins, robots, and extraterrestrial life forms. (1965, 152)

The anti-exceptionalist move to shift intelligence away from an exclusively human attribute to one shared by aquatic creatures, aliens, and robots had roots in the emerging post-war theories of cybernetics. Without distinguishing between the organic and non-organic, cybernetics examined the behaviour of complex systems in terms of feedback loops, wherein all behaviour could be gauged based on input and output signals which would then modify the system. The simplest example was a thermostat which could be thought of as self-aware, on some level, because it would constantly gauge and modify its behaviour based on information it received from the environment. All behaviour and communication, according to cybernetics (Wiener 1954), was based on this kind of loop, whether the system in question be biological or machinic. Here information and feedback loops became merged with behaviour and intelligence, blurring the boundaries that separated humans from other animals, animals from machines, and inanimate matter from animate beings.

Whilst many secular humanists recoiled from the prospect of the computational reductionism of mind and machine, Ettinger, following cybernetics, tapped into the potential offered by this line of thinking, suggesting the continuation of personal identity beyond biological death through some version of non-organic or artificial intelligence (AI) where a human mind/self would be instantiated on non-biological platforms (1965, 129-33). This was, as Ettinger himself acknowledges, an older trope in science fiction, but from early on, cryonics and immortalism moved beyond simple biological survival to imagine and claim such a post-human future.

It is in Ettinger’s next book, first published in 1972 and provocatively titled Man into super man, that the terms transhuman and transhumanity begin to find a place in the vocabulary of immortality and technological futurism for the first time. Without referencing Julian Huxley (even though he writes several pages on his anti-utopian brother Aldous), Ettinger discusses the achievement of transhumanity as a human goal, with prospects for greater intra-human warmth (110) as well as ‘the storage of personalities in electronic data banks’ (35), an idea he takes, like many others, from science fiction, where disembodied brains had been present at least since 1929 when Huxley’s colleague, another socialist scientist, J.D. Bernal proposed the possibility in his well-known work of speculation The world, the flesh and the devil. Like Huxley, Bernal is amongst the figures claimed today by transhumanists as a predecessor.

Attempts to move away from humanism feature in Ettinger’s earlier edition of the book, in which he counts ‘Eastern Communism and Western humanism’ as ‘the flakiest forms of the traditional insanity – idealism’, and calls them ‘principal secular religions’ (120). However, it’s in the preface for the 1989 edition that he clearly marks a division with humanism: ‘What is happening is a discontinuity in history, with mortality and humanity on one side - on the other immortality and transhumanity’ (5). This position becomes a call that continues to echo in the transhuman world in many ways: humanity must choose transhumanism or fall behind and possibly keep on dying, for, as Ettinger writes, ‘Human stupidity is formidable’ (162).

Transhumanism as a term and an ideology gained additional traction through an Iranian-born populariser and author, Fereidoun Esfandiary, known by his transhumanist name FM-2030. Wanting a better world but disillusioned with cold war politics, nationalism, and the framework of human rights, Esfandiary moved from earthly to cosmic politics with Upwingers, a book he published in 1973. His futuristic predictions and plans got him TV appearances and teaching contracts at the New School and then at UCLA where he became another nucleus around which the futurist movement would cluster. In 1989, having formally renamed himself, FM-2030 published Are you a transhuman?, a manifesto challenging the status quo and envisioning a utopian world of limitless energy, food, and joy. After his medical death, FM-2030 entered cryopreservation at Alcor on July 8, 2000.

It was in the California of the 1980s that transhumanism began to take shape as a movement, and would later continue its growth. FM-2030’s early collaborator in West Coast futurism was Natasha Vita-More, now a leading transhumanist artist and writer married to Max More, a transhumanist philosopher and president and CEO of Alcor, the main cryonics company in the United States. Born Max T. O’Connor in the United Kingdom, More changed his name a year after he moved across the Atlantic to the University of Southern California in 1988 to complete a Ph.D. With Tom Morrow, another man with a signifying name, they launched a journal and an institute called Extropy, named to counter the pessimistic destiny promised by entropy. The Extropy Institute, joined by many who had recently gathered around a space exploration group called L-5, became the new hub of West Coast futurism, focusing on enhancement technologies that, in the early 1990s, were beginning to hold up a new set of promises: control over biology, control over the brain, control over the size and speed of computational processes, control over all matter in the universe. Many current futurists and immortalists trace their roots and early sense of transhumanist excitement back to the Extropian gatherings. The dissolution of the Extropy Institute would lead, in 1998, to the formation of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), the first of its kind, co-founded by philosophers David Pearce and Nick Bostrom, who later set up the Future of Humanity Institute, a transhumanist think tank at Oxford University advocating strongly for technofuturistic solutions to human problems.

With a representative body also came conferences (Transvision) and publications (Journal of Transhumanism), declarations, mission statements, as well as internal conflicts. Although transhumanists generally see themselves as iconoclasts eschewing doctrine and imagine technology as an independent force apart from, even transcending, politics, transhumanism was never free of ideology. From the early years, social regulations and religious congregations were feared as threats to technological advancement. With its emphasis on the individual body as well as on individualism as an accompanying ethical stance, transhumanism moved in step with libertarianism. Libertarianism had and continues to have two strands: a left anarchist one and a capitalist, free-market individualist one, the latter where Ayn Rand is a common influence and innovation through the market is assumed to be the only way forward with no regard for historical and structural forms of inequality. Whilst some transhumanists have espoused a more liberal democratic ethic based on a regulated civil libertarianism (Hughes 2004), the dominant Silicon Valley tendency has been marked by strong anti-government individualism and free-market ideology.

Even as the link to the power and capital of Silicon Valley has made the souped-up capitalism of Randian techno-libertarians dominant, transhumanism is not a uniform project. For example, former WTA president and sociologist James Hughes (2004, 2012) has tried to underline the distance between the Silicon Valley billionaires and socially progressive transhumanism. Additionally, there are other variations in transhumanism besides: the transgender transhumanism of inventor Martine Rothblatt (2013); AI guru Ben Goertzel’s cosmism (2010); propositions for a Black transhuman liberation theology (Butler 2020); and budding anarchist attempts to reshape the propositions of transhumanism.

If Silicon Valley has influenced transhumanism, so transhumanism has transformed Silicon Valley. As transhumanists gained ground and moved into powerful positions, their propositions for immortality, mind uploading, nanotechnology, space colonisation, and the expansion of consciousness into the cosmos have gained ground in the tech world. Inventor Ray Kurzweil, known for his theory of the singularity, helped set up the Singularity University at NASA and was hired as an adviser by Google. In turn, Google would start its own company to do research into extending lives – the California Life Company (CALICO). Peter Thiel, co-founder of Paypal and an early investor in Facebook, took on the mantle of transhumanism and has funded biotech projects aimed at defeating death, or advancing brain mapping and mind uploading options. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has also espoused transhumanism, whilst anti-aging researcher Aubrey de Grey transplanted his research organisation, the SENS Foundation, to Mountain View, California.

Due in part to its espousal of right-wing libertarianism and heroic individualism, its ideological linkages to eugenics, and calls for the maximisation of ‘personal autonomy’ (Anders 2001, 3) over an analysis of social forces, transhumanism as a movement has remained overwhelmingly white and mostly Anglo-American in membership. Racism, colonialism, imperialism, or class inequality are almost never taken up as issues of importance for thinking about the past or future of humanity, with some key actors promoting far-right ideologies. For example, Thiel has also co-authored a nativist book called The diversity myth, reportedly donated $1 million to the anti-immigrant group NumbersUSA, and backed the Donald Trump presidency.

Although the membership continues to skew male, gender has become an important point of inflection within transhumanist thinking in part because of the presence of inventor, CEO, and writer Martine Rothblatt who has seen gender as the paradigmatic site for jettisoning biological heritage. Rothblatt, who herself transitioned in the 90s and has advocated for transgender rights, has written about The apartheid of sex (1995) and the creative freedom and technological power to determine one’s own form (2011), what transhumanist philosopher Anders Sandberg has called ‘morphological freedom’ (2013).

**Consciousness, telos, and cosmic utopianism**

When today’s transhumanists trace their history back to the Enlightenment, it is to a particular strain of science-based utopian humanism that focuses on the human power to determine its own future. This largely eschews the tragic strain of humanism (Eagleton 2009), in which the human condition is thought to be locked into insurmountable contradictions and the inevitability of death. Of course, the very basic notion of progress at the centre of the Enlightenment and modern thought is inseparable from European utopianism and scientific advancement. Science and technological advances, for example, were already part of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, published in 1627, with its vision of a future state in which humans live long and can use technology to satisfy their needs. Transhumanists have been most attracted to the stadial framework of progress and utopia, such as the Marquis de Condorcet’s 1792 Sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind which presents an atheistic telos moving through ten epochs of development to arrive at the ‘epoch of the future progress of mankind’ when the growth of scientific knowledge would put an end to inequality, and human moral progress would start on its final path. Whereas European thinkers such as Condorcet are mentioned as ‘proto-transhumanists’ by the WTA (now called ‘Humanity+’) and by thinkers such as Nick Bostrom and James Hughes, it is important to note that the original European Enlightenment project was to create a better world through the proper rearrangement of social units. Transhumanism, on the other hand, hinges its utopian vision on the rearrangement of molecular, even atomic, units as per nanotechnology, or the ‘informatisation’ of the universe. In this sense, it fits the neoliberal paradigm where state and society are pushed aside in favour of individual responsibility for health and advancement.

The informatic approach, influenced by cybernetics, was popularised by Ray Kurzweil in The singularity is near (2005), a widely-read book on the emergence of an intelligent universe. In this view, the rise of intelligence is the telos of the universe, and technology is the means and the index of this evolution. From its origins in flint-knapping to the current digital platforms whose power and speed are rising exponentially, human intelligence has brought the world to the brink of a vast machinic, nonhuman ‘intelligence explosion’ coming upon us so fast that the laws and certainties with which we are familiar will soon no longer apply. That event-horizon is called ‘the singularity’, a concept originated in 1993 with computer scientist, mathematician, and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and institutionalised by AI researchers Eliezer Yudkowsky and Tyler Emerson, who set up the Singularity Institute For Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) in 2000.

The key aspects of the informatic theory of the universe are that A) all matter is constituted, or at least can be captured and encoded, by information and complexity; since all matter, including the human brain, is constituted by and legible as patterns of information, there must be a continuum between not only human and nonhuman animals but also biological and nonbiological matter. Thus, B) humans may be regarded as one instance of the evolution of the universe from simple to complex informatic formations, bound to be superseded by super-intelligence. And since computation can capture and modify information, so C) information in the informatic cosmos may be translated from one medium to another, making all mental states potentially transferrable across matter. Minds may be downloaded and uploaded, migrating from the electrochemistry of the brain to a computational platform, rendering the biological body obsolete. This latter is the task and promise of AI. After humans create real AI, Kurzweil writes,

the matter and energy in our vicinity will become infused with the intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty and emotional intelligence (the ability to love, for example) of our human-machine civilization. Our civilization will then expand outward, turning all the dumb matter and energy we encounter into sublimely intelligent—transcendent—matter and energy. (2005, 389)

This progression of intelligence over time and into all matter in the universe has also been called a ‘telos of rationality’ (Bostrom 2008).

A number of philosophical objections have been raised regarding the informatic view. Scholars like Katherine Hayles (1999) have argued that the informatic approach, in which any mind may be transferred to other substrates (i.e. downloaded and uploaded) because it is reducible to information, mistakenly reinscribes a Cartesian dualism of mind that presumes the separation of mind from the matter in which it arises. In this way, it is actually undermining its own materialist assumptions. The transhumanist goal of reproducing consciousness in silicon-based substrates will fail because a state in silicon can simply not be the same as a state in the synaptic and neuronal assemblage that is the biological brain. As David Roden (2015, 56) points out, however, this does not preclude the development of other kinds of powerful if unpredictable mental states (and thus versions of personhood) in computational agents, in which case a kind of posthuman being, ‘Human 2.0’ as he calls it, would emerge. A thornier distinction between consciousness and computation may make that debate moot. Reviewing Kurzweil’s work in The New York Review of Books, for example, the philosopher John Searle (2002) argued that ‘increased computational power’ is a different order of thing from ‘consciousness in computers’. In that case, there would be no posthuman case to make, as human consciousness will not have been broached at all.

Either way, as most scholars agree, consciousness is a hard problem to crack (Chalmers 2002, Nagel 2012), and no view regarding it is settled. Anthropologically, it is just the absence of convincing accounts of what it is that opens up an undetermined realm in which speculative ideas grow, giving shape to current transhuman practices and subjectivities. These in turn shift the function and valence of important, though unstable, categories such as ‘consciousness’ itself, and challenge established notions of ‘personhood’ and ‘human’, two categories whose distinct coherence relies on the kind of self-awareness associated with human consciousness.

Transhumanism as subject of scholarly inquiry

Much of the scholarship on transhumanism has moved along two paths. The first is in relation to the enhancement and modification of the body (brains included) and, ultimately, of the nature of being human. In these debates, transhumanism becomes a bellwether for technology’s dangers and possibilities. It has been termed as one of the greatest threats to humanity by its detractors (Fukuyama 2002) and heralded as the best way to save humanity by its proponents (Bostrom 2014). Susan Levin (2022) has made a convincing argument that the empirical bases of transhumanist speculation are too often erroneous, especially with regards to the components of intelligence and rational decision-making. For example, whereas transhumanists tend to dismiss emotions as irrational, cognitive neuroscience has shown the importance of emotions in good decision-making and creative thinking. Similarly, the individualism of some transhumanist visions belies the fact that intelligence is distributed and contextual. Critics also liken the enhancement fantasies of transhumanists to eugenicist fantasies that reek of racism and will lead to the abandonment of fellow humans who are not enhanced or on their way to technological posthumanity (Levin 2018, Farman 2020). In response, transhumanists tend to flatten all medical and technological intervention as proto-transhumanist, arguing that you cannot coherently accept hearing aids whilst rejecting neural implants, or promote lifesaving medicine in one instance whilst rejecting the technological quest to eliminate death. Either way, the discussion about transforming human nature via technology and the control of biology is not unique to transhumanism; it has been part of an older general debate about the power of science, especially since the emergence of genetic biology, the identification of DNA, and the manipulation of species genomes gave humans a vision of ‘limitless self-modification’, to use ethicist Paul Ramsey’s (2009) words from the 1970s.

A second path has run along attempts to identify transhumanism as essentially a kind of religion. Some (Geraci 2010) have read visions of a machinic future in which the human species must be superseded in order for a better world to emerge as an extension, not of secular humanism, but of the Christian dialectics of apocalypse and salvation. However, this approach does not account for the new forms, subjectivities, technologies, and philosophies that emerge through transhumanism. Jon Bialecki (2022) takes a nuanced approach in his ethnography of Mormon transhumanists, suggesting that Mormonism and transhumanism ‘rhyme’; that is, they have affinities that resonate with each other, and a group of Mormons recognising this have been building on the resonance. Such resonances between Mormonism and transhumanism include attempts to resurrect the dead, the conviction that man can become god, and the possibility that humans live in infinitely simulated worlds. One might point equally to affinities between transhumanism and an unlikely mix of emerging intellectual trends, such as the growing interest in panpsychism (Klinge 2020), the mixture of animism and technology in ‘techno-animist’ perspectives (Richardson 2016), or the emergence of informatic selves (Farman 2014), in which selves are increasingly understood and enacted through informational or algorithmic platforms that record one’s movements, choices, desires, or physiology as informational patterns.

Despite its engagement with the core figure of anthropology—anthropos—transhumanism has yielded only a handful of sustained studies in anthropology. The overall anthropological question turns around subject formation: what kinds of subjects are made through the ideals, technologies, practices, and social formations of transhumanism? Bialecki’s (2019, 2022) aforementioned work on Mormon transhumanists examines how these two sets of ideas have come together in shaping the new subjectivity of Mormon transhumanism. Anya Bernstein (2015, 2019) studied Russian transhumanists, tracing their history through Russian cosmism, pre-revolutionary esoteric futurist movements, and the Soviet scientific and utopian secularist project, showing how Russian transhumanists disagree amongst themselves over the relationship of mind to body, over notions of personhood, and over the spiritual ideas and practices as opposed to mechanical approaches to body and mind. In either case, Bernstein argues, their approach is quite different from the American libertarian hyper-individualist vein, embracing a more collective, kin-based approach. Nevertheless, she identifies a tension that echoes the North American version of transhumanism: seeking life beyond mortality under the constant shadow of and obsession with extermination and other world-ending scenarios. Jenny Huberman (2021) brings a comparative approach to suggest that within transhumanism, kinship and personhood are being reconfigured. Drawing on Irving Hallowell, for instance, she argues that transhumanists are envisaging an Ojibwa-like world in which personhood is distributed among an array of other-than-human powerful beings, and relations with robots and software-based kin are already changing what the future family may look like. I have examined the development of algorithmic subjectivities (Farman 2014), transhuman spiritualities (Farman 2019), and suspended personhood, produced by transhumanism’s quest for immortality, specifically via cryonics, and the challenges to the category of personhood in secular law (Farman 2013, 2020). The Technoscientific Immortality project at the University of Bergen, led by anthropologist Annelin Eriksen, is researching changes in social relations and notions of the human through six transhumanist case studies between the US and Russia that are radically transforming practices and awareness around death, long considered as one of the central markers of humanity. Together, these studies underline the ways in which transhumanism is unstable and destabilising, not fitting neatly into categorical divides, becoming a contested but flexible site for further thinking and rethinking of what it is to be human and to be conscious.

This may be one reason why some social theorists have found it hard to simply brush transhumanism aside, even if they disagree with its libertarian tendencies (Hayles 2011). Andrew Pickering (2011) has made the argument that transhumanist cyborgs are interesting in their human-nonhuman ‘mangle’, but overall transhumanism starts from a very narrow premise regarding the kinds of possible mind-body capacities that exist and may be imagined for the future. As powerful as a human-machine cyborg may be in some respects (for example, in knowing what you should buy!), computationalism only cultivates one aspect of possible powers in what Pickering (2009) calls the ‘performative brain’, many others of which may be cultivated through other modalities, from psychedelic experiments to meditation. The machinic, in other words, is not attentive to other emergent selves and ‘the continual bubbling up of irreducible novelty in the world’. Thus, the problem is not that transhumanism is essentialist with respect to human nature—indeed, transhumanists see humans as a species whose nature is to change its nature, and breaking up the category ‘human’ presents the opportunity to transcend our ‘natural heritage’ and its limits (Bailey 2005; Kurzweil 2005). Rather, the problem is that transhumanism values only a specific form of intelligence or life, one that is translatable and shapeable via computation (Farman 2020). In this mode, the machinic and the computational are turned into their own reified nonbiological value—that is, they are valued in and of themselves as though they were meaningful aside from the human social contexts in which they exist. To transhumanists, the value of nonhuman superintelligence overrides human interests, and is encoded in efforts to achieve the vaunted telos of a posthuman techno-civilisation. For example, in transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom’s (2002, 5) influential analysis, one of the existential risks to humanity is argued, paradoxically, to be when ‘the potential of humankind to develop into posthumanity is permanently thwarted’ by human societies, even if ‘human life continues in some form’. What is valued over humanness in this informatic cosmology is the perpetuation of a posthuman form of life—in which the power, accuracy, and speed of computational technologies become the utmost measures of worth, mainly because these are also supposed to lead to the rise of conscious beings who, as one famous blog has it, are ‘less wrong’.

Transhumanism then may be properly understood as a social project for claiming particular techno-libertarian futures, imagined as part of an inevitable and universal trajectory of intelligence and informatic complexity. Whereas these futures promise emancipation from the limitations of human biology and embodiment, including those of race, gender, and even labour, they keep erasing and so in practice reproducing the racial and settler colonial histories and on-going structural inequalities that undergird the development of such technologies and the accrual of power and wealth to a few. In this way, they follow the white mythos of the autonomous subject ‘whose freedom is in actuality possible only because of the surrogate effect of servants, slaves, wives, and, later, industrial service workers who perform this racialized and gendered labor’ (Atanasoki and Vorna 2019, 17-9). In other words, whatever is invoked in the name of humanity or transhumanity, the futures idealised by transhumanists cannot be valued universally.

Indeed, transhumanist forms of life represent a danger, especially to those in already structurally precarious situations (racially, geopolitically, by class, by status, by physical ability) as well as those engaged in political struggles that aim against the wider contemporary socioeconomic and civilisational formations. As others have remarked, America’s soldiers are the most advanced transhumanist prototypes,

with their smart weapons, their body armor, their night-vision goggles, their special diets, their training in and integration into remote robotic combat systems, and, we would suspect, their ingestion of neuropharmaceuticals such as Modafinil to keep them alert even when deprived of sleep for 36 hours (Allenby and Sarewitz 2011, 24).

This is no accident. The projected transhumanist technologies often emerge from military research and are fed back into the military. Despite their libertarian gestures against the state, high-powered transhumanists are enmeshed with the American state and the military: for example, Ray Kurzweil has worked closely with DARPA and NASA, whilst Peter Thiel owns a policing and surveillance company called Palantir (closely linked to Cambridge Analytica).

Conclusion

Transhumanism is part of the wider set of posthumanisms that have ripped apart the common Enlightenment-era conjunction of person and human—that is, of an entity whose dignity and rights were premised on a notion of special consciousness that emphasised self-awareness, reason, and the ability to speak and act freely. If, as transhumanists claim, those features are not exclusively based in biological forms, and may be attributes of computational devices, then personhood is decoupled from exclusive humanism, and even multi-specieism, and its attributes and pursuant rights may be extended to what was previously thought of as inert or disenchanted matter.

Transhumanism will likely raise questions of personhood in anthropology, forcing us to rethink its relations to nature and technology: is it enough to be able to attribute agency or consciousness to mountains or avatars in order to make them count as persons? Do agency and consciousness only arise relationally, as an effect of interactions between beings? Or is there some metaphysical or subjective essence that agency or consciousness refer to and which may or may not be discerned in entities such as mountains or avatars? Is ‘personhood’ a more inclusive category than ‘human’? Or are these questions moot, because they are effects of formations of power that constantly work to render certain people’s claims to rights and power impossible, regardless of the categories used, and despite the struggles of people to expand the embrace of those categories?

Whilst the informatic cosmology of mind and cosmos allows transhumanists to move beyond the secular humanist disenchantment of matter and argue for such things as robot rights or intelligent matter in the universe, it also narrows the possibilities of mind by fetishising algorithmic intelligence (Ziewitz 2016). For in the name of expanding human capacities and transcending human limits, algorithmic modalities are narrowing the range of valued forms of life in ways often reminiscent of the colonial divides that separated ‘primitive’ from ‘civilised’—in this case, separating the technologically enhanced forms of life from regular old Homo sapiens, and without acknowledging the social and historical conditions that enable enhancement. Thus the populations overvalued and undervalued in these imaginaries have been de facto racially and geopolitically defined; that is, white Americans, or Western-educated urban denizens more generally, are the main proponents as well as the assumed subjects of that future. Other human socialities and possible lifeways are erased from that future, and quite likely a particular human subjectivity is being produced by the mediation of computational devices that makes for a recursive loop of algorithmic affirmation: we learn with computers how to behave computationally and so we value computational behaviour. What is noticeable in the meantime is that as transhumanism has gotten increasingly entrenched in the tech world’s networks of power, its discourse, anxieties, and projects have become harder to distinguish from those of the military, scientific, technological, and financial institutions of late capitalism: existential risk, space colonies, neural implants, robotic automation, avatar selves, and mind uploading have moved from being the maligned concerns of a few technofuturists to more common, popular goals of a post-human future.

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to those whose comments helped me think through these matters more deeply, especially the editor of the encyclopedia Felix Stein, two anonymous reviewers, and Noreen Khawaja.

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Note on contributor

An anthropologist, writer, and artist, Abou Farman is author of the books On not dying: Secular immortality in the age of technoscience (2020, University of Minnesota Press) and Clerks of the passage (2012, Linda Leith Press). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of NY.

Abou Farman, The New School for Social Research. farmanfa@newschool.edu

Ethnicity

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 15:52:22 +0000

'Ethnic flavour' potato chips in a supermarket in Kathmandu, Nepal. Photo: Sara Shneiderman, 2003

Sara Shneiderman Emily Amburgey

University of British Columbia

Initially published 22 Aug 2022

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

Abstract:

Ethnicity is a concept that marks social belonging as much as it does difference, and that lies at the heart of political debates as well as debates across academic disciplines today. Rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, the term is popularly understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. It entered public discourse in the US and Europe as early as the 1940s, but only gained significant traction by the 1960s. Emerging as an important frame for anthropological research during the same time period, ethnicity was initially seen as a terminological shift away from loaded, biologically-based concepts such as ‘tribe’ and ‘race’. This made it a potentially more accurate and productive lens through which to understand sociocultural diversity. Yet ‘ethnicity’ also retained associations with primordial forms of group identification, therefore gaining a prominent place within exclusivist nationalist discourses as well as mobilisations of multiculturalism around the world.

This entry shows how understandings of ethnicity have changed over time, and that both structural and affective features continue to define what ethnicity may be in any given context. It highlights the ways in which groups use and embody their ethnicity as a category of their identity, and that ethnicity overlaps with related understandings of identity such as ‘Indigeneity’, ‘nationality’, and ‘tribe’. Recent scholarship has criticised associations between being ‘ethnic’ and being a ‘minority’ to explore the political consequences of ethnic labels, which can serve as tools of both social change and discrimination. The anthropological study of ethnicity shows that ethnic labels are constructed, used, and understood differently by communities, political actors (both state and non-state), and scholars. It also shows that shifting claims over ethnic categories connect to broader debates surrounding authenticity, recognition, and social belonging. Lastly, this entry illustrates that anthropological scholarship has evolved alongside such political claims, and needs to account for their dynamic and often paradoxical outcomes.

Introduction

Ethnicity is one domain of identity: an affective and structural production of social belonging. The concept of ethnicity has two closely related primary meanings. The first is often used at the subjective, individual level to define identity: ‘my ethnicity is …’ This usage denotes the inherent connection between the individual and a larger group based upon a mutual recognition of shared origins and descent, as well as shared cultural practices and political projects of community building. In this sense, ethnicity is often understood as a contemporary successor of the colonial term ‘tribe’, as it refers to ostensibly singular collectivities produced through shared beliefs and practices. The second meaning is an analytical one which defines ethnicity as a social and political structure, a relational system produced through interaction between groups within local, national, transnational, or other overarching frameworks for identification. In this sense, ethnicity departs from ‘tribe’ by situating groups in relation to each other. Both meanings of ethnicity refer to the production of identity as a mutually entangled process of meaning-making, which fuses individual and collective elements of belonging.

Ethnicity can be both a tool of social transformation and a weapon of discrimination, depending upon context. Anthropologists have long criticised interpretations of the term that take group characteristics as inherent and objectively real (often referred to as ‘primordialist’ or ‘essentialist’). Based on empirical studies of group formation, anthropologists instead foreground ethnicity’s constructed nature. Nonetheless, ethnicity has remained a perhaps ever more meaningful category for political representation and practice in the public domain, particularly for marginalised communities around the world. It therefore also remains a key area of study across the social sciences, despite well-known academic critiques. A schematic periodisation of anthropological practice over time reveals how the discipline has shifted from attempting to empirically describe discrete ethnicities (1940s-1960s), to exploring the boundaries between them (1960s-1980s), to deconstructing the concept of ethnicity itself (1990s-2000s), to examining the pragmatic and affective work it does in the real world of politics and cultural practice (2010s-onwards).

This entry begins with a selective chronological overview of the historical usage of the term within ethnography and theory, to demonstrate how the concept has often been linked to marginalised populations in the context of modern nation-state development. It then segues to a regionally focused exploration of how ethnicity has been wielded differently in various global contexts, as a catalyst of social, political, and economic change. Bridging historical context, key theoretical shifts, and ethnographic studies, this entry draws connections between ‘ethnicity’ and terms such as ‘tribe’, ‘race’, ‘Indigeneity’, ‘multiculturalism’, and ‘nationalism’. It thereby considers how ethnicity as a conceptual, affective, and political category manifests regionally with distinct connections to other elements of social and political identities.

Lineages of thought

Etymologically, the term ‘ethnicity’ is rooted in the ancient Greek ethnos, which implied a collective of humans and is most often understood as ‘people’ or ‘nation’. Early interpretations in the social sciences often begin with Max Weber’s Economy and Society, published in 1922. Weber acknowledges that ethnicity acts as a facilitator of group formation in political terms that crystallises around a shared acceptance of common descent. Yet Weber does not emphasise the multivocal and dynamic nature of ethnic identity formation. Later interpretations of Weber’s analysis stress that ethnic membership is not some form of passive collectiveness but is rather constructed actively through political action (Jenkins 2008).

Weber further posits that ‘race’ works in a similar way to ethnicity in that both members and nonmembers of ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ groups must recognise their shared distinctiveness and align with others who share a perceptible common trait or phenotype. It is apparent here that the terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are historically intertwined, and ‘are not precise analytical concepts; they are vague vernacular terms whose meaning varies considerably over place and time’ (Weber [1922] 1978 as quoted in Brubaker 2009, 27). In the original German, Weber used the term ‘ethnic group’ (ethnische Gruppen), and although the term ‘ethnicity’ appears in English translations, he does not appear to use the German word Ethnizität in the original.

Perhaps the earliest English use of ‘ethnicity’ as an abstract noun is in Lloyd Warner and Paul Lunt’s 1941 study of Yankee City in the United States, The social life of a modern community. Stating that, ‘In this volume a great emphasis is placed on descent as a criterion of ethnicity’ (Warner and Lunt 1941, 237), these authors use the term in the group-specific sense to set immigrant groups such as ‘Irish’ and ‘Italian’ apart from ‘natives’ of the New England city. A slightly earlier use of ‘ethnic group’ appears in Julian Huxley and A.C. Haddon’s 1935 We Europeans: A survey of ‘racial’ problems. These authors critique the mistranslation of Herodotus’ ethnos as ‘race’ in English, and explain that in their analysis, ‘the word race will be deliberately avoided, and the term (ethnic) group or people employed for all general purposes’ (Huxley and Haddon 1935, 108). These early references demonstrate that the term gained traction in both American and British scholarship around the same time, when embedded assumptions of colonial anthropology began to give way to greater introspection about systems of classification often taken for granted at home. Such introspection came with a recognition of the need for new terminologies that could decouple discussions of human difference and social inequality from the Darwinian hierarchies embedded in biologically-based understandings of ‘race’.

In another North American context, anthropologist Franz Boas critiqued the concept of ‘race’ by debunking anthropometry, that is, the measurement of people’s bodies as an indicator for socio-cultural similarity and difference. While he did not explicitly offer ‘ethnicity’ as an alternative, subsequent commentators have linked his public arguments against essentialist visions of race and their resulting eugenicist policies with this concept (Hyatt 1990, Williams 1996). Recently, Boas’ engagement with Indigenous communities of the Northwest Coast has been reinterpreted by Indigenous scholars as work that at once ‘produced significant, albeit gradual, transformations of racial ideology, but … also perpetuated aspects of colonial modernity’ (Blackhawk and Wilner 2018, xvi). At Boas’ time, native North American communities were not identified as ‘ethnic’ in the same way as the immigrant groups of which Warner and Lunt wrote; it would only be later that ‘ethnicity’ would come to be understood as the overarching relational system for organising difference between groups within the unit of the nation-state. Even so, many contemporary theorists argue that, ‘Indigeneity is distinct from ethnicity, defined by unique representational needs that stem from Indigenous peoples’ relation to the colonial nation-state project’ (Williams and Schertzer 2019, 679). From this brief review, we can understand ethnicity as an inherently relational concept, which remains co-defined by adjacent concepts including tribe, race, and Indigeneity.

Particularly in the years following the Cold War, as notions of ‘race’ had come under heavy scientific and political criticism, ethnicity proliferated as an alternative concept useful to projects of development and social change. For example, it lent itself to proprietary claims by governing bodies over culture, territory, and political recognition (Warren and Kleisath 2019). However, it was not until the 1960s that ethnicity really came into widespread use within and outside the academy, beginning in the United States. As Eric Wolf (1994) notes, the use of ethnicity in American anthropology was part of a larger disciplinary shift from ‘race’ to ‘culture’ to ‘ethnicity’ that was reflective of world politics and public opinion at a time when the post-World War II process of decolonisation and creation of ‘democratic’ institutions were vying to solve the problems of the ‘underdeveloped areas’ of the world (Escobar 1995). At the same time, the rise of ethnicity paralleled the Civil Rights movement within the US itself, which brought into focus the social injustices linked to racial difference at home. Ethnicity was propelled into the limelight as a possible means of recognising difference in a positive sense, without thereby reifying it as an essential trait of certain groups. New disciplinary spaces such as Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies emerged in tandem with these social movements in both the UK and the US, creating possibilities to reclaim ethnicity as a positive source of belonging and self-understanding (see, for instance, Hall [1988] 2021).

By the 1990s, these celebratory views of ethnicity as a marker of diversity and inclusion gave way to critiques from Marxist and post-structural thinkers, who highlighted its constructed nature and associations with exclusivist political movements (Banks 1996). The vast array of scholarly literature on this topic is by no means obsolete, and its significance in and beyond the academy lives on, as new waves of scholarship identify ethnicity as a critical contemporary vector in political projects, as well as projects of commodification, and affective self-production (Meiu et al. 2020).

Ethnic as ‘other’

Anthropology’s nineteenth century ties to imperialism meant that its knowledge about human difference was in large part conceived of as a tool of British and other colonial administration (see Asad 1973). Towards such ends, through projects of enumeration like the census (Cohn 1987), ethnicity was typically associated with discrete, singular, and essentialised categories of social identity that were perceived as biologically determined. In other words, people were understood to have essential, inborn, embodied characteristics that marked them as a member of one group or another. Early scholars in the field such as Lewis Henry Morgan, Herbert Spencer, and Edward B. Tylor were writing at a time when Darwin’s theories of evolution laid much of the groundwork for social inquiry. Their ‘social evolutionism’ divided people into groups and placed them along hierarchies of evolutionary progress. Foundational work among anthropologists of this time period heralded the disciplinary trend of studying seemingly less advanced ‘others’, and it is from this notion of essential difference between the researcher and subject that the designation of ethnic identities became misleadingly associated with ‘minority’ or ‘marginalised’ groups. ‘Ethnic minorities’ are thus often those distinct from, and therefore available to, the anthropologist as subjects of study or the administrator as a representative of bureaucratic universalism.

Referring to a population as ‘ethnic’ still connotes a sense of marked minoritisation in relational difference to whatever the unmarked dominant community is in a given nation-state context, such as ‘whiteness’ in the United States (Jackson and Thomas 2009), or ‘Han-ness’ in China (Mullaney et al. 2012). Yet the anthropological trend of studying ethnic ‘others’ has significantly diminished over the past decades, as much anthropological research has turned to focus on dominant institutional and political networks, often ‘at home’ (Ho 2009; Nader 2011). This disciplinary shift has made studies of particular ethnic groups fall out of favour to a significant extent. Paradoxically, as the rise of identity politics around the world paved the way for a disruptive politics that frames dominant groups as ‘others’ (Adhikari & Gellner 2016; Kaufmann 2004), anthropologists have often sought to disassociate themselves from such movements (Eriksen 1993). Recognising the often highly politicised material consequences of ethnic claims for representation may disrupt dominant scholarly and political discourses that frame ethnicity as an ephemeral, entirely discursive construct. Importantly, identity-based arguments can emerge from both left and right ideological positions. For instance, they define both the Black Lives Matter, and the ‘Make America Great Again’ movements in the US. The power of ethnicity as a category of both self-consciousness and political mobilisation may therefore be equally important for dominant and minority groups (Taylor 1994; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Shneiderman 2020). Such a perspective moves away from demonising ‘ethnicity’ as a necessarily negative political force, and instead seeks to understand its actual operations across fields of power.

Ethnicity as a relational field

As early as 1940, E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1940) had proposed the concepts of fission and fusion to describe the ongoing processes of separation and integration between sub-groups amongst the Nuer of Sudan. These ideas were part of a broader school of thought known as ‘structural-functionalism’, which interpreted the structures of social life as determined by their functional contributions to community livelihood and subsistence capacities. Despite its many shortcomings, such thinking productively identified that patterns of group identification were inherently dynamic. It helped recognise that individuals’ clan membership might differ from one week to the next and that it was not essentially implanted in their bodies in any fixed manner.

Building upon such work, anthropologist Edmund Leach (1964) further identified ethnicity as a fluid vector of power across multiple social domains when he studied socio-cultural group formation and group variance over time. Perhaps the first to define ethnicity as a process rather than a structure, Leach observed the constant state of flux in ethnic belonging between the Kachin and Shan groups of northeast Burma which he had studied in the 1950s and 60s. Individuals and sub-groups would regularly shift their membership between these two seemingly separate categories as external political and environmental disruptions intersected with internal structures of association.

It was the influential work of Fredrik Barth, particularly the introduction to the edited volume Ethnic groups and boundaries (1969), which popularised the notion that ethnicity must be understood as a system of relationships between groups, through a focus on the ever-shifting boundaries between them. Until this time, scholars still largely attributed specific ethnic characteristics as essential to non-Western populations, conceptualising ethnic groups as singular, bounded units. Barth critiqued this vision of a ‘world of separate peoples’ operating in ‘relative isolation’ (Barth 1969, 11), setting off a new wave of ethnic studies that diverged from evolutionary and structural-functionalist understandings of social groups as complete and internally consistent. Barth instead sought to frame ethnicity as a dynamic and processual set of relations between groups, urging scholars to think about how groups established boundaries between themselves and their neighbours, rather than on the shared ‘cultural stuff’ found within those ever fluid boundaries.

Following Barth’s now seminal essay, scholars have since critiqued even Barth’s approach for being too rigid, arguing that his use of the term ‘boundary’ invokes too much of a sense of exclusive group reification (see Cohen 1978). Yet Barth’s work continues to be one of the most cited in anthropological studies of ethnicity today. Most importantly, it signaled a momentous shift in the way anthropologists understood social organisation, moving towards a model of cyclical change where ethnic boundaries are constantly produced through real time encounters between individuals in practice (see also Vincent 1974; Bentley 1983). This type of fluidity is again present in the work of Abner Cohen (1974) who broke new ground by situating analyses of ethnicity comparatively across the US, Britain, Israel, and several African contexts, offering a pitched counterpoint to the received understanding that anthropologists could only study such phenomena amidst ‘others’ in faraway locations. Cohen, like Barth, moved away from the notion of ethnicity as an essential characteristic, focusing instead on practice in real time to postulate that an ethnic group is ‘a collectivity of people who share some patterns of normative behavior’ (Cohen 1974, ix), and he emphasised the power of politics and economic resource competition as drivers of social relationships.

Cohen’s work and other Marxian analyses of ethnicity have been critiqued for overemphasising resource competition and failing to adequately account for culture. Arguably, they do not sufficiently ‘consider the processes, formal and informal, that link the distribution of tasks in this system to embodiments and patterns of cultural enactment’ (Williams 1989, 409). The reference to ‘cultural embodiment’—in other words, the notion that cultural differences shape behaviour at the individual level of the body in a material, physical sense—stands out. It marks the important point of tension between earlier modes of studying ethnicity that tended to view ethnic differences as essential and isomorphic with race and territory, to more contemporary debates in the field that take seriously the socio-political processes that produce both self-selected and externally asserted ethnic labels. In making these arguments, Williams also establishes the need to analyse ethnicity across the multiple registers on which it plays out simultaneously: scholarly, political, and lay (1989).

Deconstructing ethnicity: against groupist ontologies

At the end the of the twentieth century, anthropologists and other social scientists began reconsidering the uncritical use of culture as a concept. Often associated with the seminal book Writing culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), these critiques drew upon the work of poststructuralist, postcolonialist, and deconstructionist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Edward Said to criticise the knowledge claims of anthropologists in general, and their understanding of ‘culture’ in particular. They argued that many social groups deemed to exist in the sense of fixed or ‘reified’ categories were actually in flux, and far less clear cut than previously assumed. Ethnicity concomitantly began to be viewed as an outmoded reference to a ‘groupist social ontology’ (Brubaker 2009) grounded in the primary inclination to think of the social world with reference to people’s unchanging substances (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 228). People’s identity and culture was beginning to be understood as much more fluid than previously models allowed for.

For example, Arjun Guneratne describes how members of the Tharu community in Nepal created reified, or objectified versions of their own elders’ rituals to transform culture into performance, creating, ‘a tale that Tharus tell themselves about themselves’ (Guneratne 1998, 760). Along these lines, a wave of ethnographies sought to deconstruct the ethnic claims of their subjects (see for instance Fisher 2001; Guneratne 2002). Thereby, they contributed to the parallel rapprochement between history and anthropology, which focused on the all-too-frequent ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). This is the notion that cultural symbols and practices that are held to be ‘traditional’ and therefore in need of preservation are often relatively new inventions that serve a contemporary sociopolitical purpose. This was the case in many nationalist performance traditions such as those mobilised by the Nazis to authorise the idea of a historically continuous Aryan race, for example. Paradoxically, as the use of the term ‘ethnicity’ was beginning to lose its relevance inside the academy due to the systematic critical deconstruction of its symbolic repertoires, its importance for communities began to grow (Banks 1996).

Ethnicity thus came to be seen as a profoundly political concept mobilised within the identity-based politics of difference in various national contexts where state-imposed regimes of recognition required marginalised communities to mark themselves as distinctive (Appadurai 1981; Povinelli 2002; Middleton 2015). This idea lends itself to broader debates over recognition and representation within nation-states and the processes of competition for what Jonathan Friedman (1992) refers to as ‘identity space’. In other words, the increasing hegemony of nation-states and nationalism—understood as both inherently limited and sovereign (Anderson 1991)—means that cultural difference becomes a valuable commodity that can be used to make all kinds of claims upon perceivably scarce state resources (Appadurai 1981; Todd 2011; Comaroff and Comaroff 2009). As the very principal of nationalism ‘holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent’ (Gellner 1983, 1), the moment an individual, community, or nation is perceived as threatened, boundaries of identity become increasingly important in resisting the pressure exerted on them (Eriksen 1993). Several scholarly works pertaining to nationalism and ethno-nationalist conflict explore the fundamental element of recognition as a reaction to external pressure or threats. Ethnic recognition is thus political, as much as it is about belonging at an emotional and psychological level (Appadurai 1998; Eriksen 1993; Gellner et al. 1997; Horowitz 1985).

Beyond theoretical debates in the academy, conflicts around the world in the second half of the twentieth century drew increased attention to violence perpetuated in the name of ethnic, racial, or national difference (Malkki 1995). This politicisation of ethnicity marked a transition from ‘the politics of the nation-state to the politics of ethnic pluralism’ (Tambiah 1996, 8), whereby socially constructed ideas of group belonging lend themselves to constructing exclusionary regimes on the basis of a shared identity. Such dynamics have unfolded in both democratic and communist state contexts, with political mobilisation on the basis of ethnicity being linked in complex ways to Marxist and Maoist projects of class-based mobilisation (see for example Ismail and Shah 2015, Shneiderman 2020).

Ethnicity as affective politics

The beginning of the twenty-first century marked yet another significant shift in anthropological engagements with ethnicity. By then it had become generally accepted that ethnic identities were constructed through historical, political, and social processes, and were not concretely real in any essential sense. ‘Constructivism had gained the upper hand over essentialism’ (Wimmer 2013, 2), so to speak. However, attempts to address the social and political processes that maintain divisions of the social world in ethnic, racial, or national terms opened a dialogue around the ‘fluid’ nature of ethnicity (Fisher 2001; Jenkins 2002). They highlighted the need to question why and how ideologies of ethnic identification work in the real world despite our critical recognition of their constructed nature. Anthropologists realised that when debates over ethnicity intersect with racial and national identities they can be a significant locus for the exercise of power and authority in spite of being constructed. Even if ethnicity is not natural or essential, it can be owned and used as an economic resource against and within neoliberal market forces (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009), and it can serve as a locus of power and resistance towards dominant social structures (Scott 1985; 2009).

The knowledge that ethnicity is constructed thus does not lessen its social power, nor does it lessen its intimate, emotional, and affective importance in people’s daily lives. Recent scholarship has sought to demonstrate the ways in which ethnicity may thus be simultaneously instrumentalised for external recognition and ‘affectively real’ (Shneiderman 2015), as both a mode of politics and a mode of consciousness. Refocusing debates ‘on the objectification of identity as a fundamental human process that persists through ritual action regardless of the contingencies of state formation or economic paradigm’ (Shneiderman 2015, 285), such scholarship seeks to bridge the bifurcated debates between politics and meaning by suggesting that ethnicity can be both at the same time (Meiu et al. 2020).

One such example comes from an ethnography of the Thangmi community who live across the borders of Nepal and India (Shneiderman 2015). It shows how Thangmi enact certain cultural practices, such as wedding dances, in different registers for different purposes. When dancing at an actual wedding in their home villages, Thangmi may be producing the content of their ethnic identity for themselves through a shared set of practices that are mutually agreed upon as particularly Thangmi by all actors involved. The act of dancing in this way is part of the process of constructing their ethnicity in an affective sense, in the group-internal context of a wedding at someone’s home.

At the same time, those dancers, and other members of the community, may also perform stylised versions of the same dances on stage in a theatre for the express consumption of state officials with the power to recognise the community within state paradigms for ethnic categorisation. Here they are producing Thangmi ethnicity in the political sense, in the group-external context of a theatrical performance organised by state actors. While the latter is certainly constructed, in the sense that it is staged in a very intentional manner to meet certain political requirements, both versions of the dance are real and relevant to those who enact them. Both contribute to the overall ability of the Thangmi community to maintain their traditional knowledge of such cultural forms, which in turn constitute the content of their ethnic identity. The point here is that the political mobilisation of such cultural knowledge does not eclipse or erase its continued existence in community-internal forms. The constructed nature of ethnic identity can thus co-exist with its affectively real power for those who embody it (for further details, see Shneiderman 2015, Chapter 2).

The geopolitics of ethnicity

While we have discussed that ethnicity may shift over time, we now turn our attention to understanding its variation across space by considering regional literatures that bring nuance and texture to the aforementioned general narrative of debates over ethnicity. Grounded in what Richard Fardon (1990) refers to as ‘regional ethnographic traditions’, theories of ethnicity have come to intersect with global and local politics in myriad ways. In calling attention to the disparities between essentialising theories of ethnic difference and ethnographic studies of particular communities (Abu-Lughod 1991), some of the fundamental understandings of ethnicity are complicated by the incommensurability of partial and shifting claims to recognition in various parts of the world.

As scholars whose own research has been grounded in South Asia, we find recent ethnic debates in Nepal and India a good crucible for exploring some of these broader themes. Since the 1990 advent of democracy in Nepal, long-standing internal tensions between historically marginalised ethnic groups and state forces began to be vocally expressed through a range of ethnic and political mobilisations. These were both a product and driver of the tensions between Hindu nationalist ideologies and the diverse groups of people the state of Nepal has come to govern (see Pfaff-Czarnecka et al. 1997; Onta 2006; Hangen 2010). Identity politics thus became the centerpiece of national debates through successive waves of civil conflict (1996-2006) and post-conflict state restructuring (2006-2015), as minority groups struggled to attain recognition and rights within the 2015 constitution and subsequent 2017 administrative restructuring. Beginning with the National Foundation for Development of Indigenous Nationalities Act (NFDIN) in 2002, Nepal passed a series of policy reforms aimed at addressing the limited visibility of adivasi janajati, or ‘Indigenous Nationalities’ (approximately 60 are currently recognised). These policies have become closely linked to conversations around human rights, social inclusion, and development (Shneiderman 2013).

Nepal remains only one of two Asian countries to have ratified ILO Convention 169 on the rights of Indigenous peoples (the other is the Philippines). By contrast, while India has maintained constitutional provisions for the ‘upliftment’ of groups designated as Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes (ST/SC) since the 1950s, it has not recognised Indigeneity as a legal category. This has led to a different politics of ethnicity than that described in Nepal—despite the two countries’ shared borders, and linguistic and religious heritages. In India, ‘tribalness’ has become the category of aspiration to secure a better future (Kapila 2008; Moodie 2015; Middleton 2015; Phillimore 2014; Shah 2010). Using terms such as ‘backwards’ and ‘highly marginalised’, the politics of difference in various parts of South Asia can be seen as echoing early anthropological models of ethnic and racial inferiority.

However, the current politics in both countries provide a counter-narrative to the assertion that ethnicity is something that only minoritised groups have. Instead, as Krishna Adhikari and David Gellner (2016) put it, there is a backlash from dominant communities who seek to label themselves as ‘other’ in response to the growing visibility of erstwhile ethnicised minorities, such as adivasi janajati in Nepal and Muslims in India. In both Nepal and India, once-marginal ethnic labels have become targets of aspiration, as communities vie for entitlements and territorial sovereignty. Showcasing their distinctiveness as tribal, ethnic, Indigenous, and religious groups, ethnicised categories become prized targets of recognition.

The rise of cultural rights activism and increasing struggle for ‘identity space’ among marginal groups has given way to a growing emphasis on neoliberal multiculturalism worldwide. In its simplest form, neoliberal multiculturalism enmeshes pro-market reforms with policies for cultural rights granted to disadvantaged groups. In Latin America, this regime has gained traction in the name of cultural protectionism and human rights discourse in favour of ethnic minorities. Yet contrary to these alleged goals, it can lead to contradictory and oppressive outcomes, as pro-market reforms are often detrimental to the lives of various ethnic and Indigenous groups. Charles Hale (2005) asserts that

the great efficacy of neoliberal multiculturalism resides in powerful actors’ ability to restructure the arena of political contention, driving a wedge between cultural rights and the assertion of the control over resources necessary for those rights to be realized (13).

Hale’s argument is echoed in Shaylih Muehlmann’s description of experiences in northwest Mexico at the end of the Colorado River, where US dam projects and the more recent creation of a protected ‘biosphere reserve’ by the Mexican federal government have denied local Cucapá Indigenous communities the right to fish, creating what a lawyer referred to as ‘cultural genocide’ on its own people (Muehlmann 2009). This conflict between the Cucapá and the state is mired in debates over Indigenous rights, cultural and ethnic difference, and state-regulated discourses of multiculturalism. Rather than allow ethnic groups to control the Colorado Delta, the state has instead used ethnic difference to deny the Cucapá access to their ancestral fishing ground (Muehlmann 2009, 469). Instrumentalising ethnic difference under the guises of global discourses such as multiculturalism and environmental sustainability, the Mexican state has used the politics of ethnicity not to aid the Cucapás, as multicultural policies often insinuate, but to fuel their continued marginalisation. In other instances, claims to Indigenous status have been undermined when communities lose control over the ways they are represented to larger publics (Conklin and Graham 1995; Heatherington 2010; Tsing 2005), or communities may choose to reject legitimate claims to Indigenous status altogether (Li 2000).

Although neoliberal multiculturalism is not unique to Mexico, or Latin America for that matter, the case of the Cucapá shows how in the neoliberal era the intersections between Indigeneity, environmentalism, and state projects become contested sites of ‘authenticity’ (Handler 1986). From an anthropological perspective, ‘authenticity’ is a cultural construct linked with terms like ‘untouched’ or ‘traditional’ that is underpinned by the assumption that cultures are discrete, bounded units that do not change (Handler 1986). The use of ‘authenticity’ as a legitimising framework for evaluating traditions, ethnicity, and cultural heritage persists today. It comes to light particularily through cultural performances for public and political purposes (Comaroff and Comaroff 2009; Conklin 1997), as well as through private ceremonies and rituals (Shneiderman 2015). As a result, the concepts of performance and performativity emerge as important ways to understand how particular groups are ‘driven by their specific desires for recognition, self-determination, and cultural sovereignty’ (Graham and Penny 2014). As described above in the Thangmi example, performance as a tool to legitimise ethnic claims has emerged both as a powerful means of asserting and expressing difference, and as a way for contemporary governments and international bodies to capitalise on these designations.

This is the case not only in explicitly neoliberal state contexts, but even in an erstwhile communist state such as China, where ethnic classification has been constitutive of national identity since the foundation of the People’s Republic. The Ethnic Classification Project of the 1950s sought to structure the ‘number, names and composition of China’s officially recognized ethnonational groups’ (Mullaney 2010) as part of the Communist Party’s campaign to achieve ethnonational equality. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, during China’s postsocialist reforms, the linguistic and cultural traditions of minority communities came to be appropriated by the state as desireable representations of ‘traditional culture’ (Schein 2000, 24). ‘The figure of the minority, usually feminine, came to be included in what was considered to constitute the authentically Chinese’ (Schein 2000, 24). Today, minority communities continue to renogiate their place within China’s ethnonationalist politics and assert their own cultural identity through performances including tourism events, village rituals, or even scholarly and journalistic encounters (Chio 2014; Jinba 2013). It is in this way that concepts like ‘ethnicity’, ‘minority’, and ‘authenticity’ are interlinking components of ethnonationalist agendas, as well as contested sites of cultural production and representation.

Across the Global North and the Global South, anthropologists have explored similar themes related to the ‘articulation’ of Indigeneity and ethnic identity (Hall 1990; Li 2000), multiculturalism (Turner 1993), and the complex relationships between ‘Indigeneity’ and ‘autochthony’ (McGovern 2012; Pelican 2009). These and other related terms continue to be used by various state and nonstate actors as both platforms for social justice, and to continue the marginalisation of minority communities. Ethnicity can cut both ways.

Conclusion

Whether self-designated or externally imposed, ethnic classifications are regionally and historically diverse, and the entanglement of ethnicity with related terms such as ‘race’, ‘Indigeneity’, ‘minority’, ‘nationalism’, and ‘tribe’ have persisted since its inception within anthropological and popular discourse. A common thread is the association between ethnicity and marginalised groups. Although in some cases this power imbalance has been overturned to render minority groups visible in the global arena of cultural rights, analytical approaches to the study of ethnicity are not exempt from colonial legacies and the politics of exclusion. As Brackette Williams (1989) succinctly states,

ethnicity labels the politics of cultural struggle in the nexus of territorial and cultural nationalism... as a label it may sound better than tribe, race, or barbarian, but with respect to political consequences, it still identifies those who are at the borders of the empire (439).

Finally, to assume that ethnicity as an analytical category and structure of belonging will run its course would be to ignore the realities faced by communities around the world. People will likely continue to find it useful, as they navigate neoliberal policies to secure access to resources in the face of rapidly changing climate conditions, make claims to territory within newly invigorated Indigenous rights frameworks, or attempt to escape the ethnic label altogether. To address ethnicity, and do justice to the highly politicised nature of this term, scholarship must carefully consider histories of marginalisation and social inequality without imprisoning groups in an idealised image of their own past in the process (Li 2000). Ethnicity may carry numerous intimate and affective meanings for one person whilst being of no value to another, and it is through a careful consideration of the politics at stake that future anthropological scholarship can disrupt grand theories of ethnicity to reveal its multivocality and contextual specificity. In this third decade of the twenty-first century, as we see newly invigorated global protests against systemic racism collide with unequal vulnerabilities to the global pandemic and the juggernaut of climate change, it seems ever more important to apply a social justice lens as we reconsider the relationships between ethnicity and its others. Whether in lay, scholarly, and political registers, and whether within or beyond the framework of the nation-state, ethnicity will likely occupy us for years to come.

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Notes on contributors

Sara Shneiderman is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. She is the author of Rituals of ethnicity: Thangmi identities between Nepal and India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). sara.shneiderman@ubc.ca

Emily Amburgey is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at University of British Columbia, Canada. She is a socio-cultural anthropologist and visual ethnographer. Her work explores the impacts of climate change and labour migration in high altitude regions of Nepal’s Himalaya. emily.amburgey@ubc.ca